chapter
Ten
That night my subconscious startled me awake with the recurrent nightmare that had plagued my nights since last fall. Christina had fluctuated between mumbled annoyance and cursed condemnation whenever her sleep had been trashed by my pitiful whimpers or shrill yells. Since graduation, it hadn’t occurred once, and I’d begun clinging to a naïve hope that moving home and working full time—a signal to my brain that I was finished with school, with that campus—had made it stop.
Nope.
As I bumbled through my morning routine of yoga poses, I tried to focus on the lone bright sides: the interval between last night’s nightmare and the last time it had occurred, and the fact that my bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from my parents, who slept with a white-noise machine humming to drown out Jack’s bulldoggy snores (and Daddy’s). My brothers had long since moved out, so since I’d boomeranged back home, I had the east wing to myself. Maybe I should have been bothered that I could be chainsawed in my bed and no one would hear me shrieking, but I was too grateful for the privacy.
Pax and Foster had witnessed an episode on Christmas Eve. They’d each come home for a few days bracketing Christmas—Pax from New Mexico and Foster from Dallas. When I’d screamed, both of them had torn into my room half-awake, Pax wielding a bat (of course), and Foster brandishing a museum-quality sculpture not intended for home defense that he’d grabbed from a hallway niche between our rooms.
Pax had gestured once it was clear I’d only suffered a nightmare, not a murdering fiend. “Dude.”
“Fuck!” Foster stared at the marble figure in his hand. “Mom would have murdered me!”
We’d all had a good laugh, and I’d managed to convince them the disturbance was an isolated incident. Nothing to worry about. Nothing that transpired so often I sometimes thought I was losing my mind.
The awful images that had roused me to consciousness at three a.m. this morning had refused to be banished, so I’d lain there for three miserable hours, exhausted but wide fucking awake, unable to escape a hell that had been generated by a real-life nightmare instead of a morbid, regrettably wired imagination. When my alarm chirped at six, I’d just begun to drift off and had almost thrown my phone and its jaunty time-to-wake-up tone across the room.
I’m pretty sure I fell asleep for a couple of minutes during child’s pose. Also, quite possibly, during my shower.
Once the dream began, it was always inescapable, because I never knew I was dreaming. Though the sequence of events never varied, I was unable to predict what was coming next or how it would end. I lived the whole thing anew every time, start to finish—shock, hope, agony—and then I woke to debilitating, irreparable remorse. Over and over, as if my brain was determined to make me pay for the rest of my life.
“Chaz?” My throat didn’t release more than a whisper, and the only answer I got was the whine of wind, hissing in fragmented bursts through the cracked windshield. The car was entirely off the road, sitting at a sharp angle on its side. The impact had come out of nowhere. No bracing for it, no split second of awareness beforehand. Nothing but an unanticipated force slamming into us, severing our conversation midsentence—his or mine, I couldn’t recall. Nothing but the shrill protest of tires and metal and glass giving way before either of us realized what was happening. Our bodies were tossed like flimsy, inanimate things, restrained in our seats as we spun and rolled into our current position.
Crumpled against the concaved driver’s side door, his shoulder and face against the window, he was motionless and silent. Choking back a sob, I reached out to touch him, my fingers trembling, but he was a few inches out of reach. “Chaz?” I repeated, my voice more substantial, if disembodied—like it wasn’t coming from me. Still, he didn’t respond, didn’t move, and I went numb with fear.
The sickly-sweet smell of burned rubber, crushed metal, and leaking engine fluids assailed my nostrils in confirmation of what had just occurred, but the speakers still emitted an upbeat, twang-filled country narrative from his brother’s band’s newest album, as if we were still sitting at the stoplight, waiting for green. I stretched one shaky finger to switch the sound off but couldn’t reach the dash, so I balanced my hand on the center console to keep from falling onto Chaz and pressed my seatbelt’s release. The rowdy music went silent with one click, and I leaned closer to hear his shaky inhalations and see his breath making faint, steamy clouds against the cracked glass of his window. I gasped in relief, silent tears tracking down my face. I heard sirens in the distance before a low drone began inside my head, like a hive full of livid bees had lodged there, buzzing.
“They’re coming.” I swallowed hard, trying to tamp the panic down from the space in the middle of my chest where it pressed and swelled. The moon was a sliver, and the nearest streetlamp was across the street. It was too dim inside the car to assess how extensively either of us was injured, but as my eyes adjusted, I made out the thin, dark trickle of blood seeping from his right ear. It dribbled down the valley behind his angled jaw and across his throat like a slash.
The sirens grew louder. They were coming for us—I was sure now. “Hold on, Chaz. Please hold on.”
