TAINTED: THE COMPLETE DUET

by Jenner, Carmen

  I breathe for him again, but I barely have enough breath for myself. I’m winded, and my brain is not working properly. I leave him and reach for my phone in my pocket. I dial 112. It does not do anything. I remember too late that I’m not in Paris anymore, and I have no idea what the emergency number for Australia is. Instead, I pull up Ali’s number and dial.

  She answers on the first ring. “Where the hell are you? You guys are late.”

  “Ali, Levi is not breathing.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know the emergency number. I don’t know how to help him.”

  “Fuck, Coop, dial triple zero.”

  I hear him in the background before Ali yells, “Dial triple zero. Now. Levi’s not breathing. Brie. Listen to me. We’re getting an ambulance, okay? You just—Fuck. Do you know CPR?”

  “No. I’m trying, but I don’t know how to help him.”

  “Put the phone on speaker.”

  I do as she commands and pray they don’t take long as I continue pumping and breathing for him. “Fuck you. You’re not allowed to do this, you selfish bastard. You are not allowed to leave me here like this.”

  I pump on his chest. My claw marks are there from before, and I have half a mind to kiss them better now.

  “Breathe. Just breathe.” I don’t know if I’m saying it to myself or to him.

  Before long, there is pounding on the door and I can’t leave him even for a second, so I scream for them to come in. I’m surrounded by paramedics who shout questions as they move me out of the way. I answer as best I can, but I feel crazy. In my body, and yet it’s as if I’m floating above it.

  They begin compressions, only they’re not breathing into his mouth. A little plastic bladder does the job for them. As the woman by his head squeezes the bag, the man pumps on his chest several times more, but it is no use. Levi’s lips are as blue as they were when I first saw him in the tub, and my heart shatters into a million pieces as I walk away and collapse on the floor outside the bathroom, my legs shaking too violently to hold me any longer.

  “MISS, WE NEED TO DRESS the wound on your head. You need treatment,” the nurse says, sounding somewhat impatient now.

  I flinch away, but I’m not really that bothered by her touch. I hold the blanket tight to my chest. I wish the trembling would stop. I wish I could lie down on one of the beds behind the curtain and sleep. I wish I was home, back in Paris, in my mother’s embrace. Is this how she felt when my father died? So shaken to the core that a strange sense of complacency overcomes you? I am tired of grief. I am tired of people dying. My father. Ash—a man I never met but felt I knew because of the love of the people around him. And now ... Please, God, do not let him die.

  Not him.

  Please? Please?

  “Brie,” Ali says, taking my hand. I glance up at her. Her eyes are puffy and rimmed with red, and her pale freckle-dusted skin is blotchy from crying. Even with the crying, she’s very pretty. It’s not hard to see why Levi fell in love with her. It’s not hard to see why Cooper married her.

  “What the fuck is taking them so long?” Deb, Cooper’s sister huffs. I haven’t figured her out yet, except that she comes across as a complete bitch. I kind of like that about her. Bitchy women get shit done. Deb paces the room again. I close my eyes.

  “Miss, you’re bleeding everywhere.” The nurse appears almost frantic now. “We have a bed for you. I need to clean the wound.”

  “No,” I murmur, but my tongue is thick inside my mouth. Dead weight. Like Levi as I dragged him from the tub, his lips blue, eyes softly closed as if he were sleeping and not ...

  No.

  “Brie,” Ali says. “Come on, you need to be examined.”

  “I need to wait here,” I snap, my accent so heavy in contrast to theirs. It funny the things you notice at a time like this. The colour of someone’s eyes. The freckles dusting their nose. How his lips were so blue, so blue, and his eyes did not look up at me once as I tried to save him, as I fought to keep him alive for the both of us when he had already given up. “I need to be here.”

  “I have my phone. Coop will call me if they get any news.”

  I just stare at her, unable to comprehend what she’s saying.

  “You and I will go with the nurse, so they can clean up your head and run some tests.”

  “No. I have to stay here. I have to know.”

