In This Moment

by Autumn Doughton

  Hurts a whole lot.

  Hurts worst.

  I make a weird sound that might be a laugh or a sob. I’m not really sure. “Aimee, what the fuck does ‘for now’ mean?”

  “I don’t know…” She’s quiet for at least a full minute and every passing second of her silence hits me square in the chest. “I think that we both need time to refocus.’”

  “Refocus?” At least she hasn’t pulled out the just friends card. I think that I’ll lose my shit if she tells me that she wants to be my friend. I can do a lot of things, but I can’t be just friends with Aimee Spencer. Not anymore. That ship sailed a long time ago.

  “I know that it sounds stupid. It’s a therapist’s word and honestly, I’m not sure exactly what it means but I think that I need to figure it out.” She puts her head down and lets the remainder of the torn-up leaves drop from her hands. “I’ve got—I’ve got me to work on and you’ve got you and until we can both stop running, we can’t be together.”

  “Aimee, last night was…” I shake my head. “It was…”

  “It was awful. What do you want me to say? I know that you were upset over your mom and everything was a mess, but when I saw you with that girl I-I couldn’t even breathe.”

  “Aimee, I told you—”

  “I know, and I said that I believe you and I meant it. But that doesn’t change the way that I felt. Cole, I was obliterated. I had just opened up to you and when you pushed me away and turned to someone else… I-I felt like I was coming apart—disintegrating into so many bits and pieces. Afterward, when I started to think about that, I realized that it’s no wonder I felt that way because the truth is that I’m already shattered. I have been all along. I’ve been using you and what you give me like a glue to keep all the parts of me in place and…” She hesitates. “And that’s not okay. I’ve been counting on you to save me when I should have been figuring out a way to count on myself. Do you see that?”

  If words could be a black hole, that’s what this conversation would be. A hole I’m falling into. A vacuum sucking all the light out of existence.

  My eyes are burning. It hurts to blink. “I hear what you’re saying, but you can’t sit there and expect me to agree with you. You can’t ask me to clear your conscience. I want to be with you, Aimee. It’s all that I want. Anything less than that sucks.” I push my hands through my hair and pull at the ends. “So say what you have to say but don’t ask me to understand or see things your way. You don’t get my permission to break my fucking heart.”

  “Cole…” Her eyes are red and shiny. “If we can’t get our own lives straight then we’ll do worse than break each other’s hearts. We’ll tear each other apart. And maybe I could risk myself, but I can’t risk you. I just can’t”

  “In math don’t two negatives make a positive?” It’s lame and I know it before I say it but I can’t help myself. My whole world is going to shit and I need something… anything to hold on to.

  Aimee gives me a sad kind of smile. “This isn’t math, Cole. This is my life and this is your life and that means something. It means something to me.” She chokes on that last part.

  I need to be touching her, connecting the two of us by a solid line when I say what I have to say so I pick up her hand again and I stroke the tender part of her wrist where the thin blue veins cross over each other like road lines on a city map. “What would you say if I told you that I love you?”

  She looks away but I don’t have to see her face to know that she’s crying now. Her shoulders are shaking and her fingers curl over mine so hard that her nails bite into my skin.

  My voice is raw but I keep going, pressing my words inside her. “What would you say?”

  Aimee lifts her head. She pulls her hand back and touches her scar with the tip of her middle finger. She won’t look me in the eye. “I’d say that loving me is a bad idea.”

  So that’s that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Aimee

  Do you hear that sound?

  The sound of muffled voices carrying over the patio wall. The soft shuffle of bare feet against cement. The crack of a door closing.

  Do you hear it? It’s the sound of the world ripping apart.

  Cole

  I’m not my dad. Being depressed isn’t my style.

  What’s my style?

  Being pissed.

