The Muse

by Carr, Suzie

  Regret crawled up the back of my throat and traveled into my brain where it sat like a heavy fog, drowning out the sun light and all the good I’d managed to do along the way.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I walked into work the next morning and poured myself a cup of coffee to the vibes of Kelly Clarkson singing “Miss Independent.”

  I spotted Katie in her cubicle. She bent over and her underwear showed. I could’ve taken this to a winning level where I claimed the one-up position for the day. Instead, I sat idle at the coffee stand chewing on a coffee stirrer contemplating the mess I created every time I indulged in messing with her.

  I threatened her somehow. I threatened her equilibrium. I attracted her husband, her boss, even the friend she could’ve had in Doreen. I stole the limelight of credit on that big project, garnered a raise when the company had buckled their belts tighter and no one else got one, won the affection of our boss, and received those things that Katie desired most—recognition, raises, great parking spots, high-profile projects, a seat in focus groups, pretty much everything she wanted. She deserved the right and pleasure to hate me.

  I didn’t hate her. I should’ve hated her for being too pretty, too shapely, too athletic, too focused, too determined, too intelligent. Yes, the envy ripped through me and forced me into discomfort, but not enough to hate her.

  She annoyed the shit out of me. She laughed too loudly, played too roughly, tried too hard to be chummy with higher-ups. She put two-and-two together with Sanjeev offering me special privileges, and her husband checking me out, and Doreen shunning her for me, and squirmed in her high heels.

  I toyed with her because I could. I knew she could handle it. And, it felt good because in those temporary moments, I craved a mighty and powerful control over the present, helping to shadow the past. But in the moments that followed, I hit the ground hard, empty and cowardly.

  I sipped more terrible-tasting coffee, hoping it would block the sadness crushing my heart. How I wanted to go back to that day when the sweet wink in Eva’s tweet and the sultry smile in her picture melted through my troubles and fears. I wanted to be CarefreeJanie again, that girl who lived a good life, the girl who never bullied another girl out of fear of losing ground with her friends, the girl who never exposed her weak heart to a best friend who would destroy her life moments after the discovery, the girl who never uprooted her family and sent them off to a prison sentence where they sought unsuccessfully to recapture the light that once shined on their great lives, the girl who Eva Handel first fell in love with.

  Now, another girl had captured her heart, a girl who didn’t come riddled in the sticky sap of a dying tree, a girl who could proudly declare her innocence and beauty without fear of being uncovered as sinful. She’d never have to fear that look of disgust in Eva’s eyes, the sudden detachment of her love, the hollow gap after she ran from the ugliness of lies.

  I tossed the coffee down the drain, watching it spiral away from me. Then, I turned on the faucet and washed out my mess. I would not heave my ugly past into her life and drag her down into my tunnel of darkness. She deserved the bright light of purity, not the shadows of sin. I would work that day and focus on what I could control. I would proofread Sanjeev’s annual report and make it shine. I could control that. I would eat lunch with Doreen and listen to her stories of her grandchildren and genuinely smile and nod at her inflections.

  I walked out of the collaboration room, determined to stay in control. I walked past Katie. She shoveled pictures into a box. None of her usual paperwork cluttered her desktop. She looked up at me and her eyes leaked tears. Her face flushed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Congratulations. You win.” She dumped a can of pens into a box.

  “What do you mean?”

  She pulled in her upper lip, bit down hard, but the pain won out and her face strained under the pressure. The tears fell in giant drops onto her naked desk. “I was fired a few minutes ago.”

  A sight of her sitting in an unemployment office begging for work flashed in my mind. Ravaged from months of no paycheck, her eyes swollen, her face puffy, her lips battered from all of the biting. She’d be skinnier with sallow skin due to the cruel shedding of nutrition from her life. Her eyes would be sunk, lacking that creative, competitive spark all because I messed with her, causing her to mess with me, and with one ugly insult after the other, our lives were inextricably pulled out from under us both. The fun stripped away, we would spend our lives trying to get back to that place we filled before the silly games began. “How?”

  “I took things too far.” She tossed a couple of picture frames into the box. “I hacked into your system, stole your idea for the new public service announcement and handed it in as my own.”

  She exhaled a shaky breath, looked around her empty cube and the tears rained down hard. “My envy got out of hand.”

  I shook off the stunning blow. “I feel like I’ve just been punched in the face.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, staring at me with hollowed eyes too similar to Rhonda’s. “Like I said. You win. I’m out of your hair for good.”

  I walked away still numb to the news. I sat down at my seat and opened to the daily e-newsletter. I scrolled through it and counted two comments from Katie. My heart sat heavy, and I labored for air. Another sadness joined the one already in me, and this one coated me in an emptiness of unease. Losing Katie didn’t feel good.

  My lips numbed, my fingers buzzed, my head pounded. I couldn’t take this burden on, too.

  I stood up and walked back over to Katie. She was blowing her nose. “Why do we do this to each other?”

  We stared blankly at each other, two boxers without gloves, blood dripping from our foreheads, our cheeks, our mouths, defeated and tired, ready to throw in the towel.

