With so many emotions churning within me, I shouldn’t be surprised that I just gave her an insight into Stella’s death. And I recognize that was just the tip of the iceberg in a sense, because it’s time I finally talk about it. How can I expect her to want to be open with me when I can’t be with her?
“This is about you wanting to be partners, but you shut down anytime the discussion turns to you. This is about you promising me one thing and then going out and doing the opposite. This is about losing my best friend because she got caught up in an idea and never saw danger coming until it was too damn late.” I shake my head, needing to purge all of my explanations at once, and yet the last one is harder to readily admit than the others. “This is about the fact that you mean something to me and yet you have no regard for your own safety.”
Once I’ve finished, I appreciate that she remains silent, but the hitch of her breath tells me that she heard me loud and clear. She reaches over and laces her fingers with mine, her touch bringing comfort and a little more security in the midst of the sudden isolation I’ve felt.
“I’m from a small town in the Midwest. Let’s see… There’s not much to tell really. I had a Norman Rockwell type of upbringing, nothing spectacular, and then my parents died and my world turned upside down.” Her voice cracks, and I squeeze her hand, hating myself for asking her to speak about her past and at the same time needing to know, to hear it so that I can connect with her. “I’ve never been back. I left that town because there were just too many memories there, too much pain in the idea of walking down Main Street to see where my dad used to take me for ice cream or where my mom and I would meet for lunch. Or the place where the drunk driver hit them head-on and they died. So to me it doesn’t exist anymore because it reminds me too much of the loss, and I’d rather keep those memories sacred.”
I exhale slowly in response to the grief in her voice; it’s so raw that I sense that she understands how I feel about Stella, that even after all of this time, she still hasn’t fully dealt with the losses in her life either.
The heat makes me sweat and causes my shirt to stick to my skin as I prepare myself to really talk about it for the first time.
“It was my birthday.” Those first words are the hardest to get out, namely the admission that I was the cause of Stella’s death. “I told Stella not to make a big deal about it, that we’d have a little celebration at the bar later. I told her that I wanted to Skype with my family and have the party downstairs and I was more than happy with that. She agreed…” My voice trails off as I recall the look on her face, the sound of her voice as she promised me that she wouldn’t do anything else because the city had been in some major unrest with the opposition making a few daring assaults in the city to make its power known.
“There were a few new freelancers, all eager beavers to get out there and pop their break-the-story cherry. From what I could gather after the fact, Stella was hell-bent on getting me a birthday present. She wanted to get decorations for the bar and pick me up something else. I didn’t know any of this obviously, or else I would have stopped… It wouldn’t have all happened.”