I waited for her to answer me, but she never did. When I realized she hung up on me, I replaced the phone and waited, debating whether or not to call her back and apologize. No, I decided. I wasn’t going to. I was right; she wanted to throw a hissy fit about being inconvenienced, well, too bad. That was life and she had to deal with it.
It was weird, this was our first fight, and it was over something as seriously ridiculous as this. I understood she was pissed about having to cut her trip short, but the trial was happening because of her; because she’d been stalked and tormented by Curtis. I felt bad for snapping at her, but sometimes she acted juvenile and acted as if she still had a right to do whatever she wanted because of what happened to her. I’d never been attacked like her, but I’d been in situations where my life was jeopardy and I didn’t go around acting like the world and everyone in it owed me something.
JoJo was a victim of her own circumstances and sometimes it seemed as if she liked it that way. She was selfish and scared and bitter and I was sick of it. I was ready to jump into this relationship whole-heartedly, but she kept me away. She only thought about herself. I reached for the phone and dialed her number. Surprising me, she answered with a snappy, “What?”
“You’re selfish,” I blurted. “You only think of yourself. You do whatever you want to do and you don’t care about who it hurts or who is going to be affected by your decisions. Like this trip out of town, Jesus JoJo, you didn’t even talk to me about it; you just decided that was what you wanted to do.”
“You’re not my father, Steve; I don’t have to talk to you about these kinds of things.”
“No, I’m not your father,” I conceded, “I am, however, part of your life, don’t you think I deserve to know what’s going on in your head?”
Silence crackled over the line as I waited for her to answer. Minutes passed without her speaking a word. Finally I said, “I guess that means no. Look, I understand that you have to do what you feel like you have to do, but normal couples talk things over before one of them decides to do something drastic. But I guess we’re not normal.”
“Steve,” she began. “I don’t know what you want from me. You knew from the beginning I was screwed up. I don’t know what more you want.”
“I want a little give and take instead of me giving all the damn time. I give all I have and all you do is take, take, and take never giving anything in return. I’m sick and damn tired of feeling like the only one working to make this mean something. I mean shit, what are we? Are you my girlfriend, my friend, my neighbor, the nice girl who lives next door that works for me? What am I exactly to you?”
She sighed. “I care about you and I’m sorry that my decisions heave pissed you off, but what are we? I don’t know. I thought we were dating, or boyfriend and girlfriend. I thought we cared about each other and that we didn’t need labels, but I guess I was wrong. As for me taking all the time and not giving you anything in return, well, I don’t know how to respond to that. Again, I thought we were equal partners in this. I didn’t realize that you felt like I was taking everything from you.”
“I’m so confused,” I admitted. “Five seconds ago you’re telling me that you don’t know what I want from you, but you care about me and that you didn’t think you were taking from me. Which is it? Are you so fucked up beyond repair that I shouldn’t want anything from you, or are you telling me that we’re a couple and that we’re perfectly fine the way we were?”
“Both,” she said. I’m fucked up, yes, but I didn’t realize anything was amiss in our relationship.”
“JoJo you ran off to Oregon for a week without even talking it over with me. How can you think that’s normal, that nothing’s amiss?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m turning around right now. I should be back in a few hours and then we can sit down and talk about this face to face. I’m sorry that I’ve made you feel this way. That was never my intention.”
“Stop,” I ordered her. “Don’t come back because of me, that’s not what I’m saying. All I mean is that the next time you want to do something like this give me some kind of heads up and I don’t mean the day before you leave. That’s all.”
“Please let Mr. Garza know that I will be in to see him Friday morning and that I will be at the courthouse Monday morning. I wish there was something I could say to you to make this all okay again. I never meant for you to get so upset. I thought it would be a good idea for me to take a step back, gain some perspective, and come back to you, ready to begin our lives together.”
“And I would have known that’s how you felt if you’d told me more than just “I’m leaving town.” I mean, really, what am I suppose to get from that? We need to be a team, you and me, especially if you want to be with me. That’s how being a couple works. We talk about things, we make decisions together, we don’t go shooting from the hip, and hoping it all works out in the wash okay?”
