She sighed deeply, the breath leaving her body making a sound that even she found to be depressing and petulant, and worse, the sigh didn’t even being to express the depth of the misery she was feeling at the particular moment. The dream lingered in the back of her mind, and it was so damn vivid that she felt that she had seen him walking out of the room as she opened her eyes, yet it wasn’t the him she had last seen, it was an older version, the man he should have, could have been, and realizing it was only another damn dream just made the whole damn day start off in a funk.
Yet another fucking day wasted she thought to herself, sitting back in her bedroom with the lights off and the curtains drawn while the kids ran roughshod through the rest of the house, she knew she looked like the textbook example of a depressed person, and in truth, she was depressed, but she was also deeply angry, not just at her son of a bitch ex-husband who had once again dropped the ball and left her carrying the penis, or her financial situation that threatened swallow her and her kids, but at herself for allowing herself to wallow in misery and self-pity. because she had never been a wallower, she had always been a hard charger and a fighter that tilted at windmills and fought giants and refused to take No as an answer, but she had recently realized something, and upon realizing that something, all her fight had fled and she had retreated for the first time in her life and she was in danger of becoming something she had long loathed; she was becoming weak because she had realized she was getting old, and she had spent a large part of her life chasing a phantom, and she was tired.
The morning she realized it was like any other morning, the typical routine of rising at five to the obnoxious blat of the alarm clock next to her head, the kicking of the damn cat off her feet while she tried to unwrap from her pillows and blankets that seemed to wind themselves around her in 5o different directions during the wee hours of the night, the trudging down the hallway scattered with toys and children’s clothes and perhaps the occasional dog, to the kitchen to start the coffee and let out her large dog with the small bladder on the mornings he didn’t need out before the alarm clock went off. Then back down the hallway to bump up the heater so she could stand to take a piss and later shower and shave her legs without freezing into solid goose bumps and removing the tops of them with her cheap razor in the small bathroom that always seemed to be 20 degrees colder than the rest of the house. She would sit on the edge of her bed for a few minutes blearily staring at the random hotties homemade screensaver on her laptop as she waited for her coffee to brew in the kitchen, and she would smile at the little green eyed fella that appeared in random places in the mix, thinking how she wished she was younger because she would love to see just what was framed by that lovely v-shape at the bottom of his six pack, and then she would wander back down the hallway to her kitchen to get a cup of coffee and back to the bedroom to activate her computer so she could read the days news. The routine seldom changed, unless her dog needed out earlier or a child got sick, she was a creature of habit and it made her feel comfortable, like a ritual, harkening back to the days when she was a deputy and putting on her uniform was her highly ritualized routine that she was so comfortable with, she could do it with her eyes closed, but those days were long gone and with them her friends and connections and much of who she was as a person, and even though she had tried to develop new rituals and routines, they were not nearly as satisfying as the old ones, and she often felt she was losing who she was as a being.
The first sip of her strong enough to stand a horseshoe up in it coffee, often erased any lingering cobwebs in her brain and she would turn on the tv in her room to whatever music video station that was actually playing music videos that morning as a way of psyching herself up to waking up the kids that were still in bed. Often the oldest boy was already up and perched like a demented gargoyle at the foot of her bed, peering at her though his smeared glasses and inquiring if he had enough time to play some video games before getting dressed for school, to which the same standard response was always given,” Dressed first, then you can play”, to which he would reply, ‘kiss my ass mom”,(so much a child of his father), and then the standard, “No games, get dressed and sit on your bed” would be given and he would run out of the room crying and slamming doors, thus awakening the other two kids who would then come in and ask either what was for breakfast or in the case of the younger boy, if they could skip school for the day. This was the routine that had ruled her life for the last 3 years, and while it was better than the chaos and violence and brutality that had existed before, it was every bit as destructive as miserable to her. The routine of the days seldom changed, and the weekends were little better, except the ex would sometimes come by to criticize and make passive aggressive comments about the state of the house or her appearance, especially how lank and thin she had become, or the state of her hair, which constantly seemed to be in a state of disarray due to her nervous habit of running her hands through it or pulling at the sides of it absentmindedly. She would skip showers on the weekends, preferring to just lurk about in her bedroom while the ex dominated the living room and kitchen area with the children. She found that he still made her angry, and if she allowed herself to be around him very long, she became irritated to the point that her Tourretts emerged and the fist clenching and head jerks started, and he would begin mocking her until she either fled the room in anger and disgust or punched a wall so the flash of pain from bruised and injured knuckles would allow her to gain control over her faculties again.
