One Day Soon

by A. Meredith Walters

  “I have to know I did the right thing,” he implored so quietly that I had to strain to hear him. “Don’t tell me it was all for nothing.”

  “I need you, Yoss,” I told him simply. Truthfully.

  He shook his head. “No you don’t. You don’t need the horrible things I will bring to your life. I’m a fucking homeless guy with hepatitis and a shot liver who will probably die at any damn moment. Why in the hell would you want anything to do with my shit life, whatever’s left of it?” His voice quavered and his hand shook in mine.

  I leaned in. He met me halfway. I rested my forehead against his. “Because I love you, Yoss.”

  He let out a tiny sob. It seemed wrenched from somewhere deep down inside. “You love a memory, Imogen,” he argued.

  I cupped his too lean face in my hands. His skin was rough under my fingers. “You’re still my Yoss. Years haven’t changed that.”

  He closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath. “You won’t love me when you see who I’ve become. I’m not the boy I used to be. I can’t give you sunsets and fairytales, Imogen. I’m dying. Because of horrible choices that have ruined me. I’ll only ruin you too.”

  I kissed him carefully, in case he rejected me. I was prepared for him to pull away at the touch of my lips on his.

  But he didn’t.

  So I lingered.

  As long as I was able to.

  “You’re not the same. Neither of us are. But I know that I will love the man as much as I loved the boy.”

  I kissed him again. More urgently. He wouldn’t open his mouth. It was a pressing of lips. Scared and unsure.

  “Come home with me, Yoss.”

  I saw it. The softening. The moment when my words hit him exactly where I wanted them to.

  “I don’t want you to do this because you think I need someone to take care of me,” he replied roughly, swinging his legs to the side and throwing off the blankets.

  “I wouldn’t dare think that,” I said seriously, with only the hint of a smile.

  “I’m terrified to want this,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be.”

  “I shouldn’t. I made a choice once. I thought it was the right thing. What does it mean if it wasn’t?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me, but I answered him anyway.

  “Then we’ll pave a new way together. Make new choices. The right ones this time. The ones that end up with us together.” Yoss looked at me and I knew he’d come with me.

  It was written on his face.

  Longing.

  Desperate, heartfelt longing.

  “How can I say no? I’d always do just about anything to see you looking at me like that.” He smiled and then looked down at himself. “I can’t leave wearing this though. I mean, I’m used to the cold, but this might be pushing it.”

  I regarded Yoss’s pale green hospital gown. I got up and started opening the cabinets underneath the counter looking for the clothes he had been admitted in. I found them in a pile. Someone had laundered them but it was easy to see how worn and tattered the material was. I ran my hand over the threadbare cotton.

  “I’m surprised they weren’t burned,” Yoss remarked. He took the clothes I handed him. “I’ll just be a minute. That should give you enough time to come to your senses, right?” He tried to laugh. It sounded harsh.

  “Go get changed, Yoss. I’ll go start the discharge paperwork. But we’re leaving here together. Okay?” I needed his agreement. I needed to know we were doing this.

  Yoss nodded, a strange look on his face. “Okay.” He slipped into the bathroom and quietly closed the door behind him.

  I walked out to the nurse’s station. Jill was behind the desk, typing on the computer. “Hi Jill,” I said to get her attention.

  The woman looked up at me and smiled. “Imogen, hello! Another late one, huh?”

  “Actually, I’m here to help with Yossarian Frazier’s discharge. Can you start the paperwork?”

  Jill looked confused. “Dr. Howell hasn’t said anything—”

  “If you look in Mr. Frazier’s chart he is cleared for discharge once I have secured arrangements for his housing. I’ve secured it. So can you please start the paperwork?” I interrupted her abruptly. My voice was firm. My smile brittle. I knew Jill would want too many details. Details I was not going to give her.

  “I will need to check Dr. Howell’s instructions,” Jill stated primly, her back up to my tone. I didn’t make it a habit of alienating the nurses. I had a good relationship with most of them. But I was feeling antsy to get out of there.

