In the Absence of You

by Sunniva Dee

  “Did Troll invite you over tomorrow? Or… It’s not a hospital day for you, is it?”

  I’m so tired. I lean my forehead against the wall. “No. You know what? I’ll be there tomorrow. Text me your folks’ address,” I whisper.

  “Done deal.” He doesn’t sound content. “I’ll come by tonight. We’ll play ‘Guitar Hero’ or some shit.”

  “I’m exhausted,” I say, not having to lie. “Mañana, yeah?”

  “Okay. Mañana. But no ogling my sisters,” he kids.

  I don’t laugh at his joke.

  Bo calls from Sweden.

  I don’t pick up.

  He texts me while I clean the revolver I’ve never used.

  Mår du okey? he asks, and I don’t lie to Bo either when I reply that I’m tired but happy.

  Final decisions have the power to relax a man. They make you stop worrying. You’re done fighting, done calling, done leaving messages, singing songs, trying to create a life worth living.

  It’s relief, yeah, it is, when you open that little carton of bullets and load them into your gun.

  Your family, will they find you selfish? You’re doing them a favor. Instead of watching you rot from the inside out, they can remember you as you were.

  The screen lights up with Aishe’s name.

  I should have turned off the phone.

  You clean the revolver again, shiny, beautiful in the afternoon glow. You hold it up, reveling in the relief of your decision.

  If you believed in God, you’d be sentenced to Hell. You don’t though—you’re fine—plus, a humane god would say an infraction out of kindness for others is permissible when your act will cut others’ misery short.

  Your relief evaporates if you think about After. You switch on the TV and find some channel playing a professional poker tournament—

  How fitting.

  You’ll be gambling too.

  Aishe doesn’t get the hint when I reject her fifth attempt to call me. She buzzes again; the girl always was stubborn.

  You turn up the volume on the television. None of your friends would play this game with you. You’re a social person. Now the players on the show are your only company.

  Elias calls between Aishe’s attempts. He instantly follows up with a text.

  God jul, idiot! it says.

  God jul, I text back so he doesn’t try to call again.

  Troll calls. Nadia texts me.

  Even Shandor?

  What is this, a conspiracy to not leave me the fuck alone?

  When Irene types something out from South Africa, I’ve had it. I turn my phone off and let the TV blare.

  It’s four p.m. on Christmas Eve, and you don’t want to think too hard about things. Since you woke up this morning, you’ve been relieved. Why would you think about people going to Christmas ceremonies back home?

  You can’t call them. That would be insanity. Your mom would want to get on the phone too, and as soon as you opened your mouth, she’d hear how you are. You’d never do that to her. You’re not ruining her memory of you before you check out.

  You won’t.

  Crazy how physical needs interrupt the inevitable; all this bodily crap moseying on like it’s supposed to bog you down forever. The revolver comes with you to the bathroom. The phone too. Your fingers turn it back on.

  You lay the revolver gingerly on the porcelain sink, loaded muzzle pointing at your thigh as you pee. How ironic if you shot yourself in the leg before you got to play your game. You’re a sissy. You probably wouldn’t even get to the game if you did that first.

  She calls. Fucking. Again!

  “Aishe!” I scream into the phone.

  She doesn’t miss a beat. “Emil! You picked up.”

  “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  “Why? Are you okay?” And something about the way she’s fearless, meeting my questions with immediate questions, makes me talk.

  “No! I’m not fucking okay. And I want to be left the fuck alone so I can be fucking miserable alone!”

  “Where’s Bo?”

  “Sweden.”

  “Elias?”

  “Sweden.”

  “Why the hell aren’t you in Sweden?”

  “Because!” I shout as hard as I can.

  She doesn’t respond. My chest heaves and heaves with all of the last oxygen I’ll ever need in this stupid place. I’m out of here.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” she tells me.

  “Duh.”

  “Christmas Eve is bigger than Christmas Day in Sweden. Don’t try to make stuff up, Emil, because I spent most of my childhood Christmases in Ostersund. You can’t fool me.”

