The Color of Heaven - 09 - The Color of Time (9 page)

Just then, two paramedics walked out the front door with a wheeled stretcher carrying a body in a black bag. All the blood drained to my feet and I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I pushed away from the side of the car and pressed my hands to my mouth. “Oh my God! Is that Ethan?”

The police officer turned. “No. I’m afraid that’s Mr. Foster.”

“Mr. Foster!” My stomach exploded with boiling heat. “What happened? And what about Ethan? Is he okay?”

The policeman lowered his notepad to his side and regarded me with a look of compassion. “I’m very sorry, Sylvie. There was nothing anyone could do. Ethan was already dead when the ambulance arrived. He suffered a severe blow to the head.”

My own head was spinning by now and none of this felt real. It couldn’t be true.

Staggering slightly, I backed into the side of the car. “No…”

Chris wrapped a hand around my elbow, to steady me.

“That can’t be right,” I said to the cop. “Are you sure?”

He nodded.

I gazed desperately at Chris, as if he could make all of this go away, yet I knew there was no escaping it.

“What happened to Mr. Foster?” Chris asked.

“His wife called 9-1-1, and it appears that he went upstairs and shot himself before we arrived.”

I couldn’t keep my tears at bay any longer. I began to sob uncontrollably, and Chris pulled me close, into his arms. I sank to my knees, and he dropped with me to the ground, still holding me tight.

Chapter Twenty

August 5, 2015

I sat down on a large rock along the shoreline, looked out over the whitecaps on the water and tried to collect myself. I had been working so hard to move on. It had been years since I’d let myself relive all the horrific details of that night almost fifteen years ago.

The truth was…something in me had died that night with Ethan, for I’d never truly recovered from the loss of him. I’d never fallen in love again. Eventually, as the years passed, I’d merely fallen into a series of brief, unhealthy relationships with men who were unattainable. They were either married or players, and I usually met them in the bar where I worked. My sister, Jenn, believed I
chose
to avoid men who were decent and kind because I was afraid of genuinely becoming attached to someone—and eventually suffering another devastating loss.

Maybe she was right.

My therapist suggested something else—that I didn’t want to love again because I would feel as if I were betraying Ethan’s memory, and I felt guilty enough as it was for what happened. I blamed myself for his death, for if I hadn’t pushed him so hard to see inside his home and for him to stand up to his father, they might not have argued so heatedly that night.

Or if I’d listened to my parents and stayed home to scoop ice cream in Montana, things might have turned out differently. Maybe I would have met another boy and forgotten about Ethan in time, and he would still be alive today.

But we can’t change the past. Imagining what might have been is a pointless exercise. That much, I knew. Rationally, at least.

Emotionally, it was another issue altogether, for as I sat on the rocks with the salty sea breeze whisking past my cheeks and blowing my hair back, I knew that no amount of self-discipline or rational thinking could keep me from dreaming about all the things that might have been. The life we could have had if he hadn’t died that night.

* * *

Right
. Clearly, I was no better than a drug addict or an alcoholic—for I was hooked on something that was very bad for me. My substance of choice was heartbreak.

That night, it was impossible to resist. I turned on my laptop again and did more research on lucid dreaming and astral projection, then I slipped into bed and stared at the palms of my hands for at least twenty minutes, hoping to enter a dream state where I could go back in time, again, to that last summer—but this time, I would control what happened. At least in my dream. I wanted to be with Ethan again, to erase what occurred the night he died.

I wanted to taste Ethan’s lips on mine. I wanted everything to feel real and wonderful—just like it had that first morning when I woke up in this house and ventured downstairs to find Gram and Grampy cooking breakfast for me in the kitchen.

But on some level I knew this wasn’t the route to healing. That I was prolonging the torture.

I promised myself this would be the last time. Tomorrow I would start fresh and focus on something else. I would take on some sort of project—maybe clean out Gram’s gutters or paint her veranda.

Committing to that promise, I lay down on my side with my head on the pillow, and summoned up memories of Ethan’s kiss…the sound of his voice…the clean scent of his hair…

Eventually, my eyes grew heavy. I fought to keep them open, but in my struggle, it felt as if I floated up off the bed, out of the room, down the stairs. I could see all I passed as I whooshed through the front door. Out I went.

I flew to the coast, over the dark water, then I swung back around to the wide green lawn in front of Ethan’s summer mansion and landed gently on the grass beside the sundial.

Although I was in some sort of spirit form in my dream, I reached out, lay my hands on the dial plate, and felt a shock sizzle through me as I gripped it tightly…

Chapter Twenty-one

Maine

Summer, 1999

“Slow down, you’re driving too fast,” Ethan said to me as we rounded a bend in the road on the way out to Cape Elizabeth.

“I can’t help it.” I took my foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes hard, just to knock him around a bit in the passenger seat. “I’m annoyed.”

He placed a hand on the dashboard to brace himself while the radio cut in and out. A streetlamp flickered on and off as we zoomed beneath it.

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” he said. “You’ve been wanting to see the inside of the house for ages, and now I’m taking you there. I don’t know why you’re mad.”

Was this a dream? Or was I awake, as I had been on the rocky beach that day with the salty sea breeze on my cheeks? Remembering?

Knowing exactly what the future held for us that night, I took my eyes off the road for a moment and turned to look at Ethan in the pink glow of the setting sun.

“Let’s not go to your house,” I said. “Let’s go to the Lobster Shack instead and get some french fries. I’m starving.”

“There’s food at the house,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, but I’m in the mood for fries,” I replied. “Really, I gotta have ’em.”

