The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

“I can’t sleep.”

  He stepped inside, closed the door. “Do you need something?”

  I shook my head but I realized that in the dark he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know.”

  He clicked on the lamplight and in his boxers and nightshirt I could see what my nonna had meant that night in the kitchen. He looked thin. Like a man who’d been chasing sleep for longer than ten months. Like a man who’d been chasing it his whole life.

  “Why are you still up?” I asked.

  He looked down, realizing that I’d heard him walking up and down the stairs all night.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

  He sat at the edge of my bed, his hand hesitating before gripping my foot buried under the blankets. I wondered if it was easier for him to reach for me now that he knew I couldn’t feel it or if he was still just pretending like this was the way things had always been. But as much as I wanted us to be close, I just couldn’t stand lying anymore and maybe it was the exhaustion or the safety of the night but I wasn’t going to let another second go by without knowing exactly how much I’d hurt him. I wasn’t going to keep pretending like everything was okay just because I’d woken up.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He didn’t look at me. Maybe he couldn’t or maybe he just didn’t want me to see what was there, the answer to my question written in the lines on his face. But I needed to know.

  The quiet. It was still here and I needed to know where it had come from. I needed to know if it would come for me next because sometimes when I was lying in bed waiting for my dad to knock on the door and bring me downstairs I could feel it pressing on my lungs. And I felt that thing inside me that was even truer now than the day my mother had said it. I was useless—without Bryn, without my legs—I was useless and in those moments the quiet was so loud.

  “To her. To us. What happened?” I said.

  “She was sick.”

  “How? When?”

  He finally looked at me. “For a long time.”

  “Always?” I asked. “Was she always sick?”

  And is it in me, I wanted to say, because I’m her son?

  He shook his head. “Just after you were born.”

  “What was it?” I needed him to give the quiet a name.

  “The doctors diagnosed it as depression.” There was a strange lilt to his voice.

  “But was it?”

  He looked away, his voice flat. “They say it happens to lots of women. Postpartum—”

  “But it doesn’t last, does it? Not like that.”

  I’d heard enough growing up to know that I was the beginning of whatever fight my mother had coming. That I’d carried something with me into the world the day I was born. But I didn’t want vague details anymore. I didn’t want to feel sorry for a total stranger all because she had some chemical imbalance that kept her from loving her own child. I wanted to hate her for making me hate myself.

  “It wasn’t…” He stopped, eyes wide as if pleading for me to understand all of the things he couldn’t say.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t that black and white, Roman. Your mom…something happened to her but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Then whose fault was it?”

  He said the word through gritted teeth. “Mine.”

  “What do you mean yours?”

  He hung his head. “She’d said things…strange things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that she’d been seeing things. She used to say that something was following her. She was afraid but I thought they were just nightmares.” He looked up at me. “The psychiatrist’s solution was always to try a new medication or to up the dosage. She was on anti-hallucinogens and anxiety medicine and every time they didn’t work I felt like such a failure. We both did. I think she was tired of disappointing me and eventually she stopped talking about the hallucinations. And I knew…I knew she was lying but I…I just let her and now she’s…”

  My dad was rambling, fists shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of his guilt or if he knew something else that I didn’t. If he knew what had been haunting my mother and if he knew about whatever had been haunting Bryn and I too, because I couldn’t help but wonder if they were somehow the same. The darkness here in this house felt so much like the darkness in Bryn’s dream-state, the only difference being that one seemed to be haunting me from the outside while the other was haunting me from the inside. Maybe all evil looks the same regardless of where it comes from or what it wants.

  “She loved you, Roman,” my dad said. “Know that. Believe that.”

  I was quiet, not sure what to say.

  “Before.” His voice cracked. “She wanted you. We both did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He doubled over like I’d just punched him in the chest.

  “When she found out she was pregnant, when I was driving her to the hospital that day, she loved you. I promise you, Roman. She did. More than anything.”

  He cleared his throat and held his breath because we were both so sick of crying. I wanted to hate her. I needed to. But watching my dad remember her, the way she was, the way she wanted me, I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  “Was it…?” My voice gave out short of the word funeral. “What was it like?”

  He gripped his knees. “It was strange.” He exhaled. “And awful. All of it. Your nonno stayed with you at the hospital and your nonna practically had to carry me inside the church. That five-foot tall Italian woman had her arms wrapped around me, dragging me up those steps. I was a mess. I don’t even remember what anyone said or did. I just remember your nonna’s hands on me, holding me together. I couldn’t go back to the house for a while after that and the three of us stayed the next two nights in your hospital room. Me in that plastic chair and your nonna curled up on a cot. I think your nonno just stood the whole night, walking back and forth from the foot of your bed.”

  I thought about the three of them suspended in their grief for six whole months. Because of me. I choked on a sob, shuddering with it, and then the hall light clicked on. I heard my grandparent’s voices, then the door pushed open and my nonno, still in his robe and slippers, came in and put an arm around both of us. He squeezed us tight and our faces were so close, all three of us just staring at each other.

