September Rain Bk 2, Savor The Days Series
Page 28
I fold myself into the comforting lies my mind conjures: me, standing inside Jakes garage. There is no tour to prepare for, no search for a second guitarist. No lingering echoes of “not yet.” He never packed and moved. It’s quiet. Jake is visiting his mom and Henry. Max is probably at work and Andrew, the tattling asshole, is going to be replaced.
I am alone and at peace, staring at the blown out half-stack I always sat on. Max’s drum set quietly sits with the sticks lying in X formation on top of a tom. Jakes favorite sunburst guitar is upright, on a stand beside the bass. I’m seeing the numerous band posters and stickers tacked up on the walls, but I am looking at the one poster that was different from the rest.
My poet used to wax philosophical sometimes. He once said, “Through the ages there have been millions of quotable things said. Phrases that seem to fit every situation.” Jake liked to collect words like that—the kind that stuck with you. He had this cheesy poster in the bands practice space with hundreds of quotes on it. That’s probably why I can remember so many. His favorite one was a quote by Thomas Edison: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to always try one more time.” Jake never actually used it, but he told me once that one line was why he bought the poster.
I used to read it when the guys were trying to work out a kink in a riff or transition. Some of the quotes contradicted each other; like this one about how the greatest gift you can get in life is friendship, but another said health was the greatest gift. I wouldn’t know about either of those.
I liked the one from Mother Teresa. It went something like: poverty is more than being naked and hungry. That being unwanted, unloved, or uncared for is the real poverty. In that sense, I’ve been poverty-stricken from birth. Rejected by the only family I had and passed around from house to house, barely tolerated by most of the Fosters that took me in.
I think, if I had just one parent that would have been enough. But my dad was a ghost. And my crazy-ass mother never wanted me—not because she had anything better, but because of her disease. I wonder, in her schizophrenic mind, if she was trying to show me that she did love me by taking me with her in the car that morning. Maybe she didn’t want to separate from me, even in death. I could understand that.
There was another quote on that poster about how there is more power is in rising after you fall than in never falling. I like that one. But how can you get up when you’re locked in freefall?
Another quote said something like, Freedom is something you have to win—and maybe it is. For the ones who still have hope.
I think being remembered is the greatest gift. It is the only thing I can give to Jake. I can burn my candle and think of him. I can sing his songs. I can remember him. I can never make up for what happened, but I can keep vigil until I find him again in the next life.
+ + +
41
—Avery
If I had met Angel at any other moment in her life, I would not have felt a need to protect her. It’s a no-brainer. But I first saw her at a pivotal point: the moment of her breaking.
Literally, one moment I was watching a group of cranes drink from a puddle between the trees, and the next I was watching her bones fracture. That boxy car rolled down the road: a little bump before it took a short flight from the pavement, then flipped. Something small and white burst from the space where the windshield had splintered into a million tiny shards and landed in the crook of two unsure tree branches. A small tree, planted several years before was innocently growing beside the roadway, and by pure chance, it caught her.
I’ve seen some shit in my life, but that was, by far, the most terrible one. Something inside me burst as I took it all in, and I knew that I had been put there for a reason—that I was supposed to take care of her. That I was meant to keep her from ever having to go through anything like that ever again.
Okay, so I didn’t always make the best choices, but none of this shit has been painless on my side. If anything, I have suffered more. I realize it wasn’t easy on her, but she needs to understand that I have always, only ever took what she gave me and dealt with situations as they came up.
There’s no prep course for this shit. No one’s ever written a guide on how to be second-best. And let’s face it; that is all I have ever been.
I was just trying to protect us. How can she not get that?
Angel and me are different types of particles—maybe even opposites—but we’re made to cling to one another to achieve balance. Or we could be like what my high school science teacher said. He said that outer space is black because light particles need other particles to grab onto. Since space is basically empty, there is nothing for the light to hold. So it just keeps traveling, never touching anything until it enters earths’ atmosphere and finds something to cling to.
Angel is the light.
I am the one hurdling through the outer nothingness. Searching. Grasping.
Space and I have a lot in common. If only I could have known sooner, maybe I would have studied harder. I could have become an astronaut. I could have landed on the moon or docked in a space station with a Russian dude named Vlad. He might have held my tether when I went on a space walk. And I would’ve cut that tether, joining my emptiness with the great vacuum of the beyond. I might have found some peace.
I can’t believe my shit for luck. I should be the one the review board is talking to. Angel’s just gonna tell them whatever she wants and I’ll have to live with it.
Being powerless is a feeling I will never be comfortable with. I just won’t. I’ve tried. I’ve been taking the backseat through this whole damned process.
Maybe I haven’t pressed hard enough.
+ + +
42
—Angel
Hopefully, today is the last I’ll have to suffer through. When I’m done serving up my guts on a platter, I can go back to Canyon View to rot and wait for death to take me.
