He had been like this for five minutes now—since he had stormed away from the reception area, leaving a shocked Mina Belkov to deal with the new arrivals. I had to, he reasoned, otherwise I might very well have strangled her right there on the steps.
Tears of frustration threatened like storm clouds at the corner of Jim’s eyes, but each time he felt the tears about to flow, the anger would surge through him again, subsuming the sorrow and he was ready to kill again. Dear God, he was going to explode.
“Are you okay?”
The voice surprised Jim and he stopped where he was, halfway between the bedroom and the kitchen, and slowly raised his head towards its source.
Rebecca; standing in the open doorway, her face bright with empathy and concern.
“I don’t know,” he said, his anger falling away at the sight of her and exposing the raw pain that had left him wallowing in his own emotional vomit.
“My little girl, I killed her and now… now she’s alive again.” His voice fluctuated between sorrow and anger and disbelief as the words tumbled from him, the imminent tears finally welling up, soaking his cheeks with their warmth before he even knew he was crying. “My wife, she’s alive and she has my baby girl,” he stuttered. “She kept her from me for all this time. Why the Hell would she do that? Why?”
Rebecca took a step toward him, and as Jim crumpled to his knees, she knelt down beside him, enfolding him in her arms. “Hush!” she said, her cheek pressed tightly against his forehead, her own tears dampening his hair. “It’s all right,” she whispered as she gently rocked him in her arms.
Thirty-Seven
Later, Jim used his left hand to rap gently on Simone’s door. His right hand was still swollen and sore from punching his own door earlier.
With Rebecca’s help, he had finally pulled himself together. She had left him to go find a first-aid kit from the women’s communal lavatory. After checking nothing was broken, she slathered antiseptic cream onto his raw knuckles, quietly chastising him for being a big baby when he winced at the sting of the cream on his broken and bloodied skin. She wrapped a thick, padded, bandage over his hand, which did nothing to alleviate the disinfectant smell from the cream, a smell he had never enjoyed, bringing back memories of scraped knees and cut elbows from when he was a kid.
Over a pot of coffee, he talked for almost three hours; recounting his whole history with Simone and Lark and how, after Lark’s death, he had checked-out of the human race and hidden away for almost a year. He told her he was lost, that he had been since the Slip had happened. The pain of losing his child and his wife for a second time—it had eaten him up.
Then suddenly, this: Simone had arrived out of nowhere, carrying the news that not only was she alive, but Lark was too. All those months and months of worry and pain. How could she have done this to him? Why didn’t she try to contact him? Christ! He’d lived at her parents for a while, hoping against hope that they were alive. It seemed the logical place for her to contact, she could have called, sent a letter, email—anything—just to let him know she was okay. And to top it all, she’s working for the Church of Second Redemption? It just didn’t add up to the sum total of the woman he had once known. To the woman he had once loved.
Rebecca listened quietly, offering no opinion, no criticism of his actions. She had simply listened, holding his hand gently in her own and, when he was finished, she told him the only way he was going to get an answer to all those painful questions was to go and ask the one person who could answer them.
So that was why he was standing here now, waiting for Simone to answer her door; hoping against hope that there would be some good reason for all this confusion and deception, his anger at her still simmering just below the surface.
He rapped again and waited.
Simone answered the door in a white terry—towel dressing gown, the lingering smell of her shampoo or bodywash filling his nostrils with the scent of gardenias and patchouli. Simone looked like a Bedouin princess, her perfect features framed by a towel, wrapped in a twirl around her wet hair. A single strand of hair had escaped the towel’s grasp, and Jim fought the urge to reach out and tuck it back under for her.
Simone was almost as he remembered her. Her unembellished beauty flawed now by worry lines that creased her forehead and turned her lips up in a halfhearted attempt at a smile.
“Hello James,” she said quietly.
“Can I come in?” he asked, half expecting her to say no.
Her answer was slow in coming, but finally she stepped aside, opened the door wide and said “Sure. Come on in.”
A set of green luggage sat unopened on the living room sofa. She grabbed the bags and carried toward the bedroom. “Let me get rid of these. Have a seat,” she said, nodding in the direction of the sofa. When she returned to the living room, Jim was still standing nervously in the center of the room.
“Do you want a drink?”
“Please. Water would be fine,” Jim replied, suddenly aware his throat was parched and rough as an emery stone.
Simone moved into the kitchen. “I guess we have a lot to talk about.” Her voice filtered back to him like a long lost memory.
“I… I just need to know why,” he said, as Simone handed him the glass of water which he immediately set down on the nearby coffee table, his hand shaking so much he thought he might drop it.
Simone’s head tilted slightly as she bit down on her lower lip, an unconscious tell of nervousness Jim recognized from their years together. She was gathering her thoughts together—zoning for just a second while she organized what she was going to say. She sat down on the sofa and gazed up at Jim. “I was at a conference in Baltimore. The station I was working for—did you know I was working as a producer again? Anyway, they wanted me to cover it for them. I’d never been to Baltimore before—always wanted to—so when the conference was over I decided to stay a couple of extra days to look around. I was heading back to Baltimore-Washington airport to catch the flight back home. I remember there was a tailback from the off-ramp down to the link-road and I was sitting in the queue listening to the radio, it was an oldie. I’d just put the car’s AI on auto so I could finish reading over my notes from the conference, when… everything changed.”
Jim had witnessed Simone’s next reaction in virtually everybody he had met since the Slip. When the conversation inevitably turned to the question of where were you when the Slip happened? People got a certain look in their eyes, as though they were still trying to come to grips with that moment of change. Her blue eyes focused off into infinity as her brain reran the movie of the instantaneous jump from normality to this surreal version of reality.
A lopsided smile broke over Simone’s face and her voice took on a reverent quality as she continued. “…and then I was leaning out the window of our old Chevy, the yellow one you hated so much, you called it the puke mobile, remember? I had a lunch box in my hand and I was saying don’t forget your lunch. I was talking to a little girl. Oh! God forgive me but I didn’t recognize her at first. She was running away from me toward a building, it was her kindergarten, there were other kids all around us, and there was the sound of children yelling and chattering, and parents talking. Normal stuff. Normal, human stuff. And… and… then everybody froze and there was a deathly silence.”