CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Blaze
“You asked me once why I do what I do and I told you it was because I just like to help people. I haven’t been totally honest with you, and I feel like I need to be. If we’re going to go headlong into this ‘new’ relationship of ours, then it needs to be with the truth being shared between the two of us.”
I have his attention now. “Nothing’s going to change how I feel about you. I understand why you love your profession and I support you totally in it. This isn’t going to be a problem between us again, Blaze. I swear.”
I take his hand in mine, relishing the energy and comfort I take from the simple touch. “No, I know, but I still want to be completely honest and more than anything I feel like it’s time. I’ve never told another person this story,” I admit. I do my best not to think about this part of my life.
“Now you’re starting to scare me,” he lets go of my hand and palms the back of my neck, bringing my gaze level with his. “But if I’m the person you’ve decided to trust with this secret of yours, I’m honored. We’ve come too far to let things come between us, Blaze. So you go ahead and tell me what you need to. I can say with one hundred percent certainty, it’s not going to change the way I feel about you.”
I want to cry as soon as I hear those words come out of his mouth. I’ve never opened myself up about this to anyone, and it’s almost as if proof and memories were wiped away. It fucking hurts to remember. I swallow harshly against the swelling in my throat as I open this wound.
“I didn’t necessarily become a paramedic because I wanted to help people. It’s way more personal than that.” I’m already crying, I can feel the wetness of the tears streaking their way down my face. This may be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. For minutes I struggle with what to say next. Countless times I open and close my lips, but no sound comes from between them.
“Babe, you do what you need to in order to tell me this. Obviously it’s painful for you.”
Grabbing my phone, I do the one thing I can do. Going into my pictures, I pull up the most coveted I have there. It’s a fifteen-year-old me, laughing with the person she looked up to most in the world. I trace her face for a second with my fingertip before I turn the screen so Trevor can look at the image.
“She looks like you, who is she?”
I bite my bottom lip and quirk my eyebrow as I push the words past my tight throat. “My sister.”
The shock is apparent on his face. “I never knew you had a sister.”
I laugh, but it’s harsh and filled with so much hurt that even I can hear it. “My parents would love it if no one remembered her,” I stop and take a fortifying breath. “But I do, every day I remember her.”
He leans in, kissing my lips softly, taking some of the salty tears that have flowed past those speed bumps while the rest of them roll down my chin and neck, gathering in the spot where my clavicles meet. “Tell me about her, baby. Let it all out.”
“Annabelle was sixteen years older than me. Mom and Dad had a teenage pregnancy that they tried to pass off as a honeymoon baby. They tell everyone they got married when they were seventeen, but the truth is they got married when they were twenty – money can change any fact and hide so many secrets,” I give him a mirthful smile. “It’s exactly why I don’t care to ever have the type of money I grew up with.”
I take a minute, trying to figure out how I want to go into this story, how I want to portray my sister. Over the years I’ve come to learn some hard truths, but I don’t want to taint her memory in any way and I don’t want Trevor to get the wrong idea about her.
“Annabelle was different. She marched to the beat of her own drummer, danced to songs only she heard, and tried to live her life the best way she knew how,” I finally decide that’s the very best way to explain her. “She tried to be everything my parents wanted her to be and she was my hero. When the pressure got to be too much, I could always go to her little apartment, crawl in bed with her, and she’d tell me a funny story. Somewhere around her twenty-fifth birthday, things started to change a little. At first I think I’m the only one who noticed it.”
Immediately I get a flashback of her overexcited behavior about a pair of shoes being on sale, which had been so unlike her months before.
“She would get really excited about an idea, over-the-top excited, and she’d put everything she had in her toward it, but then it would crash. She’d not get out of bed for days at a time, she’d cry, talk about how much of a failure she was, and how she couldn’t do anything right. It was this never-ending cycle.”
I get up to pace, because I can’t take Trevor’s eyes on me anymore, can’t stand the way he’s looking at me with pity.
“Around that time, my parents decided she was too old to be single. For the next three years, they pushed men at her, told her bullshit about men not wanting to be around her because she liked to color her hair. She hated being a blonde, I mean absolutely hated it. Red was her favorite color,” I admit, a soft smile on my face.
“Oh babe,” he sighs.
“Yeah,” I tilt the corners of my mouth up. “She got a tattoo that year and they said at twenty-eight she was too old to be doing that type of thing. But she got it where no one could see it, ya know? On her back so it could be covered unless she was wearing a bikini. While she was at the tattoo parlor, she ran into a friend of our family. Jake was the son of one of my dad’s business partners, and he was a lot like her. They both loved to rebel. Neither one of them wanted to be stifled by the lifestyle our parents liked to lead. At twenty-eight years old, my sister fell in love for the first time,” I continue to pace, but now I look at Trevor.
“Why do I get the feeling this is the beginning of the end?” He asks.
I want to answer him and tell him it’s not. To tell him it was the beginning of an absolutely beautiful relationship that goes on today away from everyone, but I fucking can’t.
“Jake was the love of her life, but it didn’t stop her weird mood swings. He had them too, actually.” I stop for a second. “What Jake did was introduce her to a way of dealing with them. Jake was a hardcore drug user. Within two years of being with him, she lost sixty pounds and was skin and bones. My parents didn’t know what to do for her, so they wrote her off. Me? I couldn’t,” I fight the tears again. “No matter how many times she hurt and disappointed me, I couldn’t let her go,” I put my hands up on my head, clasping my fingers together.
“That’s not unusual, babe. You know as well as I do – it’s hard.”
