Jeff Shelby - Thread of Hope

“Keeps me busy,” she said, staring ahead again. “Doesn’t give me a lot of down time. To think about things.” She glanced in my direction. “I just couldn’t stay locked on that day, Joe. It was killing me. Literally, I think.”

I knew that. More than anything, that was what had slowly chipped away at our marriage. She was just as confused and angry and sad as I was, but she finally reached a point where she had to let go, at least to some degree.

I had yet to reach that point.

“Have you ever learned anything ?” Lauren asked.

I shook my head. “A few false starts.”

“What about three years ago? When you came back?”

“A complete waste. It was nothing.”

It had been a man who I later learned had done the same thing to several other parents, claiming he knew the whereabouts of their child and that he wanted to help. He had details that I thought were solid. Whether he was that good at fooling me or whether I just wanted to hear what he was saying, I wasn’t sure.

Turned out he was just a freak who thought he’d found a way to come up with some quick cash, living in a rusted-out trailer in Santee that smelled of menthol and cold medicine. He wanted five hundred bucks up front and I handed it to him. When I pressed him for details on Elizabeth, it was clear to me that he just wanted more cash to fund his meth business and that he had lied to me over the phone, probably cobbling together information from old news articles and the Internet.

I broke his jaw with three punches, picked up my money off the floor and left.

“Like I told you,” I said to Lauren. “If I found anything, I would’ve called you.”

We walked for a while longer before she pointed at a small coffee shop near the hotel entrance. For a moment, I was back in time, before Elizabeth had been born, when we were dating. I’d never been a coffee drinker before I met Lauren. She rarely drank anything but, and she had slowly converted me. We hadn’t been walking more than half-an-hour since we’d finished the coffee at dinner and she was already jonesing for more.

We ordered and collected our drinks. We found a table by the window that looked out toward the Gaslamp Quarter, the neon lights of the trendy clubs glowing in the dark.

“Have you figured anything out about what’s going on with Chuck?” she asked.

The cup was warm in my hands. “Not really. Most people are coming down on the side of the girl.” I told her what little I’d learned.

“But you don’t believe them?”

“No,” I said. “It’s weird that he was spending so much time with a teenage girl. It doesn’t look good, for sure. But I can’t buy into the idea that he was doing something like sleeping with a high school kid.” I shook my head, trying to shake any doubt I had from my thoughts so that my words were true. “Has to be more to it. Has to be a reason they were spending so much time together and has to be a reason this girl is lying. I’ve been hanging around the school, but I haven’t been able to talk to her yet.”

We sat in silence, watching the people walk by outside the window.

“It’s good to see you, Joe,” Lauren finally said.

“You too.”

“I wasn’t sure it would be,” she said. “But then you walked into that hospital room and I realized how much I missed you.”

I nodded, unsure of what to say.

“I never thought I’d be apart from you.”

I nodded again. “I know. Me either. Some days, I turn to say something to you. But you aren’t there.”

She smiled at me, nodding in a way that told me she’d done the same thing.

I pushed the coffee mug away. “But I haven’t moved on, Lauren. I'm still stuck on that day. I’m the same guy I was at the end of our marriage. Maybe a little more reasonable, maybe more realistic, but I’m still the guy that sucked the life out of us.” I paused. “Elizabeth is the first and last thing I think about every day. I’m not sure that’s ever going to change.”

She studied me for a moment. “I know. I can see it in your face. I saw it the second you came into Chuck’s hospital room.”

I always assumed I hid it well. I cut people off when they began to pry. I didn’t talk about my daughter with anyone. I tried to compartmentalize the hurt. But maybe Lauren simply knew me too well.

“I’m not saying I wanna be married to you again, Joe. I can’t go back to that,” Lauren said, her eyes bouncing from me to the window and then back to me. She reached over, laid her hand on top of mine. “But I think I’d like to spend the night with you tonight.”

Nine beers and a couple of tequila shots.

Those were my thoughts as I pried open my eyelids and squinted into the sunshine that seemed to be burning a hole through my hotel window. That’s what I remembered drinking at the hotel bar. I was pretty sure I'd put away more than that, but those were the numbers that stuck before the rest of the night went hazy.

I pushed myself out of bed and stumbled toward the window. I pulled the curtain closed, shutting out the bright light that threatened to scorch my retinas. The floor wobbled beneath me and I teetered back into the bed before it spun me out of control. I placed my hands flat against the sheets, bracing myself, and looked at the clock. It was ten in the morning. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d slept that late. Couldn’t recall the last time I’d had that much to drink, either.

A nice, rhythmic pounding started in my temples and the aroma of stale beer cloaked the dark room. I rolled out of the bed, stumbled to the shower and turned the water on.

Cold. Full blast.

I stood under the icy water for a minute, letting the low temperature shock me back to life before turning the water up to a more tolerable degree of warmth. Slowly, the pounding subsided, my tongue shrunk from the size of a rug to its normal size and I got out, feeling almost normal.

I stood at the mirror, the towel wrapped around my waist, my hands on the cold marble counter and wondered how angry Lauren was with me now.

“Not a good idea,” I’d said when she brought up spending the night together.

She'd blinked several times and pulled her hand away from mine. “Why not?”

“Come on, Lauren.”

“What?” she asked, anger sweeping across her face. “You think someone’s gonna find her while we’re fucking and you’ll miss the call?”

I held up a hand. “Don’t do this.”

The anger intensified and her eyes lit up. “Do what? Admit that our relationship didn’t end for me just because you left? That it didn’t end for me because someone took our daughter?” Her mouth puckered up in disgust. “Sorry, Joe. I guess I just didn’t love her like you did.”

“Whatever, Lauren,” I said. “I’m not having this conversation.”

I stood and walked out of the cafe.

She came out on my heels. She grabbed me by the arm, her nails digging into my skin. “The hell you aren’t. You owe me at least that.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you serious? You seriously believe that?” She gripped my arm harder. “You were half a day away when you called me to tell me you weren’t coming back. And you don’t think you owe me anything?”

People walking past were giving us a wider berth.

I yanked her hand off my arm. “Our marriage was over, Lauren. We both knew it.”

“ You knew it,” she said. “You knew it and by default, it was over for me. And you ran away like a scared little kid. You think it didn’t hurt me to see her empty room every day?” She hiccuped on sobs as she spoke. “You think you were the only one torn apart by that? My God! I told you that I still sometimes blame you. But even with that, I wasn’t ready to give up our marriage. You didn’t come back, so I had to.” The anger melted from her face and her mouth opened. Her eyes were unfocused, like she was trying to come up with an answer she didn’t have. “I mean, how did you just stop loving me? How did it change overnight? How did…”