Breathe

by Melanie McCullough

  “Son of a bitch nearly took my finger off,” he moaned.

  “Well stop whining about it and come inside so I can have a look at it.”

  Maggie led him in through the side door from which Becca emerged a few seconds later. I followed her to the Tahoe but I didn’t mention my encounter with Paul. She was so excited, I don’t think she’d have heard me if I had. She drove us to a dress store in Binghampton. She told me it was “because they had designer dresses,” and she wanted me “to feel special at my first dance.” She scoured the racks and shoved dress after dress into my waiting hands before herding me into a small dressing room with a pink curtain for a door.

  “Do you want me to come in with you,” Becca asked from the other side of the curtain.

  “No!” I screamed. I could still see the bruising. I didn’t want Becca to see. I didn’t want Becca to know. “I’ll come out to show you.”

  I tried each of the dresses on, careful to veto any that were too revealing, and left the dressing room to model them for her. It only took three or four before I started having fun with it, trying on princess dresses I would never actually wear. Becca tried some on too, her growing pregnancy belly testing the limits of the fabric and the saleslady’s patience.

  In the end, nothing seemed right. Nothing seemed like me. I knew it was silly. Garrett and I were going to the dance with other people, but I still wanted to look nice for him.

  “You’re not feeling any of them, are you?” Becca asked as she spun in a frilly white dress in front of the mirror beside me.

  “They’re all so fancy,” I replied as she moved to stand behind me and looked at my reflection in the mirror. She put her hands on my bare arms. “It’s okay to want to look like a princess now and again,” she told me. “Every girl deserves to feel special every once in awhile.”

  “It’s just too much. It’s not me.”

  She clapped her hands together and then over her mouth like an exciting thought had just occurred to her. “Help me out of this thing,” she said, turning and reaching for the zipper in the back. “I just had the best idea.” And so we changed back into our own clothes, ignoring the nasty looks we received from the saleslady and headed back to Becca’s apartment.

  She spent a few minutes rummaging through some boxes. Almost everything was packed away in preparation for the move. Eventually though she found what she was looking for and pulled it from a box. She was unable to keep the smile from her face as she brought it toward me. “Here it is,” she said and unzippered a garment bag to reveal a dress that I recognized.

  “You used to love this dress when you were little,” she told me. “You’d make me put it on you even though it never fit and you’d stumble around the apartment in my high heels begging Jim to dance with you.”

  She didn’t have to tell me, I remembered. My uncle always picked me up so I wouldn’t trip. He’d spin me around the room, the fabric whisking the floor below. After a while, Becca would join us and the three of us would sway to old country music from my uncle’s scratchy record player. They were some of my happiest memories. And the dress looked just like it did back then. Like diamonds glittering beneath the lights. It was long and a shade of blue that reminded me of ice.

  I remembered Uncle Jim holding me and feeling safe in his strong arms. Even as he spun me at amazing speeds and tossed me to great heights I was never afraid with him. I knew that he’d never hurt me. There was nothing threatening about Uncle Jim’s touch. Not like the men Maggie dated. Not like Tom Ford.

  I wondered if I had told him about Tom or any of the others if he’d have saved me? I’d always been too afraid to tell him. Afraid he’d look at me differently. Or that he’d hate Maggie. Tears began to prick at my eyes. I blinked them back before they could fall. “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Well, don’t just stare at it. Try it on.”

  I was so happy that I completely forgot about the bruises I’d spent all day trying to hide. I slipped from my clothes and extended my hand for the slip she wanted me to try on. Becca froze in place—terrified, like she’d seen a ghost. “Oh, Abby,” she gasped. “What happened to you, sweetheart?”

  “Nothing,” I snapped as I tore the slip from her hand and tried to cover up. Tried to hide even though I knew it was too late. She’d seen them. The emblems of my shame. The evidence of my crime.

