There’s something about Dad’s speech that isn’t right. Who can talk about their wife that way after this short amount of time? The several weeks since the accident must feel like days to him cooped up in this hospital bed. And no one talks too insightfully like this without time to heal the hurt from loss. Which means this isn’t positive speak at all.
“Why are your hands so cold?”
“Poor circulation, I suppose.”
There’s poor circulation and then there’s no circulation, I think. “But the doctor knows?”
Dad nods.
“Well, at least they know. That’s all we can do, right?”
“They monitor me and give me whatever medication my body needs but it’s not a good sign. My heart isn’t pumping like it used to. Through lowered organ function and the stint of blood poisoning—I’m just not what I used to be.”
I squeeze his hand until I get recognition on his face. “But they’ll fix this up? They have surgeons or injections for these problems?”
Dad wriggles his fingers so I let him go. He slides both hands under the sheets. It’s then I notice his yellow skin tone again, that he’s lost further weight.
This still can be good. Why not use this opportunity to lose the weight Dad always needed to lose?
“The issue is my body needs a multiple organ transplant. Take my kidneys, for example. I need new kidneys to clean my blood but Doc says I’m not strong enough yet to go through the operation, so for now I hook up to dialysis and that machine does most of the job for me.”
“Most?” That’s what I take from his explanation.
“Yes, most,” he says.
I don’t want to ask why he doesn’t need fully-cleaned-out blood. Maybe his medication helps with that, or something.
A weight, only slight, presses on my shoulders. Turning back from Darcy, I look up to see Dad. “You don’t have to worry about your futures. Everything’s set. The insurance will pay out. Darcy has his trust. There’s plenty in our assets, shares and estate plan to support you both for the rest of your lives, so don’t go worrying about worthless things like money.”
“Dad!” I shout-whisper. I shuffle my chair in and lean towards him. “Why should I be thinking about that?”
“Because everyone dies, hon, and your mom and I planned out our funerals and set up everything you and your brother will need when that time comes. No worries at all.”
Besides the “dying” part. “Which should be in another quarter century, give or take.”
“It’d be nice to live past seventy-five, I suppose,” Dad answers.
That’s when I can’t take anymore. I hope he’s happy that I’m listening to these details now but that’s my threshold. I ask Darcy if he wants something to eat and he says he hates hospital food. So I find the perfect excuse to get some fresh air. Does Darcy want food from The Crooked Shelf a block up?
Yes, Darcy would like that.
“I’ll be back soon, Dad. Sleep off that silliness while I’m gone,” I tell him.
At The Crooked Shelf, I don’t look for food. I step inside the crooked front doors and search for the blonde cropped hair and tattoo-less, unpierced face that belongs to the only normal person in here, Elliot.
And boy do I want normal.
I walk up to the takeout counter and order one blue milkshake with two marshmallows, one chocolate milkshake with a handful of marshmallows for Darcy, and a vanilla milkshake without the marshmallows for Dad in case he feels up to it.
The cashier slaps a receipt on the counter and says, “Five minutes. You can wait there.”
I say thank you but the lady with the six-inch spiked mohawk has already left. I sit in a chair and swear off the ratty mags since half the pages are ripped out and they’re two years old. Besides, I didn’t come here to read.
The milkshakes take eight minutes and before they come I watch the push doors to the kitchen, studying every waiter that emerges from any part of the restaurant, and even inspecting patrons in case Elliot happens to be sitting at a table.
He’s not. He’s not anywhere.
So I pick up the cardboard carryout tray of milkshakes and carefully balance it to the door. They almost spill when an electric-blue-haired patron barges in through the door, but I catch the tray in time, narrowly missing dumping everything on my leggings, shoes and the floor.
Backing out bottom first, I nudge open the doors and slip through, turning when I’ve finally made it out. That’s when all three milkshakes go belly up. Before I know it, I’m wearing at least two of the colors, Elliot’s wearing all three over his white shirt, and the ground has caught the worst of it.
