I won’t remember crying, but the wet imprint on Loretta’s shirt later will tell me otherwise.
*
The rehab clinic treats death as a rather unfortunate, but common occurrence.
The nurse behind the counter is nothing like the one on the phone; she’s almost coarse around the edges, half-lidded eyes in the middle of a sharp face that cases an even sharper tongue. She has a paint-by-numbers smile that doesn’t waver as she offers faux condolences.
“I am so sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” I mumble back, and dig my hands even farther into the pockets of my too-tight jeans.
“Miss. Urie was a troubled soul,” she says, and her fingers taptaptap at the keyboard in front of her. “Good company to those who needed it though. Some of the younger patients here had become rather fond of her.”
“Nice to know,” I reply, and I can’t make eye-contact with this woman, not because I don’t want to, but because she seems far more absorbed in the computer screen in front of her than with the person (with me) behind the desk.
“Yes, I suppose so.” She prints out a few pages, rolls her chair over to pick them up and places them on the countertop in front of me. “You’ll need to fill out these forms for the death certificate and the life insurance. There’s a funeral home down the road if you have made no prior arrangements.”
“Right,” I say, and the nurse brushes dark hair off her face. She can’t be older than fifty, grey hair pokes through above the shells of her ears, and the wrinkles loosen the flesh around her eyes, her forehead, her cheeks.
“It’s very unfortunate that she chose to end her life,” she continues. “But perhaps some people can see no better option.”
And it’s at this point that I want her to shut up, to stop talking, to just, to not talk about Catherine, because this woman knew fuck all about her. I knew fuck all about Catherine, at least the one that lived, however pitifully, in these dying days. I want to know why I was robbed, I want an answer, and I want one better than no better option.
The nurse doesn’t look at me, not now, but her eyes are almost as grey as her hair. I see these things sometimes, and it’s the sort of bullshit my mother would’ve noticed. She ducks behind the counter, comes up with a box full of meager items; a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a notebook, the bracelet that I made for her out of pasta shells when I was seven (and fuck, that one hurts), and an envelope.
“This is addressed to you,” the nurse says. “It was on her bed when the night-watchman found her.”
“Oh,” I say, and the envelope, it says ‘ Brendon Urie ’ in Catherine’s familiar scrawl, loopy letters that fall off the page, and maybe, for once, maybe I should take up a religion, coz I need to believe in a higher force for this, for answering my want so directly.
Instead, I thank the nurse, coz in these moments she’s the only higher force I have. She smiles in response, and it looks a little different, it hesitates, and her forehead creases, eyebrows twitch, and she puts a hand over mine. “You’re welcome,” she murmurs, and the smile is an artwork all of its own, it’s heart wrenchingly sad, but it’s real and it’s genuine and I appreciate that more than this woman will ever know.
I finish the forms in silence, and head back to my car. I don’t look at her body. Instead, when I get back to my apartment, I pull out a photo album that I haven’t looked at in years, pull out a hundred photos of five-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old Catherine, that has a head full of dark hair, and a face full of bright eyes. I take the one of her, the one that my Dad took on her fourteenth birthday, the one where she smiles like nothing could taint her, and I leave it on top of the cabinet in my bedroom.
I feel down my pockets and pull out the envelope with shaky fingers and a brain that swells in my head. Open it too slowly, and pull out a folded piece of paper that only has an address on it, and the words ‘go get him, tiger.’
I stare at the photo, of her fourteen and in a summer dress covered in sunflowers and leaves, and my eyelids explode, and my tear ducts swell and my heart bursts in my chest.
This is not the Catherine who clung to me at the clinic yesterday. This, it might be the Catherine that I loved.
*
*
The thing is, and maybe it’s a bigger thing than I made it out to be before, but the thing is that Ryan’s never had a lot of money.
In reality, he doesn’t have a lot of money now either, but he doesn’t rely on me. He has the will of a stony-vagina-celibate-nun when it comes to certain things, and his economic independence is one of them. Later on, years from now, he’ll refuse to move in with me coz he can’t afford to pay half the rent.
