Lost In Rewind (Audio Fools #3)

by Tali Alexander

  “It was Saturday and I was studying at the dilapidated place in New York I had called home every weekend when Eddie’s sister actually called me. I never gave her my number or called her from my own phone, so I was surprised she had my number, but at the same time, excited to talk to her. She didn’t say a word when I answered; she just hung up. But I knew who it was because I instantly recognized her phone number. I called her back and my heart broke when I heard her sad voice and realized how important my promise and I were to her. I had no intention of seeing her, but when I heard her crying, I couldn’t pretend anymore that I didn’t care or that she didn’t matter. I didn’t want to be that asshole responsible for breaking her heart. After she hung up on me, I decided to check up on her and make sure she was okay, and perhaps apologize for being a jerk and leading her on with my empty, foolish promises for years.

  “I’d paid a visit to Eddie’s folks’ home on the Upper East Side and was greeted by his mom. Mrs. Klein was disoriented, drunk, and had no idea where her teenage daughter was, so I waited, and waited, and waited until I was ready to kill someone. I dialed her number countless times, but she wouldn’t answer my calls. I had imagined dozens of scenarios—none of them good. I had this ache in my heart, reminding me that if something bad were to happen to my best friend’s sister, I would be responsible. After waiting on her cold, stone steps and calling her for hours, she finally answered her fucking phone. I can recite that phone call in my sleep.

  “She sounded out of breath when she answered. I’d asked where she was, afraid she would hang up on me again. ‘Why do you care?’ she snapped back. If only she knew just how much I cared. I told her I’d been outside her house for hours. I told her that her mom had said she’d be back soon. Then I asked her if she was planning to come home at all that night. I was worried about her safety; it was late and she was only eighteen, still in high school.

  “I was outraged, but it was nothing compared to how I felt when I heard a man’s voice in the background say, ‘What’s wrong, baby? Who’s calling you?’ I was ready to find and kill whoever had called her ‘baby.’

  “In a state of rage, I yelled, ‘WHO. THE. FUCK. ARE. YOU. WITH? Why did he just call you baby? Eddie said you don’t have a boyfriend.’ I wasn’t even drunk, and I was talking to her like she was mine, like I had a right to question someone calling her baby.

  “But nothing could’ve prepared me for her next words. She said, ‘Jeff, calm down. I’m with Phillip. He offered to fuck me at his place, and since you haven’t made good on your promises, I’m taking him up on his offer.’ And then she hung up, leaving me to wait and suffer a slow, painful death at the hands of her words.”

  I close my eyes and let out a long breath as the image of Sara at eighteen bombards my brain—her puffy eyes and those sad, trembling lips.

  “Do I even need to know what happened next?” Kali asks, ridicule and judgment coating each word.

  “Yes, you should hear what happened next, because it was the beginning of what the rest of my life became—a lie and a truth, that even I couldn’t tell apart anymore.”

  “Is This Love” by Whitesnake

  I can’t hold down the bile that keeps rising in my throat when he talks about him and other women. I lie on the rug in the middle of my room and listen to a story from the mouth of the person I know will affect my life, and in some ways, already has.

  I know what he did. He slept with his friend’s sister, and I’m afraid he did something horrible to her. I’m afraid he’s about to tell me a heinous crime he committed. I may be his next victim. Psychopaths look like regular people, and in his case, they can even be very attractive. I shake my head at the nonsense that just entered it, because there is no way my grand-mère would’ve led me to my death.

  There has to be more. I don’t want to hear about the women he loved and slept with, but I asked for this, and now it’s too late. I can’t tell him to stop. I’m about to hear what he and some girl did and how it changed his life.

  On the other end of the line, I hear him clear his throat and take a strained, deep breath. I can’t see him, but I’m sure it can’t be easy for him to talk about his wife and some girl.

  “When she finally returned home that night in a cab—scared, sad and all alone, I realized exactly how important she was to me. I wasn’t going to touch her, I wasn’t going to kiss her, I wasn’t going to do anything but talk to her. But we ended up doing everything. Until I held her in my arms, it was all just an innocent, safe fantasy, make-believe, an escape from feeling rejected. But that night, the instant we kissed in the backseat of that cab, my whole world shifted. I took her back to my shitty studio overlooking the hospital, and that’s where I took her virginity and gave her my sanity. She was my pill, my drug of choice; I became an addict. When I touched her, nothing and no one else mattered. She would look at me like I was her world, and I wanted to be someone’s world. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t tell her that I had another world, so I kept both as far away from each other as I could.

  “I never thought Jacky and I could have a future, not just because of her cancer, but because she didn’t love me that way. She didn’t look at me the way the innocent girl I spent every weekend with did. Most of the time, she would try to push me away. I’d spend the week in school allowing Jacqueline to pretend I didn’t matter, and then I would spend the weekend with another girl and pretend Jacky didn’t matter.

  “After a year, nothing mattered anymore. I was waiting to finally graduate and start my life without my best friend being a constant reminder and a source of pain. I was tired of pretending, and I did love Eddie’s sister very much. I was ready for school and Jacky to be over so I could start my new life with someone who wanted me in theirs.”

