They both tumbled into the dirt. Patrick’s hands finally slipped from the wrist, but he scrambled to his feet quicker than Josh, who had blood gushing from his mouth. This time Patrick stomped on Josh’s wrist several times, at which he screamed and the knife finally popped free from his fingers.
Patrick scooped it up out of the dirt and flung it some fifty yards into he trees.
The dirt clung to the fresh blood on Josh’s cheeks and mouth, and hands and shirt. Patrick stood there panting, watching him. Josh stood up, but still hadn’t said anything. Tears formed in his eyes, and they watched each other, both waiting to see what move would be made next.
Patrick was ready to hit him, but Josh took a few steps back. The tears begin to break down his cheeks and he took the sleeve of his shirt and patted it against his bloody mouth. Patrick saw him now, clearer than ever. He saw how far they’d both fallen.
“Just go,” he told Josh. “Get out of here.”
Patrick took a few steps back and then for the first time pulled his eyes off of Josh and returned to Mallory. He crouched down at her side, and then looked back to Josh who was still standing there crying.
“Get the fuck out of here!” he screamed and it echoed off the hillside and the forest.
Josh darted back down the road, soon disappearing below the slope of the hill. Patrick heard the faint noise of Josh’s engine starting up, and then fading into an ever more distant drone as he drove away.
His eyes teared up again, and from his crouch he fell onto his rear and looked at his hands. How was this happening? How could this all possibly be happening? He reached his hand out and caressed the side of Mallory’s face with his jittery fingertips.
Finally, he got up and ran inside to look for a phone. He found hers in the living room. They were on their way. He went back outside and waited with Mallory. He was shaking now. He couldn’t stop it. The far off wails of the sirens soon carried on the air. Patrick kept his eyes on her, there was nothing he could do now.
It was the last time he’d ever see her. The very last time. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was also the last time he would come face to face with his best friend, Josh Norris.
AFTER
Simone
IT WAS A PARTICULAR KIND of torture to see her friend go, and Simone wasn’t good at saying goodbyes. She would’ve been ashamed of herself, though, if she hadn’t at least offered a hand with all the boxes.
As Simone trailed down the stairs after Tiffany, her back arched, peering over the heavy box in her arms, careful to catch each step solidly on her way down, she realized that almost everything in their apartment had belonged to Tiffany.
Tiffany’s father had come down from Denver to with the U-Haul and had done a great deal of the work in boxing everything up. He was working on the last of the kitchen. As Simone passed by, she glanced in at him staying busy in the small kitchen where all the cupboards hung open, practically bare, save for four or five plates, a spaghetti strainer, some Tupperware, and one big crockpot that was Simone’s. It struck along one of her emotional strings, seeing the place all emptied out, knowing that she’d be left behind to exist here alone, at least until the end of the summer. The charm had been stripped out of the place and packed into boxes. Simone had thought it was their collective energy that had brought life into the places they’d lived the last few years, but now seeing the walls and everything else near bare, she realized that maybe it was Tiffany alone that had supplied every ounce of charm and she’d just been along to live in it.
Tiffany’s father was a sweet guy, and had to have known at least the majority of what had gone on between the two girls, but he didn’t say a word broaching the topic. In fact, he was nice as ever to Simone. Had given her a hug when he arrived and hadn’t given off a single bad glance or annoyance, or what she had feared most: more disappointment. He was very different from Simone’s father, who was notorious with her friends for his cold, standoffish demeanor.
Simone got the last box from Tiffany’s bedroom and went out into the bright white afternoon and slid it into the back of the truck. Tiffany came down after with the last from the bathroom, and tucked it in next to it. It was blazing hot out and they both had sweat through their shirts. They traded a glance that lasted no more than a moment, before Tiffany spoke up.
“Let me just vacuum the room and I’ll be done.”
“I can do it. I can finish up for you. It’s no problem,” Simone said, putting her flat hand to her brow to shade her eyes.
