He smacks the bed with his palm and slumps back onto the bed, hands fisted over his eyes.
“Is that what you want?” he asks softly.
“Hm?”
“To kill yourself. Is that where we are? Because that’s something I need to know.”
I laugh nervously.
In the month after Maya and her father came to Pop’s house and they all agreed we’d get married because of the baby, I tried to kill myself twice. Kind of. Is there a word for just not trying very hard to avoid ceasing to exist? It was more like that. The life I could imagine for myself, Maya, and a kid, was just a yawning blackness, so I may as well have wandered into another kind of blackness. An easier one. One without responsibilities and expectations that filled me with hopeless panic. There were the nights I walked alone in places I knew I shouldn’t, or went to parties and drank so much I blacked out, or shoved down my throat or up my nose whatever pill, paper, or powder was passed to me.
Then there were the other times.
There was the time I walked along the train tracks after football practice, still shaky from running sprints, and stood with my back to an oncoming train, the shudder of the rails growing stronger and stronger through the soles of my sneakers, the whistle finally startling me off the track almost against my will, where I stumbled down the rocky slope and retched.
There was the time I looped Brian’s ratty Eagles scarf over the bar in my closet and tied it around my neck. When Pop asked how the bar broke, I told him I was trying to do chin-ups, and he smacked me for thinking it would hold my weight.
WHEN I wake up, it’s dark. I find Rafe in the kitchen staring out the glass door at the beach, a bowl of cooked spaghetti next to an unopened jar of sauce on the counter.
“Pop used to always make spaghetti when we were kids,” I say as I pour the cold sauce on the noodles.
Rafe fills his own bowl and sits on the stool next to mine, but he doesn’t touch the food. “The night we met,” he says. “That wasn’t the first time I saw you at The Cellar.”
I eat without tasting the food.
“People talked about you, you know.”
“What?”
“The pretty guy who wanted to get the shit beaten out of him. They said they thought you got off on it. Like a fantasy of getting jumped or something.”
I shake my head. Everything feels fuzzy and confused, and that damn ocean sound, like the rushing in my ears, makes everything feel unreal.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it was a fantasy.” He looks down at his hands, twisted together in his lap. “You looked so damned miserable. And now that I know you….” He leans toward me so I have to look at him. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are sympathetic. “I don’t expect you to be okay. But I need to know where you are. I can’t worry every time I close my eyes or leave to get food that I’m going to come back and find you dead. So if that’s where you are, I can handle it, but I need to know it.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean…. I don’t know what happened. This morning. I didn’t—I just remember you being there, but I don’t know….”
“Okay.” After a long silence, he says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Which is ridiculous, because all he’s done since we met is help me. Here we are in this beach house, far away from the grime of the city, and he’s been helping me with everything. I gesture around us helplessly, trying to convey this, but Rafe catches my hand and holds it between his.
“You make it better,” I murmur, but I don’t meet his eyes. If I knew what would help—if I ever knew what would really help—I’d do it.
“Maybe you need a distraction.” He runs a hand up my neck and squeezes. “Just something to focus on.” His thumb brushes my mouth.
It would sound like a cheesy pickup line if Rafe weren’t looking at me like he’d turn himself inside out to make me feel better.
“Okay,” I say against his thumb.
“Leave that,” he says as I start to put my bowl in the sink.
Rafe runs a bath, tipping something into it that looks like the rock salt we use on the sidewalk outside the shop when it’s icy. He helps me ease into the steaming water. It’s warm and relaxing, but I feel silly with him just sitting on the closed toilet seat, watching me. He’s probably afraid I’ll try and drown myself in the bathtub or something if he leaves. I reach out a hand trying to indicate that he should get in, but it’s not really big enough.