“None of this was your fault. Not any of it. Even that day. Your father was a monster, Sabin. What he did to all of you, who he was…it’s unforgivable. But you are just as brave and strong as Chris. You got through it. God knows how, but you did, and you are here. And you are worth everything. Don’t do this to yourself. You got through it. You got through it.” I am pleading with him, but it feels tragically useless.
“You think I got through it? Are you fucking crazy? Look at me. Look at me! It’s never over. It will never be over. You think you’re all healed and shit? You can’t be that stupid.” Swiftly, he takes a piece of driftwood and lunges it into the coals in the firepit, making a flame jump out.
Involuntarily, my breathing catches, and I let out a sound. My heart races as a flash of panic sears through me.
“See?” His tone is nasty, cutting. “Trauma—the gift that keeps on giving. Do you actually believe that you can run through the pain? You can’t. You can’t outrun shit. Keep putting on your sneakers and pounding pavement, but you’ll never beat down that bitch.”
He jabs the stick into the fire, creating another burst of flame and hot sparks. It’s a hateful thing to do to me, and this time, I cannot contain myself, so I give up on trying to hold in my tears.
“I love you, but that was goddamn mean, Sabin,” I choke out. “Even now.”
“Just proving my point, darlin’,” he says bitterly. “That fire you think you’re over? You’re not. You’ll never be. And us fucked up Shepherds? We’ll always be tainted with pieces of hell.”
“You are not tainted,” I say as strongly as I can. “Please. That is not who you are.”
He drops his arms to his sides. “Of course I am. Everything about me is tainted. I love you. I hate you. I love Chris. I hate Chris. You’re both my idols and also the people I can’t get away from fast enough. With you two, there is nothing but pain and guilt everywhere I turn.”
I step directly in front of him and take his face in my hands. Immediately, my palms are covered in his tears. “Listen to me, Sabin. I am not leaving you. I won’t. I refuse to let you shut me out of your life. I refuse to let you destroy yourself. That is not going to happen.”
He pushes me away. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Now, I grab his shirt and bring us close. “I love you. Don’t do this.”
“You have to stay away from me. I’m trashing everything around me, so just get the fuck out of here! You can’t fucking help me!”
“Stop it! Stop it!” I’m as frenzied in my emotions as he is, and it’s without full awareness of what I’m doing that I lift up on my toes, press my mouth tightly against his, and kiss him hard.
To get him to stop talking.
To get him to shut the hell up with his story of torture.
To get him to love himself. To feel my love in whatever form it’s meant to take.
To make this explosion end.
I cannot take any more. I cannot pick up any more wreckage.
My hands knot in his shirt as my lips move over his, my tongue sinking into his mouth. Sabin tastes like whiskey and misery. I feel his hands on the back of my head, his fingers pulling at my hair, as he kisses me roughly. Too roughly. This kiss is angry, and it’s heated for all the wrong reasons. I know that.
I try to pull back, but his hands keep us together, so I keep kissing him, trying to drown out his pain. I dig my fingers into his shoulders, pulling at him, silently begging him to feel loved and whole and unbroken.
His touch moves brusquely over my back as he claws his hands down my shirt until he hits my lower back. Sharply, he yanks my waist against him and takes his mouth away.
“Happy? You think you can fuck the life back into me like you did with Chris? Well, you can’t. Because there is no life to get back. I never had one in the first place. All I have is damage. That’s my baseline. That’s all I know. And that’s where I’m staying. So, you go back home and crawl into Christopher’s bed. That’s where you belong. I am fucking done with you.”
There is such disgust in his eyes, in the way he speaks to me, that I move back four or five steps. I know how to handle Chris when he’s upset, even when he’s swimming in a sea of severe pain, but I do not have the slightest idea of how to handle Sabin.
Or how to handle myself. I’m only making things worse for him.
I keep backing up, slowly distancing myself from him. Just as I turn, I catch movement in the corner of my eye.
It happens so fast. He moves so fast. There is no time for me to stop him, to come up with anything to prevent what he does.
So, when he takes the burning stick from the fire and holds it to the skin under his right arm, all I can do is scream. Over and over, I scream.
Sabin’s impulsive and violent act frightens me so much that I don’t go to him. My attempts to get through to him, to help him in some way, only escalated what had already been a heightened situation, and I’m terrified that I’ll just make things worse if I go to him now. That he’ll do something even more awful or dangerous.
So, I just scream and stumble across the beach to reach the stairs.
From my chair on the deck, I keep an eye on Sabin. He drinks a little more, but he leaves the bottle more untouched than I would have predicted. A drink now and then, but he doesn’t down the bottle. That’s a very small silver lining in all of this.
What hits me harder is the realization that, for the second time in my life, I am watching a boy on a beach. A boy on a beach who is drowning on dry land. This time, I cannot give a part of myself to him because he won’t accept it.
My fear and my heartbreak are so present that it’s difficult for me to think rationally, but I know that I cannot look away from Sabin, not even for a moment.
For an hour, I sit, unmoving, my sight glued on my best friend. His back is to me while he sits on the beach and faces the water. Later, he curls up in the sand, finally asleep after this evening of agony.
