Few Kinds of Wrong (11 page)

“Are you okay?” Jamie asks. He crosses one arm over his chest in a pose he must have patented. I've never seen anyone else cross only one arm. It's like he's wearing an invisible sling.

“I'm fine.” I take another drink. “No big deal. I can't believe they called you. My real friends not available?”

“I don't know. I just know they're worried about you. Both of them are. You know you should be happy for—”

I cover his lips in a fierce kiss. I lay the bottle down on the desk as my tongue slips in his mouth. His hands explore familiar, foreign areas. I press my jeans against his, feeling how ready he is for what I want. He pulls me even closer to him so my back arches and I lean back, a moan escaping my lips. His hand goes around the back of my neck, pulling me back to him. He pushes his hungry mouth on mine. I reach down to his button-up jeans, stretched tight across his hardness, and frantically try to get the top button undone, claw at it, would rip the buttons off if I could just get my fingers to work right, and then he pulls away.

“No,” he says, hands on my shoulders, pushing me away.

“No?” There's a no?

“You've been drinking and you've had a big shock. I don't want to take advantage.” He touches the side of my face. His eyes are the colour of pity. “I know you're hurting. I can't make that go away.”

It starts at my toes—a wave of something inescapable I can't name, an intense urge for something, anything. It moves up my legs, through my torso, out my arms, up my neck and lingers at the edges of my eyes in the form of tears that hover, waiting for me to do something, wanting me to break. It will only take a word to make it happen and it comes out in a desperate whisper.

“Please.”

The sobs come the same time I do, the same time Jamie does, and he holds me, lying naked on his jacket on the office floor as I weep onto his chest until I'm gasping for breath.

Half an hour must pass before I realize I'm shivering and that Jamie's arm, resting under my head, is covered in goose bumps. I lift my head to look at him. His tear-stained
face brings me back to now, brings me back to then, and rips the moment away.

“I'm so sorry, babe.” His voice is barely audible and I wonder if he spoke the words out loud or just moved his mouth to form them. I know this isn't about Bryce or Mom or the divorce. It's about us and the parking lot. Just when I think I can't cry any more, a memory proves me wrong.

8

I
T WAS THE
sound that turned my head, a person falling to the floor, a thump as flesh met concrete. How I even heard it above the noise in the garage, I don't know. Shouts and words bounced off walls and came into the office where I was talking on the phone, receiver against ear, in the last seconds of the life I'd loved. Just a quiet thud and it was gone. In a heartbeat. In the loss of one.

I ran to the sound, ran in cold tar, legs moving quickly with little forward momentum. How is it possible that so many steps, in such rapid succession, could keep me in almost the same spot until what seemed like long eons later I was standing over Dad? His ashen face seemed devoid of Dad, like the absence of him was lying on the floor. His cheeks looked sunken even though they puffed out every time Alan breathed into Dad's mouth.

Everything seemed distant, like I'd been sucked away and was suddenly watching it, smelling it, from far away. There was just a faint whiff of garage — grease and sweat. It was all lessened in the moment. Except the sounds, as if all of my other senses had diminished and joined together to make footsteps echo like cannons and the puffs of air into Dad's mouth sound like Wreckhouse winds. My heart thudded in my chest, in my ears, in my eyes, in the tips of my fingers and the bottoms of my feet. The piercing siren of the ambulance made me cringe with pain in my ears, like music in earphones on bust, undulating back and forth from ear to ear with each revolution of the siren.

But when Bryce spoke to me—held my arm and guided me away, telling me he was taking me to the Health Sciences Centre where the ambulance would take Dad—his voice was almost drowned out, coming from some remote place, muted by the electric sound of the defibrillator as it jerked Dad into the air, arched his body in some kind of sick ballet. I nodded at Bryce and followed him to the car.

As we drove, Bryce spoke, said words I couldn't comprehend. Just muffled mutterings that filled the car but stayed outside of me. Except three words that stood out, seemed louder and clearer than the rest: “He'll be okay.”

At the hospital, a nurse ushered us into a family room. In the centre of a ring of chairs was a chipped laminate coffee table with the name
Carla G
carved in it. A phone sat on the table. Seeing it, I spoke for the first time since the sounds started.

“Mom.”

“Let me,” Bryce said. It seemed like only a second later that his lips moved into the phone receiver.

The family room door opened time and time again. Mom, Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Charlie, the guys from the garage. Mom held onto me like I was a life preserver and she was about to go down for the third time. But nothing came into focus until Jamie walked into the room. The world resumed. Touch, sights, even scents were back as I felt Jamie's arms around me and smelled him — coconut soap and Neutrogena shampoo.

I withered in Jamie's arms. I felt a hand, Mom's, I think, rub my back as I sobbed into his chest.

“He'll be okay,” Jamie said, sliding his palm over my hair and down my back in one fluid motion.

“I don't know,” I said between sobs. “You promise?”

“I promise,” he whispered.

I paced, cried, hugged, and most of all, prayed. Prayer comes in three forms: ritual, desperate and grateful. My petitions were of the second variety. “Please let him live, please let him live, please let him live,” repeated almost every second until the door opened again and I heard the shuffling of chairs, felt Jamie stand up, felt myself standing with him, pulled by his embrace.

A man in a white coat, his hair in a crewcut, spoke to Mom through echoed words, asked if she was Mrs. Collins.

“Yes,” she said and grabbed my arm. “And this is my daughter Jennifer.” Her fingers dug into my flesh, hurting so much I wanted to cry out, but somehow feeling anything except scared felt good, a strange relief.

The doctor stood before Mom, closed his eyes, and shook his head in what looked like a practiced move. In the months since, I have seen that move many times in the moments before sleep and just as I wake. I can almost picture the doctor looking in a mirror or standing before a wife and asking, “Is this sombre enough? Should I keep the sigh or just shake my head?”

