by Kristal Lim
When Trevor came home, the apartment was empty. There were no sounds coming from the television in the living room playing the evening news with the radio blasting away in the kitchen while pots and pans clanged, telling him with so much noise that Vera was home and making dinner. There was just the silence waiting for him and, after his eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright lights that he had switched on, a letter left on the hallway table. And he knew.
She had done it. She had really done it. She had finally left him.
A sense of numb unreality came over him then as he picked up the letter and sat down on the couch. He just looked at the letter for a long time, not wanting to open it and read it. Because as soon as he did that, he knew it would sink in and it would be real. He would be really alone. But after several minutes of being a coward, he finally took a deep breath and read what she had to say about leaving him.
It was quite short, but it was brutal. She didn't make herself out to be a victim and she didn't turn him into some kind of monster either. She was just honest and, somehow, that seemed to hurt worse. He tore the letter to little pieces after he was done reading, threw the scraps into the trash, then took out the bottle of whiskey he normally saved for company and proceeded to get drunk as quickly as he could. He was determined to stay drunk for as long as humanly possible. He deserved it, after all.
Just like that, it was over. Four years gone to waste. He spent the next few days in some kind of fugue where he walked around doing things automatically but nothing really registered in his brain about what was going on. All he could think about was one thought that kept going round and round his head and laughing at him whenever he tried to get some sleep: Vera had left him. She had gone and she had made it very clear that she wasn't ever coming back. Not that he blamed her for her choice. If it had been him, he knew he would have packed his bags sooner than she did and ran as far away as possible without once looking back. Some things, no matter how hard you tried, just couldn't work out. He had never believed in that before, but he certainly did now.
"You look like hell," his agent, Matt, said to him when they met up for lunch later in the week. It was an appointment that he had had every intention of missing, but Matt had then shown up at Trevor’s place to bully him into taking a shower, putting on some fresh clothes, and going out. Now Trevor glared at the other man resentfully across the table over his untouched plate of pasta. He hadn't realized it earlier, but he had ordered the dish Vera always got whenever they ate in the restaurant Matt had picked. He scowled at Matt again. The jerk had probably chosen to eat here too because he knew it was one other way to torture Trevor. Bastard.
Matt, however, simply ignored Trevor’s scowl and sipped his tea. "Listen, Trevor," he began after he had fortified himself with a huge bite of garlic bread, "I know you don't actually need to hear this shit right now but I have to say it anyway: you are way, way behind schedule and you really need to get yourself together if we still want to hit that January release." He looked Trevor in the eyes then. "Well? Is that still gonna happen?"
"I'll get it done," he promised sullenly. "Just give me four more weeks and I'll have everything finished before the end of October."
"Really? Can I absolutely count on that?" He sounded doubtful.
"Yes, God damn it," Trevor snapped. "I'll finish it by then. After that, I'm done here. I'm leaving." Until he said the words out loud, he hadn't realized just how seriously he had been thinking these thoughts since Vera walked out. Matt was even more astonished at this little declaration.
"What do you mean you're leaving?" he demanded. "Leaving where?"
"The city," Trevor responded. "I don't wanna be here right now and for the foreseeable future. I need to be somewhere else." He sighed. "I just wanna get away from everything for a while."
"But–but," Matt was sputtering as he frantically tried to think of something to say that would make the other man change his mind. Trevor could practically see the wheels in his head turning furiously. "But what about the rest of the series?" he finally managed to choke out. "You're contracted for three more!"
"And I'll still make them," he assured Matt, "just not here. I need the time away, man. You know that as well as I do."
"But where are you gonna go? Good God, don't tell me you wanna bum around on an island somewhere–"
Trevor shook his head. "No. That's not gonna happen. Not much of a beach guy. Don't worry. I'll go somewhere with a nice Internet provider so you can still keep bugging me via email every day."
Matt then tried other tactics, other reasons and arguments, just to convince Trevor to stay. He was probably afraid that if Trevor did leave the city, then he'd lose what little control he had over him and he'd never get the last three books of the graphic novel series Trevor had been contracted to do. But with every word Matt said, Trevor’s determination to follow through on his idea just grew stronger. And, though he knew he was still a long way off from getting over what had happened between him and Vera, Trevor immediately felt a bit better once he had decided on a goal that he could work to achieve. He was going to stop acting like a total loser, finish his latest work, then move somewhere far away where he didn't have to stay in an apartment where he slept with bad memories every night.