  “You just rattle me to the point I can’t think straight,” she said. “I can’t compete with you on regular terms. You’ve got all the balls in your court, and I’m left with these flat ones that don’t bounce. I had to level the playing field somehow. I figure, you stole my credit last time. I could steal yours this time around and we’d be even.”

  “How did they find out?”

  “Sanjeev knows your writing. He took me out for a coffee this morning and asked me if I had stolen it from you. I couldn’t lie to him.”

  “You thought that I wouldn’t have challenged you on taking my idea?”

  “I didn’t care. I figured I’d just tell him you were lying and jealous.”

  Our tangled mess of tactics bunched up between us. We were both equally as guilty of destructing each other and at playing this warped game. I thought back on my article and the question I posed in it. Was this the secret? Find the good even in your enemy and bring it out?

  “We can fix this.”

  She looked at me, a flicker of hope dancing on her wet eyelids. I saw a child reaching out to me from the dark, murky depths of a cold, harsh lake, begging for me to save her from the unknown below her. She stared at me with the same beg as Rhonda did so many times before. I definitely couldn’t carry another burden.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Sure we can.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I felt sad for her. I was the one left holding the prize of a job that I didn’t even want. “I’m about to do something really stupid.”

  “Well, don’t let me stop you.” She smiled weakly, tossing out one last hurrah.

  I smiled sweetly at her for the first time since before her husband groped me on the side of the bar. Then, I tore off to Sanjeev’s office.

  # #

  He was typing away when I entered.

  “Can we talk?”

  He stopped typing. “Sure.”

  “Don’t fire her.”

  “I already did.” He turned red and folded his hands.

  This gave me power to continue. “Unfire her. Please?”

  He sat back. “I don’t understand. You two d
on’t exactly strike me as friends.”

  “She’s good at what she does. I wouldn’t be nearly as successful without her.”

  “She stole your work.”

  “I handed it to her. She embellished it. We worked on it together.”

  “But she didn’t give you credit.”

  “She was getting even with me for the time I did the same to her.”

  He sat up and raised his hands. “I don’t want to know any more.”

  “We mess with each other constantly. It’s what we do. Things got out of hand. I wiped out all of her files on her computer and she freaked. So, she retaliated with the PSA project, claiming it as her own. She was just teaching me a lesson. And, when she found out that I actually saved all of her data to a flash drive, she confessed to me about handing in the PSA project under her credit. We’re both guilty and were just toying with each other.”

  He buried his head in his hands. “You two are killing me here.”

  “Please don’t fire her. We’re actually good together. We play off of each other’s talents.”

  His face blotched. He searched my eyes for direction.

  “Please?”

  “I don’t think she would’ve come to your rescue like this.”

  “Of course she would. She’s actually a nice person when you take away the insecurities. No one is perfect, and we’re all just as scared by this revelation as the person next to us.”

  He stared at me dazed and confused by my philosophical introspective moment.

  “Are we okay here?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Just ask Katie to come into my office on your way past her?”

  “Sure thing.” I walked away feeling lighter. Then, I walked right up to Katie. She was bent over her file cabinet and looked up on a sigh.

  “Boss wants to see you.”

  Panic popped on her face. I just winked, giving myself one last hurrah.

  # #

  I felt more alive in the days following Katie’s revival back to the land of Martin Sporting Goods. We stopped messing with each other and actually made great headway on some looming projects.

  Then, Eva came to town for a meeting. She didn’t stop and say hello to me to Doreen to Katie. All business, she simply slipped into the conference room for her meeting and ducked out afterwards.

  I checked her Twitter feed during the rest of the day and she hadn’t posted anything.

  I felt so disconnected, so hollow all over again.

  I took to visiting her Twitter feed regularly in the weeks that followed, and this just stirred up more anxiety. I dove into a funk again.

  Travis called me several times over the course of my funk. I dodged his calls and would later return with a text message apologizing for missing his call. I’d tell him I was super busy those days with work projects and that one of these days I promised, we’d catch up on life. I’d wish him well and end these inappropriately long text messages with a smiley face.

  Larry was not pleased. He knew me well enough to understand work would never steal my time. He didn’t bother to knock the night he barged in on me while I was knee deep in another one of my crying tirades. “Would you just get off of your pride horse and go call the woman?”

  “I can’t.” I blew my nose. “It’s too late.”

  “You look terrible.” He shook his head, disgusted with my current state.

  “Well, we can’t all have the perfect fairytale love story like you and Tim. Man meets man; they fall in love, and live happily ever after sneaking around behind the wife.”

  He stretched his eyes in horror, scoffed and waved me off before shoving back through my front door.

  I hated the world and everyone in it. I picked up my glass of water and slammed it against my living room wall. Water and glass sprayed every which way. It felt remarkable. So, I picked up my coffee mug from the morning and tossed that, too. Again, ceramic and coffee rained back in delight. Incredible release. Off to the kitchen. I reached for glass after glass and flung them towards my living room. Some hit walls, some hit end tables, some hit the bike that Larry placed back in my condo after my initial freak out, some hit the carpet and bounced, unaffected by my game. I needed them affected. So, I stormed into the living room, picked up the glasses and pitched them to the ceiling where they sprinkled down on me. I wanted to get hurt. I wanted to bleed. I wanted to feel something other than this dread.

