As Elaine Richards rolled over in the deep comfort of the soft mattress, she realized that she was alone in the large bed. Still clinging to sleep, she felt the area around her with a blind right hand. Her fingers found only the bed covers and her eyes fluttered open to find the room around her empty. The gray morning light, tainted by the storm’s persistence mad her uncomfortable with the shade it left over the room’s objects. Sitting up, she called into the darkness.

 

“Joe?”

 

There was no answer. Elaine strained her ears to listen for life from the bathroom, but found nothing. She stepped out of the bed and paused a moment to stretch her arms. Walking to the table on Joe’s side of the bed, she lifted the phone from the receiver and waited for the click that would signal her call to the front desk. Holding the plastic to her ear, she heard the steady hum and rolled her dry tongue in her mouth while she waited for an answer. After a few rings, the line went silent and the vibrant, cheerful tone of the young desk girl’s voice answered in an obvious recitation.

 

“This is the front desk. How may I help you?”

 

“This is Dr. Richards’s wife. I was wondering if he has passed by the front desk this morning.”

 

“Um,” there was a short pause as the girl seemed to trace through her memory. “Not this morning, sweetie. I would have remembered if he had.”

 

Elaine rolled her eyes from the phone. She could see the little teenager leering over the phone, smacking her gum as she read her teeny-bopper magazines. The teenager was beautiful and tall, someone her husband would find attractive. Though she was biased she felt for certain that Joe could have had any girl he wanted and the desk girl seemed to be of that flirtatious breed. She trusted Joe, but the situation didn’t make her comfortable. She could remember the days when he was hitting the bottle so hard and working late to salt the wound. She had always had the nagging suspicion that he would cheat on her. Her theory was that if he was drunk he was capable of anything, even breaking wedding vows. Some nights she had cried. Some nights she had made herself angry. She had forced many mental images from her head during that period of their lives. But there was nothing now to justify her paranoia. He was sober and she knew there was nothing to worry about. Elaine sighed and smiled at the fighting impulse to be neurotic.

 

“Thank you very much,” she said before hanging up the phone.

 

She found it impossible to count the number of disappearing acts Joe had pulled over the years they had been together. He had become a regular Houdini. Every time he hit a bump in the road with one of his patients, though he never spoke about it, she would be able to tell by his seclusion. He would get up early in the morning and leave without a sound, never telling anyone where he would be. She wouldn’t see him until the sun was gone and the moon was high in the evening sky. He would come in as if nothing had happened and pick right up with his role of father and husband. It had become a part of their everyday life. Still, something seemed strange. One of the many things she knew about her husband was that he hated storms. It wasn’t that he feared them, but they had a direct effect on his nerves, making him edgy and reclusive. For him to leave on a bad night with a storm of such magnitude raging outside the hotel window, something had to be wrong.

 

Elaine feared many things about Joe’s absence. The first was that he would rekindle his long romance with the South and refuse to return to Washington when the job was done. She knew him to be stubborn when he set his mind to anything and, if he decided that they should move back there, it would take weeks of arguments to try and talk him out of it. She didn’t hate the South, but her life seemed more fulfilling where their home was now. She didn’t want that to change. Even more than the enticement of the region, she feared that he would rekindle his greater passion with alcohol. He had been strong for a long time, but he had also given up his more stressful and challenging cases with the bottle. She wondered how he would hold against the pressure. Maybe, she just wanted to wake up in her husband’s arms for once.

 

Elaine stepped into the bathroom and her feet stuck to the floor’s cold tiles. She lowered the straps of her nightgown from her shoulders and let the loose silk fall to her feet. Turning the faucet of the shower, she measured the temperature of the water’s surrounding spray with her hand and when she had adjusted it to suit her, stepped through the thin, plastic curtain. With the warm water scattering around her to soak her skin, Elaine closed her eyes and let the procession of her thoughts continue.

 

She was no longer married to Joe Richards alone. The conclusion had come to her a long time ago. She was married to his profession and to his clients—to the long hours and the inevitable silence of a bad day at work, to his successes and failures. It was, overall, a lonely marriage, but she never regretted a day of it. She still loved him and it grew now possibly more than ever. He had remained the same romantic and charming man he had been when he was a college student. No matter what happened, his eyes never changed the light gaze of adoration they displayed when he looked at her. It brought a sigh to her lips as the warm spray of water poured from the shower head and washed the soap from her body as soon as she lathered it and took along with it the fears from her mind to send them both down the circular metal of the drain at her feet. With the rhythmic patter of the current on her back, she smiled and ran the washcloth over her chest and down to her thighs.

