Where’s Rick?

Her fingers twitched at her sides as she walked in the same circles over and over. She'd already looked through the kitchen drawers—the ones that weren't stuck shut with old grease—searching through four years of expired coupons, bent silverware, and a dead roach across the counter. Nothing. Not a single pill. Not even a half-smoked joint, some of her clients had left behind. The bar had been stupid; Merle had been an asshole again, and the man whose dick she'd sucked had given her cash, but not what she needed so desperately. Cash she'd already spent on nothing, because there was no one to buy from at this hour.

Merle Dixon.

That young bastard, with his wide, dumb grin and dirty hands, made her shiver. He'd watched her crawl on the floor for a pill like a dog, and he'd also snorted the coke himself right in front of her. Then he'd left, walking out like she wasn't even there, like she was nothing but a piece of shit on the floor he'd gotten tired of looking at.

Eileen stopped walking in front of the window, her reflection staring back at her from the glass. Those hollow eyes, her tangled, strawberry blonde hair, and the exhaustion that was written all over her face. She barely recognized herself anymore. When had she stopped being the woman her daughter adored? The one with the pinned-up hair and the white apartment walls? The one who'd had pancakes on weekends and a husband who loved her more than anything and cut the crusts off sandwiches for their daughter?

Their daughter.

Eileen wanted to throw up.

She'd seen them. Ilyana and Daryl. In the tree. Curled up together, Ilyana's legs were tangled with the Dixon boy's, and with her head against his shoulder, as if she belonged there. It looked as if she'd found something Eileen couldn't give her. Like she'd found something Eileen had never been able to give her. The boy had looked at Ilyana the way men used to look at Eileen. Before. When she was still worth looking at.

She shook her head hard, trying to push the thought away, and went back to walking around.

The bedrooms were next. She pushed open the door—Ilyana's door, though she never thought of it that way—and stood in the doorway for a moment. The sheets were still rumpled from the last man who'd used this bed, condom wrappers were on the floor, and a spoon crusted with whatever was left on it was on the nightstand. She'd have to clean that before Ilyana came back, wherever she was now. Not that it mattered. The girl had seen worse.

Eileen dropped to her knees beside the bed, lifting the edge of the mattress, shoving her hand into the gap where the box springs met the frame. Nothing. She checked under the pillow, inside the pillowcase, and between the headboard and the wall. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Was there blood on the mattress? No, no, that couldn't be blood. Ilyana was fine.

Her hands were shaking now. Reality was becoming unbearable, and every thought was too loud. She needed something to take the edge off. Just a little something. Just enough to stop seeing Ilyana's face when she'd dragged her out of that tree—the way her daughter's eyes had gone empty, the way she hadn't fought and hadn't screamed.

No, she hadn't done anything.

Like mother, like daughter.

There was nothing in Ilyana's room, and she knew that looking through her own bedroom would be meaningless and to no avail.

There was nothing there.

Back in the living room, just when she was about to simply scream, she remembered the one place where she hadn't looked. The closet, the one that was standing far away in the corner of the living room. Eileen moved to the closet fast, pulling the door open so hard it came off its top hinge.

She pulled out something that felt like a few boxes, not knowing what it was at first. The bigger one looked old and dusty, and she didn't remember putting it here. For a moment, she almost shoved it back, too focused on her search for a new high to care about some forgotten bullshit. But something made her stop.

Sitting back on her heels, she opened the bigger box.

The smell of it, oh, the smell… She remembered. There was the smell of old paper, dust, and, underneath it all? Cologne. His cologne. The one he'd worn on special occasions, the one she'd bought him for their first anniversary, which was the one that still lived in her memory even though she'd pushed away every other memory of him a few years ago.

Her hands trembled as she reached inside.

Photographs. Dozens of them, held together with a rubber band that had long since turned to look as if it might snap at any moment. She pulled them out, and the first one made her gasp in pain.

