Came back to me

The whiskey seems to be putting up a fight, but I choke the liquid fire down anyway. I was never one for drinking liquor, or just drinking in general, but I force it down anyway, hoping that it might grease the gears of my emotions, of my sadness. I'm tired of feeling empty. No. Not empty. I'm tired of feeling dry. No. Not dry either. Those words aren't strong enough to describe my state of mind. To be more accurate, I have to say that I'm tired of feeling like a desert, void of the rain that I so desperately need.

Once my family and friends had gone back to their lives, the feelings of desolation and destitution became almost impossible to ignore, nearly impossible to bear.

I need to cry for my wife. I need for the tears to fall. It has been five days since I buried my beautiful LeeAnn and I have yet to shed a single drop. Maybe it is my guilt that is keeping me barren. Maybe I don't deserve to weep for her, to be cleansed by the salty tears.

I force down another large gulp of the dark whiskey and sit my nearly empty glass on the coffee table. The tears will help me move on, to feel some sort of closure that I know that I need. I can't keep living with my emotions as desolate as the Sahara. To be honest, though, I don't want any fucking closure. I don't want to move on. I don't want my wife dead and in the ground. I want her alive. I want to see her smile and hear her voice. I want her...home.

But that isn't possible.

I just have to face the facts.

I pick the glass back up and finish the final swallow, before slamming it back down onto the table. Sitting beside the empty glass is my cell phone. I lean toward it and jab my finger against the screen. I jab the screen a few more times before I eventually reach my voicemail. Reluctantly, I play my only saved message.

LeeAnn's voice comes to life, resurrected from the dead.

"Honey. I know that you are mad at me, but please answer your phone. I need you. Damn it!"

I listen to the short message another time, probably for the hundredth time, before ending the call.

I need another drink.

But before I can reach for the bottle of Jim Bean to give myself a refill, I hear what at first resembles the front door to my house opening. But It couldn't be. I live alone now that LeeAnn is gone.

And the front door is locked.

Isn't it?

I'm not immediately sure.

"Front door open," my home security system tells me.

I jump to my feet at the sound of the mechanical voice.

*Slam!*

"Front door closed."

The slamming door rouses memories of LeeAnn.

My wife was always a delicate person with a wonderfully innocent soul, the type of person that often got kicked around by the cruel and harsh reality she had been forced to live in. As it was for everyone, life was rarely kind to her, but LeeAnn had an especially difficult time accepting that truth. Whenever she would come home from a hard day, I did my best to give her the love and comfort she never got from the outside world. However, some days were especially draining on her spirit. At the end of those days, she would rush through the front door, retreating from the world as fast as possible. Whether she meant to or not, she would always slam the front door behind her, often shaking the plaster walls.

But LeeAnn is gone.

Who is slamming my front door, then?

I can't see my front entrance from where I stand, but I stare in that direction, watching for someone to exit the foyer. I think about calling out to whoever had come into my home uninvited, but for some reason I can't find my voice.

A figure darts from the opening to the foyer and immediately turns into an adjoining hallway to the right. The person is a blur of motion, but what I am able to make out nearly sends me stumbling backward onto the couch.

Blonde wavy hair. Long pale arms and legs. The blue and white dress she had been buried in.

LeeAnn?

It can't be.

Is the whiskey doing this somehow? Is it making me see shit?

I can't immediately rush after the vision of my dead wife, because at first I forget how to use my legs. As I stand there frozen, another familiar door slams shut.

Our bedroom.

I already know what is going to happen next.

At the end of those particularly bad days, LeeAnn would seek seclusion in our bedroom. She would hide, sometimes for hours. And I would give her the solitude that she sought, knowing that eventually she would reemerge back into the world, after she had been able to put her pieces back together to the best of her ability.

While she was putting herself back together, she would play the same CD of oldies over and over. I was never a fan of that type of music, but at some point I came to absolutely loathe those particular songs. She especially liked to loop the one by Tommy Edwards. I can never remember the name of the song, but the voice of Tommy Edwards began to rub my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.

And right on cue, music begins to resonate from the bedroom, and I hear Tommy Edwards beginning to sing, *"Many a tear has to fall…"*

Before I know that I am moving, I find myself standing at my bedroom door. First, I try the knob but it doesn't turn. Locked from the inside. Using my knuckles, I lightly tap.

With a shaky voice, I say her name.

"LeeAnn?"

"Thomas?"

My legs become weak and I nearly crumble to the floor. I never thought that I would ever hear that sweet voice saying my name again, but there it is...somehow. And it is just as sweet as I remember, like the red, fruity wine that she liked to sip on a Friday evening.

