JOSH

 

The day after our meal, Sarah called me on my mobile telephone. My heart instantly fluttered at the sight of her name written across the screen. When I answered, she told me that she’d been to see Charlie that morning and had read him the letter. He was angry at me, immensely so, but she had eventually persuaded him that I was genuinely sorry for my actions. This had only had a partial effect, however, and in the end he’d told her that if I was truly repentant then I would at least meet him and apologize to his face.

“Of course I will,” I said enthusiastically into the phone when she’d told me.

“Then I can arrange a meeting?”

“Yes. It’s my last week, so I’m allowed to leave for up to two hours between ten in the morning and six in the evening. So you can arrange it for any time between then.”

“If I were to call him now and arrange a meeting for today, would that be possible?”

“So long as I was back at the Peaks by six.”

“Then I’ll do it,” she said, a shadow of glee in her voice.

Not ten minutes later, she called back to say that we were to meet him in a local coffeeshop in an hour. Realizing that the meeting was so close, my stomach turned to ice and I sensed that I was perhaps not so willing to do this as I had first thought. I became afraid of it now that it was so near, like a man on death row when the clock strikes eleven and he enters his final hour upon this earth. However, I battled against the dark voices that recoiled from it and agreed.

An hour later, I was wheeling Sarah through the doors of the coffeeshop, her sister Lucy having driven us there. The moment we were inside, I scanned the place and saw that only a few tables were occupied—two couples on separate tables by the window, a serious-looking man in glasses seated in an alcove and typing away at a computer, and two older women sitting together, each reading a book and ignoring the other. It was when my gaze reached another alcove at the back of the cafe that I felt a stone smash my heart.

Sitting there on his own, his arms and legs still in plaster, was Charlie Hodge. I went cold at the sight of him. Apart from the obvious injuries to his limbs, he also sported yellow patches of bruising and some swelling to his face, especially around the eyes.

The sight of his forlorn figure sitting there in his wheelchair made my whole body go weak. Not long after I’d spotted him, Charlie looked over at us and his face went instantly sad as he saw my figure standing there with Sarah. I was glued to the spot for a moment, my limbs transfixed like concrete.

“Aren’t we going over?” Sarah asked.

“Of course,” I mumbled.

I began pushing her across the floor toward Charlie. When we took our places opposite, I couldn't even look him in his battered face. For almost a minute, I merely sat there with my head bowed, and even when the waitress came over and took our order, I could not release my eyes from my lap.

Once the waitress had left, Sarah decided to break the silence:

“I’d like to thank you for coming, Charlie,” she said to him. Then turning to me, she added, “Josh, do you have anything you’d like to say?”

But I couldn’t speak. My knees were bobbing up and down and my sweaty hands were screwed together. My mind was stuck in a haze. That mangled person sitting opposite had experienced such tortuous pain because of me and still wore those atrocities upon his body. Under the glare of his mutilated body, I felt like an ant under the glare of a microscope.

“He’s not sorry,” Charlie said after I’d been silent for some time. “He can’t even look me in the eyes and say it.”

I lifted my head sharply to face him and looked straight into his eyes, my own welling with tears.

“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” I began in a rambling speech. “I fucked up, I left you to die, there’s no other way to see it. When I left that room I thought you were dead. But it’s not just that; it’s getting you involved for my own stupid purposes, for knowing that you could get hurt, for involving you in my own destructive quests. I didn't think twice about you, and if I did I pushed it down to satisfy my more animal urges. I manipulated you and I used you and was a fucking animal to you. I deserve nothing but your contempt. Nothing but your contempt.”

I returned my gaze to my lap, unable to look at his bruised, sad face any longer. He let out a withered groan that appeared to last a lot longer than it actually did.

“Do you know how they did it?” he said, his voice sounding firmer and more assured than I’d ever heard it before. “How they maimed my body?”

“No,” I muttered almost inaudibly.

