But she only kept sobbing, and I wanted to vomit. I knew. I knew, I just knew. My life was about to be decimated.
I pressed a hand to my mouth, to keep myself from crying with her. Her grieving continued, and before I knew it, more tears slipped down my cheeks. “Mila,” I cried, my hands shaking so much that I couldn’t hold the phone. “Tell me,” I pleaded. “What’s wrong?” I couldn’t believe I could even get the words out.
“He was okay. He was!” She sounded so adamant about that, like she was trying to convince herself. A sound of something falling came through before she hiccupped, the sound rough and gasping. “And then, oh my god.” The last words were spoken in time with a wail.
It was then that my legs crumpled to nothing under my body weight. I registered a tinge of pain from where my knees scraped on the wood floor, but it was nothing compared to the rolling of my heart in my chest.
“His face, it wasn’t his face. It was someone else’s face.” She was still sobbing, and it was all I could do to clutch the phone in my fist as my body slowly curled up in a ball on the floor, as knives dug in the spaces between my ribs, in search of what made me mortal. “I watched him struggling to breathe, Trista. Oh my g—” She couldn’t finish the sentence, choking on her sobs.
I swallowed and whispered, “Is he okay?”
“No!” she screamed through the phone. “He went into cardiac arrest. Fuck.” I heard a loud banging on the other end, and bit down on my lip to contain what was coming. It was like a wave of knives, the tide pulling back and rising above me.
“His heart fucking stopped. His heart! His heart stopped. His heart stopped! Trista,” she screamed, as if I couldn’t hear the echo of her words like a bullet to my chest. “I watched him, I was with him, when his heart stopped beating.” Her sob after that was so gut-wrenchingly awful that I turned my face into the floor and let out my own, feeling the reverberation of the wood against my lips as I let it loose from my chest.
Jude was dead.
I couldn’t stop it, I rolled over and vomited right there on the wooden floor, and dropped my phone as I pressed my hands to my face to catch the flow of tears as they flooded my eyes. My mouth was open, but no sound came. It was hard to speak, to wail, when I felt like I couldn’t even breathe.
From that point on, I’d sobbed until one of my neighbors had banged on the wall that separated our apartments. In an effort to grieve in a way I needed, loudly and without reproach, I had found myself on the roof of that shitty apartment building. Being up high like that was how I always felt closest to Jude, with the sky the only thing above me.
Jude was dead, I’d told myself over and over, until the sounds of me saying it mixed with the echo of the words themselves, so it was a discombobulated chant in my head, and it lasted so long that the words became something else when I said them, sounds I didn’t even understand.
I’d hated myself while I was up on that roof. That I was breathing the air Jude wasn’t. That I was living a life I was destroying when Jude had lost his, after already giving so much of himself to me.
After Ellie had died, I’d found myself on a roof once too. I hadn’t known if I would jump, but I had looked over the edge, felt the nothingness kiss my face as I peered down. In the end, I’d chickened out. But standing on the roof as I had been the moment I’d heard Jude’s voice, I hadn’t chickened out yet.
As if realizing just how close I was still to the edge, I crawled back away from it. I still held the phone in my hands.
“But you—” I pressed my face to my free hand, the overwhelming urge to sob my way through this conversation more powerful than anything I’d ever known. But nothing came, even as my eyes burned and my bottom lip trembled against my hand.
“Colin,” Jude said, but his voice sounded harsh when he said it like that, like he was breathing through a cotton ball. “He went into cardiac arrest while he was at the gym. With Mila.”
I shook my head, trying to accept the fact that Jude was alive. I was talking to him, but I had convinced myself he was dead. “Colin?”
“He was lucky, God.” Again, his voice didn’t sound like the voice I knew well. I knew it was him, but there was no mistaking the grief in his voice. “Someone started CPR and the gym had a defibrillator, so his heart started working again.” I heard him swallow, and while I knew it was a terrible thing to think, to feel, I was so grateful for each breath I heard him breathe into the phone. Even though I knew something was wrong with Colin, I couldn’t yet let go of the fact that Jude was okay.
