On Tenterhooks

by Greever Williams

  Veronica did not respond. De Hoyos paused on the line for a moment before continuing.

  “We would prefer to have someone come here to Cozumel to collect your mother and return her to the Estados Unidos,” said De Hoyos. “It would be well if you could come, soon.”

  “Is the investigation closed?” asked Veronica. “I mean, it’s already over?”

  “Si” said De Hoyos. “We pride ourselves on la Isla de Cozumel with being a safe place for Americanos to travel. Your mother’s passing is only the second muerte of the year. This is such a rare thing that mi Capitano asked that I contact you rapido to ask you to arrive. There is nothing more to do for the policia.”

  “Yes,” said Veronica. “I will be there tomorrow morning.”

  “Si,” said De Hoyos, “that is bueno. When you arrive you can reach me at. . .”

  And that had been how her mother had left the world behind, with no chance for goodbyes or healing the rift. It had been sudden and definitive. Veronica’s father had died decades ago, and her older sister, Louise, had never left Elysburg in her life, so it had to be Veronica who flew to Mexico the next day. That had begun a horrible two-week odyssey to retrieve the body, bring it back to the United States, deliver it to Pennsylvania and coordinate the funeral arrangements.

  “I still don’t know what got it into her head to go to Mexico, of all places,” Louise had insisted. “And she wouldn’t let anybody go with her, either. Said it was something she had to do. I think maybe she wanted to impress you or something. . .”

  Veronica never told her sister that their mother had died SCUBA diving. Instead, she talked about a peaceful death in her sleep at the resort where she was staying. Yes, it was a lie. But only a small one, designed to keep the family at peace instead of breaking it into pieces. Veronica was certain Louise blamed her for their mother’s death, even if she refused to admit it. The barrier between them only grew stronger, as Veronica took charge of all the details with a business-like attitude that left little room for debate.

  Veronica wished that the entire process had been more emotional, more organic. But she had already mastered a rigid “no-emotion” demeanor from years of experience in the corporate world. Carrying this over into the details of a burial, writing the obituary herself, and selecting the flowers for the funeral without discussion came much easier than she had expected. Moreover, it had worked. She had gotten through it all without a breakdown—her own or anyone else’s.

  The vibration on her smartphone broke her reverie and brought her back to the present.

  She gave the subject lines a cursory glance. Since she didn’t need a new mortgage rate, and she didn’t have any interest in learning how to “increase the length of her manhood,” most of them went straight to the trash. She scanned the legitimate ones and decided they could wait. As she perused, her computer dinged again with the familiar chime alerting her to a new message. The Subject line caught her eye:

  Veronica -Thought This Would Help You

  It was addressed to her and her alone in the “To” field, and the “From” field was filled with a generic auto-reply@saygoodbyetome.org that told her it was an automated message. She read on.

  Say Goodbye One Last Time

  Do you miss a loved one? Did someone you care about die without any warning? We know that pain—we’ve experienced it ourselves. . .

  She stopped reading. Like an opportunity to increase her credit score or decrease her waist size, this was SPAM. Although the ironic timing of its arrival wasn’t lost on her, she deleted the message and shut down her computer.

  “And on that lovely note, friends, we go home.”

  She took her briefcase off the credenza, turned off her lamps and left the office, shutting the door behind her.

  Chapter 14

  It never failed. As soon as Sharon sat down at her desk to eat lunch, the office door opened. She sighed and put the massive broiled beef burger back in its box, wiping the ketchup off her face. She carefully brushed the crumbs off her ample lap before standing up to waddle around her desk and out to the reception area.

  “May I help you?” she asked the man standing at the office counter.

  “Yes, I am seeking the child,” he responded, smiling.

  Judging from his dress and the Bible clutched in his hand, she assumed he was a pastor of some sort. She had not seen him at the school before, and Sharon was the type to make it her business to know everyone and everything that went on at the school. Being the receptionist in the front office helped her in this mission.

  “Sir, this is a high school. There are lots of children here,” Sharon replied, using her best patronizing-while-being-polite tone. “You’ll have to be more specific. And do you have some sort of appointment or identification?”

  “I have the only authorization that is truly needed, my child: that of my Lord,” he said, with a toothy smile.

  Sharon judged him to be around her age and, Man of God or not, calling her child was enough to move her beyond polite inquisitor to authoritative enforcer.

  “Yes, well, I am sorry,” she said. “I am all about how the Lord is wonderful and all that, but without a parent’s written permission, you cannot simply walk into this school and expect to see one of our students.”

  “I desire to see Abby Nikko.”

  “Oh,” said Sharon, tone softening, “yes, well that makes sense I suppose. But you still need to have her parents’ permission.”

  She pulled up the student records database and looked for a message from Abby’s parents. “I’m sorry, but I can’t find anything authorizing a visitor. Would you like me to call them and verify it over the phone? We don’t usually do that, but with all that’s happened to that poor family, we can make an exception.”

