“Oh my God,” I said, scanning more:
Death isn’t dark, it’s just nothing. It’s being freed from the pain. You inflict pain to end it. You suffer to end the suffering. “To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.” Willow, I came here to sleep.
I asked my dad to visit. I want him to find me. To deal with the mess for once… .
I crumpled the letter without reading the rest, shoving it into my pocket, and started running again.
“What is it, Willow?” Aunt Agatha called.
I chucked my cell at her. When she caught it, I said, “Call 911. Send them to Axel’s boat. Tell them it’s an attempted suicide, and tell them to hurry.”
“What do you mean?” Aunt Agatha stared at the phone, flabbergasted. “Where did you get this? How do you use it?”
“From Axel.” There was no time to answer the first question. “Flick your finger across the screen, and you’ll see a phone icon. Hit that, then ‘9-1-1’, and then ‘Send.’”
I ran toward Axel’s boat.
* * *
I was too late.
Axel lay on his bedroom floor, engulfed in his own seeped blood. There was so much blood, I couldn’t see where it came from. But I knew.
He had to be dead. You can’t lose that much blood and live.
Can you?
I knelt beside him, touched his cheek. He was cold, so cold.
I felt his neck for his pulse.
It was there.
He was alive.
“Oh, Axel …” I held back my tears. They were of no use to him.
I grabbed two towels from the bathroom and stretched his arms above his head. Then I knelt between them and pressed a towel on each of his wrists, pushing up his hands at the same time to try and close the grotesque gaps he’d sliced into himself.
I sat in Axel’s sea of blood, pressing, pushing, and pleading. “Axel, please, stay with me. Please …”
His hair was soaked, matted in red ooze. His arms were unevenly tinged and splattered, like a child had brushed them with a cheap watercolor crimson and would need several more coats to do the job.
His face looked like an angel’s. He looked peaceful, blissfully asleep… . Was he dreaming?
“Please, Axel …” My tears came. I couldn’t fight them anymore.
I bent by his head. My hair hung low over my face, swinging through blood back and forth like a pendulum. I kissed his forehead. Droplets of blood landed and dripped down the sides of his face.
My legs, arms, and fingers were sticky. My clothes were permeated with red.
My tears dripped into Axel’s blood, disappearing into it.
I felt light-headed, like maybe this was all a dream.
Perchance to dream …
“Why … why did he do this?” Aunt Agatha spoke from the doorway behind me.
“He planned it,” I answered. “He … he came here to die.”
She moved around me, into my view. “He had everything to live for.” Her voice cracked with emotion.
Axel’s story spilled from my mouth. I told her in condensed form: his childhood, his self-mutilation, his hopelessness. I ended with how Axel wanted his father to find him.
“And it’s my fault he did this… . I couldn’t help him.” His hands were so damn cold, I felt like he was slipping away from me. I pushed them harder toward the wrists, leaned with every bit of strength I had on the towels to try and stop the bleeding.
“He did so much for me, but I couldn’t help him,” I said.
He needed more help than you could give him, Willow,” Aunt Agatha said quietly.
“He told me he was going to therapy… . He lied to me!”
“Don’t be angry with him.”
“I’m not angry… . I’m just … oh, God … I love him… . ”
Loud stomping noises came from above. The paramedics had arrived.
“You go with him to the hospital, Willow. I’ll meet you there. But first, I’d like a word with the almighty Mr. Ridge.”
29
There Is the World Itself
It had been a whole year, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Axel.
Every day, I thought back to the last time I saw him. I watched the paramedics bandage his wrists. And I followed as they rushed him off the boat and down the dock on the stretcher. I held his cold hand on the five-minute ride to the hospital—the one he’d refused to let them take me to.
It wasn’t that bad that I could see. Not that I could see much through my tears. I chased the paramedics as they wheeled him down a hall, until some nurse stopped me and said I couldn’t go with him any farther.
And then Axel was gone. Just like that. I never got to see him again, never got to give him one last kiss.
At least I knew he was alive. Another nurse came out and told me that much. She told me too that it takes about an hour to bleed out through the veins, and the arteries do it in twenty minutes. Axel had been alone for about half an hour, so I guessed he’d hit a vein.
Knowing he was alive, I sank into oblivion.
* * *
I sat in the emergency waiting room, covered in Axel’s blood, and I cried. Blurry people came in and out; I couldn’t tell you what anyone looked like. I couldn’t describe the room or anything about the hospital at all, other than that it seemed smaller than the one I’d been in.
I slumped in a plastic chair attached to a whole row of chairs. I stared at the TV without knowing what I was seeing—that was blurry too.
Nothing mattered, anyway.
Nothing mattered but Axel.
Then someone came and sat next to me and took my hand. It was Aunt Agatha. And she spoke to me, but I couldn’t take in what she said.
We waited and waited together, and all I wanted was to see Axel. But then a nurse came and told us he’d been moved. His father had called and had him taken away, whisked him off to who knew where. While I was glad he didn’t have to stay in this hospital he hadn’t wanted me to come to, I knew I wouldn’t see him again.
