A Breath Too Late

by Rocky Callen

Tears claw at my throat. It burns and aches. You put my notebooks, my broken teddy bear, my small pillow, and my inked-up shoes in your bag.

  You walk toward the door. Back straight and eyes shining. You don’t look behind you.

  56

  Momma,

  The roar of the engine growls in the driveway, but you stand there. Face clean of makeup, eyes full of tears. You don’t run to the bathroom for your concealer. You are unraveling and used up and aching and you don’t care if he sees.

  I stand beside you as you walk down the stairs with the bags in your hands. You put them behind the couch. You keep my photo in your hands, clutching it as if you could pull me out of it and into the world. You can’t—you know that. I see it in the way your chest shakes even as your thumb gently passes over my brow.

  The screech of the front door. The footsteps.

  We both take a breath in.

  And wait.

  He’s silent, standing there, but as always, we feel him like he has sucked up all the air in the room. Slowly, you look up at him. He is bruised too. His lip is cut, the blood scabbing over. His left eye is starting to turn a shade of blue.

  It suits him.

  There is electricity in the room, I can feel it. Like a thunderstorm brewing and tinging the air with a warning. I feel the rumble, I feel the crackling. You stare at each other. Your eyes are wet, but your back is straight and you do not look away. Your eyes are roaming over his face, over all the cut and marred bits of him.

  Your secret eyes are alive and sparking with their own fire.

  Alert and focused, ready.

  I take a shaky breath. Oh, Momma. Please, please, don’t.

  Father isn’t used to seeing your eyes stare him down like this.

  He cocks his head. “You don’t look quite right,” he says slowly.

  Your bark of laughter is a thundercrack. “Oh, Abel. No, it is you.… You don’t look quite right. Or maybe…” you say, tilting your head to the side, “Maybe this is how you were supposed to look all along.”

  He rubs his hand across his mouth and down his jaw as if he could wipe the bruises off, but he can’t. He just re-splits his lip and blood trickles down his chin. There is even a swipe of blood on his hand, dripping onto the hardwood floor.

  Shoulders squared, one eye dark with bruises, you say, “I want you out of my house.”

  His jaw clenches and unclenches; I see the tic of the muscle. I know the time bomb is tick, tick, ticking along with it. He finally yanks the door closed and steps closer, predatorily. “What-did-you-say?”

  “I said, get out.” You are terrified, but you say the words anyway.

  “This is my fucking house, Regina.” Slow, lazy, deceitfully unthreatening steps with words low and even, as if he were whispering a sonnet.

  “Get out or I will leave.”

  In a blink, he clears the distance between you, and his hand is wrapped around your throat. “Now, I know I heard you wrong, Regina.” He whispers, lips brushing against your ear. “You are mine.” One hand still around your throat, he brushes your hair out of your eyes with his other hand. “And you will never”—he levels his gaze on you, as if he is about to kiss you or punch you, it is hard to know which—“never leave.”

  He shakes you by the throat, just once, nuzzles your ear, and lets go. “Now, get me my dinner.” He gives you a quick once-over. “And clean up your face. I don’t want to be staring at a street-whore lookalike while—”

  “You know what I realized, Abel,” you say, cutting him off. “You need me.” Your breathing is fast and unsteady. You are bracing yourself. “But I don’t need you. I have never needed you.” Your voice is rising, it is taking up the room, it is sucking all the air back to where it belongs. “You chased me because I was the only one who was brave enough to leave. You chased me because you didn’t like feeling like a fool. You chased me because you needed someone to break and you knew I was too afraid of what you might do to Ellie, to me. I should have left you years ago. I should have bashed your fucking car to bits when I saw it in our driveway.”

  Father’s eyes narrow, his chin leans down, and it feels like a hound has just caught your scent and is ready to attack. “Try it, bitch. I dare you.”

  The phone, the one we never use, the one that rarely rings, sits between you. You eye it, take a breath, and lunge for it. Father lunges for you too. And you are running around to the other side of the living room, slamming into the back door. Your fingers are dialing.

  9-1-1.

  You shove all your weight against the door, “Hello, Hello? I have an emergency…” You start to scramble away from the door, but Father grabs your arm, flips you around, and the punch sounds like it has cracked every bone in your face and you fall to the floor, the phone still in your hand.

  “You little bitch, you…”

  You are on your hands and knees, crawling. Blood is dripping down your nose. “My husband is beating me,” you say into the receiver.

  Father pries your hand with the phone away from your face. He slams his boot down, breaking the speaker. You scream. You scream so loud that you could splinter the house into pieces. You’ve never screamed. You’ve always choked the sobs down, stayed quiet. You let the studs and floorboards be the only ones who could hear the pain. But now you are screaming and you are crawling for the front door.

  I am trying to drag him away from you, but my fingers meet nothing but air.

  He takes your shoulders and flips you over, and pins you to the floor underneath him. “You are mine, do you hear me? You belong in this house, you belong with me, and I would rather have you in one million fucking pieces than outside that door so you are going to calm down, shhhhhh, shhhhhh, you are going to calm down and we are going to pretend that none of this ever happened. Okay?” Father’s mouth is on your bloody lips.

