by Leah Raeder
He held my gaze, and I understood. I don’t want anything…for now.
“Does this make you feel good about yourself?” I said quietly. “Scaring the shit out of little girls?”
“You’re not a little girl.”
He was wrong. At that moment, I absolutely was.
“How much does she owe?” I said.
His eyes got a shuttered, closed down look. “That’s business, sweetheart. Not for you to worry about.” He stubbed out his cigarette and put an arm around my shoulder. It felt like a shackle. “Let’s go in, before your mom gets the wrong idea.”
I was too dazed to process the rest of the night. When they were gone and I was sitting in my room, my eyes full of water but not spilling, my entire body trembling, I suddenly remembered the squeaky bank teller.
I should have known what was coming. The foreshadowing was so obvious.
I logged into my bank account.
Balance: $0.00.
—6—
Rain ran down the windows in rivulets thick and silvery as mercury. The world looked like an ashtray full of soft soggy grayness, headlights fizzling in it like cigarette cherries. All I heard was a crackling sound, rain and wet tires, as if one long strip of Velcro was endlessly peeling.
Evan had seen how somber I was and let me brood in peace. I put on music for a bit, then turned it off and listened to the rain. I should have told him before we left. I shouldn’t have left with him, dragging him into my doomed orbit, toward this black hole I was slowly circling. The seat was cool and I pressed the bare backs of my legs against it. I felt like I needed to shiver from a place deep inside of me, one not connected to my nerves.
Traffic slowed as people tried not to die in the rain. Evan took a hand off the wheel and laid it atop mine. He didn’t speak.
We reached St. Louis well past noon. The Arch was a faint shadow in the downpour, almost frightening, a shape without context. It could have been the leg of an alien ship touching down. Rain washed the color out of everything. We hunted the hot blurs of traffic lights, hitting every red. Even the universe was telling me to stop.
Evan pulled into an underground garage. I got out, leaving my bag in the car. He looked at me with concern but remained silent, and I appreciated this.
We took a haunted freight elevator up six stories. It rattled as if possessed and screeched when the gate opened and closed.
“Nothing says ‘welcome home’ like poltergeists,” I said.
Evan smiled nervously. He seemed relieved I’d finally spoken.
We walked down a dim brick hallway to a steel door, and when he opened it my bleak mood lifted for a moment.
The Friend’s loft was huge, a couple thousand square feet of bare concrete and brick. One entire wall was windows, flooding the space with pearly gray light. The open floor was divided into groupings of furniture: leather couches arrayed around a TV, a dining table and bar, a bed framed by bookcases. Stairs led to a walled area above the kitchen—bathroom, probably. There were canvases everywhere, big, messy abstract paintings, all motion and color, no form.
“This is really nice,” I said, feeling infinitely small. I didn’t even notice my voice crack.
Evan’s hands on my shoulders. “Maise.”
He turned me around. I felt a dangerous rearrangement of my facial features in preparation for tears.
“What’s wrong?” he said. His face was doing that big-eyed, furrowed-brow thing that I could not lie to.
I started to cry. “I’m sorry I made fun of the elevator.”
He laughed a little, helplessly, and pulled me close. “That’s not why you’re upset. Is it?”
“No.”
“Can you talk, or do you need to cry?”
“Need to cry,” I said like a child, and did.
At first I tried to keep my dignity, but once I started it became a runaway train, and the best I could manage was to hold on while an unstoppable force moved through me. I got the worst out standing there in Evan’s arms, the loft as blurry as the rainy world outside. Mother. Witch. Whore. Devil. Stealing my money, the money her own mother had given me as compensation for being part of this fucking family. Putting my life in jeopardy. Ruining my future and the happiness I had with this man. All because she refused to get a real job, because she was forty and still thought she could cheat the world and get ahead without working as hard as all the other suckers.
Evan led me to the kitchen. Wiped my face with a warm washcloth, listened to me blow my nose and mumble semi-coherently.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. The tears never stopped, merely waned. “I have to—we have to stop.”
He looked frightened until I explained that it was because of Mom.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I never found the right moment. ‘Hey, by the way, my mom’s a drug dealer.’ Is there a greeting card for that?”
“Tell me everything,” he said, sitting with me at the counter.
After an hour he knew the gist of my sordid family. He listened without comment, handing me tissues, stroking my hair, staring sadly at my swollen, ruddy, childish face.
When I quieted, he said, “I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with this your whole life.”
“Well, now you know.” I wasn’t crying anymore. My voice was raw, husky. Like Mom’s. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“Yes, I do.” I made myself look at him. “We can’t keep doing this, Evan. It’s not going to work.”
“Why?”
“Because I might be on a hit list somewhere? Because my life just became The Sopranos?”
He took my hands. “I’m worried, okay? No, I’m terrified. This is some seriously fucked-up shit, and I have no idea how to handle it. But it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “You’re the mob wife. You won’t leave me, even though there’s a price on my head.”
