Purple Hearts(59)

“Why didn’t you say you had a problem earlier?” Toby asked.

“Do you really want to know?” She looked at me, then at Toby, then back at me, her ponytail swishing on her back. Neither of us answered. “Because I didn’t think Cassie would get this serious with you. All things considered.”

“What are you saying?” Toby asked.

I could feel blood rushing to my face, my gut throbbing. “Toby’s been with us one hundred percent from the second he auditioned, even before we, whatever. What do you want to do, kick him out so I can date him?”

“I have stake in this band, too, now, Nora. No matter what happens with Cassie,” Toby said, glancing at me.

“Fine,” Nora said.

Then she pressed her lips together, and she looked at me for several seconds, unblinking. Nora had been there when I’d pushed Tyler away, when I’d reconnected with music, when I’d come to the conclusions about myself that made me want to form The Loyal with her in the first place. I need to make my own space from the ground up, I’d told her. Dating my drummer, especially now that I shared my futon with my fake husband, was not exactly making my own space.

She began setting up her instrument.

“And for the record, I did tell Cassie that I had a problem with it. From the beginning.”

“Why not me?” Toby asked.

“Because we’re not good friends,” Nora said. She gave him a look like sorry, not sorry. Toby held up his hands in surrender.

She was being paranoid. We had chanted music comes first, music comes first to each other for long enough that she was having trouble seeing what happened when something else—or someone else—was important, too. There was space for everything, right?

“We can talk about this later, Nor.” I played the opening chords to “Green Heron” and sighed. “And I’m sorry I forgot Fleetwood Friday.”

Nora wasn’t looking at either of us, focused on hooking up her bass. “It’s fine. Let’s just play.”

“Let’s do ‘Green Heron.’ Toby’s been practicing that hard switch after the bridge with me.”

Plunking her bass, Nora said, “I don’t doubt that he has.”

Toby sat behind the drum set, banging out a few beats, laughing to himself. “Come on, Nor. There’s no point in speculating what could go wrong. Let’s just have fun.”

“Let’s see if you can keep up this time,” she said. “Just make sure y’all don’t break up before the Sahara.”

Toby looked at me, winking. No way, he mouthed. My gut rumbled, defensive. I threw my lighter at Nora a little too hard.





Luke


Two weeks in and I was sitting next to Rita in my chair, bouncing a tennis ball on the east wall. We were supposed to be looking for jobs. But every job Rita read from Cassie’s laptop either required a college degree, which I didn’t have, or required the capacity for heavy lifting and movement, which I didn’t have, either.

Johnno wouldn’t stop calling, even when I answered and told him I didn’t have my severance yet. So I’d turned my phone off. I’d learned to watch the sun as it moved across the floor, memorizing its path. Sun coming through the bathroom, hitting the mat, meant it was around eight o’clock.

With my phone off, I felt less of the gripping fear I had every time his name showed up on my screen. At least, I told myself, he didn’t know where Cassie lived. At least that part of my burden wasn’t on her shoulders.

I’d risked powering it up to call Jake a few times. He’d called back once and left a voice mail while my phone was off. The downside to the phone being out of commission was that I might have missed more of his calls, but luckily all the feelings—the guilt, the pain, the fear—went away when the pills did their work. I’d taken four already today.

Sun that hit the other side of the place, reaching the couch, meant it was around three in the afternoon. At the moment, it was near the wall, shining directly on the plants.

“Rita, I can tell you right now, it is exactly 11:58 a.m. Look at the time.”

“Oh, 11:52. Close.”

“Damn.”

Rita, currently unemployed, had been hired to “look in on me” for one hundred dollars a week. It was cheaper and easier than a nurse, and it meant Cassie didn’t have to worry about helping me get out of the chair when she had to work late, or go to her boyfriend’s house, which she’d been doing more and more since I bit her head off nearly every time she tried to help me. When the pain went away enough for me to speak like a normal person, I would tell Rita about Jake, about JJ, wishing I were talking to Cassie instead, and then feel guilty and take another pill.

Rita and I would talk about her son, who was around my age, living in Louisiana and trying to be a chef, and then we’d sit in silence watching Hell’s Kitchen for hours. Rita would order sesame chicken with broccoli to be delivered. Rita didn’t make me do any exercises, which meant I didn’t have to waste my time making my pain worse, and that was really all the exercises seemed to do. Somehow I could convince myself every time that the pill would make getting up a little more bearable, but it wouldn’t. There was slippage, I would tell myself when I tried to put any weight at all on the leg. The exercises make the slippage worse.