Lost In Rewind (Audio Fools #3)

by Tali Alexander

  I wonder if this girl, Jacqueline, is the girl he married, whom he loved and then she tragically died? Naturally, he came back to the place he once met his wife and where it all started for them—the good old days. This man mourns her loss, and he came back to find my grand-mère to try and get closure. I can live with that kind of story. He’s not a bad guy—he’s just human. I also arrived here in search of closure, seeking to find pieces of my maman by getting to know her mère who is my grand-mère.

  I’ve always been a good judge of character, and everything I’ve heard so far matches up to the Jeff Rossi I was attracted to a few nights ago. Even the fact that he went back to his kids makes me like him a little bit more. I just don’t understand the guilt I hear in his words. Does he regret us having sex? Is he upset we went too far? Or does his guilt have nothing to do with me and I’m just imagining things? This needs to stop being about me in my head and go back to Joella’s last known reading.

  I call the bar downstairs and tell Lauren that I’m, in fact, feeling sick and need a day to myself. I fetch an empty book that I haven’t filled with notes or song lyrics yet and begin to write down the things Jeff has told me thus far. I write them down in my own words as I remember them. The inside of my head has become a messy minefield and writing his story down will hopefully help sort my scattered thoughts and feelings. Once he gives me all the facts and finally utters the actual foretelling, hopefully his life choices will become clearer to me and I will be able to help him decipher Joella’s prophecy, and perhaps, find his significance in her life.

  I lose track of time writing and sluggishly rolling in bed all day as I imagine Jeff sitting in my bed and telling me about his past in person. My phone pings with a text, startling me and my daydream of him. I glance at my screen as the most intense, haunting eyes I’ve ever witnessed stare back at me. It’s as if we’re looking right at each other and I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. I bet his wife loved his eyes. I can’t imagine any woman not being utterly spellbound by his gaze. A moment later he sends a written message.

  -Can you talk?-

  It’s almost ten o’clock at night and all I’ve wanted to do since we hung up earlier is to talk to him. I’ve thought of him all day and yet I’m still starved for more of him.

  I type out a simple, -Yes- and start to giggle as the phone rings in my hand with a call a second later.

  “It’s not Kali o’clock, are you sure we can talk?” I say playfully.

  “I’m fucked, you know that, right? I can’t even wait for morning to hear your voice again.” His voice sounds relaxed, he’s probably in bed already.

  “I will not hold that information against you, Mr. Rossi.” I can hear him chuckle softly at my attempt to make a light comment, but his words vindicate my obsessive thoughts of him as well.

  “How was your day?” This is us doing small talk, I think to myself and smile.

  “It was fine. How about you? How are you feeling? How’s your son feeling?” I hear him take a deep breath and then silence.

  “It was a hard day today for all of us, me included. Talking to you was the only thing that helped me get through it. But I didn’t call to tell you about my day. I need to hear a little about your life. I know it wasn’t part of our agreement, but I hope you can give me something about you, something I can hold on to. I don’t even know your full name, and all I can think about all day is what I’m going to say to you when I call you.” He stops talking and it’s quiet again, just the steady sound of him breathing.

  “What do you want to know?” Maybe he only wants to hear about my favorite food or the kind of music I like to listen to.

  “Tell me about your mom. Her accident.”

  I close my eyes and smile, which is my anti-cry mechanism, but it’s been failing me miserably lately. When I asked him to tell me his story, I pictured this conversation being one sided, but he wants to know about me, and he deserves my truthfulness. After all, he seems to be honest and forthcoming with me. He started divulging parts of his past like I asked of him, in the hopes of giving me another piece of the enigma known as Joella Gitanos. I must stop fixating and overthinking our sexual encounter and be thankful for the things he’s made me feel: safe and wanted—two emotions I haven’t felt in a very long time.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. That was stupid and insensitive of me; of course you don’t want to talk about this, especially over the phone.” He sounds flustered and nervous.