In a sudden sludge of time when things moved at the speed of a broken clock, the doctor opened his mouth and I watched the words “I'm” and “sorry” come out of his mouth like they were enclosed in a cartoon bubble.

“No,” my own bubble said in a long, slow, low sound, and I wrenched away from Jamie, holding onto me on one side, and Mom, on the other, walked past Bryce, leaning against the wall by the door, and out into the hall, where the sluggish world sped up again until I was running, running like Donovan Bailey, through the waiting room, trying to catch a breath while hyperventilating.

The hospital doors opened to rain that battered my face. No idea where I was running to, but sure of what I was running from, I kept going, almost across the parking lot, past the doctors' parking spaces, the police parking, the cancer patient parking — hair soaked, clothes soaked, skin soaked — when a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

Jamie held onto my arm, his other arm spread out to embrace me. I yanked away from him and stepped back then moved in next to him again. I grabbed his arm, tearing at it, panting but unable to get a breath. I moved next to his ear.

“Don't say it,” I whispered. “Please don't say it. For God's sake, Jamie, don't say it.”

I pulled back and looked at his face. He stared at me long seconds, the rain drenching both of us, rain falling down his long bangs and off his nose. He just looked at me, obeying my order, my threat. Until I broke the spell and turned away. What was it in my eyes that held him still until I looked away?

I turned back to him again. He touched my face and before I could beg him again, he spoke in a whisper, “He's dead, babe. I'm so sorry but he's dead.”

The roar inside of me came out in fists and screams and kicks until Bryce and Mom pulled me off him. Blood ran down his cheek from a cut somewhere and his top lip was swelling as they pulled me away. Bryce held me up off my feet, my legs flailing, wanting to make contact with Jamie again.

“Never again,” I said to him as they brought me to Bryce's car. “I don't want to ever see you again,” I shouted, stretching the limits of my vocal chords so I'd be hoarse for two days after.

And I didn't see him until the next day when I called his mother's house and cried into the phone for half an hour. He stayed on the phone, not saying a word the whole time. But I'm not sure I ever forgave him for not listening to me, even though he'd just told me the truth. A truth I had to hear. Still, sometimes when I look at him, I remember the rainy face that whispered sadness into my life.

Jamie and I are in the office, locked in shivering silence, when I hear shouting across the garage.

“Jennifer,” a voice I recognize as Michelle's yells. “The door was unlocked.”

“Idiot,” I say, slapping Jamie's chest. I hop up, grabbing my shirt as I do. If I can just get the shirt on, it's long enough to cover everything important. “You left the door unlocked.”

“I didn't know how long I'd be here.” He pulls on his pants as he speaks.

“Oh,” Michelle says, eyes and mouth wide. “Oh.” She raises her voice then. “Oh my God. Oh my God. This is so great. I knew you'd get back together.”

“Stop talking now.” I pull on my jeans and Jamie slips into his white button-up shirt, covering the tattoo I'd almost forgotten about: J
, the same one I used to have on my shoulder blade where scarred, lasered skin is now. “Why are you here, Michelle?”

“Your mom left a message on my machine, saying she was worried about you and could I try to find you?”

“When?”

“I don't know. A while ago.”

Looking her over, I realize she's wearing a short, black dress, fancy updo, and extra makeup. Rather like adding icing to an already iced cake.

“Where were you until then?”

“The mayor had a thing and Steve was invited,” she says of her closeted gay politician friend who often takes Michelle to public functions.

“Well, everything is fine here. Mom doesn't have to worry. And we're not back together.” I search for a missing sock.

“We're not?” Jamie raises his eyebrows. “I thought we were.”

“I needed something to make it go away. There was only so much Bacardi left so you had to do.”

He stares at me for a few seconds then looks down at the floor. “Goodbye, Michelle,” he says before he walks out of the office.

I give Michelle the stay sign and run after him. After a few steps I slow down, my feet not as coordinated as I thought they'd be. I remember all the rum I drank before Jamie came.

“Jamie.”

He stops and turns around, eyes heavy with hurt.

“You didn't think it was anything more than that, did you? It was the office floor, for God's sake.”

“You cried on me for the past half hour. Do you honestly think any guy would do that for you? Would you open up that much to anyone but me?”

I have no answer. At least not one I care to express.

“You're so selfish, you don't care how you make anyone else feel, do you? You used to care.”

“About you, yeah, but you decided to change that.”

He laughs. “Man, you don't know anything, do you? You don't see anything. You shut all of us out — me, your mom, BJ, Michelle. You shut us all out in one way or another. And as long as you're miserable and angry, you want us to be too.” He raises his hands. “Well, if it makes you happy, I have been miserable. I miss you. I miss the way you laugh, and your awful scrambled eggs, and how you rob all the sheets from my side of the bed, and those ugly green track pants you wear on Sundays, and the small of your back, and the way you kissed me and …” He looks around the garage and pulls his hand through his tousled hair. “And the—”

“I get it, Jamie, I get it.”

“No, no you don't or you wouldn't have said that to me. No Bacardi so it was me. Fuck.”

Jamie shakes his head and shuffles. A minute passes before he speaks, locking onto my eyes. “She was the only one since you, and I never saw her again after that day. Everyone tells me to get past you, I should let it go. But I don't. I don't want someone new because … not one of them knows how ticklish my shoulders are or how I faint at the sight of blood or where that little scar over my left eyebrow came from. And I don't want to have to tell anyone new those things. I don't need to because everything I ever wanted is right here in front of me. And nothing will change that. Not even how rotten you've been all this time.”