But I’m still going to stay.
After too much time, I break from my own deluge of hurt. My friend’s destruction so far outweighs mine, but it’s still a force of will to shake myself to function, and it takes great effort for me to hit the right buttons on my phone.
He picks up as soon as the phone rings. “Blythe.”
“Chris.” It’s difficult to speak. “Chris…”
“Tell me what’s wrong.” He knows immediately that there is trouble far greater than what I found in his wallet, and the urgency in his tone is unmistakable. “Is it you or Sabin?”
“Both,” the tremble as I speak is out of my control. “I need you. He needs you.”
“Are either of you hurt?”
I’m not sure how to answer this, so I just say, “I’m at the house. Sabin is on the beach.”
“Are you both safe?” This is a question only asked when it’s clear the situation is extremely serious. Chris quickly understands that we’re in a crisis. He wants to know about potential danger.
“Yes, yes. He’s asleep now. But we need you. We really need you. Sabin…” I start to cry so hard that it becomes difficult to breathe. “Oh God, he’s spiraling. He thinks he didn’t do enough when you were kids. That you didn’t let him help you the way he could have. He’s a wreck because you stopped him and didn’t allow him…you didn’t allow him to be an equal victim, an equal target. He is angry and feels guilty, and he’s totally losing it. He burned himself. Chris, he burned himself to be like you.” My breathing and crying are out of hand. I’m nearing a place that borders on out of control. “The painting. He told me about the painting. He saw more than you thought.”
“Fuck. Fuck!” Chris slaps his hand against something, and his impact tears through me. The sound of his reaction is too familiar. His sense of responsibility for his family is profound, almost too much so. “I already got a car, and I’m an hour into driving home. You not taking my calls was enough to tell me things were bad. But it’s a lot worse, isn’t it? It’ll take me another four hour
s or so, but I’ll get to you as fast as I can.”
“There’s…more…I have more to tell you.” I don’t know how I’m talking because my head is spinning so out of control. “Sabin and I…we’re all screwed up. I am so alone right now, and I don’t want to be. I am going back to that dark place I fought to get out of. Don’t let me go there. Please don’t let me go there again.”
Sabin’s disintegration is becoming my own. I’m together enough to identify it but not together enough to stop it myself.
“You’ll tell me everything when I’m there. Right now, you’re going to breathe for me. Just breathe for me. Let me hear you.”
He’s right. I’m hyperventilating. Heightened states take over my body and my breathing. I feel as though history keeps repeating itself because Chris has had to convince me to breathe normally before. This thought makes my panic escalate.
Maybe Sabin is right, and we’ll just keep cycling through pain forever. There is no escape.
I let out another sob.
“Blythe!” Chris is aggressive enough in his tone to make me listen. “Breathe in for four, exhale for eight. Do it now.”
So, I inhale slowly and listen to him count to four. Then, he counts to eight as I exhale. We do this for the next few minutes until I’ve come back down.
“A little better?” he asks.
“Yes.” My head and body are together enough for me to tell him, “I’m sorry I wouldn’t talk to you before. I’m so sorry. It was stupid. Especially now.”
“It doesn’t matter. I love you, and I’m coming home.”
“Okay. I love you. God, I love you so much.” I’m crying harder. “Please come home. Please come home.”
“Baby, I’ll be there soon.”
I hang up with the knowledge that help is headed toward us. Chris knows how to stay calm right now because he’s been through much worse storms than this. Despite and because of everything he has survived, he has become someone with a shockingly strong foundation, and it’s one that I’m depending on right now. It seems appalling that I should lean on him when this situation is so strongly tied to him, but the truth is that Chris has a skill set and fortitude that can withstand my breakdown. And Sabin’s.
It’s part of why I’m so in love with Chris. He is competent and capable in ways that are striking and beautiful. He has insight and compassion that, even with his measured control, shine through and heal.
Even in my chaos, I finally become aware of how dependent I am on him. Not in a crazy, pathological way, but I see how much he brings to what I don’t have, and my reliance on him is sharply in my consciousness tonight.
It’s why we work so damn well. Together, we create balance. I give what he needs. He gives what I need. After that, we have immeasurable chemistry, and that chemistry goes way beyond the sexual. There is a pull and bond between us that surpasses definition. And in that, I trust.
I have let him fall into me more times than I can count, and tonight, I need to fall into him.
Hour after hour, I alternate between lifting my eyes to Sabin on the beach and staring at my phone. The video that Annie sent me plays repeatedly, and it’s beyond me to stop it. I want to live in the past with my family and in the life I had before I knew what it meant to have my world blow up.
Sabin is likely right. I will never get over my losses and the vivid images I have of the precise seconds when those losses slammed into me. As much as I’ve tried to move through the memories of that fucking fire, I cannot forget. I’ll never forget.
I will very possibly drown in those flames.
If Chris does not get here soon and pull me from the fire again, I might just fucking drown in flames.
Worse, maybe, Sabin will drown in himself.
My entire body is full of anger and sadness, and I stand up and slam my hands onto the railing as I scream out at the water, “A little less fucking drowning and a little more land would be nice! Do you hear me? Do you fucking hear me? Less drowning, more land!” I stay frozen as I squint into the dark, waiting for some sort of response from the universe.
