Sliding Down the Sky (9 page)

“What’s the long version of that story?” I asked, curious.

She ducked her head, avoiding eye contact, and I took the hint. She didn’t want to talk about it.

“It’s too long for this time of night,” she said. “Maybe another time.”

“Fair enough.”

I’d had a few beers, but I recognised a sore point when I hit one.

Leo’s voice filled the room, and we both turned our attention to the stage, as did the rest of the bar. His voice was smooth, like a good whisky, full of body and soul, sliding through the notes with ease. He sang about responsibility and not being ready for it, which was weird because I saw how he was when his wife and daughter had come in earlier. He was clearly a family man. He and I were poles apart, yet I found myself identifying with the lyrics of the song so strongly, it momentarily removed me from my perch at the bar and took me somewhere else.

When they finished, it was to a chorus of applause and loud encouragement. Admittedly, we’d all had a fair bit to drink by that stage, but that didn’t diminish the effect it had on me. If anything, it magnified it.

Coming out of the spell the song had cast over me, I turned back to Sass, only to find she’d gone. Again.

“Lose your dreams, and you might lose your mind.”

– Mick Jagger

Sass

I wish I could say that I don’t know what came over me, but that would be a lie. It was my old nemesis jealousy, burning inside me, making me shake all over, barely allowing me to catch a breath. I don’t remember leaving the bar, but when I came back to myself, I was in the store room, close to hyper-ventilating.

Five things… five things… five things…

The walls began to close in on me and my heart felt like it was going to explode. My vision dimmed to the point where I could barely see anything, and a new wave of panic crashed through me. All I could hear was a buzzing that felt like it was coming from inside my brain, a thousand metronomes of misery that blocked everything else out.

“Sass?”

I looked up through the haze to see Leo standing in the doorway. I couldn’t remember sitting, or falling, but I was on the floor nonetheless. He sat down beside me and tried to draw me into his arms.

“Don’t!” I croaked, pushing him away.

I didn’t want to push him away. I wanted to pull him closer and hang onto him and not let him go, but that felt like cheating, like giving in.
I
had to control this. It was my problem, not his.

“Breathe,” he said, and I caught the urgency in his voice, even through the buzzing that filled my head.

I was holding my breath and I didn’t even realise it.

I wondered fleetingly how long it would be before I passed out. Maybe passing out would be better.

No!

I finally took a breath, and I felt like I’d climbed a mountain.

“Just breathe,” Leo said, rubbing my back.

I did as I was told, and each shallow breath came a little easier. My vision returned to normal, and the thunder in my ears died down.

“You’re okay.”

I nodded, unable to find the words. He pulled me into a hug and I sank into him.

“What brought it on this time?”

A shudder went through me, taking my entire body hostage again, if only for a few seconds.

“Talk to me,” he said firmly. “Talking about it helps, remember?”

I disagreed. Talking about it killed me, but I also knew that in my current state, I couldn’t trust myself to make that kind of decision. I tried to reason with myself. Leo wouldn’t lie to me. If he said talking about it helped, then it must help. But where did I begin?

I saw him sitting with the band, playing, and I knew that I would never do that again.

Never.

It was such a heavy word. It weighed so much, sometimes I thought it would suffocate me. It was final. It wasn’t a
maybe
or a
possibly
. It sucked out hope and replaced it with a hollow emptiness that gnawed at my chest.

What was worse was the sense of failure that flooded into the vacuum. I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this to Leo. I promised myself I was going to help him for a change, instead of the other way around. He couldn’t do this without me and I owed him. He wasn’t asking me for much, just to be there and fulfil my end of the bargain, but at that moment it felt like he was asking for the world, and I couldn’t possibly deliver.

I didn’t want him to stop playing because of me, but watching him tore me up inside. I could see how much he loved it, and I knew it was as much a part of him as it had been a part of me. He couldn’t separate himself from it, it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t something you chose to love, and it wasn’t something you could choose to let go of. It had to be taken from you, like it had been taken from me, although in my case I had taken it from myself. It was my own fault, and the sting of that loss was worse because of it.

