Wrong (36 page)

chapter eleven

“Isla? Are you alive in there? I’m hung over! I need some brunch in my face!” Rhode called from the hallway.

Try as I did, I couldn’t muster up a response.

From my new bedroom, forty-eight floors above ground, I gazed over the High Line.  People-watching the High Line was always good distraction and this morning, I needed that.  Badly.  Even memories of Abram, of our naughty car ride last week, couldn’t divert my painful thoughts.  My heart was twisting in my chest.  No matter how many times I wiped my eyes, they streamed new tears.  Somehow, l’d woken up like this, my dreams reminding me what day it was before I could even open my eyes.

In a last ditch effort to calm down, I looked outside to remind myself of the sudden and dramatic turn in my luck – my reason not to cry.

At 9AM, the railroad garden below my window was already teeming with both locals and tourists.  Among flowers, they laid out on the wooden lounge chairs, gabbing with friends and wearing pretty sundresses.  It was officially summer, the time of year that made me want things – new skirts, outdoor brunches, a bright, fresh pedicure each week.  All things I’d never had.  I was fresh out of high school when the diagnosis happened, so I never had the time or money to spare.

But in my first whirlwind week of working at the Monarch, I’d achieved every one of those summertime fantasies, and about a thousand more.

On the first night, I trained with Rhode, a blonde bombshell with a raspy voice she used to swear like a sailor.  She left me to change in the women’s clubhouse, returning shortly with two shots of vodka.  “Nervous? Don’t be.”  She arranged my hair to cover my stitches.  “Once you step foot in there, you can’t think about anything in the world besides smiling, looking perfect and making every man in there feel like he’s got the biggest dick in the room.  Ready? You are.”

I went with it and found out that the “room” was an entire floor of the hotel.  One step in and the scene took my tipsy breath away.  It was massive yet intimate, bathed in a warm, amber glow that radiated from the seventy-foot ceiling.  On the left side of the room, vested bartenders flitted back and forth, rattling silver shakers in front of arched shelves of all the priciest liquor.  At the other end of the room, there was a heavy black curtain veiling a good portion of the floor.

By day three, Rhode offered the explanation.  “The ring is behind there.  For fight nights.  They’re huge because we get some of the best up-and-coming fighters around the world to come here.  There’s a big one coming up soon, actually, which is awesome because I hear Abe will be back for it.”

I tried not to look overly excited.  “Abram?”

“Fuckin’ Abram,” she sighed, garnishing an Old Fashioned.  “Three years I’ve been cocktailing for his nights and he doesn’t so much as hang out with employees let alone hook up with them.  Makes me almost wonder why I decided to work for him.  Like, would I rather make a thousand dollars a shift or have just one night in that beautiful man’s bed? I don’t know.  But the fact that it’s even a fuckin’
question
,” Rhode shook her head.

“Yeah, he’s… pretty painfully gorgeous,” I murmured, hating the fact that I had no idea if he’d even speak to me when I saw him again at fight night.  But at the same time, I quietly thrilled over the chance at girl talk.  I’d lost half my friends in my breakup with Evan and the ones I had left couldn’t deal with my post-Elle depression.  I didn’t blame them.

“Yeah, ‘gorgeous’ hardly covers it but that’s not your fault.  Really no words to describe that motherfucker,” Rhode lamented.  “Which is why we drink.  After we’re done here, let’s boogie downstairs to XIII.”

“Won’t it be closed?”

Rhode looked at me like I was crazy.  “Not for us.”  My surprise made her flat out laugh in my face.  “Hoo-boy, you’ve got a
long
list of perks to learn about, Bruiser,” she whistled before sauntering off with her tray.

They started that night.  After a day of training, I received my first tip out: seven hundred-twenty dollars – the lowest amount I’d make all week.

It was wild.

My brain could hardly process the sudden cash flow – my wallet fattening up so much it began to burst at the seams.  Overnight, I went from dead broke to comfortable.  By my fifth shift, I’d bought my way out of my lease, moving into a suite with Rhode on the forty-eighth floor of the Monarch.  After a night of dancing at XIII, I crashed there and never left.  I had no boxes or bags to move anyway.  “We’ll have to change that,” she said before taking me shopping in the Meatpacking District, where I charged my credit card so furiously that the bank called to ask if it had been stolen.

