Author's Note: Not much to say. Thanks to all who keep reading this.
I.
She doesn't know where she is…but it doesn't matter, so she lets herself keep drifting. The nothing is everywhere around her, buoying her effortlessly, and it's so comforting she keeps letting it carry her wherever. She feels light as moonlight, clouds floating through her blood.
The longer she floats, the more things start to take shape. Above her there is nothing but sky – and beyond that, nothing but galaxy, endless sprawling blackness. Birds fly beneath her, clouds rush under like rapids, and she keeps going higher, higher, higher, until she's sailing among the stars.
The constellations spin around her, the stars glowing and dancing, sometimes coming close enough for her to touch. There's one that falls into her hands, and it shimmers on her skin. She holds onto it, trying to keep it from burning out, but before she can cup the light in her palms it falls to earth, and she's left watches it smear the sky with its memory, until the little star drops away from view.
Then she feels the hand in hers, and the sudden heaviness of it pulls her down, like the nursery rhyme and the cradle that falls.
It feels warm around her skin…and she suddenly feels cold, so, so cold. The hand holding hers is strong and warm, cupping her fingers and rubbing a thumb over her wrist. It's a safe feeling, and familiar.
Cam, she remembers blearily.
She tries to make her fingers move – grab his hand back, lace their fingers together like they do in the halls, slip it into her back pocket and let them walk intertwined. But her fingers stubbornly won't.
Still, the hand keeps holding on.
She blinks.
The room is too bright for her to keep her eyes open, and before she gets a good look around her, they slip shut and she can't get them open again. But she sees him sitting there – a dark, solid shape of broad shoulders and lanky limbs, rumpled clothes and shaggy hair swooping in his face, the slick sweat of his palm as it doesn't let go.
Cam, she thinks. She tries as hard as she can to picture him at her side, as if he can actually hear her. Where am I?
II.
"He doesn't look like you."
He doesn't know why he tells her that; it slips out, and as soon as it comes out he wishes he could take it back, because he can tell Vanessa's pissed.
She bristles. "What are you talking about?"
Dallas stares at Jayden, wrapped in a green blanket with dinosaur prints, thumb corked in his mouth and hair crazily poofing all over the pillow like a black cloud.
He wants to lean closer to Jayden. He's so still, so quiet. Dallas wants to put his hand to the little boy's mouth, check to make sure he's still breathing. But he just stands over his still little body and stares, blank.
Vanessa grabs his arm and pulls him outside, into the hallway. She clicks the door shut quietly behind her before rounding on him, her face drawn and angry.
"You show up here in the middle of the night smelling like beer and you want to see Jayden? I don't think so. Get lost."
"I didn't come here to see him," Dallas says.
"Then why are you here?" she hisses.
Dallas looks at the closed door, then back at her, in her sweatpants and tank top, hair wild and eyes ringed with dark shadows. Maya Matlin's skin was turning blue when they loaded her in the ambulance, her eyes like bruises in the middle of a sallow, sunken face. Zig Novak had kept screaming at her, kept shaking her shoulders, until the EMTs shoved him away so they could work on her.
Dallas held him back.
"Mike?"
He looks up at her, and for a second looks like she might care.
She makes a move as if she's going to touch him, but draws her hand back to her side, and instead folds her arms over her chest.
"What happened?" she asks quietly.
Dallas looks at his shoes. They're covered in mud and wet grass; it was raining when he followed the stretcher outside of the house. He stood in the middle of the driveway littered with empty Solo cups and broken beer bottles, watching the ambulance disappear while the light still glowed through the stormy night, the sirens screaming and hollering long after it had vanished into the darkness.
His throat tightens, and he has to close his eyes, but he still sees
(black blood on the concrete –)
the girl's pale face, her still chest. And she was so, so cold.
"I messed up, Vee," he mutters. "I messed up."
Vanessa reaches up, and this time, she puts a hand on his arm, tugging him forward.
"You're soaking wet," she mumbles. "Come on, you're freezing out here."
She gestures to the hotel room, and he follows her inside.
III.
A gasp.
"Maya?"
Hands on her face, warm and slick and shaking. Not like Cam's – they're too small, too supple, too delicate. They feel too warm on her skin, but they brush her cheeks, the undersides of her eyes, her forehead. It makes her skin feel stretchy, like she's wearing a rubber mask for a face instead of a face.
Where did her face go?
