In This Moment(87)

Seventeen hours.

Forty-eight hours.

Sixty-two hours and fourteen fucking minutes.

It’s Tuesday and I get my ass up and haul myself to class. As I’m parking and walking the four blocks to Davis Hall, I tell myself over and over that I won’t look for her in front of the Liberal Arts building, but let’s face it, I look. It’s not like I think that she’ll actually be there, waiting for me with that ridiculously big bag looped over her shoulder. But still.

Lunchtime. We normally meet at that pita place anchored to the union   and she gets a Chicken Caesar pita (dressing on the side), and I get a Steak Philly (hold the onions). Today it’s just me and the onionless Philly.

While I eat, my eyes dart between the tables and the door. I’m fucking pathetic. It’s like one of those accidents that you pass on the interstate. You swear you won’t look at the smashed windows and the caved-in metal. You promise yourself. You cross your heart and hope to die. But when the time comes, you just can’t fucking help it, can you? That’s me. Rubbernecking my own life.

I don’t sleep at night. It doesn’t matter that I ran ten miles this morning or that I put in an extra thirty minutes in the weight room after practice. If a million dollars were on the line, I couldn’t fucking fall asleep. I toss and I turn. I shove my pillows into a hundred different positions. I try a scalding shower and then a cold one, but none of it helps. There’s too much to think about, too much to obsess over. Memories of her vibrate against the walls of my skull, taunting me, shredding up the last of heart.

Blue eyes.

The tips of her long brown hair grazing my arm while I walk her to class.

The way that she’d sometimes skip ahead to the end of a book that she was reading to make sure that everything would work out. I’m just checking, she explained. I can’t go further unless I know.

Her breath teasing my lips.

Loving me is a bad idea, she’d said like it was as simple as that. Well, fuck you, I think. Fuck you.

But I don’t mean it. Not really.

I’m a pathetic sack of shit. It’s no wonder that she doesn’t want me anymore.

One hundred hours.

Five and a half days.

Nate and Adam talk me into a party they’re going to at some chick’s beach condo. I know that I should say no, but I guess that I’m just a glutton for punishment. I end up sitting on the porch by myself with the brassy clang of girly pop music filtering over me through the sliding glass doors.

I stare at my new phone. Sophie stopped trying to call me two days ago. Now she’s emailing. This morning I scanned the latest email and picked up a few key words like: glioblastoma and temporal lobe. My thirteen year old sister is trying to talk to me about palliative care, whatever that means, and I’m too chickenshit to respond.

Until we both stop running…

I look at my phone so long that everything on the display screen starts to blur together. Taking a deep breath, I pull up my contacts and tap out a quick text before I lose my nerve.



I thought of a new one. Oliver Twit



Stupid, right?

I wait for a few minutes to see if she’ll text me back. Surprise, surprise. She doesn’t.

Some guy comes out onto the porch and asks me if I want a cigarette. Why the hell not, I think, lighting up and sucking that shit deep into my lungs.

I’ve got nothing to lose.

Six days.

A week.





Aimee





What would you say if I told you that I love you?

I think about those words as I’m staring into the dark of my room at night, trying to read the shape of the shadows. I play that question on repeat in my head with his voice tickling my ear and the memories pulling me under.

I close my eyes and take a breath. I hold it inside of my lungs and count to ten. And then I let it go.



***



“Aimee?” My mother’s voice is strained, piqued. “Is everything alright?”

The unspoken rule is that I wait for her to come to me so I’m sure when my number showed up on her phone, she started to panic.

“Yeah um…” I look up and let my eyes drift over that crack in the ceiling of my bedroom. “I was, um, wondering if you still had the number for that doctor? The one that Dr. Galindo suggested?”

A pause. “I do,” she says uncertainly. Then I hear shuffling and I know that she’s looking in her purse for something, probably the doctor’s business card.

She reads off the number to me and then we both hang on the phone for a bit, each of us waiting on the other. Or maybe we’re just listening to the sound of our shared breathing.

“Thanks,” I say eventually. “And, Mom?”

“What is it, Aimee?”

“Do you think… do you think that maybe you’d come with me sometime? Not to the first appointment, but someday? And Dad too? Because… I love you. And I don’t think that I’m ever going to be the person that I was before the accident, but that doesn’t mean that I want to stop being your daughter.”