Her All Along

by Cara Dee

  That seemed to confuse her. She huffed and pulled her hair back into a haphazard bun at the top of her head. I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be an improvement over the braids.

  “I don’t understand people,” she said, frustrated. “Willow and I analyzed our friends last year, and everyone had already stopped playing with toys. We even asked to make sure! So, they say one thing, and then you adults say another. Like, can you make up your mind?”

  Sweet child. I knew this was difficult for her—and her sister. I was also surrounded by teenagers every day at work, so I couldn’t say we adults were entirely correct either. Because peer pressure and bullying could fucking hurt, and the truth of the matter was, the girls could face bigger problems if they shut out their peers and went solely on what they wanted.

  It was an extremely tough thing to balance, especially if you were autistic and already struggling with social cues and fitting in.

  “First of all,” I said slowly, phrasing myself carefully, “do you still want to play with dolls?”

  She scrunched her nose and shook her head.

  Okay, then. “Then you shouldn’t, of course,” I went on. “But leave out the judgment. That’s why it’s not easy to stand out and be different in school, because someone is always waiting to call a classmate loser.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek, processing. “I don’t want to be called a loser, so I shouldn’t call others losers.”

  “Exactly.”

  She accepted that logic.

  After finishing my coffee, I reminded her that I was moving today. I’d gotten the keys to my new place, with all its cracks and dents, the other day, and I hadn’t wasted a second. The house I’d called home since I’d left college was already on the market, and the bank had approved a second mortgage since they knew I’d be able to cough up a substantial part as soon as this was sold.

  Everything Angie had bought for us would be left behind. She could deal with it. I was out. I didn’t want a single reminder of her in my life. A new bed had been delivered to my own place, sans bed frame for the time being, and all my clothes, books, and few personal belongings were boxed up and waiting to be moved over there.

  “You’ll be right on the other side of the playground?” Pipsqueak asked, seemingly for reassurance.

  “Correct. You’ll see my house easily,” I confirmed. “My new backyard faces the playground.”

  “Correct,” she echoed, staring at my mouth. “I like that word. Correct. It’s good, isn’t it?”

  I chuckled quietly.

  She shrugged and smiled, then opened her bottle of lemonade. “Correct, correct, correct.” She nodded to herself, satisfied, and took a swig from her bottle. “Oh, that tastes of so much correctness.”

  I shook my head in amusement.

  I feel like we haven’t gotten closure, Avery.

  I rolled my eyes and typed my response.

  Would it help if I came over to your new apartment and fucked another woman in your bed? Do yourself a favor and delete my number. We’re done.

  After pressing send, I followed my own advice and erased her from my contacts. I’d block her if there wasn’t the occasional message related to our divorce that I had to deal with. Then I put my phone on silent and returned to staring at the building in front of me. I was still in my car, hiding out like I’d done so many times around my mother.

  It was Angie’s fault I was here. It was because of her I had to go through this.

  “Forgiveness takes a minute, Avery. And then you can have your mother back in your life. You have to forgive her. I’m your wife—don’t you think I want what’s best for you?”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face and drew a deep breath.

  She never fucking got it.

  I’d had a couple girlfriends before meeting Angie, though I’d never divulged much about my past. I’d made up lies about the scars across my back and the ones over my knuckles. The marks on my rib cage had been concealed by a big tattoo of a silhouette of a boy sitting between two massive bookcases, and he was surrounded by books that rained down over him.

  “Fuck it.” I reached over to the glove box and pulled out my emergency pack of smokes.

  I rolled down the window and lit one up, taking a deep drag that almost made me choke.

  I glanced at my hand and the smoke trapped between two fingers, and I shook my head at myself. I’d once been deathly afraid of cigarettes, not because of risks of cancer but because my mother used to enjoy putting them out across my hands. Most of the blotchy marks had healed, but my knuckles still looked like they’d been involved in too many fistfights.

  And I should forgive her for that?

  Angie could rot in hell with my mother.

  I opened the door and stubbed out the smoke on the ground.

  Time to get this over with so I could head back to Camassia. I stepped out of my car and ran a hand through my hair. Part of me wondered if it was the taxpayers who footed the bill so my mother could stay at this fancy institution right outside of Seattle. In which case, they should just throw her off a bridge.

  Breathing through my anxiety, I entered the four-story building and signed in as Louisa Becker’s son and hoped to God it would be the last time.

  One of the nurses accompanied me in the elevator, and I took the opportunity to ask if my mother was allowed to have a cell phone.

  Unfortunately, she was.

  As soon as the elevator doors opened, the hospital smell hit me with a force that made me want to run back to my car.

  I swallowed uneasily and loosened my tie a bit.

  So, she’d been moved up here now. Last time I’d been forced to visit, she hadn’t required much care.

  I didn’t bother asking for an update from the nurse. I already knew pretty much everything was wrong with my mother. Aside from a chronic chemical imbalance, a narcissistic personality disorder, and Borderline, she had a medical condition that had given her the weakest immune system. She was always ill.

  I firmly believed the world would be a better place if she hadn’t been born.

  It wasn’t as if my brother and I had contributed to much anyway.

