“Where’s Melanie.” “She’s asleep.”

“She’ll probably stay asleep because of her pills, huh?”

I heard a pained yelp cry out from somewhere deep inside of me as Sarah’s words reinforced what I already knew. “Yes honey, she’ll probably stay asleep. It’ll be just you and me.”

“Okay lover.” She flared her eyebrows up at me seductively and I laughed and cried in the same breath.

“Okay lover.” I forced a smile.

“Can we go out for breakfast…just you and me…like on a date?”

“Anything you want honey.”

“And can we get married again?” her eyes grew wide, “In a real church like we did last time?”

“I would love to marry you again.”

“I love you daddy. You’re the best daddy in the world.” Her words were whittling away at my resolve. My heart felt as though it might burst through my chest.

“I love you too.”

I lifted the glass from the table, “Look what I brought for you. I knew you’d be thirsty.”

Sarah smiled and reached for the glass but as her hands tried to take it from me I found that I couldn’t let it go.”

“Quit teasing me daddy.” She scolded with a serious glower that looked no more threatening than her smile.

I let her take the glass and I watched as she greedily gulped down the cold red liquid holding the tumbler with both hands. I took the glass from her and I placed it on the table and then I buried my head into her chest and I sobbed out loud.

“Its okay daddy, I’ll hold you.” Sarah wrapped her arms around me and I held her so tight that I thought that I might be suffocating her and I let up.

I rocked her in silence until she fell back asleep. And then I rocked her until she turned blue. And I continued to rock her even then as the sun came up and filled the room with the cheerful lie of a bright dawning day; the light of hope; the promise of nothing. I rocked Sarah still as the room turned dark and the sky outside faded back into night.

* * *

When Melanie walked through the kitchen door I was still holding Sarah in the rocking chair. She walked toward me and sat down on the couch across from me. She drew a deep sigh. She did not know that Sarah was dead.

“How did you get home?” I asked.

“I took a cab.” “Are you okay?”

“A little tired, but yes.”

“I didn’t think that they would let you out so soon.”

“They didn’t. I hate hospitals. I snuck out.”

“I’m sorry for what happened.”

“I know you are…but I think it would be best,” she sniffled and wiped her eyes with a tissue, “if the two of you left.”

“I know. I’ll leave in the morning.”

“I’d rather you left now. I don’t think I’ll feel safe with the two of you in my house.” She looked down at me but then raised her head to keep her tears from spilling from her eyes. It was wonderful of her to feel so bad for doing what she had no choice but to do. I could tell that it hurt her to evict us. I could tell that she loved us still.

“Sarah won’t be a bother anymore. She’s sleeping. She won’t wake up.”

“I don’t think it was Sarah who poisoned me.”

“I would never hurt you.”

Melanie got up and bravely walked up to me and unfolded the blanket from Sarah’s face. Sarah’s eyes were closed and other than the blue hue above her cheeks she looked as though she were sleeping.

“Let me hold her, please.” Melanie was crying now as a stream of tears dripped from her eyelashes now that she could see that Sarah was dead.

“Things were so perfect there for a while. What happened?” I said.

“I don’t know.” She sobbed. “Can I hold her?” “No.” “Please.”

“Go to bed. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

Melanie turned and walked toward her bedroom.

“Will you see that she gets a proper burial?” I said.

“Yes.” She said without turning around and then she stepped into her room and I heard her latch the door.

17

Sigmund Freud once said that the goal of all life is death. If that is the case: mission accomplished. Except for Melanie all whom I have loved have succeeded in their goal and I wait impatiently for my own end. If I were not so afraid of the dark I would end my own life; but I am a coward’s coward. I can only hope that death will sneak up behind me and take me without my knowing it so that I can end the misery that is my existence.

My dreams of late, on the rare occasions I can fall asleep, have included visits from all three of my past lovers. Of them only

Melanie still wishes to make love to me.

Perhaps it is because she is still alive and both Amber and Catherine are dead. None of them visits me with another in the same dream. I think that they are jealous of each other. But Sarah enters all of my dreams at some point or other. Thankfully, she no longer takes on a sexual role. We hold hands and walk and talk. She often asks me why I killed her and I tell her that it was because I love her. She declares her innocence and I am left to speculate. If there is a god in heaven I can only hope that he will have mercy on me for it can be said that right or wrong, taking Sarah’s life was a mercy killing. I didn’t benefit from her death; on the contrary… in taking her life I also took my own.

It was in one such dream that I came to finally forgive Catherine for her transgression.

She told me in a dream that she did not have an affair. She said that she slept with Henry for one purpose only. She wanted to become pregnant. She had hoped that I would never find out and that we could live happily ever after. So much for hopes.

Because I no longer had any reason to stay in Kansas I made the long drive back to Cleveland. I swapped license plates with a Mustang of a similar year at an auto body shop to keep the police from taking notice of my car. On the road back to Cleveland I slept in the back seat of the car rather than venturing the risk of staying in the beds of dive motels. With the doors locked and the car running and the dome light on I was far less anxious than I had once been. Life no longer meant enough for me to concern myself with the demons in the dark. But it was the demons in the dark and certainly not death that I had always feared.

In Cleveland I ditched the car on the west side in a dark alley.

On the day on which I first returned to Cleveland I called information from a pay phone. I remember that there was a cold rain outside of what must have been the last working phone booth in the city. I was shivering and soaked from head to toe. I tried to locate Tommy Sullivan. I needed a friend and he was the only man I knew who would be a friend to a man like me, but alas I could not find him.

Wallowing in the sewer of a city, with its seedy poverty stricken drug infested underbelly completely exposed made me crave death even more than I had after I had snuffed out Sarah’s life. And as I spent each horrifying night sleeping in the high corner of the underside of the steel skeleton of the Carnegie bridge scared to death of my own shadow I contemplated a high plunge from the center of the arch. But I found that I was more terrified of the darkness on the other side of death than the darkness of this world.

I ate lukewarm soup at food shelters ladled out by the most kind-hearted people on the planet. To brave the likes of me and the others in the motley mob who shared our meal our hosts must have been saints. We were sinners all: drug addicts, alcoholics, thieves and murderers.

The truth was that I wasn’t living I was waiting to die. I was waiting for the day when the police would show up at my proverbial door and take me quietly away to face the music for Sarah’s sins as well as for my own.

I took some time one Saturday to visit my old neighborhood. After begging some coins from some kind-hearted pedestrians I took the city bus. I visited the baseball diamond. It was overgrown with waist high weeds and the backstop had transformed itself into a collapsed tumble of chain-link fence and rotted timber. Despite its decrepitude I could not help but to wallow in the nostalgia of the place where Catherine and I had first made love.