Phantom Limbs

by Paula Garner

  I wasn’t sure I understood it. I mean, I was broken, too, but I didn’t try to fix myself by having sex with strangers.

  “Afterward I thought, Well, now I can forget about Otis. He would never want me now.”

  “Because you had sex?” I mean, no, I didn’t like it, but it wouldn’t stop me from wanting her.

  “No, not exactly. It was more because it wasn’t sex that meant something. It was kind of trashy, right? And you would never go out with a trashy girl. So, I thought, It’s over. And I wanted it to be over so I could move on — from you, from Mason, from all of it. But I still couldn’t stop thinking about you. And I hated myself for what I did. And I thought you’d hate me, too.”

  “I could never hate you.” I found her hand again. “Were you . . . ?”

  “He used a condom.”

  “No, I mean . . . I don’t know. Are you okay?”

  She laughed bitterly. “What’s ‘okay’?”

  “I’ve never really known.”

  It was quiet for a while. Then she said, “There was this night — it was the night I met Jeff, actually. I was still kind of a wreck. I was at a party, and I was hanging out in the living room with some people, and suddenly I noticed that there were pictures of this little boy scattered around the room. He looked so much like Mason, Otis. And I just started to freak. My friends tried to calm me down, but I couldn’t stand being there for one more second. I ran out the door — and right into Jeff, literally. And he was so nice to me, so caring. And he made me laugh.”

  I sulked in silence.

  “He was really good to me. And I’m not easy. I have a lot of hang-ups, a lot of weird triggers from the PTSD.”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder? Like war vets? You have that?”

  “Yeah.” She shifted, and I heard a quiet snap. “You’ve probably noticed the rubber band? It’s part of my therapy. I’m supposed to snap it whenever something sets me off. It’s supposed to ground me in the present.”

  “Does it work?”

  A sigh. “It helps. I have things I say to myself, too. Like my name and my address — things like that. Just to remind me where I am.”

  I couldn’t believe how damaged she was by what had happened. How could I never have had a clue? All I knew was that those days of ignorance were gone. It was time to hear all the answers to the questions I’d never dared ask — answers I’d never wanted to know. “Tell me, Meg. Tell me what happened.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve thought about telling you a thousand times,” she said. “And you know what? I don’t think I can.” She found my hand again. “You and I were so close. When Mason died . . . I felt your pain like it was my own. Because you were part of me.”

  She was excavating the raw wound inside of me, all my losses bundled up into one tender spot, and it burned and ached.

  “You need to, Meg. I need you to.”

  She was silent for a while, then finally she said, “Okay. I’ll tell you.” She took a breath. “It was my Easter candy. I still had it in my room in that basket on my shelf. There were chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs in it — probably stale by then. I found the wrappers.”

  Breathe.

  I remembered that woven pink-and-green basket, remembered exactly where it was on her shelf. Mason would have had to climb for it. He would have been so thrilled at the discovery of the candy inside.

  She started sobbing then, her mouth pressed into my shoulder to stifle the noise. “I’m so sorry, Otis!” she wailed. “I wish I hadn’t left candy in there! I wish I’d thought of the monitor! I wish I’d —”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” The words were automatic, but of course my mind was already playing the same game: If only she hadn’t left candy in there. If only she’d thought of the monitor. If only if only if only.

  But I knew from watching my mom that this was a game with no winners. And so I shut out the if onlys — which left only the pain.

  Time passed. It was impossible to say how long. Finally, rational thought returned, and I asked, “Is that why you don’t eat chocolate anymore?”

  I felt her nod in the dark, heard the movement of her head against the sheets. “It’s a trigger. I can’t stand the sight of it, or even the smell.”

  Sort of like me with SpongeBob, although I knew her things must be ten thousand times worse. I thought for a moment. “What about screaming? That seems to be another trigger, but . . . if he was . . .”

  If he was choking, how could he scream?

  “Not Mason.” Her voice was a whisper. “Your mom.”

  My gut twisted. My mom — God, my mom. “And the windows?” I asked, my voice tight in my throat. “I’ve seen you rubbing at spots on windows. Is that a Mason thing, too?”

  “Yes. Because of the . . .” She paused, then continued in a shaky voice, “Because of the handprints.”

  “What handprints?”

  “Oh God. I don’t want to tell you!”

  “Tell me.”

  “He must have tried to get out, Otis. The sliding-glass doors — you know how they would get stuck . . . There was chocolate on them, handprints . . .”

  The images — it was unbearable. And poor Meg. The things she had seen . . .

  “We were all in the backyard when it happened. Mr. Esposito was mowing his lawn — if it hadn’t been for that, we might have heard Mason banging on the glass.”

  As Meg wept, I tried to block the images. Mason panicking, unable to draw a breath, banging at the glass . . . My mom, right there through the door.

  Mom. I went weak at the realization of all the things my mother had been living with. Mason could see her through the glass. He tried to get to her, tried to get her to see him, to help him . . . But she didn’t see him! The idea of her knowing that, living with that, split my heart wide open.

  “Who found him first?” I asked, pressing my hands into my eyes.

  Her muffled cries answered my question.

