Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Page 2

  Our apartment hadn’t changed much. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of her things. Right after the funeral, I had let her mother come through here to find the vestiges of her childhood. Boxes of awards and certificates and graduation gowns went back to Louisiana; a few yearbooks, and some of Lottie’s favorite movies. But mostly, there was nothing in my apartment that could give Cathy Theriot her daughter back, and she had left Houston begging me to still come for Easter. I had promised her I would. Cathy had lost her husband a few years before and Lottie was an only child. If she wanted me to drive to Alexandria for every single holiday, I would.

  But about a year after Lottie died, Cathy remarried, and our phone calls became fewer and farther between. I was just the man who was still in love with her daughter’s ghost. She kept telling me I would eventually move on too. I knew that I never would. Eric never tried to convince me of that; he never told me to consider dating again, or that one day, it would hurt less, or I wouldn’t still smell her everywhere in this apartment. He usually just brought beer and pizza or Thai takeout and watched baseball or football with me. If he was feeling really sorry for me, I might be able to talk him into watching a soccer match.

  And so, for two years, I had kept everything as it was. Her clothes still hung on her side of the closet; her shoes still lined the floor; her books were everywhere around me; her music was still on my iPod. I wouldn’t delete her from my life. She had so many things I had no use for. I couldn’t cook – I didn’t even know what a wok was for and why it was any different than a skillet, or why we had three different kinds of olive oil in our pantry. I knew it would turn rancid, but I didn’t throw it out either. Lottie had just bought a new bottle of extra virgin olive oil. She’d never even opened it.

  Eric had tried to get me to see a therapist, but I refused. I didn’t have good memories of them. Part of me realized there was a huge difference between the things we are forced to do as a child and the things we choose to do as an adult, but I still wouldn’t go. What was the point? I was dead. This was my Hell. I was supposed to be suffering anyway.

  Eric was here now, flipping through the channels, looking for the super regional playoff game. He had brought a six pack of Shiner Bock and had just ordered a pizza. I was in a particularly bad mood today because I’d had one of those dreams last night. Such a simple dream: we were standing in the kitchen as she spread thick layers of cream cheese on toasted bagels. It was morning, we had just gotten up, and she looked so goddamned sexy in her boxer cut shorts and my old LSU t-shirt that I couldn’t help myself: I pushed the bagels away from her and took the table knife out of her hand, and she gave me that look that told me “I know what you’re up to but I’m going to let you get away with it.”

  I put my hand on the small of her back and pulled her close to me, as close as I could, and still, I wanted her closer. Her mouth tasted like coffee, and I don’t know why, but that turned me on even more. Probably because I always associated coffee with Lottie. I lifted her onto the table. This was a memory. I often dreamed of her with memories. I knew what was coming next, I wanted to relive it, I wanted to relive it over and over, but I had awakened, surrounded by that interminable silence.

  I was not in the mood to watch baseball. I wanted to crawl back into bed and hope to dream of Lottie again. To finish that particular dream. But it was 1:00 in the afternoon, and Eric didn’t let me stay in bed all day anymore. So I did the next best thing. I sulked. It didn’t take long for Eric to figure out what I was doing.

  “Dietrich, I’m not leaving just because you’re being an asshole.”

  “I’m not being an asshole.” Of course I was.

  “Of course you are.”

  “Why do you like hanging out with an asshole then?”

  “Because you’re an entertaining asshole. And you have a nice TV.” I didn’t mention his TV was bigger. He wasn’t here for either of those reasons.

  “It should be. You picked it out.”

  Eric smiled. “I have good taste.”

  “Not in friends.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  I watched as the LSU batter hit a line drive to right field. A runner on third made it home. I was the LSU fan; Eric was only watching because the game was on. I should have been excited that my alma mater had just tied the game, but thinking of LSU only made me think of Lottie.

  “Let’s go out to her grave,” I said suddenly. I had finally gotten Eric’s attention. He turned the television off.