He opened his eyes and shifted them toward me, though no other part of him moved. I edged closer, hovering over him from my elevated position. “I’m here,” I said, and then stupidly, “Are you okay?” His contorted limbs and the fact that he’d not moved anything but his eyelids were all the answer any rational person would need to that question.
He blinked and squinted as if he couldn’t quite focus on my face. “I don’t think so.” He closed his eyes while I bit down on my lip and wished we could back up ten minutes and never get into this car.
“Baby?” His voice was familiar but rasped, as though it had been scraped with coarse sandpaper. He hadn’t called me baby in months.
I strained to pull myself closer but my legs wouldn’t move. They were dead weight. Numb. “Yes,” I gasped, trying not to freak out at the realization that my legs could be paralyzed. “I’m here.”
Opening his eyes again, he stared up at me. “Lie to me. Please.”
“What?”
He was speaking nonsense. His head must have slammed into the window during the crash. His throat worked to swallow, and even that ended in a grimace. “Lie… to me,” he repeated.
“Don’t try to talk—they’re almost here,” I said, unable to see the road in our twisted, angled position—but I heard the siren roar around the corner at the end of the street. Half a block. Ten seconds. Five.
“If I’d asked you again. Would you—” He gasped. “Would you have said yes, eventually?”
Lie to me.
I couldn’t hold out pretending I hadn’t heard. “Yes. Of course I would have. I love you.” I realized that even if the first part was a lie, the second wasn’t. Not completely.
The right side of his mouth turned up in the barest hint of his customary cocky smile. “Thanks, baby.”
I laid a careful hand on his chest, just above his heart. It was warm. Warm and wet. My fingertips came away dark, and a trembling terror detonated in my lungs and ripped through my limbs as if I’d touched a live wire. I clamped my teeth together and tensed my shoulders and arms but couldn’t prevent the shudders from multiplying or the tears that sharpened my sight of everything I no longer fought to see.
A fire engine pulled up behind the car and emergency personnel swarmed around us, their determined voices coming through the broken glass. I pressed against the console, trying to free myself from the wreckage, and the edges of my vision blurred. The next thing I knew, they were dragging me away from him.
“It’s not a lie,” I’d shouted, opening my eyes to the total darkness of my room. Silence, but for the whoosh of breath from my mouth and the heartbeat hammering away in my ears. No wrecked car, no paramedics, no flashing lights.
The truth rushed out from the shadows, bright and excruciating, as it had dozens of previous times. Reality returned to separate nightmare from memory. Pain came in waves, bursts of fiery currents surging through my heart and scattering to reach my skin and set it aflame. I couldn’t move, and everything hurt—but it was a phantom pain more debilitating than any physical agony I’d ever experienced. Tears trickled from the corners of my eyes and streamed into my hair.
Chaz and I had broken up spring of junior year, over a year ago now. And even if it had hurt like hell to do it, I hadn’t regretted my decision. In front of our friends, their smiling faces gradually fading into expressions of incredulity and dismay, I had placed my hand over his, closed that hinged box in his palm, and broken his heart as softly as I could manage.
“Oh, Chaz. I can’t. I’m so sorry, but I can’t.” I wasn’t in love with him, not like he loved me, and it would have been wrong to pretend.
After a summer of no contact, we’d begun our last undergrad fall semesters. We managed a few semi-awkward social interactions, and the story of his failed proposal gradually faded from campus gossip. Within a couple of weeks, we were both hanging out and hooking up with other people. Everything felt settled between us. So what if I caught him looking at me from across the room during his frat’s first big party of our senior year? He’d smiled that familiar, affable grin and returned his attention to the girl he was chatting up, easing any lingering guilt I might have felt for not anticipating that months-ago proposal and heading it off before he’d arranged it.
Days after that party, a driver sending a text failed to notice that the stoplight ahead had turned red. She’d flown through the intersection and hurtled into Chaz’s car without ever hitting the brakes.
His mother caught me alone after the funeral and told me—her red-rimmed eyes full of stark grief and her words raw with bitter reproof—that her stubborn, loyal son had never stopped plotting to win me back. That he’d never returned that ring he’d proposed with the previous spring—the one I couldn’t accept because I didn’t want to be anyone’s wife and I’d known with utter certainty, when that diamond solitaire had winked up at me, that if I ever did it would not be him.
“You broke his heart, but he loved you until the day he died,” she said before her husband slid an arm around her shoulders and led her away, sobbing.
His absolution was a trick that disappeared when I was awake, because I wasn’t in his car that night. I hadn’t been there with him no matter my mind’s desperate attempt to invent a closure I could bear. I’d never told him that lie he wanted to hear. And he had died alone.