"Max, let's go."
The taxi arrives, Emmie pays, and it is only when she opens the door for me that I snap out of it. Everyone would have behaved the same after coming back home to see it strapped with yellow tapes like an exhibit.
I slowly descend, not paying attention to anything else, not even to the car moving away. For a moment, my dull pain becomes an afterthought in the background of my daze.
Emmie simply accompanies me, but only her presence register in my mind. I slowly grab one of the two belts of tape crossing before me, but I don't pull it. I look around, searching for the reaction of the neighborhood, and also taking in the changes in just over a day.
But only the bright light of the day and the lingering calm of yesterday, a Christmas-like day, look back at me. Even though a hint of uneasiness seems to be clinging like an overhead shadow. In my distracted state, my arm loses against gravity's pull, and my hand pulls the yellow tape along. The sound of it tearing pulls my gaze to the dark writing running over its length, and I take a breath, before exhaling.
I finish tearing it, even though longer parts of it remain pasted against the wall on both sides. I uncaringly throw it to the side and unceremoniously pull at the tape to put an end to its diagonal life too. But then, looking at the door, I realize I don't have the key of its lock with me.
I hesitantly grab the handle, and turn it.
*Click*
It has not been locked. My heart stops for a second as Emmie audibly gasps, then I push the door open. Like a dark curtain parting on the theater of a nightmare, I am welcomed by the darkness I have expected.
Chaos, blood, and turning around, bullet holes.
I take a deep breath. A hand comes to warmly cradle mine.
"Mie."
The redhead suddenly hugs me, the warmth of her plump body chasing the coldness that has spread inside me. I glance at her, and she pulls her head back to look at me, replacing her cheek against mine with her palm. She looks into my blue eyes, then leans in and takes my lips.
Her lips crush mine, and remain there, as her smell rushes into my nostrils. That takes my mind a step away from the lingering nightmarish smells from yesterday, and the images they brought back. So when the lips against mine move, I instinctively leave my passivity behind to open my mouth, and welcome the tongue that moves to invade me.
The kiss at the doorstep is soft, and it doesn't last that long, but it calms me down. When we separate, Emmie looks deep in my eyes again, and I return her gaze, before I turn to look at the stairs. There is nothing on the ground floor but memories of pain, powerlessness, despair, and blood. And I don't have anything to pick up here.
I tighten my grip on Emmie's hand, and push the entrance door back before limping to the stairs, but without much gloom on my face or in my calmly beating heart anymore.
Upstairs, the chaos seems to become an illusion. The unscathed appearance would have been even more comforting if not for the traces that have been left by the dirty feet that had trampled the corridor yesterday.
I frown in dissatisfaction, which turns into disgust as I wrinkle my nose. That feeling even overpower everything else I have been dealing with, good or bad. And I don't think anyone would be happy coming back home and seeing it defiled, desecrated like the home left for Liz and I is now. Not even being investigators gives the policemen the right to violate someone's home like this.
"Max…"
The tide of disgust tinted with anger stalls, then calms down. I don't explain anything to Emmie, even though she can also see the bit of disorder on this floor. Just thinking a bit can make her understand that everything yesterday happened on the ground floor, which makes the scene created on this floor difficult to tolerate, as much as having one's intimacy violated can be.
"Let's go. Let's take what we need in Liz's room."
"Okay."
As I push open the door of the bedroom that had become half a common one in the house, I glance at the door at the end of the corridor, the one leading to dad and mom's room, and that has remained untouched since the day Liz and I closed it a few days after the accident.
It has been touched. There is no layer of dust there to carry traces of disturbance, but I just know it, that it has been disturbed. I clench my teeth, and pause, before I push open the door to Liz's bedroom.
I appear to be brooding the dissatisfaction from the state of the second floor, and as I move to look for clothes, shoes, toiletries, undergarments, and also books and the electronic devices life can't be complete without nowadays, I let the anger that has come back run rampant inside me. I wonder if there had only been policemen who came here yesterday. I wonder what else has been touched, especially as I pick bras and underwear, both big and small. I wonder what might have been left behind, intentionally or not. I ask myself whether any perverse thought has gone into anything that happened when Liz has been fighting for her life at the hospital.
I want to force myself to breathe as calmly as possible, because as my brain gets excited, it reads despite me the attention of Emmie that has fallen on me and picked up clues about my emotional state.
I want to force myself to exhale, to hold everything in, under a lid which itself would be under a façade of calm, but I can't help but wonder about many things. How am I special? Nobody knew about me. I had nothing special going on before the accident, so how is our family special that a calamity has been attracted to fall from the clear sky?
What made dad and mom, and maybe grandpa and grandma, special, to the point of costing them their lives, and almost mine, then almost Liz's?
I remember wondering the why for everything once, and now I want to wonder again, to ponder that question wrapped in heavy fog again. I want to cry, to shout, to hysterically break it apart just to face it, its deepest part.
I want to understand, to know why my life, Liz's life…
Why can't the abyss remain in the depths it is supposed to exist in? Why us!? Why me!?!