The Best I Could

by R. K. Ryals

  The Best I Could

  By R.K. Ryals

  Copyright © 2016, Regina K. Ryals Smashwords Edition This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  This project was such a hard one to write for me. It was personal and real. It was gut-wrenching and raw. Because of this, I have an entire list of people to thank for not only being there for me while writing this, but for braving this journey. To my husband, who held me when I needed to cry. This book took me into my head in a deep way. It touched my heart and soul, and you weathered the cracks in my emotions. To my sisters, who have not only been there for me, but who have weathered some of these personal issues in their own lives. To Audrey Welch, who took a lot of bookstore trips with me so I could escape my head when I needed to step away. To Christina Silcox, I don’t even know where to start to thank you. Not only were you an ear during this project, you were an anchor. You helped this book be more, and for that I can’t thank you enough. Thank you for being my roof on this one. I love you. To Melissa Ringsted, because you aren’t just an editor, you are a friend. A dear, amazing friend who took on this project knowing the issues it touched on, and the emotional depths it sank into. To Melissa Wright, because I’m not sure when this journey became so personal for us, but it’s created a lasting friendship I couldn’t live without. No thanks will ever be enough. To Cora Graphics for the cover of this book. You brought Eli and Tansy to life in a truly beautiful and emotional way. To everyone who supports these books, I love you. To Bree High, Elizabeth Kirke, Ashley Morgan, Alicia Lane Kirke, Jessica Johnson, Lisa Markson, Nanette Bradford, Katherine Eccleston, Ashley Ubinger, Vicky Walters, Amy McCool, Julia Roop, Pyxi Rose, Alexis O’Shell, Anne Nelson, Jessie de Schepper, Derinda Love, Tina Donnelly, Jessica Leonard, Lynn Shaw, Leah Davis, Tangerine Oliver, Christi Durbin, and so many, many more. All of you inspire me! To the fans: I love you. Thank you always for taking these journeys with me.

  To anyone who has ever fought personal demons. To anyone who has ever been touched by someone else’s personal demons. To anyone who has ever been afraid to love. To anyone who has ever been touched by grief. May you find the strength you need in yourself. May you remember that you are not alone.

  Warning: This book contains self-injurious behavior

  PROLOGUE

  Tansy

  When the end came …

  Stories aren’t always told from the beginning. Sometimes, they’re told after the beginning. People are born. People die. People exist in the in-between. It’s funny the things we learn in our darkest hours, when we feel like we’re dying, but we’re not. Maybe if Death was a person, he’d say something like, “What’s so important about me? What is it about me that causes people to disappear from themselves? What is it about me that confuses them so much they forget who they are in the first place?”

  Death is a friend and an enemy, a beginning and an end. We are either comfortable with him or we’re not. I think that’s where our lowest moments lie. In that place where we’re trying to decide which it is: comfortable or intolerable.

  People avoid Death. When confronted by him, they spout off condolences and leave because they fear him. They fear Death’s face. They fear people who have been touched by him.

  Death is life’s most poignant author. Because when Death finishes a story, the characters left standing are the ones who were meant to stay.

  ONE

  Tansy

  I was standing next to my dad’s hospital bed, blood soaking a pad beneath his body, the day he died. It was the end of June and hot, but my flip-flop covered feet were cold from the recycled air in the building. Moisture splashed against my toes, and I glanced down, my eyes widening in horror.

  “Nurse,” I croaked.

  There was blood on my foot, my father’s blood. Warm, wet, and wrong.

  “Oh, honey,” the pretty, dark-skinned ICU nurse tossed me a clean, white towel, “here.”

  I didn’t catch it. I watched it fall like an open parachute gliding to the ground, covering my toes, cloaking the sight but not erasing the memory. The blood burned, carving itself into my foot, my heart, and my brain.

  Nana Hetty howled, sobs shaking her thin shoulders. “No one should die like this!”

