If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

  “And Sean?” Every part of me shook. “Was that the right thing for you too?”

  CHAPTER 26

  I scrutinized every minute detail of her face when I said Sean’s name. I think I might have eased up if I’d seen a flicker of remorse, a tiny movement of her eyes that indicated that she understood how much she’d hurt me. But she batted my words away like a fly buzzing around her head.

  “That was nothing. You know how Sean is.”

  All that I had left for her, the tiniest speck of an ember of affection, snuffed out.

  I wanted to slap the pitying smile off her face. I wanted to scream and rage at her. I wanted to be frightening.

  I wasn’t.

  I was small and weak. I curled in on myself and I cried for so many things. “I loved him. You knew I loved him.” Through tear-blurred eyes I saw her move and then she ran her hand over my hair, petting me.

  “I know, sweetie. I know.”

  I lowered her hand but kept my fingers locked around her wrist. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you understand that this is your fault? What you did to Dad, to me, to Sean, was wrong. You ruined us. You broke everything and you will never put it back together. Never.”

  I made it to the door before she stopped me, sounding much more composed than she should have, given the distraught show she’d just put on.

  “Jill.” She barked my name like I was in trouble. “I understand that you’re angry. You’re a teenager, you’re supposed to be angry. And I’m your mother, so I guess I get to bear the brunt of it. I was hoping that you’d use this time we spent apart to figure out a few things, to understand me better and why things—” she made a gesture in the air “—happened the way they did. I’d hoped that we could move past this, but I can see that I was being overly optimistic.”

  Standing across from her in the sauna that was my garage, I looked at my mom, really looked at her. She hadn’t come to me with tears of remorse and pleading words of forgiveness on her lips. She hadn’t come with concern or contrition for what Dad and I had been through since she left. She hadn’t come with any kind of admission of wrongdoing on her part. She wanted something from me, that was all. There was no way she’d be standing in my sweltering garage as she bypassed “glowing” and went straight to sweating otherwise.

  “I need you to know that I’m not the bad guy here. I’m really not.” She was babbling, her words tumbling out over top of each other.

  I didn’t bother asking that, if she wasn’t the bad guy, who did she cast in that role? Dad? Me?

  “I don’t want you to hate me. That’s all. I am your mom,” she said. “Me, I’m the one who gave birth to you!”

  This was a side of Mom I’d never seen before. She kept reaching for me, her voice breaking when I wouldn’t let her touch me. She was actually wringing her hands. If I cared, I might have been concerned.

  “I told you I don’t hate you.”

  “Right, you don’t anything me.” She made a choked laughing noise that sounded painful. “But that’s not fair. I don’t deserve your antipathy. I really don’t.”

  She was starting to freak me out. Was she sick? Was she going to ask me for a kidney or something? “Okay, tell me what you do deserve.”

  “I don’t know. But not this hostility. You’ve always been Daddy’s little girl. The two of you from the beginning. He never gave me a chance...”

  Up until that point she’d been fidgeting and biting her lip the way I did sometimes. I don’t know what happened between one word and the next, but she stopped all of it.

  “I really hate him for that.”

  Goose bumps broke out on my arms when she said that. She was taking her time talking. I wanted her to get it over with. Tell me whatever horrible thing she wanted that had upset Dad so much. I had a momentary flare of panic that pushed the pain of my sunburn and the still stinging memory of Sean aside: maybe it was a custody issue after all. Maybe she was going to ask me to come live with her.

  I was breathing faster, panting almost, as I waited for her to say it, hot, dry air filling and leaving my lungs with greater and greater speed. I would never leave Dad. She had to know that. I’d resort to something truly childish like running away before I’d let her take me from him. I’d get a job somewhere, hide out until I turned eighteen. Maybe I could still take Daniel up on his offer to drive to Mexico.

  Suddenly she was standing right in front of me, close enough that I could smell her cinnamon-scented perfume. It tickled my nose and I started to back away, but she grabbed my hands and curled them in hers. She was completely calm. “I want you to come live with me.”

  Live with me. Hearing them out loud, those three words stole my breath. “No.” I pulled my hands from her. “No.”

  She reached for me again. “But I’m your mom. You belong with me.”

  “No. I belong with Dad. You left us.”

  “I needed time, Jill.” Every step I retreated, she advanced. “I needed to figure out what I wanted.”

  “And what? You want me now? Why?” My chin quivered. “I’m horrible now!”

  “I want us to be a family again.” She stopped and I was halfway around the truck again before I did too. She shook her hair back from her face in a motion that was graceful in a way I’d never be, and smoothed out her dress. “I wanted to tell you this under different circumstances, but...” This was the only chance she was going to get and we both knew it. “I’m getting married.”

  My eyes dropped to her left hand, and the diamond was so blinding I couldn’t fathom how I missed it. Dad had never been able to give her a diamond. Her ring from him had been a pearl. I’d always thought it looked like the moon; it was so perfect it glowed. Who could want a diamond over that?

  “You are such a hypocrite. What happened to being ‘just Katheryn’?”

  She frowned at me.

