Closer

by Mary Elizabeth

  “They don’t like it,” she replies in a less aggressive tone. “And don’t act like you didn’t notice the way they looked at us earlier.”

  I stop with my hand on the doorknob and turn to the only person who has ever truly understood and accepted me. The only person who can handle me. “Who? Your brother and my sister? When have I ever given a shit about what they or anyone else thinks about us? Why the fuck would I start now?”

  “What are we doing?” Her dark eyes drop to the carpet, and my heart falls with them. “Tell me what this is.”

  The right side of my mouth lifts at the question she’s asked me over and over in the time we’ve known each other. Never once have I given her a straight answer, because never once have I had one to give. We are a conundrum of fucked up. A disappointment bomb. Ella and I are wrecked and damaged. But we own it.

  So, I say what I always say.

  “Tell me what this isn’t.”

  I quietly follow her downstairs to an empty living room and whispers coming from the kitchen where we last left everybody. They’re sitting around the table with cold coffee poured in untouched cups, speaking in hushed tones with troubled looks on their faces. Maby’s the first to notice they’re no longer alone, and she sits straight and forces a smile. The others fall into formation soon after.

  “Are we already back to this shit?” I ask, smirking at their predictability. How many times have Ella and I walked into this spectacle? “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Ella opens the refrigerator door and grabs a couple bottles of water, snubbing Emerson’s death gaze. Her pale face is indifferent, and she doesn’t utter a word before she opens the door leading to the garage, allowing it to slam closed behind her.

  “We’re concerned,” Maby speaks for everyone. She always does. My sister’s the smallest in our group, but she demands the most respect.

  “Don’t be,” I answer with a shrug. “It’s none of your fucking business, anyway.”

  “It’s one hundred percent our business, asshole,” Nicolette speaks up. Her hands are flat on the table, and her hazel eyes catch fire. “If you start this up again, it’s only a matter of time before you’re trying to murder each other. Don’t forget that we’re the ones who have to break it up.”

  I snatch an apple from the counter and smile. “Stay out of it, Nic.”

  Before I get the opportunity to follow Ella to the car, Emerson pushes his chair back and stands. He’s dressed himself since the earthquake, but there’s no sign of the comic relief he usually delivers when the mood’s tense. He’s nothing more than an older brother turned father figure, concerned for his little girl.

  “You guys are bad for each other, Teller. I won’t stand by and watch my sister go through that again,” he warns.

  Sinking my teeth into the red apple, bitter then sweet juice pools in my mouth and dribbles down my chin. I wipe it away on the top of my wrist before taking a second bite. Four pairs of eyes zero in on me so intensely that if animosity had a color it would be green-brown-hazel-hazel.

  “Oh, was I supposed to respond to that?” I ask Emerson. His jaw clenches. “Because I thought you were talking about something you have no fucking idea about again. Ella and I are fine. Back off.”

  “Teller,” Husher interjects. He turns in his chair to face me. “I’m not judging or telling you how to live your lives. It makes sense you’d turn to each other after the accident, but things got really intense right before Ella met Joe. The mindset you guys fall into isn’t healthy. The way you talk, move, and think, it’s almost like you become one person. It was just starting to get better.”

  I toss my half-eaten apple into the trash and leave, doing my best to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach that comes with knowing they’re right.

  “Told you so,” my co-disappointer chimes in. She leans against the driver’s side door with a smile curving her red lips.

  “Shut up and get in,” I say playfully, unlocking my black on black Range Rover.

  I reverse out of the garage and stop at the end of the driveway. With sunlight brightening the coppers and reds in Ella’s hair, she adjusts the seat forward to a comfortable position. She doesn’t know the last person to sit there was Kristi, whose legs were longer than hers, and I don’t tell her.

  I won’t ever tell her, because it won’t ever matter again.

  Avoiding the corner where the accident happened—where the stop sign is still down and my neighbor’s lawn is still destroyed—I open the moon roof to drench us in vitamin D and drive away, watching my house in the rearview mirror until I turn the corner and it disappears.