  Dad bled out because his body had quit functioning. Emergency surgery—a last ditch effort to save his life—had failed. His chest rose and fell, machines breathing for him. All very sterile, cold, and loud in that way machines always were. Even if there’d been no noise, the machines would still be screaming. Time’s up, they screeched. Time’s up.

  Blood leaked from closed eyes down Dad’s swollen cheeks. Crimson teardrops. Beads of it clung to his nose and ears.

  Leaning over him, my brother, Jet, whispered, “Can you hear me, Dad?”

  At nineteen, Jet had two years on me. His long brown hair was oily from two days sitting in a hospital waiting room, and strands curled against his forehead. Whiskers shadowed his jaw. His appearance yelled as loud as the machines. It yelled forgotten things. In life, in grief, and in death, we’d been forgotten. Death made people forget other people.

  “Of course he can’t hear you!” my sister cried, throwing him a disgusted look. “He’s freaking bleeding to death!”

  “Deena!” Hetty admonished.

  At fourteen, Deena was too young to have lost both of her parents, too young to depend on a college-aged brother with no real ambitions and a seventeen-year-old sister who’d dropped out of high school and gotten her GED because going to school while your depressed father wasted away just seemed wrong.

  “It’s time,” the nurse announced.

  Dad hadn’t wanted to remain on life support.

  Jet glanced at her name tag. “A little longer please, Brenna?”

  Her gaze fell to the bed, soft and sympathetic. She was caving, drawn in by the haunting anguish in Jet’s eyes. He was so much like Dad, pitiful in the kind of way that begged, “Save me.”

  “No.” My hardened gaze found Jet’s face. “He’s suffering.”

  “He should,” Deena sneered.

  Nana glared, her reddened face a sea of swollen fire from all of the tears. “He did the best he could for all of you.”

  Moving past us, the nurse touched the tubing connected to Dad. “Just being here is enough.”

  Deena scowled. “Yeah, whatev—”

  “Shut up, Deena,” Jet snarled.

  We had turned into beasts, all of us. Snarling beasts pulling against choking chains.

  Brenna unhooked the machines. Eerie silence fell, our gazes locked on the monitor as it counted down. Dad never moved. The machines flatlined.

  Collectively, we held our breaths, our chests as still as Dad’s. If I inhaled now, would he inhale, too? Despite the blood. Despite everything.

  When we finally breathed, Dad didn’t. He was frozen, a blood-covered sleeping tragedy inside of a hospital time capsule.

  People fluttered around us. Time of death was noted and marked. Voices rose and fell.

  “I need air,” I whispered frantically, because seeing Dad not breathing made it suddenly hard to remember how to do it.

  Stumbling away from the bed, I ran, my flip-flops slapping the floor. My vision blurred, turning the hallway into a tunnel of haloed lights.

  Slap, slap.

  Cold, worm-like tendrils invaded my gut, making me ill. There should be tears. I should be crying, but I couldn’t. There was simply cold worms and lost time; this weird ‘the world has moved on without me’ feeling.

  My hand pressed a
gainst an exit door. Stairs led in two directions. I climbed, gasping. When I reached the roof, I stopped short, the sight of a person startling me.

  Wind pressed against my cheeks, feathering my short, dark hair. The sky was navy with streaks of lighter blue, the dawn clawing at the atmosphere. Steam rose from somewhere down below, sending cloud puffs flying.

  A tall figure leaned against the roof’s stone parapet, a young man gazing over the city, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A fire-breathing intruder.

  The door slammed shut.

  He glanced up. Brilliant, disconcerting blue eyes met mine. A burgundy T-shirt with words I couldn’t make out hung over loose dark blue jeans. Light brown hair, a little long in the front so that the breeze lifted it, saluted me.

  “This spot is taken,” he growled, smoke rising from his lips. Red lips. Like blood. Smashing his cigarette against the stone, he threw it over the side of the building. When I didn’t leave, he frowned at me. “You heard me, right?”

  Dazed, I stepped forward, my gaze on the horizon, my mind too crowded to care about the interloper, my chest an inferno of unshed, sleep deprived tears. I needed to remember how to breathe.

