Free I Hope You Find Me by Trish Marie Dawson Page A

blonde hair that curled at the ends. I could see her
freckles and could count each one…she had four on her face and one
on the top of her right ear. I saw all of this and held onto it
before I opened my eyes. That girl was gone. I wanted to remember
her face, the face she had before death took her from me.
    When I opened my eyes the sun had filled the
room and it was all there for me to see. I was looking at her
stomach, where her arm rested and her little hand lay still inside
mine. She had a freckle on that hand too. I didn’t want to look at
her face just yet so I kept staring at her arm, willing it to move
on its own, but it didn’t of course. At some point I realized I
couldn’t feel my own left arm, which was tucked under her head, or
most of my left side for that matter. And I didn’t care. I had
cuddled up next to her during the night when the hallucinations
started, and held her in my arms while I sang Into the West by
Annie Lennox, over and over, like I used to do when she was a baby.
I sang to her, even when her fevered body stopped seizing. When her
shallow and uneven breathing quit, I was still singing to her,
gently and methodically rocking her back in forth in my arms.
    Her very last minute was peaceful. Her chest
rose slightly and then fell slowly and I felt the hot air of her
last breath tickle my cheek as I whispered to her…The ships are
here now, baby. They are taking you home. I held onto her, my first
born child, my only daughter, until the new day reminded me that my
family suffered these awful and horrible deaths and I was somehow
kept alive to see it happen. It was my own personal Hell. So I
stayed next to her, my beautiful daughter, and cried. I cried until
my heart broke and I thought that for sure would kill me, but it
didn’t.
    And now here I am, lying next to her,
willing myself to look at her face. I force my gaze up her throat,
over her chin and her slightly parted lips, which are no longer the
color of my favorite rose but an unnatural bluish-grey shade. I
ignore the blood that had flowed from her nose, spreading down her
cheeks, pooling on the pillow beneath her head. The rusty brown
color of it was dry and caked on her skin almost like paint. I
couldn’t stop now, so my gaze moved up even further to her eyes,
but instead of the deep ocean blue I was used to seeing, her eyes
were red, blood red. The scream started low in my gut and came out
of my mouth almost strangled. I screamed until I was hoarse. I
screamed for my son, who was dead in the room next door, tucked
neatly in bed. For the husband I once had, but lost to a broken
heart two years before, and for my daughter, now dead and cold in
my arms. I screamed and screamed until the wind made the curtains
dance again. I screamed until the sunlight started fading from the
room and the shadows took me over.
     
    ***
     
    My eyes flew open and a mournful groan
escaped past my lips as the image of my dead daughter silently
faded away to that place in the brain where nightmares hide. I
bolted out of bed, my chest heaving with anxiety. My lower lip was
trembling and for several seconds I didn’t know where I was. It was
dark, still night, but something was wrong. Zoey was barking at the
bedroom door, nervously looking from it to me and back at the door
again. I blinked back a new wave of tears as I realized I was
standing in Connor’s suite. A hollow thumping sound was coming from
the other room. It must have been what woke me. I wiped my hands
across my eyes and moved past the dog to open the door an inch or
so. Solid dark shadows shrouded the room but there was enough
moonlight filtering through the windows for me to see Connor moving
toward the suite’s front door in long strides. I followed him, as
Zoey rushed ahead of us, still barking. We stood, silently, inside
the hotel room. I shushed the dog and commanded her to move back.
When I squatted beside her, my legs were shaky and unreliable.
Connor was looking through the peep-hole