"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.
He thought of Frances Bean, only several months younger than his own daughter. Dave had shamelessly spent minutes, hours, days envisioning Gracie's future with his presence threaded throughout it. Bear hugs when she arrived home from school, birthday parties in which he held the honor of whipping up barbecue for her and her friends, listening loyally as she processed her first heartbreak, walking her down the aisle with her arm tucked into his.
Frances would never experience any of that with her father. All she would have were stories passed down to her from those who'd known him. A slip of fate had changed everything and suddenly, Dave felt guilty. Somehow, someway, the course he'd chosen in life had kept him alive. Sure, there had been plenty of drunken nights when he'd thought alcohol poisoning would be his downfall, but he was still there. Living and breathing.
Kurt was not. And as much as Dave knew the reasons why -- as much as he acknowledged that he'd never once considered injecting a needle into his arm when his friend indeed had -- he simply could not wrap his head around the fact that one little girl in his life would have two parents to love her while another did not.
Dave took a shaky breath, casting his gaze downward. Facing the reality that Kurt was gone was akin to watching his whole life be tossed into a blender and witnessing helplessly as some evil, high power pushed puree on that motherfucker.
Even worse was knowing that Reagan was not accounted for.
"I've got to go find her," he abruptly blurted.
Sarah nodded hastily without question. "I'll stay here with Gracie."
Dave snatched his car keys from the counter and bounded out of the house, ignoring the shimmer of damp rainfall that misted his face. Small things, stupid things, like the weather did not sway his attention. It rained so often that sunshine was almost foreign, but the rain that day seemed morbidly appropriate.
If he was going to be practical, then he would have to assign his grief into neat little boxes that he would address in order. First, he had to find Reagan. He prayed that she would be in one piece when he found her, otherwise those neat little boxes would implode. If she was okay, then he would meet the pain of Kurt's death at the doorstep to his heart readily, prepared to face it so as long as he had Reagan to help him through it.
But first, he desperately needed the confirmation that Reagan was still with him, unharmed and in perfect condition.
Losing Kurt was agonizing enough and it had forced the perspective that anything was possible. Outlandish worries, such as the one that Reagan was dead in a ditch, were more plausible than ever. If she had followed right behind Kurt, all within the same day, then Dave was sure that he'd be six feet under by the end of the week.
He didn't listen to the radio as he drove. The traffic was mild, enabling him to push past the speed limit and hustle through a myriad of lane changes, but giving his brain the space to wander was killing him. He kept his eyes peeled for signs of a car accident or a flash of auburn hair on the sidewalks, but Seattle's hazy gray scenery deterred his thoughts.
It hadn't seemed like much when Dave had first moved there. He'd felt indifferent towards the Emerald City, more inclined to bemoan the loss of his precious, rolling Virginian hills and the bright change of leaves in the fall, but Seattle had come to mean something different to him.
It had become a form of home.
Dave's life had started there, or at least the chapter of it that he cherished most. His memories drifted in the direction of Reagan, but when he remembered that he could not presently find her, he stopped them from flowing freely.
Instead, he loosened his resolve to keep his boxes of grief in order and thought about Kurt.
He thought of his happiest memories with Kurt and the automatic respect he'd felt when reading Kurt's lyrics for the first time. Looking back, the days when he'd had to scoop up Kurt's laundry or tidy their mess of an apartment didn't seem so bad. They never had been. Dave had taken care of Kurt in the most unassuming ways possible, offering small gestures here and there to let Kurt know that he cared without hovering like an overprotective mother.
In return, Kurt had taken care of him. Not physically, but he had helped usher Dave into a new realm, one that they shared together. It had turned out to be murkier than their imaginations had initially dreamt, but they'd braved the storm together anyway.
Dave recalled his younger years of idolizing bands, everyone from Black Flag to Led Zeppelin to Motörhead. He'd never considered the personal ties between each individual band member, especially not when his fifteen-year-old brain had been too preoccupied with conceiving his face plastered one day up on those posters. Why would it have mattered if Robert Plant was best buds with John Bonham? Those questions had been insignificant.
After his years in Nirvana, Dave realized just how valuable the bond between bandmates could be. He'd watched his relationship with Kurt meld immediately in the beginning, deteriorate in correlation to their fame, and come to a quiet close, a close defined by Dave begging Kurt not to die.
He'd once thought, during the roughest period of hardship, that he couldn't stand Kurt. Only a few months prior, Dave had wanted to ring his frontman's neck whenever they'd been in the same room. Now, in the maelstrom following Kurt's death, Dave confronted how much he had truly loved him in the end.
The months of discord and fighting were still memorable, but they didn't mar Dave's impression of what his connection to Kurt had been. They'd been brothers, experiencing the same ups and downs that brothers experienced over the course of a lifetime. Kurt had been the brother that Ginny had not given him, the only person to empathize with Dave's feelings of having been possibly spawned from an alien race.
No matter how often Dave had scoffed at the thought of even trying to understand the oddity that was Kurt, he would never deny that the universe had pushed them together with reason, a reason that was bigger than Nirvana and the music and the notoriety.
Dave decided, right then and there as he drove down Elliot Avenue, that when he opened the wound of Kurt's memory in the future, he would not remember the bad times. The heroin, the division between the band, the hurtful exchanges that no one had meant.
