Flashed

by Zoey Castile

  Pictures after pictures. Headlines that make me gasp out loud. Brutal visions of a car accident. The car accident. For at least an hour, I don’t even drive, I just sit in the parking lot and stare at a man I’ve been living with for four months. A man who is a stranger. I scroll through the hashtag of his name. Each image a barrage of information he’s tried to keep from the world. From me.

  Patrick, older now than the photo I found from his soccer team. Broad shoulders and beautiful. So beautiful it almost aches to look at him in magazine stills. He stares into the camera like he’s doing the world a favor by being wrapped in furs, covered in oils, spread across a bed with faceless women draped around him. Everything about him is perfect. His cropped golden hair. His emerald-green eyes. His full pink lips framing blindingly white teeth. His muscles smooth and defined. This Patrick doesn’t even look real—like someone carved the ideal man and Patrick walked out from the clay.

  Then, in videos he’s a different person. Streaking through the Met, threatening to trash a priceless vase. Stumbling out of clubs with models wrapped around his arms. Shaking a bottle of champagne to shower a line of people who scream in adoration. Tripping on a red carpet at some sort of premiere. Stepping on his co-star’s dress.

  I’ve heard of him.

  I grimaced when I heard of the overnight success. Not because it wasn’t deserved but because I think I pitied him? A star fallen from grace so quickly, it was inevitable to be a scandal all over the place.

  Almost at the exact moment that I was driving across the country to Bozeman, Patrick was drunk, racing his car down a California boulevard and getting into a three-car collision.

  “Holy shit,” I sigh.

  The least surprising of it all is seeing his likeness on a book cover. Scarlett West. I feel like I’ve been punked even though it isn’t any of my business. This guy is not the one that I’ve come to know. Isn’t it?

  How much do people really change?

  Is a near death experience enough to make someone different?

  Yes, it is, I think. Of course it is.

  That doesn’t mean that a person is better, it means they’re changed. They can choose to become better. Patrick told me that he was trying to be a better man. How much of his past matters to me?

  I think of that answer the entire way home.

  I instinctively think of it as home because that is where Patrick is waiting. I mentally replay the images that people took around the accident, vultures like Keillor. Patrick’s face was covered in so much blood it was like he was wearing a red mask. They took pictures of that. How could they do that to him?

  People were hurt, but no one died, did they? Is this why he hasn’t let anyone but two people into his life, his home?

  He let me in, briefly, slowly.

  Why me?

  I turn onto the long road that leads back to the house.

  I have the choice to go into my pool house and confront him about it over the phone, or wait for him to tell me himself. But I already know that I’m going to go with a third option.

  I can’t unsee this. No matter what, I have to talk to him.

  I park in front and head straight into the house. The lights are off in the foyer and living room but the kitchen light is on. It smells like something burned.

  “Pat?” My pulse races as my feet carry me into the kitchen.

  I freeze. There’s a bloody shirt on the counter and an open first aid kit. More blood splatter in the sink.

  Music is blaring from his gym.

  “Patrick!” The panic in my voice sends adrenaline rushing through me. I pound the door until I hear him. He tells me to leave, but I want to make sure he’s okay.

  “I know who you are,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond. I wait and wait and the music keeps playing. I press my forehead against the door. I know I am not supposed to enter here, even if I don’t work here anymore. It is something he has asked of me. There’s a loud bang, like the clatter of metal slamming into metal.

  “Are you okay?”

  My heart races in a way that clouds my mind. What if he tried to hurt himself? What if the blood on the counter means something else? What if he can’t answer and needs help?

  “Pat? Please—”

  When he doesn’t respond, I know I have to make sure he’s safe, even if he gets angry with me.

  I turn the doorknob. It is like wading through freezing water. My limbs move in slow motion, my breath trapped in my chest as I brace for the mangled bloody sight of him.

  Patrick is in the fetal position on the floor. His hand is a fist against his chest. When he notices I’m in here, he covers the left side of his face. My eyes dart where blood is smeared in a divot in the wall.