  “Brie, you sitting here is doing nothing,” Cooper says in a calm, even tone as he crouches down before me. His eyes are blue. Blue. I glance away. “Hey, he’s gonna be okay. If I know anything about that bastard, it’s that he has nine fucking lives. He’ll outlive all of us,” he says, but I see how his face falls, as if he doesn’t believe it.

  “I CAN’T SEE HIM.”

  Ali frowns. “You wanna come back in the morning? I can drive you back to our place so you can sleep. You must be exhausted.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “I have to leave.”

  “I don’t—”

  “She means the country,” Zed says. Coop and Ali turn their heads to look at him, but when Ali glances back at me, I know she knows that Zed isn’t wrong.

  “I love him.” I plead with them through my tears. I need them to know that. “I love him, but I can’t do this. The drugs, the alcohol. He tried to kill himself because we had a fight.”

  “Brie, no. Levi has been messed up for a while now.” She sighs. “Coop and I haven’t helped with that, but he didn’t do this because of you. He’s an addict. He always has been, in a way, I guess, whether it’s women, or booze, drugs, or misery. This isn’t because of any one thing that you or Coop or me or Ash did. He needs help. And he needs all of us to be here for him when he wakes up.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t live through that again.”

  “Brie, please don’t leave.” Ali’s own voice is choked with tears now.

  “I’m sorry.” I shake my head. “I’ll text you once I land in France. Just tell him ... Tell him he broke my heart, and I can’t love him if it’s already shattered into a million pieces. Tell him not to come find me.”

  “Brie, you’re making a big mistake,” Cooper says.

  “Maybe, but it’s the only choice I can live with. You weren’t there. You didn’t have to pull his lifeless body from a bathtub. You didn’t see how blue he was, but then you never did see him, did you?”

  Cooper’s eyes widen, and I can see he wants to say more, or tell me that I don’t even know him. Which is true. I don’t know him. All I have to go off is the word of an addict, and I don’t know if I can ever trust anything he tells me ever again—assuming he makes it out of this hospital at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD DRUG ADDICT

  LEVI

  “Jesus, you’re a selfish fucking cunt!” Ryan’s face is all pinched up as he stalks into my room as soon as I’m allowed visitors.

  “Do I need to call security?” The nurse stationed in the chair across from me looks up from her magazine.

  “No,” Ali says. “That’s enough, Cooper.”

  “Is it? Enough?” He snaps his attention back to me. “Did you ever stop to think about how this would hurt us, the band, or Brie? The woman you love just pulled your lifeless body from a fucking bathtub!”

  “Where is she?” I choke through my scratchy throat. Looks like I won’t be providing backing vocals any time soon, or ever, with the razorblades lodged in my throat.

  “Gone, motherfucker! Where the hell do you think she is?”

  “This is your last warning. Rock stars or not, tone it way back, sir, or I will kick you out of my hospital room.” My nurse glares at Coop, who grits his teeth so hard I can hear them grinding from here.

  “She went back to Paris?” She didn’t bother to wait around to see whether I lived or died?

  “You broke her heart, Levi. You’ve done some truly f ...” Ali glances at the nurse whose brows are raised skyward. “Messed up things. Selfish things. Ash wasn’t
even in the ground before you tried to kill yourself.”

  I tug at the restraints holding me to the bed, ensuring I can’t do anything to hurt myself again. They don’t realise I already did the worst of it. I lost Brie. “I wasn’t trying—”

  “Oh really? So you didn’t know that swallowing Oxy with a whisky chaser while you laid in a bath full of water would kill you? Don’t. Cut the bullshit.” Ali shakes her head and Cooper wraps his arm around her waist. “Stop lying. To us, to her, to yourself. Ash’s death wasn’t easy on any of us, but we don’t get an out. Not when he didn’t have the chance to stay here.” She’s sobbing now. Cooper tries to pull her back, but she breaks free of his arms and shouts, “You don’t get that option!”

