Dark Child (Wild Men 5)

“And you think he has harmed himself?”

I gape at her as she unlocks her car. “No, of course not. Merc wouldn’t do that.”

Right?

I mean, what would you do if you couldn’t sleep? If every time you closed your eyes, you sank into blood and horror?

No, Merc wouldn’t.

“I don’t know if anything happened,” I tell her as we start driving, still dressed up for a night out, made up and dolled up, as if we’re actresses in the wrong movie. “But I had a gut feeling that something was wrong, and just pray I wasn’t right.”

We’ve barely left Springfield when I get a call from Gigi that they got the door open and called the paramedics.

Merc won’t wake up.

How many sleeping pills did he take? He can’t die from just that, right? Unless he mixed them with booze.

No. He’ll be okay. I keep telling myself that as we speed toward St. Louis, but truth is, the next hour is the longest of my life.

I Google ‘sleeping pills overdose’ anyway. Turns out he should be okay.

He will be. He has to.

“Where to?” Lin asks as we wind through evening traffic. “Hospital?”

“No.” I check Gigi’s latest text. “It seems… Wait.”

Another text comes in from Gigi. “He’s awake.”

Oh thank God. “We’re going to Merc’s,” I tell Lin and rattle off the address.

Then I hit call.

“How is he?” I blurt the moment she answers. No

hellos, not how-are-yous. “Is he all right?”

“Awake, like I said.” Gigi sounds like she’s on a wind-buffeted desert somewhere, her voice cut by static. “Paramedics said he’s fine. He needs to sleep the pills off. He can’t remember locking the door.” She laughs nervously. “Guess subconsciously he wanted to escape from my interrogation? Oh God, is this my fault?”

“No, Gigi.” It feels slightly weird that we’re talking like this, when I only saw her that one time at their family lunch. “He’s just tired, that’d be my guess. He took the pills to sleep, miscalculated. That’s all.”

“I just…” Her breath hitches. “I don’t know what to do. How to help him.”

“We’ll find a way.”

“He doesn’t want to talk about it, about the dreams, he says he can’t remember what happened that night…”

“What night?” What did I miss? “Gigi, what night?”

“The night his nightmares started,” she whispers, and I’m not even sure that’s what she said, the line is so broken.

“You were there? You saw what happened?”

“No, I found him afterward. He was so little, he didn’t want to speak, and then what he said made no sense, and he just stopped… stop talking about it. And his memories turned into dreams.”

Silence falls. I don’t know what to say, what to ask.

Finally, I just say, “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” and hang up.