Chapter Nineteen
BY THE SIXTH night I’d quit calling it trying to sleep. Trying meant there was still some chance of it happening. Mostly I just lay there in the dark now, holding still and waiting for something my body had apparently forgotten how to do.
People say tired like tired is the problem.
You look tired. You should take a nap. Go to bed early tonight.
Thank you, incredibly helpful, hadn’t thought of sleeping.
Tired I could handle. Tired is a Coke, an afternoon nap and maybe being kind of bitchy until dinner.
This was different. This was reaching for a pen and watching my hand shake.
Standing under the shower, coming back to myself with the water cold and having no idea how long I’d been in there.
Crying at a dog food commercial because the old dog got adopted, then crying harder because I was crying at a dog food commercial, which felt like a pretty solid sign that things were going great.
Every sound was too loud. Somebody dropped something in the hallway at school and I nearly came out of my skin before I could tell myself it was a water bottle and not a door opening somewhere it shouldn’t.
I got two hours Monday. Maybe ninety minutes Tuesday, chopped into useless little pieces.
Wednesday I’m generously calling four, except I’m pretty sure at least half of that was just me being unconscious while my brain ran the nightmare anyway, and I came out of it at early in the morning with my jaw clenched so hard it hurt to eat breakfast.
Thursday I got nothing.
Not one minute.
I watched the window turn that ugly almost-morning blue, and sometime around five a mockingbird started losing its mind outside. I hated that bird. Deeply. Personally. By five-thirty we had a problem with each other.
Friday was when I started screwing things up.
Nothing big. Nothing anybody could point at and say, Amy is losing it.
I left my keys hanging in the door. Called Josie Sawyer and laughed hard enough about it that he gave me a look.
Put my coffee in the cabinet and didn’t notice until I went looking for it twenty minutes later.
Then I sat down in a lecture I’d been waiting a month for, opened my notebook, wrote the date at the top like a person who had her shit together, and couldn’t follow a single damn thing the professor said.
I tried.
God, I tried.
I’d catch the beginning of a sentence and hold onto it as hard as I could, but by the time he got to the end, the beginning was gone.
I’d look down to write something and forget what I was writing halfway through the first word.
Everybody around me kept taking notes, pages turning, pens moving, and mine just sat there with the date at the top and half a sentence underneath it.
That scared me more than I wanted it to.
Because school was mine.
Not Brenda’s. Not the club’s. Not something somebody rescued me into or gave me because they felt sorry for me.
I got myself across that bridge every morning.
I sat in those classrooms. I knew the answers.
I’d built this one thing all by myself, and sitting there staring at a page I couldn’t fill, I had this horrible feeling that whatever was happening to me at night had finally figured out how to follow me into the daytime and start taking that too.
So Friday I locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried over a biology lecture.
Eleven minutes. I know because I timed it, which is either impressive or deeply pathetic. Jury’s still out.
Then I blew my nose, fixed the black under my eyes, went to my next class, and answered when somebody talked to me like there was nothing wrong.
Nobody knew.
Six days without real sleep, nightmares every time I managed it, my brain starting to come apart in the middle of class, and nobody knew.
Which is a terrible thing to be proud of.
I was proud of it anyway.
* * *
Well. Almost nobody.
Sawyer knew something, and Sawyer, who has never in his life been able to leave a thing alone, was, for the first time since I met him, leaving it alone.
That was somehow worse than if he’d pushed.
He kept showing up early with coffee he didn’t make a joke about.
He stopped doing the bit where he narrates the biker.
He put his hand on the back of my neck once, in the hall, and just left it there for a second, warm, like he was holding some piece of me together, and said nothing at all, and I nearly came apart right there next to the vending machines.
“You’d tell me,” he said. Friday. Not a question and not really a demand. Just laying it down. “If it was the bad kind. You’d tell me.”
“It’s not the bad kind.”
“Okay.” He didn’t believe me. He let me have it anyway, because that’s our deal, and God help me I used it against him, the way I’d been using it against everybody all week.