He would remember the year nineteen-ninety -- warming up corn dogs in the microwave for himself and Kurt, plopping down on the couch to eat them and grinning over at his new friend and bandmate while feeling nothing but sheer gratefulness.
Dave brushed his knuckles beneath his eye and felt a surprise wetness leaking out of them. He gritted his teeth. That wasn't supposed to happen yet. Not until he found Reagan.
When he finally drove into the heart of the city, he cruised by DGC's office twice in hopes that he would see Reagan's car. His stomach ached painfully as he scanned the rows of vehicles parked on the street, none of them belonging to her.
A stab of anxiety pierced straight through him. The harrowing possibilities of where Reagan could be stretched on endlessly, presenting the chance that Dave wouldn't find her at all, or if he did, it would be too late.
If Reagan had indeed caught wind of Kurt's death before Dave had gotten the chance to tell her himself, he didn't doubt that she would have veered directly off the side of the road in shock.
He doubled back down the same street once more and decided to alter his course, taking the streets that Reagan would ordinarily navigate home. His palms grew sweaty around the steering wheel as he searched, his eyes flickering left and right through the windows.
Not you, too. You're not leaving me.
As Dave coasted through a green stoplight, he looked to the right and his chest expanded with a surge of relief.
Reagan's BMW was parallel parked near the street corner. She'd done a sloppy job of parking it, and Dave presumed that the absent spaces in front and behind her had once been filled with other people's cars, but Reagan's sat alone as the noonday blended into the early evening.
He whipped the steering wheel to the right and skidded out of his lane, earning a few angry honks from the drivers surrounding him. Dave ignored them as he threw his gear shift into reverse and eased his car smoothly into the spot in front of Reagan. The question of if she was in the car only hindered him for a second -- he could see the outline of her body in the driver's seat.
Dave got out in a rush, the soles of his worn sneakers slipping on the slick pavement. He jogged over to Reagan's window and let the moment of solace saturate every other discombobulated emotion that he was feeling. He had found her, she was safe, and now he did not have to be completely alone in his mourning. He could forget all that had been ripped away when the one thing that mattered above all was still in reach.
Dave peered into the driver's side window and his heart sank. It was definitely Reagan in there, but her forehead was bowed against the steering wheel with her arms wishboned around it as if she'd passed out. He glanced down instinctively when he felt his shoes slide into something slicker than rainwater. Wincing, he saw a spatter of vomit.
"Reagan?" Dave asked anxiously. He tapped his fist to her window. "Reagan, baby, are you okay?"
She lifted her head automatically and swiveled to face him. Through the tinted glass, Dave could see that she was disheveled. It was another pummeling sock to the stomach to see her like that, her face perfectly and heartbreakingly crestfallen with wide-eyed sorrow.
Reagan opened the door.
"Dave," she whispered. "Oh, god . . . Dave . . . I'm so sorry, I . . ."
Her whispers turned to choking sobs. Dave knelt one knee down to the street, not caring if his jeans got wet, and grabbed Reagan by the shoulders.
"What happened?" he demanded. "You didn't come home. What are you doing here?"
Reagan raised one trembling finger and pointed at her car's radio.
"I . . . I turned it on . . . and . . . and he's . . . please tell me it's not true."
Dave mashed his lips together, wishing more than anything that he didn't have to speak the bitter words that rested on the tip of his tongue. He had planned on it before, back when he'd first received the call about Kurt, but the script that he'd pieced together for Reagan's sake had come easier then.
What he hadn't planned on was having to confirm the truth to her after she'd heard it secondhand. Her eyes, shiny and red with tears, pleaded with him for a different explanation.
It was sadistic that he had to be the one to break her heart for a second time. He'd always wanted to give her the world and it felt as if now, he was carving out a chunk of it away from her.
"He's gone, Reagan."
Her face screwed up instantly, her lips baring into a silent cry over her teeth as she began to shudder. Dave pulled her into his chest and clasped one hand behind her head. His eyes were suddenly hot and blurred, but he blinked fervently against the feeling, wanting only to hold Reagan as she sobbed. He worried that if he cried, then she would cry harder.
"No," Reagan gasped into his neck, wrenching handfuls of his shirt into her hands. "Please, please, no."
"I'm sorry," Dave mumbled. He squeezed her tighter, wishing that her pain would evaporate into him. He would have shouldered it all, even with his own, if it meant never having to hear her cry like that again.
"Not Kurt," Reagan cried. "Not him. Why? Why?"
Dave inched back and cradled Reagan's face into his hands, tightening each individual finger around her cheekbones. There were answers that he could offer her, some of which would no doubt surface in the press. They were the same answers that he'd already turned over in the privacy of his mind.
Heroin. Depression. A broken marriage. Too much stardom, too fast.
All those things together made for a reasonable clarification, but they did not sound real to even Dave. They were realities of the tabloids. Not his life. Never his life, not for as long as he'd imagined how it would pan out.
He gave Reagan the only explanation that he could muster, the one truest to how he felt as his own tears finally escaped and he pressed his forehead to hers.
"I don't know," he said. "I wish I did, but I don't."