Page 11 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Nine

When the World Stills

Theo

The lyrics had been pounding in my head for days now, that one line from “Born to Run” playing on repeat like my brain was stuck on the world’s most depressing broken record.

Something about living with sadness, loving with madness—the exact words always escaped me, but the sentiment carved itself deeper into my chest each time I remembered it.

And her name. Jesus Christ, her name was Wendy. Of all the names in the world, it had to be Wendy? Almost as if Springsteen had somehow written that song specifically for us, for the particular brand of insanity I’d been drowning in for months now.

The bourbon bottle sat empty on my kitchen table, but I couldn’t even remember when I’d finished it. Couldn’t remember most of yesterday, actually. The school week blurred into late night stretches of drinking and thinking about vanilla-scented hair and sound she’d made when I’d—

The front door burst open without warning.

“Theodore Michael Garner, what the hell is wrong with you?”

Andie. My sister’s voice cut through the haze like a blade, sharp with that particular fury that only close and immediate family could manage.

She stood in my doorway, holding a spare key I’d forgotten I’d given her.

Cool platinum-blonde hair framed a face masking something between concern and disgust, her blue eyes frosty and—angry.

“Andie.” I blinked at her, my tongue suddenly thick and uncooperative. “What are you doing here?”

“Staging an intervention, apparently.” She stepped into my kitchen, taking in the empty bourbon bottle, the stack of ungraded papers that had been sitting there for over a week, and the general disaster zone my life had become. “When’s the last time you showered? Or ate an actual meal?”

I couldn’t remember. The days had started melding together somewhere around the time the coffee shop disappointment had curdled into something darker.

“I’m fine, Andie.”

“Bullshit.” She pulled out a chair and sat across from me, her expression shifting from anger to something that looked dangerously close to pity.

“You missed Dad’s birthday dinner last week.

You haven’t returned any of my calls. And according to Jessica—yes, I Facebook messaged your colleague—you’ve been barely functional at work for months. ”

“Jessica had no right to—”

“She’s worried about you, Theo. We all are.” Andie leaned forward, her tone softening. “Talk to me, dude. What happened to you?”

The question hung in the air between us, landed with months and months of accumulated damage. What had happened to me? Where did I even start? The accident? The woman whose name matched a song lyric I couldn’t get out of my fucking head? The elaborate shrine we’d built in our shared madness?

“There was this woman,” I finally said, the words tasting foreign in my mouth.

“Okay.” Andie’s expression didn’t change. “Tell me about her.”

So I did. I told her about the accident, about holding a stranger while she’d sobbed, about months of midnight drives and stone offerings and the desperate conviction that thirty-seven minutes of shared trauma meant something eternal.

I told her about the frantic sex against her car and the coffee shop afterward, about the crushing realization that fantasy and reality sometimes had nothing at all to do with each other.

“Jesus, Theo.” Andie was quiet for a long moment after I’d finished. “You know this isn’t about her, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“This obsession, this elaborate ritual—it’s not about loving some stranger. It’s about avoiding everything else.” She gestured around my kitchen, at the evidence of my slow-motion descent into madness. “When’s the last time you dealt with Mom’s death? Really dealt with it?”

Her words hit like a physical blow. Four years since the cancer had taken her, and I’d thrown myself into work, into routine, into anything that didn’t require me to acknowledge the vast emptiness Mom had left behind.

“You used that woman as an escape,” Andie continued, her voice gentle but unrelenting. “Just like you’re using alcohol now. But you know what, Theo? You can’t keep running from grief forever.”

I stared at my hands, at the wedding ring I still wore on my right pinky—Mom’s last gift before the morphine had taken her ability to speak.

Andie was right. The shrine, the obsession, the desperate need to make Wendy into something sacred… it had all been easier than admitting I was still that lost thirty-year-old overgrown kid who’d watched his mother waste away in a hospital bed.

“I need help,” I whispered hoarsely, the admission scraping my throat raw.

“Yes, you do.” Andie reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “But wanting help is the first step.”

She stayed while I made the call to Dr. Probst, the therapist she’d been recommending for years.

She stayed while I poured the rest of my liquor down the sink, while I finally acknowledged whatever I’d found in that canyon had been nothing more than two broken people mistaking shared trauma for a connection, for love.

Real healing, I realized, would have to start with myself.

Wendy

Saturday, 2:45 p.m., same week

The Riverside Behavioral Health Center looked exactly like what it was: institutional, sterile, devoid of all feeling. Beige walls, fluorescent lighting, that particular smell of disinfectant and resignation that seemed to permeate places where people were admitted when they wanted to disappear.

I’d called ahead three times, confirming and re-confirming that Delaney Lewis was allowed visitors on the weekends, and that she was stable enough for company. The receptionist had asked if I was family, and I’d lied without any hesitation whatsoever.

“Cousin,” I’d said, the word tasting like ash. “Visiting from out of state.”

Sitting here now in the visiting room with its mismatched chairs and motivational posters about healing and hope, I wondered what the hell I was really doing here. What did I possibly think this would accomplish?

Delaney walked in accompanied by a nurse, and I barely recognized her.

The vibrant, smiling nineteen-year-old from the Instagram photos had been replaced by someone who moved like she was underwater, her steps slow and sluggish, her eyes focused on nothing in particular.

She’d lost weight—too much weight—and her dark hair hung limp and unwashed around her youthful face.

The scar from that night was visible, a thin white line across her forehead that disappeared into her hairline.

“Delaney?” I stood up, my heart thundering. “I-I’m… I’m Wendy. I was there that night. When—”

Her dark brown eyes focused on me with sudden, terrifying clarity. “You were there.” It wasn’t a question, but rather a statement delivered with a voice as flat as a day-old open can of soda.

