With a trembling hand, I filled a glass with water and quenched the burning tightness in my throat. I grabbed a wad of tissues from the colossal bathroom and stumbled back to the living room, swiping tears and fears from my cheeks. My stomach growled. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything today save for banana bread and coffee, but I wasn’t about to show my messy cry-cry face to the hotel lobby. Resigned, I opened a five-dollar bag of mixed nuts from the snack drawer.
I took a shuddery breath and set my shoulders. Okay. So I had my fears and baggage. But there was still something going on with Samuel—it wasn’t my imagination.
A sudden slam made me jump. I pressed a hand to my fluttering heart and listened. Another slam, from the hallway.
Samuel?
Sure enough, he was outside his hotel room, fists digging into the solid door as if he were trying to push them through a wall of butter. He was a sweaty mess, hair plastered to his forehead, shirt clinging to his back. He favored his left foot and I assumed, given the telltale intensity of his run, he’d blistered it. Frustrated, he banged the door again.
I cleared my throat.
He whirled around. Cold sky eyes skittered over my face, then landed firmly on my neckline. “I locked myself out of my room,” he said flatly.
I tugged up the vee of my sleep shirt. “Do you want me to—”
“No. I’ll go to the front desk.”
I shuffled my feet, then decidedly took a step forward. He held up reddened hands, a silent request for me to stay where I was.
I tried again. “Samuel, about tonight. I think we should talk—”
He laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “Firecracker, the last thing I want to do tonight is talk. You’d better go back to your room.”
“But, Sam—”
“Go the fuck back to your room, Aspen Kaye!” He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed deeply. “Please. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I nodded and backed into my room, my eyes not leaving his contorted face until I’d closed the door. I pressed my cheek against the cool wood and sighed, the feelings of New York flooding my veins.
At least he’d returned, thank God.
After some minutes, I noticed my chirping phone, telling me I’d missed two calls.
They were both from Hector. I stared wistfully at his name. An overwhelming urge to call him hit me and, even though it was after midnight in Lyons, my fingertip still hovered over the send button. It drifted to my contact list and found another name: Danita.
I texted her, asking her to call me when she woke. Two minutes later, my phone rang.
“Hey, Danita.”
A gruff male spoke, instead. “Sorry, just me.”
“Hi, Angel. Where’s Dani?”
The rustle of what I assumed was a potato chip bag answered my question. “Sorry, Kaye-bear. She and Molly are having a slumber party—can you believe it? Some Welcome Home thing for Molly’s step-SILF. Either Dani has a secret thing for chicks or she didn’t get enough girl love in high school. She accidentally left her phone behind.”
“SILF?”
“Yeah, Sister-I’d-Like-to—”
“Gotcha. Don’t ever say that around Danita. Or anyone, for that matter.”
“So what’s up, manita?”
I sniffled into the receiver, feeling like a complete idiot. “I’m just a little homesick, I guess.”
“On your first night out there?”
“Yeah, no. I don’t know. Everything is just…off. These people, this place. Even Samuel.”
Angel’s jock-boy tone sobered. “What do you mean, Samuel’s ‘off’? Describe ‘off.’”
I paused, weighing what I could and couldn’t say. “He’s, well…ugh, this is embarrassing. I went frigid on him because he’s being a big-mouthed horn-dog. Kind of like how you were in high school, no offense. Which is totally normal for some guys, but, Angel—this is Samuel. Since when has Sofia’s well-mannered son ever said ‘fuck the paparazzi’ and grabbed someone’s tail in front of a hundred witnesses?” I waited on tenterhooks for Angel to speak.
“Uh, yeah. Wow, Kaye,” he hemmed and hawed. “Look, my advice is to forget blowing off steam with Dani and go to the man himself. He’s probably just all jacked up from getting you back. Hombre seriously loves you, you know? Tell him his gropey hands and naughty words are freaking you out, and you want to know why he’s acting that way. That’s what works for Dani and me. Then, if he’s still being a horn-dog, you come talk to me, little sister, and I’ll kick the piss out of him. ¿Comprendes?”
