Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (16 page)

Reluctantly I turned off the shower. I combed my hair and used Dahlia’s face cream and perfume. When I left the bathroom, she had stopped dancing and singing and was wrapped in a blanket, lying on a couch in front of the roaring fire in her fireplace.

“All better?” she asked me. She had calmed down, finally—I guessed—tired from the party, the dancing, and the late hour. There was a platter of desserts and hot chocolate on the coffee table in front of her. I sat on the floor with my legs crossed under the table.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. That was the best shower ever.”

“Let’s have cake.”

We each chose a slice of cake and took a bite. It was chocolate and raspberry. Delicious. We chewed in silence for a long time, staring into the fire.

“Dahlia, I want to thank you for all you’ve done. You saved my life. You made my dreams come true.”

“Shh,” she said, touching my shoulder. “Let’s just enjoy the dessert and the fire. No need to thank me. It took no effort on my part. Besides, at least one of us should have their dreams come true.”

“A wounded deer leaps the highest”

--Emily Dickinson

It took me forever to fall asleep. The minute I actually had good news to share, I couldn’t share it with the one person I wanted to share it with. Just a couple of days ago, Cruz would have loved to hear about Paris and Madame and Monsieur Berger. Now, I wasn’t sure he ever wanted to see me again.

Good news was like a tree falling in the woods. If nobody was there to hear it, did it make a sound? And was it really good news?

I was trying hard not to think about Cruz. I tried to be happy about Paris instead, but my emotions couldn’t get around the sad. It was too big. I had the heartbreak that only people who have never been loved suffer. I had come so close to being loved by Cruz. It had been in my grasp. One kiss that transported me high and then rejection that sent me crashing against the rocks.

If I thought about it, my chest would get heavy, and it became difficult to breathe. So, I stayed up and watched the fire, even when Dahlia fell into a deep sleep on the couch after she finished her piece of cake.

She was a great friend, even if she said it wasn’t a big deal to set me up with a free place to stay in Paris. To me, it was the biggest deal. Dahlia had never asked where my mother was, why I was living with Cruz, why I had no money or friends. But she saw my need and found a solution. She was going to communicate with Madame Berger and organize everything for me. I could never thank her enough.

After the fire grew dim, I covered her with another blanket, turned out the lights, and slipped into her bed. When I finally fell asleep, I didn’t dream about Paris. Instead, I dreamed about Cruz, his lips touching mine, his arms around my body, pulling me close.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he whispered in my dream.

“What?”

He moved his mouth, but no sound came out. “What?” I asked again. “I can’t hear you.” He kept talking, but I couldn’t hear a word. I was certain it was important for me to know what he was telling me, but I couldn’t make it out. “Speak louder!” I yelled. “Speak louder!”

I woke up to screams. At first, I thought I was the one screaming through my dreams, but it turned out the sound was coming from outside Dahlia’s room, down the hallway.

“Dahlia?” I whispered. I got out of bed. The couch was empty. She was nowhere to be found. A light came through the bedroom’s open door.

“Take it easy,” I heard a man say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Then, there were more screams. Dread washed over me as I realized Dahlia was the one screaming. I ran out into the hallway. She was standing at one end in her party dress, her hair in tangles like a rat’s nest. She was barefoot, and she was standing like a quarterback, ready to take on the defensive line. Her father was behind her, and in front of her were two men in paramedic uniforms.

I heard sirens in the distance coming closer, and I wondered if that was backup arriving. Dahlia was wild, her eyes spinning in their sockets.

“I’m just trying to finish the song!” she screamed. “I have to finish the song! Get out of my way! Why don’t you understand?”

“You can finish the song after you come with us,” one of the paramedics told her.

“No!” she screeched. “I have to do it now. I have to go to the roof and do it because the stars are going to help me. Don’t you understand? The stars will help me finish the song!”

She wiped at her face with her hand, smearing her makeup. She looked like a wounded, wild animal. Transformed. Unrecognizable. Dahlia had disappeared and a crazed beast had taken her place.

She broke my heart.