  You are on the floor, on your back, and he thinks he has won. But he doesn’t see the light in your eyes, the secret nestled there. You aren’t done fighting.

  You bite his lip, then knee him in the groin and his hold on you is lost as you shove him away and bolt for the door. He is on your heels and grabs at your feet and he trips you with one strong arm.

  You kick at him, launch to your feet, and heave your weight toward the door. The floorboards creak. He swipes again. His hand meets air.

  Father is seething and scrambling to his knees.

  That’s when you stumble across the threshold and the sun, stark and bright, hits your face.

  That’s when you leave our house of secrets, and lies, and bruises behind.

  That’s when the sirens, flashing red and blue, pull into our driveway right behind the Cadillac.

  57

  Father,

  The police take you away.

  Momma won’t lie for you anymore.

  You might have wrecked our lives, but yours will burn down along with them.

  And you won’t even need your lighter to do it.

  58

  August,

  It only took a day for my body to be cremated. My ashes are in a white urn. It is too white. Too crisp and bright and new, and Momma knows it.

  Momma carries a box to your house, sets it down and knocks on your door. She has a tear in her lip, a bruise on her cheek, but her back is straight and when no one answers, she knocks again.

  That’s when she hears your feet pound down the stairs and sees you fling open the door. Her gaze is steady. Your chest is rising and falling—your eyes searching her face.

  Momma’s sweet, honeyed voice says, “She really did have the most beautiful freckles, didn’t she?”

  The words crack the dam between you, and in the span of a breath, you collide in a hug. You hold each other closer. You hold each other up.

  When Momma pulls away, your eyes are red and your faces are streaked with tears.

  “I have a favor to ask you,” she says.

  “Anything,” you say.

  Momma picks up the box she had set down and takes out each
item, one by one.

  My white urn.

  My Sharpied shoes.

  Our two old origami doves.

  And my old, dried-out gold pen.

  “This is how I want to remember her. This—”

  “Wait, just wait one sec…” You dash back into your house and a few moments later, I see my face in stars on your canvas. “This is how I want to remember her,” you say.

  Momma runs her fingers over the brushstrokes. “I knew it.” She smiles, as bright and vast as the starry night sky. “I knew you were the person who could see her. Like I do. I knew you were the person I needed.”

  She picks up the urn and holds it to her chest before stretching out her arms to give it to you. “Will you paint her story?”

  59

  Momma,

  As you get into your car, you stare at our house. “This day was supposed to be for us, Ellie,” you say, turning on the engine.

  I watch as the familiar setting fades. The boarded-up windows. The potholes. The sidewalk cracks.

  We drive to the mountains. The urn is on the passenger seat, my seat—all of me nothing but ashes. I sit in the back seat like when I was little, looking at your chocolate eyes in the rearview mirror.

  The urn was white, but August made it mine. He took his paints and made me into stars and color, the words from my Sharpied shoes dancing in the sky along with the soaring origami birds. That was how the people I loved saw me. That is what I needed to see.

  The moment that August handed the urn to Momma, I felt myself slipping away. I couldn’t save anyone. I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t use my two incorporeal hands. I could only see: the pain I dealt, the promises that had been waiting, the ones who loved me and saw my heart as something beautiful even when I couldn’t.

  We drive away.

  I always liked our drives—the wandering, the possibility, the adventure within them. And as I watch the sun glint off the mirror and into your eyes, I know that this will be our last one.

  We arrive at Blue Moon Mountain and you park the car off Sunrise Trail. Your shoulders are shaking as you clutch the urn and two ripped and fading paper birds to your chest.

  There it is: our fortress. Our castle that we fought for on our last drive to the mountains when you were a queen and I was a warrior.

  You exhale loudly before setting the two birds on the stone ledge side by side.

  The trees part to show a valley of farms at the foot of the mountains. Patches of green. There is a breeze that blows your hair into your brown eyes.

  My ashes are tucked against your chest. Your voice shakes, but it is real. The tears aren’t being suffocated by pillows and no one here will hurt you.

  “We were locked in a box for so long, I didn’t want to bury you in one.”

  Now your hands are shaking too. You slowly open the urn and let my ashes fly in the wind.

  And then, you sing.

  It catches me off guard to hear your voice tremble and rise on the breeze.

  You sing about two birds with torn wings who still could be free. It is beautiful and terrible all at the same time. An ocean of unsaid words, of secrets, of whole hearts and whole truths and no room for lies, an undercurrent of pain that could seize and drown the whole world. And even when your voice shakes and breaks, you still sing.

  The notes fall on one another just like August’s music and I wonder if it is because grief feels like falling, like a rug being yanked from under you and you don’t even brace for the fall because you want it to hurt.

  The words clink and fall and fly together in your voice and all your words are for me. The words you kept hidden under my mattress, the words I wanted to hear, the words that were always mine.

  We are birds with paper wings. Just because the wings were tattered, doesn’t mean they could never fly. It doesn’t mean that their little fragile lives were worth nothing.

