Awake (Reflections Book 3)

by A. L. Woods

  My smile was wistful. I ignored the way the tears got lost in my beard, kicking my chin skyward, hoping it would lessen the sting that resounded behind my lids. “We both know I’m not fixing shit.”

  Dougie and I sat there in protracted silence until I lost myself to the effects of the whiskey on my brain and slumber overtook me. Eventually, Dougie climbed to his feet and embarked on the pained task of getting all two hundred pounds of me onto the couch. His grunts pulled me out of my sleep. “You tall, dead weight motherfucker.” I heard the clench of his teeth, the muttered flurry of curses as he struggled to heave me up. “You killed a whole damn bottle of Midleton, asshole.”

  Still, he was careful to lay me down with a gentleness I wasn’t deserving of. Tucking a throw pillow under my head, he planted one of my feet on the floor to keep the impending spins at bay. He tossed a heavy decorative faux fur blanket onto me before he disappeared from the room, returning with two bottles of water.

  “Drink, or you’ll feel worse in the morning.”

  Joke was on him. There was no feeling worse than this; nothing would compare.

  Or so I thought.

  I searched the floor blindly for the phone I’d discarded hours earlier, the ringing of which awakened me. The foot that rested on the floor was numb. Pins and needles spiked from my toes right up to my hip bone. My stomach roiled, the acid in my stomach threatening to wreak havoc…an acerbic cherry on top of a terrible night and the start of what I could only describe as another bullshit year ahead of me.

  My fingers closed around the phone, and my brain winced in protest when I held the bright phone screen in my line of vision. It was still dark outside, and the time on the display confirmed it was a little past six in the morning. Way too early for Trina to be trying to make amends. Annoyed, I tossed the phone back to the floor. I would deal with her when it didn’t feel like there was an elastic band constricting around my brain and my heart wasn’t about to claw its way free from my chest with an acumen worthy of Freddy Krueger himself.

  I ignored her call, and every call after that.

  Decline.

  Decline.

  Decline.

  I concentrated on breathing through the nausea when heavy footsteps above drew my focus. The bedroom door from the master flung open above me, the door catching the door stopper. On instinct, I shot up and immediately regretted it. My guts lurched, and acid rushed up my throat.

  Fuck, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

  “Sean.” I breezed by Dougie as he cleared the bottom step of the stairwell, the rush of my movements doing nothing to ease my stomach. He followed behind me, stopping to stand in the threshold of the powder room. I collapsed to my knees, expelling the regretful combination of Midleton and beer into the toilet.

  The concoction had worked for Raquel and her Irish DNA, but apparently it was too strong for my Portuguese blood.

  My throat worked again, leaving a trail of singeing acid up my tract. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead, my elbows finding the rim of the toilet to brace myself. I didn’t even give a shit that this thing was, without doubt, laden with bacteria. Maybe I’d contract a flesh-eating disease that would inevitably kill me. That would be one hell of a way to go.

  Christ, did I even hear myself right now? It was a breakup, not the end of my damn life. I wasn’t even sure she meant it.

  “Sean,” Dougie said again. I held up a middle finger to him, wanting him to get off my back. Being crowded while I was a little more coherent made the fact that I was feeling fragile—emotionally and physically—that much worse. My hackles were up. I didn’t need a nurse, and I sure as shit didn’t want a shoulder to cry on.

  I’d done enough of the latter for one night. We would revisit this song and dance in another twelve hours. Start this cycle of bullshit all over again. Maybe stick to one type of alcoholic beverage. Whiskey was utterly out of the question, though. Didn’t want to see that shit for at least another year.

  It was the heavy snuffling behind him that had me turning my head over my shoulder. Penelope’s red-rimmed eyes made more than just my sweat run cold. My blood froze in my veins, the fear slamming into me. Using the pedestal sink for reinforcement, I staggered to my feet, only for my equilibrium to send me windmilling backward into the bathroom wall. My head hit the drywall, eliciting a grunt as white pain speared through me like an icepick to the brain.

