Chapter 65

The second I got home I called Saphrin, crying still when she answered the phone. She sounded sleepy, even though it wasn't really late. She'd probably just been napping or something.

"Hello?" she yawned. Hearing her voice filled me with relief, but only made me cry more. Saphrin- my therapist. Saphrin- my best friend. She was so far away; I felt like a child. "Oh my God," she said when she heard me. "Kane? Oh my God.  What's wrong?"

Her alarm made me cry harder. I fell down onto the couch in the living room, my arm over my eyes, trying to talk. "Saphrin," I whimpered.

"Kane? Kane, what happened?"

"Saphrin," I said again. She was talking really fast, trying to consol me, trying to get me to tell her what the hell was wrong. I couldn't talk, too strangled by desolation to talk, to do anything but mumble her name over and over. Finally, after probably scaring the hell out of her, I managed:

"I don't want to be alone…"

I meant it in more ways than one. Saphrin took the most obvious meaning, which was sincere on my part.

"Come to New Jersey," she told me. "Kane, just calm down, clean yourself up, and get to the airport. Please. You can stay here if you want to, just come," she begged. I was nodding my head but didn't say anything for another few minutes. She asked if I would be okay until I got there- that was the extent of our conversation. I called a taxi minutes after, then went in the bathroom to splash water on my face, trying to calm down. I packed a bag, just filled it with some clothes, grabbed my wallet and then went downstairs to wait. The rain had gotten harder, was pouring and beating against the windows. I had gotten wet in the cemetery, my hair had not dried yet, but it was nothing compared to this downpour.

There was a courtyard in front of the building, three separate sections of the apartments, with three separate entranceways. They were all connected in the basement, but from the ground were only the three entrances to the U shaped building. Each entrance had its own walkway, they intersected in the middle to form a little triangle patch of land. In that was the tree.

It was a pine tree, Mike told me it had been planted the same year Amber was born- 1973, the year they'd opened the building. It was grown now, not huge, but not the sapling it must've been back then.

"I don't want to be alone…" it was more than the message Saphrin had perceived. I didn't want to be alone then, true…but I didn't want to be alone- period. I feared living without Amber, I felt alone without her and didn't like being that way. I didn't want to be alone, especially not then, after I knew what it was like to have someone. Had it been a few years ago when I was always miserable, that would've been completely different. But now…I'd known what it was like to love someone, to have a family, to live.

The taxi got there about a half hour later, when I was sitting on the stairs. Seeing it pull up had kind of startled me. I got out to the cab quickly, running across the courtyard to keep from getting too wet. I mostly ignored the driver, he extended me the same regard, would narrow his eyes at me in the rearview mirror now and then but that was it. My mind was still on the cemetery when I got the airport, still thinking about Amber while I was going through security and buying a ticket and even on the plane.

Riding the plane during the storm made me nervous, it usually did. I hated that. Once we were up in the air I was watching the storm from the other side of the clouds, seeing lightening in a little tangle off in the distance, getting smaller and smaller. We landed in New Jersey around ten at night, I called a cab when we were on the ground to bring me to Saph's. The whole ride there was a blur.

Immediately when I arrived she took me inside, threw her arms around me and hugged me and I started to cry again. We sat down on the couch, she left me there for a moment and went into the kitchen, coming back with a mug of hot chocolate. She rubbed my shoulder as she handed it to me.

"I made this a few minutes ago, just for you," she said. My hands shook as I took it from her, the mug dwarfed in my hands. My eyes hurt, the wounds on my arms that had since mostly healed started to sting again. Now and then, when I thought about what happened, everything would just be sore. Just then they were doing that, as Saphrin gripped the bicep on my unscarred arm, as I tried to drink the chocolate that she'd given me.

I didn't say anything, just breathed, sipped the chocolate. It had this severe calming effect, warm, spreading through my stomach, up into my chest and then my arms. I drank about half of it, then lowered my hands into my lap, looking down and away from her. I could still feel her hand on my, rubbing my shoulder now.

"How did you know this would work?" I asked quietly. Saphrin sighed.

"Ohhh, Kane," she took her hand off me and leaned down, leaned her head against me. God, she was smart. Perhaps my knowledge of what she was doing was taking away from the subliminal comfort, but I was able to calm down for her. She was leaning against me, knew that the human contact itself would make me feel better. "You're so silly. Don't you know that hot chocolate is the best medicine? Ever?"

