Amy's chest rose and fell. Harmon stayed there in bed with her in the gray predawn, he cradled her with the care a lover shows their other. They were lovers of that sort. Fast and alive at first and totally 'in love' they began the seven year journey. Now slow and steady, like Amy's breathing, like Amy's heart beating, their journey still held together with the glue only that only those fabled 'soul mates' can get their hands on.
After Amy uttered those broken syllables, "Da... rrel", Harmon's body jolted into warp speed. His exhausted mind from the extra hours at work and the meetings whenever he could get to them, and of course the patience it took to watch and wait and hope for a sick person - no, not just a person, a best friend, a soul mate - to get the help, to find the happiness existing in a sober day, in relatively healthy body. The few moments of wide awake adrenaline fueled rage for Darrel were just that, a few moments. The constant slow rhythm of Amy's breathing and heart beating lulled him to sleep as surely as a mother's lullaby for a baby. But his sleep wasn't restorative, he found no peace there.
He dreamed of the first time he told Amy he loved her. Out on the State land where the caves sat just off the hiking trail. They would go there on Fridays in the summer time and watch rented canoes float down the river he and Amy would swim in sometimes. They'd sit up high on the cliff face behind some brush and make up lives for the people down in the canoes and smoke pot and laugh and kiss - and everyone knows what that leads teenagers to do next. Happy times on the hiking trail. One day in mid August, when the temperatures seldom dropped below 90, they sat up on their perch behind the brush and discussed what a bummer it was to not have any weed. Harmon spread his arms wide, "Hey, babe, there's weed everywhere!" And she laughed - without the aid of grass. When their eyes met again Harmon slipped those three little words into Amy's ears. Those words that are so dear when they're meant went straight to Amy's veins and into her heart forever.
"I love you, too," she said and wiped a small tear from the corner of her eye.
Suddenly, Harmon felt older. His back hurt as he climbed out his old truck. When he pushed the latch on the screen door his thumb throbbed from a missed strike with a hammer earlier that day at work. His mind throbbed with excitement and worry. He knew there what was in the fridge, several cool delicious cans of self destruction. He had it all planned out though, despite the tugging in his gut to go get a beer before he did anything else. First he'd enter like Ricky Ricardo, "Amy, I'm home!" only he'd go on, "Honey, today I'm a camel." Then she'd laugh and he'd explain what his buddy at work told him about camels going twenty-four hours without a drink. And she'd get it, she'd totally get it. The bells that chimed in his head, would chime in hers. They'd hold hands by the sink and pour it all out. Life would be great, maybe they'd talk about kids. Maybe, but Harmon was nervous it wouldn't go like that.
As he stepped across the front door threshold all the picture glass cracked in its frame. The juice glasses on the coffee table beside the ash tray fell into pieces with loud cracks of thunder. He could hear cabinet doors slamming open and closed, open, closed. An endless stream of dishes flew out of the broken cabinet doors and smashed over and over again against the far wall of the kitchen. And all at once the bedroom door came off its hinges and there was Amy. Only Amy's hair was a mesh of bloody, ratted dread locks hanging askew, pointing this way and that.
She slid across the carpet to where Harmon stood. The ends of big toes the only part of her that touched the ground, the chaos of breaking things and ear shattering noise had no effect on her. She just slid closer and closer to him and now she was nose to nose with him. He could see the sunken cheeks, the corpse like bluing of her face, the empty places behind her stitched closed eyelids. Harmon could see the tiny places where the stitches had pulled through from over stressing the stitches when they were fresh.
Her mouth came open and her lips cracked. Suddenly, the sound of the wreckage of the house was muted as if cotton balls were stuffed in Harmon's ears and then sound came from her mouth. From between Amy's cracked lips. At first Harmon only heard the constant deep boom of a bass drum. The sound changed and with each change he saw the stitches in her eyes ripping a little further.
Harmon sat straight up in bed, it was dark outside and his clothes clung to him from his sweat. His ears rang with the last of what nightmare Amy said - DARREL.
The horror of the dream faded the way dreams do, only to be replaced with a new one. Amy's chest didn't rise anymore, really it looked as if she were holding her breath, her chest and breasts pushed up and her mouth hung open in a silent scream. He saw with perfect clarity the cracked lips forming this eternal final terror.
Tears fell from his eyes making dark spots on the pillow they had shared while he dreamed and her mind burned bright like the sun before going dark like a snuffed out candle. Then he got up out of bed and went to the kitchen, cheeks wet and getting wetter by the moment. By the time he was seated at the kitchen table the sun was just peeking above the trees he could see through the screen door - he never did get around to closing the front door properly. And the sun made shadows on the blond scarred wooden table top. A short shadow trailed behind the short glass sitting in front of Harmon, a longer shadow stretched out to the left of the short one. The light coming through distorted into a darker, almost coffee color before it reached the table top next to its cleaner shorter companion.
Idly, Harmon wondered why the alarm clock wasn't going off. If the sun was coming up he must be running late for work. Then his absent wondering eyes found the ends of the shadows on the table in front of him. Through his sorrow, his pain, his rage, Harmon eye balled the glass - made to hold just an ounce and a half - and the bottle of Kessler's whisky.
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