With memories of red wine, and the abnormally tall wine glass she liked to drink from, rapidly flowing through my brain, unexpected yet needed words begin to fall from my lips. "I should have answered the phone."

"But you didn't," she replies. "And I died."

I try turning the knob again, even though I know that the door is still locked. I give it a brief, pointless twist, while asking, "How are you here?"

"I died," she repeats, "and then you put me in a box."

"I did, but…" I begin, before being cut off.

"You put me in a fucking box!" she screams, from the other side of the door, her miserable tone blending into the music like a form of orchestrated chaos.

"Will you open the door," I plead. "I need to see you."

"Why?"

I take a second before answering, "Because I don't know if you are really here. Or if I am...crazy." Maybe the lack of proper mourning, of proper weeping, had finally taken its toll on my mind.

This is crazy.

Or I am.

Am I?

For a few seconds her voice disappears, but Tony Edwards begins his song anew, taking it once more from the top.

"I...am...here."

"How?" I ask again. "How are you here?"

"Something ran across the road in front of me," she begins. "I...had been drinking. I shouldn't have been driving. I called you...but…" LeeAnn trails off for a moment. "You told me not to go out. I should have stayed home. Something ran across the road. An animal. Small. I swerved and then I couldn't stay on the road. It was dark. There was a large tree. I hit it. And then...black."

I think about saying something, but I don't.

"I woke up," she continued. "And I knew...somehow I knew that I was in the ground. The box was tight and dark. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't...do anything. So I screamed...as loud as I could. I screamed for you to save me. I screamed and screamed and screamed. But you never came."

"I'm so sorry," I mumble, my heart breaking beneath the weight of her sadness.

"I gave up," LeeAnn tells me. "After...I don't know how long...I stopped screaming. And that's when I heard them."

The hair on my arms suddenly standing on end.

I ask, "Heard who?"

"I wasn't the only one who had been put in a box," she explains. "There were others. And they were screaming, too. I could hear them on all sides of me. Tormented and frightened voices screaming, like a choir of the damned. For days...the screaming. It felt like years. It felt like...an eternity. I start screaming again, too. Screaming. And screaming."

"But you got out," I say.

"All at once," LeeAnna continues, "the screaming stops. Silence. We all...felt...him. He had come for us and we all felt it."

"Felt who?"

Ignoring my questions, she goes on, "Without words, he calls for us...for us to rise to him. And we do. In a blink, we are free of our boxes and able to go to him, because we have no choice. When he calls...."

Her voice trails off.

"Who?" I ask.

In spite of the thick bedroom door between us, in spite of the music that continues to repeat unabated, I can hear her sigh. It is a sad sound filled with both hopelessness and fear. I give the doorknob another, more forceful twist, and try to push my shoulder against the door, but once again my actions amount to little more than a toddler throwing a tantrum.

"The tall man," she explains. "The tall man in the black tophat. His eyes are dark as coal and his teeth are sharp as knives. When he calls upon the dead, the dead must follow his call. And we did. We were not prisoners or need to be chained or shackled because our bodies followed him without question."

LeeAnna briefly pauses.

"There were four other people with me," she tells me. "The four other screamers. I might have recognized the others, but I was too scared to look at their faces. I did look around me, though, and I could see that it was nighttime. And I could see that a strong wind was whipping through the trees, but I could not feel it. I didn't know if it was cold or warm, because the wind would not touch my skin. The tall man led us out of the cemetery and we followed behind him like rats. Like children."

"Where was he taking you?"

"To the place where the storms never end," she replies. "And the rain never stops."

"But you got away," I state. "And you came home."

"He led us through the town," LeeAnn says. "Right down the center of everything. But no one could see us. We weren't there. And then I saw it. 4th Ave West. Where it intersects Second Street. I used to drive that way every single day. It was my way home."

She takes another brief pause.

"I started thinking about you, Thomas," she says. "For some reason, I started to remember our wedding day and how everyone got drunk off their asses at our reception. Your uncle Danny threw up all over my cousin Vicky. Too much Jagermeister. I could picture our little house. Our tiny yard. And your face. I don't know how...but...I started to run. I just kept running and running as fast as I could."

"And then you made it home," I say, finishing the thought.

"You didn't answer the phone," she replies.

"I am so sorry," I tell her again.

"You were mad," she begins, "that I went out. You ignored my call."

"No!" I exclaim, but quickly lower my voice. "I went to bed. I didn't...I forgot my phone in the living room. I was mad and...I just...I forgot it on the coffee table. I didn't hear it ring. I figured that I would just go to sleep and you would wake me when you got home and that I wouldn't be mad anymore and that everything would be fine. Like it always was. I would get over it and everything would be fine. But you never came home."