Warmth for the man who’d been a big brother to me circled me like a long-distance hug. The tension in my neck and shoulders eased, and I began to feel like myself again.
“I’ll talk to him as soon as I can.”
“Hey, Kaye? Do me a favor and keep this conversation on the DL with Danita, okay? She’s already this close to flying down there, chopping off Samuel’s manly parts and feeding them to the sharks at Sea World. Dani means well, but sometimes she needs to chillax.”
“Chillax? Seriously, Angel?”
Before I switched off the bedside lamp, I tossed my old-school day planner on the nightstand. A folded piece of paper slipped from the back pages—the photocopy I’d hidden away and forgotten. It was that wretched good-bye note from Samuel.
My fingertip traced the letters, seeing the hard press of a pen, the mental stress in each slant. The word choice was a succinct arrow to the heart. Meant to injure, to distance.
Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…
Jaime had been right with her whole Occam’s razor spiel. Dang it, I hadn’t wanted to believe that Samuel had written the note, so I’d grasped at frayed strings, desperate to wrap the blame for his final good-bye around someone else’s shoulders. But instead of despair, I felt clarity. Peace, even, because now I saw the truth.
Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…
I considered not only what Samuel had written in the note, but how he’d written, when he’d written. The how was with a heavy, stressed pen. The when was sometime after going ballistic and then running up and down the streets of the East Village.
Go home to Colorado. I don’t want to see you again. The roots between us are dead, we are dead…
Samuel had a mental illness, and it wasn’t depression. Tonight I’d briefly considered that he was doing coke again, and I still wasn’t ruling it out. But according to the articles I’d read on cocaine use, highs only lasted roughly half an hour, usually shorter. Unless he was lying about being clean and snorted a line whenever I turned my back, drugs didn’t explain his prolonged agitated state and strange eyes. But I’d seen this before, hadn’t I? That night in New York…
“Go home to Colorado, and don’t you ever come back here again, Aspen Kaye. I fucking mean it. You think this is a joke?”
It was there in his bitter words. In the note. In the backpack.
It was there, that keep-out sign on the tree house, passed from his mother…to him…to me.
I’d forgiven him. But I couldn’t ignore him, not anymore, or I would lose him completely. And knowing what I now did about his mother’s own good-bye letter, tucked away in his kindergarten backpack just before she’d tumbled to her death, there was no room for a blind eye. This was too vital. I turned out the light, Samuel’s long-ago words resonating through my dreams.
“Go home to Colorado, and don’t you ever come back here again, Aspen Kaye. I fucking mean it. You think this is a joke?”
And when daylight came, I would rise to face the last Other.
Chapter 7
Freeflying
An expansion of skydiving,
freeflyers experiment with different dive positions
to increase speed and thrill factor.
Freeflyers will find themselves in mortal danger
if they do not transition back to a traditional
dive po
sition before deploying their canopy.
Hydraulic Level Five [working title]
Draft 1.28
© Samuel Caulfield Cabral & Aspen Kaye Trilby
28. Skygods
WE TRY TO WATCH FOR THE SLIP.
It sidles up—a warship creeching unaware over planks—and bombards our sides, all hands and fire back plastic-coated pills till we sink that mother in murky silt graveyards of fishbones and rusted remnants of those other warships sunk by pills. Sometimes we don’t see the slip until it slips into us and we fall down down down to the sea floor where gravity squashes our sorry asses. There is no air. There is no lung. There is no word in the place where fishbones and warships lie. Sediment crusts for a thousand years over our limbs and encases us in a deep cave where only blind fish and gilled symbiotic creatures swim. So deep, so deep. Othertimes we slip and fall up up up to wide skies. Weightless, tumbling, pushing those words so high, so high. Cold virgin air burns off our gills and didn’t we soar? Didn’t we twine feathered limbs together like skygods? My God, Firecracker, didn’t we fly?
We found the ground when we heard sine waves crawl across Planet Bluegrass, twanged from the guitar strings of an ermine Festivarian court. They wrapped diamonds around your finger and chained you to me. You heard it again when you pressed your ear against my chest. Take me back to my room, you said, and make me yours. Lyons misted our faces as you stumbled behind me to our second-story haven, your hands on my waist.