Later on, years from now, I’ll have to learn to compromise my standard of living.
The point is, and there is a point, the point is that I’m standing outside of some feral little apartment block (again), and I know that Ryan Ross lives in room 3G with a person named Bowditch, C. and a dog named Dorian.
My fingers tap too hard on the rusted fence, the intercom is broken, and the front door isn’t locked, and I’m sorta worried that I’m thirty seconds away from being jumped. That I’ll get HIV if I touch the railings, cancer if I look too hard at the florescent light bulb that swings above my head like Katy’s moods.
The tiles across the floor are cracked and dirty, and there’s a tiny man behind the desk, sleeping like there’s nothing left (and maybe there’s not). So I let myself upstairs, because I’m an impatient asshole, and I need this like Catherine needed her drugs. I need something right now to give me direction, to focus my attention.
Room 3G has a pot plant outside the door, and the number/letter has been polished so much that it almost gleams. I knock too hard, but the door’s unlocked, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve said it before that I’m oblivious to privacy outside of my own.
“Uh, hi.” And there’s a woman here, with red hair, a pregnant belly and a tub of vanilla ice-cream in her long, pale fingers.
“Hi,” I reply, and I scratch the back of my head, shift on my feet, and fuck, is this…is this what it looks like? “Bowditch, C?”
“Bowditch, C.,” she says, and she puts the ice-cream container on the floor, but she holds the large metallic spoon like it’s a weapon. “Claire,” she says.
“Brendon.”
“Urie,” she says, and she grins a little, an upturn of her big red lips, and Christ, this woman is beautiful. She’s tall and lean, and if you saw her from the back you’d never know she was pregnant. Her skin is smooth as paper, and her eyes as blue as a bottle top Jellyfish. “I was wondering when I’d get the pleasure.”
I let loose a grin, coz it’s hard to suppress the part of me that wants to woo, to seduce, to well, fuck around. “Pleasures all mine.” And God, that’s sleazy.
She laughs, and grabs the ice-cream container again; it’s enough to let me know that she isn’t interested, that she can see right through me, or maybe, and this kinda seems likely, maybe the pregnancy (she has to be at least eight-months along) has killed her sex-drive.
“I know all about you, motherfucker,” she says.
“Good things or bad things?”
Claire leans over just enough to look up at me through her fire-red hair. “You tell me, pretty boy.”
She laughs again, and rocks back on her heels, and yeah, these are the people Ryan surrounds himself with, this woman and Katy and Spencer and a tiny voice in my head calls out you. Me.
Claire, she waddles over to the sofa, a large, dusty, stained, old thing, she shifts her weight, has to balance a belly full of baby as she wanders over. There’s a dog, Dorian, who stares at me from a wicker basket by the door.
“I’m not a bad person,” she says, and she collapses onto the sofa, blows hair off her face with round cheeks and upturned eyes. “But I can’t say the same about you.”
“You don’t know me,” I reply, and I’m still standing in the doorway.
This feels like a spaghetti-western, like we’ve taken steps away from each other, and any second now, she’ll turn around to shoot me in the gut.
Bang.
She hasn’t moved yet though; she’s leaning back on the sofa, a grin on her face and a hand on her belly. “I know enough.”
I don’t say anything; I shift my weight though, and stare at the cracks in the ceiling.
“I know you break hearts like some people break wine glasses.”
“You’re a poet,” I reply, and Claire laughs too hard, throws her head back and smiles through her teeth.
“Only when I’m trying.” She puts her elbows behind her, leans back far enough that she can see me. “I know what Ryan’s told me.”
“What’s he told you?”
“That you’re a liar,” she says, “and that you’re scared of everything.”
Maybe that’s the bang, maybe that’s the gunshot.
Claire, she’s one of those people that even when she’s baiting you (me), there’s something about her that can’t let you hate her. Something about her that’s tired and jaded and just, she’s looking out for Ryan, looking after him, and I can’t reprimand her on that.
I also can’t say that she’s treating me unjustly. Not necessarily.
