Falling Away (25 page)

When the hospital shrink finally leaves, I sit in silence for a long, long time; it’s unmitigated hell. Silence is my enemy. Where there’s silence, there are endless thoughts, the cycle of guilt and grief and heartache and regret, all unending and spinning through me until I can’t breathe or move or speak or get out from under the weight of it all. It’s why I drank, and it’s why I took the pills. Not because I wanted to die. It wasn’t about death, or ending it all. It was just about wanting to silence the noise, needing to stop the cycle in my head and my heart. I’m not suicidal. I’m just fucked up, and don’t know how to fix it.
 

The door to my room swings open, and Brayden walks in. He’s such a beautiful boy. Tall and slim and sleek, brown hair and such uniquely dark blue eyes, such killer fashion sensibility. He’s always put together. Brayden’s constant presence has been a reassurance to me in the past few years. He’s always there, and he’s always handsome and sophisticated, and so talented; those delicate, manicured hands of his can make a mandolin sing like an angel.
 

Yet, as he enters my hospital room, he’s not put together. He has dark circles under his eyes, he’s unshaven, and he’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday. He looks haunted, exhausted.
 

He drags a chair over to my bedside, and he sits down, stares at me without speaking. When he does, his voice breaks, and his eyes waver, shine, fill with tears. “Fuck you, Echo Leveaux.
Fuck you
for doing that to me.”

That is so not what I expected from him. “Bray, I—”

“You what? What can you say to me, Echo? After all we’ve been through, you…you try to
kill
yourself? What can you say to me? What can you
possibly
say that can erase what I just went through? Watching you collapse, watching you make a fool of yourself in front of a hundred and fifty people? Watching you vomit all over yourself, all over Ben? Watching you puke blood? Watching you—watching you stop breathing? How could you…how could you be so—so
fucking selfish?
” He shouts that last part so loudly I flinch backward, shocked and horrified. Brayden is not a loud or angry person, making this so, so much worse.
 

“That ride to the hospital…that was the longest ride of my life, Echo. You’re all I have left. You
know
that. You
know
that! You were there when I told them, Echo. You—you heard what they said. ‘No son of ours’, they said. ‘Never show your face here,’ they said. And you heard it. I’ve never pushed you, Echo. I always let you have your space. I let you push me away when you’re hurting. I let you drink yourself into a stupor because, god, I know how bad you need to do that sometimes, and I fucking get it. You can’t trust anyone, and I
get
it. I don’t trust anyone either, except you. Except now…can I even trust you anymore? I don’t know. You—you fucking O.D. on
my
goddamn Vicodin? How could you?”
 

I get angry. “It’s
not
about you
, Brayden!” I shout.
 

“That’s just your problem, Echo! You don’t realize that it
is
about me!” He’s shouting back. “You just don’t see that there are people all around you who care, who want to be there for you, but you just won’t let us! You don’t see that all of us in the band love you! And you don’t see that we have our own drama to deal with, no, you only see yours. Vance? His dad is an alcoholic, and beat him bloody every single day of his life until he finally got away. Atticus? His brother offed himself last year. But you didn’t know that, did you? Because you’re so sucked into your own head
all the fucking time!
Mim is the most normal of us, and she’s so fucking insecure about herself that she dresses like a guy to disguise her body, and god only knows what happened to make her that way. Will does coke, did you know that? He snorts mountains of the shit. He’s gonna be the next one to O.D., I’m guessing, which is just
super
. And me? The one who can’t figure out if he likes girls or boys better? My parents disowned me, and my brother hates me because his best friend fell in love with me, his
male
best friend, and we won’t even go into my sister.
 

“Didn’t know
any
of that, did you? And oh, wait! There’s Ben, who you didn’t fucking tell me about! Ben, who sat out in that waiting room for
six hours
, who you vomited on, who was fucking sobbing over you. I don’t even know what the deal is there, but I can guess. He likes you, but you just can’t have that, so you push him away because
god forbid
you give anyone a chance. God forbid you let anyone in, even a little bit. Yeah, I’ve been hurt and betrayed and cheated on too, and that’s by guys
and
girls, and I still take a chance on people. But you…oh no. You just shut us all out, and when it’s all too much, instead of letting us help you, you pop a bunch of Vicodin and wash it all down with a bottle of whiskey. Because that’s better than
trusting
me, or Ben, or anyone, apparently. But yeah, you’re right. It’s not about me, is it?”
 