  By the time Larry arrived back in my condo and scooped me off of the pile of glass, blood trickled beneath my bare feet. He cried with me as he carried me out of my hell and into his clean, fresh, crisp condo. He brought me to his bathtub and ran water over my bleeding feet yelling at me, cursing me out, telling me what a fool I’d become. All the while, tears sprang from his eyes and his mouth downturned into a deep frown. The water stung my feet where the glass still remained planted in my skin. At one point, the sting overcame me, and I fainted. The next thing I remembered was waking up in Larry’s bedroom with gauze wrapped tightly around my throbbing feet and Larry’s concerned eyes bearing down on me. “Why?”

  I could only shrug. Not even Larry would understand the pain of perpetual loneliness.

  “There’s someone here to see you.” He turned towards his living room and waved.

  Travis walked into his bedroom with a hesitant step, staring with horror at my gauzed feet.

  “What’s wrong,” I asked him. “You act like you’ve never seen someone try to hurt herself before.” I laughed at my wit.

  He didn’t.

  Neither did Larry.

  Larry stood. “I’ll let you two chat while I make us some dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said to him.

  “I don’t care.” His face steamrolled into a blank abyss. He really didn’t.

  Travis walked up to the bedside and stared at the edge of the bed.

  I patted it. “Have a seat.”

  He nodded as if bracing to climb into a tank of spiders, and then he sat next to me. He fidgeted with his fingers, failing to look up at me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said to him. “You think I was trying to end it all. But, I wasn’t.”

  “I know that,” he said staring at the headboard instead of me. “Otherwise you’d be dead and I’d be kneeling beside your coffin instead.”

  This should not have been a thought that shocked me. But, I shook like someone had just submerged me in a tub full of ice.

  Travis grabbed the blanket on the edge of Larry’s bed. He covered me up. “The pain feels good. I know. It feels better than the emotional pain. That just sucks the lifeblood right out of a person.”

  I looked up and met eyes with the most mature seventeen-year-old kid I’d ever met. His eyes didn’t mock or strain under the pressure of seeing someone so foolish. No. His eyes sat soft, welcoming, waiting for me to open up and trust that I was safe and free to spill my secrets. “When I was slamming the glass against the wall, I felt free. And when it cut my feet, all the sadness left me. Well, at least for a little while.”

  “You’re better than this. You know that, right?” He pointed his mature eyes at me, poking me, urging me to accept this notion as truth.

  Fresh tears burned the back of my eyes instead. “Whatever you say, kid.” I stared up at the ceiling fan wishing it were whirling so I’d have something dynamic to look at other than the caked-on dust on the edge of the blades.

  “What happened?” He asked this with such sincerity that the tears just spilled and before long, the truth followed.

  “I’m just tired,” I said to him. “Tired of constantly bowing and running away from life.”

  “Why are you then?”

  I told him everything about how I screwed up a good thing, about how even as an adult I let fear bully me into a life I didn’t want to live, about how my past caught up to me, and about how I punished myself for something terrible I left behind.

  “Then go back and get it and set it right.” He shrugged. “It’s as simple as that.” />
  “It’s too late for that,” I said this with a stretch to my voice.

  He frowned. “I’m worried about you.”

  “Look, I’m fine.” I sat up to show my strength. “I really am. It was a stupid thing I did tossing glasses every which way. I get that. I’m fine.”

  “If you’re truly fine, then, maybe I can still convince you to come with me next weekend to speak at the event. I really want you there. We’re going to show the short film, but before we do, I really want you to speak to the audience about your experiences. This could be your chance to set things right with your past, face your demons, show these kids they’re not alone. I think it might really be cathartic to talk it out and share with others facing similar paths.”

  “I can’t, Travis.” I sighed.

  He stared at me without anger, without hate, without remorse. “Do you know how valuable you are to me?”

  I mocked this display of gratitude with a scoff. “Stop being so mushy. It’s so not what I’m about.”

  “You don’t get it do you? You don’t get how valued you are.”

  “The world would still rotate if I left it this very second. How much value do any of us really hold?”

  “You pulled me from suicide. The fact that you still don’t think you’re valuable just shows how you view me, as having no value, too.” He stood up and walked to the door. He turned before walking through it. “It’s not always about you. Until you realize that, you’re going to continue tossing glasses against walls and have people come to your rescue. Why would you want that for yourself? Why don’t you want to be the rescuer instead?”

  “How?” I yelled at him.

  “Start by taking action.” He slammed the door.

  # #

  My words, originally crafted for others, came back to me and knocked sense into me. We owed it to ourselves to dig deep and find out what tools we had in our disposal to crush the shit out of our fears so we could get on living our best days. Those who helped guide others to find and lend their tools would reap rewards far too powerful for any bully to come in and swipe away. The leverage in digging deeper, in serving others, offered power. When a person came outside of this shell to protect another, he helped erase fear and replace it with a light so powerful no one could extinguish it.