Page 12 of Coming Home

I caught her reflection once under a red light on Wilshire. She was staring straight through the windshield at nothing, her hands dead and limp in her lap, rainwater still dripping from the ends of her hair onto my leather seats. I didn't give a damn about the leather. I cared that she looked like a person who had been marooned in a storm long before the clouds rolled in tonight.

I checked again when we hit the freeway ramp. Same position. Same hollow, wrecked stare. The tears were just tracking down her face without any effort to stop them.

She sat rigid in the passenger seat, staring at everything except me. I can stand in front of a bank of microphones with fifty million people watching and deliver a perfectly sterile press conference without a single bead of sweat, but put me in a car with someone I give a shit about and my brain shuts down. So I did the only thing I had left.

I reached for the display console and scrolled through my phone until I found it. A playlist I hadn't touched in three years. I hit play.

The first low, haunting notes of "Bésame Mucho" filled the quiet cabin—that scratched-up Consuelo Velázquez recording with the heavy strings. The Spanish crept through the speakers, and Emma's reflection in the glass went utterly rigid.

She sniffed once, a ragged breath. Then, in a voice barely louder than the rain hammering the roof: "You still have these?"

"Never deleted them."

She didn't offer anything else. But she closed her eyes, leaning the side of her head against the cool passenger window, and the violent shaking in her shoulders finally stopped.

I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, swallowing down the sudden, aching tightness in my own throat as the music unearthed a ghost I'd spent three years trying to bury.

Emma had dragged me into these old songs when I was fourteen. It was the summer my pet dove died. I'd spent three brutal hours digging a grave under Theo's lemon tree, crying like a total idiot while she and Theo sat on the porch steps eating popsicles. Afterward, when the dirt was packed down, she'd marched over and handed me her half-eaten popsicle without a syllable—grape-flavored, already melting down the wood stick.

That night at the sleepover, I was lying on the living room floor staring at the dark ceiling when Emma crawled over from her sleeping bag and shoved an earbud into my ear.

"Listen," she'd whispered. "You won't understand a word of it, but that's the whole point. Just let it wash over you."

It was Eydie Gormé singing "Sabor a Mí."

I didn't understand a single phrase of Spanish. But the melody found something I didn't want to name and held onto it. I'd fallen asleep with that earbud in and woke up the next morning with the track still looping and a permanent grape popsicle stain on Theo's couch cushion that his mother never let us live down.

After that, it became our ritual. Emma played those songs after every gold medal. She played them after every crushing loss. She'd plug her phone into the aux cord of Theo's car and fill the whole vehicle with Spanish boleros from the 1950s while Theo yelled from the driver's seat that we were both old souls born in the wrong damn century and begged someone to put on something recorded after 1980.

Emma would just crank the volume. I'd laugh. Theo would groan.

I hadn't played that list since the night she walked out on me. I kept it on my phone. Not to listen to. Just to know it was there.

"Solamente Una Vez" came on next. Emma's breathing finally dropped into a steady, even rhythm. She wasn't sleeping. But she wasn't drowning anymore, either.

I pulled into my driveway twenty minutes later. The modern house was dark. I cut the engine and went around to her side. She was already reaching for the door handle, but I got there first, pulling it open and offering my palm to help her down. She hesitated for a beat, staring at my hand, then took it. Her fingers were pure ice.

Inside the entryway, I flipped the lights and watched her take in the architecture.

"Guest suite is down the hall," I said, guiding her through the living room. "Second door on the left. Bathroom's attached. Clean towels are in the cabinet. Bed's made."

She nodded. Standing in the frame of the guest room, she looked impossibly small.

"I'll make something warm," I said. "Give me ten minutes."

I left her there and walked to the kitchen. Seventeen steps. I counted them out of habit.

I pulled a saucepan from the lower cabinet, poured the milk, set it on the gas burner, and reached for the cocoa tin on the top shelf. Pure muscle memory. I could do this in my sleep. Which was fortunate, because halfway through stirring, my vision decided to stage a violent revolt.

The sharp edges of the granite counter bled into the stove. The stainless steel and the backsplashes merged into one massive, silver-gray blur, and the kitchen tilted hard to the left, the floor turning liquid for three terrifying seconds. I slammed my palms down on the counter and locked my elbows, holding on, counting under my breath the way my neuro-ophthalmologist had drilled into me.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

The shapes crystallized. The counter became solid granite again. The burner snapped back into focus, the milk just beginning to simmer. I exhaled hard through my nose and loosened my grip, my joints aching from the sheer pressure.

Those episodes were coming faster now. Two weeks ago, it was once every few days. Last week, it happened three times in a single morning. I was running out of time.

I finished the cocoa, poured it into a heavy ceramic mug, and carried it back down the hall.