Sliding Down the Sky

by Amanda Dick

  She took the cloth that was draped over her arm and handed it to Leo.

  “Does it hurt?”

  He shrugged, holding the cloth under his nose and sniffing as he wiped the blood away, inspecting the cloth.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s broken.”

  I moved the ice-filled cloth from my temple to my cheek and waited for the soothing chill to seep in. My whole head was on fire.

  Sass’s gaze flitted between us. She raised her eyebrows, looking every inch the disappointed school teacher.

  “Well?” she said. “Anyone gonna tell me what that was all about? I only disappeared out the back for two seconds.”

  Leo and I swapped glances. An obvious, uncomfortable wordless exchange.

  She looked over at me, and I assumed she thought I was the one who instigated it. It was a fair call. Anyone else would’ve thought the same thing, especially with my track record.

  “Well, don’t all talk at once,” she said sarcastically.

  Just as I opened my mouth, prepared to make up some bullshit about the guy spilling beer on me or something equally as lame, Leo spoke up.

  “He was a reporter.”

  The colour immediately drained from her face, but she didn’t move a muscle. I saw a thousand emotions pass over her face like reflections in the water, but still she stood there, staring at me but not really seeing me. It was more like she was looking through me, not at me. A chill crawled up my spine. I never wanted her to look at me like that again, ever.

  Slowly, she turned to Leo, and he exhaled noisily.

  “I guess it had to happen, sooner or later,” he said. “Just wish it’d been later.”

  His words had a physical effect on her, as if he’d slapped her with them. She stumbled backwards and fell into a chair, staring at him blankly. He went to her immediately, and I suddenly felt like a fifth wheel.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” he said urgently, kneeling down beside her and putting a hand on her knee.

  She stared at him for a moment, then bolted upright like one of those wind-up toys. She crossed her arms in front of her as she paced across the room, and then turned and came back towards us again, uncrossing them, her fist clenched tightly by her side.

  “How?” she demanded tearfully, barely keeping herself together as she stared at him.

  He stood up to meet her face-to-face.

  “I have no idea.”

  “But we’ve been so careful!”

  “I know, but it was bound to happen. We talked about this, remember? It’s not like we’re in witness protection. We can‘t hide forever.”

  “We?” she snapped. “It’s not we Leo, it’s me! I’m the one they want to persecute!”

  “I know, but we’re –“

  “Where there’s one, there are more! They’re like cockroaches – misery-feeding cockroaches! And after tonight, he’ll be back, and he’ll bring all his cockroach buddies with him! I won’t be able to walk down the street without them snapping photos and… oh God.”

  She sank down into the nearest chair, doubling over.

  I watched them in silence. Leo had said she was trying to put her life back together. At a guess, I’d say having the press on your doorstep was probably not the easiest way to do that. But why did she think she was being persecuted?

  “You could try talking to him,” I suggested carefully.

  I honestly couldn’t think of any other way to keep them away. She was right, where there was one, there was bound to be others, and how would she know who was a reporter and who was a customer once they’d tracked her down here?

  She shook her head, sitting up.

  “I can’t.”

  “He’s got a point,” Leo said gently, dragging another chair over and sitting down beside her.

  “I can’t. And anyway, what would you know about it?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Leo beat me to it.

  “I told him.”

  She glared at him, and I jumped to his defence.

  “To be fair, I guessed. Leo just confirmed it.”

  She blushed, not pink but red. It wasn’t a girlish blush, either. It was a red-hot flush that said she had so much more to say but she wasn’t going to say it. On top of that, she glared at me. I swallowed the rock that had settled in my throat. Intimidating didn’t even begin to cover it. Her whole demeanour changed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “Because I didn’t think it mattered,” I faltered. “It doesn’t, does it? Matter, I mean?”

  “Of course it does!” she spluttered. “Did you tell them I was here?”

  “Jesus, Sass!”

  “I’m serious, Leo! We don’t even know him, and then a week after we open, we have a reporter in here? Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone!” I insisted. “It never even crossed my mind. And who would I tell? I didn’t know you were hiding from anyone.”

  She glared at me until Leo came to my rescue.

  “He’s right. You’re paranoid. We knew this was going to happen one day, and now it has. We just have to deal with it.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m thinking you need to calm down. Then, I think maybe Callum’s right. Maybe we should talk to that reporter. Maybe if you do, they’ll leave you alone. One thing’s for sure, you can’t hide forever. Where are you gonna go? They’ll find you, just like they found you here. You can’t just keep running away from this.”

  “Running away from what?” she snapped, waving her stiff left hand at him. “This? Believe me, if I thought running away would help, I’d do it! I don’t need a damn reporter asking me about things that I don’t –“

  She took a gasping breath, as if her brain was the one doing the running, and her mouth was having trouble keeping up. I felt sorry for Leo. If she ever looked at me the same way she was looking at him, I think I’d just crawl into a hole somewhere. I could see, even with my limited knowledge of what was going on, that this had shaken her up. Coming hot on the heels of the asshole grabbing her earlier in the week, it was something she definitely didn’t need. I could also see, judging by the desperation written all over Leo’s face, that he really didn’t know what to do to help.

