The Muse (29 page)

“Don’t fire her.”

“I already did.” He turned red and folded his hands.

This gave me power to continue. “Unfire her. Please?”

He sat back. “I don’t understand. You two don’t exactly strike me as friends.”

“She’s good at what she does. I wouldn’t be nearly as successful without her.”

“She stole your work.”

“I handed it to her. She embellished it. We worked on it together.”

“But she didn’t give you credit.”

“She was getting even with me for the time I did the same to her.”

He sat up and raised his hands. “I don’t want to know any more.”

“We mess with each other constantly. It’s what we do. Things got out of hand. I wiped out all of her files on her computer and she freaked. So, she retaliated with the PSA project, claiming it as her own. She was just teaching me a lesson. And, when she found out that I actually saved all of her data to a flash drive, she confessed to me about handing in the PSA project under her credit. We’re both guilty and were just toying with each other.”

He buried his head in his hands. “You two are killing me here.”

“Please don’t fire her. We’re actually good together. We play off of each other’s talents.”

His face blotched. He searched my eyes for direction.

“Please?”

“I don’t think she would’ve come to your rescue like this.”

“Of course she would. She’s actually a nice person when you take away the insecurities. No one is perfect, and we’re all just as scared by this revelation as the person next to us.”

He stared at me dazed and confused by my philosophical introspective moment.

“Are we okay here?” I asked.

He nodded. “Just ask Katie to come into my office on your way past her?”

“Sure thing.” I walked away feeling lighter. Then, I walked right up to Katie. She was bent over her file cabinet and looked up on a sigh.

“Boss wants to see you.”

Panic popped on her face. I just winked, giving myself one last hurrah.

# #

I felt more alive in the days following Katie’s revival back to the land of Martin Sporting Goods. We stopped messing with each other and actually made great headway on some looming projects.

Then, Eva came to town for a meeting. She didn’t stop and say hello to me to Doreen to Katie. All business, she simply slipped into the conference room for her meeting and ducked out afterwards.

I checked her Twitter feed during the rest of the day and she hadn’t posted anything.

I felt so disconnected, so hollow all over again.

I took to visiting her Twitter feed regularly in the weeks that followed, and this just stirred up more anxiety. I dove into a funk again.

Travis called me several times over the course of my funk. I dodged his calls and would later return with a text message apologizing for missing his call. I’d tell him I was super busy those days with work projects and that one of these days I promised, we’d catch up on life. I’d wish him well and end these inappropriately long text messages with a smiley face.

Larry was not pleased. He knew me well enough to understand work would never steal my time. He didn’t bother to knock the night he barged in on me while I was knee deep in another one of my crying tirades. “Would you just get off of your pride horse and go call the woman?”

“I can’t.” I blew my nose. “It’s too late.”

“You look terrible.” He shook his head, disgusted with my current state.

“Well, we can’t all have the perfect fairytale love story like you and Tim. Man meets man; they fall in love, and live happily ever after sneaking around behind the wife.”

He stretched his eyes in horror, scoffed and waved me off before shoving back through my front door.

I hated the world and everyone in it. I picked up my glass of water and slammed it against my living room wall. Water and glass sprayed every which way. It felt remarkable. So, I picked up my coffee mug from the morning and tossed that, too. Again, ceramic and coffee rained back in delight. Incredible release. Off to the kitchen. I reached for glass after glass and flung them towards my living room. Some hit walls, some hit end tables, some hit the bike that Larry placed back in my condo after my initial freak out, some hit the carpet and bounced, unaffected by my game. I needed them affected. So, I stormed into the living room, picked up the glasses and pitched them to the ceiling where they sprinkled down on me. I wanted to get hurt. I wanted to bleed. I wanted to feel something other than this dread.

By the time Larry arrived back in my condo and scooped me off of the pile of glass, blood trickled beneath my bare feet. He cried with me as he carried me out of my hell and into his clean, fresh, crisp condo. He brought me to his bathtub and ran water over my bleeding feet yelling at me, cursing me out, telling me what a fool I’d become. All the while, tears sprang from his eyes and his mouth downturned into a deep frown. The water stung my feet where the glass still remained planted in my skin. At one point, the sting overcame me, and I fainted. The next thing I remembered was waking up in Larry’s bedroom with gauze wrapped tightly around my throbbing feet and Larry’s concerned eyes bearing down on me. “Why?”

I could only shrug. Not even Larry would understand the pain of perpetual loneliness.

“There’s someone here to see you.” He turned towards his living room and waved.

Travis walked into his bedroom with a hesitant step, staring with horror at my gauzed feet.

“What’s wrong,” I asked him. “You act like you’ve never seen someone try to hurt herself before.” I laughed at my wit.

He didn’t.

Neither did Larry.