“Alright,” she replied. “I’m sorry; I just thought I was doing the right thing, not only for myself, but for us as well. Look, I want to continue this conversation, but not while I’m on the road. Can I call you from the hotel tonight?”
“Yes,” I said. “Just give me a call whenever you get settled in and we can talk about this some more. Drive safe.”
“I will. Talk to you tonight. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Did you make it to Oregon?”
“Yup. We’re settled in. It’s lovely; I wish you could be here.”
“Yeah, well. If you’d thought enough about me to ask me along, I would be.”
I sighed. He was still bitter about being left behind. “I’m sorry,” not wanting to fight anymore.
“Are you really or are you simply trying to placate me?”
“Both,” I replied honestly.
“Why JoJo? I just don’t understand, I really don’t.”
“What don’t you understand?” I asked, remembering to keep my voice down so as not to disturb Emma who was asleep on the couch.
“I don’t understand any part of you. You’re childish sometimes and you’re ridiculously complacent. You’re more than willing to take everything life has thrown at you lying down. You refuse to fight back, to fight through it,”
“How did this go from me leaving town without talking it over with you, to me as a person?”
“Because,” he spat. I could sense his mounting irritation, as he silently struggled to find right words. “All these things, they’ve just been collecting and slowly irritating me and I can’t go on in our relationship anymore, if you can even call it that, pretending that everything is all rosy when it isn’t.”
I sat on the bed in stunned silence feeling as if my entire world was crumbling around me. “What are you saying?” I asked softly.
“That things between us need work. We’re so broken that I’m not really sure it can be fixed.”
My breath caught in my throat. Was he breaking up with me? I couldn’t bear to ask. Tense silence crackled over the phone line as I waited for him to say something more. I’m sure he was waiting for me to say something; however, words failed me. What did he want me to do, plead for him to give me a second chance?
“Are you going to say anything?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted.
“JoJo, I just told you that I think we’re at the end of the road and you have nothing to say?”
I sighed; what was there to say? I knew this would happen, it was inevitable. We were doomed from the start. “If that’s how you feel then I guess that’s how you feel,” I told him. It was probably better this was anyway, I thought. It would probably be for the best if I let him go. I loved him enough to let him go because I knew that, deep down, he’d be better off without me. “Maybe you’re right, maybe we can’t be fixed. Maybe it’s better if we go our separate ways.”
“Are you breaking up with
me?” he asked.
I paused for a moment, trying to decide if this was something I really wanted to do. Every part of me screamed no; screamed for me to stop, to take it back before it truly was too broken to fix, but another, quieter, more stoic part of me wisely said, yes, yes I am and trust me, you’ll be better for it.
“Are you?” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said softly. “I am. Let’s face it; I’m no good for you. Curtis Duggar wants to kill you and your life would be so much better off without me.”
“Only because you’d rather be tied to the past, you’d rather continue to be a victim of your own circumstances because you refuse to let go of all the things that are weighing you down-“
“No, Steve, this is me letting you go, this is me trying to start completely over. This is me trying to take myself back, that’s what this week was about. It was suppose to be about me finding my way back to the person I was before any of this ever happened.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” he said bitterly, “but we both know it’s only going to be a matter of time before you need me again, but only this time, I won’t be there to come rescue you.”
“I never asked you to rescue me!” I shouted into the phone.
“Of course not,” he thundered back, “You just cried to me about creepy phone calls and people breaking into your house, and all kinds of shit like that.”
“Whatever, Steve,” I snapped. “I never heard you once complain about it before; you never said no, you never stopped trying to “rescue” me. You thought you could save me and now you’re pissed because you finally realize you can’t.” My chest heaved as bitter anger flowed through my veins. If it was a fight he wanted, a fight he would get. “So you know what, have a nice life – without me.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear and pressed end, then tossed it in the general direction of the foot of the bed. It bounced then landed on the floor with a thud. And there you have it, I thought as I stared off into the darkness. Everyone leaves, it’s inevitable.
***
Two days later, as the Nissan powered through a torrential downpour in the middle of the highway, I stared out the windshield and wondered what I would find when I returned to Mora.
“Why are we going home early?” Emma asked.
“We’ve already talked about this,” I told her, sighing. “I have to meet with the lawyer because the man who hurt that pig is going to court on Monday and I have to tell the jury about what happened.”
