“Is that why you guys have been ignoring me until tonight?”
“Here’s another truth. After the day at the beach when you swam all that way out? You almost made it here. Elle lost her shit and sent Jason to get you. She told us just to stay away from you. Said your mother would be angry and she didn’t want to do anything to upset her. She’s scared your mom might take you.”
Back. To Taylor. That will never happen.
“Everybody’s keeping secrets,” I say. I see all the webs spreading out, everyone trying to block each other, trying to exert control, but it’s useless because life is chaos and there is no protecting anyone, especially from themselves. I see Taylor now, all the barbecues and cinched-in waists, the constant efforts to keep everything tamed.
We are all beasts and there is no taming anything.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask. “If I drink more.”
“Everything.” Neve smiles sagely. “Everything that has been closed is going to open. And the best part is, no one will ever be able to hurt you again.” She hugs me, body pressing against mine. “I’ll make sure of that. You’ll be one of us.”
She guides me to the drip, so the water falls into my mouth, courses down my throat. It’s cold and clean. I want more. I can’t get enough. I drink until I’m filled up. I want to lick the wall. I stay there until I’m completely sated.
“I love Santa Maria,” I say, wiping my mouth, “and I love you.”
I mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything.
“I love you, too, Mayhem,” she says.
We fold our fingers over each other’s hands, press our foreheads together, our wet bodies.
“The world will try to lie, will try to hurt, but we will always be there for each other. We’re family now.”
“Family.” Like a wedding vow. “I do,” I say.
“I do, too,” Neve says. “You don’t have to be scared. Use your voice. Use your strength. Be everything you are.”
“I will, Neve. I promise I will. Thank you,” I whisper. “Thank you.”
SEVENTEEN
ONE OF US
In the distance, the town is dark. There’s nothing, no roller coaster, no thumping music. It must be more morning than not. Neve and I are at the mouth of the cave, facing outward, legs kicked out over the rocks. The occasional breeze is warm, and my insides are the quietest they have ever been, as though exhausted into a thick and delicious rest.
Behind us, inside the cave, Kidd and Jason are two piles of green and mustard-colored blankets. They’ve been sleeping for hours while Neve and I talked and watched the lights on the boardwalk go out, one by one, while we climbed around on the rocks and meteors blasted across the sky. The more she talks, the more she tells me, the more I see how beautiful she really is—honest, fearless. She’s in a black sports bra and matching shorts, dry now. Her hair hangs down past her shoulders. She hugs her knees in and turns to me. She looks almost placid.
“I have to go,” she says quietly, just as I’m thinking maybe it’s time for me to find some blankets and lie down on the warm rocks for a little sleep. “Jason will take you back to the farm, but I have something I have to do before that. It’s really important. You’ll be okay.”
There’s an edge of sadness to her voice, of weariness.
“Are you okay?” I say.
She smiles. “Yeah, just a busy lady.”
“Isn’t it like four in the morning?” I don’t want her to go. I am afraid for her and I don’t know why. I imagine the whole world as a predator and that I am the only one who can protect her.
She blinks, lashes kissing the tops of her lids. “I can’t tell you all my secrets in one night. I have to save something for later.” She takes the chain from her neck and places it around mine. It dangles against my chest. “You’ll need this. You’ll know when. Don’t panic, okay? It’s going to seem like you’re dying at first. You’re not. You’re going to be fine.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I say.
“Jason and Kidd are here.”
“Jason hates me.”
She smirks. “Is that what you think?”
I nod.
“He doesn’t want you corrupted. He’s mad at me, not you. Don’t worry. He’ll mellow out eventually, once he sees how much you’re meant to be one of us.”
I look up at the stars dancing above us, the meteors flying across the sky, and I let her words glide over me without sinking in.
Neve runs a hand up my arm. I shiver. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Get rest. Drink water. I’ll be at the house when you get there.”
And then she drops, and a few splashes later, everything is silent again.
It’s a moan that startles me from the sky, from trying to make sure Neve gets to shore in the dark. Kidd is shifting back and forth against the wall, still asleep. Her breathing is shallow. I pull myself up and go over to her. She seems especially small, her white hair wild and big. Beadlets of sweat have popped out across her forehead. She shifts around and moans again. I don’t know whether to wake her or not. I take a pillow, prop it against the stone wall, then wedge myself under her head so she’s on my lap. I stroke her cheek. She wraps one arm over my legs and settles.
Jason sits up groggily, sees me with Kidd snuggled against me, and leans himself against the wall. “Thank you,” he says after a moment. “That’s nice of you.”
“You’re surprised I’m nice?”
“I’m surprised when anyone is.” He rubs his eyes, still trying to get oriented. “Kidd’s been having nightmares.” He hesitates. “We had some bad things happen. It’s been a minute since it all happened, but she still tries to stay up at night. Night is when she can’t keep herself from getting scared, you know?”
“Seems like she’s in the right household, then. I don’t think anyone gets up before noon over there.” I stroke Kidd’s hair back.
“Where’s Neve?”