Instead I do the only thing that I can do, I bury my hands in my pockets, I don’t make eye contact and I mumble out a, “My sister just died,” through the gaps between my teeth.
Claire’s eyes don’t widen, her face doesn’t change, but her hand, I see it tighten on her belly. Thing about being an actor is you have to learn about body language, and your eye, it sharpens to it off screen too. She sighs, a deep throaty thing, before turning away, pulling her feet up onto the couch beside her.
“Ryan’s in his room,” she says. “It’s just down the hall.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, and Claire sighs again, furrows her forehead, and it’s like, I don’t think she can quite figure me out. I almost go back, tell her not to worry, coz I can’t quite figure me out either.
Ryan’s room, it is just down the hall. There’s a poster of Jack Skellington on the door, a pair of Doc Martins on the floor, and I let myself in, hesitate over the handle for just a few seconds.
I don’t see him straight away; instead I’m absorbing this, because my mum, she used to say that you can find out anything about a person from their bedrooms. The contents of it, the layout, how messy it is, how dirty it is, what’s broken, what isn’t, the bedspread, the wallpaper, the curtains.
This is how my mother spent her weekends. Dissecting people’s heads, crucifying them from the way they made their beds in the morning, if they made it at all, which Ryan, he doesn’t.
There are clothes in the corner, a pile, and they’re folded too neatly to be strewn there. Notebook after notebook that stack up beneath the window like a city high-rise, and Ryan, he creates countries wherever he goes. His last apartment was a third-world town leading to a solar-powered paper-cut city, and this, it’s some forest, some mediocre bush-town, where the dust-bunny people live in CD-case huts, notebook-huts, pencil tin-huts. I don’t know.
Ryan’s in the corner, he’s sitting next to the bed scribbling in someone’s paper house, his hair is shaggy, and his arms are long, and he’s got this tortured writer look down to a T.
I lean over, tip-toe and I don’t mean to loom over him, but that’s sorta what happens, and Ryan, he only reacts when my silhouette kills the light from which he was using to write.
“Fuck off, Claire,” he mumbles, but he doesn’t look up, and I end up shifting my weight before moving to sit down next to him.
“Not Claire,” I say, and Ryan, his head jerks up too quickly and he stares with wide, desperate eyes that too quickly reduce to slits.
“No,” he says, “you’re not.”
I sit on my hands, bite my lip and stare at him through my hair. “I read it,” I say, coz I did, I read my mother’s journal, and right now it feels like the right thing to say.
Ryan’s eyes loosen, and he sighs, closes his notebook, and leans back just enough to rest on the wall. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Really?”
“No,” he says. “I wanted you to, but it wouldn’t be the first time you proved to be a selfish ass.”
“Ah,” I reply, squint a little at him, and he looks at the floor, looks back at me.
“I’m glad you did.”
“Me too,” I say, and I shift a little, can’t help but feel uncomfortable, because Ryan, he’s so fucking close, so close to me, so close to home, words too close to hitting something.
“Good,” Ryan says, and he nods. “Good.”
I let loose a breath that explodes from my lungs, runs me ragged, and I say it before I can stop myself. “Catherine’s dead.”
Ryan’s head shoots up again, and his eyes are wide, his bottom lip quivers, and fuck you, Catherine, fuck you for getting a reaction like this.
“What?”
“Dead,” I say, “suicide.”
Ryan’s breath is shaky, and it claws its way from his throat, a vicious thing escaping some labyrinth, some pit of despair, and Ryan, he clutches at my arm a little, inhales too hard, and just like that, he’s recovered. His face is blank, and his eyes are half-lidded, and he rocks back into a world of something impassive. His hand is off my arm, and the imprint it leaves, the creases of my shirt, it burns.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, and I shrug, not quite sure what to say, just like I wasn’t quite sure what to say to the last thousand ‘sorrys’ I’ve received since Catherine carked it.
“Not your fault,” I say, “unless you told her to drown herself, in which case I might have to punch you in the face.”
