Chapter 36
He answers after two rings. At least I assume it’s him. There’s silence for a few seconds. “Hello?” I say into the void. “Hello?”
“Hey,” he finally says, in a choked whisper, and goes quiet again. “I’m sorry…to call you. I’m sorry.”
Is he crying? “Diego, are you okay?” I squint, trying to hear him.
“I don’t know…” he says. “Did I wake you up?”
“No, I was up.” That’s technically true. And there’s no chance in hell I can go back to sleep now, my heart is racing in my chest. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s…I feel like…I can’t breathe. I keep…trying to, but something feels wrong. Something feels wrong.”
A pain shoots from my hand down to my elbow. I’ve been squeezing my phone so hard I’m surprised it hasn’t snapped.
“What else are you feeling?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. My heart is beating super fast.” Yeah, mine too, but I don’t think it’s for the same reason.
“Are you in your hotel?” I ask him.
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been feeling like this?”
“I don’t know. For a little bit. I’m sorry for calling you. I just—I just don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I tell him.
I’m not a doctor. I’m not a therapist. But I don’t need to be either to recognize this feeling. I know it like the back of my hand. “Diego, I think you’re having a panic attack.”
He pauses a moment.
“Are they contagious?” he asks, his joke cutting through his tears.
“See, that was funny. You’re going to be okay.”
“Okay,” he says, his voice shaking.
“Have you called Emiliano?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“But it will go away soon? It will, right?”
“You should still call him. He can help you.”
He goes quiet again. I just hear shallow breathing.
“Austin.” He says my name in barely a whisper. “I…I feel like I’m going to die.”
The fear in his little voice through the phone—it almost kills me. And I say something I might regret.
“I’m coming up there.”
“What?”
“I’ll be there…as soon as I can,” I say, putting him on speaker and getting out of bed.
“What? Aren’t you back in California?”
“I’m still here.” A side effect of going radio silent on social media is that no one knows where you are.
“Oh my god, it’s so late here. I’m sorry,” he says. “Oh my god.” He can’t stop apologizing, and it breaks me harder.
“It’s fine. I’ll be right there,” I say, pulling a shirt over my head.
“Austin…”
I turn to look at my phone. “Yeah?”
“Don’t hang up, please.”
The glow of a streetlight shines into Charlotte’s living room as I quietly slip out. I haven’t left the apartment all day, and the air feels different, crisp and cold for the first time. I shiver in my T-shirt.
I raise my arm to signal a taxi a few blocks down. In the back seat, I glide through empty New York City streets, like no one lives here at all.
I stay on the phone with him the whole time.
—
Diego’s door is slightly open when I arrive. There’s no sign of him when I enter the living area, just the flickering of Phineas and Ferb on TV, the volume low. A platypus wearing a fedora is strapped to a jet pack, shooting across the sky.
“Hello?” I call out quietly before entering the bedroom.
There’s no sign of him in here either, because the person I find isn’t the Diego Cruz I know.
He’s not the confident athlete. He’s not world number two.
He’s just a boy on the floor, with his back against the bed, and with big, wet eyes that look scared of the world.
His bottom lip quivers when he sees me. “Thank you,” he says, barely choking it out.
And in a second I’m next to him, kneeling, gently placing my hand on his cheek. He gives me the weight of his face, his warm breath on my palm. In and out. In and out.
We don’t speak for a while. An attack like this can feel like forever, but it usually lasts only thirty minutes, an hour maybe.
Until it passes, there isn’t much I can do.
As I watch his chest move up and down, a strange feeling comes over me.
I think about Rob. And Mom. And Char. Seeing me go through this, witnessing something they can’t fix happening to someone they love, must be excruciating.
All you can do is wait. And wait. And wait.
For once, I see it from the other side, and it’s a slow-motion punch to the gut.
Finally, Diego moves his body down and puts his head in my lap. It’s not the most comfortable position, but I don’t want to move him. I’ll sacrifice comfort to let him feel safe.
“Fuck,” he says after letting out a huge breath.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Have you had a panic attack before?”
“Not like this. Jesus Christ, not like this,” he says. “I really thought I was gonna die. I still do, kind of.”
“You know, I think that every time, even with the smaller ones. The second my breathing gets weird, I think, Okay, this must be the end of me. I have to remind myself that it hasn’t killed me before.
I haven’t died from an anxiety attack. No one has.
I look that up once a month to make sure it’s still true. ”
“I think I want to see it in writing.”
“Well, my phone is in my pocket, so that would mean you’d have to move.”
“Okay, don’t. I believe you.”
“I hate when people ask me this, but do you know what brought it on?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t. Is it because I won?”
He did win today, the semifinal. He lost the first set, won the next three. Diego Cruz is headed to the men’s final of the US Open. In two days, he could have his first Grand Slam victory and finally be world number one. If that isn’t pressure, I don’t know what is.
“You’re so close to what you’ve always wanted, so maybe?” I tell him.
“And my ankle. It was fine, but now I’m not sure, and”—he pushes himself back up to lean against the bed—“I have this thing where…” He hesitates, moves his hands, trying to find the words.
“I think I worry about injuries too much. Even a small one like this—I can’t stop thinking about it, and I worry about it getting worse and worse until it turns into something that ruins my career.
I can’t stop picturing it, the surgery, the recovery, the surgery again…
I get stuck in that loop.” Diego lets out a breath.
“I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud,” he says.
There are pieces of him, more than I know of, buried away in there, and hearing him describe this one, with tiny trembles in his voice, I can understand how it led him here, to the floor of his room at Hotel Renée, with me next to him, staring at the back of his neck and the hair that’s been growing there since his last cleanup.
I wish I could run my hand across it and make him feel better, tell him it will all be okay.
But I should be careful. I should keep my distance.
“How did you injure your ankle?” I ask.
“During a practice set. I turned it, sliding, going for some stupid shot. It was so stupid.”
“But it felt okay today?”
“I got through it, yeah.”
“Then it’ll be fine on Sunday.”
“It’s my third chance. I can’t let it happen again. I can’t let it happen,” he says.
I knew that had to be on his mind as well.
Diego has made it all the way to the finals of a Grand Slam two other times.
Each one he narrowly lost. Commentators have speculated that there’s some mental block that’s stopping him from pulling off the win.
That thought can eat belief for dinner, and I know it has to be swimming inside him in the lead-up to the final.
He lets out another heavy breath. “God, this is shitty timing.”
“Yeah, you really can’t schedule panic attacks. I know that much.”
“What do I do?” he asks me.
Suddenly I feel like Helen. “You sleep. You try to get some sleep, and I think you’ll feel as good as new tomorrow.”
He looks at me, a hint of fear still in his eyes, and hesitates.
“Will you stay with me?” he asks.
Everything—everything in me says no. It would set me back. I didn’t even watch his match—I just refreshed the app every ten seconds to follow the score. I was making progress.
But I can’t leave him now, not like this.
We crawl into his bed, and I stay squarely on my side, setting a boundary—a boundary that’s quickly broken as he slides across the sheets and his body locks onto mine, his chest to my back, his legs warming the backs of my knees, and I melt into him again—not because I want to, because I can’t help it.
Anxiety wrecks me almost daily. It makes me question everything. It makes me believe things that aren’t true. It makes me spiral. It knocks me out. Falling in love does all those things too. At this point, it’s all the same.