Things Not Said

Chapter 6: Kyle

Kyle

I walk into the hospital with worries on my mind. Should I really come back and see her? Is this a mistake? She probably hadn’t meant for me to come back to see her so many times. She’d probably been joking when she’d said: “See you tomorrow.”

God I’m an idiot. I sign in at the reception desk and decide to take the stairs up to her room. I climb the first flight still thinking about the questions that have invaded my mind. What if my father knew I was here? What would he say then? I sigh and arrive at her level.

I play with the CD case in my hands and wonder why, oh why, I’ve brought this to her. I’m not helping her. How do I know she even remembers? My feet plant themselves in front of her door and my hands are reluctant to knock.

The questions bounce around my head and I’m about to turn away and leave when I find my knuckles rasping on the door. I curse at myself, ready to run far away when I hear her frail voice say: “Hey Kyle.” My heart leaps in my chest and I look back to the door.

No turning back now, anyways. I grab the cold handle and twist it. I walk into the familiar room and find Allie sitting up in her bed. Her face looks paler than before, her red bruises and rashes standing out more than I’d want them to. I want her feeling better, not worse. I smile at her and she smiles back, weakly.

“Come to stare at my beautiful face some more?” she laughs. I smile. Her eyes are the only things that haven’t changed.

“Of course,” I answer, “that and I brought you something.” I take out my radio and set it on her bedside table.

“What is it?” she murmurs.  I try to ignore the weakness in her voice, telling myself she’s probably just tired.

“Just listen,” I say before slipping the CD into the radio. She closes her eyes and I know it’s not only because she wants to listen to the music. I’d be exhausted myself after getting crushed by a car.

She’s trying to hear the music. I can almost see her ears reaching out to the sound that will soon be pouring out of the speakers. I hit play.

Her eyes immediately flutter open and I can see a smile spread across her face. Colour floods her cheeks as if the music were sending health into her soul. I watch her dance to the tune on her bed and she closes her eyes, humming along.

I see her immediately reach for her bound notebook on the table. She starts scribbling inside and I hear her hum to A Whisper. When the song ends and a calmer one starts, her hand movement slows with her pen. She smiles slowly, writing with the flow of the music.

I watch her. Her eyes are looking across the page as she writes more, and more, and more. I can hear her pen scratching over the sound of the music. As the song ends, she puts  back her notebook next to Of Mice and Men.

I look at her book intently, wondering what it is she’d written. She follows my gaze and as if with complete trust, hands me her book. I look back up. Technically, she’s only known me for a few days. She can only remember a few days.

How can she trust me with something so big? I look at the book, my eyes almost burning through the front cover. She puts her hand on the cover and I look up to her eyes, her green, beautiful eyes.

“Let me open that for you.”

I stare speechless as she eases the book open. Inside is ink drawn fluently on the paper, the black standing out against the pale beige. It takes me a few seconds to acknowledge the ink drawings as words. Beautiful words. The words join together to make the story she’s telling in the most majestic way possible. Atop of the words are lines with notes written across. So this is a song, I think. I read the first few lines and, with the music knowledge I have, sing along:

The Good of Night

Dreams

Nightmares and whispers at night

Nothing to escape your tight

Grasp

Hold

You hold me tightly, oh right

Nothing to stop the hurt, night

Flies

And the dreams overtake my soul

Can’t escape they’re mighty hold

And you give me all my pain

The one I lose, the one I gain

Let me dream of songs

Of dancing, and love belongs

But you take me and hold tight

Stealing away

The good of night

I look back to her eyes, her bright, loving green eyes, and look and see for the first time in a long time. I wish I’d been there for her. I want to make up for the times we didn’t talk, the times we weren’t together. I want to take away the pain he caused her. But there’s no erasing the past. There’s just forgiving it.

“I write songs.”

I blink rapidly, torn away from my daydream.

“It’s beautiful,” I manage. And it was; it had left me speechless.

She smiles: “I used to write songs with my brother while he painted. We’d sit in our room, listen to Coldplay, and he’d paint, I’d write. Our parents would never disturb us, they would just let us ‘pour our thoughts onto paper’ as they would say.” The sudden change in subject makes me freeze. I look out at the darkening sky and find my reason to leave.

“I have to go, storm coming,” I blurt out, before rushing out of the room.

“Wait, Kyle…”

But I’m already through the door, down the stairs and out of the hospital. I race home, the cold air biting my cheeks. The snow starts falling minutes after I leave the building and I make my way home with snowflakes twirling around my face.

When I stop in front of my house, I find myself not wanting to go in. I stand in front of it a long time before turning around and walking out into the blizzard. I make my way to the school and, since it’s public, quickly climb up to the art room. I plan to stay there until the storm passes but quickly find myself holding a black pen and drawing on a piece of thick paper.

The drawing is of a girl in bed. She’s lying down and her eyes are wide open. On the other side of her bedroom wall, a drunken man is leaning and banging on her door. He’s holding a bottle of whisky and has a bra hanging on his arm. The girl is clutching at her covers with fright displayed on all her features. I stand up and go to the rack of colours. I pick up a green and walk back to the table where I’d just been drawing.

On the sketch, I colour in the girl’s eyes: the only sign of colour in the drawing.

I look outside to find the ground covered in the snow and the blizzard raging on. I pick up my drawing and head for the door. I should probably go home anyways. Better now than when the snow is covering even more ground.

I take off and trudge through the snow before arriving at my house an hour later with numb toes, fingers, and ears.

I take my keys out of my backpack and throw the front door open. Only after landing on my couch do I realize why Allie had called me back: I'd left my music in her room.

***

Quite a short chapter, I know, but I had nothing else to write and I had to introduce Allie's talent. 

BTW: I wrote the song :) hope you liked it. 

Book: The Knife of Never Letting Go <--- awesome book. kinda complicated to read at the beginning cause the writing is weird. but it's amazing once you finish it. I haven't read the second book yet but I can tell it gon' be good ;)

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