“It didn’t happen. It’s just your head,” Sam calls to me on our run the next morning, struggling to keep up with my scared-shitless pace, which is coming pretty close to an Olympic marathon runner’s even with my less than fully functioning leg.
On our first mile on the track, I told him about the phone, the unknown caller, the garbled voice, struggling to put into words whatever the hell happened last night.
He’s always been the logical one. Maybe he can help me make sense of this.
“Sam, I saw it ringing. I heard someone on the other end. I could tell you every detail. It didn’t feel like a dream.”
My leg buckles and I stop abruptly. My hands grab my knees as I struggle to catch my breath, spots forming in front of my eyes.
“I didn’t say you were dreaming, dude,” Sam says as he stops next to me. “But you did have a brain injury.”
“Why is this still happening? I’m doing everything the doctor said. Taking the pills, doing the memory exercises, staying active. But every time I turn around, I see her,” I say, frustrated. I straighten up, meeting his gaze. “She didn’t even want to be with me, but now she won’t leave me alone?”
I don’t know who’s more shocked by these words. Where did that come from?
Sam just looks at me, his expression unreadable.
The guilt bubbles back up, but part of me can’t help but feel there’s truth in what I said. Kimberly said she didn’t want to be with me anymore, and yet the moment I breathe a little easier, there she is, haunting every headache and twinge of pain. Every memory of the accident. Every thought about the future.
I’m trying my best to stand on my own and do what she wanted me to do. Why won’t she just let me?
“What if this never heals?” I ask as I jab angrily at my scar. “Am I going to keep seeing things and hearing things until I go crazy? It hurts too much seeing her. Thinking she’s here.”
“It hurts you?” Sam snorts, looking back at me. “Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only one grieving, Kyle?” I notice now the rigid set of his shoulders. “I would kill to see her again.”
“Sam, I—”
“Did you ever even bother to see how I was doing? To see if I’m okay?” he asks. “You only call me when you have a problem. You never want to talk unless it’s about you.”
Hearing that makes me feel like shit, but at the same time, it was different for him. I was the one there that night. The one driving the car my girlfriend died in.
We stare at each other for a long moment, years of friendship struggling against these last few fucked-up months.
“She was my friend too,” he says, his voice low. “She was special to me, too.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. I know she was,” I say. I take a deep breath and gaze past him at the track. “I’ve been a shitty friend. I—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He shrugs and lets out a long sigh. “Me neither, man. That’s why we can’t lose each other,” he says, patting my good shoulder. “The only thing making you crazy is you. You had a nightmare. Let it go.”
I want to tell him that it’s not that simple.
“All right,” I say instead, agreeing with him. I can’t lose him, too. “Come on.” I fix a smile on my face and nod to the track. “These laps aren’t going to run themselves.”
* * *
Later, in the shower, it happens again. In the streaming water, I’m brought back to the drenching downpour the night of the accident. I see Kimberly’s face right in front of me, like in the parking lot at the hotel, her hair soaked completely through.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and when I open them, she’s gone. But the memory of that night lingers.
When I step out of the shower and wipe the steam from the bathroom mirror, I flash back again to the car, to my hand rubbing the fog from the windshield.
Chill out. It’s not really happening.
I say it over and over until the pain in my head subsides, just like Dr. Benefield told me to. I push back my long hair to see my scar in the mirror, the skin healing nicely, the color still a fragile pink. I trace it, trying to convince myself that the brain and the heart aren’t like skin. They take a little longer to heal.
But it won’t ever heal if I keep thinking what I’m seeing is real. I think about my conversation with Marley. How for the first time in months I was able to talk about Kim. The real Kim, not what my broken brain keeps conjuring. So how can I get my brain to stay on the real Kim instead of imagining her ghost around every corner? My reflection doesn’t have an answer for me.
I know one thing I can fix, though.
I tug at my hair. Time for a haircut. I look like I’m about to be cast in some kind of Revolutionary War reenactment as George Washington’s cousin.
Now, that would be a nightmare.
13
Marley leans in closer to me, studying the scar, a full three days after my last vision and my first haircut in three months. It’s super visible now, and as she leans forward, I try to distract myself by staring at the grass, or the trees, or the people out for a stroll around the park. Then… she reaches up to touch it, her fingertips barely skimming my skin. She does it so gently that it leaves behind an electric feeling.
It feels strange, like my body is waking up.
“What happened?” She pulls her hand away, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath this whole time.
“I don’t tell sad stories,” I say, teasing her.
She raises her eyebrows, challenging me. “Oh, is that how this works? I give, then you give?”
I pause, realizing that that’s 100 percent not how I want this to work. I want to tell her. About the accident. About Kim. She’s the first person I’ve wanted to talk to about any of it.
“I guess…,” I say, shifting my position to rest my back against the cherry tree, my voice trailing off. “I just don’t really tell stories.”
“Yes, you do. We all do,” Marley says as she crosses her legs underneath her. “We’re telling a story right now. Deciding how to be, what to say, what to do.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “That’s… telling a story.”
“That’s living.”
“Okay, so someone’s life story isn’t really a story?”