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Sally
Death is an inevitable part of a person’s journey. Life ends, you grieve, you mourn, and you do your best to pick yourself up and move on, holding on to the good parts you left behind and letting go of the bad. But what happens when it’s all bad? More accurately, when you have exactly two hours of good and a decade of bad in your memory bank. When the person you’ve grieved over for exactly ten years keeps your life in a suspended limbo between anger and what-ifs? What happens when the person you’re mourning is still alive?
You get bitter, that’s what.
You learn to hate, that’s what.
You go crazy, that’s for sure.
Just ask those parents like Charles Lindbergh, whose kids were abducted and disappeared without a trace, if they kept their sanity intact. Maybe when the press came calling, but Sally had no doubt they tore their lives to shreds in private. How could you not? Grief left you in shackles and handcuffs, trapped in a cage with no way out. Grief didn’t hand you kid gloves, and wish you a good day.
Her son was ten today. Which meant for Sally, there had been ten years of endless searching with no destination in sight. No endpoint approaching. An empty void of nothingness. Even her suspicions led straight to a dead end. There’d been no sign of Jack since the week after the fire, no sign of his family for nearly a decade. And anyone who might tell her his whereabouts wouldn’t. Even Paul couldn’t help. He was as lost as anyone else. He and Jack hadn’t spoken in years.
She hated them both. Jack because he’d taken it upon himself to ruin her life. Paul because he hadn’t saved her. She hated them even more than every backward soul in this town. As far as she was concerned, they could all rot where their momma’s left them. At a football game, at a high school dance, in a church pew filled with hypocrites. Hell would be busy once all these people arrived.
For now, Silver Bell was busy staying focused on her house.
She was halfway through painting over a particularly nasty word over her front door when she found it under an old workbench in her papa’s garage. She hadn’t set foot in the room in years, preferring to let the items rest with the man she lost nearly two decades ago. If she didn’t touch anything, she could almost pretend he was still here. The old saw still bore the worn indentions of his fingerprints. A dried-up, oil-soaked rag lay discarded where he left it. His old work vest hung from the nail where he’d placed it all those years ago, a rusty screwdriver and broken measuring tape tucked inside. The garage smelled like her pa, and the sensation flooded her to the point where she feared drowning.
All she needed was another paintbrush. She knew right where her papa kept them and made a beeline for the workbench. Under a box of screws and nails and an old house plan of her mama’s, she found the brush and locked a fist around it.
If she hadn’t knocked the box over when she pulled up, the paintbrush might have been the only thing she ever saw. But the box fell, and that’s when she saw the papers.
Mountains of them. Yellowed and tattered, all stuffed inside a crusty manilla envelope with a name she recognized scrawled across the top.Silver Bell Memorial Hospital. And under that,Washington Plastics.
Sally’s hands began to shake, an unexplainable reaction taking control like a subconscious survival instinct kicking in. There’s no rationale behind the desire to run for your life, but it’s there all the same.
Sally wanted to run. Instead, she carried the envelope to her kitchen and dropped it on the table, pulling the contents out in one substantial heap. Five minutes in, and she found the reason for her papa’s downfall. She went down too, in a heap on the floor.
An hour later,she turned over in bed and tucked herself into her pillow, then jolted upright when her dream state dissipated. How did she get in bed? And who put her there? The last thing she remembered was the papers, the words on them, the overwhelming rush of blood to her head when she realized what it all meant.
Documents her papa had kept. Meticulous notes of every complaint he leveled, every warning he issued, every piece of evidence he presented to his former employer, to the hospital, and every instance of when both swiftly shut him down.
“We’re taking care of it.”
“We’ve handled it.”
“Do you realize how much money is at stake?”
“One of these days, you’ll learn to keep your nose out of other people’s business. You’ll never work another day in this town.”
Her papa. His life was ruined only because he tried to help. So many things that could have been avoided. So much loss that—
“You’re awake.”
Sally startled at the sound of a man’s voice and instinctively pulled her blankets close to her chin. When she caught sight of Paul sitting on the edge of her bed, she sighed and let herself sink into the mattress. It was both a comfort and an irritation to see him sitting there, but she was too tired to fight.
“When did you get here?”
He sniffed. “About forty minutes ago. Two minutes too late, judging from the sight of that knot on your forehead.”
Sally’s hand went to her face. Sure enough, a bump the size of a quarter swelled right above her eyebrow. One-touch, and it began to throb.
“How bad does it look?” she asked.
“On most people, it would look ghastly. On you, it just makes your face more interesting.”
Sally locked eyes with him. When other people described her as “interesting” they meant it as an insult. Not Paul. It was the highest compliment, one he had no business giving now.
