Season of Waiting

by Jim Christopher

  Somehow, after days of crying—from fear over what was happening to Dad, the anxiety of being separated from him, the relief of finding him, and finally the grief of losing him all over again—Wes had wrung more tears out of her. Rage tears. They came ugly and noisy, without impediment, Irene having lost any concern over her appearance or social grace. The colors of the tended landscaping melted in her vision, bright yellows and purples from the flowerbeds blending with the sage hedges, the liquid edges of which spilled into the pale blue afternoon sky. A blur moved through her watery vision, someone pacing through the surrounding space, their essence reduced to an amoebic blob of shifting hues.

  Irene had worried about being alone. When Dad was sick, her thoughts had focused on life without him. The Caleb-shaped holes he would leave behind in her life. Those dumb jokes of his, that you still had to be smart to understand. Soft encouragement when he could afford attention away from Wes. A conduit to the memories of her mother. Now, the foundation of her grief lay exposed to her. Irene wasn’t alone—she was worse than alone. Of all the spaces Dad filled in her life, it was the one between her and her brother where she most wanted him back. Where he would keep the focus of Wes’s thrashing and clutching off of her, shield her from her brother’s shitty choices. Dad was gone, but Irene grieved for the thing she gained. The shame of knowing that she was already letting Wes consume the space she wanted for her memories of her father brought her anger back on herself.

  It was then Irene had noticed the watery blur growing in the courtyard. Approaching her. Then standing in front of her. Waiting. She cleared her eyes, bringing the smeared colors back into a definitive shape. A person. A woman. Elderly. Thin limbs swallowed in a billowing patient gown. Irene’s vision cleared enough to see the woman’s gaunt face—mouth slack, eyes disoriented, hair matted to her scalp as though she hadn’t bathed in a year. Irene’s self-pity became concern as the woman’s effluvium musk reached her nose.

  “Do you ... know who I am?” the woman rasped through a dusty throat.

  That’s when the screaming started. Not from the woman, but from inside the hospital. Then alarms blared, sharp and constant, adding to the cacophony. Through the windows, Irene saw people crowding into the hallways. Patients. Walking out of their rooms. Tubing and wiring flowing from under their loose gowns, ripped from the medical machines they were intended to serve. Some moved with purpose and determination, searching for something or someone. Others wandered lost, like this woman in the courtyard, as if baffled to find themselves here.

  In the commotion, it had taken twenty minutes to find help for the lost woman in the courtyard. Medical staff scrambled to prevent patients from hurting themselves, to corral them back into the safety of their rooms and beds. Irene worked her way through the crowd. Shoving past the families hugged in tight bundles of joy and relief. Avoiding the viscous rivers of suspect fluids left by medical tubing dragged behind wandering patients. Ignoring the hollers of doctors begging patients not to rip out their breathing tubes. Back up the stairs to her brother’s room.

  Only to find it empty. During that inexplicable chaos, Wes had skipped out, somehow hobbling through his near-fatal injuries to save his own ass from being arrested for murder.

  The wall of ice hitting her lip pulled Irene back to the present, to the bar in the airport. In her reverie, she had downed the gin and tonic in a few swallows. The cascade of alcohol soothed her from the inside, the sharp edge of the tonic’s quinine drying on her tongue. She looked to the television again, to the smiling faces of a family reunited, folks who had beaten the odds.

  Wes hadn’t been the only person to disappear that day. Hundreds of patients had wandered out of the hospital. A few had loved ones with them. A few others found their way home. Some tried to leave, but bled out before reaching the edge of the parking lot. Many, including her brother, left the hospital and wandered into the expansive Texas hill country and remained missing.

  “Wow, you’re a good drinker!” Irene’s eyes fell to Kevin, who nodded with appreciation. “Another?”

  Irene set the glass down, pushing it towards the bartender. She wasn’t a good drinker, not at all. And she hadn’t eaten since this morning. But a haze was building in her head, one that promised to blur the details of her questions around what the hell had happened to her father and brother. To blunt the edge of her anger towards her dad. Towards herself for missing him for the wrong reasons.

