My hands tremble, my heart catches, stills, tries to understand, but it’s something beyond comprehension for me. Dryness seizes my lungs, like breathing in sand. I swallow, or attempt to. Nothing works. My heart races, my breathing fast and rapid.
I raise my sunglasses and read the message again.
I couldn’t save myself, but I can still save you. . . .
I blink. Twice. Staring at it as a woman beside me watches me. I can see her out of the corner of my eye. My sunglasses slide down my nose, eyes lifting to hers but I don’t know her. At least I don’t think I do. She asks me something, and I can’t reply, not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t. Words won’t form. I’m trapped by ten words.
I couldn’t save myself, but I can still save you. . . .
8:15 p.m. I send my reply, pain shooting through my jaw from clenching and unclenching it. I draw in a deep, painful breath, gripping my phone tighter as I type out the words, my hands barely able to keep from dropping the phone.
Me: Rhya. No. Don’t fucking say that! What the hell does that even mean?
Nothing.
Do you see that guy now? The one with his throat threatening to close? Can you feel the burning in his stomach and the tightness in his chest? The heat in his cheeks at the rising blood pressure and the roaring in his ears?
No?
Keep watching.
8:17 p.m. I send her another message.
Me: What the fuck does that mean?
No reply. That burn in my stomach rises to my throat. Heavy lidded eyes close and then slowly open. She’s not serious. She can’t be. Could she? Sure, she does things to get my attention but this. . . no, it’s different now.
I’m in the penthouse suite. Carl and two more security guards step inside the foyer with us. I don’t remember exiting the elevator. I do know I want everyone in this room gone. I want to be gone myself.
Dismissively, I nod to the girls Tiller brought up here. I want them gone. I want the sight of everything and anything around me to disappear into oblivion. “Get them out of here.”
“Fuck that.” Tiller laughs; it’s not an amusing sound. It’s distaste. He holds up his hand at Carl. He never takes orders from me. I don’t know why I thought it’d be different tonight. “No.”
His denial sends a rush of annoyance down my spine, and my body locks in place. I swallow again, the action slow and deliberate. Leaning into a wall, I run the hand not holding my phone through my hair and raise my sunglasses before dropping them on the table next to my keys. “Then you take them someplace else. I’m not dealing with their shit too.”
Despite his usual indifference to everything around him, his rudeness, his callous demeanor, Tiller knows something’s wrong with me. My attention has been diverted to my phone for the last half hour, and it’s New Year’s Eve, a day I’m known for some of my biggest partying.
Tiller’s left hand rises, his thumb flicking his nose before his eyes land on mine. Can you see the disappointment in his? I can. It’s screaming back at me like my unstable thoughts about a girl I can’t save.
“What’s going on with you?” he finally asks, standing in front of me, his eyes wandering to the girls exiting the suite.
The back of my hand sweeps over my forehead, and I hand him my phone. “I don’t know what to make of this.” Part of me hopes by handing him my phone, my heart that’s threatening to explode might slow down.
It doesn’t. All that happens is my inability to say anything else to him, waiting for my brother’s words of wisdom he might offer me.
At first, he doesn’t. He refuses. I’ve pissed him off. Then his curiosity gets the better of him and he stares at it for a moment. My hand flies to my hair, tugging, but nothing offers relief.
He hands the phone back to me, shrugs, then pulls up the hood of his coat over his hair, his dark, intimidating stare moving from my phone to the closed door and Carl standing beside it. “Just let it go. It’s her bullshit,” Tiller says with a sardonic laugh. He regards me thoughtfully for a half a second, then lets out a resigned sigh. “She does this crap to you all the time. You saw when we were in Paris, and she wanted you to come over and couldn’t. She threw that big fit, stopped replying to your messages until you flew home the next day only to find her passed out in a pool of her own vomit.”
He has a point. A valid one, but still, something is different about this. In all those times she’s reacted like this, I’ve never gotten a text message like that.
What does it mean?
“You’re fuckin’ depressing,” Tiller grumbles, nodding to Carl by the door. “I’m going after those girls.”
Carl clears his throat, unwilling to leave me alone. “You okay, Shade?”
I don’t look up from my phone, my fingers tightening around it. “Go with Tiller. I want to be alone.”
They listen. For once.