  “Fine.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Shooting myself in the head,” I laugh out.

  The silence on the other side tells me she gets that I’m not kidding.

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Right,” she murmurs. She’s seen me play with my sexy friend. I’ve told her how I’d play more with it once she wasn’t around. Aishe is not surprised. “You’ve got a real gun now, don’t you?”

  Her question catches me off guard. I avoid it. “No seriously, that was a joke. I’m not shooting myself in the head.”

  “Yeah.” From her voice, she believes me. Which makes sense when she continues, “You’re about to shoot yourself in the heart.”

  Peace. Peace. No more insistence from hyped-up females.

  I always was the hyped-up one.

  In my last hour, I can’t stomach Aishe’s questions about outpatient treatments. Meds. How I “like” my shrink. She’s postponing me. On purpose she’s postponing me, and—

  You’re wrong, Aishe. Zoe is the end of the world.

  I stare at my phone as I walk back to my bedroom. Zoe’s smell is still here, half a year later, and I don’t care if it’s real or just me.

  Our pictures are scattered everywhere. Tipped over, messily arranged against the back wall of a TV. On the lower shelf of a coffee table. Everywhere, everywhere, because my love wanted us displayed wherever she could put us.

  She chose my place.

  A will, you think as you cock the gun. Point it around you. At the gamblers on the screen first. You don’t have a will. You hope that means everything goes to your family.

  A song, you think. One she will hear out.

  You don’t know about lives, if you have one or a few. If our past ones bleed into future lives, ah you’d be more careful in your next.

  Zoe, I’ll be good in our next lives.

  You call her for the last time in this existence. Push the speaker of your phone against your ear as if it’s her cheek. You close your eyes, feeling her warmth, smelling the soap she used, her perfume, the shampoo. Now you regret not asking what those scents were, because they were her.

  You hope death doesn’t take the sense of smell away. You’d hate to lose the last remnant of what she was.

  You can’t think about it, just sing to her this last time. Let her know, let her know, again, a last again, that what happened was a blip, a molecule of air in the vast atmosphere that was your love for her.

  Never doubt.

  Never doubt.

  The beauty that you are to me.

  I love you.

  Love you love you more than anyone and anything can define.

  Never, my love. Never, my Zee.

  Has a girl trapped a boy the way you have me.

  Here’s my eulogy, have it, eat it.

  I’ll see you next time, baby, next time.

  I sing my words to her.

  I do it as me. I’m not Jeffrey Osborne or Percy Sledge, Seal, no, it’s my voice she’ll hear, and as I hang up, before I shut my phone down all the way and forever, I realize that I didn’t star-sixty-seven her. I called her with my own number. My Zoe, she didn’t have me blocked.

  It eases my departure that her hate for me has lessened.

  Aishe calls.

  Calls. Calls.

  Shandor calls. Troy’
s at my door.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!” I scream in my head, the revolver shaking in my hand.

  “Open.” Troy’s voice is quiet.

  My door is always open for people who knock. But when I set my lips to its panel today, it’s to state, “I’m busy. See you in a few hours.”

  “BS. Open or I’m breaking down the door.”

  “Hold on,” I say then. “Just let me get dressed, and I’ll open.”

  He hesitates. Plays along next. “Or I’ll have to see your hairy balls?” The joke from ages ago registers, but I have no humor.

  “Right. Four seconds.” It’s hard to sound like myself.

  I hadn’t envisioned my end like this. I’d have time. It’d be peaceful. I’d get to relish the moment where I pulled the trigger to let it all go. I was going to give myself the chance for randomness too; I could be alive tomorrow, after a Russian roulette gone right instead of wrong.

  The TV people drone, not as high-strung as I hoped. Troy’s on the other side. If only he could be on this side and support me when I go.

  I remain by the door, wanting someone close. For a brief second, I think of how he’ll feel when he hears the pow.

  No, no, his pain is nothing like mine. He’ll survive.

  Fuck. Why’s he here?

  I don’t want him to hurt.

  I stare at myself in the hallway mirror, feet away from the door that keeps Troy out.