“Oh!” I gasp, standing there with a cup-less tray, still in shock.
“Charlee! Shit, Charlee.” Elliot takes the tray, pushes it onto a table and takes my bag from me. I snap out of it, looking down, at which point my legs feel wet again, but it’s so much worse than when I tumbled in the grass at the cemetery. It’s milky and multicolored and everywhere beyond comprehension.
Elliot tells me to wait there, disappears into the restaurant, and comes back out in a couple of minutes. “I ordered three more for you plus a massive box of our specialty cookies.”
We sit at a table. People finally stop staring.
“Well, hi, Charlee. I would ask how you’re doin’ but I take it the asswipe who spilled the drinks all over you just ruined that.” He buries his head in his hands.
I scoot forward in my seat and lean over the table. “It was the best thing that happened all day.”
Elliot peeks through his fingers, eyes on me. I pull his hands off his face and he watches me, his eyes scrutinizing my fingers. I don’t know why, but I don’t let go of his fingers, only twining them more tightly with mine.
I’m reeling from Dexter’s touch and I just want someone who’ll want me permanently—and show me.
Elliot leans in too, his scent coming with him. It’s a normal guy smell. Looking at him, I realize how lucky I am to have found him because we just click and everything seems to go right—besides the minor milkshake incident—when we’re together.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks licking his lips.
“Yes.”
He leans all the way over the table and meets my lips. They’re soft, and I can taste him, still picturing his tongue running over them. It’s no movie kiss where we struggle to grab each other and breathe raggedly but he meets my lips again and again until our lips separate enough and our tongues move together.
For someone as cute as Elliot, I expected…something…something to steal my breath, but I’m just as calm as I was pre-kiss.
“Your drinks, El?”
The mohawked waitress holds out a new tray with three milkshakes and an equally tall plastic container filled with cookies. She looks uninterested as I take them, probably pissed that she had to make my order again. When I try to hand over money, Elliot’s hand shoots out and blocks me. She shrugs her shoulders and leaves.
“On me, since I caused this.”
I fight back to give him the money, but decide it’d be rude spilling the drinks again just to hand him money. And sort of pointless.
“You know, this is my phone’s fault.”
“It’s not working again?” I say, mocking his pick-up line.
“It’s probably working fine but I couldn’t find it for days, which is why I haven’t called lately.”
“And you found it just before you bashed into me?”
“Precisely,” he says with a smile, showing a full set of straight white teeth. I lean in and kiss his lips quickly, while he’s smiling and unaware. It was a test, and unfortunately, it still did nothing to kick-start my adrenaline.
“I promise I’ll call this time,” he says as I leave.
I don’t tell him that I’ll be fine if he doesn’t call. I definitely don’t tell him that I feel like I’ve filled my quota for romance with him, and that I am happy for a break.
When I get to the hospital, I find Nana a
nd Pa in the room. They say they’ll leave although they only got there fifteen minutes ago, and take Darcy home with them. Darcy takes his milkshake and the container. I take out two cookies and the two other milkshakes.
“Cookie?” I prompt Dad.
He shakes his head and asks for the milkshake. I hold it to his lips and he sighs after a weak slurp at the straw.
“You had fun, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, it was good to get some air,” I say. “But it’s better being here.”
Which I find strange. Elliot seems like a nice distraction, but for some reason I’d rather feel twisted in knots with my heart weighing a ton than nothing at all—unlike my usual self.
Why does this bring back the thought of Dex when he had me in his arms, plastered to his lean, soaking chest, and then standing together at my front door, our two fingers linked?
Oh, that’s right; Dex makes pretending to be in anything other than his universe impossible.
And this? With Elliot? I think all it is, is me trying too hard for “happy” with him.
Yeah, I feel it; the smokescreen is disappearing—and it’s being replaced with the truth.
