My Everything - Seth & Amber (36 page)

“Welcome home!” Katie said sardonically to
herself as she sat, eyes closed, in her rental car on the side of
Highway 90. She had a paper bag pressed tightly against her mouth
and a mantra running through her brain on repeat.

You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and
out slowly. You can breathe.

Katie had been back in Illinois less than two
hours and here she was, smack dab in the middle of her first panic
attack in eight years. She gripped the steering wheel hard, tried
to soothe her racing heart, to anchor herself to reality. She
forced her movements to be slow and deliberate.

'This seems to be working, albeit slowly,'
she assured herself. When the overpriced therapist who had taught
her the breathing exercise and suggested the mantra had laid out
his plan, Katie had wanted to roll her eyes. She had wanted to tell
him that he clearly had no flipping idea what a panic attack really
felt like if he thought that repeating a little magic spell about
breathing inside of her head was going to have any effect at all.
She had wanted to tell him that panic attacks didn't feel like
nervousness, for God's sake, or butterflies that you could just
calm with the power of your flipping mind. They felt like having a
heart attack, like you were dying, and have you ever heard of
someone having a heart attack curing themselves by simply telling
themselves to BREATHE for heaven sake?

Of course, Katie hadn't said any of those
things, she had smiled politely and practiced with the bag and kept
her judgment of his professional aptitude (i.e., that he was a
total quack!) entirely to herself.

Still, since she hadn't had a panic attack in
the past eight years, she hadn't ever gotten to test out the
technique and prove his quackitude with rock solid evidence. Now
that she was in the middle of one, and the exercise actually seemed
to be working?

Well, I'll move his status down to 'Jury's
Still Out on the Level of His Quackosity' but I'm not nominating
him for the Nobel Prize just yet, Katie thought cynically.

The panic attack was subsiding, but Katie was
still feeling some of the physical symptoms. Her head felt as if it
were floating away, her fingers were tingling as if they were being
stabbed by a thousand tiny needles, and she was being bombarded by
an obnoxiously loud ringing sound. She forced herself to anchor to
the sensation of the paper bag around her mouth to ground her in
reality, and repeated the mantra (which, she had to admit, was kind
of growing on her...)

You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and
out slowly. You can breathe.

Slowly, bit by bit, she drifted back to the
present and into her body. She closed her eyes to appreciate the
little sensations that she was now aware of - the leather of the
seat pressed cold against her back...the icy breeze from the air
conditioning blowing refreshingly on her face.

She was aware of the weight of her chest
rising and falling. Her arms felt heavy. Lowering them to her
sides, Katie was vaguely aware that the paper bag had slipped from
her hand and landed on the console beside her.

Her breathing had returned to normal, and the
ringing sound in her head had grown sporadic. She searched her
memory in an attempt to identify if ‘sporadic ringing in the head’
was a normal side effect post-panic attack. She hated that these
horrible attacks used to occur with such frequency that she
actually HAD a personal database of experiences to check her
symptoms against.

Nope, she concluded, the sporadic ringing is
new.

Turning her head to take in her surroundings,
she saw cars whizzing by on the interstate. She squinted against
the glare of the sun, which was shining brightly down on the
pavement and bouncing off of the car windshields speeding by.

Katie retrieved the paper bag and folded it
up, returning it to her purse. She didn't LOVE the thought that she
might need to keep it handy for future use, but better safe than
sorry. I mean, let's be real, she told herself. You're twenty
minutes off the plane and barely starting down the highway toward
Harper's Crossing and you had a panic attack. You really think
you're getting through the rest of the weekend unscathed?

As she placed the paper bag inside her
gigantic 'in case of emergency' carry-on bag, she discovered the
source of the ringing.

She felt like an idiot. One the good side,
she told herself, is the fact that I don't have to add Tinnitus to
the looooong list of symptoms which characterize my flipping panic
attacks. On the bad side? Apparently I now no longer recognize my
cell phone's ring tone.

Picking up her iPhone, she swiped the screen
to answer, saying warmly “Hey Sophiebell!”

