Rock N Soul (46 page)

I sighed and nodded, and he let go of my shoulder and watched me wander off to the tiny staff break room. I got myself a paper cup of water from the water cooler and sat at the little metal table, pointedly not looking at the counter where Chris had liked to sit, swinging his legs and playing air guitar. I stayed for exactly fifteen minutes and then hurried back out to the lobby.

When I got to my apartment building that night, I stood outside, staring up at the windows from the outside for a long time. The walk had been exhausting. Without Chris to distract me, I’d felt every single step of it. And I was going to have to go upstairs and see his face on that stupid poster and his guitar propped against the wall, and every morning from now on I was going to have to remember that he wouldn’t be sitting on the couch waiting for me to get up.

I didn’t want to go inside. There was too much of him there. And even without all that had happened . . . I hated that stupid apartment. Always had. There was too much Carmen and too much Chris and too much impoverished bellboy without a future there. And I probably would have been content to stay there forever, going to work and coming home and eating Ramen and going to bed just to do it all again the next day, if Chris hadn’t shaken up my routine.

Maybe it would be good to just . . . get out of here. Not out of Boston, of course. I fucking love this city and I wasn’t going to let a broken heart drive me out of it. But even before Chris had gone, we’d talked about me finding a better place to live. That made it seem a little less like I was running from memories and more like I was just . . . doing what we’d planned on doing. And maybe while I was at it, I could shake up someone else’s routine too.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Chad’s number. When Aunt Greta put him on the phone, I looked back up at the apartment windows and took a deep breath. “Hey, Chad. How’d you like to come live with me?”

I spent a while trying to persuade Chad to move out of his parents’ house, and in the end I didn’t actually manage it. But I did convince him to come stay with me for a few days while I looked at apartments. I figured I’d be able to win him over once he was here and not having to put up with his mom screening his phone calls anymore.

When I hung up with Chad, I stared at my apartment building for a few more minutes before I finally decided that I couldn’t do it. Not tonight. So I started walking again. At first I wasn’t sure where I was going, but eventually it dawned on me that I was heading for the subway line that would take me to Gemma’s apartment. Which didn’t seem like a terrible idea. Chris and I had been there, but only a couple of times and never for very long, so it wasn’t filled with him like my apartment was. I could deal with it.

I knocked on Gemma’s door, and when she opened it I started talking before she could say anything because I didn’t want to waste time with formalities. “He’s gone,” I said, a little desperately but oh well. “Can I crash here tonight? I can’t . . . go back to our place. Not yet.”

“Yeah, of course.” She stepped forward and crushed me in a hug, and I clung to her for a while, letting her anchor me, until I had the thought that Chris would have given me shit for it. And when that occurred to me, I had to pull back.

“What happened?” she asked, quietly.

I took a second to make sure I was going to hold it together. “I told him to go. We did what he needed to do and I told him to go. I did the right thing. But still . . .” I couldn’t finish that sentence, so I just hoped she’d be able to fill in the blanks.

She put a hand on my cheek. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

A little bubble of hysterical, humorless laughter escaped from my chest. “Jesus, yes. More than . . .” I stopped myself before I said something really gross that he would have rolled his eyes at.

“Of course,” she said. “I get it.” She led me to the couch and we sat down.

A long time passed in silence before I finally said, “Hey. Can we, you know, check on him?”

“The cards, you mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I feel it. That he’s okay. I know he is. But it would be nice if the cards confirmed it a little.”

She nodded and went to get her deck of tarot cards, then came back. We both shifted so that we were sitting cross-legged on the couch facing each other. She shuffled, then spread the cards out in a wide fan between us. “Pick five cards.”

I didn’t even hesitate, just picked five in a rapid series of pointing fingers. She flipped the first one over. “The Knight of Cups,” she announced.

“Fuck,” I whispered, staring down at the same card I’d picked for Chris back at the beginning. The emo-narcissist, charging forward into battle on a stupid white horse. God, Chris was such a douche. It was the perfect card for him. But also I couldn’t look at it anymore because it made my breathing feel too ragged, so I flipped it back over. “Next,” I said, a little hoarsely.

Gemma flipped the next card. It was the Hierophant. “That’s what he picked for you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Knight of Cups and the Hierophant. The dick and the prude.” I looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not a prude, you jackass,” I said to the sky, then felt stupid for doing it. He was probably up there exploring whatever came next and teaching the angels to play “God of Thunder” on the harp, not watching me sit here with Gemma and talk to the ceiling.

Gemma sighed and flipped the next three quickly, one after the other. “The Sun, the Lovers, and the World.”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah?”

“The Sun is very positive,” she said. “It’s happiness, contentment. Joy. Really it’s the most positive card in the whole deck.”

“So he’s happy,” I said. “And then the Lovers is the choice card, you said before. So he’s happy with the choice we made.”

