Released

by Shay Savage

  “Not the point!” Tria glared at me. “I’m going to go put these away.”

  She brushed past Mandi and rushed up the stairs.

  “Family reunion going swimmingly, I see?” Michael walked in from the kitchen with Ryan just behind him.

  “You married a bitch,” I informed Ryan.

  “Yeah, but she’s hot,” Ryan said with a big smile. He came up behind a bitter-faced Amanda and wrapped his arms around her waist. He tried to kiss the side of her neck, but she pushed him away.

  “I need to speak with Chelsea,” she muttered as she walked away.

  “You go do that,” I quipped back. “And next time I decline your fucking invitation, take the fucking hint.”

  She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked over her shoulder at me.

  “You know I only did that for your own good,” Amanda said. “It didn’t really work out as well as I hoped, but I only did it to bring you back with everyone. Ryan wanted it so much. I know we haven’t really talked since we were still in high school, but I know how much you meant to this family, and how much they meant to you. That can’t all have changed, not even after everything you’ve been through.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her but didn’t respond.

  “She means well,” Ryan said as he walked over. His hand clasped my shoulder. “She has a shit way of showing it, I know. She never learned how to do any of that shit as a kid.”

  “What shit?” I asked.

  “Being with people,” Ryan said with a shrug. “You remember how she was in high school.”

  “She was a total bitch,” I said. “She was only pleasant if she was winning at Halo.”

  “Why do you think I still let her win?” Ryan chuckled.

  “Amanda has her methods,” Michael admitted. “Sometimes they are as harsh as yours can be, Liam.”

  I felt the phrase fuck you and the word bullshit creep around on my tongue, and the urge to cross my arms and roll my eyes followed immediately when I bit my tongue. While I considered various inappropriate reactions to the truth, Tria came back down the stairs.

  “Are you ready?” Tria asked tentatively. She looked around for a moment, presumably looking for her female cousin-in-law. “Hello, Ryan.”

  “Hey there, Tria,” Ryan said. “Welcome to the family.”

  “Thanks,” Tria said.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I grabbed her hand and got myself the hell out of there. Seeing Tria’s insides on a monitor was a much less uncomfortable idea than hanging around my cousin’s wife.

  Damon drove us to the doctor’s office, and we hung out in the waiting room full of screaming little kids and women with simply huge stomachs. Tria smiled and laughed at the kids’ antics, but it all just made me nervous. Once it was our turn, Tria lay down on the table while a nurse got everything set up.

  “All ready?” I asked. I could hear the nervousness in my voice.

  “I am,” Tria said. “Are you?”

  I could only nod. Any words would have given my anxiety away.

  Tria shivered and complained about the cold goop the nurse smeared over her belly, but as soon as the nurse moved onto the next step and images began to appear on the monitor next to her, she stopped talking altogether and just stared at the screen.

  “What is that?” she asked in amazement.

  “That would be your baby’s heart beating,” the nurse said. She smiled and pointed out the head and stomach, the arms, and the legs. “Did you want to know the sex?”

  “Yes,” we replied in unison.

  The nurse chuckled, moved the magic wand around Tria’s stomach again, and then proclaimed we were going to have a daughter. I had no idea how she could figure that shit out—I couldn’t tell the head from the foot.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered. “She was right!”

  “I thought she would be,” Tria said. “She was just too confident about it.”

  “She was once confident that the wino across the street was Hitler,” I informed Tria. “I wasn’t about to take her word for that, either, though the dude did have one of those fucked up mustaches.”

  Tria giggled, and the nurse printed off a few pictures of the baby.

  “What are we going to name her?” Tria asked as we climbed into the back of the Rolls. She hadn’t stopped staring at the picture, and I had to hold her hand so she wouldn’t trip over anything.

  “I have no fucking idea,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  “Something will come to us,” I assured her.

  Tria realized she had been impolite, and quickly shifted toward the driver’s seat and showed Damon the pictures.

  “It’s amazing what they can do these days,” he said.

  “Do you have children?” Tria asked.

  “I have a grown daughter,” he told her. “She used to babysit Liam when he was young. She has two children of her own now. I remember when she came home with similar pictures.”

  “I think she looks like you,” Tria said as she held the image up to the window.

  “You are so full of shit,” I said.

  “I mean it,” Tria insisted. “She has your bone structure.”

  I rolled my eyes, smiled, and pulled my wife close to me as Damon drove away.

  Though I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at in the grainy black and white images, I couldn’t help but glance at them over and over again as we drove across the city. At one point, I reached over and wiped a tear from the corner of Tria’s eye.

  “She’s going to be beautiful,” Tria whispered.

  I was never one to argue with a woman, and I wasn’t going to start now.

  Chapter 15—Change the Scenery

  “There are two bedrooms, a bathroom with a tub and shower, and an eat-in kitchen.”

  The landlord of the small rental house just five blocks from campus was thrilled to death a family was looking to move in instead of a group of students, who were a lot more likely to trash the place. It was just a small house in a row of other small houses, painted light yellow with brown shutters. There was a nice-sized porch with a swing, which Tria beamed at before we even walked inside.

