by Anne Jolin
And she was about to have her way with me.
My airways constricted.
Clawing at the material of my shirt, I stumbled towards the breakfast bar in the kitchen. My purse crashed to the floor as I lunged for one of the chairs, but I was off balance.
I couldn’t breathe.
The flooding sensation snaked around my pulse like an ambush from the past. My aim was way off and missing my target. I fell knees first and then elbows onto the hardwood floors. If I could have felt anything other than the emotional pain searing my chest, the fall probably would have hurt. Every sensory part of my body was assaulted with memories like rapid-fire, each stab going deeper than the last as my forehead made contact with the ground.
I heard him call my name, over and over again, and like a nightmare, I was falling in the dark with no way to wake up.
No.
I felt weightless, hovering over the ground.
“Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away…”
I wasn’t sure if I actually heard it or if it was only a memory, but my consciousness seized and I stopped fighting.
I let go.
The day went black.
“I can’t.”
There was a familiar voice in my head.
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
It was deeper than I’d remembered, but still the same, and it was getting louder as I came to.
“Listen, it’s work. I’ll be home soon.”
I blinked once, then twice, opening my eyes slowly. I registered that I was lying on my sofa with a blanket laid over the lower half of my body, and my forehead had a cool cloth on it.
A man was pacing in front of the windows. Not a boy, but a man.
I would have recognized that voice anywhere.
It was burned into my brain.
We all have that one person, the one that explodes into your life and roots themselves in the depths of your world and soul. You never know it then, that your completely and utterly fucked, but you are.
There’s no coming back from that.
It was like a club. Once you’re in, you’re in, and no one gets out, no matter who you are or how hard you tried. You were a member for life.
Frankly, it was a miracle if you managed to survive at all.
I had barely survived.
My past was still on crutches, and my soul had wounds that would never heal.
We were wounded because of him.
“You’ll be okay,” Henry promised.
Lifting my cheek from my bedroom floor, I shook my head. “What if it never heals?”
“What if what never heals, Charlie?” He lifted me into his lap.
“My heart.”
What makes a man want to break a heart with ease? I wish I knew.
Just seeing his profile in the light made my insides bleed.
“Get out.” My voice came out quieter than I meant it, so I tried it again, and this time it was like a low growl. “Get out.”
I’d caught him off guard and he spun around to face me, sliding the phone into the front pocket of his jeans. “Charlie, let me explain.”
“You have no right to call me that,” I hissed.
He took a step towards me, and I recoiled like I’d been shot with a hollow point bullet.
“I didn’t know.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you live here. I wouldn’t have…”
Rising from the sofa on shaky legs, I pointed towards the door. “Get the fuck out.”
My pulse was pounding in my neck and I could barely see the outline of his body now. My vision came and went with my equilibrium in its pocket.
I was grateful.
Seeing him up close would probably make me pass out again.
“Let me explain.” He stepped towards me again and I put the length of the sofa between us.
My knees threatened to buckle and I gripped onto the back of my armchair. I would hold myself up if my life depended on it.
“Explain what?” I snapped. My voice had reached a pitch so high I didn’t even recognize it.
He held his hands out in surrender, taking caution at my tone and stopping his pursuit. “You need to let me explain why I left. You owe me that.”
I scoffed.
I owed him shit.
I could hear everything like I was underwater. The way my heart beat like the echo of a foot drum. The way my eyes closed like the white noise of an old television set. The erratic way air pushed out of my lungs like the extinguishing of a fire.
I could hear it all.
“I will call the police if you don’t leave right now!” I shouted at him.
He took a step towards me and then stopped again, sizing up my intentions.
I looked at my purse on the ground.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked at my purse on the ground.
I ran and so did he.
Tripping over my own feet, I dove. My fingers reached the straps of my purse first, but before I could grab my phone, he hauled me upwards by the armpits.
The skin under where his hands touched burned through my sweater and I screamed, “I hate you!”
I did.
I hated him so much.
“Charlie, please,” he begged, but I fought him like a woman possessed.
I elbowed him and hit him like a woman scorned.
His arms wrapped around mine from behind, securing them like a vice to my sides, so I kicked hard and connected with his shin.
He cursed.
I didn’t let up. I shook and flailed as years of suppression ignited in my veins.
Oh, how the wounded did burn.
He moved us, pushing my front up against the wall, so close my forehead touched it and I was trapped. Breathing so hard against the drywall that my lungs burned.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he scolded, and I bucked aggressively. “Jesus. Stop it.”
His body was bigger than mine, like it had been back then, and he didn’t move.
“Get. Out,” I demanded.
“We need to talk.”
I laughed and it was bitter.
So ugly, even I winced.
“Charlie.” He changed tactics abruptly. “I’ve missed you.”
My body slumped against the wall.