  I feel myself drifting away from you.

  You will grow new wings, Momma.

  That minivan with the mismatched doors will help you fly for now.

  You have chocolate eyes and freckles just like me. And I am grateful to have dreamed with you even for just a little while. I just wish I could wake up and live those dreams with you now. We were constellations of misery pressed into a dark and desolate canvas. I had forgotten that the stars were still beautiful. I had forgotten that so were we.

  Hope can’t be a hollow wish or dream. It needs to be filled, levied, brimming over with intention and action and belief and reaching, reaching, reaching, stretching until your muscles ache because you want it that damn much, and you won’t stop reaching until you hold it.

  Until it is yours.

  I let go too soon.

  60

  Life,

  You were broken, often ugly, and always too much, but you also hid promises in pockets, tucked hope under mattresses, and crammed a thousand perfect moments between the shards of sharp and treacherous ones.

  I am sorry I had forgotten them.

  I am sorry I didn’t even see.

  And a breath too late, I realized …

  I loved you.

  Help Is Here.

  These resources are meant to support you and help keep you safe. All are available 24-7/365. Don’t keep your suffering secret. Seeking help is crucial to healing. Reach out if you or someone you know is hurting. There are many who have struggled and suffered with these issues. You are not alone.

  If you are in immediate danger, call 9-1-1.

  For suicide prevention:

  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

  1-800-273-8255

  suicidepreventionlifeline.org

  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration National Hotline

  1-800-662-HELP (4357)

  samhsa.gov

  The notOK App

  notokapp.com

  For child abuse:

  Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline

  1-800-422-4453

  childhelp.org

  For domestic violence:

  National Domestic Violence Hotline

  1-800-799-7233

  thehotline.org

  For free crisis support:

  Crisis Text Line

  Text HOME to 741741

  crisistextline.org

  Acknowledgments

  This book was as devastating to write as it was healing. I wrote the very first raw, messy, and incoherent draft over the course of eleven days. Alone in the dark. I didn’t want my husband to hear me sobbing over my computer. I didn’t want to admit aloud what I was writing on each page: that I was hurting too. And that this story that bled out of me was in so many ways mine.

  This book wouldn’t have existed without Katie Selby’s comment on the first page, written as a flash fiction piece online on World Suicide Prevention Day, insisting that it should be my book. I remember the feeling of fear, of dread, of absolutely not! And then I knew that this book had to be written because my heart ached at the mere thought of it. This book wouldn’t have survived that first terrible draft without Becky Johnson. She was the first to read it and critique it and help me shape it into a story. She was the one who wrote notes in the margins that made me believe that this story mattered. There were so many others who saw this novel in its infancy and who anchored me in believing that Ellie’s story was important. I kept going on this journey because of each and every one of them.

  Holly McGhee, patron saint of author dreams and also my beloved agent, has been an absolute powerhouse of editorial insight. Her patience, love, care, and brilliance are a wonder. She gave this novel new life and was its fiercest advocate. I feel blessed to be a part of the extraordinary Pippin family.

  On my very first call with Brian Geffen, I knew I wanted him as my editor. His enthusiasm and vision were so aligned with my own that I couldn’t imagine a more perfect home for Ellie’s story. His comments in the manuscript were my happy rocket fuel and made me feel so seen in my every intention for this novel
. Between his and Rachel Murray’s insights and edits, I felt we were able to wrestle with this difficult subject matter with sensitivity and heart. Brian has been steadfast in his devotion to this book, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

  And so much gratitude to the entire Holt/Macmillan Children’s team! From the very first in-person meeting with Brian and Christian Trimmer, I felt home. I was paired with the amazing (and possibly long-lost awesome cousin) book designer Katie Klimowicz and the awesome artist Peony Yip. I was mind-boggled by my copy editor, Brenna Franzitta, and her exceptional attention to detail (I am quite certain that copy editors are unicorns) and my production editors, Melinda Ackell and Taylor Pitts. I also must sing praises to my phenomenal core publicity and marketing team: Kelsey Marrujo, Melissa Zar, Katie Quinn, Kristen Luby, and Gaby Salpeter! They crafted a plan so fully aligned with this book’s mission, and I am in awe of their talent and effort. I also want to acknowledge all the people who sat around the table in the Macmillan office on that December day (and all those who have impacted this book’s journey) for championing this story. I walked into that room and kept all of my tears of gratitude tucked away, but they were there. They still are.

  I did revisions with my agent, got my book deal, and went through the editorial process on this novel while enrolled at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. While I didn’t work on this novel while attending, I was able to transfer the skills I acquired to this manuscript. More importantly, I found my people. My fellow Guardians, I am so grateful that the stars led me to you all. You are some of the most exquisite and beautiful and generous humans I have ever met. You are magic.

  Gina Loveless, my bookish bestie. Thank you for your squeals of pure joy whenever I tell you news, your ocean-deep compassion and understanding, and your never-ending badassery. They inspire me and I know I would’ve teetered into self-doubt more often without you. We are in this for the long haul and I feel so lucky to have you as my roller-coaster buddy.