The moment catches up to me. Elliot is a great guy but I’ve loved Dex for too long now to deny what’s happening to us. My mom was murdered for my dad. My dad was set up to die for money. Everyone thinks Dex is bad news in every way, especially since they think he set up the “accident” my parents and two dozen others were involved in. I might not be able to stop my dad from dying.
I fall against Dex’s chest and he holds up me up since my legs seem to have turned to jelly. He whispers, Shh, I won’t let anything happen, into my ear as I suck in air without letting any out, until my head is perched as far forward as it’ll go and I’m still sucking in but there’s no more space in my lungs left to fill.
Dex lifts me to his eye level, ducking his head to find my eyes, and says, “Hey, Charz.” He moves one hand, caressing away the tear rolling down my cheek without letting my body slip down. “I l—”
My cell cuts him off, and I twist in Dex’s hands, signaling I want him to let me go. Let anything happen, please, to get me out of this situation. Which is why it’s a relief that my phone is ringing. Which is also why it doesn’t immediately register that it’s the hospital calling.
“Hello?” I say.
“Can I please speak to Charlee May.”
“S-speaking.”
“Miss May your father is being taken to emergency surgery. Please come here as soon as you can where the doctors will explain what’s going on.”
The phone is up to my ear, but I’m not holding it at all. I’m floating amongst the wispy, foggy clouds, being pulled in a breeze both left and right and even higher. Time has warped because my mind is thinking how what when why really how when but in all that time my body has yet to move.
“My father…” I breathe into the night, looking past Dexter, past the house, just across into the black bushes that strangle the stars and the night across the road.
People are rushing by me, shrieking and running, but those noises disappear, while something—someone, maybe, possibly—pulls me somewhere, then sets me down straddling a seat. Something heavy comes over my head, blocking out everything altogether, and then a voice demands, “hold tight.”
I do this. I remember I should “hold tight” as I was told, while wind whips at my legs and we bob and weave around corners at breakneck speed, flying along, our bodies at times only inches from the tarmac.
20. Well, I Never!
Charlee
Dad told me he took fifteen minutes to get to the hospital when Mom’s water broke with Darcy. It took my mom’s best friend twenty-five minutes.
After it registers that Dex strapped me to his dirt bike and it was his words saying hold tight and we’re already at the hospital, I check the time on my cell. I see we made it here nine minutes after the call. How long did it actually take Dex to speed us here on his bike? Moreover, why does he care about my dad? Shouldn’t Dex’s dad be priority one with family loyalty and all?
Dex clutches my hands and drags us through the ER doors, weaving past coughing toddlers and their shuffling parents, past people with more scalp than hair huddled over metal walkers—all the while calling sorry over his shoulder.
Too many people walk slowly in the ER. It felt like they walked slowly when I got the call a week ago about Dad’s health, but tonight the world is on freeze-frame, moving past us agonizingly at frame-by-frame speed. Don’t these people know my dad is dying?
I blink and a hospital-blue laminated counter rests under my arms. Dex’s arm is stretched out. The nurse turns, wide-eyed.
“What’s the matter? Can I help you?” she asks.
“Walter May. Where is he?” Dex says.
She leans forward, settling at her computer. She begins typing in such a blasé fashion I feel as annoyed as Dex.
“Where?” Dex growls.
“Sir, I’m—”
“Fuck!” He catches his hair in his hands half spinning and then slams a fist on the counter. “You,” he says, pointing at another nurse nearby behind the counter. “You,” Dex shouts addressing anyone in our immediate radius. “Does anyone know where Walter May is? Father to this girl. Condition: dying.”
His words are flat like a sheet of metal, and as cool as the lining of a freezer. It’s strange watching this flip, how much sense he can make. I haven’t said a word. Not sure I will for a while, truthfully.
“Walter was wheeled to surgery a few minutes ago,” a nurse says from behind the counter.
“Where?”
She hooks her finger, indicating we should go around the corner, and tells us to visit a particular reception on level three where they have the latest details.
Dex gives the lady a curt nod, and grabs my hand again, rushing us there. He skids around a corner and catches his fingers in the elevator. Luckily it opens at that instant, so it mustn’t hurt him too much.
In the lift, that’s when it hits me. When I look at him I mean to say, this is happening, isn’t it? but I choke and dry heave, suddenly starving for air. I cough once more and breathe. I’m too scared to open my mouth again, but Dex already seems to know this. His face hangs with the weight of an old man in his eighties, after a lifetime of hurt and loss, yet he still looks exactly like the twenty-one-year-old tattooed mechanic he’s always been.
He pulls me into his arms, kissing my forehead. His lips sting, I swear it. He angles his head up and kisses me again and again on the same spot in the middle of my forehead, and his arms are so tight it tingles, which is the only real thing my mind processes while everything else blurs around me.
A moment later, ten minutes, I can’t say, but the doors open, and they make a sound, jamming when Dex tries to thrust them open faster, with his hand on either door, resulting is us having to side-step and go through that way.
At the reception desk, Dex hits the counter, getting the attention of the nurse behind the computer. “Walter,” he demands again, as if that’s his only tone. “Where is he?”