“It’ll just take a second,” Tiffany responded and headed back upstairs. It was set now that Tiffany was holding on to her upper-hand. Even now she wouldn’t accept a single gesture of kindness or goodwill from Simone, as if it would somehow begin repaying the debt. Tiffany must’ve wanted it there, to linger over Simone forever, that way Tiffany would always remain on the moral high ground, and Simone would forever be the one that stole her boyfriend and ruined an almost decade long friendship.
The vacuum droned and Simone waited outside leaning in the sliver of shade cast by the tall moving truck. She looked around at all the empty parking spots left by students who had gone back home for the summer. This complex was going to be quiet for the next few months. Simone shivered, unsure of what it would be like to cope with how quiet it would be. Her heart was starting to race and so she went inside to the downstairs bathroom and threw cold water on her face.
When everything was done the three of them stood on the sidewalk and Tiffany placed the key in Simone’s palm. Her father set the latch on the overhead door of the moving truck and jingled the keys in his hand, signaling it was time.
He gave Simone a hug, said goodbye and quickly hopped in the truck to get the A/C going.
“Well, that’s it,” Tiffany said, noticeably uncomfortable.
Simone gave a slow nod. The last few weeks had been pure misery. Once they got back from George’s funeral it was like the two of them were stuck living in a dense, poisonous fog that wouldn’t burn off. They spoke very little, cried all the time in their rooms alone, rarely sat in the same room together, and often passed right by each other as if the other hadn’t even been there.
The sun was burning Simone’s neck. She glanced into Tiffany’s squinting blue eyes. They both knew it shouldn’t be this hard, but maybe there was just nothing left to say.
Tiffany took a step forward and put her arms around Simone for a long hug. A shudder of surprise ran through Simone, and it gave her a small moment of peace that she was grateful for.
“We’ll stay in touch?”
Simone nodded and feigned a smile.
“Okay,” Tiffany said, starting to get choked up. She took the car keys out of her pocket, wiped her eyes, and went to her car. The moving truck drove out of the parking lot first with Tiffany following. Simone shaded her eyes and waved goodbye, and then stood there for a long, long while before going back inside.
***
THE LONG DAYS ALONE IN the apartment were excruciating. Simone took a summer job life-guarding at the city pool. She stayed quiet most of the time, kept her head down and did her job. The water had a calming effect, especially in the evenings when the pool was less crowded.
At night Simone would come home and either go to sleep or watch movies with a glass of wine. For many weeks she was caught in a horrible place where she was incredibly lonely, yet she didn’t want to be around anyone either. She kept wondering when she was going to begin to heal.
She and Josh had shared only a handful of brief texts. He’d moved back home almost immediately after the day he’d left her apartment. She didn’t want to look back on that time she’d spent with him, and had even had her number changed to ensure they never spoke. She was too ashamed to be friends with him. She’d looked at his Facebook a few times, but that was all. He’d put up that he was transferring schools in the fall, and Simone was relieved. At this point she felt very little for him, and she hoped that they wouldn’t have to cross paths again. It would be easi
er that way.
Patrick had attempted to contact her several times. She’d only told him that she was no longer pregnant and that he needn’t worry. The rest of his texts and calls she ignored and avoided. Once she changed her phone number he contacted her on Facebook, which she didn’t respond to, and after coming home from work one day, she found a note from him taped on her door.
It hadn’t been lost on her that he was out there also, probably alone in the house he and Josh had lived in. And that perhaps he was stricken with a lot of the same emotions as she. But the news had torn through town of the murder suicide of some older girl he’d been seeing and her fiancé, and that he’d been the one to find them both, and that he’d apparently been the catalyst for it all. It was all just too much for Simone. She didn’t want to be seen with him. And she didn’t want to spend time with him because she knew it would make her cry, and with all the crying she’d done it now just seemed pointless. But it was very difficult to resist calling him or at least texting him to see if he was okay. As much as her feelings for him had become a pile of resentment, and anger, and heartbreak, she still felt a very deep sense of sympathy for him, having lost everything just like her and for having to have gone through whatever horrible things he’d seen with that other girl. It was possible that they were in actuality the only friend the other truly had.
