by Karina Halle
“You have to want to go,” she says.
I stare up at her, resting my chin on her thighs. “I want to go,” I tell her.
“But you can’t do it for me,” she says.
But I would be doing it for her. I’d do anything for her, anything at all.
“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I admit, voice choked with my pain. “I don’t want to be the man you hate, only the man you love.”
She sighs heavily and I can feel how heavy her heart is. I hate that I’ve done this to her, my beautiful, happy girl. “I just don’t know…” she trails off. “This relationship is just so new and…shouldn’t it be easier than this?”
I swallow hard. I have no answer. Because even though loving her scares me, not loving her scares me even more. How can love be easier? How can it not be anything but absolutely terrifying?
“Loving you is what’s easy,” I tell her after a beat. “That’s the only thing I know.”
She glances down at me, her brow softening, even though I can see the battle behind her eyes. I haven’t won her back yet, not fully.
“I have to go to the washroom,” she whispers to me and I let go of her legs, getting to my feet. She shoots me a small smile as I’m back to looming over her and leaves.
I pull out the chair and sit down, head in my hands, waiting in anticipation for some clear sign that everything is going to be okay. But there’s never a sign for that, is there?
All I know is that that things have to change. And as much as it hurts, as scary as it is, I will make the changes. I’ll face everything head on, I’ll work through, anything just as long as she’ll stay with me. The thought of her leaving is this big black hole in my chest, promising nothing but emptiness.
Her phone on the table rings, startling me, and I glance at it. She doesn’t get many phone calls and the number says Toshio, her brother. Normally I would just let it ring but in her emotional state, I figure she may need to talk to him. Who knows, maybe she’d already called him, wanting to come home.
I answer it. “Hello, Lachlan speaking.”
There’s a pause. Then, “Lachlan. Is Kayla there?”
Something about his voice puts me on edge. “She’s in the bathroom, should be out any minute. Do you mind holding?”
“Sure,” he says so softly that it’s almost an afterthought.
I get up and take the phone over to the bathroom, knocking on the door.
“Kayla?” I ask and she opens it, stepping out into the hall. I show her the phone. “It’s your brother. Toshio.”
She frowns. “Okay, thanks.” She puts the phone to her ear, turning away from me slightly. She clears her throat. “Hey Toshio.” A long pause. “Um, no,” she says to something and her voice warbles slightly. She looks at me but she’s not really seeing me. Her eyes are slowly growing wild.
She gasps loudly, mouth dropping open. “What?! When did…” Her hand flies to her chest and I’m right next to her, peering at her, trying to figure out what’s happening. Her lip trembles and she starts to shake. “No. Oh, no. No. Oh my god,” she whimpers. Her eyes pinch shut and I put my hand at her waist to support her. Something absolutely terrible has happened, far more terrible than what happened last night.
Now she’s nodding, staring ahead with pained, glassy eyes, trying to breathe. “Okay,” she says quickly. “Okay, I’ll be there. I’m coming. Just…” she pushes her fist against her forehead and yells, “Oh god. Oh god.”
The phone drops out of her hands, skittering across the floor.
I quickly bend down to pick it up, trying to hand it back to her but the call has already ended. She turning away from me, fingers pressed over her eyes, her mouth open and I have to pull her back by the arm before she walks into a wall.
“What happened?’ I ask gravely, prying her fingers from her eyes. “Kayla?”
She stares at me in a new kind of horror. Her lips open and close. Eventually she says, “My mother. She had a stroke, they think. They don’t know. Oh god. They…they found her. Toshio found her a few hours ago in the house and…and…” She swallows loudly, licking her lips. “She’s in a coma. The doctors had to put her in a coma to protect her brain. Oh god,” she gasps and nearly falls over. I quickly wrap my arms around her, holding her up. She starts shaking in my arms. “I have to go home. I have to go home right now. I never should have left her. I never should have left her.”
“It’s not your fault,” I try and tell her but I know my words fall on deaf ears. My good friend guilt has a way of blocking everything else out.
“I have to go home,” she repeats, her face frozen in this state of blank fright. “I have to get on the next plane out of here.”
I bury the crushing fear deep inside. “Of course,” I tell her. “Let me handle that okay. Just go and pack. We’ll get you back to your mother. Everything is going to be fine, okay love? Everything is going to be fine.”
She nods and turns in a daze, heading over to the bedroom.
I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. If her mother doesn’t pull out of this, Kayla will be beyond devastated. More than that, she’ll be an orphan, just as I was. And though she grew up with two loving parents, when I only had one and for a short time, I know what it’s like to feel utterly alone in this world.
This is going to destroy her.
I lean against the wall, trying to breathe. Our relationship is hanging on by a thread, I’m probably the person she trusts the least at the moment and now she has to go back home. I can’t even go with her because of rugby, even if she wanted me there.
Still, I have to make sure. I could try.
I head to the bedroom to see her shoving everything in her suitcase, a blank expression on her face.
“Do you want me to go with you?” I ask her.
