The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  “Right.”

  “To make changes and discover new things and live your life instead of letting it drain into the sink. I tried to do that on my own, but you all refused to do it, too, so I’m going to drag you with me if it kills me.”

  I don’t answer, because she’s talking mostly to herself.

  It turns out that our conversation must have energized her. When I get home from school the next day, she has skinned our house.

  “That wallpaper was old-fashioned. I thought we could repaint.” Lena steps away from the front door, where she was waiting to ambush the first family member to come through it, which unfortunately was me. The walls are hemorrhaging swans, strips of wallpaper torn and dangling half attached.

  I picture my sister mutating into a werewolf, claws sliding out, shick-shick, slashing through the paper in a predatorial frenzy.

  “I was thinking cerise,” she twitters while Tito writhes in piles of shredded paper. “Nice and happy.”

  I can’t speak. Now I’ll never finish counting the swans.

  And Lena knew the story behind that wallpaper. She knew.

  When Dad gets home, I expect him to finally break, but all he does is stare. Maybe that’s just how he breaks.

  Rex shows up behind him with a McDonald’s bag in hand. “Fuck,” he roars when he sees the walls.

  “Eloquent,” says Lena. She’s twisting and untwisting her hands.

  Rex rounds on Dad, who is still gazing at the eviscerated walls. Rex-Dad interactions are rare and tense, since Rex doesn’t bother with the everything-is-fine smile like me.

  “Are you going to let this slide, too? Next time we leave for five seconds she’ll probably tear up the floorboards because it’ll remind us how Mom walked on them, or some other pseudopsychology bullshit—”

  “It’s not pseudo anything; it’s Dr. Brown’s book,” Lena protests.

  “Which she agreed was bullshit, so shut up about it.”

  “We agreed to redecorate. It’s not like anyone else has tried to help.” Her face is red. “Call me crazy, but—”

  “All right. You’re crazy.”

  She glowers. “Call me crazy, but I truly believe it’ll be more pleasant for you all to live here if you aren’t surrounded by constant reminders!”

  “You all? So what, you’re going to run for the hills again as soon as you’ve finished ruining everything?”

  I want to stand beside Rex and snarl, too: Does it make you feel better to pretend you’re like Dr. Brown, someone whose job it is to help us with our feelings without having to feel them, too?

  But taking sides is forbidden, so I shovel the anger down deep until it burns in my stomach like pain.

  Dad coughs, and I pray. It’s not forbidden for him to take sides. He can tell her off, ask how dare she start fires when she doesn’t have to breathe the smoke.

  “Maybe we could use some fresh paint,” he says quietly.

  Damn it.

  Lena sags, relieved. “Samantha and I will pick out the colors! Not because girls are inherently better at domesticity, you understand. I just know she’ll want to be involved even if the painting itself is too much for her.”

  She gives me a look that says Please.

  I throw up inside my head and say, “Sure.”

  Rex drops his uneaten McDonald’s on the floor and storms out of the house.

  Lena stays behind in the living room, glancing around at the carnage like even she isn’t sure how it got there.

  That night, my leg keeps me awake. I while away the hours sorting all the things I’m mad about, arranging them like little candles.

  I’m mad at Lena for being pushy, and Rex for taking pills, and Dad for being passive. I’m mad that Mom had nothing to offer me in the graveyard, at Anthony for kissing me without permission, that my and Eliot’s bodies don’t work right when everyone else’s does.

  Then I’m mad about everything at once, and for a second I’m so overwhelmingly unbelievably angry that I could go downstairs and tear down not just the wallpaper but the walls themselves.

  My heart beats a mantra: It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. But then a different part of me replays Eliot saying, “It just is. It just is. It just is.”

  That’s what I’m thinking, over and over again, when I sit at my desk and open my notebook, letting my leg twist underneath me just enough.

  In order to get to the school, her mom has to drive past the community art college where she met the daughter’s father.