  “Stay here,” she ordered and I heard her feet pounding on the stairs as she went down to the bar. I would have run if the only door hadn’t led to the bar below. I heard her holler my uncle’s name so I tried to dress as quickly as I could before he burst through the door.

  “What? What is it?” Uncle Jim was asking Becca. He grabbed me by the arms, looked down at me, and asked, “You okay?” before turning back to Becca. “She looks fine,” he told her. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Look, Jim,” Becca replied and lifted the hem of my shirt to reveal the bruises I’d worked so hard to conceal.

  “Jesus Christ, what is this, Abby? What happened to you?”

  I turned my head away, too ashamed to look at my uncle. “They’re bruises, Jim,” Becca answered for me.

  “I can see they’re bruises, Becca,” he snapped at her and I cringed. I didn’t want them fighting over me. Not now. Not when they had a baby on the way. Not when they were so happy. “What I want to know,” he continued. “Is what in the hell they’re doing on my niece. Abby?”

  “You don’t bruise like that by accident, Jim,” Becca told him.

  “Someone hit you?” Uncle Jim asked.

  “Come on, Abby. Won’t you tell us what happened?” Becca urged at the same time Uncle Jim asked, “Was it Maggie? Did she do this to you?”

  I shook my head no to answer both of them. There were too many questions coming at me at once. My head wouldn’t stop spinning. I couldn’t think. I just wanted to fall through the floor so I could escape.

  “Garrett?” Uncle Jim asked. “Is that what you two have been fighting about? Damn him. I’ll kill him.”

  “No,” I shouted, finally opening up my mouth to speak when Uncle Jim was halfway to the door. “Garrett would never hurt me. Not like that.”

  Uncle Jim turned and looked at me. “You’ve gotta tell me what happened, Abby,” he begged and so I did. I told it was Tom. I told him everything except what happened the night Tom died. That was too painful to even think about. And when I finished, my Uncle Jim cried. He pulled me into his arms like he used to do when I was tiny and he cried. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I should’ve known.”

  I stayed silent because I couldn’t speak for fear that the tears would fall. At last Uncle Jim stood. “We’re going to see Sheriff Wilson,” he decided. As if that would help matters. The only thing that would do was incriminate me further.

  “No,” I insisted. “What good will it do? Tom’s dead. He can’t hurt me any more.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Abby

  I went to bed before Maggie got home that night and I tiptoed to the kitchen for a drink long after she’d come in and gone to bed. A dozen empty bottles lined the countertop above an overflowing recycling bin. I knew Maggie couldn’t have finished them all. Not and have had the presence of mind to bring the empties into the kitchen. She would have just let the bottles fall to the ground wherever she happened to be when she downed the last drop. No, these looked to have been emptied.

  I crept to inspect the liquor cabinet. It was closed and bare. It was clear Maggie had taken every last drop of alcohol in the house and poured it down the drain. My throat burned and my head pounded as if I’d ingested all the liquor myself. I could see Maggie’s bedroom light peeking out by the floorboards beneath her door. I reached and turned out the light. She wasn’t sleeping and when I crawled in bed beside her, she rolled over to face me.

  “I didn’t drink it,” she said to me and she looked like a child, soft and innocent. I didn’t think either of us had the ability to look like that. Not with what we’d seen. With what we�
�d done.

  “I know,” I told her then we laid in silence for a bit, not knowing what to say to the other. When had I pushed her so far way that the distance became impossible for her to cross? When I was little, before the drinking got so bad it became hard to be near her, hard to smell the cheap booze on her breath. Before it became hard to watch her teeter and hear her slur, we’d lie together in her bed. She’d read me stories. Not just Dr. Seuss and If You Give a Pig a Pancake, but the stuff she loved. The stuff my father taught her. Sometimes she’d make up stories. Usually about a princess or an adventurer named Abby. I’d loved to listen to her speak in the deep, vibrating voice she had.

  “Tell me about my father,” I requested through the dark, trying to build a bridge between us. It was wooden and rickety. A rope bridge with a slat broken or missing here and there. One misstep and she might fall through to the rushing water below. But if she traversed carefully, she just might make it across.

