A piece of my past, chapter #2 of 4

I awoke the next day with the anticipated hangover, tired and out of sorts. A shower and hot, black, strong coffee helped a little. Gretchen was between jobs at the time, and was still sleeping. I dressed and made ready to leave. I kissed her and told her I loved her, and she repeated the same back to me. As I was getting my coat and heading out the front door, she called it out again. Being tired and out of sorts, I called back “I know” in a half-cranky/half-sleepy way.

Through the years that have passed since then, I have regretted those two words more times than I could ever count. I think she knew something was coming. I wish I had known, or at least responded better.

I showed up at work, on time as usual. I have always been anal to the Nth degree about being on time to anything I needed to go to, and even hangovers did not stop that. Karen came in shortly after me, and we both gave each other a sickly grin and a sympathetic moan of the post alcohol blues. It was just another rat-race day in the rat-race work world.

I was a production coordinator at a company that manufactured software packages for retail sale or shipment to end users. I basically took the written orders from the sales staff and translated them into work tickets for the work crew, and then fitted the job into the production schedule. It was not my dream job, but it paid the mortgage for the little condo we lived in.

On my lunch break, it was my habit to call Gretchen, to see how she was doing and share the thrills of my work day. I picked up and dialed our number, and listened to our home phone burr the customary four times before our answering machine picked up. I left a message, figuring she was in the shower or still asleep or something. Or something. I tried again a little later, and the machine picked up again. Odd. I waited maybe thirty minutes and tried a third time - no answer. I got a strange little feeling in the pit of my stomach. I told myself to stop being silly, everything was fine. Gretchen had been doing occasional on-call fill-in work at a local daycare, they must have called her in after I left that morning. It had happened several times before. But something whispered in my mind, a quiet and as yet unintelligible whisper that still filled me with dread.

As the afternoon wore on, and a couple more phone calls went unanswered, the whisper grew into a nameless fear. Something was wrong. Our company had parties once a month for all the people who had birthdays in that month. I normally love the attention, but for some reason I wanted to do nothing but hide in the back of the room that day, even though my birthday was one of the ones for that month. The company president called off the names of the birthdays for January, and when he got to mine I sort of waved and smiled weakly, then hunched down into my sweatshirt and tried to disappear. After I had put in my obligatory appearance, I scrambled back to our office downstairs and tried one more phone call – still no answer.

It was almost quitting time now, and I rode out those last moments in a quiet dread. Finally it was time to go, and I threaded my way home through the afternoon traffic, all the while listening to the whisper turn to a roar – SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT.

I pulled into our carport, got out of my car, and started up the steps to our front door. It hit me then. What I had felt at work was like being on a beach, and little waves washing at my toes, then my ankles. This was like a sudden wave, dark and cold and huge, and overwhelming after the small ones. I knew with certainty that something was dreadfully wrong. I went to the front door, inserted my key, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door.