by Roan Parrish
“You know you own me too, Matty. You know that, right? You know I’m yours. So fucking yours.”
Chapter 7
I turned downtown instead of up when I left work and walked for miles.
It had felt like I was floating half-asleep for the few days after Rhys left again, and walking felt better than staying still.
I was looking for Sid.
Grin had texted around, but half the people he tried didn’t answer and no one who did knew where she’d gone after she left the stationery store. I walked the neighborhood, looking for…I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly.
Around seven, my phone buzzed, and I saw that it was Rhys’s mom calling me. She’d called the day before too, and again, I let it go to voicemail. I couldn’t stand disappointing her with how thoroughly I’d ruined her recipe.
I headed uptown again, looping all the way back through Harlem and past Mariposa. Somewhere along the line, I’d cut west, and now the streets were differently familiar. Washington Heights. I hadn’t been around my old neighborhood since the year after I’d left St. Jerome’s. Then, I’d come back almost like I was hypnotized, to walk the streets of my youth. For weeks I’d walked the neighborhood, remembering.
Then I’d made myself forget again. I hadn’t been back since.
Because this isn’t your life anymore. You’re not the little boy who lived here, not the boy who got ditched, not the boy, not the boy, not the boy. You’re a man now.
Now, I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks. I’d circled closer than I’d realized. It was my street. Though it was long past dark, I could almost see the other kids playing ball in the street and the laundry drying on lines in the sun, smell the grilled meat, spice, and car exhaust, hear the shouts and the music spilling from open windows.
And there it was. The front stoop I’d sat on a thousand times. As my cousins ran in and out past me. As the neighborhood kids played around me. The front stoop I’d sat on, head turned in the direction of the 181st Street station, waiting. The direction my mom always came from when she came back.
Only one day she didn’t.
The buzz of a text made me jump. Grin: Any luck?
Nah, I replied. After a minute, I wrote. Im in wash heights.
Grin called me immediately but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t talk to anyone. When I didn’t answer, he texted instead. U ok?
I didn’t write back. He would know I wasn’t.
* * *
—
Friday night I couldn’t sleep at all, even though I’d walked in the city for hours before coming home. I pulled on one of Rhys’s sweatshirts and wandered down into the living room to get a book. I didn’t want to read one of mine, though. I wanted something new. Something of Rhys’s.
On the bottom shelf was a hardcover I’d never opened. It was an anthology of illustrated short stories and there was a greeting card a third of the way through like a bookmark. The card had a full moon on the front and inside it said, I’d like you better with a pumpkin for a head! Congrats, bro. <3 It was from Morgan. The bookmarked story was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” She must’ve given it to him when he’d bought the house.
I’d never actually read it, even though you couldn’t avoid knowing of the story, living in Sleepy Hollow. Now I flipped the book open, leaned back against the couch, and began to read. There was an illustration of the headless horseman, black cape billowing, horse’s eyes red, sky overhead swirling threateningly. Tree branches cut across the stormy sky and woods lurked darkly in the background.
The story itself turned out to be only ten percent creepy, but forty percent racist and fifty percent boring, and the boring factor apparently won out because I fell asleep on the couch before I finished it, and woke up with the corner of the cover digging into my neck.
I was on edge immediately—tired from not sleeping much but agitated, and I rushed out of the house to walk around. Again, I found myself in the cemetery, only this time instead of stories of the Ramones, I was thinking of the headless horseman and Ichabod Crane.
The snap of a twig had me whirling around, but nothing was there. I kept walking and felt like I was being watched. There was a couple strolling in the distance, but they weren’t looking at me. The feeling got stronger and stronger, but when I turned all I saw was a plump squirrel that froze, then chittered at me and bounded away into the trees.
“You’re fucking losing it, Argento,” I muttered and shoved my hands in my pockets so I’d stop biting my nails, a habit I thought I’d quit years before but that had made a reappearance lately, almost without my noticing it.
The ring of my phone made me startle and clutch at my chest like someone’s grandfather.
“Practically gave me a heart attack,” I said to Grin when I answered.
“Good, then we’re even, cuz you freak me out when you don’t answer.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. It wasn’t often that Grin would admit to being freaked out. “I’m in a cemetery,” I added, like the context might help.
“Aw, Matty, you having another goth moment?”
“Shaddup, I was fifteen and it was for, like, a week.” I’d had an unfortunate encounter with an abandoned black eyeliner at St. Jerome’s that had haunted me for years. “You read ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’?”
“Nah. Saw the movie with Johnny Depp and that white girl who looks like a skull, though. Why?”
“Nothing. I read it last night. Rhys had the book. It’s weird to live somewhere that’s in a ghost story.”
“New York is probably in like five million ghost stories.”
“Oh. That’s true. I guess I just don’t know any.”
Silence stretched between us, and I walked the paths on the west side of the cemetery. Imagined what would happen if a black cloaked hessian bore down on me on horseback from around the bend. Admitted to myself that I had no idea what a hessian was.
“I think maybe you shouldn’t look around for her no more,” Grin said.
“What? Why?”