  “Patrick?” I say his name again as he pushes into a stand. He faces me.

  I want to go to him, but I don’t think he’s going to accept my touch, so I hang back. I have the vague sensation that this is what it might be like to stand in the middle of a ring with a lion, beautiful and dangerous all at once.

  His face is not the one in the soccer photo and it is not the one that I’ve spent the last hour scrolling through. But he is my Patrick.

  His torso is covered in zigzags of thick scars, each one a river of pearl. The left side of his face is a concentration of more scars than I can count. They form a pattern, like the shower of a sparkler, the tail of a comet. Part of his left ear is missing, his shoulder-length blond hair tucked behind it. His nose is broken in the middle, which makes him look severe, but his mouth. His mouth, with a fine scar that runs over the left corner and to the tip of his chin, is perfect.

  I’m trying to smile. I want to say, “There you are. I’ve been waiting for you,” but he moves so suddenly that I jump. I can’t help but jump back.

  “Get out!”

  I stay put. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I fucking mean that. I told you to stay out of here.” He turns sideways, giving me the right, unblemished part of his face. “Don’t. Don’t look at me, Lena. I don’t want that pitying fucking look in your eyes. Not from you.”

  “I don’t pity you. How can you say that?”

  “Then why are you looking at me like that?”

  Because I’ve finally seen your face. Because I love this face. I could love you.

  He doesn’t let me say any of it, and I realize, in this moment, that he might be so broken, nothing I say will help him.

  “You can’t pull me close and kick me away when you feel like it! That’s not how relationships work.”

  He scoffs, a bitter smile as he crosses his arms over his shoulder. I have never seen Patrick so bare and so boxed away at the same time. “Tell me, Lena? Did you go searching for something on me? What happened to giving me time?”

  “No,” I say, my voice hard, my fists shaking at my side. “You don’t get to make me into your bad guy. I’ve given you time. I’ve done everything I could to make this thing between us work even if it leaves me empty. Part of me always knew you would never truly let me in. I didn’t even know who you were, Patrick. But I stayed because I wanted to.” My vocal chords feel raw and pinched. “You asked me to stay.”

  “Now I’m asking you to leave. You have your answers. This is who I am. Is this what you wanted to see?”

  “Yes,” I say, and that is the only thing I can be sure of in this moment. “I wanted to see you. Thank you for showing me who you really are.”

  His chest rises and falls rapidly, and then he turns face forward. He advances two steps and I stay put. He leans into the light, beautiful and broken. “Don’t act like this is a face you want to wake to every morning, Lena. Don’t lie to yourself!”

  I can feel the moment my heart breaks. I think it broke a long time ago, but I’m not sure I can place it. Perhaps it was that night under the full moon in the living room when I begged him to let me see him and he didn’t. Perhaps I knew then that it wasn’t ever really going to work out, but I hoped.

  I turn around
and he doesn’t follow me.

  He slams the door and I slam the one at the front of the house.

  With unsteady fingers, I text Scarlett: Can’t explain. On my way. This is over.

  I turn the key in the ignition but it won’t start. My mind is as numb as my fingers. Whatever tears I had are gone. I swallow the pain slicing down to my core. Maybe there was never anything there to carve out. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been able to make a relationship work, even one like this.

  “Come on, baby,” I cry to my car, but no matter how many times I turn the keys, or hit the gas, or bash my fists on the steering wheel, it doesn’t turn on. “Come on!”

  I hold the wheel, trying to steel myself, to calm down. I can’t stay here and a Lyft isn’t going to come out this far. I try to call Scarlett, but it goes to voicemail a couple of times. What if she isn’t home? I can walk there along the road, but I remember what she said once.

  Just take the trail on the left for two miles and you’ll be at my house.

  Two miles, I think. I used to walk from Union Square to the Met all the time. I can walk that far. Every motion, from turning on the flashlight on my phone, to putting on my jacket is automatic. Possessed, even. I pass the firepit where Scarlett and Kayli and I had some of my favorite nights out here. I’ve never even been out this far into the property, but I see the forked path and I take the one on the left.

