Promises of Forever, page 24
I glanced up and away again as quickly. He wore a serious expression, and I knew without asking someone had sent him. Someone had told.
“What are you doing?” he asked, venturing into the room.
“Making a list so I can move forward with my curriculum. You see this?” I gestured to the blackboard, tapping the play title on the bottom of the list. “This is the first time in more than six years they’ve chosen Othello. It’s exciting. Finally, something different. I’ll probably start with it.”
“Koa.”
I wouldn’t look at him and continued writing in my planner. “Romeo and Juliet is always a given. Same with Hamlet and King Lear. Macbeth is a guarantee. Every year, the students choose the popular ones, but Othello? That’s a treat. I look forward to it. It was one of Shakespeare’s top plays, but oddly enough, it’s rarely chosen.”
“Koa.” Niles’s shadow fell over my notebook, and he removed the pen from my hand, nudging my shoulder so I would stand upright and face him.
“What?” I injected a touch of irritation into my tone, hoping it would warn him off. Niles had no qualms about stepping over lines he wasn’t invited to cross or delving into topics I didn’t want to discuss. It had been an ongoing issue in our relationship and bled into our friendship.
Pulling an attitude never worked before, and it didn’t work now.
“Go home.” My friend wore a mask of sorrow.
“Why? It’s noon. I have two more classes to teach after lunch and—”
“Go home,” he said gentler, rubbing my arm. The touch didn’t feel good, and I pulled out of his reach, hugging the limb to my body. I didn’t want to be comforted, caressed, or reassured. I wanted to stay on the outskirts of the world where I’d lived my whole life. It was safer. Quieter.
I wished I had my cardigan, but it was at home. The weather was still stifling, and after our trip to the arena the other day, I’d hung it in the hall closet. I needed it. Its reassurance. Its protection.
“The man who raised you has passed away, Koa, and you have things to take care of. You don’t need to be here. Annette called in a sub for this afternoon. Go home and take care of you.”
“There is nothing wrong with me, and I have nothing to take care of. Grandfather organized everything on his own. The funeral home has their instructions, and I can show up or not. It makes no difference. I’ve chosen not to go. I have things to do here. Excuse me.”
When I tried to retrieve my pen, Niles wouldn’t let me have it. Against my will, he drew me into his arms and hugged me so tight I couldn’t get free. But he knew I wouldn’t try.
It wasn’t worth the fight. What did it matter? I could stand there and argue with Niles or let him have his way. I could fight tooth and nail, stay and teach my afternoon classes, and try to make everyone on staff see how much of a nonissue Grandfather’s death was, but they wouldn’t understand. I could speak until I was blue in the face, but it would change nothing.
Submission was easier.
“Go home,” Niles said by my ear. “I don’t care if you call the funeral home or open a bottle of wine, get drunk, and write morose poetry. Go spend time with your thoughts. It’s a lot to process. Get away from here.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Do it anyway. And call out tomorrow too. Take the week.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.”
“Call Dr. Kent, and—”
“Absolutely not.”
“Koa, you need to face this with—”
“Don’t patronize me. The man meant nothing to me, and you know it.”
“Fine. Then go home and toast his death. Save me a glass, and I’ll come by when I get off later. We can celebrate together.”
“No. I’d rather be alone.”
“Then be alone.” He squeezed me tighter and kissed my temple before releasing me. I’d learned long ago the power of surrender. The power of Niles Edwidge. It had nothing to do with weakness and more to do with indifference. If I didn’t care one way or the other, it was easiest to let him have his way. It closed the issue faster than arguing.
So I went home.
I did not call the funeral home.
I didn’t call Jersey or respond to his text later that night.
I talked to Rask, drank expensive wine, and wrote morose poetry, as Niles had suggested. It poured out of me. Unstoppable. Unforgiving.
The wine was a bad idea. It deepened the ever-present fog. It amplified the nothingness.