“She just jumped into the ocean and left. You think she’ll be okay?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “As long as she wants to be, she’s going to be fine.”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Kidd told me a little about what happened to you guys, to your parents, when we were hanging out earlier. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, how much did she tell you?”
“I don’t know, because she said it in Kidd-speak. But something like someone broke into your house?”
He gets a flask and takes a drink of water and wipes at his mouth. “You drank the water, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Well, no going back now.” He offers it to me. “Might as well chugalug.”
I take a sip.
“I thought the water would solve everything,” he says. “Just made new problems. It’s an addiction.”
“Addiction to what? We’re already addicted to water just being human.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “An addiction like a drug. Like heroin or crack or something, except it’s an addiction to being powerful.”
“From water?”
“Yeah, from water.”
I think for a minute. The letter I read in the Brayburn book comes back to me. About Julianna being raped in the cave, and the water, and how she cursed other people but also herself. She said she murdered people. Lots of people. Elle didn’t want me to come here. I did anyway. I am a Brayburn.
“What’s going on over there?” Jason says. “Many many pennies for your thoughts.”
“Too many pennies for you.”
He grins.
“How about you? What’s happening in that head?”
He readjusts Kidd’s blanket. “I wasn’t home. When the guys came in to rob the house. Kidd was under the bed. It’s how she survived. She bit herself until she bled to keep herself quiet. My dad got in an accident.” Jason wraps a blanket around his shoulders. “A few months earlier. He had some money from the settlement. Had some of it in cash. I guess people found out. My dad tried to fight
and it went awry. I should have been there. I could always calm my dad down when he started to lose it. I could have convinced him to hand over the money and deal with it later. But I was out with my girl, Pamela.” He looks at me. “I was having the best night. Feeling all the curves in the dark. So selfish. Whenever I think about that, it makes me sick.”
Jason in a room with a girl, feeling curves, giving himself, taking. And all the while his family was being attacked, killed.
“I should have been home,” he says. “I broke curfew. If I had come back on time, none of that would have happened.”
That’s crazy talk, of course. He might have made it worse. He could be dead, too. What if he’d tried to run out of the house with Kidd?
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s a terrible thing to think. But it’s not true.” He starts to protest, so I add, “It’s probably not true.”
He accepts this enough to nod almost imperceptibly.
“I let my mom get beat up for years.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud.
Jason’s expression doesn’t change.
I go on.
“Seemed like the whole town was conspiring for me to keep my mouth shut about it. Like, at first I was too little to know what was going on. And it didn’t happen very often, either. But as I got older and it stopped making sense to me, it was like everybody from church to school to my mom and especially to Lyle, my stepdad, were all keeping themselves blind and deaf; like they were so determined not to see anything that they convinced me there was no way we would ever get out of it. But it kept getting worse and worse. A few months ago we went to a shelter a few towns over. We never talked about it even then. Roxy just went about getting us in somewhere so we wouldn’t have to sleep in the car. Then Lyle found us because he followed me from school, and he and Roxy had some long talk, and then we went home. That’s all I ever knew about it. It was awful in that place, even though people were really nice. Babies crying. Everything smelled weird.”
“Why didn’t she just come back here?”
“She was scared, I think. I’m not sure of what, but I think she ran away from something here. Maybe this. She was afraid of what would happen to her if she came back. Plus my dad died here. I think she wanted to forget Santa Maria even exists.”
“You hear about people running away from the sticks to L.A. or New York. You never hear about people running away to a small town in Texas.”
“Yeah, well, that’s where the needle fell on empty and the money ran out, and where she stopped to think about what she was doing. She got a motel for the night and ended up staying. Taylor is cute, I guess. There’s a square and a Main Street and a Church Street and everyone tries to be kind to one another. All the same families have been there for so long. There was just this one place at the edge of town where people came through or stayed and paid by the week.” I glance at Jason, who is watching intently. “I guess there were some hookers there, maybe some drug stuff going on. I know my mom was scared of it, but I was too little to remember. We had to stay there at first. Lyle, my stepdad, that’s where he got us. He took us out of that motel and he never let us forget that’s where he found us, like that motel and our bad luck was who we were, like he was any better just because he had some money when we didn’t.”
Jason nods. “That’s how the worlds runs—money and status and what kind of car you drive.”
“And fitting in. Everything about my mom bothered the people in town. And it was like everyone thought Lyle saved us and we should be so happy about everything because we were lucky enough to have that kind of guy to take care of us. Roxy would come sleep in my room sometimes. But she wouldn’t leave him no matter what he did.”
I don’t know how to explain in words the feeling I have now, about how a person’s history affects their standing with themselves. About how in Taylor my mother and I were peculiar and nonsensical, but here we have the strength of all the Brayburns behind us and it runs like a current under our feet. Makes us stand taller.
“So what changed? What made her decide to come here?”
