“You need a noise machine.”
“A what?” We were walking to class on the campus of Berkeley Mountain College. In a few strides he would veer off toward the music building. I would go straight to where the biology test awaited me.
“A noise machine,” he continued. “It’s like white noise. Helps drown out other sounds.”
“Never heard of it.” What I didn’t say was that I couldn’t imagine not getting up to help Jess. I slid my hand into Shane’s and leaned into him, running my cheek over the soft flannel of his shirt.
“Therapists use them, and it sounds like you need one. You’ve been exhausted as long as I can remember.”
The word exhausted didn’t even begin to describe how I felt. But Jess was more worn-out, so I continued getting up at night to help. If we could just get through this phase….
Jess got pregnant during our senior year in high school by a man who used to be a substitute teacher in our school. Paul left when she found out she was pregnant. Last we heard, he was in Colorado.
His parting words to Jess were “prove it.” Jess didn’t even try to get a paternity test to “prove it.” If he was that big of a jerk, she didn’t want him in the baby’s life anyway. I agreed, however, she could use help financially, if in no other way. Her job at the bookstore barely paid for her part of the rent. The folks at Goodwill knew us by name and even set certain items aside. Jess also received frequent donations from the church, which gave her hope that she’d actually make it through this.
“You can order one of the machines online,” he said.
We stopped in front of the biology building. “I’ll think about it.” I turned to him as he dipped down for a kiss. I closed my eyes as his lips lingered on mine. His long, brownish-blond hair fell around my face, tickling my skin until I started to giggle.
“What’s so funny?” he whispered, his lips still pressed to mine.
“Your hair is tickling my face.”
With a swoop he lifted me off the ground, bringing me eye level with him, lip level. “How’s that?” he asked before parting his lips, stifling any response I might make. The feel of his mouth on mine was exquisite—I wouldn’t have answered anyway.
A minute later, I pulled away and shimmied until he set me down. “I better get inside, take a few minutes to prepare. I need all the help I can get.”
“Okay. Wanna meet for coffee when you’re done?”
“Sure.”
Shane winked at me, all blue eyes and dimples. Then he walked away, and I watched his long legs carry him toward the music building. His ever-present guitar slung over his back, his hands shoved in his front pockets. He moved as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and that was one thing I liked. The air around him was always full of calm and peace, like he was in perpetual yoga-mode.
I didn’t share that personality trait. Life had always overwhelmed me. Ever since failing fifth grade, the year Aidan died, I had been on a personal mission of academic achievement, seeing college and veterinary school as a meal ticket out of my dysfunctional home. This mission, coupled with a deep, resonating pain that had developed from being a member of my family, served to make me feel anxious, alert, and always pushing for the next step toward a better future. There was no sit back and enjoy the ride for me.
I was smiling when I walked away from Shane, trying to hold onto that feeling of ease he always gave me. With each step toward the second floor biology room, though, pessimism grew thicker and thicker inside of me. I wasn’t prepared for this test. No way. I was zoning out again from the lack of sleep, the steps blurring in front of me.
The classroom was full when I walked in but no one was talking. Every seat that lined the long tables was occupied except mine and every head was bent over our thick textbook. A girl tapped her pencil on the desk. Another student chewed gum with such force I could hear it from the doorway. Someone else drummed their hands on their knees to a silent beat. The nervous energy was palpable.
My contribution to the noise was an exhale full of doom and remorse and I wish I had studied defeat. I stumbled to my chair and slid into it, feeling the cool surface of the desk against my palms.
Well, it’s now or never. I pulled out my textbook and opened it to the marked page. Just as my mind started to settle into the flow of words, my phone dinged a new text message. Thinking it was Jess, I fumbled through my bag.
But it wasn’t a text from Jess. It was from someone who used to be the single most important person in my life—my old boyfriend, Mike. My heart did a stutter step. I hadn’t heard from him in months. When a relationship as intense as ours ends, it can be difficult to find a place in the world where you fit as friends. I hit the read button.
Hey. I’m heading back that way for a few days. Want to get together?
My fingers uncurled and the phone dropped to the ground with a clang. Everyone turned and stared, some expressions curious, some aggravated at the interruption. I scooped it up just as the professor walked into the room. In one swift movement, every student put their book away and grabbed a pencil. Except me. I stared at the text, my brain trying to comprehend the words.
I’d only seen Mike once since I moved out of his parents’ home last February. He had been walking down Main Street, chatting on his phone, oblivious of everything around him. I was walking toward him on my way to visit Jess at the bookstore. It wasn’t until I stopped right in front of him that he looked up.
He had been startled to see me—I could tell by the way his eyes widened and his lips parted. Then those lips morphed into a smile that I couldn’t help but return. In one quick swoop, he had me in a tight hug that I returned more enthusiastically than I meant to.
God, it’s good to see you, Rowan, he had said.
It had been awkward to see him after the way we left things when we broke up, but it had also been…wonderful.
“Miss Slone? Are you with us today, or should we leave you alone with your phone?”