  The nurse smiled politely and slowed down as we reached the right room.

  Once she’d left, I stood there in the doorway and studied the frail form sitting in a wheelchair by the window. She didn’t have a regular bed anymore. Everything looked like it’d been delivered straight from a hospital.

  She pulled off seventy-five great for a fifty-six-year-old.

  She must’ve noticed some movement, because she glanced at me from over the rims of her glasses.

  It was the same dead gaze I’d grown up seeing. Steely dark blue. My brother and I had inherited a dark hazel color from the father we’d never met.

  “Took you long enough, Finn,” she noted sourly.

  I hated her voice. It was too sharp—and probably the strongest thing about her, except for her teeth, maybe. She was always crunching her hard candy.

  I left the doorway and put my hands in my pockets. “It’s Avery.”

  She scoffed. “I know.”

  I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down, doing my best to look comfortable, when I was anything but. The table between us was covered in books, candy wrappers, and markers. A hobby of hers was to find typos in books and boast that she’d do a better job. The fact that she didn’t have an English degree or had never worked in editing didn’t seem to matter.

  I watched her highlight a paragraph in an old senator’s memoir.

  “Imbeciles,” she muttered. “Seven typos in 260 pages.”

  “Why did you want to see me?” I asked.

  She made a haughty sound and lifted a brow at me. “You came to see me, Avery. Because you’re like a dog. Regardless of what I do, you come crawling back. You need a leader to follow because you’re too weak to stand on your own.”

  I stared at her, forcing a casual expression. The fury I carried for this woman was
putrid and all-consuming, and it’d long since taken control of my actions in my everyday life. It colored every opinion I had.

  “I want you to stop contacting me,” I told her. “You have no place in my life anymore.”

  She wasn’t going to wake up one morning and realize what she’d done. By the sound of things, she already knew. Either she lacked empathy for it, or she’d made sense of it in a way that absolved her of guilt.

  My mother snickered and unwrapped a piece of candy. “Do you remember when we used to play hide-and-seek?”

  I flinched, and that was it. I’d had enough. I had to get out of here before I threw up, but first, I had to get my hands on her motherfucking phone.

  The crunching began. She watched me with amusement dancing in her eyes as she chewed on the hard candy, and it made my fucking skin crawl. There. I found her phone on the side table attached to her bed.

  I wasn’t surprised to see that no pin code was required. She’d never remember it. Which gave me an idea.

  “You weren’t as good at hiding as your brother, Avery,” she told me.

  “Shut up,” I snapped.

  I deleted my number in her contacts, then clicked down to see if Finn was in there somewhere. Luckily for him, he wasn’t. There were only two other numbers, neither of which I recognized.

  “Not that tone with me,” she sneered. Crunch, crunch, smack, crunch. “It’s not my fault you weren’t good at hiding, boy.”

  I ignored her. “How did you get my number this time?”

  There was no forgetting the first time, because it was Angie who’d provided it. Along with my address and email. I’d since changed both, but I’d rather not change my number. Hundreds of students had access to it.

  My mother waved a hand. “Nurse gave it to me.”

  I clenched my jaw hard and pinched the bridge of my nose. Knowing how manipulative and convincing my mother could be, I didn’t trust the nurses to simply not give her the number even if I told them I didn’t want her to have it. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and change it. I could still tell the nurses I didn’t want her to contact me, and maybe if I gave them a fake number…

  There weren’t enough precautions to take when it came to that vile woman.

  “You were always in the closet,” she mused, and I screwed my eyes shut. Thankfully, with my back to her. “Every single time. You sat there under one of my coats, shaking like a leaf.” She found that funny.

  I couldn’t stop the memories from washing over me.

  Memories of pushing my brother under the bed, telling him to stay there and be quiet. On the days I sensed she was in an extra cruel mood, I hid Finn on the fire escape, no matter the season. And I took the closet, the place she searched first. If I heard Finn cry, I even left the closet door open.

  Get out, get out, get out.

  I gnashed my teeth and quickly set a pin code on her phone, then returned it to her nightstand.

  “It’s not good to be so afraid, Avery. I tried to make you strong and resourceful. Instead, you pissed your damn pants.”

  “Yeah, it’s baffling,” I replied, clearing my throat. “You told your sons that whomever you found first would suffer until they learned not to cry at a little bit of pain, and they got scared. I can’t believe it.” I took a slow breath and faced her one last time. She was smiling, perfectly at ease. “Don’t contact me again.”

  “I’ll see you soon, son.”

  “Die,” I said and marched out.

  I felt like a contained animal as I stalked over to the nurses’ office and knocked on the door.

  Fuck. I rubbed at my chest, and it took all my strength to force air into my lungs. My hands and forehead broke out in a cold sweat, and the nausea traveled higher, tightening a noose around my throat.

  Fuck, fuck. I couldn’t stop hearing Finn’s screams.

  Or my own.

  The same nurse from before opened the door, and I rushed out the words.

  “Don’t give her my number again unless it’s an absolute emergency,” I said. “There’s a new number in that case. My old number will stop working next week because it’s through my job, and I just quit.” The lies rolled off my tongue without difficulty, and the nurse told me to hold on while she got me a form to fill out.

