If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

  I had no defense against her words, nothing to shield myself with. She could have pierced my heart with a single syllable. But she didn’t, and that was worse.

  She didn’t even try.

  Mom slunk silently into her room. Her final words to me were scribbled on a Post-it note I found on my pillow the next morning. My eyes blurred so much while reading it that the only thing I noticed was, she spelled the word suffocating wrong.

  CHAPTER 1

  JULY

  Falling was such an elastic word. It was basically horrible. People got hurt and died, falling. There was force and pain and fear, if the height was great enough. Even sometimes when it wasn’t. The terror of not finding something solid underfoot was just as real for half a second as it was for twenty.

  Yet fall was the word most often coupled with love, falling in and falling out of. How was that even possible? They couldn’t be the same. One fall ushered in delirious, stupid happiness; the other fall expelled those euphoric emotions with blood and tears and scars. Bliss and agony. Fall and fall. It wasn’t the same. There should be a better word.

  Above me, a falling star shot across the sky. Except it wasn’t a star. It was a piece of rock burning up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. It was beautiful as it flared bright against the night and died.

  But it was too hot to be thinking about anything burning up, even beautiful things.

  And it was too quiet.

  Five months should have been long enough to acclimate to the silence, to embrace the thing I’d sought for years. It was mine now. Silence so stark that it wriggled under my skin.

  Stretched out on my roof, I was searching the sky for more stars when all-too-familiar sounds punctured the silence. For a moment I thought the fighting was coming from below me. I shot up like the shingles had shocked me, but the voices weren’t coming from my house.

  It was so messed up that that realization disappointed me.

  I drew my knees up and rested one heat-flushed cheek on them. A prickle of perspiration needled across my skin as I studied the nearly identical house beside mine. All the houses on our street looked the same. Ranch house after ranch house, with drab beige walls, barely pitched roofs and graveled yards. I hadn’t given much thought to the moving truck parked next door yesterday, but it was hard not to pay attention to the rising voices.

  I’d gotten good at eavesdropping on fights. Not a skill I’d ever wanted to master, but I hadn’t wanted to still be an A-cup at almost seventeen either. The new neighbors were amateurs. They’d left their window open. A few more minutes and Mrs. Holcomb across the street would be calling the police. She’d probably still be up watching her “stories” from the previous day.

  A tiny part of me died inside because I knew that. The highlight of my evening was watching an old woman watch TV.

  We didn’t get nearly enough stars over my particular patch of Arizona, and I needed to watch something.

  A tiny breeze puffed warm air over me, causing the loose strands from my bun to tickle my cheeks. I pushed them back, focusing on the open window next door. The blinds were lowered so I couldn’t see much, but I heard enough, and it was nothing I hadn’t heard before. She was miserable and angry. He was frustrated and angry. It was his fault; it was her fault. Rinse and repeat. It wasn’t an even fight. He got quieter as she got louder.

  Things got more interesting when they moved and I saw their silhouettes through the window. She was much smaller than he was, and shaking with rage.

  “Explain it to me then,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can blame—”

  His head snapped to the side as she slapped him. He took his time turning back to her and when he did, I was almost positive she spit in his face.

  “They should have arrested you.”

  Whoa. And yep, spit. He wiped his face. “You don’t mean that. Mom, look at you!”

  Mom? That was...interesting, except that wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t anything interesting about someone getting slapped and spit on. Still, if he was some kind of criminal and she was scared of him...but so far, she was the violent one. He hadn’t so much as lifted a hand to defend himself. Not that I had tons of experience, but that seemed decidedly uncriminal to me.

  She screamed incoherently at him after that. They moved back out of view and I heard a crash, like a lamp breaking against a wall, followed by him grunting. And all the while she was shrieking, until more crashes drowned her out.

  I was up on my knees at that point, eyes wide, ears straining. This was so much worse than anything I’d heard from my parents. They’d yelled, sure, but that was it—words. The fighting next door was bad, like someone-getting-hurt bad, and from the sound of it, not the petite woman with the wicked arm. Where the hell was nosy Mrs. Holcomb?

  More silence, then another crash. “Throw anything you want,” he said. “I’m not leaving you—”

  “You stay away from me.” Her voice quivered.

  Surprise colored his words. “When have I ever hurt you?”

  “You arrogant little...” Her voice lowered into a hiss I couldn’t make out. “If I had any choice, you think I’d be here?”

  “You’d be dead if you had any choice. Just stop. It’s over. I’m not the one in jail.”

  Which meant somebody was in jail—the wrong somebody, according to the mom. But she was the one hurting him, while he thought he was saving her life...? Either way, I couldn’t just sit there and hope her arm got tired before she hit something vital.

  Half turning on my roof, I squinted in the darkness, looking for the unopened can of pop I’d brought up with me. I heard yet another crash seconds before my fingers brushed against the cool aluminum.

  I crouched down as close to the edge of the roof as possible and hurled the can across the ten feet or so that separated our houses.

  I figured the sound might distract them.

