Reagan had texted him again. Be there in two minutes. She’d sent it about five minutes ago so he assumed she’d be coming any second. “Alright, get yourself together. I’m sure Lindsey’s fine,” he told himself. “Just a fender bender.”
He waited there for Reagan to knock at the front door or just let herself in, but five minutes passed, then ten. He finally looked back at the text from her, about to text back asking where she was. Then a loud blaring rang out as a police car and an ambulance roared past the house in the direction Lindsey had sped off.
Patrick again looked at his phone, and more specifically, the timing of the Reagan’s text.
His blood froze.
George
GEORGE RUSHED INTO THE KITCHEN to get Tiffany some water. When he came back she was staggering toward the couch, saying, “Both of them, both of them!” while spastically flapping her hands.
She had arrived at his door not but twenty seconds before, pounding and pounding until he answered. She got out that she’d found Patrick and Simone in the most intimate of moments, but other than ‘both of them,’ she hadn’t been able to form any other words. George’s darkest suspicions were realized. He felt proud he’d been the one to tip her off.
He set the water on the coffee table, got his best blanket out of the ottoman and gently wrapped it around her. His arm instinctively stretched across her back and his hand squeezed on her shoulder. This was one of the few times where he didn’t have anything to say that would comfort her. Tiffany clasped the blanket tight in each hand and leaned against him. He smelled the fragrance she wore. As if he were tending to an injured animal, he stroked her blonde, silky hair.
“How did I not see it?” Tiffany said. “How could I not know?”
“No one knew,” George replied. “No one could’ve.”
“Someone knew. I need to lie down. I’m going to be sick.”
“Let me take you upstairs,” he offered.
She nodded in agreement.
He held her all the way up the stairs of his apartment and laid her down carefully in his bed. George draped covers over her until she seemed satisfied.
“The blinds,” she ordered.
He drew them and it was almost dark in the room. “Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked.
She shook her head.
With that he closed the door and walked down the stairs. George began to think of what type of meal he could make for her when she arose. Something to make her feel good, he thought.
He couldn’t believe it. Simone had slept with Patrick on today of all days, when Tiffany was at her absolute weakest. It was almost unfathomable coming from a girl he’d known for so many years. And Patrick. George felt like spitting whenever he said the name, just to get the taste out of his mouth. For a moment, George considered going over there and confronting him on Tiffany’s behalf. But he thought about it and realized it wouldn’t accomplish much. Tiffany had caught them in the act, and that was good enough.
He watched some shows while he waited. One owner had finally given him a chance at bartending down on Main Street. He was set to start on Monday, so he’d splurged in celebration and bought cable TV.
After a while he got bored and wandered over to the base of the stairs and glanced up. It’d been almost two hours. He decided the smell of a cooked meal might wake her up.
He had some bell peppers and chicken in the fridge. He cut it all up along with some onions and started on frying up fajitas.
Lo and behold, Tiffany did come creeping down the stairs, but to his shock, she was out of her clothes and only wore one of his overly baggy t-shirts. Her tan legs flexed as she wandered down the stairs, and it kept him spellbound. Her eyes were wide and alive with the smell that had filled the apartment.
“What is that?” she asked.
He grinned at her. “Some good shit.”
“Can I have some?”
He grabbed a plate off the counter that already had two fajitas made, everything he’d fried was wrapped in warm flour tortillas, and held it out for her. She skipped over to him and took the plate, overjoyed.
They ate together without saying much, but she smiled at him as she chewed, her eyes puffy and swollen. A look of gratitude was there that he’d never seen her look at him with before. When they were done he suggested that they watch a movie and she agreed. It began to feel—for him at least—like it was just another night of them hanging out and being casual together.
Tiffany curled up on the couch and as she did the shirt she was wearing crept up her thighs. George remembered how he felt about her. It could be as good a night as any, he thought, as good as any.
He put a movie in, sat down next to her, and draped the blanket over the two of them. “You sure you don’t want to talk about what happened?”
She gave him an unconvincing wag of her head.
“You sure?” he reiterated.
“I’m done with both of them,” she said. “Tonight it’s just me and you.”
“You and I?” he corrected jokingly.
Her eyes flared wide. “Yeah, you and I, whatever.”
Beneath the covers, her warm body leaned into him. Her knee slightly overlapped his thigh and it felt different than it ever had before. Tiffany rested her head directly on his shoulder and wrapped an arm around his waist. George sat up a little stiff, unsure of what to make of it.
She glanced up at him with cutting blue eyes. “Is this okay?”
“Yeah, sure, fine,” he replied and put his arm around her to make the position comfortable.
He’d put on a funny movie. It played for a good thirty minutes before he even moved. Hell, it felt like he hadn’t even taken a breath. She was so close, so intimate. He wondered what she had on beneath that t-shirt of his. And as his mind began to run off into the sexual hills, it was ripped back at remembering what had happened to her today, what she’d gone through. Any sort of ambiguous thoughts were surely misplaced on his part. This was just a girl who needed her friend. That was all.