  Four

  I spent the next few days in my new house, surrounded by tools and equipment to work on the damaged floorboards, but I barely left my bed in the middle of the living room. One panic attack set off another, until I drank myself into oblivion.

  Everything came back to me, much like it had last time after Angie had presented me with her “surprise.”

  “Sweetie, I know you said you didn’t want me to reach out to your mother, but…I spoke to her, and she’s so sincere. She wants to see you.”

  I uncapped another bottle of bourbon and took a swig.

  I couldn’t believe I’d opened up to her. Angie knew everything, except for the most gruesome details. I’d told her about the games my mother had us play as kids. Hide-and-seek, tag, and “if you touch the floor, you’ll eat your dinner off it!”

  I remembered those times when Finn and I had been forced to lick tomato soup off the fucking floor as if they’d happened yesterday.

  After taking another few swigs, I screwed on the cap and tossed the bottle near my leg. The memories kept assaulting me, and I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.

  “Mommy, please stop! He’s bleeding!”

  The worst punishment I’d ever received was probably when I’d called my aunt for help. Finn had wet the bed, I recalled, so our mother had forced him to take a bath. He’d stayed in the water an entire day; he was cold, scared, hungry, but she refused to let him out of the tub. Then, hopped up on whatever pills she’d taken, she’d threatened to throw the toaster in there if he didn’t stop crying.

  I’d darted out into the kitchen and called her sister, hoping she’d come save us.

  Joke was on me. Our aunt had been worse.

  I reached for the bottle again.

  Whatever Finn was doing with his life now, I hoped he did a better job than me. I hoped he’d been able to move on. Last I heard, he lived in Seattle and worked in radio. Okay, I hadn’t heard it; I’d looked him up.

  I blew out a breath and waited for the pain in my chest to dissipate.

  If I died of a heart attack, I probably wouldn’t take it seriously until my last breath. I’d just mistake it for anxiety and another panic attack.

  When my phone buzzed under my pillow, I made a bet with myself. Fifty bucks that it was Angie again.

  The bitch hadn’t deleted my number, nor had she stopped texting me.

  She was convinced that I was punishing her for anger directed at myself.

  In other words, she could not be more wrong.

  What would it take to finally be left alone?

  I dug out my phone and saw that I owed myself fifty bucks.

  Please answer me, Avery. We can’t end things like this. We shared everything for eight years.

  I wasted eight years on her. I only shared everything for six, because I shut down once she’d betrayed me two years ago. There was no going back after that deceit.

  She was really insisting on another way to end things, huh?

  Fine.

  I chugged from the bottle, then wrestled my way out of bed and peered down at myself. Damn, the ground was moving. Undershirt, jeans… I grabbed the nearest button-down I could find and put it on.

  Angie would get her closure.

  I grabbed my keys and stumbled out the door.

  I could drive. She didn’t live that far away. I’d be careful.

  After getting in my car, I put on my shades and backed out of the driveway.

  “I don’t want you to reach out to her, Angie. I’m serious. You know what she did to my brother and me.”

  “But you’re carrying this extra weight. Don’t you think I see it? You’re never truly happy. You’re content at best. If you could find it
in your heart to forgive her…”

  I laughed bitterly to myself and left my district behind. Fuck, I should’ve brought the bottle. Just thinking about Angie made me thirsty for a complete blackout.

  “Shit.” I returned to my lane and drove through the small forest that connected Downtown to the Valley in the south.

  “Promise me you won’t track her down, Angie. Give me your word. I haven’t seen her since I was twelve, and I want to keep it that way.”

  She’d sworn to me. She’d looked me in the eye and promised to give it a rest.

  Emerging from the forest, I drove past a sign letting me know I’d reached Cedar Valley, and I took a left toward the neighborhood where her new apartment was. Funny, when I was twelve and CPS took Finn and me away, I’d told myself it was over. I’d never see my mother again. Not too long ago, I’d said the same thing about Angie. We were over. She was out of my life. And yet…here I fucking was.

  I pulled in outside her apartment complex and peered up at the building. It was a cluster of seven or eight three-story buildings, the forest in the background, and we’d looked at an apartment here before we’d decided to just take the leap and buy a house.

  As I jogged up the outdoor steps to the second floor, I thought back on whether or not I had locked the car, but I decided it didn’t matter. It was a safe area, and I had no plans to stay very long.

  “You promised me. You fucking promised me, Angie! Holy fuck, I…I can’t believe you.”

  Apartment 4B.

  I pounded on her door. “Open up, Angie!”

  Was I really going to do this? Was I going to try to make her understand one more time?

  “Angie!” I yelled.

  I supposed I’d let the whiskey decide. Maybe I’d take one step inside her place and throw up on her feet.

  Fucking hell. I pounded some more, and then I heard her on the other side of the door.

  “What are you doing, Avery?” Her voice held plenty of anger.

  “Open the goddamn door,” I demanded.

  “Not when you’re like this,” she insisted. “You’re scaring me.”

  I let out a hollow laugh. “You don’t know what fear is.” I smacked the door. “Let me in.”