by A. L. Woods
My head bent until my mouth found the shell of her exposed ear. “This ain’t home, honey. Not anymore. You wanna fight me, we can do it when we get back to Fall River. Hell, I’ll remove all sharp objects and be sure to sleep with one eye open just to keep things interesting, but there is no scenario in which you are coming back here.”
Maybe not ever.
Her body stiffened for a beat of a second before it felt like all the fight inside of her melted away like a stick of cold butter in a hot pan. I expected her to make a scathing remark, something that would scorch my ego, but what I got instead was something I wished I could forget.
“You gotta help me find that photo of my sister.” An agonized sob all but ripped out of her. “It’s all I’ve got left of her.”
That sob she let out was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever heard in my damn life, and I had held my father’s hand when he died. We had memories of him, anecdotes to recall with smiles on our faces. We had sustained his legacy and had built lives for ourselves, and we had plenty that kept us united as a family.
Raquel had nothing.
And I swore to my father, to God, and anybody else who was listening right now that whoever did this to her would burn.
I’d make sure.
I knew who did it.
I knew who’d broken in as soon as I realized the picture frame was missing. The one that housed the photo of my kid sister at five years old in her sundress and immortalized her as a happy beacon of light with a smile that captured her missing two front teeth and deeply set dimples. She had always reminded me of a sunflower in that photo because of the sharp contrast of the lemon-colored spaghetti-strapped dress against her dark hair that had been drawn into pigtails.
It was my favorite—actually my only—picture of Holly Jane.
My family hadn’t been particularly big on buying school photos or even taking their own, so photos were hard to come by. Cash’s catty older sister Charlotte had been the photographer behind the shot of Holly Jane. It was startling how that frigid bitch could capture the essence of Holly Jane’s warmth with a disposable camera. That photo had been evidence that at one point, my kid sister had been a happy person.
My heart also ached for the destruction of the desk that I loved so much. Its delicate beauty had been marred by the violent indiscretion of Cash’s tantrum, but I could recover from the defilement of an antique secretary desk. It might be fixable, albeit a bit of a Frankenstein.
But the loss of the photo? That was irreplaceable, and I would kill him myself if I didn’t get it back.
Him.
I had known when we had parted ways at The Advocate weeks ago that Cash wouldn’t take the slight quietly. Sean had predicted it, too. Taking things in stride wasn’t Cash’s style. Even after we had broken up a decade ago, he had made a point of staying parked outside of my dorm for weeks, just waiting. He had thrown stones at the window until campus security chased him off, but the moment they weren’t looking, he was right back at it again like a stubborn STD–at best the symptoms could only be masked, but he was always there. He called until Penelope ripped the phone out of the wall. He lingered outside of classrooms and appeared in the library like a shadow. He masked it as goodwill, to give himself some confidence that I wasn’t going to off myself because of what had happened to Holly Jane or what he had done to me.
Looking back at it now, it was his way of still trying to keep tabs on me. Hindsight was 20/20, and Cash’s persistence was unmatched. That was why I had compromised on being his friend. My naïveté, and perhaps exhaustion, had left me feeling that it was easier to keep my enemies close. Which in theory would have been fine had I maintained some semblance of a boundary. My mistake had been sleeping with him on an annual recurring basis, like a bulk contribution to a 401(k). I had been investing in fucking myself over long-term, and the interest rate was unheard of.
The evidence of that was now all over my borderline unrecognizable apartment.
It would have taken the BPD all of five jerks of their cocks to pin this on him. Cash was the proverbial thorn in their side, and they had been skirting around taking him down for years. He had been booked a dozen times, but the charges never seemed to stick. Insufficient evidence, an inept prosecutor, or the four-leaf clover I was beginning to think he had wedged far up his ass had all kept him out an orange jumpsuit and a cell in Concord.
I had to give the devil his due. Cash, for all of his lack of motivation to not be another statistic, was astute in a way that few gave him credit for, including himself. He had the capacity to be anything or anyone. Maybe he was an initial victim of circumstance like me, but he had made himself a damn martyr to the cause and played into every single South Boston cliché since Good Will Hunting put our inconsequential neighborhood on the map.
Despite his lack of past convictions, the state of my apartment would have been the end of his sheer dumb luck, akin to a lawn mower over that four-leaf clover. I could see his missteps on every single surface. That motherfucker was just about the worst home invader to come out of Massachusetts in a hundred years. I could see his fingerprints all over the varnish on the desk alone, never mind the footprints of his shoes impressed like a stamp on the dozens of sheets of paper that blanketed the floor. Just like I had invited him to routinely traipse all over my life for all those years, he had stomped all over the hundreds of rejection letters and the contents of my manuscript scattered all over my apartment, too. The parallel here was uncanny.
“Just remember that you can’t escape who you are.”
He had said those words to me a few weeks ago, and this was a test. Sure, I could forget about the way our community had always protected our own and bury him in the judicial system. If I did that, though, I would have to hightail my ass out of the state if I didn’t want to sport the Scarlet Letter of “R” (for “rat”) for the rest of my life like cheap costume jewelry that stained your skin green—the kind that would have made Penelope break out into hives and made me a moving target.
