“Finally, she managed to hurl me up back to the platform, but she fell onto the tracks in the process. Five seconds later, she was gone. The train approached. I tried to reach for her, I did. But she . . .” I draw a breath, feeling tears rolling down my cheeks. “She said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Don’t you dare.”
And so I didn’t. Didn’t dare to live, to move on, to forgive myself for what happened.
It’s all coming back to me now. The moment I’ve tried so hard not to think about these past six years. The looks. The horror. The shame. The guilt. The screams. The odd silence that followed. The police. The paramedics. The insurance people. Nice, but firm. Renn and Dad crying. Pippa asking too many questions, so many questions. The police officers asking me, again and again and again, in their softest, nicest voices, to relay the last few minutes. And me, being honest, and dumb, and scared, telling them that I danced over the edge of the platform because some boy I liked had texted me.
I knew they were judging me. I judged me.
“I’ve never gone into the subway ever again,” I hear myself say. I don’t feel the words coming out of my mouth. Rather, I listen to them. “And I never will. I cannot see a train without . . . without . . .”
Without thinking about it. Smelling it. Replaying the whole scene in my head.
“Ever,” Joe says softly. “It wasn’t your fault. It could’ve happened to anyone.”
“But it happened to me.” I smile sadly. I can barely see him behind the curtain of tears. It’s happened to me twice, in fact. Dom was the second death I was responsible for. “I remember, as the policemen talked to me, as Dad and Renn frantically tried to understand what had happened, you kept on sending me message after message. The screen kept flashing with a green light. Until one of the police officers asked me to put it aside. I was still holding it in my hand. I didn’t let it go, even when I fell to the tracks and hit my head.”
There are tears in his eyes. I don’t remember Joe ever crying. Not even when Dom passed away. But he is crying now, and when I reach over to hold his hand, he clasps my fingers like I’m made out of sugar. Carefully. As if I could melt away.
“So you blamed yourself for your mother’s death, and me for causing you to act that way.” Joe stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray with his free hand.
I run my thumb over his knuckles. “I let the phone run out of battery and threw it in the ocean a few days later. I wanted to throw myself inside, too, but didn’t have the guts. I thought we shouldn’t be together after what happened. I felt so guilty. Our relationship was the reason she died. It sickened me to think I’d just continue as usual after she was gone. Go on dates, have sex, laugh, live . . . all those things. They seemed too trivial after what happened. And, yeah, school was a part of it. Going to college was a way to better my future. I didn’t deserve that. I deserved to be stuck in place, just like Mom was going to forever be stuck at age forty-three. So I dropped out. Cut all ties with Pippa and all my other friends.”
“Punishing yourself,” Joe comments.
I down another shot of tequila. The edges of my vision begin to blur.
“I decided to move to Boston. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why. I wanted to run into you, even if subconsciously. I fed myself some crappy story. That Boston was a great market for jobs. That if I ever decided to go back to school, there were lots of colleges in the area. It was also far enough from home that Dad and Renn couldn’t bulldoze their way into an intervention. I was free to destroy myself without interruption.”
Joe doesn’t say anything. He just listens. And God, it is so good to talk to him again. His gaze is like the sun. It gives me warmth and strength.
“But quickly, I realized that the city was too big, too gray, too rough. More than anything, it reminded me of you. And the pain of losing you, on top of losing my mom, was just too much. I couldn’t take it. I moved to Salem. It seemed like a good place to get my artistic mojo back. Spoiler alert: even Salem didn’t help. My art died with my mom.”
“I don’t think your art died,” Joe says cautiously. “I think it’s still inside of you, pounding on the door, waiting to get out. You’re locking it in, because your art is a way to get ahead. To achieve things.”
We hold each other’s gaze before I pour him another shot. “Your turn to tell me what went on with you these last six years.”
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “Well, as you probably pieced together, I went to Europe because Dom had just received his all-clear after another cancer scare.”