Falling Away (24 page)

“Damn, she did?” Brayden seems shocked. “I’ve never seen her cry. As we’ve covered, she shuts down. Gets wasted. Gets crazy, writes these raw, intense songs and sings the fuck out of ’em. That’s how she gets it all out. The one thing she doesn’t do is cry.”
 

“After the funeral, I was leaving, and she just hijacked my cab. Got in and ordered the driver to take us to the nearest bar. And she got just…colossally shitfaced literally in a matter of minutes.”

Brayden laughs. “Yeah, that’s my girl. She can put away the whiskey like no one else. Especially when she’s in a mood, you know?”

“Well, she was in a mood. She got to the point where she was just…gone. So I brought her back to my place. She got crazy, and tried…well, I’m sure you can guess. But eventually she passed out. And when she woke up, she just started…sobbing isn’t even the right word. She just lost it. So, yeah. That’s how we met.”
 

“Your story has some gaps in it, my friend.”
 

I shrug. “Not everything needs to be explained.”

“True enough.” He’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, wrists dangling loosely, his posture a strange, confusing mix of sexual orientation. Whatever, it’s not like it matters to me, as long as he doesn’t try to hit on me. He glances at me sideways. “Just be aware, whatever happens from here on out, that she may not ever open up, okay? I’ve known her for almost four years, and she still shuts me out.”

“She never mentioned you. In Texas, I mean.”

“Not surprising. She’s a master at compartmentalizing.” He doesn’t seem upset that she never even referenced him once.

“I’m learning that.”
 

We lapse into silence then, lost in our own thoughts. Hours pass. I send a vague message to my parents letting them know to not worry about me. I pace until my knee aches, and then I sit. Brayden paces, sits, paces. He answers a few messages on his phone, presumably from the other members of the band.

At some point in the small hours of the night, a doctor emerges from a hallway, and calls out, “Family of Echo Leveaux?”

Brayden and I both stand up; make our way over to him. “How is she?” Brayden asks.

“Are you immediate family?” the doctor asks.
 

“We’re all she has,” Brayden explains.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give out medical information to anyone except immediate family members.”

Brayden paces away and tears at his hair, then returns. “Listen, she doesn’t
have
any immediate family members! She has one set of grandparents, but they live in Texas and couldn’t be here for days, if they make the trip at all. We are the closest thing to family she has right now, okay? Just…
please
, tell us how she is.”

The doctor hesitates, his eyes flicking from mine to Brayden’s and back. “All right. Well, she’s doing okay, all things considered. She’s breathing on her own, her heart seems fine, and initial scans make me optimistic that there won’t be any lasting brain damage. You got her here in time, and that’s what really counts. Much longer, and I don’t think I’d be giving ya’ll the same news.”
 

He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose before continuing. “She’s resting for now, so you boys might as well go home and get some rest, come back in the morning. I’ve scheduled a psychological evaluation for…later this morning, I guess it is. I think I’m going to recommend detox at least, if not rehab. I’ll have a referral for a mental health specialist for her, on discharge. She’ll need someone, or both of you, preferably, to encourage her to seek the help she very clearly needs.”

“She just lost her mother,” Brayden explains. “And I doubt she’ll cooperate with an evaluation. But we might as well give it a shot, right?”

“She intentionally overdosed on a significant amount of Vicodin and alcohol. That’s called suicide, son.” He shakes his head. “If she’ll try it once, who’s to say she won’t try it again, when one of you isn’t around to bring her in? She needs help.”
 

“
I
know that, and
you
know that. But good luck convincing
her
of that.” Brayden lets out a long, frustrated sigh. “When can I see her? I can try to talk to her.”
 

“Tomorrow, late morning or early afternoon. We’ll need to run some follow-up tests, and have her speak with an in-house psychiatrist.”
 

“Okay, thank you, Doctor.” The doctor turns and leaves, and Brayden rubs his face vigorously with both hands, then looks at me. “Can I get a ride from you? My Jeep is still at the bar.”
 

“Sure. Come on.”
 