No, we weren’t calling the cops. We were gonna clean this shit up, I was going to get the door lock fixed, and then I was going to figure out how I was going to get back at that bozo of a townie. I’d had just about enough of him trying to fuck with me. I’d endured my mother for twenty-eight years, and for twelve of them, I’d been a plaything to Cash. That was more than long enough for the both of them–the cycle of abuse from people who claimed they loved me had to stop.
But before I could even consider any of that, I had to find that picture. I wouldn’t leave here without it. Embarrassment prickled my skin at the invasion of Sean’s stare boring a hole in the back of my head while I hunched over and drew the sheets of paper close to me, ignoring the weight of what felt like a brick in my stomach. I wasn’t going to bother trying to get these pages in order again. The book was bad, the footprints all over that served as a reminder that I had been evading the reality that the concept of it was never going to stick. No one was interested in a story about a heroine coming out of South Boston’s projects when I tried my luck at selling it. Hell, I didn’t buy the story. And yet I wrote it anyway and then had held my breath that some big city Yankee backed by the “Big Five” of publishers would offer me the kind of deal that would have gotten Holly Jane and I out of Southie.
Not that it ever happened.
“This is pretty good.” Sean’s voice mainlined its way into my thoughts, drawing my attention to him over my shoulder. At some point, he had bent and retrieved some of the papers from the floor. The distinct crinkle in his brow made my heart palpitate and drew my shoulder blades together. I scrambled to my feet, lunging toward him to rip the sheets from his hand, but unlike the phone, he sidestepped me and jerked his arm up, out of my reach. He kept his gaze trained skyward, his eyes roaming over the words that inked themselves into the 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of paper he held aloft.
“Give that to me.” I jumped up, trying in vain to snatch the papers back, but it was hopeless. He had nearly
a foot on me not counting his reach, and unless the Boston Celtics’ Ray Allen was about to lend me his height, my efforts were entirely futile.
“I will in a minute. Let me finish reading.”
Blood swooshed in my ears, deafening the sound of my pulse that quickened there. He was reading it. He was reading parts of my shitty manuscript. That induced a disturbing combination of exhilaration and vomit-inducing anxiety that I really didn’t have the stomach for today. Oxygen trapped itself in my chest as I watched the concentration that painted his expression, his eyes moving over each word.
After several beats of a minute, Sean lowered his arm, straightened the papers and held them out to me. His face was frustratingly impassive, akin to a master poker player. There was nothing that would give the truth of his opinion away. I tore the papers from his hands, throwing them over my shoulder, the fluttering a soft whoosh that injected itself into the quiet that hung between us. His nostrils flared as the papers swirled to the floor, a haunting reflection lighting in his dark eyes as they made their descent.
I drew in a harsh breath between my lips. “The photo,” I repeated, twisting on my heel to give him my back. “Let’s focus on that.”
We moved around my apartment in stilted silence. I ignored Sean as he collected the papers into a neat pile that would never be organized again. I had every intention of chucking it into a waste bin as soon as I could. I didn’t trust him to not try to read any more of it.
“You should pack while we look. It might turn up where you least expect it,” Sean suggested in a tone that told me he planned to have a more in-depth discussion about this event later…a discussion I really didn’t want to have.
Why were we doing this again? Why were we pretending that I was functional enough for a relationship? Any other sane person would have taken one look at the state of my apartment and drawn the inevitable conclusion that I had way too much baggage to make even the sex worth it. I fought the sting of tears that nestled behind my lids as I retrieved an oversized duffel bag from the floor of the closet by the front door and moved about the room, collecting vagrant articles of clothing and wordlessly stuffing them into the duffel.
A jolt of surprise shot through me when I felt Sean’s arms wrap around my waist from behind. I sucked in a harsh breath as his chin pressed into the crown of my head.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
Was it, though?
What made him qualified to say that? He said it so often that at times I believed him.
“You don’t know that,” I said through clenched teeth, stepping out of his embrace. He inhaled sharply but didn’t argue with me. I was sick to death of people trying to abate my feelings.
Right now, I just wanted that picture back. That was my only priority.
I packed enough clothes for a week, max. Yet even that felt overzealous. This all felt like one massive overreaction. I tucked the clear sealable plastic bag that held my cosmetics upright in the duffel bag. Circling the cramped space of my apartment, my eyes trailed over every available surface. Sean was on all fours by the edge my bed, looking into the dark space underneath.
My stomach sank as realization and grudging acceptance churned.
“Let’s just go. It’s not here,” I said. The familiar ache associated with heartbreak pervaded through my body as if someone had snapped an elastic band against my skin over and over again.
Sean’s fingers grazed against something that made him pause. Glass scraped against the parquet flooring as he pulled the culprit forward. He exhaled sharply, telling me that what he’d seen wasn’t good. He glanced at me with timid eyes, rotating his body enough to show me what he’d found.
The glass of the picture frame was shattered, the particle wood edge of the frame cracked as if it had been thrown before it was kicked underneath the bed.
He had found where my sister’s picture should have been, but the photo itself was gone.
Cash had taken it.
