Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

I laid my pack next to his and we stretched out on the bumpy surface, staring up at the stars.

“So how long have we both lived in the same city and not known it?” he asked.

“I got here a year ago.”

“A year.”

I couldn’t believe he was here the whole time. “It’s a big city, I guess.”

“Doesn’t seem big now. Do you work?”

“Yeah. At a coffee shop on Broadway. You?”

He shifted next to me. “At a garage. Changing oil. Easy stuff.”

“Not what we planned, is it?”

“Hardly.”

A breeze kicked up and our papers fluttered. I pressed down to keep them from flying away. “I guess we should do the lab.”

He pointed to the sky. “There’s the Big Dipper.”

“We should measure it,” I said, but neither of us made any move to fill out our worksheet.

This was so easy, lying next to him, just being.

“Did we ever do any stargazing when we were kids?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Should’ve.”

“Yeah.”

“Not like we were in some metropolis.”

“Nope. I remember the stars.” I shifted on the rough roof, the bits of asphalt biting into my shoulders. Still, I swear it was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Stupid. Ridiculous. But true. I tried to think of Austin passing the note across to me at the coffee shop, but he was nothing, just no contest compared to all the emotions that surfaced with Gavin.

I felt doomed. I couldn’t be with him. Too much had happened, and everything since. God. If he knew why I hit my professor, why I quit school. If he put it all together, he’d hate me. Right now, he still thought I was perfect and good.

Even though he left.

If he had all the facts, he’d leave again.

Go away, I told those thoughts. Live in the moment. Feel something for once.

I closed my eyes, reveling in the warmth of Gavin next to me and the comfort of sharing space with someone who knew me.

“Corabelle?”

My name sounded familiar when he said it, as though no one had used it since him. “Yeah?”

“Seems like the world wants us to at least be friends again.”

I didn’t know which words to get stuck on. Friends. Or at least. “Seems like it.”

“You think we’re the only ones who still think about Finn?”

Just hearing his name out here, in the open, with the heavens opened wide, made my throat close up. “I don’t know.”

He turned his face to me but I kept my eyes up on the stars. The Big Dipper rested neatly in the sky, surrounded by lesser bits of light, and I understood how it all fit together. Some moments of our lives were vivid and strong, hanging among all the other memories, not to be forgotten. Our baby was that constellation for us, and no matter where we looked, no matter what other stars dotted our sky, he would always be there, the biggest and the brightest of them all. 

Damn, this worked.

I made sure I kept my head straight, no worries about tomorrow. Just the night sky, the Big Dipper, and Corabelle next to me.

Something had shifted in her. I could see it, feel it. And as soon as I realized she wasn’t going to go away, that she’d reconciled with us being around each other again, I’d adjusted too.

She lifted her arm to point at the constellation. “I’m still reeling from the lecture on those stars.”

“Really? Why?” I’d been so distracted during class that I just transcribed the words, barely letting them penetrate. Corabelle had been so close, and I’d been so anxious to get to the TA and switch labs.

“He said two of them were Horse and Rider, orbiting together.” She dropped her arm. “They look like one star but really are two, endlessly circling each other.”

I figured Corabelle was using metaphors, like she always had. We’d been as close as one person until I’d walked. Or possibly she was just talking about stars.

“If you’d been listening today,” she went on, “you’d know that after all these centuries, a couple other astronomers decided that there were actually three. They discovered one more small star in their gravitational pull.” Corabelle still looked at the sky as she said all this, but the emotion was thick in her voice.

“That was 2009,” she said, barely holding it together, and my urge to pull her close was crazy strong. “They discovered this exactly four years ago.”

I felt the punch in my gut. That was when we last saw each other. When Finn was born. When he lived and died in his little plastic bed. I could hear the beeps of the monitor again, a steady stream of his heartbeat and random alarms. The only thing worse than those sounds was when they stopped.

“That’s a powerful coincidence, finding that third star right then,” I finally said.

