The Life You Stole

by Ann, Jewel E.

  I started to speak, but I couldn’t. When I turned to go down the stairs, to call the police, he grabbed my shoulders and forced me back around.

  “Let me go!” I wriggled.

  He tightened his grip. “Please calm down. I would never hurt you. I love you. I’ve always loved you. Don’t you remember all the things I did for you? I sent you flowers and wrote you poems. I bought you everything. I saved your family. You owe me something, Evelyn.” Anger escalated the emotion in his words. What started as a desperate plea ended in a very threatening tone.

  I shoved him as hard as I could, dropping the journal to the ground. He came at me again. “You will love me.” He narrowed his eyes—eyes so dark and unrecognizable.

  I jumped to the side, but he fell forward, tripping on the journal or maybe the edge of the runner rug. Before I knew what was happening, he tumbled down the marble stairs. All the way to the bottom.

  Not a word escaped my mouth. I didn’t move for several seconds. My gaze stayed affixed to his limp body on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A slow pool of blood oozed along the tile around his head.

  No tears. Not for Graham.

  No rushing to call 9-1-1. Not for Graham.

  One breath.

  Two breaths.

  Three breaths.

  Me. It was just my breath. Not his. Not Lila’s. Not Ronin’s.

  Four friends, two lovers, one unimaginable tragedy.

  I picked up the journal and smoothed the pages that were wrinkled. Then I hugged it to me and descended that long, hard, rigid staircase, being careful to not trip and fall. At the bottom, I stared at Graham’s eyes—fixed, vacant, dead.

  “You should have loved Lila more.” I made my way to my purse that I’d dropped at the front door, and I called 9-1-1. “There’s been an accident.”

  Completely numb from my heart’s reluctance to keep beating, I waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. They carried Governor Graham Porter’s body out in a black bag as an early morning media frenzy ensued around sunrise.

  His parents.

  Security.

  People who worked close to him.

  The house swarmed with people in shock, trying to figure out what happened. The location of his wife and my involvement. I gave my statement. Then I handed over the journal, knowing some very personal things about me and Ronin were in those pages. My only two requests: they find Lila (her body I feared) and they return the journal to me.

  Too exhausted to drive home, I crossed town to my parents’ old house. The furnace had been turned way down, so I grabbed an extra blanket and slipped into their old bed, still unmade from my dad packing his single bag and moving to San Francisco. I chose my mom’s side of the bed, closing my eyes and remembering the song she used to hum to me when I was a little girl—The Beatles “Blackbird.” I hummed it softly until sleep found me.

  Hours later, under sunny skies and improved roads, I drove to Aspen, taking note of buildings as I left Denver, their flags already at half-mast. The world knew.

  I couldn’t avoid my home forever. If there was a body in my kitchen, it had to be dealt with before I brought the kids home. Seeing him would haunt me for the rest of my life. But I had no other choice. Parking in the driveway, I climbed out of the vehicle and took slow steps toward the front door. Before I could open it, I forced myself to focus on Anya and Franz. They were always my grounding point, my source of courage, my truest reason for living. Whatever waited for me on the other side of the door—I could handle it.

  My gloved hand reached for the doorknob. I held my breath as tears waited on standby, and my heart worked its way up my throat. My hand shook. My lips quivered, and my body began to fold in on itself as I fell to my knees. Pressing my hands and my cheek to the door, I cried. Everything was my fault. Lila marrying Graham. Lila on the mountain that fateful day. Ronin feeling like a failure as a husband. Me … it was all on me. And then I just left him with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a gun in his other hand. Why did I leave my kids on Thanksgiving if I wasn’t going to save their dad?

  “I’m sorry …” I whispered between sobs. “I’m s-so s-sorry …”

  Ruff! Ruff, ruff, ruff!

  Sucking in a quick breath, I slowly opened my eyes. I couldn’t … fucking … move.

  Not a blink.

  Not a breath.

  I wasn’t even sure if I heard Mrs. Humphrey barking until she flew up the porch steps behind me and started licking my face.