And then I was alone.
All I had were his books and the note he’d left me. I carried it everywhere and read it every day:
Dear Willow,
Forgive me. I lied. I never went to therapy.
Death isn’t dark, it’s just nothing. It’s being freed from the pain. You inflict pain to end it. You suffer to end the suffering. “To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.” Willow, I came here to sleep.
I asked my dad to visit. I want him to find me. To deal with the mess for once.
My one regret is the pain I’m causing you. I’m sorry. It just hurts too much to be here.
Forget me, and move on. You deserve more than a shadow. You’ll be happy one day, I know it.
I meant what I said about yesterday being the best day of my life. Thank you for that. It was the perfect way to say good-bye.
I love you,
Axel
PS: I hope you were right about the lobsters.
* * *
But then, after a couple of months, I heard from him.
He sent me a postcard with a picture of the Alps, postmarked in Switzerland. There was no return address.
He wrote:
Willow,
I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.
I’m feeling really bad, and I don’t have it in me to call, or even to talk.
I want you to know that I think of you every day.
Love, Axel
It should’ve made me happy, getting that card. And maybe it did for, like, five minutes.
But then I got sad again—and very angry.
Angry because I couldn’t respond—I couldn’t communicate with him at all.
Why didn’t he give me his stupid address? It wasn’t like I could just hop on a plane and show up there or something.
I guess he didn’t really want me writing to him. He’d completely shut me out, and I didn’t understand it. And it hurt so much.
Did he suppose that it
would make me feel good—knowing that he was thinking of me? It didn’t.
What the hell good were his thoughts doing me? I wanted to hear his voice and be able to touch him… .
What if I never touched him again?
* * *
I called Mr. Ridge’s company and left messages, trying to find out where in Switzerland Axel was. But nobody ever called back.
I got two more cards after that—one about three months later and another three months after that.
Each had that same Alps picture.
Each had no return address.
Each said simply, “Love, Axel.”
Part of me wanted to rip them up. A bigger part couldn’t.
I decided to listen to my therapist—to try and simply accept the love he’d sent me.
Some days that worked.
Some days it didn’t.
* * *
School was still the same, but at least Axel had been right about one thing: I didn’t gain all the weight back. But I ate. I made sure to eat, because I knew that he’d want me to do it.
Even if I was pissed and lonely without him, I still owed it to him to take care of myself. He’d helped me so much and in so many ways.
* * *
Mom was doing better. At least she was only one person, anyway. She was kind of a flatliner, actually, but whatever. She came home earlier, and we’d go to the diner and talk about not much, but at least it was something. It might have been a bit better if I’d felt like talking at all.
I didn’t hear from my dad. And it was better that way. It was so much better for him to not contact me at all, instead of making plans and then not show up.
* * *
Every Friday after school, Aunt Agatha picked me up at my mom’s and brought me to the barge to help and to stay with her for the weekend. Each week, I arrived to find more of the walls covered in mahogany. A mahogany floor was taking shape, and a brick fireplace had been installed. New windows gleamed along the walls, and up front, where the stage was going to be, a humongous picture window had been installed. And the formerly dirty, stained ceiling was now coated in thick white swirls of stucco.
The barge was like Cinderella transformed, but I remained in tatters.
* * *
Axel’s boat was gone. Back to Manhattan, I guessed. I wondered if his blood came off everything—probably to the naked eye, it did. You might need one of those crime scene investigation tools to detect the bloodstains on the floor. I heard that they never completely come out.
I wondered if Axel’s dad let the boat’s name stay the same.
I wondered if Axel’s dad cared about him now.
I cried at my weekly therapy sessions.
I cried on the barge when I went to sleep, clutching Axel’s pillow. It still smelled like him.
I cried in my room when I went to bed, hugging Falstaff. A bright yellow wall faced me where Jim’s poster had been. I just couldn’t look at it.
* * *
Summer came, and once again, I lived on the barge.
In August, the work was finished. It had been a year, and the barge was ready to move to its new home.
We were to be towed to Brooklyn by tugboat—a red one like you see on the river. The Music Barge was embarking on a six-hour journey from Queens through Long Island Sound and around the Statue of Liberty to the East River.
“Excited?” Aunt Agatha asked, giving me a squeeze.
“Yeah.” I traced my foot on a sandy-colored mahogany strip. The center of the room seemed so vacant without the piles of plywood, bundles of mahogany, supplies, and power tools, not to mention Aunt Agatha’s cot and my couch, both of which had been moved to her new house in Brooklyn.
Now there were wooden folding chairs stacked in the corner, mahogany benches lining the walls, and red velvet cushions piled on the benches, waiting to be placed on the chairs when they were set up for ticket holders.
“We’ve already got a full house for the opening concert, plus every performance for the first three weeks! That advance write-up in The New York Times sure helped.”
“Great,” I said, moving my foot to the next strip of wood, this one in more of a maple syrup color.
“Wow, kiddo. I hope the audience is more enthusiastic than that.”