  I hadn’t figured on how badly my aim might suck in the dark.

  I’d been trying to hit the side of their house. Instead, the sound of shattering glass filled the night as the can broke right through the kitchen window.

  I clapped a hand over my mouth and flattened myself to the roof just as the back door banged open and a guy who really didn’t look all that much older than me shot into the yard.

  His hair was black in the faint light, and long enough that it fell over his eyes when he moved. Gravel crunched as he stalked around. It didn’t take him long to realize his postage-stamp-sized backyard was empty.

  Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Don’t look up.

  Leaving seemed like the best idea I’d ever had. I could turn away, slide off the edge of my roof and through my bedroom window. I could do it without a sound too. But I didn’t. Instead I stared. I watched.

  It was totally stupid on my part. He could be dangerous, or at the very least angry that I’d broken his window—a fact he was sure to realize if he spotted me. But for some reason I wasn’t scared. Not really. I’d done what I wanted. I’d stopped the fight. His mom hadn’t followed him outside, and he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go back in—not that I blamed him.

  That was one seriously enraged woman. I was half-surprised he wasn’t limping, based on all the stuff it had sounded like she threw at him. Why hadn’t he left? And if he belonged behind bars like his mom said, why hadn’t he...stopped her? He was easily twice her size, and I could practically see the anger steaming off him. He was physically capable of stopping her, yet I’d heard him grunt with each impact and ask her to stop instead of making her.

  He dropped his head and stretched out his hands to lean against the small wooden shed in the far corner of the yard beside mine. He bounced a palm off it once, twice, then straightened and slammed his fist into the door over and over again until the wood split with an audible crack.

 
I sat up, shivering in the hot air, and watched him back away. It was unnerving, but still—better a piece of wood than a person. My new neighbor had enough self-control to take hit after hit—and spit—and walk away. I doubted I could say as much.

  When the clouds parted, I saw something dark drip down his knuckles a second before he bent down. The shard of glass he’d picked up glinted in his hand as his head tilted up.

  The newly revealed moonlight cast a perfect spotlight on me.

  CHAPTER 2

  My eyes went wide as they met his, and all I could do was stare. At him, his bloody hand, the broken glass from my stupid, stupid pop can.

  “What the hell? Did you break my window?”

  I flinched like I’d been hit. My stomach teemed with slimy snakes as I stared into a pair of royally pissed-off eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hit your window.”

  “No?” He stood, turning the glass over in his hand. “What were you trying to hit?” Glancing toward his house then mine, he tracked the distance between them, between the fighting and me. When he hunched his shoulders in realization, the stance was so much like Dad’s that any trace of fear I’d had vanished completely.

  “I was trying to distract you, or really, just your mom. I thought something banging against the wall might bring you outside, or her, and things could cool down.” I said that last part as I was literally sweating from every pore on my body. I exhaled. “I didn’t think it through. I just didn’t want...anyone to get hurt. I’m sorry. It’s not any of my business. And I will pay for the window.”

  “Forget it.”

  Maybe all the years spent listening to my parents fighting had anesthetized me to clipped and angry speech, but the slimy slithery feeling in my gut was dissipating.

  “At least let me—”

  “I said forget it.” His anger was fading as quickly as my unease, but I preferred his initial hostility to the defeat that hung heavily from his limbs as he started walking back to his door. “Don’t bust any more of my windows, yeah?”

  “Wait.”

  He paused and looked at me over his shoulder.

  It hadn’t been long enough yet. I knew from experience that if he went back inside, she’d more than likely be waiting for him. Whenever Dad had tried to walk back too soon after a fight, Mom got her second wind. With Neighbor Guy’s mom, I didn’t want him to find out what her second wind might entail.

  I was betting it would hurt a lot more than a thrown lamp.

  “Don’t go back in yet.” I swallowed. “I mean, I’ll go inside. You can stay.” I swung my legs off the edge of the roof and was preparing to roll onto my stomach when he stopped me.

  “Hey, don’t.” He held up his hands as he approached the wall dividing our yards and tripped the motion lights on the side of my house. “Just stop, okay?”

  I stopped. The shifting clouds had kept most of his features in shadow, but in the harsh, unforgiving floodlight, I got my first good look.

  The cement block wall was close to six feet high, and he could have rested his chin on it. He was also older than I’d initially thought, though his age was hard to pinpoint since he looked several days overdue for a shave. But more than anything, I noticed the reddened outline of an open palm on his cheek.

  Seeing the mark on his face made the fighting more real than the moving shadows and sounds had earlier. His mom had hit him...a lot. I didn’t care how old he was; that wasn’t okay. Especially since it was obvious to me within a minute of talking to him that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He was visibly distressed by the thought of me, a complete stranger and admitted vandal, jumping off a one-story roof.

  It’s not okay.

  I mentally shook that thought away when I realized that the shadows that had abandoned him were no longer surrounding me either. And his eyes were trailing just as freely over me, my too-small old gym shorts and faded Jim’s Auto Shop tee, up to the tangled mass of dark blond hair piled on my head.

