Eric drops a potato into the bowl of water and starts on another one. “I went to check on him because Bay never really got sick, even when we were kids. I thought it was a little strange.”
I feel myself leaning into Eric, in anticipation of what he’ll say next.
“I found him in the bathroom. He was pale, and just blinking up at the ceiling. I don’t know what he was seeing. I tried to get the blood to stop, but my hands were shaking so badly. I couldn’t make them hurry.” Eric rests his wrists on the table, his fingers limp. “It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I was so scared. I thought he was dead when I first walked in, I really did. There was so much blood.”
My eyes are fixated on Eric’s hands, the ones who have saved a life. “You saved him, though.”
Eric scoffs. “It didn’t feel like it. Do you have any idea what it’s like to save someone and have them try to kill themselves a month later? It’s like what I did never mattered.” Eric shakes his head. “I realized that it wasn’t about me. Bay was fighting demons that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t be mad at him. I’m just happy he’s here.”
I smile. “So, you’re a barista, a techie and... a saviour? A rescuer of people?”
Eric laughs. “I don’t know about that. I was just trying to help.”
“He seems to be doing okay,” I offer. “He seems happy.”
Eric nods. “Yeah, he does. He seems up for the fight now. I’m glad he’s here with Jodie.”
“Do you think he’s ever going back to LA?”
Eric shakes his head, finishing the rest of the vegetables. “Maybe,” he says, getting up. “But I think this is his home now. I think this is where he wants to be.”
We make our way back inside. Jodie has put on some music – Madeleine Peyroux, it sounds to me – and is pouring white wine into glasses that sparkle on the counter. She hands us each a glass, thanking us for the help with the dinner prep.
“Dinner will be finished in an hour. Why don’t you guys settle in or wash up or do whatever.” She almost sings. “I’ll just be here, slaving away over the hot stove.”
Eric offers to help her, which she declines, shooing us away with a wave of her hand. Eric settles in on the couch with his feet up, nurturing his wine glass. I poke around the house in search of Bay and find him in his room, smoking a cigarette by the window.
“You should really quit those things,” I tell him, glass in hand, from the doorway. “Your lungs are turning black as we speak.”
“I’ve thought about that,” he says, gesturing for me to come inside. “The way I see it, it’s much less damage than what I would have done to my body.” He takes a long drag, the end of the cigarette crackling and burning red. “But you’re right. These things will kill me if I’m not careful.” He blows a lungful of smoke out the window, where it circles and disappears.
I notice a photograph on the desk to the side of the room. It’s a picture of Bay with Eric and Jodie, and another dark-haired girl who has her arm wrapped around his neck.
“Who’s the girl?”
Bay peers back at me to see who I’m referring to. He frowns slightly, and turns back to the window. “Her name’s Kate. We were together for a while.”
I put the photograph back down on the desk. “What happened?”
Bay shrugs. “She wanted a little more from life than I could give.”
“So you let her go?”
Bay kills his cigarette on the windowsill, chuckling. “Jesus, Cape Town. You ask a lot of questions, you know that?” He comes toward me, and angles the photograph a little different to how I had placed it. “I didn’t just let her go. I fought for her very hard actually. She gave up on me.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She said that I had to find a way to deal with what was wrong with me. She said it was too much and left. If you ask her, she’ll probably say she tried her hardest.”
“You’re calling her out on that?”
Bay looks me sternly in the eye. “You don’t give up on people.”
“But you still have a photo of her?”
“That’s the only picture I have of Eric and Jodie. She just happens to be in it.”
I sit down on Bay’s bed. I can barely lift the glass; I feel that weighed down. Bay looks at me curiously and sits down beside me.
“What’s the matter?”
I avoid the question for as long as I can. He won’t stop looking at me, so I give in. “What did it feel like? Dying, I mean?”
Bay sighs. I can smell the nicotine on his breath. For a while, he thinks about what he’s going to say to me. “Well, I don’t remember a lot, but I do remember.”
Jodie is speaking to her brother over the music, their voices carrying toward us along the hallway, reminding us of the fact that they are still here.
“It’s a lot like falling asleep. Your body gets really heavy, like gravity is trying to suck you all the way down into the earth, like it wants to swallow you whole.” He starts to press his lips together, but then thinks better of it. “It’s strange, at first, because being alive is such a fundamental part of who you are. It’s all you know. Your first reaction is to fight it. When you’re confronted with it all ending, it’s a lot to take.” Bay shifts on the bed. Outside the window, I watch the treetops sway. “I guess you can say it was what I had wanted for a very long time. It felt like nonexistence. Like I was nowhere and I was nothing. It wasn’t peaceful or tranquil or anything else that people like us would think it would be.”
“How would you describe it then?”
Bay doesn’t think about it for long. “Lonely.” He shakes his head. “There was no one there, Abby. No one. I guess I brought that upon myself, but that’s not how I saw it ending. It’s not what I had wanted.”
I feel disappointed by the answer. I feel gone again, like I am slowing dissipating and would eventually be carried out the window just like Bay’s used lungful of smoke.
