Paul Jones - Towards Yesterday

He started the car, pressed the garage door opener button and waited until he heard the metallic thunk of the roller door locking into place overhead. He slammed the car into reverse, so angry he didn’t even bother to check his rear view mirror.

There was a dull soft THUD! and rattle of metal. The car bucked as the rear left tire rolled over something.

“Jesus Christ,” he shouted angrily, banging his clenched fists against the steering wheel, as he pushed the gear lever into park.

Now he was pissed. Lark had left her bike in the drive again , how many times did he have to tell the kid not to leave the G oddamn bike in the G oddamn drive?

The door from the garage into the laundry room flew open. Simone stood in the doorway, her face a mask of anger — she always had liked to get in the last word. Bracing himself for the torrent of abuse at this, his latest screw-up, he saw instead her eyes move from him to the car and finally, down to the ground, the stream of vitriol perched on her lips left unspoken.

Her face had paled in an instant. One second flushed and ruddy with anger the next she was white as a winter morning. Her facial muscles seemed to lose all elasticity as her jaw fell open leaving her mouth sagging in a frozen ‘O’.

Her scream was silent but it was there.

“Lark,” she had finally choked, her hands flying to cover her mouth, as if she could pluck her child’s name from the air and cancel what she saw.

Jim looked slowly toward the driver’s side-mirror. He could see the handlebars of Lark’s bike protruding from under the tire, twisted and bent, the pink tassels he had fixed to each handgrip still swinging gently back and forth.

A little arm protruded from the mangled remains of his daughter’s bike, pale and twisted at an awful angle. A large pool of blood was still spreading slowly across the gray, leaf strewn, concrete drive.

He looked away then, tore his eyes from his child to stare instead at his wife. Her eyes were blank but a quizzical expression moved over her face like molten wax.

“What did you do to my baby?” she asked, her voice hushed to a whisper.

The question had haunted him for the rest of his life.

What did you do, James? What did you do?

There was an inquest of course. Both parents exonerated of any blame.

However, Jim knew the truth. He saw compassion in everybody’s eyes but when he looked into his own all he saw was guilt.

Before the accident, he and Simone had been teetering on a slippery slope that would surely sweep them into the abyss of inevitable separation and eventual divorce, but for a while, strangely, the death of Lark brought them closer. But when the tears finally dried up and he still could not assuage the burning sense of guilt that throbbed in his heart, he started to drink. He found the bottle gave him some solace, and as each day passed, he realized he no longer needed his wife; his newfound friend would do him just fine.

Yup! With the help of his namesake Dr. James Beam, he could anaesthetize himself against the pain, and finally, against all of life itself.

Six months after the accident he didn’t go home. Instead, he moved into their cabin at Shadow Mountain Lake and hired an attorney to file for divorce.

At the hearing, Simone had pleaded with him not to go through with it. She told him she knew it was an accident; as much her fault as his and she knew how much stress he was under. If it wasn’t for her insisting on him staying, the accident would never have happened. Did he see what that meant? That it was as much her fault as it was his. He ignored her plea to give their marriage one last try and, just like that, they were divorced.

Jim stood outside the door to his daughter’s room; his hand was shaking visibly as he reached for the knob. The guilt of almost twenty years had come rushing back to him. As he eased the door open, he half expected to see his daughter sitting on her bed, dead eyes peering out from behind a matted curtain of blood encrusted blond hair, to hear her say through a mouth clogged and matted with gore, “Daddy, why did you kill me?”

But Lark’s room was empty.

After the accident, they had cleared the room out. Donated most of her toys and clothes to a charity, the rest had gone to family and friends as mementos. Simone had objected at first but eventually she had submitted to him and they had removed all that had made the room Lark’s. He scrubbed it clean of any memory of her in a vain hope that removing the constant reminders of his little girl might in turn, help him overcome his grief and self-loathing.

Standing here now, her room restored and the accident still so far away yet so keenly remembered, brought back the ache of absence for his daughter. Her bed neatly made, a cuddle of soft-toys collected on the pillows, her books and DVD’s resting in racks against one wall. A her iPod speakers sat high on a shelf; below it, her TV.

It was all so… pristine, so untouched — it was Lark’s.

He slammed the door shut unable to face this particular ghost from his past. Now was not the time, he told himself. The voice in the back of his mind whispered back , When will it ever be time, Jim-boy ?

He pushed the thought aside. What he had to concentrate on now — what was important — was finding Simone. She wasn’t at the house, so, where would she most likely be? She would try to get to some place safe.

If she had been anywhere near their home then she would have seen the devastation and gone elsewhere, unless of course she was so close she had become a victim of the crash herself, engulfed by the fireball which had surely accompanied the unscheduled landing of the massive airliner in the middle of their housing development.

He could not allow himself to think that. She had to be alive and he had to find her.

Simone’s parents! Of course, they lived in Thousand Oaks. Maybe she was visiting them? She used to hop over there most weekends when they were still married. Perhaps she had made it to them. It made sense. It would be the logical place for her to go, he supposed. After all, he and Simone were divorced, would be divorced, or whatever. This flip-flop of time was confusing enough without having to think about present and future tense.

On the off-chance cell service might be working again, he activated the smartphone, scrolled through the list of names until he found the number for Simone’s parents and hit the send button. He got the same NO SERVICE message as before. In the master bedroom, he tried the receiver to the phone next to their bed — nothing. It was dead, too.

Thousand Oaks was over eighteen miles away. It would probably take him a day or more to walk it and with the current state of madness, there was no guarantee he would make it alive. He needed transportation and he knew exactly where to find it.

They had bought the bikes the previous year with a plan to take rides on the weekend up into the nearby San Fernando Mountains. There were so many great trails lacing through the San Fernando’s and surrounding hills, but for some reason the weekend excursions never materialized. Jim knew why, he was just too busy at the lab and the bikes had stayed in their racks. Simone had talked about selling them but he had promised her they would use them — someday they would.

The bikes were stored in metal overhead racks attached to the ceiling of the garage. When the tree had fallen into the den above, part of the upper floor had collapsed down into the garage below, burying the three bikes under a six-foot high mound of splintered wood, stucco and furniture.