Awake (Reflections Book 3)

by A. L. Woods

  But when Cash and I started dating, he had handed me a small silver flask filled with something that smelled like a blend of nail polish remover and car polish and told me to take a sip. I preferred the numbness of marijuana over alcohol, but drinking made me feel, I dunno, more mature and appealing to my older boyfriend in a way that weed didn’t.

  It wasn’t a big deal. Not in hindsight. Alcohol always made me more amenable, pleasant even. Marijuana made me antsy and paranoid. Alcohol made it easier for Cash to kiss me that first time and provided me with the liquid courage I had needed to kiss Sean, too. Where I transitioned to smoking cigarettes exclusively, I continued to drink regularly.

  Something they don’t warn you of when you take your first sip of alcohol before you’re legal is that hangovers, do in fact, get worse with age.

  A lot worse.

  That was why I now struggled to open my eyes, the pounding in my head as brutal as a root canal without novocaine. The air in my motel room smelled sour and foul. It stunk of the whiskey I spilled on the carpet two days prior and the Jack in the Box I’d thrown up in the wastebasket next to me last night.

  Not that any of this was out of the ordinary these days.

  This had become my modus operandi. Walk to one of the six dining options I could access on foot, stop at the Shell gas station to buy a bottle of something, plod back to the motel room, eat, drink, vomit, sleep, and then start it all over again.

  I’d holed up inside this inn room for weeks, although my concept of time was skewed. If it wasn’t for stopping at the front desk yesterday afternoon to make my next weekly lump sum payment—as I’d promised, in exchange for accommodation and not using a credit card; something they were aghast about—I wouldn’t have realized it was February.

  A month had gone by.

  Californians designed Los Angeles to chew people up and spit them back out upon realizing there was nothing particularly glamorous or transcendental about them. I didn’t fit the bill of a Hollywood starlet in the making, and I couldn’t hold a tune to save my life. The aspiring writers in this city had more talent in their baby finger than I did in my entire person. And yet collectively, they rubbed the crystals that hung around their necks like it would mollify the self-doubt. Drank their overpriced coffee to offset the anxiety that they weren’t good enough. Repeated some bullshit new age mantra to themselves to reinforce their talent like it wasn’t a quantifiable thing.

  I wasn’t a fit for L.A., not as a writer, anyway; but L.A. wasn’t a fit for me, either. Amongst the already identified issues, I was too pragmatic, crass, and frankly, too broke to stay there. So, I’d gotten on a Flixbus headed God only knew where and ended up almost three hours north of L.A., in Pismo Beach.

  Fun fact about Pismo Beach—it was where Bugs Bunny was going when he took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t aware of that before the motel’s assistant manager, Stevie, shared it with me as a fun tidbit I hadn’t asked for, but he had appeared desperate to make idle chat with me. I think it was his way of trying to discern if I was mentally stable, and that, Stevie, continues to be subject to debate. Locals claimed it was the clam capital of the world, which was almost insulting to this East Coast girl, but I didn’t care enough to debate this.

  Pismo Beach classified itself as a city, but with a population of a little over seven thousand people, someone needed to reassess what qualified a place as a city and what was really nothing more than a town.

  Eaton had more people in it.

  Ah, there it was. Another reminder of the life I left behind. Drink.

  I consciously attempted to ensure I took a sip of something every time something that reminded me of my past crossed my mind, as if it were a behavior modifier. Sometimes, I felt bad that I hadn’t at least let Earl know I wasn’t coming back, especially after everything. Karen was likely thrilled. I’d done her the favor of burying myself, but Earl hadn’t deserved that. He had been kind to me, even when I didn’t deserve it.

  My stomach stirred as the shame coiled. Although that guilt paled in comparison when I thought about my best friend—my pregnant best friend, who was now in her second trimester. I told myself to call her. Every single day I tried to will myself into picking up the phone to at least let her know I was okay.

  Thinking about calling her scared me.

  The trouble with time is that with enough of it to yourself–where you have nothing but your own thoughts and own voice percolating inside of your cavernous mind—you inevitably question yourself and the degree of your actions.

  And when you’re in this much emotional pain, you drink some more.

  In my gut, I knew I owed Penelope that phone call. It wasn’t fair that she got caught in the crossfire of something that had nothing to do with her, so the best thing to do would be to just rip the Band-Aid off. Pulling the covers from over my head, I forced myself upright. The dull familiar pain throbbed through my brain as I fought to stave off the wince. It was a little past ten in the morning on the West Coast, which meant it was one in the afternoon back East.

  Before I could change my mind and talk myself out of it, I reached for the motel room phone and dialed Penelope’s number.

  It rang twice.

  Maybe it was motherly instinct, or maybe it was just Penelope being intuitive, but she somehow knew it was me before I could even get a word out. “Raquel?” The brick that lived in my gut sunk to the ground at the sound of my name in her mouth like a curse.

  “Yeah.”

  Her intake of breath was sharp, the silence heavy, and then she was off. “Of all the stupid fucking things you’ve done in your life, Raquel Marie, this might take the cake,” she shrieked.