"Maya? Can you hear me? Maya?"
Something wet and sturdy presses against her; breath on her skin that tickles and smells sour. She tries to wrinkle her nose, but the mask face won't move.
She wants to open the mask eyes, but nothing. Her eyes are still too heavy to open.
Easier to keep them close. Can float off that way, go somewhere else, back among the stars to catch their light. Not here. Too heavy here…
"Maya?"
"Katie, shh, come on, okay; give her some air."
"She moved, I know she did!"
A pause. "Katie…"
"She did!" A wet, strangled sob, first loud then muffled. "She moved, I saw it!"
Maya's still drifting, but her sister's voice is strong and clear. She doesn't want to focus on it, but it's bringing her back to earth, anchoring her in place.
Her eyes open, slowly.
White everywhere. It's too bright, and it makes her close her eyes again. She only gets the faintest impression of two figures, one dark-headed and the other taller, standing in front of her while they speak.
The shorter figure turns around and is suddenly on top of her again, pressing its face to hers.
"Maya!" Katie's voice is clear and sharp, and, Maya can hear it now, full of tears and panic. "Oh god, please look at me, sweetie, please."
"Easy," the other voice says. The taller figure. Louder and soothing.
Not Cam, she notices.
No, not Cam…
Jake.
Jake. He's here.
Why is he?
Better question – why the hell is Katie here?
Where the hell is here, anyway?
Maya tries to sit up, but she still can't even wiggle her fingers. She tries to take a breath, and instead feels something in the base of her throat. It would make her gag, if she could.
"Maybe I should call a doctor…"
Doctor?
"Katie, it was probably just a reflex…"
"No! I saw her! I just…I'll get a nurse…"
"Okay, hold on. Look, you stay with her. I'll go get the nurse. Just…stay here, okay?"
Wait, Maya thinks. Don't leave me. Tell me what's going on!
She wants to thrash, but finds she still can't even move her fingers. Panic wells up in her, and she feels like she might explode.
Focusing all of her energy on Cam's hand clutching hers, she pictures the image in her mind, feels the shape of the bones and ridges in his hand, the map of his veins in his wrist, the lifelines trailing across his damp palm. Hands she knows as well as her own frozen ones.
This time, she forces her eyes to stay open, no matter how bright the lights are.
Katie is standing at her side, her shape dark and blurry but getting closer to her as it descends on top of her.
"Maya!" Her sister is crying so hard she's half-gasping for breath, and Maya really registers her tone this time. Katie sounds so troubled and frantic that it makes her stomach hurt. The last time Katie cried like that was the day Drew broke up with her.
Her sister's hands press against her cheeks, and Katie bends their heads together to kiss her forehead.
"Oh god," her sister sobs, her arms slipping around Maya's shoulders. "Oh god, you scared me so much. Don't ever do that again! Don't!"
"Katie."
Jake's voice again. She can see his smudged outline, too, a blur of red and brown and gold, and as he comes closer into view she can see dark circles under his eyes, the tightness of his features.
Jake's hand comes to her sister's shoulder. "Katie, give her some air."
Katie ignores him.
She hears Jake sigh. "I'll go get your parents, okay?"
Before he leaves, he bends down close to her face. She can see the exhaustion in his eyes clearly now, along with the worry, and the…fear?
His hand comes to her forehead, and just rests there for a moment. It's rough and calloused, but he's surprisingly gentle.
"Welcome back, sweetheart," he murmurs, as he brushes the hair from her eyes.
Katie is still hanging onto her, her weight a solid presence at Maya's side. It takes her a second to realize that the reason Katie is hovering above her is because she's lying down…and she's in a bed, and it's not her own.
Cam.
The hand holding hers. It's still holding it, but hanging on tightly, like she might disappear again if he lets go.
IV.
"They're still a little damp," Vanessa says, as she hands him the folded bundle of his warm-up pants and Ice Hounds windbreaker, "but that's all the quarters I had for the dryer."
He takes them anyway, trying not to wrinkle his nose at their mildewy smell. "Thanks," he mumbles.
Vanessa nods, shutting the bathroom door behind him as he slips back into his clothes. One forty-minute shower and nearly all the hot water later, he's finally stopped shivering, but his teeth are still chattering. He wipes away a part of the fogged-up mirror, sees the drawn look to his skin, and takes a deep breath, grinding his teeth together to make them stop.
