The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

my surprise says, “Yeah, maybe it is. I’ve had a few of those in my life.”

I say nothing else before turning, walking outside, and pulling the door closed behind me.

I stare out at the car, the roads, the billions of flakes, and I’m swept up in painful desperation. A sudden and insatiable desire for everything to just be…over.

Before I can put up my defense shield, a dark and hungry thought swoops in.

How wonderful it would be to drive into a tree. Head-on. Seat belt unfastened. Headfirst, through the windshield, a jagged shard slicing right through my carotid artery. The blood. So much blood, draining in such a hurry from my body I’d feel nothing more than a surge of dizziness, then fatigue, and then a soft and beautiful drifting away. Surrounded by snow, all that blood. Like a piece of performance art.

I have to shake my head to keep the fantasy from growing.

“Let go,” I say aloud.

I trudge to the car, wanting to let go of everything, but still the world clings to my back.

Fifty-One

Boston, Massachusetts

4:15 p.m.

Colin navigated his rental car out of the facility and did everything the woman inside the Google Maps app told him to do. Turn right, turn left. Merge onto the highway, continue for five miles. He happily relinquished all decision-making to her.

The last decision Colin had actively made was this morning when he booked a last-minute flight to Boston. After that, the rest of the day he’d spent in a trance.

He was exhausted and headed directly into a brutal snowstorm, not a good combination. He’d driven through some bad storms in Wisconsin, surely worse than what he’d encounter here, but his fatigue was probably the equivalent of blowing a point-oh-seven on the breathalyzer. Not legally impaired but enough where a responsible citizen wouldn’t have driven.

One hour, seven minutes to Bury. Eight-minute slowdown twenty miles ahead due to road conditions.

Colin had slept perhaps an hour after he talked to Rose last night, a conversation he struggled to recall. And sleep wasn’t even the right word for it. It was more like his brain just overloaded and shut off, a circuit breaker flipping. But after that hour of sleep, his brain went straight back into panic-and-desperation mode. He’d lain in bed all night, praying for more rest, finding none.

Instead, a singular thought had begun looping in his mind.

Go back to Bury.

There was no context for the thought. No plan. Nothing other than a sense he had to return and confront Rose. That she wasn’t allowed to get away with what she did, even if Colin didn’t know what exactly that was. But she was guilty of something. Rose. Her sister. Her father.

Someone had to pay for something. For all the shit in the world. Someone had to pay.

By four in the morning, Colin gave up, turned on the bedroom light, then downed the first of many cups of black coffee as he searched for flights to Boston. There were a few options, none of them cheap, which was to be expected when booking to leave the same day. Boston had gotten snow last night with more to come later in the day, and while some flights had been canceled, there was one option available. Seven hundred bucks got him a direct flight on one of those little Embraer jets, landing at three in the afternoon. Seven hundred goddamned bucks. That was what tragedy did for you; you lost all perspective.

He hadn’t known what to put in for the return date, so he just made it for a few days later, giving it little serious thought. Maybe he’d want to come home tomorrow, maybe never. Perhaps Bury was supposed to be his final destination in life. After all, Bury called to him. He cared about nothing else. Not his mother (who’d left him several voicemails), not his job, and certainly not the surprising amount of paperwork generated by the death of a spouse.

He’d get to those things. Probably. His mom had to be cared for. It was time for a nurse, and Colin would have to be the one to make those arrangements. But she’d have to drink alone and tuck herself in at least another night, because Colin was singularly focused.

Focused, but with no plan.

He settled onto I-93 North and eased his back against the car seat, now aware of how much tension he’d been carrying. The snow was already falling and it took only a couple of minutes before it became mesmerizing, wrangling Colin’s overtired brain. At one point, he caught himself drifting into the other lane and corrected, but not before earning a honk from another car. He waved to the offended driver, then powered his window down an inch, letting the cold air whip his senses back to attention.

Then he thought, what would be so bad if he just ran off the interstate? Maybe veer right into a ditch. Or the concrete support pillars of an underpass. Wouldn’t that just solve everything?

The thought of it became more hypnotizing than the snow. It was all so simple, as if he’d just made one random move and solved a Rubik’s Cube.

No more worries. No more pain.

He knew thoughts of suicide were common for people like him…young widows and widowers. But it was different knowing about these thoughts and having them. Knowing about them was like reading a bland brochure about signs of depression. Having these thoughts… Well, there was just a comfort to them he couldn’t rationalize. It was like winning Powerball. All his problems would be gone.

All it would take was a flick of the steering wheel. He’d want to take his seat belt off first, of course. The airbags might be meddlesome, but if he accelerated to seventy or eighty, they wouldn’t be enough to save him.

There was an overpass coming up. Maybe a half mile away. Less, even.

Colin put his foot on the gas, passing the rest of the cars that were taking the snow with caution. Once he had a