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“We’re right here, buddy.” Grampa’s voice swirled around me, squeezing and soothing, just like one of his hugs.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
Sully.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, on the verge of tears now. “I wish you could’ve met them … I wish you could’ve seen—”
“We did, honey.”
I searched for their eyes in the light, praying for a glimpse, for proof, for anything to tell me they were reallythereand I wasn’t trapped in some horrible purgatory, to be haunted forever by the voices of the people I’d loved and lost and missed. But I found nothing. Not even my own hands, held in front of my face. Nothing but light and sound.
“Hey, man.” Another voice now. One that struck a deeper chord and left me choking on the threshold of despair.
“Oh God, Billy.”
He laughed that nasally laugh I had almost forgotten the sound of. “What did youfreakin’ do, man? You seriously went and got yourself shot?”
Oh, that’s right. That’s what happened.
“Yeah …” I felt for my body and the blood. My hands met with the firm mass of my stomach, but not the hot stickiness of the blood that had poured from me before.
“Always have to be the hero, don’t you?”
I spun in a circle, desperate to look him in the eyes. “I didn’t save you though.”
“Man, how were yougonnasave me when I wouldn’t save myself?”
“But I’m sorry, Billy. I could’ve done something or told someone—”
“I knowthat,man. We were both stupid kids, doing stupid shit. But we’re good, you and me. We always have been.”
I continued moving, floating along on a sea of nothing through a world of blinding light.
“What is this?” I asked Billy or Gramma or Grampa—anybody who would answer. “Why can’t I see anything? Where are—”
My words were halted by a faint, familiar tune, someone singing in the distance.
“You are my sunshine…”
I closed my eyes to the lyrics, allowing every word to encircle my heart with a comfort I hadn’t known since I had been a little boy, unburdened by a truth that would eventually destroy my innocence.
“My only sunshine…”
The voice was closer now, and the place where I knew my chest should be ached with longing as I desperately wished for a time when I could climb into her bed, curl up beside her, and not care about where she’d been or what she’d been doing.
“You make me happy when skies are gray…”
I remembered her arms around me. Remembered her scent, her voice, her youthful smile before addiction had the chance to swallow her whole. She was beautiful, I realized. God, I hadn’t acknowledged that in so long, but, man, she was. The second prettiest lady I had ever known.
“You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…”
That voice was even closer, nearly beside me, and I feared the moment I’d open my eyes and not see her there. I wanted to look at her face, to know that she was as okay as I was now. I wanted—no, Ineededto know for sure that she had been saved if not in the last life, then in this new one, full of happiness and love.
But what if she wasn’t there?
Would I be able to handle the crushing grief of losing her yet again?
“Please don’t take my sunshine away…”
