by Callie Hart
Contents
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
FAQ WITH THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CALLIE'S NEWSLETTER
TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE BITS!
ROOKE
Copyright © 2017 Callie Hart
ROOKE
copyright © 2017 Callie Hart
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places and characters are figments of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. The author recognises the trademarks and copyrights of all registered products and works mentioned within this work.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”
—Oscar Wilde
ONE
THERAPY
SASHA
Drowning is a peaceful way to die.
There’s the panic at first, of course. Your lungs screaming for oxygen, your mind revolting, blinding flashes of light stealing your vision, every muscle in your body burning and on fire as your cells begin to die. And then the terrible moment when you can no longer keep your lips pressed shut, can no longer deny the primal urge to inhale, and you do it, you open your mouth, knowing what it means as the cold water floods your lungs: this is the end.
That’s when everything slows. A kind of calm settles over you, and the panic and the fear melt away, dissolving as your limbs begin to fall numb. It doesn’t take long. The thrashing stops. The hammering in your ears stops. The mundane, silly things that plague your everyday life are no longer important. And then you simply…leave. At least that’s what it was like for me, anyway. Every night, when I close my eyes, I relive the morning five years ago when the Chuck Holloway Moving Co. truck with the splintered windshield and the green, frayed piece of rope tied around the handle of the driver’s side door careened across the freeway, hitting my sedan, sending my car tumbling over the side of the Brooklyn Bridge with me still inside it. I remember the weightlessness of the fall, and the terror as the nose of the car impacted with the water, and then the seeping cold and the violent scramble to escape.
I wasn’t ready to die. Moreover, I wasn’t ready for my six-year-old son strapped into his car seat in the back seat to die. I knew I had to get back there before the car submerged, to unclip him, to drag him into my arms, to force open the door and kick us both free of the sinking wreck. It wasn’t possible, though.
“Start again, Sasha. What did you do the moment the car hit the river?”
Again, we’re going through this. Again, we must rehash the finest of details, assessing and measuring each of my actions. Dr. Hathaway smiles softly as I tense in my seat. It’s a very comfortable seat, I’ll admit, but I despise this chair. Having to sit in it once a week, five years after the accident, is a self-enforced prison sentence I will never be free of. Dr. Hathaway, in his late forties, his still-thick hair shot through with steel, in his immaculately pressed shirt, and his designer thick-rimmed glasses, folds his hands in his lap and waits for me to begin.
“Well. I hit my head. On the steering wheel. It made it really hard to see properly.”
Dr. Hathaway nods. “What were you feeling as the water started to fill the car?”
“I was frightened. More than frightened. I couldn’t breathe. And Christopher…” I look away, out of the seventeenth-story window of his Manhattan offices, not really seeing the other high rises or the cold, stark white-blue of the New York winter sky on the other side of the glass. “Christopher was screaming,” I say softly. “He was always so quiet. He never made any real sound, but that day…” Christopher was deaf. He never quite understood that when he opened his mouth and he breathed over his vocal chords that he produced sound, so he just never did it. The day our car went over the bridge and into the river was the first time I’d really heard him scream since he was a baby.
Silence hovers over us like a suffocating blanket in Hathaway’s office. I know he won’t prod me any further. He won’t ask me any more questions. It’s up to me to go through every split second of the accident until I reach the end now. The sooner I begin, the sooner it will be all over. I clear my throat.
“He was screaming. I couldn’t think straight for a moment. I was so dazed from hitting my head that I just sat there, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then everything began to tip sideways and I realized something really bad was happening. Something really, really bad.” I can still feel the weight of that terrible realization settling in my stomach. I feel it at least three or four times a day, no matter how well I might be coping.
I continue with my account of the story, experiencing it all over again as I relive the murky water swallowing the car. “I unfastened my seat belt. It was hard to climb into the back. It felt like the car was spinning over as it sank beneath the water, like it was almost on its roof. It was hard to move. My arms and legs felt strange. They didn’t want to work properly. Christopher was reaching out to me. He was so afraid. He kept signing for me over and over again. He was trying to get out of his chair by himself, but we’d bought a really good car seat for him. Andrew insisted we get something strong, something hard wearing. Something he couldn’t just let himself out of. The button was really stiff. He couldn’t press it. His fingers weren’t strong enough. I eventually managed to pull myself through to the back, and I unclipped him. He climbed into my arms. I don’t know how long that took. It felt like it was a long time. A really long time. The fire department said it couldn’t have been more than ten to fifteen seconds, though, that the car couldn’t have sunk that far if I could still see the lights from the bridge overhead through the back windows, but I don’t know. It felt like forever.
