Chapter Twenty-FourKami
Two years later
Lots of things can happen in two years. So many that our brain tucks half of them away because it’s impossible to remember so much. How can I give you an idea of what happened during that time? How can I get you to understand the mistakes I made? All of them guided by the desperate need to move on and get over my pain, which was so profound that for a long time, I could barely breathe.
I went off to college, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. I left because I was more or less forced to by the people who supposedly loved me and wanted the best for me. Now that time has passed, I understand them, but back then, they felt like enemies to me. I hardly spoke to my parents that first year of college. With Katia, it was different. We had long talks at first; I told her what life at Harvard was like, and she would talk about Thiago and how she was still waiting for him to wake up. But then a moment came when the conversations got shorter and shorter, and I could hear the pain in her voice every time she had to tell me nothing had changed; Thiago was the same.
I had to stop talking to her. It wasn’t easy.
And with Taylor, it was even harder. He asked me to stop contacting his mother. He said they could never move on with me pulling him back in. Maybe he was right. Maybe moving on was what we both needed, but for me it felt impossible if moving on meant leaving Thiago behind. I needed to know how he was doing. I needed to keep hope alive. But finally, I erased Katia from my phone and blocked her number, along with anyone who might have kept me informed of Thiago’s condition, which was always the same: bedbound, deteriorating by the day. It was hard to stop calling. That was my one tie to Carsville and Thiago. But my hope had died with the waiting and the growing knowledge that I was never going to get that call telling me that something had finally changed.
I needed to take stock of the harm I was doing: to my parents, because I had shut them out; to my little brother, because I couldn’t feign happiness when we spoke; to Thiago’s mother, because I wasn’t letting her heal; and more than anyone else, to Taylor.
Because I did something soon afterward, something I know I can’t justify, but my heart, my body, and my mind needed him the way a drowning person needs a breath of air.
We ran into each other one day on campus. He hugged me, and we grabbed a coffee at a little place nearby and talked about everything and nothing, and finally he addressed the elephant in the room: “Kami, why did you decide to come here in the end?”
I couldn’t lie to him. I wouldn’t know how. “You’re the only thing that keeps me close to him…”
The grief in his eyes, the pain my words caused him, were nothing compared to what I was feeling. Or at least, so I told myself then. I had forgotten that Taylor hadn’t only lost his brother, he’d lost me as well. I didn’t think about his feelings, I didn’t consider how a hug from me might remind him of whatwe once had, and I didn’t know that he’d been keeping an eye on me all over campus from a distance, that he’d even talked to my roommate many times to find out how I was.
These are the kinds of things you’re not aware of when you’re in the state I was in, submerged in your own pain, your own grief, your own thoughts.
We talked for hours, but after that, the distance between us remained. I ignored his messages and calls, closing myself off again, because I couldn’t stand to be reminded of that pain. Months passed, but then we saw each other at a party.
I hadn’t been going out. My roommate and the friends I’d made had stopped even inviting me. They’d learned to accept me for who I was, or for who I’d become from so much pain, and they respected the fact that I was the kind of friend you could have coffee with or watch a movie with once in a while.
I don’t know exactly what led me to go out with them that night. Maybe I just needed to finally get out of bed, get my head out of the books, get dressed up for once. It wasn’t some kind of sign that I was starting to get over what had happened. On the contrary: I was so sad, so desperate, that I needed a distraction to keep me from doing something truly crazy.
I needed to feel again, to feelhimclose, and that’s why I went to the party—to find Taylor, to see him again.
Because if I couldn’t be with Thiago, I could at least be with the next best thing.
It took me a while to find him. Someone offered me a drink, and I accepted. Then another, and I took it, too. The alcohol helped me relax, the same way it had more than once when I’d stayed in alone, drinking in my room.
Finally, I saw him standing in the opposite corner.
He was smiling.
He was handsome.
There were two girls chatting with him.
It bothered me at first to see him looking so relaxed with all those people around, looking happy even, just being normal when his brother was lying in bed in a coma after saving his life. The thought barely formed before I forced it out of my head.
I had stopped hating the cause of all this; I knew I couldn’t blame Taylor for surviving, even if his survival was the reason his brother was unconscious.
He must have felt someone watching him, because he looked around, and finally his eyes settled on me. I saw surprise on his face, but a few seconds later, he smiled.
He cut off the girls talking to him, actually just walked away from them without saying anything, and crossed the room to where I was. When I smiled back, I realized it had been ages since I’d used those muscles in my face; they felt tight, rusty.
“I didn’t think I’d ever run into you at one of these parties,” he said.
“I feel a little weird being here,” I replied, noticing how different he looked. He had let his beard grow out, and his hair was shorter. He was on the basketball team, which explained all the girls following him around.
“I’m glad you got out of the dorm. It’ll do you some good,” he told me. “What are you drinking?”
“Gin and tonic,” I replied. But it was really mostly gin.
