These were not people I’d ever imagine myself comfortable with. Ignoring Ray and the woman’s stare, I fixed my eyes on Toby. His grey-blue eyes flashed a momentary expression of surprise before he lowered his head and blew out a heavy breath. I couldn’t understand how they could just sit around so unaffected. Didn’t they know about Mrs. Faye’s condition?
“Is this your girlfriend?” the woman asked, her raspy voice thick and smoky.
Ray eyed me with a dopey grin. “Not anymore, she ain’t.”
Confused by his comment, I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Shut up,” Toby snapped, as he rose from his chair and moved toward me. Our eyes locked, and my view of the room was blocked by his looming figure. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me backwards. I almost tripped over a case of Red Bull as he cornered me in the pantry alcove. Accosted by a thick smell of frying oil that permeated the area, my stomach rolled.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice low and edgy.
I was shocked at how he looked—bloodshot eyes, wrinkled clothes. It was obvious he hadn’t touched a shaving razor in days.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m doing what I do best—nothing.”
“Don’t you think you should be at the hospital?” I spoke loudly, not caring if the others heard me.
Toby cupped a hand over my mouth silencing me and shook his head, no. They didn’t know about his mother.
With a bearish grunt, he lowered his hand to my neck. His eyes dipped down to watch his hand’s movement over my body as he continued to drag a heavy palm down across my collarbone and then over the outer swell of my right breast. Despite everything, my body warmed under his touch. I had to close my eyes. I wanted to push his hand away, but I needed to bring him back to the hospital with me. This was the easiest way to get him to cooperate.
“Damn,” he murmured, an inflection of awe in his husky voice. When I finally opened my eyes, I could see how stirred up he was. Without another word, he pressed me backwards. The hard ridges of the pantry shelving dug into my back as he tugged a handful of my hair, forcing my head back and my face upwards. Holding me in place, his mouth closed over mine, and he kissed me hard.
His overgrown beard felt like gritty sandpaper on my face, but like magnets drawn forcefully together, my body was incapable of staying away from his. My response to his kiss was automatic.
“Yo, this ain’t no Commack Motor Inn,” Ray yelled, cackling.
As I pulled away from Toby, my face burned.
“Please, let’s get out of here.” I grabbed his hand and implored him to come with me. Willingly, he followed me as I led him outside to the back door of my car. Hoping he’d just assume I wanted to crawl into the back seat with him, I slid in first, moving over to make room for him. He bounded in after me, but as soon as he saw my father, he jerked to a stop.
Toby turned to me with an accusatory stare. “What the hell is this?”
From the front seat, my father commanded, “Shut the door and buckle up.” I sensed Toby realized this was not open for debate, but still I was surprised, as well as relieved, when he actually did as he was told.
As we got onto Sunrise Highway heading towards the hospital, it was obvious Toby was furious with me. I tried to hold his hand, but he shook me off. The entire trip he stared out the window, his whole body bristling with anger.
Dad dropped us off right at the hospital’s entrance and went to park the car. I squared off in front of Toby and took both his hands in mine.
“I know this is hard, but I’ll stay with you,” I whispered.
Without another word, Toby followed me up to the ICU. At the entrance to his mother’s room, he halted, and his face lost all color.
Two nurses were attending to Mrs. Faye, who was noticeably struggling to catch even shallow, little breaths. I could feel there wasn’t much time left.
Aunt Joan came forward and took Toby’s hand. “I think she’s been waiting for you,” she said and led him over to the bed.
Toby bowed his head and moaned, “Oh, God” before slumping down in the chair at Mrs. Faye’s bedside. Laying his head near his mother’s, he took her limp hand and pressed it to his face.
I moved behind him to lay a hand on his shoulder, a gentle reminder that he was not alone. Aunt Joan gave me a fleeting smile of gratitude.