It was what I needed to stop thinking of Abram – to stop wondering where he was, what he was doing, if he was okay.  If he was bleeding or making someone else bleed.  I spent every second with Rhode and the bartenders and had the nonstop, no-care-in-the-world kind of fun I didn’t think existed for people like me.  A full week from my first night and I’d dined at a four-star restaurant, danced with a New York Yankee at XIII, filled my new
walk-in
with a summer wardrobe and skinny-dipped with the staff in the rooftop Infinity.  And I’d gotten my stitches out.  It felt like I’d made a complete one-eighty transformation.  I had a new job, a roommate, new acquaintances and for the first time ever, money.  And enough to look at something, want it and then buy it.  That was a concept so foreign that Rhode liked snapping random candids of my face when I went shopping.

But all that wasn’t enough.

It whisked me away but still failed to drown out the little girl who forever lived in my thoughts, because on the morning of her thirteenth, I woke up gasping in tears.  I felt her wondering why I hadn’t thought of her in so long.  Elle had always been impossibly humorous about her situation but today, I knew I’d let her down.  Toward the end, when she told me she’d be “moving” to Heaven, I’d told her that we would still talk every day.  At the same time, every evening, I’d think of her and it would be my way of calling.  Through my thoughts, I’d tell her my funniest story of the day and then I’d look up in the sky to make sure she heard it.  If it was raining, she joked, that meant that she hadn’t.  But probably just because she’d been “chillin’ with some angels,” and she would be back soon.

I spent a year telling her stories.  But now I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked up in the sky for her and the guilt was suffocating me, so I stared out the window, desperately searching for my breath.  In the midst of that, my phone buzzed with a text.

From Holly.

Happy birthday to our beautiful Elle.  She’s smiling down on us and I know she misses you so so bad.  I miss you too babe.  I have your jacket that she loved to pieces.  You need to take it back for her. Call me when you can. Love you

I nearly crushed my phone in my grip. “Our beautiful Elle.”  Our beautiful Elle whose funeral you didn’t attend because you’d already booked a trip for Miami with Evan.

In tears, I both wallowed and fumed.  Holly was the last person I needed to hear from.  Not while thinking of my sister.  Suddenly sobbing, I pulled on whatever my fingers snatched from the closet and grabbed a few bills from my wallet.  I needed to be away, close to Elle, so I left the hotel with no keys, phone or wallet – just a few hundred dollars in my pocket and all my darkest thoughts in my head.

chapter twelve

I walked up the winding road of daisies that led to Elle’s grave.  I had a long apology waiting for her on the edge of my lips.  I wanted to start with being sorry for letting myself forget her, if even for a little.  I wanted to explain that I’d get her jacket back soon.  There were a hundred more things I had to say sorry for, but the second I reached the top of the hill, I gasped and choked on it all.

Already kneeling at her stone cross were my parents, in their best clothes, with armfuls of flower, notes and teddy bears.

Fuck. 
I froze, turned around and walked straight back down the hill, my tears completely silent so they wouldn’t hear me.  Though my heart pounded, I floated like a zombie through the cemetery, rattled with no purpose or way home.  Not that I wanted to leave.  I wanted to talk to my sister.  But at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to look at my parents – particularly my mom.  My dad would speak to me if she allowed for it but she didn’t, so that was that.

Once again, I felt like I had nothing.

My eyes drowned in such a flood of tears that by the time I reached the foot of the hill, I thought the car parked there was my cab.  But my cab had been yellow, not black, and a sedan, not a Rover.  My walk slowed to a stop as I realized who sat in the driver’s seat.  My tears only streamed harder when he got out the second he saw me.  I didn’t let my weak knees crumble till he was right there to catch me.

“Isla,” Abram murmured as I melted to nothing in his arms, crying the way I wouldn’t let myself before.  He held me tight for however long I sobbed.  He murmured my name again.  “Is this where Elle is?”

It took awhile for me to answer but I finally nodded, looking up as he smoothed my hair back.  I didn’t wonder until that moment why he was there.  “How did you find me?”

“I was getting back just as you left the hotel.  You looked…” He trailed off.  I knew how I looked – like a mess with swollen eyes and tear-streaked cheeks.  “Like you shouldn’t be alone.”

“You didn’t have to come.” 

“I tried not to.”