  Still, I couldn’t move. Did he set her loose before I arrived the night before? Was she just now finding her way home?

  Snow crunched behind me. Steps. Each one getting closer, louder. I turned one tiny inch at a time. Trudging his way through the snow, red jacket popping against the white background, black hat, and a stick in his hand was … my husband.

  My living. Breathing. Husband.

  A warm wave filled my chest, my skin tingled, and my eyes burned with tears, making my nose run as I gave Mrs. Humphrey a quick ruffle on her head. I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t. On my knees I covered my whole face with my hands and sobbed.

  When the footsteps stopped, I let my hands fall from my face as the tears continued.

  “Lila’s dead,” Ronin whispered, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  I managed a single nod.

  “I don’t know how to make it—”

  “I don’t care.” I shook my head over and over.

  “Lila and I—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Graham—”

  “I don’t care.”

  I really … didn’t … care.

  My heart had no room for grudges, no room for anger, no room for contempt. What would one give to have someone back … back from the dead? What would one give for that second chance?

  Anything.

  “You’re alive,” I whispered.

  His gaze averted to his feet. Shame. Ronin felt shame. “It’s unforgivable.”

  “You’re alive,” I whispered again.

  “It’s my fault.”

  “You’re alive.”

  He shook his head repeatedly, face scrunched in pain. “I ruined us!” His gaze jerked up to meet mine. “It doesn’t matter that I’m alive!”

  “IT’S ALL THAT MATTERS!” That undying emotion, that sharp edge of reality brought me to my feet, to the bottom of the stairs, right in front of him with my hands framing his cold cheeks. A split second later, he blinked his red eyes, releasing so much grief as his hands covered mine. “It’s … all that matters,” I wrapped my arms around his neck, feeling his warm body, his heart beating, his breaths on my neck—him. I felt him.

  Words … they were hard to find as we made our way into the house. We would be fine. I knew it. But I wasn’t fine in that moment.

  I was tired.

  No … exhausted.

  The bottle of whiskey and the empty glass remained on the table, but the gun was gone. I stared at the table.

  Ronin grabbed the bottle and tossed it into the trash. Then he set the glass in the sink. I stared at the table.

  He slipped off my coat. I stared at the table.

  “Out back,” he murmured while hanging up my coat.

  I narrowed my eyes a bit but couldn’t tear my gaze from the table.

  “I wouldn’t have done it in the house.” He wrapped his arms around me, pressing his chest to my back.

  When I didn’t say anything, he kissed my cheek and released me along with a tiny sigh.

  Again … I felt his guilt and his shame. I felt his fear that we would never get past this.

  “Evie … please say something.”

  As Mrs. Humphrey settled onto the sofa, I turned around, leaving behind the images of Ronin at the kitchen table with a gun. There he was … in front of me, no gun, just … alive.

  “I love you, Roe.”

  He lifted his gaze, disbelief etched into his face.

  “Evelyn Alexander …” he took one step and wiped my cheek
s, so much sadness still in his eyes. We lost our friends that day, and life would never be the same. “You’re my favorite.”

  My smile grew, fighting its way past the grief. “Your favorite what?”

  “Everything,” he whispered, his voice breaking apart as he rested his forehead against mine.

  My thumbs brushed along his tear-stained cheeks. My heart drummed, awakening those old butterflies that had been dormant in the pit of my stomach for way too long. “Are you going to kiss me?”

  He grunted a tiny laugh, a sigh of relief as he smiled. “Probably.”

  EPILOGUE

  Ronin

  “I’m ready to listen,” I sat on the velvet pillow as Athelinda maneuvered her seemingly brittle self to sit on the pillow across from me. The same old nasty incense hung in the air.

  Same tacky room.

  Same creaky wood plank floors.

  Same weathered book with the brown-stained cover and the words “I AM” on the front.

  Different situation.

