by JA Huss
“Really?”
She nods, gently.
“Well, that’s fucked up.”
“Fair enough. But there is another way to see it. And that’s that it just is. And what you do with what is is what makes you you.” She looks around again at our surroundings, “And baby, I’m so, so, so proud of who you’ve become.”
My shoulders don’t heave this time, and my breath doesn’t quicken, but tears begin falling again. “You are?”
“Cross my heart,” she says. And then adds, “I feel like I don’t have to say the second part.”
And just like that, Mom has me laughing again.
I don’t care what she says. I have missed her so much.
After I stop laughing, I take her hands in mine again.
“What now?”
“Sweetie...” Her shoulders rise and drop, and she lets out a sigh. “You know what now. She’s waiting.”
I look up at the sky, or whatever it is above us that seems bigger than sky. I look around at the water everywhere. The quiet, peaceful cataracts and the rippling, cresting waves. I notice the obelisks again and ask, “Do you know what those are holding up?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. But they look strong. Which is unsurprising.”
“Why?”
“Because you built them.”
And before another millisecond can pass, I have pulled us together and wrapped my mother in a hug. She hugs me back and strokes my head again.
“How can I bring you with me?” I ask, the sound of my voice muffled by her hair.
“The same way you keep me with you already,” she says, softly.
I sniff through my tears so that I can say, “I love you.”
She pulls back, looks me in the eyes – our eyes – and wraps her palms around my cheeks. “I love you, Tyler. More than you can ever know.”
I slowly let my crying stop and then ask, “How do...?”
“Lie down here,” she says, gesturing to the ankle-deep pool we’re in. I do. The water splashes and laps around my ears.
“Now what?” I ask.
She steps back, away from me, and the water starts running by my ears faster. Louder. The pool is getting higher, engulfing me. Carrying me like I’m being run backwards down a water flume of some kind.
Over the increasingly noisy sound of the rushing river, I shout, “I love you, Mom!”
“I love you too, honey!” she calls out. And then, “Oh! Hey! Be careful!”
I smirk at that, because that’s something she used to say when I was going off to do something dangerous. Which was all the time. And I offer the same response I used to give back then. “Come on, Mom. You know me. That’s not gonna happen.”
And she offers back the same retort she always used to give as well. “I know. But I have to say it anyway. I’m your mother!”
And then the current sweeps me away.
“One, two, three, four, five.” I hear the count happening quickly and feel something heavy pressing on me. Then I feel something. Lips. Touching my lips. Perfect lips. Soft, delicate, kissable lips with a precious little Cupid’s bow. Then again, I hear...
“One, two, three, four. Come on, you sorry son of a bitch!” And again, lips on my lips. And now I feel a pain in my chest. A weight. But a weight that feels like it’s being lifted. No. Not lifted. Ripped. Ripped right out from the center of me.
And now I can hear coughing. And as I hear the coughing, I start to realize that it might be me who’s doing it, because the sound seems to correspond with the searing pain I feel all through my ribcage and sternum. And now the coughing turns into gagging, and the gagging turns into something that sounds like vomiting, and then my eyes open and I can see a tiny geyser of water spurting up from my mouth.
And then a face enters my field of vision. Maddie’s face. The look in her eyes is one of terror and astonishment. And even though I hate that part for her, I love that it’s her I’m seeing. Because... because it’s all worth it. Everything. Every cost, every loss, every moment that isn’t absolutely perfect is made perfect just by virtue of her being.
And as I cough again, that pain is back, and I hear something that sounds like a crack. To be precise, it sounds like a bone cracking. To be even more precise, it sounds like a rib bone cracking. And to be very, very precise... It sounds like my rib bone cracking.
“Oh, shit!” I shout, as I roll over on my side onto the pool deck. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Logan’s lifeless body floating in the water, a bloom of red expanding out away from him. And glancing down the length of me, I see a ripped t-shirt, soaked in my blood, tied around the place in my leg where the bullet went in.
“Ty? Ty? Tyler! Talk to me!”
“Hey, babe,” I croak out. “Can you go back to the kissing stuff?”
“I wasn’t kissing you! I was giving you mouth-to-mouth!”
“Oh. OK. Maybe I don’t understand how kissing works.”
She swings herself behind me and puts my head in her lap. Her naked lap. Where I am now looking up at her naked breasts, and just like that, Chuckie shows up to say hi.
She does kind of a double-take as she gives me a once-over and sees what’s happening down below my waist. “Are you goddamn kidding me?” she says.
“I dunno, babe. It just happens. Cut me a break. I’m having a rough night.”
“Christ. Can you stand up?”
“Maybe? I dunno. Do you need, like, all of your bones to stand up and shit?”
“OK,” she says, rising up and laying my head gently down on the concrete. “Shit. I’m calling an ambulance. Stay here.”
“May wanna call the cops too,” I tell her as she’s running inside. Watching her ass from my contorted position here on the deck makes me almost forget that I’m pretty fucked up. Almost. Then the pain shoots through me again and I’m reminded with a quickness.
“Damn. The cops. Yeah,” she says. “What the hell will we say?”