A blush burst over my cheeks like wildfire, and I dropped the phone into my bag.
Professor Sims stood at the front of the class, his gaze shooting daggers into my flaming face.
I sat up straight, cupping my hands together. He cleared his throat and with a lick of his finger, started passing out test papers, one by one, moving slowly around the room.
I glanced out the window, trying to steer my mind down a different path—a path that led toward biology, not to the past. But even as he slapped the white paper down in front of me, I didn’t see questions and answers. Rather, the black printed words blurred into an image of Mike’s handsome, and once beloved, face.
DEPLETED DIDN’T even begin to describe how I felt after the test. From the sleepless night to the text from Mike to answering test questions that I didn’t know, I felt like my bones had turned to sludge.
I barely had the energy to flip open my phone and read the new text from Shane:
I’m at the union. Come by when you’re done.
I often met him after biology when we both had an hour break, and I should’ve headed there now. Shane’s ready smile would lift my energy, at least temporarily. And the coffee he would have waiting for me would help even more. Instead, I was sitting on the edge of a stone wall that surrounded the campus water fountain.
Students passed talking in groups, listening to iPods, lingering in their own solitude. I pulled in a deep breath of cool mountain air, willing it to energize me, to awaken my sleepy cells. But when I thought about getting up, about joining these students in going about my day, I realized my feet just would not move.
This campus was situated on top of a mountain surrounded by other rising peaks. The leaves were already turning from lush green to red, gold, and brown. When autumn fell, there was nothing in the world more beautiful. I tried to focus on that beauty, tried to use it to jolt my senses to life.
It didn’t seem to be working.
The spray from the fountain splattered against my face when I turned toward it. I
dipped my fingers into the cold water and thought about Mike’s text. Why was he coming home in the middle of the semester? It was only October. He shouldn’t have a break until Thanksgiving.
When we were together, I would’ve given my right arm to have him come home and visit. His being too busy was one reason we broke up. He played on the university soccer team and that kept him from coming home last year, or even really being available. The distance between us didn’t seem to bother him, certainly not like it had bothered me.
Why did he want to see me?
There was another ding on my cell phone, but I didn’t look at it. I pushed my fingers back into the water causing ripples over the scattered copper pennies lying at the bottom of the fountain. And I thought about pine-colored eyes that melted my heart…spoke to my soul. Ten minutes later, I flipped open my phone.
Are you coming?
Shane’s latest text read.
But I scrolled past that one to Mike’s text and hit reply:
I’d love to get together. Tell me when and where.
SHANE HAD left the student union by the time I got there, which was just as well. I yearned for more time to think, to try and figure out why I was consumed by a simple text.
I shook my head to clear it and meandered through the tables, the tight space overflowing with students and backpacks. I found an empty seat at the very back of the rectangular room. Before sitting, I pulled out my English Lit book and let it land with a thud on the wooden table. I sighed, and the guy sitting at the next table looked up, his expression sour. I flashed an I’m sorry to bother you look, but he bent his head and ignored me.
I eased down onto the hard, plastic chair and closed my eyes. My nerves pricked with edginess from the test and the unexpected text from Mike. Our relationship had been intense, to say the least. We started dating when I was a junior in high school and within two months, I was staying at his house because living with my own family had become hazardous to my health, literally. Dad beat me up, my sister tried to kill herself, and my mother confessed to the murder of my baby brother all those years ago. Mike and his family took me in when I had nowhere to go, allowing me into their lives and their hearts.
When we broke up it had been more than the severing of a relationship. Mike wasn’t just a boyfriend. He was also a savior. And then there was the issue of moving out of his home, of moving on, of standing on my own for the first time in my life. I chewed the edge of my pen as the words of his text floated through my mind.
Finally, with steely resolve, I opened the English Lit book. A twelve-page paper was due in one week, and I had waited until the biology test was behind me to get started. As I turned to the dog-eared page, my phone started to ring. I chose not to acknowledge that I hoped it was Mike calling to follow-up on his text. Holding my breath, I flipped it open and stared at the cracked screen. It was Jess.
“What’s up?”
“Jacob won’t quit crying, and I have to get to work. Tanya can watch him for an hour, but I wanted to see when you would be home….” Finding childcare for him was proving to be a daily struggle. First, it was too expensive. Even though her boss, Mr. Sumners, gave her a raise when he found out she was pregnant, it still wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough.
Our downstairs neighbor, Tanya Johnson, who had also been my high school guidance counselor now-turned friend, helped out with watching him. But she probably had something else to do this evening, like help another dysfunctional teenager maneuver their way through life. Thank goodness that was no longer me.
I glanced at my watch. “I can come home now. My statistics class was cancelled. I have an English Lit paper I have to start tonight, though.” I gathered my stuff.
“Thanks, Ro. I really appreciate it. I’m sorry to be such a…burden. I’m just…”
I wove around the tables and pushed through the heavy glass doors. “You’re just what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m…we…are too much of a burden.”
“Jess, don’t be silly. You’re no burden. You know I love the little guy.”
