by Julia Kent
Instead, I appreciated the beauty inside the car.
“I’ve never had to be that desperate, Tyler. I’ve never had to worry my sister would steal from me, or that my parents wouldn’t be there in a crisis.”
I held my breath. Not sure why.
“You called me Princess earlier and I don’t think that’s quite fair—”
“It wasn’t. I was being stupid—”
“But I’ve never had to scramble like you did. I’ve never had no one to turn to. I’m sorry your parents put you in that position.”
“Mom’s dead.”
She jolted, like I’d slapped her. “Your mom is dead? Oh, my God, I’m so, so sorry. No one should have their mother die when they’re so young. How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
I watched her throat spasm suddenly, like an invisible hand seized it and squeezed.
“You were so little,” she whispered.
Little. No one had called me little in a very, very long time. Not sure I ever really was little, actually. Not the way Maggie meant it.
“And your dad. Is he, um, in prison a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind if I ask for what?”
“Smaller stuff. Possession. Petty crimes. ‘This guy’ crimes.”
“‘This guy’?”
“Yeah. You know. ‘This guy showed up and left the drugs here,’ or ‘This guy showed up and took your wallet out of your purse,’ or—”
“Oh. Got it.”
“It’s always someone else’s fault.”
“I see.”
“Didn’t take me long to figure out who ‘this guy’ really was. He always told me exactly what he had done, only he expected me to believe it wasn’t him. And you had to play along, or it was even bigger trouble.”
“And your brother is following in his footsteps?”
If she’d kicked me in the head she couldn’t have hurt me more. Holy fuck. With one question she cut me in half.
A dull roar of a chant began in me, the words so clear. My fault. My fault my fault my fault. If I’d been a better brother, Johnny wouldn’t be a junkie. If I’d stayed, he wouldn’t be a junkie. If I’d gone to social services, he wouldn’t—
If if if. The world was fueled on ifs.
“I guess.”
She straightened up and looked at me. “Did I say the wrong thing? You look like you’re about to hit something.” Maggie said it without fear, though.
I realized my hands were gripping the cardboard box of crackers Lena had packed. I’d torn the box along one edge.
“Yeah. No. I mean...I don’t know.”
She held up her phone. “Do you want to call your brother?”
A blinding sense of paralysis made it hard to answer. My hand answered for me, taking the phone and dialing my own number. Instinct kicks in when nothing else is left.
Three rings later and voicemail picked up. My own recording greeted me.
“Voice mail,” I said tersely. Johnny either wasn’t answering, had sold the phone, or just – who knew? A wave of exhaustion hit me. I’d put Johnny on the back burner of my mind when the L.A. panic had hit.
I really couldn’t give him any mental real estate right now.
And yet I worried.
“Sorry.” She frowned. “You’re different from them.”
I whipped my head up, narrowing my eyes. Where was she going with this?
“I am?”
“You have something inside you that tries to be better.”
“I don’t think I’m better than them. I just don’t go looking for trouble. Or meth.”
“I don’t mean that you think you’re better than your Dad or brother. Not like that, Tyler. I meant that you strive for something. Your dad and your brother don’t have that in them. I mean, I don’t know them, but I know you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I want to know you.”
“You wanted to know me Biblically.”
“Now I want to be your friend.”
“I’m not a charity case.”
“I never said you were. I don’t make pity friends.”
“And I don’t do pity fucks.”
“Is that all I am to you?”
Ah, God. She did it again. My breastbone felt like it was twisting.
“No. I haven’t fucked you.”
She sighed, a deep, heavy sound of resignation that made me think I’d gone too far. And then:
“Why do you really think I wanted to sleep with you?”
I knew she was worrying this topic to death. Yammering about it. Talking until none of it made sense anymore and she could just put the issue to bed out of sheer exhaustion.
“I already told you. Now you tell me.”
“I already did.”
“Then tell me about the rape.”
Chapter Nine
Maggie
“Why do I need to tell you any thing? You said you already Googled me. That’s all you need to know. The basics are highly searchable if you know what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t want the basics. I want the full story.”
I began to shake inside at the same time that a resonant calm filled me. No man had asked this question. I’d dated here and there for the past couple of years. First dates. Only first dates. Because Googling a potential partner is about as commonplace as making sure you have condoms in your purse or wallet for a date, most of them found the info.
The really weak ones just bagged out on me. I always knew that was why. The others were a mix of codependent assholes who wanted to rescue me, insensitive bores who just wanted to rubberneck, and genuinely nice guys who just weren’t compatible with me.
The codependents and the rubberneckers had researched my story so much that they didn’t ask me to tell my story. They seemed to revel in what they already knew.
When you’re a media sensation for all the wrong reasons...
“What do you want to know?” I asked carefully, wondering what he was fishing for.
“Anything you want to tell me.”
Shock tended to get people to back off, so...
