A hand gripped her arm, and she flinched before she realized it was Rajni. “Don’t do that,” the other woman whispered. “Please. Don’t look down like it’s you that should be shamed by what happened.”
Mari cleared her throat, covered Rajni’s hand with her other one. “I know. I do. I’m still figuring out all the space between knowing and knowing, though. It’s hard. That’s why . . . this new guy.”
She looked up, all her fear flooding into her face. The lack of bullshit in Rajni’s personality was a blessing and a curse, because she wouldn’t lie to you, but you couldn’t hide anything from her, either.
“I don’t know if I should do this. With him, I mean. I can’t tell, for sure, if it’s a good idea.”
Rajni squeezed her arm one more time before she sat back. “And you were hoping I might know?”
Mari nodded, wincing, but sort of smiling. “It’s a lot to ask. And I know you don’t know him, but you . . . All your boyfriends have been so great. Jorge’s the sweetest, and Leo—he looks intimidating and he can seem crude, but truly he’s got a heart of gold behind that mouth. You must have better Man Radar than I do to have dated both of them.”
Rajni shrugged off the compliment and fell silent for a moment, appearing to really think it over as she toyed with her chai. When she finally looked up, her gaze was steady. “I know this. A man never slaps you just once. He might say it’s once, but if it’s once, it’s all the times.”
“I don’t think he would hit me,” Mari backpedaled, “but—”
“But you didn’t think your ex would, either.”
Mari exhaled a laugh at Rajni finishing her sentence. It wasn’t funny, but there was something relieving about being understood so thoroughly. Even if it was humiliating, too.
Rajni crossed her legs. “One and done, that’s what I say.”
“But you just said they never hit you just once.”
“They don’t. Once and I’m done,” she clarified. “I’m gone before they get to twice, no matter how much they beg.”
Something changed in the other woman’s expression and Mari struggled not to let her surprise show on her face. She could hardly believe something like that had ever happened to tough-as-nails Rajni, but there was a time when people would have said the same about her. Bad relationships could happen to anyone, she supposed.
She cleared her throat. “But what about until then? Before the once, I mean. I don’t want to . . .” She trailed off. “I can’t go through all that, not again. Just to end up in the same place.”
Brad and Jack both came from violence, both raised their voices when they got angry. But surely not everyone with a temper was dangerous and not everyone from a rough childhood became violent. She hadn’t. Rajni seemed to be saying that there were warning signs that could go either way, but the line got drawn at hitting. Mari remembered arguments when Brad would throw things at her, and decided that the line got drawn before intimidation, too. It was violent, doing something like that, even if the lamp didn’t hit you. But there had to be more, a way you could tell without just waiting for the first slap.
“What does your gut say about Jack?” Rajni asked.
“That he’s right.” Mari looked up, her answer having come out before she thought it through. “Not just that I trust him but that something about him . . . is just right for me.”
Rajni smiled, and didn’t say a thing.
“But what if I’m wrong?” Mari asked again, her chai slowly going cold between her palms because her stomach was in too many knots to drink it.
Rajni sipped hers, unperturbed. “All right. Let’s say you two lovebirds get a pizza, but you ordered the medium, not the large. You get to the last slice of pizza and you’re both still real hungry. What does—”
“He’d pretend like he didn’t want it so I could have it,” Mari answered before Rajni even finished the question. It was no test at all, considering how many times Jack had lied over the growl of his own stomach about not wanting to have any of whatever tailgate meal she’d cooked that night. He was never hungry until she’d eaten her fill. And then he’d say, “I’ll just have a little if you’re gonna throw it away otherwise.”
“Then he’s a good man,” Rajni said simply. “Pizza doesn’t lie.”
* * *
—
The next day, Jack did not show up for work.
This wasn’t just a first, it was sort of like a seismic event. According to the biologist grapevine, it had never happened before in project history. At lunchtime, Mari had asked the crew what was going on. They had spent the morning stumbling along under the guidance of Gideon, who was the second-in-command but knew nothing because Jack had trusted him with nothing. The crew looked around at each other with a lot of wide eyes and guilty looks and didn’t say a word. Joey opened his mouth and got an elbow to the ribs for his trouble.
Mari didn’t know what the heck was going on.
Rather unfortunately, she’d had a breath-holding, courage-scraped-up plan for tonight that involved a pizza. She was pretty sure the plan wouldn’t go so well if Jack had the puking flu or something. She was also pretty sure that if she didn’t do this tonight, she’d die alone with thirty-two cats because she’d never have the confidence to make a move on a man again.
Which is why she found herself knocking on Jack’s motel door that night with a cardboard box in hand that had shot her food budget for the whole week, freshly showered with her good jeans on.
He opened it with his man bun swinging crookedly, his T-shirt inside out and all twisted from where he’d just thrown it on. A change in his scent hit her, bringing with it a flinch of memory, and it took her an extra second to identify it and blink in surprise.
“Are you . . . drunk?”