The world became a giant sensory deprivation tank, and I floated there, unable to think, unable to feel, unable to process.
Words spilled out of me onto paper, ink smearing under my fast-moving hand. Its context was a toxic and grisly stream of consciousness, ugly and perverse. I didn’t understand it or know where it originated, but there it was. I destroyed each page the second I filled them, tearing them from the journal and crumpling them. The balls of discarded paper filled the waste basket and my desk.
I couldn’t stop writing. The words ate me alive. Caustic yet soothing. Beautiful yet ugly. Necessary. I purged. I bled onto the paper.
Night came. The darkness that lived deep in my soul stirred and woke. It had been slowly gaining power all day. I’d felt it and could no longer hold the door shut. My strength was depleted.
The horrors I had avoided for years breathed down my neck and whispered in my ear. They flashed across my retinas like waking dreams.
The rotting poison I’d locked away decades ago seeped through the cracks and bubbled to the surface. It crawled through my veins. It curled around my lungs and heart and wormed its way through the narrow channels of my brain.
For the first time in many years, I was back there. In that house. Hiding from the monster.
Running for my life.
Unable to escape.
27
Jersey
Koa had gone silent, and it nagged at me. Our texts were regular enough that I could anticipate them daily. Usually I initiated the conversation, but he always responded. I hadn’t heard from him since Tuesday night. The six texts I’d sent on Wednesday had gone unanswered. The call I’d placed that morning went to voicemail.
Between clients, I checked my phone again. Nothing. It was nearing four on Thursday afternoon. Classes would be out for the day. Koa had no excuse for ignoring me, so his silence was concerning. I sent another text, asking him to at least check in so I didn’t worry, and then pocketed my phone as I made plans to drive to Peterborough after work.
My next patient was a college-level basketball player with a bad knee who had recently undergone surgery. Surgery for an athlete was never good, but at nineteen, he had a high chance of a full recovery, unlike I’d had at thirty. I read the guy’s chart while standing in the hallway, reminding myself of our progress and what therapy techniques we were working on.
Before I could open the door, my pocket buzzed with an incoming phone call.
“Finally.” I scrambled to answer, seeing Koa’s name on the screen. “Hello? Where the hell have you been? Are you okay?”
“Hi. Jersey? It’s Niles. Do you have a minute?”
Niles? On Koa’s phone? My stomach dropped.
“Is everything okay? Where’s Koa?”
“He’s here. Can’t you hear him?”
In the background, someone played piano. It wasn’t the melancholy Chopin Koa had demonstrated for me a few times over the summer. Whatever score he’d gotten a hold of was angry and violent. The abrupt, fast pounding of notes, although precise and intentional, radiated something caustic and aggressive through the phone.
Coming from Koa, it made no sense.
“What’s going on? I’ve been calling and texting for two days. He hasn’t—”
“His grandfather died, and… I can’t reach him. I’ve lost him, Jersey. I don’t know what’s going on. He won’t call the doctor. He won’t talk to me except to yell at me to get out and leave him alone. He’s… beyond approach. He’s had moments of instability in the past, but I’ve never seen him this bad. Can you come? If you can’t talk him down, I’m calling an ambulance.”
“An ambulance? Christ.” I scrubbed a hand over my beard and spun in place before staring at the door separating me from my client. I had another scheduled after him. “I need a couple of hours. I’m at work, and I can’t leave. I can be there for six thirty or seven. Will you wait?”
“I’ll stay with him until then.” The enraged music continued in the background, growing louder and faster as Koa reached a certain part of the piece. Niles sighed. “Sorry to call while you’re working.”
“I’m glad you did. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I disconnected the call and stood for a long minute, processing. Koa’s episodes from our camp days came back to me. Specifically, the one where he’d attacked another boy and had been sent home. In those days, when something or someone threw Koa over the edge, it was hard to get him back. The following year, he’d told me he was better. He’d told me he had medicine because his brain was sick.
