Cade
“ZANDI!” I grabbed her and ran from the room in one motion, headed back down the stairs, and out to the garage. I was probably overreacting, but everything in me was screaming to get her help.
“It’s going to be okay baby, I’m here now.” I placed her gently in the backset before going around to the driver’s side. I hopped in with my heart lodged in my throat and my mind on freeze.
I was going on autopilot, my movements seemingly no longer under my control. I was so flustered I barely remembered how to put the key in the ignition and turn it.
I put my foot on the gas and hit reverse before the garage door was all the way up. Nothing seemed real as I peeled out of the garage and down the driveway headed back the way I’d just came from.
I wasn’t even sure if I’d locked the door behind us. It didn’t matter. Right now my only concern was getting her help. I berated myself for acting like a beast and scaring her half to death but what did she expect?
I cautioned myself not to go too fast since I was still not one hundred percent myself. Plus the fact that I had no idea what condition she was in back there. But my foot refused to ease off the gas.
I was going on pure fear and adrenaline, which is never a good mix. But there was no time to stop and get my shit together. My mind was a jumble of questions that only she could answer, but that’ll have to wait ‘til later.
I haven’t been able to think straight since the moment she flew into my arms. Now my mind kept wandering back and forth and I had to shake my head twice to clear it.
Just what the fuck is going on? Is someone playing some kind of game with me? I’m sure the girl passed out in my backseat is my long lost wife, but how was she here now when no one could find her for two years?
I wanted to accept that it was as simple as it seemed. That she’d found her way back home from wherever the hell she’d been. Still, the one recurring thought that kept replaying over and over again is that things like this don’t happen outside of a movie. That it couldn’t really be happening like this.
Then I wondered if I should call the police. What was I supposed to do in this situation? Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her out in the open like this? What the fuck!
Every emotion known to man ran in and out of my head. Joy, fear, anger! All the things I’d felt in the beginning when she first disappeared came rushing back full force.
I grabbed my phone with a shaking hand and called dad. “Son, are you okay?” I couldn’t find my voice. Then I realized that I couldn’t tell them this shit over the phone.
I cleared my throat and found my voice. “No, meet me at the hospital.” I pulled up to a stop sign and looked back over my shoulder to make sure she was real. “We’ll be right there.” Dad’s voice came through the phone jolting me.
I couldn’t stop taking looks at her in the rearview mirror as I sped through traffic still not believing she was real. I was afraid that I’d look back there and she’d be gone. That it was just my mind playing tricks on me.
By the third time I looked back at her I was finally coming to believe that it was real and not a dream. My mind fought to make sense of the incongruity of things happening this way even as a smile broke out across my face and my body began to relax.
This is happening, it’s really fucking happening. At this very moment I didn’t care what she’d done or where she’d gone. Just having her back made all the dark places inside me, see light again.
She’d come back to me, just as I always knew she would in the deepest corner of my heart. But no amount of wanting could prepare me for the reality of her return.
I checked on her again when I came to another stoplight. She looked so small curled into herself, so helpless. My heart clutched when I thought of where she’d been and what she’d been through.
She was naturally small to begin with, but now she looked under nourished, almost like she’d been starved. Her color was off, her cheeks sunken in and there were pools of dark circles around her eyes.
Anger burned a hole in my gut as I vowed vengeance against who or what had brought this on her, on us. What was it she’d said? ‘They took me?’
“What happened to you baby?” She hadn’t moved or made a sound since I put her back there but the slight rise and fall of her chest each time I looked told me she was still with me if barely.