Brenda tried twice. Wednesday she stopped outside my door and stayed there long enough that I knew it was her, and I heard her hand touch the wood, then heard nothing at all because she couldn’t make herself knock.
Wednesday she skipped the knocking part, came in and sat on the end of my bed, put her hand around my ankle through the blanket and said, “Baby, you look like you’re bein’ eatin’ alive. ”
I told her I had a big test coming.
Brenda looked at me for so long I almost took it back.
“Alright, then,” she finally said, except there wasn’t one bit of alright in it.
She went back to her room, and I lay there knowing she was awake because I was awake, which was exactly the problem with Brenda. If I hurt, she hurt. If I couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t sleep.
And Sable called.
I let it ring twice and then I picked up, because it was Sable, and because there’s a limit to how much you can lie to somebody who’s seen the bottom.
“You sound terrible,” she said. No hello.
“I’m fine.”
“Amy Rose.”
“Don’t full-name me, I’m not one of your kids.” I sat down on my bed with the lamp on at eleven at night. “It’s just a rough patch. Sleep’s not — I’ve had a rough week of sleep.”
The line went quiet, and I heard her move, heard a door close on her end, heard the sound of a woman stepping out onto a porch to talk where Malik and Zara couldn’t hear her.
“The dreams,” she said. Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“How bad.”
“Bad.”
“Amy.” Her voice dropped. “How many nights.”
I didn’t answer, and she counted it out of the silence, the way she would.
“Hey.” Very soft. “You can’t do this. You can’t out-tough it, Amy. I know, because I tried. It just takes and takes, and right when you think you’ve got nothing left, it takes that too.”
“I know how it works.”
“Then you know what you gotta do.” A pause. Careful, the way she’d step around a hole in a floor. “You could go see him.”
And there it was, out in the open, said by the one person who knew what this was like.
“No.”
“Amy — ”
“He didn’t even have enough respect for me to say it to my face.
That’s the part I can’t get past. If he didn’t want me, fine.
Whatever. People don’t want people back all the time.
I would’ve lived.” My throat tightened and I hated it, hated that after all these months he could still do this to my voice without even being in the room.
“But he didn’t tell me. He put his arm around another woman and walked her down that hall with everybody watching.
With me watching. He made sure I understood without him having to say one damn word. ”
“Amy—”
“Do you have any idea how stupid I felt?”
That one came out small.
I stared down at my bare feet. “Everybody knew I followed him around. Everybody knew how I felt about him. God, I wasn’t exactly subtle.
” I laughed once, but there wasn’t anything funny in it.
“Then he just picked somebody else right in front of me like he was making sure there couldn’t possibly be any confusion. ”
“I’m not—”
“So no. I’m not walking down there at two in the morning because I had a nightmare and asking him to make it better.
I won’t do that to myself. I won’t stand on his porch and hand him one more chance to show me how little I meant to him.
” My eyes burned and I scrubbed at them, mad now because crying was apparently the only hobby I had left. “I’d rather never sleep again.”
And Sable made a sound.
Small. That same little catch I’d heard on her back steps months ago, that half-breath, the front edge of a word that wouldn’t come out. But this time it didn’t stop. This time something behind it gave way.
“Oh God,” she said.
“What.”
“Oh, God, Amy.” And her voice had gone strange, thin and horrified, and I sat up straight in the dark. “Amy. Listen to me. He didn’t sleep with her.”
The room went very still.
“What?”
“He didn’t—” I heard her take a breath, then another, too fast. “That night. I saw him, Amy. After I left you out front, after we talked, I went around back to get some air before Thunder came looking for me, and Rune was out there. Alone. It couldn’t have been ten minutes after he walked down that hall with her.
He was walking toward his cabin with a lost look on his face, and there was nobody with him. No club woman. Nobody.”
I couldn’t get any air.
“He left her,” Sable said. “Wherever he took her, he left her, and he went back home. That’s what I saw. That is exactly what I saw and I have never in my life been so sure of anything.”
