Before Nic, before everything bad that had happened, I was just sort of there, existing, but not really living. Everyone around me had their lives and hobbies and friends and passions, and I had a dead-end job, a dead-end future and a friend who would go so much further than me after school. I was Sophie, but that’s all I was. Bored, aimless, mostly alone. And then suddenly I wasn’t. I was part of something bigger, a player in a world that lived and breathed passion and danger, and it was wrong, and scary, but it was more than just existing, and now that I had experienced it, it was hard to shut off. It was hard to leave it behind.
Every noise made me jump, every screaming nightmare demolished my throat, every pleasant moment was squashed by harder, stronger memories of darker ones. I couldn’t stop to smell a flower without my brain going: Hey, this is a nice rose, but also, remember that time you saw a guy get shot in the chest? I couldn’t even watch Aladdin any more. Yeah, this genie sure is charismatic but on a slightly different note, do you think blood is stickier when it’s warm and still inside a person’s body, or when it’s drying all over your hands an hour or so later?
When I stood in my room amidst old DVDs and books and clothes and all the other comforts of my old life, I felt completely unlike myself. Something new had taken hold of me. It began as a pinch, an uncomfortable twinge in the pit of my stomach that twisted into something darker. It wasn’t my ribs. It was fear. I was afraid, and the fear was relentless.
And the solution?
If you believe you are suffering from PTSD, we advise you to seek help from a qualified health professional.
The solution was to tell a therapist about the night my mother and I almost got shot in the head by a bunch of trigger-happy mobsters, and the lingering irrational urge to make out with the boy who had tried to kill my uncle directly after I stuck my hands inside his brother’s chest cavity to save his life.
I’d rather go on a picnic with Hitler.
Instead I replaced my preferred hobby of watching Netflix and eating ramen noodles with a couple of new games called shadow-watching and street-staring. You don’t really notice how many shadows there are in the world until you start being afraid of them. I spent hours at the windows looking at shapes go by, watching pedestrians to see if they were watching me. I studied every car on the street with manic interest. After a time I saw the same one cropping up over and over – a blacked-out Mercedes with black rims. I convinced myself someone was watching me. When I went outside to check, it was gone, rolling down the street and disappearing from view – whoever it was, they were just going about their life.
I missed my father more than I thought possible; his absence was like a physical ache in my chest – this haunting sadness that I couldn’t shake, this face that was never far from my mind. I needed him and he wasn’t there. Sometimes, the anger surfaced and I would curse him – how could he have left us? How could we possibly face this without him?
I started to dream of him – of that fateful Valentine’s night a year and a half ago. My mother’s screams rose up through the floorboards, and before she crashed into my room with news of what he had done, I heard her, somewhere far away, shouting in a voice thinned by hysteria: ‘He got him. He got him!’ Was my mind playing tricks on me, or was this fresh new horror lifting the veil on all the other things I had squashed down to the bottom of my memories? ‘He shot him!’ And then it was my voice, screaming into a void inside an impossibly expanding warehouse, looking for Jack in the blackness and knowing he was already gone.
During the day, I called every number I had ever had for my uncle. I left messages with old acquaintances. But there was nothing. The Falcones were gone, too. Millie said their house was deserted now. There was no sign of them ever having existed in Cedar Hill, nothing except for the memories seared into my brain.
And something else, too.
One morning, when I had beaten the sunrise, and was pacing around my room, attempting half-heartedly to tidy it, I came across the shorts I had been wearing that night at the warehouse. I held up the frayed denim, and Luca’s switchblade dropped on to my bed.
Oh. I picked it up and traced the letters. Gianluca, March 20th. It was heavy, the crimson falcon swooping across the handle like it was going to unstick itself and take flight. I sat down on my bed and stared at it. I had his switchblade. The proof that he had set me free against his family’s wishes – that he, of everyone, had done the right thing in that one moment. I had one last piece of the Falcones sitting in the palm of my hand.
It felt good. I had an unexpected surge of confidence holding it. I guess it reminded me of the confidence he’d had in me. Plus, it was a weapon, and a weapon meant protection. I slid the pad of my index finger along the sharp edge of the knife, revelling in the feeling of metal on skin, the quiet sureness it gave me.