  “You’ve never asked about him before,” she replied. “Not even when you were a kid.”

  I’d never thought I needed to know. I’d heard the stories like everyone else. Took them for fact. I shrugged the one shoulder that wasn’t crushed beneath me, pressed against the mattress. “I’m asking now.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard plenty. People in this town ain’t exactly shy about airing dirty laundry so long as it doesn’t belong to them.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  She told me about her mother dying—around Christmas the winter she turned ten. And she told me about her father and the drinking and how Uncle Jim took the brunt of Grandpa Rhoades’ anger. “He was always trying to protect me, your Uncle Jim,” she told me. “Deflecting attention. Taking a beating that I deserved.”

  Though I knew he didn’t know about the things Grandpa Rhoades had done to Maggie. It surprised me that Uncle Jim would continue to visit someone who’d been so cruel to his family. I relayed as much to Maggie.

  “Your uncle’s a good man. With a good heart. He’s got more forgiveness in him than I ever did. I mean just look—the man keeps me around. And Becca’s no angel. She’s put his heart through the wringer a time or two.” She brushed my hair away from my cheek. “I was a lot like you back then,” she continued. “I couldn’t wait to get out of this place.”

  I cringed a little at the comparison. For the first time, I hoped she didn’t notice. “I had dreams and when your father breezed into town looking as fresh and as bright as the midday sun I fell hard for him. He had dreams too. We made dreams together. And then I spent one morning lying on the bathroom floor for fear of moving and making the nausea worse. Then the little stick turned pink.

  “I assume I don’t have to tell you what that means?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to speak, to interrupt her flow. I was enjoying listening to the sound of her voice. It was crisp and clear like I remembered it being when she told bedtime stories to me all those years ago.

  “Your grandfather, when he found out…I was only sixteen you see and he was my English teacher. You’re grandfather wanted to kill him. Got a whole group of his drunken hunting buddies together. They loaded their shotguns. I begged your Uncle Jim to help your father and he did, driving him out of town and putting him safely on the first bus back to California.

  “That’s where your father was originally from. The place he always talked about taking me someday.”

  “You couldn’t go with him?” I asked.

  “Not that night. Your grandfather wouldn’t let me out of his sight.” She closed her eyes as if the memory pained her and I knew it did. I now understood better than anyone what she’d been through. “I remember driving through town wedged between my father and Lyle MacNamera, my heart beating a million miles a minute, praying your Uncle Jim would get to your father in time.

  “I tried to go later,” she continued. “I had to save up for months but I finally had enough for a ticket out of this town.”

  “But then I was born,” I finished for her.

  “But then you were born and, well, here we are.” She didn’t tell me that she loved me. Or that she didn’t mind staying once she had me. I guess even with our newfound camaraderie, she saw no reason to lie.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Garrett

  The night before the homecoming dance I knew I could no longer put off renting a tuxedo. I’d waited so long Martin’s on Main Street ran out of my size and I had to drive to Carthage just to get one. I parked in a small lot behind the tailor’s and hopped from the truck.

  Carthage was only two towns over and was pretty much a carbon copy of Little Bend—small and stale. The old man who went to get my tux from the back was ancient. Looked like he could have lived there when they laid the first bricks in town.

  I paid the man—fifty bucks I didn’t have for a tuxedo I didn’t want to wear to a dance I didn’t want to attend. I’d told Abby I couldn’t keep swimming just to make her happy, yet there I was doing something I didn’t want to for Zoe. I think I believed I owed it to her. She’d been so quick to forgive me.

  I was so caught up in my thoughts I didn’t see the Jeep blocking the back of my truck and I didn’t notice Nolan until the force of something metallic collided with my shoulder. I fell to the ground, grasping my injured arm, then rolled over to see Nolan hovering over me with a baseball bat. I kicked at him with both feet and he crumpled to his knees while I scrambled to my feet. I didn’t notice his friends either until they grabbed me from behind and forced me back against the side of my truck.