Ethan’s eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “What’s going on? You’ve been after me for a year to show you the house. Now you want to go and get french fries?”

“It’s nuts, right?” I replied with a dazzling smile, as if I had a secret I couldn’t wait to share with him.
I felt so happy!
“But I just decided that I can wait to see your house. It’s not going anywhere. Besides, what if your parents come home? Your dad would have a fit if he found me there. I’d rather meet them another way, when we can prepare them for it—later, when you have more freedom. They’ll have to accept your decisions eventually, right?”

“They won’t come home,” Ethan assured me. “They’re on their way to the airport right now. The jet’s there, waiting for them. Dad was talking to the pilot on the phone an hour ago.”

I gently touched the brake to slow down at another sharp bend in the road. “I have a funny feeling about it, that’s all,” I said, keeping what I knew of the future to myself. “Let’s do it another time.”

Ethan stared at me curiously for a moment, then took his hand off the dash. “All right. If that’s what you want to do.”

“It is,” I replied. I took hold of his hand and squeezed it, feeling confident that I had done it. I had changed the course of our futures, for the better.

If only this was real
.

If only it
wasn’t just a dream.

An Unexpected Fork in the Road

Chapter Twenty-two

The Foster Mansion

August 6, 2015

I sat up in the darkness and pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, which was pounding like the dickens. I felt disoriented, not sure where I was or even what day it was.
Was it morning yet? Did I have to go to work?
I glanced at the red numbers on the digital alarm clock next to the bed and saw that it was 4:30 a.m.

No wonder I felt groggy. It was practically the middle of the night and I was still half asleep. I’d gone to bed too late. Lord knows, I should never have opened that bottle of wine at 11:00. What was I thinking? I was thirty-three years old. I should know better by now.

A strange feeling tingled my fingertips as I lay there blinking up at the ceiling. I shook my head to try and rouse myself. Suddenly the darkness in the room unsettled me. I felt blind. I needed to see. Rolling to my side, I reached over to switch on the lamp.

The lightbulb buzzed and flickered. I frowned as I looked around. Everything felt strangely foreign, as if I were waking up in a B&B that belonged to someone else, but that was silly because this was my own bedroom and I was in my own home—my summer mansion by the sea, which Ethan’s mother had left to us in her will.

Tossing the covers aside, I slid out of bed and touched my feet to the floor.

I definitely needed to take something for this headache, so I rose from bed and shuffled out into the corridor, then padded down the main staircase to the kitchen on the ground floor.

When I switched on the lights, there was a buzzing sound again and everything flickered.

I wondered if there was a problem with the wiring. This was an old house after all—a money pit, to be honest, and I certainly wasn’t rolling around in disposable cash. If I had any sense, I would call a real estate agent and put this place on the market.

But who was I kidding? I was a hopeless case when it came to letting go of things. I had been living there for over a decade. This was all I had left of him.

It was not until that moment, as I moved toward the cabinet by the fridge where I kept all my medicines and first aid items that I remembered the dream I’d just had.

A rush of grief moved through me and I stopped in my tracks. I felt dizzy all of a sudden and had to sit down on one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

Good Lord, I’d dreamed about Ethan…about the summer we first met, and the summer after that.

It all came flooding back to me—all the strange disconnected elements of the dream, the thrill of seeing him in the hospital that first day when he came to check on Jenn after she was hit by the car. The panic I’d felt when I learned I was pregnant after returning home to Montana. Not being able to see him for most of the year while he was at Yale. That had been torture.

Then I remembered how the dream had taken a bizarre turn and morphed into a frightening nightmare—where I walked into this very house to find Ethan lying dead on the floor in the front parlor, in a pool of blood. In the dream, his father had pushed him.

Thank God it was just a dream.

Yet, something about it felt so real
…

Rising to my feet, I ran into the front parlor to inspect the white marble fireplace—in particular, the corner where Ethan had hit his head.
Why in the world would I dream something like that? What did it mean?
I felt a sudden overpowering urge to pick up the phone and call Ethan, to make sure he was okay, but it was the middle of the night. We were no longer together. He’d think I was insane.

Feeling half panicked, half in a daze, I returned to the kitchen and withdrew the basket of pills and ointments from the top shelf of the cupboard. I quickly rifled through the boxes of anti-histamines and Band-Aids, found the Tylenol, and filled a glass with water at the sink. My hands were shaking. I stared at my palms.

After swallowing two pills, I turned off the lights in the kitchen and climbed back up the stairs with the glass of water in hand.

Maybe I
should
think about selling this place, I thought miserably as I slid back under the covers. There were simply too many ghosts here.

Chapter Twenty-three

“That’s really weird,” my best friend and co-worker, Cassie, said to me as she moved behind the bar, slid the cash tray into the register drawer and pushed it closed. “Although maybe it’s not. I’m sure lots of women dream about their ex-husbands dying in some sort of freak accident. And his father, too. Wasn’t he a real piece of work?”

“He wasn’t the warmest of men,” I replied as I lifted one last upturned chair off a tabletop and set it down on the plank wood floor, then straightened the red and white tablecloth.

Though Cassie and I had only known each other for a few years since I started working at the pub—it felt as if we’d known each other forever because our connection had been instantaneous.

Looking around the pub to make sure everything was in order, I moved to the door and flipped the sign to “Open.”

It was only 11:00 a.m., but the lunch crowd would soon trickle in.

“It was probably one of those stress dreams,” Cassie suggested as she slid the drawer closed on the antique register. Then she turned to the mirror behind all the bottles of booze and swept her curly red hair back into a ponytail.