She leaves me there. I sort through my thoughts and decide I have to fix up the issue that holds her from me: the accident.
Then I get on the bus to go home to grab something to eat since I’m still starving. When I come out the side door after raiding the fridge, with every intention of catching the bus again, something catches my eye. A dirt bike, mine from years ago, is still leaning between the carport and the neighbor’s fence. I’d found it a while back and had started working on it on the odd weekend up until the accident.
I close my eyes for a second, praying it still starts, that it has enough fuel, that…yes, the keys are hanging off a wheel spoke. I rip off the cover wet with rain and throw my leg over the saddle. My leg kicks back, one, two, three times until it catches and idles, then I rip at the handle and it roars to life.
I shake out an old helmet, dislodging a spider that scurries away. Then I pop on the helmet and disappear into the night.
I’m going to visit every pub in town, and every town around this town, until I find my drunk ass of a Dad.
Then it’s on.
* * *
This body follows where the dirt bike takes me. With this huge black helmet I bet I look like a marshmallow head, but I don’t care and no one can see me. Just how I like it. I skid over damp roads while the drizzle settles into my clothing.
The speed, this rush, is what I love. Even the mixture of wind tearing at my clothing and the dampness can’t deaden the thrill. My usual resistance to the cold turns into a long-ago memory. The sensation is so far from the feeling of needing to collapse, to pass out when my sugar levels drop and I have my hypos. When it feels like the world has drawn out my strength until I’m nothing more than a pair of knobbly knees.
I’m sure riding a dirt bike like this on the roads would turn a cop’s head, but I don’t care. I need this now.
I stop at each bar I find, making sure I keep my hood up and my hair a bit messed in front of my eyes. Not that it matters.
Dad isn’t in any of them, so I take the long way back home. I stop at a restaurant where there are gas heaters above the chairs and tables outside so maybe I can gain feeling in my fingers and toes before I take off again.
I kick the stand up and lean the bike near the wall out front. Inside, there are clusters of people drinking, leaning over tables and laughing, and stabbing at pieces of food. And Dad.
A kid of about eight whizzes by me and I grab hold of his shirt. He whirls into me, almost toppling over.
“Hel—” he starts to scream.
I clamp my hand over his mouth and withdraw a twenty-dollar note from my pocket. This was meant to buy me lunch for a couple of days at work, but I’d trade an empty stomach for answers any day.
The note attracts the boy’s hand. “For me?”
I mime a zipper shutting my mouth, then hold up that finger to him. “One task and you can have this.” I look around but no red-faced fathers or squealing mothers have tried to attack me yet, so maybe I can actually pull this off.
“There’s a man in there sitting at the bar with a green shirt and short black hair.” I whip out my phone and start recording. “I need to you stop nearby and pretend to play with something, or do your shoelace. Whatever. Just stand nearby for a minute.”
The boy has an incredulous face, mirroring the exact feeling of idiocy surrounding this plan also in the small, rational side of my brain. “You want me to just stand there?”
“Do you know what ‘blending in’ means? Hide in a corner, or play a game on the floor, but don’t stand and stare. And make sure you’re somewhere near that guy. Now go and take this.”
The boy snatches my cell and runs off, fully into his specialized mission. You wouldn’t know he’d been running in pointless circles just before I caught him. As soon as he nears my dad, he drops to the ground and starts crawling, picking up bits I can’t make out from here with one hand and holding my cell in the other.
It’s funny how society works. Everyone’s afraid to be the first one to stand up to the weird or unusual. Two teenage waitresses step over him, giving him nothing more than a puzzled look. Meanwhile, this kid hangs pretty close to the seat where Dad is sitting. Just Dad and his beer and a phone conversation I am going to hopefully hear part of soon.
That’s when a middle-aged man appears from the kitchen, headed straight toward my spy. Like the fool I am, I throw my arms up in the air, trying to catch this kid’s attention. This kid whose name I don’t even know. By some miracle, he looks up and sees my air punching and hand waggling and stands up and walks out of the front doors as if nothing happened. I indicate I’m heading off to the side of the building, and he follows.
