Standing Sideways

by J. Lynn Bailey

  “This, Livia, is a bacon sarnie.” He pushes both of our plates over to the other side of the kitchen counter. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Jasper bought me a shirt back when he went to New York City sophomore year. The shirt said, Everything Is Better with Bacon. He brought it back with a face that suggested he knew it was meant for me and no one else.

  “I’ll have water, please,” I say, pushing the memory away “Where did you learn to make these?”

  I wait for him to sit. He slides into the seat next to mine, so close that our knees touch.

  “British thing.”

  Daniel watches me as I take a bite. The bacon, lopped up in the sweet, tangy brown sauce, crunches with each bite. I try not to moan as I chew. It’s so good.

  “My brother…” I pause to contemplate my next words—not because of what I’ll say, but knowing that he’ll appreciate me changing the subject from his mother. “He brought me back a shirt when he traveled to New York City a few years ago. It says, Everything Is Better with Bacon.”

  An empathetic smile spreads across his face—not a plastic one put together to demonstrate sincerity, but one created deep within the heart, one that can only be generated through a felt sense of shared grief.

  Daniel takes his napkin and wipes his mouth as I finish my sandwich. “Your brother was great?”

  I, too, wipe my mouth. His knee pushes into mine in the softest way possible.

  I nod, justifying what will come out next but feeling the desperation inside to share it with someone else. “When we got the call, one of the surgeons donated his pilot and his jet to us to take down to LA.” Feelings pile into my chest like mounds of bricks. “My dad and an FBI agent were there to pick us up at the airport and drove us to the staging center.”

  Daniel doesn’t look at me, but his knee presses harder into mine. He gently cups his hands around his water glass.

  Crowded, the butterflies push on my insides, and my chest grows with an ache, making more room for the butterflies and the bricks.

  “It was at the fairgrounds in one of the halls where they held the exhibits. The art exhibits. The craft shows. There were cots. And families. And sadness.” I nod, as if trying to convince myself that it doesn’t hurt that bad. That the sadness and despair don’t come flooding back. But they do.

  Reality: the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.

  The place I’m in right now, at this very moment, is hard to exist in and even harder to breathe in.

  “Some people were inconsolably crying. A mother sat on the floor uncontrollably sobbing.” I stop. “We sat and waited on a cot—my mom, dad, and me.”

  Daniel’s leg pushes harder into mine.

  “A woman who I assume was an FBI agent was dressed in business casual—and I remember this because it was a humid day in LA, and the hall was hot. She was in a sports coat, and I noticed the sweat rings under her arms. She got on a loud speaker. She said that the first bus of survivors was coming in. We hadn’t heard from Jasper since it all went down, so we didn’t know much at this point.” I spread my fingers out and place them on the cool granite. “We watched a sea of people move like a body of water. Or a flock of birds, swarming across the sky, following the leader. They quickly moved together. My mom, dad, and I followed suit.” I swallow my grief when I hear it come out in my tone.

  But Daniel doesn’t ask any questions. He lets me continue.

  Have you ever felt like you can’t catch your breath? Or hope the breath you breathe will be your last? I want to ask Daniel.

  I didn’t feel this way after my dad left.

  I didn’t feel this way after Poppy died.

  And I especially didn’t feel this way when I lost my virginity to Simon James.

  But I feel this way now. Like some massive feeling is blocking my airway, and I can’t breathe past it.

  I look at Daniel.

  He’s staring at his water glass, and his leg is pushed up against mine, urging me on, saying, Continue, without words.

  “We followed the sadness out the front doors of the hall where the bus was pulling up. It was a bright orange school bus. But, this time, it wasn’t full of kids after a long day of school; it was full of post-traumatic stress disorder, probably years of therapy, and awful sadness that only those who have survived know what it feels like. The doors opened like an accordion.” I laugh to myself. “My therapist has asked for this story over and over. I’m not sure why it’s so easy to talk to you, but I never told her or anyone anything.”

  Daniel still stares at his water glass. He’s biting his lower lip. He doesn’t look up, as if he’s afraid—not for himself, but for me.

