Perfect Nightmare

Chapter Twenty-four

Patrick dropped into his leather recliner and closed his eyes for a moment. His head sank into the headrest, but tonight — for the first time since Christmas Eve — it wasn’t despair that had drained him to the point of exhaustion. No, tonight it was something else: a faint sense of hope; hope that perhaps, after all, he might find a way to survive the grief that until now had seemed utterly fatal.

Granted, that sense of hope was faint, little more than a tiny pinpoint of light piercing what seemed an infinity of darkness. He opened his eyes as if to see the faint glimmer of light better and found himself gazing at a vase of daffodils that Claire had somehow managed to sneak into the library while he was gone. They glowed on the mantel like a beacon, each of them perfect, each of them seeming to infuse the library with a feeling of life.

Claire had been right to fill the house with flowers this morning.

And she’d been right about the support group tonight, too.

Alison Montgomery had said little as she drove them the two miles or so to Shelley and Gordy Castille’s house a few hours earlier, and he’d had no idea what to expect. What he found were a half-dozen cars — ranging from a battered and rusty old VW beetle to a brand new Mercedes-Benz — parked in front of the kind of house that looked as if it would be owned by someone with a Ford Explorer.

Inside, nine people were murmuring over glasses of wine. All of them smiled at him, but no one offered any of the sympathetic words he’d heard so often over the last months that they’d become nearly meaningless. As they sat down, Shelley Castille turned to a wan-looking young woman who seemed to be melting into the corner of the sofa. “Beth?” she said.

It seemed that the young woman had not heard her name, but then she stirred, tried to speak, and pressed a sodden tissue to her eyes with one hand as she clenched the other into a fist of frustration at her failed attempt. After a moment she took a deep breath, then another, reached for her wine, then seemed to think better of it. “My husband ought to be here,” she finally said. “I think that’s what’s killing me the most.” She took another ragged breath, and her eyes moved to Patrick. “Our baby died—” she began, then choked on her own words and pressed the tissue to her nose and mouth. “Oh, God, it’s so hard to say that.”

“Take your time,” Shelley said, gently touching Beth’s shoulder.

Patrick found himself leaning forward in his chair, holding his own handkerchief out to the young woman. “Thanks,” Beth whispered, managing a hint of a smile, which vanished as she began to speak again. “Our baby died last week. She was only four months old. We’d been trying to have a baby for ten years. Ten years! And then—” Her voice broke and she spread her hands apart. “And then she died. She just died in her crib!” Her voice began to rise, her pain palpable. “Our lives revolved around getting me pregnant, and then being pregnant, and then having this baby, and now she's — she’s gone — and David—” She choked again, took a deep breath, and forced herself to finish. “David just went back to work.”

Patrick stared at her, trying to comprehend her words and failing. What kind of father could have done that?

“I mean, I don’t get that,” Beth went on. “I really don’t get that at all.” Her voice took on an edge as her grief coalesced into anger. “Is it like our baby was such a small part of his life that he could just go back to work like she never happened?”

“I’m sure it’s not like that—” Shelley began, but Beth didn’t let her finish.

“I know!” she cried. “I know it’s not like that! But I just don’t see him hurting — not like I hurt.”

“You know he does,” someone said.

Beth nodded, but she looked so forlorn, so vulnerable, that Patrick wanted to hold her, to comfort her.

Her eyes darted from one face to another. “I’m so angry at him,” she said. “I’m so angry about everything, but I know I shouldn’t be. I should—” She broke down again, and now Shelley took her hand.

“You should feel whatever way you feel,” Shelley said. “There’s nothing wrong with being angry — we’ve all been angry. Most of us still are.”

A slight man with thick glasses — a man whose name Patrick hadn’t caught — cleared his throat and began speaking in a voice etched with as much pain as Beth's. “I lost my boys,” he said. “My twins. They were in an accident with my wife.” He bit his lip. “My ex-wife,” he went on. “She had them for the weekend, and after the accident there wasn’t a scratch on her. But the boys weren’t in their car seats, and they both died. She’d fastened her own seat belt, but couldn’t be bothered to strap her own sons in! Talk about angry! I was furious at her, and furious at God, and furious at everything. All I could do was sit in the dark and plot revenge. I didn’t know what I wanted more — to kill her or just curl up and die myself.”

Patrick barely heard the murmurs of understanding that ran through the room, so transfixed was he by the words he was hearing.

Words that expressed perfectly how he himself had been feeling the last months.

The man spoke again. “After a while I started losing track of time. Whole afternoons would pass and I couldn’t remember them. It was like I’d have blackouts where I’d find myself at the grocery store and couldn’t remember how I got there or even why I was there at all.” Patrick’s focus had narrowed until there might as well have been no one else in the room. “I was losing my mind over it — I don’t know which was worse, my grief or my anger. But they were both killing me.” He paused again, collecting his thoughts. “Then I came here, and found out I wasn’t the only person who’d ever felt that way.” His eyes roamed over the room and came back to Beth again. “You’ve got a right to be angry,” he said softly.

Beth’s eyes were so bleak, they tore at Patrick’s heart. “Will I ever get past it?” she asked.

The soft-spoken man smiled gently. “In time,” he said. “If you want to.”

“How?” Beth asked, her voice hollow. “How can I ever get over it?”

The man spread his hands in a wry gesture. “We all find our own way,” he replied. “I finally decided to join Big Brothers, and now I have a dozen kids who seem to need me just as badly as I need them. Seems like that’s what always does it — find someone else who’s hurting as bad as you are, and try to give them a hand.”

Now, in the silence of the library at Cragmont, the nameless man’s words echoed in Patrick’s mind.

… find someone else who’s hurting as bad as you are, and try to give them a hand.

Patrick ran his hand over his face and felt the little scab on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving that evening. At the time, he hadn’t even felt it. In fact, he hadn’t realized he’d cut himself until he noticed the trickle of blood running down his neck. He’d stared at the reflected image of the cut for nearly a full minute, but felt nothing. Then his gaze shifted to his own eyes, where he’d seen only blankness.

The same kind of blankness he’d seen in Beth’s eyes tonight.

… find someone else who’s hurting as bad as you are, and try to give them a hand.

His eyes fell on the newspaper that lay folded on the table next to his chair, and on the photograph of the girl who had vanished.

The girl who looked so much like his Jenna.

This morning he had used that newspaper to fuel his grief. Now he picked it up and looked at it in a new light.

Lindsay Marshall. A nice name.

More of the nameless man’s words came back to him.

… I started losing track of time… I was losing my mind… curl up and die…

Only that morning, he had awakened in the mausoleum with no knowledge of how he got there.

And he didn’t want to lose his mind.

… find someone else who’s hurting as bad as you are, and try to give them a hand.

His eyes fixed once more on Lindsay Marshall’s image.

What could he do?

What could he offer?

He wasn’t sure.

But the point of light that had pierced the vast darkness in his soul began to brighten.