Falling Away

by Jasinda Wilder

  She stares out the window as I pull into a subdivision of small houses, one-and two-bedroom single-family homes worth maybe a hundred and fifty grand at most, most of them with faded, peeling paint and sagging gutters and ten-year-old cars in the driveways. She directs me deeper into the neighborhood, letting the thick, tense silence build between us. Finally, she points to a tiny blue house with gray shutters and a small patch of overgrown yellowing grass. There's a black mailbox attached to the wall by the front door, the kind with the flap on top, and it's overflowing with junk mail and catalogues and magazines and envelopes. Several newspapers in translucent pink bags sit on the front stoop in a pile. A green hose lies in a haphazard coil in the driveway at the side of the house, and a chain link fence separates her driveway from the side yard of the house next door. There's a detached garage, and another tiny patch of dying grass out back.

  I pull into the driveway, and Echo is out of the truck before I have it in park. "Thanks for the ride, Ben. See ya." She closes the door.

  I put it in park, shut it off, and get out. Echo watches me lumber awkwardly after her to the front door. She just stares at me, and when I'm on the stoop with her, she finally sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Ben, how clear do I have to be?"

  "I hear what you're saying, Echo, but it doesn't match the way you were even half an hour ago. I don't know what you're thinking, or what you're feeling, and I don't expect you to actually do something totally crazy like actually tell me, so I'm gonna stay and help, and you can just go ahead and deal with it." I meet her gaze steadily, keeping the hurt her words inflicted off my face and out of my eyes. "You can't do this alone, and you're not going to."

  Her hazel-green eyes stare into mine, her brows drawn. Eventually she just sighs and unlocks the front door and pushes it open. "Fine. Whatever. Suit yourself. But don't expect--"

  "I never expected anything, Echo." I move past her, assessing the interior of the house.

  There's a tiled entranceway where the door opens to a coat closet, with a living room to the right. A picture window faces the street, with a couch on the wall kitty-corner, a TV mounted to the wall opposite the couch, and a cheap coffee table between them. Beyond the living room is the kitchen, separated by nothing but an abrupt transition from threadbare tan carpet to cracked and bubbling linoleum.

  The house smells musty, with hints of mold and rotting food. There's a styrofoam container on the coffee table, the lid closed with the handle of a fork sticking out between the lips of the clamshell, two empty Coors cans beside it. A hallway off the kitchen leads, I assume, to the bathroom and bedrooms.

  Echo just stands in the entrance, hands fisted at her sides, struggling to breathe. "This house. Jesus, this house." I wait for her to continue, and eventually she does. "I grew up in this house. She never moved after I left for school. She said she was going to, and I think she even looked at apartments, but she never moved."

  I close the front door and lean against the wall to get my weight off my knee, content to wait for her.

  "I don't want to be here. I don't know how to do this." She sniffles. "I'm a bitch, and you don't deserve it. I'm sorry. Just...go, okay? I'll be fine."

  I notice she didn't take back anything she said, though. So I still don't know which version of Echo is the truth, the Echo that was in my bed, or the Echo standing before me now.

  I take her by the shoulders and turn her to face me. "I'm not leaving, so just listen. Here's what's going to happen: we start in the kitchen, clean out the cabinets and the fridge and all that. I'll run out and get a bunch of boxes and some contractor bags. Okay?" She nods, silent, and keeps her eyes on the floor. "Okay. So you start there. Use whatever garbage bags there are here to clean up the trash first, and I'll be right back." She nods again, and looks so mixed up and full of agony that I want to kiss her and take it all way, but I don't.

  I wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her against me for a quick hug, and I kiss the top of her head. "I won't say it'll be all right. But I will say that you'll be okay. Someday. For now, just...keep breathing, okay?"

  She lets out a shuddery breath and pushes away from me, sets her purse on the floor near the coat closet and kicks off her shoes, moves into the kitchen. I watch as she digs a box of garbage bags out from under the sink, shakes one open. I leave her there and pick up a flat of moving boxes, a tape gun, and packing paper from a U-Haul store, and then stop by Home Depot for a box of contractor bags. When I get back to the house--only finding it again after several wrong turns--Echo is standing in the kitchen with three full garbage bags around her feet, flipping through a cookbook.