When Tiller’s gone, I remain with my back pressed against the wall and stare at the message again.
I couldn’t save myself, but I can save you.
Adrenaline hits my chest like a punch to the heart, incapable of seeing a positive outcome from this. I breathe in slowly through my nose, my pulse raging. I know what it means. I do. I may not want to believe it, but my gut tells me I know.
My first call is to Auden because he lives ten minutes from her apartment. Maybe he can get to her. Maybe he can stop her from what she’s about to do.
He answers on the third ring. “What’s up?”
“I need you, man.” My teeth clench, and I feel them grinding against one another. “Can you go check on Rhya? She’s not answering my calls.”
Auden groans into the phone, his breathing heavy in annoyance. “Dude, it’s not the first time she’s hasn’t answered your calls.” There’s a flick and spark from his lighter and then his slow inhale. “She’s probably high and fucking someone,” He laughs on the exhale, but it’s not amusement.
You’re seeing a pattern here, aren’t you? Everyone knows these are Rhya’s tricks with me, but my heart, my aching chest, it’s telling me otherwise.
“When was the last time you checked on her?”
He inhales another drag of his cigarette, his voice muffled as he holds the breath in. “The other day. She was high.”
Figures. My neck bends forward, a slow regretful shake to the stiffness constricting it. “And not today?”
“No.” He chuckles; it’s condescending in a sense, and I don’t blame him. Can’t. This is fucked. “Kind of busy here.”
“Doing what?” I’m not sure why I’m asking. I know what he’s doing.
I hear noise in the background, words from someone I can’t make out. “Trying to get my fuckin’ dick wet, jackoff,” he snaps back. “Some of us actually have to work at it.”
It’s a jab at me, and though he’s my best friend, I usually don’t let him get away with talking to me like that. But I suppose I’m asking a lot of him tonight.
My jaw clenches and unclenches. “Christ, man. Can you go just go fucking check on her, Auden?”
He growls into the receiver, and it’s then I hear a woman’s laughter in the background. “I will, later. Twenty more minutes isn’t going to make a difference, ya impatient fuck.”
It might. He doesn’t know that.
Do you see my palms sweating? Do you hear the sharp intake of my breath? It’s all a window into the chaos of my mindset.
My mind races with possible outcomes and if she has the nerve to do what I think she’s going to do. I could call Reece. He’d go back to her apartment, but deep down, something inside me knows that whoever goes to her apartment now could find her dead. The last person I want to see that would be Reece. They’ve been through too much shit in their lives with their dad.
Next I try Ricky, my uncle. He’s known Rhya just as long as I have. Hell, he’s practically a father to her too.
8:39 p.m. That’s when my chest constricts for some reason. A rush of blood leaves my heart, and I gasp involuntary, unknowingly to what moves through me in that moment.
In a panic, I text Ricky.
Me: Where are you?
He replies instantly.
Ricky: In LA. Everything ok?
Me: It’s Rhya. I think there’s something wrong with her.
Ricky: Ok. Need me to go check?
Me: Yeah, if you can.
Ricky: I’m about an hour away. I will though.
You’d think I should feel better, right? I don’t. I won’t until someone goes over there. She could be playing me. She could. This could be her payback for me telling her I was done. But what if it’s not?
What if it’s more?
Rolling my lip between my fingers, I scowl at my phone. Deciding. Ricky wouldn’t be in time. Auden could be.
8:46 p.m.
I call Auden back.
He answers, slower this time. “Goddamn it, dude. C’mon. I said I’d go later.”
I pace the same path by the windows, the night alive and rushing with excitement like the blood in my veins. “I tried Ricky but you’re closer. Go over there and check on her. Now.”
“How many more times are we going to try to save her, huh?” he shouts back at me, his words filled with frustration. “She’s fuckin’ with you again. She does this shit because she knows she can get your attention.”
I lean into the wall again. I’m spinning out of control, the room with it. My stomach burns and my throat feels like it’s on fire. As I pace, images of Rhya rush through my mind so quickly I can’t see them, but they’re there. It’s flashes, years of what she’s done, moments of the other day and what we’d become and what we might have been if not for the darkness that hangs over her. “I get it. You’re pissed at me, but I need you to do this. Something’s up. I’m fucking begging you here. I wouldn’t do this to you on a night like tonight, but something is really fucking wrong this time. Please go over there.”
