Read Westlake Soul for Free Online Page B

Song.
    My Bond girl, remember?
I want to be your Soul,
she had said.
    She came to see me twice when I was in a coma. The first time she sat in the chair next to my bed, her hand clutching my fingers, occasionally stroking my hair. Her touch had always sent unreal sensations through my body, like threads of light in a plasma globe. Easy to imagine the fine hairs on her arms stiffening. But on this occasion, I had no light to give. I lay numb and unresponsive. A marionette with tubes for strings, waiting for someone to make me dance. Nadia leaned close enough to kiss me, whispered in my ear.
    “Wake up, baby. Wake up for me.”
    She thought she could do it—that her voice, her touch, was like fairy dust, and would wake that deeply sleeping part of me. That it didn’t happen changed something inside her. Very subtle, but enough for her to question our harmony. Enough to set a cool wind blowing across her miniature sun.
    “I’m here.” Her fingers tying bows in my hair. Unravelling them. Tying bows. “Wake up. Come back to me.”
    Tears had no effect on her beauty. In fact they enhanced it, the way imperfection can make a portrait more real. She would stop crying, eventually, but at that moment she was hurting. A nineteen-year-old raincloud. She curled her hand around my wrist and felt the vague tick of my pulse. It was all I could give her.
    She visited again five days later—the day before she left for Toronto. Her hair was tied back, her face exposed. The lines of her cheeks seemed sharper, and her eyes too big. A sallow bead of light played on her brow. She kissed the bridge of my nose, delicately, before sitting down. Her hand looped into mine and for a long moment she sat silently, gazing at my sleeping face, listening to the chirp of the cardiac monitor.
    “We were supposed to be at the beginning,” she said. Her lips tightened. She looked away from me. The light through the window struck her glistening eyes. Not pink sunshine, but the pale silver of a Vancouver afternoon. “I had it all planned, baby. We were going to get married somewhere uncomfortably hot, then honeymoon until our bodies were shattered. You were going to open a surf shop while I deejayed. We’d have two children: Marvel and Calypso. A dog called Jesus. And we’d live happily ever after in a place where you could hear the palm fronds whisper, and where our garden was made of sand.”
    No tears. Maybe she was all cried out, or had found a ridge of inner strength, shaped like a saddle horn, that she clung to as the life she knew bucked and reared. With her hair drawn back she appeared austere. Harsh, almost. The effect of cooling winds. Still beautiful, but different from the girl who had sat in that seat five days before, her pieces held together by the weak glue of disbelief.
    “Come back to me, baby,” she said.
    My IV line dripped saline.
    Nadia let go of my hand. She reached into the beach bag she had brought in with her, took out her iPod and the Allen & Heath headphones she had been wearing when I first saw her. She leaned close and looped them over my ears, making sure they were comfortably placed. Then she plugged them into the iPod and found our song.
    You may think—with us being so young, sexy, and kick-ass—that our song was something contemporary, blazing hot. Armin van Buuren, perhaps, or deadmau5. Maybe even one of the classics. “These Eyes,” by The Guess Who, or just about anything by Bob Marley. Yeah, you may think that, but you’d be wrong. Nadia was a deejay, and her appreciation of music ran deep. Thus, our song was a l’il something from the nineties.
    The
seventeen
nineties.
    Beethoven’s
Sonata pathétique.
The adagio movement. Special to us because that was when our protons first collided. Another memory I relive often, regardless of hurt. Every sweet sound. The smell of floor polish and lavender. My heart suddenly feeling as if it were filled with helium, climbing in my chest, wanting to carry me away. It