Hole-Hearted

Hole-Hearted

by Rory McClannahan

The vibration of the phone in his pocket made Mark jump. He was sure that he’d never get used to that feeling – like a short jolt of electricity was coursing through his body – but he wouldn’t turn off the function because it was the only sure-fire way to get his attention.

He finished writing the sentence on the editorial he was working on – a stirring indictment blaming the solid waste problems in Barton on incompetent management – hit control-s on his keyboard and then dug into his shirt pocket for the phone. It was a text from Sweeney, who was supposed to be covering a planning and zoning meeting but had once again gotten sidetracked. It was a maddening habit this young reporter had, she was always heading this way and that like a puppy chasing its tail. The result was usually nothing and she usually spent wasteful hours chasing down a lead. Mark was trying his best to teach her to determine was wheat and what was chafe when it came to news, but he had to admit to himself that her methods worked from time to time. She had a way of getting good, interesting stories.

This time, it looked like she was going to drag Mark away from the office and possibly delay getting the paper to the printer. It also would push back his arrival at home, where he had James Bond marathon and a microwave dinner waiting for him. Ah well, she wouldn’t text if it at least wasn’t interesting, he thought.

“Come quick – 318 Poplr. U wont bleive,” the text read. Her spelling and grammar always were horrendous in her text messages. Mark suspected she did it on purpose to drive her editor crazy. It would have, too, if she weren’t such a good reporter and the copy she did turn in wasn’t sound. He was going to hate to lose her. She hadn’t given her two weeks, but it wasn’t often a small newspaper saw talent such as Margaret Sweeney’s and when it did, that talent soon moved on to bigger markets that paid better and offered more exciting work than covering zoning meetings and historical society teas. That’s where Sweeney was going eventually. That’s what Mark should have done when he was her age working for this same newspaper in this same small town. He stayed, though. He made a home here. Got married and raised a family here. In return for his dedication, Barton had taken his wife away and the town’s businesses abandoned newspaper advertising. Everyone still read the Barton Times, but in larger numbers online for free. It was only a matter of time before Mark’s corporate overlords shuttered the paper. He was just hoping he could make it to retirement before that happened.

The address on the text was familiar, but Mark couldn’t place it. He again saved the editorial he was working on, turned in his chair and pulled up his pant leg. He scratched the end of his nub – the place right below his right knee where the doctors had used a bone saw to remove that part of his leg that had been crushed and destroyed, taking what skin there was and folding and stitching it together like the end of a burrito. He didn’t like wearing the prosthetic leg any more than a lot of people don’t like wearing shoes. It wasn’t especially uncomfortable, but neither was it comfortable. He usually left the prosthetic on during business hours, but if he was in the office alone, he’d slip it off and let the skin below breathe.

It was a pretty standard Ottobock prosthetic with a titanium shaft and hydraulics and such. It worked well and when Mark wore it, he barely had a limp. There was a part of him, though, that kind of longed for an old wooden leg. Maybe then, people wouldn’t have been so quick to forget how he lost his leg. He told himself that he really didn’t want people’s sympathy, but he held onto a slight resentment when people minimized or forgot the night his wife was killed and his leg was left mangled. They’d just forgotten, going on with their own lives and pushing aside the tragedy that was solely his.

For good measure, Mark grabbed one of the good Nikon cameras in the office, locked the door and made it to his truck. The drive over was short, but Mark had to wait in front of the truck stop for a line of semis to make their exit. Mark had always heard that people who lost a limb might sometimes feel it itching in some sort of ghost memory. He’d honestly never experienced that and thought some people were just full of crap. With no leg there’s no nerve endings, therefore no itch. However, as he sat there listening to A Flock of Seagulls on the radio, he felt his right foot start to itch madly. Except there was no foot and the feeling wouldn’t go away.

Minutes later, he was pulling onto Poplar Street. It was coming back now, why he knew this neighborhood. How could he forget?