  He pauses. He sounds winded, as if physically reliving his actions.

  “Did you tell your friend’s sister you were sleeping with someone else?” I present a question I already know the answer to, but I need to hear his response. My question is meant to hurt him like he’s hurting me right now.

  “I told you that I kept them separated. One had nothing to do with the other. Jacky was a cactus that wouldn’t allow me to get too close and love her completely. She would spend time with me and sleep with me, but our relationship was limited, guarded. There was a huge elephant in the room that she chose to ignore, and it infuriated me.

  “I’d take the train into Manhattan every weekend for her, but she didn’t know and I couldn’t tell her. Not to mention, I was human; I needed to be loved and appreciated, and she didn’t do either of those things for me. But the girl who waited at my apartment did. She loved me, she wanted me, and she appreciated my effort. I would touch her and all my problems would vanish and nothing else mattered. She was a portal, an escape, a make-believe world I created that would come to life at the end of every week. She was my reward and salvation. We talked about the kind of life we’d build together one day, and I couldn’t wait to start a new chapter with only her once law school was done. I didn’t need to tell her about Jacqueline; there was nothing to tell. We wouldn’t be together anyway.

  “I never in my wildest dreams thought that Jacky couldn’t beat cancer. She was young and she had money to get the best treatment. Michelle kept hinting that she wasn’t doing well, that life was unfair and she didn’t know how she would go on without her best friend, but I didn’t listen. My brain wasn’t programmed to think of a world without Jacqueline in it.

  “As we got closer to graduation, I spent less time with my so-called best friend. We didn’t study together; we were too busy with finals, and it felt like a natural disconnect. Eddie’s sister was accepted to Brown University. She was also following her family’s footsteps to become an attorney, like her father and brother. I was going to get rid of that apartment and find a job around anywhere she was, but that’s not what life had in store for us.

  “I told you already that Jacqueline’s father paid me a visit a month before I graduated and turned my life upside
down. His daughter was dying and he wanted me to love her, marry her, and give her what every woman should have—a family. It was like a dream and nightmare wrapped into one. Her family had finally accepted me and I would get to marry the girl I always thought was unattainable, but she would be painfully taken away from me in a year. What was I suppose to do? Huh?”

  I listen and realize he’s asking me a question. “Jeff, are you asking me what I would do?”

  “Yes, what would you do if you were me? Would you tell everybody the truth? Was I supposed to go back to New York and break that poor girl’s heart?” The agitated sound of his voice tells me just how much he wishes he did tell the truth, but clearly he didn’t.

  “I would tell the truth. I would own my actions and consequences, even if it meant breaking someone’s heart. C’est la vie.” I hear him chuckle at my response.

  “That’s life, huh? Well, I’m sorry, I couldn’t look her in the eyes and break her heart. I wasn’t man enough to tell her that the place we’d made love and where she gave me her heart and her body was the same place I’d rented to watch over my sick best friend, who was my longtime lover, the one I was now going to marry. I didn’t have the balls to tell her I came to the city almost every weekend to make sure Jacqueline was okay, and not just to see her. I was a negligent pretender, but I wasn’t that kind of heartless monster … not yet. I couldn’t witness her disappointment. So instead of doing the right thing and breaking up with her, I just did the cowardly thing and stopped going to the city to see her altogether. Like a child, I ignored her calls, texts, and emails. Nobody knew about us anyway, so it was easy to detox her out of my system like the addict I’d become.

  “I couldn’t feel guilty about my newly acquired predicament, because I had to concentrate on Jacky and whatever time she had left on this earth. That was my only job. Once again, I thought I had a plan, but I think the universe saw it and laughed. Then it showed me who the real life architect is.”

  “I’m scared to hear what happens next,” I say out loud.

  “What happened next is worse than you could ever imagine.”

  I swallow the acid and stop trying to predict his next move, and how or why Joella would have had anything to do with it. Our physical distance and his account of the past add another layer of separation between us, and with each new revelation, I travel a little further away from the idea of him.

  “It was May first, and our last final was done. The whole gang was together at BlackGod celebrating, drinking as if tomorrow would never come. I drank to try to forget the girl I knew was waiting for me like a lost puppy back in New York. I drank to try to forget that my best friend was dying. I drank in an effort to pretend I wasn’t a scared idiot who was about to propose to the love of his life that night. I drank and hoped I was anybody but me.

  “I had Jacqueline’s ring in my pocket when I went upstairs to the bathroom. I got to the top of the stairs and this woman, whom I’d never paid any attention to before, motioned for me to come closer. I was a bit buzzed, but I remember looking around. There was no one there except me.

  “She said, ‘Come, boy, I will give you a reading.’ But it was the way she’d whispered it with certainty that caught my attention. I said I wasn’t interested, that I’d only gone upstairs to take a piss. I hadn’t gone up there for a reading. I told her I didn’t even believe in fortunetellers anyway. I’d always believed that you make your own fortune—you know what I mean? But upon closer inspection, the smiling woman looked familiar to me. I had to have seen her before, maybe sitting at the top of those stairs on another occasion I had gone up to use the bathroom. I mean, after all, we did frequent that bar no less than twice a week.

