These Gentle Wounds

by Helene Dunbar

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  My thumb hits it over and over, echoing each frantic beat of my heart.

  Mom is in front of me, making oatmeal and insisting that I drink the orange juice.

  The car smells of leather and animal crackers. On top of that there’s the air freshener that’s meant to smell like cherries. The kids breathe, quiet, in the back. Then they cry, drowned out by the poetry of Mom’s prayers.

  The car goes into the water and I’m staring at that eagle overhead, pushing out the window, grasping for the sky. I’m cold, wet, sure that if I reach up to touch my hair, it will be soaked with river water. I can smell that horrible scent of fish, and seaweed, and dead things.

  “Ice? What is it?” Kevin’s voice circles through the dark like a rope to pull me out.

  He’s called me “Ice” as long as I can remember. Mom said it was my first word. No surprise—my father was only interested in me because he wanted a kid who could play hockey and finish what he’d started and fucked up.

  But Kevin wasn’t in the water. He wasn’t … it takes me a minute to realize he’s real and in front of me.

  I hold out my hand with the letter clenched in it and watch my brother’s face as he starts to read.

  “That son of a … ” Kevin stops himself and holds out his free hand to help me up. I force myself to take it. After the closet, the room is too bright for my eyes and Kevin closes the curtains while I throw myself onto his bed and press my back against the cool, hard wall.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, like that’s a realistic option. “We’ll talk to my dad when he gets home. This”—he looks down at the letter and I can see his jaw tense—“is not going to happen.”

  I want to believe him. Kevin is great at sorting shit out, but at the same time, this is official stuff. Government stuff. I don’t think even he can take care of it.

  He moves the stack of catalogs over without looking at them and sits down, then picks my arm up and dangles it like it’s a piece off a mannequin and not something attached to me. “Man, Ice, I thought you’d stopped doing that. At least stick to ruining your own clothes.”

  The gray fleece is Kevin’s, really, but since I do the laundry in the house, I get dibs. I run my fingers over the bottom of the sleeve, which is frayed and wet. Half of the time I don’t even know I’ve been chewing on something and anyway, I can’t control what happens during a spin.

  I grab my arm back and dry the shirt off on my jeans. I can feel my heart beating, the blood pounding in my ears so loud it’s all I can focus on.

  Kevin knocks me on the leg. “You aren’t breaking our pact, are you?”

  The pact came after That Day, and the spinning, and everything else. The pact was that Kevin would always look out for me. And that I would trust him to. I’d only have to tell him about Cody being a dick at practice and Kevin would go after him. He’ll fight anyone and anything to keep me safe.

  He doesn’t know that I’m the one he should be beating the crap out of. And I can’t tell him, because I can’t handle him hating me.

  So I shrug while he picks up a catalog and absentmindedly rifles through it, trying to look like I haven’t just freaked out. I pretend I’m outlining a paper for school and make a list in my head of the things I know.

  I know that my mom did it all to get back at my father for The Night Before.

  I know that afterward, he didn’t want us. Me, I mean. Because I was the only one left. Kevin wasn’t even his kid, so Jim got stuck with me too.

  I know that having one of your parents try to kill you and the other one not want you wrecks something inside.

  And I know that even though all they really did was annoy me, I should have tried harder to save the kids.

  Once everyone agreed I should try to go back to school, my hand would start spasming when I was stressed, or tired, or thinking about the wrong things, and I needed to keep moving all the time. Then the spins started. Sometimes they spun me back to That Day, sometimes just to some stupid memory that’s locked in my screwed-up head.

  I don’t know if there was something in the water, or if I inherited something from Mom, or if it’s my punishment for being so bad and selfish.

  Perhaps all I really know is that I wasn’t like this before.

  And I am now.

  Five

  It’s called acrophobia when you’re afraid of heights, but I’m not sure what it’s called when you can’t get enough of them.

