Pushing the Limits (36 page)

Noah’s arms tightened and I could have sworn he kissed my hair. I could do it—for him. I could give myself up and tell Noah to stay hidden. I was reaching out to shove open the door when Noah’s hand smacked it back down and held it to my stomach in a death grip. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked in a low voice.

“Taking a peek to see if we’re in the clear?” Crap, I sucked at lying.

“Hell, no, and you’re full of shit. You’re staying here with me.”

“Your brothers …”

“I gave them up.”

I shifted so I could see his face and the pain in his eyes sliced through me. “Not for me.”

His throat moved as he swallowed and he shook his head. “For them.”

My cell vibrated. Isaiah texted back: Bad. Get out thru window now. Car ready.

“Fuck,” whispered Noah. “I must have triggered an alarm. Come on.”

He quietly opened the door to the coat cabinet. In a methodical yet somehow fluid motion, he opened one of the windows. Without headlights, Isaiah’s car moved stealthily into the student parking lot.

Noah picked up one of my feet to help lift me out the window. “Keep running until you can get in Isaiah’s car.”

“What about you?” Pure panic shook my insides. I thought my eyes were going to wheel out of my head.

He gave me his relaxed, wicked grin. “I’ll be right behind you, baby. Did I ever mention you’re uptight?”

As he gave me a boost, I noticed that Mrs. Collins’s desk sat file-free. Oh, well. I rapidly climbed through the window and sprinted across the parking lot toward Isaiah, peeking behind my shoulder to see Noah crouched near the wall. Blood pounded in my veins and the cool night air burned my lungs as I raced to freedom.

The back passenger door flew open and I dove inside, landing on Beth’s feet. I slammed the door behind me. My gut twisted at the sight of Noah running full speed toward the car. Lights in the main office flashed on. Isaiah continued to drive closer to Noah. My eyes darted between Noah and Mrs. Collins’s dark office. Isaiah threw the front passenger door open and took off the second Noah landed in the front seat.

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Isaiah glanced in his rearview mirror.

“Take me to my car then go home.” Noah was watching the dark, closed window of Mrs. Collins’s office. He cackled and hooted when the light turned on the moment we crossed the invisible freedom line of the grocery store parking lot.

Isaiah pulled up next to Noah’s car and the two of us got out. Beth still lay sound asleep in the back. Isaiah called out to us, “Fight someplace else. Don’t stay here.”

Noah offered Isaiah his hand. “Thanks, bro.”

Accepting it, Isaiah answered, “Anytime, man.”

Isaiah drove off as Noah started his car and followed after
him. Two blocks from the school, a police car with lights flashing and no siren drove past us going the opposite direction. That had been freaking close.

Noah covered my hand with his. “You okay, baby?”

“Yeah.” But I didn’t feel okay. I felt anything but okay. I waited for my pulse to stop beating my veins like a gang initiation, for the blood to leave my face and for my lungs to not burn as I gasped. We were safe now. We were free, but my body still reacted like the devil was chasing me.

Another cop car drove past and the blue and red flashing lights hurt my eyes. In my temples, a slow, steady throb mimicked the rhythm of the blue light—away and near, away and near.

The left side of my face felt numb and my head grew light. “Noah, I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Hold on.” Noah turned into an abandoned parking lot. He’d barely parked the car when I threw the door open and stumbled out, hacking up the remains of my long-ago lunch.

Noah held my hair away from my face. His body shook with silent laughter. “Seriously, you are way too uptight.”

Part of me wanted to laugh with him, but I couldn’t. I sat back on my knees and stared into the dark night. I couldn’t get the flashing lights out of my head. The red and the blue. Near and away. Near and away.

And then … darkness. No lights. No sounds. Darkness …

Vibrant, colorful images flashed forward in my mind in rapid succession, hitting me like bullets from a machine gun. My head dropped forward and I covered it with my arms to drown it all out. My mind pulled at the images, attempting to sort them, to categorize them, but it couldn’t—and the loss of control, the bombardment, caused sharp, excruciating pain to tear through
my brain. Voices and sounds and high-pitched screams clawed at my mind.

I realized that I was screaming and heard Noah speaking rapidly to me. The sound of glass shattering and my own screams drowned him out.

