A Breath Too Late

by Rocky Callen

I stay close to you. I watch the way your slight muscles contract under your T-shirt. The way your breath is so close that if I were alive and in front of you, you could make my bangs fly. One thing is true—I feel awake, buzzing, tingling, and intoxicatingly alive.

  I dare not reach out, dare not break the illusion that I am not a shadowless ghost and that I am in fact here with you and you aren’t staring through me, but at me, with those intensely gray eyes—eyes like storms that could sweep me away in their torrent. You growl-sigh again and back up, pressing against the wall, sliding down to plop ungracefully on the ground. Nothing about you is ungraceful. Except this.

  The anger is gone.

  That’s when I see it.

  In your eyes, a desperate, sad, wild thing.

  And it scares me.

  Because I know what you want to do.

  Because I had been there … and done it already.

  You get up, walking quickly.

  You wanted to lose yourself. Let go. My eyes scan our surroundings and I hold my breath. Everything suddenly seems too pointy and dangerous and I want to lock you in your room and keep you safe.

  But I can’t.

  You pull out a little Ziploc bag of pills from your pocket. You are swaying on your feet. You go and get another beer and pop the pills in your mouth and down it with several huge gulps. The beer is dripping from your chin.

  You stumble, tripping over broken branches and falling to your knees. You crawl a few paces and retch into the green, overgrown grass. The pills are out of you, I think, but you are still heaving in air and coughing out spit. You are something other and it makes you look ugly. I never thought that you could look ugly, but you do now.

  You are laughing and clawing at the air as if you don’t know whether the air around you is hilarious or terrifying. Maybe you didn’t cough up all of the pills? I see the shift in your eyes … as if you are seeing something that is there, but it’s not. Sitting up abruptly, you begin to shift back. All terror now.

  And for just a moment, I think you look at me. Your eyes, like a feather, graze mine softly before you pause, brow narrowing, sweat dripping.

  “August?” I reach out.

  And you scream. At first I think it is because you see me, but your eyes are settled beyond me, afraid. You’re on your feet, clawing at the air as if bats are attacking you. You’re desperately trying to make them go away. “Get OFF me!” you scream. Whirling, you stumble and trip away. I can’t catch you despite my outstretched arms.

  Then you stop. You are staring at the gap in the wood, where the little window opening in the side of the bridge shows the beautiful river churning and racing below. “Ellie?” Your voice is hoarse, broken.

  I blink, waiting for you to turn around.

  “August?”

  You don’t turn around, but take a step closer to the side of the bridge.

  “Ellie…” Your voice hitches. “Is that you?”

  I look at the spot where you were just staring, staring as if I am actually there looking back at you, but I’m not. I’m five paces behind you with nothing for you to see.

  You take another step.

  “Ellie, don’t!” It’s like a wail and a command forged together. Another mingle of emotion and words that makes something entirely new. Falling to your knees, you’re reaching, shaking. “Ellie! Please!”

  Your body is shaking so hard, it looks like you have the power to make the bridge rumble. You stretch out your arms as if you truly hope you can grasp the nonexistent me you’re seeing. “Please—” Your voice cracks again as if something inside you reaches out to steal your words back and drown them. “I can’t catch you.”

  I stare at you. I didn’t know a strong person could break. I thought you had to be born ruined or be chipped away slowly over time. I didn’t know that just one thing—one loss—could shred a person to pieces. But here is the evidence.

  Two days ago, there was a boy named August and his smile was bright and beautiful and he played guitar, and made geeky, intelligent jokes, and could laugh off jabs and make girls blush, and all he was armed with was his notebook. Two days later, after an announcement made in a classroom, days skipped from school, and a bottle of pills purchased, here you are now at this ledge.

  “No!” Your scream bellows out and knocks me back. Trying to stand, you fall and desperately drag your feet, half-crawling, half-stumbling, to the bridge wall.

  You stare into the water as if you have seen me jump in. The moon glints off the current, beautiful and deadly. “No, no, no, no, no,” you cry, shaking your head from side to side, choking on tears. Starting to rip off your shirt, you step up onto the ledge. “I’ll catch you … I promise … I’ll get you.”

  You are going to jump in.

  You are going to die.

  I rush toward you, reaching. Emotions go to war but none can win. Anger, fear, sorrow, and desperation reload their ammunition and shoot, piercing one another so it’s all a bloody mess inside of me. I know I will fall right through you. I know that you are only two steps from jumping.

  I lunge forward, hoping and not hoping, wishing and not wishing, but all I know is that I must … I must … I MUST reach you.

  I crash into you imagining that you are solid in my arms, corded muscle. I imagine the realness and physicality of you shocking me. But as I reach my arms around you, my arms close on nothing but air. You are still moving, still stepping up higher onto the ledge. So I move with you, ready to fall all over again, just so you aren’t alone.

  Without warning, you stop. One leg out the window and one inside, both hands braced in the in-between. Your breath is gasps, a rising chest and shaking shoulders.

  The determination melts from your shoulders. You become limp against me. You bump your head softly against the wood. “You aren’t there,” you say.