“That’s why I do what I do at the hospital. So that no one’s alone when they go.”
I sigh.
“Abby, there are people who come into this world and will later know exactly what they want to do with their lives. They chase after their dreams and build their lives and are happy and fulfilled. When death comes for them, they look back on their lives and think that it all really wasn’t that bad.
“Then there are people in the middle who simply just exist because there’s nothing else they can do. People who go to work, fall in love, get married. They push out a couple of kids, hoping they’ll do better, and die. Which is an okay life, if you ask me. There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary.”
I grimace at the thought.
“Then there are people like you and me, who are simply born and stay incomplete. It’s just our lot in life. It’s what we have to deal with.”
“Wouldn’t you rather deal with something else? Like cancer or elephantitis?”
Bay chuckles. “I would not wish this on someone else. But it’s okay. I’m building a life for myself out here, out of all of this. I’m trying to move forward.”
I drain my glass of wine, my head spinning as I come up for air.
“Trust me. I know what it’s like to die in bits and pieces,” Bay says. “Just keep breathing. One day you’ll wake up and there won’t be a hole in your chest anymore. Then you can truly start to live.”
I take a deep breath to try to still the shudders inside me. “Were you scared?”
Bay answers immediately. “No.”
I regard him from my seat. “Are you afraid of dying?”
He laughs, but it’s one that he has to think about first. “No. I’m afraid of not living.”
“But you almost died twice. That would scare anyone.”
“I already died once. That takes the novelty out of it a little,” Bay says. “I came back different. It’s not easy to notice on the outside, but I am. I’m not the same person anymore.”
“Who are you now then?”
“I’m t
he guy who gets to start over.”
“Are you glad they brought you back, Bay?”
He sighs next to me but doesn’t say anything. The room suddenly seems smaller, like it had shrunk when we weren’t looking. I don’t think I should ask him again. Maybe he’s still deciding. Maybe he’s still trying to figure it out.
After a while, throughout dinner and everything after, while the four of us are battling it out in a game of Jenga, I forget that he never even answered my question at all.
Chapter Twelve
It’s quiet for a Saturday night. Everyone has gone to bed and Eric has locked up the house, despite Jodie’s sentiments that it’s not needed. Bay gives me an old Beatles T-shirt to sleep in since I am running out of clothes again. It smells like fabric softener and enclosed spaces. I take a quick shower to get rid of the day’s heat, and by the time I get back to the room Eric is lying in bed, sideways, eyelids soft. His frame takes up most of the length of the bed, his legs curled at the knee.
I move toward him, crawling softly onto the bed so not to wake him. I lay down beside him, as close as I can without touching him, squeezing into the spaces his body has left me. I want to bury my nose in his neck, smell his hair. I want to put my arm around him and fall asleep that way.
“I feel like you’re staring at me,” he says, voice muffled with sleep.
I half smile. “Sorry.”
Eric lifts his head upward toward me. Our faces are so close together that each time he breathes out I breathe him in. He stirs, and his knees come up hard against mine. His eyes are still closed. I wish he would open them.
“Did you tell Jodie about Luna?”
His eyes stay closed, but I can tell that he’s awake. Just not looking at me. His lips move like he’s about to say something.
“Eric?”
“I know about Ben.”
My heart stops. My breath gets caught in my throat. I can’t move.
“You left his number on my phone.”
Crap. I’d forgotten about that. “You spoke to him?”
Eric opens his eyes to look at me. “Yeah. He’s out of his mind worried about you.”
“Eric...”
“I didn’t tell him where you are. Although, it was wrong for you not to.” He frowns at me. “You can’t do that to people, Abby. You can’t just leave without a word. It’s not fair.”
His words hang in the air between us, heavy and imposing.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re okay. That you’re with good people.” He turns away, eyes cast toward the ceiling. “He sounds like a really good guy.”
I smile sadly. “He is.”
We go quiet for a while. I listen to Eric breathe until I think he’s fallen asleep. I feel myself start to fade away into sleep when Eric’s voice cuts through the silence.
“Was it hard leaving him behind?”
I picture Ben’s face, and remember the night he first told me he loved me. Tears spring to my eyes, stingy and invasive. “Yes,” I say, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
*
A few hours later, just before dawn, I wake from one nightmare straight into another. I open my eyes to find a dark figure in the room. It’s looming over my side of the bed, austere and frightening. Panic rushes to the surface, wanting an escape. I prepare myself to scream, but a hand clamps over my mouth and stifles the sound. The hand smells like nicotine.
“Bay, what the hell are you doing?” I whisper into the shadows when he releases me. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and his form becomes familiar.
“Come with me,” he whispers. “I need to show you something.”
My heart rate descends to normal. “Can’t it wait?”
“Do you think I would wake you up at four a.m. if it could wait? Please.”
I fumble around in the dark. Eric stirs next to me.
“Careful,” Bay says as I get out of bed. “Don’t wake him.”
I slip on my sneakers while Bay watches impatiently. He ushers me out of the room before I can get dressed or run a brush through my hair.
