Furious thumbs fly over the tiny screen, my teeth locking together tighter with every click and tap.
I can’t. Grant will be home and wonder where I am.
Is it possible to hear laughter through a text? I don’t have to hear Ari speaking to know the tone of his voice, the dark whisper of sound as if his mouth is against my ear teasing me with the destruction I know he wants.
Ari: I suggest you remove the leash your husband has attached to your collar. And beyond that, I suggest you stop lying. We both know Grant works late into the evening. He loves bragging to me about it. I’ll see you at the mausoleum at six. Don’t be late.
No. Any place but there. For whatever reason I can’t bear the thought of defiling my parents’ resting place more than I already have. The cemetery will always carry the stain of Ari now, but I still won’t add to it.
Meet me at my house instead. 6741 Golden Dawn Road.
Several minutes pass in tense, deafening silence before the final pings come through.
Ari: Interesting choice.
Another text.
Ari: See you there.
. . .
A few hours later, I find myself wandering an empty house. Without the furniture and rugs, the curtains and instruments, without the life that once existed here, it feels like walking through a skeleton that has desiccated down to nothing over time.
Ghosts haunt this structure. My mother’s after she passed at home from an illness that nobody could fight. My father’s after his sorrow for losing his wife pushed him to a decision that would leave me alone.
I was orphaned at sixteen, left to remain in a home that spoke of sorrow and death, in a place where shadows stood over me at night.
Despite all that, I survived. Barely. I became reckless and rebellious, meandered a slow path of self-destruction that somehow, some way, didn’t take my life.
Perhaps it was simple luck that kept me alive. We don’t all make it, though. I had friends that died from stupid things, mostly drugs and alcohol, or action without thought.
When we’re young, some of us can choose to believe that life is an endless journey, that youth in all its stupidity has a way of sheltering us from the truth of our own mortality.
I never had that belief, not with the disorders I suffered, and certainly not after losing both my parents, but my friends did. Some of them lived to tell the tale, but not all.
Not Jason. Although, with his issues, I’m not surprised. Nobody in my circle knew what happened to him. He simply disappeared one night, the same night we’d fought, and I’d refused to speak to him again. Maybe it had something to do with that, but I hope not.
To this day I wonder about the people I once knew who drove off into the night never to be heard from again.
Three, to be exact.
But maybe that’s another consequence of youth: friendships can be so fleeting. People come into your life for a handful of months and then are gone again as if they were never there to begin with.
For those reasons, I hate this house, and it’s why I chose it for this meeting. It’s already defiled by blood and pain, regret and nightmares. There is nothing Ari can do to make it worse.
Only a few minutes remain before he’ll be knocking on the door, and I use them to wander from room to room, memories assaulting me of nights spent alone, of waking up in weird places, of dreams that I was conscious of while having them.
Stepping up to the French doors in the kitchen, I lean a shoulder against the glass, allowing the side of my head to rest on the cool surface as I scan the shadows outside. It’s not entirely dark, but the large trees provide enough shade to block out the last burst of color beaming out from the setting sun, and I can just imagine that the dance of shadow and light are the ghosts of memories just out of reach.
I close my eyes from emotional exhaustion, my blood pressure at a dangerous high because I feel like I’m free falling through my life, one mistake leading to a moment when my marriage is at risk, the life I created for myself to balance the chaos is now threatened.
A quiet scream volleys from my throat when a sharp knock rattles the glass, my eyes flying open to see Ari standing on the other