Almost Enough

Amanda checked her phone for the address Chanse sent her, refreshing the page over and over. They were less than five minutes away, but it was the longest five minutes she has ever had to endure. Shayne and Courtney tried their best to talk her through it, but she couldn’t listen. She was nauseous at the thought of her girlfriend lying in bed with someone else.

Her mind filled with memories of them together. Days spent singing in the kitchen, laughing while wine-drunk on the couch, walking the sidewalks on hot LA summer days, Spork attached to Angela’s chest in his baby carrier. The sound of Angela’s laugh filled her head, and she imagined the two of them, Angela’s head thrown back, her body shaking with the sound that made every bad day better.

She focused on Angela’s touch, warm and teasing. The way Angela’s fingers always found themselves to absentmindedly trace Amanda’s skin, even when she was in full focus mode. But now, she prepared herself for the worst. Her chest felt tight, as if every memory was a brick placed on her lungs, making it very hard for her to breathe. The memory of Angela slipping through her fingers like the sand on the beach she stood on earlier.

A sigh escaped her mouth before she could help it, and her head pressed against the window. She swallowed the tightness of her throat, allowing herself to sit in grief, but not express it.

Shayne looked over at her, “Do you want to try talking again? No rush.”

“It’s just, I don’t know how much of this I can handle. If she really is with someone else. I literally cannot comprehend it. I have spent so much time with her, so many days in the past years comforting her through every crazy rampage she went on after she didn’t book, or felt like she failed. I’m so exhausted. I need her so much, and I know she needs me.”

“Yeah, she never knew how to stop.” Shayne tried to laugh his sentence off, his hands tightening around the wheel. From the backseat, Amanda could hear Courtney sniffling.

“I actually don’t think she knows how to stop. She always books herself 24/7, and sometimes I just want her to be with me. But I don’t want her to think I am holding her back, and so I never say anything. Sometimes…I just want to be enough. But clearly I’m not.” The words were bitter against her tongue, and she had to swallow the venom rising from her stomach.

“I really don’t want this to be true…” Courtney sniffed again, wiping at her eyes.

“Me too.” Shayne and Amanda stated at the same time, their words lingering in the air.

The rest of the short ride was silent, and they finally reached the bar. They parked next to Chanse, Angela’s car sat empty next to it. Amanda could barely look at it.

Amanda opened the door of Shayne’s car, her body shivering with nerves.

Chanse walked up to her, Spork in his hands.

“You brought Spork?”

“Yeah she left without him, and I didn’t want him to be alone.”

Shayne was the first to state the obvious, “we can’t carry him around while we look for Angela.”

“She always keeps an extra carrier in her car, usually thrown under the passenger seat.” Amanda muttered, moving over to Angela’s car. She saw her face in the reflection of the car window, she looked miserable, which was exactly how she felt.

“Is it locked?”

“No..” Amanda said, ripping the door open with a little too much force than necessary, “..it never is.

Right where Amanda said it would be, was Spork’s carrier. She hooked it around her shoulders and her waist, and Chanse slipped the tiny dog inside. He smelled like their house, and a time Amanda wished so hard to go back to.

“I can’t help but say it, but it’s kind of weird that Angela wanted to take a break and all of a sudden she leaves with some man at the bar? Am I just really insecure right now, or is this just some insane coincidence?”

“No it is definitely weird, but Amanda. I really don’t see Angela just leaving you and immediately getting with someone right after. Angela has self-destructive tendencies, but never any like this.” Chanse tried hard to have his words puncture the wall Amanda was starting to put up.

Courtney chimed in, “I don’t see it either, plus the bartender said she left first, and he went after. How do we know that they both just didn’t go home? Maybe she realized her message to Chanse wasn’t coherent, and she called an Uber.”

“So why isn’t she home?”

“I don’t have an answer for that.” Chanse hung his head low, and Amanda was starting to grow warm with anger.