He stands up, moves toward the door. “I love you, Echo. I want to be there for you. I have been, and I will be. But I will
not
sit by and watch you do this to yourself. This is your last chance with me, babe. Do this again, and I’m gone. And if I go, so will the band. It’s not an ultimatum, or a threat. It’s just…the facts.” He gives me one last sad glance. “Get help, Echo.”
 

And then he’s gone without a goodbye or a backward glance, and I’m trying to cry, but I just can’t, because it’s all stuck inside me. Just…stuck.
 

Moments later—or maybe it’s minutes, or even hours—the door opens again, and Ben comes in. I groan and slide down to the horizontal, cover my face with the thin white scratchy blanket. “It is you,” I say. “I was hoping you were a hallucination.”

“Wow. What a welcome.” He sounds bitter, unsurprisingly.

“I don’t want you to see me like this.”
 

“Too late. I’ve already seen you at your worst, Echo, or did you forget how we met?”

I’m not done being self-destructive, clearly, judging by my next words. “Go away, Ben.”

“So it’s like that, is it?”

I shake my head. “No, I—” I fight a sob. “You deserve better than this, Ben. I—I regret how I ended things. But…I just…I need some time, okay? I need—I need to get—” It’s too hard to even finish. It’s all a hot wet hard knot in my throat, Brayden’s righteous, justified anger, my embarrassment, my regret, my guilt, it’s all too much.
 

“Okay, Echo. It’s fine. I get it.” He stands up, and I notice he has a new cane, a polished length of shiny brown wood with a curving silver handle.
 

I reach for him, grab at his arm, desperate to make him understand. “No, Ben, please, just wait a second.”

“You just told me to go away, that you need time—”

“But I’m not…I’m not pushing you away, okay? I just—I fucked everything up. I’m a mess, an awful shitty mess, and I want to—clean myself up, I guess. I don’t want you to go away, not forever. I just want you to see me when I have something to offer besides…” I choke on my words, my tears, “besides what I am right now.”

“But Echo, don’t you get it? I care about who you are right now, regardless of what you think you have to offer or not.”
 

“That’s because you’re a better person than I am.” I breathe slowly and deeply in an attempt to sound halfway intelligible. “Maybe this is me still being selfish, but I don’t want you to be with me when I’m like this. I want better for you from me, for myself. God, that doesn’t even make any sense. It sounded better in my head.”

“No, I get it.” He grabs my hand, his big, rough, tanned palm engulfing mine. “I’m here, though, okay?”

“You’ll wait?” I pull at him, wanting his proximity, now that he’s here and he’s real and he doesn’t seem to hate me. “You’ll wait for me?”

He nods. “I’ll wait.”
 

I gaze up at him. I feel so needy, all of a sudden. Like all the years of holding myself rigidly strong and never needing anyone have left me empty inside and hungry for whatever I can get.
 

“Kiss me?” I ask, feeling small and hopeful.

He stares at me for a long moment, and then his brows draw down and his expression shifts to reflect some inner pain. “No, Echo. See, I’m selfish too. I want all of you. I don’t just want one kiss because you feel bad about yourself.”
 

He crouches at my bedside, and I roll to face him, and he has both of my hands in his. Tears stream down my face. “Ben—”

He ignores me and keeps talking. “I want more than one kiss. I want more than one
night
, more than one tumble in the sheets.”

“But I don’t know how—”

“It’s simple, Echo. You just have to learn how to be totally vulnerable, that’s all.”

I laugh. “Is that all? Just bare all my secrets, just like that? Just…be totally vulnerable?”

“That’s all.”
 