"I am home now."

"Please...LeeAnn...let me in," I beg.

I hear movement. And then a subtle click as the door's lock disengages. I hastitly twist the knob, finally feeling it make the full rotation. Slowly, I push on the door and hold my breath as it swings inward.

And there she is.

LeeAnn.

My wife.

The image of her I have had trapped in my head for days, the still-frame of my wife lying in the morgue, releases its hold on me at last. That gruesome picture is quickly replaced by the sight of her standing in front of me. Beautiful...is a word that fails in every way to capture how she looks at that moment.

Breathtaking...might be more fitting.

Impossible.

A miracle.

I can't seem to find the right word.

Before I am able to take a single step into the bedroom, the weakness in my legs becomes too much for me and I crumble like bricks onto my knees. As I look upon my wife, dead but somehow home, I feel a familiar warmth flush over my face and I know that tears are not far behind. LeeAnn simply watches me in silence. And then, without warning, the music stops. Silence steals the air and I watch confused as LeeAnn's eyes suddenly widen.

"He is here," she says, fear distorting her expressions.

"No…" I begin to say, but my words are ended by the bedroom door being violently slammed shut in my face. In a flash, I am back on my feet and fighting with the door knob, which has become locked, once more.

I start pounding on the closed door with both fists.

I hear her shout my name.

"Thomas!"

"LeeAnn!" I start screaming back to her.

"Thomas!"

"I love you! I am sorry!"

Below our shouting, I hear another, much deeper, voice coming from inside the bedroom.

"It is time to go."

"LeeAnn!"

The deep voice speaks again.

"Try not to wander off, this time."

"Thomas!"

"No! LeeAnn, no!"

"Thomas! I forgive you!"

And with those final words, the door's lock clicks free and the door swings open, revealing an empty bedroom. I rush into the room. I spin round and round for several seconds, but there is nothing to see.

She is gone.

Again.

Her words repeat in my head.

*"I forgive you!"*

I suddenly fall into a sitting position on the side of our bed.

*"I forgive you!"*

As I sit there, questioning my reality, questioning my sanity, the skies inside my mind, which have become dense and overpopulated by dark clouds, finally release and the rain my desert so desperately needs begin to pour. And I hungrily and ravenously weep.

The whiskey seems to be putting up a fight, but I choke the liquid fire down anyway. I was never one for drinking liquor, or just drinking in general, but I force it down anyway, hoping that it might grease the gears of my emotions, of my sadness. I'm tired of feeling empty. No. Not empty. I'm tired of feeling dry. No. Not dry either. Those words aren't strong enough to describe my state of mind. To be more accurate, I have to say that I'm tired of feeling like a desert, void of the rain that I so desperately need.

Once my family and friends had gone back to their lives, the feelings of desolation and destitution became almost impossible to ignore, nearly impossible to bear.

I need to cry for my wife. I need for the tears to fall. It has been five days since I buried my beautiful LeeAnn and I have yet to shed a single drop. Maybe it is my guilt that is keeping me barren. Maybe I don't deserve to weep for her, to be cleansed by the salty tears.

I force down another large gulp of the dark whiskey and sit my nearly empty glass on the coffee table. The tears will help me move on, to feel some sort of closure that I know that I need. I can't keep living with my emotions as desolate as the Sahara. To be honest, though, I don't want any fucking closure. I don't want to move on. I don't want my wife dead and in the ground. I want her alive. I want to see her smile and hear her voice. I want her...home.

But that isn't possible.

I just have to face the facts.

I pick the glass back up and finish the final swallow, before slamming it back down onto the table. Sitting beside the empty glass is my cell phone. I lean toward it and jab my finger against the screen. I jab the screen a few more times before I eventually reach my voicemail. Reluctantly, I play my only saved message.

LeeAnn's voice comes to life, resurrected from the dead.

"Honey. I know that you are mad at me, but please answer your phone. I need you. Damn it!"

I listen to the short message another time, probably for the hundredth time, before ending the call.

I need another drink.

But before I can reach for the bottle of Jim Bean to give myself a refill, I hear what at first resembles the front door to my house opening. But It couldn't be. I live alone now that LeeAnn is gone.

And the front door is locked.

Isn't it?

I'm not immediately sure.

"Front door open," my home security system tells me.

I jump to my feet at the sound of the mechanical voice.

*Slam!*

"Front door closed."

The slamming door rouses memories of LeeAnn.