“Okay, okay. Jesus.” He snorts as if he’s not buying it. “I’ll do it. Just hold on.”
He hangs up on me and I pace the room, my stomach lurching.
9:08 p.m. He calls back.
I swallow, excessively trying to clear the lump in my throat. Nothing works as I bring my curled fist to my lips, bouncing my knuckles off my lips. I’m tentative, but I rush out the words, “What the fuck took you so long?”
Auden’s breath blows through the receiver, he’s climbing stairs. “I had to finish what I was doing.”
“You mean who?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He’s quiet, seconds pass, and then I hear him knocking, calling out her name, pounding on her door like I had the other day, but there’s no answer. No sounds.
“Come on, Rhya. Don’t do this to him.” He pounds again, this time harder. “Just open the goddamn door so you can tell him you’re fine and I can go home.”
9:13 p.m.
Nothing.
Still no sound.
And then it happens.
An unmistakable bang bellows through the receiver. You know that sound. Everyone does. It’s unquestionable. A noise heralded by death and destruction. It’s a sound, but it reverberates through my ears, halting the rapid thump in my chest.
Silence follows. Disturbing silence.
Did you jump? Do your ears ring like mine? Did your stomach tighten? Do you know what she did? Do you feel that warm rush of your blood to every part of your body like I do?
She wouldn’t, right?
Wrong. The ones who do it. . . the ones capable of ending their own life, they don’t tell you they’re going to do it. They just fucking do it.
I start shaking, hard, and I think I feel my chest moving, beating, and it stings. It fucking boils, bursts into flames. Only. . . it’s not beating fast enough. It can’t keep up with my breathing.
I think I’m screaming, or maybe it’s him screaming, yelling out her name, screaming no, just fucking screaming. . . .
Inhaling quick gasps of breath, I stop pacing, mind scrambling for a different outcome to the ringing in my ears, the only sound that particular pop would make.
“What was that?” Auden finally asks, his words shaking.
“Don’t open the door!”
“What?” He gasps, and I can hear him trying to break in. “Why? I can’t just stand here, Shade.” He’s hitting the door with something. “Rhya! Let me in!”
“Goddamn it, Auden! Don’t open the fucking door!” I roar, my ears ringing, the sound pounds in my ears, like I heard it again, only I didn’t. It’s my mind replaying the sound. “Call 911. I know what she did.”
He’s crying now. He knows, too. “I don’t know. . . . I don’t. . . . I should go in there. What if there’s someone in there with her? What if it wasn’t what we think?”
“You know goddamn well what that was!” I scream. And though I’m upset, I have no tears. I have no. . . no reactions of any kind. Numbness, maybe. “I’m telling you, Auden. You don’t want to go in there. Just call 911.”
“I have to see if she’s okay.”
“She’s not. You and I both know what that sound was. Call 911 and tell them you heard a gunshot inside her apartment.”
He waits. Seconds. Maybe a minute, I don’t even know how long because time is no longer relevant. It’s non-existent, but it’s present whether I acknowledge it or not. “Okay, I. . . uh. . . I’ll call you back in a minute.”
God, Rhya, what have you done?
I drop my phone to the floor. I inhale deeply and my chest expands. I push the breath out. My stomach pulls in, wanting to rid my body of everything. Food. Her. Thoughts, Emotions. Pain. Regret. . . every goddamn thing she’s done to me over the years. I want it all gone.
Fuck her.
Jesus Christ. . . how could she?
Why Rhya? Why did you fucking do it?
At 9:32 p.m. my phone rings. I let out a quivering breath and close my eyes, my shaking finger swiping over the screen.
“Shade. . . I just. . . . I can’t even process what I’m seeing. Jesus there is so much blood. Why does there have to be so much blood?” Voices shout around him telling him to get back, but I know he doesn’t. I can, in that very second without being there, imagine exactly what he’s seeing.
Rhya.
Dead.
The color in my face. . . gone. My expression blank, my body and mind exhausted, but it’s like I’ve hit a red line, revved too far for too long. “Auden,” I yell, attempting to gain his attention as he argues with someone on the other end. “Fucking calm down and tell me what’s going on!”