I drive him back to the bar and drop him off beside his old red Wrangler. Before he gets out, he glances at me. In this moment, he looks young, small, and tired. “She’ll be okay, right?”

I can’t summon a smile. Don’t even try. “I hope so. I really hope so.”

I go home, and collapse facedown onto my bed. I hear my door creak, and I know it’s Mom, checking on me. “I’m fine, Mom. I don’t want to talk about it. A…friend had an…emergency.”

“Is she okay?” Mom’s voice is quiet, compassionate.
 

How does she know it’s a her? I roll to my side and glance at her. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Being there for a friend who is going through a hard time is understandable, Benny,” Mom says, perching on the edge of the bed beside me, trailing a hand over my forehead. “Just don’t let it bring you down, okay?”

“Doing my best.”

She smiles at me. “I know. Just…sometimes, we have to know when to walk away and let them find their own way.”
 

“I can’t walk away. Not again.”
 

Mom nods, her eyes knowing. “Like I said, just…don’t let it bring you down too, okay?”

“Okay.”

I fall asleep and dream of sirens and ambulances, blood and vomit and hanging braids and Echo gasping, apologizing, Oz bleeding, a smoking, crumpled hood, Echo telling me goodbye, Kylie’s face as I walk away…I dream of everything, of hell and pain and all the things that haunt me.
 

Waking up is a relief.

FOURTEEN: No Man Is An Island

Echo

Waking up consistently sucks. More mornings than not, I loathe the moment consciousness floods through me. Waking up brings pain. Emotional pain, mental pain, physical pain.
 

I don’t want to wake up. I keep my eyes closed and plead with whatever the fuck is out there—or isn’t—to let me back under, to let me stay under where there’s no pain.
 

But there’s only waking up, my head throbbing, a viciously raw throat, a stabbing pain in my stomach. I’m dizzy, sore, confused, sluggish. I’m awake for a long time before anyone shows up to check on me. I use that time to try to remember what happened, why I’m in the hospital.
 

I remember being at home, drinking hard. Hating myself. Hating being me, hating my life, hating being awake. Wanting to sleep, just…sleep. Not think, not feel. I remember not caring that I had a gig. For the first time I can remember, I didn’t want to sing, didn’t want to perform. I just wanted to sleep.

I remember going to the bathroom and happening across a bottle of Vicodin Bray had left at my place, a while ago. I remember how I’d taken a Vic and then had a couple drinks, how tired I got, sleeping for twelve hours straight. If one pill and a couple drinks could do that…

Oh god.

I remember downing all of them, one by one, chasing them with the Beam. And then Bray showed up and physically dragged me to the gig. By which point I’d already finished the fifth, my second in two days. But he didn’t know that, or that I’d taken the pills. It was all starting to hit me, I remember that, too. He dragged me to the show because he knows under most circumstances that getting on stage and singing it out will cure what ails me. Temporarily, at least.

I remember getting sleepy, so tired, being pulled under, feeling sick…

I thought I saw Ben, but I don’t trust that memory.
 

A doctor sweeps into my hospital room, then. He’s tall, dark-haired, and stern, anywhere from thirty to fifty years old. It’s hard to tell, being clean-shaven with a youthful face, but his eyes are hard and tired. “Miss Leveaux.”
 

“Doctor.” I have no desire to talk to him, to hear his recriminations and faux-concern.

“How are you feeling?”

“Shitty.”

He nods as if this is exactly how I should feel. “Well, I suppose this is to be expected, under the circumstances.”

“Yeah? What the fuck do you know about my circumstances?” I sound hostile, because I feel hostile. I can feel him judging me, even before he opens his mouth.

 
“I know you recently lost your mother which, understandably, has led to some…emotional distress, you might say.”
 

I just stare at him, knowing I should hold my tongue, because he’s just doing his job. But does he have to be such a pompous dick about it?

“Emotional distress,” I repeat. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“And, sometimes, when we’re under extreme duress, we may find ourselves making decisions that—”

“Don’t lump yourself in with me, asshole. You don’t know shit about me, and you don’t know shit about my
emotional duress
or whatever the fuck you just said. When can I get out of here?”
 