Her ex truly was a bastard, and she hated having any contact with him at all, but the children were still young enough that they were unaware of most of his faults and they worshiped the ground he walked is non-child support paying ass upon.
She longed for a break from the monotony of the days, and had even attempted dating from time to time, but most of the men she encountered found her to be a terrifying challenge either due to the history of domestic violence from the ex in her past, the amount of children, or the fact that she really didn’t NEED a man around. She came across with a “Don’t fuck with me” attitude and she was often very blunt in conversations with men, laying out the history of her marriage and children and the resultant issues she had dealt with, and it scared the shit out of what passed for men in Flagstaff, to the point where she couldn’t even get a pity fuck. She wasn’t ugly by any stretch of the imagination, she was tiny, only 5’tall and 103lbs, and she was blonde with very expressive blue eyes, eyes the told her story all too well, and often hinted that she knew a secret and that she was just busting to share it. She had a rocking body that even though she had borne 4 kids, was in athletic shape and looked like a cross between a female Marine and biker chick with how she dressed. She often got looks, from all shapes and sizes of men and women, but no one ever seemed to get off the blocks, due to the fact she just seemed so damn intimidating, even when she tried to dial it down and play the helpless blonde, it just came across as a trap and freaked men out, so by the end of the third year with no end in sight to the loneliness, she was a disheartened mess and had given up. She wasn’t looking for her,” One”, in all actuality, she believed her ,’One” was dead, and that he had died 27 years ago on the side of an East Texas highway, murdered by a drunk driver who sat on the side of the road and watched him burn to death pinned in the cab of his truck. She had never gotten over the loss of her young, first love, never mourned properly, never healed and never loved as deeply as she had loved him. She had developed relationships with other men, large in part to satisfy family obligations and to shut up the fucking rumors from her mom that she was gay.
The gay rumors had traumatized the hell out of her when she was younger, and they had caused her to resent the hell out of her family for many years, and she decided to put an end to them once and for all by getting caught fucking a boy on the living room couch right before she left for college. the poor boy was lucky to make it out the back door and into the woods before her irate father emptied the contents of his .357 into the trees behind him, and her mother promptly added to the scars and lumps on her skull in a fit of temper, all the while proclaiming that “she did not need to randomly screw some trailer park boy to try and prove she wasn’t a lesbian because they were fine with her being one.” It was at that point she decided it was just easier to play along and let them believe their delusions. She really thought her mom wanted a gay kid just for the, attention and pity that she would get from the rest of her narrow minded friends.
Her career choices along the way did nothing to dissuade her parents from believing her to be gay, she was a gifted photo-journalist and after a stint in the Marines as a combat photographer during the Gulf War, she spent a few years wandering about the world free lancing for various news agencies in hot zones, and occasionally even celebrity events. She indulged in a few torrid affairs with unremarkable men, drank a lot, and never really connected to anyone, and even got shot during one of her forays into a war zone in the Middle East, but she lived for the adrenalin and it was a heady and adventurous time and she loved every death-defying moment of it.
All good things come to and end, and it seemed that at her wildest and most reckless that she had to found her grounding. The romance with the Iranian expat was a bad idea from the beginning, it was tumultuous and dangerous, and he was exotic and exciting and handsome and their temperaments lead to many nights of passionate fights and sex under the Paris skies after too much wine, and when she found she was pregnant he offered to either pay for an abortion or to send the child to his family in Iran. She fled to the states and to family.
She thought that the delivery of a beautifully exotic baby girl would for once put to rest the rumors about her sexuality, but, alas, her mom would not let it die. She was not cut out to be a parent at that point in her life, and her mother was over the moon with the idea of raising such an exotic little being, so in order to save both of them a lot of suffering, she contacted the father and had him sign away his rights and she signed away hers and fell into a bottle for the next 2 years.
