“Fuck you, Axel.”
17
_________
Axel
I heard the door slam when Leah disappeared, but I didn’t move. I stayed there in front of the white canvas I’d bought her that morning, my heart frantic. How fucking long had it been since my heart had beat like that, so chaotic, so fast? My life was usually like a sea without waves, calm, serene, easy. I’d only had to face the truth one time, and that was when the Joneses died.
I remember that day as if it just happened.
A few hours before, Oliver and I had gone out and gotten drunk with a group of English tourists who invited us to finish the party in their hotel. When the phone rang, we were already taking the gravel path out, laughing about things that had happened the night before. The sun shone high in the clear sky, and Oliver picked up the phone, still smiling.
I knew it was something bad when I saw his face, as if something inside him had shattered. Oliver blinked and grabbed the post in front of him, crumpling to his knees. He murmured, “An accident,” and I took the phone from his hands. My father’s voice was on the other line, hard, like a smack across the face: “The Joneses had an accident.” I could only think of her.
“Leah? Dad…” I gulped. “Is Leah…?”
“She’s hurt, but not badly.”
I hung up and held Oliver’s shoulders while he vomited in the garden of that hotel. My brother picked us up on a nearby street ten minutes later. Ten minutes that were eternal, while Oliver lost control and I gathered what strength I had to keep him on his feet.
18
_________
Leah
I didn’t leave the room the whole afternoon. But I did open my backpack, take out my books, and do my homework. When I finished, I put on my headphones and let the music fill me. It was the one link with the past I allowed myself, because I couldn’t…I couldn’t do without it. Impossible.
“Hey Jude” played, then “Yesterday.”
When “Here Comes the Sun” came, I skipped it.
I went back to “Yesterday,” to “Let It Be,” to “Come Together.”
For the first time in ages, the hours in those four walls where I had felt so safe became eternal. I walked out to go to the bathroom around nightfall and Axel was gone, so I went to the kitchen to grab a bite, not looking toward the back porch, because I was still painfully conscious of what was out there. I opened a few cabinets until I found a box of Tim Tam cookies, but my hand drew back when I saw what was next to them: a bag full of strawberry lollipops shaped like hearts. I was about to grab one when Axel came in. Still wet, he left his surfboard in the doorway and looked at me cautiously.
“I’m sorry about earlier. Really sorry,” I said.
“Forget about it. What do you want for dinner?”
“I don’t want to forget about it, Axel. I can’t. I feel like I’m drowning every time I do something normal, something I used to do, because that’s like saying life will just keep going on its merry way, and I don’t understand how that’s possible when a part of me is still inside that car with them and can’t get out.”
Axel ran a hand through his damp hair and sighed. And then…he said something that broke me. Crack.
“I miss you, Leah.”
“What?” I whispered.
He leaned on the bar in the kitchen between us.
“I miss the girl you were before. You know, watching you paint, joking with you, that smile you used to have… And I don’t know how, but I’m going to get you out of there, out of wherever you are, and bring you back.”
He didn’t say anything else before getting in the shower, but those words were enough to give me a bout of tachycardia. I stood still, my eyes focused on the window and one hand on my chest, afraid that any movement might provoke an earthquake and the ground would slip away beneath my feet. But it didn’t. The calm was almost worse. The absence of noise or chaos. Calm and nothing else. Like the hint that a storm is coming, or you’re in the eye of the hurricane.
19
_________
Axel
When i spoke to oliver that night, I didn’t tell him anything that had happened in the afternoon. When I hung up, I realized that I was hardly telling him any of the things that were taking place under this roof, where we lived, in which things only had the importance that we wanted to give them. And despite everything, Leah and I got along well with each other; we could get angry and then have dinner like two civilized people. Or spend days without saying more than a few words to each other, and it wasn’t weird. Somehow, we fit together, even with the sadness that was eating away at her and the desperation I was starting to feel, because if there was one flaw I had, it was impatience.
I’d never been the type to wait.
I remember when I was little, I wanted to buy a remote control car, and I pressed my parents about it for days. My brother had been begging them for months to take him to get a board game so boring I rolled my eyes as soon as I heard its name. And so, according to my childhood logic, one afternoon I took my brother’s piggy bank, stole all the money out of it, and put it back without anyone noticing. My parents took me to get the car, thinking I was spending my own savings, and Oliver and I played with the toy on all the roads and trails behind our home, setting obstacles with stones, tree trunks, and leaves to see if it could climb them. For weeks, I saved the money I made for good behavior or doing chores, and little by little, I put it back in Justin’s piggy bank. When he decided to buy what he wanted, I had sold the car, now half-destroyed, to a kid from school, and he wasn’t missing even a cent.
The moral of the story is, why wait till tomorrow to get something you can have today?
At that moment, my impatience was killing me.
For Leah. Because I needed to see her smile.
* * *
The next day, when she got up, I noticed the bags under her eyes.
“Rough night?”
“Kind of.”
“Stay home. Rest.”
“Are you giving me permission to skip school?”
“No. You’re old enough to know if you need to go to class. But if you want my opinion, I think you’ll be wasting your time, staring at the chalkboard without grasping anything, because you look like you’re about to fall over. Sometimes it’s better to gather your strength before diving back in.”
Leah went back to bed. I spent a while in the waves before returning home and making a sandwich. I sat down at my desk to try and make some headway on work I had left aside the day before to go get that easel that was now gathering dust on my back porch. I wrote down on a piece of paper my upcoming deadlines and pinned it up beside the calendar. Then I got to work on some commissions until Leah came back out of her room at midmorning.
“Did you get some rest?”
“A little. Is there any milk left?”
“I don’t know. I need to go to the store.”
“Maybe…maybe I could go with you.”