  Jim’s house, the one he inherited from his parents, the one we’re living in, has a widow’s walk—kind of a walled-in area on the roof that goes around the whole top floor. Kevin and I have been climbing out our bedroom window onto it ever since we started living here.

  That’s a lie.

  I’ve been climbing out. Kevin has been following me to make sure I don’t jump.

  I’m not stupid. And I’m not suicidal. I don’t want to jump to my death any more than I wanted to die by drowning. But the urge to step off the wall—to free-fall through the air, to fly—is painfully hard for me to resist. I know I can’t fly. I know it would end badly, with me crumpled in a bloody and probably dead mess. But sometimes I want to take that step so badly it hurts. My stomach clenches and for a minute I believe the only thing that will help is to go over that edge.

  Even Kevin knows his lectures about control won’t help when I’m feeling like that, so it’s only his grasp on the back of my sweatshirt that stops me.

  I know it’s wrong, but I can’t keep from going up there. The one concession I’ve made to both common sense and my brother is that I’ve promised I won’t go up there alone. So far, this is a promise I’ve kept.

  But now everything in my head is clumping together. Memories of my mom, fear of my dickhead father, confusion about Sarah, that freaking letter … all of it is making me feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t get out.

  So I head to the window, but Kevin calls me back. “Don’t you have a game tonight?”

  “Walker’s starting,” I mumble. I hope he isn’t going to grill me about it, because I’m not sure I can deal with one more thing tonight.

  I must look desperate, because Kevin shifts gears and says, “Hey, I almost forgot. I have something for you.”

  I take the brown paper bag he holds out. It rattles as my hand shakes and I wait for an explanation.

  “Mark is finally trying to quit smoking,” he says.

  I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. I know his friend Mark a little, but I’ve never smoked. My father smoked. The smell still makes me gag.

  “He wears one of these on his wrist and snaps it whenever he wants a cigarette. He says it distracts him or something,” Kevin explains.

  I stick my hand into the bag and pull out two stretchy circles of leather. They’re kind of like rubber bands only they look cool, braided and dark with patterns of color running through them.

  “I thought they’d work better than the pens,” he says.

  Now I get it. Kevin hates the pens.

  I usually have one with me in case my hand starts acting up. The clicking annoys the crap out of him.

  But I never do it for that reason.

  Well, almost never.

  Mostly I do it because it calms me down. And sometimes it keeps the spinning at bay.

  I put one of the bracelets on and snap it hard against my wrist. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s a sharp jolt that seems like it will keep me where I need to be, in the moment.

  “Thanks,” I say. I mean it, but my head is already somewhere else. I reach under my bed and pull out the screwdriver I took from the tool shed the last time Jim forgot to lock it. I push it against the window frame and start to jimmy the lock open. Ever since I climbed onto the walk in my sleep one night, Kevin holds the key hostage. I get tired of begging for it or trying to steal it when he isn’
t watching.

  My brother crosses his arms and shakes his head while I work at the window.

  “Can this wait?” It’s clear from his expression that he has other things to do. He probably should have thought of that before getting detention.

  I want to make things easier for Kevin instead of always being a complication. At the same time, the thing that lives in the pit of my stomach is almost forcing me to push myself through that window. I feel like a little kid who thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t get a certain toy. It’s stupid. But my heart is pounding hard and I can’t resist the pull of all that air and free space.

  Kevin grabs the screwdriver and holds it up in front of my face, trying to look tough.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he says, looking at his watch. “You can pay me back by helping me with this damned paper for English.” That really means he wants me to write it for him, but it’s a small price to pay.

  I snatch the key out of his hand and am halfway out the window before he finishes speaking.

  “ … and when he gets home, we’ll talk to Jim.”