  She glances at me, and then goes back to the cookbook, her expression distant, as if seeing memories rather than me.

  I haul the bags outside and toss them to the curb. I empty the fridge and freezer item by item, leaving only the half-empty box of Coors. We'll need those, I think. When the fridge is empty, I start on the cabinets and drawers. Echo glances at me now and then, but seems absorbed in the cookbook, which I realize now has notes in the margins, recipes and adjustments scrawled in the whitespace. The handwriting, I realize, isn't feminine, but masculine.

  I dump the silverware drawer into a bag, and start on the flatware.

  Echo glances up as I'm about to toss a couple of plates into the bag. "Not those!" she cries. She stands up, sets the cookbook aside, and takes the plates and bowls from me. "The other stuff is fine. But this set...not these."

  I realize the plates I was about to throw away are fragile and old looking, from an antique set of fine china. I set aside four more plates, six bowls, six tea plates and matching mugs, and six appetizer plates. "Family china or something?"

  She nods. "Yeah. It belonged to Grandma. She gave it to Mom when she got married. It's...very old."

  "And the cookbook?" I ask.

  She's quiet for a long moment, turning a bowl over and over in her hands. "It was...my father's." She glances at me. "And no, I'm sorry, there's no way in hell I'm getting into that right now."

  "I wasn't going to ask," I lie.

  She softens a bit. I bring in a box and assemble it, tape the edges together. I wrap the china in several layers of packing paper and stack it all in the box, set the box aside, and resume emptying the kitchen. Three contractor bags later, the kitchen is empty. I take a couple bags into the bathroom. It's getting more personal now. There's a hair dryer on the sink, still plugged in, a curling iron beside it, two tackle boxes of makeup, and a box of tampons on the floor beside the toilet.

  I hear a stereo turn on, static of the tuner as Echo finds a station. A guitar chord thrums, and "Country Must Be Country Wide" by Brantley Gilbert starts. Cheyenne liked country music. I don't know what kind of music Echo likes. Shit, I don't know where she goes to school, what she studies. She might have a boyfriend back at school. I shake off that train of thought.

  "Echo?" I call out. She peeks her head into the bathroom. "Anything in here I should set aside?"

  Echo steps in, peeks into the cabinet under the sink, rifles through the makeup. "Leave the makeup. Everything else goes."

  So I toss everything, the cleaning products and the bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hair oil and face oil and body lotion and whatever else the two dozen bottles might be. The pink and white Venus razor sitting on the corner of the tub. The pink goofy sponge thing. At one point, I toss something into the garbage bag and a whiff of something erupts, the scent of shampoo from the slightly opened top. The scent hits me hard, because I have a sudden and powerful olfactory memory of that shampoo scent on Cheyenne's hair.

  I finish in the bathroom, drag the heavy bag out to the curb, and return to find Echo sitting on the couch, flipping through a photo album, tears streaming down her cheeks. There's a stack of photo albums on the coffee table, a jewelry box, the two tackle boxes of makeup, a couple stacks of dog-eared paperbacks, a wood-handled hairbrush with fine blond hairs still tangled in the bristles.

  "I'm trying to find all t
he...personal stuff. The sentimental things," Echo says without looking at me. "Just so you don't think I'm not doing anything."

  "I didn't think that."

  She flips a page, touches a photograph with an index finger, and sniffles. "Why are you helping me?"

  "It's too much for one person to do alone." I sit down on the couch beside her, stretching out my throbbing, aching knee. "And whatever else we may or may not be, I'm your friend. And friends help each other."

  She sniffles again. "You suck." But she says it gently, so it means the exact opposite.

  "I know."

  Echo flips the page, and I glance down at the pictures. There's Echo as a little girl, platinum blond hair in pigtails, wearing Mickey ears, flashing double thumbs-up and a gap-toothed grin in front of the Magic Kingdom castle.

  "There are pictures of me, and pictures of Mom, but none of us together." She touches a picture of herself on a carousel horse, from the same trip, taken from the horse beside hers, I imagine. "It was just her and me for most of my life. No one to take pictures of us together."

