“Yes.”
I heard something unzipping. “I’m keeping these.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“Journals.”
“Whose?”
“Judging by the content, I’d guess they were your mom’s.”
That hit me with such force that I was glad I was sitting down. “What do you mean, ‘judging by the content’?”
“What I saw,” Mira said, her voice taking on a more somber tone, “it looked like things Liddie would say.”
I wondered at her tone, but was so preoccupied with the journals that I wanted more info now. “What did it say?”
“Stuff, Andra. I packed them up, you’ll see them. Chill your pits.”
I resisted grumbling my impatience. “What else is there?”
“Papers and shit.”
Not being able to see what she was seeing was killing me a little bit. I listened to all the background noises and tried to figure out what she was seeing herself.
“That cat piss cologne smell is everywhere,” Mira said, right before coughing. “There’s a monster fuck ton of paperwork here and I haven’t even gotten on the computer yet.”
“What kind of paperwork?”
“Hmm,” she said. I imagined her looking at the paperwork and wrinkling her brow in concentration.
But before she could reply, I heard the sound of the door creaking again.
“Where are you going?” I asked, idly tapping my nails on the table.
Instead of replying, I heard a whoosh of noises at once: grunting and yelling by Mira and the sound of things being thrown around.
“What’s happening?” I asked in the phone. I felt fear crawl up my spine, panic bubble up my throat.
Mira didn’t reply.
I heard more grunting and Mira screaming, “Six!” and I knew, deeply, that something was wrong.
“Julian!” I yelled. A second later he was in the doorway.
“Call Six!”
His eyes widened and everything for the next ten seconds moved in a blur. I watched Julian pull out his cell phone and fumble dialing the numbers.
I was screaming into the phone, my palms sweating so bad that the phone slipped and I picked it up and held it tightly to my head, yelling her name over and over. There were still noises, grunts and moans and things crashing in the background.
From the ear piece came a thud. There was a whimper, a grunt, and then another thud.
From that moment on, my hands started trembling so badly I worried I’d drop the phone. I glanced over at Julian who I’d only heard say Mira’s name before he’d looked at the phone, as if he’d dropped the call.
But I knew Six had hung up the moment Julian called.
There was silence. Until I heard heavy breathing.
And then the voice from my nightmares spoke, and my blood ran cold. “Who’s this?”
I looked at Julian, covered my mouth with my hand. My mind ran in a hundred places and I felt a vice tighten around my lungs.
My mind raced. What did I say?
I opened my mouth as the words wrestled their way out and yet nothing came. I heard a deep breath and then the phone clicked off.
I don’t know how long I held the phone to my head, my mind spiraling out of control, my eyes staring straight ahead.
Julian’s face came into view. I saw his lips move, his eyebrows draw together. But I couldn’t focus my attention. It sounded like I was underwater, his voice a bunch of garbled sounds.
“Andra,” he said sharply, placing his hands on either side of my face. “Andra.”
I couldn’t speak. The shock from what I’d heard had taken away my ability to speak.
“Six got her out. They’re at a hospital.”
I blinked.
“Mira will be okay.”
I inhaled deeply. “Okay,” I croaked.
His arms were around me a second later.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The ringing of the disposable phone woke me up. “Six.”
I heard his answering sigh come through the phone. But he made no other sound.
“How’s Mira?”
Another sigh. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and squinted at the clock. 2:03 in the morning.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. His voice sounded rough, as if he’d scrubbed his larynx with sandpaper.
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t know,” he repeated.
I was confused. “Is she still in the hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you not know? Aren’t you with her?”
He coughed. “No.”
I slid my legs over the side of the bed and pushed my hair from my face. “Why?” I yawned and looked back at Julian, noticed he was still asleep. I got up from the bed and walked down the stairs.
During the time it took for me to answer and walk into the living room, Six didn’t speak. I pulled the phone back, saw the call was still connected. “Six?”
“Mira is done, Andra.”
“What do you mean?” I pulled a throw around my shoulders and curled up on the couch.
“Mira is done with me, with you. It’s over.”
I frowned. “She can’t be done with you; she’s having your baby.”
That was when I heard a sound I’ve never heard from Six before. It was strangled, but muffled. I knew it was grief and my heart sank before he said the words that confirmed my suspicion.
“Mira lost the baby.”
Even though I’d expected that answer, I still felt the pain deep in my belly and clutched my stomach as nausea bubbled up my throat. “Six,” I said on an exhale, my eyes tightening.
He cleared his throat again and immediately coughed after. “She kicked me out of the hospital room. I’m…” his voice drifted off and I heard him cough again.
I ached. I pictured Mira, with her funky clothes and small, rounded belly and sassy attitude and then put that image in a hospital bed. And it made no sense, not a bit of it.
“Does she have anyone else with her?”
“No. She’s all alone.”
“You have to go back to her,” I insisted.
“Andra, she kicked me out. She screamed at me. She threw things. She doesn’t want me near her right now. She’d rather grieve privately. She-” he paused. “She made a scene.”