“Yes.” I sat back down as she took the chair across from me, the nurse retreating to give us some privacy. “I wanted to see how you were doing. To check—”

“Beck’s dead.” She said it the way someone might comment on the weather. Matter-of-fact. Emotionless. “Did you know that?”

“Yes, I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Are you?” She tilted her head to one side, studying me with an intensity that made my skin crawl. “Because I remember you. You held my hand that night.”

“I did.”

“And then you left. With that man.” Her voice never changed inflection, never betrayed any emotion. “The one who tried to save Beck.”

My chest tightened. “We gave our statements to the police—”

“I don’t care about the police.” For the first time, something flickered behind her dark eyes. Not anger, exactly, but something harder. Deader. “I care about the fact that you’ve been building memorials to my dead boyfriend.”

The words felt like a slap across my face. “How do you—”

“I have friends. They send me pictures sometimes. Of the accident site.” She leaned forward, her face never leaving mine. “All those stones. All those flowers. Very pretty. Very elaborate.”

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even breathe.

“Do you know what I see when I close my eyes?” Delaney continued in that same terrible, flat, dead voice. “I see his face. The way it looked when the life left it. I hear the sound the metal made when it twisted. I smell the gasoline. I taste the blood in my mouth.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks, but she showed no reaction.

“I can’t paint anymore. Did you know that?

I was an art major. Now I can’t even hold a brush without my hands shaking.

” She held up her right hand, and I could see the visible tremor, subtle but constant.

“The doctors say it’s a trauma response.

PTSD. They have a lot of real fancy words for being broken. ”

“Delaney, I—”

She cut me off. “So tell me,” she said, “what exactly were you grieving? Because it wasn’t Beck. You didn’t know Beck. And it wasn’t me, obviously, since you never once came to see me until today.”

The question hung in the air between us, thick, suffocating. What had I been grieving? The answer was so obvious, so shameful, I couldn’t even say it out loud.

I’d been grieving the end of feeling needed. The end of mattering to someone, even if that someone was a complete and utter stranger. I’d been grieving the return to my ordinary, empty life where no one’s survival depended on my actions, or even my presence.

“I think,” Delaney said very quietly, “you were grieving yourself. Your loneliness. And you used our trauma to build yourself a shrine to feel important.”

“That’s not—” But I stopped, because it was true. It absolutely was.

“The man,” she said, her gaze lifting to meet my eyes. “The one who tried to save Beck. You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

I nodded, unable to speak.

“Because he was there. Because he witnessed you be brave for, what, half an hour?” Her smile was terrible, and horrifically empty. “But that’s not love. That’s just… grief wearing a disguise.”

We sat in silence for a long time, the weight of her words settling over me like a shroud. Around us, other visitors continued to speak in hushed tones to their own broken loved ones, but I could only hear the sound of my own shallow breathing.

“I need to go,” I finally whispered.

“Yes,” Delaney agreed. “You do.”

I rose on unsteady legs, looking down at this girl who’d survived what should have killed her, and somehow found a way to see right through me and my bullshit.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For everything.”

“I know you are.” For the first time, her expression slightly softened. “But being sorry doesn’t fix anything. And building shrines doesn’t bring the dead back to life.”

The drive home was a blur of tears and self-loathing, the kind of ugly crying that made driving dangerous, but all I wanted was to get back to my apartment so I could hide there.

Still, I pulled over twice, once to throw up in a gas station bathroom, and once to sit in an empty parking lot and sob until my throat was raw.

By the time I arrived at my apartment, the sun was setting, painting my living room in shades of orange and red that reminded me too much of brake lights, of emergency vehicles, of everything I’d been trying so hard to forget.

I stood in my doorway, observing the evidence of my slow descent into madness. Accident reports scattered across my kitchen table. Printed photos of Delaney and Beck taped to my walls. Black charcoal sketches of twisted metal and broken glass covering every available surface.

And in the corner, a pile of smooth river stones I’d been painting, preparing for Tuesday nights that would never come again.

I’d turned my apartment into some kind of mausoleum, a shrine to trauma I’d confused for healing. But healing required facing the truth, and the truth was far uglier than I’d been willing to previously acknowledge.

I wasn’t grieving Beck Foster. I was grieving the version of myself that had finally mattered to someone, even if it was only for thirty-seven minutes. I was grieving the end of feeling needed, feeling significant, of existing outside the comfortable prison of my own loneliness.

And Theo.

God, Theo. I’d projected every romantic fantasy, every pathetic need for connection onto a stranger who’d been kind to me in the worst moment of my life. I’d confused the bond from that trauma for love. I’d confused his desperation for devotion.

The breakdown, when it came, was different from that night in Theo’s strong arms. This time, there was no one to catch me when I inevitably fell. No hard chest to sob against, no gentle, calloused hands to stroke my hair and whisper that everything was going to be okay.

This time, I fell apart completely and utterly alone, curled up on my living room floor, surrounded by the evidence of my beautiful, disturbed delusions.

I cried for Beck, who’d died too young. For Delaney, who hadn’t, but had lost herself anyway.

For Theo, who deserved better than becoming someone’s trauma response.

And finally… finally, I cried for myself. For the lonely woman who’d been so frantic for connection, she’d built an elaborate fantasy around thirty-seven minutes of a shared crisis.

The sun finished setting, leaving me in the darkness with my tears and my shame and the terrible, necessary work of figuring out how to be alone again.

How to be alone without building shrines or confusing kindness for love or using other people’s tragedies as an excuse to feel alive.

It was the hardest thing I’d ever do.

But for the first time in months, maybe even years, it felt like I was doing the right thing.