“Cuz you ain’t gonna randomly find Sid on the street in her hood, Matty. And cuz it’s no good for you to be back in yours. Month after St. J’s? You weren’t in a good place, bro. You were a stranger there then and you’re even more now and that’s how it fuckin’ should be because you don’t live there no more. You want a damn New York ghost story? There it is.”
The month after we left St. Jerome’s, when I’d returned to my old neighborhood again and again like a sleepwalker, it had been Grin who found me. We were living together in Chinatown then, him and me, two awful brothers who talked constantly, and a fifth guy who never talked.
Grin had followed me one night. Followed me onto the subway, then as I walked, and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed anything. When he found me I was sitting on my old stoop wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now. We’d all dreamed our plans to each other over the years. What we’d do when we got out of St. Jerome’s, talking as if it were prison or high school rather than where we lived. But its walls felt so definitive, our presence there so determined, that it was as if we all knew our lives couldn’t begin until our time there ended.
From sports stardom and fancy cars to mansions and beach idylls, we dreamed it all. What no one ever told us was the way St. Jerome’s provided a negative against which to dream the positive. The way once we didn’t have it anymore, we were just in the regular world. And the regular world wasn’t conducive to dreaming.
The night Grin followed me was the night we made the pact. He’d done it for me, because I scared him, but we’d both held fast to it over the years. It was simple: Stay alive. Stay out of prison. Don’t be a fuckup abandoner asshole like all the grown-ups we know. Get happy-ish. We’d added the “ish” when the pact seemed too overwhelming.
When Grin moved down to Florida a year later, he’d
still texted me sometimes in the middle of the night. You’re not there r u? And he’d keep texting until I answered. I hadn’t realized quite how freaked out he’d been until then. Until he was a thousand miles away and still worrying whether I was on that damn stoop.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said softly, the cemetery sprawling around me. “Why am I like this? I was fine. I was doing fine. I thought…I thought I was different now. I really thought I was fine, man.”
“This about Rhys? What happened?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Ever since he left I’m…” My voice was so low I wasn’t sure he could even hear me. I reached out a hand to the nearest tombstone, needing to feel something solid. “I feel fucked up, man. It just kinda…snuck up on me. I really, really thought I was okay now,” I said again.
“Bro, listen. I’m not that shocked you’re feeling messed up. Probably feels like he abandoned you. Like, you know, like before.”
The world went gray, and it was hard to hear over the whoosh of blood in my ears.
“Matt. Matty? Grim!”
“Yeah.”
“You there?”
I was choking, and my mouth tasted sour.
“He didn’t abandon me; he’s on tour and he’s coming back.” The words came out in a desperate rush.
“I know that, Matty. Your boy’s hella in love with you. Course he’s coming back. Just saying, sounds like you’re tweaking cuz you feel all those old feels, you know?”
Right. It was just an echo. An uncomfortable reminder. The emptiness in the house that rang out like a hollow bell. The deafening buzz of a housefly in the corner. The prickling feeling of perpetual nothing stretching out in four dimensions. The nauseating familiarity as my body changed back to accommodate them again.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, man. You want me to come there? I could find a bus and—”
“Naw, man, it’s okay. But thanks. I…thanks. For real.”
“You gonna tell Rhys how bad it is?”
“No, it’s…I don’t wanna mess up his tour. He’s killing it, having such a good time. He’s so happy out there. And he…this is his dream, bro. The music and being married. I can’t…I can’t ruin one of them for him with the other. Besides, I’ll be fine when he gets back.”
I could practically see Grin doing the lip-biting thing he did when he wasn’t saying something he wanted to say, so I waited.
“I get it. But wouldn’t he wanna know? You said he likes to know everything, and…and it’s not like he won’t go on more tours in the future, right?”
My stomach roiled. Of course he would want to tour again. Fuck. I set my jaw.
“Then I guess I better get used to being okay when he’s gone.”
* * *
—
But I wasn’t okay.
That night I woke from a nightmare where Rhys had no face. It was just the back of his head, and when I spun him around it was the same on the other side. His voice sounded normal, comforting, kind, but it was coming from nowhere.
The next night I dreamt that he walked me to the cemetery, to the grave where the Ramones filmed their music video. He grinned the grin that lit up my heart, and then he took me by the hand and put me in the grave. He was still smiling as the first shovelful of dirt hit my face.
The night after that, I dreamed of the headless horseman. He was huge and cloaked in black and his horse had no head either, so it rampaged around the house, terrified, breaking windows and smashing into walls, leaving smacks of blood and the scent of fear. The horseman was silent, riding out the horse’s bucking frenzy with an otherworldly calm. Then he dismounted next to my bed and clapped a black-gloved hand over my mouth. With the other hand he pressed on my breastbone until my ribs snapped one by one.
After that, I didn’t sleep anymore. I threw myself into work with a desperate zeal. I roamed the city streets and took a late train home, then I turned on every light in the cottage, trying to banish the shadows, and settled on the couch with a blanket wrapped around me. I reread all my favorite books and watched terrible television. I played mindless, brightly colored games on my phone. I took cold showers when I felt drowsy and went for runs in the morning to wake myself up before work.
