I didn’t want to be that person. If I was, what would happen the next time someone crossed me?
And what the hell kind of father could I possibly be with that kind of darkness in my soul? It was my fault MacKenzie had lost her mother. I had brought that on her, with my involvement in the club. Sure, Mad Dog’s men had killed April, but her death was all my doing. Her blood was on my hands.
Since April’s death, I felt adrift. She was my anchor, always had been. We joked about her being a ball and chain, but it was a good thing, in my case. She kept me tethered, tied to family and the things that were important to me, when I could have kept running out of control with the club, like back in the early years with them. When she died, I lost my moorings.
I looked back down at the piece in my lap. It would be so easy to just end everything. I sat silently, the weight of the options heavy on my mind.
Then I set the weapon on the nightstand, beside the slip of paper with the phone number on it. I don’t know why I had kept it.
Or why the fuck I picked up the phone then. I should have done something else, called a friend. Shit, called a hotline or something.
But I didn’t. I called a woman I didn’t know.
When she answered, I almost hung up.
“Hello?” She asked it three times before I swallowed the lump in my throat and spoke.
“It’s Joe. Hammer. The computer guy,” I said. Why the hell was I calling her?
“Hammer,” she said, her voice soft. “I wondered if I would hear from you.”
“I don’t know why I’m calling,” I said.
She was silent, and for a minute, I thought she’d hung up on me. “It’s okay not to know,” she said.
“I-” How the fuck did I explain what kind of mental space I was in right now? I didn’t know why the hell I was calling her.
"My wife -" I began. I couldn't continue. It was too painful to explain to someone who didn't already know. She couldn't possibly understand.
"You lost her," Meia said.
"She was murdered."
"Loss is difficult," she said. "You begin to despair, to think you're better off dead."
"You lost someone close to you."
"Yes," she said. "A long time ago."
"How do you get past it?"
"You don't," she said. "It's just becomes a part of you, woven into who you are."
"It never gets any better, then."
"Pain dulls," Meia said. "Maybe it's not as sharp as it used to be, yes?"
"Maybe," I said. It still felt pretty damn sharp, even after two years. "Sometimes I don't think I can take it anymore."
"Suffering is a part of life," she said. "So is loss. Struggling against it, not accepting it, does not change it."
"Accept my wife's death as fate or some shit?" I asked. "You're going to tell me it's God's will or something?"
"Nothing so trite, I hope," she said. "But accepting the inevitability of the suffering that comes with life makes it less difficult. Because then you are not struggling against reality."
"Shit, talking to you is making me more depressed than I was before."
Meia was silent, and for a minute I thought she might have hung up the phone. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft. "It will pass," she said.
"What will?"
"What you're feeling right now," she said. "It will pass. You will keep waking up and one morning, you will find that the darkness is not quite the shade of blackness that it used to be."
I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know if I could just keep waking up, if I could keep putting one foot in front of the other. "Is that what you did?" I asked.
She was silent for a long time before she finally spoke. "No," she said. "I embraced the darkness."
I hung up the phone, my mind still reeling after talking to Hammer. As if I somehow knew him. I didn't know him. I needed to remind myself of that fact. Listening to him talk about his dead wife, the one who was murdered - it didn't mean I knew him. Just because he had lost someone important didn't mean I understood anything about him.
It didn't mean anything. It meant only that he understood loss. And he knew nothing about me. I had talked about my loss like it happened a long time ago. My sister's suicide had happened long ago, but my loss was ongoing. That I hadn't told him, afraid of getting a man like that involved.
And darkness, I thought. That he understood, too. He was calling because he was steeped in it. It was a crisis. I didn't understand the crisis exactly, but I knew that much. I understood desperation - blackness-when I heard it. I'd been there so many times before.
I walked out of the bathroom, my phone in my hand, and set it on the nightstand. Aston rolled over, mumbling something incoherently in his sleep. It was risky, unfathomably so, taking Hammer's call, speaking to him in whispers in the bathroom. I stood there for a moment beside the bed, looking at Aston’s sleeping form. He looked peaceful, lying there, his chest rising and falling with each breath. Like he had nothing weighing on his conscience.
Conscience. As if he had one. He had no conscience, nothing to worry about, that much I was certain of.