Fade to Black - Proof Read Free

best he could. When he got to the
end, the part where he, or Casey or whoever, was shot, he felt a lump in his
throat and was surprised when his eyes filled with tears. He looked up at his
wife, comforted again by the beautiful gaze which drove deeply into his.
    “I just wanted
to get home to my girls,” he said and his voice cracked.
    Pam held his
stare a moment and then stood up. She took the ice pack gently away from his
head and examined his wound. Jack could picture her wrinkled brow and pursed
lips in his mind and smiled.
    “No more
bleeding,” she announced.
    Then she took
both of his hands in hers and pulled him to his feet. She wrapped her arms
around him and hugged him tightly, her face soft and warm on his chest. Her
hair tickled his chin.
    “Come on, my
war hero. Let’s get back to bed.”
    Pam turned and
led him by the hand to the stairs. “God, Jack. No more CNN headline news for
you for a while, ok?”
    Jack chuckled,
squeezed his wife’s hand, and then slipped back under the covers of their bed.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
     
     
     
     
    Pam curled up
beside him under the sheets, her head on his shoulder. Her long hair lay across
his chest, which she stroked gently and soothingly. Her touch was like magic.
    “Teaching
biology too boring for you, Jack?”
    Jack hugged
his wife and said nothing. As Pam drifted off to sleep, he lay thinking over
and over about the images that remained. He was also haunted by a surreal
feeling. In the dark he tried to imagine the rest of the room—what color the
curtains were, where the closet was. He was dismayed to find the answers that
came to him were hesitant and unsure. Unreal was the right word, he thought. He
reached out his hand and fumbled for a light on the nightstand. It felt
unfamiliar, but he finally found a switch on the base. He clicked it on.
    The curtains
across the room were blue and yellow, just as he’d guessed—or known, of course.
And the closet door, though still uneasily unfamiliar, was right where he had
thought it would be.
    Pam squeezed
her eyes tight and mumbled, “Y’ok?” sleepily.
    Jack clicked
the light back off and rubbed his wife’s arm.
    “Sorry.”
    As he drifted
off to sleep, Jack was haunted by two things. First was the names of his dead
Marine buddies, which ran through his brain again and again, almost like a
ringing—Kindrich from Tennessee and Bennet from Texas. The other was the
disturbing realization that had Pam not said he was a teacher, which now of
course felt right in an unsettled way, he wasn’t sure he could have come up
with his job on his own.
    Other than leader
of Marines.
    Hoorah.
    Then he
drifted away to nowhere, away from his bed, away from Fallujah, to a deep and
dark sleep.
    A dreamless
sleep.
     
     
    *   *   *
     
     
     
     
    The unreal
feeling quieted but never really left. Jack woke to Pam’s gentle prodding, but
he didn’t feel at all rested. He showered and dressed absently, his mind
drifting back to his dream over and over again. Though it lacked the intense
reality of last night, it still had a quality to it, a rightness that was
disturbing. The dream itself and the terror it brought seemed much less
intense, but it bothered him how real and vivid his memory of his Marines had
been—his friends, as if he really knew them.
    Jack wondered
if he had somehow incorporated real people into his dream, like Dorothy had in The
Wizard of Oz . Not only could he picture them as they had been in battle
together, but he found he could picture them in other settings as well. He had
a vivid image of Simmons laughing, eating brown rice out of a brown plastic
bag, and leaning against a sand berm. He had what felt like a memory of
dragging a shit-faced Chuck Bennet, out of a bar near Twentynine Palms Marine
Corps Base in California. He had fallen down beside Kindrich’s Mustang and then
started laughing uncontrollably. The clarity of these “memories” bothered Jack
even more than the images from his