by Amanda Dick
I couldn’t stand to see her like this, sobbing on the floor, desolate and heartbroken. It was too much like the early days, after Em disappeared. The misery was palpable, like a living, breathing creature that had been waiting in the wings all this time, ready to swoop in if we let it.
“Come on,” I said, putting my arm around Bridget. “Let’s go into the living room and sit down.”
She didn’t move and the wretched sobbing continued.
I looked past her, at Maia, who was sitting on the other side of her. “Help me?”
We helped her to her feet, and the three of us slowly made our way through to the living room.
ALEX MAY NOT HAVE laid a hand on me this time, but driving away from Bridget’s house an hour later, it felt like he had. My entire body ached and my head was pounding. Trying to be strong for Bridget, and Maia, had left me feeling like I’d been dumped by a succession of waves – waves called anger, guilt, grief and frustration.
I still wasn’t sure we should’ve left, despite Bridget’s assurances that she was alright. Alex was more than likely home by now, albeit sleeping on his front porch, since his house key was no doubt with his car key, and therefore still at Bridget’s. And he’d wake up tomorrow, completely oblivious of the pain he’d caused tonight.
We had to do something about him. What had started out as the occasional slur when he’d had a few too many had become a personal crusade – against me, against the world, and it was looking like Bridget was in the firing line now, too. Who was next, Henry? Maia? Where the hell would it end?
I could handle it – and I had been. Not brilliantly, I’d be the first to admit, but I had been handling it. Bridget was another story. She didn’t deserve any of this.
“Are you okay?”
I shot a quick glance over at Maia. “Yeah. Fine. Thanks.”
“Do you think you should slow down a bit?”
“What?”
“You’re going way over the speed limit and it’s freaking me out.”
I glanced at the speedometer and eased my foot off the accelerator immediately. “Shit – sorry.”
“It’s okay, I can’t blame you. That was pretty intense.”
Intense. Understatement of the century.
“What would you have done, if he hadn’t left?”
Probably a lot more than I thought I was capable of. “I don’t know. Thrown him out, probably. Called the cops, maybe – anything to get him away from her.”
Maia didn’t reply, but the words came tumbling out of me anyway.
“It’s one thing shitting all over me, but what he did tonight crossed a line. All she’s ever done is try to help him, and that’s how he reacts? I don’t care if he meant to hurt her or not, he pushed her and she fell. Now she’s gonna have to go to work tomorrow looking like that. It’s just… wrong.”
“Yeah, it is,” she mumbled, reaching over to lay a hand on my thigh.
Her palm burnt through my jeans, searing my skin. That one simple gesture suddenly had me feeling like all the emotions I’d been locking up for the past five years were about to come ripping out of me in a frustrated roar.
I needed some air.
I glanced briefly in the rear-vision mirror to make sure the road was clear, and made the next turn, heading down to the bottom of the hill and pulling off the road. I parked on the grass verge, under one of the huge trees that lined the street, separating the harbour from the road. In the seconds before I turned off the headlights, columns of light bathed the trees and the water beyond.
Then everything went dark.
I ran a hand down my face, trying to clear my head. The voices in my head were screaming at me relentlessly and if I didn’t get a handle on it soon, I was going to throw up, I could feel it. I opened the truck door and tumbled out.
“Heath?”
“I just need a minute,” I snapped, more harshly than I meant to.
I bent over double, then stood up straight again, taking deep breaths, gulping in as much air as my lungs would allow. I felt like I was drowning. Em’s face flashed in front of my eyes.
When the hell was this going to end? This guilt, this torture, this constant managing and controlling and keeping everything down, shutting everything away – it was exhausting. It ripped and pulled at my insides, threatening to choke me.
Jesus.
Was this how it was going to be, always? Five years on, and no answers, no moving on, no going back? This constant limbo – purgatory of the mind, eating away at me like a disease, hollowing me out.
“Heath?”
Maia’s hand on my back, cutting right through the pain like a knife through butter. She was the only thing making sense right now, and even that was a joke. I didn’t even know her last name. I just knew that I needed her, right here, right now.
I turned to her, grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her hard on the mouth. She would make everything alright again. She could help. She would save me.
Stop!
The voice screamed in my head, but for a moment I thought it was her.
Horrified, I released her and stumbled backwards. “Shit, Maia… I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean… “
“It’s okay,” she breathed, her eyes wide in the moonlight.
What the hell was happening to me? I was as bad as Alex. Maybe we had more in common than I realised.
“It’s not okay! It’s fuckin’ not okay!”
Rage and remorse rushed out, drowning me in the process. I channelled my helplessness at the driver’s door, kicking it with all the strength I had left. The air was sucked out of my lungs until all I could hear was a loud hum, obliterating everything else.
Then I was on my hands and knees, fighting back tears, feeling more helpless and worthless than ever. He was right. Alex was right. He’d been right all along, and denying it now seemed pointless. It wasn’t going to bring her back.
“It’s my fault,” I choked. “It’s my fault she’s gone.”