I was naked, standing in a cold new world, stripped of who I was and unable to do what I loved.

“If this is too much for you, just tell me,” he said.

I looked up at him, the numbness slowly ebbing out of me.

“I’m serious, Sass. If this is too soon, I get it. I thought it would help, but now I don’t know. I just know that I needed to do something to –“

He swallowed, hard, and there were tears in his eyes. I’d done that to him. I’d made him feel inadequate and desperate. Shame bloomed inside me, spreading its tentacles like poison. I couldn’t let him feel that way. I’d get my shit together. I had to.

“No,” I said, pulling away slowly, my body still trembling. “It’s not too soon, and it’s not your fault, none of this is. It’s just me. I have to try harder.”

It was the truth, and it hurt because I knew trying harder was going to take everything I had left, even though it wasn’t much. Maybe it wasn’t even enough.

“We should get back out there,” I mumbled.

Oh God – Callum!

“Relax, it’s okay. I’ve already locked up.”

I looked up at him, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

“What?”

“It’s been half an hour, Sass. Everyone’s gone, I saw to it myself.”

No. No, it was just seconds – minutes, at the longest. I shook my head to free it from the cobwebs that cluttered up my brain.

“It’s okay,” he said gently.

It wasn’t okay. It was the opposite of okay. I’d done the one thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. Tears burned my eyes.

“I’m sorry… “

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said, drawing me close again.

I held on to him. Suddenly, I was exhausted.

“I’ll try harder,” I whispered again. “I promise.”

He pulled away, taking me by the shoulders and fixing me with that determined, steely gaze, the one that reminded me of Dad.

“Jesus, will you please stop saying that?” he said. “You’re not super-human, and you’re not fooling anyone, least of all me. It’s gonna take time – you know that, right? But you’re getting there, and that’s the main thing. Tonight was tough, but you did it. You were awesome – you handled it. Take the victory, it’s yours, you deserve it.”

I huffed out a breath, shaking my head. No I didn’t. The fact that I let a panic attack get the better of me proved that.

“Hey,” he said, giving my shoulders a squeeze, drawing my attention back to him. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint, remember that. Think back to six months ago. See how far you’ve come. You can’t expect to just bounce back, you’ve got to give yourself time. Some things might seem impossible now, but just take a look at your boots.”

We both looked down at my black, lace-up biker boots. My favourite boots in the world. The ones I’d recently started wearing again because I’d figured out how to lace them myself. I looked up at him, and he winked at me.

“See? Not everything’s as impossible as you might think.”

I nodded dumbly.

“And it’s okay to ask for help, too. You’re not invincible. None of us are.”

My heart raced. No, I wasn’t invincible. I was full of doubts and insecurity, with holes in my soul and pieces of myself missing. I was the opposite of invincible.

“You’re tired,” he said, pulling me close again. “It was opening night – probably the busiest night we’ll ever have. It’ll get easier though, I promise. Everything’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

I wanted to believe him so badly it hurt.

“There are two ways you can go with pain: You can let it

destroy you or you can use it as fuel to drive you.”

– Taylor Swift

Sass

“I think Gemma should take your shift tonight.”

I must’ve looked as deflated as I felt.

“You need to get some rest, Sass.”

Leo was right, but I still felt like I’d let him down. I couldn’t help it. They needed me to be more than just a live-in babysitter. I hated feeling so useless, like I couldn’t be trusted with anything important. It wasn’t just my disability, it was my mental state.

I threw myself into proving to them, and myself, that I could do better. I made dinner for the first time in a long time. I hated being in the kitchen. I wasn’t a fan of cooking before, and was even less so now. I wanted to take my prosthesis off because I found it easier to work without it, but I knew how awkward that would make Leo feel. Instead, I perservered.

Gemma had rigged up a chopping board especially for me, with nails poking out of it so I could hold things still while I chopped or peeled. It was a lifesaver. Even though things seemed to take so much longer, and I found my patience wearing thin at times, I stuck with it.

I put half of the simple, but hopefully tasty, pasta into a container for Leo and Gemma to take into the bar and eat later, and saved the other half for Aria and I. It felt good, to do something helpful.