“I tried to open the door to the car then. The one beside Christopher’s car seat. It was jammed shut, though. It wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t do anything to move it. I kicked at it. I used both feet to try and smash the glass. I saw a show once that said you should use your belt buckle or something, that you should wrap your belt around your shoe and use the hard metal part to break open the glass, but I wasn’t wearing a belt. I couldn’t find anything hard to use. Nothing. Christopher was frantic. He was shaking all over. He was clinging to me, burying his face in my shoulder. I kept signing to him that everything was going to be okay, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew I was laying to him, and I felt…I felt so guilty. I failed him. I couldn’t save him. The water kept pouring into the car, and I couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t long before the car was almost full. Christopher—” I choke on his name. This part of the story is always so hard to relive. The sharp edge of pain
that lances through me is enough to steal my breath away, even now, after so much time has passed.
“Christopher kissed me on the cheek, and he signed that he loved me. He was six years old and he knew he was going to die. A child shouldn’t have to…god, no child should ever have to face that knowledge. It’s just not right.”
Hathaway nods. His expression is impassive. There’s no judgment in his eyes. No emotion whatsoever. Just once I wish he would let something slip. I wish I could see the condemnation in his eyes. The pity and disgust he must surely feel whenever I tell him about the time I allowed my only son to die.
“I held his hand,” I whisper. “It was so cold. He was freezing. I held onto him so tight. As the water rose over our heads, I crushed him to me, and I told him I loved him, too. And then…everything went black.”
“You don’t remember the police officer who jumped from the patrol boat into the water after you? You don’t remember him smashing the rear window?”
I shake my head slowly. “I remember letting go. I remember hoping I was going to see Christopher again. That’s all.” I tell this lie every time I sit in front of Hathaway. It seems wrong to admit that I did see the shadowy shape of the man swimming toward the car. I recall with perfect clarity how he repeatedly beat and thrashed against the window of the car, until eventually he managed to shatter it with a jagged-edged rock. I was half crazy from holding my breath, but I remember his hands reaching into the car and tearing at me, trying to drag me out of the wreck. I didn’t shove myself out of the vehicle, though. I did nothing to help the guy to save me. I already knew by that point. I already knew Christopher was dead. I also knew I couldn’t live a day on this earth after letting him down so terribly.
Never in all of our sessions together have I admitted to Hathaway that I wanted to die. I wanted to stay inside the water-filled shell of the car I’d had since college, and I wanted to go with my son. I fought against the brave man who was trying to save my life. I struggled from him, ripping myself free from his strong hands; I closed my eyes and I opened my mouth. I let my life go.
That’s when everything truly went black. That’s when I lost consciousness and I allowed the void to take me.
“I woke up in the hospital two days later suffering from hypothermia and a broken collarbone,” I say. “And that was it. Christopher was dead.”
I always find it so hard to say those words. Saying them is owning the fact that I will never hold my boy again. Acknowledging the fact he will never see his seventh birthday, or his tenth, or his twenty-first. He will never grow up and have adventures in Europe, children of his own who will make his heart burst with warmth every time he sees them smile.
“And what do you think you could have done differently, Sasha? What do you think you could have done to save Christopher? To prevent the accident in the first place?”
I stare blankly at the floor. My hands are chapped from the cold. I’ve forgotten my gloves yet again, and the wind outside has been biting for weeks now. “I don’t know,” I say quietly. “If I hadn’t been so confused after I hit my head…”
“The doctors told you it was a miracle you were even conscious, didn’t they? Didn’t they say the force of the blow should have snapped your neck?”
“Yes. They said that.”
“Then how could you have been more alert?”
I say nothing.
“What else? What else could you have done to save Christopher?”
“I could have taken a different route to drop him at school.”
“Christopher’s elementary school was in Brooklyn, wasn’t it? You had to cross the bridge to get him there. There was no other way.”
Again, I say nothing.
“What else?”
There are thousands of ways in which I could have altered the events of that day five years ago, but I know how ridiculous they sound to a reasonable person. They’re happenstance, what-ifs only divine premonition could have brought about: I should have had some sense that something terrible was going to happen. If I had, I could have left later to drop Christopher off at school. I could have kept him home altogether. I could have called and said he was sick, and we could have stayed in the house all day, reading, tucked up under a blanket, pretending to be space warriors or robots.
Hathaway sighs, tapping the end of his pen against his desk. “You know you weren’t responsible for your son’s death. You know deep down in your heart that it was just an awful accident. Both the police and the fire department said there was nothing you could have done.”