Larry stood. “I’ll let you two chat while I make us some dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said to him.

“I don’t care.” His face steamrolled into a blank abyss. He really didn’t.

Travis walked up to the bedside and stared at the edge of the bed.

I patted it. “Have a seat.”

He nodded as if bracing to climb into a tank of spiders, and then he sat next to me. He fidgeted with his fingers, failing to look up at me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said to him. “You think I was trying to end it all. But, I wasn’t.”

“I know that,” he said staring at the headboard instead of me. “Otherwise you’d be dead and I’d be kneeling beside your coffin instead.”

This should not have been a thought that shocked me. But, I shook like someone had just submerged me in a tub full of ice.

Travis grabbed the blanket on the edge of Larry’s bed. He covered me up. “The pain feels good. I know. It feels better than the emotional pain. That just sucks the lifeblood right out of a person.”

I looked up and met eyes with the most mature seventeen-year-old kid I’d ever met. His eyes didn’t mock or strain under the pressure of seeing someone so foolish. No. His eyes sat soft, welcoming, waiting for me to open up and trust that I was safe and free to spill my secrets. “When I was slamming the glass against the wall, I felt free. And when it cut my feet, all the sadness left me. Well, at least for a little while.”

“You’re better than this. You know that, right?” He pointed his mature eyes at me, poking me, urging me to accept this notion as truth.

Fresh tears burned the back of my eyes instead. “Whatever you say, kid.” I stared up at the ceiling fan wishing it were whirling so I’d have something dynamic to look at other than the caked-on dust on the edge of the blades.

“What happened?” He asked this with such sincerity that the tears just spilled and before long, the truth followed.

“I’m just tired,” I said to him. “Tired of constantly bowing and running away from life.”

“Why are you then?”

I told him everything about how I screwed up a good thing, about how even as an adult I let fear bully me into a life I didn’t want to live, about how my past caught up to me, and about how I punished myself for something terrible I left behind.

“Then go back and get it and set it right.” He shrugged. “It’s as simple as that.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said this with a stretch to my voice.

He frowned. “I’m worried about you.”

“Look, I’m fine.” I sat up to show my strength. “I really am. It was a stupid thing I did tossing glasses every which way. I get that. I’m fine.”

“If you’re truly fine, then, maybe I can still convince you to come with me next weekend to speak at the event. I really want you there. We’re going to show the short film, but before we do, I really want you to speak to the audience about your experiences. This could be your chance to set things right with your past, face your demons, show these kids they’re not alone. I think it might really be cathartic to talk it out and share with others facing similar paths.”

“I can’t, Travis.” I sighed.

He stared at me without anger, without hate, without remorse. “Do you know how valuable you are to me?”

I mocked this display of gratitude with a scoff. “Stop being so mushy. It’s so not what I’m about.”

“You don’t get it do you? You don’t get how valued you are.”

“The world would still rotate if I left it this very second. How much value do any of us really hold?”

“You pulled me from suicide. The fact that you still don’t think you’re valuable just shows how you view me, as having no value, too.” He stood up and walked to the door. He turned before walking through it. “It’s not always about you. Until you realize that, you’re going to continue tossing glasses against walls and have people come to your rescue. Why would you want that for yourself? Why don’t you want to be the rescuer instead?”

“How?” I yelled at him.

“Start by taking action.” He slammed the door.

# #

My words, originally crafted for others, came back to me and knocked sense into me.
We owed it to ourselves to dig deep and find out what tools we had in our disposal to crush the shit out of our fears so we could get on living our best days. Those who helped guide others to find and lend their tools would reap rewards far too powerful for any bully to come in and swipe away. The leverage in digging deeper, in serving others, offered power. When a person came outside of this shell to protect another, he helped erase fear and replace it with a light so powerful no one could extinguish it.

“Larry,” I called.

He appeared in two seconds. “Yes, darling?”

“I need you to find me something appropriate to wear next weekend to this event.”

He broke out into a smile. “That a girl.”

“And, I might need a ride.” I looked to my battered, wrapped feet and sighed.

“I’ll pick you up and haul you over my shoulders if I need to.”

Chapter Sixteen

Sometimes in life, people had to learn to swallow fears and walk past the shadows that lurked. This was one of those times. This wasn’t about me anymore. This was about so much more than me.

We entered the ballroom at the Hilton. Hundreds of chairs lined up in rows and covered the marble carpeting. Hundreds of people chatted, stood idle, or ate carrots and crackers and hummus while soft jazz filled the space. Chairs filled up quickly as people climbed over stranger’s legs in search of the perfect seat. We stood back behind a wall of hotel workers who wore black aprons and carried sterling silver water pitchers. A sense of pride for Eva’s efforts and talents coursed through me. She had arranged all of this.