I start to trail off. But Sylvie doesn’t let me off the hook. She pushes me onward in that silent way she has. Listening longer and with more sincerity than anyone I have ever known. And pretty soon, I’m telling her how my dad treated my mom. How he only ever showed up during her episodes. How he only ever calls to tell me how badly I’ve fucked things up.
“I actually like the family business. I want this legacy,” I tell her. “I’ve got the Calson drive just like my grandfather. But…I’ve also got the Calson mean streak. The anger. Just like my dad…”
This time I do trail off, but like an empath, Sylvie picks up on the thing I haven’t said.
“Is that why you are having so much trouble right now?” she asks. “Why you get hit with demons whenever you try to leave the apartment? Because you are afraid you will become your father as soon as you step out the door?”
I let out a long breath. “I think I already know what you should major in when you get to college: psychology.” It sounds like I am making a joke, but I’m dead serious.
“Holt, you’re not going to turn into your father,” she says ignoring my attempt to change the subject. “You are much too kind. Look at what you’ve done for me! You are the kindest boy I have ever met.”
I don’t bother to correct her. It is not in my best interest for her to know my so-called kindness is specific to her and goal-driven. She has no idea that as of the day she agreed to move in with me, she’s at the center of everything I do. That if not for her, there would be at least a hundred people outside my bedroom door right now, including five or more girls vying for the honor to give me some sexual relief from my “demons.” That nobody and no one can do what she can. Calm my mind. Satisfy my hunger. Give me that warm feeling inside after a lifetime of cold.
No, I don’t regret what I did to keep her. Not for one minute. Her parents don’t appreciate her. Don’t need her the way I do. Not even close.
We spend all weekend in bed. Talking, laughing, and fucking whenever the mood strikes. So we fuck a lot. I lose count of how often the kisses turn into something that has me reaching for my stash of nightstand condoms. Truth is, I am way more interested in eating her out three times a day than I am in eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
For those reasons and more, I’m like a dog left alone at the house when Sylvie leaves for work the following Monday. On Tuesday, I try to surprise her at work for a surprise lunch date. But I don’t make it. A choking sensation stops me cold when I push the elevator button. And by the time the old-fashioned Otis appears behind the brass scissor gate, my limbs have started to shake, forcing me to turn back and take refuge inside the apartment.
However, even as I pant inside my front room and knock back half a bottle of Jack to calm myself down, I note the attempt as the milestone it is. I haven’t made it all the way to the elevator since May when this affliction first took over.
I’m getting better. For her. And she’s the reason I push myself a little further every day.
After another month, I’m able to make it all the way to the downstairs door. Two more weeks after that, Javon and I are at the Union Station bus stop to greet Sylvie when she climbs off the shuttle.
“Hey, my friend,” she says, a happy and surprised lilt in her voice as she comes to stand in front of me.
Her greeting makes my dull, leaden limbs and the crushing, panicky feeling in my chest worth it. Her smile makes me feel like I can do anything, go anywhere so long as she’s by my side.
But as we walk back to my place, it’s not long before I notice Sylvie looks even more uncomfortable than me. We are smack in the middle of the dog days of August and it is hot as hell. But she is hunched beneath my arm like we are out for a stroll in mid-December and she forgot her coat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“People are staring,” she answers quietly. “They’re wondering why a guy like you is with a girl like me.”
I look around and, sure enough, the people walking by are all but breaking their necks to get a better look at us as they pass.
I barely even noticed. When you’re the richest kid in a school of rich kids, you get used to being stared at. But to Sylvie I say, “Yeah, they’re wondering how a guy like me landed a girl as beautiful as you.”
She finally looks at me, her face scrunched up in an expression of such adorable skepticism that I stop and pull her into my arms. “I love you,” I tell her.
Several beats pass before she replies, “I love you, too.”
She loves me, too.
She loves me, too.
I kiss her. Right there on the sidewalk. And guess what? The kiss is so good, my body lightens. And as for the pinpricks and the feeling that the world is trying to rip me apart for daring to step outdoors…they vanish. All that shit just—poof! —disappears, right along with our dysfunctional parents and those assholes on the sidewalk who don’t understand what we are or how we came to be.
They don’t matter. Our parents don’t matter. Nothing matters…but us.
Which is why that night over dinner when Sylvie asks me what I want for my birthday, I say, “You.”
“Me? You already have me!” she answers with a laugh. “And I even asked for a vacation day so I can stay home with you.”
I like the way she says “home” instead of “here.” It’s another milestone in our relationship. Which is why I decide to throw caution to the wind and push us both past another milestone. “No, I mean you,” I answer. “I want you. Forever.”
“Forever,” Sylvie repeats.
She sounds confused, so I set down my beer and clear things up for her. “Sylvie, I want you to marry me. Like, next week. On my birthday. I want us to go to the courthouse and get married.”
Her eyes widen, but only slightly. “Seriously, how high are you right now, Holt?” she asks with a little laugh.
But I don’t laugh. I don’t even smile. “Sylvie, listen. I want you to marry me. And you can say no, but you might as well say yes. Because I’m a Calson…”
“…and Calsons get what Calsons want,” she finishes quietly.