  “Motherfucker, has it always been so tight in here?” I slammed a fist against the wall, ignoring the pain while I rested my sweat-coated forehead.

  “Did you tell him?” Penelope’s voice trembled. Neither seemed marginally concerned that I’d taken out my aggression on their powder room wall. It seemed like the least of their problems.

  “Tell me what?” I didn’t know what to focus on. My need to chunder dragon again or the fact that I was one breath away from a full-blown panic attack because I couldn’t shake that whatever they were about to tell me was going to make an awful night that much worse.

  Dougie held up his phone in one hand, Trina’s name on his caller ID. Her breathless sobs and chain of apologies pouring from the speaker had me reaching for the phone he held out to me.

  “Trina, what the fuck?”

  “Sean, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” she said, sounding distraught. I knew she was remorseful for what happened, but did it really warrant calling everyone and their damn mother at six a.m. to talk to me? My spine went rigid when I picked up on deep, masculine voices in the background I didn’t recognize, my fingers clenching the phone.

  “Who is that?” I barked. I was still semi-drunk, and even if I struggled to stand without the help of the bathroom wall, I could still swing my fists and land my throws if someone was fucking with my sister right now.

  “Ms. Tavares, may I have the phone, please?” a deep voice requested. Then I heard some shuffling. Where was she? Who was she with? My stomach grumbled in warning, but my adrenaline was thrumming too hard for me to notice that I was going to have another foray with the toilet soon.

  “Mr. Tavares?”

  “Who the hell is this? What’s going on?”

  “This is Detective Romaro with the Eaton Police Department.” Judgement laced the lawman’s tone. “Can I ask that you meet us either at your home or at the station?”

  My head pounded, my limbs wobbled. “What happened?”

  “Mr. Tavares, it would be better if we discussed this in person.”

  “Put my sister back on the phone.”

  “Mr. Tav—”

  “Put my fucking sister back on the phone.”

  “All right, that’s enough from you, dickhead.” Dougie pulled the phone from my hands, sandwiching it between his ear and shoulder as he brushed by Penelope.

  He jutted his thumb in my direction. “Watch him,” he murmured to his fiancée, whose eyes were glittering with a fresh batch of tears on the verge of spilling over. Dougie departed from the sardine can powder room, leaving me with Penelope, mumbling an apology into the phone.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” I asked, glancing at her. She didn’t reply. Instead she eased further into the bathroom, her arms reaching around my middle, her clammy forehead pressed against my bicep.

  We had never hugged before.

  “I know you’re hurting.”

  “You don’t know shit, Penelope.” I tried to shrug her off, but she clung tighter, refusing to let up.

  “I do. I know, Sean.”

  Dougie returned, the phone fisted in his hand, his jacket on, Bruins beanie covering his mussed hair. Penelope broke away with another sniffle, her head bent.

  “Get your shit together; we gotta go.”

  “Go where?” I gritted, unwilling to part with the support of the powder room wall. We were bonding here. “Why is my sister with the cops?”

  Dougie blew out a breath until his lips vibrated. He exchanged a look with Penelope when she glanced at him. It was as if they were communicating without so much as uttering a wo
rd. He nodded at her, then pegged me with a hard look.

  He rubbed his forehead with the back of his winter-busted knuckles. “There was a fire.”

  My forehead felt like it took the paint right off the walls when I ripped my head back. My eyes flitted between my friends, the hairs on the back of my neck rising at half-mast. “What?”

  Dougie scraped an open palm over his face, his eyes struggling to focus. This fucker was about to get misty-eyed on me. I’d been lying broken on his living room floor two hours ago and he hadn’t shed one tear, but now, he was a fucking mess struggling to get it together.

  “I’m sorry, man.” He took a fortifying breath that sounded painful. “The Heritage Park house is gone.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Allow me to let you in on a little secret. When you’ve hit rock bottom, and you think things can’t get any worse? They can. It can get a hell of a lot fucking worse. It’s possible for things to get so bad that I grabbed the space where my armpit and tricep meet and twisted that piece of flesh, just as my ma used to do when I was restless in church as a kid to bring me back to reality.

