Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  But it’s not for the player in handcuffs. Jay is calm. All he does is scan the crowd. When his eyes fall on me, he pauses. Even from here the blue of his eyes is piercing. Clear and calculated.

  The shiver in my back expands until my shoulders are trembling and goose bumps rise along my arms. We could be the only two people here, the way all noise and movement around me cease. I want to call across the stands, ask him if he remembers saying he would dedicate this football season to me.

  Jay works the muscle in his jaw once, tears his eyes away from me, and lets the officers move him out of the stadium. Before he is completely out of sight, I see him flash his coaches, the cheerleaders, the fans, his aw-shucks grin.

  I don’t move as the crowds slowly find their seats again and the second string quarterback is brought onto the field. There is still a game to play, even though the stands are thick with confusion. Jen’s family doesn’t return and neither does Selena. It’s cold in my empty row.

  The halftime show is weirdly subdued and the marching band can’t seem to agree on one tempo. The dance team looks like they forgot to choreograph their performance. I’ve lost sight of where I am. There is too much color and not enough oxygen and the white lines on the field bleed into the green of the grass and the red of the uniforms; everything looks like mud and blood.

  Caleb appears beside me, says something. The stands are emptying. At some point, the game ended.

  Caleb packs in the next room. He’s too quiet. I need slamming doors right now. Something to distract my brain. It’s too busy racing, reliving Jay in handcuffs, the ride home in a quiet sort of panic. There’s a mania to the way my eyelids flutter, my feet pace the room, my fingers clench and unclench fists.

  Not knowing what else to do, I brush my hair and I want to pull it tight, tightly, tighter. Anything to keep from wondering where Bean is right now, from trying to imagine the way Jen feels right now. Anything painful to take the place of the staggering in my chest, the heady pressure that hasn’t faded since the arrest stole the air from the stands.

  But nothing hurts enough for that.

  “I’m leaving.” Caleb pokes his head in my room. He balances on one foot for a second, lopsided as he tries to even out his thoughts.

  There’s so much he could say, could ask. Who are you, Kayla? I should have warned you, Kayla. Kayla . . . about Hailey . . . about that night last spring.

  But he goes with: “I guess I’ll see you soon?”

  “Maybe.”

  I told him yesterday that I might drive to Missouri State to visit over Veterans Day weekend. It would depend on whether I can get behind the wheel of a car without hyperventilating.

  Caleb crosses my floor and squeezes me in a big-brother hug.

  “You should try. It’d be good for you. To get behind the wheel again. Try to be . . . normal.” He pulls away, giving me an encouraging smile. “Let me know either way.”

  I nod. If I could wrap my head around my thoughts I might say more to him about how great it’s been to see him, how much I enjoyed the view from Point Fellows on our hike, how I get it. I get it now. But I don’t.

  “Drive safe,” I say.

  “I’ll call when I get there.”

  I stand at my window and watch Caleb’s truck lights cut through the twilight and then they’re down the road and out of sight and all I can see are the lights left on at the houses across the fields.

  My mom materializes in the doorway. She keeps her hands occupied by wiping them nervously on a dish towel, again and again. “Do you want to talk?”

  Dad is reorganizing his spotless shed out back. Again.

  A truck comes up the road. Because he is where I am when I need him. As though he knows everything. But he can’t know everything, because if he did, he would never come again.

  He is too good for that. For secrets. For me.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  Mom bites the inside of her bottom lip for a second and I feel sure she’s going to say no, to make me stay home so that I’ll talk to her.

  “Don’t be out late,” she says as Noah pulls into the drive and waits.

  I nod and go down to meet him.

  I climb in his truck and don’t speak until after we’ve pulled out of the driveway. My arms are wrapped around my ribs and my tongue pauses on the tip of a sharp canine.

  Noah seems relaxed, breathing slowly while I force my arms not to shake.

  He stares straight ahead. The tips of his shaggy hair curl just slightly at the back of his ears, disappearing into the dark crease behind the lobe.

