Dead Echo

  Chapter 4: Patsy

  Patsy Standish closed the carport door and turned around to look at her newly-bought house. It was a bittersweet moment lost to the silence standing hard around her. All hers, completely paid for, and her only twenty years old. Nothing like any trailer she’d ever lived in before. John and little Terri had been dead almost eleven months now, her husband and daughter. And much of that time was a vast chasm of anguish, confusion, ultimate disbelief that something so horrible had actually happened to her, to them. She walked over to the dining room table. Sat down and cupped her hands in front of her, looked across the wooden surface where the others should have been sitting. A great, sustained emptiness rang through her, slammed into her brain, leaving her senseless before a thoughtless stream of pictures that never seemed to end. Their tiny apartment of the past two years, the hours the two of them had talked in bed, his promotion to sales manager, her pregnancy, the very taste of a beautiful future she’d never expected. Then the smoking car, the taste of gasoline at the back of her throat, the heat of the flames, the little hand by the side of the road.

  And now this.

  She stood up and went over to the kitchen island. Pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She’d known of nothing else to do, but now done, the satisfaction remained distant. She’d had to get away, make a complete 360 degrees. Or she’d be dead too. She knew that now, there was no doubt. She’d thought about taking the .38 caliber John had received from his grandfather four Christmas’s ago and blowing her fucking brains out so many times it was pathetic. But she hadn’t. And with that, she knew there was still something to be said for miracles.

  She blew out a plume of smoke and stubbed the barely-touched cigarette into the dusty sink. Then she closed her eyes, counted slowly to ten, and turned around to face the clutter of the new house. Jane Brenning (“call me Janie”) the real estate lady had assured her this was “just the thing.” A “nice little starter home” she’d said, grinning below her sunglasses, oblivious to the fact that her client had no starter family to go with the starter home. Oblivious that all those Patsy loved now lay in two graves at the back of Perpetual Rest Cemetery not far from here. Just over fourteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms (“plenty to grow into,” she’d been assured), a nice fenced in back yard. She thought about the trailers of her youth, the later apartments, and didn’t see much of a goddamn difference. During high school, lying in bed in the tiny broom closet of a bedroom with the paper-thin walls and the smell of mildew rising up from the floor vents, she’d always imagined differently. She’d wished for this…prayed for it.

  And she’d gotten it.

  Thoughts of the .38 surfaced again in her mind. It was right out there in the car, underneath the driver’s seat, that hand-sized suicide. Of course it wasn’t registered but she’d never held much truck with authority. She flexed her fingers and looked down at her almost translucent white hand. Right there at your fingertips, the voice in her head said soothingly. Just one little pull and all this shit’s history. No, she thought and tried to snap her mind away from the gulf. Because that’s what this place, this new house, this “nice little starter home” was supposed to alleviate. She couldn’t go down that easy. It would do the memory of John and Terri ill; there’d be one less to remember them. No, she’d tough it out, keep going as long as she could. She nodded her head and bent to the boxes at her knee to begin unpacking.