  We sit on the roof side-by-side. One of Kevin’s hands is wrapped around the bottom of my sweatshirt, pinning me to the shingles. If I really wanted to, I could pull away, but I let him hold on to the illusion that he’s protecting me. He doesn’t say it anymore, but he thinks that if he’d stayed home, he could have stopped Mom. So I let him feel like he’s keeping me safe now, even though the things that can hurt me are mostly inside.

  From up here I can see the tops of all the bare winter trees in the neighborhood. I can see the whole parking lot over at the elementary school. Closer to us, there are birds in the heated birdbath of the house next door, and the stars are just starting to come out.

  “Remember our bird?” I ask.

  Kevin sighs and nods. He hates when I talk about stuff from before.

  When we were little, Mom bought us a bird. It was a parakeet, I think. Green and yellow. Every morning Kevin and I would make sure it had food and water. Sometimes we’d let it out of the cage and it would fly around my room, always landing on the highest spots: the curtain rods, the shelves. After a while it even learned to come back when I whistled for it.

  One day we came home from school and it was gone. The cage wasn’t even there, and when I asked Mom about it, she just looked at me and shook her head. “Sorry, sweetie. He thought it was making too much noise.”

  I never had the courage to ask what happened, whether my father killed it or let it go. But I like to think of it flying free, perched happily in a tall tree somewhere. Maybe it’s even one of the birds I can see, although you don’t see a lot of parakeets sitting in trees in Michigan.

  “Why do you think he’s showing up now?” I ask, hoping Kevin will have some insight. In all the time I spent in the closet, I couldn’t come up with a reason that made sense. It isn’t like my father stuck around after Mom and the kids were gone.

  Kevin sighs and pulls his jacket tighter around him. He has more reason even than I do to hate my dad. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s got a girlfriend or something and thinks he can handle a kid? Maybe he just misses you?”

  Something about the thought of my father missing me makes me shiver. I catch myself bringing my sleeve up to my mouth and force it back down again. Before all this, things had been cool for a while. I’d been cool—maybe not totally normal, but good. Now I’m back to being a mess.

  “I wish I knew what Mom was thinking,” I say to the darkening sky. I try to pretend, even to myself, that The Night Before never happened, that I have no idea why she did what she did.

  Kevin doesn’t know about that, so he just knocks his shoulder into mine. “That’s a puzzle we’re never going to solve. You know that. Whatever crazy-ass idea she had in her head was her being screwed up. Don’t start blaming yourself again, okay?”

  I nod again, because that’s what he wants me to do. If I’m not careful he’s going to start getting angry and irritated with all my questions. So I ask the real one that’s on my mind.

  “Do you think Jim will make me go? I mean, you’re … ” The word “leaving” gets trapped deep in my throat. I can’t even say it, so I snap the band around my wrist. I’m not spinning, but that little bit of pain feels better than thinking of Kevin going off to school somewhere and leaving me alone.

  He looks away like he’s afraid of his own answer. “We have over a year before I go to college, if I go away. Who knows, I might stay here and commute. State has a good culinary program. Or maybe Mr. Meyers will give me that sous-chef job he keeps hinting at.”

  I pull my sweatshirt free and walk over to the railing. I put my arms out and spin around. When I close my eyes, the whole world feels like nothing but air and I’m floating in the middle of it, one of those fluffy bits you get when you blow a dead dandelion; the ones you’re supposed to catch and make a wish on.

  “Anyhow,” I hear him say, “I don’t think my dad is going to send you anywhere if he has a say in it.”

  My lips press together. I don’t answer. Jim is a good guy, but who knows? Maybe he’ll see this as his opportunity to get rid of me once and for all.

  Kevin’s feet scramble against the shingles as he follows behind me. I kind of wish I’d never told him how badly I want to step off.

  “Ice?” he calls from somewhere, but I don’t open my eyes to find out where. As I’m whirling around, it sounds as if his voice is everywhere at once.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’ll be okay.” There isn’t one note of doubt in his voice. Kevin has always been able to get what he wants. Somewhere in the soup of our DNAs, his dad’s must have made all the difference. He thinks telling me it will be okay will actually make it okay, like he has some direct line to the universe. I know it isn’t true. Saying it doesn’t just make it happen, not even for Kevin. But sometimes it helps to know he thinks that way.

