All We Left Behind

by Ingrid Sundberg

  My room doesn’t have a lock. I jam a chair under the knob, which takes a couple tries, and Marion pretends to be interested in the trophies over my desk.

  “Those are from soccer,” I say, messing with the chair. “But a few are from middle school, and track.”

  Tiny flecks of gold reflect from the trophies onto the wall. They catch the light from the window over my bed. The sheets are rumpled. Half on. Half off. Left that way from this morning, because I didn’t expect to have—

  “Sorry about the mess.” I pick up a stray shirt and chuck it into the hamper and straighten the sheets. “Just give me a—”

  “It’s fine,” Marion interrupts, her voice right behind me. Hand on my back. I turn and her mouth presses into mine. I wrap my arms around her and our bodies find the bed. Sheets tangle with the smell of her. Of us. Of clothes being removed, and sweat, and me in—

  Her body arcs and this is not like in the car. It’s not closed windows and feet against door handles and bunched-up jeans half-off and wedged. There’s room for both of us in this bed and I’m overwhelmed by the space of it. There’s space for elbows and arms. There’s space for legs and limbs. And I want all of it. I want every inch.

  Marion

  I tremble and want this moment.

  I want it to hold me. To burn me. To sear me with his breath, and his words, and his him.

  I want to hang on to his touch and his scent and the brush of crisp-soft sheets against my toes and shins.

  I want this to keep. I don’t want this to dissolve, like it did the first time, into rose hips, and creek water, and unspeakable skin.

  But he’s tender. Too tender. And everything frail and soft and vulnerable—

  Turns into mud.

  Kurt

  The sheets stick to the sweat of my legs and Marion rolls off me.

  She turns, clutching her hair, and leaves me to look at the white of her back. Her shoulder blades arch and her body trembles. I’ve seen her like this before. That first time in my car.

  The sheets tangle over us, but we don’t touch. I put a hand on her shoulder. But she shakes it off.

  “Please don’t,” she whispers.

  My hand hovers over her. Useless. I ball it up into a fist and stare at the ceiling. Stare at the gold flecks from my trophies that are spit over the walls, a hundred tiny pieces broken in the light.

  I hate what I’m hearing. Marion’s crying sounds like when I could hear Josie through the wall. But I was too scared to knock on her door, because she was going to tell me to fuck off. And this is just like Mom coming home obliterated and me not asking why. Hoping she knew how to figure it out herself. Hoping she knew how to hang on.

  This sounds exactly like that. Just as far away. Just as close.

  And I’m sick of it.

  I roll over and pull Marion against me. I wrap her in my arms and refuse to ignore it. I hold her tight and promise not to let go. She tries to shake me, just like Josie did with her fuck-you glare, but I won’t let her. I’m not walking away from this.

  I’m going to see this.

  Hold her through it.

  I won’t let her find some other way to chase the pain—music, booze, whatever. I’m going to sit here in it.

  With her.

  It takes a minute for Marion to realize I’m not letting her go. But when she finally does, her shoulders release, relaxing into a new quiet, and then they heave and she sobs.

  Sobs with her whole body rocking against me. Sobs about something I don’t know, and maybe I can’t know, and maybe I will never know.

  I want to understand, but maybe I don’t need to. Maybe all I need is to be here, and that’s what fills the void. Maybe all I need is for her to understand that she doesn’t have to do this alone.

  Marion

  He holds me so tight it feels like something new breaks in me. A flood that I didn’t know was in there. And I’m tired. Of holding it in. So he holds, and I cry.

  I cry for all the things I can’t say. For the loss, and the naked parts of me, and the shame. For the tenderness of his touch, that may never do anything but bring the darkness to wake. For being a child.

  When Kurt finally releases me, the sheets are a puddle beside my head. He touches my shoulder, my spine, my hip, and then lets me lie here in the sheets. I stay still, breathing, for what seems like an hour, and the shadows grow dim.