  The day after my wife came back for me, they found Lila’s body. She’d driven her car off a cliff. To anyone else, it looked like an accident on a treacherous snow-covered road. That was the story that made the papers.

  The Porter family made the stories in Lila’s journal disappear. Graham’s death was ruled an accident. We stayed in Colorado long enough to bury our friends. Then we flew to San Francisco to get our babies.

  Since San Francisco was only a twenty-minute drive to Berkeley, I felt the need to tie up some loose ends with my favorite parapsychologist.

  “You’re ready to listen or obey?” Athelinda grinned, showing me her gnarly smile. She hadn’t aged a day since the last time I’d seen her. She still looked a century old.

  “Obey.” I returned a smile.

  “Then that’s easy. You don’t need to see me if you understand the instructions. Hinder not the soul’s intended path unto the light … lest shards of darkness shed upon thee. What’s not to understand about that? Stop being a superhero. Boom! Problem solved.”

  “No catches? Caveats? Footnotes? Clauses? No giving the blood of my firstborn with two blackbirds wrapped in blue corn husks or anything like that?”

  She laughed, but it turned into a cough. A cough she didn’t cover up but rather spat in my face.

  I cringed, using my sleeve to wipe the spittle.

  “Don’t bring back the dead, and God will be pleased with you.”

  “Why did my heart stop? When Lila coded a second time, my heart stopped.”

  “Yikes!” She cringed.

  “Yikes? Your answer to why my heart stopped is yikes? I’m paying you for yikes?”

  She thumbed through her book and scribbled an illegible note on one of the pages. “I’ll look into this. I’ll have to consult with …”

  “God?” My eyebrows slid up my forehead.

  “The Keeper.”

  “When do you talk to the Keeper?”

  She shrugged. “When I die. My list of clarifications—questions—is getting so long I fear my earthly heart won’t restart if I dillydally too long.” She tapped her pointy fingernail on her notes. “But this feels like an important one to clarify. My best guess is you were too close to this person. It’s really a miracle you’re still alive after she took her own life.”

  I nodded several times, not mentioning the gun and my intentions. “Find boring and embrace it if you like your life. Okay?”

  “And if I die again, stay dead. Right?”

  The woman of many lives gave me a wry grin. “Yes. A wise man would do that.”

  “You’re not wise?”

  She pulled her hair over her shoulder and began braiding it. “No. I’m weathered. You’re showing wisdom.”

  I thought I preferred bravery. I thought I could prove to the world, to whatever god reigned over me, that I was worthy to decide who lived and who died. Maybe I even felt a bit of immortality having died and come back to life.

  My time with Lila taught me just how fragile our existence was in the universe. I still didn’t understand why my peers could save lives and not suffer consequences. Perhaps God was testing me. I failed that test … or almost failed it. After all, had Evelyn not unexpectedly shown up Thanksgiving night, I would have taken that gun out back by the woodpile and pulled the trigger—given my life as a sacrifice for disobeying God, for letting Lila die, for hurting Evelyn deeply.

  I stopped counting how many times she saved my life, but I realized my true indebtedness belonged to her. Every day I would live and love her and our perfectly imperfect life. I’d hang up my red ski patrol jacket and find a job where lives weren’t in danger. What? I had no idea. And it didn’t matter. We’d figure it out together.

  Evelyn

  Eight months later …

  Losing my best friends and my mom in the same year nearly crippled me. It taught me the fragility of life. I learned I couldn’t exist in this life by holding on to the past.

  There were so many things in Lila’s journal that I wanted to discuss with Ronin. Did he know she was being abused? Did he know her cancer wasn’t real? Why did he keep it from me? What exactly happened in their moment of intimacy?

  However, in the days we stayed in Denver after Thanksgiving, preparing to say goodbye to our friends, I never asked him those questions. Lila begged me to forgive him, so I imagined the worst. I imagined that he knew everything and that he kept it from me. Then I imagined the reasons for not telling me. I knew they were, at their core, born of love.

  Ronin loved me.