  “There it is.” She says it every time like she’s unveiling something.

  The daughter knows the story of how her parents met—not because she asked, but because her sister told her.

  Back then, her mom was a pretty, young student who made sculptures out of trash, and her dad was ten years older and had a job cleaning up trash. The only thing they had in common was that they both liked to eat lunch alone. One day, they happened to eat lunch alone together at the pond next to the school, which had a legendarily unfriendly swan that had been raised on a diet of college students’ sandwiches.

  Her mom went to pick up a discarded bottle for her newest sculpture, the swan made a break for her tuna sub, and her dad valiantly rushed to defend it. Her mom turned and suddenly had to save a surprisingly cute janitor from being beaten up by a swan.

  Fifteen years later, once they saved enough to put a down payment on a cramped house, the Realtor told them they could change the wallpaper when they moved in.

  Her mom said, “It stays. It’s a good omen. I met this man because of a swan, so if this house is marked by swans, it’s the house for me.”

  The daughter props her feet on the dashboard. She’s not doing it to be annoying—she wants to stretch her legs before the game. She thinks that her legs look okay, stuck out like that without the fat squished against anything. She’s always had strong negative opinions on the other parts of her body, but she’s pretty neutral about her legs.

  The mother glances at her, away from the road. “Feet off the dash.”

  She takes one leg down but leaves the other up. Sometimes when she’s away from her brother and sister, she acts like the baby in front of her mom and only feels a little bit guilty.

  She likes when her mom drives her places, likes the feeling of being carried through the world with all responsibility handed over to someone else.

  Beyond the windshield, the silver Jeep is still coming fast.

  And then, suddenly, it turns into their lane. Not the wild swerve of a drunk driver, but a sharp, neat turn

  Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

  I picture Eliot on his couch with the afternoon sunlight slanting into the room, but I can’t get his chest to move in my mental image, and it just makes me panic more.

  I close my eyes to block out the other images, but they stay crisp on the insides of my eyelids. The Jeep turns again and again, tires not squealing, brakes not grinding.

  It turns on purpose.

  I grip my head to squeeze out this thought, but it seeps through me like acid. My leg is searing. I fumble with my pain pills and drop them all on the floor.

  I try to remember how to go blank, but it’s been too long; I’ve lost the trick. I’ve been letting myself feel the good things, and now I have to feel the bad things, too, and I’m too small for them.

  It’s not fair.

  It just is.

  My phone screen lights up on my desk, and my brain processes a message from Eliot.

  Look out your window. I’d throw rocks at the glass, but modern technology renders such romantic gestures obsolete.

  Also I might break it.

  I look out my window. There’s a shape on the lawn, and as my eyes adjust to the moonlight, I realize it’s Eliot Rowe, perched atop our ginormous, ugly, striped couch that is supposed to be gone forever. He’s waving.

  I attempt to break it into bite-size pieces of information to fit into my brain: Eliot. Couch.

  Crutches, Vicodin, bra, sweats
hirt, shoes, in that order.

  I sneak downstairs as much as I can sneak, but Rex passes out high every night, Lena wears earplugs and a face mask, and Dad takes sleeping pills. In the living room, Tito wakes up from his vigil on the empty rectangle in the carpet, following me into the backyard.

  Eliot hops off the couch as I approach him wonderingly, half afraid the whole scene will vanish if I get too close. He lands softly in the grass like some nocturnal forest creature, no coat as always, the moonlight lining his hair with silver.

  “Hello, animal,” he greets my dog.

  He never knows the right thing to say, but somehow he knew to come tonight.

  I fling myself at him in a hug, knocking us both back into the couch. The jolt hurts my leg, but I don’t care.

  “Sam—” he stammers.

  He’s stiff but he’s warm. This is the person I picture to lessen my pain.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I manage, and then I make myself stop. Beside me, Tito yips when he recognizes the couch and leaps onto his favorite cushion. I run my hand over the coarse fabric. All its familiar lumps and crevices are in the same places.