Time ticked by. At some point, Toby’s shoulders wilted under my hand. With eyes closed, he appeared to have fallen asleep. He looked completely wiped out, and I felt a pang at the cruel twist of fate that was stealing his mother from him. I decided that despite my own sadness, I would try very hard to be strong for Toby. I would be his rock.
I had no idea how long it was, an hour, maybe less, when the monitor over Mrs. Faye’s bed flat lined. Toby’s head snapped up, and a nurse who’d been keeping watch stepped over and flicked off the electronic device to stop the droning noise. Because of Mrs. Faye’s DNR request, there would be no further medical attention. The nurse gave us a slight nod as if to acknowledge Mrs. Faye’s departure from our world. Toby’s face registered no emotion, but Aunt Joan bowed her head and began to cry.
I stood looking at Mrs. Faye’s now lifeless body and Toby’s blank expression. So shaken by my own sense of loss, I leaned weakly over Toby and hugged him from behind. His aunt shuffled closer and took one of his hands into her own. Holding him, I kissed his temple and whispered, “It’s going to be okay.” But my words were shaky at best. We remained motionless, all of us dazed in our grief, for several long moments.
Within my arms, Toby’s body began to shake violently. I held tight, rubbing his chest, and tried my best to calm him.
Suddenly he shook off his aunt’s hand and hunched forward, away from me. I fought to hold onto him, but he growled, “Let go,” and pushed my arms away.
“You made me watch her die. Are you happy now?”
The harsh words ripped a hole in my already fragile composure, and I began to cry as he left his mother’s bedside. I could only watch as he rushed the ICU entrance door in the main hallway. Shouldering the large windowed door open, it protested his force with a screech. Visitors in other ICU areas turned to stare. I caught sight of him clutching his stomach just before the door swung shut.
31. Toby
I threw open the door of the nearest bathroom, and it crashed against the tiled wall. My body was too heavy to keep upright. Feeling myself buckle, I gripped the metal handicap bar next to the toilet and dropped to my knees. Claudia came in and started to run water. Hiccupping through her tears, she pressed a wet paper towel to my face. My stomach rolled violently.
“Don’t!” I shoved her hand away. My body shook with spasms as I threw up, over and over, until I was completely empty.
I gulped air, all the time feeling as though someone was holding me underwater. This is what it must feel like to drown—lungs burning, struggling for air—an overpowering need to fight, kick, and get free. Pushing Claudia away, I managed to get back on my feet and took off blindly down the corridor.
Outside, I started to walk east, towards home. I didn’t actually want to go back there, but I was afraid that if I stopped moving, I would be unable to keep my head above the water.
Houses were dark, neighborhoods silent, when I finally slowed. Exhausted, I forced myself up the last step to the door of the place I’d always gone when I couldn’t go home—Ray’s. His car wasn’t out front, but I banged on the door anyway. After several minutes, a light came on, and Diane opened the door and stared at me.
“Cripes, Toby. You know Ray’s on late shift this week,” she carped, but I guess she saw how fucked up I looked. “What’s going on? You all right?”
“No,” I managed to get out before all the walls closed in on me. I bent over, gasping for air. Diane opened the door and helped me inside.
“What the hell happened?” she’d returned from Ray’s bedroom with the bottle of tequila he kept stashed there.
Opening a cabinet, she fished o
ut a glass and pushed a drink into my hand. I stared into the amber liquid and said, “Julia’s dead,” and tossed back the shot. The alcohol burned, but the fire was welcome. I had another.
I didn’t want to talk, but the tequila loosened my tongue. Once I started, I told Diane everything—the fight, the fall, and afterwards, the bone-chilling, deathly look on Julia’s face.
“She’s dead. And it’s my fault.” I groaned, mashing my forehead on the table.
Diane reached over and stroked my hair.
“No, it isn’t. Kids say shit that upsets their parents all the time. You couldn’t help that she couldn’t handle it.”