  The nurse gets to her feet and Cooper grabs his wife’s arm and drags her from the room. And then I’m alone with a red-rimmed-eyed Zed who hasn’t said a word since he entered.

  “She’s right.”

  “Zed, I—”

  “You need to leave, sir.”

  “Get help, Levi, or you’re out,” Zed says, and I just laugh, because when your friendly neighbourhood drug addict is telling you that you need help, you know you have a really big fucking problem. He holds my gaze as the woman pushes him towards the door and I do the only thing I can.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Too late. Always too fucking late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  SHARING IS CARING

  LEVI

  “Levi, would you like to share with us today?”

  I let out a heavy sigh and swing my gaze from Ted’s ugly-arse shoes up the length of his chubby body clad in a cheap knockoff Adidas tracksuit, to his ruddy face. Which just so happens to be uglier than his shoes. “Not really.”

  “You know to make it through this program you have to share your feelings, your downfalls, and your victories.”

  “Well, since you twisted my arm, let see. Victories: multibillion dollar platinum albums, playing to sell-out tours the world over, and a sex tape that went viral. Oh, and I have my own line of dildos.” I wink at Cherry, the skinny blonde who makes crackhead chic look like an occupation. When I agreed to do rehab—or more when the government and my label mandated it because I tried to off myself in a bathtub full of pills—this is not what I had in mind. I’d been hoping for one of those celebrity joints where you hang out with fellow rock stars and actors who don’t really have a need to be there except to get some much-needed R and R. Fuck me, was I wrong! Instead, I was spirited away to some shitty retreat in Sydney’s blue mountains. The view was nice, the food was disgusting, the people were annoying, and the drugs and liquor were nowhere in fucking sight, and I wanted to kill someone.

  Ali, Coop, Zed, and Deb showed up every Sunday, just like families did. I refused to see them. I wasn’t ready for another arse-rimming, and I sure as fuck wasn’t ready to talk about Ash, or what we were going to do about his replacement. The truth is we can’t replace Ash. Just thinking about it is a fucking insult.

  “Levi, you know we don’t allow discussions about sex or sexual paraphernalia.”

  “Paraphernalia? It’s a dildo, Ted, not an alien probe.”

  “At any rate, if we could keep the discussion to—”

  “Boring-as-fuck topics? Or would you like me to share the time that I fucked up my life on a colossal scale and killed myself less than a week after my best friend died of AIDS? And my girlfriend—who’s hot, by the way, so fucking hot—and French, did I mention that? Well, she weighs about as much as my twelve-inch cock, and had to fish me out of the tub, and left for Paris before I even woke up in the hospital. I haven’t had a line of coke or a sip of whisky in two fucking months. Oh, and on top of that, I was brain-dead just long enough to lose all sensation in my right hand, so there goes my ability to masturbate which is the only thing this place has going for it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play the guitar again like I used to. How’s that for sharing, Ted?”

  “Okay, why don’t we take a deep breath and start at the beginning?”

  “Why don’t you lick my nutsack?” I stand and kick back my chair, because you can’t be a rock star and not be a complete fucking diva once in a while, especially in a place like this.

  “Levi.”

  “Fuck off, Ted.” I storm out of the room to a chorus of protests from the other group members. Fuck that shit. Fuck this place.

  I head toward the exit, past a beautiful busty woman old enough to be my grandma. “Shouldn’t you be in group right now?”

  “Group this,” I say and shoot her the bird.

  She just shakes her head as I push out into the courtyard, which is really just a sun-drenched deck overlooking a huge mountain slope. You could gain some fucking speed falling down this cliff face, assuming you could climb up and over the safety barrier without being seen first. It’s like a fucking cage. Isn’t that just the perfect metaphor for my life. I need a fucking cigarette. But they don’t let us have those here either. It’s bullshit. How the hell are you supposed to get better without the use of drugs, nicotine, and alcohol? These are a few of my favourite things. Along with sex, angry French girls, and now the sound of a lone goddam cello.

