The Edge of Always (12 page)

When two more stalls become free, they jump at the opportunity and shut themselves inside. Soon after, they wave good-bye and wish me good luck with my “music career.” When I’m almost the only one left, I turn to the mirror, but I don’t look at myself. Instead, I reach into my pocket and take a pill, washing it down with water from the sink.

It’s just to take the edge off.

Then I look at myself, pushing the pill and the guilty feeling I get every time I take one, far into the back of my mind. I make up excuses to justify taking them, and I almost fool myself. But I know that the guilt I always feel is there for a reason.

In less than eleven minutes, I don’t care about the guilt, the excuses, or the edge anymore, because that part of my brain has been numbed.

I run my fingertips underneath my eyes to wipe away any smudged mascara, then blot the oil from my face with toilet paper. I have to look good when I go back out there. I feel great, but I have to look as good as I feel.

Pushing myself through the crowd, I find Aidan and Michelle standing behind the enormous bar and join them. I then remember Andrew was getting me a drink, but I’m not walking back through all of those people just to get it.

“You two are fantastic!” Michelle shouts over the noisy crowd. She hugs me, and I return it, feeling my pill-induced smile stretching hugely across my face.

I turn to Aidan. “What did you think?”

“I agree with Michelle!” he says. “You should write your own music and play here more often. I get all kinds of talent scouts in here. And celebrities.” He points to the back wall, where a series of autographed photos of various musicians and movie stars hang in an even line. “Get a head start with your own material,” he goes on. “I bet you two would easily land a music contract within a year.”

I’m so high right now that he could tell me he thinks we suck and have no future in music at all, and I’d still smile like this, letting his words go through me like air.

I look out across the length of the room to see Andrew up on the stage with his guitar and the house band getting ready to sing his trademark song, “Laugh, I Nearly Died.” He likely can’t see me through the crowd, but he knows I’m watching. I love to watch him onstage, in his element. I know that as good as we are together musically, he’ll always own it more when he performs alone. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to think of him the way he was the first time I saw him perform. Because on that night in New Orleans he was singing
for
me, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

I’d do anything to feel like that again. Anything…

Seconds into the song, Andrew, like always, has the attention of everyone in the room. The two girls at the table are standing up now, dancing with each other provocatively, but I know it’s all for Andrew. I’ve seen it before. They want him, and he lets them believe, just for one night, that he wants them, too. Perfectly harmless. Andrew and I both look at it as making other people feel good about themselves. A little flirting here and there, making some lucky girl or guy the center of attention just long enough to make them blush and smile. You never know what’s going on in people’s lives behind closed doors, and a little flirty, positive energy can never be a bad thing.

When we get back to Aidan and Michelle’s just after midnight, I head to bed before everyone else. I lay here for an hour, listening to their voices filter down the hallway and into the room. Andrew was going to come to bed with me, but I insisted he hang out with his brother. He worries about me way too much these days. We’ll be going back to Raleigh tomorrow, and I want him to spend as much time with Aidan as he can.

Another hour passes and I’m still awake.

Frustrated, I thrust my hand inside my purse, fishing for the bottle. Without even realizing it, I am now down to my last few pills.

I pass out on three this time.

“Camryn? Baby, please wake up.” I shake her back and forth, my hand gripping her shoulder.

My dominant emotion right now is worry. My secondary emotions are anger and hurt. But strangely enough, the feeling of uncertainty is keeping all of the others at bay.

I shake her again. “Get up.”

I have no idea how many of these fucking pills she took, but judging by the nearly empty bottle, the prospect of it being enough to overdose sends a panic through my entire body. But she’s breathing steadily and her heartbeat seems normal. If she doesn’t wake up—

Her eyes creep open, and I suck in a fast breath of relieved air. “Camryn. Look at me.”

Finally she focuses enough to look me in the eyes. “What?” she moans softly and tries to shut her eyes again, but I grab her by both shoulders and force her to sit up.