It was well past dark and Mark pulled out his flashlight to see if he could make out addresses. He knew it was a futile effort. This was a poor neighborhood – one of Barton’s poorest. The houses were all Section 8 and the landlords cared about nothing except collecting the monthly government check. The tenants had no sense of ownership of the homes and treated them as such. Mark hated to generalize and knew there had to be families who lived in Sunrise Estates who did care about how they lived and kept a clean house. Visual evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.

He didn’t need to see the address, he found the house easy – it was the one with all the people in the front yard. It figured that his star reporter was in the middle of something like this, sometimes he thought she didn’t have the sense to stay safe. There were no cops and when Mark got out of his truck, he was surprised to find that there was little noise. With this many people, it was odd that they all seemed to be speaking in hushed tones. It didn’t look like anyone was looking to be violent, but Mark hung on to his large flashlight just the same.

The activity seemed to be on the side of the house and Mark followed the whispers.

“Psst, over here,” an urgent Sweeney called to him. She was standing around the side of the house with about a dozen other people who all seemed to be set aglow by something. She had her smartphone out and was taking photos of whatever was emitting the light. Mark took the camera off his shoulder and put the strap around his neck as he rounded the corner of the house, ready to shoot a photo of the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot or E.T. What he saw was much more difficult to explain.

The light reflecting off the faces of the people was coming from a hole in the house. It was the kind of thing didn’t make sense – if any hole in the side of a house makes sense. This six-foot wide aperture did not look as though someone had cut an opening in the side of the house. No, it almost looked as if someone had taken a giant pencil eraser and wiped out the siding and the window that was once there. Furthermore, the fissure did not reveal a darkened room – the house was not currently occupied. Instead the hole revealed what looked like a teenage girl’s bedroom at mid-morning. The light and shadows were confusing, as if the sun were shining into the room from where everyone was standing in the dark.

“What do you think this is?” Sweeney asked Mark. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

While the young reporter was acting as if she were an old soul, it didn’t take long for Mark to realize what he was looking at and who the room belonged to. Nausea rose up from his stomach and sweat appeared on his forehead. This had to be a joke. How else to explain how Carrie Ryan’s bedroom was being displayed for the world to see when Carrie Ryan hadn’t been seen in nearly seven years?

When he thought about Carrie Ryan, he always thought about his leg and Lisa. And when he thought of Lisa or his leg, his thoughts always went to Carrie Ryan. The three would always be connected in Mark’s mind, one didn’t exist in a memory without the other. Something very weird was going on and without trying to explain it to himself, he knew he had to be at the center of this.

“What’s going on?” he asked Sweeney in a phrase he’d asked her dozens of times about a whatever story she was working on. It was shorthand for “tell me what’s going on, but don’t bore me with minute details until I ask for them.”

“A couple of kids sneaking a smoke first saw it, just at dusk,” Sweeney said. “It could have been there longer, but nobody noticed until the light from inside the … hole contrasted with the darkness. It hasn’t grown since and nobody has appeared on the other side. The best theory I heard was from some stoner dude who said it was probably a tear in the space-time continuum and that we should hurry and close it before the world is sucked into a black hole.”

Mark had been examining the edges of the hole, afraid to get to near the anomaly or touch any part of it. He looked at her when she paused.

“Or something like that,” she continued as if say that there would be no way a stoner from Sunrise Estates had a firm grasp of reality, never mind advanced physics. “I was heading to my meeting – I thought I’d drop by and see this property everyone’s going to be arguing about tonight – and saw this on my way. Just all these people looking at it.”

Sweeney stepped toward the aberration and reached out a hand to touch it. She stopped short of touching its invisible plane.

“It seems that while you might see a hole, it’s more like a window, or maybe a screen. You can’t stick your hand through it. It feels as solid as a wall would be, but it also shocks – or really burns you, I guess, when you try to touch it. We’ve been trying to send things through it, but everything gets knocked back.”

Mark moved more toward the center of the hole, looking in the room for any clue what might be going on. A calendar of the wall was from seven years before. His eyes, though, were drawn to something on the floor next to the mussed bed. It was a business card. He could clearly read the name on the card, it was his own. He looked to Sweeney and without a word, they both knew what his next question was going to be. She answered before he could ask.