Vanessa is sitting on the edge of Jayden's bed when he steps out of the bathroom, brushing the little boy's wild hair away from his sleeping face. She looks up at him, then looks back down to Jayden.
"Feeling warmer?" she whispers.
He nods. Thinks about taking the seat beside her, then decides to sit on the opposite bed instead.
Vanessa touches her fingers to Jayden's cheek. He shifts in the bed, and they both hold their breaths, hoping he won't wake, but he just turns over. Dallas watches his toddler belly pulsing as he breathes in and out, in and out, safe and steady.
"So," she says after a long moment of just watching Jayden, "I'm assuming you didn't just walk across half the city in the middle of the night to get a warm shower."
He stares at his hands in his lap.
"Mike." Vanessa looks up at him sharply. "Tell me what happened, or I'll call your billet parents. I don't think they want to come all the way out here at two in the morning."
The seat underneath him on the bed is starting to feel wet from his clothes.
"You remember he had green eyes, when he was born?" he says finally
Her eyes widen. "What?"
He looks at Jayden breathe again, and Vanessa sighs.
"Okay," she says. "You should really leave. I'll call a cab, if you need it, but you need to go home. You seriously can't be around him like this."
Dallas looks over at Jayden, curled like a comma in the darkness, barely an arm's length away.
"I screwed up," he mumbles.
She shakes her head, tapping her foot against the ground.
"You told me," Vanessa says. "So skip to the part where you tell me how."
He can't see her face very well in the shadows, but he knows she's scowling.
"What are you going to tell him about the adoption?" he says finally. "Are you really gonna just…give him up?"
He doesn't need to see her to feel the tension rolling off of her.
"Okay," she says. "Get out. I mean it. I can't deal with you, so get out."
"But you'd really just let go of him." The words come out a cold whisper.
"You walked all the way here for this?" Vanessa stands up and walks away from him, arms tense and swinging at her sides. "Alright, first of all, fuck you. Second of all, you're drunk and need to leave. And third, you lecture me about leaving?"
She glares at him, eyes hard and silver fury in the moonlight. "Better for him to have no dad then one who lets him go."
Dallas turns away from her; there's a hand at his throat, and its tight and unforgiving.
"I know," he murmurs, hanging his head. "You're right. I failed him. I failed and I let go."
Vanessa is standing over him, hands on her hips. Her face shifts to surprise, as tears slip down his own.
"I let," he stutters, then gasps. It's a deep, collapsing sound, and he puts an arm over his mouth to block the sound.
"I almost had him," he chokes out. "And then he wasn't…"
Vanessa frowns. "What are you talking about?"
Dallas looks up at her.
"I let go," he tells her. "I let go, and I shouldn't have, but I couldn't hold him anymore, and it's my fault…"
The last part comes out a strangled sob, and he doubles over in tears.
"It's my fault," he hears himself say, like he's going through a tunnel way too fast.
"Mommy?"
Vanessa turns around. Jayden is sitting up in bed, sucking his thumb. He takes it out of his mouth when he sees the two of them, and his own eyes fill with tears.
"Mommy?" he repeats weepily, reaching out for her. "Mommy!"
Vanessa sighs, then turns to him. She takes the boy into her arms and rocks him quietly, shushing his cries into her shoulder.
"It's okay," she whispers. "Shhh, shhh, baby, it's okay, it's okay, everything's okay, shh…"
Dallas sits on the edge of the bed, hands shaking in his lap, and watches Vanessa hush him until Jayden's tears peter off to a soft whimper. He watches her rock him slowly, hands wrapped around his head and lips pressed to his damp forehead, and lets his own eyes drift shut as he buries his head in his hands.
V.
It takes every effort she has to open her eyes again, but she forces it to happen.
There's a thin, shaggy-haired shape at the end of her bed, the side of the hand that's gripping hers so tightly. She can see the shape of Him so clearly, and no matter how much the haze of sleep wants to suck her under she keeps her eyes open.
Cam, she thinks, trying to make her uncooperative body at least twitch in response. It's like she's made out of concrete. But she squeezes His hand back, and finds she CAN make her fingers move, so she squeezes again, and again, and makes her fingers close around his. He's here, and He's never let go of her.
Her sister's voice again, but it sounds like from far off. She tries not to notice it, just focuses on clutching His hand.
