Familiar Eyes

Sometimes you can sense when something is about to happen.

Sometimes you just have that prescience and you can't say why you know it is reality and not imagination you are seeing. Those are the times when you want to close out the thoughts, take them back for fear they will come true. Like the connection between the lives we are living and the mystery of what swims deep inside our brains untapped surfaces.

Like closing your eyes and experiencing the death of your children in an automobile accident a hundred miles away. My twin daughters were only seventeen when their car careened over the edge of a mountain road. I felt the car tumbling, heard the girls screaming, until there was nothing but silence. I saw their pretty eyes, so much like their father's filled with terror. My husband, Derek, was angry with me for thinking such things, until the police came to the door. After that, he too had grown silent.

I did what people do. I kept working, even though I was just a secretary, even though the reason for my job was to pay for tuition that would never be needed.

It was Saturday when my boss called. He worked too much, played too little and took things as they were presented to him as fact.

He married the stereotype: beautiful, blond, and bored in the way that the wives of executives have perfected, filling her days with things that meant nothing to anyone. I suppose it never occurred to him that other marriages were different, that people needed time together. Derek and I had not been the same in all the years since the girls had died, but I kept hoping.

Chad assumed my weekends were at his disposal, that I had no life. Perhaps he remembered that Derek was gone on business for the weekend, but I was still put out. I had to drive to their beach house to deliver a report. It was too isolated for good technology; the point of the house after all, was to get away.

I felt the sensation of dread again on the drive out there. Stopped at a red light, I blinked and saw a mass of crimson on pure white, the flash again of familiar eyes. I doubted my subconscious, I often had flashbacks, but I changed lanes anyway and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Chad's beach house sat on the edge of the bluff, clean sand stretching below for miles. I could see him walking along the shore, his white chinos billowing. They too were clean and bright, not a trace of red anywhere. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had talked myself into thinking I had some gift of sight when really it was memory composed of shock and grief that made it seem like I'd known it was coming.
The door was always open at the beach house, and I didn't ring the bell. I knew my way to his office from deliveries on other weekends and didn't want to make small talk with the trophy wife. If there was a way for me to be in and out before he got back from his walk, my weekend might be saved. I could leave the file, tell him I wasn't able to raise anyone when I dropped by. It wasn't a good lie, but if I was quick and quiet, it would work.

Deep carpet silenced my steps down the long hall. I could hear music somewhere in the house, far enough away to cover the creaks when I opened the heavy office door.

I hurried to the desk. I knew this room, but had a feeling of deja' vu from what felt like moments before. I shivered and told myself to calm down. I was clearly remembering the girls again, their familiar eyes. There was nothing else wrong.

Then I saw the handwritten note on Chad's desk. I recognized Derek's stationary. His own unique design. It didn't belong there.

I placed the report on the corner of the desk. I was drawn to the note; I had to read it. I reached for it with dread. I felt the way I feel when I am about to finish a book I have enjoyed but fear will disappoint me in the end, consternation mixed with the chill of premonition. I knew something was very wrong.

I heard voices then, from down the hall. Chad had made better time than I thought.

I read my husband's words: Darling~ Yes. Saturday. Love, Derek

So. Derek was with her. Derek, my creative, sensitive husband, who wept with me when our girls had died, was having an affair with my boss's wife. And Chad had found out. How clich�.

I didn't want to be part of any scene, though I knew it was not what I'd envisioned. The bloodshed was not real; it was my own heartbreak, my sanity dying. Derek. How could he?

I heard Chad call out from somewhere in the house, "You should have come, it's glorious out there!"

There was no answer. I wondered how long it would be before I was discovered. I wondered why Chad was pretending that everything was normal with her. He clearly had found the evidence. Why wasn't he angry?

The door opened to the office then. I dropped the note back onto the desk, but I wasn't quick enough.

"You know," Chad's smile was smug, "I always count on your efficiency. You brought the file?"

"Yes."

He called back over his shoulder, "Darling you were right, it worked."

Derek followed him into the office, dressed in white chinos too. Chinos I didn't recognize. They were just like Chad's, but he wore no shirt at all, his well toned chest bare, too bare. The last time I'd seen it, a T of dark auburn hair covered his torso. Now, he was shaved clean, and the pants bore the bright red stains I'd expected to see on Chad.

"They'll call it a crime of passion, you know," Chad said, slipping the gun from the deep pocket of the loose pants.

"I tried to save her," Derek agreed. I looked down then, and saw her body, crumpled behind the tall leather chair. Blond mats were drying in clumps around the gaping wound on her head, gray fragments of what used to be an idle brain spilled out.

Sometimes you can sense when something is about to happen, but there isn't anything you can do about it. I looked into Derek's familiar eyes for just a moment before my gaze started filtering through a crimson haze. I felt the roar of the gunshot from a place where pain just didn't register. I was conscious enough to see Derek and Chad smile at each other, and their passionate kiss.