I’ve been close to that place where taking my life seemed like the way I was going to go. Being there, I didn’t really think about my future, but I don’t want to tell her that because she deserves a better answer. “I’m sure he thought about it,” I say. “Even though he might have never said anything, he had to think about it a little. Being with you forever.”
“You think so?” she asks hopefully.
“I know so.” It’s a lie, but for a good cause. She deserves it—deserves the world and more.
“Quinton?”
“Yeah.” I’m getting choked up and even one word conveys all the grief, agony, regret, and sorrow surfacing inside me.
“I know it’s really hard to think about the future and everything,” she says. “But I have this really good feeling that yours is going to turn out a lot better than you think it is.”
“I hope you’re right,” I reply, massaging my hand over my aching chest, the scar across it a permanent reminder of what happened that tragic night. “But I don’t even know what I’m going to do in the future. I keep thinking about where I could possibly be a few years from now…”
“And what do you see?”
“I don’t know… nothing, really, at the moment.”
“Well, what do you hope to see one day?”
I roll on my back and glance at another picture of Lexi, one where I have my arms around her in a tight embrace. She’s in a red prom dress and I’m wearing a black tux. It was taken only a few weeks before the accident. “I hate seeing anything, because it makes me feel guilty that I’m… not having a future… with her…” I get really unnerved as the topic drifts toward Lexi. In a way it makes me feel like I’m almost cheating on Lexi by talking to Nova about her, yet I feel guilty talking to Nova about my old girlfriend because I’m sure she doesn’t really want to hear about her. It’s very confusing.
“Do you think she’d want you to have a future still?” she asks in a tentative voice.
That wasn’t what I was expecting. “I’m not sure…” My thoughts wander to that night she died and begged me not to forget her. “There’s actually something that happened… that night of the accident that makes me think she might not have wanted me to.”
“What was that?” she asks, then quickly adds, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
I’ve been asked by my therapists several times to talk about that night. What happened. How I felt. I always refused to give details, but with Nova, I feel like I can finally talk about it. Maybe because I know she’s seen things like I have. Death. Or maybe it’s that over the last couple of months I’ve come to trust her.
“She asked me to promise her that I wouldn’t ever forget her… when she was dying… and I did…” My voice is so strained and so quiet I’m not certain Nova even hears me. I wish I couldn’t hear me, because as soon as I say it, I want to take it back. But I can’t. It’s as permanent as the scar on my chest.
Nova is silent, probably trying to figure out how to respond to such an alarming statement. I feel bad for putting her in such a position, letting horrible secrets like that slip out that no one wants to hear about. I’m about to tell her that I should probably go, when she finally speaks.
“You don’t have to forget her to move forward in your life,” she says. “You can still remember her. And I’m sure you will, without even trying. In fact, I think it’s impossible to forget about someone that you loved once. They always stay with you.”
“But you know what happened with me… you know that I was the one driving during the accident.” I’ve never wanted a hit more badly than I do right now. The idea of sniffing, injecting, hell I’d go for inhaling, anything that could distance me from my emotions, sounds amazing right now.
“I know what I read from the newspaper.” Her voice is so soothing that it’s making my heart stay steady despite how much it wants to speed up. “But it doesn’t mean I understand what happened. I know from experience that hearing about stuff is way different from the actual experience.”
I think she’s trying to press me to tell her, but I can’t. There’s no way I can tell her the details of that night. What went on. How responsible I am for the lives lost that night. What exactly happened. Knowing Nova, she’ll definitely tell me that it wasn’t my fault when she hears everything, but that’s not what I need from her right now. I just need her. The sound of her voice. The image of her in my head.
“I can’t,” I whisper, feeling strangled. “It’s too hard to talk about.”
Her soft breathing flows from the other end and I match my own to the rhythm because it helps me to breathe through the weight bearing down on every inch of my body, helps keep me afloat even though I feel like I’m on the verge of drowning.
“Do you know what Landon and I were doing the night he took his life?” she asks. “We were lying in his backyard stargazing. And it seemed like such a perfect night, except for one thing… something Landon said to me that just didn’t sit right with me, yet I wouldn’t press him to talk about it.”
“You can’t force people to talk about things they don’t want to.” I’m not really sure if I’m referring to Landon or myself.
“Yeah, but I should have tried harder,” she insists. “He’d always say these things to me… these dark, disturbing things that still haunt me to this day because most of the time I’d just shrug them off, too worried that he’d like break up with me or something if I pushed him too far.”
“Nova, what happened wasn’t your fault.” I attempt to comfort her, but I’m not sure how good a job I’m doing. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“He said, ‘Do you ever get the feeling that we are all just lost? Just roaming around the earth, waiting around to die?’ ” Her voice trembles at the end and she takes a moment to pull herself together. “It was one of the last things I heard him say before we fell asleep on the hill together. When I woke up, he was gone. I couldn’t figure out where he was, because it wasn’t like him to just leave me like that.” She laughs, but it sounds so warped and wrong, laced with pain and sadness. “Go figure, it ended up that he left me forever… something I found out a few minutes later when I found him in his room.”