You Only Die Twice - By Christopher Smith Page 0,61
myself, which means that you should have it. It’s like I’ve always told you. For the right person, the one who understands, you always give what you want yourself.”
“Mom also used to say that.”
“She did. She was a good woman.”
“The best.”
“No better.”
“So, what is it?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the baseball they used to toss back and forth on their front lawn when she was a kid. She recognized it immediately and brought her fist to her mouth. “I haven’t seen that in years.”
He handed it to her. “We had a lot of fun with it, didn’t we, kid?”
She started to tear up. “I’ll miss you both so much,” she said, hugging them. “Even if I will be calling you every night, I’ll miss you both. You have no idea how much. Thank you for teaching me everything I know. You saved my life in those woods.”
“No, Cheryl, honey,” her grandfather said. “You saved your own life. Don’t you forget that. That was you in those woods. Alone. That was you fighting him. Alone. You think about that and never forget it. It wasn’t your father or me. You survived because you stood up against that son of a bitch and fought him. You survived because that’s who you are. You’re a survivor. You’ve made the whole family proud, especially us. Mostly us.”
He looked at Barbara. “Sorry for my language, ma’am.”
“No need to apologize. He was a son of a bitch,” Barbara said. “And I don’t mind saying that I’m glad that officer shot him dead after what he did to Cheryl and all of the other young women they’ve linked him and his friend to. He deserved to die. I hope he rots in hell.”
* * *
When everyone left, including Barbara, who said she would return with James when the movers arrived, Cheryl found one of the sturdier boxes and sat down on it.
She was tired. This whole ordeal had taken its toll. Her dreams were bad. Her days weren’t much better. But she was moving on. She was getting out of here. And that was a gift because after what she’d been through over the past four months, she needed to start anew.
In the months following what happened to her in the woods, she’d had two operations on her leg, one to set the femur she broke when he fell on top of her, and another to remove the bullet from her thigh. Months of therapy helped her to get to the point where she was now. She was able to walk with the use of her walking stick and soon, within the next two months or so, she was told she wouldn’t need it at all. She’d be able to walk normally again.
But she wasn’t sure what normal was anymore.
For a woman who already had died twice in her young life, right now, for Cheryl Dunning, she felt uneasy about her future. Given all she’d been through, she felt she had every right to feel that, as much as she didn’t want to, but there it was.
The scars of her past had settled in and they continued to sink in, not unlike acid, burning straight through her. When she was with Barbara or James, her father or her grandfather, or even with Patty, with whom she’d eventually come clean, she tried to mask those scars with a brightness she didn’t feel. It was despair that she felt. It was fear of the unknown that she felt. It was the idea that if this could happen to her twice, why could’t it happen again? Of course, it could. Probably would. But when?
She decided not to tell anyone her concerns or the state of her mental health, which was so poor, she knew at some point soon, she needed to see a therapist.
But she didn’t see the point in worrying her family and her friends more than they already were worried for her. All they wanted was the best for her. She knew that and she felt it, so she went forward with an upbeat attitude in an effort to make them feel better. Would she snap out of how she really felt? She didn’t know. Probably not. Maybe so. At the very least, while Mark Rand and Kenneth Berkowitz had succeeded in taking her life, it was only for a moment, which means they failed to fully succeed on each count, didn’t they?
And that was something, wasn’t it?
Cheryl Dunning stood and went to the