For the next two weeks, he wrote, drew, revised, and re-drew whatever he made for about eight hours each day. By the time he was done, earlier than he had anticipated, he had gone past the number of pages he was expected to turn in and the editor had to cut out some parts with a lot of dark looks and grumbling under his breath while Trevor sat looking innocent in the man’s office. He didn't really mind the guy taking out whole chapters and panels. He didn't seem to mind much of anything these days. But, with creating one book out of the way and three more that he wasn't due to start working on anytime soon, he finally got to focus on the matter of leasing his apartment and searching for some place he could retreat to where he could get his head in some kind of order.
Getting the apartment off his hands was easy. There were always people looking for someplace decent to live in in the city. But finding a safe harbor, a refuge, from all the crap that had happened in his personal life over the past year was a bit trickier. His real estate agent kept sending him photos and links to virtual tours where he could check out different houses from all across the country, but he never felt any one place was the right fit. It was starting to get really frustrating.
He was beginning to be afraid that he would end up on a beach somewhere after all, a thought that made him shudder. Trevor didn’t really hate beaches, but they were just not the ideal places for him either. He preferred mountains and woods, which always drove Vera a bit crazy whenever he dragged her off on a camping trip. However, he had to make a choice very soon because the people who had leased the apartment from him would be moving into the place in the next few weeks and he couldn't still be hanging around by then. So on a late afternoon that had the wonderful crispness of fall in the air, he went for a walk in the park where he hoped to get his head clear enough to come up with a decision.
He ended up thinking about Vera instead. How he had spent most of his life feeling like something was slightly off with the world, like there was something that he was missing, and then when he had met her, he had thought that she would be the one to fill in the blank spots. She was smart and beautiful, and she had made him feel things he couldn’t remember ever feeling before. So of course he had wanted to be with her. Of course he had wanted to find out if she could finally complete that sense of hollowness that had persisted inside him since he woke up one day when he was sixteen and felt that the world was a darker place than it should be. Nothing had helped him overcome that emotion, not even when he actually got desperate enough to try therapy and prescription drugs. But he had hoped so much that Vera would prove to be the one who would make a difference in how he felt. Instead, he had ended up hurting her in a way that she didn’t deserve.
He was wandering aimlessly down one of the paths in the park, wrapped
in these thoughts and ignoring all the joggers rushing past, when he suddenly found himself knocked off his feet without any warning and he fell face down.
"What the hell!?" He was prepared to launch into a world-class rant when the person who had knocked him down took one look at him, raised a dark eyebrow, and wrinkled his nose as if he thought Trevor smelled bad.
"Oh, it's you," the offender said quite dismissively. He was a young man–tall, lean, and incredibly handsome, even though Trevor normally never noticed such things about other guys. He had black hair that was slicked back and eyes that were the oddest color Trevor had ever seen. They kind of looked like amber. He was dressed quite strangely too, a combination of punk rock and Victorian that was almost but not quite steampunk. In fact, he looked a lot like he might have stepped out of one of the pages in Trevor’s graphic novels. As Trevor got to his feet, still glaring at the man, the strange-looking guy just turned his back on him and picked up the bicycle he must have been riding when he crashed right into Trevor. When Trevor realized that the stranger intended to simply ride away without anything resembling an apology, he quickly grabbed on to the bike's handlebars.
"You're not getting off that easy," he said angrily. "You ran into me with your bicycle. You at least owe me an apology, never mind your insurance details, pal."
The young man looked astonished as if Trevor was being outrageous by suggesting that he apologize. "Don't be bloody daft!" he retorted. "It certainly was no fault of mine that you were not fully aware of your surroundings so you never noticed you were walking along the bicycle path."
"What?" Trevor was really angry now. "This isn't a bicycle path. This path is for joggers and strollers only, you jerk."
"Nonsense." He waved a hand and pointed to a spot behind Trevor. "Of course it's a bicycle path. Look."