  She turned to me, reached out for me, and I cried uncontrollably. She touched my face with gentle fingers. Said my name. Held me.

  And together we grieved.

  Later — much, much later, when we were both spent of tears — I propped myself on my side, facing Meg, even though I could see nothing in the dark. I found her hand and held it. “Meg? I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you after — after what happened.”

  “Oh, Otis —”

  “No. Let me finish. I’m sorry I couldn’t see what was happening to you. I’m sorry I didn’t want to listen.” I exhaled. “It’s so fucked up. All I ever wanted was to be whatever you needed. Everything you needed.”

  It was so silent, she must have been holding her breath. I squeezed her hand. “I never would have knowingly hurt you.”

  “I know that.” She let go of my hand and touched my face. “Otis, it’s not your fault. I know how much you were hurting. I know you were doing your best.”

  She pulled me into a hug. Again we clung to each other, and in those moments, we were in a bubble that nothing could have penetrated. There was only Meg and me.

  After a while, she said, “My therapist helped me understand that I needed to find some closure, to face all this again, to face you. Especially with my dad coming back and . . . the problems with my mom. So . . . he’s really been there for me. I’m sorry I had to take his calls. Sometimes I needed to talk to him. . . .”

  “Wait, what? When you took those calls? I thought you were talking to Jeff.”

  “No! That was Dave returning my calls.”

  I recalled how she dropped everything to answer the phone that first night, and then again after the incident at the pool. So that was her therapist. Not her boyfriend.

  “This summer I’ve been trying to figure out if I could do this. If I could come back. Dave helped me come up with a list of places to visit while I’m here, places that remind me of Mason, to gradually try to become okay, or something closer to okay. I did a few of them — Dairy Queen, Chuck E. Cheese’s, stuff like
that — but it was hard. And then it turned out . . . I couldn’t do them all.” She let out a long breath. “I don’t want to go the rest of my life without you in it, but I don’t think I can spend the rest of my life being reminded of Mason.”

  “I don’t want to go the rest of my life without you in it, either,” I told her. “But I can’t forget Mason for you.”

  “I know that. And I’d never want you to.”

  Was that what we were left with? A no-win situation?

  There seemed to be nothing left to say.

  We held each other in companionable hopelessness. I listened to her breathing, felt her hand resting on my chest. I didn’t know how much time passed, but I started thinking at some point she was going to have to go back to her own room, before the parents woke up and determined that maybe I wasn’t as “safe” as everyone assumed. Even if I actually was.

  So I savored the last moments with her. I knew that this closeness we’d carved out here tonight was temporary. Because what had we resolved, really? Nothing. The damage wasn’t repaired — just illuminated.

  She shifted, and her hand moved on my chest — just the tiniest bit, her fingertips skimming my skin. And it felt amazingly good. Also alarmingly good. I whispered, “It’s really late. Or early. We’d better get you out of here.”

  “I guess you’re right.” She raised her head, her hair tickling my chest. “Good night, Ot.” She shifted again, and I could sense how near she was, could feel the warmth of her breath on my face. She leaned in to place a kiss on my cheek, but she missed — or did she? — and her lips grazed mine.

  And it flipped me over a hundred and eighty degrees. Did she do it on purpose? Was it an accident?

  I hugged her to me, terrified she’d pull away — terrified she wouldn’t. I heard her inhale sharply, and we hovered there, our lips a millimeter apart.

  And then, I don’t know who initiated it or how it happened, but it just did, like the pull of the moon. And the moment our lips met, it already wasn’t enough. A thousand years of kissing wouldn’t have been enough. But I pulled back, needing confirmation that it wasn’t just me, that I wasn’t misreading her, taking advantage. She pulled me back to her, and with a gentleness that just about cracked me in half, she held my face in her hands and kissed me slowly, softly — like she thought I might break.

  And I kissed her back. Every cell of my being wanted to pull her closer, to bury myself inside her, to meld with her. To show her what it could feel like when someone loved you. Hell, to show myself that, too. But I held back, held back everything other than kisses so slow and soft, they were both barely there and more seismic than anything I’d ever known.

  I ran my fingers over her hair and down her back, pulling her closer, closer, but she was never close enough. She whispered my name against my mouth as we kissed, which was an indescribable turn-on. She took my hand and slid it under her shirt, onto her back. Her skin was so soft, so hot under my fingers, and the sounds she made as I touched her sent me through the stratosphere.

  She ran her hands over my back, my chest, and then her fingers wandered down, down, brushing over my stomach, nerve endings exploding like supernovas, my heart pounding. I touched her back, her side, hesitating, wanting to touch more of her. She took my hand, tentatively guiding. The room spun as she moved my hand from her rib cage upward. She gasped as I skimmed my fingers over her breast — I pulled away briefly with a smile to shhh her — and then resumed, kissing her, touching her, feeling her respond to me in ways that eclipsed every fantasy I’d ever had.

  A voice in my head — a very small, faint voice — was suggesting to me that I put an end to this now, as there were few directions left with regard to outcome. I tried to pull away, but Meg pulled me back. “Don’t stop,” she whispered breathlessly. “Please.”

