THE NIGHTMARE WITHIN: Chapter 1

Chapter 9

He had never expected to meet someone at a stuffy fundraiser.  He was only in attendance to maintain his profile in the city's highest social circles.  But Michelle was different from the usual gold-digging women in attendance.  She had received her degree in sociology the year before, and had been working at a women's shelter in the south side of Chicago since graduating.  As they talked, his stammering lessened and the abrasive fundraising hobnobbing became increasingly distant.

They had talked most of the night, and by the time the event was wrapping up, the subject matter of their conversation had continued to get deeper and more personal.  They had already parted company when Gage realized he hadn't asked for her phone number.  As politely as possible, he wedged back through the exiting black-tied old men with their Versace-draped younger companions.  When she greeted him at the table, her papers gathered and her purse slung on her shoulder, she gave him that same perfect smile.  She wrote her phone number on a cocktail napkin, and he knew his life was about to change dramatically.  

Their age difference had never been an issue.  So what if he was eighteen years her senior?  Michelle didn't care, and as long as she was happy, so was he.  She took him places he had never been and would have never imaged visiting.  They walked the crumbling sidewalks of seedy public housing neighborhoods, walking two blocks away to where expensive high rises rose like some new life form set to dominate.  She pointed out the gentrified layers of the city.  Layers of money pushing away layers of decay, like grasping tree branches stealing the richest sunlight from the underlying ground brush.  She pointed out the walls separating the classes and races.  The expressways cutting off the projects and their populations of the poor, the disaffected, the drug-addled.  Michelle opened Gage's eyes.  He'd rarely felt compassion or empathy for others.  She proved day after day just how wrong he was for his first impression of her.  She was a fighter with a stubborn streak, yet somehow, she was able to care for people she had never met.  Her personality was intoxicating.

Their marriage was a civil ceremony a year later.  Nicole was born a year after that, a bundle of energy so similar to her mother that they could have been carbon copies.

Sixteen years on, sixteen years in which Gage thought he lived a happy life with his wife and daughter.  Sharing moments, making memories.  All fallen apart as quickly as he had fallen for Michelle all those years before.  It was a trivial morning and Michelle was running trivial errands.  Dry cleaning exchanged, a library book returned, tasks that Gage had always told Michelle were simply too trivial to waste her time doing.  They had people to do those things for them.  But his wife enjoyed her early morning walks, the fresh air, and the quiet streets.  Maybe he should have gone with her.  Maybe things would have turned out differently. 

In line at the dry cleaners, a stranger had taken up a conversation with his wife.  Later on, he learned this stranger was an artist.  A poet, a pianist, a man who presumably neither shaved nor showered regularly.  Gage wondered why such a man would be in line at a dry cleaner's.  His clothes would be wrinkled, disorderly, mismatched, his uniform representative of his suffering for his craft.  This weasel of a stranger had taken up a conversation with his wife, a trivial chit-chatty subject no doubt, and just that easily, so simply, the woman he had trusted and loved beyond words followed this angst-ridden would-be artist back to his loft.  She had called later on, long after Gage had left worrying behind and was heading straight for full-blown hysteria, tears in her voice, scratchy jazz music thick in the background.  Between her tears she told him it was over, she'd found someone else.  She'd actually used the words soul mate when describing her new man.  Just that quickly, fallen apart, a family ruined.  

He wasn't able to tell Nika right away.  The words wouldn't come to him, and if he could find the words, saying them would only make them true.  Her mother was never coming home.  He wished he could hire someone to explain to his daughter that for a reason as stupid as a chance meeting in line at a dry cleaner's, her mother was no longer a part of the family.  The night of Michelle's phone call he eventually gathered his courage and went to Nika's bedroom--her boy band posters with their Colgate smiles leering at him, her stuffed animals appearing defensive of their place within his daughter's heart--and he had told her the news.  At first, he thought Nika hadn't heard him, that his grief had possibly weakened his voice.  But Nika had heard, and even more importantly, she had listened, distilling the knowledge down to its base elements.  By the time he had finished speaking, his beard was wet with tears and a dull pain was shooting across his temples, mocking the beat of his heart.  For some reason, Nika's lack of reaction hurt more than if she had broken down completely.