“It’s impossible if it’s your family,” I argue with him. “Completely and totally impossible. One day she called me and asked me to come meet her. Mom and Dad had cut her off of the family money, but even at fifteen I had a debit and credit card. My driver picked her up, and we drove to Birmingham where I withdrew two thousand dollars from my account and gave it all to her. After that we went to this horrible neighborhood. She had me wait out in the car. My driver kept asking if I wanted to leave, and I did Trevor, I wanted to leave her there because I was so scared.”
“You probably should have.”
“What happened next I will never forget in my life. She came out of the house and got back in the car. I told the driver to take us back to Laurel Springs. I felt dirty and knew I’d never be able to do this for her again. I had to stop enabling her, and none of this felt good. We got on I-65 and she was okay for the next twenty minutes or so. She told me, ‘It’s not working the way I need it to, Daphne. I need more now.’ I didn’t know what that meant, Trevor, I swear to God.”
“Of course not,” he’s still keeping his distance, almost like he’s afraid to come too close. “You had absolutely no idea what it meant.”
“I watched her pull out a tourniquet and a syringe. I started screaming, asking her what the hell she was doing, and she said the most horrible things to me. About how I was the favorite child, and she was a throwaway, and the only reason she put up with me was because I gave her money. It was so painful to hear her talk to me that way. And back then, when I got hurt, I hurt the other person back. It’s what my parents taught me to do, it’s what they did to one another. I told her have fun killing herself then, because that’s what would happen.”
“Shit,” he closes his eyes, devastation written all over his face. Devastation for me, devastation for her, I’m not sure which.
“Yeah,” I answer, feeling the fresh wash of shame I always do when I think about that day. “She was shooting up, and I was so mad and hurt, I didn’t pay attention at first when I heard the noise. To be fair, I didn’t understand what the noise was. When I glanced at her, she was slumped over, her eyes open, stuff coming from her mouth. The syringe was sticking out of her arm still. I didn’t know what to do. Back then I had no idea what Narcan was, didn’t even learn about how it reverses the effects of an overdose until I was an EMT, I was helpless as I yelled to the driver. Cellphones were a newer thing, and I had one, but the ambulance didn’t get there in time. She died in the backseat of that car, with me sitting next to her.”
I finally let him take me in his arms, and I cry like I’ve never cried for Annabelle. I’ve kept it in for so long, and telling him about the situation releases a dam that’s been holding back all these feelings. I sob against his chest as he holds me tightly, promising me it’s okay to break down, to feel the way I do. I pull back, mopping up my tears from my face.
“We found out later she was bipolar, and she wasn’t medicated. My parents knew it, and they encouraged her to not be medicated – they didn’t want anyone to know. How crazy is that? They’d rather her be a drug addict than have a mental illness. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve ever forgiven them. I went through life in a haze for the next year, until something clicked. They acted like Annabelle had never even been in our lives, and I wanted them to see her every time they looked at me. I wanted them to be reminded of what they did to her. If they had pushed her to get help and treatment, she’d probably still be alive today.”
“What happened to Jake?” he asks, pushing my hair back from my face.
“Died the same way she did, except he was alone in the bed they shared. I swore to myself I’d be able to help the next person I saw who needed it. It’s one hundred percent why I became a paramedic, why I don’t take my tests to get out of the bus. It would take a lot for me not to do it anymore, Trevor. It’s so personal to me, and when you asked me to quit, I just couldn’t. I can’t.”
“I understand that now,” he pulls me into his arms, rocking me against his chest. “I saw that tonight as you helped Stella, and now I understand it so much better. I wish you would’ve told me this before, but I know it hurts and it’s hard.”
“So hard,” I feel fresh tears. “I’m gonna go through all these events in my life she’s never going to have. I’m going to get married, have children, and she’s never going to see it, she never got to experience it. There are some days I feel so damn guilty,” I break off, shaking my head.
“You’re living the life she couldn’t. I have no doubt if your moods started swinging, you’d get help. You’d ask why.”
“But I would ask why because of her. Nobody would help her,” she protests.
“Ten years ago, we didn’t understand mental illness the way we do now, Blaze. It’s a sad but true statement, and you have enough people in your life that recognize the symptoms. You wouldn’t be left alone, baby. I promise you that. I’d go to the ends of the earth to help and save you. I know it doesn’t seem like it after I was such an asshole about your job, but I promise you I’ve changed.”
“I know you have. We’re both to blame for that,” she admits. “You for not understanding, but me too for not explaining. We’re on a clean slate now, right?” I want this man to be in my life forever, and if that means being more honest with him than I’ve ever been with anyone else, I’ll do it. I love Trevor Trumbolt with every piece of me, and I will lay myself bare before him – completely broken and I know he’ll put me back together again.
“Yeah, we’re in this together,” he clasps our fingers together. “No one can break this bond.”
And finally, for the first time in my life, I feel like I can breathe without the guilt of my sister’s death on my conscience. That weight has finally been lifted, and it feels better than I ever imagined it could.
“I wanna go to her grave together, if we can, I want to introduce you to her,” I tell Trevor. “I know that sounds weird, but when I need to talk to her, I go to her grave.”
“We can do whatever you need to. I’ll do anything you need me to. We’re in this together, Blaze. You never have to deal with anything on your own again.”
I slump against him then, suddenly so tired. He picks me up and carries me to the bed we’ve been sharing since he came home from the hospital. Together we lie down, and when I close my eyes, I go into the deepest sleep I think I’ve ever had.