“But your loss was a shared one. She needs you.”
“Exactly. And that’s why she kicked me out.” Six said, his voice rising several octaves in anger.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Haven’t you seen how fiercely independent she is? She’d rather wallow alone than have my presence around her. My grief was suffocating her. She couldn’t breathe.”
Oh Mira, I thought, my heart splintering. “I’m so sorry, Six.”
There was absolute silence on the other end. I remembered how I’d felt when people had told me how sorry they were for the loss of my mom and remembered how words in the depths of grief were just noise.
“I’ve never seen her like that, and I’ve seen her in some low places.”
I held my breath. This was the most candid Six had ever been about anyone apart from what he’d said about my mom.
I heard a sound clang on the other side of the phone. “I should have killed him,” he said, the tone of violence clear in his words. I heard a thud.
“What happened?”
“I knocked him cold, grabbed Mira and the stuff and got the fuck out of there.”
Before I could say anything else, he spoke again.
“Listen. I’m going to bring this shit back to the beach house, but then I’m going to leave again.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I’m not letting her go.” And with those words, his voice took on a different tone, a tone that made me uncomfortable to hear. His words were laced with equal parts grief and determination and fear. I could sense his trepidation.
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you later today,” he said before abruptly hanging up.
I looked at the phone for a full minute and then I closed my eyes.
I recognized grief, determination, and fear in Six’s voice. They were what fueled the burn in my belly. But overwhelmingly, I felt supreme anger.
Mira was hurt by Hawthorne.
Mira lost the baby that she’d smiled about just days earlier.
Mira was alone in a hospital bed, her body recovering. But her heart was irreparable. I didn’t know Mira well, but I knew she’d wanted that baby.
Mira kicked the one person in her life out of her life at her darkest moment.
All because of me.
I needed to do what she’d reminded me to do. To take charge, to pursue my freedom.
So, instead of crawling back into bed beside a sleeping Julian, I opened up his laptop and left a few clues.
I needed to bait Hawthorne with the breadcrumbs I was leaving. I needed to put some more pressure on him. I couldn’t leave the beach house, so I’d lead him to me.
“Andra, wake up.”
My eyelids weighed one hundred pounds. I didn’t, I couldn’t, lift them. I moaned in protest.
“Here,” Julian said, and a moment later I inhaled raspberry tea.
“Mmmm,” I murmured, but firmly kept my eyes closed.
“Open your eyes, my love.”
His words were like sunshine, warming me from the inside out. I felt my lips lift in a smile.
“Why’d you sleep on the couch?” he asked, reminding me of the reason why I was asleep on the couch and not in bed. My lips lost the smile.
I opened one eye, rubbing the other with my hand. “Mira,” I breathed.
His eyes widened and he brought a second hand up to hold the cup he held. “What happened?”
I closed my eyes again and winced at the lance of pain to my chest. I turned my face to the pillow.
I felt Julian’s hand on my back. “Did Six call you?”
Instead of speaking, I nodded my head.
I heard the clank of him setting the mug down on the table and then felt the cushions shift to accommodate his weight as he sat next to me on the couch. He didn’t push me to speak, just rubbed my back.
I turned my head back so I could see his face. “Mira lost the baby.”
His entire face fell. He, like I, wasn’t very close to Mira, but they’d developed a weird sort of friendship at some point.
Julian looked to the window and exhaled loudly. “How’s Six doing?”
I rolled so I was on my back and angled my head so I could see him better. “Not good. Mira kicked him out of her room. He sounded pretty shaken up about it.”
I reached my hand for his and squeezed.
He cradled both of his hands around mine and then brought my hand to his mouth for a kiss. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” It was honest, at least. My mind and my heart were a mess of emotions, each of them varying in degrees of intensity. “I need to go for a run.”
Julian nodded and pulled me up to a sitting position. “Let me come with you,” he offered.
I shook my head. “Alone,” I said, meeting his eyes.
I watched him as he digested that. The emotion in his eyes flickered in and out so quickly that I couldn’t register what it was. He let go of my hands and nodded again. “All right.” He backed up and gave me some space.
I stood up and walked to the back door.
“Andra,” he called after me.
I turned around. “Yeah?”
He stood in the center of the hallway, his hands in the pockets of his sweats. “Be careful,” he said, his voice a few octaves lower than before.
I stilled. Did he know what I’d been doing last night?
“I’ll beat the seagulls if I need to,” I said, trying to make light of the situation. But my voice sounded strange and my hand came to my throat as if to check that it was still there.
Julian didn’t smile, just stood in the hallway, watching me. Why did he have to be so damn observant?
I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile and ran out the back door, down to the water line.
Five minutes into my run, my lungs burned, my chest ached. I thought running would alleviate the grief that constricted my lungs but all it did was make it worse.
I plopped into the sand and breathed in and out, slowly. The waves rolled slowly up the shore, smoothing out across the sand. I closed my eyes, inhaled in through my nose. The scents of salt and sea and sand were so foreign still.