  She turns the page, and then another, and then I stop her, pointing at a photograph. "There's one of the two of you."

  It's a shitty photograph, blurry, the frame tilted sideways. It looks like it was taken in the backyard of this very house. Echo laughs. "Yeah. Great-Grandpa Gene took that. He was a hundred, literally. Everyone else was inside. It was my birthday. Mom was taking a picture of me, and Grandpa Gene just took the camera and snapped this."

  "Well, it's not a bad photo for a centenarian."

  "I think he had a heart attack a couple days later." She glances at me. "So, what's left?"

  "Just the bedrooms."

  "The hardest part, then."

  I nod. "Yep."

  She stands up, sets the album on the coffee table, and precedes me into the smaller bedroom. Echo's, it looks like. I wasn't sure what I expected from Echo's childhood bedroom, but it's not what I find. There are posters on the wall, but not of boy bands or horses or rock bands, but rather posters of Broadway stars. I recognize Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Wicked, Rock of Ages, and there are other posters of other singers I don't know. There's one of Yo-Yo Ma, and there's an artistic piece depicting the blinding lights and crowd as seen from on-stage, the back of a woman's head and her hands cupping an old-school type of microphone, the rectangular kind.

  There's a rack of CDs between a desk and the double bed, and it's jammed to bursting with CDs, overflowing, double-stacked and more piled on top of others. The music spans genre: I see Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks and George Strait and the Dixie Chicks and Sara Evans and Miranda Lambert, Sarah Bareilles and Sarah Brightman and a bunch of other presumably classical singers, as well as pop artists like One Republic and Maroon Five and Muse and Train and bands crossing more into rock from the eighties, nineties, and into the new millennium. Basically, any and every kind of music possible. I even see a few hard rock albums from Korn and Linkin Park and Three Doors Down.

  There's surprisingly little else. The desk with a jar of pens and a pair of scissors, a chest of drawers, a closet, the bed with a patchwork quilt neatly tucked under the edges of the mattress.

  "Impressive music collection," I say.

  Echo snorts. "That's not even a fraction of my collection, just what fit on that little shelf." She crosses into the room and crouches to examine the plastic jewel cases. "It is fairly representative of my taste, though."

  "You like a little of everything, then."

  She nods. "More like a lot of everything. Music is what I do, after all."

  "Really?" I try to sound casual when I'm anything but.

  She shrugs. "Yeah. It's my major: vocal performance."

  I'm not sure why just yet, but something inside me sinks. "Oh. Wow, that's...awesome. Where--" My voice cuts out, oddly, and have to start over. "Where do you go?"

  "Belmont." She's looking at me, now, hearing the off note in my voice. "What's wrong?"

  "Belmont. In Nashville." There's only one Belmont University, so the clarification is pointless.

  "Doing It Our Way" by Gloriana comes on, both fitting and painfully out of place.

  "Yeah," she says, standing up and turning to look at me. "What?"

  I shrug and shake my head, not willing to face what the realization has done to me, what I'm feeling and thinking. I refuse to acknowledge it. "Nothing." I lift the bag in my hand. "So what stays and what goes in here?"

  She doesn't take her eyes off me. "Everything goes. I cleaned this room out when I moved to Nashville. Those jewel cases are empty. I have the discs at school." She moves in front of me as I take a step deeper into the room, stopping me with a hand on my chest. "Ben, what's the deal?"

  "Nothing."

  She sighs. "Now who's shutting down?"

  I groan and drop the bag, sit on the bed. "I'm from Nashville."

  She stares at me. "What?"

  I nod. "Yeah. Lived there my whole life, from the time I was three. I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but we moved to Nashville when I was three. I'm about thirty credits shy of a bachelor's from Vanderbilt. I was the starting quarterback there for three years straight."

  Echo blinks. "Shut the fuck up. You're kidding, right?"

  I shake my head. "Nope."

  "I have friends who go to Vandy. I mean...Jesus. I dated a guy who was on the football team--two years ago?"

  "What was his name?" I ask, feeling shaky.

  "Marcus Shaker."

  I fall backward onto the bed. "You dated that asshole? Jesus. He's a hell of a tight end, but he's a total dickbag."

