I had forty-seven missed calls and one hundred and four text messages. All of them from Asa and Gram.
I called Asa first.
“Are you okay, Sugar? Where are you?” he roared into the phone. I pulled it away from my face so he wouldn’t burst my eardrums, and when I heard him quiet down a little I brought it back.
“I’m so sorry!” I told him anxiously, “I fell asleep after school and I just woke up!”
“What do you mean you fell asleep after school? It’s Saturday,” he asked , his voice an ominous rumble that made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.
“I know it’s Saturday, I’m not stupid. I fell asleep yesterday after school and didn’t wake up until today,” I answered, enunciating every word.
“Are you seriously lying to me right now? What the fuck, Callie? That’s like twenty-four hours of sleep.”
“No it’s not. It’s sixteen, and I’m not lying,” I snapped back. I was starting to get a little peeved at that point. I knew he was worried, so I would let him get away with a little pissy behavior, but I couldn’t believe he was accusing me of lying.
“Why the hell would you need to sleep for sixteen hours?” he scoffed back, as if I was being completely ridiculous.
“Because I haven’t slept since you left, you jackass!”
My hand flew to my mouth at the confession, and I berated myself silently as I realized what I’d done. I’d played the happy-go-lucky, well-adjusted girlfriend on the phone that week, and all of the lies and assurances I’d given him were wiped out in an instant.
“Aw, Sugar. I’m sorry you’re not sleeping,” he crooned quietly, his bad attitude completely vanished. “What’s keeping you up? You scared or are you having a hard time shutting your brain off?”
“A little of both, I guess,” I confessed, “but it’s getting better.”
“Shit, Callie, I wish I could be there,” he complained. “I’ve got some shit going down the next two weeks, but I may be able to come down for a couple days the week after.”
“Okay, that sounds awesome!” I exclaimed, and the excitement in my voice had him laughing quietly. “Hey—I better get off of here and call Gram. She’s been blowing up my phone all night.”
“Yeah, I bet. I called her last night,” he warned, and then I heard him sigh, “I was getting ready to get on my bike and come looking for you.”
“Well, damn,” I huffed in mock annoyance. “I should’ve slept for another hour.”
“Not funny, Calliope. I’ll call you later, yeah?”
We said our goodbyes as the background noise on his phone got louder, and once we hung up I wondered what he was doing. It sounded like he was surrounded by people, but I wasn’t confident enough to ask about it. I didn’t want him to think I was checking up on him or something ridiculous like that.
My phone call to Gram sounded eerily similar to the one with Asa, but thankfully, Gram said that she would be headed up to check out my place later in the week after she dropped Cody at the airport. It filled me with relief that she was coming to see me, but it also made my stomach drop to know that Cody was headed back across the country and what that meant.
The coroner had finally released my parents’ bodies and my parents were getting their funeral.
On one hand, I was glad that they were no longer being poked and prodded in some sterile lab, but on the other, it was gut-wrenching to know that their time was finally coming to a close. Soon they’d be buried in the ground, and I struggled with the fact that I wouldn’t be there to say my goodbyes.
I’d never gotten to say goodbye.
It also made me sick to my stomach when I thought of the way I’d been so focused on Asa and my new life. I’d pushed my parents’ gruesome death to the back of my mind so I could just get through each day, and I’d latched on to new problems in order to hide the old ones. Because of this, I’d been projecting all of my angst onto things that weren’t impossible to change. I could never get my parents back, they were completely lost to me—but I could change the situation with Asa even if I was refusing to do so.
Knowing that the things I was upset about could change if I wanted them to gave me a sense of control—the control I’d lost when I took that drink at that party. If I just kept my mind on matters that were easily rectified, I could lock the door on things that I knew could never be fixed.
Missing my boyfriend, and choosing that to be my solid focus, made me feel normal in a life that was far from it.
So that’s what I did.
I got up that day, did my laundry, and took a shower. I went along living a life that I’d never envisioned for myself, and pretended not to know that my parents were being buried just three days later.
Instead, I thought about Asa, what he was doing, and why there were so many people with him when I’d talked to him on the phone.
It wasn’t until I was in bed that night, lying in the quiet, that I thought about my parents and how much I missed them. Then, once I’d pulled the blankets up and over my head, I let the tears and gut-wrenching sobs envelop me.
Sorrow was such a small word for such a huge emotion.
Chapter 30
Callie
I woke up Tuesday morning with a feeling of dread.
Holy God, my parents were going to be buried that day and I wasn’t there. I wondered if they knew what was happening, if they’d understand why I wasn’t there for Cody and Gram. I had a feeling that they’d be relieved that I was out of danger even though they wouldn’t be too pleased about my living arrangements. I curled further into my blankets and let quiet tears run over the bridge of my nose and into the hair at my temples. I missed them—even their overprotectiveness that had plagued me for as long as I could remember.