When they reached the midway point of the movie, she grabbed the remote off the coffee table and paused it. She looked at him, like she’d been impatiently waiting. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
“About what?” he asked.
“About me,” Tiffany said.
He pulled back and narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?” The last thing he wanted to do was misinterpret this situation.
“I’m here half naked, curled up with you under the covers on the couch, and you’re stiff as a dead guy.”
“I’m not stiff,” he said.
She shook her head. “What, you don’t want me now?”
“Tiffany,” he said, holding up a hand, “I’m not sure what you mean with this.”
“You think I don’t know that you’ve wanted me all this time?”
“Wanted you?” he scoffed, pretending such a notion was preposterous.
“This is your chance, George. I’m not going to spell it out for you.”
He hesitated, feeling his heart begin to stutter.
She grabbed his hand and placed it on her thigh, which was still beneath the cover. “That’s better.”
Before his mind could process it, they were kissing. Or rather, she was kissing him. She grabbed his hand and ran it further up her leg until it brushed her panties.
She pulled back from his lips and took a breath. “Are you gonna take those off or should I?”
He looped a finger beneath the lace running along her hip and awkwardly began to slide the panties off of her. She came back to kissing him. Feeling like he was going to erupt, he suddenly stopped.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
Her eyes didn’t convince him that she was totally sure. “I’m sure. You deserve me like he never did.” She kissed him again.
“It’s just,” he started between kisses, “we’ve been friends for so long.”
“So?”
That was all he needed to hear. Pretty soo
n his t-shirt was completely off of her body, and she had nothing on underneath. Leaving the movie where it was on pause, she dragged him up off the couch, still fully clothed, as he shielded the erection in his pants, and led him toward the stairs up toward his room.
Patrick
AFTER A SECOND TRY, PATRICK got the knot just right on his tie and slid it up tight flush into the top of the collar. The neck of his white button-up shirt felt tight and restricting on his ability to breathe.
Draped over the shower rod was his suit coat, gray with very subtle light pinstripes. He didn’t own a black suit, so this would have to do. He pulled it off the rod, slid each arm into it, and shrugged until it was snug on his frame. He flattened out the tie several times. It was a pretty blue tie, close to a peacock blue.
He’d never been to a funeral.
He stood before the bathroom mirror for a long while, staring at his tie as if he were staring out at a long, open horizon in the desert. As if anywhere you looked or wanted to go, it would be the same.
A pair of his sunglasses were resting on the sink. Patrick put them on, and a lock of his black hair fell over one of the lenses. He swept it away and glanced back at the mirror. No one would be able to see his eyes, and that was a good thing. As he stood there in silence, looking himself over obsessively, a tear ran down his cheek from beneath the frame of the sunglasses. He sucked in air, a sort of gasp at seeing it.
He’d yearned to cry for so many years. Patrick lifted his finger slowly and then wiped his cheek and looked at the wetness on his fingertip. It made more tears come. More than he was prepared for. He latched onto the sink with both hands. Clenched it until his hands were white. He sobbed and wheezed and felt his midsection ache. It was beautiful and awful all at once. It took death to truly make him feel something, something that broke his apathy.
He sensed he was running late, ripped some tissues from the box, wiped his cheeks and around his lips, then tucked them in his pocket and headed out the door.
As he drove across town to the cemetery, which was on a great hill on the western side of town overlooking the majority of the valley, he noticed that there were wet spots on his tie from where he’d been crying.
At the cemetery, cars were lining the dirt path into the heart of the plots. Patrick looked for his mom’s car. He saw her before he found her car. She was there tending to Gwendolyn, the now broken mother, holding her by the arm as they walked toward the place of burial. Patrick decided it would be better to leave them alone and stay toward the back of the procession, behind all the chairs.
He waited in his vehicle, a good distance off, watching the rows of chairs fill up. And while he did, the late-morning sun was swallowed up by dark clouds. Dots of soft rain splattered his windshield and for some reason it made him cry again. By the time he pulled himself together and glanced back across the grass and headstones to where the procession was about to take place, all the seats had been taken and many more people were standing around in the space available behind and on the sides.
He pulled himself out of the van, feeling an awfulness rise up in his body. There was the crunch of pebbles under his dress shoes as he walked along the small cemetery road lined with cars. Then he got onto the grass and listened to the swishing of it under his feet, and the rain came down a little harder then.
Patrick felt it on his head and neck and face and hands. Fat, cold Colorado drops. The dots on his tie from his tears were lost now in a cascade of similar dark pocks on the peacock blue silk.
A minister of some sort began the funeral with some words, and then a few readings out of the Bible. Then there were a few speakers. A cousin, Reagan’s shaken father who Patrick had never met, the one who spent most of his time abroad, and one of her high school friends. By the time her father spoke, there was probably almost a hundred and fifty people there.
Reagan was loved.