  “Of course.”

  I waited while she pulled up Yoss’s file on the computer. A few minutes later she cleared her throat. “Yes, I see Dr. Howell’s note here. Were you able to get him into the shelter?”

  That is none of your business!

  “I’ve gotten him appropriate accommodation. I’ll update his chart tomorrow,” was all I said.

  Yoss would require follow-up care. I would have to put in his file where he was staying.

  I hadn’t really thought about that.

  But I didn’t really care.

  Those were hurdles I’d jump later.

  Right now, I wanted to get Yoss out of the hospital before he talked himself out of it.

  I felt as though I had to hurry. That when I returned to Yoss’s room he’d be gone. He’d have disappeared.

  “Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll be along to have him sign his discharge paperwork and to give him the outpatient instructions.” Jill gave me a strange look. “Should I put the Salvation Army as his current address?”

  She was still digging. I was getting annoyed.

  “I said I’d update his chart tomorrow. But thanks, Jill.”

  Without saying another word, I returned to Yoss’s room just as he was emerging from the bathroom. The torn jeans and old flannel hung off his frame. He had put on some weight since being in the hospital, but it was obvious he still had a long way to go until his clothes fit him right.

  He stood with his hands awkwardly at his sides, his eyes on the floor. “Jill will be bringing your discharge paperwork in a minute,” I said, wishing he’d look at me. There was a strange tension between us.

  Maybe I had pushed him too far. Maybe he didn’t want to stay with me. Perhaps I was transferring my own hope onto a man who had none.

  “You’re still sure about this?” he asked, his voice rough. His words lacking all confidence.

  He finally looked at me and I saw his fear.

  Yoss was scared.

  “It’s okay to admit that you weren’t thinking clearly when you offered me to come home with you. I understand that seeing me again has brought up all of these old feelings. What we used to have was intense. I don’t think either of us ever expected to see each other again. Not like this. So things are getting mixed up with who we used to be. I don’t want you to feel responsible for me, Imogen. I don’t want you to feel obligated to ghosts.” Yoss clenched his hands into fists and chewed on the inside of his lip.

  His fear was about me.

  And my possible sense of obligation.

  I took a step towards him. Then another.

  Then another.

  “Yoss,” I said his name firmly. His green eyes met mine. “I’m doing this because of who we are to each other now.”

  He sighed. “It’s been fifteen years, Imi. You don’t know anything about the person I’ve become. How can you say we’re anything to each other?”

  I put my hand on his chest, ignoring the feel of his ribs beneath his skin. I pressed my palm over his heart. Thud. Thud. Thud.

  “I know who you are in here. I trusted the eighteen-year-old boy who made sure I was fed. Who protected me. Who loved me. And I trust the man he became. Sure, people can change, but I see who you are.” I patted my hand on his chest before withdrawing it.

  “Now prove me right.”

  Fifteen Years Ago

  Today was my birthday.

  I was turning se
venteen.

  One year older.

  I gazed up at the steel girders above me. Stretching in either direction, vibrating with the constant rush of traffic.

  It was noisy. My eardrums thrummed with the constant drone.

  Seventh Street Bridge was the place for the people that life had thrown away.

  I was one of too many in this unspoken side of a broken down city.

  When I had first found myself beneath the bridge all those months ago, everything had seemed dark and dirty and more than a little scary.

  But now, brutal and raw, I found it soothing. The never-ending noise. The stench of fires that burned in the trashcans. The wasted eyes of the kids around me. The shadows that lingered and never went away.

  Now it was home.

  And that was the only place to spend your birthday.

  The sun was bright. The air was cool. I felt the wind against my skin, my baggy sweatshirt and tattered coat doing little to keep out the air.

  The rocks were hard and sharp under my palms as I leaned back on my hands, stretching my legs out in front of me, laughing at a lame joke Bug was attempting to tell.