When a car door slams, I start to cry again. I’m sick of crying. I’ve done enough of it in my life, and I hate coming undone, but I can’t control myself. In a blur, I’m in Christopher’s arms, and he wordlessly holds me against his chest until I begin to find some level of calm.
“Sabin’s still out, so he’s okay for right now,” Chris says gently. “Let’s take this one piece at a time. We’re all going to get through this.”
He lowers me down to a chair and then sits himself across from me.
“Annie made that video for me,” I share. “And all it does is break my heart. I couldn’t get myself to show you before. Or anyone. It’s supposed to make me happy, and instead, it shreds me. Sabin knows that none of us will recover. We won’t, Chris. We won’t. That means that James and Estelle and Eric…we can’t get better, can we? The video just shows how true that is.”
“Oh, Blythe. Do you want me to watch it?” he asks. “I don’t have to, but would it help you?”
I nod, so he starts it from the beginning. I now know every sound of every second, and I watch him as my family and my past move before his eyes. At one point, he stops the video and rewinds a particular section a few times, listening to a young me with my parents. I hear my mother talking to me as she rocks me to sleep while I murmur what sounds like nonsense.
Chris smiles, finishes the video, and turns off the phone.
“What Annie put together for you? It’s extraordinary. Tonight, you only see the loss, but it’s so much more than that. You got to experience something beautiful. Please don’t forget that. By default, we grab on to the loss, but you can choose not to. Look at these pictures for what they are. It’s just love here. Over and over, it’s love.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think about how this compares…about how you didn’t have this. God, I’m sorry.” I’m awash with the level of selfishness I’ve allowed myself.
“You get to feel this loss. You had something that was stolen from you for no good reason. You’re allowed grief—when it happened, now, and in the future. You can feel this pain for the rest of your life, and that’s okay. One day, it will become tolerable, but it’s all right if it’s not today. You plan for healing. You have to assume that you’ll get there. That’s the fight we are in. Each day, we are fighting to heal.”
“I don’t know if we can. We’ll never forget.”
Chris runs a hand through his hair. “Jesus, Sabin did a number on you, didn’t he? Look, we don’t have to forget. There is no forgetting. Healing doesn’t mean that the past doesn’t exist. It means that we allow it, that we accept it, and that we continue to move on.”
I want to believe him, I do, but I have doubts tonight.
He takes my hands in his. “Let’s take care of the first thing. Look at me, and listen very carefully. The wedding invitation. You don’t understand why I still have that, do you?”
I shake my head.
“I keep that with me as a reminder to never do anything so fucking stupid in my life ever again. To never shut myself off from you or run from closeness and intimacy. I keep it to remind myself that I was the one who should have never let things go that far and that I am the one who should have stopped the wedding. I’m ashamed of everything related to Jennifer and the wedding. I very nearly lost you for good, and it’s only because of your faith in us and your profound trust in me that I got fucking lucky enough to get you back. Then, we got to build this relationship that we have today. That’s why I keep the invitation. Blythe, you are my world. You know that, right?”
His adoration is so genuine that I actually smile. “You are the great love of my life that I get to have.”
Chris kneels in front of me and wipes my eyes. “Yes. You will always have me. We are unbreakable.”
“We are unbreakable,” I repeat.
“Yes. Now, you need to tell me about Sabin. And about you and Sabin because I think you guys
are a little mixed up about where you stand with each other.”
So, I tell him everything. It’s difficult to share the details because I know it must hurt Chris to hear about Sabin’s anger toward him, and Chris already feels as though he should have done the impossible when they were growing up. But he listens patiently as I pour out what I know.
To his credit, he doesn’t flinch when I tell him that Sabin thinks he might be in love with me and how that is contributing to his self-destruction.
I don’t want to say what I’m about to, but I must. “And tonight, on the beach, when he was falling apart…I kissed him.”
Chris actually has to suppress a smile. He clears his throat. “And how did that go?”
“Not very well.” Now, I’m kind of embarrassed by all of this.
“About as well as it did the first time when Sabin got drunk on Thanksgiving in college?”
“Pretty much.”
He laughs.
“Aren’t you mad?”
“No, I’m not mad. I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner. I figured you guys would test the waters at some point. Although, I assumed it would be in a less extreme context.”
“You did?”
“Of course. With as close as you are, as physically comfortable as you are together…” He shrugs. “It’s a question you two would need to clear up at some point.”
“I’m sorry. It was a dumb and awful thing to do. Not to mention, it made everything worse.”
“Are you worried that you’re in love with him?” he asks gently.
“No. I mean, maybe…” God, I hate this conversation and this night. “I don’t know what is happening.”
“I think I do.” Chris wipes my cheeks again. Despite the circumstances, he is so peaceful and steady. “So, when you’re with Sabin, do you feel sexually attracted to him? Do you get all tingly and aroused? Do you want to rip his clothes off?”
“What? No! Ew!” I wrinkle my face. “God, Chris, seriously.”
He smiles again. “What, no, and ew are not really the reactions of someone who is feeling passionate, romantic love.”