He leaned against the edge of the door, stumbling a little when it swung farther open. ‘‘It’s what Wyatts do,” he growled, voice as dark as his bloodshot eyes. “Can’t hold a job, can’t hold our liquor. We fuck up, we get drunk, we do it all over again.”
She stood there, as off-balance as if she’d stepped into a dream. He had a beer sometimes, but never two, even on the rare times when she’d gone for a second. She’d never seen him drunk, or hungover, or even heard him talking about being either. “Except . . . you never screw up at work. And you don’t get drunk.”
“Is that a pizza?” He frowned at the object in her hands. “Why do you have a pizza? You never buy anything.”
“It’s a long story,” she mumbled, hesitating.
She wasn’t sure if she should invite herself in and try to sober him up, or stay well away from whatever train wreck suddenly had him missing work in favor of the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table behind him. But instead of shouting or throwing things, he gave her a mournful look.
“I got you something,” he announced. “Prolly shouldn’t give it to you now, though, because I’m wasted.”
That tickled a corner of her mouth into turning up. “Is that so?”
He dropped his head against the door and groaned. “Stupidest, saddest present in the world. Jesus.”
“You got me the saddest present in the world?”
He opened one eye. “Why’re you smiling?”
“Because that sounds kinda cute, is all.”
He closed his eye again. “Ain’t cute. Ain’t fucking cute.” He groaned again, deeper and rougher. “Stupid. Shoulda drank myself to sleep before you got back.”
“Then I wouldn’t get my present.”
He didn’t move. She made her decision, sweeping past him into the room. She deposited herself at the table and plunked the pizza next to the whiskey. Brad had done a lot of things when he was drunk, but he’d never bought her a present. Those had only usually shown up . . . after.
“Better give it to me now,” she announced. “You’ll just be more embarrassed once you sober u
p.”
He gave her a narrow look. “Why aren’t you yelling?”
“Maybe I’m working up to it.”
He looked at her.
She folded her arms and looked right back.
He shut the door, staggering a little. “Okay, I’ll give you the present. But only because I’m drunk. And if you don’t like it, you gotta get drunk, too, so you forget about it.”
“That seems fair.”
He rummaged around in the nightstand beside the bed and came up with a plastic bag, hesitating. “Ain’t wrapped.”
“I imagine I’ll live.”
He crossed the room with three too-quick strides and shoved it into her hands, grabbing up the bottle and twisting off the top, then giving it a side-eye and setting it back on the table, untouched.
Brad never would have left a bottle of whiskey alone until every bit of liquid was wrung out of it. Her shoulders eased a little more.
Mari unwrapped the bag, taking out a textbook-sized paperback. On the cover, it read Treatment Workbook for Survivors of Domestic Abuse. Her fingers tightened, and a shiver worked itself through her whole body.
“Said you didn’t have no friends, back home when you was married,” Jack said abruptly. “Said you couldn’t make no home for your husband. Ain’t you. Says right here in the book.”
He leaned across the table to tap it with one thick finger.
“People married to assholes that thump on them, those guys always tell you it’s your fault, not theirs. Keep you home so nobody sees what they did, tell you they’ll take care of you so you don’t have to work. My mama didn’t have any friends, either. Nobody to take her to the doctor when she started having fainting spells, nobody to find her when she passed out and hit her head too hard. That’s how my daddy wanted it. Didn’t want nobody to see the things he did to her.”
She looked up at him with her eyes starting to water. “You read all that in the book already?”
He snorted. “Fuck, I had all day.”
She watched him, trembling as she tried to decide if she should say anything about the terrible way he’d lost his mother.
Jack slung himself back into his chair, his arms loose and carelessly hung over the armrests as his eyelids drooped. “You should have seen the guy who sold me the book. Skinny little asshole, glared a hole right through me. If he could have found a reason to take my book in the back so he could spit in it, he would have.”
“Why would he think that you’d buy that book if you were the one hitting people?”
Jack reached over and rapped the book with one knuckle. “Chapter seven, that’s why. Apologizing. They’re always sorry after what they did. Real sorry, too, not even lying. Doesn’t change anything. Just like a drunk, gives up drinking every morning and takes it up again every night.”
He looked at the bottle on the table and seemed to remember he still held the cap. After a moment, he leaned forward and screwed it back on with slow, clumsy fingers.
“My daddy was like that. Bad enough that when my big brother was eighteen, he left and took me with him.” Jack grunted. “But Leroy had my dad’s temper. At least he just used his fists, not whatever else happened to be lying around.”
She winced. No wonder he had such trouble trusting anyone. He had thought his brother was taking him away from all the violence, only to find out he turned on him, too. She waited, hoping the silence was gentle enough that he knew he could tell her more, if he wanted to. But she wasn’t exactly surprised when he didn’t go on.
Mari laid the book down in her lap. Careful with the pages, because she suspected that if he’d needed understanding so badly he’d skimmed half of it in a day, she probably needed to read it cover to cover. “You want to tell me why you weren’t at work?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just temporary suspension, anyway. Boss won’t fire me, or he won’t have anybody to do his boy’s work. He just wants me to know his dick’s bigger, that ‘no’ ain’t a word I get to say to him.”