  You vomit again and then collapse to your knees. Defeated.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and I am ashamed because sorry will never mean enough. It can’t whiteout pain or loss or bruises or sorrow. A Band-Aid for a wound that is too big, but I say it again: “I’m sorry.” You pull out of the opening and lean against the bridge wall. Sliding down the wall, you fall to the ground.

  “I just wish you were here,” you say to the darkness, to the shadows and the bridge and the night. “I just wish you were here. With me.”

  I stare at you, watching as the far-off-ness settles into right-here-ness. You don’t see me, but you’re coming back, the drugs wearing away in your veins, reality falling back into place.

  And even though you can’t hear the hitch in my voice, I whisper back, “So do I.”

  * * *

  I remember learning in psychology class about how people suppress traumatic memories to keep their minds safe, to black it all out so they can keep going, and I suddenly realize that my selective memory hadn’t been a cruelty, but a mercy. All leading to this moment. Because I am triggered by August’s almost-death into remembering my own. I feel it then, like the whole ocean surging to swallow me up. It is a sea of memories and it is finally ready to meet me at the shore.

  the year of graduation

  25

  Depression,

  I didn’t know what you were when you came sneaking under my window. I had known sadness. I had known loneliness. I had known anger and resentment and shame and fleeting numbness. I had known all those things. They would come and go, settling into the air and around my fingertips and eyelashes. A scream, a bruise, a curse, a door slam might’ve triggered it, but then I would grit my teeth and narrow my eyes, and with time, I would scare it off. The feeling would slink away. In a few minutes. A few hours. A few days.

  But one day, you came. Seven minutes before my alarm. My eyes opened and I didn’t move. I just looked out the window.

  I had always loved that window. It faced east and every morning, no matter if I had to clamp a pillow over my ears all night, I would wake up to a sunrise. And that morning, it was beautiful. The blue stretched its arms
and slivers of sunlight crept their fingers up the horizon, casting shades of pinks and oranges in all directions. I would have usually smiled at that sunrise, but that morning I just looked at it.

  I looked and felt nothing.

  I felt like I was nothing looking at nothing.

  I didn’t see the peeling white paint on the window pane, or the inky etch marks I had made on the sill, or the portrait of sun and sky beyond the glass.

  I just saw a window.

  I saw a place from where I could jump.

  I didn’t move when my alarm buzzed.

  I just kept looking at the window and wondering how long it would take to hit the ground.

  26

  August,

  I was about to cross the threshold of my next class when I pulled out my Chemistry seating assignment sheet and stumbled to a stop. I was going to be wedged between Henry Jordan and you. I looked up. I could see the back of his short buzz cut and your shaggy mane of brown hair. I was to be squished between this new boy at school (I knew everyone in our class except him) and my old best friend who I had divorced when we were twelve years old.

  I was quite certain the gods (if there were any) were trying to punish me.

  You looked back at the door and smiled. It was the kind of smile that should be illegal.

  For the past few years, I studiously avoided you. I had ignored the murals you painted during the art exhibitions, ignored your notes in my locker, ignored your name whenever it came up in conversation. I had blocked you out. My life had been so much easier that way. Letting you in had been a foolish risk with Father always looking over my shoulder, ready to pounce. At least this way, I was safe.

  That’s what I had told myself. But then you smiled at me from our Chemistry desk and I could not ignore you. First, you would be one of my partners for the rest of the year. And second, in all of this time of blocking you out, you became someone new, someone … beautiful. I scolded myself at the thought. Your hair had grown out and curled away from your chin. You had stubble on your jaw. And your eyes, those gray eyes, somehow had gotten even bigger, as if the whole world could fit inside them.

  Stop smiling at me! I didn’t move from the doorway. I was an awkward roadblock and people were pushing past me. You stood up and gestured for me to take my seat. I looked away from you. Outside. To all of the non-smiling things.

  “Ellie Walker!” you said to me, still smiling, when I finally reached our desk.

  “August Matthews.” I tilted my head in greeting. You were far too bright and colorful. You were far too much and I wanted to dim you down like an Instagram photo.

  “And Henry Jordan, right?” I said to the boy with the buzz cut sitting on the other side of my chair.

  He startled at the sound of his name and looked at me and waved nervously. I smiled at him, suddenly feeling a little warmer to him just because he looked as unsure and unsteady as I felt.

  I shuffled between the seats and breathed in deeply. The heavy, oppressive feeling, the sadness that often chased me into rooms and out of them, hadn’t lodged in my chest yet. I was grateful for that, at least.

  “Wow, Henry. You got a smile out of the infamously non-smiling Ellie Walker.” You said it and that made Henry smile at me. It was a kind, puppy-dog smile. I smiled at him again. I felt you watching us, I felt you roll your shoulders and tap your knuckles on the desk.

  “So,” you said a little too loudly, “senior year. What are your plans?” It is hard to make conversation when you don’t want to, and it is even harder to make conversation with someone when you strategically cut them out of your life for years. The words seem forced and simple and ridiculous. What do you care what my plans are?

  Henry answered first. “I am getting ready to apply to schools for pre-med.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s impressive.”

  Another puppy-dog smile in response. I suddenly wanted to pet his buzz cut.