  “No, it’s not that. I want to tell you, I just haven’t spoken out loud about her in years.” I feel my throat closing in.

  I hate talking about ma famille. I would never just tell someone about the most painful moment of my life. But at the same time, I’m not one of those girls who pretends everything is perfect when it’s not. I don’t dance around topics, I say things as they are, and so before I overthink his question, I get right to the point. I tell him about the moment I go back to in my mind at least once a day, and how it always ends the same way. I carry the guilt of my maman’s death every hour of every day like a badge of pain. She was too young, too beautiful, too talented, and too good to die suddenly and leave me alone without her love.

  My plea is always the same. I wish I was with her when she died. I wish we were both in heaven together and I wasn’t left on this earth alone to wonder how I could’ve possibly saved her. I feel the flood of tears coming. I feel the wall of regret building up as I try to smile through the painful memory. If we weren’t talking on the phone, I would pick up her violin and submerge the pain in one of her favorite melodies. I would pretend I’m seven years old and her hands are guiding me across the strings of her cherished instrument, which is one of the only tangible things I have left of her.

  With my eyes still closed, I cringe and dread the pity he will feel for me once I tell him. But sometimes, you don’t have a choice, and the only acceptable thing to do is to smile and expel the pain that lives and blooms inside you.

  “My maman died when I was almost ten. It was her thirtieth birthday. I was waiting for her to pick me up from school, I made her a card out of flowers and my papa and I had a surprise waiting for her at home, but she never came.” I take a few deep breaths and smile as hard as I can to make the silly redundant tears go away. I go on recalling the nightmare. “The local fisherman found her car capsized two days later at the bottom of the sea. Her body was still inside. They found her on my tenth birthday.” I hate my birthday and the sea equally. I hate the water that took my maman away, and I despise the day that will forever commemorate it.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry,” he chants repeatedly, sounding more alert and even closer. His words are wasted on me. I’m numb to those words, because I’ve heard them millions of times before and no one could be more sorry than I am.

  I feel horrible for telling him—I hate making people feel sad for me.

  “A child having a mother is the most important thing in the world. I think about my kids growing up without their mother, the only mother they’ve ever known, and I wish I was dead instead of my wife every day.” I hear the genuine pain and anguish in each of his words.

  I’m all choked up as I try to tell him that kids need both their parents equally and nobody deserves to die. That this is how life works, shit happens, we need to go on and do the best we can. But his words begin to resonate in my mind, and I realize that I’ve heard them somewhere before, not a million times, but just once coming from Joella. She mentioned to me years ago when I first came to live with her that she wished it was her covered in water and not her daughter, but the universe wouldn’t listen. She said the universe doesn’t negotiate.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose to calm myself—as I feel the panic begin to pour and radiate through my skin. I’m not a time traveler, nor can I rework the hands of fate. I can’t change the past, but I do want to forget sometimes what causes my pain. I put him on speaker as I look at the picture he sent me. I long to get lost in his eyes
and try to forget. When we kissed a few days ago, the past disappeared, time stopped running, and the future became irrelevant. I’m ready for his eyes to suspend reality once again.

  “I wish I could hold you and kiss you, right now,” he whispers, reading my mind with his eyes staring at me through the screen while he lets out an aggravated breath.

  I want nothing more than to kiss him and mute the memories that hurt me. But the reality is that we’re worlds and miles apart. I must remind myself that my grand-mère’s words to him needs to be my only priority. I fail to hold back my feelings for him and admit, “I want to kiss you all day, but we don’t have that option. You need to tell me more, and I want to listen. You have a busy life and every wasted minute you’re talking to me is a minute that you should be spending with your enfants.” I mean every word I say, I’m not delusional when it comes to my role in his world.

  “Talking to you is not a waste, Kali. Us meeting wasn’t an accident—it was predestined.” He sounds annoyed or perhaps upset.