Jude was okay.
“But it’s not good, Trista. Damn it. It’s not good.” I could hear noise in the background, but I still felt like I was slowly waking up—my brain wasn’t processing things as quickly as I knew it could. “He’s in heart failure. After his hospitalization two years ago, they determined he was in advanced cardiomyopathy. He had valve replacement surgery, but his heart is beyond help at this point. He’s severe enough to need a transplant.”
I didn’t know what to say. It felt like a new grief was carving a hole into my chest, like an ice cream scoop-sized swoop, and I was already so weakened from when I’d thought Jude had died. I pressed a hand to my rib cage, wishing I could reach in and loosen my ribs one by one, just so I could breathe.
“Where is he now?”
“At the hospital. That’s where I am, too. He’s been assigned high priority on a wait list, but I’m going to be frank—” he let out a big breath “—chances are he’ll pass away before that can happen.”
I didn’t trust my legs yet to stand, so I stayed there on the hot roof even though I could feel it burning the skin of my knees. “That bad?” I asked, my breathing slowing but my eyes still leaking.
“Yes. You should come, Trista.”
I was already nodding, trying to think of how much money I had in savings to buy a ticket.
“I can buy you a ticket on the next flight out,” he said, as if he was reading my mind.
My stomach hurt from this conversation. I felt like I couldn’t digest the fact that I was talking to Jude, but not talking to him about all the things I wanted to. And my ex-boyfriend was lying in a hospital bed, on the edge of losing his life, and I had just been on the edge of a building, thinking Jude had lost his.
The fact that I had considered a very Romeo and Juliet way to end everything suddenly hit me and I sucked in a breath. I wasn’t going to jump. I’d gone up on the roof to be closer to Jude. “Okay,” I found myself agreeing. I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t not go to Colorado. I wasn’t poor, but I certainly didn’t have enough money to purchase a plane ticket and sustain me while I was out of work.
“When can you leave?”
“Today,” I said, not convinced by the conviction of my own words. “Tomorrow,” I added. “Just . . . you tell me when and I’ll be there.”
“Okay. Can I reach you on this number?”
Closing my eyes, I said, “Yes.”
I stared at the skyline, the noise of my surroundings rushing back. After Ellie had died, I’d walked onto a roof, too, like I couldn’t get enough air in my living space.
I wasn’t going to jump, I reminded myself.
Seventeen hours later, I boarded a flight to Denver.
Chapter Seven
2011
A week after leaving Wyoming, with significantly less cash, I walked into a beach hotel on the rocky Maine coast and dropped cash onto the counter.
“A room, please.”
The woman wore a muumuu that crinkled when she leaned against the worn counter, bringing with her the scent of fish. “We don’t take cash for rooms.” The light under her head brought her more into focus, and I put her around fifty to sixty years old. She looked hearty enough to weather many decades still.
But I didn’t own credit cards. I’d emptied my only bank account before I’d moved to Colorado, so I didn’t even have a debit card at my disposal. “I can pay more.”
Her rubber-gloved hands came to the counter, t
he source of her fish smell evident from the fish guts I saw around the fingertips. “Don’t matter,” she said, but it sounded like “mattah” from her accent.
I shifted weight from one foot to the other. “Maybe I could speak to the owner or something? I don’t have a credit card.”
“You could, but it won’t make no difference.”
“Please,” I pleaded. It was near midnight and I was ready to fall into a bed for a week.
“Okay.” She snapped off the gloves and wiped off the fish guts from the counter with a disinfectant wipe. After rubbing hand sanitizer over her hands, she flipped her head back and forth so the frizzy gray strands flicked over her shoulder. “I’m the owner.”
My heart sank. “Of course.” I stared at the wrinkled bills, one of only a handful left in the cigar box. “Is there another place that would take cash, do you happen to know?”
