Signs of Attraction

by Laura Brown

I clenched my own fists. It would be so easy to knock some sense into him. Show him what it was really like for me. Get out some of this pent-up aggression I had no escape for. A red haze threatened to overcome my vision, chanting that it would solve all my problems.

  I closed my eyes and released my fists. I was not my father. I was not my father. I was not my father. How easy it would have been. How wrong. I turned to the wall as the tears slid down my cheeks, and I pulled out my phone.

  Me: You don’t understand. You may think you do, but you don’t. Ever try to think of something, anything, and the answer isn’t quite there? So you think harder, search deeper, and grasp that answer from the depths of a fog? That’s my brain. Every. Damn. Day. Ask me what I ate? Fog. Have to solve a math equation? Fog. I’m not hiding behind anything. I’m in a fog. And it’s not clearing. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. And you want me to swim through that fog every damn day? For the rest of my life? What life is that?

  I clicked Send and rested my head on the wall.

  Reed: So the answer is to give up? Have you tried thinking without the pills? Have you tried other avenues of working through the fog? Counseling? It’s only 3 weeks since the attack. Is that long enough to give up? To really give up? And don’t answer, because you’ll just spout more bullshit.

  He moved to the door, a chasm of epic proportions growing between us. He didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Therefore I let the chasm grow, even as it killed me inside.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Reed

  MY HEART STOPPED, plain stopped, when I saw the colored pill bottle sitting in the trash. I no longer saw her trash can. I saw Dad’s drawer and the multiple bottles I found after his death. I saw the damn tree he plowed into. The casket . . .

  Every stable thought in my head shattered in a violent death. No longer did I have any ground to stand on, any purchase. This couldn’t be happening. Again. This couldn’t be fucking happening!

  I needed to know where this pill issue stemmed from. I released the door knob and turned to Carli. “If you don’t have your pills, what else would you use?”

  Carli’s mouth dropped open in shock, and damned if that didn’t help the ache in my chest some small bit. “Use for what?”

  Slowly, painfully, I signed, “Suicide.”

  “Nothing.”

  The answer was quick, clipped, as if she still hid something. After letting me, in she’d begun shutting me off. The irony caused me to laugh.

  Carli’s face screwed up tight. “Fuck you.” She turned on her heel, brown hair flapping over her shoulder. I grabbed her arm and held tight while my other hand secured my phone.

  Me: I’d gladly fuck you, but I don’t think either one of us wants that right now, except for an angry fuck. You’ve been abusing pills. I’m not leaving you alone.

  Carli yanked her arm until it broke free. “I’m not a kid.”

  Me: No, but you’re struggling. I’m not allowing something to happen to you. I love you too much to let you allow any more pain in your life.

  Carli: The pills weren’t pain. Love is pain.

  The first time she mentioned love to me and she coupled it with pain. This was a whole new direction I hadn’t seen. I didn’t think there was anything left in me to break, but she always managed to find more. Her eyes remained glued to the floor, and I took hold of her chin, forcing her head up until her eyes met mine. I saw pain there, the same pain I felt.

  “If fight love, then pain. Stop fighting.” God, had she been fighting me all this time, keeping the wedge between us? I wanted to engulf her in my arms, kiss her until she couldn’t deny either of our feelings. She turned to her phone before I could react.

  Carli: Family is love, right? Family did this to me. I don’t have the capacity for love or much else. Don’t you see? I’m beyond damaged. You should cut your losses while you can, find someone who can love you back. Find someone who still has a heart.

  Family was more than blood—family was also a choice. And regardless of the anger I still felt, at all the rips in the foundation, I still chose her for my family. She continued to decimate me, and I stuck.

  Family shared. Or they ended up headfirst into a tree. It was time I stopped steering us toward the damn tree. I stomped over to her nightstand, my hand grasping the half-full pill bottle from my pocket. I placed it next to the empty one, my gut lurching at the sight. A lineup of past and present. A lineup to prevent the future.