It was Dominic. Her Dominic. Standing by the lake, the one with the peach trees where they always went and where he promised to love her forever, his arms wrapped around her from behind, holding her pregnant belly. She was laughing in the photo with her head thrown back against his chest and her hand resting on his, where it lay across her stomach.

Eileen remembered that day. It had been hot, their first real Georgia summer. He'd insisted on driving there, even though she'd complained about the bumpy roads. "Worth it," he'd said, kissing her temple. "Always worth it."

Eileen's vision turned blurry, and she blinked hard, feeling angry at the tears that were about to fall down. She wasn't going to cry. Not over him. Not over any of it.

But the next photo was worse.

Him holding Ilyana in the hospital. The baby was wrapped in a blanket, one tiny fist pressed against his chest, with her face scrunched up and eyes closed. He was looking down at her like she was the most precious thing he'd ever seen.

"She's perfect," he'd whispered. "Just like you."

Eileen set the photo down, her hand shaking so badly she nearly dropped it. She reached into the box again, pulling out letters this time. The paper was creased from being folded and refolded; some of the ink was smeared—whether from tears or age, she couldn't tell.

The first one she opened was short. Just a few lines in his familiar handwriting.

'My dearest love, I can't stop thinking about you. About us. About our little girl. She's perfect, you know? Absolutely perfect. I never knew I could love someone so much, but she's changed everything. She's my sunshine, my everything. And you? You're my world. I can't wait to see what the future holds for us. For our family. I love you both. Always.'

Eileen started sobbing before she could even stop it. She pressed her fist to her mouth, trying to hold back the sounds, but it was too late. The tears were coming now, rolling down her cheeks and dripping onto the paper.

She'd read these letters a hundred times. A thousand. Back when he was still with her, one of them wasn't home because of work, when she'd put them under her pillow and pull them out in the middle of the night, she'd convince herself that the distance was temporary, that the construction job would end and that she'd get her promotion, and that they'd go back to Atlanta and everything would be fine.

It wasn't fine.

None of it was fine.

She looked through more photos—him at the lake with Ilyana, holding her tiny hands to help her balance on a tree stump; the three of them at Christmas, her in a red dress she'd bought on sale and him in the sweater she'd knitted that came out too big in the shoulders; and Ilyana's first birthday with cake smeared across her face, him laughing so hard she'd nearly dropped the camera.

The letters were words of love, promises of forever, and plans for a future that never came. And then she found it. The long one in the other box, the smaller one. The letter that hurt the most.

She didn't need to read it. She remembered every word.

'This weekend, while you're away to finally earn your promotion, I'm going to take her on a little trip. Just the two of us. I know you told me not to use my remaining sick days, but I want to show her the world, even if it's just another small piece of Georgia. And I've packed a picnic—her favorite sandwiches, the ones with the crusts cut off, and those little cookies she loves so much.'

Eileen couldn't hold herself up on her heels anymore and sat down on the floor, turning her back against the closet door, holding the letter in both hands. She could see it. She could see him in the kitchen, carefully slicing the brown edges off white bread and arranging the sandwiches in the old wicker basket they'd bought at a flea market. She could see him packing the butterfly net—the one he'd found at the thrift store, the one he'd been so excited about because Ilyana had been fascinated by the monarchs that gathered in the backyard.

'We're going to the lake. You remember the one, don't you? Where we used to go before she was born? Where I promised to love you forevermore, among all the peach trees? It's still quiet there, at our favorite place, our own personal paradise, peaceful.'

Eileen was breathing raggedly now. She hadn't cried like this in years. Hadn't let herself. Crying was a luxury, and she'd long since traded luxury for numbness.

But here, alone in the living room, surrounded by the memories of a life she didn't want to remember, she couldn't stop.

'Once we're at the lake, I'll take pictures for you, for us. Lots of them. I know you'll want to see her smiling face when you get back home to us. She's been babbling about her pretty Mommy nonstop, you know? She misses you so much when you're gone. Your cuddles, your kisses, and when you tickle her.'