I hold out my hand.
Wrinkling his forehead, he says, “Nuh-uh, I’m not stupid! Money first, dude.”
I hand over the twenty bucks and he passes my cell back just as quickly.
“You can go now,” I say, waving him off with a jerk of my head.
As he turns to run, I add, “Thank you. What’s your name?”
The kid smiles and puts his hands on his hips. “Richy,” he says proudly.
“Well, Richy, thanks a lot.”
And the kid is gone. I don’t see him again after that. I plug my earphones into my cell and kick-start the bike.
And I press Play on my phone.
Zipping along the shoulder of a bend, I hear my voice first, saying, “There’s a man in—” I fast-forward past our chat until I hear scratchy sounds. Likely my phone brushing against the floor. Dad’s voice is in the jumble of noise somewhere. I’m searching through the sounds, separating everything that doesn’t matter into one section of my head, ignoring the piercing wind and rain until Dad’s voice clears up.
“…I’d love some of that cash. Get my grandson some proper equipment, my wife a nice weekend away and a car. But I’m not stupid. What do you think Lisa will say? She’ll ask where I happened to pluck out that five- or six-figure sum. Tahny and Dexter will be clueless for a while. I could hide it from them. But not Lisa. Not her.” Dad goes on to talk about how this is exactly stealing money and it doesn’t seem “fair”. Then he moves on to other details. “Maybe I was entitled to the money. Back then, yeah, but not after all that’s happened—all I’ve done.” The time lapses where this other person takes ages to speak, then, “You’re still planning to do it? That’s a cruel way to—” and the recording cuts off. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered I’m not driving back home. I’m…
I’m driving to Charz’s? I pass the mechanic’s where I work and head down a street I think I’ve been on before. Charz had her sixteenth here. I remember from years ago when she’d invited me, shocked that being a year above her in school and with only an exchange of half a dozen words meant I’d scored an invite. But even then I had my eye on her. She’s all I remember from that night.
I stand the bike up and lean against it pulling off my helmet and reflexively gasping for clean, fresh air. I have to wipe my face with my sleeve, even though it’s damp too. But I can’t leave yet. Looking down at my cell, I have hope until I see the time: 9:05 pm. Too late for friends. Too weird to show up at a house whose address I’m not supposed to know for friends.
I see her through a gap in the curtains. It looks like she’s reading to that little brother of hers the way her legs are bent on the side and she’s resting on her elbow curled over him, holding something in their laps. Charz may keep her head down and stay backed into a corner like when Raych went off her rocker the other day on my lunch break, but she has a helluva better soul than anyone I’ve known.
Darcy stares at her face, not a blink, just awe radiating from that look as she reads from whatever’s in their lap, her mouth making noiseless shapes. One second they’re straight-faced, the next they’re turning into each other and laughing in sync. Although I couldn’t be farther from them than I am now, I’ve never been closer to Charz than this.
Around me she’s beautiful and brave yet scared. Here I couldn’t label her if I tri
ed. She’s just being herself, a natural carer.
I decide that now’s the time. I don’t know how this happened, but I perch the helmet on the seat and walk up to the front door.
I stand at the threshold, thinking, thinking…
I would knock and Charz would leap through the door and wrap her arms around me. I’d tell her I’m pretty certain my dad is planning something weird regarding the ski accident with her father despite him possibly feeling bad about that plan to steal his money, and I’d tell her all we need to do is a bit of discussing, research, and then we could tell our case to the police when we’d know what’s going on for sure. Charz would be so thrilled I’d thought this out neatly. She’d link her wrists around my neck, and I’d press her against my body and our bodies would match together so perfectly we’d go upstairs together to just lie in bed because we fit that well side-by-side and Darcy would be sleeping anyway.
And then what, Dex?
With fierce resolve, I walk away and leave the Mays be.