Patrick listened to each of the speakers as they recounted stories about her life and what she meant to each of them. Their words were very honest and sometimes even beautiful to listen to. The impact she’d had on people was astounding. He wasn’t the only one who’d realized how special she was.
No one had mentioned it and Patrick was thankful, until her high school friend came to the end of her speech and pointed it out that once Reagan had finally conquered the demon that had haunted her young life, her life was then ultimately taken away by a drunk driver no more than eleven months older than she was.
The high school friend tried to connect the dots of how Reagan’s life could be a symbol that the issue of alcoholism was bigger than any one person, and that it stretched across the very fabric of our society, and sometimes ripped it apart. But to Patrick, all he heard and saw when she tried to illustrate her point were all the mistakes he’d made, and how he was the one to save Reagan’s life in the river, and he was the one to steal it away when he let Lindsey grab that bottle of Jack Daniels off his bedspread, when he’d thrown her out of his house, how she’d swung the wine bottle at him and it shattered.
He bowed his head and put his hands over his mouth to muffle the cry. It felt like he was being eaten alive by a massive black hole inside him. He was almost out of control after a minute or two, but no one said anything. In fact, he inspired others to tears around him.
The sky darkened further; rain really started to come down, and umbrellas started sprouting in the crowd. Patrick didn’t own an umbrella. The rain soaked his suit coat and his clothes beneath. His hair kept falling onto the frames of his glasses and after a few times of this, he stopped trying to fix it and let it fall in a sodden droop.
The minister said a few more things, read a few more verses out of a Bible whose pages became soaked as he read. Then people lined up and Patrick got in line with those around him to make a final pass by the casket.
His mother had told him about the viewing the night before, but Patrick couldn’t bring himself to go, to face Reagan’s parents in a confined setting. He didn’t have the courage and didn’t want to upset anyone on the off chance they realized that she’d been on her way to see him that night. The police had spoken with him by telephone to confirm a few things. He knew that her parents were aware that she had gone to see Patrick. But they didn’t know that the person who killed their little girl had also just come from Patrick’s house. He was terrified of telling anyone the truth. And it wouldn’t bring her back. What really happened would be a secret burden Patrick would take to his own grave.
They were handing out white roses to everyone in line. They were to be set on the casket to bid Reagan a safe journey to whatever life came next. Patrick took his rose from a tall man in a suit. The petals were bright white, so pure looking, so elegant, just like Reagan. He waited until it was his turn and then slowly moved up alongside her in the large, omnipotent box.
He stood there a while longer than others had, looking down at the wet casket. Rain was running hard down the sides of it, sliding right off into the earth. He held out his rose and gently set it directly over where he thought her lightening bolt necklace might be. Patrick wanted to ask her aloud not to forget about him, no matter where she was going. And more than anything else, to forgive him. But he remained quiet and said the words in his mind.
His rose stayed in place for a moment and then slid down the far side of the casket with a rivulet of rain carrying it. He realized that of all the people at this funeral, of all the people in the world, there was no one she’d been closer to in her final few weeks than he. He shuddered, cold and wet in the rain, and then moved on, carrying a stony face, but beneath his shades his stinging eyes were suffused with warm tears.
It was impossible to stay any longer. He couldn’t face his own mother or Reagan’s parents. He marched directly to his car through the soaked grass, got in, and drove hurriedly out of the cemetery.
The roads were awash with rainwater. Patrick broke down not more than a few blocks down the hill. He had to pull over as awful sounds and spasms overtook his body. H
e banged his forehead against the hard steering wheel. There was no escaping the moment. No escaping what he’d done. He then pulled off the main road onto a quiet street and spent a half hour parked in a random neighborhood, just lying there in his seat.
After that he drove south out of town toward Mercy Hospital on the high mesa. There was someone he had to pay a visit to while all these emotions were fresh on the surface and visceral.
Several minutes passed between when he parked and when he went inside. Patrick calmed his breathing, tossed his sunglasses onto the dash and patted his damp tie on his eyes, then took it off along with his suit coat. He was left in his wet slacks and a white button-up shirt. If he happened to run into Lindsey’s family, he didn’t want to look like he’d just come from a funeral and make them wonder who he was.
The hospital was bright and clean. It wasn’t a sad place. He went to several reception desks trying to get directed to Lindsey’s room. In a bigger city, he might not have even been able to see her, but the nurses and staff were very accommodating and it wasn’t very busy that day.
Patrick was led to her room and he stopped in the doorway. There were the sounds of oxygen being pumped into her and a machine monitoring vitals. He saw her across the room, lying in the cloudy light from the window. She was on a ventilator, and dressed in a gown, entirely motionless except for the rising and falling of her chest as the machine pushed air into her.
“Hello,” someone said to his left.
He snapped his head and noticed an older yet striking woman with long gray hair. She was in a chair, reading a book with a tattered old burgundy cover.
“Hi,” he replied. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know if anyone would be here—”
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