Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [66]
He looked over at Melanie. Her eyes were closed and she had slumped against the door, her hair covered in shards of glass.
The nightgown barely swelled over her heart. She breathed.
He watched her for awhile, watched her sleep, and then begin to stir, her eyes opening, struggling to sit up, moving her fingers and toes, touching herself just as he had—a delicate evaluation of what worked and what did not.
At last she looked over at him, her face bleeding where the glass had cut, but otherwise in one piece.
She raised her eyebrows and he knew the question, shook his head.
They were sitting upright in a beat to shit RV, still buckled into their seats. Glass busted out of the passenger and driver side windows, sunlight passing in blinding shears through fractures in the windshield.
And they had not smiled like this before. Not in their lives. Like they’d borne witness to a private miracle. Been made to see. Called forth from their tombs.
There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.
An introduction to “Unconditional”
I’m a father. I love my son beyond words. Beyond understanding. This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written. You’ll understand why afterward, but to say more would spoil the revelatory nature of how this story unfolds.
unconditional
“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.
“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.
“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it is.
“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…
“What?
“Want me to read this now? While you watch?
“You’re just like all of ’em, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.
“Ain’t I right?
“No?
“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”
My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.
In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved