Dax
Nothing in my life has gone the way I wanted it to. I screwed up so much in my teens that I’d chalked up my inability to find a job once I graduated from college to some sort of karmic payback. The old me would have said it was God’s way of laughing at me, telling me that the lessons I’d learned in Sunday School were all lies. That there was no way to overcome the past. But that me died six years ago. It was only through sheer force of will that I refused to give up this time. And my hard work paid off, but even the job offer that finally came in near the end of summer held a bitter edge.
My fingers clenched the steering wheel tight enough that my knuckles turned white and ached as I drove down a vaguely familiar stretch of highway. I kept my eyes glued to the lane in front of me, convinced that if I allowed my gaze to drift to the shoulder, I’d still see the dirt stained crimson and the ruts in the gravel where I’d gone off the road.
It wasn’t an exaggeration to say my life ended on a dark stretch of flat, straight as an arrow highway in the middle of nowhere. At the time, it was what I thought I wanted. When I’d thrown my leg over the saddle of the Honda motorcycle that’d been collecting dust in the garage since my father left us when I was five, there’d been no destination in mind. The only decision I’d made was that I’d never have to face my mother or my old life again.
Nearly two months later, I was wheeled back into the house I’d grown up in, completely dependent on my mother for everything from bringing me meals to helping me wash the sweat off my balls. As humiliating as that was, being back in the home I’d sworn I’d never visit again wasn’t the darkest point in my life.
That moment had come seventeen days after the accident when I woke up and my senses were assaulted by the antiseptic scent of the hospital, shrill beeping of machines around me, and a middle-aged doctor with far too much energy waving a blinding light between my eyes. As the fog lifted from my mind, I realized I had yet another failure to add to my long list. I couldn’t even die properly.
“You’re a very lucky man,” the doctor told me enthusiastically as he completed his examination. “If there hadn’t been an off-duty EMT on the road that night, chances are we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
I’d chewed on that knowledge for a few days, wishing I could find that EMT and punch him in the throat. I blamed him for doing what most people would have thought was the right thing. It was his fault that I’d lived. Every beep of the monitor beside me added another dollar to the insurmountable pile of debt I’d never get out from under, and somehow that was his fault as well.
It didn’t take long for the bitterness to start doing what I’d been unable to accomplish. I felt myself dying again, but this time it was my soul dying as my body regained its strength. I was strangely okay with dying, but only if it was on my own terms. I didn’t feel as though I was in control when it was my anger toward other people rotting away at me. That gave me a reason to fight.
“It’s good to see you’ve had a change of attitude, Mr. Collins,” Dr. Rutherford observed when he stepped into the room for his morning rounds. “You have a strong name. It’s about time you lived up to your legacy.”
I snorted at the absurdity of his statement. Names were nothing more than a collection of letters strung together to form words.
“I know you probably think I’m full of crap, but I’m not. There was a time when surnames had meaning,” he explained as he pulled a smartphone out of his pocket. He turned the phone to me and explained the family crest I vaguely remembered seeing in my grandfather’s home once when my mother dragged me over there, demanding that they have a relationship with me even if my father was a good-for-nothing sack of shit.
I shoved it back at him. Rutherford’s methods were often unorthodox, and I respected him for that. But if he thought a genealogy lesson was going to inspire me to recovery, he was straight-up delusional. “My improved attitude has nothing to do with the name on my birth certificate,” I spat at him as I fumbled for the controls to lift the head of the bed. “I’m sick of this place. I want to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time without someone waking me up to poke at me. I want real food. I want my own clothes. I figure that since you keep insisting I won’t die anytime soon, proving I can take care of myself is the only way out.”
I’d never told Dr. Rutherford or anyone else that my resolve to master the basic life skills necessary to finish my recovery at home came to me in a dream. I was intelligent enough to know it was more likely a drug-induced hallucination, but when I woke I couldn’t shake the faceless voice telling me I’d been given another chance at life, warning me to not waste it.
That same voice returned over the course of my year-long recovery. Every time I suffered a setback and thought I’d have been better off if the stranger had left me to die as I’d wanted, the voice taunted me. When the nightmares began as I came to terms with the fact that I had to prove my demons wrong, the voice calmed me, reassuring me that Icouldmake something of my life.
I never mentioned any of this to anyone because hearing voices seemed even crazier than wanting to kill myself in a fiery wreck along a desolate stretch of highway. I began listening to the voices in my dreams and quietly taking the steps needed to prove that I was worth something, despite being told otherwise for so long. I’d come too far to give in to my own doubts now.
