by Karina Halle
Had I even heard her? I looked again, harder, searching each person, my ears trained for her voice. Suddenly I was hit with an overwhelming sense of urgency. It wasn’t that my situation wasn’t scary – it was. Ask any drunk the next morning when they don’t know where they are.
But in the back of my mind, I’d already been rationalizing everything. I must have blacked out for one reason or another but I had to have come to New York with Perry. I don’t know why we came here or when but we would have come together.
We would have had to. The girl just agreed to marry me – the crazy fucking girl – and I know I would have not let her out of my sight for a second. She was more precious to me than life itself.
And yet, she wasn’t here. I felt her presence, heard her voice, but it was about as substantial as the air in front of my face. She was nowhere to be seen just as I probably was for her.
My heart decided to take a nose dive.
What if I couldn’t find her?
What if something horrible had happened to her, to us? Every second that ticked past on that bridge, I was getting the feeling that some horrible had happened and the world was just waiting for me to catch on.
I put my hand to my chest and kneaded my knuckles along it, hoping to dispel the nervous energy that was building up. I needed a cigarette to clear my head. I needed a drink to calm my nerves.
I needed Perry just to get by.
I breathed in deeply through my nose, willing the pain in my ribs to go away. I had to have a plan of some sort if I was going to get anywhere. Staring at the throngs of people as they walked past, their attentions utterly focused on the space in front of them, I wondered if anyone would be nice enough to let me borrow their phone to call Perry. I contemplated running after the lime green glasses girl but she was long gone.
Lady luck was smiling at me however. I asked two twenty-something girls in sundresses with cigarettes dangling from their lips if I could bum a smoke. After one of them did, rather begrudgingly, I turned my charms onto the nicer, plumper one and asked if she wouldn’t mind me borrowing her phone for a minute.
This time, mentioning a girlfriend came in handy and once she realized the guy with the ’stache wasn’t getting potentially rapey on her, she gave me her Samsung. I actually had to correct myself and tell her my girlfriend was actually my fiancé now. Man, did that sound both weird and awesome to say that out loud but it seemed to win me a few points, which I hoped would turn into a few extra minutes on the phone.
Turns out I needed them. Perry didn’t answer her phone, even when I called three times in a row. The girl was starting to sigh and look put out, the subtle way to say “dude, get the fuck off the phone” and I grinned nervously at her. “Just one more person to try.”
Actually I had more than a few people to try but since the last place I remembered was the Palominos, I figured that was my best bet. I hated having to ring her parents but hey, I guess they were going to be my parents too one day. They better get used to it. And so should I.
But there was no answer at their house either, which struck me as odd. Usually her mother was home, if not Ada. I left a long, yelling message on the machine.
“Hey, so it’s Dex and sorry to bother you, but if Perry is there I would love to speak to her. I’m in New York City. Not sure how that happened. Anyhoo, I would be much obliged if someone, anyone…Ada…Mr. Palomino…dad? I guess I have to call you dad soon, right? Maybe not. Anyone really, if you would pick up the phone because I think this will be my last call for a while and I can’t seem to find my phone. Or my wallet. Or know what’s going on or how I got here. So yeah. Answering the phone would be great. Hello? Bueller?” Pause. Waiting for them to pick up. “But you won’t do that because you’re not home. That’s fine. I’m busy too. I’m on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s awesome. There are two young ladies here, one I’m sure has something against mustaches and the other who is giving me a look like she’s sorry she lent me her phone. Well, if I don’t hear from you guys…It’s because I don’t have my cell. I told you that, right? Anyway, I’ll call back. When I can. I might not be able to.” Another pause and this is when I noticed both girls look like they are ten seconds away from blowing their rape whistle and bringing out the pepper spray. “Okay, bye.”
I hung up and gave the phone back to the girl, shooting her an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I thought maybe they’d pick up if I started rambling nonsense.”
She stared at me while she tucked the phone in her purse. Then, without saying anything, she and the other girl walked away in a hurry, shooting me anxious glances over their shoulders, as if they’d never left a message like that on a machine before.
I exhaled and watched them go. Well, that was a bust. I decided to start walking to Manhattan, give it a few moments, then try someone else for a phone. Perry had to pick up at some point, I left her more than enough voicemails.
Not if she’s not okay, the thought shot across my head like a bullet. Maybe that’s why you can’t get a hold of her.
Fuck. I clenched and unclenched my fists. What if something had happened to her?
I refused to entertain the thought. I needed to hold it together, not fall apart. As long as I found out she was okay, just to hear her voice, more than anything, then I’d deal with the rest.
But refusing to think about it, didn’t mean I didn’t feel it, that sickness, black and sticky like tar, clinging to the inside of my lungs.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was sprinting down the bridge, urgency pressing through my legs. I was bumping into people, knocking commuters off balance, their cries of anger and annoyance the soundtrack to my pumping limbs but I couldn’t give any fucks. There were no fucks to give. It was like the faster I went, the more I was aware that something horrible was about to go down and all the speed in the world wouldn’t help me.
Or her.
Or anyone.
