“Eric, we argued. There are certain things you don’t understand about my daughter.”
“You blamed her for Scarlett’s death, didn’t you?”
“If you’d just listen to me—”
“No, I don’t need to listen to you and I don’t need to understand anything about your daughter. If I were you, I’d be glad my daughter survived, I wouldn’t make her feel like shit because she did. How the hell can you blame her for her sister’s death? How fucking dare you? If you think that’s okay, you’re a poor excuse for a father and you don’t get to talk to her.”
“Please, let me talk to her.”
“No, you blew your chance with me.”
“But—”
I hang up. I don’t want to hear anymore. I’m right and I don’t care what he thinks.
I make my way to my office and I work on the ideas I have for the tracker, but I’m thinking of her.
Last night while I sat in her room I thought of assimilating the device and tracking it in real time. It’s the only thing I can think of doing that makes sense. So rather than programming the tracker with a code to track, I’d be doing everything live. The assimilation works perfectly so I essentially make a replica of Robert’s device, but all my efforts to track the fucking thing while I’m using it are fruitless. Hours pass and I come up with nothing.
There’s something I’m missing or not factoring in because shit like this should come easy to me. My mind is also all over the place because I’m thinking about Summer.
The next few days go by and she’s a mess. She doesn’t eat and she doesn’t leave the room.
The day of the funeral comes around and her face is swollen and her eyes so puffy they look like slits in her face. I have to hold her up to get her to the church and once we’re there it’s hard and she’s a mere shadow of the woman she was only last week.
She seemed to calm for a moment when we walk inside and she looked at her sister in the white cassette covered in white roses inside and out.
With the amount of weeks that have gone by since her sister’s death, it wasn’t a good sight but her father insisted on an open cassette and I think Summer needed this last goodbye.
I can’t deny that it hit me hard seeing Scarlett lying there dead. I like to think I can switch my feelings on and off, but sometimes I don’t have that kind of control. Seeing her there was a snapshot of what will happen if I fail.
Summer’s father tried to talk to her, but she came back to me and held my hand.
Once the burial was over, I took her home, and she retreated to that shell again.
I made use of the time at home by working on the tracker but with more failed attempts frustration takes over again by nightfall and I end up in that room again that illustrates the darkness of my mind.
I switch on the lights and look over the images on the wall of the dead. When I get to Robert, I growl. I’ve never wanted to kill anyone so desperately.
I grab a glass paperweight and throw it straight into the wall. It smashes when it hits his face and I wish he was here in front of me so I could kill him.
The shuffle of footsteps sound behind me and I whirl around quickly because no one is supposed to be in here. That’s when I come face to face with the angel and her doll-like face.
She’ll know she shouldn’t be in here, but she has that shell-like look about her that suggests she’s not thinking about what she’s doing anymore. She’s just going through the motions.
“Summer, baby,” I say. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
Her gaze shifts from me to the gruesome pictures on my wall and I half expect her to run through then door and try to escape again.
As the seconds tick by and there’s no reaction from her, I don’t know what jars me more.
The way she absorbs the images of the dead without emotion, or the fact that she says nothing and looks at them like she’s browsing in a grocery aisle at the supermarket.
She looks over every image and when she gets to Robert she reaches out and traces an X over his face.
“I wish I could kill him,” she states. “But you know it’s not his fault he knows me. That’s someone else’s fault. Robert or Jake or whatever the fuck his name is was just another monster in my life. Monsters act the way they do and you can’t expect anything different from them. I knew better though and I fucked up. Now my sister is gone and I can’t bring her back.”
I walk over to her and rest my hand on her shoulder.