Page 5 of Your Chorus
I think that’s why I never left. I grew up here, and I’ve always felt like Montreal is some kind of current you can plug yourself into, like the power lines that link our houses also keep us connected to one another. Forging connections the traditional way has never really worked out for me, but in Montreal, you feel like you’re part of something just by being here. You can’t get lost, and you can’t lose people.
Unless they’re trying really hard not to be found.
I pull Roxanne’s number up on my phone and hover over the call button. A siren blares on the street like a warning, but I don’t heed it.
The break up was bad—even worse than they usually are. Roxanne had been acting weird for weeks, snapping at me and doing things she knew I wouldn’t like. She’s tried it before: coaxing me into being the one to leave her because she thinks that will hurt me less.
I wouldn’t let her pull that on me. Not again. I called her out on it, told her she was being immature and causing both of us more pain. We fought hard. I brought up some shit from her past. She needed to hear it, but not like that. I gotangry, lost my cool. Normally I can keep my anger inside, bury any trace of emotion. Usuallythat’swhat we fight about. She’ll beg me to feel something, to say something instead of staring all her arguments into silence, but I couldn’t stay quiet this time.
“You want me to go? Fucking tell me to go, Roxanne!” I remember roaring at her, so loud her neighbours banged on the walls.
“I don’twantyou to go, but—”
I didn’t even let her finish her sentence.
“Bullshit. That is all such fuckingbullshit. You either want this, or you don’t, so what’s it going to be?”
She stared at me, and for a split second, she was that same scared sixteen-year-old outside the bus station. Then her face hardened, and she was shouting back at me, her accent going as thick as when I first met her.
“Crisse de câlice!An ultimatum? Are you really so emotionally stunted that all you can handle is an ultimatum? Fine. I want you to get the fuck out of my life!”
It took the fight right out of me. I don’t know what I expected from her, but it wasn’t that.
“Roxanne,” I begged, my voice cracking, “youaremy life.”
She couldn’t look at me as she whispered, “This isn’t a life. Go. Just please...go.”
So I went. I took the memories that felt like they were stuck in my throat—the ones of her laughing, the ones of her moving beneath me, the ones of her heartbeat thumping against my ear—and I swallowed them down and went.
I thought I’d be back. I thought she’d come crawling. I thought that when she told me weshouldquit, she didn’t mean we actually would.
It’s been five months. I see her at shows every now and then, but she won’t do more than nod at me. I’ve called her a few times, and she answers, but it’s only to tell me the same thing: we’re better off apart.
There are so many things that Roxanne Nadeau is right about, so many things that make her smarter and stronger than me, but if she truly thinks we’re better off this way, she’s more wrong than she’s ever been before, because this right here? The way the world turns to ash when we aren’t together?
Thisis not a life.
I bring the phone up to my ear as it starts to dial.
I expect to get her voicemail after the first few rings go unanswered, but then the line clicks. I can hear her breathing into the receiver before she speaks.
“Hey.”
Just one fucking syllable in that smoky rasp of hers and my chest gets tight. The hand that’s not wrapped around my cell phone twitches, and my whole body braces for some kind of impact as adrenaline spikes my senses and kicks my heart rate up like a key change.
I force myself to pull air in through my nose and hold it down before letting it out as slow as I can.
Neither of us says anything.
Anyone else would miss the barely audible sigh she makes, but I hear it. I know what it means, and I know she knows I hear it. She’s pissed at me for keeping quiet, for leaving her hanging like this. She always said I was the worst person in the world to talk to on the phone.
“It’s a fucking telephone, Cole,” she told me once. “You have to usewords.”
Only she was laughing when she said that, and she sure as hell isn’t laughing now.
“I...”
I can’t finish my sentence. I can’t even remember why I made the damn call. It’s been weeks since I’ve heard her voice, and all I want right now is to hear more of it.