She grabbed a binder beside her and flipped it open, loudly moving through the pages. Once every few seconds, she looked up at me, taking me in. “Are you looking for a room for an hour?”
I scrunched up my nose. “An hour? No, more like a week or so. Maybe longer?”
“Are you a hooker?” It sounded like “hookah” and took me a second to get her meaning.
“What?” I laughed. “God, no.”
“Runnin’ drugs?”
I shook my head. “I just got here, from Pennsylvania. I just want a place to stay while I figure out what I’m doing.”
“What’s in Pennsylvania?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm.” Her lips moved like she was chewing something. “Why here?”
Shrugging, I said, “Why not? My car needs some work done. I’ve been on the road for a while.”
“Running from an abusive husband? Boyfriend?”
It gave me pause as I thought of Doug. “No. I don’t have a boyfriend.” Do not indulge, Trista. Put it in the back of your mind.
“If you don’t gotta abusive boyfriend, what are those bruises about?” She motioned with one chubby finger at my face, but her eyes looked calm. “You make a habit of walkin’ into doors?”
I shook my head. “It was an accident.” It was my first lie to her.
“Well, you’re going to have to give me more. Tell me what you are, since I know what you aren’t.”
I curled my fingers on the countertop. “I’m just looking for a place to rest my head while I figure my life out.” It was heavier when I said it like that, and I regretted not stating it in simple terms instead.
She pursed her lips, her gray eyes crinkled and tired. “It’s against policy to rent without a credit card for incidentals. If you take off and leave with a TV or something, I wouldn’t have a way to find you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. My car has been ticking and having little hiccups as I drive. It needs work, so it’s not like I’ll be able to take off anytime soon.”
“Uh huh.” She picked up a pen and then turned her head to holler over her shoulder. “Chuck!”
Her voice when she yelled was all power. She may have seemed older, but she was still a powerhouse. The way a man poked his head into the front office from a room in the back, looking like he was worried he’d done something wrong, showed her dominance over him. He looked about twenty years younger than she was. I guessed it was her son by the way she jerked her head to get him to come to her.
“You got keys?”
I blinked. “To my car?”
“Well, yeah. You don’t got keys to anything else, do ya?”
She looked impatient and I felt bad for taking a minute to get on the same page. “Why do you want my keys?”
“You give me your keys, Chuck’ll take a look at your car and then I’ll know I can trust that you’re not going to take off with my TV.”
Chuck glanced over me before pulling his Red Sox cap off his head and running a hand over the long blond strands. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s been ticking since I left Pennsylvania and sometimes it doesn’t want to start,” I said as I handed my keys to him. “Are you a mechanic?”
“He is. Boats, bikes, cars—he can fix it all.”
Chuck seemed to blush under his mom’s praise. “I mean, I can sure try.”
“Uh, can you let me know what the damage is before you fix anything?” I couldn’t believe I was handing over my keys after a quick five-minute conversation. “I just want to make sure I can afford it.”
The woman leaned on the counter. “And if you can’t afford it, what’s your other option?”
I shifted on my feet again. “Well, I don’t suppose I have another option.”
“Uh huh.” She looked over the pile of money on the counter and took out a few bills. “A week, you say?”
I nodded.
“Can you work, too?”
“What kind of work?”
“Let’s say dishwashing and room cleaning and picking up trash?”
“Sounds easy enough.”
“Uh huh.” She said that a lot, I was beginning to learn. “I’ll charge you half for the week. You can make up the rest by doing some housekeeping and dishes work. And if you can’t afford the car repairs, we can work something out.”
I shook my head. “Are you serious?”
“Do I look like I’m yanking your chain?” Her eyes were hard, her mouth in a line.
“No.” It intimidated me, the way she stared at me like she didn’t expect her kindness to be questioned. “Thank you. That’s very generous of you.”