  I faced Carli. “Pills.” I gestured to her bottles. “Pills killed my father.” I broke into slow and full ASL, using the classifiers that set up the 3-D language. I motioned taking one pill, then another, then the whole damn bottle. Opened a car door, got inside. Made a point of not putting on my seat belt. Held my hands against the wheel. Set up the tree in the distance. Switched to far-away scale, the “three” hand shape representing the car heading closer and closer to the tree. I switched between close up and far away, mimed texting, until the car and tree collided. “Dead.”

  Carli gasped, and her hands flew to her mouth. But it wasn’t enough. My language and hers, both were needed to make sure she understood the full extent of what I was telling her. I picked up the notebook and her pen.

  I’m sorry I never explained enough about myself for you to understand this. My father died in a car accident, yes. After his death, Mom and I discovered he’d been abusing pills. We don’t know why; we can’t ask him. He was driving at midnight, texting me when he hit a tree.

  She blinked, her eyes threatening to overflow. She took the notebook from me.

  I’m so sorry. But I am not your father.

  Her chin jutted high and everything—everything—careened off the road. I picked up her empty bottle, held it level with my shoulder before dropping it into the trash. She continued to stare, face now void of emotions.

  “Fine, I give up.” I couldn’t go through this, not again. I took the other pill bottle and handed it to her. “Go ahead. Kill yourself.”

  She took a step back, hands raised. “No. I don’t want them.”

  I cocked an eyebrow.

  Her head tilted down as she pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket.

  Carli: OK, I do want them. It would stop the pain. Mine. Yours.

  My insides broke to such an extent I wasn’t sure the liquid dripping down my face wasn’t blood.

  Me: It would stop your pain, yes, assuming no afterlife. But my pain? No. HELL no. My pain began when my father died. Not while he struggled in silence. My pain intensified when I found his unfinished text. My pain turned downright suffocating when I watched his body lowered into the ground. My pain doesn’t end. You can end yours. But those pills don’t end mine.

  We headed for the tree—only she was in the driver’s seat.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Carli

  MY HANDS SHOOK as I held my phone and read Reed’s words. Over and over again. Each word a stab to my heart. He held nothing back in his face, all but exposing his mangled heart. And suddenly I got it. I was supposed to heal him.

  I failed.

  My pain became his pain. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But some pain couldn’t be solved with a prescription bottle. His couldn’t.

  And with a shocking gut punch, I realized mine couldn’t either.

  Not the pain from my concentration, not the pain from my reality. Only the physical pain from my head. The most manageable pain I possessed.

  I placed my phone nearby, blindly fumbling around until I hit a surface. Then I touched Reed’s cheek, wiping the tears away. Tears I caused. Tears I didn’t want to cause. He didn’t deserve my pain. He didn’t deserve this. He was too damn important to me to deserve this.

  But my thoughts weren’t my own. They weren’t clear, and I didn’t know how to explain all this to him. His eyes—God, his eyes. I’d never seen them so lost, so broken. I grasped his face in my hands and mashed my lips to his in a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners kiss. The kind that heated from zero t
o sixty in two seconds flat. He grasped onto my waist, yanking me into him as he angled his head, taking the kiss deeper. I clutched onto him, desperate, as tears slid down my cheeks.

  I needed him inside me, and not in the way we were clearly heading as he pulled my shirt over my head. I needed him in my head, in the chaos.

  In my heart.

  I needed him to know things I couldn’t say in either language, things I couldn’t even tell myself. I wanted him to know me better than I knew myself. But words wouldn’t come, not with the OxyContin in my system. Heck, maybe not without it in my system. I could only will him to know, will my heart to beat the truth into his.

  He slowed the kiss, and his heart kicked up a beat. Somehow the impossible happened. I felt this thing between us, whatever Carli + Reed equaled. The pulse at the base of his neck, where my lips now clung, jumped to the rhythm, to the math, so the Xz that we created thrived in him as much as it thrived in me. I clung to him, and words bubbled up inside, wanting to be released.