The one material possession I loved more than the desk he had destroyed, he had taken it away from me, like he’d taken so many other things in my life.
My breaths came out hot and fast, a buzzing filling my ears at the vacancy. Hot tears burned the back of my eyes; I struggled to control them. I blinked hard and fast, the motion alone keeping them at bay. My fingers twitched at my sides, and my shoulder blades squeezed together until the searing pain between them formed a pulse so painful that I felt it in my toes.
Panic suffused me from the inside out. Each breath was a struggle to fulfill, like a balloon that kept deflating no matter how much air I blew into it. I pressed my fists into my sides in an effort to stop my body from trembling, but the rattle worsened.
“Look at me.” Sean’s command cut into my thoughts. I looked to see him rapidly closing the few feet between us. When had he even stood up? His hands went to my shoulders, and my eyes found his as my breathing wheezed and my chest constricted. “Tell me five things you can see.”
“What?” I panted.
“Do it, baby.”
Five things I could see? What the hell was he talking about? My eyes flickered around the room, my balance threatening to give in. “A window, a book,” I began. I gasped for air, and his thumbs pressed into my shoulders with a little more pressure, like he was trying to keep me focused. “A sweater, a bed, and you.” My hands found his waist, and to my surprise, I clung to him like he was a life raft in the middle of a darkened ocean.
“Good,” His voice sounded so even, his concentration infallible, but still my panic didn’t let up. I still felt like I was drowning in that open body of water. “Now tell me four things you can touch.”
“This is stupid.” My voice cracked as I tried to step away, but he kept me in place like an anvil.
“Raquel,” he said, his voice feathery light, “trust me.”
I squeezed my lids shut, tears matting my lashes.
“Four things I can touch,” I repeated. I exhaled, concentrating on the memory of my apartment. “You, the desk, the comforter, and my duffel bag.” My heart rate started to slow, the drowning pulse dulling in my ears. Could Sean’s little game actually be working?
“Three things you can hear,” his voice soothed.
My ears strained to listen. I heard Batty Betty above us yelling into a telephone because she was hearing impaired. Outside, birds chirped, the sound getting lost to the distant cacophony of traffic.
“My upstairs neighbor, the birds, and traffic.”
“We’re almost done,” he assured, his thumbs working like windshield wipers across my shoulder blades. “Two things you can smell.”
I sniffed the air, picking out the scents. His spicy and clean scent cut through the noise in my brain like a hot serrated blade, dampening the anxiety attack with it. Traces of my laundry detergent laving away the residual damage as I drew in my first full and complete breath, “You and my laundry detergent.” The knots in my stomach unfastened, trembling in my body fading off.
“One thing you can taste.”
I opened my eyes, glancing up at him. How had he done that? How had he known to do that? He saw the question in my stare, his lips tilting into a soft smile.
“It’s a grounding exercise I learned in therapy a couple of years ago.” He tucked my hair behind my ears.
“You went to therapy?” I couldn’t help the mystification that I knew was alive on my expression.
That smile of his was a private one. This one was just for me. This one was my favorite.
“One thing you can taste,” he repeated in a whisper, keeping me focused on the task at hand.
I licked my lips, stepping into him. “You.”
My mouth was gentle as it fit against his. The buzzing that had vibrated my body moments ago was gone, my heart rate even, my breaths full. His large hands framed my face as he broke away from the kiss, brushing his nose against mine.
“Better?”
“Better.”
“Good.” He pressed a kiss aga
inst my forehead and stepped away, taking a look around my apartment in a way that appeared final. “Is there anything else you want to bring with you?”
I wondered what it was like to view my space through his lens. I glanced around the apartment that had been my home for the last five years. Nothing had changed from the day I moved in, so what made this place home? Had it ever really been, or had it just been somewhere to lay my head down at night? I’d never bothered to make any effort to make the place inviting. It had always seemed like it was enough to not have bloodstains on the floor or indentations marring the walls from where someone’s fist had landed. Maybe my definition of the word had been diluted to fit what I understood of the term.
From his perspective, this wasn’t a home at all.
And maybe he was right.
“Hand me the book on the nightstand.” I kicked my chin toward the well-worn copy of Valley of the Dolls. Sean reached for it, and when he picked it up, a thin paper slid free from the inside. It moved in slow motion, spiraling to the floor until it kissed the parquet with a soft sound that was deafening to my ears.
It wasn’t a paper; it was a photograph.
Holly Jane’s smile reached the corners of her eyes, as if the photo had been captured in a moment of laughter, her hands stretched up and outward.
Sean crouched to the floor, still holding the book. He picked up the picture, holding it like he thought it might rupture into flames if he didn’t handle it with the utmost care. He glanced up at me, his lips set into a tight line. He flipped the photo face down, his thumb working over the back.
“What?”
He was quiet for a beat of a minute, his Adam’s apple working in his throat as he swallowed. “Was ‘remember’ always written on the back of this photo?” There was something guileless in the way he said it, as if he truly wanted to give me the opportunity to be honest with him. I shuffled the weight of the duffel bag on my shoulder, lengthening my spine.
It was time I told him what had happened in the parking lot.