I sniff and roll onto my back, stare at the ceiling through blurry, red-rimmed eyes. “Let me just rip my chest open real quick, then.” I say it with a laugh, but the laugh turns to a sob, and then I’m sobbing hard, and then I have to twist to the side so he doesn’t see how terrified I am. I’m crying because it’s impossible, because I just don’t know how to do what he wants.
 

“Do it, Echo. Rip your chest open, and let me in. Let me see you bleed. I can’t promise I can make it all okay, because I can’t. But I can promise to be there when it’s not.”
 

I look at him over my shoulder, my body still facing away, and my hair obscures my vision, so I don’t see him coming, I smell him first—soap, shampoo, cologne, and that otherness of Ben-scent—and then I feel him, an all-consuming presence over me, fingertips brushing my hair away, hand cupping under my neck and lifting my head, and his lips touch mine softly, briefly, gently.
 

It’s not a kiss; it’s a promise of kisses to come.
 

He goes, then, and I let him go, even though I want to scream and cling to him and cry and beg him to carry me away and wrap us back up in that bubble, where nothing mattered and nothing hurt.

He goes, and I need whiskey with a vicious desperation that has me clawing at the sheets.

And that’s when I know I have a problem.

*
 
*
 
*

A lot has happened in the last two weeks and while I still don’t completely have my shit together, at least I know it and I’m trying to do something about it. Bray is sitting next to me on the couch, shirtless, hair messy, eyeliner from the night before smeared across his eyelids. He’s in a “gay phase”, as he puts it, which means he borrows my skirts and wears my makeup—poorly applied, usually, but whatever. Maybe I should give him makeup lessons. He has a bird tattooed on his chest, on the left side, over his heart. It’s a lark, he once told me, but wouldn’t explain its meaning. It’s a gorgeous tattoo, done life-size in photorealistic detail and color. The lark is perched on a branch, crest raised, mouth open to sing, wings spread as it prepares to take flight.
 

He leans forward, touches the record button on the GoPro that faces us, set up on a tripod. “Hey, hey, ya’ll. I’m Brayden and this Echo,
ob
viously. Since Echo the Stars is on temporary hiatus, we know all ya’ll need your fix of Echo’s singing, and possibly my magical mandolin. So, here we are. This is a personal project, I should probably point out. No filters, no polish, just Echo and I as we are. I haven’t even slept yet, and it’s six a.m. I’m still wearing last night’s makeup, and I lost my shirt at some point, but I don’t care. We’re just gonna make some music and put it out there. This is for us. And hopefully, ya’ll will like it, too.”
 

I glance at him. “Bray-bay?”
 

“Yes, my dear?”

“You’re rambling. Shut up and play your mandolin.”
 

He sticks his tongue out at me. “Meanie-head. But alas, you’re right. Without further ado…” He flexes the fingers on his chord-hand, closes his eyes and ducks his head, and then begins strumming a slow, mournful melody.

I sing:

“
Forgive me, forgive me…forgive me,

But I just can’t get those words out,

Those two little words, can’t set ’em free,

Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me,

I should be able to say it, should be easy,

But those words, they get stuck

And anyway it’s not like you give a fuck

If I say I’m sorry, they’re just words, two little words,

That mean so little,
 

Too little, too late,

And they just can’t erase the hate I pile on myself,

Can’t bury the guilt I keep on my shelf,

Can’t bring down these walls,

Can’t tear down these halls,

Even if I beg you on bended knee,

Forgive me, forgive me,

Forgive me,

I should be able to say it,
 

But those words just get stuck,

And anyway it’s not like you give a fuck,

And it’s just my luck,

You’d forgive me, you’d forgive me

Like it’s just that easy,

Because we all know the truth,

We all know the hardest part,

The thing that’s really an art,

Is when I say forgive me, forgive me,

Forgive me,

Is to say it to myself,
 

To take the guilt off the shelf,

To bring down my walls,

To tear down the halls,

To beg myself, to plead with my own soul,

Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
”

“That was, obviously, a song called ‘Forgive Me’.” Brayden tilts his mandolin so the rounded bottom rests on his thighs, leans his chin on the edge of the headstock, and then gazes at me sidelong. “And Echo? Just so you know,
I
forgive you.”