I don’t want to be a Calson. Not with her. But it’s the truth. I want Sylvie. I want to be with her more than anything I have ever wanted before. So, I stay silent and wait for her to realize what I already know.
That we will be together forever and I am never letting her go.
Sylvie’s expression shifts several times in the waiting silence, emotions flitting past as she considers my proposal. But in the end, she gets it. Reads the etched-in-steel writing on the wall of my steady gaze.
“Okay,” she says with a shy dip of her head. “We can marry if you truly want to.”
Yes, I truly do. For the first time this summer, I don’t feel like a fuck up. Her acceptance makes me feel good. Better. Normal. Sylvie is everything to me now. My everything. Even if she doesn’t fully accept it or understand why.
And I have never been happier. For a while, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been…until one week later when I wake in a hospital bed.
Chapter Nine
HOLT
I come to with a choked gasp. The inside of my mouth is a desert made of cotton sitting on top of a throat filled with sand. My head vibrates with a sawing, throbbing headache unlike any I have ever known. A few more seconds pass before I realize I am propped semi-upright. I have an IV in one hand and it’s resting next to a plastic bed rail.
At first, I think I must be in the hospital. But then I realize no, I’m still in the penthouse. The setup reminds me of something I once saw on a history program about King George VI of England. Towards the end of his life, he needed surgery but instead of having to go into a hospital, the hospital came to him. Same here. But instead of an OR in the dining room, someone has set up a simple staging area in my den, complete with a hospital bed and several machines beeping in the background.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” a chipper voice says, and a nurse appears in my line of sight.
&nbs
p; “Yeah, I’m awake,” I agree, my voice a cross between a croak and a wheeze. There’s a weird pressure in my stomach like I need to puke or shit and my body can’t decide which to go with.
I must look as green as I feel because the nurse sets a blue kidney-shaped plastic pan on my lap and tells me to use it if need to.
The way my stomach’s twisting, that could seriously be at any moment. Fuck, what happened? The last thing I remember is knocking back a fourth beer while trying to hide my anxiousness from Sylvie. And then Javon texting me to say Luca was on his way up with the stuff I’d asked for.
The thought of Sylvie sends a sharp wave of alarm through me. “Where’s Sylvie?” I ask the nurse.
“Sylvie?” the nurse answers. Her brow wrinkles with confusion.
“My girlfriend. Where is she?”
The nurse shakes her head. “I’m sorry but no one else was here except your guard when the doctor and I arrived. He’s the one who called us.”
I don’t understand and my head pounds with new confusion. “Where’s Sylvie?” I ask again. Then I command, “Get her. I need her.”
The nurse regards me warily then stammers, “Okay, Mr. Calson. You’ve been through a lot. Your father went to lunch with Dr. Milavoc but I’ve let them know you’re awake and they’re on their way back here.”
I know Milavoc. He’s a concierge doctor, the kind who makes house calls to those who can afford him. During the weeks after my mother’s death, he was in charge of monitoring me and declared me stable enough to attend Beaumont a few months later when all the press had died down. But I’m perplexed about the other person she says is on his way here.
“My father? Why is he here?” I ask.
Turns out the nurse doesn’t have a clue about the real Jack Calson because she shoots me a look that has “are you serious?” written all over it.
“Of course, your father is here! And he is very worried about you,” she answers. “He told me to contact him the moment you woke up.”
I blink hard at her and then ask, “Where is Sylvie? I need to see her.”
“I really don’t know,” she answers again, her voice taking on the strained quality of an adult speaking to an obstinate child. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Dr. Milavoc to explain your condit—oh! Here he is now with your father…”
The woman looks and sounds relieved when my father enters the room with Dr. Milavoc. If you didn’t already know who was who, you might assume the tall man with the barrel chest is the doctor because he’s the one doing all the talking. But you would be dead wrong. My father’s the one speaking to the doctor in the same patronizing boom he uses on junior execs in the Arkansas offices.
Still, the doctor is so intent on what Jack is saying, he doesn’t seem to notice me sitting up in the bed until the nurse clears her throat and says, “Doctor Milavoc, your patient was hoping to discuss his situation…”
“You’re awake, good!” the doctor says, rushing forward. He takes the chart from the nurse and asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit about to vomit,” I answer truthfully. “What happened to me?”
“You don’t remember?” he asks, his expression carefully neutral. Same as it was when he asked the questions that cleared me for boarding school. In the past few days, how often have you felt depressed or hopeless? Any bad thoughts? How about your sleep?
But this time, I respond to his questions more truthfully than I did when I felt I had to prove I wasn’t crazy like my mother. “No, I don’t remember,” I admit. “But I’m guessing I must have OD’d or something.”
Milavoc nods, his expression somber. “Yes, that is correct. You were completely non-responsive when the EMTs arrived. They managed to revive you, and once they determined you had been unduly affected by a combination of opioids and alcohol, I was brought in to pump your stomach and administer an intravenous course of naloxone to reverse the effects. Given all you’ve been through, it is not surprising your body is responding this way. But I promise you will be more or less back to normal in a day or two. Well, at least physically...”
