He yanked his T-shirt on and brushed his still-wet hair back, looking everywhere but at me. “I should get you home.” He started walking again, stopping only when I didn’t follow. “Don’t be such a child, Jill. Let’s go.”
All the playful tenderness evaporated.
It wasn’t hard to ignore the insult of his words when all I could focus on was that he’d been hurt. Badly. And more than once. “Daniel...”
He lifted the shirt back up and I flinched. “Look. See? They’re old. From before I moved, okay?”
No, it wasn’t okay. And they weren’t that old, not all of them. My head was racing. I thought back to that first night I saw him, the way he’d held himself so stiffly. I’d thought it had just been because of the fight with his mom. Now I ached to think of the pain he must have been in.
So many scars. What could do that? He looked like he’d been half split open and no one had bothered to put him back together right. No one.
A series of stupid thoughts ran through my mind, like, how had he been able to climb onto my roof so easily? Or had I hurt him when we were playing around in the pool?
But I couldn’t shake one dominating thought: Someone hurt him.
Questions coiled like snakes in the pit of my stomach as Daniel started walking. When I caught up to him, I brushed my fingers against his and he stopped.
“From before? This is why you moved?”
I could see the irritation when he turned to me. I’d never once seen him look at me that way. It chased away every little detail I’d ever found attractive in his face.
We were totally exposed on the sidewalk with the streetlights flooding down around us. Still, I didn’t care as I searched Daniel’s face, waiting for him to talk to me.
“My dad,” he said with a twisted smile, “isn’t anything like yours.” He licked his lips. “I bet your dad taught you how to ride a bike, drive, replace brake pads? My dad taught me to be quiet. Taught me the difference between my mom crying because she was upset and when she needed to go to the hospital.” He bent and picked up an empty can, hurling it at the wall behind him.
It was nowhere near me, but I flinched.
“I’d been begging her to move out with me. I told her I’d take care of her, but she had to leave him. He’d stopped hitting me when I got big enough to hit back, so I could say that to her in front of him.”
I watched Daniel start to crumble in on himself as he spoke, like the bones in his body were shrinking. His next words started out as a whisper.
“She wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t come with me. She stood next to him like I was the one she was afraid of. Me!” He punched his chest hard enough that I winced. “I stood between him and her so many times. Let him hit me so he wouldn’t have the energy to go after her. So many times... So I left her. I left her with him. I should have killed him that day. I could have.”
I should have been scared by his words, by the cold and quiet way he talked about killing his father, but I wasn’t. I could hear the anguish just in the way he was breathing.
“This last time one of the neighbors called me when they heard the screaming. It was almost too late when I got there, when I got him off her.” His hand slid up his side, over scars that I’d never be able to forget.
I filled in the words he didn’t say. Matching up the scars I remembered. So many. But he was here. Daniel was standing in front of me.
“He nearly killed her, hit her so hard that the police didn’t give her a choice anymore. But even that wouldn’t have been enough. She’d have waited for him. Her bones were broken from his fists and she would have waited for him. What kind of sick love is that?”
It wasn’t love at all.
“I packed everything up while she was still in the hospital. She would have stayed, so I didn’t let her choose. She had no money, no place to live, and her husband was behind bars for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. If I’m lucky, he’ll be gone for ten years. If he’s lucky, it’ll be longer, ’cause if I ever see him again, I’ll bash his skull in with that baseball bat he likes so much.”
I had to close my eyes, which only made it worse as Daniel’s words painted a horror I couldn’t conceive of, one that made my recent confessions to him about my mom feel so unbelievably petty. But I couldn’t dwell on any of that since Daniel was still talking.
“She always wanted to live somewhere warm...she hated the snow. So here we are. No snow for her, and no...” His throat choked off then and he didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
I wanted to go to him, to hold him. I took a step, but I hesitated, worried I might end up hurting him if I touched the wrong place. Then a streak of white-hot hatred blistered through me for the man who’d caused them. It birthed a violence so intense, my vision flared red.
Daniel didn’t notice the emotional fracture I was feeling. It wasn’t a helpful reaction, so I tamped it down as best I could and took another step.
He reached out, grabbed fistfuls of my shirt, and literally hauled me to him.
I took my cue of how tight to hold on from him. Tight. Rib-crackingly tight.
We ended up facing each other sitting on the curb, my legs folded up between us. I listened while he talked. Not about his dad, I could tell he was done on that account. His mom though. With every word I could hear how desperately he loved her. It was kind of staggering.
All I could think was, why? What had that woman done to deserve that kind of love? The only reason I kept silent was because I could hear him asking the same question. Not out loud. But in every pause, every pulled-in breath. Why?
The small, selfish part of me turned those same questions inward. Stealing a moment that belonged to him. It all seemed so unfair that some could love so constantly and others so capriciously. Daniel’s mom had done nothing to deserve his love and, from the way he talked, she could do nothing to jeopardize it. Dad had tried more than I had with Mom, but the result was the same: she didn’t love either of us. When I tried to analyze it, put labels on her behavior, love never came close to displacing disregard or spite.
