be another thing for him to watch and protect. The issue is that I feel like if he steps out of my sight, he’ll be gone like Brandy and Rose.
And I’ll be alone again.
Shepherd pulls back as I hear a noise behind us. “I’ll be just fine. If I take a while it’s because I’m not wanting to draw them back to the house. You don’t know where he has eyes, okay?”
I nod as I grudgingly let go of him since Dave is coming. Otherwise, I might have continued clinging onto him and pleading him to stay here with me.
“Here, take this,” Dave says as he hands Shepherd a walkie-talkie. “The phones don’t always work well out here, but this will. I set yours to silent, so if you press this button here,” Dave says as he demonstrates, “it makes a beeping noise on our end. How about if you need help, you press it twice.”
“Thank you,” Shepherd says as he turns to me. “And if I press it once it means I’m fine, but things are taking a bit longer, okay?”
I nod as Dave drops the other walkie-talkie in my hand. “Please be careful.”
“I’ll be just fine,” Shepherd assures me as he gives me a confident smile before slipping out the garage door.
“Come on,” Dave says as he grabs my wrist and pulls me back in.
When I get to the couch, I notice Dave has a hunting rifle sitting on the coffee table.
He must notice me looking at it because he says, “You can never be too careful.”
And I get it. I get it far too well.
An hour passes as my anxiety skyrockets. Dave tries to get me to eat or watch TV, but instead, I can’t stop cradling the walkie-talkie to me and begging for it to make a sound.
“It’s been an hour and I’ve heard nothing. What if something’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing’s wrong, it probably took him an hour to even get there if he was going the back way, okay? You have to remember it’s dark and he can’t use a flashlight in the woods.”
I nod because that makes sense. To Shepherd it probably hasn’t felt like a long enough time to send me a signal that everything is fine.
“I get why you’re anxious. Waiting on a loved one is such a hard thing to do,” Dave says, and I remember that he lost his wife.
I nod again because I know I’m being hasty. “I’ve felt like I’ve been alone in this world for so long, and then suddenly I have someone there for me but every step of the way, I’ve had so many chances to lose him,” I explain.
“I understand. My wife had cancer,” Dave says. “It was extremely severe before they even found it and while they tried treatments, they eventually told us nothing was working. I started to fixate on the time I had left with her but instead of my days being filled with happiness that she was beside me, they were filled with dread. Was today the day? What about tomorrow? Will she leave me then? Will I be alone? It put so much toxicity in my life that one day my wife had to sit me down and make me understand that we had to appreciate every moment we had with each other. Every morning we woke up we couldn’t wonder if it’d be the last, we had to appreciate it as if it were the last. She was such a positive and upbeat woman. And even though they gave her months, she lived another two long years.”
That had to have been so hard for him to go through. I can’t believe he was able to keep up so much positivity.
“What I’m saying is that it’s okay to worry, you don’t want to be stupid, but you need to let the past be the past and the present be the present. You have someone beside you now; you need to be strong and think of the good things.”
I nod as I hug the walkie-talkie to my chest. “Okay. I will.”
“Good. Now eat some food.”
I nod as I grab the sandwich and take a bite. And just as I’m finishing, I hear a single beep telling me that Shepherd is doing okay.
Even though I listened to Dave’s talk and Shepherd continues to send me beeps about once every hour, my anxiety grows into the night. Dave stayed in the living room with me, but he’s been asleep since about eleven.