  So that’s what I am. I’m pissed. I’m a lump of barely contained hostility. I can’t see straight, can’t think right. And deep down, I know that means that even if I’m not crying or playing dead, I’m just like every other schmuck that ever handed his heart to a girl and had her squeeze it between her fingers until it burst in a grotesque explosion of blood and torn up tissue.

  Hour one: “Let me know if you’re gonna upchuck,” Daniel says. And he’s being serious. I want to laugh and tell him to go fuck himself, but the thing is that I actually might throw up.

  Hour three: I punch a hole in a wall at the house. Daniel goes to Home Depot to get a plaster repair kit.

  Hour six: Adam leaves and comes back with a case of Natty Light. He puts the whole goddamn thing on my lap and tells me not to worry about getting him back because it was on sale.

  Hour seven: I work up the nerve to look at my phone. There are four missed calls from Sophie and one from my mom’s number. Oh, and I have a text from Kate. She’s just checking on me. Fuck that shit. I smash the phone. I guess it’s a good thing that I saved my contacts to the cloud or whatever.

  I haven’t counted time like this since my mom left us. It’s like my balls are connected to the minute hand on the clock and with each passing second, they get twisted just a little bit tighter.

  Seventeen hours.

  Forty-eight hours.

  Sixty-two hours and fourteen fucking minutes.

  It’s Tuesday and I get my ass up and haul myself to class. As I’m parking and walking the four blocks to Davis Hall, I tell myself over and over that I won’t look for her in front of the Liberal Arts building, but let’s face it, I look. It’s not like I think that she’ll actually be there, waiting for me with that ridiculously big bag looped over her shoulder. But still.

  Lunchtime. We normally meet at that pita place anchored to the Union and she gets a Chicken Caesar pita (dressing on the side), and I get a Steak Philly (hold the onions). Today it’s just me and the onionless Philly.

  While I eat, my eyes dart between the tables and the door. I’m fucking pathetic. It’s like one of those accidents that you pass on the interstate. You swear you won’t look at the smashed windows and the caved-in metal. You promise yourself. You cross your heart and hope to die. But when the time comes, you just can’t fucking help it, can you? That’s me. Rubbernecking my own life.

  I don’t sleep at night. It doesn’t matter that I ran ten miles this morning or that I put in an extra thirty minutes in the weight room after practice. If a million dollars were on the line, I couldn’t fucking fall asleep. I toss and I turn. I shove my pillows into a hundred different positions. I try a scalding shower and then a cold one, but none of it helps. There’s too much to think about, too much to obsess over. Memories of her vibrate against the walls of my skull, taunting me, shredding up the last of heart.

  Blue eyes.

  The tips of her long brown hair grazing my arm while I walk her to class.

  The way that she’d sometimes skip ahead to the end of a book that she was reading to make sure that everything would work out. I’m just checking, she explained. I can’t go further unless I know.

  Her breath teasing my lips.

  Loving me is a bad idea, she’d said like it was as simple as that. Well, fuck you, I think. Fuck you.

  But I don’t mean it. Not really.

  I’m a pathetic sack of shit. It’s no wonder that she doesn’t want me anymore.

  One hundred hours.

  Five and a half days.

  Nate and Adam talk me into a party they’re going to at some chick’s beach condo. I know that I should s
ay no, but I guess that I’m just a glutton for punishment. I end up sitting on the porch by myself with the brassy clang of girly pop music filtering over me through the sliding glass doors.

  I stare at my new phone. Sophie stopped trying to call me two days ago. Now she’s emailing. This morning I scanned the latest email and picked up a few key words like: glioblastoma and temporal lobe. My thirteen year old sister is trying to talk to me about palliative care, whatever that means, and I’m too chickenshit to respond.

  Until we both stop running…

  I look at my phone so long that everything on the display screen starts to blur together. Taking a deep breath, I pull up my contacts and tap out a quick text before I lose my nerve.

  I thought of a new one. Oliver Twit

  Stupid, right?

  I wait for a few minutes to see if she’ll text me back. Surprise, surprise. She doesn’t.