Why did he love her?
Why didn’t she love me?
We had no answers, and the lack ate at us both.
Somewhere through all of that I took his hand. I was holding it in both of mine, running my thumbs over his knuckles. I didn’t feel even the slightest bit self-conscious even when Daniel ran out of words. Some things just fell away in the face of others.
We weren’t drifting inexorably closer to each other in a moonlit pool, wanting and wondering and possibly daring. We were sitting on a cracked curb with scattered pebbles and cigarette butts littered around us.
And it was better and worse altogether.
We sat, letting dim streetlight and our words reveal scars so deep and raw that they threatened to block out every other emotion that came before and possibly after.
CHAPTER 21
I woke up Saturday morning, after crawling into my bed only hours before, to a Post-it.
It was stuck to the fridge, not my pillow. And it held Dad’s handwriting, not Mom’s, but that didn’t stop my throat from swelling shut before I read it.
I left you the truck. Don’t crash it. I’ll be home from the auction Monday night. Might bring you something. —Dad
Underneath was a little sketch of a convertible peeling away. My throat relaxed and I smiled, recognizing myself behind the wheel.
Dad had told me about the auction weeks ago, and probably again yesterday, but I’d forgotten completely. I’d stayed out till almost dawn with Daniel and slept through my chance to say goodbye. Dad and I hadn’t been apart for more than a day since Mom left, and unless it was self-imposed, solitude was not my friend.
My raging I-didn’t-sleep-nearly-long-enough-last-night headache reasserted itself when I looked outside and saw that Daniel’s Je
ep was gone.
Nausea bled through me. He hadn’t meant to tell me—show me—anything about his dad; the streetlight had forced his hand. And even though we stayed together wrapped in shadows until nearly dawn, I couldn’t be sure what the light of day would do to us in his mind.
I knew what it was like when someone discovered horrible things about me. It made me feel like that diseased part was the only thing about me to be seen. Feeling defined by the thing I loathed above all others...it was unbearable. I’d spent an Arizona summer on my roof trying to get away from that feeling.
I had no idea where Daniel went, except away from me.
And I couldn’t even blame him.
Claire hadn’t mandated running on the weekends yet—and yet was the operative word—but I was willing to do anything that morning if it meant leaching off some of her cheerfulness, like a parasite that couldn’t survive on its own.
“You are not a parasite,” she said, when I called her and shared the comparison. “Plus I just so happen to have a surplus of merriment today and I can’t think of another person I’d like to parasitically donate it to.”
“That is sweet and gross, Claire. Thanks.”
Kind of like Sunsplash, which was where we decided to go.
* * *
Claire bounded out of her house in shorts and a T-shirt with a towel thrown over one shoulder when I pulled up. She swam her hand through the air after she hopped into the passenger seat of Dad’s truck. “Let’s roll.”
When I failed to “roll” so much as an inch forward, Claire flipped up her sunglasses to look at me.
“Headache worse?”
“Yes.” It felt like someone was inside jumping up and down on my eyeballs. “But it’s not the headache.” My drive over to Claire’s had left me with nothing but my thoughts for company and they’d been less than pleasant.
Claire reached over me and shifted the truck into Park, then sat back with her concerned-friend face on—Claire gave really good concerned-friend face—and it was the impetus I needed to spill.
I told her about last night. Everything until Daniel’s scars.
Claire’s expression dissolved into frank disapproval when I got to the night-swimming part, then outright distress at our almost kiss.
“He did not!”
“No, I told you. The light came on so we ran.”
“But he was going to! And you were going to! That is so...really not smart, Jill.” When I let my head fall back against my seat, she continued. “There is something wrong with a twenty-one-year-old kissing a sixteen-year-old. Tell me you know that. And what about Sean?” she added with a note of hurt in her tone.
I completely ignored the Sean comment since, of the three of us, she seemed to be the only one still laboring under that delusion. “Claire. I need you to check the lecture for a minute. Can you please do that?”
“I don’t know. What are you about to say?”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I’ll try. Best I can do. But if you want to get a tattoo on your face or something, I’m not going to just sit here and smile.” Claire crossed her arms and leaned back against the window. “I’m never going to be that kind of friend.”
“It’s not a face tattoo.”
“You like him, don’t you?” Claire drew her knees up. “That’s worse than the face tattoo.”
Sliding my hands up to the top of the steering wheel, I sighed. “I like being around him. I like that I can talk to him and not feel...” I hesitated, looking for a word that wouldn’t sound like an insult to Claire, but I came up blank. It wasn’t that I didn’t value her friendship, but it was hard sometimes, all the times, when it came to family stuff. And family stuff had been ALL the stuff for me lately.
Before I could really start to squirm at my inability to communicate, Claire nodded almost to herself.