  I walk and walk until my feet start to hurt from rubbing against the sides of the ankle boots. My breath comes out in clouds and the cold is seeping into my bones. My hands are too numb to accept the thumbprint on my phone and it takes me four tries to type in the code. I don’t know what time I left. I don’t know how far I’ve walked. All I know is that every tree looks exactly the same in the dark. The hot anger that felt like lava when I was in the house is cooling, leaving hard chunks of regret. I drop my phone so many times, that on the last one, the screen cracks.

  Slowly, the horrible realization of what I have done dawns on me.

  I walked into a patch of woods in the dark in a dress and heels. It is probably forty degrees, getting colder by the minute, and my jacket is a flimsy pleather. It is pitch black and my phone light flickers at best. The trail is no longer clear, and I know that I’m going the wrong way because I’m winded from climbing up instead of going flat and straight.

  I hug my body tight because sometimes you have to be your own best comfort. And then, I let out a long, frustrated scream. The kind of scream I’ve been holding inside for so long it leaves me feeling tired. My joints hurt, my throat aches, and I finally sit down on a log.

  I did not come to Montana to die in the woods. It doesn’t really occur to me that there might be animals in these woods until an owl hoots from somewhere. Shitshitshitshitshit.

  I try my phone again, my fingers too numb to feel the splinters that come from swiping across the screen. Scarlett is calling me back!

  The second I answer my phone utterly and completely dies.

  11

  Love Is a Wild Thing

  PAT

  “What have I done?”

  The swell of anger ebbs too late because Lena is gone. My heart hammers in my chest as I wade through the house in the dark. Her car is still parked out front and the lights of the pool house are still on. I sit at the kitchen counter and relive that awful moment when she walked in and I told her to get out. Maybe I can fix this in the morning.

  I’ve already given up all my chances at forgiveness from her. How many times have I told her I was sorry? That look on her face, the sadness in her eyes. The anger that pinched her lips together to stop from crying—or yelling, “There is no fixing this anymore.”

  Get out. Why did I say that to her? That is the opposite of what I want. Stay. Hold me. Be with me. Love me. Don’t run away. I could have said any of those things, but I panicked. I saw the fear in her eyes.

  But who wouldn’t have been afraid? She came home to blood on the counter. She came home to the smell of something burning. Something wrong. I know who you are.

  “Fuck,” I sigh into my palms.

  I have no right to call her, but I tell myself to do it. Even if it’s to say goodbye. There are already ten missed calls from Scarlett. Now, an eleventh. Lena must’ve told her about what happened. I don’t feel like having her yell at me, even if it’s what I deserve, so I hang up.

  She instantly calls back.

  “What?” I answer.

  “Don’t what me, Patrick. Where is she? What happened?”

  “She’s in the pool house. Everything she told you is true.”

  “She hasn’t told me anything. I can’t reach her.”

  There is real panic in Scarlett’s voice. Dread seeps into my heart. I remember Jack’s face on impact. I remember the moment of stillness just before the headlight collided into us.

  “She sent me a text saying she was coming here. What is over?”

  I can’t even focus on Scarlett’s words as I walk to the front of the house. Lena’s car is still there, but when I step out barefoot and the sensors come on, I realize that the door on the driver seat is open, the lights still on. I didn’t notice. How could I not have noticed? I was so relieved to see that red piece of junk there that I didn’t see something was wrong.

  “When did she say that?” I don’t know how long she’s been gone. How long was I sitting at the counter reliving the sight of her face? “Her car is here but the keys are still in the ignition.”

  “An hour ago, Pat.”

  I know what we’re both thinking. It takes five minutes to drive to Scarlett’s property if you cut across the rocky path on the outskirts of the woods, and fifteen, twenty tops, if you take the long way down the driveway and onto the main road.

  I run around the pool. Into the house that has been hers since she got here, Scarlett shouting my name on the other line.