  I keep staring at his eyes on my phone’s screen, which helps recharge and ignite both my body and my soul. The more I look at him, I begin to feel myself disappear. Maybe that’s his purpose—making me forget reality. He doesn’t know it, but he’s sparing me the grief I keep bottled inside one glance at a time. When he calls and texts me, even if it will only last for a few minutes, I stop feeling like the only person left in the world. It’s comforting to feel needed by someone other than myself. He’s currently my only form of escape, a kind of window, but I’m not sure if it’s his past or future that I long for.

  “Tell me more,” I request against my better judgment, steering the conversation away from my sordid childhood. I like him so much, and the stupid reality is that I don’t like hearing about a woman he loved, even if she’s gone, but I push him for more anyway. Isn’t it funny that even when we know something is going to cause us pain, we still ask for it, still want that ache? Perhaps it’s our way of punishing ourselves, or seeing just how much somebody else can hurt us if we let them.

  “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi

  I don’t like hearing the sadness in her voice, and I wish I could kiss her pain away, but whether I like it or not, that’s my curse—being unable to make the people I treasure happy. Is this how my daughter will one day remember her mother leaving her? I don’t care how late it is, I have no intentions of hanging up with her. If it were up to me, we’d talk all day and all night. I continue telling Kali my one-sided truth. The side that makes me seem like a decent guy. And as trivial as it may be, it’s become important that she doesn’t hate me. I want her to understand what I did and not think of me as a monster. I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s life. I continue narrating my manipulated truth in the hopes of a beautiful stranger’s acceptance.

  “It didn’t take me long to know that Jacqueline was, in fact, very ill. She went to New York City alone every weekend for treatment, and I followed her—she just didn’t know it. I used a portion of my school loan and rented myself a tiny place in the village by NYU hospital. I’d stay there through the weekend, making sure she was okay while going in for her weekly treatment on her own, and I felt good knowing I was close in case she needed me. But she never called me, never needed my help, not once.

  “Michelle, her best friend, was the only person I could talk to about this. She was in the know about our hush-hush relationship and she constantly tried to prepare me. She knew it was an inescapable fact that Jacky’s illness could take a turn for the worst. I was also, in my own way, trying to condition my head and my heart to not build an imaginary life with her, realizing that I may lose her—not to another guy, but to fucking cancer.

  “This went on for a year. Maybe about a month before graduation, Jacqueline’s father, Jack, invited me out for dinner to a swanky steakhouse. I was nervous and a bit excited, hoping that maybe he’d offer me a job once I passed the bar. I expected that Jacky might have put in a good word for me. Her dad’s law practice was no joke; it was fucking legendary, spanning many generations and covering high-profile cases. We actually studied many of their cases in class.

  “I definitely didn’t expect the horror I heard from him that night. Jack Boyd had been waiting for me at the table with red-rimmed eyes, and when I saw him hunched over a scotch and his pale expression, I knew that nothing he would say to me could possibly be good. I was right. He told me how his only daughter, Jacqueline, the joy of his life, the center of his universe, the most beautiful girl in the world, had been diagnosed with cervical cancer—which I already knew. But then he continued to tell me that the doctors had given Jacky less than a year to live, with the advanced stage of her malignant cell proliferation.

  “I sat at that restaurant numb, dead, and unresponsive. In the back of my mind, buried under a pile of shit and lies that I’d told myself in order to sleep better at night, I knew this day would come. I had tried to distance myself emotionally from her, but I wasn’t ready to lose my best friend—the girl that had turned my whole world upside down, the woman that I was in love with. I couldn’t imagine a life devoid of her existing in it somewhere.

