If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

  “Don’t do that. You can’t imagine what kind of damage water does to a car.”

  “I’ll put sugar in the gas tank.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “And the next time I get a flat—”

  “Please don’t say it.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “—I’ll. Just. Keep. Driving.”

  “Sean.” My eyes shot open. “We will not be friends anymore if you do any of those things.”

  “Promise?”

  And I felt it. That match strike, engine catch, firework thrill in my heart. It wasn’t that desperate need that had smothered me in the past, keeping me anxious and half-sick most of the time. It was like a flower blooming. It made me feel strong and warm and happy.

  I felt the gentle beat speeding under my palm and knew my heart was pounding just as fast, and not only from car-related anxiety. I felt it in the fingers that locked with mine and the breath that ghosted over my lips.

  When Sean kissed me, I waited for that same wrongness to flare up, the one that reminded me of Mom holding his shirt, the one that said stop because this will hurt.

  But it never came.

  Instead, I thought of him coming to the track after working all night to run with me, because of me. I thought of him bringing me movie-theater popcorn even when he wasn’t going to the movies, because he knew I loved it. I thought of the way he’d held me when I told him about my mom. The way my pain had hurt him like it was his own. Not just that night at the park, but always.

  I thought of everything that had ever made my heart soar, and it was all Sean.

  And I kissed him back.

  His arms encircled me and his lips pressed against mine with the sweetest pressure. It wasn’t a long, drawn-out kiss. It was his lips on mine, his breath mixed with mine, and it was a moment that I would have lived in for eternity.

  When he pulled back and took in my face, his lit up with a kind of wonder that I couldn’t help but laugh at. Sean’s dimpled smile did that funny thing to my heart again, only this time it didn’t scare me.

  But the screaming from Daniel’s house did.

  CHAPTER 44

  Sean and I jerked apart. He spun every which direction, but I knew exactly where to look even before her next scream had words.

  “You killed him!”

  Glass breaking, piercing and shrill, shredded the night. I rose up on my knees to see a table lamp in Daniel’s front yard surrounded by a sea of glass, glittering against the dull gray gravel.

  I scrambled over the peak of my roof and down the front side, my bare feet skidding and just barely stopping me from sliding off the edge. It only took seconds, but unnamed fear clenched me so hard in those strangled heartbeats that I barely registered catching my hand on a stray nail. It tore right through the fleshy part of my palm.

  It didn’t hurt until I saw him, framed in jagged glass beyond his broken living-room window. Daniel stood immobile while his mom was a blur of fists. Her words barely had form. Shrieks and incoherent sobs slapped at me as she struck him.

  “You killed him!” she screamed, over and over before folding in on herself.

  A phone lay forgotten at her feet. When Daniel reached for her, she shrieked as if she were on fire and attacked again, slapping him hard enough that his head snapped to the side, and our eyes met through the broken window.

  I had nothing with me this time. No pop can to throw, no coupon for his Jeep. I couldn’t fix anything. I watched Daniel turn back in time to catch another slap.

  I’d only seen Daniel once with his mom, and then only in silhouette. They were flesh and blood this time, less than twenty feet away, bordered by broken glass like some sort of sick stage play. I saw the way the pained expression slipped from his face.

  Then she spit at him. “It should have been you.”

  When Daniel failed to react, impotence smothered me until I wanted to scream as she drew back her hand again. Maybe I did scream. Because he caught her wrist only inches from his face.

  She had to see what I saw, the break. The moment Daniel was done. The moment he stopped trying. She attempted to pull her wrist free, but he held on. He didn’t need to yell like she did. His voice held a kind of quiet anger that was impossible to miss.

  “He’d have killed you a dozen times over if I hadn’t gotten big enough to distract him. I let him bust my hand with a hammer the last time you burned his dinner. He didn’t deserve what he got?” He lifted his head. “It was my jaw he broke when he lost his job, my back he burned.” Daniel pulled up his shirt, and even twenty feet away, I could see the round, puckered flesh dotting his shoulder. “What did he deserve for that?” He pointed to the massive scar that spanned his torso. “I was ten when he pushed me out the upstairs window, do you remember? I hit the porch light on the way down. He wouldn’t let you take me to the hospital until you cleaned up all the blood. What’s that worth?” He threw her hand back and she stumbled. Her black hair had fallen free from her bun and the strands snaked around her face, concealing her features, but they did nothing to disguise the contempt in her voice.

  “We would have been fine if you’d stayed away.”

  “He would have killed you if I’d stayed away! And for what? Because you forgot to record a show he liked? Maybe you were wearing the wrong color. What did you do to deserve a dozen broken ribs and a bat bashed into your face?”

  “No!” she screamed, jumping at him again. “You were the one who made him mad. If you’d just left us...”

  I was moving then, skirting the edge of my roof until the wall appeared below me. When I flipped onto my stomach to slide down, Sean was there. Sweat broke out across his forehead, and not from heat, as he followed right behind me. Concrete from the wall touched my bare feet, then gravel a second later as I jumped to the ground. I started to run but an arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me back.

  “Jill, there’s glass everywhere.” Sean looked at my bare feet.