“I think I get it now. Not all of it,” she added with slightly furrowed brows. “I don’t talk to you about weight issues and stuff because you can’t even begin to understand what that’s like for me—and I am glad because it takes so much energy and fight, and every day I have to think about calories and food and my weight and insulin and it’s exhausting.” She finished in a gust of breath like even talking about it taxed her. “You’ve never had to safety pin your jeans because the button wouldn’t reach. You’ve never had to wait until the late bell in a class before getting up because you knew odds were you’d get stuck in the desk. You’ve never had to listen to perfect strangers make comments in a restaurant about what’s on your plate.”
“Claire,” I said, in a soft voice. “I never knew any of that.”
“Yeah, because I didn’t want you to, just like you don’t want me to know all the stuff with your mom. And you’re right. I can’t relate, and even though I know you’re happy that I don’t have to, it must be nice to have someone to talk to about crummy mothers.”
My heart gave a funny lurch and my smile was small but sure. It was... Nice probably wasn’t the right word, but yeah. “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about all that,” I said.
“And I’m sorry I can’t talk to you about your mom. I’m even happy that with Daniel, you have someone hurting in the same way that you can talk to. But, Jill,” she said, shifting back to a point I’d wrongly hoped she’d forgotten. “Anything that happens between you guys is going to only hurt more in the long run. I mean, what’s the best possible scenario here?”
There wasn’t one.
“You guys start, what, dating? Is your dad going to go for that?”
I didn’t need to answer that.
“So then you don’t tell him. You sneak around. You lie.”
I shook my head. I wouldn’t do that to Dad. I couldn’t.
“Okay. Then you wait. Will it be better when you’re eighteen and he’s twenty-three? Will he wait? Will you? Because if the answer is yes, then okay. End of lecture. I won’t say another word.”
My headache came charging back. “Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to make everything into big-picture terms?”
“Because everything is big picture. You know that.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet it isn’t. I tell you about a guy and you jump two years into the future and ask me what that looks like. How am I supposed to answer that?”
“When you liked Sean you could. How many times have we planned your wedding, a dozen?”
“This is different.”
Claire leaned toward me. “Why? Why is it different?”
“Because it is. I just met Daniel. I’m still getting to know him. And he’s got all this stuff going on, and...”
“And what? You were in love with Sean for years.”
My cheeks were wet before I realized I’d started crying.
“Sean will come around, you know. He probably already—”
“No. I don’t care anymore. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Maybe until you can say it without tearing up. And I was right there watching you watch him with Cami at the movies the other night. I see you every day running with him. I’ve been watching you two for months get over whatever it was that happened, and you’re almost there. I can tell, even if you can’t, that he’s already there. So don’t get distracted by something it doesn’t sound like you can fix anyway.”
* * *
Daniel’s Jeep wasn’t in front of his house when I got home late after dropping Claire off. But instead of going inside, I sat in my driveway with the engine idling and the overpowering scent of chlorine that lingered on my hair and skin. The pool from the night before had smelled sweet by comparison. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Daniel; the water droplets on his eyelashes, and I remembered that flare of panicked excitement I felt as he leaned toward me.
And then my mind lurch
ed forward and all I could see were scars.
My fingers twitched, and pain, as vivid and real as I’d ever felt, suffused my body as I remembered each and every one.
Claire was right about that. There was nothing I could do to fix what had happened to Daniel, what was still happening to him, but that didn’t keep me from wanting to try and hoping he’d come back so I could.
Just as I was about to pull into the garage, a gray Suburban stopped in front of Daniel’s house. The driver got out and walked to the passenger side. When he opened the door, Daniel got out, took two steps, and crumbled onto the sidewalk.
CHAPTER 22
I flew out of the truck, barely remembering to yank the keys from the ignition, before running next door.
“What happened? Is he okay?” Heedless of the spectacular sunburn I’d gotten that day with Claire, I dropped to my knees on the graveled yard and bent to see Daniel’s face. “Daniel...?”
The driver laughed. “He’s just drunk off his ass is all.”
I glanced at the driver before turning back to Daniel, who had rolled onto his back and was staring up at the sky with unfocused eyes. I sat back on my heels and sucked in air that suddenly stank of alcohol and cigarette smoke.
Drunk.
I hadn’t ever seen it in person, up close. I hadn’t smelled it before either. It started to mix with the chlorine that clung to me and the combination turned me almost as green as Daniel.
It was sobering, for me at least. Daniel was too busy trying to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head.
Driver Guy squatted down next to Daniel and patted his face. “Yo, Daniel, you cool if I take off?”
Daniel was apparently cool with anything at the moment.
“Are you kidding? You can’t leave him here like this.” I watched Driver Guy walk back to his car. “At least help me get him inside?”
Driver Guy unlocked his door. “Nah, I’m good.”
And without another word he drove off.
A single laugh that was more a gasp than anything left me as I stared after his fading taillights.
If I Fix You Page 12