  “Where are we going?” my passenger asks. She sits back in the red leather seat as her hair swirls with the breeze.

  “Let’s find somewhere to sit before we head to Joe’s. I want to talk to you about something.”

  Ella and I end up at a small café not far from the lake. We ask for a table on the patio and order orange wheat beer and appetizers. Our chairs are unsteady, and we pick at our food, but fresh air gives me new perspective, and Ella has color in her cheeks. She sits on the opposite side from me with her legs crossed and questions on her lips. It kills me not to know what she’s thinking, but I’m content with the easy silence between us.

  I finish my beer and don’t order a second. She orders a third and finally asks, “What’s on your mind, troublemaker?”

  “When you were on the phone with Joe’s dad, I called the hospital,” I say, smiling at the waitress as she places a glass of water in front of me. “I got us some time off.”

  Ella’s cheeks burn red, and her long eyelashes lazily sweep across the tops of her cheekbones. “It’s funny how I didn’t think to do that myself. No one needed to talk to me?”

  I shake my head. “They know what’s up, Smella. The papers we need to sign will come in the mail.”

  “When do we go back, next week?”

  “Thirty days,” I reply. She stops before the glass touches her lips and sets it down in front of the breadsticks. “Don’t argue. We deserve the time.”

  “I don’t know, Tell. Won’t it be easier if we return to our normal routine?” She exhales heavily and sits back. The chair rocks from side to side. “We’re needed at the hospital, and I have bills.”

  “It’ll be easier if we’re together.” My heart beat, beat, beats inside my chest. “And I have an idea about your bills.”

  Ella rolls her eyes and laughs out loud. “An idea? Like when you would take care of my car payment and I had to threaten your life to get you to stop?”

  “Something like that,” I say, clearing my throat nervously.

  Her eyes search mine, and she replies, “No. You’re not paying my bills. I’ll move stuff around if I need to. I’ll figure something out, but I won’t take your money.”

  “Move in with me.” Words I’ve kept locked behind my lips bolt without abandon, shocking both Ella and me. But they feel like the truest things I’ve said in a while.

  “No. Hell no,” she responds immediately, leaning forward. “You cannot ask me to move in with you, Teller.”

  “Why not?” I say, meeting her head-on. Bravado trumps nervousness, and I love a challenge.

  “Are you being serious right now, because if you’re messing with me, that’s mean.” Frustration takes a drink from her beer, blinking over the top of the glass. Late afternoon light glistens from her nail polish and the rings on her fingers, and I can still smell the scent of vanilla in her hair.

  Excitement fills me all the way up, lessening leftover guilt that plagued me after the shame squad cornered me. There are a million and one reasons why Ella and I shouldn’t be within thirty feet of each other. God help us if history repeats itself—we won’t survive—but she’s my girl, and that’s a solid enough reason for me to follow this through.

  “I’m not messing with you,” I assure her.

  She presses her lips together and taps her fingertips on the table. “You can’t ask me to move in with
you because Kristi isn’t here. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to her.”

  Dodging the reality of our situation, I scrub my hands down my face and push the accident from my mind. If I try hard enough, it’s almost possible to forget the person I spent the last year of my life with is dead. Then I don’t have to feel guilty about not feeling that guilty, because I can pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t feel anything.

  Avoidance is bliss.

  “We didn’t finish our conversation the other night … before the crash,” I manage to say, rubbing my hand across the back of my neck.

  “When you told me Kristi was moving in with you? That conversation, Dr. Reddy?” Ella wipes her mouth on a white paper napkin and throws it on her plate. She looks away from me, straight-lipped and shaking her foot. “Can we go now?”

  “It wasn’t like that, Gabriella. I said she wanted to move in, not that I wanted her to.” I pat my pockets for my cigarettes. “I didn’t have a chance to say everything—”

  She scoffs, shaking her head. “Can we not do this right now? As flattered as I am to be your second choice, I need to go to my dead boyfriend’s house and pick up my things before his dad tosses them out on the street. If you can’t handle that, take me home so I can get my car.”