  Tossing the bat to the side, Nolan stood. He rammed his fist first into my gut. I groaned and folded at the middle. When his friends lifted me back up by the shoulders, he wound up and struck me across the jaw. My teeth trembled and I could taste the blood that pooled in my mouth. I spat at Nolan’s feet and he hit me again. The bones in my nose shattered with a sickening crunch.

  I was on my knees, pretty sure Nolan was going to kill me when I heard the distinct sound of metal colliding with bone. At first I thought it was my bone, but there was no new pain to accompany the sound. And then Nolan crashed to the ground beside me.

  I looked up through my cloudy vision. My head was foggy and I was certain I had a concussion, but I could see Abby clearly. Standing over Nolan with the bat in her tiny hands. Her Uncle Jim ran up behind her and chased Nolan and his friends to their car. They peeled away while Jim and Abby helped me into the back of his SUV.

  “My God, he’s bleeding so bad,” I heard Abby tell Jim through the haze. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Keep his head up,” Jim shouted. He tossed her a towel, which she placed against my nose and I heard the crackling of bone. It felt like my nose was on fire and I moaned in pain.

  “I’m sorry,” I remember hearing Abby tell me right before I bent at the middle and threw up on her feet. I laughed thinking of Lake Silverton and how I knew then that I loved Abby because she’d thrown up on my feet. I wondered if this moment would have the same effect on her.

  Later, at the hospital, she and Jim stayed with me while the doctor reset my nose and a police officer came around, questioning me about what happened. I told him that I’d been jumped and when he asked me if I knew who had done it, I lied and told him no.

  “You should have told him,” Abby lectured me as we left the hospital and walked back to her uncle’s car.

  “What good would that have done?”

  “Nolan Carter is an animal,” she replied. “He belongs in a cage.”

  I couldn’t argue with her so I took her hand in mine and brought it to my lips. “I’m fine,” I assured her. “No one needs to go to jail over it.”

  “Let’s just be thankful that we were there to break it up and move on,” Jim agreed as I climbed into the backseat of the SUV. Abby followed and I laid down across the bench, resting my head in her lap.

  “What were you doing there anyway?” I asked Abby while Jim took us back to my truck. She blushed and I thought abou
t kissing her again. To be honest, I always thought about kissing Abby, but her uncle was only inches away in the driver’s seat and I was back together with Zoe.

  “I had to have a dress altered,” she revealed. “It’s one of Becca’s and, well, I’m a tad bit shorter than she is.”

  I chuckled because I’d never seen Abby in a dress. “A dress? For you?”

  “And why is that so funny?”

  “I’ve never seen you in a dress,” I admitted. “I bet you’d look beautiful in a dress.” The painkillers the doctor had given me were apparently starting to kick in, destroying the filter between my brain and my mouth.

  “It’s for homecoming, so I’m sure you’ll find out.”

  It had never occurred to me that Abby would be going to the homecoming dance. She’d never attended a dance before. Not even junior prom. Now I briefly wondered who she was going with before I realized that I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m going with Jeff Walker,” she told me anyway.

  The pain in my heart at that moment was worse than the pain in my nose. Difference was the painkillers had begun to numb my body while I didn’t think there was a substance on Earth with the power to numb my heart. I knew I didn’t have the right to be hurt or angry. I was the one who’d pushed her away. Right? I was the one who was dating Zoe.

  I drifted off, lulled to sleep by the drugs and the smooth vibration of the car. I awoke for a bit when Jim helped my dad get me to my bedroom and then again later when Abby snuck in through the window to my bedroom. I fell asleep holding her, knowing that it wouldn’t last forever.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Abby

  Friday night I got ready for the dance, showering first, taking my time, letting the water fill me until I had the courage to actually leave the bathroom. Until I felt that maybe I could have a good time that night. When I emerged from the smoky room I found Becca and Maggie sitting together on the couch.