Just Remember to Breathe

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  Outside, we walked about half a block away, and he turned around and leaned against a wall.

  “Listen,” he said. “I told you last night… Dylan…he’s like a little brother to me.”

  I nodded.

  “Well… I’m a little worried. Honestly I’m a lot worried. About how he’s going to react to all of this. Being thrown in jail, the fight, everything.”

  I bit my lip, staring at the ground. “I am too,” I whispered.

  “That guy’s got a martyr streak a mile wide. You need to understand… I doubt he ever told you the details, at least in the right time sequence. But after you guys broke up, and he shot up his laptop, our squad got mixed up in the patrol rotation as part of the punishment.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “That was the patrol when they got hit by the roadside bomb, Alex. When Roberts died.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “He told me it was several days later.”

  Sherman shook his head, sadly. “No. Now listen, Alex… nobody blamed him. Nobody said it was his fault. It could have happened any time. We were getting hit all the time. But Dylan blamed himself. He and I emailed back and forth about it a lot when he was in the hospital. I tried to get him to see it, but … well… guilt is pretty ugly stuff. And he’s convinced that if he’d just kept his shit together, Roberts would be alive.”

  “Okay. So… what does this have to do with now?”

  He looked at me, closely. “Think about it, Alex. What else happened to someone he loved after that?”

  I felt my stomach cramp. “Oh, no.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’d bet a million dollars he’s got the idea that it’s somehow his fault that asshole tried to rape you.”

  I shook my head violently. “No. It was not his fault. It wasn’t my fault. That was all Randy.”

  “Yeah, well… just be careful. Be prepared. Because I think Dylan’s going to be blaming himself, and I don’t know what he’s going to do about it.”

  “You don’t think he’s going to break up with me, do you?”

  “He might.”

  A tear rolled down my face. He reached out and touched my chin, and said, “You and me… it’s our job to try to bring him back, okay? I don’t know if we can, but … well… I love that guy. And I’m not going to let him go off the edge if I can help it.”

  “I won’t either,” I whispered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Just stay quiet (Dylan)

  When I was escorted into the court room, my hands were still cuffed, in front of me now, and a police officer had me by the left arm.

  I was not in the best of shape. My cast had cracked, and most of it had simply fallen off. My fingers were curled, and I wasn’t able to do anything about it… they hurt like hell. My entire hand had the sickly grey pallor I associate with zombie movies. My shirt stank of vomit, though I’d done my best to clean myself in the sink before they took me out for the arraignment.

  The vomit happened when I went into a seizure.

  From a clinical perspective, the seizures are minor. The doctors say I might have them for a year, or five, or maybe never again. There’s no way to know. I’m careful to take my anti-seizure meds on a daily basis. But obviously I didn’t take any that Saturday or Sunday night, and sometime around four am on Monday, I felt it coming. My whole body tensing, a blinding headache descending on me, and the next thing I knew, I was shaking, tiny rapid shakes that were so jarring I couldn’t move at all. I don’t think anyone would have noticed anything at all, except that I aspirated some of the vomit and started choking.

  I didn’t know what to expect walking into the courtroom, but this wasn’t it. I’d never been in a court, and I guess I expected some old crumbly building, something like the old Night Court reruns my Mom used to watch. Instead, I walked into a clean, carpeted, well lit room with lots of lush wood paneling. The police pushed me into a pen with the various other criminals and told me to sit and wait.

  That’s when I saw them. Not just Alex, but also Sherman, Joel, Kelly. They sat together, in a group around Alex, as if to support her. And she was staring at me.

  I had to close my eyes. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t hurt her. I couldn’t break her heart all over again. But I don’t know what choice I had. I could hurt her in the short term, like tearing off a band-aid, or I could hurt her permanently, in the long term, by involving her in my fucked up life.

  The hearings went on forever. One right after the other, with the judge basically handing out decisions in rapid fire. So I was a caught out surprised when they called my case. The officer leaned over to me and said, “Come this way,” then led me to a table at the front. A man in a suit came up the center aisle and sat at the table next to me.

  I stared at him, then said, “Who the hell are you?”

  He leaned close and whispered, “I’m Ben Cross. I’ll be representing you. For this morning just stay quiet, I’m familiar with the details of the case. We’re going to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

  “Who hired you?”

  He jerked a thumb toward the back of the room. “They did. Your friends. Joel’s my brother-in-law.”

  Oh, no. They were mixed up in this even worse than I realized.

  “I didn’t ask for that.”

  “Be glad you don’t have a public defender.”

  “I don’t want you here.”

  He shook his head. “Do you want to go to prison? Look, we can settle the details after the arraignment. For now, can we do it my way?”

  “Whatever.” I turned and looked away. I didn’t mean to be ungrateful. But what the fuck. They went out and hired a lawyer for me? Who the hell could afford that? And why? Jesus Christ.

  So Ben Cross went to work for me. Before I knew it, bail had been set, and I was back in the holding cell, waiting. An hour later, the cops came for me again, and led me out to the lobby of the jail.

  I was dreading what was coming next.