That soon changed by late July when Simone eventually made friends with a girl at the pool named Jessie. Jessie worked year round and had already graduated from the college. She hoped to become a director at the rec center pool within a year’s time. She was going to stick around Durango, and was comfortable there.
Jessie tried to get Simone out for drinks after work several times, but the only place Simone went out in public was to the grocery store, and it was the one on the opposite side of town from where Patrick lived. Her daily movements hardly ever strayed from her work and home. In a town of such small size, she felt obligated to stick to her routine and block any chance that they might cross paths, even though it was an inevitability that they would see each other once school started.
So for weeks Jessie could only get Simone to come have drinks at her house, and even then she wouldn’t stay long. Simone did begin to smile again, and began—for brief moments—to feel normal again. She did feel cautious around Jessie, not ever really telling her too much about the past year. Simone was deathly afraid of losing this new friend she had, and was always on edge that she would do something wrong. She was sure that once Jessie found out about her past that she’d disappear. Jessie often told her that she could work on just relaxing some, but she never probed too hard into what exactly had made Simone behave in such a way.
One night in late August, with school just a week away, and after weeks of begging and pleading, Jessie convinced Simone to have a night out on the town. With a little time to kill before getting ready, Simone sat down at the desk in her bedroom and hopped onto the computer. She scrolled through photos that she knew she shouldn’t be looking at but often did anyway.
There were pictures of her and Tiffany in high school. George was in a lot of them. A sad smile crept across Simone’s lips. Then she scrolled through college photos, and usually she stopped before the ones from the last year, but today she proceeded and eventually came to those that had Patrick in them.
She stopped on one from Saint Patrick’s Day. One of just her and him. She was wearing a green top hat and smiling at the camera, and Patrick’s cheek was pressed into hers, but he was sort of glancing down at her lips. She remembered the green sticky shamrock pasties she’d stuck onto her face at the corners of her eyes and she remembered that before they’d all gone out, Patrick had drunkenly let her paint a giant green shamrock onto his neck and they’d all laughed at how stupid it looked.
They looked impossibly happy in the photo, just the two of them. Like the only thing easy about that time had been when they were together. And looking back on it now, she wondered if they could’ve been together somehow, perhaps if they had met in another time and place.
Even now, Simone wondered who this Mallory girl had been. Did he care about her, or was she just another girl to him? Simone wondered if Mallory had meant more to him than she had. What Simone had actually meant to him was still unanswered and that was the hardest part of not seeing him. It was a question that never ceased to rip her up inside, one that she may never know the answer to.
Simone focused her wet eyes on the screen. There was another photo of Patrick alone that she remembered taking with her phone, sticking it in in his face at a party randomly and blinding him with the flash. A surprise close-up. She stared at his brown eyes, and in this photo he had that endearing carefree expression that had always been so dangerous to her heart. It was a photo that Simone had kept on her computer and not shown to anyone else, including Tiffany.
Tears rolled out of her eyes. She was there in the quiet and the sun had gone down already and the twilight filled her room. She remembered what it was like to be with him, that first night over winter break when the snow was dumping out of the sky and they were inside together in her bed. She could still see the relaxed truth in his eyes when he was on top of her, her legs tightly wrapped around his hips, him holding her face gently in his hands, kissing her like they were in love, their sweat letting their chests slide together in unison. Patrick was the only guy that had ever made her feel that way, like she was being swept away into a river. The only one that made it seem like there was no time, no past to regret and no future to worry over.
Simone closed the photos, wearily looked out the window as day submitted to dark, and sat alone.