He stared at me for a second. Then we both burst out laughing. Wild, brittle laughter, on the edge of hysteria. He pulled me close, pressing my forehead to his chin.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You should run away.”
“If I ran away, I would be crazy.”
Somewhere in my cavernous chest, another sliver of light chipped into my heart.
I leaned back. “Maybe I should run from you again. For your own good.”
He looked at me with that sweet pout and I knew I couldn’t. Though he never mentioned it, leaving him that first night had shaped the way he saw me. The shooting star he couldn’t hold. Sometimes he’d touch my hands and my face as if to check whether I was really there.
God, if I could only go back to that night and tell myself to stay. Tell her, There’s something so beautiful waiting for you. Don’t run from it. Run toward it.
“What would your mother think,” I said, “if she knew what kind of girl you got mixed up with?”
His eyes tightened. He looked through me for a split second. Then he focused on my face, a mask sliding over his with a smile painted on it. “She’d think, ‘I am not surprised.’ Now, if you’re done trying to break up with me, I’d like to cook for you. You can reevaluate whether you still want to break up afterward.”
There’s another hidden story about your past, I thought. Now you owe me two.
#
Things I did for the first time in my life that day: shopped for groceries with my boyfriend (we spent an hour walking around a fish market in our sunglasses calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Smith, pretending to be undercover assassins); made out in an elevator (haunted or not haunted—both firsts); took a shower and shaved my legs while my boyfriend watched, spellbound (“I’ve been fantasizing about this.” “No touching. Is something burning?”).
When I stepped out of the bathroom there was a trail of lit candles leading down the stairs.
Oh sweet Jesus, I thought.
I followed the light and the smell of sweet to
mato and whitefish. Evan moved around the kitchen like a maestro, lifting a lid, stirring, gliding over to the oven just as it dinged. I watched him with an awed, goofy gape until he enlisted me to chop fresh basil.
“What are we making?” I said.
Besides an insane love story, obviously.
“Pine nut-crusted flounder, roasted vegetable medley in herb and butter sauce, and tomato bisque.” He paused behind me, raised my hair, and kissed the nape of my neck, all while taking a dish out of the cabinet above me. I stared at my hand, wondering what would happen if I put the blade to my skin. I didn’t think it would cut. I didn’t think I was awake.
Whose life is this? I thought. How did I sneak into it?
“Who taught you to cook?” I said as we set the table. “Your mom?”
Again, that millisecond flicker in his eyes. “My dad, actually.”
“What’s your dad like?”
He looked at me for a moment like he couldn’t remember who I was. Because I was young. Because the concept of dead parents hadn’t yet occurred to me. I had only two concepts for parents: Gone, and Wish You Were Dead.
“He was better than we gave him credit for,” Evan said.
I stared at a fork, wondering how to take back my question.
“He was a mechanic,” Evan continued, his good humor returning. “Strongest guy in town. A car fell on a guy he worked with, and he lifted it by himself till they pulled the guy out. It messed up my dad’s back, so he had to stop working. He started taking cooking classes out of boredom. Imagine the Hulk in an apron, but less green. Same approximate radius of destruction.”
I smiled. “Who’s ‘we?’”
“What?”
“You said, ‘better than we gave him credit for.’”
Evan’s gaze shifted away. “Me and my sister.”
Another mystery sister. First Wesley, now him. It was like every XY I knew didn’t want me to know he was related to an XX.
We stood there with our secrets and mistakes, a beautiful dinner waiting for us.
“Let’s forget all the bad stuff for tonight,” Evan said.
“Deal.”
We ate by candlelight in the sepulchral loft. Storm clouds obscured the real stars, but the city came alive, a horoscope of earthbound constellations spreading below us: meteoric tail lights, neon pulsars, twinkling and shimmering all the way to the horizon. It made my heart ache. The city at night gave me the same melancholy twinge I’d felt as a kid watching Mom plug in the Christmas tree. Something beautiful and full of promise, but something you knew you could never touch.
The food made me feel good and strange, too. Light, sweet flounder broke apart and dissolved on my tongue, and the bisque was so creamy and savory I wanted to drink it straight from the bowl. It was overwhelming. He’d done this for me. All of this. I watched him carry our plates to the sink, thinking, All of this came from one night. If I hadn’t gone to the carnival, you would’ve looked at me like any other student when I walked into your class. And that made my heart ache, too—the thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together.
“If we hadn’t met, where would you be right now?” I said.
Candlelight danced over his face. His eyes were embers. “Watching the lights.”
We stood at the windows, looking out over the rainy city. He held me to the cold glass and kissed me, slow and intent. Our mouths tasted like pinot grigio. We moved to the couch, him atop me, crushing the leather, but after a while we ended up simply lying there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “My mind is all over the place.”
His arms tightened around me. “Don’t be sorry.”
I watched the dark, glittering city.
“Did your dad love you?” I said.
“In his way.”
“Did you feel loved, when you were a kid?”
“Not really.”
“What about your mom?”
His body went rigid. I breathed as shallowly as I could, not wanting to disturb whatever was happening inside of him.
