One Life

by A. J. Pine

  Zach sniffs, and I know he’s crying. “Yes. I do. Because he died, Zoe. He made a decision that cost him his life, and it’s going to cost us for the rest of ours. So yeah, he was stupid and reckless—and selfish. And I don’t know if I can forgive him for that. I don’t know if I can forgive him for what this has done to all of us, because it didn’t have to fucking happen.”

  I hold tight to the phone, but my fingers tremble. My whole body shakes. If Zach can’t forgive Wyatt for dying, how will he ever forgive me for not stopping Wyatt when I could have? Losing Wyatt broke us all, but if they find out the part I played, I’ll lose them too.

  “You have to forgive him, Zach. He didn’t want to leave us. You have to forgive him.”

  My pleas to Zach are selfish, and it tears me apart that half my begging is for him to forgive Wyatt, and half is searching for preemptive forgiveness for myself.

  “I can’t do it, Zoe. Not now. Not yet.”

  “But maybe someday? Don’t spend the rest of your life hating him. You love him too much to do that.”

  I listen to him take a few deep breaths before he speaks. “I know,” he says quietly. “I’ll always love him. But right now I need to hate him too. I need to hate him, Dad needs to work—and smoke the occasional joint—and Mom needs the lawsuit. She needs an answer to the why.”

  “Why?” I repeat. Only one word, but we both get the depth of the question, one neither of us can answer. Why does a couple struggle so hard to have children, endure infertility treatments and a difficult pregnancy to get the only two kids they thought they’d ever have—me and Zach—only to somehow be able to conceive on their own years later? Why were they gifted this crazy, uncontrollable joy of a boy only to have him taken away after eighteen short years?

  I let out a shaky breath, tasting a tear as it hits my lip. This is why I let my brother shoulder this burden without me. It’s shitty. God, I know it’s shitty. But I can’t make it through one conversation with him without totally losing it. What will happen if I go home, if I see Mom in the throes of trying to find answers enough to satisfy her devastation? Instead of making things better, I’ll give her one more thing to lose—her trust and faith in her daughter.

  So I let my brother, my twin who means the world to me, deal with what I can’t, hoping that one day he’ll forgive Wyatt for dying and me for not being there when either of them needed me.

  “But answers won’t change that he’s gone,” I say through the tears, trying to keep my voice at a respectable crack-of-dawn Sunday level. “Finding someone to blame won’t bring him back.”

  I listen to Zach’s ragged breaths. Listen to him try to do what I’m failing at right now—keeping it together.

  “If she doesn’t find someone else to blame, she’s going to blame herself, Z.”

  And that’s when I lose the ability to form words at all. It’s also when Spock walks out of my room. He doesn’t hesitate when he sees me, not for a second. In a flash of movement he is on the couch with me, and I’m somehow on his lap now, the blanket wrapped around us both. He reaches for my phone, and I hand it to him without another thought.

  “Hey,” he says quietly to my brother. “It’s Zach. I mean Spock.” A pause. “Yeah, I don’t think she can talk anymore right now.” Another pause. “Sure, man. She’ll call you later. Or I will. No problem. You’re welcome.”

  He must end the call after that, because I don’t hear anything else, and I don’t see anything but the skin of his chest where my face is buried, where I’m wracked with silent sobs.

  “Zoe.”

  I look up at him, my vision blurred, and he wipes the tears with his thumb, brushes my hair, now wet and matted to my cheek, off my face. I never wanted to lose it in front of him, for him to see me like this. This isn’t the girl he met ten months ago. I wonder now if she even exists anymore or if this is who I am now. Because if this is it, he won’t last a month with me, let alone all the way to the end of the summer and beyond. As good as Spock is, and I know he’s the best, would he even want the me I am now?

  “Zoe,” he says again, and I don’t answer. Instead I burrow back into his chest, letting his hand continue to work through my hair, to rub my back. I feel the callouses of his guitar-player fingers and want them to do more than just rub my back. I want those fingers, his hands—everywhere.