  “Survivors began to pour out. Reunited with family. Lots of tears. Kissing. And hugging. I’ve never wished for something in my life so fucking much, Daniel. I’ve never prayed so hard in my life.” I shake my head, ashamed of what I say next. “Why couldn’t just one of those families have been us?”

  I take in a deep breath because I know the last part of this story is heartbreaking. “The sea of sadness gravitated back inside the hall—some with their loved ones, many without. Many, many, without. And, in a weird way, I was grateful. I know that’s selfish to say, but I was grateful other families were hurting just as bad as we were.” I stop and push back the tears, only for a few seconds.

  “My mom, dad, and I sat on a cot closest to the front door this time.” I pause. “In that moment, at the staging center, my mom should have been yelling at my dad. They couldn’t stand to be in the same room together. In that moment, I should have been worrying about my application to Harvey College. Jasper should have been sitting next to me. But he wasn’t. And the world keeps turning, and I can’t understand why.” My last words fall apart into a whisper.

  His knee moves even closer, as if there’s room to move, pushing into my leg with intensity.

  “We sat there in silence; the hall was eerily quiet. Families waited. Nerves high. The FBI agent called over the loud speaker that the next survivor bus would be coming in one minute. So, the wave of people moved outside again, just like cattle. And, just like the time before, as the bus pulled up, the accordion door opened again—this time a different bus. And survivors poured out again. Some of the families we’d walked back into the hall with last time now had their loved ones—their brother, their sister, their cousin, father, or mother. They’re a family again.”

  My chest begins to ache, and I feel short of breath. I need a pill right now.

  Daniel turns to me with purpose, and his eyes burrow deep inside mine. “You don’t have to continue if you don’t want to, Liv.” He takes a strand of my hair and pushes it behind my ear.

  “I don’t want to.” I pause. “I need to.” Now, my legs are between his, as if this were how it should have always been. “I felt like I was losing my mind. Like reality was slipping away, just out of my grasp, and I couldn’t stop it. And I couldn’t believe it either. Like my brain was making excuses for Jasper. Why he wasn’t on the last two buses.” I pause as I allow my fingers to fidget.

  “We went and sat back down, but not thirty seconds later, the agent came over the loud speaker for the last and final time. Uneasily we went outside, slowly, terrified of who wasn’t on the bus. I counted the families as we huddled together in the suffocating night sky. About twenty families left. The odds were good, right?” My voice quivers with hope and sadness. Like maybe, if I retell it, it will end differently. “Sometimes, I still think it’s all a bad dream and that Jasper will stagger out of his room before school, complain about the time, rub his right eye, and say, What are you staring at?”

  I cover my mouth because the heartbreak of truth is almost too much to bear: he’s not coming back.

  “The last bus pulled up.” I try to take a deep breath, but it gets caught somewhere in my chest, only allowing me to take a half-breath. But I take what I can get. “Three buses full of survivors. Thre
e buses.”

  His thighs squeeze tighter around mine.

  “Six survivors. Only six survivors came off the last bus. And Jasper wasn’t one of them. You start to try to deny the fact, right? He’s at a hospital somewhere. They’ve overlooked him. He’s safe; we just need to find him.”

  I don’t tell Daniel this part because it makes me feel crazy. I begged the bus driver to give me my brother. And she cried as I begged. I screamed at her. Told her she didn’t bring my brother home like she was supposed to. I used words I’d never used with anyone. But she took it. She cried, and she took it. I told her to turn on the lights. I checked each individual seat, each seat, for my brother as Tracy collapsed outside on the ground, my dad by her side. I got to the last seat, and Jasper wasn’t there.

  I tell Daniel the ending I want him to hear, “I checked seat after seat, Daniel. Twice. He wasn’t there. I yelled from the back of the bus to the driver, ‘You forgot my brother. He’s at the college. Can you go get him, please?’”

  “Daniel?” The British tone is short, deep. He says Daniel like it’s one syllable instead of two.

  “Shit.” Daniel rolls his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. I forgot my phone in the car.”