  I miss her like a fucking mental patient, but it’s not as if I can do anything about it from in here. I was hurt, pissed that she didn’t even wait around to see if I croaked it, but the way Ali tells it, she’d been destroyed when I’d tried to kill myself, so I couldn’t blame her for walking. Not really. I wanted to believe she was so in love with me that she’d stay, she’d put up with that bullshit because she loved me, but I understood why she’d walked. Only I was idiot enough to push away a woman like that, because I knew I didn’t deserve any better.

  And there it is. The reason I fall in love with women who only love me conditionally. Because I wasn’t worthy of the kind of love the world lays down for. I wasn’t Cooper Ryan. I wasn’t Ash Cohen. I wasn’t even good enough to be Ash’s damn shadow.

  Fuck you for dying, brother.

  Fuck feelings.

  Fuck two months sober.

  Fuck rehab.

  And fuck getting out of here because I have no idea how to be out there now, without my best friend, without the woman I love, and without the drink as a buffer between me and the rest of the world. I have no fucking clue, but I’ll soon be forced to find out anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  DOCTOR KNOW-IT-ALL

  ONE MONTH ON

  LEVI

  “Why don’t we talk about Brie?”

  I give a humourless laugh. “Why don’t we not?”

  “Levi, in the time I’ve been seeing you, we’ve talked about everything that’s transpired in your life, your mother, your addictions, the fact that you’ve been doing well in the month since leaving rehab, but your romantic relationships are the one thing you’ve skimmed over.”

  “That’s not true, Doc.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Nope. I’ve told you all about how I like to fuck women. I told you about Ali and how that royally screwed me up.” Doc’s hot. Once upon a time I would have tried to fuck her, but not now. I have no desire to fuck any woman that doesn’t come with a French accent and an angry girl attitude.

  Jesus. I need a fucking drink. Oh yeah, I can’t because . . . three months fucking sober.

  “What are you thinking about right now?”

  Not Brie. Not fucking her. Not the smooth slide of whisky down my throat.

  Liar.

  “What am I thinking about? I’m wondering if I could slit my wrists with your letter opener before we finish this session.”

  Doc gives me a wry smile. She knows I’m talking out of my arse. I threaten shit like this all the time, it’s a “defence mechanism” using humour to mask my guilt, my shame. The truth is I have no desire to die. I fucked up. I hurt an arseload of people, some that took a while to forgive me, others who maybe never will. Which is why I have no fucking desire to bring up Brie with the good doc. “You’re using your sui
cide attempt to mask your pain. Are you thinking of harming yourself again, Levi?”

  She always asks this too, because she has to, I suppose. “No. I’m not thinking of offing myself, Doc. Been there, done that, got the fucking scars to prove it.” I flex my hand, because while I don’t actually have any physical scars on the outside, I did lose a lot of the mobility in my right hand, and though I spend all day every day practicing long after Coop and Zed have gone home, my licks still aren’t where they should be. And if I can’t play, then I really do have nothing to live for.

  “In our first session, you said something about a woman being unable to forgive you. Was that Brie you were referring to?”

  “Jeez, Doc, anyone ever told you that you’ve got a one-track mind?”

  “It’s my job to have a one-track mind, we only have an hour.”

  “Tou-fucking-ché.” I blow out a noisy breath and lean back against the headrest. “Fine, what do you want to know?”

  “What would you like me to know?”

  “Jesus, do all shrinks answer questions with questions?”

  “Yes, we’re taught to in order to mess with our clients.” She smiles again.

  I grin and continue, because Doc knows how I like it when she stoops to my level. “I don’t know what to tell you about Brie, other than she’s the love of my life, and I don’t deserve her.”

  “The love of your life? That’s quite the statement. But I’m curious, why do you feel you’re not deserving of her? Is she Mother Teresa? A saint? A goddess?”

  “She’s everything. All of those things and more.”

  “And you don’t deserve her because ...”

  “Because I tried to kill myself.”

  “You did, that’s true, but does that make you unworthy of forgiveness, or unworthy of redemption?”