For my husband, the love of my life
Published by S. M. Schmitz
Copyright © 2015, by S. M. Schmitz. All Rights Reserved.
This e-book is licensed for your enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
PROLOGUE
It should have been raining the day I died. At least, that’s what I always thought. Rain would have given me some better explanation for what happened. It would have given me something tangible to hate, even if it is completely pointless to try to fight the rain. But it hadn’t been raining that day. It had been sunny. Clear. Beautiful, even. It wasn’t too hot yet, as Houston is so often, but it was only April and a rare spring cold front had moved drier air into the city so even the humidity was bearable.
I found myself repeatedly distracted by that impossibly blue sky and kept looking out the window of my office, thinking Lottie would inevitably make some comparison of it to my eyes later, which just made me want to go home so I could see her, even at the risk of listening to her eye analogies. I am almost positive she only did shit like that because she knew I suffered from a complete lack of romanticism and I never knew how to respond, even after all these years.
I couldn’t focus on work anyway, so I tossed my iPad onto my desk and tried to think of some equally nonsensical analogy for hazel eyes, which was a lot harder because not many things in nature that people want to be compared to are light brown with green flecks scattered throughout. Somehow, I didn’t think she would want to hear that her eyes sparkled like damp Spanish moss.
I had just crossed through my Spanish moss idea when my boss, a middle-aged man with thinning hair and wire framed glasses that magnified his dark eyes, which most definitely reminded me of the gray-brown mud of South Texas, quietly opened my door and stepped into my office, shutting the door just as quietly behind him. I knew that expression on his face. Gaunt, serious. Grave. I had seen that look before. Someone was dead. I immediately started going through a mental checklist of who was in the field. I stood up and waited for him to tell me who it was.
“Daniel?” I motioned toward a chair because he hadn’t moved since walking through my door. Daniel glanced at the chair but didn’t budge. He just stood by the closed door, staring somewhere between the empty chair and me. Eric, my best friend – ok, my only friend – was in the building. I knew he was safe. But the longer Daniel stood there without speaking, the more I wanted to leap across my desk and beat the words out of him. What the fuck did he think he was doing anyway? I tried speaking again, in case I snapped and really did beat the shit out of him.
“Daniel, I’m not your fucking therapist. Talk or get out.”
He finally looked up at me. And that’s when I saw the tears he had been trying to keep from falling trapped behind those thick lashes and pooling around those muddy brown eyes. “Dietrich,” he choked on my name. God. What could have happened to make my asshole of a boss cry in front of me – the same guy who once told me with a smug smirk that the job he was sending me out on was probably going to get me killed but I was German, so he didn’t mind taking the risk? I didn’t bother pointing out that I had moved to the U.S. when I was fourteen and was an American citizen because he already knew that. Just like he knew I was one of the best damn agents on his team and he resented me for that because I hadn’t been born here and spoke with an accent he didn’t like.
He cleared his throat and wiped sloppily at his eyes. “Dietrich,” he started again, this time speaking so softly I had to sit down. Nobody ever delivered news that wouldn’t completely destroy you in that tone of voice. “Your cell phone. Why don’t you have it on?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even make sense of his question. “I’m sure it is. It’s …” I glanced around my office and remembered tossing it in my gym bag that morning. “Oh. It’s probably in my locker.”
My stomach was ice. There was a pounding in my temples that made my head feel like a bomb was about to detonate in there. I couldn’t breathe. My cell phone. My personal cell phone. There was only one person this could be about now. Not just one person. The person. The only person. The only person this man, once a pathetic abandoned, loveless child, had ever loved. My world. My life.
“Lottie.”
It was a question. At least I meant it as a question. I don’t know how it came out. I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore. I was dying. It had started then, even though I didn’t know it at the time. He was talking. What was he saying? He was speaking words, English words, words I should understand, but none of them made any sense. My office suddenly seemed both terrifyingly small and overwhelmingly enormous at the same time, both boundless and constrictive, and the names for everything around me vanished. How can I just get him to shut up, just get him to stop saying these words? Can I even walk? How do I walk? And what is he saying? Listen, Dietrich. It’s English. You speak English. Listen.
“…the car … red light … Jamie … driving … so fast … on Kirby … Dietrich? … listening? … dead … Lottie …”
Lottie. My world. My life.
******
That pounding. It wouldn’t stop. I slowly opened my eyes and realized it wasn’t in my head anymore. Someone was knocking on my door. I knew that knock. Not many people ever knocked on my door, so of course I knew it was Eric. I wanted to ignore him but how could I? He had gone to the hospital morgue with me to identify her body. He had gone to the funeral home with me to pick out a casket. He had talked for me when I had no voice as the funeral home director asked about open caskets and rosaries – what the fuck did that even mean? Lottie was Catholic but I had never thought to ask my 25 year old fiancée if she would ever want people to pray the rosary at her funeral, and why did people even do that? – and if we wanted a mass. Her mother was there, as numb and useless as I was, and so Eric had taken charge.
