Pressure - By Jeff Strand Page 0,60
the girl home.”
Darren seemed to become suddenly aware that he had the gun on him. He slowly removed it from his pocket, looked at it as if unsure what it even was, and then pointed it at me and pulled the trigger.
I went down, screaming and clutching my upper leg.
He slowly walked into the cabin, defeated.
I just lay on the ground, eyes squeezed shut. When I opened them, I was staring at Andrea’s upside-down head.
A minute later Darren came back out of the cabin. He crouched down next to me, waved a cell phone in front of my face, then stood up and hurled it into the air. The cell phone sailed far into the backyard.
“I’m really disappointed, Alex,” he said, eyes glistening. “I can’t make you into something you’re not, I guess. You won’t be seeing me again. Have a good life. Give Melanie my best.”
He walked out of my line of sight. I heard him swing open the front gate, get in the van, and drive away.
Then I began to drag myself along the ground, struggling desperately to maintain consciousness.
PART THREE
* * *
ENEMIES
Chapter Eighteen
“Tracy Anne, you stop that right now!”
My daughter turned to look at me, grinned her adorable grin, and then proceeded to fling another handful of sand at the little shit who’d knocked over her castle. He deserved it, of course, but as a responsible parent it was my duty to keep this feisty almost-four-year-old from hurting the boys. I went over to the sandbox, scooped her up, and perched her on my shoulders.
“Donkey ride! Donkey ride!” she shouted, squealing with laughter.
Neither Melanie nor I were completely sure where Tracy had gotten the phrase “donkey ride” from. The only thing certain was that Melanie thought it was a lot funnier than I did, mostly because Melanie never played the role of the donkey.
I walked through the park, thinking that it wouldn’t be too much longer before Tracy became too old to ride on my shoulders without breaking noteworthy bones. But for now I would continue to be a good daddy and give her donkey rides whenever she wanted, low ceilings notwithstanding. After all, she was the greatest, most beautiful daughter who had ever been born in the entire history of the world.
And I had the greatest, most beautiful wife in the entire history of the world, too. I was quite a lucky guy. Everybody else had to be jealous.
There’s a kind of love where you want to know everything about a person, where every smile, frown, or tear is a glorious mystery to be solved. Where every freckle is an object of fascination. Where you’d rather spend two hours sitting at a bus stop with this person than a week on a Caribbean cruise alone. It’s an infatuation, and it can’t help but fade with time.
Then there’s the kind of love that’s a true bond, where this person is your rock, where you can’t imagine living apart, where you know that no matter how bad things get, no matter how long that dark night of the soul lasts, you can depend on this person to keep you sane.
Melanie was my rock.
The year after I killed Andrea was a bad one. Melanie and I hadn’t been together long, and there was absolutely no reason she shouldn’t move on to easier relationships. This was a time of parties, of new and varied boyfriends, of enjoying the last time in life before truly adult responsibilities take over. Not a time to be giving up all of that to help me through my trauma.
But she did. She stood by me during the police investigation. She consoled me when I woke up screaming in the middle of the night, babied me when I woke up crying. Melanie didn’t judge me for what I’d been forced to do, not even when Andrea’s parents (who hadn’t seen their daughter in years) tried to slap a wrongful death lawsuit against me.
The little girl’s father was a lawyer. He got me out of that mess. Her mother made me more chocolate chip cookies than one human being could ever eat.
Darren’s van was found behind a grocery store. Darren himself was never found. I saw him quite often, even though I knew he wasn’t really there.
After sitting out the spring semester, I went back to Shadle University in the fall, at Melanie’s insistence. We got an apartment together, which her parents didn’t think was particularly cool but which they allowed to happen, even giving us a