  Then there’s music.

  Fragile acoustic music. It comes with the brush of his arm on my back. Soft. Meant to comfort. It comes with his heart, and his secrets, and his him. And I should love this. I want to love this.

  But I can’t.

  Love means trust, and trust means letting it rise—the silence that I don’t talk about, the invisible that is only allowed to be shimmering half-truths and not really seen. He’s not allowed to make those parts of me become solid in the light. I won’t let him. I won’t let him coax it out of me. It’s too dark and black, and all the oceans and rain can’t wash it out. My shame is too messy, and love is supposed to be clean.

  “I have to go,” I say, sitting up and collecting my clothes.

  Kurt stops strumming, and I have to turn away from his concerned eyes, wanting all of me. The room goes quiet and I slide on my shirt. My jeans. My socks. The sun is almost gone and a tiny bow of orange is all that’s left rimming the window.

  His hands press into his guitar strings and the tiny vibrations cut out.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, as I walk to the door, my whole face puffy from crying. I look back, and for the first time he looks naked—vulnerable—with only his guitar over his lap. His knees press awkwardly together and his toes dig under the sheets.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he says, running a hand over his arm, covering his chest. I unhook the chair and move it back to the desk. “Whatever it is,” he insists. “You never have to tell me.”

  But that’s not how this works. Of course I have to tell him for this to be what he thinks that it is. For us to be what he wants. My hand falls on the doorknob and he’s up.

  Guitar left behind him on the bed.

  “Don’t,” he says, putting his hand on the door, and I can’t ignore the way my body reacts when he’s as close as he is. How my skin knows his skin.

  “Kurt . . .” I barely get the word out. All of this caught in my throat. I step away from him, needing distance. Everything too near the surface.

  “Stay, please,” he says. “I don’t have to know.”

  I glare at him, anger slicing through me, furious at him for wanting me to pretend. The fact that he knows there’s anything to tell, is the problem. Nothing real, nothing important can start like this! Not with this secret sitting between us. And the fact that he wants to pretend it isn’t there—like Lilith, like my father—infuriates me.

  “I have to go!” I say, whipping my hair off my neck.

  “You don’t.” He presses himself against the door to keep it shut. “You can—”

  But his voice drops out and gets raspy, unguarded in a way that scares me more than anything else about him. I can hardly breathe and the room smells like sweat and dust and I wish he had something to cover himself with.

  “This . . . ,” he says, his voice trembling. “You, me . . .”

  He struggles for the words, fidgeting with his hands, and his eyes flick to the bed, like he wants the sheet to cover his legs. But he looks at it for so long, it scares me to think perhaps I’m the only one he’s ever taken to that bed. That everyone else gets the car and the ridge.

  “Marion, I . . .”

  My chest squeezes and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. Only, I don’t want to hear it out loud, because it’s not true. It can’t be true when he doesn’t know all of me. Not with the shame and shitty parts that are filled with mud and darkness.

  No one can love those parts.

  “Marion, I lo—”

  “I’m not your mother!” The words splinter out of me. It’s a low blow, and it scares m
e with how harsh it comes out. But I needed something to stop him—anything. I couldn’t hear him say it.

  I cough, and try to glare at him like I mean it.

  “I’m not some girl you’re supposed to save,” I say, and everything about him goes rigid, the softness in his eyes turning to ice.

  “Fuck you.” His glare hits me hard, and the sun is gone. His words are pained and angry, and I know I’ve used something he’s trusted me with. A secret. But he should never have trusted me with it. He shouldn’t have told me about his mother. Sharing those parts only makes him vulnerable, gives other people ammunition. People like me. Only, I know it was shitty and I shouldn’t have used it.

  But this is what I do when I’m backed into a corner.

  Shame crawls through me and I can’t bear to face him. I reach for the doorknob, my knuckles brushing his side, and he jets away from me. He stalks to the far end of the room and yanks the sheet off the bed to cover himself.