What’s happened to him? How did this happen? That’s what I think, but my mind has shriveled up at the idea of speaking again, so I have to wait. I just need to know Dad’s fine. That should come first.
Dex tuts and touches my shoulder. “I need to make a call. Listen to what this nurse says and then go. I’ll catch up soon.”
I mouth what but Dex kisses me on the forehead again, already punching keys on his phone.
He’s gone.
I turn back to the lady, tears brimming my eyes again. My eyes are stinging so bad, searing more like, my cheeks on fire as if a heater is blowing up against them. My face hurts. My head—it’s throbbing. I stare at her, expressionless. I’m empty. I’m what scientists have discovered is called a homo sapien but I’m an empty storage box inside.
Why is this happening? Why now? How?
“Ma’am, please…” the nurse rushes around the counter reaching for me as if she has minus one second to catch me before I collapse.
“Yes, now—” Dex says from the distance, then, “Walter—Charz!”
I spin, everything blurring. The nurse has me, helping me stay upright.
Dad. But he’s not there.
Dex is at my side. “Mom’s working. She was just on a break. She’s coming up now. It’ll be much quicker if she explains.” He takes my shoulders and nods to the nurse. “I’ve got her, thanks.”
He nudges me toward the seating area, but no. No, I thought Dad was being wheeled past me and I could see him one last time. No, my parents are dead and I do not want to move a muscle because that will somehow validate the fact I’m nobody’s daughter anymore. I don’t care if no one’s okay with that. I don’t give a flying fuck.
I don’t want hands touching my shoulders, or oh, honeys, or any of their sympathy. Apart from Dexter. I need him.
Dex carries me in his arms to a square waiting room where a TV with poor reception crackles in one corner, and seats line the room, back-to-back. He eases me into a chair and then crouches between my legs.
What, I mouth again.
; Dex holds my hand placed on my thigh. His eyes are red angry lumps in their sockets. His broken look switches something in me.
We’re at the hospital. Dad fell, or something. Is that what the nurse was trying to tell me?
“Where’s your bike?”
It’s the first thing I manage to say after what’s going on fell flat on my tongue. I remember holding on tight and now I’m getting shivers, feeling so terrified his precious bike will get stolen.
Hold tight.
It’s all I can remember.
“My bike?” He starts as if I’ve pulled a rug out from under his feet. “It’s, um, on the road? I don’t know where I left it. Charz,” he says, propping himself up on his knees and holding me by cupping my cheeks. He brings his forehead to rest against mine, and sniffs. I see us from the corner, as though a fly on the wall, Dex scooping up all the parts of me—mind, body, the broken, the helpless—and holding it together the only way he knows how. By holding himself as close as possible and trying to take away my pain.
“Is he alive?” I murmur.
“He’s alive, Charz. He’s on this floor, just down a bit in another ward being worked on. He fell and hit his head, apparently, but I don’t know how or why or…” Dex stops and flips his hair out of his eyes.
“What? Dex, are you okay?”
He nods facing the other way then stands and paces along the wall, never turning his head toward me. Without thinking, I follow him and catch him when he’s about to turn back. Instead, his fists fall against the wall, his head flopped between the gap. I wrap my arms around his hard middle from behind, afraid to duck under into his space. I’m sure he doesn’t want that.
We stand like that for a long time, with him facing the wall and me shaped around his body, arms wrapped around his waist. I sob into his T-shirt until I’m resting in soaked material and he’s sniffing, too.
At the same time as I undo the knot of my hands at his waist, he pulls towards the wall, away from me. Instinctively, we turn to each other, and I can see his eyes are red and wet. I collapse onto his front, pressing up against his hard chest, because I need to be inside his arms. He backs up to the wall by feel, still embracing me, and we slide down the wall stuck together until we’re a heap of knees and elbows in the corner.
He props his chin on my head. We sit like this for forever. My arms are crossed over my chest and Dex holds me up against him, between his legs, with his hands over my crossed arms. I’ve never felt more safe than huddled like this in him.
“I won’t let this happen,” Dex says.
I’m about to say neither of us can prevent death, but I realize he means the hack and steal. He won’t let his dad take the money. Right now, I believe that because I am too spent to disagree, and because I believe Dex won’t let it happen without it killing him first.
“Thank you.”
I lean forward and plant a lingering kiss on his forearm. I breathe heat in from his skin. It’s calming, in a way.
“But why are you here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he says, concern pitching his voice higher. As if I’ve just asked why a mother would love her child.
“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t know why I asked; I don’t know why he wouldn’t be here.
Suddenly, my heart takes off, my muscles itching to move. I shimmy out of the pretzel position Dex and I are folded in, standing up. I hold my hand out and pull him up.
“That was quick,” he says.
“I need to find Nana, Pa and Darce. Isn’t your mom here?”
I think I see Dex smile. It’s gone before I can be sure. I wobble into step, shaking feeling and blood back into my feet.
Darcy’s brown hair rounds a corner as I reach the opening of the waiting room. “Darce!” he whips around, drops his jaw and ogles at me, then shouts for Nana to Pa to turn back.
“I’ll be back,” Dex says, kissing my cheek.