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Well, good for him.” I stretched. “I think . . . I think I’m just going to go to bed.” She looked surprised at the sudden end to the conversation, but I just couldn’t think about Chris anymore. I’d hit my limit for the day. She got up and found me a pillow and some blankets, and I kicked off my shoes and took off my suit jacket but otherwise just lay down to sleep in my clothes. Chris’s ring felt cool against my chest and I fell asleep with it clutched in my hand.

Two weeks passed, and although Chris’s absence didn’t start hurting any less, it at least got easier to fake it when I was in public. Richard stopped giving me those “you’re a huge insurance risk” looks, and people stopped asking why I was so pale. Malika called me out on looking miserable on my mandatory breaks, and started taking hers at the same time so she could sit with me in the break room and play cards for a few minutes, and I was grateful for that. I got some moderately threatening texts from Carmen demanding that I give her Eric’s number—like
that
was going to happen—but I ignored them. Gemma met up with me for lunch a few times, and she didn’t make me talk about Chris.

Not that it mattered, because he kept showing up anyway. Gemma did a few more tarot readings for me, and the same cards kept cropping up every time. Mostly the Knight of Cups and usually at least some combination of the Lovers and the Sun and the World. The Knight, though, came up in every reading unless we specifically removed it from the deck.

After it became obvious that the Knight was going to keep showing up, Gemma took me back to the new age store where I’d first told her about Chris. She bought a new deck (“Just in case the one I’m using is corrupted,” she said, like I knew what that meant), and while she was paying for it, a different deck in the glass case caught my eye.

“Hey.” I motioned one of the employees over. “Can I look at that deck?” I pointed to it.

“The dragon one?” the guy asked. “Sure.” He took it out of the case and handed it to me. “We have a sample deck you can look through if you want to see some of the cards before you buy it.”

“Thanks,” I said. He pulled out a much more beat-up box of the same cards and handed that over, too. I opened it and picked a card at random, which surprisingly was not the Knight of Cups.

It was, however, the
Ace
of Cups. Which was new. I held up the card to the guy behind the counter. “What does this one mean?”

“Well, you should probably ask your girlfriend if she’s pregnant,” he said, smirking.

I frowned and glanced over at Gemma. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Well, traditionally that’s the pregnancy card. Or, on a broader level, the ‘beginning of an emotional journey’ card. It also means marriage or engagement.” He smiled. “So . . . congratulations?”

I thought about snapping at him that my boyfriend was dead, thanks, so I really didn’t see any marriage in my future, but it wasn’t like
he
knew that. So I just let it go and pulled out another one. This time it
was
the Knight of Cups.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Fine, I’ll buy the deck.”

He rang me up, and Gemma and I sat down at the table where we’d sat with Chris before. She shuffled her deck, and I pulled my new one out of the wrapping and started mixing my cards up too.

A card fell out of my deck. It was the Ace of Cups. I glared at it, then put it back in the deck and kept shuffling.

After we were sure that the cards were all nicely randomized, Gemma spread her whole deck out facedown on the table in a big arc. I did the same.

“Pick one,” she said.

I picked a card from her deck and flipped it over. The Hierophant. I stared at the card for a few seconds and then looked up at Gemma. “Why the fuck is this happening?”

She bit her bottom lip before responding. “It’s probably just because you’re thinking about him so much, you know? You’re calling his cards to you subconsciously. Maybe you should try to pick a card while you’re specifically thinking of some other question.”

I paused with my hand hovering over her deck. Then I took a deep breath and then clenched my fingers into a fist. “I don’t know how to think of anything else.”

“Yes, you do,” she said. “Listen, you and Chris talked about this, right? You said that he told you to have a happy life after he was gone. So what are you going to do to try and have a happy life? Think about that.”

I swallowed hard. “That’s still Chris, though. Everything is about him. The whole rest of my life is going to be about him.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. She reached across the table, and I put my hand down so she could pat it. “The rest of your life is about
you
, Tyler. And besides, you being happy is what he would have wanted anyway.”

My throat was starting to feel tight again, but I managed a snarky eye-roll. “He’s an asshole, and he doesn’t always get what he wants,” I said, then sighed. “But you’re right.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I flipped another card. It was the Page of Pentacles. I picked up the tiny booklet that had come with my deck and flipped to the section that described it—it was the education card, plain and simple. A student, a scholar, someone on an educational venture. Which, if I was being honest about it, was what I’d always wanted to go back to. Maybe this was the time to revisit that. The cards certainly seemed to think so.

I turned my head and looked out the window at the people going by outside. If I found him again when I died one day and I was still a broke-ass bellboy without any friends, Chris would rag me about it for fucking
eternity
. And I really wanted our eternity to be about other things. Happier things. Gross things. So maybe this card was right. “I think I’m going to go back to school,” I said after a moment. “He told me that I should. And . . . I want to.”