“Lyle hit me,” I say. “Rammed me into a wall.”
slut slut slut slut
“He … found something and he came after me. I’m pretty sure every time he ever hit Roxy, he really wanted to hit me. I think I drove him crazy, and he’d get mad. It was like he was relieved when he finally got to, like he was finally doing the thing he’d always wanted to do.” Lyle’s grunt as he laid hands on me is something I’ve not talked about since it happened, and now it seems to me that grunt was the bliss of a thing clamped down for years finally being allowed to snap open its eyes and come to life, finally being allowed to breathe.
It seems like the mushrooms have worn off, but I’m still able to find words without fear. My usual awkwardness is gone for now, and instead there is a vibrating trill, like something is trying to make itself heard.
“Shit,” Jason says, after a minute. “That’s heavy.”
“I just can’t ever figure out why it was okay for him to do it to her all those years but not me. I mean, why did she let him?”
“You never asked her?”
“You don’t know Roxy.” I think for a second. “I don’t know Roxy either.”
“She’s got the dullness,” Jason says.
“What’s the dullness?”
“Something people put on themselves when they don’t want to look at the truth about anything. You’ll see soon enough. But also, I get where she’s coming from. I could see taking some punishment myself, but if anyone ever did anything to Kidd it would be game over, you know? Maybe your mom thought she was keeping a roof over your head, clothes on your back. Maybe she thought that was the price.”
“I didn’t even get to know my real grandparents. I didn’t get to make any decisions for myself. All because … what? What’s so bad about Santa Maria?”
Jason looks down for a minute. “I guess I can’t blame her. I sometimes wonder about the choices I’ve made for me and for Kidd. Choices I can’t take back.”
“I guess we all do things.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what was the strangest thing? It’s the thing I’ve been trying so hard to understand. When he hurt me he called me a slut.” It seems funny now. “I never even kissed anyone.”
Do I imagine Jason catches his breath, that the air changes in the cave, brings everything closer, into focus?
“Never?” he says. “Not even at a birthday party or something? No truth or dare? Nothing?”
“What birthday party? I went to one at the roller rink when I was ten. They all held hands in a line. I was the last one. They went as fast as they could and then they let go so I fell. I was going so fast. I bruised my ass so bad. I never went to another one after that.”
“Damn,” he says.
“So why slut?”
“That’s just something guys say.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Real stupid.”
It seems so ridiculous I even laugh, and then Jason is laughing, too, and it’s a cool sound that bounces around the cave and lands in my ears, then rushes to my toes. I let out a little gasp.
“What?” Jason says.
“Your laugh,” I say. “It’s real. It’s…” I sink further against the wall. “I thought the mushrooms were done, but I guess not.”
“You’re past the visual part. Now you’re onto the doors-of-perception part, like Aldous Huxley wrote about.”
“Says the expert.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve only done them once. Once was enough for me. I got enough doors open already. But since you’re there, you might as well get the benefits, right?”
The sound of the ocean rushes into the cave, but otherwise it’s silent. I almost want to leave it quiet like that, but Jason has barely talked to me and now he is, and I am happy and interested, and other words I can’t think of right now but can feel all over.
“Jason,” I venture, “what i
f everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be and you can only know things at the right time?”
“I’m listening, tripping girl.”
“No, for real though. I don’t want you to get mad, but think about it. What if you weren’t at your house the night your parents died for a reason? What if your life was supposed to lead you here? All the pain and tragedy and the terrible things that happened with your family?”
Jason’s face closes. “Are you trying to say there’s a silver lining to my parents getting shot in their own house? Because I hate that.”
“No! I’m just saying you wouldn’t be here without that having happened, and maybe you’re supposed to be. Just think about it for a second. What if?”
He relaxes his neck backward so he’s staring upward at the curves on the ceiling. I take it as a sign he wants to hear what I have to say.
“What if the same is true for me? All those years of misery and that big fight with Lyle had to happen so my mother would have to bring us back here. What if everything in both our lives has brought us to this minute, in this cave, for a reason?”
This concept makes so much sense, I have to close my eyes to take it all in. If that were true, no time would have been wasted, no bruise would be for nothing. There would be purpose and then the question would be about what’s to come, not what’s already passed.
“You’re starting to sound like Neve, you know that?” he says.
“We’re practically the same human.”
I say it as a joke.
“I hope not,” Jason says. “She’s so fucked up, Mayhem. Don’t let her pull you in.”
I can’t hide my shock. “I thought you were friends, family. I thought you…”
“I’m loyal,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I can’t see what’s really going on here, and you should make sure you’re watching, too. Don’t let the idea of people overshadow truth.”
Neve’s arms had encircled me as she put the necklace over me. I saw her heart-shaped face and the way she was looking all the way into me and didn’t avert her gaze the way other people do.
“And I got another what if,” Jason says. “What if I’m selfish and you’re a coward and that’s how we wound up here? What if we’re stuck on some crazy-ass planet where people are savage and want to pretend they’re something else? What if it’s pure chance that has us here and nobody’s looking out for us and it’s every man for himself, so I’m going to care about Kidd and look out for me, and you’re going to keep trying to get your drugged-up mama off the couch and keep her from going back to your sadistic stepdad, and that’s it? What if there’s no meaning to anything?”
Mayhem Page 10