  It’s part of what makes Kevin my best friend. My only friend, if I’m honest. The guys on the hockey team are okay. I don’t think it’s that they like me. But they like that I can stop the pucks that come flying toward me. They’d put up with almost anything for that.

  “Come on, time’s up,” Kevin says, waiting for me to go back through the window first and locking it behind us. I know he’s never going to take a chance that I’ll turn around and do something stupid.

  I flip through the book that Kevin’s supposed to be writing about for his class, but my head isn’t really in it. “Focus,” he keeps telling me, but it isn’t that my mind is wandering off; it’s that I keep waiting for the front door to open and for Jim to come home and sort everything out.

  Finally, finally, finally, I hear the door. Kevin and I look at each other and grab the paperwork, flying downstairs.

  “Man, today kicked my ass,” Jim says when he sees us. “Anyone want to grab me a beer?”

  He does some kind of office work for one of the auto companies, but he comes home looking like he’s been hauling car parts all day. Usually he takes a shower before he even wants to speak to us.

  I can feel the weight of Jim’s eyes on me. They’re brown, like Kevin’s. They both narrow them, like Jim is doing, when they know something’s up.

  I dart into the kitchen to grab him a beer, holding my breath when I open it. Beer always smells like the old house. Like my father.

  I can’t afford to spin now.

  I lean against the door frame, trying to listen to what they’re saying in the other room. Kevin’s voice is tense and quiet, so I know he’s telling Jim about the letter. I snap the band on my wrist a couple of times, take a deep breath, and walk back to the living room.

  They stop talking when I walk in, and their deliberate quiet hurts my ears.

  I hand Jim his beer and sit down next to Kevin on the couch, waiting for someone to break the silence.

  “Sorry, kid,” Jim says, holding
up the letter in his calloused hand. “I think I need to give DeSilva a call tomorrow.”

  Amy DeSilva is the lawyer who dealt with everything five years ago. I was hoping this wasn’t the sort of thing we’d need her for. I was hoping Jim would say, “I won’t let them take you,” or “I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep you here,” and we’d be done with it. But he isn’t saying anything. I squeeze my eyes shut and scrunch my hands into the spaces between the cushions on the couch.

  “It doesn’t matter though, right?” Kevin asks. “I mean, he left. Doesn’t that terminate his rights?” He’s fishing for the words I want to hear. I guess maybe he wants to hear them too.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Jim says. “I don’t think so. But … ” I open my eyes just as he holds his empty hands out. “I’m not a lawyer. Let’s see what she says.”

  I don’t know if his “I don’t think so” is in reference to it not mattering or to my father signing his rights way.

  Kevin’s jaw works like he’s got one of those hard candies in his mouth. I recognize the signs of him trying to contain his anger, like the counselors at school taught him to a couple of years ago after he broke Cody’s nose for pushing me into a locker and writing “spaz” on the outside.

  It might be wrong, but I’m jealous that Kevin can just get pissed, punch something, and get it out of his system. Most of the time I turn into a black hole. All of the stress concentrates in one tiny place in my stomach and twists and turns until it feels like it’s going to flip me inside out.

  “In the meantime, we still need to eat. How about something easy? Pizza?” Jim asks, looking at Kevin. Then he adds, “Or … ” and looks at me.

  I get it, given that I have kind of a strange thing with food. I always have, but Mom made it way worse by deciding to use oatmeal and orange juice as her sedative delivery system. There’s no way I’m ever going near either of those again.

  I sometimes wonder if that’s why Kevin became such a good cook. He’s always trying to find something I’ll be willing to eat. But now I just shrug. I don’t really care. Eating isn’t really high on my priority list.