On the TV, they were still talking about the body they found on the south side. It wasn’t something you needed to pay much attention to; dead people were always showing up there. Providence was a great city, safe for the most part, but it had a dark side like all other cities I suppose, an arcane danger that swam beneath the surface of the otherwise still waters.
* * * * *
Have you ever felt like you didn’t fit into your own life; like you’re doing what you’re supposed to do by going through the never-ending motions, but at the same time you feel like you’re just pretending it isn’t all meaningless? That’s all I could think about as I made my way out of the restaurant that night. I was one big, bloated square peg trying to fit into the ever-narrowing round hole of my life. Though I tried never to let myself slide too far down that slippery slope of thoughts, because who knew what was at the bottom of it. Not me.
The frustration of my thoughts and my iron-fisted efforts to forget them had wound me up into an edgy second wind. It was fed with the kind of energy that you get when your body enters a complete sleep and nutrition-deprived state, some sixteen hours after you’ve woken up. I decided against my better judgment to take a small detour to my local twenty-four-hour gym.
Running water over my head in the locker room’s small sink was both cold and refreshing. But for some reason it didn’t do anything to get rid of the smell of Italian dressing. To the passerby, I probably looked homeless, or peculiar. Maybe both.
I looked up into the mirror as water dripped down from my thick, light brown hair and splashed over the t-shirt I had changed into. Nervously fingering through my hair, I looked for more grays to pluck. I shouldn’t have had any, but I’d already found six in the months since I had turned twenty-five. I stood on my toes and leaned toward the mirror to look at my teeth.
Shit. Lettuce. Fucking fantastic. I don’t even remember eating lettuce today.
The treadmill at the gym was my sanctuary. It was the best way I knew to untangle the knots my mind got into. It was a point of control in my life, maybe the only point of control. I always knew I could set the speed and that would be the speed it went. It may be silly, but I enjoyed the consistency of it.
That night I cranked up the volume on my cheap headphones and slammed my worn sneakers down on the perpetually spinning belt. Angry music from my phone revved up in my ears, screaming words I shied away from saying in my own life, and I tapped the controls of the treadmill to a higher speed.
“Push it,” I said out loud to myself. The faster I could run, the better I would feel, this much I knew from experience. I was always convinced that if I ran fast enough, all the crap from my life would just fall into the distance behind me. I just wasn’t sure if I would ever reach that speed.
The treadmill’s speed ramped up again, demanding that adrenaline flood my body with a purpose it lacked otherwise. I walked around my life like a has-been, without actually having been anything. And I knew it. Sometimes I would just sit somewhere, anywhere, and watch people. I’d study how they interacted with each other and with the world around them. I’d contemplate their existence and my own in relation, and I’d wonder: Do they feel as unsatisfied with their lives as I do?
Most people, my family included, gave me this dismissive snicker whenever I talked about feeling this way. The kind of snicker that seemed to imply “what more do you expect out of life?” In short, my answer was “a lot”, I just hadn’t been able to define what that meant yet. Years of trying without success made me unsure I ever would. What’s worse, complacency was starting to set into my life like a vexatious disease, the kind that isn’t fatal but still dampens your experiences and holds you back on the brink of fulfillment. Every day I felt more like a prisoner of my own life and the chains I carried were getting heavy.
Deep in my thoughts, it was a while before I fell out of my trance. Short of breath, I lowered the treadmill’s speed as sweat poured down my body and mixed with the faint smell of Italian dressing and copy toner that still lurked on my skin. It was late, with only the handful of people willing to work out past midnight left.
My eyes wandered downstairs where a man was leaning up against the entrance to one of the classrooms. He was holding a white towel around his neck and staring up at the balcony. He had a perfectly toned body, the kind that you only get from divine intervention or relentless hours at the gym. I secretly hated guys like him—the ones who looked like they’d been lightly airbrushed in real life, giving them a year-round natural tan.
His gawking quickly become a distraction. I attempted to inconspicuously peek behind me to see who he was looking at and judge whether they were worth all the attention. Doing so strained what little balance I could ever speak of. And with pure, undeniable finesse, I slipped, twisted, and fell onto my beloved treadmill, ass-first. The shock from the fall was short-lived because the high-speed belt flung me, now head-first, two feet behind the machine.
The only other person left upstairs was a woman I didn’t know, and she quickly dug her head into the magazine she was reading to avoid any eye contact. I ignored the urge to get up, choosing to stay sprawled out on the scratchy industrial carpet in defeat, laughing to myself (or at myself). I didn’t have the mental capacity to feel any more embarrassment.
“Are you okay?” someone asked from the staircase.
I propped myself up on my elbows and looked over at them. It was him, the gawker.
Great, he saw that.
I lowered myself back down to the ground and closed my eyes. “Yeah. I’m fine. Thanks,” I said to the ceiling. After I realized he wasn’t going away, I gave a gritted smile. “I wish I could say that it was the first time that’s happened.”
My cell phone was at his feet, as it had flown to the other side of the room during my gymnastic demonstration. When he crouched down to pick it up, he kept his eyes on mine and smiled.