  Preacher’s free hand closed over hers, as she picked up the handset. His hand felt like ice. On any other day, Sharon would have been grateful for the lunch hour in the office, alone to eat her lunch and peruse confidential student files or play online poker. But now, in this moment, she felt alone and vulnerable.

  “No, child,” he said, smiling, “that will not be necessary.” He placed his Bible on the counter and tapped a long curved finger on the plate of his oversized digital wristwatch. “I’ve got all the time in the world. Do you?” He flashed her a toothy smile and flicked his tongue across his thin upper lip.

  He pushed the phone down, and softly squeezed her plump hand before letting it go. She felt the gooseflesh gallop up her arm to the shoulder, seemingly giving birth to a pain in the joints of her elbow and shoulder. She suppressed an involuntary shudder, as he picked his Bible up, backed away and opened the door to the hallway.

  Without another word, he was gone. Sharon began crying suddenly, as she tried to rub the warmth back into her hand and arm. She peered through the glass and watched him walk purposefully toward the main entrance. She moved to the front door of the school to see him continue across the school grounds, making sure to stay until he was out of sight.

  She could feel her heart tight in her chest, and tried to slow it down by taking deep breaths. As she walked back across the hall, she stopped at the bathroom to splash her face with cool water. She had a sudden urge to scrub her hand, hard.

  Chapter 15

  Steve rolled over and looked at the clock on the nightstand: 2:37 a.m.. Kicking the covers off with a sigh, he grabbed his glasses from the nightstand and sat up. Only the alarm clock and the low pulsing red light of his phone on the pillow beside his lit the darkness: Julie’s pillow. Her side of the bed had become his desk of sorts at night. Magazines, mail, the TV remote and his laptop covered the comforter. Shortly after her death, he had put her pillows up on a shelf in the closet. He tried to make the king-sized bed with just his pillows, placed in the middle of the bed, when he bothered to make it at all. It looked ridiculous, out of balance. Eventually, he had returned her pillows to the bed. Even if she would never rest her head on them again, putting them back on the bed made for a good appearan
ce, at least until it was time to turn out the lights and crawl into bed alone.

  When he grabbed the remote to flip through the stations, Steve found nothing that could hold his interest, so he tossed the remote back onto her pillow and grabbed the stack of work mail spilling out of his rucksack. He had decided the day before that he needed to get the pile off his desk at work, yet he had refused to throw the journals and magazines away before he’d had a chance to give them a good read.

  Steve had always been a traditionalist when it came to magazines. He respected the blogs and online versions, and agreed they made for easy searching and insight, but he still appreciated the feel and satisfaction of the printed page.

  Julie had often teased him about it.

  “You’re a techie guru who won’t give up the paper. You’re like a walking oxymoron. Or maybe we should scratch that ‘oxy’ part.”

  Then she’d laugh so hard that she’d end up snorting, which would lead Steve to laugh right along with her.

  As he leafed through the magazines now, he saw right through the pages into the past, thinking back on the many times and many ways in which she had made fun of his book-wormish traits.

  He shuffled the stack looking for a cover with some appealing headlines to draw him in. The small lavender envelope slid out of the stack and landed on his lap. He didn’t remember loading it into his pack, but there it was.

  He put the stack of magazines aside, opened the envelope and read the brief message again.

  I wish something like this did exist.

  Having a chance to say goodbye might have made this a little bit easier. Having her ripped away without warning had put him in an extended state of mental shock, or at least a partial mental shutdown. What words would he have said if he had known it was the last time they would speak?

  Steve laid his head back on the pillow. He took several deep breaths, staring at the ceiling, then yawned and removed his glasses, rubbing his eyes. He looked down at the letter still in his lap, shook his head and reached for his laptop on the bed beside him. While it booted up, he turned off the TV and read the note one more time. He logged into his network and entered the web address on the card in his web browser. A simple black and white page loaded. “Say Goodbye to Me” in tall, plain letters covered the top of the page, and underneath was an italicized tagline: A chance to tell them how you feel, even though they’re gone.

  Beneath it was a simple web form, formatted like an email. The date showed at the top of the message.

  “What the hell?” he asked, shrugging.

  He filled out the TO field with a simple “You” and the FROM field with the accompanying “Me.” Leaving the SUBJECT line blank, he moved the cursor down to the body of the message and began writing.

  Doll,

  I wish there was a way to talk to you one more time. I’ve got so much to tell you and show you, but I always figured I’d have our whole lifetime together. It wasn’t until you were gone that I understood how much I needed you. We always showed love and passion, but I would have done so much more for you if I had known we would only have a few years together on this planet. I miss you more than I can even try to say. It hurts me deep in my heart. At first, it was like somebody jabbed me with a giant spear, but now it’s like a dull ache that I can’t shake. Every place I look I see you, I see us. I turn on the TV, and I see the commercials that made you laugh. I search the drawers for the can opener, and I find that pig spoon you loved to eat your ice cream with. The house seems so sterile and cold. I sleep in our bed, and I feel so small in it by myself. How am I supposed to do this now? I am so angry and so confused. I don’t know where to go. I wish you were here again. I need your warmth in our bed and in my heart. I don’t know anything anymore, and I want to feel good again.