  “Oh God. Please don’t say please, Meg.”

  “Please.”

  And just as my lips started to melt against hers again, my phone rang. I tried to ignore it, but it was such an odd time to get a call. . . .

  “Otis, no,” Meg whispered when I pulled away.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. I rolled over and scrabbled to reach my phone on the nightstand, my knee protesting as loudly as other parts of me were.

  I checked the screen. It was Abby. “Hello?”

  “I’m so glad you answered!” Abby said. “Listen. It’s Dara. We had — sort of a fight.”

  “What happened?” I asked, sitting up, wincing as pain shot through my knee.

  “She just started saying all these bizarre things. She wants to move with me to Colorado! I mean, I really like her and everything, Otis, but I’m going to college! I’m not ready to move in together or anything. She said she loves me! I mean, we’ve been going out, what, a couple weeks?”

  “What did you say to her?” I asked, trying not to sound accusing. I tried to ignore the sound of Meg’s rapid breathing, which was distracting.

  “I just told her that things were moving too fast, and it wasn’t the right time in my life to get that serious, and we should maybe take a step back.”

  My heart dropped, imagining what it must have been like for Dara to put herself out there like that, only to be shut down. And it kind of pissed me off, that Abby had moved so fast if this was so fucking casual to her. Dara had never let anyone near her before Abby — had never even been kissed before Abby.

  “What’d she say,” I asked, “when you . . . when you broke up with her?”

  “She just went off! And then she started drinking — she has vodka in her dresser drawers, did you know that? And she just got more and more upset until finally she kicked me out.”

  “When was this?”

  “Maybe an hour ago? I’ve tried calling her, but she won’t answer. I thought maybe she’d talk to you.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “I’ll try.”

  “Call me back!”

  I hung up.

  “What’s going on?” Meg asked, sitting up beside me.

  I gave her the rundown.

  “Poor Dara,” Meg said. Then, tentatively: “But . . . isn’t this the sort of thing she tends to do? Create drama and wait for you to come to the rescue?”

  Although it might look that way to Meg, one thing Dara was not was a drama queen. I dialed Dara. To my surprise, she answered.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why?” She sounded totally calm.

  I was baffled. “Abby called me. She said you had a big fight, and you weren’t answering the phone.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve told you not to worry about me.”

  I processed that for a second. “Aren’t you upset?”

  “I’m okay now. It’s all good. But I have to go — I have some stuff to do.”

  “What stuff?” I said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “So I keep odd hours. Go to sleep, Mueller. And stop worrying about me. Okay?”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  We hung up, but the uneasy feeling stayed with me. “Something’s wrong,” I said to Meg.

  “I thought she said she was okay?” Meg said, reaching out and stroking my arm.

  “I know, but . . .” I thought about it, then shook my head. I was already reaching for my phone.

  Meg sighed.

  This time Dara didn’t answer.

  There were a lot of reasons she might not answer. She might not hear the phone. She might be busy. She might be annoyed that I was calling again. But I couldn’t rest. I called her again and again, growing increasingly uneasy.

  And then she sent a text:

  I told you not to worry about me.

  And then she sent another:

  I’m sorry I never told you I love you.

  I paused for about a second. And then I flew into motion.

  “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, STEAL YOUR parents’ car and drive there without a license?”

  “Yes.” Remembering the glass on the floor, I slipped my shoe
s on as fast as I could, ignoring my screaming knee, then went to find the light switch.

  “Otis, come on. You’re not being rational.”

  I flicked the switch, and we both squinted in the sudden brightness. I pulled on some clothes and limped to the bathroom, downing a couple of Motrin while I was in there. When I came out, Meg was waiting for me in the hall. “At least wake up your parents and have one of them drive you,” she whispered. “You’ll be breaking the law! What if you get pulled over?”

  “My parents will just want to call the cops.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I know this seems insane to you. But you don’t understand Dara.” Maybe she never would. Maybe the only two people in all the world who could understand me and Dara were me and Dara.

  “I have to go,” I said simply.

  She watched me for a moment, then slipped out of my grasp.

  And I knew that in Meg’s eyes, I’d made my choice: I’d chosen Dara over her. But I couldn’t do anything about that; the tug to Dara was too strong. The fact was, my life was with Dara now — it had been for years. Whether Meg came back or not, Dara would be a part of my life. If she was okay.

  I couldn’t think about any of that, though. I hobbled back to my bedroom and grabbed the mirror box, then took my dad’s keys from the hook by the door and headed out.

  Our car was in the driveway, fortunately behind Meg’s dad’s. I eased onto the road and set the navigation lady for home.

  As soon as I was on the highway, though, the certainty that had filled me just moments before started draining away. Was I being totally irrational? Meg was right — Dara had acted out before, and eventually she calmed down and things returned to normal. And what if Dara really was planning to hurt herself? How could I be sure she’d hold off long enough for me to stop it? Maybe I should call the police after all. But say what? “Dara Svetcova said she loved me. RUN!” I couldn’t be sure my gut was right. Maybe I was just overreacting. And Dara would kill me if I sent the cops to her house and she was fine.