  I want to forget about Zach not sleeping last night, about Wyatt’s death, about trading my mother’s guilt for my own. I have visions of pictures of the construction site, pictures of Wyatt’s broken body, printouts of his cell phone records. How will any of us survive that? Wyatt trusted me, saw me as the voice of reason even if he didn’t agree with Mom and Dad. They never would have signed off on him doing something not only dangerous but also illegal. My parents put up with a lot when it came to Wyatt’s adventures, but not this. And I shouldn’t have either.

  I lift my head and not so gracefully wipe my nose with the collar of my T-shirt. Then I crush my mouth against his. He kisses me back at first but then pushes me gently away.

  “Talk to me, Zoe.”

  My only response is to kiss him again, and this time he pushes me back with more force.

  “Zoe, please. Let me in already. Let me help.”

  I maneuver myself from the cocoon I’m in and sit so I’m straddling him, my panties and his thin boxer briefs the only things between us. He hardens against me, and I plead.

  “Not yet,” I whisper, still trying to hold back when I’m already a tear-soaked mess. “I just need it all to go away,” I say. My lips fall to his, and he lets me kiss him this time, gentle and urgent all at the same time. “Please make it go away, Zach.”

  He breathes in a sharp breath. I don’t call him this, his name. And the intimacy of it tears away something inside of me, because I just used it to manipulate him. Because the only way to obliterate the guilt is this.

  He covers my mouth with his, and I take his initiation as acquiescence. Only a few more seconds of guilt remain as I sink into him. His tongue slides past my teeth, and I slide up his length, listen to him groan into my mouth. I work my hand between us, enter his briefs from the bottom and find him waiting inside.

  “Shit,” he breathes the word against me as I grip him from the top and slide down, then back up again. “Zoe.” The word is strained, but there’s an intensity to it that makes me pause, that forces me to look at him. His brows pinch together, and though I know he wants what I’m doing to him, I see nothing on his face but anguish. “We can’t,” he says, his voice stronger and more controlled. “Not like this.”

  Spock wraps his hand around my forearm, pulling it from him. And fury bubbles from my chest, anger he doesn’t deserve, but I have no one else to unleash it on except him.

  “Fuck you, Nolan,” I say, backing off of him and onto the hardwood floor. Doesn’t he see how much I need this? How he’s the only one to make it go away?

  “Zoe, don’t,” he pleads, his eyes so dark, the blackness inside me growing with each step I take toward my door.

  When I make it inside the frame, his eyes still hold mine in their stare, and I want so badly for him to stop me from putting this wall between us. I want him to say the bullshit words I won’t believe but need to hear anyway.

  It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Everything will be . . . okay.

  But he says nothing else, maybe because he knows the words are lies, and he’s above the bullshit of hiding from the truth. But right now that’s all I have—hiding.

  So I grab the half-unpacked FedEx box, shove all of the scattered articles of his I can find back inside, and set it outside my room along with his guitar.

  Then I close the door and count silently to ten.

  I hide. But no one comes to seek.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  When I hear Spock leave the apartment, I stop pretending to sleep. The only outlet I’ve ever had that has worked when I needed mental release is drawing. It has to work now, or I’m not going to make it through the day l
et alone the rest of the summer—or a trial.

  I sit on my bed with my sketchpad and close my eyes, playing back my mind’s eye version of Wyatt’s last visit to see me and Zach at school—just a few months ago. The craziness of it was the normalcy. There were no stunts, no big adventures other than taking him to a basketball game, for which Adam got us courtside seats. We ate at Yu’s, and Wyatt crashed on my couch rather than at Zach’s frat house.

  When he left he kissed me on the cheek.

  “Thanks,” he had said.

  “For what?” I asked, convinced the whole weekend he had to be bored off his ass.

  “It feels good to just be,” he said. “I forget how much I miss you guys until I’m here.”

  “Gee. Thanks,” I teased.

  He pretended to backhand me.

  “Whatever. I love you guys, but it’s easy to get caught up in the whole This is my life, and this is your life thing. I like getting to hang with you to reboot.”

  Reboot, I think. That’s what I need—a reboot. Power down and then power back up again. Maybe Wyatt will still be gone, but somehow I’ll know that I can get through it. If I can get something on the page, that will be a start. A sign. Proof that no matter what shit is still to come, I’ll make it through to the other side.

