Page 26 of Keep Me

Zane’s hands stopped on the wooden spoon. I watched his jaw do the thing, that tiny, instinctive tightening of the bone, the guard checking the fence lines. He looked at me, his eyes searching my face for the shadow of a sniper.

“He was walking a Pomeranian named Sir Reginald,” I added casually. “He sat next to me at the library the other day. Said he will save me a seat beside the good outlets in the future.”

Zane stared at me for one beat. Two. Then, I watched the defensive lines dissolve. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t deliver a speech or offer a warning. He just let his breath out through his nose, his shoulders dropping in a conscious, deliberate release that mirrored my own grounding exercise perfectly.

“Good,” he said softly. “The good outlets should always be saved for you. Help me with these.” Zane gestured to the stack of papers sitting on the small kitchen table.

It was the lease renewal for the start of the semester. The landlord had finally sent the finalized copies, the legal print clean and black against the wood. I sat down, pulling the pen from where Zane left it for me. It was my second signature scene in a week. I wrote Seren Garcia with a steady hand. Zane took the pen from my fingers and signed his name right beneath mine.

My bets were paying off. Everything was falling into shape. I had one more year in the blue apartment with Zane. I was going to call my dad tomorrow night. Austin would be home next week. Someone was going to save me a seat by the good outlets. I went to sleep that night inside the word after.

Ghosts

The phone rang at 2:07 in the morning.

I was awake before the second ring. That is a thing my body had learned how to do, wake all at once, no climbing, no surfacing. The old training. I lay still through one full ring, listening, the way you listen at a door. Trying to decipher if the sound was real or coming from the abyss of a dream.

The screen lit the nightstand white. A number I did not know. The area code from West Bridge. Nothing good came from West Bridge. West Bridge had never been good to me. Beside me, Zane’s breathing changed. He was awake too. Neither of us said anything. Nobody calls at two in the morning so that you can go back to sleep. Two in the morning is when the ghosts are awake. They are about to throw my things around and leave a big fucking mess for me to clean up.

I didn’t want to answer. I wanted to ignore it. A few years ago, I probably would have. But this was not a few years ago. This is now. I answered.

“Hello?”

“Is this Seren Garcia?” A woman’s voice. Calm in a way that was a job skill. Calm in a way that reminded me of the police officer who once called to tell me that the violation of my body was not worth the trouble of prosecuting.

“Yes.”

“Seren, I’m calling from the West Bridge Medical Center emergency department. Your father, Tom Garcia, was brought in by ambulance tonight. We have him here with us now.”

The room was noticeably quiet. Zane had fixed the radiator with a wrench last night, and now there was nothing left in the apartment that made noise, and I remember thinking that the silence was a mistake. That we should not have fixed it. It was wrong and I needed the apartment to say something.

“Brought in,” I said. It did not seem like a question, and I did not know what answer I was looking for.

“Yes, by ambulance. He’s being looked after. You’re listed as his emergency contact on file. We’d like you to come in. Are you able to come?”

“Is he okay?” I asked her.

A space where the answer should have been. Small. Professional. Yet somehow insurmountable and brutal. An ocean tidal wave.

“He’s being looked after,” she said again. “How far away are you?”

I knew the number without doing anything. I had gotten to know it intimately for three years. We did the drive every month. Back and forth. Back and forth.

“Two hours,” I said. “I’m two hours away.”

Another space. Shorter than the first one. A riptide. “Drive safely,” she said.

My mind replayed her words. We have him here with us now. Have. Present tense. I sat on the edge of the bed and held the grammar like a railing.

Zane was already up. He did not turn on the overhead light, just the lamp, and he moved through the room without any noise at all. Jeans. Shirt. He set my jeans on the bed next to my leg. He set my sweater on top of the jeans. I was looking at the phone in my hand. The call had ended at some point. I did not remember it ending.

“Seren.” I looked up at him. “Socks,” he said, gently.

I put on socks. It helped, having one word at a time. He crouched in front of me and put my sneakers on my feet like I was small, and I let him, and neither of us called it anything.

Keys from the ceramic bowl. He took my phone out of my hand, and the charger it was plugged into. He put them in his backpack, put the bag on his shoulder. At the door he stopped, went back to the pantry, and took out a granola bar. He put it in my hand. I held it. I would hold it for two hours without ever once thinking of it as food.

The stairwell was the same stairwell. The street was empty the way streets are empty at two in the morning, parked cars and orange light and nothing moving, the whole city holding still like it knew something. I had that feeling you get when it feels like you are the only person awake. Like everyone else is paused and you have escaped from it and been shoved into fast forward. The air was warm. It had no right to be warm. It felt like it should be snowing. I had never seen snow.