  “It’s been four seconds.”

  You pull the trigger. Your eyes are so wide in the mirror as your index finger presses down.

  Jesus, is this how you look, you suicide people?

  You shut your eyes. Press harder.

  Click.

  Shit?

  “What. The FUCK, Emil?” Troy roars from outside.

  I’m shaking. Shaking so hard. I’m a wuss for not making it happen. Have I made anything happen lately?

  He slams his body against the door. “Open. The. Damn. Door!”

  You stare at yourself. It’s hard to do when your eyes water like it’s the last day they’ll ever water—it is.

  You do it again, a rush—

  All this life rushing through your veins, because life does its most now, wanting quantity when it can’t have quality—now, now it knows days, hours are done and last minutes and seconds whoosh out.

  Click.

  Click.

  The door explodes. My third try was moot too—how—

  What. Are the odds?

  Of six bullets.

  I gasp in air, knowing he’ll stop me. They’ll confiscate my gun, tuck me away somewhere, drug me up, unless I can—

  Pull the trigger again.

  EMIL

  My mouth hangs detached.

  The pain propagates, reaching every crevice of my chest. It flares up to my shoulders, speeds down to my stomach, until I have to fight to remain on my feet.

  I want to crumble and moan, but my stare is glued to the doorway, this apparition—my eyes, they decide for the rest of me.

  “You!” she screams, my love, my sweetheart, my bitchy girl. She screams so loudly my eyes flicker shut. “How dare you do this to me?”

  I can’t speak. I don’t understand. She’s here—furious, a love absolute saturating her irises. She looks at me with all the passion of Zoe, with everything I’ve ever needed.

  “You don’t care about me.” The air abandons me slowly.

  “I love you like crazy, asshole!”

  I sink to my knees, small huffs that should be laughter escaping me. My heaven. “I couldn’t live without you.” My fists clench in my lap. I’m on the floor, pitiful, but—

  Dead is worse.

  “What were you thinking?” That beautiful, sweet all of mine chokes out. “I saw ‘I’m Sorry.’ How could you do that to yourself? Ah…” She’s crying. My heart pounds for her crying.

  “Zee.” The luxury of pronouncing her name to her face. With Zoe in my space, I’m relearning how to breathe. “I just needed you to know.”

  “So you could leave me forever?” she asks, tears glistening on her face. “I’d come back to you.”

  “When?” I shout. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Now,” she whispers. “I wanted to stay away. It didn’t work very well.”

  “Because you love me?”

  “Yes, and damn you for this.” She grabs the revolver and wiggles it sideways in front of me. She shakes the two remaining bullets out into her hand. I can’t get enough of her furious, sad, lovely features, so I stare.

  One of the two bullets in her hand isn’t a blank.

  What if it had hit my heart before she came back for it?

  “Watch,” Zoe says. I drink up the way she walks, tiptoeing on high heels to the trash bin so she can chuck the revolver into the garbage.

  “You got something to say to me?” she asks, straightening and lifting her chin high. Steely eyes full of love and righteous wrath. She expects me to object.

  “That I love you,” I hiss. “And love you. And love you more than life.”

  There’s a sob inside my Zee. It erupts as she sinks down to me and lets me pull her into my lap. “You’re so thin, baby.” I kiss her tears, kiss her neck. “Don’t be so thin.”

  “I didn’t like being without you.”

  “Then why did you wait so long? Did you get my songs on the phone?” I ask, but now her shoulders are shaking.

  “Yeah. You broke my heart over and over with them.”

  “Good,” I say. “Never leave me like that again.”

  “Never look at another woman,” my jealous girl whispers. “Never play with guns. Never try to kill yourself.”

  “So many rules,” I hiss, sucking on lips that can’t compare.

  Troy’s voice eases in and out of my awareness while I press Zoe against me on the floor. I inhale her, taste her, memorize what I’ll never be without again.

  Troy calls Aishe. Shandor. Elias.

  “Hi, Bo? Yeah. He’s okay. Zoe’s here. No, not kidding; he left her a song on the phone.” He puffs out air. “She’s switched his light back on.”