When will you ask me, Caulfield? I’ve loved you my whole life.
When can I have you, Aspen?
When you ask me. I want to know it’s for my whole life.
But you already know I belong to you.
I want to be your wife, you said. My fingers pushed the denim off your hips and crawled like those sine waves over your skin until they found the places that made you sing. I’ll marry you in April, you cried. April is a good month, I whispered. It’s your month, snowless and green, waxy leaves and roots and life. I’ll make you my wife in April. Now tie me to the dirt, Firecracker, before I slip from this throne of yours.
I took you on an old bed.
I kissed your diamond ring and swore I belong. I belong. I belong. I belong to you. You braided your hair so I could unbraid it. I buried myself in the cape of your body and your blood stained the white sheets red as the rubies you scattered over my thighs. Then you placed me on your throne and made me a king.
And still, I slipped.
Sleep came fitfully that night, followed by a barrage of dreams. Samuel’s greedy hands pawed at the brunette in New York. Wild eyes. Harsh words. Bits of notepaper fluttered over my shoulders, through my fingers amid fine dustings of white powder. Nicodemus, walking ten steps ahead, his back forever in front of me, plowing through snowdrifts. Yet I followed with my keyhole eyes. And then I was face-to-face with the last Other. I was so close, I only saw its leathery pores and crackled skin, smelled its putrid breath. But if I took a step back.
And another step.
And another.
A sob tore through my throat and I awoke. My entire body trembled, clammy with sweat as I clutched at my pillow, a frightened child in the throes of a nightmare. I saw the last Other. Not just the beast’s teeth, or clawed fingers, or porous skin. I saw the thing in its entirety, and it made me gasp at how I’d been so detrimentally blind.
Oh my God. I knew what was happening to Samuel.
My hand fumbled for the lamp switch. Light poured into the hotel room and drove back the last shadows of my dream. The red glow of the alarm clock said it was five fifteen: two hours before we had to leave for Burbank to tape the Helen Boudreaux Show. Wrapping myself in a hotel robe, I grabbed my phone from its charging dock. My brain raced. Before I could forget, I typed my observations through blurred eyes:
History of drug use. Memory loss. Tragic past. Rigid schedule. Trouble sleeping. Anxiety. Sadness. Loneliness. Perfectionist. Creative genius. Secrets. Fear of being like his mother. Mentally ill parents.
And now:
Excessive sexual energy. Wild eyes. Uncharacteristically rash.
My fingers brushed over the stark words etched on the screen. I’d been too close to him. As I gingerly backed away from those demons, I realized they made up a single, snarling creature. The same being that nearly killed Nicodemus. The same creature that plagued the man I loved. The last Other.
At the end of my list I typed a single phrase:
Bipolar disorder?
The green room behind the soundstage was fragrant with coffee and muffins early Saturday morning. The Helen Boudreaux Show was filming multiple episodes to air the following week while Helen recorded the voice for a mouse or bug or toy—I wasn’t sure which—in an animated flick. Samuel and Helen were shooting the breeze about it while a studio audience roared with laughter. I watched him on the mounted TV, my fists clenched, just waiting for his next cringe-inducing comment. To my right, Justin chatted up a familiar, thirty-something character actor while he browsed on his phone. To my left, Caroline was also on the edge of her seat while Samuel switched from topic to topic so quickly that neither of us had time to process before the next “but I don’t want to talk about blah blah blah” spiel began. If Samuel bashed the Water Sirens movie one more time, Caroline would fly onto the stage, rip the wireless microphone from his collar, and say something like, “What Mr. Cabral means by ‘schizo scene jumps’ is the movie is a piece of film-making art and you should all see it in November.”
“He’s all over the place,” Caroline grumbled. “We should have canceled.”
“You think?” I snipped. I’d suggested as much to her after Samuel gave us a grunted greeting in the Roosevelt’s lobby then prattled away while a bewildered Justin nodded, trying to keep up with his frenetic stories. “What did you think would happen when you overloaded his schedule, Caroline? He warned you he was stressed out.”
