Page 4 of Hounded

The receptionist tapped away on her keyboard without looking up.

I stood for too long, eager to leave but not ready to go.

Assuming all went well, it was a sixty-day program. Two months felt like eternity considering Indy and I hadn’t been apart for more than a few days in the past century. The thought of going back to the trailer alone was daunting. I didn’t sleep well without him. My mind made for poor company, taking me to places I didn’t want to go and dwelling there. Endless years of living gave me too many memories.

Sometimes I wished I could be like my phoenix and forget.

Finally, I willed my feet to shuffle toward the exit. The journey through the parking lot to my truck seemed to drag on for miles. When I finally clambered into thedriver’s seat, I felt drained.

My hound was resigned as I started the engine and shifted into drive. I took the long way home, traversing the rain-slick, two-lane highway that wound around walls of crumbling shale and stands of pine trees. Clouds covered the sun, letting only patches of bleak light filter through. It was not enough to brighten my dull and dreary thoughts.

I didn’t turn on the radio and didn’t dare glance at the empty seat beside me. I simply stared at the road ahead until I couldn’t see at all through the film of scalding tears.

With a rough jerk on the wheel, I steered the truck onto the shoulder and slowed to a stop. Then I sat, idling, slouched in my seat while my breaths clouded in the air.

Indy was gone.

It was quiet.

And, for the first time in a hundred years, I was alone.

2

Loren

During the two monthsIndy was in rehab, I had a lot of time to think.

After repeating the cycle of life and death, love and loss over and over, I believed I excelled at grieving. But something had changed this time, deep inside.

When I returned from Hopeful Horizons, there was much to be done: cleaning, packing, and painting over the scorched spot in the trailer’s ceiling. But I couldn’t bring myself to do any of it. I could hardly move. So, I laid on our burned mattress, wrapped up in sheets that smelled like Indy, hugging his pillow and wishing it were alive and breathing.

I kept vigil like I was still waiting for my phoenix to be reborn, and I thought. For days. And days and days and days.

I thought about how short a decade was when weighed against immortality. I thought about demons both real and imagined, and what kind of horrors must have plagued Indy to make him need to silence them with drugs. I thought about how happy he seemed the day hedied. I left him giddy and giggling and returned to find him engulfed in flames.

It was a betrayal. The happiness was a lie, and I’d believed it.

From the day I first found him, Indy felt fragile to me. He had a transient nature, but I never blamed him for the way he was made. He was a victim as much as I was, though we suffered in different ways. It was his curse to forget and mine to remember. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

But this time—this time—he left of his own accord. He chose to go and left me with nothing but ashes and broken pieces.

I was confused. Lost. Lonely. Angry.

The anger spurred me to action. I got out of bed, and I got busy. The trailer had been our home together, but now it would only be his. I removed myself bit by bit, packing my clothes in plastic totes and piling them in the bed of my pickup. Pictures and cards went straight to the community dumpster. Sheets and bedding were tossed and replaced with new, and I painted over that charred circle on the ceiling until it was gleaming white.

It took about a week to turn the place. I staged it as spotless as a show home, then I moved out. I spent the next month trying to wedge my 6’3” frame into the front seat of my pickup, sleeping light and waking up sore, and thinking.

I thought about leaving, but where would I go? More than that, where would Indy go? Who would look after him when he returned to the world? Who would protect him? No one knew him like I did—no one knew him atall. So, it had to be me. It always had been; always would be.

I thought about that moment the day I took him to rehab while I stared at his remains and waited for the fire to burn again, for life to restart. It carved out a pit in my stomach to realize there was a second, a fraction of an instant, when I hoped it wouldn’t. Because I excelled at grieving, but starting over destroyed me every time.

At noon today, I would be doing exactly that. Indy would be packed and waiting at Hopeful Horizons, and I would be there to drive him home.

It was after 10 AM, and I’d been dragging around since dawn, walking the cracked asphalt streets that wound between the motorhomes and RVs that populated Trailer Trove RV Park.

Indy and I settled in Trailer Trove two decades ago after buying a lot and trailer from an elderly couple bound for a Florida retirement home. The Airstream they left behind stunk of mothballs and age, and it hadn’t been updated since ever. Indy claimed to love the “original charm,” then spent the next year directing me on what he wanted ripped out, replaced, and painted over.

Living here for twenty years had not ingratiated us with the other residents, largely by design. Excuses like good genes and Indy’s skincare regimen only went so far in explaining how two young men never appeared as anything but. To anyone paying attention, I should have been middle-aged by now and looking like my father with his receding hairline and modest gut. Instead, I was eternally thirty-two, tall and lean, and wondering when Indy and I would need to pull up our roots and movedown the road to the next community that didn’t know us and never would.

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