The following is an excerpt from the 3rd novel in The Cantos Chronicles called The Bones of Who We Are (2019) . All rights reserved.
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My eyes open to the exposed rafters above my bed. There's a chill in the air, and I burrow deeper under the covers to block it out. I close my eyes to return to the bliss of sleep.
School.
Shit.
You'll see Abby.
Abby!
My eyes fly open as heat spreads across my chest. I smile and my cheeks heat with a new awareness of my body and hers. What we did last night. I remember the feel of her in my arms.
I love her so freaking much.
I'm up and out of bed.
Your father supposedly loved your mother. Look what he did. I shake my head of the thoughts. Nothing is going to steal the golden joy I've got today.
Nothing.
I'm dressed.
My thoughts are a flurry.
I wonder how this is going to go down at school. Should I kiss her? Hold her?
Oh shit! The fight. Will I be suspended?
My phone vibrates. I smile hoping it's from who I want and knowing it probably is.
Abby: You awake?
My heart constricts thinking about her. Good morning. I write and add an emoji with heart eyes. As if she were with me, I feel her lips, her tongue, the way we struggled to say good night in the cab of the truck. "I love you," I'd said unable to stop now that I understood, unable to stop my hands touching her, making sure she was real.
Now, I can't stop smiling.
The three dots come up and stay that way for a long time. I feel the crease between my eyes as my eyebrows draw together. I wonder what she's thinking and have a moment of panic. What if she thinks she's made a mistake? My heart stumbles a moment, careening to a halt before slamming into a wall and sputtering back to life with an erratic pace. What if maybe I'd imagined everything? I type: What's up? You okay?
Abby: No.
I lean against the bathroom counter, my joy trickling down the drain behind me. The phone is in my hands, chest high, and I'm watching those three dots taunt me. It was too good to be true. I was a fool.
Abby: Going to the hospital.
I breathe, unaware I'd been holding my breath. At first there's a moment of relief she hasn't sent me a message which says we've made a mistake because I know last night was not a mistake for me. Within the span of a split second, my relief turns to concern. Why would she need to go to the hospital?
I write: Why? WTF? What's wrong?
Abby: It isn't me.
Me: Who?
Abby: It's Seth. There's been an accident.
My mouth drops open and closes. There's a mistake. I swallow down the doubt as I dial her phone. Maybe it's nothing and there's been a mistake. Abby answers on the first ring. "What the fuck are you talking about?" I ask.
I'm back in the school office last night after the fight. It's like slow motion in my mind. I see his head hung and the way he glances at his father. The fear. The look he gave me as Dale and I walked out. I remember thinking maybe I should do something, but what?
My throat constricts. I think I might be sick.
"Williams called Matt this morning," she says. I hear her tears. "His dad transported Seth to the hospital late last night; it's bad."
There are a million questions going through my mind, but nothing comes out. My throat has closed, and my stomach flips over on itself. I breathe through my mouth fighting the nausea.
"Gabe?" She asks.
"I'll meet you there," I say and hang up, confused and needing to move at the same time as though there's an itch deep inside my legs working its way up through my spine and out my mouth. A strange animalistic sound, part sob, part yell, part warrior cry, comes from inside me. It's deep and guttural, rooted in emotions so visceral I wouldn't have found them if I had been looking. I sink to a crouch on the bathroom floor, curled into myself as though it might protect me from the pain or to hold in my grief.
"Gabe," Martha knocks on the bathroom door, and when I don't answer she opens it. "Gabe!" She sees me, breathing as though my lungs are coming out from my mouth, she's on the floor with me. "What is it? Are you okay?"
"It's Seth," I choke. "Something's happened."
"Oh. Oh," she says and holds me against her. "What is it?"
"I don't know. Abby called. He's been in an accident. She's going to the hospital." The information comes out in short bursts of breath. "It's my fault," I tell her, look at her. "My fault," I say.
"No. No," she says my face in her hands and comforts me.
"I should have known. His dad-"
Martha holds me at arm's length so she can see me. "We don't know anything, yet," she says. "I'll take you down there, okay?"
I nod.
"It may be something minor." She offers hope.
I accept it, but there are no hopeful kites floating in the sky of my mind. It's bad. When we walk into the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit and I see the grim faces of those inside, I understand this isn't a room of hope.
Abby, who's waiting in the room with her dad, jumps up when she sees me and rushes into my arms.
We wait.
***
"I've been looking for you," I tell Abby later when I find her in the main lobby of the hospital. She'd disappeared, followed Seth's Mom from the waiting room, and I haven't seen her since. I waited. And waited. And waited. Accusing eyes burned holes through me while I did which propelled me from the room when she didn't return. The silent accusation from fake people at school – Seth's friends - aren't any different than what is already scrolling through my mind like a 24-hour news alert: Freak fought Seth. Seth in hospital. Freak's fault.
After wandering the hallways and feeling claustrophobic with the hopelessness of illness and death, I go to the lobby. That's where I find her. She's drawn herself into a tiny space of a functional chair, her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, as if she's trying to disappear. The despondent way she looks I feel in my soul like hundreds of nails pounded into my flesh. Her cheek is resting on her knees, and she stares unseeing, or seeing something that isn't concretely in the hospital lobby with us.
She looks up at the sound of my voice.