Drunken debauchery in Dallas…it sounds like a cheap porno, and in a lot of ways it was, midnight ramblings around Deep Ellum with the artsy crowd, slam dancing to questionable Indie bands in back alley bars, sleeping off the booze in the back of cars or on the floor of some artists flop in the Mitchell building, wearing one of her dog tags in her boot and another around her neck so if she ended up with her throat slit in an alley, she would at least end up back where she belonged. She started running with a rough crowd, the rich older sons of the Turtle Creek set, as well as a loose knit gang of upper middle class Gen x’ers that were disaffected and angry at the whole, ’greed is good” line that was being thrown about, she wandered about the Metroplex, party to party, couch to couch, wounded and angry, not sure where she was going to end up and at loose ends. She spent her evenings at clubs and racing through the Metroplex in her truck, until she managed to cross someone who was bigger and badder and angrier than her and she realized that unless she wanted to die in a really horrible way, she had to leave town quickly, she had to get gone and fast, she made a call to the person who had never judged her, and who had always offered a soft place to fall, and a couple of hours later a wire transfer of funds came in at Western Union and she had enough cash to get her to Arizona and on the road to the next chapter of her life and once again away from the place where the phantom was always too far away to bring her peace, yet so close he burned her with the agony of a thousand flames.
Living in Arizona was like moving from a tropic jungle, rich in moisture and life and everything she had ever known, to the devils sauna. Living with her Uncle was also an adventure, though as the black and grey sheep of the family they had an understanding and kinship that made the transition a little easier. Her arrival at his home was in the wee hours of o’dark thirty that cold February, so rather than wake him she decided to polish off a bottle of Patron she had bought to deal with insomnia, and just sleep in her truck with her .45 until morning rolled around. Her hat pulled down over her eyes and her boots on the dash of the darkly tinted truck, she was not visible from the outside, but it did not stop her Bear of an uncle from beating on the side glass hard enough to make her jump hard enough to drop her pistol and what was left of the Patron. Her uncle had jerked the truck door open and grabbed her by the collar of her jacket, dragging her out into a bone-crushing bear hug, calling her, “Futz face” and telling her how much he had missed her and that she reeked. That was as far that the comments about the booze went, he didn’t judge, didn’t linger on it, he reached over into the back of her truck and grabbed the duffle that held all her worldly goods and started walking back to the door of his house as she gasped to collect her breath and the rest of her stuff and follow.
They spent months wandering around art galleries of Arizona in her truck or his ratty old Galaxy, eating Asian food and talking about all that was afoot in the world of art and photography. But she had decided that it was time to make a change, and as usual he was supportive of her and becoming a paramedic was something that he could get behind, after all he had already died once due to his bad heart, and it was the quick action of EMS crews that had saved him, and he knew she lived for the adrenaline and missed the action from being in war zones, so she decided to go back to school and get her paramedic at the local college down in Tucson and work part-time teaching to help pay for groceries and odds and ends, since there was no rent or mortgage to worry about. Her photography wasn’t discussed much, as an artist himself he understood that when a muse leaves it’s a painful topic of conversation, and he knew that part of her pain was that her muse had left her when she had the child, in fact she had not taken a photo in over 3 years and had even sold her main camera and burned most of her art prints in a fit of pique. He was more disturbed to find that she was not writing, after all, she had been a gifted writer long before she ever picked up a camera, and her poetry and short stories had won awards and even been published while she was in grade school. Sitting out in the back garden in the evenings he had tried to ask about the writing, but she took a drag on her cigarette and just told him that the writing muse had packed up and gone to stay with Galen, and knowing what that meant, he let it drop other than to ask about where her journals were, to which she answered that her mother had taken them for their own safety when they emptied out her place in Texas when she left in a hurry.
Paramedic school and clinicals went by quickly, and she found a department in a rural area nearby that allowed her to pick up a few shifts a month and meet the requirements for certification, and in seemingly no time, she was fully certified and moving up the ranks within a moderately sized department, and achieving pretty much every certification that she could along the way including firefighter and Incident Commander. The hours were long, and she often came home with injuries or with a haunted look, and on occasion a bottle of Patron accompanied her out to the back yard and she would sit out by the fire pit into the wee hours staring into the flames and beyond them, tears streaming down her face, and he knew she was watching him burn all over again. When she did come back into the house to go to bed, those were the nights he heard her cry out his name, “Galen!”, and he knew that she was still trying to save him, and he couldn’t help her.
Being a paramedic and a firefighter had its rewards, and when she saved a life it made the pain a little less, but there were times when the pain came screaming in to her life and she fought back a rage that threatened to engulf her and it took everything in her power to keep from acting on her deepest desires, and it was on those calls when she encountered drunk drivers, and dealing with them drove her harder and she knew she could not stop until she was able to put a stop to them before the created the pain and suffering she was dealing with, and it was then that she decided to apply to become a deputy sheriff.
