Chapter Twenty-Two
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“That’s not why! Okay?” I say the line loud and firm but allow the despair to come through.
We’re almost at the end of act one.
It’s gone well so far, but I can sense that the audience isn’t particularly moved.
“Please, if we’re going to this stupid reunion, then let’s go. Let’s go now.”
It’s the scene where Hailey is about to tell Lola she’s a ghost.
Aimee, as Hailey, looks at me from across the stage with her arms crossed.
She comes over to me and lightly smacks my legs off the chair so she can sit.
When she does, she leans forward and whispers so that no one else can hear, “Do it your way.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a drag,” I say, loudly, ad-libbing, then whisper under my breath, “ What? ”
She must be noticing the lukewarm response in the room too.
“End the scene your way. You were right, it should be Lola who tells Hailey.” She says it quickly and quietly before going back to projecting, standing and walking a few feet away to say, “Tell me why you’re so scared of going in to get this stupid time capsule. I know it’s not the breaking-and-entering part; you stole enough vibrators from Spencer’s Gifts to prove that crime isn’t the issue here.”
The audience laughs in surprise, even though I doubt they have Spencer’s in Ireland.
I laugh too, taken off guard by the freestyle.
“You’re right, it’s not the crime part.” I stand also, then let the smile fade as I briefly rub my own shoulders awkwardly before letting my arms fall to my sides.
“Hailey, there’s something I have to tell you.”
She pauses.
“Okay, what?”
This is so risky.
Especially considering how dark things got in the dressing room.
I don’t want to think about it.
I don’t want to remember it.
I’ve never allowed myself to remember the accident as thoroughly as I fear I’m about to.
Not even the other night with Kiera.
“Do you remember driving back from that party? We were in your dad’s car. Leaving that guy Sam’s house.”
Aimee’s jaw sets bravely.
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember… what happened?”
The room goes tense for the first time.
It’s funny how you can tell.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“We were listening to music and you were being—”
“We were fighting. But do you remember on the corner of”—my gut roils—“Mangrove and Ponce de Leon…”
A hand goes to her mouth slowly.
“There was an accident.” She looks scared of her own words.
“Yeah,” I say.
Then, all at once, “Hailey, you’ve been dead for over a decade.”
There’s a unified gasp from the audience, and then, after the perfect amount of time, Aimee storms offstage.
She has to; since we changed the lines, no one knows that it marks the end of the scene, the end of the act.
Luckily, it works narratively.
As soon as she’s gone, I let my chin fall to my chest.
I crouch and cover my mouth, with a thousand-yard stare into the wings.
I hear Aimee whisper-shout, “ Curtain! Now!” to the crew member, and at her word, they shut the curtains on me, marking the time for intermission.
The lights go down as they do and the theater erupts in applause.
I step offstage, feeling a little nauseous.
At the best of times, I used to feel weird onstage.
The excitement moves through the body, churning and agitating and vanishing and appearing again, as strong and unpredictable as an angry ocean.
I wasn’t worried about tonight, for the most part.
We got to a pretty good place in rehearsals.
It was kind of the equivalent of cramming for a test versus studying the whole semester—it’s all fresh.
But now that we’re changing it on a dime like this, it’s basically experimental theatre.
I’ll have to talk about what happened.
Out loud.
For real.
For the first time in my life.
I’ve barely thought about it to myself until the last few days.
In the wings, Aimee is texting and talking on her walkie-talkie furiously, making sure everything is in place.
She’s mentioning missed cues no one noticed and worrying that the mic is picking up on the creaking of the floorboards.
She’s telling them to pay attention, because things are going to be unscripted.
It’s a bold choice, and the shocked looks on the weary stagehands’ faces show it.
But Aimee doesn’t back down.
Through a crack in the curtain, I glance covertly out to the front row, where I see Theo is returning from the bar with two beers while Cillian watches the kids.
I swear to God my previously mute ovaries scream at the sight of him smiling and talking to Clare, who now has a hand on her hip and is confidently yammering about something.
I shut the curtain and step away, looking at the set onstage.