“Katie where are you? I thought you would be
here by now. Did your flight get delayed? I can’t wait to see you”
Sophie squealed, the words tumbling out of her mouth, one over
another. Katie smiled to herself. She had always thought that
Sophie could paraphrase that old Army motto to adopt as her own, 'I
say more before 9 am than most people say all day!'

“The flight was fine. I am on my way, and I
will be there in twenty minutes Sophiebell, I can’t wait to see
you, too!”

.“Okay, hurry,” Sophie pleaded, but then
followed it up with the command, “but drive safe!”

“I will. See you soon, doll!” Katie tried to
cover the stress in her voice with ebullience as she said goodbye
and hung up the phone.

It's 8:30 AM on Thursday morning, she told
herself, repeating the mental math to herself. My return flight to
California is at 7:00 P.M. Sunday night. All I have to do is get
through the next four days (preferably without having a nervous
breakdown!) and then I can wing my way back to my lovely, safe,
predictable life in San Francisco.

Let the countdown begin.

It had been ten long years since Katie Marie
Lawson had set foot in Harper's Crossing, the town of her childhood
and her youth, the town that was in many ways responsible for
making her the person she was today. It was definitely rife with
memories, both beautiful and dangerous.

There were so many things about Harper's
Crossing that Katie had buried deep inside, and sometimes she
wondered if she had buried the good along with the bad. She could
already feel the effervescent rising of those memories to the
surface, and she worried about what would happen if only the
dangerous memories came up, with none of the beauty to temper
it.

But, she had to keep reminding herself, this
weekend wasn’t about her, it was about little Miss Sophie Hunter,
who was getting married to Bobby Sloan Jr. the youngest of the five
Sloan boys. Sophie had called her, ecstatic, three months earlier
to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid
of honor.

Katie breathed out a sigh as she pulled back
onto the highway. Nothing short of the apocalypse or her beloved
Sophiebell's wedding (the two events which anchored the opposite
sides of the 'cosmic scale of awful to wonderful possible events'
in Katie's mind) could have brought her back to the apparently
panic attack inducing town that had raised her.

Sophie (or 'Sophiebell' as Katie had called
her since Sophie was six and decided that she was Tinker Bell) was
the closest thing Katie had to a sister.

Katie was an only child. She and her Mom,
Pam, had gone to live with her Aunt Wendy in Harper’s Crossing when
Katie was four, immediately after her parents divorced.

Craig, Katie’s Dad had come to visit his
daughter exactly one time since she moved to Harper’s Crossing. It
was one month after she and her Mom had arrived, Craig took Katie
to Tasty Treats for a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice
cream.

He talked about how much he loved her and
assured her that the divorce and the move had nothing to do with
her. He also promised to see her once a month…suffice it to say, he
didn’t keep that promise.

Katie had not seen her father since that cold
October Saturday 24 years ago.

Growing up, she had always just assumed that
he had stayed away because he and Aunt Wendy “did not see eye to
eye” as Katie’s Mom always said (although, now, as an adult, she
was leaning toward the theory that it was because he was a
shitheel).

Honestly, if Katie’s memory served, she
hadn’t really seen a lot of her Dad even when he and her Mom were
still together. It had seemed to Katie that ‘pre-divorce’ it was
just Katie and her Mom and then ‘post-divorce’ it was Aunt Wendy,
Mom and Katie.

She never really missed her Dad. Sometimes
she would miss her idea of what having a Dad in her life would be
like. But never the man who had fathered her, she really never knew
that man, and what she had known, had been unpredictable. Promising
to come visit her once a month and then never showing hide nor hair
of himself ever again really just seemed par for the course where
he was concerned. It was just the last in a long line of broken
promises that had characterized their father-daughter relationship,
and – even at four years old – Katie didn't remember being terribly
surprised when the months rolled around and he didn't.