  Vanishing before they could form.

  Reed pulled back. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  But that was always the plan. Nothing lasts forever. My head, the pills, this fight—all proof. We’d reached the point of no return. I hated it, absolutely hated it, even as I knew it had to happen. I shook my head as more tears threatened to fall. I tugged at the button on his pants, desperation settling in. Desperate because I couldn’t give in to what I wanted, what I needed.

  Him. I needed him. And not just for tomorrow.

  A tomorrow that would never come. All we had was this last moment, and I had to tell him how I felt before I never had the chance.

  My tongue wouldn’t form words and couldn’t form words he’d understand. So I used it to taste his body as I revealed his skin, lapping at the ridges and bumps, the smooth and the hairy. I almost had him, too, but he stopped me once I got him flat on his back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need you.” Finally, some words. Words that worked. He crashed me to him, removing my own clothes as our mouths spoke the language of lovers, the language we shared equally and fully.

  For the first time ever, I almost skipped the condom. I just wanted him, needed the connection. Reed, sans brain injury and those damned pills, had his head on straight and protected himself. He lay flat on my bed, and I straddled him, taking him inside. No longer protecting myself. Because he had me. All of me.

  There would never be a happy ending; my father made sure of that. A part of me would die when this was all over. Nothing I wasn’t already used to, thanks to my brain injury. One more hole in my soul, in my damaged life.

  First I needed this, with him. He needed this before the rug finished being pulled from underneath us. I showed him as best I could, using our bodies as communication. Flesh against flesh, heartbeat to heartbeat, lips to lips. I showed him until we both flew over the finish line, until we lay sated in each other’s arms.

  I couldn’t look at him, kept my head buried in his chest. I wanted to pause time, find a time machine. Anything to save this, save us. I bit back the tears as I got off him and then collapsed into a sitting position beside him. The pills stood at attention. Reed was right—they hurt him, they caused his pain.

  “I can’t . . . ” I closed my eyes, trapping the moisture inside. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ignore the pills. I couldn’t deal with the pain.

  The bed shifted, and I opened my eyes. Reed mirrored my image, both of us naked. Both eyeing the pills. Minutes stretched past, and his breathing increased. He got up, but I stayed as I was. Deep inside, a part of me struggled to break free, to change the course, to hit me on my damaged head. Too deep inside, too buried by other shit.

  When I took in Reed again, he was dressed and typing on his phone. I grabbed a robe and fished out mine.

  Reed: Can’t or won’t?

  Both. I stared at him, a silent plea on my face: don’t make me answer that.

  Reed: I can’t and won’t stand by as you kill yourself. Been there, done that, fucked me up for two years. And here I am, back in the same story.

  I blanked my face and forced my thumb to move over my phone.

  Me: That’s why I can’t. Won’t. I’m no good for you. I’m not a long-term bet. You are. You deserve better than me.

  I watched his face as he read. I braced myself for the crumble. Not the way his eyebrows furrowed. Not the way his jaw clenched. He shook his head, looking anywhere but at me. With steam all but rising from him, he picked up my pills. I stood to get them, but he held me back, managed to open the container lid, and dumped them all in the trash.

  “What the fuck?” I said, not caring he couldn’t hear me.

  He gathered the empty pill bottles and threw them into the trash with such force that the can tipped sideways, pills sliding onto my floor. He looked at me, anger and exasperation on his face. Lost for words, as lost as I was.

  No words, no texts, nothing passed between us. He stomped out. Away from me. Forever.

  I really needed another pill.

  I crawled on the floor, picking up each small round destroyer of my relationship. One by one I collected them back into the bottle. A sob burst out of me, then another, and another, until I could no longer see what I was doing. I ended up in a puddle on the floor. The only way to communicate the turbulent chaos inside was to cry. I hugged my knees to myself, rocking through the tears, through the pain, through the fear.

  When I checked my phone, I had a new text.