We used to sit out in Aimee’s backyard for hours.
She had an old house from the 1920s, where my parents had a new build.
My house was all mosquitos in hose-water-drenched grass, cool tile flooring, fresh paint.
Aimee’s house had crank windows and real wooden floors, paneled walls in a galley kitchen.
The backyard was lush and filled with flowers I never saw anywhere but there.
It smelled like honeysuckle and dew.
The back had a lattice with ivy and morning glories and we used to sneak out by climbing it.
Of course, when we snuck out, we usually only sat in the backyard.
In retrospect, we were kids who wanted to be bad but never really got into trouble.
Her parents probably knew.
But she sometimes would sneak out to see Theo, and they went all over town.
“Water, babes?”
I turn to see Antony holding a big bottle of water.
“Thanks,” I say, taking it.
“No problem.”
He then runs off to deal with some other crisis no one in the audience would ever notice.
I think about Theo and Aimee again.
When we were in high school.
Once they started dating, they were inseparable.
It did make me jealous.
Aimee was right.
She hadn’t outright said it that way, but that’s what she meant.
I had some crushes back then, obviously, a boyfriend or two, but they were dumb boys.
A way to get kissed for the first time or not show up to prom by myself.
She had that first love with Theo, and I didn’t, so I couldn’t understand it.
The truth is, in high school, no one wanted to date me.
Probably because all I did was hang out with my best friend and scream-sing “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran in the car with my mom.
The truth is, I was jealous that Aimee had a boyfriend.
Jealous that he hadn’t liked me.
The truth is, I got work done and lost all that weight because I didn’t want to look at myself.
I wanted to be someone new.
I wanted to be chosen and accepted.
The truth is, ever since the car accident, I have been hiding.
The truth is, Aimee is dead.
I saw her die.
This has never hit me like it does in this moment.
Even the other day when I collapsed in Kiera’s lap.
It’s like that moment walked so that this one could run.
My ears ring and my heart races alarmingly fast.
Everyone around me seems like part of an even different reality.
I feel like I’m dying; my brain is emitting that drug, maybe that’s what all of this has been.
It’s a panic attack.
My first major one since I arrived.
They happen when I feel out of control.
That’s what Cillian said that first night.
I don’t think I would have understood it a week ago, but yes, I do feel out of control right now.
I’m unraveling a ball of certainty that I am not sure I can rewind.
I’m accepting what was unacceptable, and I’m afraid of what it’ll mean.
Will it make all of this fall away?
Will it send me home?
Will it make the rest of my life unlivable?
I need to breathe.
Around me people move and talk efficiently as if I’m not experiencing an emergency.
In, two, three, four.
Hold, two, three, four.
Out, two, three, four.
Hold, two, three, four.
Then again, in…
My heart rate slows and I’m starting to be able to hear and see normally again.
If the panic attacks are about feeling powerless, then no wonder I’ve had so many.
I’ve never had an ounce of control.
In LA, I don’t have power over the hours of my day, the money in my bank account, the way I look, what I say, what I eat—anything.
Or I do have control, but I haven’t been taking it.
“Okay, you do the first line, and we’ll go from there,” says Aimee, appearing suddenly at my side.
“Try to keep it close to the script where you can for the lighting cues and all, but do whatever’s best.”
Her happy face makes me want to cry.
“Aimee—”
“Do it,” she says.
“I don’t think I can do it. I can’t talk about this—”
“We have to do this. Do it for me.”
She stares at me hard and I feel how deeply she needs it.
But why in front of everyone?
Why in front of an audience?
And yet, somewhere in me, I feel like I understand.
Onstage, we can’t run from it.
Onstage, it’s easier to face, as if it’s not quite as real.
“We’ll use it,” she says.
“You and I have trouble being vulnerable. It’s like Kiera said. We’re tough. But you never had trouble onstage, did you? You’re so much more confident when you’re acting.”
I don’t get a chance to answer her, because a moment later the bell rings outside and we hear people start to get back to their seats.
The theater begins to quiet as the lights go down, and Aimee whispers, “ Places!”
