Time won’t move. I’m stuck in this moment for what feels like forever until it’s too, too much and I blurt, “Dad’s dead too.”
“What?” Rosa squeaks. She clears her throat and tries a second time, “When? Are you—okay?”
That undoes me again, spilling sharp-edged tears that sting my face. My nose is raw and red, my cheeks at their last layer, my poor skin all but eaten away by layers of potent tears.
Rosa slips her arms around me and says, “So your dad passed away from his injuries?”
“Apparently he was leaning out of his bed and…he slipped, Ro. He slipped, cracked his skull. He lost consciousness fast, but the doctors fought with his body in surgery for hours. Dex stayed with me, and I was lucky to have him care for me so much. His mom, Dad’s nurse, was the one who told me.”
I push against Rosa’s arms. Her body goes slack and I prop up on one elbow, wiping my face dry with my sleeve. “I’m too tired. I’m too, too spent. Too everything. Everything’s…”
My bones rattle from agitation because in my head, it’s simple. I’m lethargic, I’m unenthused, I’m lazy, I’m the walking dead, I’m soulless—I’m nothing anymore. There’s no fight left, and I suppose it’s better this way because Darcy has our grandparents caring for him now, and I’ll stop confusing Dex since he doesn’t know how to handle “us” and I can’t help make up his mind.
It’s better this way with me invisible. This comfort is easy with my expectations limited to me. It’s hard to disappoint, you see, when you can fail nobody but yourself.
“Shh, you don’t need to speak. Let’s get up because if I’m being honest you stink like a whore after her night’s work, dunked in chlorine and left to dry in the dark all damp. If I’m being brutally honest…” Rosa chuckles, and says, “No, let me save that with my anger at you for later too.”
After fifteen long minutes of begging, pulling, yanking at my hair, I surrender, agreeing to sit up and talk so long as she stops hurting me. Somewhat satisfied, she runs downstairs and re-emerges at my door with two armfuls of food.
“Here,” she says, handing me a rum ball and a chocolate-coated cookie.
“I don’t like those much.”
“Oh.” Her tone sounds dejected as she puts them back in the container. “I thought because they were…never mind.” She rips open a bag of potato chips and holds out a handful of fatty, greasy chips to my lips, the scent wafting up my nose every time I breathe. Finally, I grab them and munch, my lips moving into a painful, tentative smile.
“Wow, okay, do me a favor and don’t smile. You’re less scary when you’re frowning.” She grins and nudges my shoulder with hers.
“If a genie could give you three wishes, what would you pick?” I ask her, curious. The last time we played this game was years ago.
“Easy: I’d have canceled my trip to Europe, I’d win the lotto, and I’d make Robert Pattinson fall in love with me for the rest of his life.”
“You dream big.”
“What’s life without almost impossible goals?”
“Almost?”
“Yeah. The best moments in life are the ones when you achieve something you thought was impossible. Making the cover of Vogue, finding a cure for a type of cancer, sponsoring a child and saving a life.”
I gulp, trying to swallow that information, but it doesn’t glide down so easy.
“And you?” Rosa says through a mouthful of chocolate.
“Wow,” I cry, bursting into laughter. The feeling is strange, like my outburst has ripped off a Band-Aid I’ve been wearing for a week, and underneath I’m tender and spongy. I stop as quick as I started.
“I’d put myself on that ski lift at Mason’s Resort instead of my parents, I’d have got a degree or something to make my parents proud, and I’d never have fall—”
Stopping myself before I say what I can’t take back, I finish, “—never have given Dexter the wrong message.”
“You are dating him!” Rosa says, following up by thrusting another hand of potato chips at me. Seeing my look, she adds, “I won’t allow you to go anorexic on my watch. What have you been feeding yourself? You’re skin and bone. Now, eat.”
I nod, and take the potato chips because that’s easier than arguing with Rosa. “We’ve been talking and doing stuff,” I mumble down at the comforter.
“Have you touched his you-know-what?” Rosa peers into my eyes, staring up at my face from under me.