“Don’t look too grateful; I’m giving you one of the rooms we haven’t renovated since the nineties.”
“That’s okay. As long as it has a bed, I’m happy.”
And I meant it. Hard to be picky when your car had served as a bed for the last two nights, parked in an empty rest area on the side of a highway. So when the woman, Maura, unlocked the door and gave me the spiel about the air conditioner not always working, I nodded gratefully. “This is great, really.”
She looked me over dubiously, like she’d wait to see how I pulled my own weight in the morning, but she made sure to tell me, “That’s what windows are for, you know. No need to rack up the air conditioning bill.”
After she left, I dropped my suitcase on the floor and peeled the clothes off my body. I hadn’t had air conditioning for most of the drive, since my air conditioner had gone out a thousand miles earlier, so a cool shower was like a blessing from above.
After leaving my mom’s, I’d called my grandpa to check in and to tell him, in as few words as possible, that mom was as close to all right as she’d ever been. When I mentioned Maine, his voice warmed in a way I hadn’t heard in years.
“You should see the ocean,” he’d said, and told me he’d spent many summers as a kid on the beaches of Maine, particularly Kennebunkport. “Great seafood. Great old city.”
My aim had been for Kennebunkport, but shortly after I passed Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, my car had given me a warning that its end was imminent. The last sign on the highway I’d seen had been for York Harbor, and I’d followed directions from the services just off the interstate for the inn I was now at.
After washing my body of three days of driving dust, I collapsed onto the bed. It wasn’t overly soft, but it also was not lumpy. The comforter was years past its prime in style, but it was too hot to use it anyway. I stripped to just the sheet and climbed into the bed before letting out a sigh.
The room was small, with just the bed, a low white dresser with an older television and VCR, a mini fridge, and a worn oak table with two chairs. Beside the bed was one nightstand with an old but dust-free dandelion-yellow lamp. The room was older; Maura hadn’t been lying about that. But it was clean. Next to the lamp was a telephone and I remembered my own, in my pocket.
When I’d left Wyoming, I’d picked up a new phone—a burner phone—and had passed my number along to my grandfather and the staff at his assisted living facility.
It hadn’t rung once in four d
ays.
I tried to feel peace about that. The only ones with my new number were my grandfather and his assisted living facility. That was what I wanted, was the reason I changed my number. But all it did was reinforce my complete and utter loneliness. I had no one in the world with me.
It could be argued that I did have people. But I’d left them with every intention of a fresh start, a time to grow and become who I was meant to be, without their influence.
And as I rolled onto my side in the bed, I told myself this again, repeated the thing I’d said to myself a hundred times.
You chose this.
It was one of the first decisions I’d made for myself in years.
That didn’t stop me from rolling to my stomach and burying my face into my pillow, the ache for Jude so deep and so profound that I could scarcely breathe and not feel the hollow.
I woke up at five in the morning thanks to the sounds outside my window. Bleary-eyed, I pulled on a tee and walked to the window, peering out in the distance as the morning sky just kissed the harbor. Maura was surveying some goods in a truck and it was then that I realized my room was situated right over the side entrance, where the kitchen was.
“Come on, Tommy,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Did your ma feed you this morning?” she asked with a clap on his back. “I’ve got some cream pies on the cooling rack and coffee on the burner.” She looked softer in the early morning light, like the weight of the day was still light upon her shoulders.
I dressed quickly, made my room up to look as neat as it had been the night before, and took the stairs to the ground floor.
Maura was just in the kitchen doorway when she saw me. “Ah, there you are. Your name again?”
“Trista.”
“Trista, this is Tommy. He brings me seafood and hooch.”
Tommy was young, no more than nineteen, and looked like he was wearing clothes three sizes too large as he awkwardly stuck out a hand for me to shake. In his other hand was an oval donut covered in a chocolate ganache. “Hey,” he said simply, before shoving the donut in his mouth. “I gotta go, Maura. I’ll be ‘round tomorrow.”
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