Free Phantom of Riverside Park by Peggy Webb Page A

you thought what your life is going to be like twenty years
from now?”
    “What about you, McKenzie? Why aren’t you out
with some charming young man instead of hanging around with an
older brother or talking to a dozen cats?”
    “Show me a man who’s as smart and sweet and
loyal as a cat and I’ll show you a living, breathing miracle.
There’s no such animal, big brother. Present company excepted. And
of course, Paul.”
    Paul Matthews, the husband she’d adored, dead
for five years now, cut down on their first anniversary by a
drunken driver who had swerved onto the sidewalk right in front of
their house. She’d been inside lighting candles on the table when
she heard the commotion. Racing outside she’d found her husband
fallen among a dozen bruised and scattered roses. He’d died in her
arms.
    “Paul wouldn’t want you to be alone,
McKenzie.”
    Gathering her belongings, McKenzie gave him a
look that conveyed in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t about to
enter into a discussion about why she had chosen to remain
alone.
    “Change your mind about the soup. Say yes,
David.”
    “I have work to do, McKenzie.”
    She sighed then walked out the door. David
stared at the empty chair where his sister had sat.
    Once when he’d vacationed in Maine, many
years ago, he’d watched a flock of Canadian geese wing their way
south for the winter, heading for warmer lakes and balmier weather.
Suddenly one of them, a straggler barely keeping up at the end of
the vee formation, had turned and headed in the opposite direction,
north where the lakes would soon freeze and snow would blot out
every speck of green on the horizon. He’d wondered what made such a
magnificent bird choose isolation and possible death.
    Now he knows.
    David won’t be eating chicken soup in
McKenzie’s sunny apartment overlooking the Mississippi River. He
won’t be seen at tailgate parties and county fairs making the
acquaintance of thirty-year-olds.
    He’s made his choice.
    o0o
    McKenzie drove home crying. The thing that
broke her heart was that David had meant every word he’d said.
    Her brother, the man who had been her hero
all her life, had shut himself off from life for so long that he
didn’t realize he still had a heart and a soul.
    Sometimes when she thought about him late at
night with nobody to keep her company except her animals, she cried
so hard her eyes swelled up. When David was eighteen and a senior
at Johnson Country High School, he’d been voted Most Handsome,
which didn’t begin to describe his beauty. Before the accident his
features had been so perfect, so astonishing that people used to
stop dead still in the street to stare as he walked by.
    McKenzie would have grown up with a complex
if she’d been the jealous type. As it turned out, she’d been happy
simply being in her brother’s shadow. She still was.
    Only now the shadow he cast was dark. And all
because of the dreadful isolation he’d endured over the years.
    The psychiatrist he’d seen during the long
days of recuperation after he’d returned from Iraq had told him it
was survivor’s guilt that held him back from finishing his
reconstructive plastic surgery, guilt that he’d come home when
thousands hadn’t. David embraced the theory, but McKenzie thought
it was only halfway right.
    She believed the answer lay deep in David’s
subconscious mind where late at night hand grenades exploded and
guns barked. He used to shatter the night screaming, “I can’t save
them,” while she raced down the hall to shake him awake and end his
night terrors.
    But waking never ended them: David carried
the scars deep inside where nobody could see. His face was his
scarlet letter, an outward symbol that matched his tortured
soul.
    As she drove home for her own lonely dreams
of Paul and what might have been, she thought of her brother
sitting alone in the dark. She knew what he would be doing: staying
awake as long as possible trying to escape his dreams of the