“I’m sorry—” I couldn’t break out of my permanent mope, even though I really was glad her dream was coming true.
She gave me a rap on the back. “I understand, love.”
“When are we leaving?”
“I have a few things to take care of first. And we’re moving the barge with a guest. My assistant musical director.”
Now this was big news. “When did you get an assistant?”
“Just yesterday. He contacted me unexpectedly, and his qualifications were absolutely perfect.”
“You hired him over the phone?”
She nodded proudly. “I did.”
Aunt Agatha used a cell phone these days. She’d become convinced of the importance of communication when she’d called 911 that day a year ago. Now she handled all her business that way. It was a little scary, watching her fall in with the times. What would be next? A refrigerator? A shower?
“You know,” I said, “you ought to get to know someone a little before you hire them.” Yeesh, did I really have to tell her this?
“You don’t trust my instincts?” she asked.
Thinking of Craig, I said, “No.”
“Well, we’ll have more than six hours to see if we like him. If not, we can set him adrift.”
“Ha, ha.”
* * *
The new steel doors on either end of the barge were very easy to open—unlike their predecessors—with their push bars on the inside and shiny new knobs on the outside. The doors hardly made a sound when you opened them, except for a tiny squeak.
And now the front one squeaked.
“Ah, here he is now,” Aunt Agatha said.
Super. I wasn’t in the mood for making small talk with some strange dude for six hours. If I’d known about this in advance, I wouldn’t have gone along on this voyage.
I faced the huge rear window, staring out at the water and the boats. I couldn’t see it from that angle, but I knew there was a schooner in Axel’s spot.
“Willow, say hello to my assistant.”
I didn’t feel like turning around. People generally sucked. The mahogany floor creaked with footsteps that came closer to me.
“Hello, Willow,” a soft, familiar voice said right behind me.
Oh my God. Axel!
He touched my shoulder and ran his fingers down my arm, raising a line of goose bumps.
“I missed you,” he said.
I turned around and embraced him, like he might disappear if I didn’t hold tight. He wrapped his warm arms around me, and I leaned my head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, inhaling his scent.
Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to speak.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Aunt Agatha said. “I have to tend to a few details before we depart.”
The door squeaked again.
We still didn’t say a word. I wanted to hold him like that forever.
I closed my eyes and felt the rhythm of the barge rocking, along with the rhythm of his pulse.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I shouldn’t have lied to you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I wanted to call you, Willow. But I was just so depressed.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“So, what does matter?”
“That you’re back. That you don’t ever—ever do anything like that again!” I tilted my head, ran my hands through his hair, and draped them around his neck to pull him down. “It matters that you kiss me right now.”
Everything bad melted away in that moment when our lips met again.
* * *
After a few more kisses, I had to ask him a question. “Are you okay now?” I asked, holding his hand
and looking into his eyes as I rubbed my thumb along the thicker, rougher line across his wrist.
He nodded. “I’m in therapy—for real, this time. I was at a clinic when I wrote you from Switzerland. I just left it three weeks ago. They helped me—a lot. And now I see a psychologist in the city. And my dad … he’s actually been pretty cool. Your aunt really got to him. I’m not sure what Agatha said to him, but whatever it was, it shook him. She actually got through to him and made him understand things. I’m not saying we’re close, exactly, but … it’s gotten a lot better.”
“So … I don’t have to worry?”
“No. Not anymore.”
And that’s when the tears started flowing.
“Just when I thought you’d made such progress,” he said, wiping away my drops.
“You started it,” I said, wiping at his.
We laughed and kissed again.
“Ahem.” Aunt Agatha cleared her throat behind us.
We broke apart. “I’m sorry, Agatha—” Axel said. “We’ve never done anything more than kiss, honest!”
“Relax, my dear boy,” Aunt Agatha said with a laugh. “I’m just relieved you two finally realized you’re in love.”
“Aunt Agatha!” I was shocked by her approval.
“Darling, did it ever occur to you that I, too, was once young?” She waltzed over and socked Axel playfully on the arm. “Welcome home, dear heart.”
“Yeah,” I said, giving him another quick kiss. “Welcome home.”
* * *
Axel and I stood on the back deck as the barge headed out slowly from the dock. We floated away, arms around each other, bouncing lightly on the waves, watching the boatyard retreat until we couldn’t see it at all.
“What are you thinking about?” Axel asked, leaning his head against mine.
“There was this Shakespeare quote that kept running through my head while you were gone,” I said. “Where thou art … ”
“There is the world itself,” Axel finished. He hugged me hard. “Willow, I’m so sorry… .”
“I told you never to be sorry,” I reminded him.
We passed under a railroad bridge. The men in the control booth above it waved at us. We waved back.
“Thanks for saving me,” Axel said.
“You’re welcome,” I answered.
We bopped on a big wave, courtesy of a passing schooner. I looked into Axel’s eyes. There was no more pain or emptiness. And the intensity I saw there and could hear in his voice was all good now. He was happy—to be home, to be with me.
Saved By The Music Page 19