I wasn’t sure how to react to that but he was pulling me into his chest, so I let myself lean on him.  “My parents are here,” I finally murmured.  “I came all this way and now I can’t even see her.”  As Abram wiped my tears, I blinked, realizing he’d come all this way too.  We were in Long Island, two hours from the city.  I looked up at him.  “I’m sorry I took you so far away.”

He brushed my hair back to smile at the lack of stitches on my forehead.  “Don’t apologize for the things I choose to do.  We might as well get that out now.”  When I looked up at him quizzically, he laughed.  “Evidently, I can’t actually keep my distance unless we’re separated by state lines.  Like I said, I tried not to come.  Maybe not hard enough, but that’s not your problem,” he said, touching the faint curve that touched the end of my lips.  He let me rest my cheek on his palm, quiet for a bit.

“It would’ve been her thirteenth today,” I broke the silence.  “She was looking forward to this one.”

“I’m sorry.”  A deep frown creased Abram’s brow.  “When did you lose her?”

“Last year near her birthday.  She was in a coma for the final week.”  I tried to shrug it off in front of him.  “Leukemia.”  My explanation for how it couldn’t have been helped. 
We did all we could
.  It was the line I hung onto when I fell into that dark place.

I could see the true sympathy in his eyes.  It lessened the surprise of what he told me next.  “I went through the same thing last year.”  He paused, his gaze briefly falling.  “I know how it feels.  Like a part of you is gone forever.  Like you might never be whole again.”

I wasn’t sure if my fresh tears were for him or me but I looked up and gave a defeated shrug.  “I won’t be whole again,” I said matter-of-factly.  “Elle saved me.  She made me the person I am and she was bettering me every day till she died.  Now it feels like I’m just… incomplete.  Like I’m walking around without an arm or a leg but no one can see, so they don’t understand.”

Abram shook his head.  “We’ll both be one piece again, Isla.  It’s just going to take time,” he assured gently.

Maybe. 
I paused to look out at the bright grass.  I couldn’t see the birds but I could hear them chirping.  I stood there listening to them for a moment, letting myself revel in Abram’s touch.  “When did your brother pass?” I murmured out of nowhere.  I could feel it was a brother.  I could feel that they were close.

There was a long silence before I got his dark reply.  “He didn’t pass.”

For some reason, the words chilled me to the bone.  I wasn’t sure why but I couldn’t wonder because suddenly, I heard voices coming from the end of the road.  I looked behind me to see my mother just reaching the top of the hill.  She made eye contact with me before I rushed into the car, Abram following and obliging as I urged him through panicked tears to drive away, away.

chapter thirteen

I was the bad mistake.

Elle was a mistake too.  My parents were still too broke to raise even me by the time she was conceived.  But from the day she was born till the day that she died, she was perfect.  She never talked back, rolled her eyes or slammed the doors.  She minded her own business but came running if you called her, smiling at everything and everyone.  And I hated that.  I hated her for proving that my parents were in fact capable of love – they just had none for me.  I resented her for making me realize that I did want my mom’s attention.

It wasn’t till I was seventeen that I even started liking Elle.  But shortly after, she was diagnosed with leukemia.  The bright little girl who was friends with every kid in class, who planted tulips for our widowed neighbor every spring, was suddenly weighed down by sickness and stripped of the childhood she’d have flourished in.

For her, I stopped doing all my terrible shit.  I stopped stealing pills.  I stopped taking them.  I stopped sneaking into college parties just to flirt with boys and pocket their phones.  I stopped being pissed about how poor we were and realized that no amount of hocking stolen goods would pay for chemo, or the time my parents would have to take off of work to care for Elle.  So I got a job and went to college.  I wanted to be a teacher because Elle dreamed of going to school.  I helped my mom with bills and did whatever she asked.  And the cancer went away.  When it did, my mom was done speaking to me again, but that was fine.  Elle still FaceTimed me every night so at least my dad would sometimes wave in the background.  And by now, I had my students to adore, to shower with the love and attention I wished I could give Elle every day.

“You had their pictures in your wallet,” Abram murmured.  I blinked.

“I did,” I realized softly, remembering the school portraits and notes from my favorite students.  There were half a dozen shoved into the part of my wallet that most people kept their bills.  “I loved them,” I said, a flood of memories suddenly filling my head with full names, birthdates, favorite colors and foods.  Silly stories about what the class hamster probably dreamt about at night.  I laughed quietly.

