Three Gray Dots

by K. L Randis

  I smiled, patting the top of her hand, then bringing her hand up to my lips and kissing the back of her knuckles.

  “Does this mean I did a good thing?” Mom giggled.

  “It means you did the best thing,” I replied.

  “Will you visit with me for a while? I can make us some tea, and I might be able to find those cookies you like before you head back to college.”

  The bits and pieces that still were amiss in her memory while she was lucid were hard to listen to. “I’ll stay as long as I possibly can,” I assured her, pulling out my phone to text Meg that I was going to have to postpone our wine and pizza date.

  MEG! She’s lucid, staying as long as I can. Rain check for tonight?

  She must have been sitting right by her phone, because her reply was almost instant.

  OMG. Of course! Hug her for me. Tell her about Jackson. Don’t tell her about the bombing. Tell her everything. HUG HER MORE. Then come home and tell me everything. What I would give to talk to Cheryl right now. GO! STOP READING MY RAMBLINGS OMG I LOVE YOU SO HAPPY FOR YOU.

  I locked my phone after reading her text, a smile so wide across my face it made my cheekbones tingle. “Do you want to hear about how I met Jackson, Mom?”

  “I’d love that,” she replied. “But first…Pippa, can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Are we staying at a hotel?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Just like Mom, I was half-asleep most of the time, drifting in and out of a fog.

  Morning was my favorite time of day because it meant I had a brand new twenty-four hours to readjust my sails and attempt to re-ground myself. Breakfast would consist of an omelet, coffee, and searching current topics on my Twitter feed to assess the lives of celebrities I would never meet. I’d check emails and cross off checklists for paperwork that was backing up at work, then have to re-coffee.

  Somewhere after the daily conference call or email exchange with my boss, I’d munch on some fruit or get lost in a text exchange with Meg about her latest dating drama or vent over her lack of ovaries from when endometriosis took them from her. I’d call the nursing home, but only after I watched funny videos from my phone that popped up on social media, because sometimes the news wasn’t always sunshine and unicorns. Actually, news from the nursing home was mostly filled with updates of Mom’s medications or whatever episodes she experienced the evening before that were worse than normal.

  Usually after those calls, I’d get lost.

  I’d find myself staring out the kitchen windows, looking for cardinals and surveying the modest acre of property from my one bedroom apartment. The quiet that surrounded me was unusual, at least to me, since I had come from a life-in-the-fast-lane that my career had provided up until the attack. Light duty meant half the hours, half the responsibility, and half the distraction I so desperately needed. The hum of my nearly dead refrigerator clinked in the background while I wasted time trying to find myself, trying to wake up.

  The attack.

  The explosion.

  The accident.

  The ending.

  I had called it so many different things in my head for so long that I sometimes failed to see what it was in its true form; murder.

  It was murder. My love of camaraderie running against the pavement with complete strangers nearly killed me.

  And for what?

  True to my personality, before I got too lost thinking about the ‘what ifs’ or ‘if onlys’, I pried myself away from the window, heading toward my bedroom.

  I had to get out.

  If I ran fast enough, the pounding in my head would fall into rhythm with the beats in my chest. If I ran far enough, the past would struggle to keep up, and it would float away from me, evaporating into the air like a morning fog rising off of the ocean.

  I never did run fast or far enough.

  I tried, though. I tried to forget Jackson barking catcalls from behind me about how the shape of my ass made him want to take me home instead of finishing the run. We would push each other to the edge of exhaustion, nodding in each other’s direction in support when the playlist blaring through my ear buds set my pace just right and there was no room for talking between steps.

  I ran alone now. The moment my doctor approved me for exercise, I was lacing up a pair of sneakers in an attempt to escape my own thoughts.

  Jackson was a memory I was trying to live without. He had trained with me for weeks, sloshing through cold, sand, and rain just to help me get in one extra mile. I never explored why he was so dedicated and supportive, but retrospect is a funny thing. All the notions I had considered in the past about him maybe loving me and wanting to be by my side while I trained for the hardest marathon I would ever run in my life were long gone.

  He was never training for me, I had concluded, he was training with me. His absence in my life was all the proof I needed to know he wasn’t serious about keeping anything between us going.

  I crossed Island Drive on the south side of Topsail Island, heading north. I knew that if I could just make it four more blocks I’d be able to turn around and call the day a success. My therapist had told me to increase my radius two blocks at a time.

  “Is it the distance or pain that prevents you from getting to the beach?” she had asked. She poised her pen above her clipboard, anticipating my response. When I turned to gaze out the window instead of answering, she lowered the pen and sighed. “You can tell me, Pippa.”

  Rain had collected on the window in her office and I watched the beads of water drift into each other until they were so dense and unstable they’d slide uncontrollably down the glass. It was exactly how I felt most of the time. One minute I was standing at the corner waiting for a light to turn green so I could finish my run and the next I was fetal positioned on a bench outside of the Polish Deli, unable to breathe or move.

  “Meg came and got me the last time,” I said. “The store owner had to call her to come pick me up. I couldn’t move.” I kept my eyes transfixed on the raindrops, watching them spiral out of control to the bottom was comforting. It was like I wasn’t alone. My eyes shifted to the light switch on the wall above my therapist’s right shoulder.