It’s probably one of my few smart choices for the night.
11. Happy = Too Hard
Charlee
I leave home early to pick up Darcy from school and find myself staring up at a restaurant sign: The Crooked Shelf. Smiling, I walk to the back table again and prop open the menu. In a few seconds my eyes glaze over “cappuccino” and I call over a waiter to take my order.
Elliot turns around, seeing me flag him down. The cute waiter is here again.
The least I could do is restart that idea to hang out with him and see where that goes. If I’ve ever needed a distraction, it’s now because I do not need to fall for…no, no I haven’t fallen for Dex—how could I?—but a guy like Elliot who seems nice, and hot, isn’t something I should turn away from.
“You want that disgusting milkshake with the marshmallows again, yeah?”
I suppress a giggle and shake away the images of my tears all over this strange guy I didn’t know a week ago. “No, actually. I’ve decided to stop punishing myself and try a nice, normal cappuccino.”
He winks and says, “Coming up, beautiful.”
Beautiful? He called me beautiful? I comb my fingers through my hair. It’s loose and hangs over my shoulders today, and I have a lower-cut tank on than I’d usually wear, although I have a V-neck sweater to cover my arms. I guess this could be seen as nice, but the B word?
In the minutes Elliot takes to bring back my cappuccino, thoughts about Dad come to life around me. They turn the man talking to a girl at a table nearby into Dad talking to me. Thoughts about Dad’s death replace the elderly lady with blue veins popping out of her skeleton hands into an even frailer version of Dad. And every other child here is a ten-year-old boy with a mushroom cut calling out, “Dad, Charlee, Mom! Look at this!”
Death has a funny way of possessing someone. When you go to school and feed your kids, and bring home a check at the end of the week, death is invisible. Not only invisible, but an intangible issue that’s too hard for most to understand.
When death takes away your mom, you’re surrounded by it. It’s in the silence when you hobble through the front door, stinking of chlorine and riddled with want for sleep. It’s in the headache you get when your little brother takes a few dollars from your wallet and you don’t know how to react as his parent would.
But then death promises it’ll take your dad too and death isn’t here and there. It’s through your bones, weighing you down when you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock ten times.
And eventually, death becomes the most attractive thing and your purpose for living, when you accept it.
That’s where my dad’s wrong. He’s too out of shape for death yet.
“Here you go,” Elliot says, sliding my steaming cup in front of me.
I thank him, dump in an extra sugar packet for a boost and lick the froth. He’s still there. Looking up, I smile and wobble my head, asking if there’s anything else.
He peers over his shoulder and seemingly satisfied, takes the seat next to me. “I’ve been thinking of something since you came here last.”
“Oh?” I gulp at my coffee just to do something, then have to mask the oh-my-it’s-scalding issue as a result of my awkwardness.
Elliot pulls out his cell on the table and taps the screen. “There’s something wrong with it.”
Confused, I look at the unmarked screen, then turn it around in my hand, feeling the edges. “Its electronics don’t work?” More like, what does this have to do with me?
“It was fine until last week but since then I’ve been dying to text or call you and the problem is I can’t because I don’t have your number.”
Again I scald my tongue, but it pierces me with enough pain on top of my pre-existing burn that I will not do it again.
I hadn’t expected this, but I’d thought about it once when I’d seen him before. Not all week, though. No, that was reserved for imagining tracing Dex’s tattoos with my finger and wondering what the bar from his eyebrow ring would feel like under his skin, and then the image of me that close had me thinking about the way his square jaw would flex and work when he got mad, which I’m too ashamed to admit is possibly the sexiest thing.
“That’s a phone problem I can fix.” I type in my number and prank call my cell.
He needs to be able to contact me again if we’re going to chat more. I give him my number because I figure who cares? Dex doesn’t. He has Raych and has made it clear he doesn’t want me.
