Tomorrow

Tomorrow - Chp. 7

                        I was still rubbing my cheek even as I stood by the gate. I had no idea Margaret could hit so hard. Moving my jaw, there was an ache there and for a few seconds I wondered if she had knocked a few teeth loose. Looking towards the garden, I saw her sitting on the ground with her back to me. That voice; that persistent, nagging sound spoke loudly in my ear, telling me to go back and hold her, comfort her, but I didn’t listen.

            I knew I should. Common sense told me she was reacting out of grief but damn it, she attacked me and all I did was offer my condolences. Was I allowed no measure of grace even now? I thought about Fred, the man mother said was too gentle looking to be fighting off in the war. She couldn’t imagine how he had fared all this time, half expecting he would be sent home much earlier and heavily wounded.

            She had prayed along with everyone else for his safe return but it all had been in vain. Fred Hale was only twenty-five, far too young to die so tragically on foreign soil. Margaret’s grief had been appropriate, expected, but her anger towards me was not. Even now I tried to recall what it was that popped into my thoughts when she asked if I remembered her brother.

I couldn’t say exactly what it was I saw and felt. The moment was fleeting, shorter than a pause but there had been something. For just the briefest of seconds I thought I saw a young, dark haired man laughing at me. He wasn’t tall and he looked too thin to be a threat to anyone. But the moment was too quick, too fast for me to really take in his appearance. Even if someone presented me with his picture now, I still couldn’t say if this was the man I thought I saw.

Still there was something more. What bothered me about the incident wasn’t so much what I saw, but how I felt. It was admiration, interest, a sense of camaraderie with this unknown man. If we were friends as Margaret claimed, and I had no reason to doubt her, then we were very good ones. The longer I thought of him, the more I felt I should feel his loss; that it should hurt.

Yet there was nothing. I felt no more for this man than if I read his name in the local paper and gave a momentary shudder that so young a life was ended. He would have been forgotten as soon as I finished reading the page. I wasn’t thinking that to be mean. It was what I felt.

When Margaret bowed her head, I could see her shoulders shaking from the sobs. My small companion, my inner voice urged me to go there and I did start to move, taking several steps before coming to a grinding halt.

A sense of doom, that something was invariably wrong if I chose to go to her filled me and I stopped. I had no idea where this feeling came from. It was just the two of us there, or rather it was me watching from a distance and it stayed that way as I found myself retracing my steps and going back to the gate. The feeling that I was nearing a barrier that I would strike it and be propelled backwards was so strong that I found myself running in the opposite direction.

I couldn’t go forward. I had to take steps back.

By the time I reached my car, I saw my hands were shaking. The feeling of doom had increased further that I nearly raced off, rushing back home to escape it. Only when I entered my home, and felt the peace and comfort that it always gave to me did I start to relax.

What had happened back there, I asked myself? My brain ran wild with the images of what occurred while at the Hales, but none were bodily threatening. Yet, that was what I felt. Pouring myself a small I drink I sipped at it slowly, only managing to drink a small amount before setting the glass down.

Perhaps that sense of dread had been fueled by the news of Fred’s death. The man did die tragically, and only now was I coming into terms with what that actually meant. But somehow it was more than that. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t pinpoint what it was that made scared me. It may only have been a feeling, but it touched me as deeply as if I had been shot or stabbed. Either way it caught my fears and toyed with them, manipulated until it got its victory.