I laughed a little, stared down into the shades of brown that swirled around in the mug. "Now I do."

She didn't ask about what happened, prompting me not to talk about it. I drank the rest of it, rubbed my eyes on my shirtsleeve. She laughed a little, too, and touched my arm again.

"You're all ripped again," she observed softly.

"Yeah, I got tired of not fitting in any of my clothes…passes time, too. It's probably not that healthy for someone like me to be bored, you know?" I tried to crack a smile, tried to make it kind of a joke, but I couldn't bring myself to laugh. Saphrin didn't, either, but when I looked up to see her I saw this…light. In her eyes. The smile on her face flickered like a dying florescent bulb, twitching for its life.

"Your arms were always one of your best features," she said to me. Something tightened in my stomach, looking down at the scar tissue over my right hand, creeping up around my wrist, crawling up on my fingers. The doctors said I was lucky that I hadn't been degloved. Thinking about that made me, me, squeamish. So now one of my best features, as she called it, was ruined. Perfect.

"'One of'?" I asked her. "I have more than one?" I was smiling, trying so fucking hard to make everything okay. She laughed, sat back and shoved me a little.

"You egotist," she accused. We both knew it wasn't true, but this was almost a game by now. She said things that she was supposed to say, I pretended that they meant something to me. If either of us ever admitted that it wasn't real, if we ever admitted that we knew the other one was just playing a role, we'd have nothing. "You know you're beautiful. You have great arms, great hair…" she trailed off. Her gaze set on mine. "Beautiful eyes…"

I realized what was going on and turned away from her, putting the mug down on a table beside the couch, leaning my elbows on me knees and tangling my fingers into my hair. "Don't do this to me," I said under my breath.  Saphrin stood up, grabbed the mug off the table and disappeared into the kitchen. My scalp burned from me tugging at my hair, it took me a moment to work up the nerve to follow her. When I walked into the kitchen I saw her leaning against the counter, her hands gripping the edge, her hair in her face. I bit my lip.

"Sorry…" I said to her. I hadn't noticed before the way her midsection had filled out, the prominence of the pregnancy had taken form. "Listen…can we just talk?" even I heard the desperation in my voice. "Please? That's all I really want from you, I just need someone to talk to…"

She smiled up at me. "Of course we can talk, duckiebunches," she took me by the hand and led me back into the living room, through there and into the guest room, where she'd already set up a bed for me. There was an electric blanket over it, which she turned off once we entered, just made it so that the bed was warm. She acted like everything was so breezy, I kind of envied it. "Sorry about me spacing out," she said. "I haven't really been myself lately…" she placed a hand on her unborn child. Five months along, not a huge kid or anything, but you could tell. 

I shrugged. The bed was in the corner, she was leaning against the wall at the foot of the bed, I had my legs crossed in front of me at the head. She reached over, put her hand on my knee. Squeezed. I looked away from her.

"So you wanna tell me what happened?"

My head snapped up, I must've made some shocked little sound. It surprised me, since she never usually pressed me like that. My mouth hung open. "Umm…"

"Kane, it's okay, you're here, you're with me, I have plenty more hot chocolate…" she rubbed my thigh, moved over to sit closer to me, took my hands, holding the scarred one without hesitation. That made me feel more comfortable around her, instilled me to remember that she was my friend. She smiled, an unwavering stare on me. It wasn't menacing or anything but kind of scared me. As similar as our minds worked, she was really unreadable sometimes.

"What needs to happen?" I asked her, looking away, staring at her hands. It was like she had magic powers or something, willing me to yield to her questions. One of her hands pulled away, they were like magnets to my legs or something. She gripped what she could, obviously couldn't reach her hand around my thigh. I groaned, my head fell back against the headboard. I closed my eyes, all I could see was Amber.

"…Kane?"

Maybe I hadn't realized how long the pause had gone on. I opened my eyes, felt chills to see Saphrin there as if I'd felt her hand on me and expected to see Amber. My eyes started watering and her face filled with concern. "It's strange…" I finally told her. My voice cracked.

"What?"

I bit my lip, I could feel my hands shaking. "Just…that she's gone. I mean, when you really think about it…when you step outside yourself and think about it…it's just weird. Do you know what I mean?"

She nodded. "Yeah, I guess. Like, we're never…never going to see her again…" we were depressing each other. Staring at each other. Torturing each other.

Each of us wanted something that we couldn't have. That was the bottom line.