 

Turning the water off, she reached for the towel that hung over the top of the clear glass door. Running the cloth over her body to wipe away the beads of water, she sighed again. What if she had never met Joe? What would her life have been like? She shuddered the thought from her head. It was unimaginable to even consider herself without him. She would have had a life oblivious to him, but to think of the irreplaceable joys he had given her throughout her life, including the life of their beautiful son, caused her heart to flutter with pain.

 

Wrapping the towel around her, Elaine walked back into the room. When she reached the bed, she sat on Joe’s side which was next to the night stand. She grabbed the short chain under the lamp shade and gave it a quick tug. As light poured into the room, a chill ran through her and her hand raised to her mouth. Lying on the table, in the same position Joe had left it the night before, was his father’s watch. It had been given to Joe by his father the week before his death. Since then, he had never taken it off except when he bathed or slept. Now, it sat there, forgotten and ignored on the table.

 

Grabbing the handle of the small drawer, she pulled the night stand open. In the center of it was Joe’s wallet. Once again, the uneasiness flooded around her in short waves. She didn’t know what to worry about, but found the fear unshakable. He had left in the middle of a possible hurricane without his father’s watch or his wallet. Those were things Joe would not function without. Why had he left in such a hurry? It didn’t make sense to her and, if Joe was anything, he was sensible. Elaine found herself worried sick. This was the feeling she had never gotten used to. It was the thing she hated about being married to Joe.

 

                      *                                        *                                           *

 

As he sat hunched over the small square table in the Pine Haven Public Library, Joe stared at the blank area of skin where his father’s watch normally rested. His wrist seemed strange without the thick silver strapped around it. He had never noticed how gaunt his forearms were. It was the first time he had ever forgotten it. In that, he saw concrete evidence that he was slipping. Routines broke apart in a mind that had passed its prime. Along with his own mortality, the watch showed him just how temporary his place at the top of his field was. All because he had not remembered the watch. It was the watch that symbolized the last broken promise his dear dad had made him.

 

He could remember the day in the park clearly in his mind. The weather was clear and beautiful under a sky that’s only flaws passed over in the white, cotton clouds he could remember as being the best for naming shapes. He was down in Georgia for a short visit when his father asked to meet him at the playground where he and his brother had spent the majority of their childhood. Sitting on the bench at the outskirts of the large fenced-in yard, he could remember the birds singing in the air and the children’s laughter carried to them by the soft breeze that ran through his hair like the unseen fingers of a lover’s touch. More than anything else, he remembered seeing his father come to tears for the first time in his life.

 

Joe pulled the dripping strands of hair from his brow in a nonchalant motion of his right hand. Slicking the wet mop straight back, his fingers were instantly soaked with some of the excess water. A few drops of rainwater fell from his head to the small puddle that formed on the table in front of him. To conceal the mess, he wiped the tabletop with the sleeve of his shirt. He was cold and tired. The nausea in his stomach that, a few hours earlier, had brought him to his knees in the small bathroom of room 231, still clung in its heavy settled network from his head to his gut. As he stared out the window at the storm’s violent rage, he fingered the hard cover of the thick, blue Bible he had snatched from the hotel. It brought memories of his mother and the Sunday School lessons she had taught to all of the children his age at the Bufris Baptist Church every Sunday. It was hard to accept the things that she told them after her death, as he watched his father drink himself under the waves of oblivion as a ship sinking into the ocean. He could hear the wind’s desparate howl through the window’s glass and the moan hurt his soul beyond what the memories could manage. Joe shivered under his raincoat.

 

He was sure the flirtatious desk girl had not seen him leave the hotel. He had slipped away from the shadows at the top of the staircase when she left to see to something in one of the back rooms. It wasn’t a necessary precaution to take, but with the state of mind he was in, it was far more convenient than having to talk to her. He had roamed aimlessly down the street, unaware of any possible destination, until he discovered the oddity of the twenty-four hour public library where he now sat. The building was just two streets over from the hotel and, when he saw the lit sign, Joe had run with ferocity, clutching the book underneath his coat. It hadn’t mattered whether he had run or walked, though, for he was long past drenched.

 

The run had been painful with the jostle of the remaining loose components in his stomach. Each step had brought him closer to emptying them into the deep puddles of water at his feet. If that were to happen, Joe didn’t know how he would make it back to the hotel. He imagined himself passing out face down on the sidewalk and the headlines of the celebrity found collapsed in a small town during a hard storm. The world would laugh at him.