“I dunno,” I moan, my face now squarely against the ground. “Let’s start with the truth and work our way backwards.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” she says, hopping from one foot to the next. “I don’t wanna leave you here.”
“It’s OK. I ain’t going nowhere.” And then I moan again as the pain from kind of everywhere makes itself known. So this is what real, actual pain feels like. Yeah. This blows.
She comes running back over. “No, no way. I’m not leaving you.”
“Babe,” I say, summoning as much composure as I can. Which is actually just exhaustion, but it looks the same, probably. “Babe, I’m fine. OK? I’m fine. I’ll be right here.”
And now her lips start trembling. She nods, but the tremulous lips and scrunched-up face let me know that she’s about to lose it. I work my way around to my back again, even though it hurts like a bitch, so that I can see her face. I take her hand and press it to my chest. My chest that is once again marked with the reminders of the life I’ve lived up to now. I don’t mind that they’re still here. They’re part of me. They’re part of everything I’ve been through. They’re part of making me who I am. And that person is lying here holding Maddie Clayton’s hand, so I must’ve done something right.
“Babe, listen. Grab the phone. I’m not going anywhere. OK? I will be here when you get back.”
She sniffs back her tears, squeezes my hand tightly and says, “You will?”
“Where am I gonna go?”
“I dunno. You went somewhere a few minutes ago. I thought you were...” She chokes off before she gets out the last word.
“No way. I’m right here. Hey... I go where you go.” I wink. Or blink. Not sure.
She sniffs one more time and says, “Promise?”
I think of all the things I could say. I could tell her that of course, I promise. I could tell her that I’ll do my best. I could tell her that she has no idea what I would do to make sure that we’re together for as long as possible. And even beyond that.
Yeah. I could say a lot
of things.
But instead, I simply go with...
“Cross my heart.”
I feel like I don’t have to say the second part.
Chapter Twenty - Maddie
December 31st
New Year’s Eve
11:50 PM
“Here. It’s a regular-sized straw. I’ll pour the juice in a cup and you can drink it that way. OK? Please?” That’s me, talking to Tyler. The nurse gave up trying to get Tyler to drink from the juice box – which he says he won’t because the tiny straw freaks him out – and went back to the nurses’ station mumbling something about “bullshit way to spend New Year’s Eve.” But he has pills he’s supposed to take and he started choking when he attempted to dry-swallow them, and then he spit them back up.
I seriously don’t think I could love him more if I tried.
The fact that he can be the toughest son of a bitch I have ever met and the most hard-headed infant all at the same time is just... well. It’s perfect.
He tried to leave the ER last night and just go home, but then he collapsed on his way out the door, so the doctors insisted he be admitted. At least we were able to get him a private room. I can’t imagine we’d be here right now if he had to share a room with somebody. I can’t imagine it because he said, “I ain’t fuckin’ staying if I gotta share a room.”
The cops have been back a couple of times over the course of today. They actually just left a little while ago. We’ve now told them the whole story of exactly what happened three different times, but they just keep asking the same questions, always prefaced with some version of, “Let me make sure I’m getting this right.”
We called Robert and Evan in Paris to kind of fill them in on everything that’s happened. Evan wanted to jump on a plane and come straight back, but Tyler convinced him that there’s nothing they can do, and we’ll take care of stuff with the house. Although it’s possible they won’t be able to come home when they planned anyway, depending on how long their place is a crime scene. We had them on speaker and I did hear Robert saying in the background, “You didn’t teach him how to turn on the alarm?” Which is a fair question and caused me to wonder how long Logan had been watching us in the house after we got back. But then that thought creeped me out and I decided it doesn’t matter much now anyway.
We also gave the police Ricky’s card to have them confirm everything we were telling them with him, but I don’t know if they’ve been able to make contact. God only knows if Ricky’s even still got a job. I hope he’s OK. I wonder if we’ll ever see that guy again. I dunno.
“I don’t need no fuckin’ pills,” Tyler tells me now. “Seriously, babe. I’m fine. Know what? Let’s get out of here. We’ve got ten minutes. We can get to the Strip and at least see some fireworks. K? Fun times. Let’s go.” He throws the sheets off his legs and goes for the IV drip in his arm, but I manage to stop him before he pulls it out.
“Will you stop?” I implore. “Babe, we’re not leaving. Seriously. Give that up. We’ll be able to see fireworks from the window. Here, I’ll pull the shade up.” I do.
“Fuck,” he says, flopping back down. “I’m... Fuck. I’m sorry.”
I sit on the edge of the bed and stroke his cheek. “Why? For what? What are you sorry about?”
He bites at the inside of his mouth and lets out a sigh. “We should be in a fuckin’ treehouse and wearing loincloths and... I dunno. I’m sorry.”
“Babe,” I say, “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Nothing,” he mumbles. “Stupid.”
I turn to him now and say, “Listen to me. OK? Please? Can you listen for a second?” His lips purse, like he wants to protest, but then he relaxes and nods.
And I begin.
