Embrace the Night

Page 189



"Sarah, wait."

With an impatient sigh, she turned around, waiting for him to catch up with her. He was a tall man, with long black hair and dark gray eyes. He had the look of a foreigner, she thought, though she had detected no accent in his voice. Spanish, or maybe Italian, she decided, but she didn't really care.

"What do you want now?" she asked.

"Let me walk you home."

"Listen, Gabriel, I guess you're trying to be nice, but I'm really not in the mood for company, so why don't you just go away and leave me alone?"

"Very well," Gabriel said. Taking her hand, he bowed over it. "I'm sorry to have troubled you."

Sarah stared after him as he walked away, bewildered by his old-world courtliness. She took a few steps, then turned back, intending to apologize for her rudeness, but it was too late. He was gone.

She glanced around, wondering how he had disappeared so quickly, and then, with a sigh, she walked home, back to the quiet four-bedroom house that had once symbolized everything she held dear; a house that was empty now, as empty as her life.

Inside, she sat in the front room, sitting in the dark as she had every night since she got home from the hospital. She couldn't make herself sleep in the king-size bed she had shared with David, couldn't make herself go into the nursery. She didn't answer the phone, didn't open the mail, didn't turn on the television. She slept during the day so she wouldn't have to remember how full her life had once been.

Before the accident, each new day had been brimming with promise. On weekday mornings, she had spent a quiet half-hour with David before he went to work, packing his lunch, eating breakfast, kissing him good-bye. Shortly thereafter, Natalie would wake up, eager to be held. She'd been such a happy, contented baby, always smiling, her chubby fingers reaching out to grasp at life, eager to explore…

Sarah shook her head, willing the images away, not wanting to remember, unable to forget. She closed her eyes and the memory of a tiny white coffin resting amid three larger ones rose up to haunt her.

The tears came then, and she huddled in a corner of the sofa, steeped in misery, wishing the stranger she'd met in the park had been the depraved killer she had read about in the paper a few days before the accident. The woman in the story had claimed that a monster with red eyes had attacked her in an alley and bitten her in the neck. "Just like Dracula," she had claimed.

Sarah frowned. Perhaps, subconsciously, she'd been hoping to run into the blood-sucker when she started walking in the park at night.

Just before sleep claimed her, she found herself thinking of the strange man in the park. There had been a world of sadness in the depths of his dark gray eyes, but she had been too caught up in her own misery to spare a thought for his.

Now, on the brink of sleep, she wondered if he, too, had lost a loved one. If he, too, had been wandering in the dark, searching for oblivion.