  Grimacing, I struggled to find my voice, then spoke, “Pen.” I sounded like a heaping pile of dog shit. My vocal cords were so rusty these days that sometimes the sound of my voice was reminiscent of a tragic foray with a blender.

  “Don’t ‘Pen’ me!” she shouted into the phone. My brain immediately screamed at her volume in my already throbbing head. “I could kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know shit!” She was still shouting, and I let her. She was mad, and she had every right to be. “Do you understand how stressful it is to be four months pregnant and your best friend just up and vanishes? No note, no contact for thirty days. No explanation. Just poof. One minute we’re laughing in my kitchen, the next you’re out of my front door without so much as uttering a word.”

  “I know.”

  “Every time you open your mouth, I don’t know if I want to kick your ass or cry.” Penelope choked on a sob. “You know nothing, you self-entitled dick.”

  “Penelope—”

  “No,” she cried breathlessly.

  I ground my molars together to keep myself from doing the same. Crying with a hangover would just make the pain so much worse, trust me.

  “Now I know you’re alive, I’ve decided I don’t want to talk to you.”

  I heard the click of her phone. I trained the receiver against my ear until the distinct disconnect tone and dead air resounded through the speaker. My hand shook when I lowered the receiver back into place.

  Somehow, that went worse than I could have ever expected. Sliding the bedsheets back, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed to propel myself upright. A pulse formed between my eyes as I stumbled to the bathroom, stepping in the sticky whiskey mess and ripped my foot away from the tacky gold fibers that made up the motel room’s carpet.

  Flipping on the bathroom light, I recoiled at the sight of myself. It was, in fact, entirely possible to lose an alarming amount of weight on my fast food, binge drinking and vomiting diet. You couldn’t put on weight if you were struggling to keep said food down because of how much you drank. To add salt to the wound, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my hair. Actually, I could. Last week. Save for my usage of the bed, I was perhaps the cheapest guest Pismo Inn ever had to accommodate. I declined cleaning, I barely went throu
gh towels, and I kept the lights off in the room a majority of the time.

  It was almost like I wasn’t here at all. I think this classified as depression, and the realization of that was like greeting an old friend. The last time I felt this dangerously on the precipice of wanting to just end it all was when Holly Jane died. I was a corporeal, living, breathing thing, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anymore.

  Dropping my drawers, I lowered myself on the toilet seat and took care of business. Alcohol was a diuretic on the system, so it felt like I was doing this exact act upward of thirty times a day. Flushing, I worked the bar of soap in my hands before rinsing them off. I avoided having to look at myself in the generous bathroom mirror for longer than I had to.

  I just wanted to go back to sleep.

  Lowering myself back into bed, I stilled when the phone on the nightstand rang. Reaching for it, I grunted something that could only be interpreted as both a “Hello” and “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Morning, Raquel. It’s a beautiful day outside,” Stevie chirped. If Tony the Tiger and Dory from Finding Nemo could defy biology—then Stevie would have been a byproduct of their pairing. He was overly optimistic to a fault, and upon realizing I was going to be a permanent fixture here for the foreseeable future, he made a point of calling me every morning just to make sure I was still, y’know…

  Alive.

  “Yah huh,” I mumbled, dropping my weight back onto the mattress. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

  “Before you do, you’ve got a call from a woman who refused to give me her name, demanding to speak to you. She sounded angry.” I could picture him standing at the front desk, coiling the telephone cord around his fingers, chewing on his bottom lip.

  Well, that could only be one person. My stomach did another flip, my lungs squeezing.

  “Can I transfer her, or should I tell her you’re unavailable?”

  I let out a noncommittal sound, pulling the covers back over my head, coveting the darkness. “Yep.” Rest in peace to my eardrum, Penelope was coming back for round two and I deserved it.

  “Great, she’s all yours. You have yourself a blessed day!” On top of Stevie being a walking poster child for Xanax, he made a point of reminding me that Jesus loved me whenever we had the misfortune of crossing paths face-to-face. Between us, I was confident that his Jesus had a voodoo doll of me and was pushing a pin into my forehead at this very moment.

  The line transferred with a click. With a fortifying breath, I spoke, “Hello?”

  “Cali-fuckin-fornia? That’s where you are?” Penelope trilled. I thought I heard Dougie whistle in the background.

  “Penelope, Christ. I’ve got a wicked hangover; can you use your indoor voice?” I pleaded.

  “Oh,” she screeched, making my skin break out into goosebumps. “Is my voice bothering you? Too bad. You’ve had thirty days of peace, and now you are going to hear every damn word that comes out of my mouth.”

  Exhaling, I muttered, “Okay,” then pushed my face into the stiff pillow.

  “No, I don’t need your permission.” I could almost see her waving her hand in the air to punctuate her point. “You do whatever you want all the time with no regard for how you make anyone around you feel. So, I don’t need your ‘okay.’”

  “Would you prefer I just—”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen? Yes!” she shouted. “How could you do that? How could you just up and leave?”

  “I—”

  “No, shut up. I’m not done.”

  I fell quiet.

  “You just left. You broke up with Sean, and just…left. He told us what happened. I understand why you were hurt, but Raquel, are you going to spend the rest of your life just running away from your problems? This is insane. This is extreme even for you, do you understand that?”