  “My boys.” He kissed me on the forehead, then my dad. “My boys.”

  16

  Roman

  Craig was sitting across from me, letting me catch my breath. We’d been going full speed since I was released but that morning I woke up sore and it made me slow. I hadn’t just hit a physical plateau, I’d slammed into it face first and my entire body was reeling from the impact.

  “It’s normal,” Craig said.

  But I’m not normal, I wanted to say. I was the guy who’d miraculously woken up from a six-month coma; I was the guy Craig had said was special, stronger. I was a Santillo, my nonno’s namesake.

  “I can do this,” I said, pulling myself back up into a sitting position.

  “You’ve been pushing it hard today. Remember there’s no hurry.”

  “Why because I’m still paralyzed?” I snapped.

  Craig’s face didn’t move an inch.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just…”

  “You’re done for the day.”

  “No. I—”

  “You’re done.” Craig reached out a hand but I didn’t take it. He sat back down. “Don’t let this get to you. Everyone has setbacks.”

  I’m not everyone.

  “The body needs a break sometimes.”

  “It just had a six-month break, isn’t that enough?”

  “All the more reason it needs one now. You’re still in recovery mode. For six months your body was completely inactive and now we’ve hit it with more physical activity than you’ve probably ever done in your entire life. And I’ve been letting you control the sessions, letting you push yourself but if we keep going at this pace
you’re going to wear yourself out. Maybe you already have.”

  “I’m fine. Just sore…”

  “That’s okay. We’ll get it again in a couple of days.”

  I didn’t want to deal with this, not this morning. I’d hardly been sleeping, still not comfortable in my old bed. The progress I’d been making had felt like a constant, something I could count on. But no matter how hard I’d pushed that week my body was still fighting me. And I was so sick of fighting my body. Of it winning.

  Craig looked at me. “Do you want to know why I gave up fighting?” I glanced at him in the corner of my eye and he continued. “Burn out. I trained seven days a week and eventually my body said enough. Totally screwed up my shoulder and then I blew out my knee, all in the same month. Everything I’d worked for just gone because I didn’t know how to pace myself. I didn’t know how not to be desperate. You…”

  “I’m desperate?”

  “You’re scared.”

  “I’m—”

  “You are. But it’s okay to be scared.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is and it’s totally understandable.”

  “I just feel like I took a huge step back this week.”

  I wanted to say, and I don’t have time for that. But then I realized that I did. I had all the time in the world to get better or to get stuck being sick and broken. Time. That’s what I was really afraid of. The sessions with Craig were a distraction, making me think that I was working towards something important. But when they were over, when I was just sitting on the couch or lying in my bed, time was a physical adversary, grating across my skin, waking me up in the middle of the night. It felt endless and that’s what scared me—that I’d be stuck in this body forever.

  I slammed my fists on the mat and suddenly Craig was reaching for me. But then he flinched.

  “Shit, you must have really worked up a sweat.”

  I stared down at my hands, sweat evaporating like smoke. They were red and almost blistering, something fiery and familiar seething just under my skin. They looked like they had that night in Bryn’s dream-state when she’d left me alone, her dreams convulsing and twisting into my worst nightmare until I’d ended up back at the site of the accident. I’d been lying bloody under that mangled tree, startled by the darkness, my body turning into one giant flame as the shadow pressed on me from the inside out. But the heat didn’t rage through me like it had when I’d destroyed the shadow. Instead it was concentrated in the tips of my fingers, my veins sparking like live wires.

  “Whoa,” Craig said. “You feeling okay?”

  I tucked them under my knees but the second my fingertips grazed my skin, the hair there was singed.

  “I…” Craig almost reached for me again, but I pulled away. “I’m fine. Just got overheated.”

  “You sure?”

  But he wasn’t looking at me. He was still staring at my hands, at the ribbing where my fingers were starting to burn holes through my shorts. What the hell?

  “Roman.”

  “Yes, I mean…” No. “I’m fine.”

  I hesitated before touching the strings of the bass, testing my hands against my knees, against the remote control. But they’d finally cooled, the anger or whatever other strange and awful thing that had ignited them earlier slowly evaporating. Even though I knew it was still there. And suddenly I knew I was right about what I’d felt the moment I woke in that hospital bed. That darkness was still in me and it always would be.

  But that wasn’t all that lingered. The second my eyes snapped open for the first time I’d felt like I was on fire. My mind had registered the pain, my memory filling in everything else—the pills, the car accident—until every healed break and old bruise was throbbing like new. I thought it had all been connected, the pain and the flames inside me. But what if they weren’t? What if the only reason I could still feel the darkness inside me was because something else was trying to fight its way to the surface too?

  I stared down at my hands, the skin dry and plain and betraying nothing. I flipped them over, eyeing my palms, tracing the veins that were barely visible as they splayed from my wrist. There was a spark and I blinked, a dull light shifting beneath my skin. I snapped my hand closed but even though the light was hidden the temperature still started to rise.

