Fear Itself Read Online Free Page A

furniture was the built- in sort of indestructible prefabricated mass produced and maple colored Formica that was crafted for so many such suites before the seventies. The carpeting was new, or at least newer; a brown durable Berber of thick and tightly woven yarn. The heavy gold curtains were drawn, by me, to block out the hastily approaching morning sunlight.
    I needed to sleep, but every time I tried I would find myself still thinking twenty minutes later. I could almost feel the windy wake of the earth’s rotation rushing too quickly for my prelation, forcing daylight upon me before I could steal so much as a nap. I flipped and folded and crumpled my pillow for the umpteenth time, trying to delude myself into thinking that it was the un-moldable hotel pillow that was prolonging my exhaustion; denying me the bliss of torpidity. I watched as the clock crept in ten and twenty minute intervals from midnight until four in the morning. I slept like a corpse until seven a.m., and then played the clock game again until ten, waking from my shallow sleep just long enough to see that time had advanced a few minutes or a quarter of an hour. Sarah, other than occasionally feeling for me in the dark with the extension of a limb or the bob of her head, slept like a stone.
    At ten-fifteen I finally decided that I wasn’t going to get any more real sleep and I got out of bed. I opened the curtains and found that the hotel room looked less desirable in the light of day than it had at night. There were coffee stains on the sink outside the bathroom. The carpet, while newer, was badly worn at the threshold and the wallpaper was yellowed and curled in places where it was peeling away from the wall.
    After I showered and dressed I sat down on the bed next to Sarah where she still slept. It seemed a shame to have to wake her. She was so beautiful in her sleep; so peaceful.
    But was she too peaceful? Was she a bit blue?
    I panicked and jostled her awake and you would have thought that I’d won the lottery by my expression when her soft blue eyes opened, peaking sheepishly through strands of her sandy-blond hair. She looked up at me confused.
    “What’s wrong daddy?”
    I didn’t realize it right away but I was crying; dripping rainforest sized droplets onto her face while smiling in relief; she was not dead. One such experience was enough for a lifetime. Sarah reached out to hug me and I pulled her to me.
    “Nothing baby. Nothing at all.”
    I couldn’t handle any more death;
    certainly not Sarah’s. She was my only reason for living now that Catherine was gone. I was a man that needed to be needed. That is why Sarah was such a Godsend. She came to us just as we had given up all hope of ever having a child. As a parent I became unwittingly addicted to being needed. I never even realize my addiction until Catherine died. Sarah was my crack cocaine.
    “Were you thinking about Mommy?” “Yeah, honey. That’s it. I was thinking about Mommy.”
    “It’s okay Daddy. Grandma said that
    I’ll get to see her when I go to heaven.” “That’s right honey.”
    “So can we go to heaven today? I want to see mommy.”
    I held her to my chest and rocked her. No one she had known had ever died. No pets. Not even a goldfish. To her, heaven was a place not so far away. I guess in reality that was true.
    * * *
    Sarah bathed and then we dressed back into the clothes we had worn the day before. We had no choice since we had arrived at the hotel late and exhausted. We had no toiletries so I had the hotel’s maitre’ de send up toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant.
    We could have gone to the store to buy a change of clothes but I figured that we could stop by the house and get what we needed. If the police were there I we could talk them into a couple of t-shirts and a few pairs of jeans from our laundry room. If no one was there I figured that I would simply have to cross the line; slip through a window or the rear sliding door to the family