  Tracy has probably made my phone disintegrate with text messages with the way I left the house this afternoon.

  “It’s six o’clock.” He shoves his phone back in his pocket, but his legs stay around mine. He doesn’t turn, and his eyes stay fixed on mine.

  I’m sorry, he mimes with his mouth when a tall, older redheaded Daniel glides into the gigantic kitchen, as if the room expected him. Like he’s late for a talk he’s giving on some sort of innovative surgery.

  Setting his briefcase on the counter, he looks down at his phone and then acknowledges us. “Oh. Hello. My son didn’t inform me that we had a guest.” Again, voice short.

  “You didn’t get the telegram I sent to the hospital, Dad?”

  Ignoring Daniel’s sarcasm, the Daniel look-alike but older says, “I’m Radcliff Pearson. And you are?” His glasses sit at the end of his nose, newspaper in the other hand, his blue scrubs neat, clean, presentable, as if he wears them for looks and not for blood.

  I stand, tripping over my own two feet and Daniel’s, like I should have stood a long time ago, but my thoughts just couldn’t meet the future.

  “Livia Stone. Nice to meet you, Dr. Pearson,” I say in the old-me voice. Like it’s all premeditated.

  “Please. Mr. Pearson is fine.” He tosses his hand in a give-no-mind-to-it way as he looks through the mail on the counter, shoving the newspaper under his arm.

  Daniel rolls his eyes.

  “It was nice to meet you, Miss Stone.” Mr. Pearson pauses, looking up from the mail to me. “Daniel, you can see your friend out.” He turns on his heel and strides out of the kitchen and down the hallway, just the way he came in. His running shoes—probably super-expensive surgeon sneakers—barely squeak down the stone hallway.

  “I have to go,” I whisper to Daniel, my mind imagining what my mother has done to my phone, text message after text message. Call after call. I’m surprised Belle’s Hollow PD hasn’t tracked my phone down to the Pearsons’ yet.

  “Wait. Sit.”

  I do—and not because I have to, but because leaving Daniel is something I don’t think I’m capable of doing right now. He takes my hands in his while he does the mouth thing, not making eye contact, but he doesn’t say what I think he’s going to say.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re supposed to be in your life at the exact moment you realize you’re supposed to be? Like your life has never, ever made sense before.” He searches the floor and my eyes, licking his lips—not in some weird sexual way, but in a way of conviction, intention. He continues, “But then you have this moment, and you realize your entire past makes sense? And that maybe God put you, me, in this instance, on this planet for this exact experience right here.”

  He reaches up to touch my cheek with his thumb and slowly runs the length of my jaw. “I don’t know why my mother chose Belle’s Hollow, Liv. I don’t know why I moved half a world away from a place I felt perfectly content in with a dick of a father and a sick mother and a cat—a dumb cat, no less—named Sebastian. I don’t know why you stopped your car for me on Monday. But two things I believe in most: things I can see and science.” He pauses. “I’ve never witnessed a heart break with my eyes, but I have now. I want to put the pieces of you back together. Build a mold around your heart. Made of titanium and all matter indestructible, so it never gets broken again.”

  This time—this time—I don’t even notice his accent. I want to take him by the hand and lead him where heartbreak doesn’t exist and sick mothers don’t die. Where life can be measured, not death. Where death isn’t real. And all that surrounds us is the best of what life has to offer: the color pink, unicorns, and puppies. Just good.

  But then these words fall from my mouth, “That’s not real life, Daniel.”

  Being with Daniel makes me forget, only momentarily, about what my life is like outside this house. Outside of Simon. Outside of Belle’s Hollow. Outside of my life. Like I’m a stranger who’s just knocked on the my-life-with-Daniel door because it’s fiercely stormy outside, and I ask to come in out of the chaos.

  With these feelings he gives me, I know the sadness will return. I know the heartache will eat me alive tonight as I crawl in bed. And I’d rather not feel it. Not feel any of it.

  I stand, and it catches me off guard because it’s not something I want to do. Maybe it’s my heart trying to protect itself.