“I don’t know how your card got in there. No one here put it there.” Mark was at once dubious. Of all of Margaret Sweeney’s annoying and endearing habits, there was one that drove Mark crazy. She had a quirk of writing down important information on any scrap of paper she could find, but she had a special affinity for business cards, just not her own business cards. Mostly his, because he wouldn’t notice a few missing out of the box of 500 cards that Mark had ordered 12 years before when he was made editor. It probably would have taken him another 20 years to run out of cards without Sweeney’s help.

Regardless of whether the card was placed in that room that night or seven years before, he saw what was happening and with that came the answers to a dozen questions that had haunted him for seven years. He stepped away from the house and into the darkness of the yard. He needed to sit and finding nothing to sit upon, he fell to the ground.

Sweeney came running up.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, kneeling close to him.

“That card,” he said. “On the reverse side I’ll wager that there is a phone number, 975-9837, on it. It also says 10:30.”

Sweeney grunted. “How would you know that?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just a hunch, I guess.”

Mark reached out his arm in an indication that he needed a hand up. Sweeney gabbed it and pulled him up. He quelled the wave of nausea that struck him with several deep breaths.

“I think your stoner friend may be smarter than either of us would give him credit for. Then again, even a blind squirrel finds his nuts every now and again,” Mark said, moving back toward the house. A pair of pre-teen boys were busy throwing dirt clods and the hole just to watch them crumble when they hit the invisible barrier guarding the hole.

As he moved closer, the one of the boys stopped throwing dirt clumps. Mark had to give an authoritative stare to the boy who continued throw clods to get him to move away. He stared for a long while, studying what had to be Carrie Ryan’s bedroom. He looked around the room for confirmation. The walls were covered with boy band posters that were most likely acquired at Wal-Mart. If Carrie had come from a middle class family, her room would most likely would have been painted pink, with matching furniture. Instead, she was poor. She at least had a bed, but it had no headboard and no sheets, only a nest of dirty blankets.

Confirmation that this was Carrie’s bedroom came easily enough, in fact the evidence was right there next to his business card with the number of an abortion clinic written on it. It was her Barton High School identification badge. Every student was issued one and Mark recognized the photo on it from the numerous times he saw it on the news and ran it in his own paper.

Carrie Ryan. Standing there, Mark wondered what kind of trick the universe was playing on him.

He reached out his hand to touch the hole, to see if he could just reach in and grab that business card.

“Careful,” Sweeney said behind him. “You can’t touch it. It’s hot. Really hot. We tried already.”

He glanced at her and about another dozen expectant faces, all nodding in agreement. It didn’t stop him though. He had more at stake than they did. He turned back to the hole and slowly moved his hand toward it. At first, he thought they were all crazy – he felt no heat coming off it. When his fingertips touch the plane, though, he felt a searing pain of … what? It didn’t feel like heat from a fire, nor from an electrical arc but it certainly burned his fingertips.

He moved his hand quickly back. It wasn’t a feeling like he’d ever experienced before. He shined his flashlight on the tips of his fingers. The digits that had made contact were red with his middle finger sporting a small blister. He had been hoping that the pain was imagined, that no real damage could occur to his flesh. Too many damn movies, he thought to himself.

Mark moved away from the hole, motioning to Sweeney to follow him away from the other people. When they were at his truck, he finally spoke.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ve got to go put the paper to bed and get a few things from the house.”

“What about the planning meeting,” she said, her brow wrinkled in concern. “And shouldn’t we get something on this in the paper? This is going to be big.”

He smiled a weary little grimace and put his hand on her shoulder. This was exactly the second time he had touched his young ace reporter, the first being their handshake when she darkened his doorway looking for a job. He could have sworn she flinched a little when he rested his hand there, but he couldn’t think about that now. He had to make sure she understood what he was saying and followed his instructions.

“Don’t worry about the planning meeting, I’ve got a stand-alone photo I can run in its place. You stay here. If you can convince these people to move off and maybe try to find something to cover it with, that would be great. I don’t expect these folks would let you do that though. I imagine this thing is already on social media, but we can’t control that. We’ve got some time, but eventually Scully and Muldare are going to show up and run everyone off. I want someone here when that happens.”