  “Kayla—” he begins.

  “Shh,” I cut him off.

  He twists his head to catch my eye and my lungs ache at the breath held captive there; it threatens to whoosh out at the hurt in his expression but I release it slowly.

  His name is on the tip of my tongue, the letters writing themselves across my lips should I only open them. I long to tell him that he made me feel like it was possible to come home again, easy to be the Kayla I liked. And that if he knew the truth, all that would change.

  My lashes flutter in a series of quick blinks. My head begins to spin like a carnival ride.

  “I can’t talk about . . . that,” I say.

  And when he looks at me again, there’s a new understanding in his expression. Maybe even sympathy. Because my involvement, he knows, must be complicated.

  My involvement is complicated.

  “What do you want to do, then?” he says.

  “Can we go to the river? Just walk for a while.”

  “Sure.”

  There is a milky quality to the sky. Like drifts of cotton floating to the stars. The air is sharp, brittle, and cold when I breathe through my nose. The quiet is small-town quiet: the white-noise musical insects and the whoosh-rush of a river.

  He takes my hand and we walk a little until we find a patch of soft grass, then sit. The blades tickle the sides of my neck when I lie back and I remember a moment like this from a lifetime ago with three girls and thinking life was perfection, that it could never change.

  “I belonged here once,” I say.

  Noah stretches his body out beside me. We are almost the same height. I like that our shoes are placed to nudge against each other. That our knees line up. That when I turn my head, my eyes go right to his mouth. “Why do we try so hard to belong?”

  “You do realize you’re asking me that question, right?” Noah laughs softly.

  “Did you ever want to belong . . . more?”

  “Who doesn’t want to belong to their home? I used to beat myself up about it. Almost as much as those other guys beat me up.” He laughs again.

  I close my eyes, wanting to forget that ever happened to him.

  “I hated that my mom came from someplace different, the way she looked, the way I looked, that she grew things in our garden that nobody else did. I hated that she took me away from here for a while. It was important to her that I know my roots, but I didn’t care. But then I stopped hating myself, you know? For all these different reasons. It takes a lot of energy to hate where you come from. Too much.” Noah gathers a handful of grass and begins stripping the blades in two.

  “It takes a lot of energy to love it, too,” I say. “Sometimes I feel exhausted. Like this town sucks everything out of me. And for some reason . . . I’m willing to give it everything.”

  “Does it? I didn’t know that. I feel very . . . neutral about this town.” He lets the grass fall back to the earth through his fingers. “I don’t want to give everything to this place. I’m never going to be like the other people here, but I’ve decided that’s okay. I don’t have to look a certain way or play certain sports or eat certain things to be okay. I can do my own thing.” He shrugs. “I’ll get out of here soon enough, so in some ways it’s just about biding my time.”

  “But isn’t that lonely?”

  “I have friends, Kayla. People call me quiet. They think I’m invisible. But they don’t realize that I’v
e just chosen who and what’s important to me. . . .” His voice hitches and I wonder if he means me, at all. I want him to mean me. “I ignore all the rest. And they don’t even see how doing that is subversive.”

  “I see you,” I say, turning my head to look at him. “I’m sorry I didn’t before. I’m sorry I ever stopped seeing you. I was wrong.”

  “The only thing that’s making me start to regret not caring about this town . . . is you.”

  He raises his hand and tangles his fingers in my hair. My hands go to his strong shoulders as he angles himself halfway over me. And when he kisses me, it doesn’t matter if either of us belongs or if we’re invisible to everyone outside this riverbank. All that matters is the realness of us, here, right now.

  We stay on the banks of the river until the night chorus awakens and river-chill sets in. When he drives me home, our small talk interspersed with lingering breaks is as comfortable as it can be with all the thoughts lurking at the edges of my mind. Our hands, clasped in the center of the seat, are warm. When we turn onto Sunview, a heaviness comes over me.