  “The second bedroom is right next to the master bedroom, so it will be perfect for your impending arrival.” She turned and smiled broadly at Tria, who instinctively covered her protruding stomach.

  It wasn’t huge yet, but as little as Tria was, it was quite obvious at five months pregnant, Tria was having a baby. I tried to hide the fact that I was counting the days before she was further along than Aimee had been when she lost Matthew.

  It was strange how knowing his name—even if it was the name Aimee’s mother had graced him with—made thinking about him a lot easier. Erin said it was because I had a name for the mourning, but I thought it was more about separating him from the baby Tria was having.

  A girl.

  That helped, too.

  The place was perfect; I had to agree. For me, there were two major perfection points—it was big enough and fit the budget. Tria liked that there was a tiny, fenced-in back yard where she could take the baby outside to play.

  We moved in four days later.

  “I think I was getting used to having a car when we needed it,” Tria said as we lugged groceries up the steps of the porch. She carried the light bulky stuff—the bread and toilet paper. I wouldn’t let her carry any of the heavy stuff, and she refused to let me do it all by myself.

  “I’m sure Damon will drive you around whenever you want,” I reminded her.

  “I think Michael might actually enjoy having his driver back,” Tria said.

  “He and Chelsea both really liked having you in the house,” I said, “driver be damned.”

  “What would you think about having them over for dinner?” Tria asked. “It would be a good start to the hundreds of years of repayment I owe them both.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I shoved canned food into one of the cabinets. I put all our stuff away as Tria pulled out a coup
le bags for Krazy Katie. “Did you want to go over and see her this afternoon?”

  “Probably,” Tria said. “We haven’t been there in two weeks.”

  “We left her a month’s worth of stuff last time,” I said.

  “True,” Tria agreed, “but I feel bad about not seeing her. She has to be lonely without her smoking buddy on the fire escape.”

  We hauled two bags of supplies back outside and to the bus stop. It took a little over an hour, but we eventually made it to our old apartment building in the shit part of town.

  Maybe it was just because I hadn’t been there for a while, but the place looked even worse than I remembered. There was trash fucking everywhere and three hookers hanging out a block away in broad daylight. I glanced up to the fire escape, but Krazy Katie wasn’t outside.

  I wrapped a protective arm around Tria as we walked into the building and up the stairs. The place smelled funky, which was another thing I didn’t really remember. We walked down the hallway, glanced in tandem at the door of the apartment where we used to live, and then bypassed it for the next one. I banged on the door.

  “Open up, you crazy bitch!”

  “Liam! Stop that!”

  “It’s a term of endearment,” I told her.

  “Oh, it is not!” she snapped back. She reached up and knocked again.

  “Katie! Katie, we have some things for you!”

  No answer.

  “I don’t think she’s here,” I said. “If she was, she’d open the door—she always does. She wasn’t out on the balcony, so she must have gone somewhere.”

  “Where?” Tria asked as she turned on me and put her hands on her hips. Her expression was tense and worried. “Where does she ever go, huh?”

  “She’s supposed to meet with her social worker every week,” I reminded her.

  “And what day is that?”

  I huffed a breath through my nose.

  “Tuesdays,” I said. “Today’s Monday. I’ll go through the window.”

  Leaving Tria at the door with the groceries, I hauled myself up the fire escape ladder and lifted my leg over the railing. There were about fifty cigarette butts neatly lined up at an angle against the grid so they stood on their ends. I shook my head a bit before yanking the window open and climbing inside.

  The funky smell was more prevalent as soon as I got in. It was enough to make my nose sting a bit, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was a stale, old smell, and it got worse as I walked toward the front door.

  “What is that smell?” Tria asked as soon as I opened the door.

  “Not sure,” I admitted. I tried not to show my concern, but I had a tight little knot forming in the pit of my stomach. I left the door open and went straight for the bedroom while Tria carried the bags to the kitchen.

  It was dark, but that wasn’t what set me on edge. The smell was stronger and familiar in a way I didn’t like at all. It reminded me of when my great aunt was in hospice care right before she died, and Dad had taken me to visit. It was pungent and reeked of endings.

  I looked at the filthy floor, and my gaze came to rest on the only piece of actual furniture in the room—the large double bed. The blankets and sheets were crumpled at the bottom, and the mattress lay exposed. A tiny, crumpled heap lay in the center of the mattress. Her dark eyes stared blankly toward the closet.

  “Fuck,” I mumbled.

  It took three steps to get to the side of the bed. Once I was there, I didn’t know what to do. I reached out tentatively to touch her shoulder, not knowing what the fuck was going to happen. Just as I felt her cool skin, her eyes blinked twice.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Liam?” Tria called from the other room.

  “She’s in here,” I said. I looked back to the lump on the bed. “You scared the fuck out of me, you crazy bit—”

  My words halted as her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to convulse.

  “Tria! Call 911!” I screamed toward the other room. “Get an ambulance here!”

  My heart began to race as I tried to hold her enough to keep her from flying off the bed and hurting herself. I didn’t know jack shit about seizures but figured that was a good thing to do. The attack didn’t last long, but once it was over, she didn’t open her eyes again, and the distinct smell of urine stung my nose.