  Numb wasn’t the right word for what I felt right now. Empty. An insatiable void that ate at my insides. As the detectives spoke, my eyes worked around my living room, but I wasn’t listening.

  Not really.

  I was running through the same coping technique I’d taught Raquel.

  The problem was, I was looking for her everywhere. I wanted to touch her; to feel her soft palm in mine. I wanted to hear her laughter, her upward inflection and hard consonants. I wanted her scent, that sweet citrus-vanilla fragrance embedded on my memory the same way it was on my sheets. I wanted to taste her pillowy and unrelenting lips, the sweep of her demanding tongue. I wanted to relish the way she always tasted like a heady combination of coffee and whiskey, with faint traces of tobacco and something innately minty.

  Her presence was absent from my house when I got in.

  I called, called, and called again. I called her until my phone died and then called from the landline. I left her voicemails until her box was full. Angry, vitriolic voicemails demanding an explanation for what was a clear overreaction. I Googled her; OK, so it was wrong—but did it really warrant this kind of reaction? Then the sadness settled in, replacing my anger, and I left her somber broken messages, too. Pleading with her in muted whispers, begging her.

  I didn’t beg.

  But for her? I’d be a pauper. I’d prostrate myself if it meant she would come back from wherever she went. I would snatch the sun and moon out of the sky, lay out the stars at her feet to match the constellations of the freckles that peppered the bridge of her nose. Whatever she wanted, she’d have it.

  If she would just come back so we could work this out, because this dumpster fire cannot be reality. It just couldn’t be.

  When we got back to my house, all three of my sisters were already there. Where Livy and Trina were standoffish and evaded my gaze at all costs, Maria plunged herself into action. She did all the talking, filtered every question the detectives threw at us. Dougie translated my fractured sentences, impaired by my still somewhat drunken and incoherent slurs that could only make sense to someone who’d seen me in that state before. He did that while coaxing me with a nudge of his knee to drink the bottle of water he’d fished out of my fridge.

  It had been years since I’d been this drunk.

  Eventually, once the initial shock wore off, Trina stared at me with her red-rimmed eyes. Livy soothed her with an arm draped firmly around her narrow shoulders, cooing quietly.

  I just sat there like an interloper, replaying how I found myself in this position. Pretending that it wasn’t our latest construction project that was torched to the ground and that my girlfriend wasn’t gone and nowhere to be found. I could smell the faint traces of gasoline in the threads of my sisters’ clothing; they had already gone to the house in Heritage Park before coming back here.

  I guess I should say they went to see what was left of the house. I’d overheard them describing cinders and soot. Burned wood and gasoline. Ash that floated in clumps like dark tufts of dandruff before plunging downward, disappearing with a faint sizzle on the chilled ground.

  It was another mar on an already shit year I wanted to sleep through.

  The detectives asked questions. I didn’t answer. I caught things in passing snippets.

  “We have reason to believe that the fire was set intentionally.”

  “There are a number of footprints on the site, but due to it being an active construction zone, it’ll take us time to process the evidence.”

  “We’re canvassing the area for potential witnesses who could help expedite our investigation.”

  None of it mattered to me. My mind concentrated on the rewinding and replaying the memory of Dougie pulling into my driveway and realizing Raquel’s piece of shit Camry was gone. I had all but ignored the cops who climbed out of their unmarked cars, calling my name in a modulated and robotic tone. I fished house keys out of my pocket and flung the front door open. I could still smell her. It was faint, but it was there.

  “Sean,” Dougie had said, but I’d bypassed him.

  “Sean, please,” Maria ordered. They must have shown up at the same time we did. I kicked off my shiny dress shoes, following the length of the hallway into my bedroom. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find my bed empty, still made. No decompressions to the duvet to suggest she’d at least sat down and thought things through first. That didn’t stop me from looking for signs of her elsewhere.

