Go back.
“Cat? CAT!”
I hear Julian’s voice somewhere in the distance, but I’m too tired to answer. Everything is slow motion, drawn out, each moment elongating endlessly, the trails of smoke lingering after a cigarette. I know I am falling to the floor again, but my legs are icicles. Immobile. My eyes are leaden, and I keep them closed as the tide rolls in, covering me with white froth that clings to my skin like a million tiny seed pearls, a myriad sucking mouths pulling at my flesh until it falls slowly, softly away from my bones.
THIRTY
MY TEETH CHATTER, my head shaking. Snowbanks and icy ponds. I’m so cold that I can’t feel my body. I know it’s there, but I can’t feel it. A sharp pain on my cheek snaps me awake, and my eyes creak open like a curtain rising moments before a performance, the room wobbling unsteadily into focus.
Ethan stands above me, and for the first time I’m aware that I’m wet and shivering, floating in ice-cold water that fills the enormous tub. Standing under the gold chandelier dripping with crystals, Ethan resembles an angel, the soft waves of his hair framed by a yellow nimbus of light.
“Cat, are you OK?” he asks, pulling me up so that I’m sitting. My dress is stuck to my body, another layer of skin. I shake uncontrollably, my teeth clacking against each other like a mouth full of marbles.
“I’m sorry I slapped you, but when I came in here to see if you were OK, you were passed out on the floor, so I threw you in the tub. That didn’t wake you up, so I had to give you a smack.” He looks at me apologetically as he grabs a handful of towels from the heated rack on the wall and wraps them around my shoulders.
“How long was I . . . out?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a half hour?”
It feels like years. I stand up carefully, the water sloshing beneath me, grabbing on to Ethan’s arms for support. When I step out of the tub, he hands me a terry-cloth robe, and when I stare at it stupidly for a long moment, he pulls it from my hand and wraps it around me. The phone is still on the floor, and I can hear a busy signal coming from the receiver. Julian, I think, closing my eyes again. My legs buckle beneath me, and Ethan steadies me so that I don’t go tumbling into space. My feet rest against the cold tile floor, and I’m grateful for the feeling, grateful to be feeling anything at all. I don’t want to die or be out of the present, I realize with some astonishment. Not even a little bit. I want to be right here, feeling whatever I’m feeling, even if it’s messy or complicated, even if it hurts. I let the realization stream through me, and it’s like sitting in the sun on the first real day of summer, the heat opening every pore of my skin. My eyes spin in their sockets, and I drift back down to the floor. Thirty minutes ago I could have died, and yet, I’ve never felt as alive as I do right this very moment.
“I think we should get you to a doctor,” Ethan says, his brow crinkled with worry.
“No, no,” I protest, sitting down on the toilet seat and hanging up the phone. “I’ll be OK. Where is everyone?”
“Well, some people left a while ago, but Alexa, Giovanni, Sebastian and some other stragglers are still here in the other room. Actually, Giovanni’s kind of freaking out, if you want to know the truth.”
“Freaking out how?” I ask, looking in the mirror. My skin is unnaturally pale, my hair and brows standing out in sharp contrast. I can see my collarbones in sharp relief above the robe, and I wonder how much weight I’ve lost lately.
“He’s been telling people that he wants to jump out the window.”
“WHAT? Seriously?”
I turn around and face him. All at once I am almost sober. The drugs are still coursing through my veins, but they seem far away, trampled by a rush of adrenaline.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Not that people are paying him any attention or anything. But, yeah. He says that he’s homeless, that he doesn’t have anyplace to go.”
I think back over the last few weeks and could kick myself for noticing, but not really noticing the black overnight bag Giovanni had started taking with him everywhere he went, stashing it behind the bar nightly, the tight smile on his face each morning after work when I said I had to go home, how that very word itself must have hit him in the pit of his stomach, deep as a sucker punch.
I force my feet to move, and open the bathroom door. There are empty bottles everywhere, and the floor is littered with clothes, soda cans and broken glass. Aria and Amy are nowhere to be found, and the deep beat of house music still pumps through the suite.