I walked toward the parking lot, dodging the colorful leaves falling around me. I opened the door to my ancient car that was better suited for a museum than modern roadways. “I have got to get a new car.” I eased into the worn driver’s seat.
“See! That’s my point.” Jess’s voice rose to a shrill pitch.
“What’s your point?”
“I know you need a new car. But you can’t get one because you have to make up for the rent I can’t pay. And the groceries. And the…” Her voice dropped off, but I could hear her breath shake over the phone.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ll be home in twenty. I’ll start the paper when you get home.”
“Okay,” she managed.
“Jess?”
There was no answer.
“It’ll be okay. I promise.” But I doubted she heard me. The phone clicked off before I finished my sentence.
I punched the gas and sped home, worry prickling at the edges of my brain. Jess seemed to be unraveling. She’d lost the weight she gained from having the baby and was actually too thin now. But worse than that, she had started pulling out her hair.
A habit since high school, it was never more than a single strand here and there, more self-soothing than anything else. Now there was a thinning strip where her hair parted. And I often found strands on the back of the chair where she sat up all night with Jacob.
With these troubled thoughts obliterating anything else, I hurried toward our home, each mile leaving me more unsettled.
“ROWAN? IT’S Gran.”
“Hey, Gran. What’s up?” Jacob rested on my hip as I warmed his bottle. Jess had left for work an hour ago.
“I got a call from your mother’s caseworker.”
I clenched my teeth as I took Jacob into the living room and sat on the chair. The faint stench of old formula wafted off its frayed fabric.
“Oh yeah?” I managed, bored with the topic already. I didn’t intend for my voice to sound disinterested but it did. Oh well.
“First of all,” Gran continued, “the caseworker said that Charley-bear is doing great.”
Charley-bear was a dog that came to the animal shelter last year. When I couldn’t bring myself to see my mom, to try and reignite a relationship with her, I arranged to have Charley-bear sent to her under a program that pairs prisoners with pets. It allowed me a sense of closure while not having to interact with her.
“That’s good to hear.” I tried to burp Jacob, but he started crying so I popped the bottle back in his mouth.
“Yes, that’s good news. It was such an amazing idea you had.”
I stayed silent. My relationship with Gran was improving, although we still had hurdles to jump. She knew all along my mom smothered Aidan; had known since the morning he didn’t wake up. And she let me take the blame. She thought she could save her daughter with the lie and that I wouldn’t be blamed for his “accidental” death since I was only ten. She was so wrong, it was almost laughable. I was blamed—by my dad, my sister, Trina…by myself.
“Well…” Gran cleared her throat as if sensing where my thoughts had gone. “She also said your mom is seeing a new psychiatrist.”
A pit was forming somewhere inside my stomach like it did anytime Gran called to give these updates. She seemed to think I would eventually have a relationship with my mom. She was wrong.
“Your mom is on a new medication. There is a new diagnosis.”
The pit expanded like a balloon with each word she spoke.
“And there is a new treatment they’re working on.”
I stared out the window, half listening, half counting the leaves on the tree across the parking lot.
“They…I mean…” Gran cleared her throat. “Dr. Schweitzer would like you to come in….”
There were several branches with red leaves, a few with leaves still green, and protruding right up the middle was a branch with leav
es brown and crispy-looking.
“Dr. Schweitzer thinks it would help both you and…and your mom.”
Jacob spit up all over my hand, the warm milk oozing over my fingers and seeping into the crevices between. Silence came through the other end of the phone. At one point, I heard Gran sigh. The raspy sound irritated me.
“Trina started therapy,” she continued, unable to stand the sound of my silence. “She hasn’t been in a while…but she’s gone in a couple of times.”
Trina was my younger sister. We had zero relationship ties between us. Zero. Trina was the type of girl who was all bubbly blonde bimbo on the outside and manipulative psychopath on the inside—a psychopath who was doing hard drugs the last time I saw her. Gran was crazy to think this psychiatrist would help either Mom or Trina.
Jacob started to cry. He needed to be burped, and from the weight of his diaper, changed as well.
“Let me ask you one thing.” My voice was clipped at the edges like I had taken sharp scissors to it. “Are you going to see this psychiatrist? You know, to talk about your role in all of this?”
Gran went quiet again before she said, “Yes. Yes, I am. I have been seeing her.”
“Good for you. But I gotta go,” I quipped. “I’m watching Jacob tonight and he needs changed.”
“Oh. Okay. Can I leave you Dr. Schweitzer’s number?”
I hung up without answering. Jacob spit up all over my jeans this time and all down his pajamas. I held my breath as I darted to the bathroom to give him a quick bath. I’d worry about Gran’s words later. Or maybe I wouldn’t.
“HEY, BABE.” Shane walked into the living room.
“Hey.” I reached to my toes to kiss him, but he still had to bend down to meet my lips. When I pulled away, I put a finger to my lips. “Jacob’s asleep.”
“Is Jess here?” he whispered.
My Name Is Rowan: The Complete Rowan Slone Trilogy Page 37