18. Catching Charlee
Dexter
Dad’s footsteps are thuds pounding toward my bedroom. He chucks open my door and says he’s doing this and do I want this, too?
“Nah, whatevs,” I reply, replaying chords, then continuing, finding my rhythm again.
Your hand is my warm when I’ve spent the night in the cold / My hands fit your curves when you lean into my body / My lips are the puzzle fittin’ the crook of your neck / Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a wreck.
I clamp my hand down, suffocating the echoing ring from my guitar. The door just slammed. Did Dad leave?
Before I forget them, I scribble the lyrics on my makeshift paper-wrapped blackboard. The pen keeps drying out while I write. I try to revive it, shaking it in the air, banging it on my bedside table, until it makes a cracking sound and physically snaps in half. Royal-blue ink splatters onto my bare chest and blurts the paperboard like I’ve sliced open the pen’s aorta. “Fuck,” I mutter, jerking back. “Fuck, fuck—”
Then it hits me, reeling me back like a yo-yo string curling around its base. The car is making its usual dying, gurgling sound off in the distance. And I’m home alone.
I cross to the door, ink following me in the form of a thin blue print. I shove my feet into my military boots and grab one of my workout rags from a basket of dirty stuff.
Do you want something from the store, bud? That’s what Dad asked me, I think. I’d know if I had paid attention.
How long is he going to be out? Do I have time?
Dad and I, we haven’t always stared daggers at each other’s backs. We used to play hoops in Chicago with Jack, and sometimes Dad would teach Jack and I how to steer the wheel of the car, making engine noises with his mouth, which at five and seven really sounded like a car idling. Tahny would roll her eyes, faking interest in the back seat, squealing at her Seventeen mag.
Fast-forward fourteen years and Tahny has a toddler and no boyfriend, Dad has us in debt and possibly wants to steal money from Walter yet feels guilty about it, and Jack is under my skin on one forearm, woven through the forest on the other tricep, and six feet under.
After I’ve washed as much of the pen ink from my hands as possible—some has seeped into my skin, temporarily adding new tattoos to my fingers—I pad down the hall to the end room. I grit my teeth, bracing for disappointment, but the lock pops. The door swings in and bounces off the stop.
At first I don’t move because I’m just imagining this luck, that Dad couldn’t have left the door to the room where he’s keeping his secrets wide open. But I’m inside, so it must be real. It’s funny that the inside of this spare room looks so different compared to how I imagined it before. The bed is more an instrument for his mess than a possibility of somewhere for a guest to sleep. There’s an open cardboard box full of junk on top of the mattress, the contents all gray with years of dust. There’s a peeling paperboard filing cabinet we assembled from a Walmart box years ago, that I swear had been long trashed. Papers escape it as if they’re hands trying to claw their way to freedom. The desk holds a computer tower, one of those old ones from years ago, but it’s become a catch-all for pens, junk, trinkets, tools, and keys now. The power button is covered, too.
What does Dad do in here?
Papers are scattered over the bed, creating weird kind of comforter. The first papers are bills. All types, from personal cell bills to credit cards and house utilities. And not just Hollingworth statements. There’s one there with Walter May’s name on it, listing bank account details.
Other sheets are blank, and some scribbled on. I maneuver through the junk on the floor and lean over the bed, spreading the papers, moving and digging under the layers.
I pull out one paper. Underneath are stacks of family photos. Not our family but the Mays. I can see where Charlee got her looks from. Her mom looked like a model back in the day—blonde hair like Charlee, a dress that shows off her tiny stomach and long legs. Walter stands behind her, his chin jutting over her shoulder and big hands encircling her waist from behind. As I flick through, there are others of them, and in the end I can’t look at any more.
Other papers show statements for Mason’s. Some are two years old, back when Dad was managing part of the ski resort. At the oldest date, two years and two months ago, a statement has + 2% beside an equation. In monthly intervals further equations are marked. I realize these are profit statements.
