34 - How to Save a Life

Fine.  Y'all win.  Even if you hate it, you need to tell me that.  Silence is the pits.  :)


He could barely wrap his head around this.  Tony had seen some crazy stuff in his days with Bon Jovi, some of it good-crazy, some of it bad-crazy, but none of it compared to this mess. No wonder she was so hesitant to tell it.  This really happened to somebody?  She couldn’t possibly be making this shit up, could she?

She warned you…

She did warn him more than once, but he’d brushed each warning off, never imagining that the story could be as far-fetched and fucked up as it was.  Whose imagination was that vivid?

And she wasn’t finished???

He needed another cigarette before finding out how he came to fit in all this.

Tony slid both feet to the floor, dipping his hand into his pocket as he went back to his smoking post by the window.  He paused only for a swallow of his watery whiskey, meeting Lilah’s eyes.  She watched him warily, as though she thought he was done with the whole thing. 

He wasn’t done.  By no means was he done.  He was consumed with the need to find out how the fairytale progressed, but he needed to buckle in first.  Putting the glass down, he continued on to the window and slid it open.

Once he had the sedative-stick lit and took a deep drag, Tony held it until his lungs hurt.  Feeling more settled, he blew the smoke out the window and inclined his chin toward her.  “Go ahead.  Louisville.”

“Um, yeah.  Louisville.” 

She closed her eyes – again.  It bugged him that she couldn’t seem to stand to look at him while she relayed the information.  Was she that afraid of his reaction, or was it that hard for her?  Both plausible reasons upset him.

“The morning of July twenty-third, I laid in bed physically and mentally wounded, and I prayed.  I gave up believing in God a while back, but still I prayed, begging to die.  Really, I was pleading for the guts to take my own life.  My self-esteem was shot, my life was completely turned inside-out, and I had no future that I could see.  I’d finished raising my son, and sure as hell wasn’t making his life any easier by being alive.”

She might as well have been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance for all the emotion she showed.  Lilah’s spiel was dry and detached, completely devoid of any personal involvement.  She spoke of committing suicide as though it were someone else’s life – someone she didn’t like very much.

It made Tony uncomfortable, and mad.  Inexplicably, irrationally, insanely angry.

She has exactly two seconds to move on or...  Or…  Hell, I dunno, but I’ll put a stop to it.

“That was about the time that Joanna barged into my room, waving the HullabaLOU tickets in my face.  She’s not an obsessive Jovi fan, but when we heard the band would be there, she agreed to go with me.  Unfortunately, at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less if Richie had sent his personal car and backstage passes.  But Jo doesn’t put up with whining.  She basically ended up forcing me out of bed for the drive to Louisville, saying that if I was going to die it wasn’t going to be on the day Bon Jovi was within two hours of my front door.”

“This is the friend who couldn’t come to Europe with you?”

“Yes.  She’s chronically ill, and wouldn’t have been able to do all the travel for this many shows.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

Lilah laughed humorlessly, toying with her earring.  “A little bit of everything.  Chronic fatigue, rheumatoid artitis, fibromyalgia…  It was a big deal for her to do HullabaLOU, but she goaded me into it because she knew I’d regret missing it.  We made quite a pair, me with my head and neck bandaged up like a mummy, pushing her wheelchair around Churchill Downs. It did get us some preferential treatment though, so we were closer to the front than we would’ve been.”

Tony frowned, taking another deep drag off of his cigarette.  Her comment about a mummy prodded at something in the back of his mind.  Before he could put his finger on it, she shrugged and moved forward with her tale.

“When Richie hit the first lick on the guitar and Jon grabbed that white mic stand…My shitty life faded to the background. I was able to lose myself in the familiar songs and hide from reality for just a little while.”

“So this is how Jovi plays into it.  The songs.”

She met his eyes and held them, pausing thoughtfully before speaking again.  “No.  I could’ve easily listened to the whole set, lettin’ it erase my life for those couple of hours.  Then I would’ve gone back home and found a way to put an end to the pain and misery that were slowly smotherin’ me.”

He understood people had grief, and that it could be overwhelming.  He also understood that Lilah’s grief was a little different, and it had a whole lot of other shit mixed into it.  But dammit if he understood how somebody felt so smothered that the best alternative was not breathing at all.   It was another block in the wall of resentment he was building against her ex – make that former – husband.

Tony angrily flipped ash from the glowing tip of his cigarette, biting out, “Why didn’t you?”

She rearranged her legs so that they were folded under her, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and fiddling with her earring again as she leaned into the headboard.

“It was somewhere past half-way through the show – I couldn’t even tell you which song they were doing – when the big screen behind the band caught my eye.  I very seldom look at the screen, but there was something there that I couldn’t help but stop and look at.  A woman…  wrapped up like a damn mummy…  looking happier than anyone with that many bandages had a right to.  Her eyes were dancing right along with her body and her smile was wide enough to drive a truck through.”

“You.”

She nodded slowly, folding the hem of her t-shirt, creasing it, and smoothing it out again.  “It…  was one of those life-altering, come-to-Jesus moments for me.  Up on that screen, was proof that I could still be happy.  No matter what Jerry Springer crap had rained down in my world, I still had something inside that wanted to be happy.”