Maia was kneeling beside me, her arms around my shoulders, pulling me towards her. I wanted to fight her, I wanted to warn her to stay away from me, that whatever we thought we had would be ruined soon enough, because of me. Because I didn’t deserve her.
“It’s okay,” she was saying, slicing through the noise in my head. “It’s okay. Come on, sit down properly, talk to me.”
I wanted to push her away, to get back in the truck and put as much distance between us as possible, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength to stand up, much less walk away. I fell sideways onto the ground, and I wanted to stay there, curled up in a ball on the damp grass in the moonlight, until all of the shit in my head disappeared. But she wouldn’t let me.
“Breathe,” she said gently. “Just breathe.”
My body was numb. I felt like I was floating. The only thing I could feel was my heart, racing. How could I feel my heart when I couldn’t feel the rest of my body?
Somehow, Maia’s voice found its way into the space between heartbeats. “Come on, sit up.”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to do as she said, sitting up, trying to make my body react normally.
Breathe.
In. Out.
Do it again.
I stared at Maia’s hand on my knee for several moments, fighting down the bile that rose in my throat. After what seemed like an eternity, I summoned up the strength to lift my head and look at her. She stared back at me, her beautiful face full of compassion. Why wasn’t she running from me?
Selfishly, I didn’t care why. I just grabbed her hand, anchoring myself to her in case she changed her mind.
“I’m sorry,” I said, unable to speak above a whisper.
“Why?”
For everything I’ve done, for everything I didn’t do.
“Tonight. All of this.”
She smiled. That understanding smile that absorbed some of the pain I was feeling without question, sucking it out of me until I felt almost human again.
“
You don’t need this bloody sideshow,” I mumbled, trying to explain.
She shrugged, adjusting her hand beneath mine so our fingers were laced together. “The only thing I need is you.”
In the moonlight, with the shadows from the trees dappling her skin, she looked so much like Emily, I had to remind myself that she wasn’t. The memories flooded in, but I pushed them away. Only this time, not because it hurt too much.
I pushed them away because I wanted Maia. And as much as I knew I should feel guilty about that, I didn’t.
I reached up, gently cushioning her cheek in my hand. I wanted to say so much, but I couldn’t find the words. She covered my hand with hers, as if she could read my mind.
A shiver danced up my spine, one of those slow shivers that seemed to ignite all my nerve endings, one by one, until my whole body was tingling. God, what I wouldn’t have given to have just stayed there with her, in that moment, where everything seemed to have just stopped. Time, worry, the world. It all seemed to float away, leaving us sitting there, together. There was a rightness to it that I couldn’t explain, nor did I want to. I just wanted to prolong it as long as I could.
“What happened, the night Emily disappeared?” she murmured, her voice dragging me backwards.
I sighed, so deeply that I felt as if I had turned myself inside out. I needed her to stay with me, to help me through this. I moved my hand away from her cheek, taking her hand instead, drawing it down, turning it over and staring at it. I ran my fingertips along the edges of her short, perfect nails. It was a valid question, and she deserved to know, but telling her was gonna hurt like hell.
“We were at Joel’s housewarming party,” I said, lifting my gaze from her hand to her face. “We’d planned on staying the night, so we’d both had a bit to drink. We weren’t pissed or anything, but we were heading that way.”
Em was wearing the pale lemon halter-neck and denim cut-off shorts that were her favourites. She’d just had her hair cut, all blonde and chin-length choppy layers, framing her face. She was a couple of glasses of wine behind me, too busy talking to Jas and dancing to Joel’s crappy music. I’d watched her from a distance, dancing, laughing, drinking. She was beautiful. Beautiful and sexy and noisy and happy. And that was the very last time everything was fine.
“Then for some bloody reason, she started bugging me to leave. She didn’t say why, she just wanted to go. I told her she could just crash out in Joel’s room, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to leave. She wanted my keys, but I wouldn’t give them to her – she wasn’t fit to drive, neither of us were.”
Maia nodded, further entwining her fingers with mine.
“I didn’t want to leave,” I shrugged, shame wrapping its arms around me, drawing me back into the fold again. “I was having a good time – I thought she was just being melodramatic. So I told her if she wanted to leave, she’d just have to phone Bridget to come and get her. She wanted me to come with her, but I didn’t want to. She got shitty, stormed off. I thought she’d gone to call Bridget. I found out later that she’d starting walking home.”
What I wouldn’t have given to replay that night, that moment. I’d have phoned Bridget myself, I’d have waited with her, I’d have made sure she was safe. I’d have done everything differently.
“And that was it. She was gone. She was just… gone.”
Maia was solemn in the moonlight. We sat like that, on the grass, her hand in mine, my heart tearing into tiny pieces all over again.
“It was my fault,” I said simply. “If I’d done what she asked, she’d still be here.”
She squeezed my hand gently, holding it with both of hers. “It’s not your fault, Heath.”
“Alex thinks it is.”
“Alex is hurting. I don’t even know him and I could see it, plain as day. It looks to me like he wants someone to blame – and because there isn’t anyone, he’s frustrated and angry and he’s lashing out at you, because he can see that you feel guilty about it. He’s homed in on that.”