  “I am looking at schools for business.” Your legs stretched out under the table. You were seventeen. Your voice was rougher than when we were kids and yet it was still so familiar, like the whisper of a memory. I blinked at you from under my veil of side bangs.

  “Business,” I repeated.

  “Yeah, business,” you said back. You looked confused and uncomfortable with the obvious disbelief in my voice.

  I blinked again. “Not … art school?”

  You shrugged.

  I suddenly felt betrayed. It was irrational. It was dumb. But you had been the boy of brushstrokes and color, the artist who made drawings I wanted to live in. I sighed. I really didn’t know you at all.

  “Original,” I said finally.

  You fake-glared at me. It had been so long since I had seen that expression. I thought my heart would explode and be a catastrophic mess on the table between us.

  “Ah, I see you are trying to mortally wound me, dear Ellie, by hurting my pride. But alas, you have already done that, yet here I am, still standing.”

  “Sitting.”

  “What?”

  “You are sitting.” I tried to push past the way you said “you have already done that,” and so I decided to talk about my plans.

  “I don’t know what I am going to do yet, but…” I paused. I had never said it aloud. I had only written it in my diaries. But the year would be full of moments all about looking forward and so that was what I was going to do. “I want to be a writer.”

  “A writer,” you repeated back to me, but it didn’t have the edge of disappointment that my voice had when I’d replied to your future plans.

  Still, I wanted to shove it back into my head. I wanted to keep it hidden. Far away from judgmental eyes. But you didn’t look like you were judging me. You looked like you were piecing a puzzle together.

  “That’s nice,” said Henry. “Like a journalist?”

  I shook my head and tapped my foot on the linoleum. I was wearing my inked-up shoes. There was barely any white space left on them. “No, like a novelist.”

  Henry was about to say something, but you interrupted him. “What do you want to write about?”

  Write about what you know. I had read that in a book once and like a tidal wave, I was slammed with feeling lost and cold and uncertain.

  “I want to write about broken things,” I said softly.

  Your gaze whipped to me, suddenly serious. Your eyebrows scrunched up together so high that I thought they looked like two caterpillars aiming to take flight right off your face.

  Mr. Jameson walked in, ten thousand watts of scientific enthusiasm. He knocked into the skeleton and nearly walked straight into his desk.

  We all turned our attention to the front of the room.

  You chewed on your lip for a moment, then leaned closer and whispered, “I want to know about broken things, Ellie.”

  I didn’t look back at you.

  “My mad scientists! It is time to…” Mr. Jameson’s voice bellowed throughout the classroom, nearly outdoing the ten thousand watts of Jameson-ness he walked in with. It was like he swept up all the air and there was only enough for him to speak.

  I was grateful. I hadn’t wanted to talk to you about broken things.

  I didn’t want to tell you that I was one of them.

  27

  August,

  That first week back passed quickly, and suddenly it was time for Chem again. Thank god for block schedules so I didn’t have to sit next to you every day.

  I squeezed past your seat to get to mine. You didn’t move, didn’t even look up. Henry’s seat was empty. I dropped my book and notebook on the desk and made a big show of arranging my space so I wouldn’t have to look at you either. You felt too close. I felt like you already knew too much. I opened up the textbook and started reading intently. Well, fake reading. I could feel you shifting beside me, turning your head ever so slightly. I kept reading. Not really seeing the words as my eyes scanned and just blurred them all together.

  “Ellie…” Your voice was tentative
and quiet.

  “Shhhh, I am reading.”

  “Ellie…”

  I whipped my head to the side, annoyed. “What?”

  Your eyes went wide and apologetic. You lifted your chin to the book. “Um, your book is upside down.”

  I blinked at you, then snuck a glance at the text. It was, in fact, upside down.

  I closed the book and held it to my chest. “I was … trying something.” What in the world was I talking about? Is this what happens when you do something ridiculous? You come up with even more absurd things to say? I wanted to smack my forehead with my textbook, but that also seemed, well, ridiculous.

  “I am sure you were.”

  I looked at you.

  You were smiling.

  “Stop that.”

  “What?” You didn’t stop.

  “Smiling. You look ridiculous.”

  “Says the girl who reads books upside down.”

  “Listen, I—”

  “You really should fix that habit because when you write your books it will be hard to write them that way.”

  I stilled; my body went rigid. Where was Henry? Where was Mr. Jameson? Their cue to interrupt was sounding. Yet they’d missed it.

  “If I ever become a writer…”

  “You will be a great writer, Ellie.” You said it in a rush. You said it like you’d been waiting to say it for hours.

  I tapped my foot, drumming it to take out some of the nervous energy. “Why do you say that?”

  You were quiet for a second and then with your eyes far away you said, “Because once upon a time, you dreamed up a world for us to live in behind an old subdivision in the woods. It was real. It was ours. And it was beautiful. You’ll write like that. You’ll make things real with your stories.”

  I felt my eyes go glassy, not because of the familiar ache in my chest that kept growing, but because it was like you had plucked out my future dream and said it aloud when I was too afraid to say it myself. You had thought a long time about what you were going to say. I could see that.