  “That speech you gave not five minutes ago about needing to be you, not someone’s wife.” Not someone’s mother.

  Another frown. “Jeff is very different from your dad.”

  “I’ll bet he is.”

  “Please, Jill. We can start over. If you just gave me a chance, Jeff and I, we want you to come live with us.”

  I bent over a little and steadied myself with a hand on the truck. “When did you meet him?” I didn’t really need her to answer. I knew it had to have been before she left. Maybe her leaving hadn’t been about me catching her with Sean at all. Her hesitation confirmed it.

  “It happened so fast. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love.”

  “It must have been really inconvenient, what with you already being married!” I let my voice grow louder with each word until I was practically shouting. “Jeff? Is that his name?” I didn’t care what happened with her new husband, and I told her that in the crudest way possible. By then it wasn’t just sweat that was dripping down my face. “Does he know about Sean? What you tried to do with your teenage daughter’s friend?”

  Mom’s spine snapped straight and her voice lowered. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that, but we both know Sean is a flirt, maybe I let him get carried away that night, but it’s an ugly thing for you to insinuate anything more than that.” She exhaled and placed a hand over her heart. “What happened to you? You never used to behave like this. It’s cruel, Jill.”

  My head was going to explode. “You happened. You.” Then, like a child, I started to whine. “Just go. Can’t you just go? You and Jeff can start a new family somewhere and leave us alone...just go...please.”

  But she didn’t. She walked over to me and looked at me with her golden-brown eyes that I’d envied all my life. “Don’t cry. I’m here now. We’ll get past this. I’m not going to leave ever again.”

  I dropped my head and let out a sob. “Why are you doing this? Don’t you get that I don’
t want you here?”

  “I think it’s for the best. I told all this to your dad.”

  Yeah. I remembered that conversation. “You’re insane if you think I would leave Dad.” My tears had stopped, or more likely they’d just evaporated in the heat. I stood there like a statue while she smoothed my hair off my forehead, going back to grab a strand that was stuck with sweat to my skin.

  “And you’d choose him over me?”

  “Every time,” I said, with as much force as possible. And then I saw her swallow.

  “Even if he’s not your father?”

  CHAPTER 27

  There was an accident at the shop a few years ago. A 2003 Chevy hatchback crashed down onto my foot when the lift malfunctioned.

  I remembered the pain. The way it throbbed up my leg like a jackhammer, like an animal crunching and grinding the bones between its teeth. It wasn’t the kind of pain that burst sharp like a firework only to fade away. It consumed and fed on itself, expanding and increasing beyond words like agony or torture, like it was the only thing that had ever existed and it was eternal.

  Only it wasn’t. The memory conjured only a shadow of the pain. It didn’t seem real, like a dream that slipped away faster and faster the more you tried to grasp it. Pain.

  But I had never hurt the way I did when Mom loosed her soft, poisonous words. I could feel them spreading venom through my chest, my heart beating them in burning pulses to my arms, legs, hands, feet.

  “Liar.”

  When did I sit down? My palm rested on the oily brown stain that spread across the concrete beneath me like a puddle of filth.

  She sat down next to me. She ruined her dress. And she was holding me, rocking me. And I let her.

  She wouldn’t let me go when I tried to get away. When she told me about the neighbor right after she and Dad got married.

  I threw up when she told me that I had his eyes.

  Nothing was real after that. Not Mom cleaning up my sick or me letting her go inside without a word of protest and accepting the ginger ale she brought back. Not her soft lips on my cheek or her words—no longer poisonous—that she was going to give me some time.

  Then there was only the sound of her heels clacking against the concrete, growing quieter as she left.

  I don’t know how many hours I sat like that.

  My eyes were dry when I opened them, when I pushed up from the filthy floor and went inside. The pantry door was open. Soup cans and boxes of pasta were scattered on one shelf. My bag of half-eaten Fruity O’s was lying on another next to a jug of laundry detergent and a couple rolls of duct tape. And next to that was a little box of baking soda.

  I snatched it from the shelf and headed for the bathroom. The master bathroom. The one I’d helped Dad fix as a surprise for Mom when we moved in. I ran my fingertips across the creamy countertop and up the periwinkle walls.

  I sat on the closed toilet sprinkling baking soda into the tub as the faucet gushed warm water. I slid off my dress and lowered myself into the water until only my nose and the top of my head were exposed. The tub was big enough that I could extend my legs completely, my toes tipping forward to rest on the far end.

  I inhaled deeply and sank under the water.

  No sound. No light. With the water all around me, I was floating and felt almost nothing. The water was opaque from the soda. I felt like I was in a cloud. All white and fluffy and weightless. I couldn’t see any of the purple-blue paint that I’d helped roll on the walls. I wished I could stay like that forever. No pain. No nothing. Just warm and peaceful.

  Even as I formed the thoughts, the pressure of my filled lungs began to build. I tried and failed to keep a bubble from escaping my lips.

  Then another.

  And another.

  The pressure ebbed, but even that respite was brief. As soon as my lungs deflated, they ached to be filled. I sank farther down. I wasn’t ready to leave that all-encompassing warmth.