When I walk into the living room, Giovanni is standing by the large bank of open windows, shouting at Sebastian, who is egging him on. Giovanni’s dusky skin is streaked with tears and sweat, his corkscrew curls are hanging limply around his face, and his black sequined jacket is ripped at one elbow. Alexa is, unbelievably, passed out on the couch snoring loudly, her face mashed into a pillow, her red lipstick smeared like a gunshot wound.
“I’ll do it!” Giovanni screams, pointing at the row of open windows, his eyes wild. He is as intoxicated as I’ve ever seen him, and God knows what he’s been ingesting while I’ve been passed out.
“Go ahead,” Sebastian says with a smirk. “Do the world a favor.”
This kind of behavior isn’t exactly new. Giovanni and Sebastian have always disliked each other heartily. But add in a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, the anonymous space of a hotel room, a life where there are no rules, no limits, and anything can happen.
Anything.
Sebastian gives Giovanni a small shove, and Giovanni stumbles and falls, grabbing on to the sheer white curtains, the material ripping with a sound so fierce that I clench my jaw, my teeth scraping against one another.
I walk over to Giovanni and grab his arm, hoist him back up to his feet. Once standing, he pulls away. His pupils are black and bottomless, and I wonder if he even knows who I am.
“What did he take?” I shout into Sebastian’s insipid, passive face.
“How the hell should I know?” He shrugs. “Who cares?”
“I care,” I spit back, pushing him in the chest so that he falls backward in his platform shoes. Sebastian gives a disgusted snort, pulling himself to his feet and brushing off his pants with pissy, exaggerated movements before stalking out of the room.
“Oh . . . So now you care?” Giovanni says slowly, the haze clearing from behind his eyes. “You don’t know anything about me!” he screams. “You never ask!”
The words stop me dead. I think of all the clues I’ve missed, the hints he may have dropped, wanting me to ask, to give some small sign that he mattered. That I cared. The unshed tears clouding his vision as we stood on top of the speaker suspended over the dance floor at Tunnel.
Home? Where’s that?
I try to grab his hand and pull him toward me, but he yanks his body away, out of reach.
“Gio,” I say, pleading now, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“You didn’t WHAT?” he yells, backing up, his expression frantic. “Sorry you didn’t care?”
“But I do care,” I say. “I really, really do.”
Giovanni spies a broken bottle on the floor and leaps at it, holding the jagged end above one wrist, the tender skin exposed.
“Do you care if I do this?” His eyes are hardened and defiant, but the mouth trembling beneath them belies it all.
Before I can react or grab the broken glass away from him, he slashes blindly at his own arm, blood dripping over his hand. The sight of the crimson stream rolling over his flesh, falling onto the carpet, makes me stop right where I am, bringing one hand to my mouth as if by covering it, I can somehow stop this from happening. But somewhere inside me I know I can’t stand here stuck to the floor, that I have to act right now before something even worse happens, before that shard swings down again and everything is lost.
“Giovanni, drop the bottle.” He stares at me, his expression uncomprehending. “Drop it,” I say again, my voice low and pleading. There is a moment where all is still except for the music pumping inces
santly through the room before the bottle slips from his fingers, falling soundlessly to the floor.
I reach out again for his hand, and this time he lets me. He starts to cry, hot salty tears falling over his cheeks, and I brush them away with my free hand.
“You should’ve told me,” I say quietly. “You could have stayed with me as long as you needed to. I love you, you know.”
When I say the words out loud at last, they lose all their power to hurt me and I can see for the first time how true they really are. I’ve been silent about the things that are most important for too long, for my whole life, really, and I want to hear my own strong voice saying the things I know are the truest to the people I love best.
Giovanni collapses into sobs, sinking down to the floor and mumbling incoherently.