“I teach martial arts here if you’re interested. It could help you with your balance . . . or lack of balance.” He chuckled. “Maybe you should stop by sometime for a lesson.”
He was tall and handsome, with dark brown hair that skewed intentionally in every direction. I was sweaty from my run and knew that my hair, which had never done anything intentionally, ever, was matted to my head in the most unattractive way possible. Being a solid three or four inches shorter than him meant I knew he would notice. Even in his baggy gym shorts and sweatshirt, he looked better than I did on my best day. I hated him.
I took my phone started to walk away. “Yeah. Sure. Maybe,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Max.”
I looked at him like he was speaking some new language that consisted of only clicks and whistles. “Huh?”
A terribly perfect, if not naturally coy, smile stretched across his face. “My name . . . it’s Max.” He reached out to shake my hand.
In order to shake his hand, I had to shift my phone from my right hand to my left. It went well. I dropped it again, and then smacked my face on his knee when we both bent down to get it.
Max laughed and wiggled his pointy nose. “Long day?”
“Yeah . . . sorry. Thanks.” I was already halfway down the stairs before I looked back and saw him still staring at me with an entertained smile. Clearly, he’d never seen a hot mess in its natural habitat before.
Fuck!
Apparently, I did have some capacity for embarrassment left.
Still smiling, he called to me from the top of the stairs. “What’s your name?”
“Everyone calls me Hat,” I called back.
“Like the kind you wear on your head?”
“Do you wear yours anywhere else?”
Staggering through the parking lot, it was clear to me that I was in no state to multitask as I tried to force my phone to turn back on. It was used when I got it, and never worked all that well. Dropping it eight or nine hundred times didn’t help ei
ther. I was collapsing into my car when my phone came back to life.
Three voicemails?
With my proclivity for ignoring voicemail messages, even my excessively large family knew not to leave me one. Something wasn’t right. I was starting the first voicemail when an incoming call from my sister blinked across the display. From the moment I saw her name, my stomach boiled like I had swallowed a handful of burning embers directly from hell.
“Sydney? Is everything okay?” I asked as I answered.
They say you can hear in someone’s voice when they’re smiling and it’s true. You can also hear when they’ve been crying, and even without sobs, I could hear my sister’s loud tears on the other end of the phone.
“No. You need to come to my house,” she said.
“Syd, what’s wrong? What’s going on?” My stomach couldn’t handle the embers any longer, it boiled like a kettle abandoned on the stove and I fought back the choking urge as unsettled acid crept up my throat.
“It’s Mom, Hat. She’s dead.”
Chapter 4
In that moment, death made me forget how to breathe.
Time continued without me in it. I couldn’t have told you if seconds or hours had passed from when Sydney first called me. I was there, in my car, motionless and staring at my phone, trying to remember how to breathe.
I must have driven to Sydney’s house, because the next thing I remember I was standing outside her condo with my phone still clutched in my sweaty hand.
Breathe.
I can only describe those moments as a waking dream; you watch it all unfold and look at everything as if it’s real, but don’t believe any of it is. You can’t believe any of it is. Except that time there was no waking up. There was no sitting up in bed and clutching your pounding chest. There was only the door to my sister’s condo, separating my waking dream from the reality that just couldn’t be real.
When I finally opened the door, a sadness exploded from the room and rushed over me. I looked into my sister’s cracked, red eyes from across the room and had no words. She looked back at me with hopelessness and said nothing either.
Before I could close the door, her daughter Zoe was wrapped around me. She sobbed uncontrollably into my shirt, and her tears soaked through and dripped directly onto my heart. I stood in the doorway and rubbed her head, still having to remind myself to breathe. I was either unable or unwilling to take another step into the house . . . another step toward reality.
“Hey, you,” Paige said to me from the exposed kitchen, the wisps of her short blond hair covering her swollen eyes.
Sydney, Charley, and our younger brother Finn, all looked up at me, waiting for me to say something.
“Hi, family,” I said back with no feeling. Part of me, that inner-child that never fully grew up or lost his naiveté, was waiting for someone to tell me I was dreaming and that once I woke up it would all be okay. But no one did.
With Zoe clinging desperately to my arm, I walked over to my sister and hugged her. The world spun just a little slower around us as we held each other, like we had demanded time itself to stop so that we wouldn’t have to experience the next moment it would bring.
Paige pulled a sniffling Zoe back to her room and soon the only sound left was that of Sydney’s lips sucking slowly on the end of her cigarette.
“What happened?” I asked, finally breaking the silence.
Sydney started to talk, but her tears and trembling voice suffocated all her words. Charley moved to sit on the arm of her chair, hugging Sydney from above.
“They said it was a heart attack,” Charley said while rubbing Sydney’s shoulders.
“What? That can’t be right,” I snapped back.
“Hat.” Charley’s lips folded inward as she spoke.