My wife was always a delicate person with a wonderfully innocent soul, the type of person that often got kicked around by the cruel and harsh reality she had been forced to live in. As it was for everyone, life was rarely kind to her, but LeeAnn had an especially difficult time accepting that truth. Whenever she would come home from a hard day, I did my best to give her the love and comfort she never got from the outside world. However, some days were especially draining on her spirit. At the end of those days, she would rush through the front door, retreating from the world as fast as possible. Whether she meant to or not, she would always slam the front door behind her, often shaking the plaster walls.

But LeeAnn is gone.

Who is slamming my front door, then?

I can't see my front entrance from where I stand, but I stare in that direction, watching for someone to exit the foyer. I think about calling out to whoever had come into my home uninvited, but for some reason I can't find my voice.

A figure darts from the opening to the foyer and immediately turns into an adjoining hallway to the right. The person is a blur of motion, but what I am able to make out nearly sends me stumbling backward onto the couch.

Blonde wavy hair. Long pale arms and legs. The blue and white dress she had been buried in.

LeeAnn?

It can't be.

Is the whiskey doing this somehow? Is it making me see shit?

I can't immediately rush after the vision of my dead wife, because at first I forget how to use my legs. As I stand there frozen, another familiar door slams shut.

Our bedroom.

I already know what is going to happen next.

At the end of those particularly bad days, LeeAnn would seek seclusion in our bedroom. She would hide, sometimes for hours. And I would give her the solitude that she sought, knowing that eventually she would reemerge back into the world, after she had been able to put her pieces back together to the best of her ability.

While she was putting herself back together, she would play the same CD of oldies over and over. I was never a fan of that type of music, but at some point I came to absolutely loathe those particular songs. She especially liked to loop the one by Tommy Edwards. I can never remember the name of the song, but the voice of Tommy Edwards began to rub my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.

And right on cue, music begins to resonate from the bedroom, and I hear Tommy Edwards beginning to sing, *"Many a tear has to fall…"*

Before I know that I am moving, I find myself standing at my bedroom door. First, I try the knob but it doesn't turn. Locked from the inside. Using my knuckles, I lightly tap.

With a shaky voice, I say her name.

"LeeAnn?"

"Thomas?"

My legs become weak and I nearly crumble to the floor. I never thought that I would ever hear that sweet voice saying my name again, but there it is...somehow. And it is just as sweet as I remember, like the red, fruity wine that she liked to sip on a Friday evening.

With memories of red wine, and the abnormally tall wine glass she liked to drink from, rapidly flowing through my brain, unexpected yet needed words begin to fall from my lips. "I should have answered the phone."

"But you didn't," she replies. "And I died."

I try turning the knob again, even though I know that the door is still locked. I give it a brief, pointless twist, while asking, "How are you here?"

"I died," she repeats, "and then you put me in a box."

"I did, but…" I begin, before being cut off.

"You put me in a fucking box!" she screams, from the other side of the door, her miserable tone blending into the music like a form of orchestrated chaos.

"Will you open the door," I plead. "I need to see you."

"Why?"

I take a second before answering, "Because I don't know if you are really here. Or if I am...crazy." Maybe the lack of proper mourning, of proper weeping, had finally taken its toll on my mind.

This is crazy.

Or I am.

Am I?

For a few seconds her voice disappears, but Tony Edwards begins his song anew, taking it once more from the top.

"I...am...here."

"How?" I ask again. "How are you here?"

"Something ran across the road in front of me," she begins. "I...had been drinking. I shouldn't have been driving. I called you...but…" LeeAnn trails off for a moment. "You told me not to go out. I should have stayed home. Something ran across the road. An animal. Small. I swerved and then I couldn't stay on the road. It was dark. There was a large tree. I hit it. And then...black."

I think about saying something, but I don't.

"I woke up," she continued. "And I knew...somehow I knew that I was in the ground. The box was tight and dark. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't...do anything. So I screamed...as loud as I could. I screamed for you to save me. I screamed and screamed and screamed. But you never came."

"I'm so sorry," I mumble, my heart breaking beneath the weight of her sadness.

"I gave up," LeeAnn tells me. "After...I don't know how long...I stopped screaming. And that's when I heard them."

The hair on my arms suddenly standing on end.

I ask, "Heard who?"

"I wasn't the only one who had been put in a box," she explains. "There were others. And they were screaming, too. I could hear them on all sides of me. Tormented and frightened voices screaming, like a choir of the damned. For days...the screaming. It felt like years. It felt like...an eternity. I start screaming again, too. Screaming. And screaming."

"But you got out," I say.

"All at once," LeeAnna continues, "the screaming stops. Silence. We all...felt...him. He had come for us and we all felt it."

"Felt who?"