Patrick
FOR WEEKS HE HAD NOTHING to say, which wasn’t made easier by people always approaching him, often people he hadn’t even known, with the nerve to ask him about the accident. It was usually at night that they came up to him on the street asking him if he was who they thought he was. After a few near altercations, which he walked away from, he stopped going out, kept to himself, and spent most of the early summer inside. A few times a week he went to the grocery store. Once while he was checking a carton of eggs a young couple down the way kept staring at him and whispering. He put the eggs back, threw his full basket on the floor, and walked out. Something about that experience, though it was one of many, deeply hurt Patrick’s feelings.
He made an ad for a roommate and posted it on a bulletin board on campus, but the very next day he went and took it down. It was lonely in the house and Patrick often awoke in the night having sweated through his sheets from nightmares. When he daydreamed he still saw the look in Josh’s eyes on that day. It was unlike anything he’d ever witnessed in a man, and still set his hairs on end. Josh had left all his things, except for his computer, his drawings, and a good amount of his clothes. He even left his bed.
The investigation had required Patrick to spend an entire twenty-four hours with the police and several follow up appointments with them and his attorney. By the time he got back home for an extended period of time, four days had gone by and he realized Josh wasn’t ever coming back.
He gave all Josh’s things away, and kept his old room spartan. In fact, he became somewhat of a compulsive cleaner, giving the whole house a once over every few days.
One evening a long soaking rainstorm rolled in, and Patrick opened all the windows of the house. He sat there at the kitchen table and stared out at the night with cool damp air blowing in, drinking whiskey and watching the night sky light up with small bursts of far off lightening. He texted Simone two messages and received nothing from her. That night’s sleep was filled with the most awful dreams. He woke up terrified and disoriented and locked himself in the bathroom until the next morning. The next day he threw out all he alcohol in the house and decided to try and let Simone, or at least of the idea of her, go also.
Patrick’s mother had scheduled for him to see a therapist, and he had blown off the first few appointments, but after that night he started going. It was about the onl
y time he spoke to anyone, as he couldn’t risk going out to look for a job and be humiliated or gawked at.
His therapist recommended he find a way to get out of the house, so he started taking long walks along the river walk. Soon the walks became frantic runs. He often set out a half hour before sunset, went a few miles past the high school and then sat on a bench watching orange streaks glimmer on the water as the sun went down behind the mountains, and then he would sprint back, usually arriving home as the last bit of dusk was dying out and the crickets got busy chirring in the trees.
The letting go process was harder on him than he let on. Patrick drove to Simone’s apartment one day. He didn’t even know if she was still living there. He saw on Facebook that Tiffany had moved home, and he’d messaged Simone but still gotten nothing back. Her number had been changed, so for the first time he could ever remember, he felt wrong to be coming around, like it was unwelcome, and maybe it was, but he had to see her. He drove past the complex twice, unable to turn in. Finally he had the nerve to pull in and her car was gone. He returned the next day at a different time and still her car wasn’t there. This time he knocked on her door and waited. Nothing, so he left a short note on her door stuck with tape.
Where are you, Simone?
He didn’t leave his name or number. He felt he didn’t need to, and besides as much as he dearly wanted to talk to her, he also didn’t want to come around that place anymore, full of its memories and sharp pains.
Others remained watchful, some pretending they hadn’t stared even when he caught them lingering, but the harder part was that many ‘friends’ he had become very familiar with over the last few years now wouldn’t acknowledge him.
He arrived early on the first day of his marketing class. The teacher began by introducing himself and just then a girl with black hair and bright blue eyes came squeaking in the back, and there was only one open seat two rows away from Patrick. He felt like jumping up out of his seat and hugging her, but when she caught his eyes and darted them away while meandering toward the chair, that familiar damper came over him, realizing her not wanting to see him hadn’t been a mistake. Patrick refused to believe she’d completely moved on, it just wasn’t possible in his mind. He wanted to smile at her, but didn’t. And as class continued, he could feel the uncomfortable tension, neither wanting to make it obvious that all they could consider during class was what to say to each other after.
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