Scowling, I growl, “Ro!”
“Okay, okay. So no,” she confirms, shrugging her shoulders. “But excuse me saying are you OUT of your MIND?” Then, blushing, she adds, “If I could touch that shit, I would never let go.”
“Am I out of my mind?” I ask myself. “I can’t answer that honestly.”
“He’s a bloody murderer, Charlee. Forgive my weak moments when we talk about him. You know I come back into Melbourne for two seconds and my mother asked me if I stayed away from the Dexter-types when I was overseas? And she wasn’t referring to the players with the ripped abs and model faces. She was referring to the type that kidnap, rape and torture you.”
“I know,” I mumble.
“God, you haven’t, have you? You’re not in love with him?”
“Please,” I scoff.
“Good. I don’t want you any more hurt than you are after everything else that’s happened. You go public with this relationship and you’ll be all over the papers, you’ll be out of a job, Darcy will be bullied at school…”
Rosa crab-claws around the food, trying not to put pressure too close and topple the open containers and packets. It’s all balancing precariously.
“You know I’m all for learning from mistakes the morning after, but he’ll be the biggest mistake you’ll ever make, Charlee.”
Too late. “I know.”
27. At the Heart of the Hollingworth
Dexter
For a whole week, Charz has not only not spoken to me, but also rejected my calls. One almost-coma, almost-death-experience, and I’m fucking sure now. I need her like I need air and without her I’m choking. There is no label for this because no human on earth has experienced what I’m going through. I’m choking while my pain is slashing open my chest, and my head is pounding and my soul feels lifeless.
I’m aching. Shoulders, biceps, thighs, everything. Today’s the first day I haven’t gone to the gym in a week. Since it’s the weekend again, the garage isn’t in need of me, so I’m closeted in my space. For the first time in ages, I look around my bedroom and I’m horrified. I know messy, even by my standards, but I think I’ve reached a new low. I can smell the piles of dirty clothes in the corner near my window, on my desk chair, which I haven’t been able to use in a month, on my desk, on the bottom right corner of my bed that I don’t need when stretching out at night, and smack-dab in my line of footing when I step in my room.
I go to the kitchen and peel away a black garbage bag from the roll. I shut the drawer, then re-open it and peel off another three as well.
Back in my room, I chuck it all in the bags. Belts, shirts, sweats, T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, shorts, socks, boxers—the word “floordrobe” doesn’t begin to describe the state. This goes to the laundry basket and placed in heaps around it.
Space. It’s there, although finding it is making me break out in a massive sweat. My shirt is soaked.
Remembering one of the promises I made before I fell into a coma in Charz’s pool, I grab a few sticks of candy. I put one in my pocket and the two other on my bedside table. Despite my careless attitude to many things, it’s taken until now, until almost losing my life and Charz from my life, to realize I do need to look after me. I’ve finally realized it’s okay to say that I’m a diabetic. It’s not the end of the world.
Five hours later I drop the vacuum handle and look at my cell clock, which says it’s only been a bit over an hour. Still, my muscles don’t agree, sore from the punishment of a week-straight gym workout without any off days. I fall crosswise back o
n the bed, with my arms splayed above my head and over the sides. As my heels swing under the edge, they kick something hollow. I reach underneath and find my guitar.
When I sit on my bed, guitar set on my thigh, I see it. The paperboard resting against my wall, the ass of it facing me. I need to look at it again, so I flip the board over and the sprawls of ink, notes and lyrics shock me at first.
My usual thing is to doodle, ‘cause that’s when my ideas come. Next to the lyrics about life not having a purpose is a flipped car, on its top, crumpled like a bit of paper. Next to my school musings about girls, a broken bottle of Jack Daniels lies on its side and on the other side of those lyrics are a pair of boobs.
I spot the lyrics I wrote about Charz weeks ago and there’s no picture. It jolts me because a picture, for me, is like a thousand words, jogging my memory back to how I felt at the moment I wrote the song.