“I said wake up. Keep your eyes open.”

She sits up sloppily, but it’s nothing too out of the ordinary from having been forced awake and upright like that.

“How many did you take?”

Michelle stands in the doorway behind me. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

Suddenly, Camryn becomes completely coherent. I don’t know if my question has finally caught up with her, or if the mention of an ambulance is what did it, but she looks at me with wide, frightened eyes.

“How many of these goddamn pills did you
take
?”

Her gaze drops from mine, and she looks over to see the prescription bottle on the nightstand. When I decided that sleeping past two in the afternoon was not at all like her and came in here to check on her, I found the bottle on the floor

“Camryn?” I shake her again and get her attention back.

She just looks at me. I see so much in her eyes right now that I can’t choose between humiliation, regret, hurt, anger, or surrender. And then her eyes begin to fill with tears. I feel her body shaking underneath the weight of my grip on her arms. She bursts into tears, falling into my arms, sobbing uncontrollably, and it rips me in half.

“Andrew?” Michelle says from the door.

Without looking back at her, I say, “No, she’ll be all right.” And I swallow down my own tears and anger, feeling my chest constrict.

The door shuts quietly behind me as Michelle leaves the room.

I hold Camryn for a long time, letting her cry into my shirt. I don’t say a word. Not yet. Partly because I know she needs this, just to be able to cry and get it all out. But the rest of me is so fucking pissed off and hurt that I feel like I need to take a step back and gather my composure so I don’t say the wrong things. I hold her tight, wrapping my arms around her trembling body. I kiss her hair and try not to cry myself. The pissed-off part of me helps with that.

“I’m so sorry!” she cries out, and in that fraction of a second when I hear the pain in her voice, it almost completely erases the angry part of me and I grip her even tighter.

“You’re apologizing to
me
?” I ask with disbelief. I pull her away with my hands firmly around her upper arms. Shaking my head furiously at her, I go back to a few minutes ago. “No, first I need you to tell me how many you took.” I look her dead in the eyes.

“Last night,” she says. “Only three.”

“How many were in this bottle originally?”

“I don’t know. Twenty, maybe.”

“Then how long have you been taking them?”

She pauses and answers, “Just since Tuesday. They’re my mom’s. I took one when I had a headache, but then I started taking them…” Her eyes well up with moisture again.

I reach out and wipe the tears from her face. “God damn it, Camryn,” I say, pulling her into my chest again for a brief moment. “What the hell were you thinking?!”

“I wasn’t!” she cries. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

I grab her cheeks in the palms of my hands. “You
know
what’s wrong. You’re fucked up over losing Lily, and you don’t know how to deal with it. I just wish you would’ve talked to me.”

With her face still in my hands, her eyes stray from mine. The eerie silence between us strikes me in the strangest way.

“Camryn?” I try to get her to look at me again, but she won’t. “Talk to me. You have to talk to me. Listen, there’s nothing you did wrong, or could’ve done to prevent what happened. You have to know that. You have to under—”

Her head jerks away from my hands, her eyes boring into mine full of pain and… something else.

“It
is
my fault!” she says, backing away from me on the bed.

She stands up from the bed on the other side and crosses her arms, her back facing me.

“It’s not your fault, Camryn.” I walk toward her, but the second she feels me getting too close, she whirls around at me.

“No, it
is
my fault, Andrew!” she says with tears barreling from her eyes. “I couldn’t stop thinking about how being pregnant was going to mess everything up! I hated it that we were still living in Galveston after four months! I wondered how we were ever going to do the things we wanted to do with a baby! So yes, it’s my fault that we lost her and I fucking
hate
myself for it!” She buries her face in her hands.

I rush the short distance over to her, wrapping her up within my arms again. “God, Camryn, it
wasn’t your fault
!” I don’t think I’ve ever said anything to anyone with that much emotion before. My chest shudders uncontrollably against her.