She sounded like Vinnie. “Maybe he’s right.”
“He’s not,” she insisted. “You can’t blame yourself for something like that. Sometimes, things just happen. You can unpack them and repack them and twist and turn them around all you want, but sometimes there just isn’t an answer. Sometimes there isn’t anyone to blame.”
I willed her words to take seed in my heart and grow there, choking out all the doubts. I wanted to let go of the guilt and the pain and the regret. I wanted to believe her. She spoke so surely, so positively, with no inkling of doubt. As if this was the way it was, and there was no use wishing it was anything else. God, I hoped she was right.
“It hurts, but sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to move on,” she said. “Life is so fragile, so fleeting. You don’t want to live with regret. It’ll eat you up and destroy any chance you have of ever being happy.”
I could see she believed that with the whole of her heart. It made me wonder how she got to be so wise. Wisdom like that was born of loss, heartbreak, the almost unbearable burden of grief.
Wisdom like that came from experience.
THAT NIGHT, I WAS MORE restless than usual. I couldn’t keep my brain, or my body, still. Maia wasn’t the only one suffering from sleep deprivation. This bullshit, having her down the hall, was killing me. I wanted her. More than that, I needed her, especially now.
I stared at the ceiling, having given up long ago on counting sheep as my brain rehashed the day’s events for the thousandth time, a movie playing over and over in my head.
Who had she lost? No one spoke the way she did about moving on unless they had personally had to do it. That kind of advice comes only from hindsight. Was her own grief causing this sleeplessness, which in turn was possibly causing the hallucinations, or whatever the hell they were? How was I supposed to help her with that if she didn’t tell me about it? Besides that, I barely had a handle on my own grief – tonight was evidence of that.
I shifted in my bed, rolling over onto my stomach and burying my head face-first in the pillow. My brain was wide awake, my body twitchy. I couldn’t get comfortable. I was too hot. I needed air.
I threw the covers off and got out of bed, creeping out into the hall. Maia was probably asleep, and if she was, I didn’t want to wake her, despite my own selfish need to have her close to me.
As I turned the corner into the living room, the moonlit view of the harbour came into view. The French doors that led out to the balcony stood wide open, which was odd. Maybe I forgot to close them? My head was all over the place after we got home, so it was a definite possibility. I walked over and was about to do just that, when I saw a Maia-shaped figure sitting out on the end of the jetty.
The image had the same pull over me as she herself did, and before I knew what I was doing, I was padding barefoot across the balcony, down the stairs and over the lawn towards her.
She looked like a vision, a classic painting by one of the masters. Hauntingly beautiful, a study in solitude. The moonlight cast an ethereal glow over her white t-shirt and bare legs, making her hair look silver. She sat near the end of the jetty, her knees pulled up, hugging them tight. I had begun to notice little things about her, like the fact that this was her favourite sitting position. It made me feel closer to her somehow. As if she had shared something with me, even if it was unintentionally. Hot on the heels of that realisation was the flip side – that I still knew precious little about her.
She looked up as I got closer, walking off the damp grass and onto the smooth wooden planks towards her. She didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Hi,” she said softly, as I sat down beside her with a sigh, dangling my legs over the edge.
The breeze was cool and minimal, but it was enough. I finally felt like I could breathe again. Maybe it had nothing to do with the fresh air and everything to do with the fact that I was beside her.
“Hi,” I said. “Couldn’t sleep huh?”
“Apparently I
’m not the only one.”
We were close enough to touch, and it felt as if there was a current of electricity arcing between us.
She gave a small laugh, like a puff of air escaping. “What do you have against shoes?”
I looked down at my bare feet, suspended above the water, and wiggled my toes.
“The first time I met you, you were shoeless. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you wear any kind of footwear since.”
She had a point. It gave me a little thrill that she’d noticed. “Hate them. They make me feel claustrophobic.”
She smiled at me, as though she wasn’t surprised. I was beginning to think nothing surprised her.
As worried as I was about her and the fact she wasn’t sleeping when she so desperately needed to, I also had to fight the urge to lean over and kiss her. This time of night was brutal on the impulse-control. It made everything seem unreal, irrational. It was as if anything could happen, as if the laws of the universe had been deferred. As if you’d found a loophole, and if you were brave enough, and the stars were shining brightly enough, you might just be able to slip under the radar and escape your reality, if only for a while.
I looked over at her, my attention immediately captured by her eyes. They glowed a kind of honey colour. I’d never seen them that colour before. It was the moon, I convinced myself.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said quietly. “I can’t shut my brain off.”
I didn’t tell her that she was the one mostly occupying my thoughts, robbing me of sleep.
She sighed, resting her head on top of her knees. “I know what you mean.”
I looked out over the harbour. The water was dead flat and almost black. I didn’t come down here often anymore, even in the daytime. This was our spot, mine and Em’s. In the dark, her with a glass of wine, me with a beer, sharing secrets and getting things off our chest. It wasn’t the same without her.
Yet here I was, with Maia, and there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather have been.
