The Last Time We Were Us (31 page)

I
T’S STILL DARK
out when we get to the hospital. I continue to gasp and cry, and the EMT lady isn’t calm like before. I’m scaring her, I know I am, but I can’t help it.

The door of the ambulance opens and the warm night air hits me, they roll me over the concrete and through the double doors, and it’s like a movie, but it’s a horrible movie, because I’m not watching it happen, I don’t get to cut to the cute guy speeding down the highway, eager to see his girlfriend, make sure she’s okay.

The nurses inside are even less helpful than the EMT. They ignore my questions about Jason, they hook me up to an IV and do the same tests the EMT did, and they say the words
possible concussion
and
stitches
a lot, between plying me with questions about what medications I take and whether I have any allergies.

I’m fine!
I want to scream.
I am not important right now! Just tell me that
he’s
fine!

Eventually, a lady in a white coat comes in, sticks her hand out.

“I’m Dr. Puri,” she says to me. Her voice is warm, her words are soft. I take her hand. “You’ve had quite a night. You’re doing wonderfully.”

The tears come faster, because I’m not wonderful. I’m the opposite. “I need to know that my friend is okay,” I say.

“What is your friend’s name?” she asks as she shines the light in my eyes again, as she looks at the chart.

“Jason,” I say.

“And your friend was with you?” she asks. “During the attack?”

I nod weakly.

“Can you tell me what happened tonight?” she asks.

And I open my mouth to speak, to tell her, but where do I even start? When did this all start? Tonight, when MacKenzie texted to say Innis was mad? Or yesterday, when I taunted him? Or before that, when I slept with him? Or when Jason came back? Or when Jason left? Or when he hurt Skip? Or when Skip called Mr. Sullivan a fag? Or one of the hundreds of dominos that led me here tonight, bleeding and broken and wanting only one answer, but there are so many questions, infinite questions, before I can get what I want.

“Just go slowly,” she says, seeing the confusion, the chaos, all over my face. “Start with how you got hurt.”

“My . . . a boy . . . someone I used to be friends with, he came over . . . he, he had . . .” But it’s no use, because the tears start again. “I need to know about my friend,” I say. “I can’t say anything until I know about him.”

I
T’S UNCLEAR HOW
much time passes. Seconds or minutes or hours. Dr. Puri repeats some of the same questions as the nurses before cleaning my wound, numbing my cheek, and giving me stitches—twelve, she says, which I guess is kind of a lot—while I stare at the wall and try to calm down.

When she’s done, I’m alone again. It’s bright and fluorescent in the hospital, and I don’t know if the sun is up yet, if a new day has come, if it is a day that won’t have Jason in it. With every passing moment, I hate the sound of gurneys even more, the flip of doors and the cacophony of hospital sounds that I must sit through.

Is it possible that this is it, that life is, in the end, just a collection of effed-up circumstances, just a stupid silly game where you find love, find the greatest love, the greatest of all loves, find more than you’d ever thought possible with another person, find a way that it finally all makes sense, and then you lose it? And I know that nothing ever will heal that loss.

And I am about ready to scream at all of it, at the pointlessness of it, when I see Mom’s face through the window.

She rushes in, her cheeks wet with steady tears.

“Mom,” I say, and the tears are coming hard on mine, too. “Mom.”

She reaches through the equipment somehow, gives me a hug, and over her shoulder, I see him, standing there behind Dad, standing there next to, of all people, my sister.

“Oh my God, Liz, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t believe I encouraged you to be with him. I’m such a horrible mother.”

Dad and Lyla are in now, too, hugging me. Jason hangs back, looking in through the window, giving us our space. My bones ache at how much I want to see him.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“Are you in pain?” she asks. “The doctor says it’s probably not a concussion, but oh God, your face . . .” The tears start up again. “Your face. I just, I can’t believe it.”

“She’s going to be okay,” Dad says. “You’re going to be just fine, Liz.”

My sister stares at the right side of my face, and I realize I can lift my hand. I do, and it meets a swath of gauze. “Don’t, Liz.” Her lip quivers. “Don’t.”