I try for a smile, and I get half a one in reply. It’s not much more than an upturn of the lips, but it’s enough to give me palpitations, Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum in my throat, behind my eyes, everywhere but my chest.
“Okay,” he says, and he rubs the back of his head with long fingers, and I’m left here too self-conscious, too out of place, almost inadequate, a dirt-clump amongst diamonds.
“So, Claire,” I start, and I try to keep judgment out of my voice, try to keep anything out of it.
Ryan shrugs, stares back at me with that half-a-smile and eyes that have been cut out of chocolate. “A friend,” he says. “It’s not my baby, if that’s what you want to know.”
“I wasn’t implying- “But I was, because somewhere in the back of my head is BrandonBrandonBrandon.
“Yes you were,” he says, “and we’re just friends.”
“You and her, or you and me?” And it slips out before I can stop it, before my head catches up with the rest of me.
Ryan’s smile falters, and he squints bleary eyes. “You tell me,” he mumbles.
This is where something in me flat lines, my head and my heart auto-restart, and for a few seconds I’m left running on nothing. This video’s been played too many times, and now when you run it, all that comes up is some metallic haze, a blur, a fuzz. “Both,” I say, and I’m out of petrol, out of gas, need to stop over somewhere to refuel, coz this, it isn’t meant to happen like this. “Just friends,” I say, and Ryan’s face doesn’t change, his smile has been smeared across his face like drag-queens draw on their eyebrows.
“Right,” he says, and he closes his notebook, drops the pencil onto the floor, and stands up too quickly. “Course,” he mumbles, and I want to backtrack, rewind rewind rewind.
But I don’t, instead I change the subject. “I’m organizing Catherine’s funeral for next Monday, Central Park cemetery. Come if you want.”
*
I’m so fucking young when I move to LA; naïve, wistful, Alice in Wonderland, through the looking glass, Charlie in the motherfucking Chocolate factory.
I’m even younger when I start to drink.
There’s something undeniably freeing about losing your brain cells, losing your conscience, that little voice in the back of your head that tells you that this is sorta fucked up. It gives me a freedom that I craved, that I needed, and it was something that I latched onto when I moved here, a liberty that comes too easy at William Beckett’s parties.
“Jesus,” Jon says, and maybe it’s two in the morning.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” And yeah, there aren’t really that many maybes about it. I’m lying on the floor in Bill’s porcelain bathroom, arms wrapped around the base of the toilet.
Jon, he isn’t impressed, he’s all rock-hard eyes and pale face, and I try not to look up at him too hard, just keep my forehead pressed to the sweaty porcelain in front of me.
“Okay,” he says, and he breathes too hard, in through his nose, out through gritted teeth. I feel his arms grab at me, pull at my shirt, at my torso, and this, it feels like nightmares I had as a kid, the monster under my bed.
“’m fine,” I mumble, and somehow, somehow I pull myself up, the toilet and Jon, they’re a set of mismatched crutches and I grab onto them like I’m drowning, and maybe I am (drowning in the liquor that rolls around my stomach like cream in a half-empty jug).
“Not really,” Jon says, and he tugs at my arms, pulls me through the door and back into the swell of the party. There’s yelling and music everywhere, pretty, pop stuff that explodes in my ears.
I’m pulling away though, stumbling outside, staggering to my car before I can think otherwise. Jon, he’s sidestepped by some pretty girls, a guy that he went to high school with, and I’m fumbling with a set of keys as he yells out behind me.
“Ngh,” I say, and I breathe out too heavy, through my parted lips, and I can smell it all, smell liquor and tobacco, and fuck, when had I smoked?
“You can’t be fucking serious.” And there’s a voice behind me, some bodyless sound, and I turn around too quickly to come face to face with a skeptical Ryan, all angles and limbs and quirked brow.
“Fucking serious,” I repeat, and I don’t even know what I’m saying it to, don’t know what I’m serious about, don’t quite know what I’m thinking.
“You can’t drive,” he says, and he puts his hands on his hips, leans forward a little to stare at me that much better.