He glances over his shoulder at my father as if looking for a sign. But my father continues to hang back with his arms folded over his barrel chest, looking at me with a disappointed gaze.
Hell…I know he’s thinking about my mother. How bad she got toward the end. But that’s not what happened here. Which is why I address him more than the doctor when I say, “It was an accident.”
I’m not lying. I still can’t remember what happened after Luca got here, but I am the happiest I have ever been. And I would never do anything to fuck up what I have with Sylvie. At least not intentionally. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. It was an accident,” I say again, my voice strong with certainty.
The doctor nods like he believes me, which is good. But fuck…Sylvie must have been here when everything went down. And that is not good. Not at all. As worried as she gets about things, she must be losing her mind right now.
“Sylvie,” I mumble. “I’ve got to find her.”
The machines and the nurse protest as I slowly begin to leave the bed. “Mr. Calson, please! You are in no condition to be up and about just yet,” Dr. Milavoc says as he and the nurse push against my chest. “You’ve got an IV and several monitors attached to you, not to mention a catheter. You must stay in the bed for now.”
“No, I’ve got to find Sylvie!” I shove the doctor so hard he stumbles into my father. Then I roar, “Let me out of here!”
Turns out, it is not easy to exit a bed when you are under the care of a private doctor. Eventually I stop fighting, mostly thanks to a sedative-filled needle the doctor jabs me with at my father’s command. The next time I open my eyes, I’m in restraints.
What follows is a week of assessments during which my father decides I won’t be starting at the New York office the following Monday after all. Instead, I’ll be put in the care of a private addiction specialist, who will oversee my rehabilitation here in the penthouse, where no one will see me. And after 90 days, I might earn back the privilege of following my father’s original plan that I start work under him at Cal-Mart’s Arkansas headquarters.
Over the course of the week, I don’t calm down so much as pretend I have calmed down. I agree to everything my father decrees and arrangements are made. They give me a new phone, claiming they couldn’t find the old one.
“I bet money that gal took it,” my father says. “Javon said she left you here to die. I doubt she’d think twice about stealing your phone on the way out.”
He’s baiting me. My heart tugs against his words, but I clench my teeth hard to keep from defending Sylvie. I need my father to think I believe the lies he had to have paid Javon to tell me about her. Need him to believe I’m back in line so he’ll leave me in the care of others just like he did to Mom.
But as soon as I am alone in the bathroom with my new smartphone, I dial the number for the Blackberry I gave Sylvie. It goes straight to voicemail but I leave a message anyway. I desperately need to talk to her, even more than I need to breathe.
“Sylvie, its Holt. I’m sorry for scaring you. But babe, I’m fine now. Call me back.” I pause before adding a very un-Calson-like, “Please. I need to hear from you. So please call me.”
After making the clandestine call, I return to my bed in the den and continue to behave like an upstanding young scion who deeply regrets having fucked up.
Eventually, the performance takes. Dad leaves four days into my assessment with a sharp order for me to get my goddamn shit together. Two days after that, Milavoc decides he and the nurse can leave me in the care of the addiction specialist scheduled to arrive later that afternoon.
I am so grateful for all they have done for me that I impulsively decide to go down in the elevator with them. And instead of breaking into a cold sweat and shaking like I want to, I steel myself and ask the doctor about my chances of getting better halfway through the ride.
Milavoc is still repl
ying as we step off the elevator. I tell Javon to remain at his post because I’m going to walk my medical team to their cars parked in a nearby lot. Javon nods and I pretend not to feel his suspicious stare on my back as I exit the building, all the while listening to Milavoc’s stories about patients like me who were able to overcome addiction and depression and get a new lease on life.
I ask Milavoc so many follow up questions that I end up apologizing by the time we reach his Audi.
“No, believe me…I wish half my patients were as interested in their futures as you are. But you are young and you have your whole life ahead of you, Holt. I know you will be fine.”
“I hope so,” I answer, casting my eyes to the side in a way I can only hope comes off as abashed, since I wouldn’t even know the meaning of that word if I hadn’t come across it during those months of SAT prep.
And maybe it works…because both Milavoc and the nurse pat me on the arm and tell me everything is going to fall into place before they get into his car. I thank them and wave as they drive away…
Then I walk in the opposite direction of my skyscraper apartment until I find a liquor store. And from there, I make my way to Union Station where I get on the first 950 that shows up.
I’m more than halfway through the bottle by the time I make it into the back of a cab idling outside Union Station in Hartford.
“Where we going today, brother?” the driver asks. He has a heavy Jamaican accent, like Sylvie, but it is not nearly as musical or compelling. He eyes me with obvious suspicion through the rearview mirror. Probably because I’m hunched over in his back seat with a bottle of Grey Goose, trying not to lose it as I pull that first paystub Sylvie left on my desk out of my sweatpants pocket with a tremoring hand. “Take me to this address,” I tell him. Voice slurred with the Goose that is currently kicking my empty stomach’s ass.
He takes the stub, squints at it, and eyes me in the mirror some more. “This be in Blue Hills. What business you be having there?”
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