Guards escort me back into the small blue room. I’m put into my seat at the vinyl-wood table. Today, I’m anxious to vomit the words. I have no intention of waiting for anyone to prompt me. But my plan is interrupted by Darren, the quiet man whose name reminds me of the guy on that old TV show about the genie.
“What happened when you woke up in the hospital?” He asks.
This throws me. “I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with me.”
“We have the hospital records right here, if you’d like to go over them.” Quiet Darren sets his thin hand over one of the many manila folders on the table in front of him.
Tara and her tight bun are sitting beside him. She looks a little pale.
I shake my head. “Living it was plenty.”
I don’t need to see what they saw, too. Their truth won’t match mine on this one, anyways. It never has; their chain of events is much more difficult than mine. I’ll stick with my memories and touch on theirs when the time comes.
“I was in a lot of pain. My left shoulder was sprained, my left wrist, too. My arm was in a sling, but I’m right handed, so . . .”
My lawyer lightly shakes his head. Tara looks down. Darren sits back in his chair.
They must think I’m so stupid, that I don’t realize the magnitude of what’s not being said. I know I can’t always trust my own mind, that’s why I made the point that this proclamation is all my perception. Mine. What I saw. When I saw it.
What they don’t understand is how it feels to be me.
Living with my problems is like trying to negotiate a one-way maze. I can only go forward and every passage, every choice, looks the same. All I see is the path I think I should take. Nothing is certain—there is no logic, only guess work. So what seems like the right place to turn can end up a dead-end. If I could’ve only gotten some distance, some height, I could’ve seen where I was going wrong. But I’ll never get to go back, never start over. I look back now and see the wall of problems for what they were. I have accepted that I made wrong turns and am living with the dead e
nds.
At seventeen, I was working inside a complex problem with limited information. I didn’t know I was afraid of Avery’s choices. I still am. She has always tried to push things, push people and their situations. IN her mind, she needs to test every boundary, every person. She needs to know when they’ll break.
When she twisted Rosa’s arm behind her back that day in the girls’ bathroom, I knew she wanted to break it.
Once, when she was taking a shower, her mind just went off on some tangent, wondering ‘what would happen if I just stayed in here?’ Because she was curious how people might react. But mere wondering is never, ever enough. She has to know the answers. Avery stayed inside that shower until the hot water was gone, until she got all pruney, until she was freezing, until someone came pounding on the door, until someone broke it down, until they physically dragged her out of the shower and made her get dressed.
Pushing, pushing, and pushing just to see what might happen when a person is faced with the unexpected.
I know Darren asked me about when I woke up in the hospital, but that doesn’t seem so important at the moment. “I first saw Avery on the day of my accident. Did I ever tell you that?”
My mouth is all watery and my throat feels a mile wide. “Her mean-streak was showing the first time I talked to her. That was after my accident, after I got out of the hospital.”
I have to shake my head at my own unbelievable idiocy, the same stupidity that kept me blindly comforted from the first. “It wasn’t like I saw what she was doing and thought, ‘Oh, she is violent!’ It was more like I couldn’t understand and made no judgment. I was a stupid kid.”
+++
I was placed with my first foster family after they released me from the hospital, after the second surgery to repair my skull. Avery happened to live in the same apartment complex. I was upstairs and she was down.
On days when my head was hurting too much to go to school, I would lie in my room and look out the window at the playground behind the complex. Some days, Avery was there. Most times, other kids in the complex were out there, too. I thought, at first, that she was playing with them, but as I watched I saw that she was only playing near them. It was interesting how she didn’t seem to care that the other kids weren’t talking to her or inviting her to play.
I have no memory of the accident itself, only some parts that I dreamed about, but I always remembered Avery being there. I saw her on the ground, calling to me after I hit that tree.
One day, when Avery was out there alone on the playground, I snuck outside.
As I walked along the path that led to the swing set, Avery’s back was to me. She was standing in a patch of tall grass at the end of the path, staring down at something I couldn’t see. Then she turned aside, walked to a large planter and removed a decorative rock. I watched her carry it back into the grass. Once she reached her previous spot, she stopped, raised the rock over her head, and slammed it down.
There was this odd noise and I thought maybe she was laughing.
I inched closer.
She picked up the rock again and slammed it back into the grass.
I didn’t identify the high-pitched cry until it cut-off.
It was a mercy killing, she’d said. She couldn’t find anyone to take the starving kitten and it had no mother. She was helping it.
43
—Angel
All three of them are scribbling in their note pads. I am sure they have a million questions, but I have exhausted that subject.
Switching back to the previous topic—the question of waking up in the hospital—I answer as if I never veered away in the first place.
“I was sure I must have run at least a few blocks from that motel before I got hit by that police car.”
