The Virgin: Redemption

The Virgin: Redemption

By

J. Dallas

Copyright © 2013 Shiloh Walker writing as J. Dallas

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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The nightmares are always bad this time of year. Especially here. I’d avoid this place for the rest of my life, if I could. Really, there’s only one reason to come back. One reason…and one particular time of year.

My father died just two days after his birthday.

He’d been born sixty-two years ago, in this little village north of Boston.

I was born here too, and up until the summer I turned eighteen, this had been home. Then, if you’d asked if I’d ever planned to leave, make my home somewhere else, I would have laughed.

There had been no other home. This place had been it, the only home I’d ever known, the only one I’d ever wanted to know.

Then it was just ripped out from under me.

Coming back here when there was nothing to come back to just hurt.

Huddled on the bed in the bland, nondescript hotel, staring at the digital readout on the clock, I tried to force myself to stay awake. My eyelids were heavy and my eyes were gritty. Little wonder. I hadn’t slept last night, but I couldn’t avoid it anymore.

Not that I wouldn’t try. I’d fight it as long as I could, but something told me I was about to lose that battle. It was past two in the morning. I wouldn’t last much longer.

I’d read until the words blurred before my eyes. I’d already sucked down so much coffee my belly felt raw.

I couldn’t stay awake. I couldn’t run from the nightmares anymore.

Staring into the blank, mechanical eye of the camera, I signed it out. Circling my hand in front of my chest.
Please.
My fist on my palm--I darted a look out of the corner of my eye but he was staring everywhere, staring at everybody around us. Looking for any sign of the police.

Not at me. I finished the word.
Help. Please. Help
.

I’d been begging for help for three days. My grasp of sign was limited. My grandmother had been deaf and I used to be able to sign fluently, but she’d died eight years ago. Use it or lose it, right? That was true even when it came to languages, sign included.

“Hurry up, bitch,” he whispered, moving in until he was practically touching me. I had to fight not to shy away. I didn’t need the reminder, didn’t need him to touch me, threaten me again or show me the gun he’d tucked inside his jacket.

He had my parents.

I fumbled with the card as I pulled it out of the ATM and grabbed the cash.

Two hundred dollars. All I could get from the ATM with the limit. He looked at it in disgust but didn’t take it from me. He wouldn’t. Not here out on the sidewalk, with people passing all around us.

He’d wait.

I shot another look at the camera.

Please. Help.

If somebody didn’t figure it out soon...I swallowed as he caught my arm and started to pull me along with him. It was subtle, the way he did it. Anybody looking at us wouldn’t figure it out right away. You’d have to really be watching to see it.

I swallowed, my tongue thick and dry in my mouth, my legs wobbly from almost a week with next to no food, hardly any water. He was moving too fast and I could barely keep up. My head spun and everything seemed to blur around me.

When I tripped, he jerked me up, his fingers bruising. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry…I just…”

Darkness crowded the edge of my vision.

My knees hurt as I hit the ground, but I didn’t even register that I’d done it until a minute later.

“You little—”

“Freeze!”

His eyes came back to me. His voice was a low, ugly whisper. “You just killed them. Bitch. Stupid bitch.”

I swallowed. Would have cried, except there were no tears left. None at all.

I came awake then, a knot swelling in my chest. But my eyes, just like that moment, frozen in time, were painfully dry.

These dreams weren’t like normal dreams. Not like normal nightmares. I’d rather be chased by a maniacal clown, find myself naked in front of a boardroom with only the annual report in my hand. I’d even go back to the dreams about Drake—those dreams I’d wanted so badly to forget, the ones where I woke up, aching all over. Aching for his touch while my heart cried out for him. Just him.

Even the
other
dreams. The dreams where I was trapped. Wrapped in darkness, and just trapped, while I heard a familiar voice in my ear.
Scream…scream for me
. I’d take any of those, every night for the rest of my life if it meant I’d never have to dream about that final day again.

Too bad it didn’t work that way.

There was a faint, rhythmic ticking. Now that I was aware of it, it seemed to grow louder, and louder. Turning my head, I grabbed the watch I’d taken to wearing.

Five a.m. I wouldn’t sleep any more. But the thought of dragging my miserable, tired ass out of the bed was more than I could handle. So I lay there, huddled and brooding under the blankets.

It was one thing I did very, very well.

Ten years.

My father had been gone for ten years.

It was supposed to get easier, wasn’t it?

Rolling onto my belly, I pressed my face into the pillow as the loneliness, a miserable ache in my gut, just spread and spread.

The minutes bled away into hours, heralded by each slow tick of my watch. I lay there until it was nearly seven, then I forced myself out of bed, showered, packed up the few things I’d brought into the hotel.

It was time to do what I’d come for.

After this, I had no idea what I’d do next.

