Falling Away (23 page)

I’m telling you now, I’m sorry.

I’m telling you now, I wish I’d said it then,

When I still had you here,

When I still had you near.

I’m sending this message to Heaven, Mom,

Do you hear me?

Do you hear me?

I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry,

I love you, Mom, I love you,

And I want to come home,

I want you to come home.

I’m sending this message to Heaven,
 

But I don’t think it will make it there,
 

And neither will I.
”

She gasps and curls in on herself as she finishes the lyrics, and the band plays on a couple minutes longer, and then Brayden leans against her as he plays one last lilting circular melody on his mandolin. She’s sobbing, and everyone, including her bandmates, is clearly wondering what to do, what to say. She pulls it together, after a moment.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, guys. My mom died recently, and I’m just—I’m trying to deal with it. Not well, clearly.” She laughs bitterly. “I mean, how do you deal with that kind of regret, you know? You heard the song…I have so many regrets. So much I never got to say. I didn’t feel any of this until recently…when she died I was just numb at first, you know? Just…numb. It didn’t feel real. I still cried, but the reality of it, that she was really, permanently gone, it hadn’t hit. I— I tried to call her. Right after I got back to Nashville, after the funeral. I wasn’t even thinking, I just dialed her number, wanting to talk to her, to tell her something, to resolve the stupid shit we’d been arguing about, and—her number was disconnected. I didn’t even have an old voicemail to hear her voice one more time. Just…” she waves a hand and makes her voice go high and robotic, “‘We’re sorry, the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service.’”

“Echo, honey, let’s play another song, huh?” Brayden says, trying to ease her out of her rant.

“No, Bray, I need to say this. I need—they need to know why I’m like this.” She waves him off, and now she doesn’t seem quite so stable, emotionally or physically. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I tried to call her, and she didn’t answer, she wasn’t there…and—I just miss her. But you know, it’s not even that. It’s—it’s…there was this guy, right?” She sways on her seat, gripping the mic stand for balance. “There was this guy. We met, and we had this thing. You know…this
thing
. This big, important…
thing
. And I let it go. I let him go. But I didn’t just let him go, did I? Oh no. Not Echo, I couldn’t do anything that easy, could I? No, I had to push him away. Make him think I didn’t—make him think I didn’t feel what he… ” She weaves unsteadily on the stool, shades her eyes, peering out at the crowd.

She sees me.

“I…am I drunker than I thought, or is that you out there, Ben?” She stands up slowly, with the careful precision of the very, very drunk, and stares at me. “It is you. Goddammit. You shouldn’t be here. You said…you said you weren’t coming back, and now you’re here. And you’re seeing me like this.” She looks like she’s about to pass out, swaying on her feet.

I’m standing up, moving toward the crowd toward her. “Echo?”

She looks at me. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

I’m almost there, reaching for her. “It’s okay, it’s okay—”

“No, it’s not, because I took some—” she curls forward, teetering, and vomits at her feet. “Oh god—”

She pitches forward and I catch her before she tumbles off the stage, and then I’ve got her in my arms. “Echo?”
 

She looks up at me, and her skin is pale and yellowing and the whites of her eyes are yellow too. “Not—not okay. I took a bunch of Vicodin, Ben—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t take it anymore—” and then she vomits again, on me, on the floor.

I glance at Brayden. “Call an ambulance.”

Brayden just stares at Echo, who is limp now and barely breathing. “Echo? Jesus, what did you do?”

“CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!” I shout, and he jerks into motion, digging his cell phone out of his pocket and stabbing at it.
 

I tune out as he relays information to the operator, my sole focus on Echo. Her head lolls backward, and I roll her in my arms so she’s facing down. Drool and blood-laced vomit streams from her lips, and she’s gagging, gasping, groaning, crying, mumbling unintelligibly.
 

“Echo, stay with me baby, it’s me, it’s Benji, I’m here, okay? I’m here, you’ll be okay, just stay with me, just hang on, okay?” My voice shakes, trembles, and it’s hard to carry her without putting weight on my knee, but I don’t dare put her down, so I balance against the stage.
 