+++
I remember feeling relieved for half a second when I saw the IV in my arm. I was actually glad I wasn’t dead. Until I remembered how I got there.
I took too long to go for help. I ruined any chance Jake might have had because I fell apart. Every second I hesitated, with every breath I took, I betrayed him.
I would never touch him again. I would have to live the rest of my life without holding him, kissing his face, resting my head on his chest to hear his heartbeat. I would never watch his eyes crinkle when he laughed or feel his strong arms embracing me. Never feel his breath on my ear as he whispered my name.
My heart cursed the minutes that carried him away, the room he was laid in, the hands that threw him into that reposed state where I found him, and my own lap—for so impotently bearing his weight after missing the moment when he breathed his last. And my broken brain for not knowing what to do about it.
All of him was taken—who he used to be, who he would have become, the future that he was building for himself was gone and I was left behind. Alone.
A deformed tree struck by lightning—I was ruined.
I was on fire. Furious with myself. With that bitch I’d called a friend.
And the doctor was out of his mind. He strolled in, all nonchalant, and broke into some kind of speech about how I was lucky.
I kept my mouth shut, too consumed with ideas of how I was going to hang Avery when the cops came to question me. No, I didn’t see anything, but what I saw after, and the sounds I heard, and the way she apologized; those were the nails in her coffin. My loyalty was to Jake and she would pay for what she did.
The police came in as soon as the doctor left my room. One of my nurses said they had been there waiting for me the whole time.
The moment I laid eyes on those two officers; it was as if the burning ache—the one that said I was somehow betraying myself by talking to cops—had been waiting for that sign of authority to make it all real. Their presence solidified my allegiance; it justified my speaking to them. And I needed that, because even though I was going to spill my guts, there was still that innate part of me that naturally distrusted cops.
There was the dual smack of righteous rage and Jakes resolute absence. My anger was the tip of a flickering flame that grew to a scorching inferno when Jakes’ name tipped into it. Like gasoline, the two ignited.
My shame for cooperating—for the nerve of my breath after Jakes had stopped—was buried beneath the rubble for the moment. I sat up, watching the two cops place chairs at the end of my bed before sitting down.
I told them everything I could think of before they said a word. Every little detail, before they even asked for it. The way the night didn’t go as I expected it to. How that chick Angelica was so beautiful and awesome on her guitar, that I was jealous when she performed alongside Jake because she was doing something I never could. She complimented him in a way I only dreamed about. And then Jake was mad at me and left me hanging. It was too much stress and I got a headache.
In the fantasyland of this legal drama, I was articulate. I told the cops everything and they believed me. They were going to arrest Avery and I was going to be their star witness to testify against her.
Reality was a cruel slap to the face.
44
—Angel
“Why is that?” Tight Bun Tara asks. When I stare at her, she clarifies: “What ‘reality’ felt like a slap to the face?”
My back straightens with decisive stubbornness. She knows damn well what. “They said I was lying.”
Her eyes move from mine down to the paper in front of her. Pen in hand, she scribbles her notes across the page. “How did that make you feel?”
I scoff. “How do you think?”
“Betrayed?” Her eyebrows lift over the squared rim of her glasses.
I’m very tempted to scream, “DUH!” But calmly explain, “Betrayed is an accurate description.”
“Did they tell you what they believe happened? What their theories were?” It’s Darren asking this time.
I nod then look at the microphone, remembering I’m supposed to speak. “Yes, they did.”
“And can you repeat those theories to me?” Tight Bun Tara asks.
And all the faith I had—more than I ever realized, judging by the rampant disappointment coming on like a wave, vibrating through my chest—all that faith in her, in the belief that she would see me, the person inside; the love and dreams that I’ve lost . . . the hope.
It’s gone.
I can feel myself shrinking, deflated like a popped balloon. Only, I am not trying to block them out. My legs are not curling up, my arms are not clinging to my stomach. Still, I feel as if I am being oppressed, losing energy and I can’t stop it. I don’t think I want to.
My breathing becomes labored. My eyes lose focus.
+ + +
45
—Avery
I remember very well, the whole pathetic scenario.
The cops had me cuffed, sitting in the interrogation room. I was giving as much attitude as I got. From the moment I was bulldozed into the station, the whole scenario reeked of a bad cop show—some chick-cop set each of my fingers over an ink pad then rolled them, one at a time, onto a page with boxes that labeled each print with a name and corresponding digit. She said the ink would wash right off, but my finger tips and palms were covered in inky blotches for days after.
Then, I was strapped into a hard plastic chair and left alone for hours inside a little room as they attempted to bore me to death.
When the two idiot cops that arrested me finally came in, saying stupid things like, “play time is over,” all I could do was laugh in their faces. I mean, who they fuck did they think they were? They didn’t know me.