  My throat weaved, the lump lodging itself painfully. She had said his name and didn’t care that it was taboo to me. My sore spot, like someone had dug their fingernails into an open flesh wound that was already festering with an infection. I felt his name in my heart, another crack fissuring across the already scarred surface.

  I didn’t want to think about him.

  I didn’t want to talk about him.

  I didn’t want to hear his name.

  I didn’t want to remember him.

  “You are by far the most selfish person I’ve ever met with the worst coping mechanisms. You sink yourself further and further into toxic habits. I thought you were getting your life together. I thought you were figuring this shit out.”

  Well, didn’t that make two of us? I’d been desperate for things to be different. Dreamed of a happily ever after and felt the briefest brush of love. I had hope, believed in a future and was naïve enough to consider its possibility as a reality.

  But it was all erected on a lie.

  “You fucking scared me,” she continued, her voice breaking. “The cops found your car in the parking lot; we filed a missing person’s report. I worried that you were dead. I had to contemplate what that was like.”

  Sometimes, it felt like it might be better if I was…then the pain would stop. Maybe in my own way, I was trying to kill myself. I was too much of a coward to commit to just doing it, so I engaged in things I knew would expedite the process without it feeling intentional. I drank too much; I smoked too much; I ate and vomited. I slept all day, and I skipped bathing.

  I was on a suicide mission, but hearing Penelope’s devastation was a sobering intervention.

  She sniffled loudly before speaking again. “I had to think about a world without you in it, and then I learn you’re alive and hiding from all of us. What did I do to you to deserve this, Raquel? Tell me.”

  She didn’t do a thing. This wasn’t about her. She was…collateral. A helpless bystander who was caught in the shitstorm. She wasn’t wrong. I could have waited. I could have let her know where I was going. My fight-or-fight instincts had governed every decision that night. As soon as I’d uncovered the lie, I bolted without so much as sparing her a second thought.

  Her justified anger overwhelmed me, but I didn’t know how to get her to understand my reasons, either.

  “Don’t work yourself up, sweetheart,” Dougie murmured in the background. “The doctor told you had to keep your stress levels down.”

  That guilt from earlier speared me with such force, the wind momentarily knocked out of me. I’d stressed her out, and I knew I was contributing to at least eighty percent of her condition.

  “No, she needs to hear this,” she hissed. “She needs to know what she does to people when she just runs away all the fucking time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked, my resolve cracking under the pressure.

  “I don’t want your pathetic excuse for an apology; your apologies are always garbage.”

  My head recoiled as though she had reached through the phone and struck me.

  “You want to make it up to me? You will get on a plane right now and come back.”

  I heard her shuffling in the background.

  “What’s the address? I’ll send you a ticket myself.”

  My spine went ramrod straight. The demand had sucked the air out of all my lungs, the panic receptors in my brain sounding off in warning. Go back? To Boston? To the hub of my heartbreak?

  I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

  “Don’t ask that of me.” I struggled to keep the tremble out of my voice.

  “This is your home, Raquel.”

  That word was a sucker punch to the gut, the ache pervading. It had been my home, but I’d never been safe there. It always felt like I was drowning there. The few months of reprieve I’d had hadn’t been earned honestly. Pressing my fingers into my temple, I cleared my throat and said, “It’s not home anymore, Penelope. I don’t think it has been for a long time.”

  Her pause was as pregnant as she was. “So, what’s your plan then? You live in California now? In a fucking inn? That’s your home?”

  When I didn’t
reply, she released an agonizing, metallic sound from the back of her throat. “You go through a nasty breakup and you had to leave me behind?” She started to sob. “What did I do? Please tell me. What did I do that was so bad you had to leave me, too?”

  “You did nothing.” My voice broke. “You were perfect, and I want you to be happy. I want you to have beautiful babies and live the life that you deserve with Dougie.”

  “No!” she shouted. “You promised me you would be here. You promised.”

  The dam inside of me broke. The tears stung like sea water on grazed skin when they fell from the corners of my eyes, coasting down my gaunt cheeks. I let them burn.

  “I know,” I whispered.

  “Then make it better. Come back.”

  “Penelope, please. I don’t know how to make you understand that I can’t come back there.” Not now, maybe never.

  “Come back home or go to hell and forget about me, forget about everything.” Her justified anger replaced her agony, and I wouldn’t argue with her. When I didn’t speak, she let out another anguished shriek before a thud resounded through the phone, like she had dropped it. Dougie’s voice, low and soothing in the background, came through. He was the strength she needed, and the reason I knew she would be okay, with or without me.

  Footsteps tapered off as her wailing faded off in the distance. I’d ruined her, too. I left behind a trail of casualties in my wake; that was what I was good at.

  “Flannigan,” Dougie clipped flatly.

  Wincing, I closed my eyes. We were on last name terms now. I should’ve expected this; I was public enemy number one in the eyes of many. He would be no exception. “Patterson,” I replied, though there was no gumption in my tone.

  I heard the sound of a door being shut in the background, and the decompression of air escaping the chair he was settling himself in.