I’d never understood the full implication of that statement at the time.
As a child, I’d always assumed medicine made sicknesses go away. If a kid got an ear infection, the antibiotics eliminated it. What I hadn’t comprehended in my youth was the lifelong effects of mental health illnesses. What Koa dealt with—whatever it was—was a forever deal, and once again, his barely stable mind had been pushed beyond its limits.
I had a feeling that didn’t happen as often anymore, but when it did, it was catastrophic.
I finished the day queasy with worry, leaving paperwork behind so I could hit the road and get to Peterborough. I arrived at a quarter to seven and parked on the road since Niles’s vehicle occupied the driveway behind Koa’s Audi.
Standing on the porch, I heard the same aggressive piano music coming from inside. It had been hours, and he was still at it. Unlike earlier on the phone, the music had grown sloppy, his mistakes glaring. I knocked but let myself in, figuring it would go unheard over the racket.
Niles met me in the front hallway and offered a wane smile. “Prepare thyself, my friend. The battlefield is messy, and the odds are not in our favor.”
I chuckled. “What do I need to know?”
“He’s… toeing the line of self-injurious. I tried to stop him, but I was afraid he’d physically throw me out the door.”
“Self-injurious how?”
Niles didn’t explain and hitched his chin, indicating I should follow him into the library.
Koa sat on the piano bench, wrapped in the cardigan I hadn’t seen since our skating date, his face a picture of concentration, cheeks pink, hair in disarray. His focus was on a spread of sheet music, his fingers dancing stiffly and aggressively over the ivories.
He stumbled, fingers slipping on the keys. Stopping, he made fists with both hands, flipped them knuckles down, and smacked them repeatedly against the top edge of the piano—hard enough I flinched. Hard enough there was no way it wouldn’t hurt.
“Again,” Koa said through gritted teeth.
And he played.
“Jesus.”
“It’s been going on for hours. His knuckles on his right hand are already bleeding, and he won’t stop. His hands are going to be a mess.”
“What the hell is he doing?”
“Disciplining himself for making mistakes. But the more he does it, the worse his playing. It’s a vicious cycle. They’re going to swell like balloons at this rate.”
Speechless, all I could do was watch the horror show as Koa played—poorly—then smacked his knuckles on the piano as punishment, screaming, “Again!”
I wanted to collapse and cry. I wanted to yank him away from the instrument and wrap my arms around him so he’d stop. I wanted to find a way to reach the innermost part of him he shared with no one so maybe I could understand the pain he carried around with him like a shadow.
A fire burned in the fireplace. It was much too early in the season for such things, and the room was stifling. Koa’s hairline was sweat-drenched, and I couldn’t fathom how hot he must be wrapped in a cardigan, sitting a few feet from the roaring flames.
I didn’t know what to do.
Niles turned to me, lowering his voice. “Unless you can talk some sense into him, I’m calling an ambulance. They’ll lock him up, and he’ll be pissed, but this isn’t right. This is a breakdown, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not qualified to handle it. He needs professional help.”
Niles was right, but I wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet. “Give me a few minutes.” I didn’t know what I was planning, nor did I think I could offer any special words to calm Koa down. If Niles, his longtime friend and ex-lover, couldn’t reach him, what hope did I have?
I didn’t start by approaching Koa. I aimed for the stairs to the second floor. Niles called after me, “Where are you going?”
In the bathroom, I rooted through the medicine cabinet, finding a veritable pharmacy of prescription medication. I figured I might. No one has a lifelong relationship with a therapist and doesn’t have a drug or two on hand to show for it. Especially Koa, who’d been in active therapy for as long as I’d known him.
I read the labels one after another, their contents barely pronounceable, and I was familiar with a lot of drugs in my line of work. I wasn’t sure what half of them were for, and based on the fact that all of them were full, I wondered if Koa bothered taking them at all.
But I found what I was looking for. Xanax.