  I peeled my hand open again, one finger at a time, my gaze tracing the light across my skin until the entire thing was glowing. The light turned white, the space around me illuminated as it climbed the walls. Holy shit. I heard footsteps, my nonna coming down the stairs and I snapped my fist closed, the light inside and all around me blinking out. The skin barely had time to cool before I reached for the bass to pretend like I’d been playing all along.

  My hand hovered over the strings but I paused, trying to sense the flames inside me that I couldn’t see. The night I’d first woken back into my body, something about Bryn’s presence had acted as kerosene. Maybe all along that was the real reason the coma couldn’t snuff me out. Because I wasn’t just made of flesh and bone and blood. There was something else strung through my veins, something powerful.

  But not impenetrable.

  My eyes drifted down to my legs. Whatever was inside me, the light or the darkness, it still didn’t change the fact that I was human. So maybe I was stronger than most people but I wasn’t immune to all pain. I wasn’t immune to tragedy. In fact, maybe I was just a magnet for it.

  The bass rested on my knee and as the strings bit into my fingers I let out a hard breath. They were cold and sharp and covered in dust. I brushed them clean with my shirt, igniting a sharp squeal, and then I gripped the neck of the bass.

  My hand rested there, hesitant. My old bass had been sitting in the corner of my room for weeks but I just couldn’t bring myself to touch it. Because it made me think of Bryn, of how she’d known that I was real, of how she’d known me when I didn’t even know myself.

  I couldn’t help but think of the Schecter she’d picked out for me and the way it had felt in my hands the first time I’d held it, plucking the strings, fingertips pinching the frets. I looked down at the frame of the one in my lap, scuffed and scraped and dinged. I used to stay up all night playing when I couldn’t sleep until my mother would bang on my bedroom wall and tell me to stop. Maybe that’s the real reason I did it, not to fight my insomnia, but so that I could hear her voice. Just once after a week of nothing but silence.

  I plucked a string, letting the vibrations disappear against my skin. The hair rose on my arms and I plucked a few more. The sound was so deep, sticking to the back of my throat, and I let it sit there, letting myself taste every note.

  I flexed my fingers, grateful that I could move at least that much, that I could still play, and then I did. I fiddled with a few scales I’d made up when I first learned to play and then I dropped into YYZ by Rush. It wasn’t until I started sleeping in my own room again that I realized why I’d liked them so much after listening to them at the farmhouse. I had a copy of every one of their albums thrown in the top drawer of my dresser, along with Mismatched Machine, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Coheed and Cambria.

  My fingers stuck against the strings, slower than they used to be, and I had to start over more than once. I was halfway through my third attempt when my nonna answered a knock at the door.

  My clothes were still damp from the sweat I’d been pouring earlier, my face covered in a week’s worth of facial hair, and the last time I’d had a proper haircut was in the hospital the week I’d first woken up. In other words I looked like an Italian immigrant who’d stowed away on some cargo ship with the rats en route to America. Not exactly fit for company.

  “Hi.” She just stood there, apprehensive.

  “Cass…”

  I hadn’t meant for it to sound casual, like some kind of nickname, a term of endearment I may or may not have whispered into her ear that night we were both buzzed and my hand was scaling beneath her shirt. I just couldn’t choke out the rest of her name. What is she
doing here?

  “How are you?” she said.

  There was something strange in her voice and it made me think I should put up some kind of defense.

  “Okay,” I said, wary.

  “Can I sit?”

  I didn’t answer but Cassie sat anyway. I saw my nonna in the sheen of the television. She glanced over at us and then she went upstairs, leaving us alone.

  Cassie inched closer and I could tell she wanted to touch me but I didn’t know why.

  “I saw Jimmy,” she said, working out some kind of explanation as to why she’d randomly shown up at my house after not seeing each other for more than ten months. “He told me you were back home.”

  “So you thought you’d come by?” I asked.

  “I thought…” She stopped, cheeks flushed. “I wanted to see that you were okay.”

  “And now?”

  She looked away. “Jesus, Roman, why do you always have to be such a dick?”

  It stung only because it was true. Those were the parts of me Bryn had never seen only because I couldn’t remember they were there. But Cassie had seen them and she still came.

  “I’m sorry. I just…I don’t know why you’re here.”

  “Because I care about you,” she said.

  I just stared at her, not sure where this was going.

  “Roman, do you…?”

  “Remember?” I finished.

  She chewed on her lip, nodded.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Us?”

  “Everything.”

  “Carlisle doesn’t know. I don’t think Jimmy knows either unless…I mean, you didn’t tell anyone did you?”

  “In those forty hours between sleeping with you and crashing my car and ending up in a fucking coma, I’m pretty sure I had time to tell the whole world. In fact, I think I pulled over on my way to kill myself, sent a mass text to everyone I knew, and did just that.”

  “What?” Her lip quavered and I realized what I’d just said.

  “I…didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  She was right but if I could hardly admit it to myself I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it to her. I thought I’d wanted to die once but if I went back there, if I let myself feel that again, I knew this time there’d be nothing and no one to stop me.