Dark Advent Read Free Page A

eyes were wide and round. He kept his hair shaggier than what current fashion allowed, but he liked it that way. He retained it partly in defiance of the other yuppies-in-training swarming the campus, with their interchangeable clothes and interchangeable smiles and interchangeable hair. Interchangeable personalities.
    Jason pounded along until he neared the southwest corner of the park, then slowed to catch his breath. He spat and paused to gaze at the house across the drive rounding the corner. On the front lawn, a boy and girl sat playing with toys. They were no more than five or six. The front door opened and a woman poked her head out. They left their toys and disappeared inside the house. Suppertime.
    He began to run again.
    The house had been his home once. He’d lived there with his parents since he was nine years old. He still didn’t like to see other people living there. Irrational, sure. Made about as much sense as blaming them as the direct cause…
    He ran harder.
    His parents…and what a stupid way they’d picked to bow out of this life, too. Last summer they’d been on their annual two-week jaunt that had become as inevitable as the Fourth of July. This time they were out West, driving through the Rockies. Except his dad had gotten careless on a curve, maybe (the truth would never be known), and they slipped over an edge. A short roll down a slope and into a ravine, and all of a sudden Jason was your basic class-A orphan. Easy as falling off a cliff.
    “Marry an orphan,” his mother had often told him, her only child. “We don’t want to have to share you with in-laws on holidays.”
    They’d usually laugh about it. Funny how cruelly the tables could be turned.
    It had happened on a Friday afternoon, and Jason had gotten word of it early the next morning. The rest of the weekend was a meaningless blur, half-remembered fragments that may or may not have happened. He was finally discovered by Kelly, who grew both worried and perturbed when Jason didn’t show up the next Monday morning. After a half-dozen unanswered phone calls, Kelly drove to their house. He beat on the door and thumbed the bell and, when he found the front door unlocked, let himself in. He found Jason sitting in a hallway, clutching an unused frying pan, his clothes wrinkled, his hair tangled, three days of stubble on his face. His pants had that pissed-in look common to winos and imbeciles. Jason looked up at him with dark-ringed eyes, a vacant stare that chilled Kelly to the core. It looked like nothing whatsoever lived behind those eyes.
    Kelly turned out to be a godsend. He got Jason cleaned up, fed, pulled him out of the shell he’d retreated into. He helped him arrange to have the bodies flown back and had Jason stay with himself and his wife until relatives could arrive. Later, he helped get Jason’s finances straightened out—the will, the insurance policies, the bank accounts, listing the house with a realtor, selling the land in the country earmarked for that retirement home, getting the investments signed over into Jason’s name. Jason came out of it not rich, but decidedly well-to-do for a twenty-year-old.
    For nearly a week after Kelly found him, Jason was surrounded by family and friends who helped share the burden. But eventually they all returned to tend their own lives, leaving him with that inevitable cliché, “If there’s anything we can do…” He rambled about the newly empty house with a curious restlessness. Never before had the house seemed so imposing, with memories lurking around every corner. And he realized he was beginning to think of it as a house and a house alone…no longer a home. Moving out and heading back to school a few weeks later was a relief.
    Jason began to feel light-headed with the heat, and slowed to walk again. Sweat rolled down his face. He decided to leave that house behind without a second look. Because what had made it a home had been gone a long, long time.
    * *
    Jason paid