I returned to the library, where Koa was busy reorganizing the sheet music, laying the next few pages on top of the ones he finished playing. Without contemplating my approach or the consequences, I sat on the bench beside him and closed the fallboard.
Koa stilled. It was like I’d powered him down with the simple action. The only part of him that moved was his chest with his rapid breathing.
He didn’t look at me. His gaze remained fixed at a spot in the middle distance, hands curled and cradled loosely against his sweater. “What are you doing here? I didn’t invite you.”
“Niles called. He told me you weren’t feeling well.”
“I’m fine.” A shudder radiated through him, and he lifted a hand, examining it. He stuck a bleeding knuckle into his mouth, then shook it like it stung, staring at it again as though amazed at the damage. They were red and inflamed, battered like he’d been punching a brick wall for hours, and I worried he might have cracked bones.
I studied him and couldn’t find the person I’d spent the summer with. The intelligent, sophisticated man I’d fallen in love with, the man with a passion for literature and melancholy music, was gone. In his place, I discovered the broken boy from camp. The one who couldn’t figure out how to be like the other children. The one with a secret he held so tight to his chest it was slowly destroying him.
Koa had retreated further inside his head than usual, and I couldn’t imagine what he saw. I glanced at Niles and asked him to find a glass of water. He skipped out of the room as I turned back to Koa.
“I know you can hear me. I know you’re listening. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to tell me what’s eating you. I know it’s bad. I know there’s a lot going on in your head right now, but you’re scaring Niles. He wants to send you to the hospital, and I know you don’t want that. Something really rotten has moved in upstairs, hasn’t it?”
I brushed Koa’s sweaty hair from his forehead. He didn’t move away or flinch. “And I bet it doesn’t feel good. I also know it’s hard to make it stop sometimes. It happened at camp when we were little, more than once. One time, it was so bad they had to send you home, and I hated it. I wanted to be there for you, just like I do now.
“A long time ago, you told me taking medicine made your head better. I think it would help what’s happening right now.”
Niles cautiously handed me the glass of water and backed off. I set the bottle of Xanax on the fallboard. Koa focused on it. Staring. Not moving.
“You don’t have to feel this way, Koa. You must be exhausted. It’s okay to take a break from it all.”
His vacant stare remained stuck on the pill bottle, but I waited. I knew his gears were spinning. After a few minutes of quiet contemplation, he picked it up and fumbled to open it with his swollen hands. He helped himself to a single pill.
I felt like I’d won the war, but in truth, I’d won a single battle. It was something.
I offered him the water, and he drank the whole thing, hand trembling enough that I feared he might drop it.
Handing back the empty glass, he stood and wrapped the cardigan around his middle as he stepped out from behind the bench. He was unsteady, but I didn’t reach for him.
Koa glanced from me to Niles and back. “I’m going to bed. You can all stop worrying now. I’ll be fine.”
Without looking back, he left the room.
We listened as he climbed the creaky stairs. When a door on the second floor shut, Niles asked, “What did you give him?”
“Xanax. He’ll sleep.”
“He’s got a full bottle of wine in him.”
“Then he’ll sleep well.”
Niles collapsed on the couch, kicking his feet out and covering his face with his hands. “I’m spent. I’ve been here for hours. I can’t believe you walk in, and in five minutes he’s better.”
“He’s not better.”
“You know what I mean. He stopped playing. I couldn’t get him away from the damn piano.”
I spent a second at the fireplace, smothering the flames the best I could before sitting in Koa’s favorite reading chair. “What happened?”
“He cracked. I don’t know. Yesterday, after he got the news, I could barely get him to go home. Today, he’s… I’ve never seen him like this.”
“I have. Kind of. It was different. As a kid, he’d have episodes at camp. Usually, something triggered it. Violence, blood… a cap gun once. That was the worst. Archery. He would either detach or lose his shit completely. He beat a kid up once.”
“Koa?” Niles stared with astonishment. “No way.”
