Free High Tide by Inga Abele Page A

insane?”
    â€œAnd what about you?” she asked.
    â€œI happened to be there. If I had a second chance, I’d do it again.”
    First of all, so you wouldn’t. Second, because I hated him. He got on my nerves.
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    Ieva had jumped to her feet, her face pale, spots at her temples.
    â€œYou just don’t get it! So if we really were insane, then you’re sitting in prison because of two complete jackasses? Think about that! You’re wasting your life because of two idiots?”
    That was uncalled for, he thought. Then he answered—“Yes!” And what else could he say, when she had him cornered like a rat?
    Yes!
    Like Croesus, squandering lives.
    Total bullshit.
    He has to think about it every day.
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    They both went to the kitchen. Fried some eggs and bacon, carried the pan to the room and ate. Then they went to the second floor TV room, sat next to each other in the soft, red chairs behind the potted palm. At night they made love, and it was good for her. Insanely good for her—Andrejs felt it. Maybe she was seeing someone out there, on the outside, but he didn’t care. For him the sex always seemed secondary. It was like being lazy. The important part was for her to be next to him, for her to feel good, and then he was also able to sink into that whirlpool. That was the last thing. And he’d wash away his anxiety, stress, the sediments of time, wash it all away. Lightning struck and traveled down through the lightning rod, down to Ieva’s world. Then it was a new morning, sparkling and clean. A new page could be turned. A pure, white page, still clean of any marks. That’s what the sex was like for Andrejs, but for her? Who knows.
    She didn’t say anything.
    That night, toward morning, the light of an unusually bright full moon flooded the room. He tried hard to convince himself that he was asleep, but in reality was laying wide awake with a deathly weight on his chest, hugging the precious body next to him—and then she woke suddenly with a scream.
    He wasn’t able to calm her down, even though he was able to pull her into his lap, stroke her hair and her ribcage and knobby knees. She sat there, curled into a ball, and whispered that she’d sensed an evil in the room!
    The devil had been in the room. Andrejs rubbed her back and tried to calm her, said the devil didn’t exist, it was something people had made up, but she cried and told him her dream: she and Aksels had been standing high up on a hill, everything was green and happy, and there was a rainbow behind them. But when they had taken each other by the hand, gashes appeared on their palms and blood streamed onto the ground.
    Jesus, at that moment Andrejs would have been ready to shoot Aksels ten times over, riddle his dead body with more and more holes, so he would go to hell once and for all. That little shit, that son of a bitch! He was in Ieva’s dreams, even though he was long dead. He stomped around Ieva’s dreams!
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    Andrejs wasn’t able to fight him, no one can fight in dreams, because you don’t break into dreams, you’re invited in. Andrejs could only hate him—hate him more than he had ever hated anyone else in the world.
    And he said this to Ieva—said that at this exact moment she was with a murderer.
    Told her not to call it what it wasn’t.
    And that she was a bitch if she let Aksels wander freely in her dreams, while she was sleeping with Andrejs. And that this institution, in case she didn’t know, was built for people just like Andrejs, because out of a hundred people who feel hatred, only one will actually pick up the shotgun, and that person is him, and he doesn’t regret any of it.
    Ieva had looked at him with such fear, the bluish whites of her eyes glazed over in the moonlight. He could tell by her breathing that what he had said was slowly sinking in.
    â€œYou shot him only because you’d learned how to kill in