Lost In Rewind (Audio Fools #3) (30 page)

I shake Jeff and his eyes from my mind and advance deeper inside. The last time I was here with him, I was hyperventilating and in shock. I didn’t have a chance to inspect and touch this suspended encapsulated past that was left to me. I fainted but seeing it all now still seems familiar. I lightly push a half opened door and cringe at the awful shrieking sound it makes before I find myself inside the room that was once Joella’s bedroom. Again, as if being slapped in the face with his memory, I experience something I have no right to feel for a stranger I can’t stop thinking about.

I throw myself on a bed that’s covered in white sheets and let out a cry that seems to come from somewhere too deep to name. No one can hear me and I make sure to let it all out. A good honest cry is sometimes the only answer. My cathartic sob finally subsides, followed by hiccups, and I can’t help but take out my phone to look at the picture of his eyes again. I’m a horrible person for wanting someone who clearly doesn’t belong to me. I lured him to kiss me. I orchestrated and forced our attraction. If I didn’t come on to him in this room, we’d just sit like two regular adults and exchange words and nothing else. He was weak. He’d just lost his wife and I attacked him because he mentioned a piece of my past.

I won’t ever call him again.

I’ve done enough.

I wipe my tears and sit up, inspecting the charming, feminine bedroom my grand-mère once slept in. The draped ceiling and the soft lighting make this room feel like a honeymoon suite at some overpriced boutique hotel somewhere in the south of France. I smile at the graceful statue of the dark-skinned saint that’s placed prominently at the center of the room against the wall, adorned in dried flowers and melted candles.

After my maman’s accident, and after her funeral, my papa and I haven’t once visited a church—God couldn’t help us, she was gone, and we had to live without her. We both felt responsible for her death in our own silly ways. But as I sit here on my own, surrounded by memories full of heartbreak, the urge to touch the patron saint of my people feels almost unbearable. I remove the relic from its chosen display and bring it close to my chest. I say another silent prayer and question the silence around me as to why I wasn’t in the car that day with her? I ask for only one thing, I ask for guidance to help me find a place to call home, wherever that may be. I close my eyes, clutching the black Madonna to my heart, and the craving for sleep wins over my weary body. In my dreams I’m never alone.

I feel my phone vibrating under me as I wake up disoriented in a sunless room. I have no idea where I am as consciousness manifests. I adjust my eyes to the bright phone display and Lauren’s chubby familiar face fills my screen.

“Hello,” I whisper in a hackneyed voice that sounds as if I’m sick.

“Where have you been all day? I went up to your place twice already. Should I be calling the police to track you down?” I smile. Perhaps I’m not alone after all. If I went missing, someone would notice. Lauren would find me.

“You won’t believe it, but I’m upstairs on the second floor. I fell asleep in Joella’s bed.” I hear her gasp even with the loud music and yelling in the background.

“Frenchy! How in the world did you get inside? Wait! Did you find a key?”

I touch Jeff’s key that now hangs around my neck. His eyes materialize before me without warning and a stupid smile highjacks my lips against my better judgment.

“That guy that came asking about her a few nights ago—Jeff—he had a key. He left it to me before he ran away.” I don’t mean to sound disappointed, but I also can’t mask how I feel. It will take everything I have to not call him back, but I have no choice. I need to leave him alone and not escalate our mistake—and him not calling me back confirms that.

“Why do I feel like you’re not telling me something?”

“Nothing to tell, he’s not important,” I hiss out.

“Okay, whatever you say, Frenchy. That definitely sounds like nothing to me,” she adds with a snort at the end of her sarcastic comment.

“I’m ready to sell the bar and I’ve decided that you and your mom should own it,” I declare without warning, just having come up with my brilliant plan. I always knew that Lauren and her mother would be the only people I would ever consider entrusting this place to, and I don’t need any money from them. I just want them to run it like they always have.

“Shut the fuck up. You know I don’t have the dough to buy this place from you. The building alone is worth millions.” She giggles as if I just told her a joke.

“Lauren, I don’t need any more dough. Joella and my maman left me enough of that. I just want peace of mind knowing this place stays in the family. The last couple of days it became clear I can’t stay here; I don’t belong. I feel alone without her here. There must be a place in the world where my heart will feel whole again.” I continue rubbing the key as if a genie may pop out and grant me three wishes. No genie, no wishes, just a land of questions and a sea full of sorrow.

“Frenchy, Frenchy, haven’t Joella and your mom taught you anything? Running away won’t fill your heart. Your mom ran away to France but she never left. You first need to find all the scattered pieces of your heart for it to feel whole, and then no matter where you are in the world, you’ll feel complete. Home is not a place, it’s a state of mind. You had no intentions of leaving Rhode Island or this bar a few days ago and now you’re ready to jump ship … tell me what happened with that good-looking bathroom creep!”

I have no idea how to explain Jeff to Lauren. I haven’t been able to explain him to myself. Everything my eyes land on feels touched by him. But I shake my head and my hopes of Jeffery Rossi, until his image disintegrates and disappears. He’s not my future; he’s just a roadblock—an obstacle in my mind right now. I smile as hard as I can to tip my emotional scale and deny myself the urge to cry again. He belongs to someone else, he gave his heart away, and I don’t need a man without a heart.

“There’s nothing to tell. He was kind enough to tell me what Joella once told him fourteen years ago on the night they met, and I was lucky enough to get to hear it. It’s that simple.” My face begins to ache from the fake smile plastered on it.

“So you two didn’t sleep together?”