  I thought of the little girl who used to live behind us in our old house. Her name was something like Angie or Angel. I don’t remember, because her family lived there for only a month. Less than.

  I think she was four when she drowned in their pool.

  I was only a few years older, but I remember my parents being really upset about it and enrolling me in swimming lessons soon after, even though I already knew how to swim. And when I finished, Dad still wouldn’t let me swim in our pool by myself. Ever. I never minded, because I always had more fun swimming with him anyway. Mom never once went swimming with us. Something about the chlorine bothering her.

  I used to wonder about Angie or Angel and what it felt like to drown. I’d try and hold my breath underwater as long as possible and imagine breathing in water instead of air. Not like when you choke while drinking something, but actually breathing water. Before it killed you, wouldn’t it feel nice? Like this same warm floating feeling of being suspended in a tub, but on the inside too? I’d never wanted to find out before.

  I thought about it then. Not the drowning and dying part, not really, but the oblivion? I thought about that.

  I wouldn’t be able to hold my breath much longer. Already it felt like I’d lived an entire lifetime without air. I wasn’t scared. The tub was long but not especially deep. Only inches separated my mouth from the surface. I could reach it in less than a second if I wanted to. But right then, I wanted the warmth more than I wanted the air. I wanted it so much that I opened my lips—not letting the water do more than bathe my tongue, my teeth, my mouth. I wondered.

  I sat up suddenly, gulping air into my lungs, my legs bent up tight to my chest and my cheek resting on my knees.

  Breath after breath after breath.

  I stayed like that in the tub long after the warmth left the water. Long after my fingers and toes went pruney. Long after the skylight showed that the sun had set and the bathroom became dark, too dark to tell what color was on the walls.

  CHAPTER 28

  Dad never let me turn the thermostat down past 79 degrees, but even with the heat pressing in from outside, I still shivered when I got out of the tub. I stood up and took Dad’s old gray bathrobe off the hook. Technically, it was my robe since I’d bought him a new one last Christmas, but in my head it would always be his. I’d washed it half a million times so it was wearing thin in places, but it was also the softest fabric on the planet. Every time I slipped it on I felt nothing but a whisper drifting over my skin.

  It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.

  She was a liar.

  There was no way. I would have known. Dad would have known. He’d never have endured everything she put him through if it were true. If I weren’t his. He could never love me the way he did if I was the result of her cheating. And he did love me.

  I spun to the mirror and I searched for him. For Dad.

  You have his eyes.

  My eyes were greenish-brown. Dad’s were blue. But his father’s were green.

  She was a liar.

  Of course I would look more like her, I was a girl. But he had to be there too. I just had to look hard enough.

  Something sharp bored through my heart.

  Dad and I were the same. We were so much the same. I’d believe I wasn’t hers, but I’d never believe I wasn’t his.

  She was a liar.

  Walking made me realize that my sunburn overall felt better, like my skin was only one size too small instead of the ten sizes too small from that morning. In my room I pulled on a pair of drawstring pants and a T-shirt. I started to leave, then slipped Dad’s damp robe back on. Better.

  When I heard knocking on my front door I almost jumped out of my skin. I stood in the hallway staring at it like a bomb was on the other side. Or Mom.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.r />
  “Yo, Whitaker!”

  “Sean?” My legs went all rubbery in relief.

  He looked up as soon as I opened the door, smiling at me like he’d been waiting all day to see me, sunburn and all. “Hey. Heard you weren’t feeling great.” He shifted a brown paper bag in front of him. “Brought you something that might help.”

  I ignored the bag. For one moment I ignored everything except for the fact that he was there. I stepped out the door and hugged him. I didn’t know who was more surprised.

  Sean’s breath stirred my hair as he brought his arms up around me. “Hello to you too.” He voice was low and soft, caressing. “Tell me this isn’t ’cause you’re on a bunch of painkillers?”

  I shook my head into his chest, knowing the respite from reality wouldn’t last, not after Mom. Not after those old wounds had been reopened, leaving me raw and exposed.

  I let Sean get carried away.

  And that quickly, I remembered that Sean was salt.

  I pulled away just as suddenly as I’d gone to him. After everything that had happened that day, I felt like a wrung-out towel, lacking the energy to force him to leave or confront him the way I had Mom. I pushed my hair back, knowing I’d have to say something, but the action exposed my sunburned arms as the oversize sleeves of my robe slid back.

  With less hesitation than I’d hugged him with, Sean reached for me, gently squeezing my forearm and letting go to watch white finger marks appear and then get taken back over by my lobster skin. “Ouch.”

  Something pricked my eyes as I stared at him. I could only nod. I took in his appearance for the first time, the crisp white shirt and dark jeans, the way his messy, haphazard hair looked slightly less messy and haphazard. The part of my heart that I hadn’t been able to wrangle away from him caught in my throat.

  He saw my gaze trail over him. “I was at my grandmother’s. It makes her happy when I dress up a little. She says I’m starting to look like my grandfather.” He shrugged but flushed slightly. Sean idolized his grandfather, a firefighter who died before he was born. I’d seen pictures before and there was a resemblance.