Page 69 of The Fall
I’ve been letting my dad’s calls ring until they go unanswered because how do you tell your father that you’re heartbroken over a man who doesn’t know you and a love that never existed? Oh, yeah, and themanpart of that, too.
“He’s relieved you’re doing better. He asked me to tell you he wishes he were here with you.”
The words fall flat. I’m alone in this. There haven’t been any of my Orcas teammates rallying around me. There’s no hand to hold, no quiet voices of comfort. In Tampa, I wouldn’t be alone. I wouldn’t be?—
I crush that thought before it grows.
“Torey, I want to talk to you about something called post-traumatic amnesia.”
I go very, very still.
“It’s not unusual, after a brain injury, for someone to be… confused.” Dr. Granholm chooses his words carefully. “Disoriented. It’s common not to know where you are, or even who you are, as you were.”
I hesitate. “My disorientation...” I falter. “Why did it even...”
His gaze softens. “You were placed in a coma overnight. Comas are often like dreams, where your subconscious and conscious minds blend together hopes, fears, experiences, and random, disconnected thoughts.” He hesitates. “You were asking for Blair Callahan?”
I nod.
“Blair Callahan is the captain of the Tampa Bay Mutineers, the team you were playing when you were hit last night. It’s possible that your brain incorporated some elements of the game and of the Tampa players into your coma. And as for dreams—sometimes they’re meaningless. Sometimes they reflect our deepest wants.”
Deepest wants. A sob rises in me.
I was inlove. I hadeverything. Blair looked at me like I was the only star in his sky.
Andnoneof it was real.
Silence stretches between us. The last threads of hope unravel inside me.
Dr. Granholm rests his hand over mine as my tears spill down my cheeks again. “I’ll be back to check on you later, Torey. Get some rest.” He walks out, and the door clicks shut behind him.
I want to melt out of this bed, out of my own skin, scream until my voice gives out, until the world reshapes itself back intothe life that I recognize. I cave inward like a collapsing star. My body curls into itself, knees-to-chest, forehead-to-knees, trying to hold the pieces of myself together. Sobs tear through me. This is a wound in the center of me that spills out a grief I don’t have the right to feel. I cry until my throat is raw, until my chest aches, until there’s nothing left inside me but an endless emptiness.
Two weeks. Fourteen sun-drenched and perfect days. It feltreal. It all feltsoreal.
But it wasn’t, and it isn’t. He never held me like that, and I’m in love with a lie, the beautiful, cruel trick of a damaged brain.
I had everything, and now I have nothing. Less than nothing, because it was never real. There was no great love story, no epic, timeless romance between me and Blair. There’s only me, shattered and alone and clutching these fragments of a life I never lived and a love I never had.
He’s gone, and he was never mine to lose. The sobs come and come. There’s no escaping it. There’s no end. I am acutely, devastatingly alone.
There are no palm trees here.
Sixteen
It’s beenseven days since the hit.
Seven days since the world slammed into me and I twisted in the dark, and now I’m stuck trying to make sense of the impossible.
Every time I close my eyes, the time I spent in Tampa slithers farther away. I woke up in the hospital, anguished, and then I was sedated. I woke up again, shattered, and everything I’d been certain of wavered like reflections sinking underwater. It’s all slipping through my fingers, and the more I chase it, the faster it vanishes.
This is worse than fading away. It’s complete erosion, and I’m scrambling to hold on to the pieces of what I knew, what I lived. Sometimes, my memories come in flashes. They’re not even images. They’re textures, feelings, impressions: the heat of Blair’s skin, the drift of cotton sheets, the clatter of Nerf darts underfoot.
It’s been days since I bothered with the lights in my apartment. Shadows pool in the corners like spilled ink. In the dark, I can pretend that this is all a nightmare and that soon I’ll wake up in Blair’s arms, in our bed, in our life.
But I don’t wake up.
Tonight, I’m bathed in the glow of my phone, watching the Tampa Bay Mutineers skate across a screen too small to capture all of Blair’s brilliance. The game’s halfway gone, and so are Tampa’s chances. Blair’s prowling the ice and the guys are frustrated. It bleeds from their movements, each pass missing, each hit harder than necessary. Hollow shouts from the bench, his hands tight on the stick. I’m watching a disaster in slow-motion, every misstep magnified.
