6. The Death Toll
6
The Death Toll
I HADN’T SEEN him since that rainy April evening. I’d tried not to think about his blue eyes, or his artfully disheveled blond hair, or how his calloused fingers felt when they touched me—
Suddenly, the bar seemed much too small. The walls were closing in. I couldn’t stay here. What was I
doing
? I was Florence Day, and Florence Day didn’t live her life like this. She didn’t share her stories—whether they were real or not—she didn’t wear tiny black dresses, and she didn’t drink artisanal drinks named after dead poets.
The universe reminded me of that.
Rose saw Lee Marlow a split second after I did, and I heard her whisper, “
Shit
. We can go if you want—Florence?”
“I—I need some fresh air.”
“I can go with you—”
“No.” I said it a bit too sharply, but I didn’t care. The people at neighboring tables were staring at us now, sipping on their dead poets like I was part of the dinner show. “I’m fine. He can—he can
go first. I need to go to the bathroom.” It was a bad lie, and we both knew it, but she let me go anyway.
I tore my gaze away from Lee Marlow and made my way toward the back of the bar, where the bathrooms would be. The emcee welcomed Lee up to the microphone, and he introduced himself, and said he would be reading from—from—
“
When the Dead Sing
. It’s a little book you might’ve heard buzz about. It’s coming out in a few months, so please be gentle with me,” he said modestly.
A few months? That soon? This past year, time seemed to slip through my fingers like sand. How could it be a
year
already and still my heart hurt this much? I could barely breathe. I didn’t watch where I was going. I just knew I needed to leave, and I needed to leave
now
—
But the line to the women’s bathroom was ten people long. That was at least thirty minutes. And I felt the tears at the corners of my eyes burning. I couldn’t wait.
And I refused to break down where Lee could see me.
I
wouldn’t
.
Beyond the women’s bathroom was a glowing emergency exit sign, and I took it as a girl in a sparkly purple dress asked if I was okay. “No,” I mumbled truthfully, slipping past the line to the emergency exit, and burst out into the cold April air.
I had to breathe. I had to calm down. So I did. I filled my lungs up with so much frigid air, I felt they might burst, then I let it out again. And again. I tilted my head back and blinked the tears out of my eyes, hugging myself tightly so I wouldn’t rattle apart. Not here. Not anywhere.
Never again.
I hated that I cried when I was angry, or upset, or annoyed. I hated that I cried at the slightest flux of emotional nuance. I hated
how helpless I felt. I hated how I wanted to both march up to him and give him a fistful of my thoughts and run as far away from him as I could.
I hated how I couldn’t do both.
“I
told
you,” sighed a soft male voice, “I don’t need to hear you read from your damn book agai—oh. Hello.”
I spun toward the man—and froze. A tall shadow sulked against the brick wall. He quickly pocketed his phone and stood straight, making himself even taller, and with my eyes already blurry with tears, he looked like a shadowy nightmare.
Oh no. Narrow, darkly-lit alley. No one around. My life spinning out of control.
This was where I got murdered.
“If you’re gonna kill me, do it already,” I hiccuped a sob.
He paused. “Come again?”
“No one’s around. Do it quick.”
He sounded baffled. “Why would I want to do that?” He stepped out of the shadows, and I could see his face finally. And that made it all the worse. It
was
a murder-y stranger, but not of the life kind. He was the kind to murder a career.
My
career.
Benji Andor.
And worse yet, he could see
my
face now, too. His thick eyebrows knit together. “Miss Day?”
“
Shit
,” I cursed, quickly looking away. Oh no, could he see me
crying
, too? That was mortifying. I wiped my eyes. “What are you doing here, Mr. Andor?”
“Ben,” he corrected, “and same as you, I suppose.”
“Crying in a back alley?”
“Not that, no . . .” He judged his words carefully, frowning.
Why—why did he have to be
here
of all places? I had half a mind to turn around and go back inside but . . . Lee would still be
reading from that stupid book. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to remember it existed. I just wanted to disappear.
I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes and took a deep breath.
It’s okay, Florence. Calm down. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter
—
Then his voice, soft and a little hesitant, asked, “Is there anything I can do?”
No.
Yes.
I didn’t know.
I wanted to get away from Lee Marlow and his words. I wanted to get away from his memory. Everything about him—because he reminded me that I only had myself to blame. And I didn’t want to remember that. I didn’t want to remember any of it. My heart still felt like it was freshly broken, shattering all over again, the jagged pieces falling deep into the pit of my stomach like fresh pains.
And I didn’t want to feel that anymore. It had been a year. Why wasn’t I
over
him? Why did I still want him to look at me like I was the only story he wanted to learn (irony, that one), and tuck my hair behind my ear, and kiss me like I was the heroine in a romance, and tell me I was loved? That he loved me.
I missed that the most. I missed it so much, the closeness, the certainty that I mattered.
And I wanted to matter again.
To someone, to anyone.
For a moment.
“
Yes
,” I decided, and reached up—because he was so damn tall and I was very much not—and took his face in my hands and pulled him down to crush my lips against his. They were warm and soft and dry, and my fingers brushed against the stubble on his cheeks. My stomach burned, but it filled the ache.
He made a surprised noise, jolting me to my senses. I quickly jerked away. “Oh my god—I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I usually don’t do this.”
“Make out in back alleys?”
“Kiss tall strangers.”
He gave a snort that sounded like laughter. “Did it help?”
My lips still felt wet and tingly, and he tasted like a rum-and-Coca-Cola sort of dead poet (Lord Byron?), and I didn’t mind. I gave a nod. “But it doesn’t mean anything,” I added quickly. “It doesn’t—this doesn’t mean—I’m not going to fall in love with you.”
“Because romance is dead?” he asked, tongue in cheek.