It was a cheap shot, a sucker punch, and it worked.
It hollowed me out.
“It’s been almost a decade. You don’t get to miss me,” I told the eggshell paint I’d picked out for this wall last spring as I spoke. I liked it then. I hated it now.
“Charlie—”
“Stop calling me that,” I hissed, as the first tear fell from my eyes. “This isn’t a Nicholas Sparks novel, Dean. You didn’t disappear because you were called off to war with some valiant or noble reason not to communicate with me. You just left. You abandoned me.” My mind couldn’t keep up with my body’s distress signals and I was burning. “But I’m all put back together now, so you don’t get to call me that.”
He pressed into me harder from behind, but the fight was syphoned from me and I was starting to shut down.
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It doesn’t matter. Cowards don’t get the girl.” I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.
It was a mistake.
The smell of his cologne had always been a trigger for me.
“But—” he started to argue.
“But nothing.” I choked against the sob suffocating my throat. “Get the hell out of my apartment.”
He shoved his face into the mess of my hair and inhaled. “What did I do to you?”
My limbs gave way completely. The only thing now keeping me upright was his body.
“No one likes a martyr,” I whispered, trying to push away from the wall.
The sobs were coming. I could feel the weight they carried breaking the back of my soul with every step they got closer.
“Charlie, I’m sorry.”
The hint of sincerity in his plea was
more than I’d bargained for, and it broke me in two. “I need you to leave,” I begged, as cries wrecked the frame of my body. “You’re… You’re hurting me.”
He tried to hold me as I started to slide down the wall, but I shook my head wildly, tears at a free-fall now.
“Please,” I hiccupped as my butt collided with the ground. “If there was ever a time—” I sobbed. “If there was ever a time when you actually loved me. Please, just go. Please leave!”
I felt his shadow standing over me, but I was falling apart at the seams and I needed for him not to be here.
I needed not to be reminded of the way his hands felt on me.
I needed not to be reminded of the way he smelled.
I needed not to be reminded of the way things were.
“Dean, please.”
My trauma was swallowing me whole, and in that moment, I was barely human.
“This isn’t over, Charlie,” he whispered, and if I’d been coherent, I might have felt his lips on my hair.
Heavy footfalls moved away from me towards the door, and then nothing.
Emptiness.
The only noise in my apartment was the sound of the Charleston as I knew her being slaughtered in my gut.
“Charlie? Are you in there?”
I heard the sound of Henry’s voice from the other side of my bedroom door, but I couldn’t speak. I had nothing left but to feel sorry for myself.
I just lay there with my head on the floor, hoping to God that any minute now my broken heart would sever in two and the shards would numb any feeling I had left in my chest.
I was pretty sure this is what dying felt like.
Maybe dying would have been better.
“Charlie?” The silhouette of my brother came into view when he opened the door, bathed in the light of the hall, only to disappear in the dark as he closed it behind him. “What’s wrong?”
The sobbing coming from my throat sounded like I was being strangled every time I tried to breathe. “He… He…”
“Shhh.” I felt him lay his head down beside mine.
“Dean… He… He’s gone.”
My boyfriend was gone.
Vanished.
“What do you mean he’s gone?”
I couldn’t find the words to tell him. I couldn’t find the words to tell anyone that the boy I’d loved since I was seven years old and he’d loved me back—or I thought he had—had left me. Not only that, he’d left me without warning in the middle of the night like a thief on the devil’s back.
It had been three months.
I hadn’t told anyone for three months, hoping he’d come back.
He didn’t.
He didn’t show up for work.
His apartment was empty.
He had no family.
He was just…gone.
Gone like he’d never existed in the first place.
Gone like he’d been something I’d imagined for all these years.
“He’s gone and he’s never coming back,” I whispered. “Not ever.”
There was a growl in the room. He was sober, I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew, I always knew, and thus, he schooled his temper quickly.
“You’ll be okay,” Henry promised.
That was the thing about my brother. He never needed as many words as other people. He never listened to wait for his own chance to speak; he just listened and he always understood, and he never judged.
Lifting my cheek from my bedroom floor, I shook my head. “What if it never heals?”
“What if what never heals, Charlie?” He sat up and pulled my teenage self into his lap.
“My heart.”
Sweeping the hair from my face, he whispered, “The only person who doesn’t know how strong your heart is, Charlie, is you.”
I sobbed into his neck. “Please don’t leave.”
“I’d never leave you alone,” he swore like an oath.
“I’m scared you’ll go too.” I clung to him with everything I had left. “I can’t lose you.”
“I know it feels like I have let you down, but I’m still around.”
“Always?”
He held me tightly. “Always, Charlie bear.”
“Where did you go just now?” Doctor Colby asked, as her upper body leaned forward in the black armchair.