“Why — ” My voice came out of somebody else. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I forgot.” The words broke coming out, and I could hear her crying now.
“Oh, Amy, I know how awful that sounds, but think about where my head was then. I was waiting every second for Gabriel to make a move. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, half the time I didn’t know what day it was.
I saw Rune standing out there looking gutted and somehow I just... lost it in everything else.”
“Sable—”
“It’s been nagging at me for weeks, and for some reason tonight it hit me. How could I have forgotten something so important to you?”
“Sable. Stop.” My hands were shaking. Not from the not-sleeping. “Stop. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, you’ve been carrying this for months — ”
“You were running for your life.” And I meant it, all the way down, because I have been the thing running and I know what it does to a mind, I know exactly how much of the world just falls out of your head when you are busy staying alive.
There was nothing to forgive. There was nothing even close to it.
I got up off the bed.
I stood in the middle of my room with the phone against my ear, my heart going like a hammer, and I felt something happen in me that I didn’t have a name for, a sort of cold glaring terrible clarity.
He didn’t sleep with her.
He walked her down that hall, in front of everybody, in front of me, then he left her.
Which meant it wasn’t real. Not one second of it. It was theater. It was a performance, put on for an audience of one, and I was the one, and he had stood there and looked me in the eye and made me watch —
“Amy?” Sable’s voice, far away. “Amy, say something.”
I looked at the window. The pines out back. The path through them.
“He chose it,” I said.
“What?”
“He chose to do it that way.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.
It sounded soft and dangerous, and some part of me stood back and marveled at it.
“He could’ve told me no. That’s it. One word.
No. He could’ve knocked on my door and said I was too young.
He’s too old. I’m not built for his life.
He doesn’t feel that way about me. Pick one.
Pick literally any reason on earth, Sable, and I would’ve cried and hated him and probably embarrassed myself for a while, but I would’ve lived. ”
“Amy — ”
“Instead he decided I was too breakable for the truth.” And there it was, the thing under all of it, coming up out of me.
“He decided for me. He looked at me and he saw somebody too fragile to be told, so he built a show and he broke my heart the fastest, cruelest way he could think of, and he made me watch, and he told himself it was a good thing.”
The line was silent while I ranted.
“No.” I shoved my arm into the jacket. “Do you know how many men have decided things for me because they thought I was weak? My entire freaking life. What I could do. Where I could go. What happened to me if I didn’t do what they wanted.
” My voice cracked then, and that only made me madder.
“Rune was supposed to be the one man who didn’t do that. ”
I was already pulling on my boots.
“Amy, what are you doing?”
“I’m going down there.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Okay, but you haven’t slept in six days and maybe midnight after six days without sleep is not when we make major life decisions.”
“I’m not making a life decision. I’m asking a question.”
“You are putting boots on. I can hear the boots. Those are angry-question boots.”
Any other night, that would’ve gotten me.
Not this one.
“Amy, please. Just wait until morning. Sleep on it.”
I actually laughed. “Sable. I can’t sleep. That’s how we got here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I’m done waiting. I’ve waited months. I stayed away from him, didn’t ask questions, didn’t make a scene, didn’t make anybody uncomfortable. I did exactly what he wanted, and he knew. Every single day, he knew I had it wrong and just let me keep thinking it.”
“What are you gonna do?”
My hand stopped on the doorknob. That was a real question, and I didn’t have a real answer.
There was too much of everything in me, six nights without sleep, my father’s face or maybe not my father’s face in a parking garage, the nightmares, Rune’s hand over mine on his chest, his bike behind me every morning, and now this huge new hole punched straight through the story I’d been telling myself for months.
“I’m going to ask him why.”
It was the only answer I had.
I hung up on my friend, opened the door, and slipped out the back of the clubhouse into the dark. The pines were black ahead of me, the path darker, but way out at the far end of the property one light was still burning.
His.
I headed straight for it.