 “They beat me first, making a circle around me and passing me from one to the next. That’s how I lost these teeth.”

He turned his head to the side and opened up his mouth with his fingers. I looked up momentarily to see a huge gap along his jaw where four molars had been smashed out. I winced the moment I saw it and returned my eyes to the familiar sight of my lap.

“They fractured a couple of ribs and shattered my left eye socket too,” he went on with his morbid description. “They wouldn’t let me go down. Wouldn’t let me fall to the floor. Kept picking me back up. I wished for unconsciousness then—oh, how I wished for it—but somehow it wouldn’t come, even when they were smashing me about the face. I couldn’t even protect myself; they’d hold my arms apart and I was completely at their mercy. I began to become numb to the pain.”

Here he paused, and I took the opportunity to look back up at his face. I was about to say sorry again when he continued:

“But if I thought that I was actually numb to the pain, I was completely wrong. It just needed to go up a notch or two. They brought in two beer crates and held me in place while they stretched each of my arms across them. They held them there while the fat one whose neck you’d cut stamped down with all his might, breaking each of them.”

“I’m real sorry, Charlie,” I began rambling again, my voice constricted with emotion. “It should have been me. I should’ve stayed and taken your place, you should’ve never been there, you took my—”

“Then they took my legs,” he continued over me. “Have you ever broken your thigh bone, Josh?”

“No,” was all I could manage in reply.

“Your friend here has.” And he addressed Sarah, “It hurts doesn’t it? Indescribable pain.”

“Yes, it does,” Sarah softly said from beside me.

“I thought I was going to die,” he snapped with hardly concealed fury, the hands that stuck out of his casts screwed up into fists. “And it was—”

He was stopped by the waitress arriving with our order. As we each took our drinks, Charlie’s face was red, his anger barely contained in his features, his need to tell me of his agony almost unbearable.

The waitress left and he continued:

“It was only when they broke my second leg that I was finally able to pass out. That’s when they dragged me into an alleyway a couple of blocks down the street and dumped me there to die. Eventually someone found me and called an ambulance. It took six operations to repair my arms and legs and they say I may never walk unaided again.”

I looked up at him and once more saw the terrible rage in his face, his lips screwed up tight, his eyes bulging from their sockets and dripping with tears, his jaw muscles taut and his whole head shaking uncontrollably from anger.

“My father has money,” I said out of desperation more than anything. “I can pay for the best medical care.”

But he ignored me. He clearly had something to say and wasn’t going to let me interrupt him.

“Do you know what the saddest thing about it all is?” he said, before answering himself in a trembling voice. “The saddest thing is that during those few hours leading up to the card game and the ones we spent around that table were some of the best hours of my life.”

A tinge of brightness reached his voice when he said this last part, like a sunbeam breaking through a sheet of cloud.

“I enjoyed it too,” I said to him, looking him in the eyes with a gentle expression. “I really did. At one point I actually thought we’d walk out of there with all their money.”

“Me too,” he muttered.

We were silent for a while. I returned my gaze downwards, but would occasionally glance up at Charlie and see his rigid, tear-filled face glaring at me. Having nothing else to say, and wanting to break the silence, I inquired, “I heard your parents were coming up from Texas to take you home?”

“They did,” Charlie sniffed, “but I couldn’t face going back there with everyone wondering what had happened, seeing me like this. It’s bad enough everyone at college. I’m gonna wait until I’m better before I go home. My father went back after a week, but my mother is staying here with me, she’s rented an apartment for us. College has suspended my studies, so I get the added pleasure of having to repeat the year.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said with sincerity.

“So you keep saying.”

The table went silent again and each of us drank some coffee, Charlie doing so with a long straw that Sarah helped him with. Watching this pathetic sight made me feel even worse, and I couldn't look at him while he sucked away at that straw, his eyes remaining pinned to me.

“So you’re gonna be in town for a while?” I asked after some time.