Mark opened the door to his truck and got in. “One more thing – text me if something happens on the other side of that hole”

Driving away was difficult, Mark wanted to stay and stare at that hole. More than anything, though, he wanted to get his business card out of there. To do that, he would need some equipment. In his garage he had a pair of rubber-coated gloves like electrical linemen wore. He found them one day when he was cleaning out the garage and he was always debating whether to throw them away. Something always made him put them back on the shelf above the paint.

Getting the paper done and sent to the printer took about ten minutes. Harold, the guy he paid to pick up the papers and load the newspaper boxes, would drive the seventy miles in an hour or so and pick up the printed papers. Mark now had nothing but time, but his foot was heavy on the truck’s accelerator. He quickly made it to his empty home, found the gloves and headed back to the house on Poplar Street that had the hole to the past.

When he got back, there were more people mingling outside the house, including the Barton chief of police. Well, it was fun while it lasted, Mark thought, but in his mind he knew he wasn’t going to let that fat bastard stop him from doing what he needed to do. He needn’t have worried though. The chief was at Mark’s truck before he could even get out, a look of worry was frozen on the lawman’s face like a Halloween mask.

“Margaret said you know what this thing is,” the chief said as Mark climbed out and then turned to reach in and grab the gloves.

“I’ve got some theories, Bill. She didn’t tell you?” Mark asked.

“She didn’t say anything, just told me to wait until you got back. Is that … I think that’s Carrie Ryan’s bedroom?”

It made sense that Bill would be a little rattled about the appearance of this hole into the past. He wasn’t chief then, but he was one of the investigators in her disappearance and he was the one who arrived first after Justin Ryan ran over Mark and killed Lisa. The chief didn’t ever talk much to Mark other than about how the high school football team was doing and the like. It now appeared that Carrie Ryan haunted more than one person in Barton.

“Look Bill, I’ll explain everything, but is there anything you can do about all these people? You know, use your authority to run them off? Maybe put crime scene tape around the house or something?”

Chief Bill nodded and ambled off following Mark’s orders. Before the chief could get away, Mark called after him.

“Bill,” he said. The fat cop stopped and quickly turned, the look of fright still on his face. “Did you call anyone else to come take a look at this? Is the FBI going to show up soon?”

The chief grinned a little and shook his head. “No,” he said. “This ain’t any of their business. It’s weird, but I sort of feel like this is all about … us.”

He turned on his heel and headed around the house, shouting at everyone to clear the area. Mark was surprised how effective the chief’s order had been, the bystanders were shuffling off by the time he got around the side of the house. Mark paid little mind to the people being run off and the police chief stretching crime scene tape around that side of the house. The hole is what had Mark’s attention, all he could do was stare at his business card with the number of an abortion clinic written on it. All he had to do was reach in and grab that card and everything would be as it should. He would have his leg back and he would have Lisa back. There was no doubt in his mind that this hole was there for him.

Sweeney moved to stand beside him, also staring at the hole. Mark looked at her, the glow of a morning from years before illuminating her face. He knew what she looked like, but he forced himself not to look at her in any other way than as a boss looks at an employee. As he looked at her now, her eyes focused on Carrie Ryan’s bedroom she had an expression that seemed to be beckoning to him from the past. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a tail with strands fighting to get out. That was a common look for her, Mark decided. She had the kind of hair that would never really know a good day, always a step away from complete disarray and yet appealing in its own way. Her mouth was small which made her front teeth look larger than they really were.

Sweeney’s face was smooth and young, her skin tanned lightly as someone who spent her weekends camping and hiking and biking would. She wasn’t pretty in a conventional way, but she had a twinkle of knowledge and humor in her eyes. From the glow, Mark realized that he probably loved this woman who was young enough to be his daughter. He shook those thoughts out of his head. What was important was Lisa.

