So when I opened my eyes on that third day, I tried to keep all my emotions in check. I didn’t want to sleep again. I didn’t want to float in the black. I wanted to feel the pain, I wanted it to burn. I wanted to feel grief squeezing tightly around my heart, because that was the only way I would know it was real. Being in the black was confusing. It was deceptive. It was easy. If I stayed there for too long, I’d never want to come back.
“Easy there,” a voice said. That voice I knew.
I turned my head to the right. I was in my room at Big House. In my bed. My back was sore. I was sweaty. I needed a shower. I needed to stretch my arms and legs. I needed get out from under the comforter.
“You need to just breathe,” Abe said, as if he could read my thoughts. He sat in a chair next to the bed, watching me with sad eyes. There was no one else in the room.
“Water,” I croaked out. “Thirsty. Please.”
He nodded and lifted himself up from the chair and moved out of sight. I heard the faucet in the bathroom a moment later. Only then did I allow a tear to fall from my eye. It tracked its way over the bridge of my nose and fell to the pillow. I thought, for a moment, about asking to be put back to sleep, for Doc Heward to come back and give me another injection so I could go back into the dark and float. I pushed this thought away as the fog from the drugs began to clear from my head. Too easy, I thought. It’d be too easy.
I saw a flash of blue out of the corner of my eye, bright and warm. I looked, but there was nothing there. I thought it an aftereffect of the sedative.
Abe came back and helped me sit up in my bed. He handed me the cup of water and then sat back in the chair with a sigh.
“Where is she?” I asked finally, the silence too loud.
He didn’t have to ask who. “With the Trio,” he said quietly. “Christie told me they’re thinking about staying here. For a while, at least. To help with Lola. And you.”
“I don’t need to be taken care of,” I snapped. “Neither does she. Not by them. I can do it. We don’t need help.”
His words were pointed, but kind. “Benji, you haven’t been in a position to help anyone these last few days.”
I said nothing. He was right, of course. I looked away. I hurt all over, a pain that seemed to be buried deep into my bones.
“Has the funeral happened yet?” I asked gruffly.
“Of course not. Lola would never do that without you. You have to be there.”
“He’s still….” I couldn’t finish.
Abe knew what I was asking. “Yes. He’s still at the morgue. They had… they had to make sure there was nothing wrong with Big Eddie. Do you understand?”
Yes. Yes, I did. They had to make sure there was nothing wrong with him so they cut him open and dug around on his insides. They desecrated the body of my father in search of the truth. Had it been Doc Heward? No, I thought not. It would have been the medical examiner, the one who’d been out of town on the day I saw my father in that freezer. I nodded at Abe and asked him what they found, because they would have found something. There would be something there, because the only way my father would leave me would be if he was forced to. This was not going to be something as cosmically simple as an accident. He didn’t slide off the road because the pavement was wet. He didn’t swerve to miss a deer. No. To rid this earth of my father would take something darker than that. A conspiracy to take him away. They would find something, because Big Eddie was too big to go out because of something as mundane as a car accident. He could not die because of something so artless.
“What did they find?” I asked Abe.
He shook his head. “They haven’t said yet. It takes some time for the tests to be done. Tox screens, blood work. They’ll want to make sure there were no drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of the accident.”
Stop saying accident, you old bastard. It wasn’t an accident. “Big Eddie wasn’t like that,” I said sharply. “He would never have been so stupid.”
“I know, Benji. It’s routine. They have to check. To make sure.”
I have to go to Eugene. Meet up with some friends. I’ll be back in the afternoon.
“He told me he’d come back,” I mumbled as I started to shrink back in on myself. “He said he’d come back.”
“I know he did, boy. Big Eddie was a man of his word too. I’m sure he would have come back just as soon as he could have.”
We were silent, for a time. Then, “Did I hurt her?” I asked in a small voice.
Abe sighed and grabbed my hand. His old skin felt soft against mine. “No. Scared her, yes. But hurt her? No. You didn’t touch her, though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Doc Heward is a lot quicker than he looks, I’ll give him that.”
There was no recrimination in his voice, but I still needed him to understand. “I wasn’t… I didn’t want to hurt her,” I said. “She… she was the one… I just can’t stop thinking that she took him from me.”
“But she didn’t,” he said. “Lola had nothing to do with it. She’s in just as much pain as you are, Benji, and she’s going to need you as much as you need her.”
He was right, of course, but still I was stubborn. “She has the Trio,” I said bitterly.