“How many times do we have to do this?” I ask, finally looking back at him. “How many times are you going to say that before we can move on to something else?” I’m rude. My tone is sharp and angry, but Hathaway merely shakes his head.
“As many times as we need to, I suppose. As many times as it takes for you to realize that it’s the truth. To feel that it’s the truth.”
I blink at him, pressing my thumbnail into the fine skin over my index finger knuckle, holding my breath. “I’m never going to feel that way.”
Hathaway places his pen down on his desk in front of him, followed by his notebook. He doesn’t seem annoyed by my words. He doesn’t appear to be affected by them one way or another. “Then I guess we’re going to be doing this for a very long time.”
TWO
BLEEDING HEARTS
SASHA
“Why don’t you just sell? It’s so big. It must be costing you a fortune just to heat the damn place. You’re here on your own. You do not need four bedrooms.”
“I’m not selling the house, Ali.” Today seems to be a day for repetitive conversations. I can’t remember how many times my best friend has tried to convince me to part with my brownstone, and I can’t remember how many times I’ve sighed and told her it’s not going to happen. “I grew up here,” I say, throwing a tea bag into the chipped mug I’ve just taken down from the cupboard. I have my back to Ali, so she can’t see the strained look on my face, or how furrowed my brow is. I don’t need this today. I can’t handle arguing over whether I do or don’t need four bedrooms. Of course I could easily downsize to a two or even one-bedroom place, and yes, it would mean I could buy something else and still have close to a million dollars left over to do whatever the hell I wanted with, but she’ll never understand. This place is full of memories for me. I gave birth to Christopher in the damn hallway, for crying out loud. I’d gone into accelerated labor before Andrew had been able to get home, and I’d been alone. I’d been the first person to see him, to take him into my arms, to hold him to my body. His room is just as he left it—toy trucks and decapitated Lego Stormtroopers all over the floor, his sheets mussed and pushed back where he bounced out of bed on the morning of his death.
I won’t leave this place. I will never leave it.
I make Ali her cup of tea and I hand it to her, hurrying from the kitchen through to the formal dining room.
“Are you sure you’re in the mood for book club today?” She gingerly takes a sip from her drink. She has no patience, she knows the hot liquid is going to burn her mouth, and yet she can never seem to wait for her tea to cool before she drinks. I get a bottle opener down from the shelf behind me, placing it next to the three bottles of Malbec I bought earlier from the liquor store.
“It’s okay. The distraction will do me good.”
Ali pulls a face. “I don’t even understand why we’re reading this book. It categorically makes no sense.”
“Of course the book makes sense, Al.”
My friend sticks out her tongue. She’s thirty-three, the same age as me, but she acts like a twelve-year-old sometimes. She looks younger than her years. Her thick red hair is always wild and crazy, like she just stuck her finger in a power outlet, and for the most part her makeup looks like a teenager applied it—bright pink blushes, and shiny, glossy lip balm probably called bubble gum or cotton candy. She’s always giving me hell about my makeup, or the lack thereof. She thinks I should d
ye my long dark hair blonde. If she had her way, I’d lose my jeans and sweaters and I’d wear skirts and low cut tops an awful lot more. We met in college, back when we were still teenagers and still very much alike. We used to misbehave together on a daily basis, getting ourselves into trouble with boys and with our workload until I met Andrew, a business major, and I buckled down. I think she’s spent the last eleven years trying to get her old friend back.
“What about this makes any sense?” She tosses a dog-eared paperback onto the table I’m trying to prepare for the other members of our book club, who will be arriving in less than half an hour. She nearly hits a bowl filled with assorted crackers and I scowl at her. Picking up the book, I set it to one side, rearranging the cheese plate.
“It’s a romance story. You know. Boy meets girl. Boy does something monumental to fuck up their relationship. They fight and go their separate ways. Boy works hard to regain her trust and her love, and they live happily ever after.”
“Real life isn’t like that. Well, apart from the boy doing something to fuck up the relationship. That’s actually pretty close to real life. But what kind of guy sells everything he owns to prove a point to his spoiled-ass rich bitch girlfriend? Gabriel’s Way was just too far-fetched. I wish I’d never read it.”
“Save it for book club,” I tell her. “If you start complaining about it now, you won’t have anything to complain about once the other girls get here.”
“Oh, I’ll still have plenty to complain about, trust me. That book was garbage. I don’t get why we even let Kika pick books anymore. They’re always so saccharine.”
“We’re a romance book club. These books are meant to whisk us away from our lives, to make us swoon and feel that flush of love for the first time again. What do you expect but saccharine?”