I heard heavy boots race up the stairway and two policemen appeared. They quickly assessed the situation, looking from Dahlia to the paramedics to me to her father and back to Dahlia. “You got this?” one of them asked the paramedics.

“We might need some assistance,” a paramedic answered.

I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t know what was happening, but I did know it was out of my control. Dahlia needed help that I couldn’t give her.

“I have to finish my song!” Dahlia screamed. She rocked on her heels and then took off, right at the paramedics.

Red rover, red rover, send Dahlia right over
, I thought, watching her try to break through the two men. They caught her with a loud, collective grunt, almost falling over but managing to subdue her.

“Don’t hurt her!” I yelled, watching them push her to the floor.

“Don’t get involved,” one of the cops ordered me. He was all business, and I stepped back and bit my lower lip. The policemen took over, holding Dahlia down while the paramedics dug through their supply of drugs. They injected her with something, and she calmed down immediately. It went quickly after that. A stretcher appeared; they took her downstairs, put her in an ambulance, and took her away just as the sun came up.

Her father and I watched from the driveway as the ambulance and the police car drove away. We stood in the cold morning air in our pajamas and bare feet long after they were gone, watching the empty driveway for what I didn’t know. Perhaps we were just trying to digest what we had witnessed or convince ourselves that it actually happened. It was the kind of event that didn’t seem real, like a kiss from a perfect boy that was quickly rejected. My first best friend disappeared in a cloud of crazy in the back of an ambulance. How could I ever accept that as being real?

The fresh air and the quiet helped me in that moment of loss, but I couldn’t quite stop crying. “Get dressed, and I’ll drive you home,” Dahlia’s father said, finally and walked back into the house. He was stone. Emotionless. But I was a basket case. Nothing in my life had prepared me for what I had just witnessed.

I packed my bag and met him back downstairs after about ten minutes. “Come on,” he said and walked me to his Jaguar. He opened the passenger door for me. He started the engine and turned off the radio. We drove for a few blocks in silence.

“This is not the first time, you know,” he said. “Or don’t you know?”

“Is Dahlia going to be okay?”

“She’ll be in treatment for a while. A few months.”

“A few months?”

“I knew it was a mistake to send her to school,” he said, but I thought he was talking more to himself than to me. “She does better with a tutor. It’s probably my fault with all the moves.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Dahlia’s bi-polar, been that way for several years.”

I gave him directions to my house. He parked in front, got out, and opened my door for me. “It was nice meeting you,” he said. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

So much didn’t work out. My life. My friendship. And now with Dahlia gone, my apartment in Paris hadn’t worked out.

He got back into the car and drove off without another word.

I stayed on the sidewalk and watched him go. I had been watching a lot of people leave me, lately, I realized. My mother, Cruz, Dahlia. Alone feels different to every person, but my alone was cold and heavy and made it hard to breathe. That’s why my heart did a little leap when I noticed Cruz’s car in the driveway. I had feared that he had left me for good, but he was here at least for now.

It was still very early so I was as quiet as possible when I opened the door and walked upstairs. I had a terrible urge to peek into Cruz’s room and to tell him about Paris and how I almost had an apartment for a year, about Dahlia and her break with sanity and her trip to parts unknown. But then I remembered the last time I saw Cruz, our horrible fight, and his rejection.

My heart had been broken on so many levels, I wasn’t sure it could ever be whole again. But he was there, I wasn’t alone, and that made it bearable.

***

Here’s what I figure: If God meant for a woman to have triplets, he would have given her six arms. Mrs. Maclaren and I had had four combined arms, which were two short for handling her toddlers. It had been a crazy day helping her with her kids. One was pooping out of his diaper and eating it—Can you say gross?—while another one was heading for the electrical outlet behind the TV with a fork in his hand. Meanwhile, the third one was just crying because that’s how babies are.

Annoying.

I definitely earned my money, and since the Maclaren triplets were being even more gross than usual, their mother paid me extra to sit with them at the end of the evening while she took a bath.

“I owe you so much,” she said to me, as she closed the bathroom door.

