Here After

by Sean Costello

Hunger. That gnaw. There was the animal part of him—bladder, bowel, hunger, thirst—and the rest was emptiness, the absence of drive or enthusiasm, the baseline energy required to power a life. His friends had been after him to seek counseling, doing their best to snap him out of it, set him back on the path. But the path to where? What was left after family? Dana and David had been his engine, the center from which all things flowed and into which all of his energies were directed. What was he supposed to do now, pick up and start over? He just couldn’t see it. A family wasn’t a car or a lawnmower, something you replaced if it got trashed. It was over and he could see no path.

Peter stood hunched in the shower, trying to blot out the image of Roger’s son drowning, staring up from two feet under, round face fishbelly white and those vacant eyes, sky-blue gone to black. It had been so vivid, so starkly real, dark water green with algae, an arc of sunlight finding the boy’s lips, deathly purple against the pale of his skin.

The Cades lived in a quaint, single-family dwelling on Cahill Drive, two blocks south of Warner Park. In contrast to the cramped design of most suburban developments, the homes in this part of town had been built with a little breathing space in mind. The area had been cut from very old forest, the many trees left standing all huge and majestic, giving the area a shaded, rural feel. Compared to Vickie’s townhouse in Mississauga, eight minutes east on the 401, Oakville seemed a paradise.

Peter sat Roger on a boulder at the edge of the swamp and used the flashlight to examine the laceration in his scalp. It was an inch long, but superficial; he doubted it would require stitches. He asked Roger if he was hurt anywhere else and got a vacant stare. He touched the bump on his own head, then joined his friend on the boulder. He opened his cell phone, but the damn thing was dead, muddy water trickling out of the seam.