Lifting her face, she met his eyes with a quiet determination.  “I’m convinced that, in that moment, Fate and the man operatin’ the video screen joined hands to save my life.”

Cigarette butt burnt down to the filter, he tossed it in the empty whiskey glass and leaned against the wall without bothering to close the window.  Folding his arms, he let his eyes slide blindly to the floor as the tenuous recollection from a few minutes ago flared to life, and a peculiar feeling worked its way through him. 

“I remember that day,” he spoke carefully.  “Not remember remember, but I have a vague mental picture of that ‘mummy’ in the back of my mind.”  Lifting his attention from the carpet, he intently studied Lilah’s face to confirm the resemblance.  “I’d been watching the shots from backstage and the bandages caught my eye.  You were just looking at the stage, not doing anything, but then something happened to make you smile.  I put the shot up.”

Because the fuckin’ sun came out with that smile, you sappy-ass pussy.  The damn smile of hers that still does something to you.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” she murmured, a bit of that smile sneaking out.  “Maybe that means…”  Before the smile could go full-blown, Lilah pulled a disgusted face.  “Well, this is where it might start soundin’ a little stupid.”

“Go on.”

“I, uh…  I knew your name before then, but that’s about all I knew, and only because you were Jon’s other brother.  When I got to huntin’ stuff up online about Bon Jovi’s video production staff and found out you were video director…” Her eyes darted away, and she started messing with her earring again.  “A chill like I’d never felt before raced up my spine.  I just knew you were the one, and that there was some kind of…  connection between us.”

Shrugging, she rushed on, as though embarrassed.  “I spent hours online finding out everything about you that I could, and every detail I discovered sent that same chill through me.  After a week or so, I had gotten so…  enamored with you that I started having dreams that were more than dreams.  They were…”  The last word was muttered too quietly for him to hear.

“They were what?”

Tucking her hand into her lap, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin to lock their gazes.  “Premonitions.  They were premonitions.  Or at least that’s what I’m callin' 'em.”

Premonitions?  That was creepy enough to have him lighting another cigarette.  Like he didn’t smoke enough already, Lilah was going to turn him into a chain-smoker.

Cigarette lit, he manned up enough to venture, “Uh.  What kind of premonitions?”

“Not the kind you’re thinkin' of.  Premonitions probably isn’t even the right word.  I…  You just kind of started livin’ in my subconscious, I guess.”

That went about ten steps beyond creepy.  He was trying to tell himself the woman in front of him hadn’t become anybody different in the last fifteen minutes.  She was the same Lilah that had summoned his protective instinct.  She was the same woman that fit his body like a tailor-made glove, but it was hard not to look at her in a completely different light.  A slightly unbalanced light.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know how else to explain it,” she apologized quietly.  “I dreamed about you.  In the dreams, we talked, spent time together.  I learned who you are.”

“Those were dreams, Lilah.  You don’t know me.”

Just like you don’t know her.  But wasn’t it just a little while ago that you knew things you had no reason for knowing? 

“I understand what you’re thinkin’. I swear I do but, as crazy as it sounds, I believe with all my heart that the things you told me in those dreams were real, Tony.  The things that you … showed me… were real.”

Showed?  Who…  What…  Huh?

“Like what?”

“Like…”  She slowly rearranged her legs again, this time putting her feet on the mattress and hugging her bent knees.  “What turns you on with oral sex.”

Remembering last night and how, at the time, he wondered at her expertise with his ‘hot spots’, Tony froze with his cigarette halfway to his mouth.  Guys were guys though, weren’t they?  He’d never asked another guy what he felt best about getting blown, so it could be a universal thing.  Coincidence.

“And..?” An unexpected breeze pushed smoke back into the room, catching him unaware and forcing a cough from his chest.

“Your nipples are so sensitive that you can barely stand to have them touched, but if you’re havin’ trouble getting’ off, it will put you over the top every time.”

The cough went deeper and he nearly strangled on his own dumbfounded surprise.  Nobody – nobody – knew that other than his ex-wife.

“And that you can’t seem to quit smokin’ even though the thought of lung cancer scares the hell out of you.  And that seein’ what Richie’s been through isn’t enough to keep you from drinkin’ too much, even though you think about him with nearly every damn drink.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. 

“And that the real reason you can’t make yourself care enough to get either of those things under control…”

No.  She does not fucking know this.

“…is because you think it doesn’t matter to anybody.  As much as you love your brothers and their families, you feel like the odd man out.  An outsider.”

The hair on his arms stood on end from wrist to elbow.  He was officially freaked-the-fuck out.

“That’s enough.”  Not even bothering to snuff out the remains of his cigarette, he flicked it harshly outside and slammed the window shut.  He’d heard all he wanted to hear.  This shit couldn’t be real.  She couldn’t know things that he didn’t even admit to himself.  Not possible.

“No,” she countered quietly, rising to her feet and circling the bed so that she could stand in front of him.  Lilah placed a feather-light hand in the center of his chest and regarded him with somber eyes.  “You wanted to know why I’m here, and this is it.  You saved my life, Jersey.  I came here hopin’ to save yours.”