  “Yes, please. And the tab.” As Kevin went to work putting her drink together, Irene slipped her phone out of her pocket and checked the time. She knew she had plenty to spare before her plane opened for boarding, but why trust when you can verify? As she looked, a text notification appeared on the black glass. It was from Sheriff Dietrick: Still nothing on Wes. Sorry. Have a safe flight. Irene sighed. The sheriff promised to update Irene at least twice a day. But since he disappeared from the hospital, there had been no trace of her shithead brother.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Irene nursed the drink as her intoxication bloomed. The news moved from the “miracle at Uvalde” to more mundane stories. Politicians lying. Businesses stealing. People hurting and killing each other. The stories arrived and passed in moments, each one taking a small piece of her and leaving her more exhausted.

  The cackle of the airport PA system pierced the noise of the bar. “This is a call for general boarding of flight 2718 with service to…” Irene recognized her flight number before the announcement dissipated into the din of conversations around her. She downed the rest of her cocktail, leaving money under the glass before collecting her notebook and pen back into her pack. Hoisting her father to her chest, and her backpack over her shoulder, she stumbled from under the weight of the negative news and out of the bar.

  Her gate was a short walk away, just out of sight along the curving hub-and-spoke concourse. Irene moved at an unsteady pace, her legs slogging through her viscous inebriation. The stream of people ebbed and flowed around her, as content to ignore her as she was to be ignored.

  “Come on, they just called our flight! We’re gonna miss it! Let’s get to the freakin’ plane already!”

  The man was not speaking to her, but near her. His voice and accent tugged at a thread in her mind, one attached to fond memories and feelings. The vowels launching wide off his tongue, his inflection animated with a gruff impatience, the undercurrent of Bostonian attitude impossible to mistake. That accent sounded like home now. To hear it warmed her heart, reminding her of the friends and life waiting for her back east. She smiled, following the stranger-from-Boston as he and his companion cut a wake through the disorganized flow of travelers.

  Her smile waned as they slowed. The man stood on his toes, searching over the heads of the throng in front of him. “For the love of Pete,” he declared, “are these people in line? Or are they just in the way?” They had reached their gate.

  Glancing at the marquee in front of the jetway, Irene verified the flight’s destination: Boston, Massachusetts. Her face fell. The time had come to say goodbye. Not to these strangers. To Boston. To school. Those friends and that life she had planned for herself there. Moving around the crowd, Irene hugged her father a little tighter to her chest as she continued to the next gate. Her gate. A hopper flight to San Antonio, Texas.

  The choice hadn’t been easy. She wanted almost nothing more than to return to the safety of what she knew. Classes, teaching, research. Lose herself in data and hypotheses. Relish the lust of systematically unraveling the intimate secrets of the universe. To seek truth through the scientific method. A process she could trust and follow.

  Yet there remained the rock under her mind. The unanswered question that irritated her consciousness at every moment. Why? Why had Wes taken Dad all the way to Texas? What was Dad thinking? What happened in those two days that turned everything into a shit show? She wanted to find Wes. Needed to find him. When she did, she’d wring information out of him until she understood. Until the jigsawed pieces she
carried now fit together into a sensible picture. When this need was met, she could return to the life she wanted.

  School would be there. After discussing her situation with her advising professor, the university had offered to extend her leave of absence for two years. After a lot of introspection and some therapy, Irene took the opportunity. That gift of time, combined with the resources left to her by Dad, meant she didn’t have to worry about anything except locating her asshole brother. Irene merged into the group of boarding passengers and trudged her way towards the plane. The line of people swayed in front of her. She was solidly drunk. Maybe she should have eaten something with the booze, but the opportunity had passed. She stumbled her way down the aircraft’s center aisle, relieved to find her seat open and waiting for her near the window of row twenty eight.

  She side-stepped into the row, then carefully tucked Dad-in-the-box beneath the seat in front of her. Before stowing her bag there, Irene pulled out her day log and pen. Her mind was too clouded to get anything done, but an open notebook aggressively displaying data model designs and equations lessened the chances of someone making small talk. She had no use for it on a normal day, and while alcohol tended to loosen most tongues, for Irene it did the opposite. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts, let them swim in the gin and tonic until they could swim no more, and then see where they ended up drowning. The notebook open on her lap, pen in her hand, Irene watched through her window as the ground crew buttoned up the plane.

  A flight attendant announced that they were ready for departure, and Irene offered silent thanks for the empty seats beside her. The flight would be quiet, give her an hour to reset. Think about next steps. Maybe she could hire a skip-tracer to find Wes. Were they really a thing? Or was that just in movies and television?