I don’t even know what kind of funeral my best friend arranged for my dead girlfriend. It didn’t matter. I saw her body in the hospital. Lifeless. Cold and broken with deep purple splotches under the paper white skin. I guess, then, that’s when I knew I had actually died. Her chest didn’t move, didn’t allow her lungs to fill with air – so how could I breathe? Her heart didn’t beat, didn’t push blood through her bruised and shattered body. Whatever heart of my own I had discovered the day I met her vanished when her heart stopped beating. My body moved, reacted. But I was dead.
Eric was still knocking. He knew I was inside. I had to be. We were burying my fiancée today. I pushed the blankets off of me and sat up slowly. My head was pounding viciously. Apparently, several days of not sleeping will create one hell of a hangover. The clock told me it was almost 8:00 a.m. Her funeral was at 1:00. And Eric kept rapping at my door. I was pretty sure he would knock the damn thing down soon if I didn’t open it.
“Goddamn, it, Eric, I’m coming. Stop making so much fucking noise.” I glanced through the peephole, more habit than concern, because honestly, ISIS could have been outside my door at that moment and I wouldn’t have cared. He was holding two garment bags. Our suits. I had a sudden vision of a very different day – the day we were supposed to have – of Eric standing outside my door with those two garment bags, one for me, and one for him as the best man at my wedding.
I pulled the door open and let him in without saying anything. Without Lottie, I didn’t know how not to be an asshole
again.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked. I glanced over at him, his usually carefully styled short brown hair was messy, unbrushed. He hadn’t shaved and he had dark circles under his eyes. He looked like shit. God, I probably did look half-dead. I sighed. I was too tired to be a smartass about it.
“A little.”
“It’s raining, it may not stop...” He had wanted to say something else but whatever it was, he stumbled, pressed his lips together and tossed the bags on my couch.
Now the fucking rain comes.
“Oh.” What else could I say? Half the time, I couldn’t even remember to speak in English anymore. I sat down on the end of the couch that wasn’t covered in freshly pressed suits and rubbed my eyes and forehead. God, my head hurt … but it was a welcome pain. This physical pain I understood. It was a distraction from the complete hollowness that had swallowed me for the past three days.
I had tried to stay with her as much as I could. The visitation, the rosary – which I still didn’t understand but her relatives from Louisiana had all come with beaded necklaces in hand, chanting repetitive prayers and I waited for something revelatory to happen, some sort of spiritual awakening, but mostly I just watched with the same detached sense of amused curiosity I always had when Lottie talked about her Catholic upbringing. And then, as people started filing out, wanting to shake my hand, or God forbid, hug me, as they made their way back to their hotel rooms or homes, her mom, Eric and I had moved back up front, alone with her at last. And we sat in silence, except for the aching, strangling cries of a heartbroken mother and Eric’s mysterious occasional sighs and crossing himself. I had known Eric almost as long as I had known Lottie and never knew he was Catholic too.
I wasn’t going to leave her, but around 4:00 a.m., Lottie’s mother finally asked us if we could give her a few hours with her daughter alone. And how could we say no? Before leaving, I leaned over her, kissed her forehead – so cold and smooth, like marble – and gently touched the ring on her left hand; that hand, delicate with a few perfectly placed freckles that formed a Bermuda triangle across the back. Three freckles, that’s it. Nothing else inside that triangle, like any spot that had tried to emerge from the sun’s daily assault on her pale white skin just vanished inside those three. Her right hand sported scattered freckles, light and hardly visible unless she spent too much time in the sun, but they had covered all of her visible skin with so much makeup, I couldn’t see those tiny freckles I knew were there.
I knew every spot, every mark, every freckle and scar on her body. With an eidetic memory, I would have remembered anyway, but this was her body. I didn’t just remember, I knew her scent, her voice, the way her skin felt under my fingers, the way her body reacted and moved closer to me when I touched her. I knew the way she tasted, exactly how she felt when I was inside of her, the way she moved against me. No other woman would ever take her place. I also knew that the day I met her. Eight years later, looking down at this small body, her thin frame, wavy brown hair draped over her shoulders and falling loosely over her chest – I was even more certain now that no woman could take her place.
Eric had sat down in the armchair next to the sofa and rested his head in his hands. I doubt he had slept at all. “I called Cathy for you.” Cathy was Lottie’s mother. Shit. Never even had the chance to be a real son-in-law, and I was still a terrible one. “She wants us to go to the hotel and bring her clothes and makeup to the funeral home. She won’t leave.”
I nodded. My head protested vociferously. “We should go then.”
Getting dressed for the love of your life’s funeral is probably as close as anyone can get to having an out of body experience. I had to pick out a dress shirt and a tie. But I don’t remember doing either of those things. As I slipped my feet into my newly polished black dress shoes, I caught a quick reflection of myself in the mirror. My stomach lurched from a memory of Lottie teasing me about being a poster-child for good “Aryan” breeding. Somebody had brushed my light blonde hair. I had shaved? Those dark under-eye circles didn’t seem quite as bad as I had imagined but against my pale, north German complexion, they looked like perfect purple semicircles.