  Birthdays had never been a big deal for me. Often my mom forgot about them completely. I had grown out of the disappointment. I had come to expect little.

  In some ways, this was better than any of my other birthdays before.

  At least I was smiling.

  “Shut up already,” Di groaned, throwing a crumpled soda can at Bug’s head. It bounced off his temple and fell to the ground without him even noticing. He continued with his badly recited joke as if nothing had happened.

  “And the bartender said, ‘You can’t leave that lying there. Wait, that’s not right.” Bug frowned. “No, the bartender said, ‘You can’t leave that sitting—that’s not right either. Shit, I forget,” he grumbled. Shane rolled his eyes. Karla snickered and I only smiled.

  “Just stop already,” Di said, though there was no malice in her voice. Bug never really made any sense.

  “I’ve got another one! A really good one too—”

  “No!” Shane, Karla, Di, and I all said at the same time. We shared a look and started laughing.

  Bug sat down, kicking his foot in the dirt, his mouth in a pout. “Fine. Be that way.”

  I nudged his shoe with mine. “Maybe later, Bug,” I told him, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

  Bug instantly brightened. His moods were in constant flux. Happiness, sadness, anxiety, excitement, they flowed over him quickly, never staying in place long enough for us to figure out what was really going in his head.

  Yoss said it had to do with the drugs.

  I often wondered what Bug had been like before he became hooked.

  “You’ve got to stop encouraging him,” Di scolded me but I waved away her comment.

  “She’s the sweet one, Di. It’s why Yoss treats her like she’s made of fucking glass,” Karla sniffed, her lip curling.

  Karla and I would never be friends. She barely tolerated me and I had many a fantasy about connecting my fist with her face. But we had the same friends.

  We loved the same boy.

  And that made dealing with each other a necessity.

  Even when that particular boy wasn’t around.

  Shane took a long drag from his cigarette. A trunk honked somewhere, the sound reverberating off the cement uprights around us, like an echo.

  He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. “Fuck me, it’s as cold as a witch’s tit out here.”

  Karla pulled her sleeves down over her hands, tucking them between her thighs. “Maybe we should head back to The Pit,” she suggested.

  “It’s not too bad out here,” Di immediately countered.

  None of us wanted to go back to The Pit. Even though it’s where we slept at night, it wasn’t a place we liked to spend too much time.

  Bad things happened there. Even during the day.

  Just last week two guys, that had shown up only weeks before, raped a girl. Police had descended. Arrests were made. Yet we didn’t feel any safer.

  Then two nights ago, a man was found dead in the old warehouse of an apparent overdose.

  Again, we had had to take off for most of the day while the police combed over every inch of The Pit, arresting known drug dealers, intimidating the runaways. Yoss kept us all away until they had cleared out. And when we returned, Yoss’s CDs were gone.

  I was upset, but he told me not to worry about it. Holding onto things was next to impossible in The Pit. If it was important, you had to carry it with you.

  “I would give anything for a mocha latte right now,” Karla said, shivering slightly.

  Shane, noticing how cold we all were, pulled an empty trashcan over, filling it with litter off the ground. He spent several minutes trying to get it to light.

  “Here. This will probably help,” Bug said, pulling a small bottle of brown colored liquid from his coat pocket.

  Shane took it and opened the lid, sniffing. He made a face. “What the hell is this shit? Lighter fluid?”

  “It’s homemade hooch. Not bad either,” Bug said. Shane dumped it on top of the garbage and put the lighter to it. It immediately went up in flames.

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind your insides rotting,” Shane muttered, handing the bottle back to Bug, who took a long swig, coughing afterwards.

  The five of us huddled closer to the small fire, holding our hands out, trying to get warm. “Okay, Imi, if you could be anywhere right now, where would it be?” Di asked, starting the familiar game.

  When we didn’t have food in our bellies, we fed off dreams.

  Off possibilities.

  It sustained us when we had nothing else.

  “The beach. It’s what she always says,” Karla interjected before I could say anything.