She barely looks at me. “You can’t go. You have rugby.”
“I know I do but this is important.”
She shakes her head, grabbing a pair of jeans out of the laundry basket. It’s all happening so soon. She’s leaving.
It would be completely selfish to fear that she might not ever come back.
“You stay here,” she says. “This is…I have to go be with my brothers. We have to figure out what to do.”
“I know,” I say softly. “But I could make something work. If you needed me, you know. For support.” The truth is, I probably couldn’t make anything work. Not right now, before our first game. But if she needed me to be there, if she wanted me there, I would do whatever I could.
“You stay here,” she says again.
I nod. “Okay. I just wanted to make sure.”
I go to my computer and quickly book her a ticket on the next flight out of Edinburgh. There’s one that leaves tonight, stopping over in Newark and then LA, but at least she’d get to leave as soon as possible.
And just like that, both our worlds completely change for the second time today. We’re both silent and reeling on the drive over to the airport, with Lionel and Miss Emily in the back seat to keep me company on what I know will be a very lonely drive back home.
Everything is happening so fast, my heart and mind can barely catch up. One minute I’m begging her to stay, to give me a second chance. The next minute she’s leaving and it’s out of our hands. She’s leaving and what we are as a couple, who are to each other, is being left completely unresolved. But that’s the least of our problems right now and right now I don’t think I deserve to dwell on anything that remotely resembles myself.
It’s all about Kayla. And that’s where my heart breaks all over again. Because I know how much she loves her mom, how much responsibility she feels for her. I just want to be with her, by her side through all of this. I want to be the rock she so desperately needs. I want to be the hand she reaches for at night, the chest that she cries into.
And skip, skip, skip goes time.
I’m getting whiplash.
We’re now at the security gate and she’s already said a teary goodbye
to Lionel and Emily in the car, and she’s all checked in and now we’re standing a few feet apart and the short distance between us feels a continent wide already.
“I know I’m going to regret this moment,” she says quietly, her tone still flat, in shock.
“What do you mean?” I ask, reaching for her hand. It’s cold and limp in mine.
She blinks a few times, then studies my face, her eyes pausing at my nose, my lips. “I know that in the future, when things settle down, in whatever way, I’m going to look back at this moment and I’m going to regret that I didn’t take it all in. That I didn’t see who was standing in front of me. That I’m going to wish I could recall your face.” She shakes her head and a single tear spills down her cheek. “None of this is sinking in. That I’m leaving. I don’t know what’s going to happen. With her. With us.”
I raise her hand, flipping her palm up and kissing it. “Your mother is going to be fine. You’ll get there and she’s going to be fine. She’ll know you’re there. She’ll pull through, okay? And us. We’ll be fine too. You’ll come back to Scotland when she’s better, love.”
But as soon as I say the words, I see the look in her eyes. The look that says she doesn’t know. The look that said that maybe she was planning on leaving anyway.
Sorrow carves a path through my chest.
She was never planning on staying.
It takes all my strength to stop from collapsing to the ground, right there in the airport.
“I’m sorry,” she says to me.
I try to smile. I fail. “Don’t be.”
“I love you, you know.”
My vision blurs. “I love you too.” But my voice cracks and it’s all too obvious that I’m being decimated from the inside out.
This is probably the last time I’ll ever see her again.
And now I know I’ll regret this moment too.
For not forcing myself on her plane.
For messing everything up and preventing us from having a chance.
For letting her go.
I can’t let her go.
With tears in my eyes, I grab her face and kiss her hard on the lips, letting all my love, all my cares, all my pain melt into her, as if she could take all of me with her.
I let out a soft sob against her mouth, my hands starting to shake.
This is the end.
We’re both so blindsided.
She pulls away from me first, sniffing hard, mascara underneath her eyes. “I have to go,” she whispers.
Then she turns away.
Walks away.
Disappears behind the security partition.
And I’m lost in the distance between us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kayla
The flight attendant is telling me to buckle my seat belt but I barely hear her. I can barely move my fingers, they are so cold. I feel like a block of ice, numb to the marrow, but I think it’s keeping me alive, keeping me from losing my mind to worry and grief. So I welcome the way I move, slow motion, underwater. I hope it wraps around me for all the time to come.
If I try and think about any of it, it creates cracks down my middle and I am trying so hard to hold it all together. On one hand there is my mother, in a coma, on the threshold of life and death and none of that would have happened if I had been there. It’s my fault through and through that this happened and I have no one to blame but myself.
On the other hand there is Lachlan, the man I love, the man with demons I can’t fight, that fight me back, and I left him. I left him in Scotland and I left our relationship broken with no chance of repair. I might never see him again and that too, even for all his faults and his self-ruin and his terrible addictions, feels like a death as well.
Shut it down, I think to myself. Bring up that big black heart and shut it all down.
It’s a shame. But it’s the only way I’m going to get through this in one piece, even though I know I’ve already left a vital part behind in Scotland.