I look at her. “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice betrays her, and she leans into Mom for support.

“Did the hospital call you?” I ask.

They look at each other then, all three of them, like they’ve got some kind of terrible secret. At the window, I see that Jason has stepped away.

Dad finally talks. “Jason drove to our house,” he says. “Scared the hell out of us, standing there, sweating and out of breath on our front porch, in the middle of the night. He told us everything, that he’d made sure you were breathing, taken your pulse as he waited for the ambulance. He wanted to get in the ambulance with you, but they wouldn’t let him. We rode over here together.” Dad looks back to the empty window. Then he looks back to me. “We told them he was family, Liz. He wanted to see you so badly.”

My sister looks down at her feet—Ashamed? Forgiving? More confused than ever? Mom, she just stares at me. In fact, she won’t take her eyes off me.

“He got you to safety,” Dad says. “We owe him for that.”

I see Jason’s face at the door again and I smile, open my eyes wide, begging him to come in. Dad takes Mom’s arm, leads her reluctantly away, Lyla following.

Jason crosses the room in two quick steps, and then he’s at my bed, right here in front of me. And he is okay.

“I was so worried about you,” I say, my breath already coming in gasps. “I was all alone and no one would tell me about you, and I thought—I don’t know—I thought he did something to you, and what if, what if—”

“I’m here.” He leans in. “And I’m fine.”

I reach my hand to his, and I hold it, and all I can think is that I don’t want to live a single day on earth where I don’t have the chance to hold his hand.

He leans down and kisses me, right there with my whole family watching through the window. “I love you so much,” he says.

“I love you, too.”

He pulls back, brushes the tears from underneath my eyes with his thumb.

When my breathing calms, when I feel my heart beat normally again—or almost normally—I ask him: “What happened?”

“I don’t want to upset you,” he says.

“Too late.”

Jason cocks his head to the side. “What do you remember?”

I shake my head. “I remember seeing my face with blood on it. Then nothing.”

He nods. “Innis let me go as soon as he saw what he’d done. He freaked out, and then he was just gone—out the door—and I wanted to go after him. I wanted to kill him, Lizzie.”

“But you didn’t go after him?” I ask, because if I know one thing, I know this. The violence has to stop. It will just snowball and snowball, getting bigger and bigger each time, until there’s no turning back, until every last one of us is broken.

Jason hesitates. “God, I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t.”

He shakes his head. “Turns out I love you more than I hate him.”

Chapter 30

M
Y THERAPIST IS A COOL, TATTOOED LESBIAN WHOSE
practice is located twenty minutes away.

Angie adjusts herself in her chair, fingers her thick glasses. “How’s your cheek feel?”

Mom, who has never believed in therapy, didn’t put up a fight when Dad insisted they get me in to see someone
right away.
Dad explained that I’d been through a supertraumatic experience, and that the lines of communication weren’t exactly the most open between all of us right now.

“It’s not that bad,” I say. “I still have the strong painkillers, and it’s more gross than anything, so many stitches and Neosporin and bandages and all that.”

“Have you looked at it yet?”

Mom sees it every day—she’s my official bandage changer—and my sister has taken a look, but not me. “I don’t really see the need.”

“Uh-huh.” Angie ticks something off on her notepad.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “I like to check in about it.”

“You think I’m in denial?”

“Do you think you’re in denial?” she asks.

Here we go.
I like Angie. It’s been exactly a week since the night Innis attacked me and Jason, and this is our third session. So far, I’ve done a lot of crying, and she’s done a lot of passing of tissues, and it’s been good. She’s not uptight or old or traditional, and I don’t worry that she’s going to judge me for anything, so I’ve told her all of it, the whole sordid tale. For the most part, she’s been cool, but then every once in a while, she does her therapist talk—“Oh, do
you
think you’re in denial?” kind of a thing—and it’s almost like she’s
trying
to be annoying.

“The way my mom sucks in her breath every time she sees it, it’s obviously a big deal, and I’m going to look different,” I say. “That doesn’t mean I want to see it myself before I have to.”