Her daughter's pretty mommy.

When had she stopped being that? When had the woman in the photographs turned into this hollow-eyed no one, walking in circles inside a house that smelled like piss and regret, selling her body for enough cash to buy the next fix?

'I love you so much, my darling beauty. More than anything I ever loved. And I love her. More than life itself.'

The tears came faster now and dripped onto the paper, smearing the already smudged ink. Eileen moved forward until her forehead touched her knees, and the letter was crushed between her hands.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

She didn't know who she was apologizing to. Him? Ilyana? Herself? The woman she used to be, the one who'd believed in picnics by the lake and butterfly nets and forever?

"I couldn't do it," she choked out. "I couldn't… Not like you thought… I'm not…"

The letter crumpled in her fist, and she let out a ragged scream that was muffled by one of her arms, so no neighbor could hear. Not that they'd care. Not that anyone would come.

When the tears finally slowed down, and her breathing turned slightly normal again, she sat there for a long time, staring at the photograph on top of the pile. He and Ilyana. The lake. The tree stump. His hands holding hers, keeping her steady.

She reached out with a trembling finger and traced the outline of his face.

"I should have gone with you," Eileen whispered. "That weekend. I should have called in sick. I should have…"

She knew there was another picture like the one she'd looked at, showing the first day of Dominic and their daughter together at the same lake. However, she had no strength left to reach out and look at it. Not now, anyway. Now she remembered how she'd been too focused on the promotion and on the career; she'd spent years proving that she could be more than just a wife and a mother. And he'd taken Ilyana to the lake without her.

The letters were scattered around her on the floor now, and next Eileen picked up the shortest one. A note that had been tucked inside the pocket of the old plushie—the one she'd hidden from her daughter because she couldn't bear to see her holding something he'd touched.

'For my little Ilyana, my beautiful sunshine. With love, your Daddy.'

Eileen let herself remember. The way he'd looked at Ilyana and her as if they were his whole world. The way he'd sing lullabies in the nursery, making up Italian words when he forgot the real ones. The way he'd hold Eileen's hand in the car, even when she was too tired from work.

The way he'd loved them. Both of them.

Eileen opened her eyes and looked at the wall. Through it, somewhere in the other half of this miserable duplex house, she could hear footsteps stomping around—maybe Will Dixon had just woken up.

It was a pitiful attempt to distract herself, since she had these letters now. The proof that Dominic loved them. That he'd wanted them. That none of what she'd told Ilyana, the lies about him not wanting her, was true.

And she didn't know what to do with that other than push herself to finally look at the face again, which she so desperately tried to forget about. Eileen's fingers were trembling so badly she could barely hold the next photograph steady. She set it down on the floor beside her, then the next, and then the next. A life she'd tried so hard to forget.

There was Dominic, leaning against a car with a grin and eyes that looked ever so brown. His dark hair was curly, a little too long, the way Italian boys wore it back then, when they wanted to look like they didn't care but secretly spent quite some time on getting it just right. He'd always been so self-conscious about his thick hair until she'd told him it made him look like a young Massimo Girotti in La Corona di Ferro, and he'd called her 'Gioia mia' for the first time.

Gioia mia... My joy… Just one of the many names he'd lovingly called her.

She'd had to look it up later, hiding the dictionary under her medical textbooks so her roommate wouldn't see. Not that her roommate would have cared. But Eileen had been careful back then. She had been careful about everything and especially careful not to appear too interested in a boy who wasn't from her world. But maybe he'd been destined to become her whole world.

New York City in the year of 1975.

Eileen O’Brien was just eighteen, born in 1957, fresh out of high school, accepted to a University's pre-med program, and already planning her escape from the small apartment she shared with her mother and father in Boston, Massachusetts. She'd won a partial scholarship, enough to get her foot in the door, and she'd been working nights at a diner to cover the rest. Saving every tip and planning her future career.