“What happened?” A man with a small light in his hand hovered over me. Red lights flashed behind him and beyond that constellations glowed in the night sky. My mother’s voice whispered in my ear, crooning to me to return to her story.

“No!” I fought to keep myself from falling back into the pit, back to her floor … to keep away from my own blood. “Noah!”

His voice had a husky edge as he called out to me, “I’m right here, baby.”

The man withdrew the light. A stethoscope hung from his neck. “Have you taken any drugs tonight? Have you been drinking?”

The rage in Noah’s voice tasted bitter in my own mouth. “Listen, you fucking asshole, for the fifth time, she’s clean.”

He ignored Noah as he rubbed his hands under my neck. “Pot? Meth? Pills of any kind?”

You’re not allowed sleeping pills
. My own voice echoed from the back of my mind. No. No. God, no. Gravitational forces pushed me into the ground and my mind got sucked into itself and yanked reality from my grasp.

“You suffer from depression.” I shook the empty pill bottle and stumbled out of my mother’s bathroom, stopping when my knee hit the stained glass window she had propped between two chairs to let dry.

My mother sat on the couch, a glass of iced tea in one hand and a picture of Aires in the other. She took a methodical sip.
Her eyes darted from my own empty glass of tea on the coffee table to me. Her wild red hair fell from its clip. “I know.”

I swayed to the side as the entire world tilted. “What did you do?”

She took another sip of tea. Everything inside of me became heavy as steel. “What did you do to me?”

“Don’t worry, Echo. We’ll be with Aires soon. You said you missed him and would do anything to see him again. So would I.”

The room flipped to the left. I struggled to stay upright and overcompensated to the right, but I fell regardless of my efforts. The world collapsed in on itself. The sound of glass shattering accompanied searing pain and screams. Screams from my mother. Screams from me. I opened my eyes and watched as a shower of red and blue followed me to the floor. A fleeting thought ripped through the pain … I’d loved that stained glass window.

Blood.

Blood poured from the exposed veins on my arms. It soaked my clothes and stained my skin. It pooled at the crook of my elbow and a small river streamed out and flowed toward my mother, who was now lying next to me.

“I’m bleeding!”

A strong hand gripped mine. Noah came into view. “No, you’re not.” Behind him, white lights glared and a beeping noise kept in sync with the pounding of my heart. He spoke with unwavering determination. “Focus, Echo! Look at your arms!”

He held my arms up. Clear tubing gently rubbed against my skin. I’d expected blood, but there was none. White scars. Raised scars. And no blood.

“Noah?” I gasped, trying to understand through the screams in my head.

“I’ve got you. I swear to God, I’ve got you,” said Noah. “Stay with me, Echo.”

I wanted to. I wanted to stay with him, but the shouting and screams and glass breaking in my mind grew louder. “Make it stop.”

He tightened his grip on my arms. “Fight, Echo! You’ve got to fucking fight. Come on, baby. You’re safe.”

Noah wavered in front of me and swirled. Pain sliced through me and I screamed again. A nurse pulled glass out of my arm. My father wiped the tears from my eyes and kissed my forehead. Blood soaked his white button-down shirt and smeared his face. “Shh, sweetheart, don’t cry, you’re safe now. You’re safe.”

“You’re safe, Echo.” Noah rubbed the scars on my arm.

“She can’t hurt you ever again.” My father held my bandaged hand, tears pouring down his face.

“Go to sleep,” my mother cooed, lying on the floor next to me, my blood creeping toward her on the floor.

My father scooped me up and cradled me in the hospital bed. “I’ll scare the nightmares away. I promise. Please, just sleep.”

And the constant screaming stopped and I gasped between shallow breaths and a cold, calm hospital room blinked into view. A woman in blue scrubs finished pushing something in an IV line and gave me a small smile before walking away.

My eyelids became heavy and I fought it.

“Go to sleep, baby.” Noah’s voice soothed like balm on a wound.

I swallowed and turned my heavy head to the sound of his voice. “She drugged me.”

He gave me a sad smile and squeezed the hand he held. “Welcome back.”

My voice was slurred. “She put all of the sleeping pills in the tea without me knowing and she gave me a glass.”

