T. Bunn - The Great Divide

Marcus nodded, both to show his agreement and to hide from the raking glare Suzie Rikkers gave as she passed. “Tell Kirsten to be ready for a siege.”

On Saturday Marcus woke to the remarkable sensation that he had actually fought back against his predawn foes. He arose weak and shaking as usual, but holding to a shred of satisfaction. The loss seemed foreordained, as though there were but one outcome to the strife that scarred his every morning. But at least this day he had joined in battle.

Charlie arrived early, bringing breakfast in the form of baskets and casserole dishes and Libby’s message that the best answer to any trouble on this earth was a good feed. Together they ate and studied the news.

The newspapers and the television were both full of their story: what the Chinese embassy said and what Washington said and what the judge was not saying. Photographs of Alma and Austin Hall figured prominently. Netty arrived and soon tired of the journalists’ renewed telephone onslaught. She put a message on the answering machine saying that all queries should be directed to Kirsten Stanstead, and gave the Halls’ number. Darren camped out on the front porch and scared away any who made it to the wilds of Rocky Mount. Marcus and Charlie hunkered down and plotted against the defense’s coming attack.

They sat through the evening news in stunned amazement. CBS had it as the second story of the night. The newscaster began by saying what had begun as a tempest in a Carolina teapot was now brewing up the latest international crisis. They showed Kirsten standing beautiful and resolute. Her measured tones were in direct contrast to Alma Hall’s furious tirade against New Horizons. They then showed the picture of Gloria Hall laughing on the stairway, followed by fifteen seconds of her bruised and battered face asking for money. They finally cut to the spokesman for the Chinese embassy saying his government would not stand for such outrage and was considering a large number of retaliatory measures. The Chinese official was not merely angry, he sounded downright evil.

Charlie had the good grace to wait until Netty had left and he was putting on his coat to finally say, “Suzie Rikkers is gonna come at you like a razor-backed hog.”

Marcus could not help staring. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you.”

“Didn’t take much in the way of figuring. She represented your wife at the divorce, didn’t she.”

“It was more like representing my ex-mother-in-law.”

Charlie shrugged his indifference to such nitpicking. “Logan’s got more of a brain for strategy than I figured.”

Marcus saw his old mentor out, then stood on the veranda as Charlie did his bandy-legged gait into the shadows. “You’re a good friend, Charlie Hayes.”

The old man wheeled about and made his way back up the stairs, as though he had been waiting for just such a chance to say, “I’ll tell you what’s the truth, Marcus. I’d have paid all my remaining years for what you’ve given me for free.”

Marcus nodded. “It’s turned into quite a case.”

Charlie’s gaze reached out of the night and gripped him hard. “Son, I wasn’t talking about the case.”

On Sunday Marcus awoke to sunlight and the chill of distant thunder. The nightmares had not come at all. Instead, they seemed to loom just over the horizon. Even while he slipped from bed and showered and breakfasted and prepared for church, he felt the brooding menace of what had not been.

The church’s welcome enveloped him like the embrace of an old friend. Deacon Wilbur slipped back to say merely, “We’ll be taking measures to see you stay safe.” Marcus was too held by his own accompanying shadow to respond with more than a nod. He entered the church, and felt his entire body drink in the noise and the peace.

Impossible harmonies. Marcus remained surrounded by noise and peace both, protected and yet utterly exposed. The singing gave way to prayers, and still the congregation shouted responses and clapped and waved their hands. Marcus sat in quiet repose because he was a quiet man. The sounds and the words washed over him, settling him further into himself. All the times before, all the other visits to this church and all the realizations he had made and the comfort he had found, all had been building a foundation, preparing him for this descent into himself.

Marcus sat and felt the moment unfold. Calm and sheltered, exposed and vulnerable and suddenly terrified. And listening. Not to the noise around him, but to his own internal world. The noise outside crashed like waves upon his secret island, the colors and the people rising and dancing and sitting and filling the aisles like a tumultuous sea. He just sat. And in his quietly watchful state, he observed the shadow approach.

He wanted to run. Even before he knew what it was, he wanted to flee with every scrap of his being. He was not ready for this, and never would be. But still it came.

Then he felt what had become customary in the predawn hour. He was unable to move, to stand, even to breathe. Trapped in the amber of this lucid moment, he was both awake and more aware than ever before.

Sunday after Sunday he had been sitting there and listening and learning to listen better. Being quiet and letting the silence speak. Now he sat and watched the shadow congeal into his greatest terrors, and felt so betrayed he wanted to shriek and scream until his vocal cords were ripped from his own throat. But he could not even draw enough breath to moan.

The shadow that chilled his dawns formed with such clarity he could finally name what had haunted him for so long. The word coalesced in a place where neither the shade nor the name had any place entering, but had gained entry because of him. He stared into the void of his shattered life, and called the shadow by its name.

Death had not entered his world quietly, not the day it had stolen away the two beings he treasured more than life itself. That brilliant sunlit afternoon had been filled with radio music and the kids’ chatter and his wife’s cold argument. He could not recall now what they had been arguing about. Something important, as they almost never fought in front of the children. Probably his drinking. The argument and the cause all belonged to another life, one not yet shattered by death’s hand.

Death entered the car that day with a noise so great it had robbed his world of light and meaning. His soul had died along with his children. Why had his body remained? What was so bad in his former life that he had to be continually punished by his children’s absence?

There within the church the shadow formed more clearly still, gliding upon slippered feet. The shroud it carried wrapped him up so tightly that Marcus felt his hold on the church and the comforting noise slip away until he could scarcely hear anything save the frantic beating of his terrified heart. He sat there, trapped and helpless to do anything save observe the approach of his own eternal night.

His eyes were shut so tight his entire face felt clamped by the effort of keeping out the invader. Yet still it came. Marcus sat bowed over his knees and knew he was defeated. And lost.

Behind his clenched eyelids, Marcus stared into the darkness of his nightly battleground. His nightmare became not just a memory he could run from in the light of day. Here in his one weekly moment of peace, he was trapped within that which was as real as his loss. As real as his sorrow. As real as his own death.

He stood in the upstairs hall of their Raleigh home. The house he had never entered after that day, and yet to which he had been taken almost every night for a year and a half. He stood in the hall, lit by a light so bright it threatened to sear his eyeballs. Or perhaps it merely seemed so bright because the darkness into which he peered was hopelessly empty of light and all else. Yet though he could not see, he could hear, and from the sound he knew he stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. From out of the darkness there came the sound of his son singing a soft little song about a bird and a ladybug and a little yellow butterfly. His son had been singing it that day, the day they had driven back from the beach. Singing as his father had driven him into the intersection. Singing as though trying to blot out the sound of his parents arguing. Singing with a voice gentle as summer rain.