“For God’s sake, no one will be up this hour,” he says when I protest. “And if they are, they won’t be able to see you in the dark.”
“At least let me put on a bra.”
Bay chuckles. “No, don’t.”
We sneak out of the house as quietly as we can. Bay is adept at manoeuvring in and around the house in semi darkness. I hold onto his elbow as we leave, trusting him to lead us to our destination. Outside, it’s cold. We’re both still in our pj’s, but Bay is wearing more than me. I’m only in his shirt and a pyjama shorts. Goosebumps crawl up my legs and arms.
We make it halfway down the driveway before I trip over something. I let out a yelp and get a piece of stone stuck in my kneecap. Bay laughs as he helps me up, which I don’t appreciate. We are still whispering, even though no sane person would be out this early.
“Where are we going?” I say. Everything is covered in a bluish-grey fog, morning dew drifting ahead of us like stardust.
“I want to show you something. It’s not far. Come on.”
We walk for a little while further. It starts to get lighter in small increments. Birds stir in the trees. Bay takes a right turn, onto a pathway that leads into the trees. It’s on an incline and requires a bit of climbing. We take turns heading up, Bay stopping every few feet to pull me along. I’m out of breath, my lungs burning.
“Bay,” I say, in between breaths. “Please be honest with me. Did you bring me up here to kill me?”
Bay coughs. “No. Although, if I had, this would be an opportune place to do it.”
“That does not make me feel better in any way,” I say, shrieking as something scuttles across my ankle.
“Would you be quiet? You’re disturbing the bears.”
“Oh, God. Please take me back. Being mauled by a bear is not how I want to go out.”
“Give me your hand,” he says, holding out the arm in the cast to me. “We have to climb up one last level.”
“I can’t see anything. This place leads nowhere.”
“Relax,” he says, wrapping his fingers around mine. “I’ve been here a few times. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve only gotten lost, like, once.”
“It truly and profoundly does not.”
Bay hoists me up one last time, his cast scratching against my skin. I squint through the haze of the morning, trying to decipher where we are. It’s a ledge of some sort, a wide base of rock that juts out somewhere into the darkness. I can make out the silhouettes of trees around us and beneath us. I feel the lake near somewhere, maybe below.
Bay sits down, legs folded, coughing. “Jesus, I gotta stop with those goddamn cigarettes.”
I sit down next to him, catching my breath, rubbing my arms and legs to warm them up. We sit that way, sucking on the crisp morning air for a few minutes, the light changing around us every time we blink.
“You know, yesterday when you asked me if I was afraid of dying, I sort of lied.”
I look at Bay through the semi darkness, waiting it out.
“When the accident happened, all I could think about was not wanting to die. I was alone again. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t want to be afraid because I thought I knew what dying was all about, but I was. I kept thinking of Jodie, and what it would do to her, and how even when I wasn’t trying I was leaving her again.”
He stops, and although I struggle to see properly, I think he’s fighting back tears.
“And then the crash came, and everything was really bright. I didn’t feel a thing. At least not until I woke up in the hospital with a broken wrist and broken ribs and cuts everywhere.” He touches his cast absentmindedly. “Jodie came into the hospital crying. She’s beautiful even when she’s scared. I wanted to tell her at that very moment. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that I was happy to be alive, that most of all I was happy that she w
as there.”
The darkness is fading fast now. Pale blue light is making its way toward us.
“I choked. I still don’t know why. There were just so many things going on. I wanted to deal with one thing at a time. To get better, and be strong, and show her that I was more than just a broken body.”
Bay looks at me. “I’m not trying to tell you that being in love with someone is going to save you. That would be stupid. What I’m trying to say is that you need to find something that does save you, and hope that it saves you every time. Because I can promise you that the poison leaves you bit by bit, not all once. Be patient. You’re healing. One day that feeling that you have will just be a firefly or a mosquito and you’ll be happy that you waited it out.”
I think about everything he’s said. I can’t eat up his words fast enough. Is this all that I’d needed? To have someone talk to me like this? To have them be honest and accepting? I feel a sort of lightness in my chest that doesn’t feel like I want to jump off a cliff, but instead like my soul is breathing for the first time in ages.
Bay is beguiling. I want to be him. I want to have his feelings, his sense of homeliness, of wonder.
“I was in a mental hospital a few years ago, and as part of my treatment I was required to attend a group session where we spoke about our feelings and all that stuff.”
I hold up my hand, astounded at how fast he can change a subject. “Wait. You’re serious?”
“Well, it was the psychiatric wing of the hospital, but still. A failed suicide attempt and a semi death will get you into one of those places pretty fast.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve only known Bay for a few days, but he never ceases to surprise me.
“Anyway, the doctor presented us with a scenario in an attempt to learn more about us, to gauge how we would handle a hypothetical situation.”
I nod, keeping track.
“Now, imagine this. An asteroid is plummeting toward Earth. It will destroy everything. No one will survive. We are all doomed. What do you do?”
Images of Armageddon flash before me. I think of flames and falling buildings and people screaming. I think of chaos.
“Cape Town, what do you do?”
A Sky Full of Stars Page 14