  Let him smell your socks (Alex)

  I knew Dylan was going to look rough when he came in to the hearing room. He’d been in a holding cell all weekend. But it hit me, hard, when I saw just how rough he looked. He was obviously exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, and after three days without a shave, dark black stubble covered his chin. His black t-shirt, which I had loved and drooled over, looked torn, disheveled, and a stain ran down the front.

  His hand. The cast was off, and he held his right hand in his left, as if protecting it. It was washed out, pale, and the fingers were curled up and unmoving. His face had a similar pallor. It was obvious he was in a lot of pain.

  But the worst part was his eyes. They looked … faded. Dull. Dead. I grabbed Kelly’s hand when he looked over at me, met my eyes for a moment, the looked away, almost as if he didn’t recognize me. I had to stifle tears. Again.

  No. I was not going to sit here and cry. I was going to be strong, because right now, he needed me.

  Even if he didn’t know it.

  The hearing was over quickly. Joel’s brother-in-law was obviously experienced and knew what he was doing, and quickly ran through what had happened the night of the party. He argued persuasively that Dylan was exactly what he was… a wounded soldier who had been protecting someone he loved from a sexual assault. That he should be given a medal, not a trail. The judge told him to get on with it, and the lawyer made a motion that the case be dismissed.

  At that point the prosecutor stood up and said, “Your honor, the defendant put a twenty-one year old Columbia student in the hospital with multiple skull fractures and possible permanent brain damage. He’s dangerous, and we request that he be denied bail.”

  I held my breath.

  The judge set his bail at twenty thousand dollars. When the words came out, Sherman grinned, then turned to me. “We’ve got enough,” he whispered.

  “He looks awful,” I said, as I watched the bailiffs lead him away.

  Ben, Joel’s brother-in-law and now Dylan’s lawye
r, approached us then. He already had the money in his briefcase.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go bail him out. You guys can wait in the lobby, it might be an hour or two before we finally get him loose.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and impulsively hugged him.

  “I got to tell you,” he said, looking mostly at me. “Dylan is … not exactly cooperative. He as much as told me to go to hell.”

  I sighed.

  “I had a bad feeling,” Sherman said. “We’ll talk him around. He’s pretty screwed up right now.”

  Would we be able to talk him around? What was he going to say when he came out of that holding cell. What was he going to say to me? About us?

  I was terrified. I walked out of the court room feeling numb, and found myself pacing in the lobby of the court house. I thought all of the things we could have done differently, to arrive at a different place. If we hadn’t gone to the party. If we hadn’t met again in September. If I hadn’t called him, drunk, from my room last February. If he hadn’t freaked out, and been sent out on that patrol. If we hadn’t met and fallen in love in the first place.

  It was too much. There were too many paths that could have been taken, and no way to know what would have led here and now. What I knew was, I loved Dylan Paris. And I was going to fight for him.

  I sighed. Pacing around wasn’t doing any good. And I was probably driving the others crazy. I walked over to the bench where they sat, in between Sherman and Kelly.

  “So, Sherman… what are your plans? I know you came to visit Dylan, and that’s not exactly turned out how you expected.”

  He yawned, looked up at the ceiling. “Not sure yet,” he replied. “I spent a couple weeks with my mom and dad when I got home, but we were driving each other crazy. So I floated down here, thinking to hang out with Dylan, check out Columbia. But… I’m going to finish college. Somewhere.”

  He gave me a speculative look, then said, “I was thinking about Texas, maybe.”

  “Oh really?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Rice seems like a good university. And I met a PhD candidate there who worked really hard to sell me on the place.”

  I grinned. “You two really hit it off.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it,” he said.

  I let out a single laugh. “I’m sure she wasn’t either.”

  He chuckled. “Carrie says the guys in her graduate program are terrified of her.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I answered. “I always have been.”

  He gave me a puzzled look, eyebrows kind of scrunched together, than said, “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s always so… together. School, life, clothing. Carrie’s always been a little bigger than life. I’m a little more down to earth.”

  “Well, you can’t go through life thinking people are better than you. Look at Dylan—”

  He cut himself off.

  “What do you mean, look at Dylan?”

  He frowned, then said, “Look, I shouldn’t say anything about all of this. He’d kill me. But you’ve got to realize, he’s never felt like he was good enough for you.”

  What? No. “That’s not true.”

  He nodded. “Yes, it is true. God, you have no idea how much he talked about you over in Afghanistan. Constantly. No offense, but it was pretty damn tiresome. But he’s always said, since the moment that you met, you were way out of his league. And he’d tick off the reasons. You’re rich, he’s dirt poor. You come from some kind of crazy successful family. Your father’s an ambassador or something, right?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s the kind of thing he’d talk about. His dad’s a drunk, and he was always half afraid he’d end up just like his Dad. So he puts all this together, and concludes that he’s not good enough for you. He’s always believed that. And Afghanistan only made it worse.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not true. I mean… yeah, so our families are different. But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s not about who your parents are, or how much money you have. It’s about what you do with who you are.”

  “Well, try convincing him of that. I never could.”

  “I will, if he gives me a chance.”

  Kelly, in a dry voice, said, “Let him smell your socks. Then he’ll get it.”

