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Part IV: Chapter 7 - To Figure Where You're At
I spent the next week more or less hiding out. Hiding from my mother's incessant questions, from my brother's cheeky attempts at provocation. My sister, away at college and my father, chronically oblivious, thankfully did not contribute. But I hid away, waiting and hoping for the raw pain from Tegan's words and her absence to turn into a dull ache, waiting and hoping for my own guilt to dilute into something I could live with. I wondered how long that would take. I wondered if it was even possible. I wanted to know that I wouldn't forever be waking up in the morning with a few seconds of merciful forgetfulness, before the recollection flooded back that everything was done, that it was all gone, all destroyed. Because those mornings - and every day that followed them - made me not want to be alive anymore.
I registered for the next semester of classes, met with a couple of friends whose painful questions were just as hard to evade, and that was about it. Other than that, I hibernated, and tried to figure out if life would ever be worth living again.
That night, I was staring at my overflowing inbox and not knowing how to start when my mother's voice from the doorway drew my attention. Her words didn't register at first.
"Sorry?" I said, a little testy. I looked her expression, puzzled, almost suspicious.
"I think it's a little late for visitors but she looks just awful," my mother said, incongruously, inexplicably. She'd always had this habit of launching into things with no context and expecting people to follow.
"Visitors? What?" I asked, not in the mood to try to figure it out.
"A girl. Downstairs. With a bag and claiming to be this Tegan person you're always going on about." The jolt I got from hearing her name was enough to distract me from all the things that were wrong with what my mother had just said.
"Here?" I repeated, incredulous, because there was just no way. I got up and followed my mother down the hall and then down the stairs, all my insides twisted, my heart pounding painfully in my throat. There was nobody in the entrance hall. "Is she outside?" I asked, more incredulous still as I went to the door, my hands trembling. I wanted to run and hide.
"Well, I couldn't really believe she was who she said she was," my mother explained, huffily, and I gave her a look before turning the knob and opening the door. And there she was, on my front steps, shivering in her hoody. Messy hair, tired eyes, pale. My knees almost gave out as she looked at me and tried to smile, looking small and lost there with her weekend bag over her shoulder.
"Uh," she said, with a nervous edge in her voice, looking up at the lights along the edge of the roof. "Merry Christmas, I guess?" I nodded. I'd also forgotten it was almost Christmas time until I got home and saw the decorations. Seeing her there was so surreal that it jarred me, and I didn't know how to react. I would have hugged her under any other circumstances but my feet were frozen. She was a little hunched, her hands in her pockets, shivering. I couldn't look at her without hearing her last words to me in Berlin, without that sick wave hitting me
"You look like you're freezing. Come in," I said at last, swallowing the lump in my throat, stepping aside. She gave me a nervous, grateful half-smile and came in hesitantly.
"It's freezing here," she said as I closed the door.
"Is that all you brought? A hoody?"
"It never gets this cold in Vancouver," she said, glancing around the room. The situation was clearly making her as nervous as it was me. Neither of us knew what to say or do. It was hard to even make eye contact.
"Well, I'm sorry you missed dinner but I can make you a sandwich if you're hungry," my mother said, the generosity of her offer somewhat negated by the accusatory tone in her voice.
"Oh, no, thank you. I ate on the plane," Tegan replied. My mother regarded her skeptically for a moment while I stood there, searching my mind for an explanation for Tegan's sudden, jarring presence in my childhood home. My two lives - the dream one where she was real and the real one where she didn't really exist - were suddenly crashing together and my brain just couldn't understand.
"Can I make you some hot chocolate, then? Or tea? Jamie can show you to Megan's room."
"Oh, thank you so much, tea would be great," Tegan said awkwardly, and then my mother left us alone.
"Uh. . . well I'll. . . take you upstairs. . . ?" I said, awkward too as she followed me up the stairs. There was a quiet moment as we passed my room, my parents' in between, and then I led her into my sister's room. "You can, um. . . sleep here. My sister is away at college until the 22nd . .". I said, because what else could I say? It was so strange to see Tegan standing, anxiously, in the middle of my sister's room. I didn't know how to understand the presence of her image, so foreign, against a backdrop that was so familiar to me, so plain. It was like someone had done a very weird photoshop job in the middle of my life. She tentatively set her bag on the flowery bedspread as I stood by the door. I didn't know what to say, what to do, where to look. The mixture of emotions I felt just from seeing her were in such contrast to each other that I was just frozen. I could see that she didn't know what to say either, and the silence was unnerving me.
"So, I guess, um. . ." she started, looking at me and away again quickly, "you must wonder why I'm here, after. . ." She didn't finish. She looked at me again and I met her eyes and really, she looked so tired, so sad. She looked so sorry. But yes, I did wonder why she was there. Her last words to me had been I never want to see you again. I was bewildered, anxious, and her eyes made me ache. I didn't know why she was there because I didn't know who I was to her anymore. Were we friends? What kind of friends? Did she hate me or not? Did she blame me for all of it like I blamed myself? I was waiting for her to define the margins of what I'd lost, what I would still lose. It was up to her still, and I had no power, no say.
I nodded, with a little shrug. I wished I could say something but I couldn't arrange any of my feelings into a thought that made any sense. All of my guilt and the anxiety over seeing her again rendered me mute. She looked like she wanted to say something, too, but my mother arrived with two cups of tea.
"Will you help your friend get settled?" she asked me, handing the cups to us. I assured her that I would; Tegan thanked her; she left. After a moment of warming our hands on the teacups, Tegan sat on the edge of the bed and I sat at my sister's computer desk.
