Gone for Good

21

Denial is an amazing thing.

Even as I felt my stomach twist and drop, even as I felt the ice spread out and chill me from the center, even as I felt the tears push hard against my eyes, I somehow managed to detach. I nodded while concentrating on the few details that Pistillo was willing to give me. She'd been dumped on the side of a road in Nebraska, he said. I nodded. She'd been murdered in to use Pistillo's words "a rather brutal fashion." I nodded some more. She had been found with no ID on her, but the fingerprints had matched and then Sheila's parents had flown in and identified the body for official purposes. I nodded again.

I did not sit. I did not cry. I stood perfectly still. I felt something inside me harden and grow. It pressed against my rib cage, made it almost impossible to breathe. I heard his words as though from afar, as though through a filter or from underwater. I flashed to a simple moment: Sheila reading on our couch, her legs tucked under her, the sleeves of her sweater stretched too long. I saw the focus on her face, the way she prepared her finger for the next page turn, the way her eyes narrowed during certain passages, the way she looked up and smiled when she realized that I was staring.

Sheila was dead.

I was still back there, with Sheila, back in our apartment, grasping smoke, trying to hold on to what was already gone, when Pistillo's words cut through the haze.

"You should have cooperated with us, Will."

I surfaced as if from a sleep. "What?"

"If you'd told us the truth, maybe we could have saved her."

Next thing I remember, I was out in the van.

Squares alternated between pounding on the steering wheel and swearing vengeance. I had never seen him so agitated. My reaction had been just the opposite. It was like someone had pulled out my plug. I stared out the window. Denial was still holding, but I could feel reality start hammering against the walls. I wondered how long before the walls collapsed under the onslaught.

"We'll get him," Squares said yet again.

For the moment, I did not much care.

We double-parked in front of the apartment building. Squares jumped out.

"I'll be fine," I said.

"I'll walk you up anyway," he said. "I want to show you something."

I nodded numbly.

When we entered, Squares reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. He swept through the apartment, gun drawn. No one. He handed me the weapon.

"Lock the door. If that creepy asshole comes back, blow him away."

"I don't need this," I said.

"Blow him away," he repeated.

I kept my eyes on the gun.

"You want me to stay?" he asked.

"I think I'm better off alone."

"Yeah, okay, but you need me, I got the cell. Twenty-four, seven."

"Right. Thanks."

He left without another word. I put the gun on the table. Then I stood and looked at our apartment. Nothing of Sheila was here anymore. Her smell had faded. The air felt thinner, less substantial. I wanted to close all the windows and doors, batten them down, try to preserve something of her.

Someone had murdered the woman I love.

For the second time?

No. Julie's murder had not felt like this. Not even close. Denial was, yep, still there, but a voice was whispering through the cracks: Nothing would be the same ever again. I knew that. And I knew that I would not recover this time. There are blows you can take and get back up from like what happened with Ken and Julie. This was not like that. Lots of feelings ricocheted through me. But the most dominant was despair.

I would never be with Sheila again. Someone had murdered the woman I love.

I concentrated on the second part. Murdered. I thought about her past, about the hell she had gone through. I thought about how valiantly she'd struggled, and I thought about how someone probably someone from her past had sneaked up behind her and snatched it all away.

Anger began to seep in too.

I moved over to the desk, bent down, and reached into the back of the bottom drawer. I pulled out the velour box, took a deep breath, and opened it.

The ring's diamond was one-point-three carats, with G color, VI rating, round cut. The platinum band was simple with two rectangle baguettes. I'd bought it from a booth in the diamond district on 47th Street two weeks ago. I'd only shown it to my mother, and I had planned on proposing, so she could see. But Mom had no good days after that. I waited. Still, it gave me comfort that she'd known that I had found someone and that she more than approved. I had just been waiting for the right time, what with my mother dying and all, to give it to Sheila.

Sheila and I had loved each other. I would have proposed in some corny, awkward, quasi-original way and her eyes would have misted over and then she would have said yes and thrown her arms around me. We would have gotten married and been life partners. It would have been great.

Someone had taken all that away.

The wall of denial began to buckle and crack. Grief spread over me, ripping the breath from my lungs. I collapsed into a chair and hugged my knees against my chest. I rocked back and forth and started to cry, really cry, gut-wrenching, soul-tearing cries.

I don't know how long I sobbed. But after a while, I forced myself to stop. That was when I decided to fight back against the grief. Grief paralyzes. But not anger. And the anger was there too, lingering, looking for an opening.

So I let it in.