  “I miss you too,” I say to no one in particular. I think about my students, about kids like Taylor who let nothing get in the way, who have nothing but a love for art and an ability to create.

  And then I start to draw.

  * * *

  At four o’clock there’s a knock on my door. Other than sneaking out of my room for a quick bathroom break or two, I haven’t left my bed or my sketchpad. Only when I see how late it is do I realize I also haven’t eaten.

  “Come in,” I say, not sure what I’ll do if it’s him but crossing my fingers it is anyway.

  The door cracks open, revealing Dee’s artfully made-up face. No matter how many times I see her cherry-stained lips, I still get taken aback sometimes. She looks like she stepped out of the pages of an early-twentieth-century pinup magazine. The only anachronism would be her inked-up arms.

  “You’re kinda freakin’ me out, Blue. Only reason I knew you were still breathing was because I heard the toilet flush an hour ago.”

  She pushes the door wide and scans the room. Scattered across my bed and floor are pages from my sketchpad, all in various stages of a drawing that wasn’t quite right. Like giant snowflakes muddied by tire treads, my attempts at pencil drawing pepper the room.

  She steps over to my bed, her eyes falling to the pad propped on my knees.

  “Holy shit, girl. Who is that? He’s beautiful.”

  It wasn’t until I went back to hatching, the first technique I ever tried with pencil drawing, that I got the shading right.

  I smile up at her, my eyes welling with tears—the good kind, though. Not the grieving ones of this morning or the angry ones that followed. These are the tears that remember everything good about Wyatt when he was alive, the tears that miss him but have finally found a way to preserve him.

  “It’s my brother,” I tell her, and we both look at the portrait, Wyatt’s all-consuming smile, right up to the crinkled skin at the corners of his eyes; his wild, tousled hair sticking out from under a knit cap. This is who he was and now who he’ll always be, and I never want to forget it. “I want to create my own comic—starring him. I’m not sure of the story yet, but Dee, this is it. I haven’t been able to draw for almost two months now, nothing of my own anyway. This means I can do this. It means I’ll have something for the showcase, and it might be a way for me to reconnect with my family through sharing Wyatt’s love of adventure.”

  I know she has no idea what I’m talking about, but until she was standing there, I didn’t understand how much I needed to share what I’d finally accomplished with someone, even though the person I want to share it with isn’t here.

  She sits down on the side of the bed. “Sounds like it was a better day for you than others.”

  My eyes widen. Has she seen Spock? I’m too afraid to ask, and Dee must get this, because she continues.

  “I don’t know what that was all about this morning.” She pauses, and I can’t believe I never considered the possibility of her hearing everything this morning. “But I do know that beautiful, shaggy man of yours has been sitting on the balcony with that guitar, sometimes playing and sometimes scribbling on a pad of paper, for the past hour.”

  I drop the sketchpad and pencil, not responding to her with any words at all. Instead I take a quick glance down the length of my body—gray ribbed tank and yoga pants. Not my best look, and considering I haven’t showered or taken a peek in the mirror, I can only imagine the state I’m in.

  Fuck it. Nothing can be worse than how he saw me this morning, right? That has to have been my lowest, and things were only going to get better from here. I wasn’t sure how, but the proof for me was in the drawing. Now all I have to do is get that beautiful, shaggy man of mine to forgive me.

  I hop off the bed and stride straight through the door, past the living room, make a beeline for the kitchen and then to the sliding glass door.

  My breath catches, and I pause. He doesn’t see me yet, and though the door is open a crack, he doesn’t hear my approach. Because he’s playing and singing. I can’t make out the words, because he’s only singing loud enough for his own ears, but the music is what knocks the air out of me—slow and sweet and at times a little sad. The music he played with the band, even though he wrote it, was nothing like this. Pleasantville played loud and hard, their sound meant for venues bigger than they booked. But what Spock’s playing now is almost too intimate, like I shouldn’t be listening without him knowing.

  I start to withdraw. The balcony window is in the couch’s line of sight. I can watch him from there, wait till he’s done. But as soon as my right foot lifts to take its first step, his eyes flick up from where the pick meets the strings.