Her vision is still blurry, but the hand tightens around hers, pulling it into a fist. He leans closer, and she can smell the grass stains on His clothes, the sweat rolling off Him, and smoke, He smells like smoke, and
– when Zig bends closer down to her, says her name and grabs her with both his hands, she lets her eyes close. It all comes back to her, and this time, she doesn't fight the heaviness pulling her down.
VI.
Jayden won't go back to sleep, so Vanessa has to order a movie on Pay-Per-View to keep him occupied. While he sits mesmerized by talking cartoon monkeys, eating some dinosaur-shaped gummies and sitting in Dallas's lap, Vanessa listens.
"That kid on the roof?" she says.
Dallas nods. He picks at a frayed thread in the brownish-greenish-pukey colored comforter and doesn't meet her eyes.
"I did it," he says quietly.
Vanessa's brow furrows. "I thought he jumped."
"But I made him do it," he says.
She just shakes her head.
"How?" she demands. "I saw it on the news – the kid killed himself."
Dallas's hands twitch. Jayden shifts in his lap, trying to get comfortable, and he arches his back up against the headboard. He's more exhausted than he can ever remember being, but he can't seem to close his eyes.
Jayden turns to look at him. "No move," he scolds.
Vanessa half-smiles.
Dallas ruffles Jayden's hair. "Sorry, bud."
When Jayden's absorbed in his movie, Vanessa murmurs, "what do you mean, you made him do it?"
He waits a moment before answering, focusing on the TV screen, listening to the chime and bounce of a sing-a-long. His eyes follow the little icon above the lyrics scrolling at the bottom of the screen, tapping each word of the melody.
"That day…" Dallas says, then stops. Rubs a hand over his eyes. "That morning. I yelled at him. I called him selfish and said it was his fault we lost the playoffs, and said he was failing everyone and he screwed everything up –"
He takes a deep breath.
"It's my fault," he whispers. "I yelled at him, and then he killed himself."
Vanessa looks away from him, and Dallas wonders if she's disgusted. Or scared. Or just morbidly curious. He wonders if she'll start looking at him the way everyone at school does, the way the team does when his back is turned in the locker room – like he's covered in blood and bits of broken glass, and holding a dead body in his arms.
Then she shakes her head again.
"People don't just wake up one day and decide to kill themselves," she says. "He probably had a lot of problems before he met you."
"That doesn't mean I didn't make him jump," Dallas argues.
"Do you really think that all it took was Mike Dallas being in a bad mood for a kid to jump off a rooftop?" Vanessa replies. "Whatever this was, it wasn't all about you. He probably had, you know, like a mental problem. Depression, or, I don't know, something like that. But whatever it was, that's probably what made him do it."
"He had food in his locker," Dallas says, and he turns cold again at the thought of it. Remembering cleaning out Cam's locker, seeing the moldy crusts of a lunch long forgotten, abandoned to rot away. "When I cleaned it out, I found lunch leftovers."
Vanessa raises her eyebrows. "So?"
"So," Dallas says, "people don't save leftovers if they're gonna off themselves later that day. Otherwise, what's the point in saving them."
He bites his lip, but doesn't feel any tears coming. Maybe he's just all cried out, at this point.
"He wasn't planning on doing it that day," Dallas says. "And then I yelled at him."
"No, come on, that's just stupid!" Vanessa says. She slides up closer to him until she's almost right in his face. "Just because he didn't plan on doing it that day doesn't mean he wasn't gonna do it the next. Or the week after, or next month. You getting mad at him over a hockey game isn't what made him do it. If not you, it would have been something else, and somebody else would be saying it's their fault the kid died."
"But he didn't just die," Dallas snaps. "He killed himself!"
She looks at him for a long moment, then takes a hand and squeezes his knee.
"Mike," she says finally, "a kid who kills himself after a bad hockey game has bigger issues than you. Okay?"
"I could have…" Dallas begins, then turns away.
Could have what? Saved Cam? Stopped Him? Made Him come down from the roof, apologized, gotten Him help? Sent Him home in a train, instead of a coffin?
He'd been there, right before. Burst onto the rooftop a full ten seconds before Cam took that leap. Froze in place, his voice along with it. Saw the boy turn to him, slowly.
Saw his little face crumbled, his eyes blank, his arms outstretched in his red hockey jacket, poised for flight.
He would later think about how those ten seconds seemed like ten years. Everything stopped moving, and they just stood there, a few steps away from each other, and just stared.