After ten years, I had faced down the dragon who had haunted my memories…Drake. Not much of a dragon, really. Over the past few weeks, I’d accepted that he wasn’t the monster I’d made him out to be. He was the first man I’d ever loved, possibly the only man I’d ever love. My heart still went
bump
when I thought of him and if I’d hoped to exorcise him from my thoughts, from my soul, from my heart, I’d been fooling myself.

Now I had to live with the memory of his hands on me, and the memory of what a fool I’d been. So many years spent blaming him.

True enough, we wouldn’t have had the money if Gallagher Enterprises hadn’t bought our hotel. My father would still be alive.

But only two men were responsible for locking us up those long miserable days, for every mark they’d left on my mother, every bruise, every broken bone they’d given my father. They were responsible for the bruised kidneys I’d suffered and they were responsible for my nightmares.

Those two men were the ones responsible for my father’s death.

All for money. They’d heard my father talking about the money. My dad, naïve, trusting, amazing man that he was, suckered into a card game and he’d been drunk— laughing when one of the men said they’d take him for everything he had with him, even the shirt off his back. Dad had thought it was hilarious.
I got more money now than I know what to do with…you need my shirt? Have it
.

A few foolish words, a card game.

And two cruel men.

Those men were to blame. Not Drake. And, I realized, not me.

For ten years I’d drifted, unable to figure out who I was, what I was.

I still didn’t have any answers. Just more questions. Like…
where was I supposed to go from here
?
What was I supposed to do now
?

But I no longer had a
Drake
-shaped object blocking me when I tried to look down the road to my future.

What really blocked me was myself.

It was nine a.m. when I entered the garden of stone. This was what drew me back here.

The heels of my boots rang hollowly on the carefully laid walkway. I didn’t look left nor right, didn’t need to search for landmarks. I knew where I was going. Even though I only came here on this day, every year, I could walk this path in my sleep.

Once I found it, my heart stuttered in my chest and I had to pause before I approached.

Images rose up, slammed into me—bright light searing my eyes, voices too loud, one of them louder than all the rest.

Crying—she was crying—why was Mom crying?

Kneeling down, I brushed a few stray leaves, brilliant with color, from my father’s grave.

“Hi, Daddy.”

The only answer was the whisper of the breeze.

I didn’t really expect an answer, though.

How could it have been ten years?

In my pocket was a letter from the prosecutor. One of them was up for parole. Next week. I’d go to the hearing, of course. There really wasn’t a question of that. As long as I had a chance in stopping his release, I’d go. I’d say my part. I’d hope to keep him in jail for every second of his sentence.

I could remember that son of a bitch in court, tearfully staring out at the jury.
None of this was supposed to happen. We didn’t plan to hurt anybody. We just wanted the money. He made it out like it was right there, but we kept having to change up the plan and it got so messed up. I’m so sorry. I ruined people’s lives. I’m so sorry.

He ruined people’s lives.

And he was sorry.

I thought of his words, so empty and meaningless, a thousand times.

They’d wanted the money—the money my parents had recently received from Gallagher Enterprises. My father, the foolish, hopeful, optimistic dreamer, had been sitting in a bar in Destin, Florida. We were there on a
vacation
, as my parents had put it, but they were talking about moving there.
Someplace warm and sunny. Wouldn’t that be nice, Shan
?

Sniffling, I brushed away the tears and focused on the bright spray of flowers that decorated his grave. “It looks like Mom beat me here. I need to get down there more. I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll head to Virginia for a few days when I leave here. I don’t really have any place to go right now. No goals. No plans.”

Not a single goal. Not a single plan.

Most of my adult life had been goals and plans. College, which I hadn’t started until I was nineteen; I had intended to find a job that would fill the void inside me, but nothing did it.

Then, I focused on Drake Gallagher.

I was convinced that just getting
him
out of my system would do something.

Sitting on the grass, I curled my hand into a fist and pressed it to my forehead. “Daddy, I’m an idiot, you know that?”

My free hand, I sank into the grass on top of his grave. When I’d been a child, after a bad dream, I’d sit on his lap and fist my hand in his shirt and he’d tell me a story to make the fear go away.

Nothing could do that now.

Sometimes, I’d sit with him after dinner and he’d talk about the hotel. It would be mine one day, and the idea had fascinated me. He’d tell me about the dreams he had for the place and somewhere along the way,
his
dreams had become mine as well.

It would be the biggest, the grandest place north of Boston.
Just wait and see, Shan. Just wait and see.

Losing the hotel had been a blow.

Then two months later, I lost him.

And me. The obsession that had pushed me for so long had blinded me to everything.

I don’t even know who I am now. Who I
want
to be. The false confidence that had pushed me through life the past few years was gone.

Sighing, I smoothed my hand down the soft, rich grass that blanketed the grave. “Dad, I wish you were here. I’m so confused. I’m tired. I wish I hadn’t been such a brat to you before you died. I wish…” I stopped, thinking about how useless wishes were.

If I could change how I’d treated my father, maybe I could change his death. Change how I’d treated Drake. My heart lurched in my chest and a hollowness spread through me as I thought about how much I wished I could undo the past few months.