  "You know him?"

  I stare at her. "Like I said, I was the starting quarterback."

  "Wait." She waves her hands in a 'hold on' gesture. "Ben...like Benjamin Dorsey?"

  I nod. "That's me."

  She tilts her head back. "Holy shit. Marcus hates your ass."

  I laugh. "I know, and the feeling is mutual." I glance at her. "Wanna know what our beef is?"

  "Sure."

  "We were at a frat party one weekend. Our sophomore year. I caught him roughing up this chick in the bathroom. Pawing at her, calling her names. Had his hand up her skirt, and she was fighting him off, but...she wasn't winning." I shake my head, remembering. "I pounded his ass into the ground. He missed three games because of that fight. I reported it, but the girl refused to press charges, and the school never did shit about it. But he got a lesson from me, that's for damn sure."

  "That--that sounds like Marcus," Echo whispers. "I didn't date him long."

  Something is off in her voice, in her posture. "Echo?"

  She shakes her head, turns away, head ducked, fingers plucking at frayed white threads of a hole in the thigh of her jeans. "Don't worry about it."

  "Because saying that makes me worry less."

  She shrugs. "You stopped him that time. But that wasn't the only time he did something like that."

  "Meaning he tried it with you?"

  Echo blows out a short, sharp breath, head tilted back on her neck. "It doesn't matter. Not anymore. I dealt with it a long time ago. Just...drop it, okay?"

  "Echo, come on, you can't just--"

  "I said drop it!" She turns, shouting. "It's old news, and none of your business."

  I slide up behind her, my hands curling around her arms. "Echo, Jesus--"

  She shakes me off. "I'm not talking about it, Ben. I don't need your help." She turns, takes the bag from me, pushes me out of the bedroom, through the living room to the front door; I let her push me, though I'm not sure why. "You've done enough. Thank you, and goodbye."

  "So it's like that, huh?"

  She holds the front door open, gestures out. "It's like that."

  I stop in the doorway, turn to look at her. We're close. She's holding the front door, standing in the tiny foyer, eyes hard, posture ramrod-stiff, but her lower lip trembles and her fist on the doorknob is white-knuckled.

  "More Than Mil
es" by Brantley Gilbert plays on the radio.

  I'm at a total loss for words. "Echo, I--"

  She just shakes her head and cuts me off. "Nothing to say, Ben. It's not about Mom, it's not about Marcus. It's just...I can't do this with you."

  "Why not?" I close in, stand so close she has to peer up at me. "Why are you pushing me away?"

  "Because you're getting too close, Ben. And that's the last thing on earth I have the time or emotional energy for."

  I glance down and see the outline of her phone in the hip pocket of her tight jeans. I pry it out, hand it to her. "Unlock it real quick."

  "Why?"

  "Just do it." So she does it, hands it back. I dial my cell number, and after my phone has rung twice, I hang up the call and save her number into my phone. And then I call her phone from mine and save my number under "Benji." I hand it back to her. "Can I at least see you before you leave?"

  She shrugs. "I don't know. I don't know anything right now. I just know I'm overwhelmed and you're making it worse. You're confusing me, and I don't need that right now."

  "Fair enough." I start to turn away, but then change my mind.

  I grab her face in both hands and kiss her hard and deep, wrestling her lips with mine, slashing her tongue with mine. I cup her cheek in one hand and slide my other hand to her waist and crush her against my body.

  She lets me kiss her, stunned, for several seconds, and then I break away. She gazes up at me, two fingers to her lips, like she can't believe I just did that. "You suck," she whispers.

  And then she pulls me back in, closes the front door, and then we spin and her spine is pinned against the door and Echo is lifting up on her toes to kiss me. She tries to go gently, but I'm having none of that. I don't know what's driving me. It's not mere lust, though there's that in spades. I want to prove something to her, but again, I'm not sure what.

  When her lips touch mine, shivering and trembling, her breath soughing slowly over my tongue, I breathe in her scent and then dive in to steal her oxygen, demand her kiss, demand heat, demand fire. And she gives it. She lifts up on her toes and clutches my shirtfront and gasps and relinquishes gentility in favor of aggression.