He frowns at me, but doesn’t seem fazed by my outburst or my profanity. “Well, we’ll have to do a few tests to make sure you didn’t do any lasting damage to yourself. Can you tell me how many pills you swallowed, and how much alcohol you drank?”

I sigh, and try not to snap at him. “I wasn’t really counting the pills, but…nine or ten, I guess. As for how much I had to drink? That day? Or…?”

“I see. Yes, how much did you have to drink yesterday?”

“A fifth, or most of it. I don’t remember. They’re all starting to blur together at this point.” No sense in lying about it, right?

“I see.”
 

“You see, do you? You know what, I really don’t think you
do
fucking
see
, Doctor.”
 

“Loss affects us all differently, Miss Leveaux.” He sets the chart down on his lap, clicks his slim silver pen closed, and regards me for a moment. “For example, when my wife passed away from breast cancer some years ago, I worked double and even triple shifts every single day for three months. I barely slept, barely ate. Eventually the hospital director had to have me forcibly removed from the hospital. So you see, perhaps I do, after all,
see.
Just a little bit, at least.”
 

“I’m sorry for your loss, Doctor. And maybe you do get it, but don’t sit there and act like you get
me
, okay? Because you don’t. No one does.” Why am I saying this shit to him? He’s not even a psychiatrist. He’s just some ER doctor.

“You know, it’s in times like these that I remember John Donne, who wrote in his seventeenth meditation that ‘
No man is an island.’ People quote that a lot, but they always stop at that first part. The rest of it makes it all so much clearer, you see. You need the quote in its entirety: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ We’re all a part of a whole, whether we want to be or not, whether we think we are or not. And, you know, the phrase ‘for whom the bell tolls’ that Hemingway made famous also comes from that same writing of Donne’s.”
 

The doctor leans back, crosses his legs at the ankle, and pokes at the corner of his mouth with his pen. The hardness of an ER doctor has faded, replaced by a softer and more introspective philosopher. “He opens the meditation with a bit of Latin: ‘
Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris’,
which translates to: ‘Now this bell, tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’ Donne then elucidates upon that phrase, saying, ‘Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him.’ It’s all subjective, of course, but I’ve always taken this to mean that we often don’t see what’s right in front of us, we don’t see our own afflictions for what they truly are. He writes much on affliction, Donne does, and how it not only glorifies God, but strengthens
us
. We often fail to see this, though, and we even more frequently, and sadly, fail to see the help that lies waiting for us, so close to hand. And I’m not speaking of God, Miss Leveaux. There is
always
help to be found. Donne’s point in the bit about no man being an island is that we are not alone. We aren’t each of us this disconnected and disconsolate dot of dirt in a sea of misery. We think we are, but it’s just not true. ‘Any man's death diminishes me,’ Donne also writes, ‘because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”
 

I just stare at him, unable to process the sudden influx of seventeenth-century poetry, or whatever the hell. I just stare at him, because even though I refuse to show it or admit it, even to myself, his words have a profound effect on me. I swallow hard and keep my gaze level, even, keep my emotions tamped down.
 

“Thank you, Doctor.” It’s all I can manage.

He nods, prepares to stand up, and the philosopher has vanished, replaced by the brusque, efficient doctor. “Because you’re classified as an attempted suicide, a psychiatric assessment is required before I can discharge you. Part of your discharge process will include referrals to qualified mental health professionals in the area. Seek help, Miss Leveaux. There is no embarrassment in needing help, every once in a while. It doesn’t make you weak, it merely makes you human, just like the rest of us.”

I say nothing, do nothing, and he leaves.
 

The evaluation is fairly standard, and I cooperate, if only so I can get out of this damn hospital. Seek help, he says. Right. It’s not about weakness. That’s what I didn’t say to him. It’s not about being afraid of being seen as weak, it’s that help is a fallacy. An illusion. There is no help.
 

And I am an island. I always have been.