“How could she have a heart attack? She was healthy. Right? I mean, she told us she was healthy,” I said. If I fought it hard enough I thought I could prove to them, and myself, that it wasn’t true. Then everything would go back to the way it was just a few hours before. Everything would go back to normal. I would be able to breathe again.
“It happens.” Sydney grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “It happened.”
Charley went into the bathroom and I sat down next to Finn, letting all my weight fall against him. He pushed his weight back, and we sat there, eyes on the floor, leaning on each other for the support that neither of us could provide. Charley started crying, and the sound of it echoed down the hall at us. She was the toughest among us, so hearing her break down made the whole situation feel graver.
“When?” I asked.
“Earlier,” Sydney said, lighting another cigarette. “I . . . I went to the house and she was just . . .”
“Can I have one of these?” I asked her, reaching for her pack of cigarettes. I quit after college, but at moments like this, what did it matter?
“We’re going to the funeral home tomorrow to make the arrangements,” Sydney said as she wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve. Even in death, my family never waited for anything. “You’re going to come, right?”
Is there an option? If there was, I wasn’t going to go. She’s the big sister, she can handle this. I’m still not sure I’m breathing.
“Yes,” I said instead. “We’ll meet you there?” I looked over to Finn and he nodded.
Okay. We have a plan. Plans are good. Plans meant you had control and that you knew what was going on. Breathe.
Sydney was crying harder than I had ever seen, intense waves that crashed against your heart and stuck to it like cement. Our mom used to say that her crocodile tears were infectious, and that you could cry just from looking at her. I wanted to fix it—to make it better, for her and myself. But our mother’s death was out of my control, and I hated things out of my control. So, I simply looked away to avoid getting infected by those tears.
“Paige said she’ll call the aunts . . . and they can call everyone else. I . . . I don’t know who else knows yet,” Sydney said in between waves of tears.
Right, the aunts. Good. They’ll tell everyone. We won’t have to talk to anyone. We have a plan. Plans are good. Breathe.
Charley returned to the room with a red face and wet eyes, and eventually we all found ourselves bunched together on the couch in silence. There was nothing left to say. Between the four of us, we barely made up one functioning brain, one functioning heart, and one functioning soul.
The hardest part about that day was not that our mother had died, but that she wasn’t there to help us get through it. She was a Walker’s strength incarnate, and in times like these she would swoop in and make everything and everyone better, even when it didn’t seem possible.
She wasn’t a rock, because a rock fends off water. She was more like a leaf, floating peacefully on the surface of the water no matter how violent it got. She showed you how to take on the uncertainty around you, and without her we were drowning. We remained huddled on the couch, knowing that together we were strong, or at least stronger.
Paige left, and within minutes phones were buzzing and ringing all around us. Walker cousins, aunts, and uncles had been alerted and the unofficial, yet unstoppable, family phone tree had been activated.
Sydney was the first to break our Walker stronghold; she could never leave a phone unanswered. She pushed the wildly curly hair she inherited from our mother away from her face and lowered her big eyes as she answered. Even though she was already the shortest of us, she looked even smaller somehow—doll-like, with a stiff face that helped her talk about all the things none of us wanted to say.
I was shutting my cell phone off when Zoe came out of her bedroom and shuffled over to us. “I can’t sleep . . . I just can’t,” she said.
I looked up into her sad eyes, so much like her mother’s. Of anyone in the room, Zoe must have felt the most helpless. She was old enough to be told what w
as happening when it was happening, but younger than she should have been when losing her grandmother.
I opened my arms and she joined us on the couch. Charley lovingly rubbed her head and she dozed off in my lap. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in her mind; I didn’t even know what was going on in mine.
Sydney was answering her phone for the fifth or sixth time when the burning feeling in my stomach returned. My mind was broken; a record stuck on repeat. “It’s Mom, Hat. She’s dead,” my sister’s voice kept saying in my head. It was a sentence that changes your life forever, and I knew I’d never be allowed to forget it. Over and over it played like one of those mercilessly bad songs that never go away, even after you turn it off.
I gently moved Zoe’s head to Finn’s lap, who had fallen asleep next to us, and made my way toward the door. “I’m going home to shower and whatever. I’ll see you in the morning,” I said to Sydney over whoever she was talking to on the phone, not realizing that it was already morning.
My legs buckled as I walked to my car, making each step unnecessarily taxing. It could have been the lack of food or sleep. Or it could have been the emotional hangover from being in that room. No, it was probably because someone I adored in my life was no longer in it and my body couldn’t handle the emotional weight of it.
You’ve got this, Hat. You’ve got this. People’s moms die all the time. This is normal, I tried to remind myself.
When I finally made it home, I collapsed into my overstuffed armchair and covered my stinging eyes with my arm. Cat jumped on top of me and kneaded my body with his prickly paws. If he was a talking cat, I’m sure he would have asked, “What the fuck?”
If he had, I wouldn’t have had an answer to give him. But somehow my furry friend sensed that, too. Instead of talking, he just purred his way up my chest and lay so his body was wrapped around my neck like an airplane pillow, tickling my ear with his whiskers.
Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1) Page 3