"You clocking out?" Lindsey asked, refilling a pitcher behind the counter. She snapped her gum three times quickly, as if to make up for the time she spent serving customers where it was unprofessional. Our manager thought most of what she did was unprofessional, really, but Lindsay had the sort of nonchalant air that didn't make it seem like she'd ever get in trouble for making small talk with her friends when they came in or wearing her hair down.
"Yeah," I answered. One hand sought out the knot in my apron strings while the other pulled my card out of my back pocket so I could swipe it and log my time. It was later than I'd hoped to work, but with the electricity bill due, I needed all the extra hours I could get.
Still, one am was late to work in a restaurant. I yawned gently as I fished my keys from my pocket and left through the back door, Lindsey blowing me a kiss as I left in the collected manner she always held. I'd worked for nearly eleven hours, starting at two yesterday. It was 12:48 now, not even an hour into a new day, March 10th.
In the middle of the parking lot, I froze.
March 10th.
My hands started to shake gently, and I clenched them into fists, the teeth of my keys biting into the skin of my palms. I was used to the shaking, but it had been a while, longer than I could remember, since it had appeared.
I supposed if it was going to start again, the one-year anniversary of the Milena Massacre was, in a twisted way, fitting.
I bent halfway over, my fists finding my knees, and breathed gently. Ten, nine, eight. . . I counted slowly in my head, breathing in on the odds and out on the evens, relaxing my body slowly, slowly.
It's been a year.
A year wasn't long enough to forget.
I gasped in more air, abandoning the counting. Sometimes it helped, but in the middle of a parking lot at midnight was not the right environment to recover. I stumbled to my car, my hands barely able to fit the key into the lock, and slammed the door shut, resting my head on my knees. The panic was stronger than it seemed it'd ever been, though the back of my mind was telling me it was just the attack, irrational, that I'd had worse following the Massacre. This wasn't even one of my bad ones - I could still breathe, I could still see, and I could at least think enough to start counting again.
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . . I balled my hands into fists again and pressed one against my mouth, fighting the urge to hyperventilate. It took all my willpower to keep breathing deeply, gently, and when my breathing finally returned to normal, I was still shaking. I sat in my car for another ten minutes, squeezing my fists together, waiting for another wave of fear and dizziness to overcome me.
My shaky hands fit the keys into the ignition and turned gently, the heater turning on immediately and warming my legs and the tips of my fingers, which had gone numb. I sat a few minutes more, just to be certain I could drive the few minutes to the apartment, and just breathed as steadily as possible - hard with a shudder that won't go away.
My hands were still shaking by the time I decided it was time to go home, but it was only a few blocks, and I'd been recovering for half an hour. At least at the apartment, I could try to get some sleep.
As soon as I walked in the door, my roommate glanced up at me from his spot on the couch, where the TV was paused. "Hey, A. How was work?"
I shrugged, not trusting myself to talk. Tyler stood immediately, rushing to my side. "Hey, hey. Did it happen again?"
I managed a nod, and he led me to the big green chair. It'd been there since he'd first been in the apartment, which was going on five years, accounting for its unmatchable softness from years of being sat on and having crumbs dropped on it. Ty used it all the time, but he only ever let me sit in when I'd had a rough day, and today qualified.
"Oh, god," I heard him mutter as he turned away to grab me a blanket off the couch. "It's today, isn't it? God, I should have made you come home earlier. I could have driven you, A."
"It's fine," I said, squeezing my eyes shut tightly. Ty did too much for me already; I didn't need to owe him another ride home.
"It's not."
I kept my eyes shut and burrowed further under the blanket, letting the comforter block out sound and light and keep in the warmth and my thoughts. It was hard to feel unhappy underneath a bright pink down comforter, but a nagging thought still crept in.
You didn't save them all.
I could have tried harder, or left before the first gunshot, or called the police, or not gone at all, so my name didn't have to be one of the ones on the news, as a survivor of the night.
I had survived, but it had taken me a long time to live again.