Nana and Pa hurry back to me, relief widening their eyes and quickening their strides. Darcy runs, hands out to me, smiling. I catch him side on, full force, and they all tell me how they’ve been giving me some “space”. They tell me how Dad was reaching out of his bed when he must have lost balance and fallen off, hitting the ground headfirst. The movement might have been what caused him to black out momentarily because he hasn’t been able to get out of bed for days. His head is being operated on.
That’s all for now.
Dex comes back with Lisa in tow. She tells us the long name of an operation that the doctors are performing. He’s in a critical condition. He’s lost a lot of blood, and the doctors have lost him once only to bring him back. There’s pressure in his head the doctors are trying their best and fastest to release, but it’s dangerous given almost anything might set off another problem since Dad’s body is as vulnerable as watermelon flesh stripped out of its thick, hard shell.
Lisa goes up and down checking what she can for hours. Pa finally goes home with Darcy after another hour, once Darcy’s eyes have finally given in to exhaustion at three am and he can’t hit and scream at us when we try to take him away. Pa’s right. This isn’t a place for Darcy right now. He should be home.
Nana stays with us but within a quarter hour of Pa leaving she’s slumped back against the wall, soft snores snarling from her lips and catching occasionally in her throat.
Dex has swapped from the seat next to me, to folding me in his lap, to resting back beside me with my head against his shoulder, to us simply holding hands, side by side. We eventually start I Never, minus the alcohol because what else do you do at four am?
“I Never had a picture of you taped next to my monitor,” he says.
I look at him.
“Insert drink here,” he mumbles.
“Shut up!” I squeal, clamping my mouth shut. Dex whips around to stare at me, his expression amused.
“Seriously,” he admits.
“Well,” I say next, “I Never sat by the football field to watch you peel off your sweaty shirt after a game during lunch.” Pause. “Insert drink here.”
“Well ‘shut up’,” Dex squeals in a girly voice. It’s nothing like me, I swear. I hope.
I slap his knee, or at least try to, but he swivels inhumanly quickly, leaving me desperately slapping the air where he should be as he ducks under my hands. I resort to shoving my arms into a cross over my chest.
“I Never crashed every high school party in the year level below me just to see you out of your school dress.”
I jut my chin at him, and he doesn’t flinch, grinning in a way that makes him model sexy, in a way that makes this suffocating, dreary, heart-wrenching hospital wait, with its terrible smells and stiff seats and shuffling nurse shoes all a figment of this horror nightmare.
“Insert drink here.”
“Okay,” I grin, staring at his lips, “I Never not liked Elliot.”
I then screw my face up because I messed up the game. I don’t even understand that.
“What the—?” Dex says, biting his lip. “Never mind.” He licks his lips, looks at mine then rushes words out, saying, “I Never jacked off thinking of you.”
He shoots an invisible shot.
“Dex!” I squeal. People stare at us but they can go jump off a bridge, that’s exactly how I feel. I’m someone with confidence who thinks and does what she wants to. My heart stutters and sends waves of tingles through my hands and feet, a sense of power. I haven’t mucked around like a kid since…since I was someone’s daughter. I stab at Dex’s chest. And run in circles around the waiting room with him chasing me.
“Come here and let me show you what I still do,” he says, implying that he still uses me as his inspiration during private time with his hand and his dick.
“Eew!” I squeal again, ignoring admonitions of quiet and disgusted hospital staff—of anything but Dex and this moment.
“That’s it,” Dex gasps, suddenly behind me, having snuck up from an opposite direction. His hands close around my waist, squeezing me tight. I
lift my legs and kick in the air like the hysterical woman I am.
That’s when Lisa calls, “Charlee,” in an empty, broken voice.
I try not to analyze the staff avoiding my eyes as Dex drops me to my feet. I walk right up to Lisa as she pulls me into a room with a viewing window the expanse of the entire wall and tells me words that I knew were coming, but that I never, ever wanted to hear.
“I’m sorry, Charlee, but your dad Walter passed away at 4:43 am.”
I am nothing.
This is nothing.
Actors audition for years.
Writers submit stories for years.
Alcoholics drink and drink.
We all lead to nothing, all that effort builds to nothing. Nothingness catches up to you, smacks you right here in the throat, winding you. It doesn’t mean shit if you pray, hope, try. Nothingness is the pull of sleep that takes you before you realize it’s all gone.
But Dexter Hollingworth is there, slipping under my body—I’m not sure if he caught me in time, truth be told.
21. Ungluing and the Gluing
Dexter
The morning of Walter’s death Charz was hospitalized. By which I mean Mom paged the nearest doctor to get some damn oxygen into her lungs. The doc said she was hyperventilating and in shock, so he put her in a room away from the main wards.
Two days later, I’m watching a man I saw the night Walter died walking through the ten-foot-high revolving glass door, a lady waiting for him on the sidewalk, intently watching every step. He hobbles down the hospital’s front steps, holds out his arms, and she greets him by launching herself into his embrace, bouncing happily on the spot.
That should be Charz. She should have had this horrible period where Walter had to fight some pain, a broken bone or two, and then he should have walked himself out through those doors to meet her for a congratulatory hug.
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