I thought about Colorado. About the smell of the grass, the smell of earth. I wanted to be rooted in dirt. Not carried off to sea with the sand.
I opened my eyes. I couldn’t stay here, in this beach town with its weird smells and isolation. I wanted to fill my lungs with Colorado.
I fell onto my back in the sand and inhaled again. I didn’t want these smells to tattoo my memory. I needed to do something proactive.
And then I thought about Mira. Alone, grieving in her hospital bed. Her body bereft of the life that had been growing in her stomach.
I barely knew her. But imagining her, small, unhappily fragile and in unimaginable pain was watering my eyes. She’d lost her baby, Six’s baby, because she’d been doing a favor for me.
I wanted nothing more than to curl up on my side and let the tears spill from my eyes. Grieving for me had always been very private, which was why I’d appreciated Six’s presence in my life. We were cut from the same cloth. But I didn’t imagine that Six wanted to grieve alone right now.
I climbed up to my feet and debated running back to the cottage. I looked down the beach towards the cottage and changed my mind.
I couldn’t keep running back to my comforts. I needed to do what would get me back to Colorado, so I could breathe in the air that lived in my lungs.
I had to get back at Hawthorne, for what he’d taken from my mother, from me, and now, from Mira.
So I turned and continued on, into town.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
This beach town was basically dead in the fall. My feet carried me down the streets of the town square but there was very little activity.
I considered going into one of the shops but remembered I hadn’t brought any money. Not that I had any.
“Shit,” I muttered, putting my hands up to my head as I looked around.
“You lost?”
I whipped around and met eyes that were kind. The woman those eyes belonged to was old enough to be my grandmother, if I’d had one.
It was on the tip of my tongue to kindly send her back on her way but I stopped myself.
“Yes,” I said, the lie slipping from my lips easily. “I was looking for the library.”
It wasn’t a lie after all, not really, because I didn’t know where the library was.
“Oh, of course. Let me walk you there.” She smiled up at me and I smiled back as I turned to follow her. “Are you visiting?” she asked.
I looked at all the buildings as we passed them, committing this path to memory. “I hope so,” I said, not realizing until it was too late that I’d spoken the truth.
The lady stopped in her tracks and looked at me, perplexed. “Now what do you mean by that?”
I plastered a fake smile on my face, hoping to ease her confusion. “I meant that I hope it’s a longer visit.” I glanced around the sidewalk, trying to buy time while I thought up an answer. “I was just passing through, but I’d love to stick around for longer.”
The lady smiled. “I’m afraid this town is much quieter this time of year, but our library is beautiful and has had a lot of upgrades.”
I nodded and continued following her down the sidewalk.
“What’s your name, dear?”
My head had been spinning, deciding what to do once we arrived at the library. I opened my mouth to speak as my choices ran through my head. “Cora,” I answered, a little breathlessly.
I hadn’t identified
myself as Cora in years. My heart picked up speed, thrumming in my chest, as if it knew the repercussions of merely saying that name.
The lady smiled again. “I’m Pearl. The library is just around this corner, Cora.”
Hearing her say my name out loud felt like a secret and I looked around again, waiting for the world to crash down upon me.
We came to a small building with a ramp along the side. Pearl gripped the railing and I followed behind, still cautious. It was a good thing Pearl couldn’t see me darting my eyes about. I’m sure I looked like I was about to rob her.
I opened the door for her and glanced around the library. My eyes followed the corners of the room, looking for security cameras. Naturally, there were none. My heart sank a little, but I knew I could leave bread crumbs other ways.
“Well hello, Pearl,” came a voice from behind the main desk. I let Pearl greet the librarian and scanned my eyes around the space. The main desk was the dividing point of the library, with nonfiction on the left and fiction on the right. I darted left and hurried through the stacks. And then my eyes found a bay of computers set in the back. I settled in one and wiggled the mouse, trying to wake it up.
I internally groaned when I saw a log in screen.
I walked back towards the front of the library and saw Pearl speaking animatedly with the librarian, a woman around Pearl’s age.
Pearl looked over at me as I approached and introduced me to the librarian, Anita.
“Anita, this is Cora. She’s not familiar with our little town.”
“What brings you to town, Cora?” Anita asked. She looked more than a little curious.
Shit. What was I supposed to say?
“Well Cora is just passing through, but might stay a while.”
Thank you, Pearl, I thought. I opened my mouth to ask about logging into the computers, but Anita pressed further.
“Passing through?” Her expression was more keen than Pearl’s, and I knew she wouldn’t be bought with a lie so easily.
I nodded. “Driving up the coast.” I hoped that would end the discussion.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
This was my in. But still, I hesitated. Anita eyed me peculiarly and I decided not to make those clues I was leaving everywhere else apparent to someone like Anita, someone who likely read everything – including the news. “Oh, you know,” I began, looking around, purposefully avoiding her eyes. “All over.”
He Saved Me Page 12
