You cannot prevent what you cannot predict

”I don’t bloody care!” he said, not even looking up from the TV where the game was playing. “I have told you everything I know, all about what happened, and that’s all I can do. I don’t give a damn if you still won’t let it go!”

”I know you don’t, that’s the problem.” I mumbled.

I went into the bathroom and locked the door. The room was a mess, the red carpet was covered in dust and hair, the bathtub was filled with dirty laundry and the sink was still dirty from James shaving this morning.

I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were red from the tears that had started to run down my face the second I locked the door between me and James. Other than that I was looking rather good, I had just showered two hours ago, and my hair was lying in that perfect look that I never managed to keep for more than thirty minutes. This always made my face look better than it really did, because it framed it in just the right way.

“Lucy? Are you in there?” James knocked on the door and tried to open it.

“No,” I said, and started to wash my face so that he wouldn’t know that I had been crying. James sighed, and I could hear him sit down on the other side of the door.

“I’m sorry I said that I didn’t care, okay? I’m sorry that there is something to care about at all, but I can’t do anything about that, it’s not my fault this happened,” he said through the door.

I kept looking at myself in the mirror. I knew I was being stupid, but no matter what he said I would never be able to just get over it. Right now he was saying all the right things, but I just didn’t seem to be able to let it go. When I met James two years ago it all seemed so easy. He was this handsome, smart man with a good job and a great personality, and from the very beginning he never did anything but make all of my dreams come true. And now we were ruined because of something he did five years ago. Everything would have been normal now if it wasn’t for the conversation last week that changed my life. It had started like any other conversation, we were just talking. Talking about things we had discussed so many times before, and telling stories about whatever came to our minds. If it wasn’t for the fact that James remembered the date of this particular story, and accidentally mentioned it, I would have never made the connection. I never would have realized that he was to blame for my loss. That the funny story about the drunken girl he met was my tragic story about the death of my baby sister. Of course he had spent days apologizing for it, and I really should have forgiven him by now. I wanted to forgive him, but how could I be with him any longer when the very thought of what he did still made me sick?

“Lucy? Can you say something?” James interrupted my thoughts, and startled me so that I knocked over the clothes rack and landed all over it.

“Lucy? Are you okay? What happened?” James yelled and I heard him get up and start banging at the door.

“Auch…” I mumbled, and tried to get up. The whole rack was bent over me and it seemed like an impossible project to get loose. Maybe if I just lay completely still for a long enough time, everything would just go away.

“Lucy! Answer me, damnit! What happened?”

Everything happened, and now I was done, I was leaving everything and moving to an island, far, far away. Then James broke through the door. There was a loud, cracking sound and than the door was just gone, and James stood there looking at me. For a few seconds he just stood there with a weird look on his face, and then he started to laugh. He laughed a lot, and I started to think about how stupid I must look. And about how stupid this whole, damn situation must look. Here I was, trying to stay with a man whom I no longer loved, hoping that he would change the past and make me love him again. I knew that would never happen, I knew we were over. No matter what happened next, we would never again be completely happy together. There was no point trying to stop it, or ignore it, anymore. The hard part was just around the corner and all that was left for me to do was to take the next step toward what I couldn’t see until I was there.

“Could you help me get out of everything?” I asked James in a whisper. He didn’t know what I really asked for.

“Sure,” he said, still laughing, “how come you always end up in these situations?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not careful enough,” I answered as he pulled all the clothes and the bent rack away from me.

“Well, you should work on that,” James teased, and pulled me up in a standing position. I took his hands away from my waist and walked around him out to the living room, “I will,” I said over my shoulder. And I would, I would work on not letting people I didn’t really know screw me up. Independence was my new keyword, starting that night. So I sat down at the computer and started to look for my own place. James paid more than half the rent now, but I would manage. Some small, cosy apartment would fit me just fine. I knew James was watching me, he could probably read what was on the screen. But he didn’t say anything, maybe he knew we were over too.

“I do love you, you know. Now just like last week, before all of this came up,” he eventually said. I stopped seeing the screen as his words floated around in my head, and my head tried to make sense out of them.

“I know, and I still love you. But I don’t see you anymore, I just see this man that I hate, and I don’t know which one of you is the real James. But as long as you have this cloud over you that I hate, I just don’t see the person that I love. And it brings out the worst in me, which makes me hate you even more,” I said, more to myself then to him.

“How can I make that part of me go away?” he asked, and sat down in front of my chair, dragging it towards him.

I looked down at him, he was so sincere. But it made no difference, ever since the moment he unknowingly let what mattered the most to me leave me; I had hated the man who now sat in front of me. I just didn’t know it was him until now. I had always been sure that my baby sister was gone because of the man who got her drunk and left her, the only difference now was that I suddenly loved that man. “You can’t. I’ve tried to make it go away for days now. I just keep picturing it.”

Hurt flew across his eyes. I could see his hands gripping my chair tighter, as though he needed something to hold on to. “I keep picturing it too. I never even knew she was dead. When she didn’t make any contact later I assumed she didn’t want to see me.”

“I know you did. But for five years now, I have always hated the man who just left her –”

“I didn’t leave her, I put her in a cab, paid the driver and gave him her address, and what else could I have done?”

“You could have taken the cab with her, put her in her bed and stayed up all night to make sure she didn’t stop breathing!” I cried. I knew it was unreasonable to say. No one could have predicted that Hannah would just stop living that night. He probably couldn’t even have stopped it if he was there to see what happened. Tears welled up in my eyes again as I realized that the person I always thought was to blame for this never existed. He was just some imaginary shelter I had created. I never wanted to believe that Hannah could leave me. And for me to blame James, sweet James who never did anything but the only thing responsible he could have done, to make him feel like a murderer was cruel. It had all made me into this cruel girl who was ready to leave the one person who had deserved her affection more than anyone else.

James didn’t say anything. He looked down at the floor until I put my hand under his chin to make him look at me. His eyes were red and wet from unshed tears.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for making you think this is your fault. I wish I could go back to hating a total stranger, I wish I never found out that is was you, and I wish you never found out that she died. I wish we could keep both our half’s of that story and never share them with each other.”

“It is my fault,” he said, “I should have made sure she was fine. She was to drunk to function; a better man would have taken care of her.”

“The doctor said there was nothing to do. Except for being totally drunk she was as healthy as ever until the moment she was dead,”

“Maybe I could have prevented that moment. I could have helped her up the stairs, hell, she weighed about two pounds, I could have carried her so she wouldn’t have strained herself, or –”

“Or I could have told her to stay home that night, or she could have gone to another club and you two wouldn’t even have met,” I interrupted him, “You cannot prevent what you cannot predict, James.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

I didn’t know what else to say. For the first time in five years I couldn’t find the hatred that had consumed my body anywhere in me, and it felt so good.