  It never used to feel this way. Coming home from anywhere—a doctor’s appointment, a competition, spring break in Florida—once rejuvenated me. Now, I want to slump in my seat and hide.

  “Hey,” Noah says when we get to my house. “I know you don’t want to talk yet about what’s going on. But are you going to be okay?”

  I tug on the bottom of my hair. It feels like past time for honesty. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s going to be okay.” His hand reaches for the back of my neck and he draws me to him and I press my forehead to his and wonder why he gets to get away with lying. It’s not okay—I can’t ever see a time when it will be okay. But he kisses me and for a few seconds, it’s better.

  SPRING

  “OH MY GOD.”

  I froze.

  The boys froze, too. Steven, with his fucking camera. Jay and that beer bottle.

  The part of the beer bottle I could see. Over the top of Bean’s slender, white thigh, disappearing into blackness. Her hand moved dazedly up and down, swatting at Jay, but she couldn’t reach him where he sat back on his heels, the grin slowly fading from his face.

  “Shit.” The phone light went out and our eyes adjusted to the dark in silence.

  “Kayla?” Bean turned her face to me, rolled her eyes in my direction. Mascara smeared across her cheeks. Hair clung to her temples. She put a hand down on the ground beside her, quickly, trying to keep her balance. A sob escaped her. She heaved once. Twice. Tried to kick at Jay, who was on his feet by now. Another sob and my name again, drawn out in two awful, heartbroken syllables.

  The ice that had taken over my veins melted. Slowly at first, then rapidly, stoked by anger, fury, rage.

  “Get your car,” Jay’s voice said.

  Steven took off for the house.

  I stepped forward, fists clenched and raised. My mind was in a free fall, and I couldn’t capture any real thought but the need to hit Jay and to claw his face and press my nails into his eyes and come away with blood.

  He met me halfway. His hands curled around my arms, digging into the flesh underneath my biceps and I was certain he was going to rip the muscle and tendon from the bones and I cried out from the pain and the need to destroy him.

  Bean got to her hands and knees, and where her dress was still hunched up around her hips, I could see a dark streak. If Jay hadn’t been holding me up by my arms I would have fallen to my knees and gathered Bean to me.

  “Shut the fuck up, Kayla,” Jay said, because I’d screamed, as if anyone could have heard it over the sounds of the party. But I took another breath to scream again. It faltered into a moan as his fingers tightened on me. “You don’t even know what’s going on here.”

  Jay pulled me hard, away from Bean, out of the barn, toward Nickerson Road on the far east border of the Brewster property. I managed to turn my head and I saw the party fading into the landscape. His strides were long and sure, and I tripped behind him because he would drag me, I knew, if I fell.

  I saw a car driving on the road alongside the Brewster property and then bumping over the shallow trench divider between the gravel and the grass, coming onto the fields before stopping abruptly in front of us.

  Steven got out, leaving the engine running, and Jay pulled me around to the driver’s seat. His hand was atop my head, so fucking heavy, like a concrete block, pushing my neck, every vertebra in my spine down, down, down, compressing my whole body into something inches tall, too small for my lungs to find room to expand. I gasped at air, smelled the beer on Jay’s breath. I couldn’t get enough oxygen. Any.

  Jay shoved me forward, and I wasn’t quite small enough because the side of my head collided with the frame of the door and bursts brighter than the stars exploded across the darkness of my vision. He slammed the door closed. I reached for the handle and pushed, but Steven blocked it from the outside.

  “Drive,” Jay said as he slid into the passenger side and held my right arm, keeping me in place. Steven jumped in the back.

  “Or what?!” I screamed.

  “Just drive down Nickerson.” His voice was calm, except for the telltale way his “v” sound was slightly slurred. Even after everything else, he wouldn’t drive drunk. My brain twisted maniacally, focusing on stupid thoughts like that, instead of formulating a plan, figuring out what to do to get out of here and help Bean. I needed to . . . I needed to . . . His fingers dug into my bicep again.