  But she was still yelling, hitting him.

  “I’ll go,” he said, already moving toward the house.

  “Give me your phone,” I said, and Sean tossed it back to me, but the sirens we heard halted both of us.

  Blue and red lights flashed from around the corner, illuminating dozens of neighbors in their yards, and more than a few in Daniel’s.

  Everything after that was a blur of moving bodies and blaring noise. We watched two officers emerge from the car, jump through the window and start wrestling Daniel’s mom to the floor. Neighbors recounted events for latecomers, and later for the officers.

  “He didn’t do anything,” one said, while another quickly nodded.

  “It’s true. She attacked him. He never retaliated.”

  I dropped my eyes to Daniel’s mom, who was on the ground with a knee in her back still screaming obscenities at her son. It took forever to haul her out of the house. When she passed me, her black eyeliner was smeared all over her cheeks.

  Daniel’s face. It was painful to look at as he watched them load her into the backseat. He still wanted to protect her, even as she intoned over and over again that they should keep him away from her.

  Daniel tried to go after her. “Wait,” he said. “She’s not right. You can’t—” An officer halted him, but he called to her. “Mom, I’ll be right behind you.”

  His face was worse when he noticed what I did: she fought less and less the farther away she was from her son.

  Behind me, a neighbor was watching too. “She said he killed someone.”

  I shook my head, knowing there was no way that could be true even as part of me called out for the justice of it. But could the rest be true? I’d barely been listening to Daniel’s mom. It hadn’t been the content of her words that I’d focused on, so much as the scene playing out in front of me, but I did no
w, keeping my eyes on Daniel as the officer spoke.

  Daniel’s father was dead.

  CHAPTER 45

  I curled my knees to my chest, hugging them tight against the premonsoon breeze. The clouds had spread overhead and blotted out the stars. Only a tiny break showed that the moon was up and slowly being swallowed by the encroaching clouds.

  The night was quiet. No gossiping neighbors in their yards, no sirens, no screaming. Even Sean had gone home.

  I’d been up on my roof for what felt like hours. Waiting.

  Earlier, he’d given me no reason to expect him. No look or indication that he’d want to talk with me—need to talk to me. Nothing beyond that fleeting moment when our eyes had met and I’d exhaled more air than my body could possibly contain, knowing he was okay.

  The wind kicked up and my hair flew around to whip my face. A clap of thunder sounded. By my guess, I had about eight minutes before the clouds split apart.

  Eight minutes wasn’t enough time.

  I was watching the last glimmer of the moon disappear as the storm clouds took full possession of the night sky, when I heard him.

  The back door of his house squeaked open. His head was turned in my direction before he even stepped out. It was as dark as it ever got, but I thought I saw his shoulders lift when he saw me. Two long steps, a burst of energy on the last, and he was on the wall. Seconds later, he was next to me.

  And I couldn’t blink for fear that I’d waste what little time I knew we had; time that really didn’t have anything to do with the coming rain.

  Lightning flashed in the distance, throwing the planes of his face into relief for one second, two. My heart broke for him in those seconds.

  His jaw was locked, his eyes lowered. His dark hair fell forward to skim his cheekbones. More thunder. Louder and closer this time. I wasn’t even going to get my eight minutes.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said. Altercation. That was the word the officer had used. It sounded so civil for what amounted to one prisoner beating another to death.

  “I went to see him last week.”

  A boulder hit me square in the stomach. The officer had said Daniel’s dad died that morning, and Daniel had been home for a few days already, so he hadn’t been there there when it happened, but maybe...maybe he’d said something? Or his dad had?

  “I’m not sorry he’s dead,” Daniel said.

  “I’m not either.” And more than that, I was relieved Daniel felt the same way. I could still taste the bile that had risen in my throat when Daniel had confronted his mom with the physical marks his dad left on him. If he had to deal with guilt on top of that...I’d want to kill his dad all over again.

  I didn’t want to ask him any more questions because there were no good answers, but they spilled out anyway. “Why did you go see him?”

  “I found out she was calling him, from almost the second she got out of the hospital. Maybe even before.”

  My eyes shut.

  “It didn’t matter that I got her away, moved her halfway across the country, because he still had a hold on her. I could take her to the other side of the world and she’d still write to him, talk to him.” His voice was so full of pain that it hurt me. “She’d wait forever.”

  My head and heart lurched in opposite directions. He’d gone to the monster that had destroyed his childhood—and was still poisoning any possible happiness with his mom—to plead for her. I shuddered, knowing this man I’d never met—and now never would—would have never acquiesced, not if half of what I’d heard about him was true.

  “I asked him to stop. No more calls, no more letters. To let her go.”

  I didn’t need to ask what his dad had said.

  The answer had been no.

  Horribly, unthinkably, no.

  I could imagine that fight through a pane of Plexiglas, the heated words and hotter tempers. I could see the guards dragging his father off as if I’d been there. And even though Daniel didn’t say, I could all too easily see his stoked temper inciting the wrong inmate—or five in Daniel’s father’s case—and sparking the last deadly encounter of a brutally executed life.