I was sitting on the windowsill in her office, looking down at the sea of people returning to work from their lunch hour. Everybody in a hurry to get somewhere.
“I was thinking of Henry,” I told her honestly.
I’d learned to become more transparent with her as the years had passed. She always got it out of me regardless, so it was easier this way.
Doctor Colby had moved her practice from the university campus to downtown Vancouver roughly six years ago. The move had garnered her more clients, or so I imagined it did, and I still continued to see her a few times a year. Usually, it was on a need-be basis, and well, Dean’s arrival had been somewhat of an emotional emergency of sorts.
I was distraught, a wrecking ball of sentimentality, but I was no longer ashamed by that notion. I took pride in the fact that I managed to leave the house at all, let alone clean and clothed like an almost functioning member of society.
“What made you think of him?”
Distractedly, I watched a road construction crew on the corner. More so, I found a black hardhat and burned my suffering into the surrogate unbeknownst to him.
I was angry, still so fucking angry, but that was okay. Time had passed, but still, I found anger was an emotion I was capable of managing. Sadness, however, could still cut me off at the knees.
“Charleston, focus please.”
I stood from the window, walking over to the navy blue couch adjacent to her, and sat down. “I always think of Henry.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “But what about today made you think of him?”
She spun her pen around with her fingers; it was a habit of hers, and I watched the ballpoint move in circles.
“He was there when…” My voice dropped off and she sighed.
“Go on.”
I crossed and uncrossed my legs, picking at a nonexistent piece of fluff on my jeans. “He was there when Dean left.” His name felt like a traitor on my tongue and came out on a snarl. “He promised he wouldn’t leave me.”
“Henry?”
I nodded.
“You know that wasn’t a promise Henry was capable of keeping. It’s a promise most of us can’t guarantee we will ever keep. No one knows the course in which our lives will take us.”
She was sympathetic towards the memory of my brother, she always was, and for that I was appreciative.
I nodded again. “I know.”
She scribbled something on her notepad. It didn’t bother me. Doctor Colby had been analyzing the inner workings of my mind for years. It was a wonder she didn’t write more, actually.
“Are you ready to talk about Dean?”
Was I ready to talk about Dean?
No.
I stayed crying on the floor for what seemed like hours after he left. Eventually, when the tears subsided, I’d picked myself up off the ground, locked the front door, and collapsed into a second fit of hysteria in the comfort of my bed.
My insomnia tore through the walls.
The floorboards echoed with my cries.
It seemed as though the room itself bled in response to my agony.
Relief dawned in the early morning hours, and I slept in my clothes.
It was not a restful sleep.
I had nightmares that felt as real as the pressure in my chest.
Two times, I woke screaming.
Was I ready to talk about Dean?
No.
“Yes,” I answered anyway.
She removed her glasses off the bridge of her nose and placed them on the top of the pad in her lap. “How did you feel when you came home and saw him in your space like that?”
My palms got sweaty.
&nbs
p; “Violated.” I shook when I spoke, remembering the moment I registered his face.
He’d gotten older, obviously. The stubble on his cheeks was new, but his hair had been the same light brown. It was his eyes that bore through to the core of my identity, the dark blue irises that had held so many promises, so much of a future unlived.
He had wrinkles around his eyes that looked like he’d laughed a lot in the last decade.
Seeing his face had pushed me into a free fall.
Doctor Colby nodded. “That’s not surprising. It’s been so long, and that would be a grave violation of your privacy.” Sometimes I wondered what I’d done to deserve that, to have life play such a cruel joke on me. “I think a healthy way to prevent something like this from happening again while he’s working in your building might be to establish a distinct set of boundaries.”
My stomach bottomed out. I’d been so wrapped up in the immediate nature of the chaos that I hadn’t stopped to think that he’d still be working in my building.
That my world would be plagued by him.
“Do you think that’s something you might feel comfortable doing?”
I ran the insides of my palms over the top of my jeans. “Yes.”
“Okay.” She put her glasses back on and made another note. “My suggestion would be that you either call or write a letter to your building manager, only if you feel comfortable doing so, requesting that any further access required to your unit must be approved by you directly.”
That sounded manageable.
Dave was a nice guy. He’d understand.
“This way I think you can do your best to avoid any more blindsiding.” I nodded. “Boundaries are healthy, Charleston. It’s important you express that need to those around you. Especially Dean.”
Dean.
Jesus.
My life was the plot of a bad book.
Would the damaged woman be repaired by the boy who played a part in breaking her?
No, I thought not.
“I don’t plan on talking to him again,” I argued, and she shook her head.
“Of course you feel that way.” There was a but coming; I knew that from a history of sessions with that tone of voice. “But I think it would be wise to accept the fact there’s a good chance that will be unavoidable in the near future.” Told you so. “Do you know how much damage was done to your apartment in particular?” Doctor Colby inquired.