I hear sirens, fucking sirens. My head spins, my heart clenches. I’m hallucinating, or remembering. I’m seeing the fight with Oz on Kylie’s front porch, Oz stumbling backward, slamming into and rolling off the hood of a car, blood on the windshield and on the road as he hits the concrete, and then the sirens; I’m seeing Cheyenne’s F-150 at the light, the red Mustang flying through the intersection and bashing into the driver’s side door, toppling it over, and the blood and her head hanging, already dead, and the sirens approaching, uniformed EMS and the subtle shake of a head, because she’s already dead.
 

And now…

Now there’s sirens approaching yet again and Echo is unresponsive in my arms, and I’m unable to breathe, I need to breathe, need to breathe with her, need to breathe for her, but I can’t because I’m sobbing, carrying her in a limping run toward the medics and the stretcher as they slam open the bar door and rush through the parting crowd. They take her from me and I’m answering questions automatically, but I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know her blood type or what she drank or how many pills she took.

Brayden is beside me, his shoulder under my armpit keeping me upright, providing answers. “I saw an empty fifth of whiskey, but I don’t know if she drank the entire thing at once. The Vicodin was mine, and there were only ten pills left.” He chokes and we’re supporting each other now as he falters. “She twisted her ankle a few months ago and I left the bottle for her, and I just forgot it—I didn’t think she’d do this, she’s never—never tried anything like this before…”

We’re at the ambulance and they’re lifting the stretcher into the back of the vehicle. One of the medics stops both of us with his hands outstretched. “Are either of you family?”

“She doesn’t have any family here,” Brayden answers. “I’m the closest thing she has.”
 

“One of you can ride along.” He gestures to the ambulance, and Brayden climbs in with a glance at me.

“Meet us at the hospital!” he shouts as the doors close.
 

The last I see of her is an oxygen mask going over her face, one of the medics saying something about “naloxone”, and then the doors are closed and the ambulance is gone. I hobble as fast as I can toward my car. I don’t know where my cane is. I can’t find the Silverado, my mind drawing a blank. But then it’s there in front of me and I’m twisting the key and tearing out of the parking space. I make it to the hospital in record time, find a parking spot in the ER lot and I’ve got another long walk to the doors, my knee screaming and on fire, but I ignore it, ignore it, grit my teeth and limp as fast as I can.
 

When I get into the waiting room, I see Brayden with his hands fisted in his hair, head tipped back, eyes closed, pacing back and forth in front of a stretch of empty chairs. He sees me, comes toward me.
 

“They’re pumping her stomach right now. We won’t know much until she wakes up, assuming—assuming she does.”

“Is there a danger she won’t?” I ask.

He nods. “Yeah. I’m not sure when she took the pills, or how many, or how much she drank on top of them. She could—she might have liver damage, maybe even brain damage…but at least she’s still breathing, right? There could also be heart failure. We just don’t know. There’s nothing we can do but wait.”

I turn away and take a step, two, and then my knee gives out on me and I collapse, catch myself on a chair and climb into it. “Shit. What the hell happened to her?”
 

“Her mom died,” Brayden says. “It was sudden—”

“I know,” I interrupt. “I was with her in San Antonio.” I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth.
 

“Ohhhh,” Brayden says, realization in his voice. “You’re the
other
reason she’s so fucked up in the head, aren’t you?”

“She wasn’t like this the last time I saw her. She got drunk after the funeral, but after that she seemed…upset, obviously, because shit, who wouldn’t be? But suicidal? I had no idea she’d…I didn’t think she was capable of doing this to herself.”

Brayden sits beside me. “I’ve known her since our freshman year at Belmont, and I didn’t think she was either.” He extends his hand. “I’m Brayden.”
 

I shake his hand. “Ben.”

“Our girl’s been through some shit, and she’s never been this bad.” Brayden puts his head in his hands and palms his forehead. “Breakups, being cheated on, a pregnancy scare…she was always solid. She’d drink, go into her head for a while, and in time she’d be fine. Even when she was raped she didn’t get this bad.”

“Raped?” My voice goes thin as a razor and twice as sharp. “You mean what happened with Marcus Shaker?”

Brayden’s head comes up. “You know about him?”