"So, uh. . ." Tegan started again, looking into her tea cup. "Sorry for just, uh. . . showing up like this but. . ." She trailed off, but I really wanted to hear what came next. My impulse was to help her, like I had before with the things she couldn't say, but this time I didn't know what came next either. I waited. She sighed, and I was surprised to see her eyes fill with tears as she sipped the tea. She was clearly struggling. I wanted to hear her words but I didn't, at the same time. I couldn't take any more words like I'd heard from her in Berlin, but I didn't suppose she'd flown all the way here just to tell me she hated me. But the pain on her face transmitted itself into my chest anyway.
"Tegan, are you okay?" I asked at last, concerned, but reserved. I'd never felt such a powerful conflict of emotions before. Her misery made me want to go to her; my memories of her words made me want to protect myself the way you would shy away from a hot stove that had burned you before. And my own guilt over the video made me wonder which way was best. "Did something. . . happen?" She looked at me, her eyes red already, still. Looked down at her cup again.
"I don't want to. . . I mean, you shouldn't feel. . .". she sighed wearily, hung her head a little.
"You look so tired. Did you really eat on the plane?" I asked her, and she shook her head. "When is the last time you ate?" She shook her head again, shrugged. "When was your last shower?" I asked, and she shook her head again. I wanted to hug her, to pull her close to me and never let her go again. I wanted to cry with relief that she was here, that she'd come to find me, when I'd thought that she hated me, that I didn't mean anything to her, that I would never see her again. Above everything else though, was the suffocating anxiety building in my chest because I couldn't do any of those things, didn't know what she wanted from me, didn't know how long I could hold my heart together with her sitting there so close. I wasn't ready for her, for any of this, and the urge that won out was to run. "Okay. I'll put a towel in the bathroom for you. We can talk in the morning. Okay?" She looked up at me, nodded, tried to smile.
"Okay," she said. I grabbed a towel from the hall closet and put it on the edge of the tub for her, went to my room, closed the door, and cried.
. . . . . . . . . . .
It was the third night in a row that I'd had that dream. I dreamt that I was down in front with the camera, as usual, when suddenly the barn sex video was projected onto a huge screen behind the girls. They stopped playing; there was an ominous silence, and then the crowd, fueled with bloodthirsty rage, knocked down the barriers, stormed the stage and attacked them. As the crazed fans tore them apart, Tegan's terrified eyes met mine and she cried, "Why, Jamie? I thought you loved me. . ." She cried why? again and again until her voice became the agonized screams of the dying, and at that point, on the previous two nights, I had been jerked awake, in terror. This time, though, softer, muffled sobs penetrated my sleep and seeped into the dream, incongruously. When I woke, the soft sounds continued and after a moment of disorientation, I looked down, to the floor next to my bed where the noises were coming from, and saw a dark shape lying there, trembling slightly. I lost my voice, said nothing for a long moment as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I was finally able to see, more clearly, Tegan's shape, on the rug next to my bed, covered with my sister's bedspread. Like in Vancouver, she clutched a pillow to her face to muffle her sobs, only this time, it was a pineapple pillow. It pricked my heart. The sorrow I always felt over Tegan's misery compelled me to speak when the unhealed wound from our last encounter tried to keep me quiet.
"Tegan. . ." I began, cautiously, my heart in my throat. "Are you okay?" I heard her breathing, trembling, before she spoke.
"Sorry, I didn't. . . I. . . I'm just. . . it's better in here. . ." she stammered, her voice thick with tears, and it squeezed my heart but I could do nothing. I was frozen in the memory of Berlin, stuck in the bog of my own guilt.
"Okay. . ." I said past all of that. "Are you cold?" There was a pause.
"No, I'm okay," she said, sniffling. "You should sleep." I didn't say anything. I lay there, torn, listening to her quietly crying, trying not to. I could only stand it for a few minutes.
"Tegan. . . what do you need?" She took a few deep, shaky breaths while I waited, filled with doubt, my heart aching with hers.
"Can you please hold me?" she asked at last in a small voice, her tone cautious, afraid of my response the way I was afraid of hers. After a few seconds of paralysis, I slipped out of my bed and got down on the floor with her, lifting her blanket and crawling under. As soon as I lay down in front of her, she slid over, close to me, one arm slipping around my waist. She clung to me, pressed her face into my chest as I put both arms around her, and after a deep breath, she just let go, as though it had been building up inside her for years. I had a momentary fear that this display of such abject misery would melt my reserve, and I still needed it. Nonetheless, I held her tight as she cried into my chest, trembling against me.
"Jamie," she cried into my t-shirt, "do you hate me?" Although the question was absurd, and she should have known it, it took me a moment to answer.
"Nothing could ever make me hate you, Tegan," I said softly, while her hands clutching at me, her warmth, the smell of her hair were all making me feel weak. Her tears were relentless.
"I'm sorry. . . I'm sorry, what I said to you. . . I'm sorry. . .". I wanted to kiss her face, touch her hair, tell her that I loved her, would always love her. I stopped myself. Or rather, this new, ugly fence between us stopped me.
"Don't worry about that now, okay? Not now. We can talk about it later," I said to her in what I hoped was a comforting and reassuring way. The whole thing was so confusing, my guts didn't know what to do.
"I'm sorry," she moaned, her anguish muffled against me, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. . .". She was crying so hard, I thought she might choke.
"Hey, shh. . . it's okay. I'm sorry too. We'll talk about it tomorrow, okay? No talking now." We didn't talk. I held her tighter, stroking her back. Like that first night in Vancouver, I was still awake, holding her small body to me, when her sobs subsided into silent weeping, and when the weeping became the deep, rhythmic breaths of sleep. My life was never going to be real.