She froze, then gave me an odd look. A chill ran through me, and I wondered if this was exactly what she thought would happen.
To someone who wasn’t looking, Samuel Cabral was playful, witty, even a touch arrogant. He seemed to be perfectly at home giving an interview in front of a studio audience. But I was looking. I saw the way he bounced his knee and tugged his hair, brimming with nervous energy. The way his eyes flicked from Helen, to the camera operators, to the audience, then back to Helen. The way he impatiently twisted the arms of his chair.
“So you had a reader who actually named their daughter Cinsere?” Helen asked.
“Yes. I even asked her to spell it, because I thought I hadn’t heard her correctly. So she said proudly, ‘C–I–N–S–E–R–E.’” Bounce bounce bounce. Hair tug. “She asked me to sign the front cover ‘To Cinsere. Sincerely, Samuel Cabral.’ I ended up writing something like ‘May this bring you hours of happy reading,’ because I couldn’t make myself torment the poor child any further. The mother was utterly clueless.”
Caroline’s posh head dropped into her hand. “Cardinal rule: never bash fans, especially on national talk shows.”
“We can still cancel the book signing.” I sighed.
“No. We’ll need it now for damage control. Make sure you get a shot of Samuel kissing a baby and float it on the Internet. See if anyone bites.”
“Speaking of the Internet,” Justin cut in, “check it out.” He held out his smartphone so we could see the screen. Just as I’d feared, it was one of the photog’s pictures from the airport last night. Samuel’s hand rested on my rear, and from the camera angle, it looked like he was leering down my blouse. Or maybe he actually was leering down my blouse. Above the picture was a blurb: Siren Writer Lures Back Neelie. Seriously, even Juicy the Labrador could write a better headline.
“The picture and story is also on Hollywood Days,” Justin continued, “and they confirmed the rumors. You two hottie patotties kinda went guns-a-blazing at the ol’ kiss-and-greet. Very sincerely, of course.”
Caroline’s head sank even further into her hands, and
for a moment I thought she was blubbering, but she was only muttering, “I hate this job,” over and over. I actually felt bad for her until I realized that, after Labor Day weekend, Caroline would be with her new author and it’d be my mess.
Samuel’s eccentric behavior continued through the afternoon. At the massive two-story bookstore in Santa Ana, the three of us hustled to prep for the signing. Caroline walked me through protocol, everything from the positioning of The Last Other cardboard cutouts to handling chatty fans. Samuel paced aisle after aisle of books, lost in his mind, oblivious to the stares and pointed fingers. I couldn’t tell if he was calming down or psyching up for a grueling five hours of signing his name ad infinitum.
“What do we do now?” I asked when lunch was eaten and Samuel settled behind a narrow table, stacks of The Last Other encroaching on his elbows. Already, a line of a hundred readers had queued, wrapping up the stairs and around the second-story railing.
“We multitask. Keep one eye on the signing table and one eye on your tablet. Try not to hover—it makes fans nervous and you don’t need anyone upchucking on Samuel. But don’t be so busy you fail to intervene when some crazed reader with thirty books and a blond wig asks Samuel to sign her breasts. It’s happened more than once. Word to the wise—the crazies will be up front. This isn’t Colorado—this is LA.”
I actually gulped. Samuel peered at me over his shoulder and hit me with a charming smile, which only made me more nervous. “You’ll be fine,” he mouthed. Then he turned that panty-dropping smile on a busty young thing in a blond wig and rock-climbing gear who’d camped outside the Barnes & Noble doors since three a.m., just to be first in line.
“Hey, Samuel, I’m Neelie,” she crooned.
Mother cliff-hucker, I was in a parallel universe.
Caroline was right. For the first hour, nixie after squealing nixie presented themselves in elaborate costumes. One person even dressed up like an Other, though he resembled Swamp Thing more than a demon. Still, it was pretty darned impressive. After the more enthusiastic crowd filed through, the line calmed down and we fell into a routine. Eventually, I was able to do some crash-course browsing about mental illness.
Skygods (Hydraulic #2) Page 15