“Yeah, I know him,” I growl. “I went to Vanderbilt with him. We played football together.”

“Yeah, well, your football buddy raped Echo.”

I shoot to my feet. “I never said he was my fucking
buddy
,” I rasp. “I caught him trying to molest this girl, and I put him in
here
—” I gesture at the ER, “for three days. Echo told me something happened with Marcus, but she wouldn’t tell me what exactly.” I tumble backward, falling heavily into the chair.
 

“She wouldn’t. She doesn’t talk about it. She reported him; he got a week’s suspension from school and football. That was it. And believe it or not, it was more than others in his position have gotten. She refused to leave her dorm room for two weeks straight. She nearly flunked out of three classes, missed a bunch of gigs, and lost about twenty pounds because she wouldn’t eat. I had to—” He cuts off, stares between his feet, and then continues. “I had to break into her room and bribe her with shots of whiskey to get her to eat. She’s always had a penchant for trying to drink her problems away, but never this bad. She’d go on a bender for a few days, but she’d always snap out of it. I thought she’d snap out of this, too.”
 

“She’s been drinking, then?”

He laughs bitterly. “She hasn’t been sober since she got back from Texas, Ben.” He runs stiffened fingers through his hair. “We’re close, I mean, I’m closer to her than pretty much anyone else in her life, but even I have only so much influence over her. I didn’t even know what happened to her, at first. When her mom died, I mean. She just vanished. We were supposed to meet for drinks and she never showed up. Wouldn’t answer her phone. Wouldn’t return texts. So finally I threatened to report her missing if she didn’t at least tell me what the fuck was going on. You know what I got from her?” He gives another dark, mirthless bark of laughter. “I got four words in a text message: ‘Mom’s dead. Stay there.’”

“So when shit gets heavy she shuts down.”
 

“Exactly,” Brayden says.

I shake my head slowly. “I guess I’m glad that it’s not just me she shuts out, then.”

“No, it’s definitely not just you.” Brayden glances at me sidelong. “She never said a word about you after she got back. Not till what she said earlier, on the stage, before she…yeah. She blamed it all on her mom dying. But there was something else, I just couldn’t figure out what, and she wouldn’t talk about it. Even to me, she even shut me out.” He sighs, and it’s part sob. “I shouldn’t have left her alone. She was drinking so much, but I thought she’d snap out of it. I thought—I thought—”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Brayden. You can’t
make
someone trust you.”

He turns to me, clutches at me. It’s awkward, because I’d thought he was straight, but the way he’s wrapping his arms around me and crying on my shoulder doesn’t feel that way, which has me baffled and uncomfortable. I pat his shoulder a few times until he lets go and moves away.
 

“Sorry, sorry.” He sniffles, wipes at his eyes with his middle fingers. “I should have kept a better eye on her. I should have seen how bad it was. I should have done something. She’s all I have, her and the rest of the band. My family disowned me after I came out as bi, and she never even flinched when I told her. She just accepted me as I am, even though we’d had our own little…whatever you want to call it. We had a thing when we first met, just so you know. That’s long over, though.”

I frown. “Wait, you and Echo…?”

He nods, his head tilted sideways, sniffling. “Yeah. One time, a few weeks after we met. She didn’t know I was bi. I told her afterward, and we were both like, yeah, we’re better off as friends. And that’s what it’s been ever since. She didn’t care, she just didn’t want that for herself, you know? Which I get. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me. Usually.”
 

“You know, you’ve told me more about Echo in the last five minutes than I found out in the entire three days we spent together.”

“That’s not surprising. It’s just how she is.”
 

“It’s a sucky way to be, if you’re trying to get to know her,” I say.

Brayden sighs. “Yeah, it really is.” He glances at me. “You obviously care about her, so I’ll tell you this, just…as an FYI, I suppose. She’s not a long-term type of girl. She never has been, and I doubt she ever will be. She’s been hurt too many times, in too many ways. She’s my best friend, my family, basically. But she’s not good with relationships of any kind. She just won’t let herself ask for anything. She keeps everything locked inside and just…doesn’t share.”
 

“She cried. About her mom, with me.”