“You obviously know about my leg,” Mark said. “What else do you know? Do you know how it happened?” She didn’t move, her focus on the hole. Mark chuckled to himself and to her.

“Of course you know about how and when it happened. I’m sure one of the good citizens of Barton was more than happy to tell you all about it. Probably even threw in a theory or two depending on whether they were subscribers.” Sweeney looked at him but didn’t say anything.

“Well, I guess you should hear it from someone who was there,” Mark started, sitting down on a plastic bucket in the glow of the hole, as if he was getting ready to tell a scary campfire story. The police chief had found an old lawn furniture chair and Sweeney simply squatted.

“You know about this,” Mark said tapping his fake right leg “I’m sure that some folks around here have told you some stories. It’s a small town, we all know each other and we all love to gossip. Isn’t that right Chief?”

The fat officer’s guilt was obvious, but it also was obvious Mark felt no animosity, he knew he had long been the subject of whispers. Some even came back to him, there are people who like to do that sort of thing.

“So you probably know that Carrie Ryan disappeared about seven years ago,” Mark said.

“April 22,” the chief added.

“Yes, April 22 seven years ago. I was just made editor, which meant a little more money and a lot more responsibility. I loved it though and it was a good fit. My daughters were in high school then and Lisa and I were respected members of the community. My wife was beautiful and vivacious and a great mom.

“It was the night of the chamber dinner, wasn’t it, Bill?” The chief coughed and quietly said yessir. “Anyway, we had gone to the dinner over at the old community center. The new center hadn’t been built yet so we were over in the smelly old Big Room at the center. The Lions used to have bingo there every Tuesday and smoking was allowed.

“I wish it had been a good night, but it wasn’t. Lisa was mad at me, mostly because she was tired of chamber dinners and late school board meetings and Friday night football games. We’d argued about it before, during and after the dinner. She said wives who caught their husbands having affairs with other women were lucky, her husband’s mistress was a newspaper. There wasn’t much I could say, she was right. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t mad about her attitude.

“By the time we were heading out to the car, we weren’t even speaking to each other. I didn’t even unlock the car door and open it for her. I was behind the wheel and she was standing outside waiting to be able to open the door and get in. I didn’t see or hear Riley in his truck. He hit Lisa square on smashing her against the car. I didn’t even know this until I woke up three days later, short a leg. She died instantly.”

Mark had found a stick and was drawing circles in the dirt with it. No one said anything, no one had ever heard this story from his lips. He’d never told anyone.

“Despite being a horrible husband, I did love her and I’m not sure what the last thing we said to each other was, but it was an argument. That’s hard to live with.”

He stopped and stood, then moved toward the hole. His fingers extended toward its invisible barrier, pulling back when the tips made contact with its power source.

“Riley was convicted of vehicular homicide and was sentenced to six years in prison, is that right Bill?”

The chief nodded his head and cleared his throat. “He got six years, but served only four,” he said.

“Yeah,” Mark said, turning back to them. “He was walking around town before I could even walk again.”

“No one ever talks about him,” Sweeney said.

Mark threw out an evil cackle. “Nope,” he said. “Justin Riley won’t be bothering anyone in Barton anymore. I guess you could call it karma, but he got drunk one frigid winter night at Pete’s and passed out in a ditch. They found his body a couple days later.”

Silence fell over the small group. Sweeney stood and took up the sentry post at the hole, her back to the bedroom.

“The thing is … is that I had no idea why Riley came after me.”

The chief again cleared his throat and spoke. “He told me during the interview that he knew that Mark had impregnated his 16-year-old daughter and that he was pressuring her into an abortion. We found one of Mark’s business cards with the number for an abortion clinic written on the back of it on Mr. Riley’s person.”

The chief and Sweeney looked at Mark and then at the hole.

“I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know Carrie Ryan, never met her, she’d never even been in the paper for anything. I had no idea where she got my card and she had disappeared. No one knew where she was or if she were still alive. No one has ever found her body, but that doesn’t mean she’s alive. Not around here.