  Steve paused, staring at the screen. Tears blurred his vision. For a moment, he considered deleting the message. Instead, he continued.

  But, I know you’re not here, and you won’t be coming back. I know this is not really going to help. But if this is my prayer, I’ll pray it. If this is a chance to speak to you, I’ll say it. I love you. I need your love, and you need mine. Wherever you are and whenever we meet again, you will have my love. It is the greatest gift that can ever be offered, and we gave ours to each other.

  Wiping his eyes and his nose with the back of his hand, he pressed the Submit button without another glance at the words he had written. Instantly the screen changed with a new message: Congratulations! Your message has been sent. We will see to it that your loved one gets it as soon as possible!

  Steve shut the laptop and placed it back on the bed. He put his glasses on the nightstand, pulled up the covers and stretched out again in bed, staring at the ceiling.

  By 3:24, he was asleep.

  Chapter 16

  “Martin, dude!” said Lloyd, rapping his knuckles on the pharmacy counter. “Jesus, you look like what that proverbial cat drugged in!”

  Martin had been taking inventory of the allergy medicines near the back of the pharmacy.

  “Thanks, Lloyd,” replied Martin, approaching the counter.

  “You okay, dude?” Lloyd asked. “Still not sleeping much it looks like.”

  “I’m fine, thanks. Did you find anything?”

  “Here’s all I got.”

  He handed Martin a small, grainy photo print-out. The picture, from the store’s security camera, was of a tall man, dressed in black. A wide-brimmed black hat hid his face from the camera.

  Martin tended to loathe extended conversations with Lloyd, the store’s elderly security guard. He had been with the pharmacy for nearly thirty years. He had no close family so he stayed at his post long after he’d reached the end of his useful shelf life as an enforcer of law and order inside the confines of the drugstore. Lloyd was more like a tradition than an actual crime deterrent. Years ago, the city had built a new downtown police precinct headquarters less than a block from the pharmacy, so there was rarely a shoplifter to snag. Martin found the idea of Lloyd chasing, let alone apprehending, a criminal ludicrous. But as with any small town, this one had its traditions, so the security guard stayed on, despite his ineptness or obsolescence.

  Lloyd had become bored over the years and to combat the tedium of his regular day shifts, he took to chatting up the teenage clerks who covered the front of the store. He was well-versed in their culture and his tales of “the way it used to be before MP3s players and reality shows” amused the clerks. He regularly adapted himself to their culture, often to a fault, in Martin’s opinion. What Kathie found amusing about the man annoyed Martin to no end.

  “Martin,” she would say, “it’s easy to get through a conversation with him. Just nod occasionally and have fun counting how many times he says ‘like’ or ‘dude’ in a single conversation. I am up to a record of 14 in a single five-minute conversation myself.”

  Martin squinted at the photo. “I can’t even see his face.”

  “Yeah, sorry. This new playback system we got for the cameras is like, the bomb, dude. I watched the whole night in about eight minutes. There’s no clear shot of him on it. The whole time, his face is covered by that ginormous hat.”

  Martin’s brow wrinkled in frustration as he stared at the small print-out. The photo was too grainy for him to be certain. This could be the preacher from his dreams, or it could simply be an uncanny coincidence. The figure in the photo appeared to be dressed as a preacher, and he did look rope thin. But without seeing his face —the bulging eyes, the tall yellowing teeth, Martin couldn’t be sure.

  “So you watched the whole night and saw nothing else unusual?” asked Martin.

  “Roger that. I mean, like dude, don’t get me wrong now. There were like the usual crowd of barflies coming in and some punk-ass kids who were getting their jollies off breaking curfew to go to the store and all that. And then sometime near three, your gangly lookin’ friend there came in, wandered a bit and then took off. Didn’t buy nothing. Jimmy said that he was all singing to
himself and stuff. Dude was prolly drunk. But naw, none of them went near the counter.”

  “What about the biker guy who came in early this morning?” Martin asked.

  “Yeah... Saw him on there, too. Looks like a dirtbag to me. But I don’t think he was out of camera-shot long enough to get that close to your shop. In fact, I rewound that sucker all the way ‘til yesterday when you closed up. Once you left, I don’t think nobody even got near the way back of the store all the way ‘til when you opened it back up, dude.”

  “What about the counter here?” Martin asked. “Can’t you see that on the tape?”

  “No, dude, you know that. I've been saying’ it to them forever. We got to have a way to keep an eye on the goods back there,” said Lloyd, gesturing to the shelves of drugs in the pharmacy.