“She’s fucking dead, man,” he spits out between tears. “She’s fucking dead. Shot herself in the head. The police are in there now but fuck, man, there’s blood everywhere. I don’t know what to do!”
Have you ever had a moment where the world stops? It does for me.
I can’t speak. This feeling is new to me. I was too young to know anything when my mom left. When my dad died, I remembered that horrendous heart-wrenching, soul-crushing weight on my chest knowing my hero was gone. And I was only four, but I still remember.
This though, Rhya. . . it’s different. She was different. Our relationship, different.
“I knew this day was coming but fuck, man, this is brutal,” Auden cries, choking on his tears and words.
I swallow through the burn in my throat. I want fresh air. I want to feel the outside air on my face, but no windows in the suite open and I’m trapped in my own dark mind.
“Are you okay?” he asks timidly, knowing the answer.
I hunch over, my hand on my knee for support. I breathe in as fully as possible and then hold it. And release.
Breathe.
Then hold.
Release.
I straighten my body against the wall. “What the fuck do you think?” I growl, speaking for the first time, my words stumbling over broken gasps for air.
He’s silent, crying, breathing. . . then offers, “Sorry, man. Fuck, this is seriously fucked up. Who’s gonna tell Reece?”
Reece. Her brother. Her only blood that cares. Their mom? Gone. Dead. Overdosed on heroin at twenty-seven while Rhya was sleeping in her arms.
Their dad? Prison. Distributing heroin and armed robbery.
I don’t answer. At least not right away, because I can’t imagine how Reece will take it. I know how I am, and he’s her brother. I push out another breath before saying, “Ricky will. He should be there any minute.”
I don’t know why, but I try to imagine how she was feeling in those final moments and the thought of her being alone, shatters me. I feel guilty for saying those things to her instead of engaging with her more about her mental state. I should have known, shouldn’t I?
I feel weak, the world around me spinning out of control. I don’t know how, but I find myself on the ground. Did I sit or did I fall? Did my knees give in?
Tears silently slip down my cheeks unknowingly, unforgivingly.
I’m barely holding myself together, and then that’s when it hits in full force, the reality, the devastation she’s dead. Thinking something was wrong and knowing were entirely different.
My thoughts spin back to have I done this to her?
I’m sick, my stomach rolling in guilty waves.
I don’t remember hanging up with Auden, but I must have at some point.
9:58 p.m. I’m selecting Ricky’s number on my phone.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry. I’m almost there. I’m about ten minutes away. Have you found her?”
I hesitate for a half a second. “Auden. . . found her. She’s dead. She. . . uh. . . she fucking shot herself in the goddamn head.” My words are almost robotic like. I don’t even recognize my voice; it’s foreign to me.
Did she really do it?
Maybe. . . they’re wrong.
Maybe it’s all a dream?
I know it’s not. I may not have been the one who pulled the trigger tonight but me, Jaime, her dad, her uncle, we all played in a part in all of this. We let this happen. It’s our fault. It’s my fault.
Or is it hers for not caring enough to try?
Silence fills the line, the only sounds, his gasp and my choke. I’m losing it, not there yet, but the breakdown’s coming. It’s like being under water and seeing the surface and knowing once you reach it, you can take that needed breath. When I hang up, I can break down but until then, I remain robotic.
“What?” he finally asks. “Jesus, Shade. . . tell me you’re not serious.”
“She’s dead,” I repeat, a punch to my heart, my lungs, my entire fucking body. “Auden found her. She killed herself with a gun.” My voice cracks with gun, my mind swarming with images it makes up. I imagine her on the floor, blood covering her face, and it’s her innocent eyes that haunt me, a life I couldn’t save.
Ricky’s frantic, words and questions flying around so fast I can’t understand him until he asks, “Did he. . . did he call 911?”
“Yeah, they’re there with him now. Reece doesn’t know.”
“Uh. . . I’m almost there. I’m literally five minutes away now. I can see the ambulance lights. I’ll take care of Auden and her, just relax.”
“What about Reece?”
“I’ll call him. I’ll take care of things. You just stay calm.”
Calm? How can I stay calm? Rhya killed herself.
Why?
How could she?
I’m standing in front of the windows of the suite, the ones overlooking the city and I think back to the one and only time I’ve had Rhya here in Seattle with me. Two years ago.
