Page 6 of When He Calls

A text from Noor, sent at 1:47. Hey. October check-in. You eating?

I must have missed the notification in amongst my panic.

She does this every year. The check-ins start mid-month and run through Halloween, spaced just far enough apart that they feel casual, close enough together that the pattern is obvious. She doesn't know the reason. She knows the result. She's been watching me go quiet every October since junior year of college, when she knocked on my dorm room door with Thai food and found me sitting in the dark with my laptop closed and my hands in my lap, and she sat down on the floor next to me and ate pad see ew and didn't ask a single question. That was seven years ago. She's never asked. Her never asking is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me, and I've never told her that because telling her would require explaining what she's not asking about.

Yeah. Bean and I walked. I'm fine.

Liar. But okay. Love you.

Love you too.

The bed is cold. Under the blanket, curled into the cold, waiting for body heat to fill the space. Bean jumps up and circles three times and settles against my shins, twelve pounds of fixed weight at the bottom of the bed.

Phone on the nightstand. The crisis center number is in recent calls. My thumb moves it to favorites. Because my prescription is lapsed and the therapist is in Portland and October has fourteen more days and it's responsible. Practical.

Not anything else.

October is outside where it belongs. In here there is nothing except the memory of a voice that said take your time and expected nothing. Not bravery or recovery or an explanation. Just time. Nothing has been enough in October for twenty-one years, and time was enough.

His voice. Not the words. The way it didn't rush. Forty minutes of a stranger's worst night and he didn't bend, didn't strain, didn't pretend the patience. Just had it. He said Milo when I told him my name. Once. Just the name. It sounded different in his mouth than it sounds in anyone else's.

My sheets are getting less cold. Bean is pressed against my legs, her breathing already slowed to the deep rhythm of sleep. My eyes grow heavy.

Fourteen days until Halloween.

Something in my chest, right side, just below the collarbone. The fading heat of a held conversation. Crisis line operators are voices on phones and nothing else. The way he said you just needed someone to listen is not something to fall asleep to.

Falling asleep to it anyway.

Chapter Two: Brantley

The headset is still on. The call ended three minutes ago. His personal information form is glowing on the screen. My hand hasn't moved to close it.

Milo Ashford. Twenty-seven. Callback number with a local area code. Presenting concern: panic attack, phobia-related. Risk assessment: low.

I don't usually fall apart for strangers.

The apology is so practiced it has stopped being a choice. He's been apologizing for this his whole life. The fear, the floor, the needing. And the apology on a crisis line to a person he'll never see was so automatic that the words barely had breath behind them.

That's not what has my hands flat on the desk.

Three years and two hundred and nine entries, every one of them a voice that came through the headset, filled the silence, and then left. The protocol says this is the goal. The operator catches the fall, stabilizes, redirects. The voice recovers and leaves, and the entry becomes a ghost.

Every single time, the letting go is clean. The call ends, the form closes, the headset comes off. Nothing sticks. Nothing stays in the body after the line goes dead. Sometimes I get repeat calls, but eventually those stop as the person stabilizes.

But this time, I find myself wanting to investigate the voice on the other end.

I don’t know why…

Maybe the timbre of his voice, or the inflection, or the way he tried to make himself small, even through the phone.

This time my hands are flat on the desk because if I lift them they'll shake. His voice went into my ear and didn't come back out. It lodged somewhere deep in my primal brain. My mouth has gone dry. My pulse is running ahead of my breathing. My shoulders are tight from the sound of a man on a bathroom floor saying I'm sorry, the sorry the realest thing about him. Then swearing, then apologizing for swearing, as if he couldn't decide which part of himself was the bigger imposition.

I've replayed the call six times in my head since it ended.

The intake form is standard: name, number, area code, presenting concern. Every operator on shift can pull an intake for any active call. The form is not the problem.

The browser tab that opens next is the problem.