OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

ninety-seven.

          "HAVE YOU HEARD from her?"

Sarah's anxious, small voice sounded from behind Dave as he stood with his back to her near the kitchen. His line of sight was zeroed in on the house phone, his body tensed to spring if it happened to ring.

The thing was, it had been ringing all damn day. Dave thought that if it rang one more time, he'd gouge his own eardrums out. But now he was waiting for a different kind of call, one that would further twist the knife that had been plunged into his gut that afternoon.

He turned around and clasped his hands behind his head, bowing his face to the ground. Sarah looked scared as she stood in front of him, bouncing Gracie mindlessly in her arms. Dave felt bad for the poor girl. The monotony of her job had done a one-eighty and now, she was knee-deep in the throes of a rockstar death.

And the case of a potentially missing wife.

"Not since I called her office," Dave said thickly. His throat felt like it was stuffed with cotton, but he'd grown tired of trying to clear it.

There was no fucking use. He was biding his time until he finally snapped, until the moment came that he really unraveled and lost it.

Kurt was dead. One of his best friends, his bandmate, was dead.

There one day and gone the next.

The curtains hadn't just been drawn on Dave's life — they'd come unceremoniously crashing down in a heap. The whirlwind of losing Kurt and not knowing what was going to happen next reminded Dave of when he'd first learned to ride a bike. Up until that point, he'd been flying down a perfectly linear path, wind in his hair, tripping on the powerful feeling of getting something right. But the wheels were wobbling, his grip was loosening and suddenly, he didn't know where he was going to fall.

"Can you call her office again?" Sarah whispered. Her eyes were rimmed red, but Dave hadn't tried to comfort her when she'd cried. The whole world was crying that day. Yet Sarah had tried to comfort him, and for a moment he'd forgotten that he'd lost something. Someone, but also something, more things than one.

"I'll call again and try to get Todd on the phone," Dave agreed.

Reagan should have been home by then. An excruciating hour had passed since Dave had called her. He'd tried to surmise a million different reasons as to why she'd be late. Traffic, a hold up at work, hell, maybe she'd swung by the grocery store to hopefully buy him a handle of whiskey to morosely drown himself in.

Dave knew his wife better than that. He knew how stubborn she could be, resistant to any command that she was too hard headed to follow, and that's how he surmised that she'd disobeyed him.

She had turned on the goddamn radio.

He called back DGC and was relieved when his call was put through to Todd.

"I haven't seen her since she left," Todd explained. He paused and when he spoke again, he sounded sullen. "Are you . . . I mean . . . how are you holding up, Dave?"

Dave sucked in a deep breath that whistled through his teeth. And so it began. The constant badgering of whether or not he was okay, if he was capable of moving forward in the midst of a tragedy. 

How do you think I'm holding up? he wanted to lash.

"Not my best day," he eventually responded. 

Dave hung up with Todd and turned to find Sarah still rooted to the floor, not having moved. She stared at him with the expression of someone waiting for an answer, or at least some kind of direction, but when Dave's eyes shifted and fell upon Gracie's face, the wind was knocked out of him.