“Am I going to have to tell them too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to ask Mr. Garza about that, but I don’t think you will.”
“Darn,” she said. “I want him to get in trouble for doing that.”
I snorted softly. “He will, sweetie, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
She nodded and resumed reading her book, something she’d found in the nightstand of the hotel. I focused on the road and wondered for the umpteenth time since leaving Sisters what it would be like to go back to my life in Mora, sans Steve.
It would be weird, I decided. Like living with ghosts of everything you almost had. Maybe it won’t be that awkward, I thought. Maybe it’ll be like it was right after we moved here. The radio, however, disagreed.
The only station that I could get to come in clearly as I drive North on I-5 was a station that seemed to be happiest when playing songs by random boy bands of the late 90’s. The one currently playing featured a prepubescent man whining about the ghosts of you and me.
As the miles passed, hundreds of songs from yesterday lulled me back into my teenage years. Each song offering me a glimpse into what my life would be like if I went through with this, with being single and apart from Steve.
“Mom, what is that music?” Emma asked, eyeballing the radio as the Backstreet Boys poured out of the car’s stereo.
“The only station we can get out here,” I told her. “So it’s this, or silence.”
“I guess it’s not that bad,” she conceded as the song changed.
I drove, the radio playing softly, Emma mumbling under her breath as she read. A little after noon we stopped for lunch then got right back on the road. I had to be back in Mora no later than four this afternoon.
Thursday morning I’d called Prosecutor Garza to find out when he needed to see me.
“Ms. Weston,” he’d said after his secretary patched me through. “Are you planning on coming in before the trial begins on Monday?”
“That’s why I was calling,” I replied sarcastically. “I wanted to know when the latest you can meet with me Friday afternoon was.”
“One second, let me consult my schedule.”
The phone clicked as he put me on hold, classical music, Vivaldi, played tinny over the cell phones speaker.
“Ms. Weston?” Mr., Garza said, cutting off a violin concerto in E Major.
“Still here Mr. Garza.”
“If you could get here by four p.m., Friday afternoon that would be great. It will give us time to go over everything – from the questions the defense is going to ask, to the questions I’m going to ask. I need you to be completely prepared so that we can get this guy off the streets so that way he’s not hurting anyone else.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll definitely be there by four.”
“Great, see you then.”
Glancing at the dash, I saw that I had plenty of time. It was a little after two and all things considered, we’d be back in Mora in a little under an hour.
“You ready to get back home?” I asked Emma.
She shrugged. “I guess so. It would’ve been nice to have a few more days at the hotel. But I guess it won’t be too bad, I’ll get to see Steve.”
Hello elephant in the car.
“Mhmm,” I replied, my tone noncommittal. I hadn’t told her we’d broken up, I was going to, but I didn’t know how. I hadn’t spoken to Steve since Wednesday night. He hadn’t called me either. I figured we were really over and that was the end of it.
It made me sad, but in a way, well, I was relieved. Part of my heart was broken, well, truthfully, my whole heart was broken. I cared about Steve and I didn’t want to lose him, but like I told him, maybe it was better for the both of us if we did break up. Maybe someday in the future, when I was able to finally and fully let go of the past, we could have a second chance.
It was a whole lot of maybes.
As we crossed the Mora city limits, it felt good to be home even though we were only gone for two days. I headed straight for the courthouse and my appointment with Mr. Garza.
“We have to go to the courthouse,” I told Emma as I pulled into the parking lot. “After we’re finished here, we’ll go home.”
“Okay.”
Mr. Garza’s office was cold and uninviting; it was the office of a man who liked to win and would do anything to accomplish it. As Emma sat with his receptionist, I sat across from Mr. Garza, telling and retelling the story, answering questions about the break in and the phone calls.
After an hour, he stood up, a smile on his face. “I think you’re ready for Monday,” he said, a slippery smile on his face. “The trial is set to begin at nine, please be on time.”
I nodded as I stood, grabbing my purse by its strap. “I’ll see you Monday then.” Emma was waiting for me as I exited Garza’s office.
“Look mom,” she said shoving an origami bird in my face. “I made an origami swan.”
Confined Page 15