I was nearly at the place where the bridge promenade swooped into City Hall Park, thinking about one of the last times I was in the area, paying a parking ticket with Maximus back in the way back days, when I felt like my non-existent drug trip just intensified.
There was Maximus, stepping out from the grandiose pillars of the Manhattan Municipal Building, his floppy ginger coif standing out like a red beacon on the end of a flannel stick. He wasn’t even wearing flannel, but that wasn’t the point.
I came to a halt, making sure I was seeing this right. Did I run right into the past? Déjà vu swept over me, momentarily washing that feeling of doom side. How could I just think about him and make him appear? Was I Gandalf?
But it wasn’t just him. It was also Ada. Fucking Little Fifteen Ada Palomino throwing change at a hotdog vendor and trying to catch up with Maximus, all long limbs and bad eye makeup.
What the actual fuck?
Before I could even contemplate just what sort of wizardry was at work here I heard my name being catapulted in my direction.
“Dex!”
It was more of a panicked shriek, but to say it didn’t immediately fill my heart with gold would be lying.
I turned my head to the park and saw Perry, beautiful, crazy Perry, running toward me, about to head straight into traffic.
I let out a yelp, my body frozen from the impending disaster but she managed to skirt in front of the cars which were slowing down as they turned onto the bridge and soon she was on my side of the road, unscathed except for a few people laying on their horns in her wake.
There’s a moment in the movie “10” when Dudley Moore sees Bo Derek running down the beach in slow motion. Most people don’t know what I’m talking about because most people don’t educate themselves with the classics, particularly Blake Edwards, but anyway, this moment rivaled that one.
And that doesn’t trivialize it, believe me, because seeing Perry run toward me, her face scrunched in the sheer desire to reach me, did something to my soul. It grabbed at me, clawed at me, made me realize just how damn empty I’d been without her by my side, even if for
a short while. It made me realize I needed to do everything I could to ensure that would never happen again.
“Dex,” she cried out again and in an instant she was in my arms and she was safe and I was safe and the rest of the world could go to hell for all I cared.
I held her close to me as she sobbed into my chest. I wanted to calm her down but at the same time I wasn’t doing so well either. The more she shook in my arms, the more worried I became.
“Hey, baby,” I whispered into the top of her head. “You’re here, I’m here.”
Right?
She half mumbled, half cried something into my chest and I had to pull back to give her some room to talk. I smoothed the hair behind her ears, imploring her to look at me. She eventually did even though the tears wouldn’t stop running down her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her softly. I hated seeing her cry more than anything.
She grimaced and wiped the tears off her cheeks. “You don’t know?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much, kiddo. Last thing I remember was being in Portland, upstairs, editing. Next thing I know I’m on the Brooklyn Bridge, talking to a hipster. Apparently, I’ve missed some shit between points A and B.”
She frowned, studying my face, and squeezed my hand hard. “That’s really all you remember? You don’t remember your brother?”
Michael. Again, his face flashed through my mind, as clear as day. Why it struck the fear of god in me, I don’t know.
I paused. “I don’t think so?”
“Lord, Dex, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Maximus said as he walked over to us.
“Good, cuz the sight of you makes my eyes sore,” I said right back but I couldn’t help but grin at him. I looked at Ada who had somehow already devoured the hot dog and was staring at me with questioning eyes. “Little Fifteen. Fancy meeting you in the Big Apple. Can one of you jokers please inform me of what the fuck is going on here?”
“He says he doesn’t remember anything,” Perry said to them.
I wrapped my arm protectively around her waist and pulled her closer to me. “I’m assuming some major shit went down or somehow the teleporter was invented without me knowing it.”
I don’t know why I thought they’d find that amusing but all three of them stared at me gravely. My shackles went up. “Okay, seriously. I don’t know what happened. Can one of you please indulge me?”
Surprisingly it was Ada who spoke up. “You were upstairs. I was working out. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, the sound of that scary athletic chick’s voice pounding into my head. “A workout video with the hot but crazy one with the big jaw.”
“Yes,” she said with a raise of her brow. I just then noticed how tired Ada looked. She’d always bordered on that because of her fascination with a metric ton of eyeliner but there was something different about her. The exhaustion made her seems eons older than she was, like she’d seen a lot recently.
She continued. “Then there was a knock at the front door. Do you remember that?”
I tugged at my hat while I tried to think, my other arm tightening around the small of Perry’s waist. I thought she’d relax into me but she felt just as tense as I did. “I don’t think so.” Did I remember a knock at the door? It was hard to say if my memory was true or I was just conjuring up what it would have sounded like.
“Do you know who it was?” she asked.
I shook my head even though every part of me wanted to say Michael, it was Michael.
“It was your brother.”
I nodded. Hearing it didn’t make it seem more real but it also didn’t feel like a lie. It just didn’t make any sense – that was the real problem I was having with it. Why would my brother show up now after all these years? How did he know where to find me?
“What did he want?” I asked.
She glared off into the distance and crossed her arms. “You, obviously. He did some weird shit to my head and the next thing I remember, Perry was shaking me awake.”