  “Silly,” my bitchy girl says, hair shorter and blonder, but still who I love. It’s late on Christmas Eve at a small diner in the Miracle Mile. “You should have told them you didn’t want whipped cream on the hotcakes. Waitress?” Zee’s pitch rises with the level of her bossiness. “Get us an extra plate, please, because he doesn’t like fake cream.”

  “Ma’am, it’s not fake.”

  “Oh bull. Actually, he’ll need a new plate with fresh hotcakes, hold the cream, because— Because—” Zoe swallows emotion, eyes ablaze with irritation. “Because he deserves it.”

  I know my girl. She displaces her anger unrightfully; it makes sense that she’s mad at me and directs it at the waitress. I grin with unused muscles because grins come easily around Zee.

  My body’s stunned with the one-eighty of my plans. Slowly, it catches on, waits to see if this surge of happiness is reliable.

  Over coffee, Zoe tells me that Aishe kept calling her. Over coffee, she tells me Aishe sent her my New York performance and the article written by the good reporter. Over coffee, Aishe made Zee sit down last night and hear her out.

  “I was on the phone with Aishe when you called in your last song,” Zoe murmurs, elbows on the table and hands on my cheeks. I can’t get enough. I’ll never get enough of her fingers on my face.

  “Again, you didn’t pick up,” I say.

  “Emil?”

  “Baby.” I’ve got my eyes shut and my mouth in the palm of her hand where it should always be.

  “Don’t ever sing that song again.”

  AISHE

  The last six months have flown by. Shandor and I thrive with The Thalias, who typically stay in the same town and theater for a week at a time. It’s unheard of not to be restless over our slow-moving life. I always looked for the next town, the next adventure, on the run from the one feeling I thought I was destined for. I’ve never f
elt more settled.

  The worry in Shandor’s eyes has eased. Until now, I’d thought the tense set of his shoulders, the abrupt crease of his neck were simply his way. But with my calm came Shandor’s calm, and now he smiles and finds humor in things he didn’t before.

  It’s midsummer night in Sweden. We have two weeks off from The Thalias, and for the first time in half a decade, Shandor and I are in the midst of our family. My mother’s face bears wrinkles I don’t recall, but they pull upward when she speaks to me and the tears in her eyes are of happiness. My father has lit the bonfire between our campers in a remote area of a forest. Old Zindalo is still with the kumpania, chewing on his gums and smirking as he portions out subpar moonshine in plastic cups.

  Kennick’s son has a wife of his own now, a sweet woman he clearly adores. On instinct, my mind goes to the plague, wondering if he has it too, but then I realize he might just be in love.

  “My father tells me you see Chavali and him regularly?” he initiates our conversation tonight. His muddy blues flick to my parents, knowing Chavali and Kennick haven’t been forgiven.

  “Yes, they’re happy. They send hugs and kisses,” I murmur, quiet for the sake of our clan. “One of these days…” I look around me at the love, the closeness we share, knowing no one would appreciate this more than Chavali.

  “Yeah.” Kaven nods, tipping the cup of moonshine back and forth between his fingers. “I’m working on the elders.” Leaning in, he continues, sharing what we never talked about when we were younger. “Your sister is sweet, but she and I? There was nothing there. If I can forgive my father and Chavali, old Zindalo and the others should too.”

  Flames lick high from the bonfire, promising brighter futures and illuminating the small maypole my aunt Physante has raised at the periphery of our group. It’s got the traditional flower wreaths braided into them as if we’re Swedish too.

  I oomph when a little girl with long, brass-colored hair thuds down on my lap. Kaven’s smile widens, brushing a hand over her hair and straightening the hepatica, daisies, and bluebells forming a flower bandanna across her forehead.

  “Auntie Aishe!” she giggles. “My mama will make you a wreath too!”

  “That’s great,” I say to Kaven’s daughter. Her eyes are round doll’s eyes, the color of the bluebells in her locks. “You’re such a big girl already.” I tickle beneath her chin with a bright yellow buttercup.