From Faraway

From Faraway

"Waiting to Be Near Him and Always Watching Him From Faraway…"

Copyright © 2012 by T. Patrick Mulroe, Jr.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

Smashwords Edition: January 2012

Contents

Prologue

Book One: Saint Edwards Days

Part One: The Lover

Part Two: The Beloved

Book Two: Be Mine

Book Three: Old Ghosts

Book Four: Cold Storage

Book Five:100 South Clinton

Book Six: Meltdown

Epilogue

________Prologue________

If my youth had been different there might have been someone to advise me, while I was still impressionable, against returning to the scene of the crime. I might not hold the scorn or judgments that occupy the deep recesses of my heart had my early life known an individual like that, someone who would have, at all costs to themselves, been able to warn me against returning to Saint Edwards. It is a place I left during a blizzard when I was in my twenties. Decades later during a February hosting very little snow, I have returned because there was nobody in my past to warn or advise me against it.

My homecoming didn’t go so well when I returned to Oak Park last winter. The mistake was going to my stepfather’s house. He died while I was in prison. Leona was there, the same but with gray hair. Since she married the man who raised me I am not sure who Leona is to me. She was not happy to see me.

Marlene—what are you doing here? she asked.

I could tell the moment that she opened the door that the old bitch thought she would never have to see me again. It was obvious as she stood clutching her white robe closed, her bare feet in a pair of black winter boots as she came out to the top of the porch steps.

I’m home to change my life, I told her.

You change your life? I know all about you! she said to me.

You know what about me, Leona?

I know you’ll never change, Marlene! Your father died of a broken heart because of you, the things you did! Leona said. It killed your father, the fact that you were in prison for…

I leaned into her to quiet her.

"Leave, or I’ll call the police!’ she threatened.

She stepped back into her house, my old house. My father’s house! I pushed my way in. Her hands reached to close the door but she was not quick enough. We were inside. Leona turned away from me, reaching for the phone on the wall. I closed the door behind me, rushing to grab the phone from her hand. That was when I saw real fear on her face. She ran toward the door. I blocked her. Turning away from me, Leona disappeared into the house.

Come out, come out, Leona!’ I called to the woman who kept me from my stepfather, who barely fed me as a child. You wanted to play--let’s play, Leona! It’s time to play, Leona!"

The police…

You never called the police, Leona! I yelled into the house to the woman who I realized suddenly that I had always hated.

She thought somehow that she knew the house better than I did because I’d been gone for so long, that it would leave me at a disadvantage. I ventured deeper into the place where she lived that I still knew like the back of my hand.

What do you really think you know about me, Leona?

I saw her rush toward the back of the house, toward a rear entrance. We collided in the kitchen, near a door leading to the basement. I grabbed hold of her by the hair.

Help! she began to call out.

My hands pulled open the basement door quickly.

HELP!

Shut the hell up, Leona! I said, pushing her toward the basement stairs.

HELP! she called out again.

Don’t make me do something we’ll both regret, Leona! I told her.

HELP ME!

I didn’t want problems with her. Trouble always seemed to find me somehow! It wasn’t my intention to get into it with Leona.

I had only come to the house for a place to stay while I returned to Oak Park to correct a few things, right the wrongs done to me when I was younger. He was the reason I was coming back to Saint Edwards, of course. Anyone who knew anything about us knew I would have to come back for him. I had no real problem with Leona, I told myself.

I don’t want trouble, Leona! I told her.

Focus was what I had, the thing my father always told me I would never have. I had focus but Leona was getting in the way of that.

Trouble wasn’t my intention when I came to my father’s house back in January, when all of Chicago was still covered with a heavy blanket of snow, but Leona started to make trouble the minute she saw me.

I didn’t want any trouble Leona!

HELP! she cried out again, her mouth looking to me like the beak of a bird.

She tried to pull away from me. We stood perched at the top of the stairs for a long moment.

Leona, Leona… I said to the woman who told me to take it like a woman while she would stand watching me being beaten with a belt without mercy by my stepfather—the man who raised me after my mother died.

You, evil… she started to say then stopped. Help! HELP ME!

Shut up, Leona, I said, recalling her telling me to take the beatings with the strap like a woman while I was a girl who cried.

Dear God… she said.

Shut the hell up, Leona!

The police… she said again.

That angered the living hell out of me.

Shut the hell up about the police, Leona!

"HELP! she yelled again.

I didn’t mean to push her, but it gave me pleasure to finally shove the old bitch down the stairs, something I had wanted to do for years.

Decades of rage rushed from me. I tempered them. A loud gasp escaped from her throat, kind of quiet for such a loud, foul, woman I thought. She fell backwards down the stairs. My feet were loud on the carpet that covered the stairs. Leona fell hard. Her body seemed to hit each step.

Stupid old woman! Why the hell couldn’t she just be civil to me? I stood over Leona’s broken body. Blood flowed from her nostrils and the left corner of her mouth. Her neck was broken I realized as I bent near to her. Old women fell in their homes every single day of the week. Sometimes they were not found for months. As I left Leona to be found I imagined that I heard her crying behind me, at the bottom of the stairs down in the cellar of my stepfather’s house. Take it like a woman, Leona! I muttered this-- leaving the house that belonged to my father before he died.

Since I left Saint Edwards, whenever I have been about to make a bad decision there has been someone to stop me. That was the thing about being incarcerated. It created boundaries and borders for a person like me. Someone has always stopped me from doing the things I want to do since I left Saint Edwards. When I was a college student at Saint Edwards there was nobody to warn me against my own ideas.

Behind me there is the low moan, a groan really, that reminds me of a man coming out of a deep sleep. I look in the rearview mirror. There he is I think as I check on the reason that I have returned to Saint Edwards for Valentine’s Day. He will be conscious soon. I will have to get him tied and gagged.

Once the van is parked in the garage we have rented, with the door closed down behind it, I am able to crawl into the back with him. All of these years I have been so patient, waiting to be with him again. I have waited for this very moment now! Waiting and watching today was the worst.

From the hallway I could see him in his shirtsleeves, teaching a class. The door was open enough for me to hear his voice. Near the end of class he finally reached for a bottle of water.

My heart lifted as I watched him drink the water. If I dared to close my eyes I would be back thirty years ago when we were both students in college, walking these very hallways together, I thought. There were so many things that I would do different given the opportunity, I told myself. That is what this reunion we were going to have would be for both of us, a chance to