  “Lena?” I shout but I know she isn’t here. She must have left the lights on before she went to her party. I think of her walking out in that dress, those boots. Goddammit, Lena.

  “Pat, what happened?”

  “We had a fight,” I say, breathlessly. “We’ve been—I don’t know how to explain.”

  “Don’t explain. Go get her. Lord knows she probably decided to walk here! I’ll meet you halfway on the four-by-four.”

  I hang up and run back inside the house. My blood is rushing, my heart beating so fast I have to close my eyes for a moment. I see my brother waking up in the ambulance.

  “Pat, Pat, we’re alive,” he said, crying for the first time since he was ten when he broke his leg falling off a dirt bike. “We’re alive,” he kept saying all the way to the hospital and the entire time I kept thinking, No, I’m not, until I said it out loud and he didn’t respond again until the next day.

  I didn’t feel alive. I haven’t felt alive until Lena walked into my house and breathed life into me. She shook me awake with her fierceness, her words, and I hate myself for giving her nothing but ruin.

  I take a deep breath. This is how I can be a better man. I have no other choice. There is no time for doubt or fear. I have to go. I grab a heavy-duty yellow flashlight from the garage and stalk into the woods out back.

  I know these grounds like the back of my hand, even with the new scars that decorate the left one. When my brother Ronan was still alive, we used to take the trail to the right and see who could get to the top of the hill first. Ronan used to say that the trails felt wild sometimes, that it was why he could never get lost because he knew the woods better than the rest of us. He was right, he did. There’s something about this patch that makes you feel lost the second you walk in. Even when you start taking the clear path that leads to Scarlett’s house, the trees are thinner to the right, they feel like there’s more space to breathe and walk. You get turned around, lost.

  Lena would have gone this way. I know it the way I know that she sings to herself no matter what task she’s doing, the way I know the little sigh she makes after our clandestine
phone calls, the way I know she is just as lost as I am. If she is crazy enough to forgive me, I want to kiss every part of her. If she doesn’t, it won’t matter as long as she is safe and whole.

  I climb up the hill and keep shouting her name.

  LENA

  I am officially that city slicker Scarlett and Kayli have complained about all summer.

  It is cold as fuck. I’m wearing boots, but they’re heeled and the inner zippers have rubbed the skin on my ankle bone raw and bloody. The edges of my dress are ripped from getting caught on branches I didn’t even know were there. I lick the lipstick on my dried lips, and listen to the hoots and hollers of nighttime creatures. They sound pretty judgmental the longer I sit here.

  I read somewhere that music keeps away bears. “Are bears nocturnal?”

  It might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever wondered while out here, including the time I thought jackalopes were real that first time I let Mari take me to a bar. Mari. Why didn’t I call her? You don’t let people take care of you. Even so, I know my best shot right now is to start singing. I rub my hands together for friction but that’s going to get tiring real quick.

  Does Patrick even know that I’m gone? Maybe Scarlett will come and find me when she realizes that I’ve made a stupid choice. I’m sure of it. Or maybe, just maybe, what she’ll find in the morning is my frozen carcass being pecked at by feral squirrels. Squirrels if I’m lucky.

  My breath is warm and my throat itches from singing. When I exhale, I sink into the bark of the tree behind me. Why don’t I ever think things through? I wonder if Patrick and I would have gotten off to such a bad start if I had listened to my mom’s advice. Be nicer. Pliable. Amicable. That was her, and I love my mother. I love her so much that each and every day I’m not painting, I tell myself that I can’t give up because she is waiting for me to succeed.

  The good thing about freezing to death in a pitch-black wood is that I’m too cold to cry. My tears freeze halfway down my face.

  I look up at the moon and stars peeking out from the canopy. There is no way I’m capable of pulling a Moana and finding my way out of here using the freaking stars as my guide. Trying to keep walking would be dangerous. I can wait for daylight, and if hypothermia hasn’t set in, I’ll get to Scarlett’s. She should be here by now, shouldn’t she?