I stand on shaky legs and go to my spot.
Aimee stands in hers.
The audience is completely still, waiting for the resolution of the cliffhanger we left them on.
The lights rise.
Someone coughs.
“Do you remember now?” I ask, as Lola.
“Tell me what happened,” she says.
I can see that she’s fighting back the emotion—she’s unblinking, face unmoving.
“What happened, Lola?”
I grit my teeth and tell her.
“We were fighting. We were at the party and you didn’t want to be there. I was having fun, but you weren’t. You wanted to get home to go meet—your boyfriend.” I rub my face with both hands.
“Your boyfriend—Leo.” Oh my God.
So uncreative.
The Titanic and Theo of it all.
“I was mad at you because you were always ditching me for him. You were always ditching everything for him. And he was such a jerk and such a loser—sorry.”
I feel guilty, knowing that Theo might piece together enough to be hurt.
She gives one clipped shake of the head.
“No, go on.”
This is the worst.
The actual worst.
“I—well, it was my fault,” I shut my eyes and then blink a few times before going on.
“I was screaming at you. I was nineteen, I had zero handle on my emotions back then. And I was yelling at the top of my lungs. I felt like you weren’t, I don’t know, you weren’t hearing me. I wanted you to listen to me for once. You wanted me to be quiet and—”
How much do I actually have to tell her?
Do I have to confess to everything?
I ground myself and then go on.
“You told me to be quieter, but you were screaming it at me too, so I cranked up the music as loud as I could and I wouldn’t let you turn it down. It was only a few seconds but someone ran a red light and we didn’t… we didn’t see them coming.”
“And then…”
The pause is heavy.
“You… d-died instantly.”
I resist the visuals entering my mind.
Her body in that awkward, unnatural position.
The mangled driver’s-side door.
The almost undamaged car that hit us.
The driver’s anguish.
“I remember now,” says Aimee, starting to cry, trying to keep the tears at bay.
“It was raining.”
This is true.
And I haven’t told her this part.
I hadn’t remembered that part.
God, it was pouring, how had I forgotten that?
The scene plays out again in my head: the winds were rushing, her hair blew not in a breeze but in whipping winds that cycloned through my open passenger door and her shattered window.
I could see the reflection of the stoplights and the headlights and the red and blue from the sirens on the wet asphalt.
“Yes,” I say.
“How did you—”
Aimee looks at me, and I see that she realizes too that it’s the truth.
“I don’t know. I just… know.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say with a shake of my head.
“I wish I’d been quiet. I wish I’d shut up for once in my life. It was none of my business what happened with you and Leo,” I say, remembering not to say Theo in the nick of time.
She stares at a spot on the ground, and asks, “What was the music?”
“What?”
“The music. That you blasted. What was it?”
“Oh. Actually it was… Revolver . The Beatles. ‘She Said She Said.’”
She laughs once, then sniffs.
“The lyrics.”
I nod.
She said I know what it’s like to be dead .
The foretelling of that song had made me sick with irony.
I never told anyone that detail.
They didn’t need to know.
“I haven’t been able to listen to that album since. Which sucks,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, “because it’s good.”
She laughs too.
She sits down at the table and says, “I think you got it wrong, though.”
“What?”
“The accident—I don’t think you remember it right.”
“I—what do you mean? It was my fault. We would have heard the other car coming if—”
“It wasn’t. Remember? It wasn’t your fault.”
She stares at me.
I can see a frightened honesty in her eyes and I feel weak.
The audience is tense.
“No,” I say.
For the very first time, the real images of what happened that night start to flash in my mind.
“No!” I scream now.
“You have to face it,” says Aimee.
“You have to. You never did, did you? You never think about it. You said so.”
The images are rolling in now, unstoppable.
The memories driving toward me at a hundred miles an hour, Ringo’s crashing cymbals scoring them.
The music had kept playing even once I climbed out of the car.
It was “Good Day Sunshine,” blasting relentlessly as I stepped over broken glass.
I had called her name and she hadn’t moved.
