Wherever You Are by Sharon Cullen

“You will regret that,” he said softly. Then he left the room and it was dark once again.
     
    Juliana leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, afraid to sleep, afraid she would wake to find Barun standing over her. The certain knowledge that he would return was like a living thing under her skin, an itch she couldn’t locate to scratch. Every noise made her heart thunder. Her prison was black as night. She felt as if she were sealed into an overly large coffin. When that thought came to her, as it did more often than not, she found it difficult to breathe. Like her lungs were collapsing, forcing the air out, and she had to stop her thoughts, block her mind. Sometimes the rolling of the ship was the only thing that convinced her she wasn’t buried alive.
    She slept, she woke, she existed in a vacuum with nothing for company but her terror and the rats.
    The rats didn’t bother her anymore and if that didn’t say something about her state of mind, nothing did.
    She was afraid of the dark.
    Mommy, let me out. I’ll be good, Mommy. I promise.
    It’d only been the one time and her father eventually found her but the damage had been done. He’d yelled at her mother. A huge screaming match with plates hurled at the wall and her father bellowing at the top of his lungs. In the end, he won the argument and Juliana had never again been locked in the barn.
    The fight hadn’t stopped the abuse though. It merely forced her mother to hide it and her father to turn a blind eye. As long as Juliana wasn’t locked in the barn where the neighbors heard her screams, he didn’t care.
    “I’ll be good, Mommy. I promise,” she whispered through cracked and swollen lips.
    Suddenly the scene in her mind changed and she was in the Langtree’s kitchen, eating the soft sugar cookies Emily was famous for.
    “Zach wouldn’t want to see you like this, Juliana. He’d want you to be happy,” Emily said as she clutched her coffee cup. “We won’t ever have the answers. Things happen. Sometimes…” She looked away. “Sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think we do. Asking yourself why will only make things worse. Accept that this is the way it is and move on.”
    Juliana took Emily’s advice. Graduated from high school, left home, worked her way through college, following the dreams she’d shared with Zach. Only she’d done it by herself. She’d met Daniel, got engaged, married, had a career, a life.
    Except she’d begun to wonder if maybe she hadn’t moved on.
    “I can’t do this anymore, Juliana. You have issues,” Daniel said on their last night together.
    She hid her fear of abandonment behind a bravado she didn’t feel. “What issues?”
    “Zach.” Daniel said it so softly she thought she misheard.
    She lifted her chin, pushing away the age-old pain of Zach’s disappearance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Daniel’s face flushed with anger. “Don’t give me that. You’re still in love with Zachary Langtree. I can’t hold a candle to a dead man, Juliana. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.”
    “No.” It was the only denial she could form. No. Daniel was wrong. Okay, yes, she might still harbor a love for Zach, but it was old and worn and she’d moved past it. She loved Daniel now.
    “Admit it, Juliana, you love Zach more than you could ever love me.”
    “That’s not true,” she cried, terrified of the direction of the conversation, feeling her carefully built life slip away.
    Daniel’s anger faded, replaced with sadness and resignation. “I thought with time you’d forget him. I thought I could make you forget him.” He laughed, but it was a tense laugh. “I should have known better.”
    And then Daniel dropped the bombshell that shattered her nearly as bad as Zach’s leaving. “I’m moving out, Juliana. I met someone else.”
    “No.” The only denial she could feel.
    “I didn’t mean for it to happen. But she…she loves me, Juliana. Me. Not some dead