“Six feet under.”
“So you say . . .”
And his mouth found mine again. He pressed me up against the side of the wall, and kissed me like I hadn’t been kissed in—well, at
least
a year. The night was cold, but he felt like a furnace. I curled my fingers around the collar of his dark coat and pulled him closer. As close as I could. His hands were warm as his fingers came up to cradle the sides of my face, and we danced in the dark alley while standing still.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t think—or I, at least, didn’t think. Not about Lee Marlow, or the book due, or anything else, even though Ben didn’t even know it was
me
doing the writing. I wasn’t his author. Not the one who was going to turn the book in late; Ann was. He thought I was her assistant. The middleman. No one.
I wanted to be no one for a moment.
He broke away, breathless. “Miss Day?”
“It’s Florence,” I gasped. My lips throbbed.
“No, um—that’s not—your phone,” he said rigidly. “It’s ringing.”
Oh
. Was it? I just noticed. It was my Mom’s ringtone. That
struck me as odd through the haze of kissing Benji Andor. Why was she calling this late? It
was
late, wasn’t it? I untangled my fingers from his coat and dug for my phone in my crossbody purse. He still hovered over me, bent near, shielding me against the world, and it was . . .
Nice.
It was nice in a way few things had been tonight.
When I found my phone, I realized I had over twenty missed calls from my mom—
And Carver.
And Alice.
Please call Mom
, Carver’s text read.
Wait—what? Why?
I was more confused than anything else. It was 11:37
P.M
. Was something wrong with Mom? The funeral parlor?
“Is something wrong?” Ben asked.
“I—excuse me,” I muttered, dipping out from underneath him and moving away a few feet. It was nothing, I told myself. Just—it was nothing. I quickly pressed her speed-dial number. The phone barely rang once before Mom answered.
“Sweetheart,” she began.
Something was off.
It was off before she said anything.
“It’s your father.”
And then—
“You need to come home.”
The dread in my stomach bloomed into a sickly, cold flower. “Is he okay? What hospital is he at? I can—I can be there on the first flight in tomorrow and—”
“No, sweetheart.” And in those words, I knew. It was the way Mom’s voice dipped. The way it halted suddenly at the end. It was
like finding yourself at the edge of a cliff—a sharp drop, and then nothing. My lips were numb, and I still had the memory of Ben’s fingers in my hair, and Dad was—
“H-He had a heart attack. We tried . . . the ambulance . . . it was during his poker game and he was winning and . . . Alice and I followed the ambulance but—” Her words were sporadic, trying to piece together an evening of horror while I had gotten tipsy on Dickinson martinis. “They couldn’t—he was gone. He was gone by the time we got there—by—he was . . . he’s gone, darling.”
Gone
.
The word was so quiet, I barely heard it. Or maybe my heart, thundering in my ears, was too loud. But whatever it was, the word didn’t register, not really, not for a long, long moment. And then, like the cold wind, it burrowed deep into my bones, and I could feel my heart beginning to crack. Right down the center, breaking off all the pieces of me that were my father, all of the memories—the late nights in the funeral home, when I couldn’t sleep because of a thunderstorm, when the wind howled between the cracks in the house and made them moan, so I’d quietly go down to the kitchen and get myself some milk, and sometimes I’d see Dad there at the kitchen table. He would be sitting there, watching the trees outside of the window bend in the storm.
“Oh, buttercup, can’t sleep?” he’d ask, and when I shook my head, he patted his lap and I climbed up to sit on it.
Lightning lit the skies, making the thin summer trees look like bony skeleton hands reaching up toward the clouds. I curled myself up against my dad, who was sturdy and round and safe. I always felt safe with his arms around me, where nothing bad could ever get me. He was the kind of man who gave the best bear hugs. He put his whole heart into them.
“What’re you doing up?” I had asked, and he’d laughed.
“Listening to the dead sing. Do you hear them?”
I shook my head, because all I heard was the wind howling, and the bushes outside scraping against the side of the house. And it was terrible.
He hugged me tighter. “Your grandma—my mother—told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—” And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled. “They’re still in the wind. And they’ll always be in the wind, singing. Until the wind is gone. Do you hear them?”
And he tucked his head down by my ear, and rocked me gently back and forth, humming a strange and soft tune, and when I strained to listen, I could start to hear it, too—the dead singing.
As I shuffled out of the alley to sit on the curb, numb, a breeze swept an empty potato chip bag across the ground. I watched it go, but I didn’t hear any sort of music. I heard my name. “Florence?”
I glanced back, though my eyes were blurry, and all I could see was a massive hulking shape. He came closer, and knelt to me, putting a hand on my shoulder before I realized who it was.
Ben Andor.
Right. He was here. I’d been kissing him. I wanted to forget and now—
“Hey, is everything okay—”
I shrugged his hand away and stumbled to my feet. I forced out, “I’m fine.”
“But—”
“I said I’m
fine
,” I snapped. All I wanted to do was break into pieces and be carried off by that silent, dead wind. Because there wasn’t a world without my father’s stupid parlor playlists and his cheesy jokes and his bear hugs.
That world didn’t exist. It couldn’t.
And I didn’t know how to exist in a world without him in it.
A moment later, Rose was there, shoving Ben Andor away from me. “What the hell did you do?!”
He was baffled. “Nothing!”
“The fuck you did!” She dug into her purse for the pepper spray. He quickly held up his hands and hurried back into the bar. She turned then to me and hugged me tightly, asking me what he’d done, what had happened.
“He died,” I said.
“Ben?”
“Dad.” I felt a sob bubble up in my throat, like a bird wanting to be set free, and then I gave a wail and buried my face into my best friend’s shoulder, on the curb of an empty street, while the world spun on, and on, and on, without my dad in it.
And the wind did not sing.