I was happy to work, happy to be busy and to have my mind off Dahlia and Cruz.

It had been the first day back at school since the Christmas party, and there was no sign of Dahlia. I shouldn’t have expected her to be at school since her father had explained that she would be getting treated for months. But I was hoping she would be there, anyway.

Gone was Dahlia. Gone was my only friend at school. And gone was the glamour.

Without her, I went back to being Mess Parker, and school dragged on in tedium, isolation, and fear. I spent the day either watching the classroom clocks move at a snail’s pace or reliving the fight with Cruz and Dahlia’s breakdown.

Pooping and puking toddlers were a great relief from all that.

And Mrs. Maclaren fed me, which was good since we didn’t have any food in the house.

“Here’s what I owe you and something extra,” she said handing me five, twenty-dollar bills at ten o’clock that night. “You’re my angel of mercy.”

What would Mrs. Maclaren think if she knew her angel of mercy had been abandoned by her mother and was saving her money to buy peanut butter?

Thankfully, I was exhausted. I could just shower, go to bed, and not think any more about Cruz or Dahlia. Hopefully, I would be too tired to dream because my dreams had been all nightmares lately and I was waking up more tired than when I went to bed.

When I got home, there were a couple cars parked in front, and Cruz’s car was in the driveway. Inside, models were setting up for a party, putting out bottles of wine and rolling joints. I spotted Cruz walking from the kitchen to the living room, and my heart skipped a beat.

I hadn’t seen him since our kiss and our fight. He was still the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. He literally took my breath away, and I had to remind myself to breathe or I would pass out. I stared at him, willing him to see me and apologize, but he was busy with his friends and didn’t seem to notice me. Besides, I didn’t want him to notice me. What if he looked at me with hatred? What if he wasn’t the same Cruz anymore?

The doorbell rang and Cruz turned toward it. I ran up the stairs, too chicken to stay in his path. It was a hard position to be in: the rejected invisible girl alone and the beautiful boy downstairs with his perfect, model friends.

The bathroom was clean. No wet towels on the floor. I locked the door and turned on the shower. They must have turned on the music, because I could hear the boom boom of the bass from inside the bathroom. Loud. I finished the shower and went to bed, closing the door behind me. I put my pillow over my head and wished for sleep, but the boom boom bass kept me up.

Also, the loud giggling of the skinny model girls was coming right through my door.

You know that moment when your sad turns to mad?

My sad turned to mad at eleven on that Monday night. And I wasn’t just mad, I was fighting mad. I was Khaleesi-somebody-stole-my-dragons mad.

I punched my pillow, got out of bed, opened my door, and stood at the top of the stairs.

“Shut up!” I screamed as loud as I could. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

But the giggling didn’t stop, and the music kept booming.

“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled. “I hate you! I hate all of you! You’re all a bunch of fuckers! I hate you! Go to hell! Leave my house!”

I was getting hoarse from screaming, but I wasn’t getting anywhere except more and more upset.

“Shut up!” I yelled again, and then I heard him run up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. I stopped screaming.  I stopped breathing.

“What’s wrong?” Cruz asked, reaching me at the top.

He was there, face to face with me. I don’t know why it came as a surprise. Did I think he wouldn’t come up and see why I was screaming like a madwoman? No, I didn’t. I thought he would just turn the music down and end the party. You know, ignore me.

But he was there in the hallway with me, his body inches away from mine, concern and anger on his face, and I broke down completely.

“Why are you doing this!” I screamed at him.

“Doing what?”

“You’re making all this noise, and I need to sleep.” I was crying so hard that my words were coming out slurred. My nose ran, and I wiped it on my sleeve. “Why are you doing this!”

“Calm down. Stop screaming.”

“No!”

“I said, calm down.”

“No!”

I was crying and screaming at the same time. I was madder than hell.

“I said, shut up!” I screamed. “Tell your whore girlfriends and your loser model friends to go away. I’m trying to sleep! I’m trying to survive!” Cruz’s face turned from concern to shock.  He clutched my shoulders and gave me a shake. I didn’t care. I refused to calm down for him.