Page 14 of The Tomorrows After You
“Yeah, the whole mine acreage right up to the airfield, theentirevalley, and half the town center. The only part they don’t own is all the big farmhouses on the east side.”
I nodded. It seemed weird for achurchto own so much property, but it was run by a nonprofit with a board of directors and everything, so I guess it was perfectly legal. I turned to her.“What’s the Center?”
She assessed me like I was crazy before her expression softened.“Oh, right, I guess it opened right after you left. It’s a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, and a drug rehab resource all in one. Oh, the drug problem? Got so bad in the last fifteen years that the Center began handing out free, clean needles just so that Godot wouldn’t become ground zero for the next AIDS epidemic. You wouldn’t believe how many people that we graduated with are cracked out in the Godont Valley.”
I chuckled. “The what?”
“The Go-Don’t Valley. That’s what we call it now. Because we Don’t Go to the Valley. They’re all those pre-manufactured homes that went up after that big fire ripped apart half the Valley.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing about that. People were moving into them when my parents moved here.”I pictured the interconnected buildings that stood almost like barracks from the outside.
“They’re all dumps. Remember we went to that rager at one of them the summer before you left?”I remembered, but barely. It had beena wild night. I had tried ecstasy for the first time, so my memories of that party consisted of blinding strobe lights, dance music, and trashed furniture that sat on top of sticky floors.“Yeah, that’s how they all look now. The entire neighborhood is a smack den. Honestly, I think that the Center is the only thing keeping any of those people alive.”She shook her head andtsked.
“Jeez,”I blew out a breath.“I heard Godot had gone downhill, but that’s kind of insane. Is it just meth?”
She shook her head and frowned like she didn’t know.“I thought so, but Bill said some new drug spread like wildfire over the last ten years or so. He sees ODs at the Center all the time. It’s a mix of stuff, I guess.”
Something inside me ticked. That strange instinctual feeling I get when the coincidences begin to outweigh the facts. It’s almost like seeing a bunch of random stray puzzle pieces but then a few start to match and you realize a whole game was coming together.
I had to check out this Center tomorrow.
Chelsea offered me the couch for the night but literally as she did, the baby started crying, which woke up the toddler and I was an asshole for not remembering their names.
“You’ve got your hands full,”I said.“We’ll catch up again soon.”
As I got in my car with nowhere to go, a feeling of disquiet settled over me. I had been so used to being the fearless one, the one in charge, the one other people found formidable. And here I was, holed up in my fifteen-year-old car in a town where it was nearly eleven p.m. on a Friday and everyone was already nestled in their beds, snuggled down with their families.
I thought maybe driving past my old house would make me feel better. It would give me proof that I had a home once. A life here. People who loved me.
It was a five-minute drive from Chelsea’s, and I still had it memorized. I slowed my car, rolling the window down and gazedout to see it had changed quite a bit. It had been re-sided to a different color. The lights in the kitchen were on and I could see that too had been remodeled. I idled for a minute until a small motion caught my eye.
In the corner still hung my favorite part of the house; the two-person porch swing. I could make out the silhouettes of a couple cuddled on the seat; the woman’s legs pulled beneath her, resting her head on a man’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her body.
I drove circles around the town, feeling ruthlessly alone before finding myself back at the town’s water tower. It had been Chelsea and my go-to spot for sneaking around with boys. It had a breathtaking view of the valley and mountains beyond and the clearest view of the night sky.
The ladder rungs on the water tower were rickety as I climbed to the top.
Back in my investigative days there had always been a moment — right at the cusp of blowing a story wide open. A moment when I got to sit in front of thebad guyand ask him the question I already had the answer to and watch his or her face pale while their brain raced for an adequate lie. They had been lying for so long that on a rare occasion, there was a flash of relief. The lies were over. They’d been caught. They could rest now in the deterioration of their“after”life. I called it the Gotchya Moment, and I used to live for it.
Watching the soft lights of the town below me continue to flicker out, I sat on the water tower, looking down at all the lives that had moved on without me. The weight of the loneliness felt like it might crush me.
“Gotchya,”I whispered ruefully to myself.
The deep tug of displacement was like an anchor around my foot, dragging me into the pool of water I huddled next to.
The rumbling sound of a car engine stirred me from my pity party.
“Shit,seriously?” I groaned.
Below me, a commercial truck pulled up to the base of the tower. Two men hopped out. One went around back and started to unravel a hose. The other climbed on top of the truck, hooking up the other end. One started shouting as the other turned on the hose, spewing some kind of colorless liquid all over the ground.
They were treating the water at this hour? I waited until they were preoccupied with hooking up the hose to climb down the ladder.
I was about to sneak back through the strip of woods where I’d parked when I got a closer look at the truck. An unfamiliar symbol that didn’t belong to the Spokane County Water Authority decorated the sides.
Echo Chemicals
That internal tick went off again, and I snapped a quick photo on my phone and scooped up a few wet leaves with a tissue I had in my pocket before scurrying off back to my car.