  “Now? The pizza hasn’t even gotten here yet.”

  “I need to go today.”

  Eric just sighed and pulled up the app on his phone to cancel our order. He never argued with me on this. We stopped at the flower shop on the way to the cemetery so I could buy her fresh flowers; I came out here once a week to replace them. Eric had made me promise not to come more often unless he was with me. We parked along the path closest to her grave and started walking. It was early June, hot and humid already, and we were sweating by the time we reached her. As usual, Eric kissed her headstone, murmured something to her about her fiancé being an asshole today, then walked away to leave us alone.

  The flower arrangement was full of orchids and tuberose. I had been here only a few days ago, so the last arrangement I’d brought her was still in good shape. I picked the wilting petals out of it, brushed the few stray pieces of grass that had stuck to her headstone away. I never talked to her out loud like Eric did. It seemed silly. She was dead. Unlike Eric, I didn’t believe in a Heaven. But she was here, and I often just wanted to be near her. I sat with her for a very long time before Eric made his way back to me and told me we needed to go. Just like he never argued with me about coming, I never argued with him about leaving. I brushed the grass and dirt from my pants and followed him back to his car.

  You would think sitting at the graveside of my dead fiancée would have put me in a worse mood, but as we drove back toward my apartment, I actually felt better. Some of it was just being with Eric. He had that effect on me, even when I was being an asshole. We had skipped lunch and we were hungry, so we stopped at a sports bar so we could catch the end of the game. The waitress was trying to flirt with me. I was trying to ignore her. And there was no way Eric was not going to tease me about it. As soon as she walked out of ear shot, Eric leaned across the table, and asked me, “Dietrich, does your dick still work?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “She’s kinda hot,” he continued. He was just fucking with me. He knew there was no one except Lottie.

  “I just care if our food is hot. And fast.” Goddamn it, I had set myself up. I sighed before he could even say it.

  “She seems hot and fast. You should get her number.”

  “What for? Do you think she delivers? Food, Eric.”

  Eric was smiling now. “Oh, I’ll bet she does. Get her number for me then.”

  “I’m no expert but I don’t think it works that way.”

  Eric wasn’t deterred, probably because he wasn’t serious. I had never known Eric to spend a night alone if he didn’t want to. “In my next life, I’m coming back with a European accent.”

  “Hey, this particular accent only became cool again in like the last 20 years. Be careful what you wish for.” I had no idea if that were true or not. But it seemed like it should be. “Besides, you speak better Russian than I do. Just fake an accent.”

  Eric’s smiled broadened. “I have. And it works all the time.”

  By the time we had finished eating, LSU had won the game and Eric had given me seven sure-fire ways to pick up women, all of which he knew I would never use, but because it had distracted me from obsessing about Lottie, he had persisted in telling me anyway. The thing is, Eric wasn’t a bad guy at all; he talked like it, but I knew he usually only went home with a woman if she obviously just wanted sex or if he actually really liked her. But we worked in a testosterone-driven field; he had picked up the language over the years anyway.

  As the waitress droppe
d off our checks, I noticed she had written her phone number on mine. I pushed it across the table so Eric could see. “Huh,” he slipped his credit card into the sleeve of the cardholder and picked up my check to look at it more carefully. “You should write her a note; tell her you’re really flattered but you have a girlfriend so she doesn’t get her feelings hurt.”

  And that was the kind of guy Eric really was. I wrote the note.

  That night, I lay awake in bed for a long time. I hated nighttime the most. The apartment was too quiet, too empty. The bed never felt right without her in it. I was usually the one who fell asleep pressed against her, burying my face in those long brown waves of hair, keeping an arm around her both protectively and for my own security.

  We had shocked her parents when we moved in together so young. We had only recently turned eighteen. Lottie had just graduated from high school, and I had just graduated from LSU, and we were so sure of our love, of our future together, that we risked her parents’ fury and told them what we were planning on doing. I had always liked Lottie’s parents and I was certain they would never speak to me again. But a few days later, her father called me – and asked me when we were planning on moving so he could borrow his friend’s truck. Lottie had the kind of parents I thought were only made up for movies and books.