  Reed: For the record, you don’t see yourself. You don’t see this amazing woman who’s already overcome so much. You don’t see the fighter spirit that continues to move forward no matter what is thrown your way. You don’t see that you do have a future. It might look different than it did before, but it’s still there. You can adapt and rise above.

  One thought came to mind: What if I can’t?

  Reed: Don’t give up. Don’t stop fighting just because you have a diagnosis.

  I started a response—“What if I fail?”—and stared at the words on the screen. Failure had never been an option. Not until now. Was he right? Was I giving up? Throwing my life away because of one bad blow. Literally.

  The pills in my hand called to me. Taunted me, really. They would be my failure even as they were my lifeline.

  I dumped them back onto my hand until ten nestled together. Reed’s face came to mind. The total devastation. The reality that if I eased my pain by swallowing what lay in my hand, I’d hurt him.

  Didn’t matter what I did. I hurt him.

  I sat there, I didn’t know for how long, holding those pills in my hand. Until the pink color transferred to my sweaty skin. Until I felt numb, as if the medicine was absorbed rather than swallowed.

  Could I really rise above? What kind of a future did I have with a brain injury?

  I deposited the pills back into the container and finally got dressed. My homework taunted me, teased me with achievements now lost. I picked up my laptop and typed in mild traumatic brain injury.

  I went straight to the personal stories. Many with injuries worse than mine. They hadn’t succumbed to the lure of pills. Then again, I wasn’t heading toward any success story in my current state.

  One thing connected each story: they continued to live and made accommodations for their injury. The type of accommodations I made as a kid, with my study habits. The kind of accommodations I would need to make again if I wanted to teach.

  I gathered my books and set them up around me. Normal. I had to get back to normal. Carli normal. I opened my first book and got to work. Only my mind wandered to my troublesome class. Time to follow my haphazard focus. I put the work aside and grabbed my notes from my meeting with Heidi. The answer was there, somewhere; I knew it.

  The only question: Could I find it?

  On my paper, I circled one word again and again with my red pen: control. I needed to show them I still had it. Even when I didn’t. I drew lines all over the paper, makin
g connections out of the suggestions. As my red pen bled over the notes, an idea slowly formed. It was almost painful, forcing my mind into gear, making sense out of things I couldn’t. Somehow I weathered through.

  An hour later I wasn’t sure, but I had an idea and was excited to try. I also had spent an hour on one topic. Unheard of.

  AT BEDTIME I stared at the amber container holding those tempting, teasing pills. Pills I wanted. The pull remained, the promise of fixing all my troubles contained in that small container.

  Or I could fix my troubles my own way. Without the pills. One step at a time with my haphazard thinking skills leading the way. I pulled out the ibuprofen instead.

  I collected my phone, set up a text to Reed, and froze. No. I couldn’t text him. Not anymore. We were over. That thought alone made me wish I hadn’t taken the ibuprofen already. I wanted to tell him what I’d done, what I’d accomplished. I wanted . . .

  Him.

  Too late.

  Sleep wasn’t easy. I didn’t have that blissful OxyContin euphoria. I tossed and turned without my personal comfort system. The room was too cold, then too warm. I ached but couldn’t get comfortable. At some point I managed to nod off.

  When I opened my eyes to the morning light, I was forced to close them again. The throbbing from my temples wasn’t ready for the light. This wasn’t unusual. I gave myself time to wake up in darkness, then slowly introduced light. The headache was loud and proud, and tinnitus came screaming in to round out the Carli Horror Show. But I was used to this. I could manage this.

  I hoped.

  And thus began my challenge to put my life back together. Or rather, to see if I could. One small step at a time.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Carli

  MONDAY MORNING, I stared at my face in the bathroom mirror. My mouth had a slight frown to it, and the bags under my eyes were less than attractive. But my bruises were down to a yellow tint. No makeup necessary.

  “Welcome back, Carli,” I said to my expression, trying out a smile before letting it fade at the double meaning. Was I really back?