Chapter 66
Ashe was glad to be back home, back to his house, his sanctuary. It was a safe place. And he hoped that it would always be exactly that. He wouldn’t know what to do if his own home became compromised, tainted, by whatever nastiness from the outside world may choose to creep through the doorway. He wouldn’t know how to act if he lost his only remaining safe haven from dirtiness of existence.
He hadn’t always viewed his house as a safe haven from the world, a place where he could return to when he wanted to escape. But in a way it always had been. He was only then realizing that fact. And he would fight anything or anyone that tried to take it away from him. Ashe didn’t have much left to hold. What he did have, he would hold onto with an iron grip, one that would be nearly impossible to break, as long as he still lived.
The events of the past few days had altered Ashe. He felt changed in ways he never thought possible. He felt like a different creature, a more feral being than he had been before. He may forever be the new beast, whether he wanted to or not, but his home was the same. He wondered if it would forever remain that way.
Ashe leapt from his dining room table, where he had been sitting, lost in thought, as the old man had been before Ashe had put a flashlight to his back and inferred that it had been a gun. He went to the front door and checked the locks. Enabled. He then checked the locks on the back door, which was also engaged. He followed the safety checks of the doors by making sure that the windows in the house were also locked tight.
Ashe knew that he was only temporality satisfied. He would get up to checking them again in another hour or so, because he would doubt the previous check. He might have been mistaken, might have missed a window, Ashe would tell himself before storming back and forth across the house making sure that the locks were indeed enabled and engaged.
He was not naïve enough to believe that there wouldn’t be a bit of backlash on him for what happened with the Barrett family. Because of Lucky and Franklin, he had become a buzzing in the ears of the other family members, too. Ashe had possibly become a blip on their radar. And he also never fully shook the feeling that there was a real connection between the Barrett family and Steven Reynolds. Franklin Barrett had taunted him with man’s name but how much of the taunting was based on something real. Could his involvement with Barrett brothers put him back on Steven Reynolds’ radar as well? He didn’t know, but he had no choice but to fear and prepare the worst.
Ashe tried to push it all from his thoughts, but he couldn’t move it that far. It was too heavy. For what might have been an hour, he sat and stared at the pill and the black and gold container, which was sitting on the surface of the table. The pill seemed to stare back. It was the cause of it all. He was finding himself blaming Lucky, but the pill was equally to blame. Whatever it was and wherever it came from, the little white thing was right at the core of the whole mess. And Ashe wasn’t much closer to understanding it than he was on the night that he had found the remnants of it in Scott’s bedroom.
He needed a beer. A Sam Adams was always in the fridge, chilled and waiting for his consumption. But Ashe never made it to the fridge. He never made it past the old fashioned answering machine. The number one still remained on the machine’s display. The number one…taunting him. Before he could stop himself, he pushed play.
“Sweetheart,” Susanne Walters said. “Love you. Love you.” Ever since his wife was killed, Ashe had to deal with low points, points where he didn’t know what he was doing or why he was trying to do it. Those points had been numerous in the beginning, but had grown few and far between as Ashe made his way through the lengthy and difficult grieving period. But he had once again found himself at a low point, a point seemingly lower than all those that had come before it.
He listened to sounds of Susanne.
Whenever he would play his wife’s message, her voice was loving, caring, delicate, and at peace. Because that was the way he wanted to remember her. Loving. Caring. Delicate. At peace. But Ashe knew, like his own father, that he was hanging on to fantasy. He had given himself a false reality and hung on to it even though he knew it to be fake.
The answering machine continued to play and Ashe forced himself to face the message head on. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had allowed the message to play beyond the first few sentences. He rarely let go beyond the declaration of love. At once the sick and sad fantasies began to fade to nothing, like a dream sometimes did upon waking.
He listened closely.
“I just wanted to let you know that none of this is your fault,” Susanne explained. She struggled to speak on, but she got the words out regardless of the intense pain she was being bombarded with. “You didn’t do this, Ashe. You didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t want you living with this on your shoulders. You hear me, hun? This…is not your fault. I love you, my dearest. Tell Scott that I love him, too. I am sorry, Ashe. I am sorry that this going to happen to you, my dearest. You will survive.” She fought for air. “You are strong…and so is our son. Cherish the moments together. After I am gone, you will have each other.” She made a noise as if she wanted to say something more but the message was suddenly filled a loud mechanical noise, as if the phone was being ripped from her grasp.
Ashe began to sob but refused to turn off the message.
Another voice spoke. “A strong woman till the end, your wife seems to be, Dr. Walters.” Steven Reynolds had a high pitched range to his voice. It was a voice that had been burned into Ashe’s brain, where it would remain until he died. “But she is wrong. Undeniably so, I am afraid. It is your fault. All of it. What is happening to your wife is because of you and no one else. You get that…doctor? Her life may be coming to an end in only a few minutes, but you have years to live with what you did to her. I hope it hurts. Just promised me one thing, doctor. Promise me that you won’t take your own life. I wouldn’t want your guilt and anguish to end before it had run its course. That would a shame…and a waste.”
There was a few seconds of silence.
Steven Reynolds returned to add, “You can find her at The Sunset Inn just a couple miles from the North Campus of YSU. I’m sure it won’t be hard for an intelligent man like yourself to find. And don’t worry, I will be long gone by the time you get here. It was nice meeting you, Dr. Walters. And I am glad we could have this last talk. Maybe you could even save this message and play it once in a while, to remind you how your wife suffered and died because of your actions. Bye-bye.”
The definitive click of the ended call was the last sound to be heard and caused Ashe to nearly fall to the floor beneath his weakened knees. He held himself up by leaning his weight against the nearby counter top. He reached his hand out toward the erase button, as he had multiples time before. And like those time, he never pushed it.
“I should have saved you, baby,” Ashe forced through his clenched throat. “I should have been there to stop him.” He thought about the black and gold container and the pill that was inside. If it was true…if it was true…why couldn’t he have had it in his possession back then. “If I would have had that pill, back then, you could have taken it. You would have seen that bastard coming. We would have seen him coming. We would have known. We could have stopped him. I am so sorry. I am sorry, my sweet, sweet Susanne. I’m sorry.”
Ashe wobbled his way back over to the dining room table. He collapsed onto his chair.
If he had only known.
Susanne would still be alive.
If he had only known ahead of time.
Before he could change his mind, Ashe picked up the white pill and tossed it into his throat. He nervously swallowed. He felt the pill as it slid down his still stiffened neck.
He waited for several minutes without anything.
Suddenly, whiteness began to take over his sight. It started from the corners of his vision and fluidly worked itself
across his eyes, like spreading milk, until nothing was left but the white. What little sense of self that was left to him, experienced the sensation of flight. He was both afraid and curious as he tried to anticipate where the flight might take him and what he might witness when he arrived.
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