But this is Charz and I’ve nothing to remember her by. Thinking about it, I realize we don’t have a picture, or a remember that time we rode the swings trashed? or anything noteworthy.
A while later I drop my pen, rubbing non-existent dust off my palms.
There, I think. I sit on the edge of my bed, one foot propped on the frame and tune my guitar. Then I sing:
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.
A shiver pinches the back of my neck when I finish. It’s such crap. I clear my throat and start on the other verse I penned minutes ago:
No photo of us inside my wallet / Cold lips before bed without you to kiss / Material memories we’ll have someday / Now you’re my torch leading my way.
“Fuck!” I growl, clamping the strings to halt the chord ringing out.
“Well, I thought that was amazing,” Mom says from the doorway, her hand on the doorknob.
Starting, I jump back, the guitar falling down my side to rest on the comforter.
“Hey. Thanks. Come in,” I say, patting a rare free space on my desk chair.
“I just might,” Mom says, smiling at the floor and the bed, but not my eyes. “You did well cleaning up here. I can—” Mom tips her head back “—breathe.”
“That’s not what Tahny thought,” I say, flatly.
“That girl has been more moody than a mood ring since—” she says, pausing. I know exactly who she means.
“Frank?”
“No, Jeremy.”
“I think his name was Rodrigues.”
Mom raises her eyebrows. “Since whatever-his-name dumped her. I’d pay her no mind.”
“I thought you’d have run out of here by now,” I say.
“And why’s that?”
“To grab your camera.”
Mom winks at me, patting my knee as she jogs out of my room. When she’s out, I pick up the guitar and put it back in its case under the bed. She comes back in, carrying something in her hands.
“I haven’t seen a clean room in our house since here,” Mom says, pointing to a page inside one of her photo albums.
I walk to her side and look over the pictures. Her finger is on one of Jack’s bedroom. I know this time. It was weeks before Jack was going to turn eighteen, so like any teenager sucking up to his parents, he’d not so much as dropped his day clothes on the floor between putting on his night shorts. He’d been getting B’s in all his assignments, two grades higher than his average. And he told Tahny and me not to worry about washing the dishes after dinner because he “had it”.
So when Mom and Dad splashed out and bought him his own fifteen-year-old pick-up truck for his birthday, I was more pissed than surprised.
Not even a month later and he was dead, along with my girlfriend Lily.
“Little brown-nosing shit,” I mutter, turning away.
“Who has a brown nose, Dexter?” Mom says, the veins in her forehead looking as though they’re about to pop when she stresses my name.
“Dear, dear Jacky boy,” I say, trying out how the words sound. He can’t be here to give me a good punch between my kidneys for saying that about him. I’ve never wanted to be whacked by my little brother so much, just so he could be with me.
“Sit, I want to tell you something.”
“Ma,” I start. I rub my temple with one hand, not in the mood to argue, “I don’t want you to volunteer to clean up the rest of my room ‘cause I’m knackered and this is as good as it gets.”
“Well, you’ve got some brown-nosing to do yourself before the day that happens.”
“Touché,” I say, giving my witty mom a little clap.
“Tahny is shitty, that’s what she is,” Mom begins.
I’ve said a lot worse than “shitty” in my time, but hearing this from my mom silences anything I might have said back.
“She’s shitty because Jack got a car for his eighteenth. She’s shitty because she’s had three boyfriends since my grandson was born—none being Adam’s dad. She’s shitty because of a lot of things, but do you know why she’s shitty the most?”
“Why’s that, Mother dear?”
“Oh, quit it for once. I’m trying to tell you a really important story,” Mom says.
“Okay, okay. Why?”
Mom pats down her skirt and takes a while to speak. Her fingers skim the spot on my forearm where the thorned heart lies among the forest of ink and the other spot, a little longer, where the death reaper’s scythe with the letter “J” on the handle, is inked further down.
“Because Jack’s gone and he didn’t get to see his nephew, because the only time Jack had money spent on him was when we had to bury him, and that’s just the start.”