Aria and I waved goodbye to them, then we sat down to watch some TV. Saturday night, and I was babysitting my neice. It was about as far from my former life as it could get.

After dinner, I bathed her, which was a lot easier than the dinner hurdle, because it was only Aria and I in the house and she didn’t care when I took my prosthesis off. When I settled her into bed, she chose a book and I lay down beside her to read it. Then I read another one. When she asked for a third book, I had to draw the line.

“Remember our two book rule?” I reminded her.

She sat up in bed and gave me her best doe-eyed look, but I wasn’t falling for it.

“Please, Sassy?” she begged.

“Sorry, Doodlebug. I’m beat and you need to sleep too. If your Mom finds out you were up this late, I’ll be in big trouble. Tell you what, how about you choose a book and we’ll make that book number one tomorrow night, okay? Just so we don’t forget.”

She didn’t look totally convinced, but thankfully she climbed down off the bed and went to her bookshelf to choose another book. Her finger went along the titles as if she was looking for one in particular, and it made me smile. I’d seen Leo do the exact same thing. They were like two peas in a pod sometimes.

“This one!” she announced, after scrutinising the cover for a few seconds.

She handed it to me, and I put it on her nightstand.

“Excellent choice. So that’s something to look forward to tomorrow night, isn’t it?”

She nodded, smiling, and climbed into bed again. I tucked her in and kissed her goodnight, and she gave me a tight hug. Her hugs were always tight, like she was afraid if she didn’t hug me tightly enough I wouldn’t stay. My heart swelled.

I turned her night-light on, turned the bedside lamp off, and left her to it.

“Leave the door open!” she called, as I was about to close it.

“Okay, sweetie. G’night, sleep tight.”

“Night, Sassy.”

I set about putting her toys back into the basket under the window and straightening things up a little. Starting tonight, I was going to put more of an effort into doing everything, not just the things that were hard for me. I had to be part of this family, I had to be able to be relied upon to keep my word, get over some of this shit that was festering inside my head, dragging me down. I couldn’t afford the luxury of wallowing in self pity anymore, because it wasn’t just about me. As part of their family I had a role to play, and I wanted to keep my end of the bargain. I didn’t want them to coddle me. They already had one child, they didn’t need another one.

After the accident I’d tried desperately to pick up the threads of my old life and tie them back together into some kind of safety net. I failed, miserably. I went on a three-month bender, then crashed and burned in the worst possible way, a walking time-bomb exploding in ways that made me shudder now. The people I thought were my friends disappeared. Broken and lashing out in pain, I’d been abandoned like yesterday’s newspaper. The threadbare net failed, and I fell hard and fast. Sometimes it felt like I was still falling.

What followed was a seemingly bottomless funk that nearly ended me. I locked myself in my apartment and spent my waking hours staring at my mangled left arm, and at the tattoo on the inside of my right forearm that I couldn’t even remember getting.

Then Leo turned up, dragging me out of my fog and making me deal with my situation for the first time, and in a way that was healthy. The cloud lifted, therapy began to get through to me, and one day I noticed his discomfort at the sight of my bare arm. It made him cringe, if not physically, then certainly mentally. It was so obvious, I wondered how I’d managed to miss it before. I felt sick, but I didn’t blame him. For a musician, losing a hand is probably one of the worst things that can happen. It wasn’t just my nightmare, it was his too, and every time he looked at me I could see it in his face.

I made an effort to cover it. I began to wear my prosthesis again. It still felt awkward after not wearing it for so long, but if it made others more comfortable, I was determined to perservere. I learnt a few tricks that helped to disguise it, like keeping my sleeves long and wearing my watch on that arm. It was all part of moving on, I told myself.

Since then, not wearing my prosthesis became something of a guilty pleasure, like unbuttoning my jeans after a big meal. I had patchy sensation in my residual limb, thanks to muscle damage from the accident. Some areas were completely numb, others had normal sensation. It was odd, using my arm to steady something when I couldn’t feel it against my skin. Like most things, it took practice.