Fuck! Is it that obvious?

“Why would you think we slept together?” I didn’t say anything to Lauren or anybody else about him.

“I saw him leave through your staircase the next morning. I could be off, but I believe he was wearing the same clothes—I did get a good look at him and his attire when he first came in, just in case I needed to describe him to authorities. And another interesting little tidbit I picked up was the way he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave and drive away. He just stood by his car, looking up at your window. It was very Romeo of him. It seemed as if he kept waiting for you to come running after him or something. And you seem different—blue, sad, very Juliet-ish. I don’t know, I may have an overactive imagination and I may be over-analyzing your suspicious absence around here in the last few days, or perhaps I just put two and two together.”

I hear the smile in her voice, and she’s spot on. I’m an amateur. I wear my stupid feelings on the outside for the world to see and I can’t fool anyone, especially her.

“He’s no Romeo and I’m definitely not his Juliet. Yes, fine, we did sleep together. Which was a mistake, but at least now I have the key and Joella’s words to him, so something good came out of him coming into my life and turning everything upside down.” I’m all worked up when I have no right to expect anything of him. “Lauren, trust me, I made a mistake and so did he. We had no business touching each other. I just got carried away with his storytelling. It will never happen again. It was what you Americans call a one-night stand.” I hate that saying
, one-night stand
. That term doesn’t even make sense; we didn’t do much standing on that one reckless night. And once again I’m drowning in thoughts of us naked together. I feel my face flush and heat quickly spread down the rest of me. Will I ever be able to think back to him and not feel anything? Will I ever be able to forget his eyes?

“So you’re going after him?”

As soon as I hear Lauren’s remark I begin to laugh out loud. “Really? After what I just told you, that’s what you came up with? Am I going to find him?” Maybe she doesn’t know me at all. “I’m doing the opposite of going after him. I’m running the other way.”

“Why? Does he have a girlfriend? Is he married? Does he have kids? Is he one of those emotionally fucked-up dudes?”

Maybe Lauren is the fortuneteller. She just nailed each point and described Jeffery Rossi as if she were the one with him.

“Yes, to all of the above. This guy is bad news, and like I said before, we made a mistake. I got carried away with the serendipitous notion that Joella gave a random, handsome stranger a reading, and this so-called stranger actually came back. But I learned my lesson.”

“Married with children and a girlfriend? Yeah, I’m with you, Frenchy. Run!” I sigh at her final assessment. “Do you want me to come up and get you?”

“No, I’ll be okay. I think I’d like to spend more time here and look through some of the things she left behind. I’ll leave this place unlocked and you can have whatever you and your mom would like. The rest we can donate to Goodwill or just dispose of.”

I sit up and look around the cozy place that was once someone’s home. Someone that is no longer of the same world as me, someone that once loved and lost, and I realize that life goes on with or without us. I spend the remainder of the day inside my grand-mère’s sanctuary. I collect all the old pictures I can find, photos that I’ve never seen before. I find an ancient looking suitcase and begin to gather into it the things I don’t want anyone else to have. I have enough shawls to open a store and enough photographs to fill twenty albums. Joella was such a simple woman. She had an abundance of wealth at her disposable and yet she had only a handful of trinkets that I suspect have more sentimental value than anything else. She didn’t even own a television, just books, records and cassette tapes that are without a doubt my maman’s. When I spy an accordion that I recall Joella telling me was my maman’s first instrument, I clutch it to my heart as if it’s alive.

Everything around me is a mess, including my crumbling life. It looks as if this apartment was turned upside down while robbed, and in a way, it was. I stripped it emotionally by removing its beating heart and leaving behind a stack of nothingness.

It’s well past midnight as I force myself to leave the memory nest I’ve been lost in today. I carry down my heavy suitcase and that’s when it hits me—I am a gypsy, it’s in my blood. I have no mother to love me, no country to call my own, just a dream in my hungry heart of what love used to taste like and a longing to belong somewhere.

Six Months Later

“
Here I Go Again
” by Whitesnake

W
hen a person you meet once in your life, stays in your mind and strangely helps you get up and face the world each day, that person was sent to you for a reason and must mean something. I’ve gone to sleep and woken up every day for the past six months since meeting Kali with her image in front of me. Neither Jacky nor Sara have visited me in my dreams in many months, which strangely has helped me move on with my life and not soak in a pool of guilt. I wonder if I’ll ever talk to Kali again. Besides looking at the few photos of her that inhabit my phone, I haven’t done a thing to try and make contact with her. I don’t have her last name—I’m sure it’s not Gitanos, since that was her maternal grandmother’s last name. I could do research and find out, but I won’t. I know that if she wanted to speak to me she’d have called me by now; therefore, it’s safe to say she got what she needed from our relationship, if you can even call it that, and walked away like the smart girl that she is.

I’m busy at the firm like never before. I haven’t had any time to communicate socially with any of my old friends. My only free time I dedicate exclusively to my children. I’m a different man than I was a year ago—heck, I’m a different man than I was yesterday. The only person I make time to talk to besides Emily is William Knight. If a year ago someone told me that the person I would look forward to speaking with almost every day would be William fucking Knight, I’d have pissed in my pants laughing. At first, he just texted to let me know how Sara was feeling after the surgery, about her recovery, but with time, we’ve moved on and now we actually talk on the phone about regular shit like two guys who don’t hate each other. I can’t hate him knowing how good he is to her. I wish I could’ve been that good to her but I never was. A man who loves the mother of my children as much as I know he does can’t be hated, just admired.