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Insane. Absolutely insane. That is the word.
But not nearly as insane, honestly, as what’s going to happen if Trent shows up at my apartment with a U-Haul to pack me up, only to find that scumbag Romanovski waiting for me.
I can see it now. I’ll be pregnant and he’ll be in jail for murder.
A perfect romance, really. Just one big happy family.
Shit.
* * *
The anxietyof waiting for Trent triggers old thoughts, terrible thoughts. Memories of the night my parents died. I was coming home from classes. The sun was down, the air was cool. The first frost was close. I remember that.
I came around Davidson Avenue just in time to see a black Mercedes scream past me, swerving, nearly hitting me. The right side of the car was smashed in, then the driver tossed out a liquor bottle and I saw the white streaks of paint on the crunched-in door. I slammed on my brakes and then, up ahead, I saw it. My parents’ mini-van spinning on its top in the middle of the road.
I sped forward, I think. I must have, but I don’t remember. A second took an hour. And however long later, a heartbeat or twenty, I was at their van. My frantic call to 911 was answered by a recording. And I was on hold and on hold, while blood poured from my dad’s forehead, and Mom hung limp and upside down, suspended like a parachuter from her seatbelt.
Tick-tick-tick went the van’s engine. The smell of gas, of rubber. The street was dark, one overhanging streetlamp flickering as I looked frantically in circles. Searching for help.
“911. What’s your emergency?” The voice was mechanical, robotic. Indifferent.
“My parents, they’ve been in an accident on the corner of Davidson and…” I had to crane my neck around to see a street sign. “Linwood! Davidson and Linwood. Please, hurry, they’re bleeding. Please!”
Just as the operator put me on hold to call dispatch, the whirring sound of an engine filled the air. In the darkness, I turned, hoping for a savior but it was the black Mercedes. It approached slowly, coming tentatively around the corner. Shiny wheels sounding sticky on the asphalt.
It slowed to a menacing stop. The window slid down and a barrel-chested, ruddy-faced man glared at me and somehow I knew, it wasn’t from here. It was a face from another time. Another place.
“You saw nothing, little girl,” he growled with a thick Russian accent. “You never saw me here.”
My chest clenched. He wasn’t here to help. He was here to threaten.
But then it started to come together. The white paint on the side of his Mercedes. The white paint of their van. “Did you do this?”
His eyes were red rimmed as he brought a crystal glass to his lips, drinking down the last of an amber liquid, then throwing it out the window to shatter beside me. He looked blank, dead somehow. Unfeeling. Unbothered. He adjusted his jacket, flashing the glint of a gun in a holster near his shoulder. “I will remember your face. I will find out who you are and where you live. Trust me.”
I blinked, trying to understand what was happening here. I felt the color drain from my face.
“Mouth shut, you live. Mouth open, you die,” he said. And then rolled up the window, and sped away.
As the Mercedes rounded the corner out of view, I knew I would never forget that face, nor that voice. One glittering gold tooth between yellow and brown teeth. A scar under his right eye. And that voice. I’d never be able to forget that voice.
The blood from my dad’s head dripped down onto my hand as I held onto him through the van’s broken window.
And from there, it’s just a blur. A blur of sirens and lights. Of loss and doctor’s coats, of kindly nurses and orderlies and forms. Then the sinking, sinking, sinking realization of what had happened.
Still and cold in my memory.
Death certificates and an empty house. The best coffin I could afford. The funeral, and me weeping over a stupid typo in the program of services. Sad about everything. Devastated and lost.
The nightmare did not end with the funerals. The black Mercedes continued to drive past the house on Pacific Avenue for weeks, circling and circling. A knife in my mailbox. A dead crow on the back step. It was so terrifying, so constant, that I didn’t dare reach out to Trent’s unit liaison at the base. There was no way in the world I could ask him to come home and keep him safe, because if he knew about the man in the Mercedes, I’d lose him, too.
I was able to figure out who my stalker was in time. Corsicov Rominovski was a bad guy of the old school variety. Russian mob in Detroit. No joke at all. They dealt in death and pain like penny candy.
But Rominovski was good at keeping up a front. He’d occasionally be on the news, and always when I googled him there were new hits, brimming with good news—funding new foster programs, donating to good causes. Shaking hands with local police chiefs. The mayor. The governor himself.
After the house was taken by the bank, I hid myself in the most dangerous part of town where I became invisible sure.
But he found me all the same and if he sees the moving van today, he’ll find Trent, too.