  I slip a smoke between my lips, about to light it when our waitress—a blonde twenty-something aspiring actress, who looks identical to every other twenty-something aspiring actress in LA—rushes over, blinking too fast and gaping like a fish.

  “You can’t smoke in a restaurant, sir. That hasn’t been allowed in California since, like, forever.” She sets the check in front of me and walks away, muttering something about cancer and premature wrinkles.

  With the unlit Marlboro between my teeth, I drop cash to the table and head for the exit. Ella swallows the last swig from her glass and follows me out, hooking her finger in my belt loop. Fifty feet from the café entrance, I light my cig and take a drag, filling my lungs with toxic chemicals that talk me off the ledge.

  I exhale a dense cloud of smoke over my head and flick ash to the sidewalk. A lady jogging with her black Great Dane runs between Ella and me, clipping me with her elbow and muttering, “You can’t smoke here, asshole.”

  “Maybe you should quit, Prick,” my partner in crime teases, turning her head to watch the woman pass.

  Draping my arm across her shoulders, I tuck Ella into my side and inhale another hit. “Maybe everyone needs to get off my dick.”

  She tosses her head back and laughs, lacing her unmarked fingers with my tattooed ones. We stay this way the entire walk back to my car, untroubled for a few priceless minutes. To be with her in this way feels like the most natural thing in the word.

  She’s your best friend, I remind myself. It didn’t work out for a reason.

  I’m going to hell, and Joe’s going to kick my ass the entire way there.

  As distance closes between us and Joe’s house, trauma tightens around our throats, choking the sense of sensibility we got into the car with. Ella shuts off, lifting her feet to the seat and circling her arms around her knees. She turns her body and stares out the window, watching the world pass. Tears run from her eyes and down her cheeks. When she smacks them away, I pretend not to notice, giving this moment to her.

  We’re all ticking time bombs.

  I pull onto the brick driveway in front of Joseph’s storybook home and kill the engine. Neither one of us moves. We don’t breathe or blink or exist outside of my Range Rover. Ella stares at the house, and I look at her, waiting for sorrow to tell me what to do.

  I would walk to the ends of the Earth for her. Die for her. All she has to do is ask.

  She asks for my company, not for my life. “Will you go in with me?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I reply, unbuckling my seatbelt.

  The porch light’s lit because Joe didn’t get the chance to come home and turn it off, and the sprinklers turn on, watering grass he’ll never mow. His girlfriend’s here, but he’ll never invite her in again. I walk around the front of my vehicle, kicking three editions of the LA Times out of my way, to the passenger side where big brown eyes brimming with sadness swing from the house to me.

  “It feels haunted,” she says. Ella’s eyelashes clump together with tears, and her chin quivers. She’s bitten her nails so low they’re bleeding.

  “That’s not the house,” I respond, undoing her grip around her knees and capturing her trembling hands in my own. “It’s us.”

  When she can’t steady her hands long enough to unlock the deadbolt, she passes me the key and takes a step back with no intention of going in first. The red painted door sticks to the frame but cracks open to a dark, humid room. When you’re in the medical field, coming home in the middle of the day after a twenty-four-hour shift, you need to trick your mind into thinking it’s dark. We all have blackout curtains over most of our windows.

  “Let me find the lamp,” I say when the pastel evening light following us inside isn’t enough to brighten the room.

  Ella shuts the door and stands in the entryway while I walk over to the coffee table beside the couch, remembering where it is from memory. Nearly knocking it over, I pull the chain and illuminate the family room with dim yellow-orange light. A split second passes before my brain catches up with my eyes, interpreting the scene we walked in on.

  I turn the light off.

  “Teller, turn it back on.”

  “No way,” I reply. My heart pounds hard enough to chatter my teeth.