“So... I used to think that there was a right way to do everything. It was what I would tell myself to excuse the fact that things seemed to be so off track for me. Like, I just hadn’t figured out the right way yet, and the right way was out there and as soon as I could crack the code, everything would fall into place. You following me?”
He nods. I go on.
“And then you came back into my life, the way you did.”
“I’m—”
“And,” I cut him off, “I came back into yours. And, as we both well know, at that moment, it pretty much seemed like the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. In fact, I think I may have said words to that effect.”
“Yeah, I may have heard something about it.”
I kiss him on the forehead and go on. “But that’s only because of the simple fact that I had an idea of what the right way to straighten shit out for myself might look like and it didn’t, at all, resemble what was happening then. Right?”
“Sure.”
“But this”—I gesture between the two of us—“this is, by far, and without even close competition, the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. Do you get that?”
He shrugs and half mumbles, “I dunno.”
“Well, if you don’t know, then you’re not paying attention. Because it is. You are. We are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And whether we’re in some magnificent hotel suite somewhere, or on a beach in Mexico being shot at by drug runners, or in a hospital room on New Year’s Eve, as long as it’s us, I’m good, babe. As long as we’re together, it is the right way for things to be. And I don’t know if you can believe that, or if I could even explain why it’s true, it just is. And so, while I now know that there isn’t and never will be a right way to do everything, I know that as long as we’re scaling Everest together, we’ll figure out the best way to do it. For us. And we’ll always reach the top. OK?”
There’s a long moment of silence while he just stares at the wall, away from me.
“Babe?” I ask. “What is it?”
“That was just so beautiful that I don’t wanna fuck it up by arguing that I would take the ‘being shot at by drug runners’ thing out of the speech, because that really did suck pretty bad.”
I close my eyes, shake my head, and smile. “Just take your pills, dumbass.” I stick the pills in his mouth and then place the straw to his lips as he sips.
Once he’s finished swallowing, he leans back and lets his head land on the pillow. He grimaces a teeny bit. “You OK?” I ask. “Hurt too bad?”
“Nah,” he says. “I think I’m just tired.”
“Well, stay up for a couple more minutes so that I can kiss you at midnight while you’re still awake, will ya?”
“Just a kiss?” he asks.
I look at him with arched eyebrows. “Why? What were you thinking?”
“I dunno.” He shrugs. “That Chuckie should get to ring in the new year too.”
I just start laughing, which I imagine I will be doing a lot of in the years to come, and I say, “You. Are. Insane.”
“You’re only just figuring that out?”
“No,” I say. “No, it’s been pretty obvious from the start.”
“Yeah? And that doesn’t freak you out? That you’ve hitched your wagon to an unpredictable maniac’s train?”
I press my head to his so that I can look right into his eyes. “No,” I say. “You wanna know why?”
He nods, and after I let out a small moan of want and desire and passion that lasts for several long moments, I tell him, with all the honesty that I feel in the depths of my once-filthy, currently being cleansed, evil, pure, devilish, angelic, and entirely contradictory soul that could never be satisfied with anyone more predictable...
“Because, Tyler Hudson Morgan, my love, there’s no one else it could’ve been.”
Chapter Twenty-One - Tyler
Silence. That’s what I hear inside my head.
Silence.
Not one random thought. Not one errant notion. Nothing. Nothing but the sound of Maddie’s voice telling me, in so many words, that she loves me.
I’ve been debating with myself whether or not to share with her that I saw Scotty. And my mom
. And Pete, and Jeff, and Nadir, and...
But I don’t think I will. Not now. Maybe someday. But not just yet.
Not just yet.
“There’s no point in waiting to find Heaven. It’s all already there. You just have to seize it.”
Yeah, Scotty. You’re right. I get it, man. You’re goddamn right.
And from somewhere down the hall, or from one of the other rooms, I can hear the countdown beginning. Ten, nine...
Maddie looks at me and smiles. Eight, seven...
I smile back at her so hard that it feels like my cheeks will rip at the seams. Six, five...
She puts her lips right up against mine. Four, three...
And she whispers, “Happy New Year, Tyler Morgan.” Two, one!
And when she kisses me, I whisper back, “Happy new everything, Madison Clayton.”
She’s right. I can see the fireworks from the window. Explosions. Tiny bombs going off in the night sky that signal new beginnings, and celebration, and hope. Distant and joyful eruptions of expectation and possibility.
And the very idea of that makes me laugh.
“What?” she asks, the smile still on her face. “What’s funny?”
Glancing around at my broken and exhausted body, all strapped up to tubes and lying in this hospital room with Maddie here – multicolored rockets going off outside that seem to welcome the joyful coming of a new morning – I stroke her hair and tell her exactly what’s so funny, remembering a thought I had not so very long ago...
“I just... I never dreamed Heaven would look like this.”
END OF BOOK SHIT
If you are reading this, the first thing I want to say is thank you.
Thank you for coming on this journey with us and immersing yourself in this adventure. I hope you have enjoyed it. (Presumably, if you’ve read all four books, then you have enjoyed it at least a bit – if you haven’t enjoyed it, then you should take a look at why you want to punish yourself.)