  “He approached me with sort of a favor, if you will. He asked me how I felt about his daughter. I spoke honestly and told him that I loved her with all my heart, and that I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to live without her. We both sat in the middle of a steakhouse crying like two little boys. He expressed to me that he and his wife, Sofia, would like Jacky and I to get married as soon as possible. They wanted us to try and pack a lifetime of happiness into whatever time she had left. Mr. Boyd informed me that I wouldn’t have to worry about money or work, that my life would be made, and that my only concern should be his daughter. It all made perfect sense. I adored her, I worshiped her, I loved her, and she was dying. How could I not marry her? How could I not try to give her the world? And that’s exactly what I did.

  “I had no funds to buy an engagement ring, or pay for another apartment, but her parents weren’t concerned about money. They more than took care of everything. They had the money, but they couldn’t use it to buy their only daughter time and health. I honestly thought I had my whole life figured out. I’d ask Jacky to marry me and move to New York City with her after we graduated. Her parents had already purchased a place that was waiting for us. She would get the best treatment money could buy, be close to her friends and family, we would finally play house for all to see, and I would start working in her father’s law firm. Simple, right?”

  “So what happened next? When did you and Joella meet? Did you get married?”

  I hear Kali sigh with impatience as I try to imagine her. I’m about to tell her the part where I met her grandmother, but I can’t tell her everything yet, it still won’t make sense.

  “I had the ring in my pocket the night I met your grandmother. I had just gone upstairs to use the bathroom and this old, graceful woman that had been a permanent fixture at the BlackGod bar spoke to me. I wasn’t sure at first if she was actually talking to me, but she got up and beckoned for me to follow her to the other side of the drapes. I immediately protested and told her I didn’t want or need a reading, and that I didn’t believe in fortunetellers, but she knew my name and her words compelled me to oblige.

  “She took my hands, and the minute I looked into her eyes, my whole life changed. She spoke about things she couldn’t have possibly known. She opened wounds that I’ve kept closed and hidden from everyone, including myself. I had no choice but to accept and believe every word she gave me. If it wasn’t for the things she assured me that night, I swear on everything holy I would’ve gone on with things the way I had planned. But her prophecy changed the course of my life. She planted a seed, and my actions made that seed grow and unravel, and ultimately, ruin lives. I promise, I will tell you her prophecy word for word once you hear all sides of my story, but not yet. It will make more sense after you know all the choices that I made along the road to hell.”

  “Jeff, I wa
nt to hear everything the way you want me to hear it. You don’t need to explain or apologize. This is your story, your life.”

  This girl will make me fall in love with her if she’s not careful. I imagine my sexy juror curled up in bed while I whisper in her ear stories I wish were someone else’s.

  “Don’t stop, tell me more,” she incites me.

  “I proposed to Jacqueline the same night I met your grandmother, which was a few weeks before we graduated. After finally having semi-drunk sex for the first time in over a year, I said, ‘Jacqueline Catherine Boyd, will you marry me?’ I’d been kissing her shoulder from behind—a much thinner and bonier shoulder than the last time I had her naked inside my arms—she wasn’t well. I fetched the ring from under the pillow and held it out for her to inspect and realize that this wasn’t a joke. I knew what I was doing. I was dead serious.

  “She immediately said no. Her voice was strong, not an ounce of hesitation. She actually said, ‘No way, Jeff.’ I knew she would say that. She didn’t even want us to date, and there I was asking her to get married. At that point, I was aware that most of her reserve concerning our relationship stemmed from her deteriorating health. I wasn’t going to tell her that I knew about her disease. I wasn’t going to sell Michelle or her father out. I wanted her to be the one to tell me about the cancer herself. I couldn’t have her think it was somehow a pity proposal, which it wasn’t. I didn’t want her to think it was a make-a-wish kind of offer. I mean, obviously, if she wasn’t sick and dying, I probably would’ve waited and dated her properly for all to see and try to get our lives on track before tying the knot, but we didn’t have time. She had a ticking time bomb living inside her, and I had all the time in the world. This was the right thing to do. I wanted to give her everything, but the reality was that I could only give her love and memories for whatever time she had left on this earth.