  But Daniel, who’s still sitting, grabs for my hand. “I’ll walk you out.” His fingers fraternize with mine. He doesn’t tell me I should stay for dinner.

  It’s dark outside.

  “My mom’s going to freak out.”

  “Why?”

  “I left upset this afternoon.”

  The rocks crunch under our feet, our pace a snail’s.

  “I dropped an AP course, and when my parents wanted to talk about it, I bailed.”

  “Why’d you drop the course?” And course sounds like couse without the R.

  I think about this for a moment. I shrug because I’m not really sure. “I guess I don’t know. I missed a lot of school after Jasper died. It’s just that…Mr. Joe has a connection with Harvey College, and I’d written an essay that was noticed by one of the English professors there. Mr. Joe said that he’d help me get in.”

  “Wow. Harvey? Even the Brits are well aware of Harvey.”

  I kick a rock.

  “So, you jumped ship? Have you talked to Mr. Joe?”

  “No.”

  “So, you dropped the course and haven’t talked to him about it?” Couse again. Not course.

  “Yes.” I feel the shame take shape in my face.

  There’s a long silence as we approach my car. I wish I hadn’t parked so close. For the sake of the universe and just a few more minutes with Daniel, I wish I had parked on the moon.

  “God, what a beautiful place,” I say, not ready to hear what he has to say about Mr. Joe.

  “It’s just a house, Livia.”

  “Castle,” I correct.

  Daniel stops and takes my elbows in his hands. He looks me square in the eyes for a long moment. “What if my father wasn’t a surgeon and my mother didn’t have cancer and we lived in a modest three-bedroom home in town? And what if I told you, behind locked doors at night, when the moon was quiet and the dark was relenting, that things weren’t what they seemed? That, on the outside, it was a perfect situation, right? But people change in the dark, Livia. People change in darkness. Would it change the way you looked at all this?”

  I try to pretend it wouldn’t, but wouldn’t it? I think of home. My home. My dad, my mother, surviving under one roof.

  “You’d be more human,” I whisper.

  “Is any one person more human than the other?” He pronounces other without the R.


  “Do you always answer all statements with philosophical questions?”

  He smiles.

  We reach my car, and I extend my arm for my door handle, but Daniel gently takes my hand in his again and uses his other hand to open my car door. “Please,” he says, “allow me.”

  He steps back so that I can get around the door and sit in my driver’s seat.

  Daniel leans in, his arms resting on the roof. “Thank you, Livia, for seeing me today.” He looks at my phone, which is now vibrating across the seat.

  Simon’s name is on the screen, but Daniel doesn’t say anything.

  My heart stops, and now, it’s flopping around on a bank like a suffocating fish. And, if fish could talk, it would say, Help me.

  He bites his lip. “I’d really like to kiss you right now, Livia.”

  I’m dead.

  My lips feel swollen and big, wanting his kiss more than any other kiss in the history of best on-screen kisses ever.

  “But I’d rather wait until your heart begins to mend.”

  And this kills the heat that, only thirty seconds ago, began to radiate through my body.

  Daniel leans in the car and softly pushes his lips to the space between my collarbone and my neck. My entire body goes limp, numb.

  “Text me when you get home, so I know you made it safe.” He pulls back from the car window, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  I don’t roll up my window as I start the car because God knows I’ll need fresh air, cold fresh air, to shake off the remnants of Daniel.

  Tracy and my dad are in the living room when I walk through the front door. They don’t say a word. Silence covers every square inch of our living room, even the walls, and it seeps down like molasses.

  I quietly shut the door behind me, my tail between my legs.

  They blew up my phone with text messages. Phone calls.

  This was always a Jasper move, not a Livia move. He was the one who came in late, the one who had to explain to Tracy why he was past curfew or hadn’t answered his phone. Not me. I was the good girl. Followed the rules with only minor mishaps with alcohol—unbeknownst to my parents. A rule-follower, and I prided myself on it. Homework done on Fridays, always ahead of time. Now, I can’t remember what homework assignments were given. It was Jasper’s job to break Tracy’s heart and mend it back together. He was good at that.