Dominic Feranna had walked into the diner. Born in 1956, and only one year older than her.

She remembered it exactly. April 16th, 1975. A Wednesday afternoon. She'd been exhausted, running on three hours of sleep and too much coffee. Her hair was coming out of its ponytail, and there was a grease stain on her uniform. He'd sat in her section and ordered a cup of unsweetened Espresso, and when she'd brought it to him, he'd looked up at her with those brown eyes and said, "You look like you haven't slept in a week, bella."

She'd given him the death stare—the one her roommate used to annoy her with on purpose. 'The Slavic Stare.' A typical cliché, just because Eileen was half Irish and half Slavic.

"I don't know what 'bella' means," she'd lied, "but my name's Eileen, and I'll bring you the check whenever you're ready."

He'd laughed. "You're part Irish. I can always tell. It's the eyes. And the attitude… Slav? Maybe Russian?"

"Ukrainian. And you're Italian," she'd shot back. "It's all that Dippity-do in your hair and the too many hand gestures. Or maybe it's just grease."

"American and Sicilian!" He'd looked down at his hands, then back up at her, and grinned. "Monella mia... I don't know what to say!"

"Could've fooled me, Жартівник."

That should have been it. That should have been the end of a forgettable interaction between a waitress and a customer who tipped okay. But Dominic had come back the next Wednesday. And the Wednesday after that. And then he'd started showing up on other days too, always ordering the same and always finding a reason to talk to her.

She'd learned that he was nineteen, born in New York City, working construction with his uncle's crew while he saved up for who knew what. He'd dropped out of community college after a semester and said it wasn't for him. Said he'd rather work with his hands than sit in a classroom. She'd told him that was a waste of his chances at a good career; he'd told her she was too pretty to be so mean, and she'd told him to stop flirting and drink his coffee.

But the flirting hadn't stopped.

Dominic brought her a bouquet of wildflowers he'd picked from the side of the road, giving them to her right inside the diner with a bow before he bent down on his knee, which made her roll her eyes so hard they nearly fell out. He'd learned her schedule, memorized her shifts, and started walking her home after her late nights, claiming it was too dangerous for a woman to walk alone in New York City, that he was just being a gentleman, and that he'd be happy to keep her company if she didn't mind.

Eileen minded. At first.

Somewhere between April and the start of September, between the endless cups of coffee and the stupid jokes, she'd stopped minding.

They'd had their first real fight at the end of September.

Eileen had told him she was going to study somewhere else to avoid years of studying in New York for nothing and the mountains of debt. And Dominic, who'd never been anything but kind and charming, had gone quiet.

"You think I'm not good enough for you."

"I think I'm not good enough for myself if I don't try," she'd answered.

He'd stared at her then, and she'd let him. After a long moment, he'd nodded. "Okay… Okay. Then I'll be good enough for you until you figure out you already are."

She'd cried in the bathroom after that shift at the diner, and she'd told herself it was exhaustion, nothing more. But she was thankful.

The next photograph Eileen found was from their first official date. April 16th, 1976. The same date as their first meeting. He'd planned and wanted it that way, she remembered now—he'd confessed it years later, grinning like a fool after she'd asked why it took him so long to officially ask her out, saying he wanted to make their first real date mean something and to let her be sure about him. "Two birds, one stone," he'd said. "Now you'll never forget either one."

He'd taken her to a little Italian restaurant, the kinda place where the owner knew his family and the music playing over the speakers was something his grandfather had probably smoked a cigar to.

She'd worn a green dress in emerald green, her mother's favorite color, the color of Ireland, and she'd let her Strawberry blonde hair down for the first time in months. She remembered how nervous she'd been and how she'd changed clothes three times. She'd denied it, of course. Denied it all the way to the restaurant, and even when she saw him waiting outside in a button-down shirt that was slightly too tight across his broad shoulders, or when he took her hand and led her to a table in the corner.