“Have my license.”
“What-the-fuck-ever,” he says, wanders over to me, and plucks the keys right from my boneless fingers. “You’re beyond inebriated.”
“’m almost sober.”
“Not almost enough.”
He opens the door for me, leans across it like he’s my client, like I’m some two-dollar whore begging for a fuck, and I just, I collapse into the car, into the passenger seat, and Ryan closes the door, moves around to fall into the drivers place.
The car’s running away from me, moving along, and that, it makes me feel nauseous, makes me press my face up against the cool glass of the window. My eyelids are heavy, and my brain is shriveling in my head, shrinking in the wash.
“I think I’m in love with you.” It tumbles out of my mouth like an insect out of an open trap, falls between my lips, and in seconds I almost don’t remember saying it. All this, it feels too much like a dream.
Ryan’s driving, both hands tapping against the steering wheel, and it takes him a few seconds to answer. “That’s not the impression I got six hours ago.”
“Not drunk enough then.” Whilst intoxication provides a freedom, I’m not sure if it’s always a good thing.
“Ah, so, you like me when you’re smashed,” Ryan says, and he pauses at the traffic lights, glances at me out of the corner of his eye. “You like me when I’m not around and to be honest, I sorta get the impression that you prefer me when I’m not talking.”
“You’re nice to look at.”
“Thank you,” he says, and he sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and me, I’m staring now, watching on with wide eyes and parted lips.
Maybe I’ve lost control (no maybes, not any), maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m fucking miserable, but all that comes out next are the words, “I think I want you.”
I can hear Ryan breathe, see the lights go green out of the corner of my eye, and the car starts to move again, roll beneath me. “Love me or want me? They’re different things, Brendon. Affection versus ownership.”
“They’re the same sometimes.”
“Bullshit.” And the way he says it, it isn’t particularly aggressive, not violent or argumentative, he’s just stating a fact, a passing comment, but he won’t look at me, not even when I reach out to put a shaky hand on his arm.
The silence settles like dust, like darkness, like snow, and I can’t say anything. My throat is encased in tar, in wet bitumen, in glue and my tongue is stuck there, stiff and unpleasant, and it tastes wrong, my mouth, everything.
Ryan won’t take his eyes off the road, but his arm is warm beneath my fingers, receptive, soft and lean and just, it’s nice. My apartment isn’t far from here, and I can recognize that much, see it all out the front window, my street, my complex, my world.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he whispers, and he’s backing into my driveway, eyes on the rearview mirror.
“Then we match,” I mumble, “coz I don’t think you know what you want from me either.”
We’re parked now, and he’s staring at me with wide eyes, pools of brown, hazel, coffee. This, it’s an out of body experience. I can’t control what I’m saying, what I’m thinking, and maybe tonight, maybe sobriety would have been a good thing, preferable to this at least.
“What the hell are you afraid of?” I ask, and I’m not really sure why I’ve said it, not sure when exactly I realized that Ryan was afraid of something, but he is, he was.
Ryan, he sighs, hits the steering wheel lightly with flat palms, before rubbing at his eyelids and Christ, it’s early, late, I don’t know. “You want us to fall in love? You want us to set up house somewhere in the suburbs with a white picket fence? Brendon, it doesn’t work that way.”
My mouth moves on its own accord, gapes and tries to shape words that my voice box has no intention of saying, yes, no, definitely and instead, what tears itself from my throat is a, “Why not?”
“Life’s not a Disney film,” he says, and he stares up through his hair, his bangs splitting his face into a million pieces, a million straight-edged parts to a too-hard jigsaw puzzle. “It’s not a fairytale.”
“But I want it,” I say, and I feel so fucking young, a kid in a toy store who’s been forbidden to buy a goddamn thing.
Ryan, he almost laughs, but the sound that comes out is strained, desperate. He taps his fingers on the side of the car. “What?”
And my head, maybe I’m not thinking again, not thinking straight, my eyes are burning, and my lungs ache in my chest. Everything is fucking hurting, and maybe I’m losing my mind. “Give me one fucking day.”