The page ends, and I pick out surrounding papers, reading in order. Each month, markings like 1% or 4% are common, and only one “+” marking sits next to the month in the middle of winter, the busiest season at the ski resort. Even in summer, when family activities are scheduled and other rides open for the hotter months, figures plunge again. By this stage, Dad is booted from his managerial position.
I’ve never taken a business class in my life, but it’s clear Dad’s life is déjà vu all over again. This is the mess from Chicago, except this is karma. See, you don’t embezzle money from the parents of dying children and expect to live happily ever after. It doesn’t matter if you do four years and eight months’ time for the crime. That’s human payback, but the universe has still gotta get you for what you’ve done. This is the cycle. Dad’s battling to stay on top of payments though he hasn’t stepped out of line in years, I think.
As I sort deeper through the pages, a car door slams from the carport.
I’ve gotta get out of this room, run to mine, and pick up my guitar before whoever that person is—Dad—crosses the few feet between the car and inside the back door.
Hating myself, I leap across the room. The thuds of my military boots are muffled, thankfully, by the carpet. I bolt down the hallway, slowing my step a fraction before it touches the floorboards, hook my hand around my door and pull myself in as the back door rips open.
Heart hammering in my throat, clouding the clues I’m trying to put together in my head, I grab at my guitar and fall straight back into the song I wrote for Charz. But the words are lost on me as footsteps escalate in volume up the hall.
Dad’s at my door again, saying “Weren—” but stops himself, looks at the murder scene in my room with the blue blood splattered everywhere and rolls his eyes. He looks at my guitar finally, and says, “Never mind.”
I look up to the board, the words I spent hours piecing together and scribbling out in my head a whisper in the wind, and a jumble of mess.
It’s true how they say you remember the first and last thing most. The last line, Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a wreck, is the first thing I remember singing when I look to the paperboard.
At the same time I hear the faint click of a lock from the room at the end of the hall.
The car ticks incessantly again, spluttering down the driveway and down the street in a quiet memory of what just happened.
&nb
sp; I lose myself in the lyric, in Charz. I don’t move this time with Dad out again. I strum the same chords and sing the same line:
“Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a wreck.”
* * *
When I arrive at Charz’s house on my dirt bike an hour later, my tongue might literally have Repetitive Strain Injury from repeating those lyrics. It numbed and throbbed until I couldn’t feel the words on it anymore.
At Charz’s house, I chance it and walk up the wide, never-ending path cut out of the colorful rainforest that is the May’s front yard. I walk up to the front door and say “hi” as I turn the knob. I want to be her normal, want to see anticipation and happiness, not shock or surprise on Charz’s face, when I come by. I’m drawn here, drawn to her. I want her to feel like it’s natural for me to be in her environment. I’m juggling the right thing to do, to not come here, with my need to see her. I hate it, but a very un-Dex feeling throbs inside of me. Not in my gut, or my heart, but someplace in me that is somehow both my gut and my heart without being either.
“Jiiim!” An elderly lady appears from the kitchen, gripping a dinner plate in both hands for dear life. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dexter, ma’am,” I say.
Jim’s footsteps are coming towards us, but the lady shouts his name again, never taking her eyes off me. “What are you doing breaking into my son-in-law’s house?”
A man comes around the corner, rubbing an eye, shoulders slouched. Mid-yawn, he freezes and ushers the lady to the side. “Call the cops, Bet. Go, go!”
“Wait.”
All three of us spin to face the voice coming from the doorjamb of another room. Darcy jogs to me, even while the lady shrieks, and shakes my hand.
“It’s Dexter, Nana. It’s okay!”
Darcy’s nana finally lets her arms relax, her face still full of questions. Jim, Darcy’s grandfather, comes up to me, prodding me back, away from Darcy, with two fingers to my chest.
“Now you get away from my grandson, Dexter. I don’t care who you are.”
Drowning in You Page 14