  “I didn’t ask you, Karla. So shut up,” Di snapped. Karla snorted, not put out by Di’s attitude towards her. It was their dynamic.

  “Well since I’m so predictable, I’ll pick something different this time.” I picked at the skin around my thumb while I thought about my answer.

  “I think I’d like to be skiing. I’ve always wanted to learn,” I said after a while.

  “Yeah, because being cold is so much fun,” Karla griped. Everyone ignored her.

  “I went skiing a few times. I was really bad at it,” Bug piped up, surprising all of us. No one knew much about Bug’s past. He never talked about it. None of us did really. But Bug was more secretive than the rest of us. I hated to admit that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time really thinking about it.

  “You’ve been skiing?” Shane asked incredulously, lighting another cigarette.

  Bug twitched, blinking nervously, a sign he was starting to come down from whatever high he was currently on. He chewed on his bottom lip until it started to bleed. Tearing at the skin until it looked painful. He picked at the back of his hand. “Yeah, a few times. My dad used to have a timeshare at Seven Springs in Pennsylvania.”

  He seemed uncomfortable talking about his family. His hands were shaking and he scratched at his hand relentlessly.

  “Is that where you’re from? Pennsylvania?” I asked him gently.

  “Mhmm,” Bug mumbled and I couldn’t tell if it was an acknowledgment or a denial.

  “Okay, so you wish you were skiing. I think a nice ski chalet and a hot tub sounds pretty fucking magical,” Di cut in. I noticed that she took Bug’s trembling hand and gave it a squeeze. He held onto her.

  “Okay, I can get behind the skiing thing,” Karla agreed.

  “What about you, Di? If you could be anywhere right now, where would it be?” I asked.

  “She’d be listening to really shitty music at a concert, trying to sneak backstage to meet the band,” an amused voice piped up.

  “Yoss!” Karla squealed, getting to her feet so she could give my boyfriend a big hug.

  I didn’t bother to feel jealous. Not when my eyes met Yoss’s over Karla’s shoulder and that l
ook of love was only for me.

  “Hey guys, sorry to interrupt,” Yoss said, sitting down beside me, dropping a large knapsack on the ground. He leaned into me.

  “You weren’t interrupting anything. We were just trying not to freeze our asses off,” Shane said, throwing more trash onto the fire. It flared up and we all reared back.

  “So…” Yoss began, pulling the bag over and unzipping it. “I found some shit for you guys.”

  He pulled out a wooden jewelry box with the lid missing. It was a nice one at some point, with velvet lining and ornate detail on the small drawers. He handed it to Karla who smiled as though he had handed her a diamond.

  “I love it, Yoss! Thank you!” Karla gushed, her eyes twinkling. I had never seen the surly girl so happy. It changed her entirely. She put the battered jewelry box in her lap, running her fingers along the wood. It was trash. Broken. But to Karla, it was better than gold.

  Yoss reached into the bag again and pulled out a Zippo lighter, tossing it to Bug who snatched it with dexterity I didn’t know he possessed. “Thanks, man!” he enthused. Bug had a weird obsession with lighters. He had almost a hundred stashed away.

  “It doesn’t have any fluid, but I thought the design was pretty cool,” Yoss told him, indicating the green skull on the side.

  “I love when Yossa Claus comes to visit,” Di grinned, taking a pair of old black boots with the laces missing that Yoss handed her. She kicked off the pair she had on and slipped on the new ones. It was obvious someone had thrown them out for good reason. The soles were threadbare and there was hole on the side of the right shoe. But Di didn’t care. And Yoss was smiling at his friend’s happiness.

  “They didn’t have size extra douche, so I went with this,” Yoss joked, handing Shane an oversized sweatshirt with some sort of emblem on it.

  “No fucking way, dude!” Shane exclaimed, holding it up. He held the dirty shirt to his nose. “It smells like ass, but I’ll wear it with fucking pride! Who the hell would throw this away?”