  My body careened toward the bureau, my hand jerking open the middle drawer that flew open with ease. The one I specifically cleared for her things.

  The sound of brass-nickel sliding against wood tattooed itself in my memory.

  Empty.

  Empty, save for the key I’d given her hours earlier.

  I knew then I would hear that sound in my nightmares, in every memory that smarted inside of my brain when I thought of her.

  There was no note. No explanation. No warning. No sign.

  She said it herself and meant every word; we were over.

  With my hands in my hair, I stumbled out of the bedroom, avoiding my sisters, who tried to flank me; and the unimpressed looks of the two cops as their eyes tracked me as if I was doing something criminal in my own home. Shoving my way through my sisters and Dougie’s blockade, I flipped the bathroom light on.

  Ripping the shower curtain back, I searched for her things in the caddy.

  But that was empty, too.

  How was it possible that a house that had only been her home for a short period could seem so impossibly empty without her in it? She had barely been a fixture in it. I desperately wished I could go back to eight weeks before now and hit undo on everything I’d ever done that led us to this point.

  Maybe then, this would be different.

  And not my newfound reality.

  I never thought I’d ever leave Massachusetts—at least, not like this.

  This felt rash, even to me. Another folly of my impulsiveness, of my fight-or-flight instincts that propelled me to move and not look back when danger in the form of a man who crushed my trust right alongside my heart under the sole of his size eleven steel-toed boot appeared.

  Although he had been wearing Oxfords when he’d done it, hadn’t he? The same ones he had worn the day we met.

  I had scraped what remained of my shattered heart off the bedroom floor, tucked it close to my chest, and promised to do whatever it wanted. If it wanted to leave, we left. We kept moving, and we didn’t look back. Not for anyone, not for anything, and not for a love that was constructed on bricks of deception and a lumber of lies right from the start.

  I didn’t ask permission; I didn’t think, I just left.

  That was the only explanation as to why I was waiting to board a Greyhound bus…in Philadelphia.

  My legs, fatigued from sitting still for several hours on the Amtrak I’d embarked on at Sou
th Station in Boston, pulsated. I had parked my car in the lot next to the terminal off of Atlantic Avenue, collecting the heavy duffel bag crowded with what I’d initially brought to Sean’s in terms of clothes, toiletries, and Holly Jane’s photo that I’d sandwiched inside of her copy of Valley of the Dolls.

  And the typewriter Sean gifted me.

  It was too pretty to leave behind, and I wanted a small token of our relationship. Some kind of reminder of how close I’d been to forgetting everything about who I was because of my stupid, useless heart. It made me blind to what he was, made it hard to see the evidence of what was in front of me all along. Well, not anymore. Never again.

  I purposely left my phone in the car, tucked in the cup holder, when I arrived at the station. I didn’t want to be found, and with Penelope’s family money and her connections, and what I could only assume would be Maria’s friends in high places, I wasn’t taking any chances. I emptied my bank account save for ten bucks and withdrew what was available on my credit card from an ATM to avoid leaving a digital footprint of any kind for them to find me if it came down to it.

  I imagined locating my whereabouts would be the only thing those two would ever bond over. Another guaranteed strike against me. There wasn’t a chance in hell Penelope would ever forgive me. Not after this. In Maria’s eyes, this would be another mark on my already tarnished surface. More evidence to support that I’d never be good enough for her brother. That you couldn’t buff out the dull and scarred parts of this Southie girl, no matter how much you polished and shined.

  Even if it had been him who caused my latest scars.

  I bought the ticket I needed at South Station and was the first to board the train, holding my breath until my lungs burned, exhaling only when we pulled away from the station. I’d watched through glossy eyes as everything I had ever known and loved disappeared behind me until I couldn’t even pick out the skyscrapers or distinct landmarks anymore. They faded like shadows, blending into one another until they were nothing more than a metaphysical thought.