Todd Crane
Michelle Leigh Martin
Todd Crane is a lonely man. When the weather's decent like today, he can use his stained orange coat as padding against the cement sidewalk. Sometimes the wind still chills his droopy ears though, so he wears a navy blue cotton cap with a few holes in it to cover them up as best as he can. His face is scraggly; chin and neck covered in prickly whiskers; upper lip overlain with a full mustache; eyebrows almost meet in the center, at the bridge of his nose, but not quite; tangled brown hair streaked with grey hangs in clumps around his sunken cheeks. His eyelids are heavy over white-blue empty orbs. He's seen what he thinks is everything - too much - so now he chooses to see nothing.
His chapped lips crack and bleed as he mumbles to himself, sitting cross-legged on the orange stuffed coat. Dirty fingernails scratch a bug bite on his greasy arm, scraping off a layer of grime. He coughs - no, hacks - and a woman catches his eye, a woman who looks like she could be his daughter. He's excited. Maybe it's really her. He stands and picks up his coat, drapes it over his bony shoulders and follows her across the street, mumbles and hopes she hears him.
But then he stops halfway across the street. He stops because he remembers, like he always remembers - Todd's daughter is dead.
His empty eyes fill with tears that burn as he remembers everything he tried so hard to forget. He goes back to his spot on the cement, spreads out his coat and sits and rocks back and forth while hugging his knees and once again he tries to erase it all.
Rachel Crane was beautiful, didn't look a thing like Todd and he was glad. She looked just like her mother with chocolate brown eyes and cherry blonde hair, high cheek bones and little dimples when she smiled. She was seven when Todd was supposed to pick her up from school, but he was late for a meeting. So when he swung by the school to get her, he parked on the opposite side of the street and beckoned her over, thinking it would be quicker that way. She smiled at him. The memory of that smile hit him in waves. It transformed as she ran to him. Her smile turned to an "o" of surprise, shock as the yellow school bus number sixty-five slammed into her tiny body and flattened her against the road. The smile vanished and a light went out in Todd's soul.
"You let her die," his wife said at the private funeral after they lowered the too-short casket, her voice unwavering and calm as she stared at the lilies on top of the oak wood lid six feet in the earth where her daughter rested.
Her voice resonates in Todd's ears. He can't remember his wife's name or face. All he can see is Rachel and her smile turned to shock.
He doesn't remember quitting his job or leaving the house or walking until he stopped recognizing things.
He will leave Easton soon - tomorrow maybe, because he's seen Rachel too much in the faces of the people here. The ghosts, they follow him and no matter where he ends up he'll keep seeing her, he knows. She's all he can see now. She's all he'll see forever.