  “Hey,” the guy said, “you okay? You didn’t come up here to jump or anything, did you?”

  Fingers of yellow crept into the blue world, snuffing out the lights in the buildings before us. Like candles with pinched flames.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” I asked. I wasn’t talking to the stranger, I was talking to the universe. My dad’s dead body was lying in the building beneath my feet, and I felt like I was a million miles away across the world trying to figure out how to get back to this day, this moment, and this roof.

  “Seriously, do I need to get someone?” the boy asked. “I’m not qualified for this kind of shit.”

  Ignoring him, I stared at the pink merging with the yellow and then seeping into the blue. Like a lava lamp. “I’ve heard people liken the dawn to rebirth and the sunset to death. It’s messed up how wrong they all are.”

  If the dawn was rebirth, then wouldn’t my parents rise again? Wouldn’t they stumble forth into the world and start over like happy little zombies giving my siblings and I back our lives? Without the whole brain eating thing … or maybe with it. Did it matter?

  The guy backed away from the roof’s perimeter. “Yeah … I think I’m done here. It’s all yours, sweetheart.” He skirted around me, his gaze falling to my feet. He froze. “You have blood on your toes.”

  Thank you, captain obvious.

  “It’s not mine,” I said aloud.

  He was close, so close I could smell the nicotine on his breath. His head was down, his hair waving, and I found myself asking, “Are you here for someone? You know, in the hospital? Did you lose someone?”

  “The fuck?” His head shot up. Catching my expression, he cleared his throat and offered me his hands, palms out. “Look, I don’t know what kind of story you have, and I don’t care. So I’ll give you the short version. I’m a spoiled rich kid who got arrested for driving under the influence, was forced into detox, and just spent God knows how many days listening to pitiful stories in group therapy. All while being told how thankful I should be that I didn’t kill someone. I’ve been released, and I’m waiting on my ride. That’s it.”

  I stared, the pain in my chest intensifying. “You know yourself that well?”

  “What?”

  “Spoiled rich kid who drinks too much? That’s all there is to you?”

  He scowled. “Look, you don’t know me—”

  “I’m Tansy,” I introduced.

  He paused, his gaze roaming my face before dropping once more to my blood-spattered foot. Inhaling, he looked up. “Eli,” he offered.

  My body felt cold despite the muggy warmth, my arms hugging my frame. He was right. I didn’t know him, but words kept spilling out of me, the sentences chugging locomotives destined to crash and burn.

  “You shouldn’t do that, you know, Eli.”

  “Do what?”

  “Drink.”

  He laughed. “What are you? A self-righteous volunteer here?”

  His eyes. My feet. His face scrunching in confusion.

  “No,” I whispered, “but I just watched my father die because drowning himself in drugs and alcohol was easier than dealing with life.”

  His eyes widened, filling with horror and other things. “Shit. How do I get dragged into this kind of crap?” Breath rushed out of him. In and out. In and out. How easy breathing came for him, when below us, Dad was frozen. “Look, it’s sad about your father and all. I’m sorry. I’ll … uh … keep you in my thoughts and stuff.”

  He edged away from me.

  Maybe it was the ease in which he left—as if what I’d told him was just another burdensome part of life and not like someone had just died—that made me ask, “You’ve never lost anyone, have you?”

  “Going now,” he repeated.

  “It’s weird, you know,” I babbled, not even caring if he stayed. “It’s like they’re there, and then they’re just not. Like turning off a light switch. With my mom, it was so unexpected that the only thing I can remember is the weight of it, like I was being crushed by a boulder or run over by a truck. Like I’d been ripped into a tornado, spinning and spinning and spinning. This time—”

  Eli paused at the roof door, his shoulders slumping. “Okay,” he mumbled. “I’m staying, okay? This is me,” he moved back onto the roof toward the parapet, “staying.”

  Shaking myself, I glanced at him, surprised. “What? You don’t have to stay. I’m not asking you to stay.”