“And you were gone,” Perry filled in quietly. “You left in the Highlander, with him.”
“Willingly?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We don’t know, we’ve been trying to figure that out. But Ada said you knew something was wrong. That once you saw him, you told her to run, to get out of there, to go and get me. You knew he was bad news.”
I scratched at my chin, unsure how to take any of this. “My brother and I may have had our differences back in the day, but I don’t think his appearance would have made me freak out.”
“Well you did,” Ada said. “And now you’re here.”
It was then that I noticed Maximus had been awfully silent. I glanced at him and was met with a suspicious gaze, green eyes appraising me as if I was spewing bullshit. I was close to delivering another barb to him, just to put him in his fucking place, when Perry said, “You really don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”
I’m sure if I went into a psychotherapist’s office and subjected myself to some hypnosis, I could conjure up some hidden memories, as well as stop my on-and-off again affair with smoking and badly-lit porn. “I don’t remember anything, but the moment I do, I’ll let you know.” I licked my lips and eyed them all. “So, then if I’m here, how did you know where to find me?”
Perry sighed as if she’d been asked this question a million times already. Perhaps she had.
“I ran into your brother, when I was off on my walk,” she said carefully, her eyes flitting to the pavement. “Before all this happened.”
My heart chipped a bit. This didn’t sound like it was going in a good direction. As much as I didn’t like my brother, I also didn’t want to know what she was going to say next.
She went on. “He told me some things, about who he was and where you’d be going. So I knew.” She nervously wiped the back of her hand across her lips. “And Pippa told me too. Back when we were on the coast, at the school. The visions I’d had.”
And that was fucking news to me. But as much as I wanted to be in the loop over any visions or Pippa encounters that Perry had had – and kept from me – what she said about Michael was far more troubling.
I stared down at her until her eyes met mine. “What happened after that? With Michael?”
I could see her inhaling through her nose but to her credit she didn’t break my gaze, even though I saw pity in her eyes, maybe even fear. “He did something to me.”
My heart banged angrily in my ribcage. “What?” I asked, my voice low and hard. Fire licked at my guts.
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He…he made it so I was powerless. At first anyway. I couldn’t move. And then, then I just fell to the ground I guess and passed out.”
“What did he say to you?”
She exhaled sharply then said. “He said, ‘You really are pretty, you know that. And young. Young blood is the best. My brother has excellent taste.’ Then he said…” she paused.
“What?” I asked, my fingers gripping her tight.
She looked away from me. “He doesn’t know I’m here,” she said, her voice lowering to mimic his. “And I wanted to keep it that way. I was rather a jerk to him after our mother died. And yet, now I need him. And I’m sure I’ll need you. Perry.’ Then he added, ‘See you soon’ and I already knew he mentioned New York. Pippa mentioned it too. So we came as soon as we could. It was a hunch in a way, I mean we had nothing to go on. But somehow we found you.”
Maximus snorted. I managed to tear my eyes off of her and glance at him, though I was still seething and grappling with what my brother had said and done to Perry and what the hell it all meant.
“Not somehow, little lady,” Maximus said with an unamused roll of his eyes. He looked to me. “She went into the Veil to find you. I reckon it worked but it was mighty stupid of her.”
It was stupid of her. “Perry,” I said, hating the idea that she would even entertain that thought, hating all of this.
�
�Figured you wouldn’t like it either,” Maximus said.
“I had no choice,” she said defensively. “Dex would have done the same for me.”
And that was definitely the truth. I would have scoured the ends of this world and many others if I were in her shoes and she in mine.
Suddenly I was hit with a wave of dizziness and that strange, creeping feeling again, almost like something was watching me. I quickly glanced around, half-expecting to see my fabled brother, but only saw the cityscape of New York instead. To say it was all overwhelming was being facetious.
“Are you okay?” Perry asked quickly, running her fingertips along my cheek.
I closed my eyes at her touch and nodded slowly. “It’s a lot to take. I need a beer and a cigarette and some time to wrap my head around things. All the things.”
“I know just the place to cure what ails ya,” Maximus said, forced levity in his voice. I was certain he was going to take me to a dive bar a few blocks from here, one we used to get cheap fish tacos at in University.
I nodded and with my hand gripped firmly around Perry’s, the four of us made our way down the street. The crazy thing was, even with my beloved and my friends at my side, even though all I had wanted to do was find Perry and now I had her in my arms, that didn’t make everything right.
It should have.
But it didn’t.
That horrible feeling, like something tragic was about to go down and all the speed in the world wouldn’t help me? That had only gotten worse since I found them.
And I had no damn clue what that meant.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Perry
My heart pumped forcefully in my ears. It was whole again. Happy. I could breathe.
I sat, chin resting on my hands, and watched Dex drain the glass of amber beer that had been poured for him moments ago. To anyone else Dex may have seen calm and cool, his usual cocky self.
But his hands were shaking ever so slightly and his knee wouldn’t stop jumping beneath the table. His dark eyes kept flitting to different corners of the room, waiting or watching or just trying to make sense. I didn’t know.