Into This River I Drown - By Tj Klune Page 0,181

I had tried to hurt my mother. She’d sat next to my bed the first day, and I’d opened my eyes and tried to launch myself at her, convinced everything that had happened was her fault. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t rational. I was lost under a wave of black, and I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was that she had been the one to tell me; therefore she had been the one to make it so.

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,