Chapter 19: Walk With Me A Minute
Christmas would soon be upon them and the one gift this Christmas that Carter wanted more than anything in the world was to be able to take Abby home for the holidays. For the two of them to be able to sit beneath the Christmas tree watching the lights twinkle as the snow fell from the sky outside their window.
It was more of a wish than anything that reality could bring to him. It wasn't Abby getting better for she was. Every new day brought another step forward and no matter how small that step might have been, Carter was and always would be thankful for it.
Paul's trial was harder than Carter thought it would be, and there for several days he found himself having flashbacks from his own stabbing. If this was this hard for him to handle it could only imagine how hard it was for her. He just wanted to have all this behind if and if he had his way he would have been the one to administer the lethal injection to rob Paul of everything that they had been robbed of.
Carter had never been a bitter man, or even one to hold a grudge but something was different this time. Perhaps it was the effects that one man had been able to inflict upon his life, or the fact that he hadn't done it once but twice, and there was no room for forgiveness. What sympathy Carter might have had for the man had left when he drove that knife into Abby's back. Paul attacking Lucy had been one thing but this was something of a completely different nature, his feelings for Abby were deeper than what he had felt for Lucy.
He stood now in the cool air of the apartment, the heat not having come on yet from his arrival home. From the living room he could watch the snowfall, the small flecks of white tumbling down to the earth from the dark sky. Darkness had fallen so you couldn't tell that the sky was grey. Each one that came gently falling from the sky was as individual as the people he saw when he was at work, yet when they hit the ground they all blended together, that's how his days had become one blending into the other.
He closed his eyes as he ran his hands up and down his arms in a feeble attempt to try and warm himself up a little bit. He didn't like being alone here, but for the time being he was slowly adjusting to it. He knew that it was only a matter of time before things would return to normal, what every that might have been. For nothing would ever be the same, it never could be the same that was a fact that they all had to face. It was one of those things that you might have desperately wanted but the events that had unfolded where events that could not be erased. Scars on the surface ran deep, and Carter had the constant reminder of that on his body, tattooed there for life. The mental damage that had been done, the following addiction, those you could overcome and learn to move on from. They shaped who you were and where you had been in live, but a scar, no it was deeper it was with you until the time that you died and even then when the soul left the body the scar still remained.
He opened his eyes watching the snow fall again for a moment before moving into the kitchen, all this time he'd been staying here so that he could be surrounded still by her and their memories. It was Carter's way of dealing with things, a way to kill the loneliness that had set in since she had been gone. He didn't, up until all of this had happened realized how much Abby had become a part of his life and how lost he was with out her there with him. There was something about the way that she could always make him smile no matter how hard the day had been and it was time like this when he missed it the most. When the quiet and the darkness were at there worst.
He found himself now wandering through the darkness that had settled in the apartment. He wandered back towards the bedroom, the room that they had once shared, and found himself hoping, almost saying a silent prayer that they would share it once again. Yet knowing in his heart that it would be a long time before that happened something about their relationship had changed, it wasn't his fault and it certainly by no means was Abby's fault, they had both been through so much that they had both changed. Not for the better and not necessarily for the worse, but they had both changed and it was that change that was going to make it hard if not nearly impossible for them to get back to each other. To be able to find themselves in the place where they had been before.
He picked up a small bottle of her perfume that had been left sitting on her dresser. Carter hadn't moved anything from where it had been. It wanted everything to be the way that it had been when she had left. Well minus the psychosis. He inhaled some of the scent from the bottle and drifted back to a time that seemed so far into the past, yet it really wasn't. His mind made it seem as if it was just yesterday with as clear as it was.
A few minutes passed before he snapped from the land of memories, dreams, fantasy and back to the cold harsh reality of the way that the world really was. He had decisions to make, way to many things to think about, it was all a giant jumble in his mind right now. He set it back down into it's place back on the dresser and headed back to the kitchen and pulled the fridge door open. And there it was staring him right in the face. That bottle, contemplation, temptation, it was right there in front of him.
Reality smacked him like the hard hand of a woman, as if he was a small child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He could hear a voice in the back of his head, two of them, one telling him that it was more than okay, no one would ever know. There in the dark empty apartment there was no one to know. And the other voice, the one that he knew he should listen to telling him that he would know, and that should be enough to keep him from wanting to do that. To be a hypocrite was not something that he needed to be or wanted to be.
He stood there having a staring contest with it. To do or not to do that was the question that was nagging him. Pick it up and feel nothing for a little while, stumble but not fall. He picked it up now holding it in his hand feeling how cold the bottle was, how good it would feel for just a temporary fix, and escape from what he was feeling right now. Could it hurt? Who would know? Who needed to know? He was alone, he hurt and this would fix that ache.
He walked over now to the cupboard opening it up. This wasn't the end of the world, he told himself as he pulled a glass down from the shelve setting it on the counter in front of him. There tucked away out of sight was another solution to the problems that had been plaguing him. He hadn't noticed it, for weeks he'd been eating out of take out containers so he'd never really looked inside Abby's kitchen cabinet. It didn't make sense that it was there but it was there nonetheless. Against his better judgment Carter gave into the temptations that were before him, forgetting for a little while everything that had been wrong with his life and the mess that it had become. Taking a step forward closer to the edge that he was about to fall over. One night of relief started him on a path that would lead towards the ultimate darkness if he was not careful.