  Joel suppressed a laugh, and ended up coughing instead. It wasn’t convincing.

  “Thank you guys for coming today,” I said, very quietly.

  “Don’t start that,” Kelly said. “This is what friends do.”

  I smiled at her. She could talk all day about what friends do, but where I grew up, that wasn’t true. I didn’t have friends who would go to court for me. Or jail. Or anything else. I was only then starting to realize just how special the bonds were that I’d formed here.

  So, without a word I reached out and took the hands of my friends. There really weren’t any words for what I felt.

  That’s what war is (Dylan)

  Getting out of jail was kind of a reverse process of going in. They didn’t search me on the way out, but otherwise, it was scary similar. I signed paperwork, collected my phone and wallet and keys, and then I was free to leave.

  I walked out slowly, because I was dreading it. They were probably out there. Sherman, and Alex, and her friends. And they’d seen how savage I’d been.

  I did the right thing. I protected her. But … I didn’t stop. I let the rage and anger take over me to the point where if Sherman hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed him.

  I would have killed him. No question.

  It’s not that I hadn’t killed before. I had. Three times, that I know of for sure. Others are a little hazier, where I’d fired in the direction of buildings or insurgents under cover, but for those three, I knew for sure.

  Killing is easy. It’s living with it that is difficult.

  So, when the police finally let me out, they directed me to the elevators, and I was done. Two minutes later I stood in the lobby.

  Alex sat across from me, surrounded by our friends.

  I took a step or two forward, and the full weight of what I was planning to do sunk in. My heart started pounding like crazy, and my stomach was turning, and I wanted to turn and run away. I was having second thoughts again, very real ones. Maybe I should just stop now. And try to figure out a way to make it work. There had to be a way to make it work.

  Then she looked up at me, and I caught my breath, and I could see the same happened with her. Her eyes went wide, and she stood and strode toward me. As she did, her face started to twist, and she started to cry, and I couldn’t let her just cry, so I put my arms around her.

  I took a deep, slow breath through my nose as I held her, inhaling the scent of her hair, her body. She was wrapped into me, her arms thrown over my shoulders.

  Then she kissed me, and the feeling of her lips on mine made we want to scream in grief and terror. Was I really willing to hurt her? Was I really willing to give her up. To give this up?

  Our friends approached.

  “You okay, man?” Sherman asked. I lowered my arms from Alex, but she held on, shifting around to my side.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Thanks for um.. Everything. I don’t know who paid my bail, but I’ll pay you back. I’ve got the money in the bank.”

  Sherman shrugged. “We can deal with that later. Important thing is getting you out of here.”

  I went along with them, because I didn’t have the courage to do anything else. We rode back to the Columbia campus in silence, with Alex resting her head on my shoulder. It was as awkward and uncomfortable a moment as I’ve ever experienced in my life. And it was only going to get worse.

  Knowing that it was a matter of minutes before I was going to lose her forever, I tried to memorize Alex’s voice, her hair, her scent, everything about her. One day she was going to have a wonderful, amazing fucking life. And while I might not be a part of it, I was going to remember. I’d remember every second we had together, and never, ever let it go.


  Sherman looked at me, and gave me a curious look. Almost as if he knew what I was thinking. For all I knew, maybe he did. He’s a sharp guy, and he’d been the other half a long email exchange about me and Roberts and Alex and I may have even mentioned suicide once or twice.

  We dropped off Kelly and Joel, then continued on to my apartment. After getting out of the cab, I said, “I really need to wash up.”

  God, I was such a coward. I couldn’t just spit it out.

  But why? Why was I afraid? I was going to lose her anyway.

  So, Sherman and Alex sat on the couch, and I carefully took a shower, trying not to injure my hand any further. Afterward, I slipped into my room, and changed into clean clothes. Just as I was pulling my shirt into place, there was a knock at the door.

  I opened it. It was Sherman. Before I could say a word, he said, “Before you do what I think you’re about to do, you need to listen to me.”

  I closed my eyes. “Sherman, this isn’t your business.”

  “Yeah” he said, sounding exhausted. “Yeah, it is. Because you’re my friend. And because she’s my friend. Just hear me the fuck out, all right?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  He paced for a minute, turned toward me and looked like he was going to say something, then turned away.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, spit it out.”

  He turned back and pointed his finger at me. “I warned her.”

  “What?”

  “I warned her yesterday. I warned her that your fucking overblown victim mentality was going to twist things all up in a way that made you break up with her.”

  “What the hell?”

  He shook his head. “Tell me you haven’t been screwing yourself up to do it the whole ride home. Tell me I’m wrong, Paris.”

  This time, I was the one who looked away. I couldn’t tell him that. Because he was right.

  He pointed, out the door and down the hall. “She’s out there, waiting. With her hands on her lap. Her back straight. Trying to hold it all in. Trying to stay brave, even though she knows your about to fucking blow her heart into a million pieces. For the second time. Because she knows it too. We both know you, as well as you know yourself, asshole. And let me tell you, you aren’t saving her from anything by doing this. You’re just going to break her heart, and your own, and fuck everything up that’s good in your life.”