  And if I loved him, truly, in a million alternate universes loved him, then I would forgive him without demanding accountability and without apology.

  I chose love. Always love.

  “We’re doing this.” I grinned, breathless with excitement as we handed the keys to our house over to a realtor, the same realtor who sold the building where I had Clean Art. The money from those sales gave us a new freedom to go anywhere and start over. At first we considered Vancouver, but the memories of Lila and Graham were too raw to go there.

  We chose Chamonix, France where Ronin grew up. A new beginning. I hated leaving my dad, Katie, and my niece, Ansley Madeline (not Porter) Reynolds, but they not only understood, they encouraged our relocation. My loyal intern, Soapy Sophie and her mom, Nanny Sue, inherited Clean Art—and they agreed to keep the generous ski patrol discount.

  “We’re doing this.” Ronin wrapped his arms around me from behind and rested his chin on my shoulder as we took one last mental picture of our first home. I shed a few tears. It held so many memories of my life, even before Ronin.

  “Daddy!” Franz yelled from the car with his typical impatience. “Let’s go!” Mrs. Humphrey barked in agreement.

  I turned in Ronin’s arms. He wiped my face and smiled, knowing they were happy tears.

  “Three lives.”

  He cocked his head, eyes narrowed.

  I grinned. “You have my permission to save three lives from this day forward. Your wife and your two children. You may hinder our soul’s intended path unto the light.”

  Ronin kissed my forehead. “Yes, because without you, shards of darkness would shed upon thee—me.” He interlaced his fingers with mine and led me to the car. “But really, babe, you should have said four lives. Poor Mrs. Humphrey.”

  The End

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  Check out an excerpt from Jewel E. Ann’s bestseller, Transcend!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nevaeh. It’s Heaven spelled backwards and the name of the girl to my right with her finger five stories up her nose. I grimace while readjusting in my chair. It has nothing to do with her disgusting habit. One of the wings to my pad is stuck to my pubic hair. Mom worries about tampons and toxic shock syndrome. It can’t be more painful than this.

  The receptionist keeps glancing at us through her owlish glasses, tapping the end of her pen on her chin. “Nevaeh, do
you need a tissue?” she asks.

  My parents are not the weirdest parents in the world after all. Lucky me.

  Roy.

  Doris.

  Cherish.

  Wayne.

  With over ten thousand baby names in the average name book, how does one settle on such horrible names?

  Backwards Heaven glances over at me as if I have the answer to the receptionist’s question. I’m not the tip of her finger. How am I supposed to know what it feels like up there? After inspecting her size—smaller than me—and her yellow hair in a hundred different lengths that looks like something my mom calls a DIY, I give the receptionist a small nod.

  Without moving her finger, because it might be stuck, Nevaeh mimics my nod. The receptionist holds out a box of tissues. They both stare at me. When did I get put on booger duty?

  “Swayze, do you need to go potty before we leave?” Mom asks, coming out of the office where I took my tests.

  Swayze. That’s me. Worst name ever—until five minutes ago when Nevaeh introduced herself and offered me a gluten-free, peanut-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, taste-free snack from her BPA-free backpack. My uncle thinks the millennials are going to ruin the world because they have no common sense, and all of their knowledge comes from the internet. He may be right, only time will tell, but then what’s my parents’ excuse? Or Nevaeh’s parents’ excuse? Common sense says you give your child a good solid name. Kids don’t want to be unique. It’s true. We just want to fit in.

  I grab the box of tissues and toss it on my empty chair, turning before Nevaeh’s finger slides out. Some things I don’t need to know, like why it smells like cherry vomit in the waiting room, why there is a water dispenser but no cups, and what’s up Nevaeh’s right nostril.

  “Restroom,” I mumble, tracing the toe of my shoe over the red and white geometric patterns of the carpet.

  “We can’t hear you when you talk to your feet, Swayze,” Dad says like he’s said it a million times. Maybe he has.

  I lift my head up. “No, I don’t need to use the restroom! Or potty. Do I still look four to you?”