But Eileen stopped denying it when he'd reached across the table, taken her hand, and said, "My mamma's going to love you. She's been asking about the Irish girl for weeks."

"Your mother doesn't know me."

"For sure she does. I told her everything. The way you talk, the way you walk, the way you tell me to shut up all the time."

Eileen pulled her hand back in shock, but she'd been smiling. She remembered that.

But the racism had started not long after their first official date. Especially after their first official kiss.

Not from Dominic's family—his mother had welcomed her with open arms, a woman who'd pinched her cheeks and loved to cook with her from time to time. His father was a quiet man. who'd worked construction his whole life, had looked her up and down once, grunted, and gave them his blessing.

No, the racism came from outside. From strangers on the street, from their own neighbors, from people who saw an Irish girl holding hands with a Sicilian boy and felt the need to share their opinions.

"You know what they call those like you?" Someone had hissed at her once, waiting for the bus. "Micks and Wops. That's what you two are. Not even two damn peas in a garbage can!"

She'd ignored it. She'd been good at ignoring racist bullshit like that.

"Your kind should stick to your own," a woman had said in the grocery store, watching them shop for ingredients for dinner. "It's not natural!"

Dominic had opened his mouth to say something to defend her, but Eileen had put her hand on his arm and pulled him away. "Not worth it."

"They can't talk to you like that!"

"They can talk however they want. I don't care what they think."

But Eileen had cared. Not about their opinions—those were coming from ignorant people who'd never left their neighborhoods and never seen anything beyond the radius of the block they'd been born in. It was because she could see it hurting him.

Even the letters from that time were hard to read.

Eileen found them at the bottom of the box, inside an envelope with no address and a postmark from New York.

'Eileen,

I can't sleep. It's two in the morning, and I'm lying here thinking about giving you these letters soon, about how you will read them, and about how I usually love our little ritual of me writing you these. Right now, I can't sleep. My Uncle says I'm stupid, wasting my time on a girl who's gonna leave me for a doctor in another state. He says you're just with me until someone better comes along.

I broke his nose.

But I need to know. Is he right? Will you leave? Because I don't think I could take it if you left. I know I'm just a construction worker. I know I don't have a future like you do. But I love you, Eileen.

I'll wait for you. However long it takes. I'll wait.

— Dominic'

She remembered that letter and how she'd read it in her dorm room, with her roommate asleep in the bed across from her. She'd cried then, too, and she'd written him back immediately, a single sentence on a scrap of notebook paper:

'Come with me.'

He'd shown up at her dorm the next day with a dozen red roses and a ring box in his pocket. She'd said no at first. It was too soon; she was too young, and there was still so much studying ahead. But she'd kept the ring box anyway, hidden in her underwear drawer, and sometimes, when the studying got too hard, and the future looked too uncertain, she'd take it out and hold it in her hand and let herself imagine…

A loud BANG made Eileen open her eyes. The memory of the ring box was gone from her mind as she tried to process the sound she'd just heard. A gunshot? No… A door? The backdoor? Yes, that must have been it.

She stumbled to her feet, leaving the letters and photographs behind on the floor, and walked over to the window, careful to stay behind the dirty curtain.

Will Dixon.

Stumbling across the backyard with his hunting knife in one hand and headed toward the woods. Toward his shack in the woods.

Eileen watched him disappear between the trees, waiting to see if he'd turn back. He didn't. But her hands were shaking as she stepped back from the window. Somehow, she was jealous of him, at least, right now. He probably wasn't sober. Will could just let the hours pass by now, but she could feel the minutes ticking away. Even the seconds.

Eileen looked back down at the floor. Down at the photographs and the letters. She hadn't finished looking through them, and she knew there was more in the box. More memories and more of… him.

Sitting back down, she pulled the box toward her. She needed to see the rest. She needed to remember everything.

𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 ⋮ 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐨 ⋮ 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐲𝐥 𝐃𝐢𝐱𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 ⋮ 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

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