It didn't occur to him then – and he can never imagine why – to scream for help, or try to talk him down. Not even to say, stop. Just to stare, watching the light frame him as he stood on the ledge, arms stretched out and head tilted straight up towards the sky.
Then he flew. Crouched and leapt, straight for the clouds like a bird dipping his wings towards the sun. He seemed to really hover there, like he might be floating, and it was only when Dallas heard a scream from below shatter that impossible stillness that he finally moved. And then he ran, sprinted, threw his arms out and grabbed at nothing and desperately reached for something –
And caught nothing except empty air, until he ran to the edge and saw the
(black blood on the concrete – )
body, twisted and crumpled and centered in a pooling stain of –
"I was too late," he mumbles. He closes his eyes and wonders if Maya Matlin will wake up. "I couldn't do anything."
Vanessa sighs. After a beat, she slides up next to him, brushing her shoulder to his, and squeezes his hand tight.
"And there's nothing you can do about it," she says quietly.
VII.
When she wakes up, Katie is fast asleep with Jake's arms around her, the two of them slumped into hard-backed chairs and his plaid shirt is draped over her shoulders. Her mom is sitting in the corner, legs covered by Dad's jacket, and Dad is nowhere to be seen.
It takes a colossal effort to make her head roll to one side, but she does, and she sees Zig's still there. Still with his hand in hers, except he looks ready to pass out himself. He's staring at the TV mounted into the wall. It's turned on silent, with closed captions she can't make out running across the bottom of the screen, and some guy in a police uniform chasing a guy down a flight of stairs.
When he sees her turn to him, he startles, and wipes the sleep from his baggy eyes.
"Do you want your mom?" he asks. "I think your dad went to get something from the vending machine."
She tries to open her mouth, but then remembers there's something stuck in it. She looks down and is only a little freaked to see a tube sticking out of her throat, snaking across her chest and all the way to one of the many beeping, clicking, blinking machines at her bedside. There's also a ton of other needles sticking out of her, and tons of nodes stuck to her chest underneath a flimsy hospital gown.
Zig follows her gaze.
"Yeah," he says, like he understands. "You…um, you have a tube down your throat. They had to put it there cause…"
He shifts his shoulders and bites his lip. "Cause you weren't breathing," he says quietly.
He looks down at their intertwined hands for a moment, then squeezes hers tightly.
"Do you remember what happened?" he whispers. "Anything? The party, or what you did before?"
She tries to shake her head no, but it takes too much effort. Zig seems to understand anyway, though.
"It doesn't matter," he tells her. "You're gonna be fine now, all the doctors said."
She can't move, so she just closes her eyes. Even that's exhausting, and she doesn't know how she'll be able to open them again.
You don't get it, she wants to say.
She wants to sit up and take off all the nodes and cuffs and IVs sticking out of her, move and thrash and run and make noise and explain what happened. But she's trapped in this bed and can't even breathe right, and nobody saw what she saw when she first woke up.
She remembered what it felt like, and she'd felt it, pulling her back to the ground.
The hand in hers had been Cam's, because she didn't forget that, not yet. She remembers everything about the way He stood, smelled, the way His shoulders sloped and the way His hair mopped and the way His profile looked, but mostly it was the hand in hers.
Before He left her.
Again.
He came and He held her hand and He helped her come back, but then He left her, and now she's all alone again.
Why did He leave her?
Tears start slipping down her rubbery cheeks. They feel numb, like she's been shot with Novocain. She can't move to wipe them away, but Zig takes the sleeve of his hoodie and mops them off her face. He even wipes the snot away, keeping it from clogging her nose.
Maya knows she should probably be mortified beyond belief – like, "chicken boob falling out during WhisperHug audition" mortified – that she has to be wiped like a baby, but she can't find it in her to care about it. She lays still while Zig, gently and carefully and without a hint of weirdness or disgust, wipes the tears and spittle and snot right off her face. He doesn't even fuss when she can't seem to stop the sobbing; he just grabbing tissues from the table at her bedside, and keeps dabbing her dry.
The numbness on her cheeks is fading, but she wishes it would go across her entire body, because everything hurts, everywhere.
He brought her back only to leave her again, and it hurts so bad she closes her eyes and wishes for that free sensation again –when she'd been flying among the stars and drifting into the nothing, just flying and floating and fading to black.
