Until One Of Us Is Dead

Book summary

Denny Davis is haunted by his family's death. His life spirals into darkness after his granddaughter Allie, whom he raised, is kidnapped. Thirteen years later, Denny, now an alcoholic, encounters Allie's abductor, leading to a harrowing struggle for survival.

Excerpt from Until One Of Us Is Dead

One 

 Denny was only 51, but damn if he didn't feel twice that. The last few years had been hard, but somehow he'd survived. Or, more to the point, was surviving. And it was all because of Allie. It wasn't because he was tough, although he was, and it wasn't because of determination or some divine plan of a mystical, magical sky-daddy. No, it was her, plain and simple.

 Sitting there in McDonalds, he watched her coloring on a print-out coloring page. It was a picture of a dog wearing a fireman's hat. Why would anyone want a dog to be a fireman? Denny had no idea. It seemed like dogs would be far more interested in lifting their legs to the hydrants than they would in putting out fires. He realized there were those Dalmations who were used by firemen – at least on TV – but he couldn't figure out what the dogs could possibly contribute to the proceedings. He watched the seven-year-old, leaning intently over her picture, coloring, careful to stay within the lines.

Seeing her coloring the dog's face brown, Denny said, “I think fire dogs are supposed to be white with black spots.”

The little girl looked at him, scrunching up her face in disapproval. “That's ugly. My dog is brown. His name is Charlie.”

“He's got a name, huh?”

 “He does,” she said, looking down at the paper again.

 There were many reasons Denny knew he was becoming an old man, ranging from his receding hairline, turning grayer by the minute, to his ever-increasing out-of-touch views on music and society. But chief among them was the way this little girl made him feel. He found that watching her color, as mundane as it was, was now equal to watching a movie or a Royals game. Even as a parent he'd never really felt this sort of enjoyment simply watching his kids do run-of-the-mill day-to-day kid stuff. It wasn't that Allie was different from how his kids had been; it was just that he'd become old enough – he preferred to think of it as mature enough – to relax and appreciate the little things.

 Allie.

She was that little thing. Especially now that everyone else was gone.

Thinking of this, Denny turned away, staring absentmindedly out of the restaurant window. And it all came back to him. All the people he'd lost.

First there had been Timmy. Timmy was only 14 when he died. He was fatally injured in a high-school football game. Timmy's team, the Trojans, had been winning, largely because of Timmy's on-field heroics. He was having his best game ever. They were up 38 to seven in the fourth quarter. It was third down with just over four minutes to go. Timmy stepped back in the pocket, looking for someone to throw to, but no one was open. So he stood there a second too long and he took the hit. A hard bone-crunching hit. From the stands, his mother said it looked the same as any other hit. Denny couldn't say for sure because he hadn't been there. He'd been where he'd always been – in his cruiser, patrolling the city. But this hit had been different, and Timmy’s neck was shattered. He crumpled to the ground like a discarded piece of paper and lay there, broken. Caroline said when the other players cleared the way for the coaches to examine Timmy, his body twitched violently, so much so that she could see it from where she was. And then he died, right there on the field.

Caroline was inconsolable. She'd witnessed something no parent should ever have to watch. After that, she was as broken as Timmy had been. She became something less; something of no use to anyone. She started to look at Denny differently, blaming him. He could see it on her face just as plainly as he could see the make-up she applied so liberally. When loved ones die, it's natural to search for someone to pin the blame on, and Caroline had found her patsy in Denny. Never mind that he was hurting, too. Never mind that he'd been absent only because he was out working to put food on the table. When Denny went to work the morning of the accident, he had no inkling he would never see his wife or son again. Timmy died. Caroline had lived, but not really. She had remained alive only in the most literal sense – she continued to breathe. But the truth was, she'd died that night, too. And Denny wasn't the only one who saw it. Their other child, Evelyn, saw it, too. And she felt it – felt all of it – the coldness, the disdain, the blame. Feeling her mother's undeserved hatred towards her, Evelyn turned it around and redirected it back towards her.

 By the time Caroline died, both Denny and Evelyn hated her. There was no other way to put it. They both secretly wished she would die. Maybe not die, but at least go away for ever. And then she did die, which made things even more difficult. Neither of them ever admitted their feelings about her to one another, but Denny knew they'd both felt it.