For once in her fucking life, away from California, that day was the one day I saw her happy. That day I thought life would change for us. With coconut frosting on her lips, she kissed me, lied, and said I’d be her only.
“Do you think of dying, Shade?” I look at her, sugar-sweet cream on her lips, smiling up at me.
“No,” I tell her, though I’m not sure I’m being completely honest. I do. Sometimes. Hardly ever.
Freckled cheeks flush with the cool Seattle waterfront breeze. “Not at all?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Why is everything with you so planned? Don’t you ever think of not being the star?” I stare at her as she talks, searching her eyes for the answer to what drives her to questions like these. “Don’t you ever just want to run away and start over someplace fresh?”
“I am living right now,” I tell her, the crisp fall night slaps at my face with a spray of salty ocean-mist.
“I think I could start over, in a place like this where the rain is pure for my soul.”
I remember her face that day. I see her on the pier, eating the fucking cupcake, and I want to remember that as the last time I saw her, not the vision I have now of her, bloody, broken, gone. . . .
I once had a bad experience with coconut rum and gummy bears. Just the smell of rum now sends my stomach rolling. This, the image of Rhya even in the purest of days, much like that rum twists my stomach into knots.
Do you see the man by the window? The one crying, holding his phone in his hand to his head listening to the last message she sent him and remembering a city she wanted to start over in?
That’s a man who’s, by some degree, defined himself by saving a girl. He’s the same man who swore he wouldn’t do it anymore and then she let him go. Who would he be now? How would he define himself if he wasn’t constantly trying to save her?
10:18 p.m. My phone rings. I don’t answer.
10:20 p.m. It rings again. Same caller. And I send my fist through the wall.
10:28 p.m. Rings again. This time I answer.
“She killed herself,” I tell Willa, hoping by saying it, maybe it won’t hurt anymore. I’m wrong. The words hit me. . . my skull. . . beats against my brain with a noise I’ll never shake. I clasp my hand over my mouth and squeeze to keep from screaming out my pain.
“I’m on my way up.”
“No.” I tighten my fist and look at it through teary eyes, the blood squeezing through my fingers where I’ve busted my knuckles. “I don’t need you to tell me it’s okay or get me to calm down. I just want to be alone.” My body tenses. My muscles protesting against the shaking is like they’re being torn from the bone. Ripped away like Rhya has been from my life.
“Shade. . . .” I can hear her walking, the noise of doors closing behind her and her frantic breath. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Ridiculous? Do you see how that one word sets me off? Do you see the flush to my cheeks and the fire in my eyes?
“Fuck you,” I spit back. Ordinarily, I would never say that to Willa. “Stay away. Tell everyone else to stay away from me. This isn’t okay! It never will be! I don’t want anyone around me or trying to make me feel better.”
I hang up on her.
10:56 p.m. Willa calls back. She’s silent, but then says, “We need—”
“We don’t need to do a motherfuckin’ thing. She’s dead, Willa. DEAD. Shit’s done. I’m not fucking around. I do not want your help,” I seethe into the phone, irritated she didn’t listen to me the first time.
She sobs into the phone. It’s probably shocking to her. My reaction. Rhya. All of it. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I want cupcakes from Cupcake Royal.” Cupcakes? I don’t even know why I’m asking for them. But then I demand, “Before midnight. Stay the fuck out of my room. I mean it. Call Tiller and tell him to get his own goddamn room tonight.”
She tries again. “Shade. . . .”
“No. I mean it.”
Do you see that guy? His ears are ringing, his hands are shaking, the phone falling to the floor from his hands. His mind crumbles, every thought gone.
I don’t know what time it is any longer. All I know is my stomach heaves, and I rush to the bathroom, white knuckles gripping porcelain as my stomach empties.
Could I have stopped her? Could I have made a difference?
Would the time it took from her text to Auden outside her apartment have made a goddamn bit of difference?
No. She chose this. It was the answer she thought was right.
Do you see me there? Body hunched over, vomiting, losing all control, reality crashing in on me?
Time moves even slower. A noise resonates inside of me. One I can’t forget.
That bang.
That trigger being pulled.
With my face pressing against the tile floor, I cry.
“I’m sorry,” I shout to the silence surrounding me.
Am I angry at her?
I. . . don’t know if I know the answer to that question.