  I stare at his back, knowing I’ve broken something. I wanted to walk out of this room unscathed, but that isn’t the nature of things. Lake water or ocean, if you touch the surface, it will ripple. If you dive under, it will never be the same.

  There’s only one way to fix this. But I can’t give him that grenade. No one’s allowed to have that part of me.

  * * *

  I get in my car and drive. Drive away from Kurt’s house. From his arms. From his skin.

  Away.

  Away from what knowing too much of me brings.

  I roll down all the car’s windows and the cab turns into a whipping air-tunnel of night and hair. It slashes around me uncaged. And I need this wildness out of me. I need to believe I’m not this person, this mean and angry girl, lashing out.

  Kurt is all wrong for me. He’s been wrong from the beginning. No one starts a relationship half-naked and crying. Not like on the ridge. That’s not how anything important is supposed to start. Love stories begin with daydreams and wishes, and sweet kisses on the back of your hand. Not mud. Not sand.

  I press the gas, and black trees streak past. Too close. I need someone else. Someone whose touch doesn’t dissolve into rose hips and beach peas and feet drowned in the sand. Of course Kurt wakes those things. How could he not? Our first kiss was on the ridge, with his hands in my hair, wanting nothing but to take things from me, and force—

  I hit a pothole and my car swerves. Metal rattles and the weight of this threatens to swallow me. My knuckles grip. I smell burned rubber and my instincts kick in, realigning the tires between the double yellows and the white.

  I drive, trees blurring on both sides of me. Hair blocking my vision.

  I need to believe that skin can be skin and nothing else. That skin can be silent, and not wake with memories that pull me into their current to drown. I need to believe there is another side of this, where you can have a relationship with someone who doesn’t need to get that close to you. That there can be clean slates, and apple trees, and beginning again.

  So, I drive.

  Because there’s only one person who’s supposed to be my Prince Charming. One person who will release the bad magic. The person who knows me. The person I can trust. The one who started all this as my friend, and liked me because I was smart, not because of my pretty blond hair.

  So, I drive.

  And I don’t stop until I’m at Abe’s house.

  Kurt

  My trophies are dark above the desk. I sit on the bed and pull my guitar onto my lap. Shadows fall over the neck and the maple wood sticks to my thigh. Everything in this room is small.

  The window.

  The bed.

  Me.

  I keep seeing Marion’s eyes slicing through me, red and wet and—

  Nasty.

  Like Mom’s.

  Like she was pissed at me for—I don’t know—being here. For not letting her out that door. For seeing her at all.

  This wasn’t about Mom. And fuck her for thinking it was. Only there was no air in this room, and there still isn’t. And I don’t know how to get any of them to stay.

  Isn’t it enough that she doesn’t have to tell me why she sobs like that? Isn’t it enough that I’ll be here for her no matter what? That I love her. That—

  My chest hitches, air caught.

  I pluck one string on my guitar and wish I hadn’t. The note fills up the empty room, and it’s hard to breathe.

  But I keep plucking that one string anyway.

  G and—

  G and—

  G.

  Because it hurts.

  But the quiet hurts more.

  “Who was that girl?”

  I look up and Josie is standing in the doorway. I pull the sheet up over my guitar and legs.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she says, smiling and showing off that empty space where her tooth is missing. “Good for you, little brother.”

  Her voice is so warm, she almost sounds like herself again.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I say, swallowing back the ache in my chest. How good it was. How it’s gone.

  “You like her, huh?”

  The brightness of Josie’s voice echoes through the room with everything else I can’t hold on to. I look down at the guitar in my lap—an awkward lump under the sheet. Shapeless and too large.

  Josie leans against my door frame and I want to tell her about Marion. I want to tell her that I don’t just like this girl. I want Josie to sit at the end of my bed and listen, with that toothless grin on her face. I don’t want to explain it. I just want—

  The phone rings. Not mine, but the house phone in the kitchen.

