A. M. Taylor - Forget Me Not

You awake?

he wrote.

My thumb hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds before I replied:

Yeah.

A few more seconds passed and then my phone started ringing in my hand. I didn’t answer immediately, I couldn’t. I just stared as his name lit up my phone screen and desperately tried to think of something to say when I picked up.

“Maddie?” Nate said, as soon as I answered, not waiting for me to say anything.

“Hi, Nate.” There was a pause and I looked around at my room, squeezing my eyes shut in an attempt to block everything out. I got the feeling, even from down a phone line, that Nate was figuring out what to say too, how to speak. I took a deep breath and did the decent thing and spoke for him.

“I heard about Elle,” I said, practically whispering in the dim bedroom light. “I’m so sorry.”

I could hear his breath catch, words getting caught in his throat. Words were always getting caught, trapped, in my world. There were just some things that couldn’t be said, couldn’t be heard out loud, not because that would make them more real but because sometimes sharing certain pieces of you makes them less real. Or maybe it was a combination of the two, I don’t know. I just know that there are times when language is made impotent.

“Nate,” I said, “is there anything I can do? To help?”

I heard that catch of his breath again and then the release. “Yeah. Yes, thanks. We have to go down to the station tomorrow, to the police station, but Mom doesn’t want Noah to come with us. Could you come round to sit with him?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks … thank you, Maddie.” There was another short pause before he added a little stiffly, “I know my mom will appreciate it.”

If I hadn’t already been stunned into submission by Elle’s death, I would have been heartbroken over the formality of Nate’s request. It was better, although only marginally, than the outright hostility I’d gotten from him the day before; but Nate talking to me as if he barely knew me, as if I barely knew him, was a special kind of heartbreak. The kind that had already begun to heal years before. It was like brushing your fingers over the remnant of a scar; your skin was raised, changed, marked and when you took the time to remind yourself of it the ache was still there, but only just. But Elle was an open wound, blood still pumping to the site of the injury, demanding all my attention just to keep it from hemorrhaging. Hearing Nate’s voice, however briefly, however stilted and formal, made that stupid old scar throb with pain though, however much I didn’t want it to. The last time I’d spoken to Nate over the phone, the last time I had called him, I’d still been living in New York. I was twenty-three, over a year out of college and finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed every morning.

***

It happens the way it always happens; shutters screaming shut over everyday life. I pull on my running shoes because they’re the first pair of shoes I find, even though I haven’t run in months—since I got to New York, really—and even then it was only ever something I did because my therapist and all my doctors told me I should. Exercise, they all say, as if it’s some kind of magic word. Abracadabra. I grab my keys and my cell and as I’m slamming the door behind me I pull the hood of my gray sweatshirt over my head. I have to walk up the basement steps just to get to street level and when I do I can smell it, despite the city smell: the engine exhaust and the trash cans, the Chinese takeout and the pizza place a couple doors away, the dog shit and probably the human shit too. Snow. Not yet. It’s not snowing yet, but it will. I shiver, from anticipation mostly but also regretting not putting on a coat warmer than my leather jacket. I start walking, hands stuffed into my jacket pockets, not even looking where I’m going, but still feeling the too-huge feeling in my chest. It’s grown in the last couple days to the point that I can barely breathe. Even now, with the cold stinging my eyes, they’re already smarting from almost crying anyway. I try not to cry, I really do, but I do it anyway.

The brick wall keeps rising up no matter how hard I try to knock it down, or stop it from building up in the first place, and I haven’t left the apartment in days. It has taken me the last fifteen hours just to force myself out now, and the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because it’s night, the middle of the fucking night, and no one will care who I am or where I’m going, or why I’m doing what I’m doing, or why I am the way I am. Every time I think about seeing anyone, or speaking to anyone, or having to stand at an ATM, or in line at a coffee shop, or make eye contact, or purchase milk, the scratching feeling starts up at the back of my eyes and it’s as if I can actually feel my retinas. The block of granite gets bigger and bigger inside my chest, and the brick wall builds itself up again, as if I never managed to knock it down in the first place.

I take a deep breath to steady myself, and even stop, my hand resting on a black iron railing in front of a brownstone. I almost lean over, head between my legs, about-to-faint-style, but I just keep a hold of the freezing iron and let that reassure me. After a couple of seconds, or maybe even minutes, I’m able to look around me somewhat and I notice that there’s a guy on the other side of the street walking in my direction. He’s wearing what looks like a magenta shell-suit jacket, and corduroy trousers and shoes without socks and he kind of looks right at me, but not as if he’s seen me. Just as if he were watching a movie and I was a secondary character he wasn’t really all that interested in. Blank look, then move on. I feel warm relief spread through me, as though I’ve just done a killer pee, and begin to walk on again. I don’t stop until I get to the East River.

I hunker down in my sweatshirt and jacket, trying to make myself as small as possible, hoping that it’ll also make me feel warm as well. The snow smell is even stronger here, the wind whipping it up along the river and mixing with that almost-salty metallic smell you get from the water as well. I sit down on a bench and it takes me a while to realize that there are people lying under some of the other benches, presumably because it’s got too cold to lie on the actual benches. One, two, three, four flakes of snow hurl themselves at my face, but if you ask me, they’re not trying hard enough. I lean back on the bench and, suddenly, my hands still stuffed in my pockets, my right hand curls around my cell and then, as if it’s not four o’clock in the morning, or damn close, I’m calling Nate.

He picks up on the seventh ring when I’m about to give in and hang up.

“’Lo.”

“Nate?”

I can practically hear him sit up in bed, even across half—more than half—the country, across one time zone, thousands and thousands of miles of night, and black sky, and farmland, and mountains, and rivers, and road, and motels, and tollbooths.

“Mads?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“I dunno, Nate.” I’m sitting looking at the Manhattan skyline but it’s not even like I’m looking at it at all. The slick blackness of the river looks nice though.

“Where are you?” he asks, as if we’re back in Madison, back when this used to happen all the time, and I’d call, and he’d ask where I was and he’d come meet me, and sit with me, until the too-huge feeling went away or at least lessened slightly. Sometimes, he’d even spot me walking across campus and he’d come after me, without me even having to call him. I never asked if he was watching for me, or just sitting up, late at night, unable to sleep, and looking out of his window. I never asked.