She had always accredited the fact that she
didn't miss him terribly to how full her life had been, how utterly
surrounded she was, by people who loved her. Although she would
sometimes get lonely in Aunt Wendy’s house – Aunt Wendy had a full
time job and Katie's mom usually held down two jobs just to make
ends meet, so there was a lot of time that Katie was alone with her
just her imagination and books to keep her occupied.

But, oh boy, how that had changed the summer
before Katie’s 7th grade year!

That was the summer that Sophie Hunter (aka
Miss Sophiebell) had moved into the house next door to Aunt Wendy.
And right away – literally, Katie thought, starting immediately on
moving day – Sophie had become Katie's shadow. Not that she minded
or anything! Katie loved finally having someone, anyone other than
a doll, to dress up and play tea party with.

Sophie’s dad, Mike, was a fireman and her
mom, Grace, was a nurse. Katie babysat for Sophie when Mike and
Grace's shifts overlapped. Katie’s house felt a lot less lonely
with a bouncing, laughing, full-of-life four year old in it. But
Sophiebell wasn’t the only distraction that the Hunters brought
with them when they moved to Harper's Crossing. They also brought
Nick, Sophiebell’s older brother and Katie’s first love.

Nicholas Hunter was three months older than
Katie and he never let her forget it. He had sandy blonde hair and
the most beautiful green eyes Katie had ever seen.

The day before school started in seventh
grade, two weeks after the Hunters had moved in, Nick came to
Katie’s door to get Sophiebell for dinner. She'd never forget that
day. Before he left the porch he looked over his shoulder, his
green eyes sparkling in the sun. They were even extra green due to
the fact that he was wearing his favorite Fighting Irish t-shirt.
SWOON!

He had asked, “Hey, do you think you would
want to be my girlfriend? It’s a lot easier to start a new school
when you already have a girlfriend.”

He then proceeded to shoot her a smile that
she would later come to know had gotten him anything he wanted
since he was an infant. And with good reason, it was one helluva
doozy of a smile!

As much as Katie wanted to act like the smile
didn’t affect her, she knew the heat she felt in her cheeks meant
that they were bright red. Dang. No way could she hide the
evidence.

Still, that didn't mean she had to
acknowledge it. So she did what any super-cool eleven year girl
would have done faced with Nick Hunter’s dreamy proposal.

She shrugged and said, “Yeah, whatever.”

“Sweet,” he smiled,” I'll be here at 7:45 so
we can walk to school together tomorrow.”

He then jumped off her porch before she could
say another word. She slowly closed her front door and, once it
shut, started to scream and run around in circles until she fell on
her couch in utter exhaustion. Katie always did lean towards the
dramatic.

Katie had no way of knowing then that the
relationship she had just entered would last for the next six years
of her life, and end in tragedy.

The summer after Nick and Katie's senior year
of high school, Nick had been out late one night joyriding and had
tragically driven his truck off Spencer Point.

Hours later, when the police pulled the truck
out of the steep embankment, they found a nearly lifeless body
inside. Nick had lain in a hospital bed, deep in a coma, for three
weeks following the accident. Katie and his family had been by his
side every moment that the hospital staff would allow them to
be.

Finally his parents, Mike and Grace, had made
the most horrific decision any parents could ever have to make.
They took Nick off life support.

His funeral was held three days later, and
Katie had left that very same night to go stay with her grandmother
in Chicago. She needed to escape, and she'd been running ever
since. That had been the last time she had set foot in Harper's
Crossing.

Until today.

As she turned the corner onto Harper Lane,
the street she had grown up on, she was amazed at how it looked as
though nothing had changed. It was as if time had stood still on
her street.

Not the rest of Harper's Crossing, though,
that was for sure! On the drive in, Katie had barely recognized the
town that she had spent most of her childhood in. The last time she
had been in Harper's Crossing, it contained two traffic lights and
one four way stop. Today there was a traffic light or four way stop
at every intersection!

The field that Katie had learned to ride her
bike in when she was five, played tag in, had attempted and failed
to smoke a cigarette in when she was thirteen, and had spent almost
every Friday and Saturday night parking in with Nick after he
turned 16 and got his black Chevy truck...was now a strip mall.