  She followed my gaze and her eyes softened. “I can turn the lights down a bit, if you want. Is it too bright in here still?”

  The lights were half dimmed but I had worked so hard to not let my sporadic sensitivity to light overpower me, so I shook my head. “They’re fine. I know it’s safe here.”

  Bright lights. The smell of the pavement. Busy public places.

  All triggers I was trying to manage.

  “Yes, it is safe here, Pippa. So about the beach…”

  “Jackson,” I said. “He’s the reason I can’t get to the beach.”

  It was a bold statement. I had never mentioned his name in therapy before so she leaned forward with eager eyes at my disclosure.

  “Who’s Jackson, Pippa?”

  I closed my eyes and let the question repeat itself several times in my head. Who is he really? Who’s Jackson? Where is he? Where did he go? WHERE IS HE?

  When I opened them to look at her, hot tears feverishly slid down both cheeks. Blinking them away wouldn’t help, I knew that already, so I let them fall into my lap. “I don’t know,” I answered, finally.

  Confused, my therapist sat in silence, waiting for me to continue.

  “I don’t know who he is,” I admitted, looking at her. “I just know who he was.”

  My most recent therapy session echoed in my head as I crossed Harrison Street. A pink silhouette still hovered across the skyline. If I hurried, I could make two more blocks and be back home before the sun started to set.

  Topsail Island was a twenty-six mile barrier island on the coast of North Carolina. I was lucky to have my mom, a career, the beach, and a hole in the wall bar I loved to go to with my best friend all within an hour drive away. It was fate that the marathon I had gruelingly trained and qualified for was exa
ctly twenty-six miles.

  As I made my way past Eighteenth Avenue, I tried to pushed thoughts of Jackson from my head. He was the one who convinced me that running twenty-six miles would be cake for someone who had run the hundreds of miles I logged each year. It was his persistence and eagerness to wake up at four a.m. everyday to train with me that led us to the morning of the scariest day of my life.

  The day everything changed.

  I cruised past the Polish Deli, thankful that the shop wasn’t open yet so I didn’t have to wave to the owner. He only remembered me as the woman who broke down on his stoop, the woman who started to hyperventilate so violently that I couldn’t dial my phone. He only remembers me asking to go inside the shop, and screaming at him to turn out all the lights so I could sit in a dark corner to wait for Meg to rescue me. I could hear his saturated dialect try and calmly explain to Meg what was happening, in English, but I don’t think he ever witnessed someone crash to rock bottom before.

  And it wouldn’t be the last time I did.

  I jogged past Kent Avenue, a familiar tightening in my chest threatening to make me turn around. Keeping my momentum, I tried to focus on the reason I was pushing so hard.

  “I did it, I finally qualified for this marathon,” I had said to Meg, remembering back to when I first showed her my acceptance letter months before. “I have to train every day now. Oh, it’s going to be so amazing. Cheering crowds and people running together in a sea of sweat, ugh I can’t wait.” I sat on the sofa, a carton of cookies-and-cream ice cream in my lap. “My diet should change a bit, I guess.”

  “A sea of sweat? That was your motivation to do a marathon?” Meg asked, stealing my spoon and helping herself to a mile-high bite.

  “You want to be my motivation instead?” I teased. “Run with me. We can train together and when the day comes you can jump into the street so we can cross the finish line together. Wouldn’t it be fun?”

  “Fun, yup. Also, I think that’d be cheating. Also probably illegal, I think they have security people for that. I didn’t qualify, you did,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Wait, Pip?”

  “Yeah?” I said between mouthfuls of food.

  She cocked her head to one side. “What marathon did you qualify for again? I forget. The ass-growing one?” Her eyes shifted to the spoon I had poised at the opening of my mouth, a mound of ice cream haphazardly teeter tottering on the edge.

  “Boston,” I said, grinning ear to ear. “On April 15th I’ll be running the Boston Marathon.”

  “You happy about that?”

  “Not at all,” I said exhaling, my cartoon-grin forcing a smile to spread across Meg’s face. “I am the most unhappy runner in the world today.”

  A car horn shook me from the daydream I had immersed myself in. I stumbled backward onto the curb, the front bumper of the car grazing my leg.

  “Crazy! Get off the road!” the man from the passenger seat shouted through the window.

  My hand found its place on my chest as I sucked in gasps of air, all focus starting to crumble. I put my hands on my hips and looked around for a distraction as my breaths started to become more rapid.

  You’re fine, you’re fine.

  Where are you?

  How far are you?

  I talked to myself as my eyes locked on a street sign that read FIFTH AVENUE. “You’re at Fifth Avenue?! You’re almost at the beach. You almost did it. ”

  The sun hugged the skyline, flooding light onto the sidewalk and streets for one last hurrah before it started its descent. The ground swayed beneath me as I struggled to balance my breathing and instinctively I reached for my phone. Dropping to my knees I opened my text messages, fighting with myself to decide whether or not I needed to ask Meg to come get me.

  “Why am I like this,” I whispered, staring at Jackson’s name several messages down.