His lips pressed against my hand. “You need to rest.”

My eyes flickered. “I want to wake up.”

“Sleep, Echo. I’m right here and I swear I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”

NOAH

“Still here, Noah?” Mrs. Collins strode into Echo’s hospital room. “Mr. Emerson said you brought her in.”

I raked a hand through my hair in an attempt to wake my brain. Echo had slept through the entire night. I spent most of it staring at her, holding her hand, and sometimes drifting off in the chair. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Collins’s blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Dragging a chair to the other side of the bed, she took Echo’s hand. “Has her dad been down?”

“He stayed here for a couple of hours last night, but they’d already put her to sleep before he showed. He talked to the doctor before he went back to help Ashley feed the baby.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“That he’ll know if her mind cracked when she wakes up.”

She let out a brief sarcastic chuckle. “Is that how he put it?”

“That’s my own spin.” My thumb caressed Echo’s hand. She
slept on her own now. They hadn’t given her anything else to keep her calm or help her sleep. Nothing to do now but wait. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

Mrs. Collins cocked an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you asked. You know better than I do that she’s a fighter.”

I relaxed back in the chair. It felt good to hear someone else say it. But still, after watching her fight for her sanity last night … How much could a mind take?

“Did you know she saw her mother yesterday?” asked Mrs. Collins.

Muscles tensed again. “What?”

“Yep. She sure surprised me. I didn’t know Echo had it in her to defy her father. Guess you were a bigger influence than I gave you credit for. She used her trips to different art galleries to find her mom. Left letters for her everywhere until her mother finally agreed to meet.”

“How do you know this?”

“I guess the meeting didn’t go well and her mother called her father and told him to find Echo.”

Damn. Just damn. And she’d tried to save me. Echo wanted to know what happened to her, but had been terrified to remember. I’d never really understood. Yesterday must have pushed her mind over the edge—seeing her mother, fixing Aires’ car, almost becoming a felon. I knotted my fingers with her lifeless ones.
I promise, Echo, I’ll take care of you now and forever
.

“You really didn’t know, did you?”

“Had no clue.” I thought about what she said. “Mr. Emerson didn’t go after her, did he?”

Mrs. Collins tucked the blanket tighter around Echo. “Ashley went into labor after the phone call. The baby came early.”

Once again, second place. The story of Echo’s life. Echo had
a habit of making me feel like a dick in comparison to her and today would be no exception. She left me so I could have a family, making her—alone. How could I ever have let her walk away?

“I’m proud of you, Noah.”

The past twenty-four hours had been one long nightmare. I lost my brothers. Echo came close to losing her mind. “Why is it when people are proud of me that my life sucks?”

“Because growing up means making tough choices, and doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean doing the thing that feels good.”

We sat in silence and listened to the sound of Echo’s light breathing and the steady beep of the heart monitor. My heart ached with the promises I silently made to her and longed to fulfill. She’d never be alone again.

“She had a moment before she fell asleep,” I said. “She said her mother drugged her with sleeping pills. Echo cried a lot during the hallucination or whatever you want to call it. Sounded like her mom was in a depression, decided to kill herself, and then Echo showed. Psycho mom changed the plan to include her.”

Mrs. Collins sighed and patted Echo’s hand. “Then she remembers.”

Echo

Mrs. Collins sent me an encouraging smile when the tiny pieces of tissue fell from my hands onto the blanket. “Sorry,” I said. I shifted in the hospital bed and sighed when more tiny pieces fell to the floor.

The hospital psychiatrist, a balding man in his late forties, laughed. “Tissues were made to be torn. Don’t worry.”

I felt like I had done nothing but cry since I woke up this morning. I cried when I opened my eyes to find Noah at my side. I cried when the doctors immediately came in and asked Noah to leave so they could examine me. I cried when I told the psychiatrist and Mrs. Collins what I remembered. I cried when they talked me through the events.

And here I was, hours later, still crying—a pathetic, constant trickle of tears.

I plucked another tissue from the box and tried to discreetly blow my nose. I remembered. Everything. Showing up and finding Mom in a deep depression. Deciding to stay to see if I
could convince her to see her therapist. Drinking the tea and then feeling ill.