  I’d been where he was. I knew how much it hurt to have to stand by and watch while someone you loved went through a pain you couldn’t even begin to imagine – physical or mental. The one thing I knew for certain was that talking about it helped. I’d seen it, first-hand. The last thing you wanted was usually the one thing you needed.

  “What are you so afraid of?” I asked, trying to sit upright, even though it hurt.

  Showing weakness here wasn’t going to help anyone. She was just spiralling downwards. She had to come up for air.

  I expected more venomous retorts, maybe a few expletives. What I didn’t expect was tears. They filled her eyes as she stared at me, and I immediately had second thoughts. Who did I think I was, coming in here and pretending to know her? I didn’t know her at all. I had no idea what she’d been through – what she was still going through.

  “That’s none of your business,” she said quietly.

  She was right, but I wanted to make it my business. I’d sit there and let her tear shreds off me if I thought it would help, and the realisation sent a chill racing up my spine.

  “We’ll figure it out, I promise,” Leo said, squeezing her shoulder. “The important thing here is not to let this take over.”

  She dropped her gaze, staring at her immobile left hand, resting on her lap. I had no idea what was going on in her head, but watching her work through it was torture. The kind of torture that made my whole body ache with hopelessness.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Sorrow is so easy to express, and yet so hard to tell.”

  – Joni Mitchell

  Sass

  I was free-falling, backwards, in blinding snow, with no way of
stopping myself and nothing to hold on to. I just had to let it happen, and it was killing me because I didn’t know when it would end, and what state I would be in when it did.

  I wanted to hide from the world. I wanted to be back in my apartment again. I wanted to draw the curtains, bolt the door and disconnect the phone. Yesterday, it had been anger that fuelled me. Overnight though, that had disintegrated. As I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, anxiety moved in. It swam in the bottom of my stomach like a gathering thunderstorm, robbing me of peace. My entire body was tense and sore, and my arm bore the brunt of it. Phantom pain, which had the uncanny knack of rearing its ugly head when I least expected it, made sleep impossible.

  I dragged myself out of bed earlier than usual, my arm aching. The house was quiet. Aria, the alarm clock, was still asleep.

  I sat on the side of my bed and closed my eyes. Both my arms rested on my thighs as I tried to even out my breathing. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to take any painkillers. It already felt like my life was spiralling out of control, I wasn’t going to add drugs to the mix. I needed to feel like I was at the helm of my own existence again, not the one helplessly hanging on to the rope that trailed off the back of the boat.

  With eyes firmly shut, I imagined opening and closing my fists, both of them. In my mind’s eye, I stretched my fingers out wide, all ten of them, as far as they would go, and then I pulled them in tight again, forming two fists. I could feel my fingernails digging into my palms. Then I relaxed them, leaving them to go limp. With eyes still closed, I imagined bending my wrists forward as far as they would go, then backwards, towards my shoulder. Slowly, the cramping pain in my phantom left hand began to ease.

  After the fifth set of repetitions, I opened my eyes and slowed my breathing even further. I could do this. I could control this. I began to massage my left forearm. Carefully, up and down my arm, from stump to elbow, I massaged the muscles and tendons. Gently at first, then more firmly.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the pain reduced from a crippling cramp to a dull ache. That was good enough for me. I got up, pulled on my robe and headed to the kitchen for coffee in the early-morning peace and quiet.

  I was glad I was the first up. I didn’t feel like talking. Nothing Leo or Gemma said was going to make the threat of reporters showing up on our doorstep go away. Leo was right, I just had to deal with it. Problem was, I didn’t want to deal with it. I wanted to hide, just like I’d been doing when Leo found me.

  But that wasn’t an option anymore, and I had no idea what was. The thought of fronting up to the press gave me chills. I wasn’t ready for the questions I knew they wanted to ask. I couldn’t hide, and I couldn’t face up to the truth, so what was left?

  It was that catch-22 that had me awake all night.

  Aria woke up first. She normally came into my room when she woke, but she must’ve found it empty, so she came searching for me. She found me at the dining room table, with my second cup of coffee.

  “Hey, Doodlebug,” I said, as she climbed up on my knee and rested her sleepy blonde head against my chest. “You hungry?”

  She nodded. Like me, she wasn’t good at mornings.

  “Cereal?”

  She nodded again, and climbed down so I could get it for her.

  She sat beside me at the table, eating her cereal in near silence while I finished my coffee. Before long, Gemma and Leo joined us. Saturday night was Gemma’s shift at the bar, thank God. Until then, I just wanted to stay in my pyjamas all day and eat chocolate in my room, but Aria wasn’t about to let me get away with that.

  She coaxed me out of my room, and eventually outside. I wouldn’t stretch to taking her to the park, but I sat outside with her in the back yard while we prepared to have the tea party she’d been begging me for since lunch. Gemma was in the living room, and Leo had gone to the supermarket. I was supposed to go with him, but I wasn’t ready for that. Not today. Today was about trying to get my head around the fact that the vultures were onto me. I couldn’t hide forever, but I could hide today, and if that’s all that was available, that’s what I was gonna take.