Ignoring my questions, she goes on, "Without words, he calls for us...for us to rise to him. And we do. In a blink, we are free of our boxes and able to go to him, because we have no choice. When he calls...."

Her voice trails off.

"Who?" I ask.

In spite of the thick bedroom door between us, in spite of the music that continues to repeat unabated, I can hear her sigh. It is a sad sound filled with both hopelessness and fear. I give the doorknob another, more forceful twist, and try to push my shoulder against the door, but once again my actions amount to little more than a toddler throwing a tantrum.

"The tall man," she explains. "The tall man in the black tophat. His eyes are dark as coal and his teeth are sharp as knives. When he calls upon the dead, the dead must follow his call. And we did. We were not prisoners or need to be chained or shackled because our bodies followed him without question."

LeeAnna briefly pauses.

"There were four other people with me," she tells me. "The four other screamers. I might have recognized the others, but I was too scared to look at their faces. I did look around me, though, and I could see that it was nighttime. And I could see that a strong wind was whipping through the trees, but I could not feel it. I didn't know if it was cold or warm, because the wind would not touch my skin. The tall man led us out of the cemetery and we followed behind him like rats. Like children."

"Where was he taking you?"

"To the place where the storms never end," she replies. "And the rain never stops."

"But you got away," I state. "And you came home."

"He led us through the town," LeeAnn says. "Right down the center of everything. But no one could see us. We weren't there. And then I saw it. 4th Ave West. Where it intersects Second Street. I used to drive that way every single day. It was my way home."

She takes another brief pause.

"I started thinking about you, Thomas," she says. "For some reason, I started to remember our wedding day and how everyone got drunk off their asses at our reception. Your uncle Danny threw up all over my cousin Vicky. Too much Jagermeister. I could picture our little house. Our tiny yard. And your face. I don't know how...but...I started to run. I just kept running and running as fast as I could."

"And then you made it home," I say, finishing the thought.

"You didn't answer the phone," she replies.

"I am so sorry," I tell her again.

"You were mad," she begins, "that I went out. You ignored my call."

"No!" I exclaim, but quickly lower my voice. "I went to bed. I didn't...I forgot my phone in the living room. I was mad and...I just...I forgot it on the coffee table. I didn't hear it ring. I figured that I would just go to sleep and you would wake me when you got home and that I wouldn't be mad anymore and that everything would be fine. Like it always was. I would get over it and everything would be fine. But you never came home."

"I am home now."

"Please...LeeAnn...let me in," I beg.

I hear movement. And then a subtle click as the door's lock disengages. I hastitly twist the knob, finally feeling it make the full rotation. Slowly, I push on the door and hold my breath as it swings inward.

And there she is.

LeeAnn.

My wife.

The image of her I have had trapped in my head for days, the still-frame of my wife lying in the morgue, releases its hold on me at last. That gruesome picture is quickly replaced by the sight of her standing in front of me. Beautiful...is a word that fails in every way to capture how she looks at that moment.

Breathtaking...might be more fitting.

Impossible.

A miracle.

I can't seem to find the right word.

Before I am able to take a single step into the bedroom, the weakness in my legs becomes too much for me and I crumble like bricks onto my knees. As I look upon my wife, dead but somehow home, I feel a familiar warmth flush over my face and I know that tears are not far behind. LeeAnn simply watches me in silence. And then, without warning, the music stops. Silence steals the air and I watch confused as LeeAnn's eyes suddenly widen.

"He is here," she says, fear distorting her expressions.

"No…" I begin to say, but my words are ended by the bedroom door being violently slammed shut in my face. In a flash, I am back on my feet and fighting with the door knob, which has become locked, once more.

I start pounding on the closed door with both fists.

I hear her shout my name.

"Thomas!"

"LeeAnn!" I start screaming back to her.

"Thomas!"

"I love you! I am sorry!"

Below our shouting, I hear another, much deeper, voice coming from inside the bedroom.

"It is time to go."

"LeeAnn!"

The deep voice speaks again.

"Try not to wander off, this time."

"Thomas!"

"No! LeeAnn, no!"

"Thomas! I forgive you!"

And with those final words, the door's lock clicks free and the door swings open, revealing an empty bedroom. I rush into the room. I spin round and round for several seconds, but there is nothing to see.

She is gone.

Again.

Her words repeat in my head.

*"I forgive you!"*

I suddenly fall into a sitting position on the side of our bed.

*"I forgive you!"*

As I sit there, questioning my reality, questioning my sanity, the skies inside my mind, which have become dense and overpopulated by dark clouds, finally release and the rain my desert so desperately needs begin to pour. And I hungrily and ravenously weep.