She's been crying.
I want to draw her into my arms, to offer comfort. I want to smooth the stray lock of her dark brown hair hanging over her golden cheek behind her ear and allow my hand to rest on her head. I want to lean over her, be a shelter for the pelting pain. I want to return to the cocoon we'd insulated in ourselves the night before, but it has broken open and spilled us out defenseless and unprepared into a painful world.
We can't.
With Seth lying in the hospital bed battling death, how do I deserve that?
She loved him first. She has always said she loves him. She might have told me she loved me last night, and I her. We might have taken comfort in one another's bodies, but, now, I'm not sure it's enough today.
The pain and guilt I feel are like leaden weights tied to my feet and dragging me to the bottom of a very deep sea. I'm the interloper. I've taken. I've betrayed. I gulp nothing, but it's a huge load of pain that feels like swallowing nails.
She looks away and stares out the window. "I saw him," she says. Tears slip from her eyes and create wet spots on the fabric covering her knees.
"And?" I ask but don't want to. No. I don't want to know, because the truth of what has happened isn't something I want to think about. I don't want to think about how I've committed the ultimate betrayal of him with the girl he loves, and now, she's sitting here looking like a wilting flower. I don't want to think about his body lying upstairs in the hospital room. I don't want to think about walking away from him last night, after the fight when my dad picked me up, and the look on his face when he saw his own father – a monster like my own. I don't want to think about the tears climbing up my throat, tears I don't deserve to cry. I don't want to think about it, because I don't want to lose her; I don't want to lose him. It all feels like my fault.
A sob catches in her throat. "Bad," is the only clear word I catch.
I sit down next to her and draw her into my arms anyway. She turns against me and cries big heavy sobs which need the support of an extra set of arms. I give that to her. I love her - my first lover. And I love him - my first friend. This pain can't be born alone.
She's heavy, leaning into me, bunching up my shirt in her hands. I tighten my arms around her warm body and restrain my own tears even if I feel them like razor blades in the back of my throat. The grief is a storm hurled with ferocity, gusty and frightful. Despite the bluster which mirrors the emotion careening through my own spirit, Abby in my arms brings me comfort. I find reprieve to the thoughts swirling around in my mind. As the storm of emotion subsides into a gentler rain until it passes, we continue to hold onto one another. Shelters.
Abby presses her face against my chest, her head under my chin. Eventually she says, "He's hooked up to machines. They are breathing for him."
I close my eyes, regret too heavy to keep them open, and draw her tighter.
"And his mom was trying to be brave. She said, 'he was a good boy, until me.'"
"Did she really say that?" I don't believe it.
"Close enough," she says and begins to cry again, softer this time. "It's my fault. This is my fault," she says.
I shake my head. No. No way. If anyone is to blame, it's me. "No, Abby."
She nods. "I came between you. The fight. The accident."
I pull away from her, just drawing back enough so I can see her face. Her eyes are rimmed with her anguish and regret, red and filled with still unshed tears. I shake my head. "No. You aren't to blame for this." I draw her back into my arms, but she pushes free.
Leaning away from me and no longer touching she says, "You aren't blaming yourself?"
I search her face, memorizing it. "I'm the only one to blame."
Her grief changes. It melts off of her face and reorganizes itself into something more substantive – like rock. Her eyes have hardened while her mouth has thinned out. "That's ridiculous."
"As ridiculous as blaming yourself?"
She turns in her seat, facing forward and her feet on the floor now.
I know she won't hear me – won't understand why this is my fault. She won't hear I knew he loved her. She won't hear Seth loved her first. She won't hear I betrayed him by loving her. While I might have conveniently dismissed all the harm Seth perpetrated against me, in the midst of this cyclone, my own betrayal is the eye of the storm around which everything else swirls.
I shift in my seat next to her, mirroring her body language.
Hearts broken – not by one another – but moving toward it.
We sit like that, saying little to nothing, locked in our own pain and grief, blaming ourselves but incapable of absolving the other.
Her father finds her. I watch her leave the hospital. She doesn't look back.
Martha finds me and takes me home.
Later, when the haunting of my culpability becomes insistent, and I'm unable to sleep, I climb from my bed. I pick up my phone charging in the dock on my desk. Sitting back down, I open up the screen and press the messaging app to text Abby, the blue glow from the screen illuminating the darkness around me. I miss her. I need her to fill the awful space in my chest. She is, after all, the only one I want to talk to.
I press her name and press the bubble to type the text. The keyboard opens and line blinks at me, waiting. But I don't type anything.
I want to say: I love you.
I want to say: I need you.
I want to say: I'm hurting.
I don't. I watch the blinking line.
Then I turn the phone off and the room is submerged in darkness again.
I set the phone back on the desk and lay back in bed staring up at the dark ceiling.
There is a storm swirling in me like a hurricane filled with all the debris of my life. The rejection, the pain, the ugly truth of who I am and where I've come from. Seth lying in that hospital bed is an indication. I didn't help him. I made it worse. As the emotional storm swirls, I drift a million miles from her. I don't deserve to reach out for her. I deserve to trade places with Seth. It was always meant to be that way.
Note: You can find Abby's story Swimming Sideways, Seth's story The Ugly Truth and Gabe's story, The Bones of Who We Are where ever books are sold.