My gaze lowered to all that was left in my life—the bottle between my legs. “That man is gone.”
Those words settled in the air for a minute. Just when I thought she’d crept up the stairs silently, she cleared her throat. “Can you bring him back? Please?” She reached into the pocket of her tiny cardigan, but I couldn’t make out what she pulled out. It had to have been small. “I want the one who picked out this ring with the intention of giving it to me. I want that guy back, the one who wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.”
I still couldn’t see what she had pinched between her fingers—the combination of the dark and my impaired vision made it difficult out to make my hand in front of my face without it looking blurry—but I knew what she’d pulled from her pocket.
“I want him to look me in the eye and ask a certain question, and I want to give him my answer. I want that back.” Her voice was strong, her posture the same, but the first tear finally fell from her eyes.
I didn’t want to be responsible for any more of her tears, but I couldn’t feed her a lie just to save a few tears. I knew, in the long run, I was saving her a whole lot more of them by setting her free. “That man is gone,” I repeated, more to myself than to her.
“No, he’s still there,” she said with a shake of her head. “He’s just being strangled by this defeatist imposter.” She let that hang in the air for a minute before continuing up the stairs. “If you need me, I’ll be upstairs.”
I watched her go, though I knew I shouldn’t have. “I don’t need you.” Again, I was saying it to myself more than to her, as if I were trying to convince myself it was the truth.
“If that were true, you wouldn’t still be talking to me and staring at me from the bottom of those stairs like your heart just got ripped out of your chest.” She stopped on one of the top stairs but kept her back to me. “You can keep this act up for as long as you want, Garth, but there’s nothing you can say or do to make me believe we don’t have a future together because you’re in some fucking wheelchair. We have one of the greatest love stories of all time, and what? You think something as small and stupid as a wheelchair could break us apart?” She snapped her fingers, just barely looking over her shoulder. “You don’t throw away the love of a lifetime because someone gets injured—that’s when you prove what your love’s really made of.”
I swallowed, my throat bobbi
ng from the ball stuck inside it. “Josie—”
She spun on the steps, her fists balling at her sides. “Stop calling me Josie.” Her jaw tightened. “I don’t like it.”
My own fists balled, but it was from frustration instead of anger. “Stop acting like everything’s going to be okay,” I said in a tone so small it didn’t even sound like me. “I don’t like it.”
She climbed another step. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning. And the morning after that.” Her voice sounded so final I believed her. “Oh yeah, and the morning after that and every single goddamned morning after that.”
My fists were so tightly curled I felt my nails about to draw blood from my palms. “I won’t let you rot with me. You need to leave. Now.”
Her head shook, whipping her hair back and forth over her back in one long sheet. “It should be so easy right now to look at you and process everything you’ve just said and done and feel some level of hate”—she peeked back at me over her shoulder from the top of the stairs—“but no, nothing. Son of a bitch.”
“Josie—”
“Good night. Sweet dreams. I love you,” she said with a wave.
Fire surged into my bloodstream as I felt like I couldn’t control a single part of my life anymore. “Damn it, Josie!”
She lifted her finger as if she had been suddenly reminded of something. “Oh, and here’s the ring back since I kind of stole it from your drawer when I was ransacking your room last night, searching for any clue as to where you might have gone.” She tossed the ring at me like it was nothing more significant than a quarter.
It landed in my lap, falling between the seam of my legs where the bottle of whiskey still sloshed. That couldn’t have been a simple coincidence. That was fate’s way of toying with its favorite peon and putting him in his place.
“When the guy who picked out that ring is back, he can ask me his question.”
I COULDN’T FALL asleep that night either. Big surprise.
After sitting at the bottom of those stairs for God knew how long—half wanting her to come back and argue with me, half wondering if I’d made it all up in my alcohol-induced stupor—I finally made my way back into the bedroom. I wheeled up to the same broken window and stared out it until my eyes watered.
I kept both the bottle and the ring between my legs, too scared to let go of the bottle for one reason and too scared to let go of the ring for another reason. I could have one but not both. They couldn’t coexist. Of course I knew which one I wanted—that was a no-brainer—but I knew with just as much certainty I couldn’t have her. So really, the choice of which to let go and which to curl my fingers around was a simple one, but I wasn’t ready to let go of that ring and everything it symbolized quite yet. In the morning, when I was fresh from a few hours of rest and had slept off the whiskey . . . then maybe, but not tonight.
I had a few hours left of pretending the girl I’d purchased the ring for was still mine.
That thought must have lulled me to sleep finally because I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until I snapped awake from the sound of something shattering. I was still in my chair and had a splitting headache to show for my drinking, but at least I could see straight again and didn’t feel like the room was slowly revolving around me.
“Josie?” I called, my voice hoarse from sleep and whiskey.
No reply came.
I held my breath and listened. The old house might have creaked and whined and groaned like nothing else, but it didn’t make shattering noises. No, people made shattering noises.
“Josie?” This time my voice was louder. I turned around in my chair and wheeled toward the doorway before stopping when I heard sounds coming from the kitchen. Not just the sounds of the fridge buzzing or the floorboards cracking or the walls creaking . . . the sounds of someone ripping open drawers and cupboards, searching for something. “Josie? Is that you?”