Aragón dreamed of coughs rife with blood, the glassy fish-white eyes of drowned men, turgid dark waters, severed feet, stained slaughterhouse walls, rusty blades, corpses slow-twisting on meat hooks, wakes of vultures, unseen footsteps, shards of bone, noxious fumes, coiled whips, hanks of human hair, hooded figures, fingernails scratching windowpanes.
All the horrors of the world and his daughter lost among them.
He woke up drenched, the covers kicked below his feet. He’d sweated through the sheets, the pillowcase, the pillow itself. A fan turned lazily overhead. The king-size bed felt unsteady around him, like he was at sea rocking on a rescue boat that was never going to be rescued.
Hell.
This was what hell felt like.
His daughter. His baby girl.
The last moment he’d seen her, she’d thrown her arms wide across the dance floor, summoning him for a hug. Business had interfered. The image of her floated in his mind’s eye. Arms spread, eyes smiling. And him gesturing. Be right back.
He pulled himself from bed, every tendon and fiber aching. Found his feet unsteadily. Shuffled into the bathroom and emptied his stomach into the toilet. Hands on his knees, leaning over the bowl afterward, he didn’t understand the shuddering in his chest until he realized he was weeping.
Shuffling down the carpeted hall toward the room where his wife slept, he leaned on the walls for support. At ghostly intervals Anjelina peered out from rounded frames. Her school pictures, the same smile on her evolving face. Preschool, in sixth grade, now a senior portrait. That rare perfect gem, never a brooding stage.
He would kill the world before he would let harm come to her.
And yet that wasn’t an option.
Belicia’s door was slightly ajar. She lay in bed, facing away as she always did. It struck him that he was thankful for this; he couldn’t bear to have his eyes on her face right now. He could hear the rasp of her breath. Was she sleeping? Or breathing in the darkness, aware of his presence in the doorway?
She did not turn to him.
He wanted the comfort of a wife. No, the comfort of a mother in the arms of his wife. He was diminished, a boy-child, standing on trembling legs, pathetic and broken.
His shame overwhelmed him. The fraudulence of who he’d pretended to be, of who he’d convinced himself he was. No, he was still a terrified little boy and had always been nothing more. He was scared to face his wife, to see his failure to protect his daughter reflected back at him through her grief. All the pain Belicia had been through, and now he’d caused more. So much more. So much worse.
The sweat dried cold across his body, his nightshirt clinging. He was trembling. He put his shoulder blades to the wall beside the doorjamb and slid down to the carpet.
Be right back, he’d gestured to his daughter. Be right back.
He bowed his head to his knees, the hellish memories of the nightmare moving through him. He was too exhausted to cry. He shook and he ached and he told himself to take a breath. And then another.
It seemed impossible that he would make it through the night.