  This wasn’t good—not good at all.

  “Krazy Katie?”

  No answer.

  I shook her just a little and stopped almost immediately. She had just been shaking violently, and that didn’t make her answer me. I tried grasping her fingers but still got no response. I could feel her pulse in her wrist and see her breathing, but there wasn’t much else.

  “Liam, what’s happening?”

  “Did you call?”

  “I did. They’re coming.”

  “Something’s wrong with her,” I said. I looked up, desperate to have her give me some sign that she knew what to do, but Tria just stared with wide eyes and an open mouth. “I mean really wrong. Fuck, Tria, what do I do?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  I didn’t know if it took forever for someone to get there because they were busy, if EMTs didn’t like coming to this neighborhood, or if it was just my perception. By the time the paramedics arrived, Krazy Katie had started to cough up blood. Though her eyes opened as they lifted her up onto the gurney, she never said a word.

  Tria called Damon, and he drove us to the hospital. We watched a parade of patients come in and out of the ER with bloody gashes, nasty head bumps, and one obviously broken arm. Things picked up and slowed down in regular intervals until we hit about two in the morning, when a bunch of drunken idiots with busted lips and knuckles were brought in by the police, and a doctor finally came out to give us an update on Krazy Katie.

  I stopped breathing and could barely feel Tria’s hand as she gripped my fingers. She used the other hand to cover her mouth as the doctor spoke. Tears immediately began to pour from her eyes.

  Lung cancer.

  Advanced.

  Resting now.

  Nothing more we can do.

  A few days.

  Maybe a week.

  I felt my body go numb as the doctor spoke. Tria had to shake my arm before I even realized he had left, and a nurse was trying to dig information out of me.

  “Are you the next of kin?”

  “No,” I managed to say. “I don’t think she has any. I mean, I don’t know of any. No one ever came to visit her.”

  “We lived next door to her,” Tria clarified, “but we moved out a while ago. She has a social worker who might know more. Liam? Do you have the worker’s number?”

  I fumbled around for my wallet, dug out a little card, and handed it over.

  “We’ll contact the social worker,” the nurse said as she walked out of the room.

  I’d heard that phrase about people feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, but this felt more like a body-sized vise had wrapped itself around me to the point that my insides were going to just pop right out of the top. I dropped down on one of the nasty plastic benches because it happened to be where my ass landed. It could have just as easily been the floor.

  I was never one to cry at bad news, but as soon as I dropped to the bench, the tears just overflowed.

  Chapter 16—Choose the Name

  Tiny.

  That was the word that kept coming into my head as I looked down at the miniscule figure lying motionless in the middle of an oak box that was way too big for her. Cream-colored satin surrounded her withered body.

  The little funeral home next to the small, Catholic cemetery was nearly empty.

  Tria and I sat in the second row, and Krazy Katie’s social worker sat behind us. Across from the social worker sat Erin, who refused to listen to me when I told her she didn’t need to come. Damon hung around in the back row, like chauffeurs usually did—always in the shadows. In the front near the cask
et was a priest standing up and talking about how Krazy Katie was in a better place.

  He didn’t actually say Krazy Katie—I amended it in my head. As far as better places went, well, I couldn’t really argue with that. Where she had been sucked balls.

  I hadn’t been able to refuse when Michael said he would pay for a proper funeral for the woman who had been my friend, if that’s what she had been. I wasn’t really sure how to think of her. I felt as if I were in a fog of disbelief for the past four days.

  That’s how long she lasted.

  The doctor said she had to have been in rough shape and a lot of pain for a long time, which made me feel fucking great. How could I have missed that? How could anyone have missed that?

  But we did—we all did. I missed it. Tria missed it; her social worker—everyone. By the time I started wrapping my head around what was happening, she was gone and I was borrowing a suit from Ryan for the funeral services.

  I told my family to stay away—they didn’t know her. There was no point in their coming. Michael agreed but only if Damon drove us so we didn’t have to take the bus or whatever. I agreed so he would get off my back.

  Tria’s fingers gripped and released my hand as she used the tissue in her other hand to wipe her nose. I tried not to focus on the stress she was under and how it might impact the baby. Erin assured me it would be better to let Tria get her emotions out at the funeral than to try to keep her calm, so that’s what I did.

  Honestly, I was having too hard a time keeping myself together to worry overly much about Tria and the baby. Maybe the change of pace was good for me. I cried in the hospital when they first told me, but I hadn’t since then, not even when Tria came running out of the hospice room to tell me it was over.

  Krazy Katie had been suffering, and watching her like that sucked. She couldn’t breathe right, and every time she tried, she would cringe from the pain. It was too stressful for Tria and way too much for me to take when I couldn’t even handle my own shit. I leaned on Michael and Chelsea a lot, and I even had two more sessions with my mom.

  They went about as well as the first one.

  To top it all off, I felt like shit when Krazy Katie was gone. If it had been something other than cancer, I probably would have been okay with feeling like shit, but I didn’t. I felt like shit because part of me was glad it was over.