Surprisingly, in spite of all of the fuckery she had engaged in out in Dallas in other areas, she had remained unscathed by legal entanglements, and only had 2 rather extravagant speeding tickets, including one that was earned when her drivers license was still paper, and she was stopped by a Texas state trooper for doing over 98 in a 55 with the added issue of drag racing. The irate trooper claimed that she was going much faster,(she in fact was doing 132 when she pulled around the Chevy), but he was so shocked to see a 15 year old 4 ft tall girl behind the wheel of the souped up muscle car, he was momentarily stunned into mercy and decided to allow her father to handle the worst of the punishment and cite her for a non-jail able offence, but he did tell her father the actual speed and she lost her car to being up on blocks for 3 months and forever earned the rep and the family speed demon. With the absence of legal entanglements, and the fact that she was in peak physical condition as a firefighter, she was quickly accepted into the academy as a reserve recruit for a rural sheriffs department that she had worked with in the past, and she moved through the academy much as she had moved through being a Marine, like she was born to it. She had a sense of purpose and she was driven and she was up before dawn each day, running and preparing her uniform and gear for training, and when graduation day came, she was in the top three graduates, and her pride at receiving her badge was evident to all in attendance at the ceremony.
As a female in a rural department, she was much in demand for undercover details, and she was quickly aligned with the narcotics unit and moved into working biker bars and special details that worked to abate the movement of drugs through the state, but she most came alive on the nights that the department ,’wolfpacked” the highways looking for drunk drivers. She volunteered for every single holiday where there was likely to be drunks on the road, and her arrest stats were unbeatable when it came to drunks. Some of the other officers tried to give her grief about being such a hard ass on people who made “just one little mistake”, and she would just take off her Smokey and remove a cracked and faded picture and hand it to them, and they would look at it and see the name and the two dates on the back and most often they would hand it back with an apology and go about their business, after all, more than a few were on a mission in memory of someone.
Life was good, work consumed her and she had been even giving consideration to finally moving out of her uncles house, after all, she was sure that he was ready for some peace and quiet, and living with a misanthropic, night-crawling cop/paramedic/firefighter had to be a bit of a drag for a 60 year old boho artist, but as it turned out, she need not have worried. She knew he had not been well for a long time, he had fucking died once already when he was 40 and a massive heart attack wiped out over 90% of his heart, and he had even been on the transplant list for a couple of years before he took himself off and became a lab rat for some pharma company in some hippy do gooder effort to help others, and she knew he had been sleeping more and more and resting more than normal, and even his paintings had taken a darker tone, but she was trying not to see it, she didn’t want to see it, but fate has a way of bitch-slapping people when they least expect it, and it so happened that she got slapped when she was in the middle of actually going on a damn date for the first time in close to 5 years.
She liked the guy, he wasn’t a brilliant conversationalist, but he was damn good looking and he was tall and built like a tank at 6’6 and biceps as big around as her thighs, so she thought he might be fun in other ways, so even though they had to keep things on the down low because he was a ranking officer in the department she worked at, when he invited her over to “clean her pistol’, she excitedly got all cleaned up and jumped in her truck and went, but weirdly enough, when he said, “clean pistols” that is what he meant and she was getting both frustrated and non-plussed at the same time trying to figure the guy out when her cell phone went off with a call from her uncles house. He knew she was on a date, and if he was calling it had to be important, so she grabbed it right away and was stunned to hear a strange voice telling her that she needed to get to the hospital as soon as safely possible, but little did she know, it was already too late.
The next 20 minutes went by in a blur, when she arrived at the hospital, she was met by a doctor who tried to gently pry more next of kin information from her, and it was a good thing he got the information he needed first, because she had been holding out hope, just not ready to accept that the one person in her life that had always gotten her and never judged her had finally decided to check out and leave her. When the doctor started his, “We did everything we could…” speech she simply screamed and hit the floor and the next two weeks vanished into a haze and have never reappeared.
