How to Save a Life(43)

You made my skin forget

Gave me new memories

New sensations that didn’t drag the shadows from the past In your arms I could start again,

Start over.

There is no greater gift in all the world Than you

to the wreckage

that is me…



I never told you

How I longed to kiss away your every bruise until there was no evidence

No ghosts of your own suffering

To put your pieces back together

Seal the cracks

Vanish them like they never were

And never, ever

Leave a scar



I never told you

I would take your pain if I could

I would drink it down

And take my comfort

In making you ache a little less

For a little while

Did I?

I’ll never know because I never told you that I loved you



I love you

I love you

I love you



It’s too late to say it now

The time has passed for words

How pathetic and small and weak

On the phone

Or on a piece of paper

Starving

Without the force of my own vitality

My voice

My breath

My blood singing in my veins for you

To give them power

They are lost



I love you

It’s too late but I love you

And I’m sorry

I never told you.





All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~Elias Canetti





I dream of a river and I am carried along its currents. No boat or raft. I’m submerged to my chest in cold, dark water as the river cuts through a deep valley or canyon. I see huge, looming walls of rock. In my peripheral are people, places and moments in time. They skim across the rock and vanish when I look at them directly. I can only catch a glimpse. A few scraps.

The blue whale.

The rusted clown.

The melting spire.

Memories.

Hers, not mine. She’s carried along with me and she’s been cleaved in two, one half of her bright and vibrant, the other half gray and dying. I carry her with me in a current of her memories. We journey together. We run. Men from her broken and violent life chase her and I have to protect her. To pull her out of this deep ravine and carry her somewhere safe.

As the light of dawn begins to spill into the canyon, I’m sucked under by a riptide. It’s a cold, bony hand dragging me under. I kick for the surface, but the pull is too strong.

I hover somewhere between the shallows and the deep, my lungs stretched to bursting…

I wake up gasping for breath in deep, greedy gulps. Shivering so badly my cot creaks. My skin is pale as bone, broken out in gooseflesh, as if I had been swimming in freezing cold water. The dream skims just beyond my consciousness and I can only grab onto a few shreds. I remember almost nothing but the words that fall out of my mouth.

“North,” I say aloud, still trying to catch my breath, my teeth chattering. “The center.”

I don’t know what that means except that Jo needs me. She‘s in danger. Or in pain.

She’s slipping away, fading to gray, and I have to find her before it’s too late.





Dolores, Louisiana

Four years later



It was a slow day. By two p.m.. Lee’s Place was all but empty. Only a few stragglers at the counter hunched over their coffee and greasy hash browns. I finished up my side work and went to the back room to take off my apron and count up the day’s tips.

Twenty-seven dollars.

I sighed. “Shit.”

Patty appeared at the door to the back room, staring me down with stony gray eyes, as if my shift weren’t over and I was cutting out early. I always likened Patty Stevenson to Medusa, with a head full of suspicious snakes watching everything and everyone around her.

“Where you going?” she said.

None of your goddamn business, that’s where.

I forced a smile as I looked up at my boyfriend’s mother, not quite meeting her eye for fear of being turned to stone. “I’ve got errands. Some grocery shopping for dinner tonight. Nothing exciting. You’re still coming over, right?”

She made a scratchy noise in the back of her throat and patted the coiled platinum curls of her hair. My overactive imagination heard snakes hissing. She glanced at my loose ponytail with the strands I pulled free to help conceal my scar. Her eyes narrowed at the cut that split my lower lip, still dark with congealing blood.

“You take better care of Lee, you hear?” she said, jutting her chin. “If you didn’t rile him up like you do, he wouldn’t take a hand to you, and you wouldn’t have to show up to work looking like this. I can’t have my employees looking like trash.”

“I know, Patty.”

She sniffed again. “I’ll see you at your place for dinner. Don’t forget Lee likes his fried chicken nice n’ crisp.”

As if I’d forget. The last time I made Lee fried chicken, he raged it was ‘undercooked mush.’ I barely managed to dodge the skillet of scalding oil he threw at me, then spent the better part of the night scrubbing it off the kitchen wall.