Chapter 15 #3
It’s been off since Tilly’s. Alana had it at some point during the flight— I assume she went through it— but it’s in my jacket pocket now, returned without comment during our layover because her hands were full with her own powder-pink bags.
I ease it out and press the power button, angling the screen away from her.
The loading screen. Then the lock screen. Then, the notifications arrive.
Melissa: forty-one missed calls. A string of texts that begin with BILLIE PICK UP and end with something entirely in caps that I can’t read in full before I’m scanning past it. Fourteen voicemails. The most recent message is from a couple hours ago and says only:
Melissa
I’m coming. Don’t die.
Then, messages from Tyler: two texts. Both sent last night. The first says:
Tyler
hey, you coming home?
The second, sent thirty minutes later, says:
k. Going to sleep.
The trail ends there. How inspiring, I think. I wonder why I don’t want to fold his socks for the rest of my life?
I look at those two messages for a moment.
I think about what I would have felt two months ago, reading them— how I would have hoped for more from Tyler.
Now there’s no desire in me. Not for him.
Not for his love. What we had just hangs there, like a sentence someone else started and never bothered to complete.
I scroll. And then I see another name:
Rodrigo. Three messages. All checking on me, making sure I’m alright. The last one makes my breath catch in my throat:
Rodrigo
I’m in Barcelona. I need you to tell me you’re okay. My heart will not rest until I know. Please.
I stare at it.
My heart will not rest until I know.
I have never in my life received a message like that.
Not from Tyler. Not from anyone. It is the most plainly, unselfconsciously honest thing a person has sent me in years, and it arrives via a man I met for twelve minutes at a baby shower, who told me not to make new friends and also whispered be careful into the space between us like it was something he had to give.
My heart will not rest until I know.
Alana is still talking. I am not listening to a single word.
I want to reply to him. The impulse to type something back— I’m here, I'm okay, I’m in a car on a coastal road outside of Barcelona— is so strong that I actually start to do it, my thumb moving toward the keyboard, and then I hear my name.
“Billie?” She’s looking at me.
I lock the screen. I put the phone in my lap with my hand over it. “Sorry,” I say. “Just checking the time.”
She gives me a look that says she is deciding whether to believe this, and then she looks back out the window and continues.
The road narrows. On the left, the coast opens up— wide and grey-blue and completely indifferent to me— and on the right, the land rises into low hills scattered with white buildings.
A village. Small, compact, real. A cluster of narrow streets and the particular density of people living their ordinary lives in the same square kilometer they’ve always occupied.
The car slows.
There’s a bend in the road— tight, the kind that requires the driver to brake properly, to actually reduce speed— and as we come into it I look at the door handle and I look at the village and I look at the door handle again and I think: I’m going to do this.
I don’t decide, exactly. I just sort of— act.
The door opens and the air hits me like a wall and then I am out, rolling onto the side of the road with more noise than I’d planned and considerably more gravel than I’d hoped, and then I am on my feet, and I am running.
Behind me: the car brakes. Hard. I hear Alana’s voice, shouting.
I don't look back. I run toward the village. My legs are doing something I didn’t know they could do, which is move fast when a real reason presents itself.
The pavement narrows into a cobblestone alley and I take it at full speed, and my shoulder scrapes a white wall, and I don’t stop.
It’s only when I reach the far end of the alley and flatten myself against a wall to breathe that I understand.
My hand is empty. Where did my phone go? I just had it!
I reach into my jacket pocket. I press both hands against my jeans.
I have no phone. It was in my lap— and it’s gone.
And I know, before I even finish the thought, that Alana already has it.
I know because I know Alana, and that she sees things coming before they arrive.
She already had one hand on that phone before the car door opened, while I was too busy fleeing to feel it.
I press my back against the warm Spanish stone and listen to my own breathing.
Rodrigo is somewhere in this city. Melissa is coming. I have no phone, no money, and no idea what street I’m on.
My heart will not rest until I know. I wish I could tell Rodrigo that I’m okay. Well— kind of okay.
I look at the alley, and the village opening up in front of me, its narrow paths and morning light coated in the sound of someone’s radio coming through an open window somewhere above me.
I have never been less prepared for anything in my life.
I start running again.