  Some guy comes out onto the porch and asks me if I want a cigarette. Why the hell not, I think, lighting up and sucking that shit deep into my lungs.

  I’ve got nothing to lose.

  Six days.

  A week.

  Aimee

  What would you say if I told you that I love you?

  I think about those words as I’m staring into the dark of my room at night, trying to read the shape of the shadows. I play that question on repeat in my head with his voice tickling my ear and the memories pulling me under.

  I close my eyes and take a breath. I hold it inside of my lungs and count to ten. And then I let it go.

  ***

  “Aimee?” My mother’s voice is strained, piqued. “Is everything alright?”

  The unspoken rule is that I wait for her to come to me so I’m sure when my number showed up on her phone, she started to panic.

  “Yeah um…” I look up and let my eyes drift over that crack in the ceiling of my bedroom. “I was, um, wondering if you still had the number for that doctor? The one that Dr. Galindo suggested?”

  A pause. “I do,” she says uncertainly. Then I hear shuffling and I know that she’s looking in her purse for something, probably the doctor’s business card.

  She reads off the number to me and then we both hang on the phone for a bit, each of us waiting on the other. Or maybe we’re just listening to the sound of our shared breathing.

  “Thanks,” I say eventually. “And, Mom?”

  “What is it, Aimee?”

  “Do you think… do you think that maybe you’d come with me sometime? Not to the first appointment, but someday? And Dad too? Because… I love you. And I don’t think that I’m ever going to be the person that I was before the accident, but that doesn’t mean that I want to stop being your daughter.”

  She’s quiet for a long time. Finally she speaks and I can tell that she’s crying. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”

  Cole

  I text her a new title every day. After Oliver Twit, it’s Lice in Wonderland and then Laughter House Five and Life of I.

  I like to imagine that she gets my texts while she’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed in that little cream tank top, studying or putting lotion on her legs. I picture her trying to suppress a smile and failing miserably. And somehow, that one thought gets me through the day.

  Sometimes I send her other things: a random song lyric that pops in my head, a picture of my sneakers right before I run in a heat against Nate. One morning I send over a shot of the awful kale and spinach smoothie that Daniel insists that I try for breakfast.

  I tell myself that I’m not trying to be friends with her or anything like that. It’s not like she ever responds so it seems more like sending messages out to sea in a bottle or writing in a journal than harassing an ex-girlfriend. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a sort of peace in it. And I know how stupid that sounds. I know that I’m figuring out ways to justify it to myself, but maybe that’s not so terrible. Reaching out to Aimee in these little insignificant ways makes me feel something other than anger and self-pity, and today that matters more than my pride.

  I finally call my sister back on a Tuesday when I know that she’ll be home from school. I’m not up for a video chat yet, so I hold the phone up to my ear and I wait. Sophie answers on the second ring and, my voice a sopping mess of barely held together syllables, I tell her that I’m sorry.

  The kid is cool. She doesn’t give me a bunch of crap. She tells me that it’s no big deal and that she loves me, which, of course, makes me feel like an even bigger piece of shit.

  We talk about Mom for a while. Sophie tells me that she’s on a waiting list to get into a hospice in a few months.

  “What about treatment? Can’t they try chemo or radiation or something?”

  “Didn’t you read my emails? She’s past all that now.”

  “I-I’m…” I force myself to take a deep breath. I’m on the floor of my bedroom with my back pressed up against the closet door and my feet against the bed rail. “I’m so sorry, Sophie. You shouldn’t be dealing with this on your own. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t say fuck around me. It’s crass.” Her laugh is weak.

  “Sophie...” My voice is serious.

  “Cole…” Hers is equally as serious.

  “I just—I just don’t know what to say to you or to her or dad.”

  “It’s okay. It is. We’re okay. She’s sleeping in the guest room,” she says, sounding way older than thirteen. “At first it was weird, but now it’s good. I think dad might be waking up from his coma.” She pauses. “And I know that it’s not going to end well, but I think that we needed this. Dad needed this. It’s like… like…” She’s searching for the right word.