"It's almost the same feeling as having a child," she added, hesitantly. Before I could get stung by the comment, she fondled my leg again. "I know what you mean though. Death is a strange thing…it's like, this one time over the summer, I was all alone in the house with Evan…and I was watching Halloween VI, and I figured: 'Hey, Amber would like this. Maybe I'll give her a call…' and then…. It's so natural to think that she's around…when you remember that she isn't, even if it's been a while, it's fucked up. Cause I guess, when you're not thinking about what happened, it's just easy to think that she's still here…"

The room was stiflingly silent. I tensed. "What happened? That day with the movie. What happened after you remembered?"

Save for the few times I'd seen her crying, she'd always seemed so relaxed. Just then, even, she leaned back, tapped her fingers against her stomach, narrowed her eyes a  little. It seemed like a cigarette could've been there, which would've completed that laid-back image of hers.

"I cried," she said simply, shrugging her shoulders. "What else is there to do about it?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing," she repeated. Her arms reached up, over her head to stretch. She shifted and laid down over me, so that her head rested against my chest, so that she was practically in my lap. I didn't know why she was doing this, but didn't have the energy to argue, so wrapped my arms around her, rested my hands on top of hers on the womb.

"Any names?" I asked after a while. I felt a little screwed over by nature sometimes, thought about how it wasn't fair that I was huge and strong and seven feet tall…when I was depressed I wondered why I couldn't be little, like Spike Dudley or Jeff Hardy, someone who could be comforted by another person. When I was in good spirits I was really proud of my size, but I suppose when you feel that depressed and insignificant, you wish you were as small as you felt.

I think perhaps this was another one of Saphrin's tricks, kind of showing me that it was just as comforting to hold someone else.

"A boy…I dunno. I'll ask Raven. But a girl…Astra Lynn? I like that one, it'll be fun."

"Fun," I echoed. She turned her head, twisting a little to look at me.

"Cheer up, Kane," she said. My hands suddenly felt burning on hers, I wanted to get away from her…but something made me stay. My masochism, my bravery, my will to do anything about it faded thin from all this abuse I'd taken in. "You want more hot chocolate?"

"No…" I felt so tired. Not like I wanted to sleep. Just…tired. "What am I supposed to do with myself, anyway?" I asked her.

"Well…you got ripped again. Does that mean anything?"

"How?"

"Like…personally? Does it make you feel better that you rebuilt your body? That takes a lot of work, you know."

"Yeah, I know…obviously…"

She turned away, laid back down on me, shifted her hands so that hers were on top of mine, squeezing them. "Well…? Does that make you feel better, that's kind of doing something with yourself, right?"

I groaned. "Not really. I don't know…I need like a job or something. I don't need any money, I just need something to do. Working out is like…it's like breathing, for me. I like being in shape, you know? I don't feel proud that I fixed myself up, I just felt overly disgusted that I'd gotten all thin."

"So go get a job," she told me. I couldn't respond to that.

After a while I started to doze off, the exhaustion I'd gone through all that day weighing heavily on me. Saphrin stayed where she was, curled on her side a little next to me, wrapping her arms around me. I was too tired to protest. As I started falling asleep I remember saying "Won't Raven be mad at us?"

And she said: "No."

I woke up the next morning with her still on the bed, on the other side of it, minding her business. The house was really warm, comforting. I stretched and got up, left the room, tried to be quiet and not disturb her. I checked in on Evan, too, for no real reason, he was still sleeping and was fine.

Everything was really quiet, very calm as I passed through the kitchen and went into the living room, as I sat down on the couch and held my head in my hands. The cordless phone was on the table next to the couch, where I'd put down the mug the night before. I picked it up, stared at it in my hands for a while.

Saphrin was still sleeping. So was Evan. I didn't know where Sugarbear was. Basically I was alone to think about this. It was a big step.

With my opposite hand I reached up and touched the unscarred arm, ran it up over my elbow and bicep, up to my shoulder. It felt good to have all the muscle filled back in. Maybe Saphrin was right, maybe I should've been happy that I'd improved myself. Maybe…

I closed my eyes, drawing in a deep breath, feeling the phone in my right hand. The nerves were bursting all through my body, made my hands tremble when I finally opened my eyes and turned the phone on.

And dialed.

And put it to my ear.

And waited.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Hey, this is Kane…" I said.

"Kane? Oh, hey. What's going on?"

"Vince…? I want to come back."