C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

I tried to talk. Couldn’t.

“Yeah, I know we’re running out of time,” he said.

“SEE YOUR NEW FRIEND?” Cody asked as we drove down my street. I looked out the passenger window and saw three sheriff’s cars parked across from our house, each stacked on top of the other. No, not three. As I focused it turned out to be just one.

“They’re making sure you and Melissa don’t take the baby and try to make a run for it. He’s been there all afternoon. Hey, did you do something today to piss off the judge?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. He’s calling in his chits with the sheriff.”

MELISSA MET ME AT THE DOOR. I would have felt better if she’d scolded me, laid into me right there. Lord knows I deserved it.

She helped me get my clothes off, helped me get into bed. The ceiling spun, and I ran to the bathroom. There was very little left to throw up. I took a shower and cleared my head a little, gargled and outright drank several gulps of the mouthwash.

I was in bed when Melissa brought Angelina in to kiss me good night.

“I’m sorry,” I said to both of them. “I’m so sorry.”

“Get some sleep,” Melissa said, taking Angelina to her bedroom.

THAT NIGHT, I had a dream. It was fused with alcohol. It was cinematic: A pair of headlights snapped on in a dark garage. The light filled with hundreds of large swirling moths. No, not moths-snowflakes. A deep-throated engine roared to life and the vehicle, its front grille looking like a mouthful of teeth, blasted out through a two-foot-high snowdrift. Snow exploded as the older-model pickup bucked drift after drift, going fast enough that it wouldn’t get bogged down in the heavy and deep blanket of white.

Finally, the pickup swung onto a two-lane ribbon of black highway that was glazed with ice. The full moon lit up the snow in the meadows and sheened the ice on the road, but the pickup didn’t slow down. Gradually, as the defroster cleared the windshield, I could see the driver.

He craned forward in his seat, leaning over the wheel. His eyes were dead as stones but there was a half smile on his face. On the seat of his truck was an arsenal of weapons: rifles, shotguns, Taser, bear spray, brass knuckles, leather saps, revolvers, semiautomatics.

The two-lane eventually melded into the interstate, which finally turned south. The ice cleared. The vehicle picked up speed and soon it was rocketing down the interstate, bathed in moonlight. There were no other cars on the road. As the truck hurtled into the night, chunks of ice broke off beneath it and skittered across the highway like comets leaving snow trails.

The heater was blasting, and the radio was up loud, alternating between archaic country and western heavy with steel guitars and a Southern preacher who spoke in a mesmerizing cadence while his congregation urged him on. The cab smelled of gasoline, sweat, and gun oil.

At the rate the snow and ice was flying off the pickup, Jeter Hoyt figured it would be clean by the time he hit Denver.

IT HAD BEEN A miserable day. I awoke with a monster of a headache and a terrible taste in my mouth. As I brushed my teeth, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and didn’t like what looked back. My eyes were red coals in dark pools of blue. I looked ten years older than I was, and felt fifty years older. The guilt I hadn’t felt the day before hammered me now, made me wonder why I’d drunk away a perfectly good afternoon feeling sorry for myself when I could have been home with my wife and daughter, could have been doing something.

By the time I got dressed, it was ten in the morning. After all, there was no place to go.

Melissa was playing with Angelina in the family room, making her giggle. When I saw the two of them there on the floor, I wondered how much I’d missed over the past year being at work. A lot, I knew. This was the place important things were happening, not at the office.

“Da!” Angelina cried happily. I picked her up off the floor and kissed her soft fat cheek. Damn, how babies smelled good. Again, I wondered at what age would they stop smelling so sweet? And I thought, I may never find out.

“I thought it best to let you sleep,” Melissa said, taking Angelina back. “You were completely out of it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Except at one point when you sat up in bed and yelled, ‘Here he comes!’ That was interesting.”

“I was dreaming that Jeter Hoyt was on his way,” I said.

Melissa said, “Let’s hope you weren’t prescient.” She shook her head and turned her attention back to Angelina.

I padded to the window and parted the curtain.

“He’s still there,” Melissa said. And he was: the black-and-white sheriff’s vehicle. I vaguely remembered him from the night before. “There’s another one around the corner in the alley.”

“You’re kidding!” I said.

“I wish I was. I saw him this morning when I took the garbage out. He’s a nice man named Morales.”

“Hmmm.”

“I was thinking,” she said, “since you’re going to be home for a while if I couldn’t ask you to take out the garbage.”

“Sure.”

“I may have some other chores as well. I know you’re not at your best with time on your hands.”

“True.”

“And I don’t want you just hanging around driving me crazy,” she said.

“I’ve never not had a job. I don’t think I know what to do.”

“Look for another one, for starters. I left the employment section of the paper out for you. Who knows how quickly you can find something else? And I don’t need to tell you it needs to be fast.”

“Who knows,” I echoed.

“If we need to move, we need to move,” she said, bouncing Angelina on her knee, making her chuckle.

I looked at the two of them and felt my eyes mist up. I turned away.

AS I ATE cereal for breakfast, I watched them. I realized Melissa had taken no noticeable steps in preparation to turn our daughter over, even though it was just four days away. She’d packed no boxes, emptied no drawers. She behaved as if by denying the inevitability of it, the exchange wouldn’t take place. I conceded I was doing the same thing.

Sheriff’s cars in front of the house and down the block in the mouth of the cul-de-sac. There was no way we could slip past them even if we intended to do that. And where would we go anyway? Would we live in our car with the baby, constantly looking over our shoulders?

The obvious places for us to go were my parents’ ranch or her parents-her mother’s in Seattle or her father’s in Phoenix. But because they were obvious, they would be the first places the authorities would look.

There was nowhere else I could think of. If we tried to live on the road, we’d burn through our meager bank account so quickly it would leave skid marks. My severance check and vacation/sick money wouldn’t be processed for weeks. By then, if we had run, the sheriff would follow the check to us, wherever we were. Our credit cards would max out fast. We had no other income.

There was no way to sell the house for what little equity we had in it and use the money to escape. In the current Denver housing market, that could take months. I could get a few thousand from the Jeep and a couple thousand for Melissa’s car, but what would we run away in?

Every damned option was bad. I felt like driving back to the cop bar and finding that friendly bartender and pasting down another fifty and starting over. I spent the rest of the day organizing the garage and the attic, generally staying out of Melissa’s way. I kept my eye out for things we could sell if we had to. I watched a napping Angelina when Melissa went to King Soopers. She reported that she asked the deputy down the street-she described him as a very nice man-if he intended to follow her there and back. He told her no, their orders were to follow only if all three of us were in the vehicle, if it looked like we were attempting to flee our home with Angelina.