Elliot scans the restaurant again and he sets his hands on the table, slipping out of the seat. He bends down and kisses my cheek. That’s two kisses in two weeks. The most I’ve received from someone other than family since my ex-boyfriend dumped me, but that was so long ago I’ve forgotten how long it’s been.
“Thanks,” I say.
He walks away blushing. I’m happy I can make someone feel that way. Granted, I’m still waiting for the wave of euphoria, but the rest of the drink at The Crooked Shelf is much better than it was before.
I text Elliot, Glad to fix your phone for you. Chat soon.
When I get to my car parked across the street, he’s replied with, Loved seeing you today. And yes, my phone should have a better week.
For the five or so minutes it takes to drive to Darcy’s school, I replay Elliot’s face when he pulled out his phone, my growing embarrassment each time I remember thinking his phone was literally broken, and that, although cheesy, he’s the type of guy I’ve been looking for. Right?
I smile all the way up to Darcy’s classroom, where he’s huddled in the middle of a group of boys from his class. Seeing him like this eases my guilt that my personality of a wet sock doesn’t affect my little brother here where he can forget our issues.
As I approach they’re making weird sounds. What are they laughing at? One boy yells, “That’s so mean!” and another slaps his back and says, “It’s just a picture.”
“Hey, Darce.”
Darcy jumps, and I can feel his body shaking through my hand on his shoulder. “Charlee!” He snatches the drawing away and scrunches it in his pocket.
A mother calls to the group and one boy throws his school bag over his shoulder, waves and drags his feet over to her. The rest disappear, leaving Darcy with his hands behind his back and the scrunched drawing in his pocket.
For something his friends and he were so proud of, it seems like a source of embarrassment now, with Darcy speechless and walking back to his car wearing his own bag, not complaining how heavy it is or about homework. Not even about how boring class was. He’s silent and compliant, which is worse.
We buckle our seat belts. “So what was that thing you were showing your friends?”
“No, you’ll get mad.”
“How do you know that? You haven’t shown it to—”
“No, Charlee. You will get mad. You’re mad a lot and this drawing will make you mad.”
I start the car and take off. Gee, I thought I never got mad, actually. For the litt
le boy I picture needing help with homework, reaching the top shelf in our pantry, and playing Warcraft games on the internet, he’s more mature than I give him credit for at times.
That and he can probably read my face as well as I can read his.
I reach for his pocket, but he grabs my wrist. I turn to him for a split-second and we both erupt in goofy grins. We fumble for a full minute, my one hand on the wheel, my other grabbing and tearing at Darcy’s pocket, his hands everywhere in my peripheral vision. The car darts over the center line and someone beeps me back into position. We slow down and Darcy’s laugh diminishes to silence eventually.
“Give me that ugly drawing, you little thief.” I blindly grab again but he cackles and darts out of the way.
“Never!”
We drive in silence again down a main road until we stop at a set of lights.
Darcy says, “You really think you can handle it?”
“Sure I can. I’ve been putting up with you for weeks in the damn house alone, so I bet I can handle an ugly picture.”
“It’s not ugly!” He thumps his hand on the passenger side dashboard. “It’s better than your ugly face!” At that he bends over in laughter at his own joke.
I snatch up the picture and hold it to the opposite corner of my driver’s side. When he lashes at my arm, I tease, “Get back or we’ll have a car crash and you’ll die.”
He doesn’t laugh as I expect. I need him to laugh because between Elliot and this banter, today has been a happy day.
I start wondering why he’s cowering in the seat and refusing to look anywhere other than out of the window.
Until I unscrunch his drawing.
There’s a pair of kidneys, linked together by a vein of sorts, dripping with blood. The kidneys have black crosses on them and eyes and limbs. The outer hands of the kidneys hold a sword each and growl with a speech bubble saying “I will fight!” They say this to the creature on the opposite side of the page. Its body is hidden behind a full-body black cloak, the hood exaggerated and gaping over its bony head. He holds a big scythe that towers over his skeleton-like body.
Drowning in You Page 8