“My mom is an alcoholic. She pretty much ruined our family.”
I glanced at him. He had that lost, X-ray-through-the-world look again.
“How?”
Evan sat up. He laid a hand on my leg to show me it was okay, then let it fall.
“My dad hit her, and she drank. I never knew which came first, but they fed each other. My mom was a nasty drunk. She’d say horrible shit, call my dad stupid and worthless, call us all names. She was miserable and abused and clinically depressed and never got the help she needed. She’d drink herself into blackouts.”
I thought of Mom and her gray-outs. “Jesus,” I said.
“One day, she was in the backyard with Beth, my little sister. I was in the garage so I didn’t see it, but I’ve thought about it so much I feel like I was there. Beth was in the pool, in the shallow end. She had water wings on. Mom was drinking at ten in the fucking morning, guzzling gin. I hate gin, by the way. The smell of it makes me sick. So Mom was drinking, and she passed out, and Beth was playing by herself when her foot got too close to a drain. It sucked her down and the wings couldn’t keep her above water. She kicked and splashed and screamed, and then she drowned. In three feet of water, in bright sunlight on a summer morning. And the whole time my mother was lying right there, five feet away, while Beth screamed for her.”
I stared at him, my mouth open, eyes wide. I didn’t know what to say.
He looked at my knee. “For years, I hated my mom. I wished I could’ve switched places with Beth. That any of us had died instead, because we all deserved it. She was innocent.” He sighed, his frame sagging, succumbing to gravity. “But you know what? It changed my mother. She finally stopped drinking. She went to church, though she was only looking for forgiveness, not faith. She cried all the time. She said she’d do anything to make sure I was happy, because now I was her only child.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I left when I was sixteen, and I’ve never been back.”
We sat there in the shadows, full of unspeakable things.
“Now I know,” he said, touching me again, “why I was drawn to you. We have the same darkness inside.”
“Our fucked-up parents?”
“Our lost childhood.”
I curled against him, running my hands over his arms, his chest, lightly, reverently, as if I’d just discovered he was breakable. How bizarre, I thought. Mr. Wilke has a psycho mom and a shattered family, too, and that’s why we understand each other. Why did everything beautiful come from pain?
“You don’t seem that much older than me,” I said. “Do I seem young to you?”
He kept stroking the same lock of my hair absently. “In school, you seem older than everyone. With me, you seem young. But I feel young with you, too.”
“We have no age. We exist outside of time. We’re timeless.”
Evan smiled. “Like Jack and Rose.”
“Or Lady and the Tramp.”
He laughed. “The nurse and the English patient.”
“Louis and Lestat.”
He took my face in his hands. “You are the bravest girl I’ve ever met. You’ve been living with this crazy family shit and never said a word.”
I shrugged. “Or maybe Louis and Claudia. I’m the little girl you’ve frozen in time because you plucked me like a rose and made me a vampire. We live together for a hundred years and I hate you and yet I’m in love with you.”
Oh my god. I had actually said it. As a joke, but those were the words, in the proper order and everything.
“Maise.”
“You’ve been living with a dead sister and never said a word. Is it brave, or just how things are?”
His hand moved against my face. “You are so worldly,” he said, and it was both a compliment and a regret.
We kissed again, and his body lay over me and pushed me into the cloudy
vagueness of the couch and I thought, Do what you want, I relinquish myself to you. But I guess he saw the disconnection in my eyes, because he stopped, and breathed against my throat, holding me. Just holding.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I want you to.”
He looked into my face. “That’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“All of you.”
It seemed like such an incredible thing to ask of a person.
“I don’t know where all of me is right now,” I said, feeling silly and young.
He kissed my temple, my eyelids. “It’s all right. I’m happy. I could spend this whole weekend just talking to you and be perfectly happy.”
“Me too,” I said. My voice was strained. “So if we’re both so happy, why are we sad?”
Evan laughed, and we kissed again, without expectations.
#
Going to bed was awkward. I didn’t know the protocol. Should we brush our teeth together? Little kids brushed their teeth with an adult. Just pretend you’re alone at home, I told myself. I took everything off but my underwear and a T-shirt. He stood on the other side of the bed in his boxers. We stared at each other.
Then we both laughed.
“This is so weird,” I said, echoing Wesley on homecoming night. Where was he? Was Siobhan kissing him good night? Did she do that?
“Weird because I’m your teacher, or because you’ve never done it before?”
Good question. “I can’t even tell.”
We sat on opposite sides of the bed.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Is this how it is for married people?”
“Awkward and distant? Yes.”
I grinned. “Let’s pretend we’re a troubled married couple.”
“I feel like you’re trying to test if I can actually act.”
“I hate how you do that, John. You always think I’m testing you. I guess our kids are just a test, too.”
He looked at me, trying not to laugh. “Well, Martha, maybe if you didn’t hand me a questionnaire every time I want sex.”
“And when is that, John? At midnight, after I’ve spent all day babysitting your spawn? Or when your secretary isn’t available to blow you on the weekend?”