  I didn’t want him to stay, did I? This fire-breathing, snarling stranger trying to escape the crazy that was me?

  He snorted. “Tansy? That’s your name, right?” I nodded. “Well, Tansy, seeing as I’m still waiting on a ride, and I happened to be the unlucky guy standing on the roof when you obviously needed sympathy, I suppose I’m kind of it. That’s not saying a lot. I’m an ear, but I’m one unsympathetic son of a bitch.”

  “Good,” I answered, surprising us both. “I don’t want sympathy. I want … I want …” A hiccup escaped, the sob barreling up my chest, choking me. “He suffered. A lot.” My gaze fell to my toes. “So much blood.”

  Eli flicked a lighter, drawing my attention. An unlit cigarette dangled from his fingers. “This is where I tell you that the subject of bodily fluid should remain off the table.”

  A single, muted tear slid down my cheek. Eli pretended not to notice. Holding out the cigarette, he offered it to me.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  He shrugged and lit it.

  My gaze took him in. “So your family has money?”

  “Oh, we’re talking about me now?” he asked, exhaling smoke.

  “You said no bodily fluids,” I reminded him.

  A smile touched his lips. A hint, nothing more. “Shitloads of it,” he answered. “My family has shitloads of money. Tons of money and not a lick of give a damn.”

  My heart beat a steady rhythm against my rib cage. One thump. Two. With each beat, it yelled, “You’re still alive. Breathe, Tansy.”

  “I’m trying really hard to feel sympathetic, but I got nothing.”

  “Good,” he answered, throwing my words back at me. “Because I don’t want sympathy.”

  We stared at each other. He was older than me; maybe my brother’s age.

  “My heart hurts,” I let slip.

  Eli froze. “Yeah, well … that’s another topic I’m completely incapable of discussing.”

  Approaching him, I leaned awkwardly against the stone ledge. It came up to my chest, so even if I wanted to hang over the world, I’d have to climb up to do it.

  How would that feel, hanging over the world?

  “Hearts aren’t your thing?”

  He laughed, the sound short. “Not even a little.”

  I glanced at him. “What is your thing?”

  “What’s yours?”

  My ha
nds gripped the ledge, the gravel digging into my fingers, leaving little rock impressions. “Knitting,” I answered. “I like to knit, and I like gardening.”

  He stared, aghast. “You sound like my grandmother.”

  “Because I like to knit things and play in dirt?”

  “Yeah.”

  My face heated, but I welcomed the embarrassment. It distracted me from the pain, from the chaos I was going to have to return to.

  “And yours?” I asked. “What is your thing?”

  “Boxing,” he answered, “and boats.”

  “Toy boats or boat boats?”

  “Boat boats.” He spread his hands wide, ashes falling from the cigarette. “The bigger, the better. Small works, too, though.”

  My brows rose. “I’ve got a few words for you. Titanic? Lusitania? USS Arizona? Bermuda Triangle?”

  Eli leaned toward me. “I’d be more impressed with your nautical knowledge if you hadn’t just spouted off a flawed liner, two ships that went down after being attacked in wartime situations, and a mythical location.”

  “I don’t pretend to know a lot about boats other than well-known disasters.”

  “You’re missing out,” he informed me. “The sea is a bea—”

  The roof door slammed open, my brother bursting through it; a twisted jack-in-the-box I wanted to push back into the box. “Tansy?” His narrowed, grief-stricken eyes slid from my figure to Eli’s and back again. “I thought you might be here,” he murmured, ignoring Eli. “There’s nothing left to keep us here. We need to go.”

  I stepped away from the parapet. “Dad—”

  “They’ve taken him. We’re leaving with—”

  “I don’t want to go with her.”

  Jet sighed. “We don’t have a choice. Think about Deena. Come on, Tansy.”

  Reluctantly, I edged toward my brother.

  “Hey,” Eli called, stopping me. “You’re going to be okay, right?”

  I glanced back at him. “I thought you didn’t do sympathy?”