“Look at me!” I say, pulling her away again. “That shit is so normal. And if you’re guilty, then so am I. I thought about things like that every now and then, but also like you, I wouldn’t have given her up willingly if I could have.”

She doesn’t really have to confirm that statement out loud because I know she wouldn’t have either. But she confirms it anyway:

“I didn’t regret her at all,” she says. “And I… I want her back!”

“I know. I know.” I hug her tight and walk her to the foot of the bed, guiding her to sit down. I crouch between her legs, propping my arms on her thighs and taking both of her hands into mine. I look up at her and say one more time, “It wasn’t your fault.”

She wipes away a few tears, and we just sit here like this for what feels like forever. I think she believes me—either that or she’s just avoiding it. Then she looks toward the wall behind my head and says in a quiet voice, “Does this make me a drug addict?”

I want to laugh, but I don’t. Instead, I just shake my head and smile softly up at her, pressing my fingertips around her hands gently.

“It was a moment of weakness, and even the strongest person isn’t immune to weakness, Camryn. Four days and one bottle of painkillers doesn’t make you a drug addict. Bad judgment call, but not an addict.”

She looks back down at me. “Michelle and Aidan are going to think so.”

I shake my head. “No, they won’t. And no one else will, either.” I stand up and sit down beside her. “Besides, it’s nobody’s fucking business. This is something only you and I have to know about and deal with.”

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she says, looking out ahead of her. “I can’t believe—”

“You weren’t yourself,” I say. “You haven’t been since Lily died.”

The room gets strangely quiet again. I look at her from the side, but I give her this moment. She appears lost in deep thought.

And then she says, “Andrew, maybe we shouldn’t be together,” and her words hit me so fast and so hard that I feel like the air has been sucked out of my lungs.

I’m so stunned that it’s like her words have completely stolen all of mine. My heart is racing.

Finally, when she doesn’t elaborate, I manage to get out, “Why would you say that?” And I’m scared of her answer.

She continues to stare out ahead of her, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. And then she does look at me and I see the same intense pain in her eyes that I know she sees in mine.

“Because everybody that I love tends to leave me, or die.”

Relief courses through me, but it’s overshadowed by her pain.

It’s in this very moment that I realize this is the first time Camryn has opened up about any of this to me, or to anyone else. I think about the things Natalie told me, and about the conversations that Camryn and I had while on the road, and I know that right now Camryn is admitting the depth of her pain not only to someone else, but more important, to herself.

“I feel so selfish saying it,” she goes on, and I absolutely let her without interruption. “My dad left us. My mom changed. My grandma, the only person that was the same and was always there when I needed her, died. Ian died. Cole went to prison. Natalie stabbed me in the back. Lily…” She looks at me finally, the pain intensified in her face. “And you.”

“
Me?
” I crouch in front of her again. “But I’m here, Camryn. I’ll
always
be here.” I take her hands into mine. “I don’t care what you do, or what happens between us. I’ll never leave you. I’ll always be with you.” I wrench her hands. “Remember when I said you were the world to me? You asked me to remind you if you ever forgot. Well, I’m reminding you now.”

Sobs shudder through her body.

“But you could’ve died,” she says, tears straining her voice. “Every single day I was at that hospital, I thought it was going to be your last. And then when it wasn’t and you pulled through, I still found myself reading it. Weeks,
months
later, because a part of me felt like I needed to get used to the idea of you being gone. Someday. Because I just
knew
you were going to leave in one way or another. Just like everybody else.”

“But I
didn’t
,” I say with desperation and smile a little with it. I sit on the floor and pull her down with me. “I didn’t die. I didn’t because I knew you were there with me the whole time. Because I knew we were meant to be together, and that if you were going to be alive then so was I.”

“But what if you do?” she asks.

I didn’t anticipate that.

“What if the tumor comes back?”

“It won’t,” I say. “And even if it does, I’ll beat it again. Hell, I went eight months without going to the doctor once and I
still
beat it. With you in my life, whipping my ass to make me go regularly for checkups, there’s no way it could kill me later.”