Twenty-One
Mary saw something in Roman’s eyes. Something she chose to ignore. There were more important things in her life right now.
“Oh, hey. It’s Captain Killjoy. Here to join the party, Mary?”
“What’s that supposed to even mean? Cara, what’s going on with you?”
“You got all fucked up, you know.”
“What?”
“Everything. Maybe it feels like you dragged yourself out of it, but… but I know better. Can’t lie to me. Not to me.”
“Cara, you’re not making any sense.”
“Sure I am.”
Mary sucked a breath in through her nose and closed her eyes for a second. Long enough to breathe out a silent prayer.
“How long?”
“How long what?”
The way she said it was less a question as much as a challenge. Would Mary dare to push it further? The answer was obvious. It ought to have been obvious to Cara, as well.
“How long since you fell off?”
Cara shrugged. “Are you going to help me up or not?”
“Is this some kind of cry for help? Because if you wanted me to be worried, you could have just called me.”
Cara’s eyes sunk. “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.”
“Tell anyone what?”
“It’s not important any more.”
“What’s not important? How is Roy? Did you two have a fight or something?”
“No,” Cara said. Her chest fell as she let out a long sigh. “He’s been great through the whole thing. From the first minute.”
“Cara, you’re not making any sense.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Too early. And now it’s… well, whatever. I just wanted to go away for a little while. So I went away. It was easy.”
“We need to get you help.”
“You want to help, fine. Give me help.”
Roman looked hard at her. Then he looked hard at Mary. She noticed his lips pinch together.
“You’re not doing anyone any good with this,” he said. “You want to grieve, nobody blames you for that. But you’ve got a husband at home, no doubt worried sick about you.”
“He’ll get over it eventually. It’s better for him if I just disappeared.”
Roman’s face tightened up. “Get up.”
Cara reached up. He didn’t take her hand. She reached to Mary. Mary looked over at Roman. He looked angry. Angrier than he’d looked over anything else that she’d seen in the short time she knew him.
“Help me up.”
“You can try by yourself,” Roman said. “You try and you fail, and I’ll help. You don’t get to rely on your friend to keep you on your feet.”
Mary kept her hands at her sides. It was a struggle. When she saw a hand reaching out, she wanted to take it. A horror story played out in her head, a guess at what had happened. Cara had never said she wanted kids. It hadn’t ever been in the cards for her.
But what if it happened? What if it almost happened? Mary lost her nerve and abandoned the thought before it could hit home.
Cara looked up at them pathetically. Like she wasn’t sure she could handle the effort. She reached up again. Mary grit her teeth and waited. He was right. She had to fight for it. Just a little. Just show that she was ready to try. It felt harsh. And it felt fair.
The woman lying on the ground looked like it was going to take everything that she had just to coordinate the movement to pick herself up.
And then, to her own apparent surprise, she did it. Her body turned and shifted, and she pushed with her hands on the ground. She made it to her knees, then set one foot on the ground and tried to stand. Which was where things all started going wrong.
Cara’s weight shifted hard as she tried to straighten on her feet, and her body tipped off to the side and she started to fall. A pair of arms caught her. Roman stood her up straight.
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know,” Cara answered. Mary watched the whole thing with an awful pit in her stomach.
“You should have called me.”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” Cara said. And then she started stumbling back towards the alley, guided by the people on both her flanks. They walked out onto the street. By that point, Cara’s legs moved in vague approximations of steps as she was mostly carried between them. It was fine either way. Mary kept telling herself over and over again.
It was all going to be fine, because they’d at least come close, they’d at least given her a chance, to get better from all this. And that was all that anyone could hope for. At that point, they just had to try to put her in a good position to succeed, and hope that it took. If they were lucky, maybe it would. If they weren’t…
Mary kept moving and closed her eyes, moved her lips in the words of another prayer. They would be. Because Cara’s life likely depended on it.