  “How?” is all I can say.

  He straightens, recovering his smirk. “The old man at the dump said the person who took it was wearing a Ravens shirt. So all I had to do was ask around until I found somebody with a new neighbor from Baltimore. I went door-to-door. For a while. Probably why I overheated the other day, actually, but if I’m going to die for a cause, I’d like it to be furniture.”

  “All you had to do?” I imagine every citizen of Forest Hills opening their door to find Eliot, holding a cigarette and demanding intel about their neighbors. I start laughing.

  “The Ravens guy didn’t even charge me for it,” he adds casually, like he’s talking about something normal and not a miracle. “Said it was stinking up his house.”

  I trail my fingers over the divot that Rex’s body has carved into the cushions, the one comfortable spot in an uncomfortable object, made to fit only him and Tito. “How’d you lug it here?”

  “I paid the dump owner to borrow his truck. He loaded it up and everything. Apparently decrepit people can still be useful—who knew.”

  I’d burst into happy tears if that wouldn’t be an awful thing to do to Eliot Rowe specifically.

  “You said it was stupid that I cared about the couch,” I point out.

  “It is stupid.” He looks away and coughs awkwardly. “Should we throw out our backs maneuvering it inside?”

  “Let’s leave it here. My brother will see it in the morning and pee himself.”

  I sink into the cushions. With Eliot as a protective layer between me and the panic of what I wrote in my room, I can breathe again. The memory sat wrong in my brain for so long it got scrambled, that’s all. Just because I can’t recall tires squealing doesn’t mean the Jeep turned on purpose.

  More importantly, I came so close to remembering the accident. It’s terrifying but thrilling, too, like a fifty-foot fall with a safety net at the bottom.

  Eliot lounges back and gives the couch a fond pat, as if they’ve bonded. “I was going to bring it during the day, but then you’d have had to explain the couch and me to your family. One bizarre thing at a time.”

  “You’re not bizarre, Eliot. You can meet my family anytime.”

  “Tomorrow at five, then?”

  Shit. “Um—”

  “You didn’t think I’d actually say yes.” He’s grinning. “Don’t worry. My quota of lunatic family members is already filled.”

  I’m ashamed of my own relief. Who cares what my family thinks of him?

  He shifts and grimaces. “It’s like sitting on sledgehammers covered in packing peanuts. Now that you have it back, can we ceremonially burn it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you ever have a bout of temporary insanity and do decide to introduce me to your family, I’m sitting somewhere else.”

  I’m giggling. He smiles. His arm fits snugly against mine, a line of heat on my skin, and I imagine us fused there, our veins opening into each other like a network of rivers leading into the sea.

  “You know what’s really weird?” I ask.

  “Too many things in my life lately.”

  “It’s the fact that it’s one a.m., and I’m sitting in my backyard on my ugly couch with Eliot freaking Rowe.” I shake my head slowly. “But it’s also really good. I don’t know what random events in my life led to this weird situation, but I’m glad they happened that way.”

  He’s silent, which usually means he’s generating a sardonic comment, but I can tell by his dumbfounded expression that this time he’s not.

  He looks at me. His eyes are the exact color of the crater shadows on the moon.

  This is a bizarre twilight zone where couches come back from the dead, and I’m capable of facing my fears, and it’s okay, right now, if he kisses me.

  He glances away, looking twice as confused as before.

  Tito jumps in my lap and then his, bringing us back to earth the way he does when he’s afraid the humans are drifting away. Dreamily Eliot strokes his back.

  “This animal isn’t so bad,” he says softly.

  A flood of affection for him slams the breath out of me.

  I normalize my voice. “He’s getting fat because I was always the one who walked him.”