“Let’s think clearly for a moment. Angela was too drunk to drive home, she attempted to call Chanse, hopefully wanting to be picked up. It didn’t work, so, where did she go?”

Through gritted teeth Amanda snarled, “some man’s bed?”

“Amanda, stop. She may need our help, and we won’t be able to find her if you are angry. This is so not slay.” Courtney paced around, looking around the street for any sign of Angela.

“When she is drunk, sometimes she’ll try to walk it off, thinking it will actually make her sober.” Amanda searched her memories for every time she could remember being around drunk Angela.

“This is going to be so hard, we literally have no direction to where she could have gone, this city is gigantic, and no one in the bar saw where she actually went.” Courtney kept straining their neck to see where Angela could have gone. “You don’t have any way to track her phone?”

“No, we both agreed we thought it was creepy to track the other person.”

Shayne looked around at everyone, “Should we just pick a direction and start walking?”

“Sure.”

~
On the rooftop, Angela tried to think of anything but her ankle that felt like it was on fire. She searched her pockets for her phone, but remembered it was in her purse. This is also when she realized she dropped her purse while running.

The man could have her wallet. With her phone, her keys, her ID.

Her ID. That had her address. The address of the home Amanda was in right now. (Or so she thought.)

This realization caused Angela to sit straight up, how could she have been so reckless? Now a man, who wanted to hurt her, or worse, now had her most prized possessions, and could be on his way to her house right now.

She groaned as her muscles ached, her body sore from running, her ankle now three times the size of the other. She gasped as she tried to move her leg, and bit down on her tongue hard as she lifted her leg, and tried to scoot her way over to the edge of the rooftop. She looked over, the street lit up, but no sign of life on this side of town.

She couldn’t help but cry. This was so hopeless. No one was going to find her, unless she was lucky enough for some gigantic bird to land on top of her and lift her down.

There was a door that led to stairs into the building, but the thought of climbing the stairs, crawling down as her ankle slammed into every step almost seemed worse than dying on this rooftop. She laid back down, exhausted. Her eyelids weighed a thousand pounds, and she struggled to stay awake. The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was the rain clouds moving in.

~
“Shit, did you guys feel that?” Shayne moved his hand to the back of his neck, feeling for the raindrop that landed on his shirt.

“Of course, this could not get any worse.” Amanda placed her hand above Spork, trying her best to shield him from the incoming rain.

They walked for almost five minutes, each person taking turns calling Angela’s phone. At first they rang, and by the time everyone almost finished their second call, it went straight to voicemail.

“I bet her phone died.”

“Yeah..”

Amanda looked up at the sky, the occasional raindrop landing on her face, and she prayed to the Universe for any sign of Angela. For any sign she was okay, that she was not in the arms of someone else.

Spork shuffled in his carrier, and started to bark.

Amanda looked down at him, following where he was looking. On the ground was a black handbag she has seen a hundred times before. She sprinted forward, leaving her friends behind, and picked up the purse. A few feet away she saw scattered makeup, Angela’s keys, her dead phone, and her wallet.

“Amanda! What is it?”

Amanda choked out her words, almost in a sob.

“Her purse, her stuff. Chanse, I think you are right. I know Angela. She would have never just thrown this stuff on the ground, even black out drunk. Something, or someone, made her drop it.”

“You watch way too much Dateline.”

“Shayne, this is really not the time to make jokes.” Courtney shouldered him, and then dropped down to gather Angela’s belongings.

“Everything is accounted for in her wallet. Clearly whatever she was running from didn’t want what she had.”

“Which means they only wanted her. That is so much worse.” Amanda’s heart plummeted, the thought too much to bear.

“Well, with where the stuff was scattered we can assume she was headed this way.” Shayne pointed East, but unfortunately it did not lead them to anywhere helpful.

Courtney pulled the bag around their body, and linked arms with Amanda. “What if she had just got up and went missing?”

Amanda sighed, her body tense, and she reached out to the stars, her soul speaking to the Universe, “I’d find her.”