  It wasn’t just the hovering press that consumed my thoughts, either. Callum was right up there, caught up in this whole messy explosion of my past and my present, maybe even my future. I saw the look in his eye when he’d gotten up to follow me last night, before everything turned to crap. He’d stepped in when the reporter had turned up, defending my privacy. He knew who I was, and he’d never once said anything to me about it. I couldn’t even muster up the necessary energy to be mad at him for that. It just confused me even more. He confused me.

  One minute he was teaching me self-defence and fixing his startling blue eyes on mine, as if he wanted to see inside my soul. The next, he was punching the shit out of someone. He went from Mr Sensitive to The Incredible Hulk in two seconds flat. If that wasn’t the definition of unpredictable, I didn’t know what was. Asking me out to dinner the first time we met. Showing up at my house just to see if I was alright. Not backing off, even when I made it perfectly clear I didn’t want him around. He was like a brewing tornado. I never knew where he was going to touch down next. He exhausted me, because I was trying like hell to put him off, but he kept coming for me anyway and I had no idea why. He was more persistent than any stalker I’d ever met, that was for damn sure.

  “There, Sassy,” Aria said, pointing to the place she wanted me to lay the blanket.

  I pushed Callum out of my mind. I was determined to be present for her, rather than locked up inside my head, which was where I’d been all morning.

  “Right there?”

  She nodded, and I obliged, unfolding the blanket and laying it down on the grass. She’d picked a spot away from the house, and she stood watching me while I struggled to smooth the corners of the blanket down, one by one, until it was flat. Nothing less would’ve been acceptable. She had very high standards when it came to her tea parties.

  “Good?” I asked, kneeling on the edge and awaiting her seal of approval.

  She nodded, all businesslike as she put her pink plastic basket down on the blanket.

  “Now, tea party,” she said.

  I watched her take out her plastic tea set, laying it all out carefully on the blanket, all the while chattering away. I was so jealous. How wonderful it would’ve been to not have a care in the world.

  “You have this one,” she said, giving me the yellow cup, saucer and matching plastic plate.

  “What about the pink one?”

  She tut-tutted, as if I were the child and she were the adult.

  “Pink one mine, Sassy.”

  I smiled. Of course it was. Pink was her favourite colour.

  Voices from the house drew our attention. Almost at the same time, we both turned to see Callum and Gemma walking out the back door. My heart pounded just seeing him. It was as if I’d conjured him up from thin air. It was disconcerting to say the least, but Aria didn’t seem nearly as affected by his appearance as I was.

  “Boys,” she said simply. “Boys okay at tea parties?”

  There was no point making it more awkward.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep things casual. “Why not? It might be fun.”

  She seemed satisfied with that, and scrambled upright, running to meet him as he walked across the lawn. Gemma retreated into the house, the traitor.

  “Hi,” I heard him say, as Aria reached him.

  With her usual lack of tact, she pointed to his face.

  “Ouch. Hurt?”

  “Huh?” He touched his head briefly, and I could see the bruise from where I sat. “This? No, it’s okay.”

  She seemed happy with that, grabbing his hand and dragging him over the lawn towards me.

  “Have tea wif me and Sassy!”

  She pulled him down onto the blanket beside me. I had kicked my shoes off and sat cross-legged, my arms resting in my lap. His leg brushed against mine as he sat, and it sent an unwelcome jolt through me.
Once again, I felt like my body was betraying me, but this time it had nothing to do with phantom sensation. This sensation was very real. Too real.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he smiled uncertainly. “What’s going on here, then?”

  “Tea party!” Aria cried, clapping her hands before sitting down opposite us.

  I hoped he hadn’t come with a thousand questions, because I really wasn’t in the mood for questions. Not today. Today, I was trying to pretend the outside world didn’t exist. I glanced over at him, noting the bruises. He shrugged, but I’d already seen the way he winced when he sat down. Apparently, I could add ‘strong, silent type’ to the list of things I knew about him, which was still embarrassingly short.

  He carefully tented his knees, resting his forearms on them.

  “I can honestly say, I’ve never been to tea party before,” he said.

  Aria’s eyes grew wide and she stopped digging around in her basket to stare at him openly.

  “No tea party?”

  He may as well have said he’d never heard of Santa Claus.

  “You obviously don’t have sisters,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “There was just me and my brother.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “I... not anymore, no. He died.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, cringing internally.

  He shrugged it off graciously.

  “It was a long time ago. We were just kids.” He paused, frowning. “This is so weird. I haven’t talked about him in years.”

  Aria stood up and walked over to him, lacing her arms around his neck in a tight hug. He was completely taken aback, as was I. Aria’s capacity for love and comfort was endless, as I knew well. I’d never seen her be that familiar with someone she’d barely met before, though. After a few moments, his arms wrapped around her little body gently. I was jealous. Irrationally so, but jealous just the same.

  “Thanks,” he murmured, as she let him go.

  She stood in front of him for a moment, assessing him, as she’d done to me on many occasions. It was as if she was trying to reassure herself that he was alright. He took the scrutiny well, and then she sat back down opposite us, cross-legged, and turned her attention back to the basket she’d brought outside with her.