When my plane finally lands in San Francisco, I’m a walking statue. The only thing that gets through is seeing my brother Nikko, along with Stephanie, waiting in arrivals.
“Oh, honey,” Stephanie says softly when she sees me, running toward me with open arms. She holds onto me tight, sniffing into me and it takes so much to not break down and lose it. I have to stay strong though, because if just seeing her makes me cry, I’m not going to get through the next few days.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, pulling back. Her eyes are swollen from tears. “Toshio called me and told me what happened, said Nikko was going to pick you up. I had to come along.” She looks around me. “Lachlan couldn’t come?”
I shake my head. I can’t even explain.
She winces. “It’s okay. I’m here. We’re all here for you. Nicola, Bram, Linden. We’ll get you through this.”
I nod, appreciating it more than anything. I look over at Nikko and give him a soft smile.
Nikko is the second oldest, a really smart software engineer with a wife and a toddler. He’s always been the quiet one, the calm one, the old soul, and I’m glad he’s the one who came to get me. Nikko always provides the right amount of comfort.
“Kayla,” he says, embracing me. “I should have been there. We should have done more.”
I shake my head. “No. I was wrong to leave.”
“No,” he says adamantly, pulling back. He stares intently at me. “Kayla you have done so much for her. So much. Her sons just haven’t been there and we should have been. We should have never let you take on so much by yourself.”
Oh god. Now his eyes are watering. I can’t do this.
I turn away. “Let’s just go. Please. I need to see her.”
The drive to the hospital feels surreal. It just doesn’t seem like anything other than a bad dream. Then again, the last twenty-four hours have been a nightmare, with Lachlan starting it all. My eyes pinch shut at the image of him dropping to his knees, holding onto me for dear life as he sobbed his apologies. I knew he meant it all. I knew he did. But the damage was already done.
My beautiful beast. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.
I lean forward, curling over the pain and Stephanie reaches forward from the back seat, rubbing my arm, telling me it will be all right. She doesn’t even know the half of it.
Once at the hospital, we go upstairs and I’m hit by the painful wails, the sterile smells, that heaviness in the air. Each step we take down the hall seems longer than the first and there’s a part of me that starts to panic, wondering if it will all be too late by the time I get there.
Eventually we get to the ICU and see Paul and Brian in a small waiting room, talking to the doctors. I give them quick hugs as they tell me Toshio is on his way, had to drop off Sean somewhere.
The doctor, a tall blonde woman with a no-nonsense face, proceeds to tell me everything as Steph holds my hand.
My mother appeared to have a major stroke, blood clot in the brain.
Toshio came over to the house and found her unresponsive on the kitchen floor, called an ambulance.
They’d said the damage so far points to her being on that floor for a very long time.
In the back of my head I think about when I rang her to tell her my news.
And she never answered.
Could that have already been it? Could I have been so selfish in my desire to stay with Lachlan that I was calling her up to tell her this while she was suffering from a fucking stroke?
Loathing myself has reached another level.
The doctor then tells us that she’s been put into a medically induced coma in hopes of keeping the swelling down. The coma shuts down everything in the brain so that in extreme cases such as this one the brain has a chance to recover.
“And what are the chances of recovery?” I ask quietly. I glance around at my brothers’ faces and I’m hit with how grim they look. They already know. Of course they already know. The chances aren’t good.
The doctor gives me a tight smile. “We can’t say for sure yet. It depends…if the swelling recedes, then we can try and lighten up the coma and see if she can come back and what her level of function is.”
“If she can come back?” I ask incredulously.
“Our goal is to get her out of the coma as quickly as we can. We don’t want to have her under for any more than we should. But it’s still a risk to put her there. We never know if the patient will come out of it, even if we lessen it. But sometimes it’s the only chance we have.” She tilts her head sympathetically. “When we decide to put a patient into a coma, we’re already talking about extremes. Your mother has a very tough time ahead of her. You’re all going to need to be very strong.”
I almost faint. Steph tightens her grip on my arms, keeping me upright. “Can I see her?” I whisper.
The doctor nods. “Of course, follow me.”
We go into the nearest room and she pulls a curtain aside.
There is my mother.
But it’s not my mother.
My mother was tiny but she’s never this tiny. Not this old.
This is a small, dying woman, skin greying, almost translucent, painfully thin and hooked up to a million machines. They beep, monitoring her, the only sign that she’s not dead at all. I watch her heart beat on the monitor for a moment, then look back at her, trying to connect the two images, the proof that she’s alive.
“That’s not her,” I whisper, my hands at my mouth, waiting for someone to agree with me, to tell me that this is all a big joke. But no one says anything. The amount of pain between us all is staggering. I can’t even comprehend it and my brain shuts down all over again. Switch by switch.
But still, I pick up her hand, her papery skin so weak and thin, and I hold it, willing strength into her, screaming inside my head for her to please, please pull through.
There’s no response. I don’t know why I thought there would be. They have to wait to bring her out of the coma anyway. But even so, I thought that maybe, maybe just me being there, having all her children around, would let her know that she has a lot left to fight for.