“I suspect that her dad, in a fit of rage, killed her and buried her body out in the boonies then came after me. I still couldn’t figure out why. I suppose it would have been easy to find my business card and I suppose she could have written down that number. But that’s a lot of supposing.”

The police chief stood quickly from the chair where he had been quietly sitting. Mark was startled by the movement. Clearly something was bothering Bill, but Mark had no idea what could make the lawman so jumpy. In the years he had known him, Mark had never known Bill to show much emotion. His feeling on the subject was that it was because the police chief was not blessed with much depth. Mark had known Bill Phillips since the cop had been a left tackle on the Barton Lions football team years ago.

“Umm,” the chief said kicking at the dirt. “I know where she got that card.”

Mark silently looked at the police chief.

“She got it from me,” he said unable to face Mark. “I was the school resource officer then. She was having trouble and she asked me who she could talk to about … a problem she was having with her dad. I swear, she never said anything about being pregnant, but I gave her the number to the Family Clinic. I was only thinking about the counseling they offer over there. I didn’t even think about the abortion clinic there until it came out during Justin’s trial.”

Bill swallowed hard, Mark could tell the big man was trying his best not to cry. He’d been living with that guilt for seven years, Mark realized. No wonder Bill always looked for an excuse to avoid Mark. Bill walked away from the light, but Mark and Sweeney could still hear him in the darkness. He had allowed the years of guilt and grief come flowing out in a series of sobs.

“I’m so sorry, Mark,” they heard from the darkness, “if I hadn’t done that Justin would have never come after you. I … your wife … she was one of the nicest people in the world and I killed her.”

Mark was in shock, unable to know what to say. That answer came when Sweeney came over and placed a hand on his shoulder. The touch told him what he already knew but he now had to impart to the chief.

“Bill, you didn’t kill Lisa. I’ve thought about that night so many times that I can’t stand to think about it anymore. I can’t stop, though. I think about it when I put this goddamn fake leg on every morning. I have my own guilt, what if we’d left earlier when she wanted to go? What if I’d opened the door for her? Why did we have to be arguing?

“The thing is that there is only one person to blame for all of this and that’s Justin Riley. He left me crippled and killed my wife and God knows what he did to his daughter. The stories that came out in court are pretty clear that he was a Class A son-of-a-bitch. It was only a matter of time before someone got hurt. If it is something you need, know this. You have no reason to feel guilt, you were doing what you thought best. That’s more than what a lot of people did.”

Sweeney removed her hand from Mark’s shoulder and moved over to the hole. Mark turned and saw she was staring through the hole and into the bedroom. Her jaw was set in determination, a look Mark had seen on several occasions when she was mad or frustrated. He’d observed her enough to know that steely look in her eyes meant she was getting ready to solve a problem.

He joined Sweeney over by the hole looking into Carrie Ryan’s bedroom, his business card lying next to the bed, taunting him. Sweeney had opened her mouth to speak when the unexpected happened – not that the appearance of a hole through space and time would appear on the side of a house where there would normally just be a regular old window.

The door across the room was flung open and a sixteen-year-old girl with pink hair ran in, flung a backpack into a corner, slammed the door and flung herself on the bed. What was truly odd, though, was that everything was silent, the hole into the past apparently didn’t include sound. All three in the present were stunned into silence, although Mark thought to himself this was what he had been hoping for.

The trouble was that this girl was in obvious pain, an emotional kind that only someone who is being abused can know. He saw it in the way her small frame shook in despair, her face buried in a pillow. Just as suddenly, she jumped and the door to her room was opened as though blasted out by an explosion. In a way, it was an explosion as Justin Riley filled the door with a bearing of malice, drunkenness and murder in his eye.

Mark feared that they were going to witness Carrie Ryan’s death and not be able to do anything about it. He was surprised though that all that occurred was the father and daughter silently shouting at each other, but Mark nearly jumped out of his skin when the large man reared back his fist and punched the girl in the stomach. She doubled over and fell to the floor, while he continued to shout out at her.