 Evelyn was the one who found her. It had only been eight months since Timmy's death. It was a warm June day. The sun was out, the birds were singing, and neighborhood kids were out riding bikes and playing catch. When Evelyn came home from her boyfriend's house to grab some things, she she found Caroline lying in a bathtub filled with red water, dead with both her wrists slit. After having just lost her little brother, finding her mother dead was an incredibly hard thing for a 16-year-old to endure.

 Denny and Evelyn went to the funeral, the second they'd attended in less than a year, and they both sat there wondering what had happened to the life they had known previously. Both of them knew right then and there that it was gone. By this time, they were both tough enough – broken enough – that neither of them cried. Denny was aware that everyone's eyes were on him, watching to see him weep, but he didn't give them the satisfaction. Thinking about them judging him made him even angrier than he already was. But he didn't cry. It wasn't because he didn't love Caroline. No, never that. She had been his high-school sweetheart. The love of his life. He'd lost his virginity to her. She had been his everything. The fact was that Caroline – the only woman he'd ever loved – had already been dead for nearly a year. He didn't cry because he didn't have any tears left to shed; he'd already spent them.

He started drinking. Not one or two beers here and there, but a bottle of Jack every day, seven days a week. And Evelyn suffered even more as a result.

Denny should have taken time off work. Everyone told him to, but he didn't listen. He'd never listened. He'd been a hard-headed SOB all his life, and this was no different. Looking back on it, he now wished he'd taken the time off to care for his daughter. But he didn't. He was a fuck-up as a parent just as he'd been a fuck-up at everything else. Soon Evelyn was doing a smorgasbord of drugs and getting into trouble for things ranging from telling her principal to go fuck himself to vandalizing some random woman's car for reasons Denny never knew. None of it had made sense, and that fact now baffled him. How could he not have understood what she'd been enduring? Had he taken the time to consider her pain rather than dwelling on his own, he would have realized how damaged she was. But he didn't. He'd been a selfish prick.

This led to Evelyn moving out and staying with her aunt Patrice at 17. Within the year, she was pregnant. She'd still been doing drugs while pregnant – the doctors found heroin in her bloodstream – but somehow Baby Allie had come through it unscathed. But Evelyn didn't make it. In the end, it wasn't the drugs that got her. Evelyn, Denny's first child, forever his baby girl, died in childbirth.

 Somehow her death caught him off guard, even after the other deaths. Somehow it was different. He'd been deeply sad when Timmy died. He'd certainly been affected. And when Caroline had died, well, that was what it was… She essentially died twice, the first one making it easier to cope with the second. And, truth be told, the alcohol had softened it some. But not with Evelyn. Not with his baby girl. Nothing could have prepared him for the immense pain and emptiness he felt. Even when they'd been fighting, he'd always believed things would be right again one day. There would be time. There was always tomorrow, right? Except there wasn't. They had run out of tomorrows.

  Denny had always felt close to the kid. All of her life he'd spoken to her like an adult. He didn't know if that was good or bad, but it had always felt natural. And he'd never felt bad about it because she'd been more of an adult as a child than most of the adults he'd known. But none of that mattered now. Nothing mattered.

 Or so he'd thought.

But then he realized there was one thing left that mattered. One person. There was that precious child. Baby Allie. Suddenly, with everything and everyone else in his life gone, Denny had managed, finally, to get his priorities straight. Unfortunately, Caroline, Timmy, and Evelyn weren't here see it. Denny stopped drinking. He stopped smoking. And he turned in his badge. He did it all for Baby Allie.

It hadn't been easy raising Allie by himself, but he'd managed. Denny had always believed himself good at things but when Allie came along, it became apparent pretty quickly that he was lacking in some areas. It also became obvious how much of the child-rearing had been done by his late wife. He'd always believed they'd been equal partners, but he saw now that was bullshit. Parenting was a tougher gig than he'd realized. But he kept working at it, trying to provide Allie with the best life he could. Somewhere along the way he learned how to parent, and he and Allie became a family. A small family, but a family nonetheless.

When she was two, Denny's mother had started babysitting for her. Allie always enjoyed going to grandma's because she said Grandma had the best toys. One day when Allie was there, his mother coined the name “Denny-Pa”, which was a combination of his name and the word grandpa. At first Denny scoffed at the name, thinking it sounded ridiculous. But his mother kept using it, and eventually it stuck. Just like that, he became Denny-Pa. It was a goofy moniker, but it's who he was. He was Allie's Denny-Pa, and she was his Baby Allie.