Trevor turned and looked, and there was a sign that proved the man was right. But he could have sworn that sign wasn't there earlier. Scowling more fiercely than ever, he turned back to face the guy, ready to argue some more when, to his complete surprise, there was no one there. And his hand was merely grasping thin air where he was supposed to be holding on to a bicycle.
Amused laughter rang out quite close to him. He started and almost jumped out of his skin when he saw that a woman had somehow crept up to his side and was now standing only a few inches away without him noticing anything. He sort of stumbled then righted himself as he hastily put a few feet between him and the stranger, his nerves tingling in some kind of warning he couldn't decipher.
"Do forgive Raven," she said to him in a voice that was guaranteed to make any man feel weak in the knees. "He can be such a thoughtless, careless boy sometimes." Her eyes then raked over Trevor in an appraising manner and she smiled in a way that scrambled his brains a little. She was, in a word, gorgeous. Her black hair framed her heart-stoppingly beautiful face in waves and her skin had that perfect, smooth glow only very rich women could afford. But it was her eyes that really caught him. They were the same eyes he had seen on the guy who had disappeared, and they were full of secrets.
Her perfect pink lips curved into a smirk when she saw that he was practically ogling her. "You grew up very well," she commented, which he thought was a very strange thing to say. He was about to ask her why she would say such a thing, but she glanced over his shoulder then and frowned. "If you will excuse me," she gave him a brief glance, "I have a wayward son to chase after." She started to walk away, but turned back for a moment to look at him again. "You have only a number of days to get to her, soldier. I suggest you make haste. I would so hate it if all my careful plans don’t come to fruition." And, with those mystifying words, she stalked off. A sudden wind rose up then, picking up leaves and other debris, obscuring Trevor’s vision for several seconds. He blinked and batted the scraps away from his face, and in that short time, the woman disappeared as thoroughly as the guy had done earlier.
It occurred to Trevor then that maybe he was having a sort of breakdown, imagining people appearing and disappearing around him. He went home after that and even took his temperature just to make sure he wasn't delirious with some kind of fever. After assuring himself of the fact that he seemed to be physically fine, he had an early dinner and decided to go to bed. Maybe the stress of trying to find a new home had gotten to him. Maybe he just needed some sleep then he'd be okay. Yeah, maybe.
He went to sleep thinking that everything would probably make more sense in the morning. But his subconscious apparently had other ideas. For some reason, he found himself dreaming of the time when he was sixteen and his mom had made them move to this small town where nothing exciting ever happened. He saw himself as he was then, too tall and gangly to be completely comfortable with his own body. This was the town where the strange depression that had plagued him for most of his life had started, so maybe it really wasn’t so strange that he would be dreaming of the place. But the things that then happened in his dream were just plain weird. He was walking through the woods that he remembered surrounded much of the town, seemingly in search of something because he was calling out a word, or a name. Maybe he was looking for someone, he couldn't really be sure. The dream got even stranger then, with weird things like a black ballroom where a girl danced until her feet were bleeding and something sharp pierced his hand. But the thing that really stayed with him about the dream when he woke up the next morning was this strong feeling that he wanted to go back to that town. It was the place where his life seemed to have taken a sadder turn for no reason that he had ever been able to figure out, even with hours of analysis, so maybe it was time for him to return there and try to solve the mystery of his own head once and for all. Plus, it had the added allure of being far away from anywhere Vera could possibly want to go to since there wasn’t a beach anywhere near it. It wasn’t that he was nervous about running into her again if he stayed in the city. It was just that–he really didn’t want to be running into her again anytime soon. Not until he could face her without shriveling up inside.
His mom still lived in the town and, a few years ago, she had married a nice widower named George and moved into the guy’s big, empty house. So, after carefully avoiding her phone calls over the past few weeks, he finally dialed her number and told her that he was thinking of moving back, for good. Needless to say, she was exhilarated at this news.
So he called up the real estate lady who had been very patient with him and all his finicky ways, told her what he wanted, and asked her to find him some houses. She was surprised at first, but it took her less than an hour to provide him with a few great options. He ended up picking out a house that was just a few streets away from his mom’s place and, just like that, the agent sent over the papers he needed to sign and he was its new owner before the end of the week.
He packed up his stuff and, a few days before Halloween, he moved into his new home in the old town he had left seven years ago, hoping to start over with his life.
~~~
Chapter 17