  I can’t even walk my own dog anymore. For a jarring second, that ruins everything, but then I let it pass, because my leg isn’t stopping the rest of me from being happy tonight. I may not be good at dog walking anymore, or lacrosse, but at least I’m good at Eliot.

  “I could walk him. I mean, if you want.” He gives an exaggerated shrug like he doesn’t care either way. “I go for walks at night when I can’t sleep, which is always. I could stop by and pick him up.”

  I stare at him.

  He squirms. “It’s safer to walk with a dog at night, that’s all. Scares off the bears and murderers and whatnot.”

  Tito drools on Eliot’s elbow and then licks off his own drool, as if to say I love you and walks and bears and murderers.

  “That’d be great,” I stammer. “I’ll start leaving him in the doghouse for you.”

  He rubs one of Tito’s ears between his fingers like a coin.

  “I had a dog when I was little,” he says distantly.

  I hesitate, and then I put my arm around his shoulders. I squeeze him briefly. He’s too tall, too rigid and angular, but I’m glad I did it.

  “Hey, Eliot? Next time Anthony does something, don’t act like it doesn’t bother you.”

  He slips away. “But it doesn’t bother me.”

  “It’s okay to be bothered.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” he repeats. It fits his voice easily, like he’s spent years reciting it, which I guess he has.

  Even now, he won’t let me in.

  But there are so many things he doesn’t know about me either, so many parts of my life I have yet to share. It would take years to give him all that. It’d be worth it, though, to get some of him back. We could trade ourselves back and forth until we had enough pieces of the other to become more than just ourselves.

  I refocus on him. “Anthony will leave you alone if he thinks he’s successfully bothered you. Even if it doesn’t, pretend it does. Your safety’s more important than your pride, okay?”

  “If you really believe that showing weakness makes you safer, that it convinces people to leave you alone, you haven’t met any people.” He says it lightly, but he folds his hands together in his lap with a kind of resigned sadness he probably thinks is secret. “They only leave you alone once you prove with finality that they can’t hurt you.”

  I shut my eyes. “Just—please? Eventually it’ll blow up, and someone will do something bad.”

  “Like hit me?” He laughs.

  I punch the couch cushions. “It’s not funny!”

  His laugh fades. “It really bothers you that much.”

&nbs
p; “Yes.” It bothers me even more that he’s still pretending it doesn’t bother him.

  He opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. I watch him struggle to phrase the question in his eyes.

  At last, he just says, “Fine. I’ll end it.”

  But he doesn’t tell me how or when, only leans back and closes his eyes like he’s too exhausted to do anything but fall asleep right there in my backyard.

  I breathe in the cool air like it’s cleansing me. People have such different perspectives on humanity, just based on how much kindness or cruelty they’ve experienced. I want to be nice to Eliot until his perspective changes.

  People have been pretty nice to me. Maybe I shouldn’t waste the opportunity to be someone who thinks humans are all right, even if sometimes they say they’re sorry for my loss when they haven’t felt its depth, or they don’t realize that their shouting and arguing harms me even if it’s not directed at me, or they persist with obvious lies because they’re scared of the truth.

  After a while, the sky starts getting lighter, and I have no choice but to poke Eliot awake and send him back to his lonely house.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE NEXT MORNING, REX GOES OUTSIDE IN his boxers, sits down on the couch, and drinks his coffee right there in the yard like he always expected the couch to find its way home.

  Lena demands an explanation, but when her interrogations don’t yield anything, she stomps into the kitchen and furiously chops fruit, running the blender on the loudest setting. During breakfast, though, I catch her sneaking peeks into the living room with something like relief.

  At school, I sleep through all my classes, through lunch, and through the bell. When I wake up, the classroom’s deserted, chairs shoved back wildly everywhere like there was a sudden evacuation.

  The problem with having no friends is that nobody wakes you up to ensure you don’t miss the bus. But now I have Eliot to bring me home.

  I peel my cheek off the dried drool cementing me to the desk. A note falls to the floor.

  I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.