Mom’s eyes are shiny, but if she feels like crying, she hasn’t yet. She usually doesn’t around me. But I feel it too. That pull from inside that reminds me of a thing he said, or the way we’d all be laughing at him for straightening his hair. The pull latches on to the memories that have nothing to do with the car crash and they’re so happy that they burn me from the inside out, acting as fuel to the anger and grief pulsing through the rest of my body.
I gulp. “What’s the rest?” I ask, curious for the first time if there’s more to my family than I’ve known.
Mom rubs roughly at her face and slaps both her thighs, getting up at the same time. “Look at me, your silly Mother dear. I might just go make a sticky-date pudding. Haven’t had that in a while.”
“What about your important story? Please?” I say, even using my manners. If I keep the mood light, be sincere, she might divulge.
But her look is so solemn that I feel guilty for attempting to be stupid with her.
“Ask your father. Oh, and make sure that girl hears those lyrics you wrote for her.”
Mom leaves me with all these thoughts, but the one that makes sense, that I finally remember after a week of desperately trying to contact Charz, happens to be so simple I overlooked it.
Yet it jogs my memory from the moment before I passed out in her pool.
FJH stands for “For Jack Hollingworth”.
* * *
“Now that’s a first,” Dad tells me. He falls onto a sofa cushion beside me.
“Huh,” I mumble into the cushion.
I’m laying facedown, thinking about Mom earlier today and what the hell she meant, about Dad, about Tahny.
“Home at eleven pm. Shit!”
“Yeah,” I say, before I even see him. “I’m an old man.” I turn over and rest my head back. “Don’t know how you do it.”
“I’ve heard that one before, son.”
“And you’re still an old man,” I say. “Hey… Nah, better not. Your old man feelings won’t hack it.”
“Try me.”
I’m about to shock myself, because this isn’t what I’d expected to say, so it must be worlds from the comeback Dad is expecting. “What happened with Jack?”
Maybe Tahny was right. Maybe I just do m
y own thing and don’t care what goes on around me. Since Jack died, I’ve been doing a lot of gym or guitar or getting inked. When I’m obsessed by something, I’m happy and it’s ridiculously easier to block out pain. Maybe there is more to this Jack thing than I’ve paid attention to.
“What are you getting at?” he says as if he’s testing me.
“Actually, at first I thought you were playing dirty with the gang back in Chicago and were trying to rob a dying man of his fortune, but I’m pretty sure that was never the plan. Which means I’m more confused than ever.”
Dad blinks, frowns. “Jack died, son. We both know that whoever ran Jack and Lily off is probably having a beer with his buds tonight and that’s that.”
There’s a tone to Dad’s voice. If you weren’t part of this family you wouldn’t get it. It’s too serious. Although Dad walks around like he’s built of nails and doesn’t appear to have the tear ducts to weep over anything, there’s a catch in his voice when he’s trying to be so serious. It tugs at something in my chest, which bangs hard.
“Come on, I mean it. Mom was saying something about why Tahny is all pissy these days and I think she was serious. Did something happen with Jack I don’t know about?”
“She means our past. We’ve been through a lot, packing up and shipping all over the world, my charges, Tahny having that baby with no Dad, your brother dying. I’d say that’s enough to make any woman pissy, mmm?” I nod as Dad stands up and claps my shoulder as way of saying goodnight. “And that’s without even having PMS.”
I scoff back a disgusted sound. “Right. Later.” That stupid PMS crap got me, and now it’s too late to go running after him for more answers.
Dad walks down the hall and into his and Mom’s bedroom. With the house otherwise empty and quiet tonight, whispers of their soft conversation are the only sounds I can hear. I’m much more used to Tahny moving around and Adam’s crying.
But alone, with no toddler crying, and quiet, save for little whispers, I can’t fall asleep. My body is killing me, and I want nothing more than complete oblivion, so I get up and take a sleeping pill, hoping this shit actually works, then plop back on the sofa, which is softer than the springs poking out of my mattress.
Drowning in You Page 21