  My phone was a vault of memories. When you care about someone and don’t realize it’s the last time you’ll ever speak to them, you tend to hold onto emotional memorabilia longer than you should. Those messages were the only memories I had left. I could revisit them anytime I wanted, to remind myself that he was real and that he could have been so much more than a running buddy if I had put my selfishness aside.

  I scanned over Dylan’s name and opened up Jackson’s instead. Our last text was ancient, it was practically mummified sitting among conversations I had with other people who texted me on a regular basis.

  The impact of staring at Jackson’s name in my phone was immediate.

  My breaths slowed, and the ground stopped swaying so hard. I tried to blink the focus back into my eyes. As I sat staring at the last thing we wrote to each other, the bottom left corner of our conversation started to move.

  I knew what was happening. I had opened up our conversation millions of times. I had typed messages out every once in a while, only to delete it. Still, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  The bottom showed three round bubbles, each one filling up in succession, a gratifying occurrence when someone was typing a reply to a text message. I stared at the screen, breathless, waiting for them to stop and for words to appear in our conversation. I waited to see what had Jackson texting me at that exact moment, with me kneeling on the side of Fifth Avenue battling a past I was trying to outrun.

  They continued pulsing like a heartbeat that was shocked back to life. They danced while my inhales and exhales slowed to a normal rhythm.

  Without thinking twice about it, I texted Jackson the GPS location of where I was kneeling and nothing more. His reply was immediate:

  I’ll be there in two minutes.

  I didn’t need to explain anything.

  I navigated to a nearby bench, bringing my knees to my chest and dropping my head in my hands. It seemed like a century before Jackson’s car pulled up to the curb. His dashboard reflected only a nine-minute lapse of time from the text I sent him.

  We sat in silence, his car weaving traffic like a seal explores the ocean. I don’t know how I knew he would bring us to the beach but I was relieved when we pulled into our usual meeting spot. He opened his door after finding a parking spot, ran around front, and opened my door.

  The cool sand that was cast in shadows from the buildings on the shoreline flicked my ankles as he pulled me onto the beach. My hand enclosed in his, I followed, succumbing to his silent guidance like a lost child at a parade.

  When we got to the water’s edge he spun around and sat down in the sand, gently tugging on my hand to follow him. He removed my shoes and socks, then his own. Placing his hand over mine, he scooped up handfuls of sand and placed them into my palms, coaxing my hands to transition it from one hand to another in a platonic game of don’t-spill-the-sand.

  I was transfixed.

  I was also finally cognizant of what had just happened.

  “How am I supposed to go on like this?” I said finally, letting the last handful of sand rejoin its place on the ground in front of me.

  “Like what?” His voice was like velvet, soothing me in a way I didn’t know I needed.

  “Like this,” I said, lifting my chin for the first time to look him in the face.

  He nodded, but the tear streaming down his left cheek did not go unnoticed. “The same way I do,” he said.

  “How’s that? How do you just go on living like you haven’t been through the worst thing in your life? At what point can I control these anxiety attacks instead of letting them steam roll over me when I least expect it? How will this ever work?”

  “With each other,” he said, confidently. “I don’t need you Pippa, I’m a grown man and I own all my choices. I can’t fix the parts of me that ruptured because my parents died or because I saw too much fighting a war for my country that I didn’t start. I want you, Pip. I want to spend time around someone who trusts me enough to text me their location and know I’ll show up. I’m not trying to be un-broken, I would just rather be broken with you. You’re the only one who understands how
I feel.”

  “Would we really want that? It sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

  “I do, I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

  “So what, we pretend we’re not kneeling in the middle of streets or needing to be coaxed out of panic attacks with beach sand? We just hold onto each other and fall apart?”

  “It’s a start,” he said, grabbing my hand. “After all, when you were at your lowest just now, who did you text?”

  I stared at him, not wanting to admit that I was aching for him too. He was right. When I was at the peak of an anxiety attack, Jackson was the first person I wanted to call. I think crisis situations and good news always help identify who is truly important in your life. When something terrible or wonderful happens, there’s always that one person that you want to tell first.

  My person just happened to have been MIA since I returned home from the hospital.

  “So if that’s how you feel where have you been, Jackson?”

  His mouth twitched. “I was waiting for you to figure out where I fit. You called me today, though, so maybe I now I know. Look, I’ve been meaning to give you something…”

  “It’s not enough,” I whispered, cutting him off.

  “If you need more help we’ll find it. Give it over to me Pip, let me carry some of this with you. We can—”

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” I whispered, turning my face to the ocean. “I meant it’s not enough for my daughter, Jackson. I’m not going to be good enough.”

  The words fell out of my mouth. I didn’t intend on saying them, but there was no other way for me to describe the gravity of how I felt. He needed to know the truth.

  “Your…daughter?” Jackson asked.

  I shrugged, unable to look him in the face. “Surprise,” I said, annoyed at the burning in my chest. “Her name is Phoenix. I guess we’re both not who we needed each other to be.”

  “How? I mean, who do you have a —?” He stopped, his eyes darkening at the realization that he knew the answer before I had a chance to tell him. “Dylan?”