Wrestling a tremendous sense of guilt, I drank to shut it out. I don’t know what time it was when Diane led me back into her bedroom and made me lay down. My shirt was wet, and despite the warm weather, I shivered. I tried to take it off, but my arms were useless. The room suddenly began to rock. With a hand on my chest, Diane stilled me.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Just lie back.”
I was too wasted to do anything but comply. After she pulled off my shirt, she removed my sneakers. And then I must have started to bawl. The next thing I knew, she was lying next to me, hugging me and rubbing my back. I couldn’t seem to control myself. I pressed my face into her neck and closed my eyes.
“Don’t leave me,” I moaned, barely audible in my fucked-up state.
“Poor baby,” she murmured. Her fingers ran over the back of my head, smoothing out my hair as she kissed my forehead. I burrowed in tighter, afraid that if I didn’t keep touching her, I would disappear.
32. Claudia
“Claudia, let him be,” my father tried to reason with me.
I tugged on his sleeve to make him move.
“Please, Dad, we have to go after him.”
“Men deal with sadness in different ways,” he said.
I was sure this was not a man/woman way of dealing with sorrow. Toby didn’t deal with the grief, he simply cut out. I knew Dad would never do that. Even under pressure, Dad was always rock-solid. It was he who held me while I cried.
Dad drove home from the hospital slowly so I could keep a lookout for the familiar lone figure walking the streets. But we never found him.
I called April, and she and Dario came over to my house. Dario had located Toby via text. He was at Ray’s house. Like my dad, though, Dario opted for letting Toby be for the night. April put her arm around me and let me lean on her shoulder.
“I feel like I failed him. I fell apart,” I sobbed.
“You’re only human, mami. You cared about Mrs. Faye.”
“He was angry at me for making him go back to the hospital.”
“You did the right thing, chica. He may not see that now, but eventually he will.” April squeezed my shoulders.
The next day, Dad watched me as I pushed my dinner around on the dish. I’d cried all night and most of the day. He’d come in to sit with me for an hour and rubbed my back like he used to do when I was younger.
“Your financial aid package came in the mail yesterday,” he said. I knew he was trying to lift my spirits. “Everything seems to be in order.”
Any other time, the way he simply relayed the message, without taking a stance, would’ve made me happy. Right now, USC seemed so unimportant. All I could think of was that Mrs. Faye was gone. Really gone. In all the time I’d worked for her, it never occurred to me that she might actually die. I had chosen not to believe it.
I tried hard to refocus my thoughts of her. I wanted to remember the deep blue eyes that crinkled when she smiled and her soft, encouraging words as she reminded me that dreams were worth chasing. In such a short time, she had become a big part of my life, a bright spot as I worked through my problems with my father. I remembered how happy she looked when she found out Toby and I were dating. I knew, too, that she was part of the reason I’d fallen in love with Toby. I had fallen in love with both of them—being around them, watching the two of them together. Mrs. Faye had let me in—she’d made me feel at home and part of her family.
It was difficult to imagine it was over, that all I had left were a few months of memories, but it was Toby’s behavior that was truly inconceivable. I couldn’t get a grip on how he was acting. That he didn’t want to be with me made the loss of Mrs. Faye all that more awful. In my experience, death brought people together, not pushed them apart. Nothing about his reaction made any sense.
I waited all day for Toby to call me. After I’d finished helping Dad with the dinner dishes that night, I realized he probably wasn’t going to. And I simple couldn’t wait any longer. I was going to Ray’s to get him, whether he liked it or not. We needed to be together to get through this.
“I’ll drive you,” Dad said, when I told him what I was going to do.
I smiled tightly at him. “Thank you for offering, but I need to go by myself.”
“Claudia, I don’t want you driving around with this Van Sloot kid on the loose.”
“I’ll be extremely careful.”
He stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ll be alright. An unmarked has been posted in that area.”
Making me promise I would go ‘there and back with absolutely no detours,’ he let me go.