Over and over and then I had gotten back in, my knees on the seat.
When I shook her, she moved like she was made of rubber.
I was cold all over as I stepped back out of the car, and that’s when I’d noticed all the silly things.
The socks.
The gas station.
“I was a terrible driver. Especially in the rain. Remember that time I backed out of your parents’ driveway and hit the neighbor’s car? That wasn’t even a thunderstorm. That was light rain.”
“I’d—I’d forgotten—”
“Or the time I rear-ended the guy at Steak n’ Shake?”
There’s a small ripple of laughter from the audience.
They’re asking for permission to find humor in the tragedy.
I give them a joke.
“That was meaningless sex,” I quip, even though my soul feels like it’s slipping out through my bare feet.
I kicked my shoes off in the last act.
They laugh again, a laugh of relief, but I can tell they’re in this with us.
“Very funny,” says Aimee.
“But M—Lola, are you sure someone hit us because they went through the red light? Weren’t we the ones to go through the red light?”
“Of course it—right? Wait, no…”
Aimee, look out—AIMEE!
My own words come screaming back into my head.
I gasp, putting both hands to my chest.
I can hear the words as clearly as if they were being screamed in my ear.
AIMEE!
“And I was the one to turn up the music,” she says.
“Because I was trying to drown you out. I didn’t want to hear it. Did I?”
My hands are shaking.
My body lowers to the ground, my fingers reaching for the plastic grass.
My ears are ringing.
Everything feels very far away.
No, stop talking, stop—no, I don’t want to hear you speaking right now, I want to—Meg, let go!
Aimee’s voice from the past comes to me as clear as a bell.
She hadn’t let me turn off the music.
She had cranked it.
That’s why I was yelling.
That was why I was screaming at her.
I was yelling over the music.
“Oh my God,” I say quietly.
I don’t project enough, but the whole theater is so silent that they can hear me.
I remember now, how she slammed through the red light, accelerating as she did.
She could get so livid back then.
And then the other car had driven straight into her side.
“I’m the only one who knows,” she says, her tone softening.
“I’m the only one who was there. And since I haven’t been here to blame, you blamed yourself. But it wasn’t your fault. Neither of us were perfect. We were doing our best.”
There’s a long silence.
It doesn’t make it easier that she had fault in it.
It doesn’t make it hurt less.
But it’s the truth, and that’s important.
Tears roll down her face and I feel myself burning hot with feelings that have been locked away for years.
I let out a sob and then laugh before saying, “I love you so much.”
“I love you too.”
“I miss you all the time.” I can barely get through the words.
“I don’t talk about you because it hurts so, so much—it’s not because I don’t miss you, it’s not because I don’t care anymore.” My throat is tight and my nose is so congested I can’t breathe through it.
“It’s because I’m afraid that if I admit how sad I am, I’ll never be okay again.”
My breath comes in sharp staccato.
She nods, then kneels on the plastic grass in front of me, reaching out and pulling me into her.
“I know that.”
I hug her back.
Hard.
No matter what is going on here, I am certain that the arms around me right now, the hair I’m burying my face into, the scent of her skin—it’s Aimee.
No one will ever be able to tell me that this moment was not real.
Both of us start to catch our breath and I become vaguely aware of the sniffles coming from the audience.
We break apart and I see the way the stage lights hit her skin.
I can see her every tiny pore.
I can see the lighter tips of her eyelashes where I missed putting mascara.
She looks offstage and gives an almost imperceptible nod.
A cue.
I cover my eyes for only a moment and look up when I hear the back door of the set opening.
Antony appears in the doorway.
His bit part.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
I stand, blinking, and then say, “Sorry, we were—”
But Aimee has vanished from the stage.
I look into the wings and am relieved to see she’s still there.
Both of her hands are on her chest, and her face is blotchy and red, but she’s smiling encouragingly.
“My friend used to live here,” I say to him now.
“I’m in town for a reunion and I haven’t been back since… since she died.”
More sniffles in the audience.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” He looks behind him.
“My wife just made dinner. Would you like to come in?”
I hesitate, then walk through the door.