Alone With You Somehow

Alone With You Somehow Chapter 4

It didn't seem like a long drive, despite the silence.

Clayton couldn't turn off his brain, couldn't focus on just the road and let his eyes glaze over. He wanted to turn everything off, become a dark basement, but he couldn't ignore the woman's presence. There was almost a radiating heat coming off of her, like she was a bonfire he was standing too near. But he couldn't concentrate on just her either. It was like he had popped a pill the size of Texas. From one thought to another to another.

For five years he had lived on a quiet street just outside of Sudbury, Massachusetts, a small house on a two-acre lot hidden from the road by a thick stand of oak trees and accompanying underbrush. His driveway was nearly overgrown, a small break in the greenery, and it was approaching.

And still he was thinking.

The woman next to him.

The feel of Amanda's neck snapping in his hands.

His run through the park.

The blessed, momentary silence after the low-hanging branch.

It didn't seem real. How could this be his life?

When Clayton pulled into his driveway the questions continued to mount.

Twenty feet beyond the oak trees his property gave way to the manicured lawn he remembered, the even rows, the varied colors of green made grey now in the moonlight.

And his house.

A flat-roofed rambler, rundown on the outside, the windows covered with heavy curtains. His lawn was perfect but the bushes around the house were overgrown. A perfect foil for his perfect lawn.

Clayton didn't remember that.

He took his foot off the gas.

He. Didn't. Remember.

In Clayton's memory, in the hours and hours of cutting grass walking back and forth in planned rows, he had never noticed that the shrubbery needed a trim. This seemed as impossible as what had happened in the bathroom. He hadn't just been sleeping all those years, it was like he had been in a dream, surrounded by waves of the illogical but never seeing them. This must be insanity. He had not taken any psychology classes in school, had never cracked a psychology book as far as he remembered, but that must be what this was. Some form of sickness that a man with a framed piece of paper hanging on a wall would be able to diagnose and assign a name.

Clayton parked the car and tried to cut through the feeling of all that was unreal about him. It felt like he was treading water in a rain cloud.

And then it got worse.

When Clayton looked at his own house he realized that he did not remember the inside. The unkempt bushes were like sentries denying him even a glance at what they protected.

This was his house. He remembered parking his car in the driveway countless times, getting out, holding the keys in his left hand, walking to the front door, and then . . .

What waited beyond was like an open closet door at night.

The woman spoke. "What's wrong?"

Clayton didn't look away from the front door of his house. He could hear the rattling of keys in his memory as he prepared to first open the lock and then turn the knob on the door.

He had lived in this house for five years. After college he'd worked as an assistant to one of his teachers for a year, and then this job had come up. An exclusive private school, the best in the state, paying twice what he could have expected fresh from college. Five years. He remembered signing the loan papers. He remembered the woman who had handed him paper after paper asking for a full signature on some and only initials on others. He could remember the loan office, the small conference room they sat in. The woman had been a redhead, thin with overlarge breasts that pressed against the edge of the table when she leaned forward to give him the next piece of paper to sign.