Then, just as suddenly as he had entered, Justin Riley stormed out. Carrie was sitting on the floor, but she didn’t stay there. She made her way over to a garbage can and vomited. Once done, she retrieved her backpack from where she had hurled it, emptied its contents onto the bed and began filling it with underwear and other clothes she could stuff in there. When it was full, she walked toward the hole.

Mark felt that he could reach through and touch her and for a moment their eyes seemed to lock. Her gaze looked familiar, as though he knew her from somewhere. It must have been all these years of looking at her photo, wondering where she was buried. But this Carrie was different from the one in the photo, more weathered and more worried.

At the hole, she looked as if she was pantomiming the opening of a window, but in her time and space, she had really been undoing the latch and lifting it up. She hefted her backpack and threw it at the three people waiting seven years into the future. Chief Bill made like he was going to catch it, Mark ducked out of the way and Sweeney didn’t even flinch.

Carrie Ryan followed her backpack out the window and into history. The three in the present stood dumbfounded, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before Justin Riley would return to the room and find the business card laying on the floor, almost but not quite under the bed. That thought inspired Mark into action.

“I’ve go to get that card,” he said to no one, but everyone knew why.

He looked around on the ground to where he had dropped the pair of rubber lineman gloves. When he found them, he put the right one on.

“You think that will work?” the chief asked him.

“I don’t know. What do you think, Margaret?” She hadn’t taken her eyes off the spot where Carrie Ryan made her escape.

Mark stepped up to the hole, holding his gloved hand flat and straight. When the glove tip made contact with the invisible surface of the anomaly, he could feel the heat and pain in his fingertips. The surface gave little and inside the glove, his fingers and hand were feeling the pain. Sweat poured from every part of his body and he was starting to feel sick to his stomach.

He kept after it and felt that he was making progress in getting his hand into the room when the glove burst into flames and Mark screamed in intense pain. He pulled his hand back, his long-sleeved shirt sleeve on fire and the hair burned from his arm. The skin was red and blistered. He screamed in pain and frustration.

“God damn you!” he screamed at his business card. It was only a matter of time before Justin Riley would walk in and find that card. It was only a matter of time before he gets so angry and drunk that he’ll get into his truck and search out the person on the card. It was only a matter of time before Mark would lose Lisa again. Tears streamed down his face as he screamed again and tried to jam his other hand through the invisible barrier through space and time.

This time, he felt it break through the barrier, but the pain was too harsh and he pulled back again. He fell to the ground where the chief and Sweeney both kneeled to offer comfort.

“Your hand,” Sweeney said pointing the flashlight on the red and blistering appendage, “it’s burned. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Mark rolled over and stared up at the stars, anguish turning his face into a demented mask. All the pain of the past seven years came to a boil. Sobs bubbled up from his psyche and expelled themselves from his mouth, ears, nose and eyes. He let it come because he knew that it didn’t matter. The universe had given him a solution to his trauma, but mocked him in the end. What was even the use of living?

He didn’t know how long he had been in that internal state of realization before he realized that two sets of very concerned eyes were staring at him. In a moment, calmness swept over him. Best to act sane. He sat up and asked the chief to run a garden hose over to put cold water on his wounds. He knew he was going into shock and wanted to stay conscious for at least a little longer so he could watch Justin Riley come in and seal his fate.

Sweeney was next to him, her lips sealed in a grimace of worry, her brow furrowed in determination. “That second time you punched the hole,” she said. “Your hand made it through, didn’t it?”

He nodded, “Yes, I think it did.”

She stood and moved to the hole, her face illuminated by the sun from seven years before. Before Mark could say anything, she moved her arm back as if she were getting ready to throw a baseball and swung her whole arm forward into the hole.

Her face twisted in pain but she didn’t scream like Mark had. He could see that her hand made it through and that the skin looked like it was being fried. The flesh first quickly turned red and blistered. It didn’t stop though and without warning lit on fire.

“Sweeney!” Mark screamed trying to gain his feet, but that proved difficult for a man with two burned arms and only one leg. “Stop!”

Inside the hole, he could see her hand aflame, but it was inching closer to the card. The pain was so intense, her face was screwed up in anguish. Her head turned slightly to look at Mark.