“To what,” he laughs, and he sets skeptical eyes on me, “woo me?”
“ Yes. ” Because really, yes.
“Jesus, Brendon.”
“My happy ending,” I say. “I want it now.”
Ryan, his eyes aren’t wide, but they aren’t slits either, they’re normal at the moment, the size of pistachio nuts, and they’ve hazed over, blurred like he’s moving too quickly, or maybe I am, because before I know it, we’re kissing. His lips are gentle on mine, chapped and rough, but they’re nice, fresh, and fuck, my breath, I must taste awful. I slip my tongue in before he can quite get around to sticking his down my throat, because I don’t want him to taste tobacco, don’t want him to taste liquor and desperation and the girl (I don’t know her name), her cherry lip-gloss, because three hours ago we weren’t in a position anywhere near as innocent as this. Or rather, I wasn’t. I don’t handle rejection well; I don’t handle it at all.
He’s not responsive, not too sure, and I wish he was, wish I was too, wish I wasn’t hesitating, but I am, and he is, and all of this, it’s just wrong. Where are my fireworks, my singing birds, my magic? I want my pumpkin carriage, my kiss to wake me from my coma.
But Ryan, someone hasn’t told him the details of this role, this contract; he breaks off too early, sighs into my mouth and rubs his lips over my cheek, across the shell of my ear. “But it’s not the end yet.”
Chapter 17
There’s this splice in the curtains where the sun grazes through like a monster, like a cockroach, a clawed, ugly thing, and those tiny rays that peak through, they’re someone’s nails, talon-fingers. That, it’s enough to rouse me from my sleep, appeal to my sixth sense, that thing inside you that rattles around in your ribcage, around your skull to get you to wake the fuck up.
Of course, mine isn’t so much a monster, nor is it an instinct, more that it’s Loretta who sits on the edge of my bed eating a bowl of cereal and staring down with an air of almost blatant disinterest.
“Ngh,” I say, and the monster has crept up one of my nostrils, gotten caught in the nerve endings and brain juices of my skull and it’s banging around like it can’t get out (and it can’t, not without coffee and a few days of r’n’r).
“You, Brendon Urie,” she says, and then she scoops another spoonful of bran flakes into her mouth, is munching away like a donkey on cud. She swallows, blinks, stares back at me with this smug little smirk that tugs tight at the corners of her mouth. “You fascinate me.”
“Really?” I manage to mumble out, and the monster, it’s crying now, moaning and clawing at the space behind my eyes.
“Yeah,” she says, “for someone so fucking stupid, so fucking stubborn and persistent, you sure are without a fucking roadmap.”
“Too early, Lor.” And I pull the blanket over my head, coz maybe, maybe when I tug it back down she’ll be gone. Just like magic.
“It’s ten-thirty, Bren.”
“It’s fucking daylight. ”
She pauses, but then her fingers, they jerk at the head of my blanket and pull it back down. Loretta, she stares with half-lidded eyes that are really more intense than they should be.
“My point is, Brendon, that you have no fucking direction, and I don’t know what you’ve got planned with this latest endeavor, if you have anything planned at all, but-“
“What fucking endeavor?”
Loretta sighs, purses her lips at me, before nodding to the doorway, and Ryan, he stands there too tall and too thin and too beautiful, especially when I’m pretty sure I look like all hell.
“I’m an endeavor now?” he says, and he pulls at his messenger bag, rolls his eyes, and Loretta, she grins back at him.
“Aren’t you?” she says. “You’re a fucking handful at least.”
“Don’t deny that.”
I roll over some more, leave them to their banter. Everything hurts, and I don’t think I’ve ever been this hung over. It’s not just the booze, and I know this, it’s the whole emotional rollercoaster that’s been stuck upside down on one of the loop-de-loops since two days ago when Catherine fucking drowned herself.
I hear a sigh behind me, a whirlwind of thought that ruffles my hair, and Ryan, he’s sitting beside me. His eyes are closed and his hands are fingering the cuff of his jacket.
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