To Keep Her Safe is All I Know

Chapter 13

There's a pause.

"So Sadie doesn't know anything?" Balz asks.

"No, but Melanie's gonna tell her. She said probably some time this evening."

Chris looks at his watch.

"Which should be any time now." He says, "I should probably get going, they're gonna be back at my house soon, I bet. The only reason they went home was so Melanie could get some of Sadie's things."

"Go be with them then. With all this stuff that's going on though, are you gonna be okay for the tour?" Ghost asks.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll be...yeah. I just need to go be with them."

x

That night, Chris lay in bed, simply waiting. He didn't even have to look at his phone for a text to know that they would be there soon. Because that's what he and Melanie did with each other in times of stress.

As if on cue, Chris could hear his front door opening downstairs. He doesn't move, knowing that his guests would know where to find him. When he sees the lights downstairs disappear, Chris reaches over to the nightstand and turns on the lamp that illuminated the room just enough for him to see Melanie appear a dozen or so footsteps later, with Sadie slumped over her shoulder, completely dead weight. Sadie's arms and legs were completely slumped down and her head lay on Melanie's shoulder. Chris could tell by looking at Melanie that the shock had worn off. Melanie looked at him now with eyes full of desperation and loss of hope. Chris simply nodded to her, in understanding.

Melanie then kisses Sadie's temple, "Hey, you wanna go see Chris?"

Sadie's head lifts in surprise, as if she didn't even know that they were at Chris' house. She then looks over to Chris and nods. Melanie brings Sadie over to Chris who takes her immediately. He leans back with her on his lap, rubbing her back as she cried into his chest.

Melanie went over to the window and opened it, despite how cold it was, and she sat in the window sill, looking out at the world as it just continued to spin while her life slowly rolled downhill.

She'd done a very similar thing the night Tori died.

She didn't sleep at all; no one in the house did. No one in the country did. It had been such a long and terrifying day. Chris lay in bed that night, but he was wide awake. He stared at his ceiling and all he could do was think, and he thought entirely too much. So many things had happened that day, and there were a lot of things that he could have been thinking about, but the thoughts that troubled him and stayed with him the most were those of Melanie and Tori. Melanie had been crying all day. Chris had only seen Melanie cry one time before this and it was only for a few minutes. Melanie had cried all day today. For hours and hours and hours it seemed. She was obviously a wreck. She was now just sitting in the window sill, probably also thinking entirely too much.     

And Tori. God, Tori. Tori had been like another sister to Chris, but an older sister; a guardian of sorts. Tori just always seemed to...understand Chris. And now, she could be gone. If she wasn't gone, she was likely lying amidst what was now just rubble, the fallen pieces of what just yesterday were the Twin Towers. She was probably hurt, she was probably cold, she was probably hungry; Chris couldn't decide whether it was worse to think of Tori being dead or to think of her being alive and going through such suffering.     

As Melanie now sat in the window sill of Chris' room thinking about the loss of her ex husband, she too was thinking about the loss of Tori and the impact that it had on her life. One of the last times she went out of her house before she began her month long journey of no sleep, no school, and nearly no food. The only time she left the house apart from Tori's funeral was to go with her parents to the morgue to identify Tori's body.