I sit next to him, cradling him in my arms and rocking him slowly back and forth the way I wish I could still be rocked to sleep, safe and sound. I grab someone’s T-shirt left behind on a chair and wrap it around Giovanni’s arm, stanching the flow of blood. It covers my fingers with its wet, primal heat, and I feel a corresponding tug in my heart as the blood in its chambers pushes through tiny valves and crevices, pumping endlessly. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, it seems to shout, racing faster through my veins. I can hear sirens approaching outside the window getting closer, and Ethan is suddenly standing above me, his hand on my shoulder.
“I called for help,” he says, looking unsure, and I can see that he is sweating, probably ruing the day he decided that leaving work was a good idea. “I cleaned up the best I could,” he says, and I know he’s referring to the cornucopia of drugs that have been littering the suite all night long. Giovanni is quieter now, but he’s still a total mess, sobbing and smearing what’s left of his black eyeliner all over his face.
“Where’s Sebastian?” I ask, looking around at the almost empty room.
“He took off. I’m going to get Alexa out of here, too,” he says, walking over to the couch and picking her up so that she curls into his arms as if she was born to fit there, her arms hanging limply around his neck.
When the paramedics burst in wearing blue-and-white down jackets, they immediately pry Giovanni away from me and he collapses onto a gurney, where they begin checking his pulse, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his uninjured arm so that it squeezes the skin tightly. Don’t hurt him, I think over and over, my hands reaching out toward his motionless body, hovering over his flesh.
“What did he take?” they keep barking at me. Giovanni laughs once, a staccato hiccup, and promptly passes out. I watch the faces of the paramedics tense as Giovanni slips into sleep, his eyes closing.
“I don’t know,” I say because it’s true. “Some coke, and he drank a lot of champagne. Maybe some X, but I can’t really be sure.”
In the ambulance I hold on to Giovanni’s hand and watch his face, so pale in spite of his bronzed skin, his eyes moving rapidly beneath closed lids. I know he’s dreaming, that he can’t hear me at all, but still I lean down and whisper to him that he’s safe, that I won’t leave him. I tell him all the things I’ve longed for someone to murmur to me at night, just before I fall over the precipice into sleep.
Safe. Love. Home.
At the hospital, I sit in a green waiting room full of people with bleeding heads and extremities, drunks wailing in the corner, babies crying restlessly. The sun is just beginning to paint the sky with streaks of magenta and gold, and my skin feels clammy, makeup painting my cheeks with long black rivulets. I’m still wearing the bathrobe, my damp dress underneath, and my feet are cold and bare against the chipped linoleum. The X is wearing off, and my body feels like a wet washcloth, wrung out and left to dry.
I get up and walk to the phone, dropping a quarter into the slot, and dial a number I know by heart but never use. It rings and rings on the other end of the line, and I picture my father and Jasmine curled companionably into each other in their oversized bed, the morning sun shining through sheer white curtains, the white princess phone on the bedside table waking them out of their reverie. When I hear my father’s voice mumble a sleepy hello, I break down into tears, my breath heaving in my chest.
“Daddy?” I say. “It’s me. Caitlin.”
I’m aware, even as I speak, that I haven’t called my father “Daddy” in a very long time. I close my eyes and see us sitting together on the stoop of our apartment, eating ice cream, and I wonder if he remembers that little girl who loved the simple pleasure of his undivided attention. I wonder if he ever thinks about me, or if I remind him so much of my mother, their failures, his dead marriage and the violence that came with it, that he can hardly bear to think about me at all.
“Caitlin, what is it?” I can picture him sitting up in bed, shrugging Jasmine’s arms from around his torso so that they flop onto the silken coverlet. “Are you OK, honey?”
There is a concern in his voice that I haven’t heard in so very long, and it melts what is left of my already rocky composure. I sink to my knees in the hallway, hugging the receiver to my chest for a moment before bringing it back up, tears running hotly down my cheeks, thawing me to the core.
“I need help,” I say. The words feel alien and strange leaving my mouth, but I know they are the truth. I do need help. And I need my father, maybe more than I’ve ever needed him before.
“Where are you, Cat? I can send a car.”