  The runway sped past the window, dropping away to reveal the urban sprawl of the Dallas-Fort Worth … what did they call it? A metroplex? As the plane rose into the sky, concrete spread like a disease below, fingering into the wide and flat expanses of nature that made up most of the state. Her eyes followed the land to the horizon, where the embered sun hung from a line of clouds as it reached precariously for the edge of the world. Color exploded out from there, their luscious flavors and depth perhaps amplified by the alcohol in her brain. Golden rays and long shadows caressed the land, while the thick layer of clouds burst with spirals of orange and purple, creating a phosphorescent eye staring across the sky. Across the wide, flat expanse. To this plane, this window. Holding Irene’s wonder with color and light. She held her breath, wanting to keep her grip on that moment and its beauty as long as she could.

  She knew better, though. Every moment had to pass, as this one would.

  The eye blinked. The plane jolted. Irene gasped as she tried to make sense of things. Through the window, the runway sped past again. The sun was well below the horizon somehow, leaving the sky cold and dark behind the line of trees that throttled past the moving plane. She shook off the haze, surprised that the flight had passed so quickly. Was she so drunk that she had passed out?

  The plane roared and rattled as it slowed, and Irene began collecting herself and her belongings. She felt Dad with her feet, smiling with relief that he hadn’t gotten up and run away during her inadvertent snooze. Her notebook had slipped off her lap at some point, and she found it by her feet. Irene closed her pen and stowed it in her pack, then pulled the day log off the floor of the plane.

  The attached bookmark dangled free, failing to do the one thing it was meant to do. As the plane moved to the gate, Irene thumbed through the pages, looking for the last set of notes she made in the log so she could set the bookmark in the right place. Her eyes watched the inked pages flip, catching when the spreads became blank again. Irene turned to the last page of notes, smirking at her own chicken scratch. It was near indecipherable, even to her.

  As she moved the bookmark into place, her face fell. Below her scrawled and wandering notes sat a single line of print. Neatly oriented to the lines on the page. Letters crisp and clean. The familiar endearment broke her heart and then her mind.

  HELLO STARLIGHT.

  Author’s Note

  Please review Season of Waiting.

  Thank you for reading Season of Waiting. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. Creating this book was an emotional journey, as elements of my life formed the foundation for many of the characters and themes. It is my terrifying privilege to share it with you.

  This is my first published novel, and I hope to write many more. Leaving a review will help make this book more discoverable by readers like you (the smart, good-looking ones). Having more of those readers motivates and promotes my writing career.

  To learn when my next book will be available, please subscribe to my author newsletter.

  If you are interested in bringing this book into your book club, my discussion guide is available online.

  If you’re interested in learning more about me, please visit my author website.

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  Acknowledgements

  Writing a novel is hard. As I learned by creating this book, it’s also the easiest part of the process.

  I have no shortage of people to gush upon for their support, hard work, and encouragement. Kid[0] for prompting me to finish the process this time with some well-chosen gifts. Kid[1] for helping with decisions on cover visuals; how did you get such an artist’s eye? Julie Smith for the continuous love and support, the reminders of why I’m putting so much energy into this, and for showing me the emotional impact of the story. Liz Dunbar for the writing upgrade and book club resource ideas. Ray Christopher for story and character debugging. Audrey Hammonds for the early-early reader feedback and stoking the fire under this project. Don Jones for technical, process, and motivational support. Geoffrey Hummelke for proofreading and excitement. Michele Alpern for cleaning up my copy. Nichole Lecht for capturing an unwieldy story in a single image. Angela Greenwell for giving me the emotional structure and coaching to accomplish this along with so many other goals. And Gunner for the reminders to leave it alone every once in a while, go for a walk, and enjoy the moment.

  Then there is everyone who has supported me indirectly, through their content and resources. There are far too many to list, but I am compelled to call out a few. Randy Ingermanson and his book How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method allowed my software brain to break the authoring process into small, iterative steps. His approach is the only reason I finished writing a novel this time around. Joanna Penn and her insightful, positive books on managing your own self-publishing career have been vital in navigating the “Now what?” void that opens after the first draft exists. Her books, blog, and podcast were the cat-herders for my own publication and launch efforts.

  About the Author

  Jim Christopher lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, and makes a living as a a technologist and learning sciences adviser. His work history is a crooked path, meandering from stagehand, audio engineer, carpenter, cognitive psychologist, behavioral researcher, musician, software developer, to whatever he might be doing today.

  To relax, Jim writes, cooks, crochets, builds tiny houses, and walks his dog.