  “I remember her saying, ‘Your eyes … two different colors. You’re one in a million, boy.’ She stood with difficulty and drew back the black velvet curtains, and beckoned me to enter the small, hidden room at the top of the stairs, right across from the men’s room. I can’t explain what compelled me to accept her invitation. I can’t decide if I was intoxicated, or perhaps hoping she’d actually know my future since my reality at the time took an unforeseeable turn.

  “Her lips came together in a knowing grin as she said, ‘Show me your hands, Godfrey.’ I corrected her and told her that my name is Jeffery, not Godfrey. I thought maybe she’d mistaken me for someone else. But before I could stop her, she’d taken hold of both my wrists. I sat down and listened, completely startled. Although, it was her next words that had me frozen in place. She said, ‘Those eyes … I’ve seen them countless times, boy. Don’t you worry about your name, just pay attention to what an old woman has to say.’ I looked down at her wrinkled hands, which had given away her advanced age, and watched as she began to trace a line from my index finger down my palm and to my wrist. She stopped at my wrist, and then we both looked up in sync.

  “She raised three fingers and smiled before saying, ‘Three children will come from you—a king and two queens. But you will be lost without her. Your life collided with pain and suffering that won’t end until you find her. Only the girl with the biblical name will save your broken heart, Godfrey. She will heal you and you will heal her. When she grows up, you will be lost no more, my boy, and your life will be filled with music and begin again.’ I removed my hands from her grip as if her prophecy had burned me. She had no way of knowing about her. She had no right telling me such crap. Who did she think she was? The girl she spoke of … it was over between us. I hadn’t seen or called Eddie’s sister in weeks. This stranger knew nothing. I was going to marry Jacqueline, end of story.

  “I was never the same after I spoke and looked into your grandmother’s eyes. She was the reason I went back to New York to see the girl I had cowardly abandoned. I went back to try and explain, try to end things with her like a man and let us both move on. I had every intention to never see her again, especially since I was getting married. She had her whole life ahead of her, she was practically a baby who just graduated high school, and I was a new attorney, fresh out of school, who would be moving to New York to try and build a career. Jacqueline was my future, not her. But seeing the girl I couldn’t stop thinking about, coupled with the gypsy’s taunting words, became my ruin. She planted the seed, but I watered it with empty promises and I willed it to life. I lived a life of sin because I thought I knew my absolute future and what it held, but I knew nothing.”

  I hear him crying, but I’m too busy pacing my room in circles while methodically compartmentalizing his words. I struggle in my efforts to decode Joella’s reading to him and try not to go crazy with all the information I finally have. I rewind and play back her prophecy over and over. She said his name, she knew who he was, in a way, and it must’ve been him she waited for all those years. She could’ve sold this bar thousands of times, but she never did, and he has a key. He had to have been the reason she kept this place and why she remained here waiting for him to come back. But why?

  It dawns on me that I don’t know Eddie’s little sister’s name. I don’t recall Jeff mentioning or saying her name once in his storytelling. But why? I need to know her name, now!

  My phone is suddenly quiet as I look down at my screen to see that it’s completely black, dead, and Jeff and his story are gone.

  Out of frustration I fling my phone across my bed, and just as quickly, go after it to find it and plug it in. I place my hand under the covers to try and fetch it but I can’t seem to locate it. I dig further under the covers until my hand grazes over and comes in contact with a key.

  “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” by Whitney Houston

  I did what I promised, I told her the prophecy, the nonsensical prediction of her old, senile grandmother, and she hung up on me, as I knew she would. Now I need to get as far away from the memories as my head will allow me, without undergoing a lobotomy. It’s the first time I’ve actually regurgitated my life to someone out loud, and I don’t particularly like myself very much. I sound like a lying pig that cheated on his sick girlfrie
nd, fiancée, and then wife with a young, innocent girl, and I haven’t even told her the whole story. I snicker with disgust. At least I won’t be adding Kali to my reckless body count.

  I don’t care about understanding or knowing why that old woman presumably waited just for me. I rub my chest to try and find my key, but again I’m reminded I don’t have it anymore. I left it under Kali’s pillow. That key doesn’t belong to me. Her grandmother would want her to have it. It doesn’t matter anymore why she said what she said, and I don’t care about her perfect granddaughter, either. Lies, lies, lies.

  I splash water on my face and readjust my favorite green tie tightly around my neck before I brace myself to step back out into my life. I need to get back to work and look forward to seeing Emily and her family tonight. Hopefully she’ll give me good news about Sara and her slow recovery. I’ll also hand over the key to the apartment in the village I once called my home with Sara. I’ll have Emily and Louis speak to Sara and William about it and decide to do with it as they see fit. I have no reason to ever go back there, just like Sara, that place was never really my home. My kids are my only home.

  I glance outside at the heavy rain accompanied by an ominous thick, dark fog that has suddenly engulfed the city. The steady sound of water coming from the sky silences my mind. I look down at my phone, still clutched tight in my hand, and scroll to Kali’s selfie. I have my finger on the delete button, but I can’t bring myself to erase her face from my phone or my mind. I decide to keep her forever immortalized behind the glass screen to safely torture myself.