Leaving Yesterday by Kathryn Cushman Read Free Book Online

Escape. “Hey, I noticed as you pulled in, your passenger side brake light is out.”
    “Yeah, it has been for a few weeks now. I just can’t seem to get my act together to take it in and get it fixed.”
    “That’s easy enough to fix. Rick could do that in a minute or two. Tell him to give me a call if he has any questions.”
    “We’re, uh …” I looked at the car, then back at Kevin, “separated.”
    His hand fell from the handle of his truck and he shook his head. “I was trying so hard not to say anything stupid, and now look at what I’ve done. I’m so sorry.”
    “No, it’s fine. We’ve been separated a couple of months. Between Nick’s death and Kurt’s addiction, things just got a little too hard to take around here, you know what I mean?”
    “I understand it better than you can imagine.” His face was sad as he shook his head, and I remembered Nick telling me about Chris’s mom. She’d been somewhat of a plastic surgery addict, until a botched operation left her in constant pain. After that, she’d begun fueling her life with booze and prescription drugs. In Kevin Marshall’s face, I could see that nothing had changed for the better in the last few years.
    “Well, I’ve got to be going.” He climbed into his truck, and I stood in the driveway and watched him pull away.
    A moment later, I stood outside the door to Nick’s room, trying to get the courage to open it. His things had remained more or less unchanged since his death, and I had learned early on that spending time in there only opened a sadness that I hadn’t yet learned to manage. Avoidance had always been one of my defense mechanisms, and aside from the occasional cleaning, I rarely stepped foot inside.
    The room was dark and smelled of dust. I promised myself I’d come clean it in the next week, but not today. Not now. I set the bag of pictures on Nick’s denim bedspread, barely glancing at the framed certificates on the wall, the posters of the Dodgers, and the small shelf of trophies, mostly earned in scholastic events rather than sports. I closed the photos in the room with the rest of the memories. I would look at them later. At that moment, I didn’t think I had the strength.

    Saturday morning, I took the podium at the Living Above Grief seminar. The faces changed from event to event, but the expressions never did. An energy-sapping, mind-numbing grief shrouded this room like fog rolling in off the Pacific. Most of these people were lost so deep in it that sometimes the thought of simply vanishing forever into the emptiness seemed like the only option. I had been there. Truth be told, I was still there, but they didn’t need to hear that. They didn’t need to know that I still woke up crying, that I dreamed about Nick’s murder, that I still wanted to scream and rage and throw a tantrum. No, what they needed to hear was that with God, life could go on.
    The PowerPoint presentation was dialed in to perfection. I always started with a few pictures of Nick as a child. “My son Nick wanted to be a missionary from the time he was very small. He used to line up his stuffed animals and tell them all about grace through faith.” I flipped to the next slide, which showed him dressed in his favorite costume, his face painted green. “Of course, he also wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.” There was always a little snigger around the room at this point. Everyone enjoys a cute kid story. I went to the next slide. “This is Nick, repainting the wall in his brother’s room.” A small murmur of “awww” went around the room before I continued. “Lest any of you be deceived into believing this was public service, he’s painting over the words ‘Kurt is a stupid head’ and several similar comments, which he had applied with oil-based paint. Yes, my son was a not only a tagger, but he was a tagger inside his own home.”
    More stories, more laughter. As we got to the photos from his teenage years, they would