  We didn’t have much then. I wouldn’t even meet Eric for another two months, but we had moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in Tiger Town near LSU. Her parents gave us some of their old furniture so that we weren’t eating on the floor. In the beginning, we lived like any other kids. We ate a lot of macaroni and cheese, and we didn’t have cable. Lottie’s parents paid for our internet service because she needed it for school.

  I had been accepted into graduate programs in physics all over the country, but I wasn’t going to leave Lottie. I still didn’t have a Plan B, so I started working at a cell store, and that’s how I met Eric. He came in one day for a new one, complaining he had dropped his and it was irretrievably cracked, broken, dead. I told him I could probably fix it and he didn’t believe me. I don’t blame him. To him, I was just an 18 year old kid, and although he doesn’t always act like it, Eric’s a genius too. He figured if he couldn’t fix it, there was no way in hell I could. An hour later, I handed him his repaired phone, and Eric decided to look into this kid who was good with electronics and had just graduated from university summa cum laude.

  There had been times in the nine years since that summer I had wished I had thought more about my decision to join him, had thought through what this job would entail and what I would be sacrificing. But at the time, it was a lot of money, a lot of adventure, a lot of power to dangle in front of a kid who had never had any of those things. And I liked Eric. So I agreed. I signed on. My citizenship application was sped up. I was soon able to buy Lottie everything she needed and we never ate macaroni and cheese again. At the time, I had only told Lottie that I would never lie to her, so I begged her not to ask me too much about this new job I was training for. Lottie never doubted me; she never asked me any questions at all.

  We had eight years together. Eight perfect years. And maybe I should have felt grateful that I had gotten to experience that kind of love and devotion and happiness when so many people don’t, but I didn’t feel grateful for having this afterlife that had consumed me; this Hell that had become my prison. Without Lottie, there was no escape. I would go on through what felt like an eternity without her, knowing how beautiful life should be and knowing mine would never come close again.

  As I lay there in that dark room waiting for sleep to take me, I found myself doing something I often did now: talking to a God I didn’t believe in. If He existed, then I hated Him. I hated Him for allowing all of the horrors I had seen in this world, hell, some of which I had participated in and maybe that just made me hate Him even more; I hated Him for my mother; but I hated Him mostly for Lottie, for letting me find a love that healed a broken child and had given me the promise of a future I wanted for the first time then ripping her away from me. And as I drifted off to sleep, I thought, “The least you can do now is let me dream of her.”

  Chapter 2

  That night, I did dream of Lottie. She was standing on the beach in Galveston, pointing out toward the Gulf, excitedly bouncing on the balls of her feet and squealing, “Dietrich! Look! Dolphins!” That was one of her favorite things about going to the beach. I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture of her with the dolphins playing in the waves behind her. It was such a great picture of her, with the Gulf breeze blowing those loose waves of hair around her, her petite but curvy body filling out the bikini she was wearing – God she was so sexy – and her smile so genuine, so full of joy. I immediately set that picture as my phone’s background. Lottie started to protest then laughed at herself and said Eric was probably the only other person who would ever see that picture anyway.

  We sat under a beach umbrella and she started building a sandcastle, because even at 23, Lottie would do things like that. I watched her for a while but she was driving me crazy. The whole thing was structurally unsound. So we rebuilt it together and a couple of kids passing by stopped to admire it; Lottie loved kids. She couldn’t resist. She surrendered our sandcastle to them. And I absolutely worshipped her for that.

  We walked down the beach, occasionally wading into the water to see what was floating in there. It was usually just dead jellyfish, which can still sting and it hurts like hell, or a piece of trash, but Lottie liked to look for seashells even though she never kept them. Part of the fun for her was just to see if I could identify what kind of animal it used to be. I wasn’t particularly interested in marine animals, I just had a photographic memory. I was about to get to the part of this dream where Lottie found a shell I didn’t recognize, which always excited her, and she was so fucking adorable in the way she teased me about it, but then I woke up.