“You need to come,” I say through the haze of my tears. “You need to come and get me.”
When we hang up, I just sit there, clutching the receiver to my chest, and I wait, watching the sun as it makes its way across the chipped linoleum floor until it reaches my legs, creeps up my torso, warming me from the outside in with its soft yellow rays, the sunlight moving through my flesh and into the cells of my body, the very marrow of my bones, like a kind of baptism.
THIRTY-ONE
I NEVER THOUGHT I’d live somewhere as normal as New Canaan, Connecticut, but I’ve been here for a month now, and so far no one’s chased me out of town with a bunch of torches or anything. The grounds of my father’s estate are framed by rolling hills hushed and blanketed in whiteness. Through the frosted panes of my bedroom windows I can see dappled gray horses in the distance, and the drifts of snow that press against the house make me feel safe and hidden away—especially when I sleep huddled under a pile of blankets. And sleeping is mostly what I did for the first few weeks I was here, my face pressed into a wide, soft pillow.
When my father showed up at the emergency room, his long black coat spotted with snow, I collapsed into the heft of his body, falling limp. As his arms encircled me, I heard the tears in his voice and along with them, his regret. My father isn’t perfect, something he’s recently admitted during one of our joint therapy sessions, but we’re trying. I’m trying. With every session, I’m coming closer to someday forgiving him for abandoning me, for turning away from my mother’s abuse. Sometimes the anger still claws at me when I look at him, but I’m learning to wait for the moment to pass. It always does, eventually. Maybe I’ll even talk to my mother again someday, although right now that seems as likely as visiting the moon. I’m not back at school yet, but my father says that it doesn’t matter, that what I need now is rest, that I have all the time in the world for history and algebra. It probably isn’t really true, but it makes me feel better each time he says it.
Even living with Jasmine hasn’t been that bad. Since I’ve been here, she’s left stacks of Godiva chocolate bars on my nightstand, stocked my freshly painted white room with extra pairs of pajamas and slippers, and filled the bookshelf with classics like Jane Eyre. This gave me pause for a second, until I realized that she’d probably never even read it, that she had most likely asked a bookstore clerk what books were appropriate for a seventeen-year-old girl, that in all likelihood she probably wasn’t leaving some tome about a crazy lady locked away from the world lying around just to torture me. That would be going a little far—even for Jasmine.
At night we s
it around the kitchen table and eat the dinner that Marta, the cook, has prepared, or we’ll order in Italian or sushi. “NO avocado in the California roll,” my father will bark into the receiver while giving me a slow wink. “My daughter hates it.” I have to grudgingly admit that my father and Jasmine seem kind of perfect together. I like to watch them when they don’t know I’m looking, mesmerized at the tenderness between them as he leans in to her hand resting on his cheek, or pulls her to him as they cuddle together on the couch watching a movie on HBO. Sometimes, though, when I’m watching them, I can’t help thinking about my mother, how my father would walk past her in the kitchen after work, oblivious, and I hurt a little inside for what we’ve all lost. Still, it’s obvious that Jasmine makes him happy, and for the first time in years, I actually want my father to be happy.
From what I hear through her letters, Alexa is now the reigning queen of downtown, and her parties, thrown in tandem with Sebastian, have become almost legendary. Her debutante ball at Tunnel broke some kind of record in attendance, and there were club kids and Upper East Side debs lined up all the way around the block waiting patiently to get in. Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” was the track of the evening, and the drag queen cotillion that took over the main dance floor is still talked about in clubs and on street corners. Ethan left the scene as quickly as he’d entered it, leaving Alexa behind and moving, I’ve heard, to Los Angeles. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I picture him out there among the palm trees and platinum-blond starlets, pouring drinks in some fancy bar with oak-paneled walls. I like to imagine the sound of the surf pounding outside his window at night as he sleeps, his tanned body turning in clean white sheets, his hair tangled on the pillow. I hope he’s found what he’s looking for out there in that la-la land of perpetual sun I know only from movies. I hope it’s something real.
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