"A," I heard Ty saying from outside the comforter, and I emerged again, feeling like I'd slept for a year despite not even falling asleep. "I was gonna tell you when you walked in, but I forgot after the PA." I smiled barely at his attempts to frame the panic attack as something else, his attempts to disguise the discomfort for my sake. I hated admitting to anyone that I was having a panic attack, that I was losing control, still suffering from the effects of the Milena Massacre a year later. It was easier to call it a PA, imagine other things the name could stand for - Personal Administration, Punctual Adam, Perestroika APUSH. Tyler's favorite was Public Arrest.
"There's a letter for you on the coffee table. I saw it and I was like, 'Who the hell is Adam Newman', because I forgot you had, like, a real name."
It took me a few seconds to recognize my name as well - Adam Newman, or more literally, Adam New Man. A new man after the Milena Massacre, a new man after dropping the infamous survivor name, a new man after disowning the Burke fortune to make my own way as a writer or owner of my own business.
Where was I with that? Oh, right - working at Denny's to pay rent and having panic attacks in the middle of parking lots.
"Here, man. Maybe it'll help. You want some tea?"
"Uh, yeah," I answered distractedly, taking the letter he handed me. It looked professional, with an unfamiliar stamp in the top left corner and my new name printed in perfectly block letters in the center. I grabbed the letter opener from the top shelf, handily near me, and slit the envelope gently open, pulling a single typed sheet from the package.
The tea kettle shrieked, the blanket I was wearing fell to the floor, Tyler appeared in front of me again to ask if I was okay, but I barely heard or felt any of it. In that second, my entire world was focused on the words in front of me, the letter that had been sent to me.
Dear Mr. Newman. . .
"Are you okay, man? You're scaring me. I don't know whether that smile's a good thing or whether you've lost it."
We would be honored if you would be interested in dictating or writing a memoir. . .
"Sit down, man! I have to get the kettle off."
about the events that transpired on March 10th of last year and your life before and after it. . .
"Put the goddamn blanket back on, too, okay? It'll help."
as one of the survivors of the Milena Sable Massacre and, as our research has discovered, the former heir to the Burke fortune. . .
"A!"
"Yeah?"
"What the hell is in that letter?"
My words, which had seemed tongue-tied before during the attack, seemed all too eager now, ready to rush over my tongue and tell the world. "It's from a publishing house, an agent there. They found me - us - here and they want me to- to write a memoir about my life, like the Burke thing and the casino and living here and giving up everything - and they've got a goddamn title already."
Ty sat next to me, his face alight with joy. "What is it?'
"Fold."
He guffawed. "Man, that's - that's amazing! Damn, you'll be rich. It's easy to write about your life, right? I mean, what, you played tennis for twenty-four years, played poker for a night, and now you work at Denny's."
The blanket fell again as I stood, pacing around the living room frantically. "No, it's so much more. There's so much I can say, I can teach, there's so much to make up for. I mean, I was the heir to the Burke family fortune, man. Even you heard of the Burkes."
"Yeah, but I didn't think the son would ever be my roommate in downtown Boston. A, do you know what this means?"
"We can move out of this apartment and fully sanitize that chair?"
"You'll be in the spotlight again, man. Interviews, talk shows, the works. Are you ready for that again?"
I glanced back down at the letter, slightly crumpled, then to Tyler's reserved face. He didn't want to see me get hurt, but I knew what I was saying would be the truth.
"I think I am."
After all, it was no coincidence that that letter came on the anniversary of that night, that it shook me out of a panic attack about the horrors of the massacre and into the greatness that could come out of it. It was no accident that the early morning of that day, when just a year ago I was heading blindly into the worst day of my life, would soon become the best day of my life.
I would never be able to save all the victims of Milena Sable, nor would I ever be able to repay the families for their help with the book or comfort them enough to deal with the loss of children and husbands and wives and parents. Still, it seemed that on that day, the anniversary of their death, the letter was a sign, a prayer, a note from them, wherever they were, promising me it would be all right.
And as you can see, since you've finished this memoir, it's been more than all right.
Adam Burke.
Fin.