I was dressed. Somehow, 30 minutes had passed and I was standing in our – in my – bedroom, getting ready to bury the only part of my life that had ever made it worth living.
Eric was waiting in the living room. He had shaved and combed his hair but still looked like shit. I probably still did too. After all, doesn’t having one’s heart torn apart kind of mean your days of not looking like shit are over? I felt like I should say something. Some kind of thank you. Some, hey, not only do I literally trust you with my life – which is really saying something, because most of our colleagues are a bunch of incompetent jackasses – but you are obviously a hell of a lot more capable than I am of doing … the kind of stuff best friends should do but we both know I’d fail miserably at? I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for that.
“Eric,” God, I am the most asocial asshole on the planet. But Eric knew me well enough to know that, and he knew I would have no fucking clue what to say to him.
“I loved her, too, Dietrich. She was my friend. And you were different around her. Hardly anyone at work ever got to see that, except maybe Daniel. They joke about you being a cold, indifferent … well, you know … but they never got to see the way you were when you and Lottie were together. How … normal you really are.”
“Was.” I didn’t mean to say it so quickly. I may not like people in general, but I know how to read between the lines; he was trying to tell me he was worried he was going to lose his best friend too. And after all he had done for me, I didn’t have the decency not to shatter that hope until after this goddamn day was over.
******
The rain had finally stopped by the time we were gathered at the cemetery. I watched in detached numbness as the priest said a few more prayers, handed a small silver crucifix to Cathy, and tried to offer words of comfort… something about Heaven, maybe. Probably. I mean, he’s a priest and it was a funeral. I’m sure he mentioned Heaven somewhere in there. Words just floated past me. My eyes were fixed on the cerulean casket in front of me. Eric later told me he had picked that one out because she would have chosen it for the color – it was the color of my eyes. At the time, it was just blue. A smooth, blue rectangle with silver bars running along the sides for the pallbearers. She was in there. As soon as we left, they would lower her into the ground, cover her with dirt. I had the crazy idea that if I just stayed under the avocado green canopy, I could keep her out of the ground forever. I could stay with her forever.
Suddenly, I felt Eric gently pulling on my arm. He was standing. We were alone, except for the priest and the cemetery crew, waiting a respectful distance away from us, but waiting for us to leave so they could finish their jobs and go home. Probably to their own wives or fiancées or girlfriends. Maybe their kids too. Lottie had always wanted kids. She made sure I knew that before the first time we slept together...just in case. We were seventeen.
I looked up at Eric, bewildered. The sun was much lower in the sky than I expected it to be. How much time had passed? How long had they been waiting for me? The priest moved into the seat beside me. Fuck. He was going to try to save my Hell-bound, atheistic soul and I was finally going to lose it. I was pretty sure Eric wouldn’t approve of me killing a priest, considering I’d just learned he was Catholic and all.
“Dietrich,” the priest’s voice was soft but not in the same, I’m-about-to-fuck-up-your-world kind of way that Daniel’s soft tone of voice was. He knew my name. I couldn’t recall his – I hadn’t paid attention to most of the service. I’m sure it started with Father. “You’re both so young. I honestly can’t even imagine the pain of this kind of loss. I have the names of some grief counselors if you’d ever like to talk to someone.”
It took me a minute to understand he wasn’t talking religion to me. I saw him for the first time – took in his short, round body and equally ro
und face, his receding hairline and eyes so dark they were almost black. But what was that behind those dark eyes? Compassion? Sadness? Kindness? Great. Now I was going to have to give up mocking priests.
I shook my head. “Thank you. We’ll go.” I stood and reached out to touch her casket one last time; the sun had warmed it so that it felt more like an incubator rather than a tomb. I couldn’t stay with her forever. It was time for me to go.
I glanced up, where the rain clouds had mostly drifted eastward and the brilliant blue Texas sky broke through the gray. The rain was moving on to Louisiana. And my afterlife had just begun.
Chapter 1
Two years later
Have you ever had a dream that seemed so real that when you woke up, you weren’t quite sure what was reality and what was imagined anymore? Because I often dreamed of her still. Cooking dinner. God, she was such a good cook. Folding laundry while we streamed The Big Bang Theory. She thought it was funny. I thought she was adorable when she laughed. Making love then talking in whispers in bed, which was completely ridiculous since no one else lived with us but it never seemed right to speak louder while laying naked in bed. Her falling asleep on my shoulder, as she so often did, and as I stroked her hair, thinking this is more a Heaven than any place Man had dreamed up.
Sometimes, I still woke up expecting her to be in bed with me, and when I reached over for her and felt nothing but empty sheets, I expected to hear the steady drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker or the muffled voices of the television coming through the bedroom wall. Perhaps she had just gotten up to watch TV, like she did sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. And so I would lay in the blackness of that empty room and listen. I would listen until my ears started ringing from the complete silence surrounding me and I finally gave in and admitted that this was, in fact, not a dream. This was my afterlife. And I was alone.
Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Page 1