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Shit.
For the umpteenth time in the last few years, my heart broke. I was going to fucking kill that guy.
I could only imagine what she was doing. Probably lying across her bed with a teddy bear pressed into her chest, unable to move and unable to discern if she was indeed breathing or not. Just opening up her phone to press Call was difficult for her in these moments, so I knew she’d already been like that for a while, working up the strength to reach out to me.
I reacted without thought. “I’m pulling up our new song so you can listen to it, okay?” I tried to keep my voice as calm as I could, scattering to pull up the correct folder on my computer. “Listen, these are the isolated vocals. Can you hear me all right?”
I clicked play on the most recent demo I had saved on my desktop. It was about her. All the songs I wrote were about her, really, but she didn’t need to know that. I just knew she liked listening to me sing, and when she was stuck in one of her scares, listening usually helped.
I dragged my hands heavily over my face, pressing into each divot and crevice with my fingers as they slid. By the end of the song, the camera still hadn’t turned to her. Fuck. I had to do something else, and driving over to her house to be with her wasn’t a fucking option. God, how that frustrated me.
“Hey,” I said, picking up a pen from my desk and standing in front of the camera. “Can you see me from where you are? Are you able to look this way?”
She didn’t answer. I just had to assume she was or would be soon. I had no other options.
“Watch this.” I pushed up the sleeve of my sweatshirt, brandishing my tattooed forearm. “Okay. I’m at the starting point,” I said, pressing the pen to my wrist bone. “I’m in the trees behind the tracks. Where should I go?”
She only wheezed.
Shit. Keep going.
“I think I’ll go this way.” I traced the pen up around the design on my skin, leaving behind an inky trail that I desperately hoped she was following. “Can you follow the pen?”
“Uh-huh,” she whined through her squall.
Okay, that’s progress.
“I don’t see where to go next. Maybe I should just cross through this black space…”
“No!” The word was followed by a round of choppy breaths. There she is.
“Where?” I asked.
“Left.”
“Mine or yours?”
“Toward your body,” she said in a staccato rhythm. Three whole words.
“Okay. Now where?”
“Over the train tracks.” Four.
“This way?” I asked, going the opposite way to see if she’d react to a joke.
“No! Where we used to sit.”
I smiled and dragged the pen toward the inside of my elbow, drawing a little star. “We made it.” I lifted the pen from my skin. “Now we can sit here together in the sun and listen to music while we wait for the train to come. Remember what it was like?”
“Oh, Jonah.” She sobbed heavily as she regained her full ability to speak. “I can’t do it. I really can’t do it.”
“I take it you’re not having fun anymore?” I leaned back in my chair and ripped my hand through my hair. Kai had been on the brink of a breakdown for so long that I was starting to forget what she was like before Javi. Not really, obviously, but almost. Six out of the seven days a week, she told exciting stories of time with her girlfriends or funny patrons from the bar, and on the seventh day, she told the truth. Today must’ve been the seventh day.
“No, Jo. I hate it!” The sounds of her cries tore me in two, though an evil part of me was just a little bit satisfied to hear she wasn’t enjoying Spain. Every time she said anything negative about it, my heart convinced me a move was on the horizon. “My life is full of things I don’t even like. People I don’t even like. I hate it!”
“What happened?”
She whimpered as she picked the phone up and sat herself in a criss-crossed position. A teddy bear was smushed into her chest, wrapped in a black sweatshirt I’d left behind for her when I left Spain. That made me smile. I didn’t take the situation lightly at all, but it was nice to know someone needed me.