His will left everything to her, but he had counted on her keeping her wits about her, and when she simply folded into herself in the back room with a bottle of Patron and refused to eat or sleep, it was simple for her parents to swoop in and have her declared incompetent and in need of hospitalization. By the time she was released, and vanished into the heat of the day they had already had themselves declared executors of his estate and were in the process of selling off everything of value, but oddly she was not angry, merely resigned and when she broke in on her way out of town, she only took his brief case with some pictures, a painting of his and her clothes that still remained, and his art supplies, and her pistol but she left all her certifications and uniforms, taking only the tattered and faded picture of the long dead boy as she drove off into the night still chasing the phantom and the end to the pain that lingered in her heart.
She had headed North, longing to get to someplace where there were trees and grass and where it rained once and while again, she wanted to get out of Arizona and while she had considered spending the night in Flagstaff, actually staying longer than overnight was not even an consideration, but as the snow started coming thicker and faster around the windshield of her trusty old 2-wheel drive truck, she knew she was seriously screwed because not only did she not have any chains, she had never driven on snow, not once in her entire life and while she didn’t really worry about herself, she was terrified of anything happening to her truck.
As it got darker and the snow got heavier, she became determined to find a place to pile in for the night, and determined that pretty much once you passed Munds Park, you were committed to trudging all the way to Flagstaff unless you wanted to risk freezing to death on some exit ramp to nowhere Ville or getting your ass run over by a over caffeinated speed freak trucker. Her speed had fallen to 25 mph and she was staying in the right lane, trying to stay the hell out of the rest of the screaming psychopaths ways and shaking her head as she saw the headlights from yet another vehicle coming up on her too fast for road conditions. Fuck! went through her mind as the tan Jeep pick up started to go around her and then began fishtailing and sliding towards her beloved trucks front left fender, as she made the rookie mistake of all rookie mistakes in snow driving and jerked the wheel towards the right and the 40ft embankment that sent her and her truck tumbling down the into the rocks below.
Hey! You got to wake up! If you don’t wake up you are going to freeze down here dammit! Girl! Wake the hell up! She had known that voice, she heard it in her dreams from time to time and she had heard it that night in her truck, commanding her to action to save her sorry ass from yet another scrape, just as it had commanded her when she had been shot in that shit hole of a 3rd world death trap, and all those times she had danced of the edge of the abyss with booze and bad men. It was the phantom she had never stopped chasing for close to 20 years, her heaven and her hell, the reason her life was one constant train wreck of pain and suffering. She had sworn at him in the truck, telling him to leave her the fuck alone, she wanted to die, she was tired of him always being out of reach, and that maybe if she died here, she could finally be with him again, but that was when he dropped the mother of all bombs on her, he had told her that it wasn’t allowed! She was not allowed to die before her time and this wasn’t her time?! What the hell? How could this not be the time? Couldn’t it meet all the requirements, after all, car accident, exposure, she was obviously injured. “Don’t be a pussy, Jen, you have been hurt way worse than this and beaten the hell out of bigger men and then danced until dawn.” He had allowed her to see him then and she had been shocked to see that he looked older, in fact he looked her age! “How the hell is a dead guy aging?” she had grumbled at him, twisting around so that she was sitting on the roof of her now upside down truck. Oh, got your interest now do I? its one of the perks of the job, I can pretty much assume any age up to the age you are at, you want, whatever it takes to motivate your sorry ass into saving your own damn skin. “So this is what you would have looked like at 30 she asked?” Fraid so he replied, and she had promptly burst into tears. He had been so handsome, with his tousled curls falling over his forehead and his blue eyes peering at her. His cheekbones were high and his jaw was covered with scruff and he had a slight mustache that nicely set off his deep dimples. He still had maintained that ethereal, otherworldly look that had drawn her to him as a young girl when she first fell in love with him, and the memory that he had been so destroyed by the accident that they had been forced to have a closed casket funeral came crashing back into her and she promptly burst into tears.
WHAT?! am I ugly, here I can look like the me you remember, and the next thing she knew she was staring at the teenage him, down to dirty football uniform he was wearing when he had gotten into the truck to drive home, and that only made her sob harder. OH JESUS WOMAN! you have got to stop crying, help is nearly here and I am going to have to leave, but you cannot just quit, and you cannot die a violent death, isn’t going to happen, you have a special path and I’m here to kind of keep you on it, so please don’t make things harder, ok? You always were a firecracker, and you damn sure haven’t changed as you have gotten older. I cant show myself very often, but know that I’m around, though not like , watching you in the bathroom or anything because that would be kind of gross and weird, but when you need me I’m around.”