  I tried to imagine the view from his perspective and hit the brakes when the picture of a vagrant twelve-year-old formed in my mind. A feeling of inadequacy wrapped around me like a sweaty hug and I almost jumped down just to get away from it. And him.

  “What are you doing up there anyway?”

  I doubted he could see the dark sleeping bag I kept up there, so he couldn’t guess that I slept on my roof more nights than I slept under it. More important, he didn’t need to. “I like to look at the stars sometimes.”

  He looked at the sky and then back at me. “Stars? Seriously?”

  I didn’t bother looking up. There weren’t any stars that night. The sky would have looked blank if not for the moon, although even that was in the process of being swallowed up by clouds.

  “I said sometimes.”

  “And the other times?”

  “I just like to get out of my house. It’s quiet up here.”

  He smiled. “You mean usually.” It wasn’t a big smile. More of a quirk of his lips on one side, a brief flash of teeth. It was the weak smile more than his words that brought me right back to feeling awful for him.

  I bit the inside of my cheek and tugged at the hem of my shorts, trying to cover more of my legs. Then I sat on my hands to keep from pulling my stupid bun down.

  His eyes flicked down to track the movement of my legs. He took a step back, then half turned before facing me again. “You can’t go around jumping off roofs, okay? You’ll break your leg or something.”

  I bristled at his words and let them fuel an equally flippant response. “As opposed to my hand?”

  I couldn’t actually see his injured hand with him standing that close to the wall, but I saw his shoulder lift and assumed he was flexing it. The muscle in his cheek—the one that was still red from being slapped—twitched. I immediately felt responsible. Not just for a thoughtless comment, but for reminding him of what I’d witnessed.

  As easily as if I’d called them, the snakes slithered back inside.

  Neighbor Guy nodded, to himself or to me, I didn’t know, and left without another word. He didn’t go back inside, which relieved me to no end. Instead I stood and watched as he walked around the side of his house and got into a navy Jeep parked in his driveway. With an urgency that rocked his vehicle, he backed out and hit the brakes hard before he turned and drove off, a grinding noise echoing behind him.

  The solace my roof usually provided abandoned me after that. I no longer felt like I’d helped him, not in any substantial way. Uselessness gnawed at me for hours before I moved to the flat part of my roof, which covered the patio, and drifted into an uneasy sleep.

  The grinding noise roused me sometime before dawn. I didn’t function well at that hour, but as I watched him park and enter his house, something occurred to me that was so obvious, I wondered how I’d slept at all.

  I slipped silently off my roof—without breaking either of my legs—and through my window. In my room, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk and found a stack of coupons wrapped in a rubber band. Mom had designed them back when she’d decided all the shop needed to thrive was a little advertising. She said people still had to drive, even in a bad economy. Coupons, flyers, we’d even done a commercial...it was pretty awful, but she’d been so happy the day we shot it. The advertising did help, but her enthusiasm had waned when the business didn’t boom the way she’d anticipated. We hadn’t seen a coupon all year.

  I thumbed through the stack and pulled one free. Before I lost my nerve, I scribbled a few words on the back and hurried out the window so Dad wouldn’t hear the door.

  I knew what that grinding noise meant. He needed new brake pads like, yesterday. Probably not the most important problem in his life, but it was the one I could fix.

  I walked up to the Jeep and clamped the coupon underneath his winds
hield wiper.

  I did owe him for the window, after all.

  CHAPTER 3

  The sky was beginning to lighten as I climbed back through the window. My T-shirt snagged on the latch, jerking me back, and I kicked my desk lamp trying to regain my balance.

  The lamp didn’t break, but the accompanying crash as it hit the floor was loud enough that I wasn’t surprised when my bedroom door swung open and Dad burst in brandishing a baseball bat.

  “Jill, what...?”

  Under different circumstances, a father catching his daughter sneaking into her bedroom in the wee hours of the morning would be followed by a lot of yelling. Dad took one look at me crouched on my desk and sighed. “Still with the roof?”

  I could hear the weariness in his voice. He didn’t get enough sleep as it was without me waking him up early. He worked all the time, partly for the money—stupid Pep Boys had opened a shop two blocks from us and we were starting to feel the pinch—but also so he wouldn’t have to think about Mom leaving him. Leaving us.

  “Sorry, Dad.” I closed the window behind me and hopped off my desk.

  He raked a hand over his wild mess of dark, bent tangles. It was getting long in the back. Mom always had him keep it neat and short, but it was starting to brush past his collar. “You can’t keep doing this. Not at five o’clock in the morning. Only serial killers get up this early.”

  I didn’t try to follow that line of logic. “Or cross-country runners. You remember which one I am, right?”

  Dad yawned wide enough that I could count the fillings in his teeth. He shuffled farther into my room and set the lamp back on my desk. “Didn’t Dahmer run track in high school?”

  “Ha-ha. You’re funny at five o’clock in the morning.”

  “I should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning. You should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’ll be quieter next time,” I said. “Promise.”