“I have to,” she said through clinched teeth. He shook his head, unable to understand. Inside the hole, her fingers were just inches from the card, but her clothes had long burned away and her arm was quickly beginning to blacken. The finger still inched forward.

“You don’t understand,” she said, turning her attention back to her hand. “What happened to you was my fault.”

“No,” Mark said, unable to move to pull her back; confused in the knowledge that he could stop her but also hoping she completed the task. However, the guilt at what she was doing was beginning to find a seat in his conscious. “You are the last person who has anything to do with this. You didn’t even live here then.”

She turned one last time to him, the look of pain had disappeared and was replaced with a serenity that at once calmed Mark’s soul. Her brown eyes were familiar. He knew them, seen them in photos for seven years. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Maybe he didn’t want to, or maybe the fact that Carrie Ryan’s hair was no longer pink and that her teeth were now straight and her nose a little narrower. He just never made the connection that Margaret Sweeney and Carrie Ryan were the same person.

“I remember the card,” she said. “I tossed it away. I was mad at the chief for giving it to me – I was never pregnant. Because of that my dad went after you. I can’t live with that anymore.”

Just as she made one last push, her arm thrusting past the shoulder into the hole, Mark found his conscience and moved to pull her out. What she was doing was madness, it wasn’t her fault and now she was killing herself for him. He never expected anyone to make a sacrifice for him like this, but he also ached for his normal life to return. He wanted the pain and humiliation of what had happened to disappear. At that moment, he both loved Margaret Sweeney and wanted her to pay the price she deserved for messing up his life. In the end, though, his soul found its footing and he knew he had to pull her back.

He couldn’t reach her, though, as she screamed and her fingers closed on the business card with Mark’s name and the number of an abortion clinic written on it. As soon as she touched it, the card burst into flames and instantly turned to ashes.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be okay.”

Darkness.

It was always dark because Lisa never left the porch light on. As usual, the front door was locked so Mark had to fumble with his keys to get in.

He tried to be quiet, but he could see from Lisa’s “room” that she was awake and most likely texting someone. She’d moved into her studio – bought a cheap bed from Walmart and everything – under the pretense that his snoring kept her awake. He knew his marriage was slipping away but he wasn’t sure how to stop it, or if he even wanted to. He kicked his shoes off and popped his head around the door to say hello.

“Hey,” he said, “how was your day?” She looked up from her phone. She wasn’t surprised to see him, but she wasn’t pleased either. He tried to smile and didn’t even try to step inside the room. He knew she would try to shrink away if he did. She didn’t like him in there.

Lisa put the phone down.

“Fine, I guess,” she said, looking at him and offering no more. “You said you’d be home at eight.”

“Yeah, the meeting went later than I thought. Then I had to work with the new girl to get the story done.”

She didn’t say anything about it. No questions whether the new reporter would work out, no questions about how his day went. Nothing. She only looked at him, expecting him to say more.

Her phone buzzed as a text came through. She glanced at it briefly and back to him.

“Who you talking to?” he asked.

“A friend.” There was nothing else, no explanation; just a quizzical look as if to ask him if there was anything else he had to say to her. He knew better. This friend – the one she spent all her time with – was more than just a friend. He debated on whether to push it, whether to get into this right now. If he did, there would be little sleep tonight.

Not tonight, he thought. Maybe this could be salvaged, but he was too tired for an argument. He needed a clear head before making accusations.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Goodnight then.”

She didn’t answer. She just went back to her phone, smiling at what she read on the screen. He went back to his room and stripped off his clothes. After brushing his teeth, he climbed into bed and turned on the bedside light. He laid there a minute, thinking about the day and hoping his new reporter would work out. She showed promise in the short time he knew her.

She was from Barton, he learned that day but he had never heard of her when she was in high school. No matter, though. She would do good, but if she was too good she would eventually move up to a bigger market.

Under the blankets, he felt his right leg go cold and then instantly he panicked slightly when his toes went numb. He ran his hands up and down the leg, scratching and massaging until the feeling came back.

Even when it felt better, it was still itchy.