I eased off the gas as I pulled into Marshall. It struck me as odd that this old rail stop meant so much to me and yet this was the first time I’d been within city limits. While I sat at the railroad crossing waiting for trains to pass in each direction, I pulled out my phone and recalled the address for the small house I’d leased. There hadn’t been time for me to drive out to look at places, so everything had been done by email and phone. What made me choose the small, centrally located two-bedroom home was the possibility of buying it when I decided if this was where I wanted to settle down for the long term. The real estate market was bad everywhere, but especially here in America’s heartland, where no one wanted to live unless they had family ties or were brought out here for work.
It only took me a minute to get from the edge of town to my new “centrally located” home. What a joke that was, since I couldn’t imagine much of anythingnotbeing close to everything else in this town. My stomach dropped to the floorboards as I checked my phone because there was no way in hell the house I was parked in front of was the one I’d seen in pictures. They had to have done some serious digging for those images, because even from the driveway I could see rust on the metal shutters, which at some point had been repainted from the black in the pictures to some sort of weird pinkish-tan color.
I didn’t bother grabbing any of my belongings as I unfolded myself from behind the driver’s seat of my far-too-sensible sedan. It wasn’t flashy and certainly wasn’t anything the old me would have picked out, but it was comfortable and good on gas mileage. Matt said choosing a car based on sensibility was a sign I was getting old. It wasn’t. It was smart because I was still up to my ass in debt, and being comfortable was important since I went through every day with more aches and pains than most people twice my age.
The key was sitting under the welcome mat at the back door, just as the realtor had promised. I’d thought that was risky, but now that I was here, I realized why he wasn’t worried. Marshall likely had a neighborhood watch that could rival the security of most gated communities. I swore I could feel the eyes of my new neighbors watching me from behind the heavy floral drapes in their living rooms. And I knew their windows were covered with the type of drapery my grandmother had in her home because nothing around here seemed to have been updated since the seventies.
I let out an audible sigh of relief as I walked through the back door of the house. The kitchen was a bit dated and the rooms were on the small side, but there was plenty of space for one person. I shot Matt a text asking him what time he’d be here with my furniture and everything that wouldn’t fit in the backseat of my car and then walked through each room with the move-in inspection sheet. Surprisingly, most of the issues seemed to be aesthetic.
With Matt still at least two hours away, I quickly tired of sitting on the floor staring at my bare walls and decided to walk around a bit and get a feel for the town. Now that I wasn’t crabby from the drive and my muscles weren’t so tight, I didn’t see Marshall as a crappy hole that time forgot. It was a quaint town unaffected by the hustle and bustle of modern life, much like you’d find in any show on the Hallmark Channel. The downtown square was a collection of old buildings framing the regal white courthouse acting as an anchor for the community. Families wandered casually, looking in the windows of the small shops, many of which were closed for the weekend.
Bells jangled as I entered the hardware store. The old man behind the counter barely acknowledged me other than a quick nod and a grunt. I had no clue why I was there, other than I wanted to get the supplies to give the house a thorough cleaning so I could see past the dust and grime.
I stopped short when I heard a little boy whimpering for his father in the next aisle. My blood pressure rose as the cries continued and I rounded the corner to see what was going on. The store only had about ten aisles, so I couldn’t imagine the boy’s father couldn’t hear his pleas.
I moved slowly and crouched a bit so I didn’t scare the boy as I approached him. He looked to be about five or six. My adviser had warned me that my size was the one thing I’d need to take into consideration when dealing with kids if I truly wanted to teach kindergarten. To someone under four feet tall, my six-foot frame and broad shoulders could be intimidating as hell. I’d rolled my eyes at the time, but now I made a mental note to thank him because I didn’t feel quite so incompetent trying to help this child.
“Hey, are you lost?” I asked, keeping my voice low, trying to hide how pissed I was at his father for being so irresponsible. He flinched when I gently placed my hand on his back, rubbing small circles to try and calm him.
“I wanted to look at the toys.” He sniffled, then hiccupped, but his breathing grew steadier. “He’s going to be so mad at me.”
The fear in his small voice infuriated me. I swallowed hard to keep from saying something the boy didn’t need to hear. “I’m sure he’ll just be happy to know you’re okay. Let’s see if we can find him.”
I reached out my hand, wondering if he’d take it. It shouldn’t have surprised me when I felt his small fingers wrapping around mine. Kids were trusting. Too trusting. Which was yet another reason I wanted to strangle the man who was supposed to keep him safe.
“Do you know my daddy?” he asked as we started walking from aisle to aisle, looking for his father. I shook my head.Where in the holy hell did the asshole disappear to?