Mari stiffened, ugly goose bumps running up her spine.
Jack sniffed carelessly, half-asleep already. “This docks me a couple days’ pay. It’s what he was after, costing me money. I don’t give a shit.”
“Is this about the bird nest?” She remembered Jack saying his boss wouldn’t forget, that he’d find a way to get even with Jack for disobeying. “Rod told you to do something to it, and you said no—that’s why you were there, wasn’t it? So early in the morning.” His boss couldn’t do that, could he? It was against the law. But of course he wouldn’t say the suspension was because of the nest. He’d make up some other excuse to punish Jack. Her face fell.
Jack frowned at her. “Don’t look at me like that. Didn’t hurt any baby birds.”
“I know you didn’t. You wouldn’t.”
“Humph,” he grunted. His eyelids slipped down again, and she realized he was going to fall asleep right in his chair and leave the entire pizza for her to eat herself. While she read the book he’d bought her because he didn’t know how to heal her but wished he could.
Mari set the book aside and slipped to her knees in front of his chair. She touched his hand. “Can you do something for me?”
“Yeah. Whatchu need?” He yanked himself straight, blinking sleep out of his eyes. “Sorry, got jawing on, didn’t ask if you came by because you needed something.”
She patted his knee. “Drink some water, have something to eat. And get some sleep, okay?”
He nodded, but just to be sure, she went to the bathroom and put some water in his travel mug. She filled it all the way to the brim, her chest feeling just as full.
She brought the cup to the nightstand and then extended her hand, pulling Jack to his feet when he took it. Without much fuss, she maneuvered him to the bed and left him sitting on the edge, blinking up at her when she retreated to pick up her new book and his bottle of booze.
“You gonna pour it out?” he asked, not sounding like he cared one way or another.
“Nah. I’m going to drink it.” She smiled. “I love whiskey, and from the looks of it, I handle it better than you do.”
Jack rubbed his hands over his face, sending his hair even more chaotically askew as he mumbled something that sounded like “fuck, that’s sexy.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.” She flicked off the light as she opened the door. “And, Jack?”
“Mmm?”
“Thank you for the present. I like it, more than you’d probably believe.” She hesitated for a second, and then closed the door.
She left the whole pizza behind.
18
Tomorrow
It was still early when Mari got to her room, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and the Treatment Workbook for Survivors of Domestic Abuse in the other. She took off her shoes, poured herself a drink—paused, then poured it a little stiffer—and began to read.
On the other side of the wall, Jack was quiet. She wondered if he’d gone to sleep already, or if he was over there feeling self-conscious about his gift. She hoped not.
By the second chapter, she’d forgotten all about him. By the third, she was reading as fast as she could, her fingers starting to go numb where she gripped the pages.
It was all there, laid out like a map of every year of her adult life. The honeymoon phase, when their connection had been positively electric and she thought no one had ever understood her like Brad did. The slow buildup of angry arguments that moved to criticism, then intimidation, and then violence. The way he always had some excuse why he didn’t like this friend or that friend of hers, reasons why she needed to cancel plans. Why he wanted her to spend all her time at home, just with him. Why, after her car accident, he never wanted her to go back to work, because he wanted to take care of her.
She had thought she didn’t have friends anymore because she was kind of boring, and
because she always seemed to upset people. But here in this book, she could see how Brad would set up situations for her to fail, then blow up at her when she inevitably did. How, after she and Brad moved, her friends used to say they’d called, but Brad swore they hadn’t, and she’d believed him and thought they must have been lying.
In chapter seven, she saw how his genuine remorse and fear that she’d leave him would lead to his apologizing and being so painfully sweet. Just like he’d been back when they first got together. How that would make her feel guilty and ungrateful for being angry with him.
Suddenly, her whole life made sense. Everything that had felt confusing and shameful was laid out in this book. Bullet points one after another because it had never been that her luck had gone bad: everything traced back to things Brad had done to her. Ways he’d manipulated her and isolated her and hurt her because of what was wrong inside him.
The book knew everything because it wasn’t just their marriage, it was a pattern that happened to other people. No different than if she had diabetes and she’d finally gotten a diagnosis that explained every strange thing her body had been doing.
It was a revelation, and at the same time, it was deeply, harrowingly humiliating.
How had she become such a cliché that this book could explain her whole marriage without the authors ever having met her?
It wasn’t as if she’d been following a manual, or even that Brad had. They’d just been groping along the best they knew how in an imperfect world. She knew neither of them had meant to end up here on that day so long ago in the courthouse when they promised to love and honor each other.
She poured another whiskey, thinking about it. Staring at the dent in the wall where so many people had opened the motel door just a little too hard. There were other people, just like her. So many that books were written about them, for them. So many people, ashamed of what their lives had become and all thinking they were alone.
Breathe the Sky Page 14