  Josie jolts up, pushing herself off the door frame and toward the kitchen with an energy I didn’t know that she had.

  What’s she—?

  I move out of instinct, tossing my guitar to the side and pulling on my pants.

  The ringing has stopped and I find Josie in the kitchen with Mom’s phone cord wrapped around her. Receiver up to her mouth.

  “Tina? Yeah, hey!” She coughs into the receiver.

  “Who’s Tina?” I ask, but this crazy smile spreads over her face like she just won the lottery.

  “Yeah, yeah. Hold on,” Josie says into the phone, finding a pen and scribbling an address on the inside of her arm. I try to sneak a look, but Josie holds a finger up telling me to wait. She listens to whatever the person on the line is saying. “Kurt.” Josie caps a hand over the receiver. “You have a car, right?”

  “For what?”

  “To meet.” She nods to the phone.

  “Meet who?”

  “My friend.”

  “Who’s going to give you what?”

  That slap-happy grin falls from her face so fast you’d think I killed a puppy. What the hell is up with this day? First Marion, now Josie? All I want is to walk out of this damn kitchen and forget them. Only Marion broke something in me, and I can’t ignore this.

  “All right, slow down,” I say, her sad face cutting into me. “Give me the phone. Let me talk to them.” She hands me the receiver and her fingers feel like twigs. “Who is this?” I demand, untangling Josie from the cord, and there’s a silence on the other end that makes me squirm. “Hello?”

  “Josie?” The voice is female and far away.

  “Who is this? And why are you calling my sister?”

  “Is she all right?”

  “What would you know about it?”

  “Probably more than you,” the girl says bluntly, and I don’t like it. “Can you put her back on the phone?”

  “No. How about you tell me who you are and what’s going on?”

  “Kurt!” Josie snaps at me. “She’s an old friend.”

  “Hi, old friend,” I say way too snarky, but I want to cut through the shit. “What are you going to give my sister?”

  “Fuck you, Kurt!” Josie tries to grab the phone but I won’t let her have it. She gives up after a second and throws her hands in the air. “You think all I need is you and Dad
and to be locked up in this hellhole? You think this is a life?! Don’t delude yourself into thinking that just because I’m home I won’t slit my wrists or hang myself in the shower!”

  I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut. Josie rolls her eyes like I should have seen that coming.

  “God, Kurt, there’s a hundred ways to check out of here that have nothing to do with Mom’s truck.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” That angry, dead-eyed Josie is back. “Give me one good reason not to.”

  My gut’s in my throat. This isn’t happening. Not after—

  “You wouldn’t do that to Dad and me,” I choke out, but the glare in her eyes says otherwise.

  “Right,” she says, that eerie hoarseness returning to her voice. “After he kicked me out. After you did—what? When have you ever cared about me, Kurt?”

  “I, I—” I rack my brain, and it horrifies me when I can’t think of something to say. My mind is spinning, and this is happening too fast. It’s possible I didn’t do enough, but I didn’t do nothing. “You were gone,” I say, but the words feel so damn small.

  “No, I wasn’t.” Her eyes get glassy. “Mom was gone, not me. You were so ready to save Mom. But you didn’t give a shit when I needed you, Kurt! Dad checked out, but God, you didn’t have to go with him.”

  “I am not like Dad.”

  Josie shakes her head. “You’re exactly like Dad,” she says quietly.

  “I’m nothing like—” But my lip trembles and I don’t want to see it. The cord to the phone is wrapped so tight around my arm, my hand is red.

  “Can I talk to my friend?” She nods at the phone.

  I lift the receiver, not sure if anyone’s still on the other end. “Hello?” I say into it, feeling like Marion and Josie’s bloody punching bag. “Hello? Tina?” I ask again, but the following silence is so big I don’t want to tell my sister her friend’s not there.

  “Yeah, hi,” the small voice says, and it’s stupid how relieved I am to hear it.

  “Tina?” I grip the phone.