  I hated waking up from those dreams. I resented my brain for tearing me away from the only place I had ever wanted to be. Slowly, I had to force myself to relocate. The empty bed. The quiet room. The soundless apartment. The time on the clock. 3:30 a.m. It was often 3:30 when I woke from these dreams. No. I was not with Lottie. Not in Galveston and not here in our apartment. This was my afterlife. I had died two years ago. And there was nothing for me to do now except get up and go to work.

  I guess I should have moved. Maybe a different apartment would mean living with fewer ghosts. They were all Lottie, but different Lotties. She was everywhere within these walls, in this building, on these sidewalks, on these familiar streets. And especially at this intersection. I drove through it every morning on my way to work. This intersection, where a few seconds had torn open a hole in my universe, had left a gaping wound within me that could never heal.

  That morning, I sat at the corner of Kirby Drive and Main Street, as I waited for the red light to change. Sometimes, I would imagine the wreckage of Lottie’s black Passat, tangled into an angry snarl of metal and plastic. The car that had hit her was a white Ford Mustang. The driver was speeding, not paying attention, didn’t see the red light. And in those precious few seconds, my life had ended – just a few different seconds and everything would have changed, and my world would still be whole, Lottie would still be alive, I would not be living in this Hell. Her best friend had been in the car with her. Another innocent life shattered by the impact of that Mustang as it slammed into the driver’s side of Lottie’s car. The only person who survived the accident was the driver of the Ford Mustang.

  Distantly, I could hear a horn honking. Someone was honking. I gradually realized they were honking at me. The light was green. It was 4:30 in the morning. How long had I been driving around these streets, looking for a ghost? How long had I been at this intersection, wishing, perhaps, I had it in me to take someone’s life without it being part of my job? Sometimes, I was afraid that I did. Because I wanted him dead. I wanted to kill the man who had taken Lottie from me. I had thought about it. Eric had as well. He had offered t
o help me. But I was at the hearing; I watched him break down; I watched him as he suffered with the guilt of his past. And I told Eric we should let him live – death was too easy a punishment.

  I took my foot off the brake and drove through the intersection. I needed to hit something. I needed to run or fight or kick and beat. After two years, I had exhausted the spectrum of ways to feel pain. It was channeled now into aggression. It was the easiest outlet, the most convenient. Given what I did for a living, there were often opportunities to get rid of it. But today, I would be in my office. There was a gym in the building at work; I would beat the shit out of something there.

  Almost two hours later, showered and changed but still feeling just as angry and irritable, I decided to walk a few blocks down to the coffee shop. I didn’t often drink coffee. That was Lottie’s obsession. Eric would sometimes arch an eyebrow at me and ask me, with the most deadpan sincerity, if I weren’t genetically required to love coffee. I never even knew who my father was, so I would offer, with equal mock sincerity, that I must only be half German. I went to this coffee shop because Lottie had loved it – the chain had originated in New Orleans, and even though the coffee tasted just like Starbucks to me, she claimed it was far better, as only a good Louisiana coffee can be. I’m not even sure what that meant.

  Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who thought it was better coffee – or maybe Americans just really loved their coffee – because it was always busy. It was just past 6:30 in the morning when I opened the door, a line of people tapping at their phones stretched back toward me while a group of baristas called out orders and scribbled names on paper cups. A half smile threatened to pull at my lips at the thought of the frazzled, college-aged girl behind the counter trying to figure mine out, let alone how to spell it. I didn’t even know what I would order. I looked at the puzzling options listed above the baristas’ heads and wondered whose brilliant idea it had been to rename coffee sizes from small and large to tall and grande. Same fucking thing, except now people just sounded pretentious and arrogant.