  “Please, turn the lamp on,” she repeats in an even tone, void of the panic I feel. “Now.”

  There’s no delay between my eyes and intellect the second time around. I know exactly what I’m looking at when I see it. I know because Joe told me he was going to ask Ella to marry him a month ago. I knew, and this is part of what I was trying to tell her before the wreck.

  It was now or never.

  Now it’s just never.

  But I didn’t know it was going to be like this.

  On every flat surface from the bookshelves, the entertainment center, and the hardwood floors, sits bouquet after bouquet of red roses in murky glass vases. Some tipped over during the earthquake, and it’s a jungle in here. After three days in a stuffy house with no one to take care of them, the water on the bottom of the vases is cloudy, releasing a heavy mildew scent. Petals darkened around the edges and wilted, decaying from their normal shade to a burnt orange color. Flower buds droop over dry stems, and leaves fall to the floor.

  “What the hell is—” Her eyes find it when I do, and we both chew on our words.

  On the center of the coffee table is a small blue box holding a diamond ring.

  It shines in the low light, waving a future Ella won’t ever live in front of her face. My first instinct is to flip the fucking table over, because Joe was going to marry my person and because the look on her face tells me she might have wanted to, but Gabriella walks over and snaps the lid shut, enclosing the rock.

  “What did he think I was going to do with these roses?” she asks in a still-calm voice. Color has drained from her face again, and her expression shifts from regretful to indifferent. “It’s wasteful.”

  Ella doesn’t give the flowers or the ring any more consideration and walks to the back of the house to Joe’s room. While she’s gathering her things, I take it upon myself to make sure the windows and doors are locked, and I turn on a few more lights so it won’t look like the house is empty from outside. There’s a dirty plate in the kitchen sink and a photo of Ella stuck on the fridge by a magnet. The trash needs to be taken out, and his answering machine light blinks. Time’s stopped, and everything is so utterly normal, Joe could walk in the door and I would believe he never left.

  “Will you help me with the flowers? I don’t know when his dad plans on coming by, but I can’t leave it like this for him to find.” Ella places a small suitcase by the door and faces the room.

  The roses, dead or alive, look absurd next to
her.

  “You already packed your stuff?” I ask.

  She nods, looking to me with brittle determination. “I don’t have much here.”

  For the next half hour, we leave the front door open as evening turns to night, and cool air carries away the scent of decay. I toss the wilted flowers and dry leaves into the garbage can, and Ella washes the vases, towel drying and setting them on the kitchen table. Before we take off, she goes through the refrigerator, throwing away anything that can go bad, and I check the mail, dropping bills that won’t be paid and fast food coupons Joe will never use beside the house phone.

  Ella sweeps crushed leaves and stray rose petals from the floor, and I replace the trash bag, even though there won’t be anyone here to fill it again. We both avoid the ring, walking around it and looking everywhere but at the coffee table. While I push the couch back against the wall, she goes down the hallway, straightening picture frames.

  I wait by the front door with an unlit cigarette between my lips and my hands in my pockets, still contemplating flipping the table over when Ella reappears with a small fish tank between her palms. An orange goldfish swims in circles as its water sloshes back and forth, trickling over Ella’s fingers.

  “What the fuck is that?” I ask. My cigarette bobs up and down.

  “Joe’s pet,” she answers, holding it out for me to see. The fish keeps swimming, and more water dribbles to the floor. “It was in his office.”

  “That’s not a pet, Smella. Put it back where you found it.”

  “We can’t leave it here,” she says, tucking it under her arm. The ends of her hair dip into the tank. “Do you think there’s a goldfish rescue or something we can take it to?”

  My laugh echoes off the walls. “I doubt it.”

  “Then I have to take it home.” Without looking around one more time, she walks past me toward the car. “Leave the key after you lock the door.”

  “What about the ring?” I call out, sticking my cigarette behind my ear.

  “Leave it.” She slips into the front seat. Her eyes meet mine through glass and distance. “It’s not mine.”