 

When he had reached the front door of the library, a flyer caught the corner of his eye with its yellow paper contrasted by deep red letters. Stopping under the shelter of the front walk, he eyed the paper before ripping it from the door and stuffing it in a crumpled mass into his pocket.

 

Dan Thomas, Hypnotist

Now open for business. Quit smoking now, get in touch with your forgotten past.

Free consultation.

Located at the corner of Fifth Street and Hawkins Drive

Call me at 555-2733 between the hours of 8am and 5pm,

Mon. - Fri.

 

Joe never believed in hypnotism, even when he was a child. It all seemed to hokey. In his opinion, even if it were possible, it would be too dangerous to use effectively and parlor tricks didn’t belong in science. The mind wasn’t a playground. Joe kept the flyer anyway. If things continued in the same direction they had, he would get desperate and would have to try anything. Swallowing his pride for the attempt at something new wasn’t an entirely implausible option for him, though the ones who knew him best may have had different opinions.

 

Staring down at the blue backed Bible, donated to the hotel by the Gideons, he ran his middle finger over the rough cover and traced each deep groove. It had been ten years since he had opened a Bible and just as long since he had thought about it. The last time he had heard a verse had been at his father’s funeral, but he didn’t think it counted as a religious endeavor when he purposefully blocked out anything that might help him cope. He had clung to his anger desperately. It was the only feeling he found inside him.

 

The whole deal hadn’t been a total loss. From the ashes of his father the phoenix of his career had emerged and burned brighter than any light he had ever witnessed. It was the first time he had felt true pride and accomplishment. The past didn’t matter anymore. All he knew was the future.

 

As he ran his finger over the Bible’s worn cover, his mind wandered back to his last meeting with Grady and to the blank stare glazing over the patient’s eyes as he went catatonic. It was the second wall that had erected itself before his own eyes. They were bad enough, but Joe still wondered if they would be the last of his obstacles. So far, the case was going nowhere and was getting there quickly.

 

Flipping open the faded cover, he gazed at the thick, dark stamp the Gideons had embedded into the first page. Turning the next couple of pages, he came to a stop at one of the stories he still remembered from his mother’s Sunday School classes. It was the story of Cain and Abel: the first murderer and his victim. He set his eyes to the words and leaned on his elbows in preparation to read. As he read the tragic tale, he tapped the side of the table with his thumb’s short nail. It had become the only way he could concentrate, though the memory of what it nearly cost him was fresh in his mind. He would be sure to control the habit on his next meeting with Grady.

 

There was something in the story that had always spoken to him from somewhere among the jealousy and hatred that had spawned the world’s first murder. “Am I my brother’s keeper?,” Cain had asked when God himself inquired about his siblings whereabouts. It was a question that would ring throughout the remainder of the book and the pages of history as well. That was the point of it all. Man’s responsibility to his fellow man. When he finished, his eyebrow raised and he let out a short sigh. He had never heard the ending before, with Cain leaving for a land called Wandering. After that, his story was over. There wasn’t even the courtesy of a “Cain died.” Closing the book, Joe wondered why he had felt compelled to bring it. He had seen it as he was leaving and snatched it up without thinking about it. The stories in it were irrelevant to him or his case. It wasn’t going to help him with Grady or Jess and now he would have to carry it back to the hotel with him.

 

Standing up, he twisted his body over his waist and let the ripple of pops echo from his spine. He was tired and desperate to go back to the Hovington House. Whatever it was he had come to the library for had escaped him. Nothing made much sense to him anymore, but it didn’t seem to matter at that moment. It was time to get back to the hotel and into bed before Elaine realized he was gone. He didn’t want her to worry and knew she was prone to do so.

 

As he placed his hand on the library door’s handle, he grimaced at the visual update of what was happening outside. The wind had died down quite a bit, but the rain fell even harder. From the wall of falling water, nothing was visible. There was only one side of the street and only one building in the town. The rest was steam and water. Pushing the door open and stepping outside, he let the rain pound into his face. The sudden cold made him suck in his breath, but a moment later he had adjusted to it. He would not be running back to the hotel. He would take his time and enjoy the walk.

 

As he made his first steps toward the hotel, Joe noticed something that had been beyond him before. He couldn’t hear the voices that had repeated the same phrase since its introduction to his dreams. There were no echoes to float through his mind as they had before and would probably do again. He found that he couldn’t even hear the heavy drops of rain slapping the pavement at his feet. He doubted that he had suddenly gone deaf, but as Joe walked, in his mind there was only silence.