Corabelle turned on her side, watching me. “When he said it in class, I could barely breathe. And you sat there, all defiant in your chair, just as stiff and angry as you got at the end.”

I’d been angry. I knew that. The doctors had no more told us Finn would die than everyone was looking to me to make the decisions. To be strong for the whole lot of them, as if this wasn’t as hard for me. Just thinking about that day made the rage boil over and before I could think about what I was saying, I blurted out, “You made me sign the papers to turn off the machines.”

Corabelle sat up. “What are you talking about?”

I should shut this down, but I’d started it. I had to finish it. “The damn forms. The ones allowing them to shut down his ventilator.” Bitterness coursed through me. I hadn’t thought about this in years, but she was making me. She was dredging it all up.

Corabelle tried to touch me, but I jerked away.

“Is that why you left?” she asked. “Because you had to sign?”

I couldn’t breathe, much less answer. Everything was rushing at me, like it had in those final days.

Corabelle dropped her hands in her lap. “We did what the doctors told us to do.”

I couldn’t take this anymore. I sat up and snatched at my bag. “I signed the paper. I decided when it ended. I was the one who told them when to let him die.” I kicked at the fluttering page of the lab assignment and stepped on the stick as I strode away. This wasn’t going to work. Too much history. Too much misery. Too much everything.

I shoved through the door and hauled ass down the stairs. Only when I was on my motorcycle, the roar of the motor drowning out all sound, did I start to feel any better. Distance. I needed miles to separate me and Corabelle again. Nobody could go through all this and come out okay. No one could be tough enough. I sure as hell wasn’t.

The lights of the city began to fade as I tore through Torrey Pines State Park and to the ocean. Just the quiet there, and the lack of strip malls and concrete, calmed my fury. I hated blowing up at Corabelle for something that wasn’t her fault. If she’d signed the papers, nothing would have been any different. The nurse would still have come in, and Corabelle would still have sat in that chair to hold the baby her first and last time. They would still have removed the ventilator. And the whir of the machines and the beeps of the monitors would still have gone silent.

Finn would still have died.

I turned off where the highway made contact with the beach and killed the bike. The water crashed against the shore, its endless wake a lulling sound, like the white-noise monitor some friend had given us for the baby. When Corabelle was still pregnant and couldn’t sleep, I played it for her at night. We laughed that since we couldn’t go to the college by the sea, we’d bring the sea to us.

Everything was flooding back, a trove of memories deeper than the ocean in front of me. I couldn’t handle it any more than I had back then. I’d run again and ditched Corabelle a second time.

I yanked my helmet off and ripped the gloves from my hands. What was I doing? Where was I going? I wanted to hurl something at the moon, all serene in the stars. My classmates were on the building still, doing their lab work, and now I was going to start with an incomplete on the first assignment. Hell, maybe college was a waste. I had experience at Bud’s. If he wouldn’t promote me out of the oil changes and tire repair, I could find a place that would. My family boasted a long line of blue-collar workers. I didn’t have to be any better.

I couldn’t run from the stars, the whole ceiling winking at me like a mockery of my time on the roof with Corabelle. There didn’t seem to be any place where I could escape. 

The sugar jars clanged together as I shoved them all in a bin to be filled. Whoever closed the night before was officially on my bad side. Prepping the coffee stand for the next day was the job of the evening crew.

I opened on Thursday mornings, a crazy early shift that started at 5 a.m. The shop would open in half an hour and Jason and I were manic, grinding beans and starting all the coffees, filling the bagel bin and bringing in the pastries from the dawn delivery.

But the work was brainless, so I could think through all the events of the night before. After Gavin stormed out, I caught the page of his lab work, filled out mine, adjusted for his, and turned them both in. I didn’t really want to help him, and even as I did it, I burned with anger that he let something as small as a signature ruin everything. If he hadn’t left me then, I would have been okay. No blackouts, no arrest, no leaving my old college.

Sugar slid over my hands as I overfilled a jar. “Shit!” I said, pulling back on the jug.