It was dusk when I rounded the corner near Ray’s house. There was no sign of the Jeep out front, just Ray’s mother, sitting on the front stoop smoking a cigarette. She was wearing only a short, black silky robe with her bare legs extended out in front of her. I got out of the car and approached her.
Up close, I could see she was almost attractive if it weren’t for the bad skin and wiry hair. She looked tired and her makeup slept in. Not that she seemed to care.
Though I was leery of Ray and his family, I needed to know where Toby was.
“Hi. I’m looking for Toby. Do you know where he is?”
She nodded. I watched her pick at her teeth with a long pinkie nail. “That’s a shame about his mother. Poor guy’s a mess. Spent the night. Ray had to work the night shift, but I stayed with him.”
I didn’t sense any malice, but her words irked me. Toby had chosen to come here—to her—instead of letting me take care of him. The knowledge cut me.
“Do you know where he is?” I repeated, less patiently.
She tightened the sash on her robe and nodded. “Yeah, Ray and him went back to his mother’s house.”
33. Toby
Ray found me in the bathtub when he came in from work. I had slithered into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and, too drained to remove my jeans, I crawled into the tub and let the hot spray soak me. Wearing his 7-Eleven work shirt, Ray smelled of coffee and grilled hot dogs as he helped me to my feet and moved me to his bed where I’d slept most of the day away.
Later, sobered up, I drove home. Ray followed me back, making sure I got there without incident before going on a food excursion.
I was sick to my stomach, reeling from the after-effects of last night’s tequila binge, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to sit inside the empty house. I went out to the back deck instead.
I had awoken with slits for eyes that morning. My head was banging, and Diane was sleeping next to me in her bed. Her hair was in disarray around her face, and she was wearing nothing more than a tee shirt and panties. My own jeans were down low around my hips as if I’d either tried to get them off, or back on, and had lost interest in doing either. Diane’s hand lay over my bare stomach, not far from my unzipped fly, and I recalled the awful dead feeling I had inside me. Last night, it had been so horrible, I’d clung to her just to feel alive. It was the first time I had ever been too drunk to remember what I’d done, or if I’d even been fucking laid.
I used my cell twice before I shut it down. I had texted a stock guy at work about Julia’s death and asked him to relay it to Abe. I then answered a call from Joan, who cried into the phone that she’d been worried about me.
“Come stay with me for a few days,” she begged.
“I’m fi
ne,” I tried to reassure her, though it was a lie.
She reminded me we had to make funeral arrangements, and I promised to call her back the next day to talk about it.
Ray returned with sandwiches and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Let’s make a toast to moms,” he said opening the bottle.
Yeah, I killed mine and screwed yours. Salute!
“Let's not.”
I swiped the bottle from him and cracked the seal. I was afraid if I didn’t keep myself mellowed, I would grab something, twist it, tear it apart, decimate it—and really, nothing deserved the punishment I so desperately wanted to give. Except maybe Dev. About to take a mouthful, the sweet bite of liquor hit my nose. My stomach lurched with a sickening reminder of last night.
I pushed the bottle away and lit another cigarette. Letting my head rest against the chair back, I blew out a ring of smoke. My family was gone. It didn’t seem real. I spiraled further under the weight of the truth. I was alone.
I didn’t even have Claudia anymore. Being with her had always been a pipe dream. It’d been a fluke that I’d managed to get her in the first place. Even if she had wanted to stay with me, once she found out what I’d done, she would wish we were burying me instead of Julia.
As I stared up at the night sky, I briefly considered what was next. Before Julia got sick, I had wanted to enlist in the Marine Corp. Now there was nothing stopping me. I welcomed the thought of being pushed to my physical limit. Let them beat the shit out me. I wanted it. I deserved it. Maybe they’d send me overseas where I could lose myself in someone else’s fight.
34. Claudia
There were three cars in the driveway: Mrs. Faye’s little compact, Toby’s Jeep, and Ray’s white sedan. The house was dark. So he wouldn’t worry, I texted my father about the change in plans.
Saving Toby Page 23