Abram glanced at my expression and smiled.  “I’d teach if I was cut for it,” he said to my surprise.  “Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

I hadn’t considered it till now.  “I think so,” I replied.  Back at the school, my class had become my life – the kids my kids, their parents my parents.  They were the substitute family I had in Elle’s remission and I would happily sacrifice my mother’s love for my sister’s health.

Not that we didn’t become a family again, when the cancer returned a few years ago.  My mom started calling again, picking me up to go to the hospital.  When it became clear that Elle was struggling to hold on, she took my emotional support.  She even held my hand one night, for an entire hour.

But then Elle died, we were all a mess and my mother cruelly blamed me.

She reminded me of the job she’d been fired from for being too dazed at the office, distracted by the worry I put her through as such a bad child.  If she’d never been fired from that job, she would’ve climbed the ranks over the years and been paid enough to get Elle the best doctors in the country.  Everything would have been different if I hadn’t been expelled that week when Percocets fell out of my bag.  “
I could’ve done more for her but you wasted my energy.  I wish He took you instead but who can blame him for wanting Elle.”

The last words she spoke to me.

They pierced my heart again when I said them aloud in the car – the explanation Abram had asked for.  He was quiet for a solid minute when I finally finished.  I noticed his grip on the wheel had changed over the course of my story.  When he started, it was a lazy forearm draped over the top.  Now, his long fingers were wrapped tight around the leather.  “I’m sure you know it wasn’t your fault,” he finally said.

“I do,” I replied, trying to sound light.  I did know that.  But it didn’t stop me from wishing that I could’ve died instead.  It didn’t stop me from picturing the girl Elle fantasized about being, and how that girl would’ve grown into a wonderful woman that the world deserved to meet.  She would’ve gotten a job to serve others, loved all the right people and made differences I never could.  My mom actually hadn’t been wrong.  Between the two of us, it should have been me.  Elle was just a better person.  So I considered a morbid fantasy of killing myself to bring her back.  Pills would be appropriate but my mind always gave me a gun.  I figured if I prayed to the universe hard enough, it could happen – she’d return or at least reincarnate somewhere close to my parents.  And if she didn’t, well, at least I wouldn’t be around to know.

Those were my dark thoughts.  They came less frequently these days so I tried to give Abram the censored version, leaving out the suicide part so he wouldn’t think I was crazy.  Still, when I was done, he wore a deep frown on that torturously handsome face.  “Everyone changes as they get older,” he said.  “She would’ve grown up to be just as good a person as she was before she died, but she would’ve made mistakes too.  We just idealize people who went too early.  I know.”

I saw the glint of pain in Abram’s eyes – the way he quickly furrowed his brows to get rid of whatever thought he was having.  I wanted to ask him then about his brother but suddenly, my phone rang.  Startled, I answered the call just to stop it from buzzing.  “Hello?”

“Isla?”

Damn it
.  Holly.  “Hi.”  My stiff tone had Abram eyeing me.

“Isla.  Hi.  Um… are you in Long Island? Your mom just called me asking if it was me who was with you.  At the cemetery.”  She went on before I could answer.  “Isla, if you’re here you might as well meet me.  We clearly have a lot to talk about and I do have your jacket.  Evan gave it to me to give to you.”

I winced at the sound of his name off her lips.  “I don’t know if now’s the best time – ”

“If you’re at the cemetery, you’re twenty minutes from my house.  You’re already here, Isla, just come meet me at our usual place.  Please.  I know you think you hate me right now but I also know you’re alone and that you need your best friend.  If for nothing else, you should want to meet me for the jacket.  Don’t pretend you don’t want it back.”

I did.  I hated that it was in Holly’s possession.  The fact that she and Evan had touched it made my skin crawl because I had planned on putting it on Elle’s grave today.  Through my silence, Holly heaved a sigh that hurt my ear.

“Isla, I
know
you’re upset about your life right now but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to ask that you – ”

“
Holly
.”  I stopped her before she could say something to change my mind.  “I’ll meet you.  I’m coming now.”

When I hung up, I stared out my window.  Abram let me stew for a minute of silence.  “Where are we going?” he finally asked.  I gave him directions and on the way over, I explained every last thing about Evan and Holly.