  He offers me a sad smile, one where his mouth says one thing but his eyes another. It doesn’t matter, because it’s enough to propel me forward and through the door. He rests the guitar against the railing, knocks the pad of paper from his lap, and drops the pick to ground. Then he looks at me, expectant, waiting. Ball’s in my court.

  “That was beautiful,” I tell him. “What you were playing? Is that your showcase piece?”

  He nods slowly, and his eyes narrow while anticipation weakens my knees.

  So I collapse onto his lap and throw my arms around his neck. He doesn’t reciprocate, but he doesn’t stop me.

  My forehead falls against his, and I feel him beneath me, breathing in deep. When he exhales, his warm breath brushes past my cheek. I’ve done nothing but shut him out, and I don’t pretend to deserve him still being here. But he is here, so I let myself hope.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I was awful. You’ve done nothing other than be exactly who and what I’ve needed. What I did this morning—there’s no excuse.” I skim my fingers along his hairline, caressing his face. His eyes close. “I was in a bad place,” I add. “I still am, but that doesn’t make the way I treated you acceptable in any way. Just please tell me I didn’t lose you today.”

  Spock looks at me again. He lets out a long, tired-sounding breath.

  I run my fingers through his hair, and he leans into the touch this time, but still no words. I can sense him fighting something inside himself, and I don’t want to push him, fearing the voice that tells him I’m too much to deal with right now will win out.

  But as my hands make their way to his face, my fingers tracing his unshaven jaw, finding his soft lower lip, he lets out a sigh, and his eyes lock on mine. One soft kiss on the tip of my finger, and hope floods my veins.

  “I love you,” I tell him, not giving a shit about the quiver in my voice. “It’s crazy and fast and at the shittiest time in my life to bring you into it, but I love you. I don’t blame you if you cut and run at this point, but I tho
ught I would just reiterate the whole loving-you thing in case you weren’t aware.”

  His expression softens, and even though the sad smile is gone, something in his eyes shifts, and a little bit of the fear subsides.

  He opens his mouth to speak, and I hold my breath, because this is it. Either he’s staying or going.

  “It’s not supposed to be this difficult this early. Is it?” he asks, and I shake my head. “I know whatever we’ve had since we met, we’ve had some fucking obstacles. Distance. My insistence on maintaining that distance. Shit you still don’t know about me and that I probably don’t know about you. This is supposed to be the time we figure all that out. I’m here now, Zoe. I’m all in. But you’re not . . .”

  “Yes, it’s difficult,” I interrupt. “And I know a lot of that is me. But it’s not early, right? Not really. You said it yourself. This has been brewing for a long time—since we met. And maybe I’m not getting everything right just yet, but I’m in love with you. That’s a start. Isn’t it? Tell me I got that part right, and we’ll figure out a way to make the rest work.”

  He lets out another long exhale and offers an expression I can’t read. So I wait, because I’ve done what I can to show him I’m all in too, as much as I can be right now.

  “Could you, maybe . . .” A grin starts to appear, and this one is 100 fucking percent real. ”. . . tell me how you feel about me again?”

  His hand finds my cheek, and his fingertips skim my hairline.

  I half sob, half laugh, then kiss him. And he’s kissing me back. He tastes like Spock, like home—like mine.

  “I love you, dammit.”

  He laughs when I say this and kisses me again.

  “I love you dammit too, Supergirl . . .”

  He pauses, and I know what’s coming next.

  “But,” I say. I knew he wouldn’t forget no matter how much I tried to throw off his train of thought. “That’s an I love you dammit, but.”

  He lets out a breath and kisses me once before he continues.

  “But,” he starts. “I can’t just be the guy who’s good for karaoke and dinner parties and sex.” He lets out a laugh. “Don’t get me wrong. I like all those things, especially the last one—but not when you’re using it all to avoid what’s really going on with you. I’ve already done the whole put-real-life-on-hold thing. This is it for me. And I know on top of everything else that’s going on, I’m throwing more at you. But here’s the thing—I can’t help you get past your brother’s death if you don’t let me in.”