Wednesday, February 14, 2007

705 days, 23 hours, 20 minutes, 41 seconds

Valentine's Day. And off to another roaring start. Remember the Tylenol murders? That's all she can think of. The first person killed was a woman at her fiancé's mother's house. It took months for people to believe that he (or his mother) hadn't been trying to kill her. And she doesn't know what to believe. That he was out of vitamins, yes. That she ran out of the Tylenol in her purse, yes, but that was because he kept taking them. Then she saw the bottle on the kitchen counter. A pale brown capsule, not the expected red and yellow, but it said something about a new, quick-dissolving formula. It certainly wasn't quick yesterday. Unstoppable headaches sucking out all her energy, she could barely hold her head up. How easily the body remembers. And if, as he insists, these were the vitamins he'd kept in his suitcase, why didn't they at least give her energy? Ultra Man vitamins. At midnight he hands her sugar-free Godiva chocolates. Her voice sticks in her throat as she tries to say I love you.