And then I did it all over again.
I listened to Rhys’s album on repeat, letting the sound of his voice sink into me, letting the threads of our story twine themselves around me.
“Back Row” was about a time we went to a midnight screening of a trashy seventies sci-fi flick and the film had burned halfway through, a black spot consuming itself onscreen. In the song, we watch the burning over and over with every chorus. In real life, I’d jumped as the theater was plunged into darkness, and Rhys had made a joke about the aliens’ ray guns hitting a little too close to home.
In “Long Ride Home” Rhys had been on tour for weeks, months, years, only to find a mysterious lover waiting for him at home. When he’d first played it for me, I’d asked if the lover was Caleb, and Rhys had looked at me, half confused and half hurt. “No,” he’d said. “It’s not Caleb. It’s you, Matty. It’s always you.” And I’d kissed him for what felt like hours. Kissed him until he begged me for more.
My favorite was “Cross-Country Blues”—partly because of the melody and partly because it felt like such a personal glimpse of Rhys. His voice got so low at the bottom of the last verse that it was almost a growl, and it made me shiver every time. I played it over and over.
Whenever Rhys called, I asked about tour. I asked question after question so we never talked about me. He told me where he was, what restaurant he’d eaten at or what terrible gas station snacks they were living off of. He told me about the shows and how great this solo or that harmony had been. I drank it up, only allowing myself to close my eyes and picture the scenes Rhys painted with his voice to guide me.
If we had to talk about me, I told him about work, about a book I read, about something that Grin had texted me or the funny picture Theo had sent of Caleb covered in dirt and glaring into the camera after he fell over in the garden. I told him about how the days were cooler now, and I was starting to see the first signs of Sleepy Hollow’s long and meticulous gear-up for the Halloween tourist season.
We decided we would carve pumpkins this year and maybe even give out candy. We agreed we needed to hire someone to clean the gutters. We pledged to run more often as the weather cooled. We confirmed that we couldn’t wait to fuck each other every which way to Sunday. We agreed on all of it, down to what kind of candy to give out. And then I’d hang up, and another night would stretch before me like a marathon. Then another day.
And I knew—I just knew—that if I could get through the rest of Rhys’s tour then everything would be as it should again. We’d be back together and I’d sleep again, and Rhys would sing to me, and we’d learn how to cook for real, and…and…it would be fine. It would all be just fine.
One Friday, Imari caught me outside my office at lunch and asked me if I needed help. I didn’t know what she meant, and she walked me into the bathroom and stood me in front of the mirror. She pointed at the blue bruises under my eyes and shadows under my cheekbones. She said if I needed help, I would always have it from her. I shook my head, humbled by her care, and thanked her.
But how could you ask for help with nightmares, like a child? How could I say, I’m not on drugs, I think the headless horseman is haunting me and if I go to sleep he’ll crush me or Rhys will bury me alive?
I told her I just needed a weekend, and she sighed and said she did too, a whole month of weekends. I thought about it, and I couldn’t remember her ever taking a vacation in the two years I’d worked at Mariposa.
Usually I pretended that my journey home to Rhys’s didn’t skirt my old neighborhood. That I always sat on the river side because I liked the view of the Hudson once we were out of the
city. But in truth, there was a stretch as we followed the Harlem River where I closed my eyes or looked the other way so I wouldn’t see it.
Hell, that was the beauty of New York. Cut three blocks over, take a different train, turn in the other direction, and whole neighborhoods, whole chunks of the city, whole chapters of your past disappear like they never existed at all.
Today on the train home, for the first time ever, I looked toward Washington Heights as we passed it. I imagined I could see dead into the heart of the neighborhood. I imagined I could see into my old house. See into the kitchen it was impossible to keep clean with that many kids running around. See the living room with the pullout couch that was always pulled out, shoes and sweatshirts and blankets strewn around. See my aunt sitting on the edge of her bed, eyes closed and fingers pressed to her temples against the din.
That night I fell asleep on the couch as soon as I got home despite myself and slept for sixteen hours. When I woke up the next morning, I had a bunch of texts from Theo, and four missed calls and five texts from Rhys. That’s when I remembered I was supposed to have gone to Caleb and Theo’s for dinner the night before. They must have told Rhys when I didn’t show up.
Rhys’s first text was teasing, calling me a space cadet, but by the last one he was clearly worried and pissed off that I hadn’t texted back. I texted him back: Ugh I AM a space cadet and I crashed out early but everythings fine. How are you?
Then I texted Theo and Caleb: Im so sorry you guys. I fell asleep. Im an asshole.
The knock on the door came before the text even chimed sent. I dragged myself to the front door with a sneaking suspicion I knew who I’d find there.
“Caleb said heart attack in the shower, but I thought maybe creepy home invasion by people with animal masks,” Theo said. Because that wasn’t terrifying fuel for my nightmare fire at all.
I pushed my tangled hair out of my eyes. “Um, no. Sorry to disappoint. Nothing quite so dramatic. I just fell asleep right when I got home and I—fuck, I woke up just now. Guess I was dragging a little this week. Sorry.”