  I crumpled into the driver’s seat. Steven’s battered old Ford. My palm hovered over the stick shift and I concentrated on commanding my hand to stop shaking and grip it. I blinked red haze.

  Jay reached his other arm forward and I thought he was going to grab me so I yelped, but he was just turning the music off. I wanted to put my seat belt on. An oddly clear idea when every other thought made me feel like shattering. But I was afraid of making any movement that Jay hadn’t told me to. I ground the gear into first and pressed on the gas so hard the car lurched forward. I squinted into the distance, trying to find the road until the car bounced over the unevenness of gravel.

  “You’ll keep your mouth shut. You didn’t see anything,” Jay said. His voice was slurred but hard.

  “Uh, yeah, she did.” Steven. From the backseat.

  Jay turned around and smacked him. “She didn’t see anything!” he yelled.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I repeated. I didn’t know what I was saying. All I knew was that I needed time.

  I had seen everything. Everything. People would know about it. I’d make sure of that.

  But we were driving. Where? Why? Where did they want me to drive them?

  Jay took his hands off me. Rolled the beer bottle between his palms and looked at me. “You’re a good girl. My sister’s best friend.” He stopped.

  A good girl. His sister’s best friend. In the part of my head that was swimming with hope, I understood that to mean he wouldn’t . . . couldn’t . . . do anything to me. But the rest of my mind was suffocated with images of what he did to another of his sister’s best friends. To another good girl.

  “She wanted that,” he said. He slammed the bottle against the dashboard. Glass flew everywhere.

  “Dude!” Steven yelled. “My car!”

  “It’s a piece of shit.” Jay laughed.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the jagged, sharp-teeth edge of the bottle. If I told what I’d seen—and if that meant his life as he imagined it could be over—how hard would he try to keep me quiet? How much could my life have meant to him?

  I shifted into fourth, carefully keeping the car steady on slick, oily gravel. We were leaving the field landscape and approaching a stand of trees, thin and spindly at first but thickening quickly.

  Maybe miles behind us now, Bean was crying, alone, sprawled in the dirt. Or crawling back to the house. I prayed that whoever found her first would, please God, do something to help her.

  I had to do something. I h
ad to get out of this car. I had to stop them.

  My eyes felt glued to the road, as though if I looked away for one second I could lose the tiny bit of control I had being in the driver’s seat. As if they’d finally realize I could turn back, drive where I wanted to go, not them, do something. If only I could push through that panic and figure out what. But a movement in my peripheral vision commanded my attention. I turned my head. Jay brushed the tip of a bottle shard across his thumb. Shadows glinted off the glass and then in his eye when he slowly looked over at me.

  A sound halfway between a sob and a cough escaped my mouth.

  I had to save myself. Then save Bean. Like the way the flight attendants said on planes: put my oxygen mask on first then help others. In the strange mix of wild and calm in my head, crashing the car was the right thing to do. If I turned into the ditch so that the tree hit their side . . . blocked their doors. I would have time. Enough to get back.

  Our eyes locked.

  He saw everything in the set of my mouth, in the dark hate in my eyes, in the white of my knuckles around the steering wheel.

  “Bitch—” He lunged across the car for me. His whole body: foot wedged in and slammed into mine on the gas pedal, hands over hands. But I had already turned the car and the gravel was so accommodating, loving these kids and the doughnuts they pulled on this road late at night and it was as easy as falling into a cloud.

  Steven’s car always spun beautifully.

  The truck cresting the hill just ahead of us tried to spin, too. The truck almost managed to turn enough, its headlights cutting across the surprise on my face for less than a second. It turned far enough away to hit the back of our car instead of the front, connecting with metal and glass and Steven’s flesh and bones. The doors on my side flung open and gravel and bark embedded in my skin everywhere and the hood slammed into a tree and blood slammed into my head and my chin slammed into the ground. Salty warmth burst over my teeth.

  There was no lingering car horn, only a vague memory that the truck had blared its horn before we crashed. There were no voices, only the vague idea that some voices might be silenced for good.