  It had taken his dad more than a week to die from his injuries.

  And I couldn’t be sorry about any of it.

  I kept looking at Daniel out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to stare, but I was looking for anything, any shift of his body, that meant he wanted to say more. But he didn’t shift. He barely moved.

  So I did.

  I stretched out my legs, half curling one under me. “It’s going to start pouring any second. It’ll be like we’re under a waterfall. But we can go inside—I don’t think my dad will mind.” I knew he wouldn’t. Any other night, yes. But not this night. I put my hand flat on the roof between us, intending to stand up and urge Daniel physically as well as verbally to come inside, but his hand shot out and pressed mine down. It stung, since that was the hand I’d caught on a nail earlier, but I didn’t react.

  “Stay,” he said. “Please.”

  Daniel hadn’t moved save for his hand. Hadn’t turned his head to look at me. It was as though the rest of his body was locked. But I stayed. Of course, I stayed. Even now, his fingers were curling under mine, prying my hand up from the scratchy tiles, lacing our fingers together. His hand was so warm compared to mine. And his grip was just shy of painful, but I squeezed back just as firmly.

  I didn’t bother with my sideways glances anymore. I openly stared. He was bouncing his head slowly, nodding it in small, rapid movements. Even in the dim light, I could see the scratch marks on his face from where she’d attacked him. His mom. They looked deep enough to scar.

  I prayed they wouldn’t, that nothing in his life would ever scar him again.

  When I reached out to brush his hair from his face, Daniel turned into my hand. A moment later he was clutching me to him, his hands locked behind my back.

  It wasn’t a remotely romantic gesture.

  His dad was dead. A man he’d spent most of his life cursing, maybe even wishing dead. I didn’t know if he felt relief or anger. Maybe he didn’t know. I think he’d been so focused on the burden of keeping his mom safe, showing her what life without abuse could be like, clinging desperately to the hope that she’d wake up one day and not hate him for trying to save her, that suddenly being freed from all that was its own kind of burden. One that he couldn’t share with anyone.

  But he was, in a way, sharing it with me.

  And that was why I clung to him as tightly as he clung to me. Why I didn’t press him to say a word. Why I thought of my mom and wondered if there could be an emotion somewhere between love and hate. Why I let the promised rain drench us both when it began to fall.

  CHAPTER 46

  Sean, Claire and I got home from the hardware store a couple days later, laden with paint cans and drop cloths. It felt like overkill for such a tiny room, but Claire was adamant, and I really wanted that periwinkle color gone from Dad’s bathroom. As first steps went, it was small, but it was a start, and Claire was ecstatic that I wanted her to help me take it.

  She could barely see around the massive and scarily comprehensive box of painting supplies she was holding, but Sean noticed Daniel almost as soon as I did.

  He was leaning against the front of his Jeep, both hands in his pockets as he squinted at me in the bright sunlight. I didn’t need to see the oversize duffel bag at his feet to know why he was waiting for me.

  “We’re gonna head in and get set up.” Sean brushed my arm, then took Claire by the shoulders and steered her toward my house.

  It was so much the perfect thing for him to say that I almost kissed him on the spot, but that didn’t feel like the best way to let Daniel know what had happened while he was gone. I didn’t regret my choice, but
I did regret that it might hurt Daniel.

  I walked toward him. “You’re leaving.” I tried to keep my voice steady. I’d known he would leave. I just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.

  “I wanted to see you before.” He cocked his head, looking at me and then toward Sean’s Jetta. “Guess I’m a little late.”

  Daniel and I had missed from the start, and the lack of rancor in his voice told me he knew that too. It was a near miss in my case, maybe for him too, but we’d avoided true heartbreak.

  And we cared enough about each other to be glad.

  “You look happy,” he said.

  “I feel happy. I’m trying not to scare it away.”

  His smile was bittersweet. I knew better than to ask Daniel if he was happy, but I hoped he’d find it in his future, wherever he went.

  I moved so that the sun split around my body and shaded his face. “Will you go back to Pennsylvania?”

  Daniel shook his head and looked at the houses across the street. “There’s nothing there for me.” He tried to say it as if it didn’t matter, as if he was talking about some restaurant that he didn’t like instead of the only home he’d ever had. But I could see the effort behind his indifference in the way he kept his eyes traveling up and down the street, like he was just casually looking around when I knew his movement was because he didn’t want me to see his eyes.

  “And your mom?” As far as I knew, she hadn’t come back since the police took her away.

  “She’s got sisters there. I don’t have a reason to keep her away anymore.”

  I heard the way he referred to them as his mom’s sisters, like he had no claim on them, even though they were his family as much as hers. There was a lot he’d never told me about his family, but he’d told me enough, both then and now. Either they didn’t want him, or he didn’t want them. I hoped for his sake it was the latter.

  The sun was hot against my back. The rays cut through the thin cotton of my shorts and caused my skin to prickle all the way down the back of my thighs. There was no evidence of the torrential rainstorms from the past few nights. The sun had sucked up every last drop of water, leaving only a slightly muggy weight to the air, a humidity that made my clothes stick to my skin.