  “Closure?” I offer up.

  “Yeah. It’s closure for all of us. I was mad at her for years, but now I kind of feel like—what’s the point? I’m just happy to have this time with her to make things better.” Sophie drops her voice. “Do you mind that?”

  I’m taken aback by the question. “Why would I mind?”

  “I don’t know, Cole. You haven’t wanted to talk to Mom since she left, and you still won’t talk to her. It’s always been us against her and now… Well, I don’t want you to think that I’m not on your side anymore. You did so much for me and I—”

  I cut her off. “Sophie, please don’t even finish that sentence. I don’t want you to think that way or carry around any of my bullshit for me. She’s your mother. ” Aimee’s words come to me. “She’s a part of you and I want you to have that.”

  “Me too.” Sophie sighs softly and I wish that I could see her face because I know that she’s smiling and I love that smile. “I was too young before. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know that her favorite dessert was lemon meringue pie, or that she sang in an a capella group in high school, or that she’s afraid of heights. And I realize that those things sound silly, but… I don’t know… I needed answers and now I have my chance to get them.”

  We talk a little longer. Sophie tells me about school and gives me the Aaron Miller update. Finally, she asks about Aimee.

  “How do you know anything about Aimee?” I ask.

  “I called the house phone looking for you and Adam told me.”

  “Then you know that it’s over, yeah?” My stomach tightens. I don’t want to talk to Sophie about this.

  “But I don’t know why. I don’t know how you feel.” Now she sounds more like a thirteen-year-old.

  “The why is because I’m an ass.” I knock my head back against the closet door. “And I feel like I’ve been chewed up, swallowed, and then spit back up.”

  “Like regurgitated puke?”

  I laugh because, disgusting as it is, regurgitated puke sounds about right. “Something like that.”

  ***

  One day, I think catch a glimpse of her walking across campus. My heart bucks and for a second I can’t breathe right, then I’m rocketed in motion—running after her, carelessly pushing people out of my way. It turns out to be
someone else. The girl is shorter than Aimee. She has dark brown eyes and a narrow nose that hooks downward at the end. She looks at me like I’m crazy and I wonder if she might be right.

  A little while later, in a not-entirely-coincidental coincidence, I bump into Mara coming out of the campus bookstore. We exchange stilted hellos while I search her features for any traces of Aimee.

  “How is she?” I try to sound casual, like my life doesn’t depend on the answer.

  “She’s good. She’s seeing someone.”

  The sentence steals my breath.

  It knocks me on my ass.

  Fuck me. So this is what being eviscerated feels like. My brain flashes to that scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson is lying on the cross with his entrails in a puddle at his feet.

  Mara catches the expression on my face and quickly puts her hand on my arm. “No! Not like the way that you’re thinking. God no! I meant that she’s seeing a counselor. It’s a good thing. Good for her. Good for my parents.” She narrows her eyes. “Good for you maybe.”

  “Huh,” I say like the sun didn’t just collapse and go supernova.

  Life moves forward. Daylight comes. It goes. I’ve started to read at night. It helps me sleep. Maybe it does something to my brain, or maybe I like it because books remind me of Aimee.

  Sometimes I dream about the two of us lying on our backs in my truck bed. I feel her hand in mine, her warmth pushing up against my body. Then the wind comes in and it picks her up and tries to carry her away from me. But I don’t let go of her hand. I can’t. I cling to that kite string like nothing will stop me. And when I wake up, I wish that I could keep dreaming.

  On most days, Sophie and I talk. Sometimes she wants to tell me about our mom and I listen to that. Other times she talks about teenage girl stuff—school, boys, the dog—and I listen to that too.

  “I emailed dad a few days ago.”

  We’re on video chat and I can see her eyes get bigger. “You did?”