His lips released the straw and he replied, “Yes. Like I said, until I’m recovered.”

I looked up at him now, fixed my eyes on him.

“Can I see you again?” I wanted to know.

“Why? Another card game? Because the last one cost me an arm and a leg! Well, two to be precise!”

I grinned at his sarcasm.

“No, as a friend,” I put to him.

For a split second his glare faded and his face softened, the twitch of a smile lighting up his lips. But he suppressed it.

“You really want to see me?” he asked.

“Of course. I wanna make it up to you. What you went through because of me was awful. I won’t leave your side until I’ve made it up to you, however that may be.”

His eyes went a little misty and he turned them to the ceiling. The sight of this almost brought the tears back to my own eyes.

“Okay,” he uttered without taking his gaze from the ceiling.

After that he gave me his number and I promised to call him by the end of the week, when I was out of the Peaks, to arrange another meeting. For the next hour, the three of us sat and chatted more cordially. I told Charlie about being at the Peaks and he told me that he’d already heard about it. He wanted to know a little about my heroics from the crash and said that he still couldn't believe it. He told me that everyone at the college was shocked. Apparently when most of them first found out that Josh Kelly had been involved in a car crash they thought that I’d caused it. It wasn’t until they watched the news that they actually saw that I’d rescued people. Sarah told Charlie about my rescue of her and I felt a little embarrassed as she did. She talked so elegantly of me, and the two of them actually spent at least ten minutes talking directly with one another while I sat silently beside them.

At the end of an hour, Charlie’s mother appeared at the coffeeshop doorway. She didn’t come in, so as not to embarrass her son, and merely waved at him.

“I gotta go,” Charlie said on seeing his mother. “Could you push me out to my ma?”

“Sure,” I said, getting up and coming around the back of him.

Charlie and Sarah said farewell to each other and I began wheeling him out. While we were still out of earshot of his mother, he asked me not to mention anything around her. If I said sorry, she’d wonder what it was for. He’d told her that it had been a mugging, which she’d bought, her son not being the lying type.

“I won’t say a word,” I assured as I took him toward the door.

“Hello, boys,” Mrs. Hodge said as we reached her and I observed that Charlie went red all over.

“Ma! Josh is twenty-five, he’s hardly a boy,” Charlie pointed out in an annoyed tone.

“I’m still a boy at heart, Mrs. Hodge,” I said, using all my charm.

The old woman smiled at me and went a little red like her son.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Ma! It doesn’t matter,” Charlie snapped at her.

“I was being polite, Charles,” she snapped at her son, looking down at him with an angered look and then back up at me with her sweet smile returned to her face.

“My name’s Josh Kelly, ma’am,” I said to her.

“Oh my! I thought I recognized you. You’re the boy who rescued all those people. You’re a hero.”

Now it was my turn to go red.

“Josh doesn’t want to talk about it, Ma,” Charlie told her. “Let’s just go.”

“Well, okay, Josh,” Mrs. Hodge said in a cheery, sunny voice. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Mrs. Hodge,” I replied as she began pushing Charlie along the pavement. “And I’ll see you soon, Charlie,” I called out after them.

Charlie turned around and I was sure that he was grinning. I still felt guilty in his eyes, but something made me feel good that I was somehow making him feel better in himself, a partial atonement for my soul. I watched the mother and son until they went around the corner. Then I went back inside the cafe and rejoined Sarah at the back, sitting opposite her this time.

“Do you feel a little better?” she asked the moment I was seated.

“Yeah,” I let out. “I don't feel that I’ve made up for anything—not by a long shot. But at least I feel like something’s beginning, like I may be able to one day look him in the eyes and not feel a worthless piece of crap in them.”

She struck her hand across the table and took ahold of mine.

“This is just the beginning,” she said softly, gazing into my eyes, her beautiful green irises shining in the electric light. “This is the beginning of the rebirth of Josh Kelly.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, lifting my coffee and grinning.