Angie nods. “Let’s backtrack a bit. Last session, we talked a little bit about how you think this is, at least partially, your fault.”

“That’s because it is my fault.”

“Why is that?”

“I already told you.”

“Can you tell me again?”

My face gets hot, but I swallow, push the tears back down. “It wasn’t just the stuff that had happened before that made him snap. It was all of it put together. If I hadn’t led Innis on all summer, if I hadn’t toyed with him like I did, then he would have been able to let it go. Both times he tried to hurt Jason, it was because of me.”

Angie purses her lips and stares at me. When I don’t say anything else, she adjusts again before speaking.

“Even if that is true, which I’m not sure that it is, it would still not be
your fault
. It would still be his fault. He is the one who broke into a home. He is the one who brought a weapon.”

“That’s what you have to say,” I stammer.

Angie makes
such a huge deal
about the fact that I feel guilty about this. I’ve told her that it doesn’t matter. I’ve already agreed to testify for the prosecution when Innis’s hearing comes up in a couple of months, and I’m not going to be all—“it was my fault, really”—up on the stand. The lawyers have made it clear that with his past, Jason will not be a reliable witness; it’s all on me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still, in the back of my head, know that there are things I could have done differently, ways I could have circumnavigated all of this.

She stares at me. “What would you say to Innis if you saw him today?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She makes another note.

A
NGIE WAITS UNTIL
the next session to tell me that she thinks it would do me good to confront Innis. She has told me that though my guilt might be natural, it is not warranted, and that calling Innis out on what he did could be a good way to move through it.

When I get home, I tell Mom. It’s the Monday before Lyla’s wedding, and she has enough on her mind, but it doesn’t stop her from picking up the phone.

“What in the world are you suggesting?” she asks as soon as she gets ahold of Angie. “Why would you urge a
minor
to put herself in danger like this?”

Mom vigorously shakes her head as she listens to Angie’s responses, and they have two more phone calls to talk about it. Mom and Dad even have a long conversation in their bedroom, the door closed and their voices soft, but eventually, she’s okay with the idea.

Jason doesn’t like it either. I meet him at his house, after his shift at the gas station, and he paces in fury.

“What kind of idiot would put you through that?” he asks.

“She thinks it will be therapeutic.”

“It’s insane,” he says, his lips turning down, his breathing quickening like he’s scared for my life.

“She said you could call her to talk about it,” I say. And he does. And eventually he comes around, too.

MacKenzie also thinks it’s a horrible waste of my energy and resources. “Why give that asshole even another ounce of your time?” she asks, when we talk the next morning on the phone. She’s already explained to Payton that she will have absolutely nothing to do with him if he so much as thinks about Innis ever again. He’s acquiesced, for now, but I wonder whether everything that happened will break them up, eventually.

Even the lawyers are wary. They remind me that I shouldn’t talk about the case or my planned testimony. Innis was picked up the night he attacked us for a DWI, and apparently there’s a pretty strong case against him. I think they’re worried I’ll go over there and come out of it deciding I won’t help out after all.

Surprisingly, it’s only Lyla who seems to be on board. Lyla, who has her own history with the family, who feels she failed me as a sister this summer, who is willing to listen to any idea if there’s a chance it might help. Lyla, who is getting married this Saturday, who should be thinking about other things, not me, not Innis, not everything that happened that led us to this moment. My parents hemmed and hawed about postponing the wedding, but I absolutely refused, and Suzanne agreed, reminded my dad that he would not be getting his deposits back if he changed the date this late.

J
ASON COMES OVER
on Wednesday morning, the day I’m set to go to Innis’s. I’m sitting on the wicker love seat on the porch, legs in the sun and
Heart of Darkness
in my hands.

“Hey.” He rushes up, leans down, and gives me a kiss.

“Hi.” I put the book down, lace my hands through his.

I’m not worried about people seeing us anymore—everyone knows everything by this point, anyway. I’ve seen Jason every day since that night, and I plan on seeing him every day indefinitely.