Free In the Dark by Brian Freeman

could see that the rain had come. It was sheeting down. Lightning sizzled, and the forest shook with thunder. The noise covered everything else. Whoever was near me could use the storm to escape.
     
I waited a few more seconds, and then I smelled something odd and sickly sweet above the freshness of the rain.
     
Marijuana.
     
     
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
     
    7
___________
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
 
     
Tish Verdure nursed a gin and tonic and studied the row of aging high school sports photos hung above the booth in the downtown bar. One was a group photo of a state championship hockey team. Another was an action shot of two tall white boys fighting over a basketball layup. In a third, she saw a cheering section of baseball players in a stadium dugout, with bats strewn around them on the ground. Some of the photos were from the 1970s, and she saw faces that looked familiar. For all she knew, some of the boys were in the bar right now. She wouldn’t recognize them today.
     
The waitress, a bored UMD student in a Rascal Flatts T-shirt, told her that one of the men at the bar wanted to buy Tish a drink. Tish waved her off without giving the man a look. It wasn’t the first time tonight. Men assumed that a single woman in the bar was on the prowl, when all she really wanted was to get drunk. She knew she drank and smoked too much. It was a way to get through the days and nights.
     
Tish wondered if she had made a mistake by coming back. Stirring up her life wouldn’t accomplish anything, and she was already lying about her past. Stride knew it—she could see it in his eyes when he looked at her. Apart of her wanted to pack up and go before things got worse, but she owed it to Laura to be here. She owed it to Cindy, too. She had foolishly made a promise to her, and she couldn’t put off any longer her need to honor it.
     
She paid her bill. It was one in the morning. She left the bar through the crowd of smokers outside the door and strolled past dark storefronts toward her rental car. Rather than get in, she continued past it, down the sharp slope of Second Avenue toward the corner. She stood by a parking meter on the curb and stared diagonally across the street, where a crumpled piece of newspaper blew up against a brick building like a tumble-weed. The ground floor of the building housed a wireless phone store behind its big windows. Neon glowed brightly in the display.
     
Back then, when she was a child, the same space had been a bank office. The bank where her mother worked as a teller.
     
Tish had been in school when it happened. The policeman who came to get her had a black mole on his cheek and breath that smelled like burned coffee. He took her to the station and put her in a white room, and then a woman in a flowery dress came in and told her. That was it. She slept with strangers that night.
     
“I’m home, Mom,” Tish murmured to the air.
     
She turned around, leaving the old bank building behind, and stalked briskly to her car. The fresh air had burned off some of the alcohol clouding her brain. She drove north out of downtown through streets largely empty of traffic. The lights stayed green. She turned right at Twenty-first Avenue, crossed over the freeway, and curled around a sharp curve to the cliffside road that led to the condominium she was borrowing. She parked under the trees at the end of the street and got out. She lit a cigarette and stood there, smoking, letting it burn down. The lake twinkled below her. The birches were silhouettes with a thousand arms, moving and alive. Behind her, the freeway overpass rumbled on its stilts like a concrete giant. She felt strange. As if eyes were watching her. That was how Laura must have felt. Tish shivered, but she finished her smoke before crushing out the butt in the street and continuing to her front door.
     
She stopped. Froze.
     
One of the miniature square panels of stained glass in the door was shattered,