“I was one of the lucky ones. My rapists were stupid enough to do it in front of a ton of security cameras and to leave DNA evidence. Their friends tried to make up fake alibis but one of them actually dropped his wallet and the cops found it under me.”
He flinched.
“Filled with blood,” I added, instinctively reaching up to touch the scar on my face.
His eyes closed. I saw his throat ripple, but he stayed silent. Not so fun to hear the truth, is it, buddy?
Tyler sighed, then said:
“I want to know how you mentally withstood two hours of steady torture like that and came out of it as normal as you are.”
Huh?
“What?” Most people asked how I kept my wits about me, or whether I don’t walk alone at night any more, or asked if I was worried about getting pregnant, or whether I had permanent scars or...they don’t bring it up at all.
“The article I read said that. For two hours straight those pigs tortured you. The hardest part wasn’t what they did to your body, was it? It was the mind fuck. Not the body rape.”
“How do you—” The rest of my sentence was, know. How do you know? But I couldn’t finish.
He started to strum slowly in the guitar, then picked out little melodies, riffs I knew he played on bass for the band. “The mind is its own mindfuck. It’s brutal. You can handle getting the shit kicked out of you as long as you know what to do with your mind. If you can tuck it away and not let it drive you nuts. It’s hard enough to turn off the mind when you’re doing something simple, like walking on a roof or trying to fall asleep. It sabotages you.”
I think that was the longest stretch of words I’d ever heard him say. And he seemed to be improvising a bass line now as he talked. Piano melodies kept flashing through my head unbidden.
“But the body can only handle so much before
the mind kicks in and tries to destroy you.”
“Maybe that happened.”
“You wouldn’t be in the car with me if that were true.”
“You presume to know a lot about this.”
He got a brooding look on his face and went silent for well over a minute. And then:
“Let’s just say I know a lot about disconnecting your mind from your body when someone’s hurting you.”
“Explain your tattoos.”
That came out of nowhere, but my brain just blurted out the first thing I could handle. Processing what Tyler meant about knowing how to make the mind run away when the body was being hurt was too much. Too fast, like a wave of emotion you can’t ride out. You have to bail on the wave and come back to it later.
“What? Why?”
“They have a purpose, right? Plus, it’s late and I need you to keep me entertained with your scintillating conversational skills.”
He laughed. “You want me to explain them all?”
“We’ve got about nineteen more hours to go, so...”
“With nineteen hours we can cover my tattoos, your rape, and probably describe our lives back to being fetuses.”
“It’s a plan.”
He snorted and shook his head, downing the last slice of his pizza. I’d forgotten about mine and grabbed a piece. The second I bit into it my stomach growled. Thank God it just growled and didn’t gurgle or roar. I hadn’t eaten anything since the gummy bears, which finally seemed to have declared a truce with our digestive tracts.
“This one was for my mom,” he explained. “It was my first.” The shades of red in the rose were more nuanced than most tattoos I’d seen. All his tats looked like a pro had done them. Back at my university plenty of people had tattoos, but anyone heavily sleeved like Tyler tended to have a few very rugged looking ones done by friends.
He didn’t.
It dawned on me. “Your dad was a tattoo artist?”
He stiffened. “No. One of his friends.” The atmosphere in the car changed and I didn’t understand why, but I was determined to get him to talk. If I was going to pour my guts out about the rape, he’d have to tell his secrets, too.
“This one?” I stroked my finger along his forearm and he jolted, the touch like electricity between us. I wanted to do it again and again, an unexpected wave of lust rolling over me like a fog bank.
“That’s a mandala, stretched out and wrapped all along that arm.” The colors, muted mauves and yellows, brighter reds and greens, with subtle blues as highlights—were extraordinary.
“What about here?” I touched his other arm, and again a shock of arousal coursed through me like an injection.
He looked at me with a smoldering intensity that made heat pool between my legs.
“That is a labyrinth,” he said softly, his finger tracing where I’d just touched. He took my hand in his and extended my pointer finger, running it like a race car along the path, slow and deliberately. The motion was intensely erotic for no reason other than the shift between us.
It was like he was making my finger make love to his skin.
That’s the moment I realized I really did want to make love with him.
And not just to hit “reset” on my life.
Tyler
Holy fuck. Maggie was killing me, with her questions and her touch. The car became filled with this cloud of something charged, sexual and deep. When she touched me I hardened, my body responding like it had been waiting for a thousand years for a drink of water.
And now a lake had appeared.
The car swerved slightly and she jerked back her hand. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have grabbed your hand.”
“No, that’s fine. Thank you for explaining the tats. So there are really only three?”
I nodded. “You dye your hair when you get upset,” I said, pulling up the short sleeves of my shirt, displaying my colorful arms and showing as much of the wrapped labyrinth and mandala as I could. “I dye my skin.”
“When did you have them done?”
“The rose was when I was sixteen. Then the mandala a few years ago. I did some moving work for a guy and he couldn’t pay me, but his brother was an accomplished tattoo artist.”
“You bartered for tattoos?” For some reason she found that funny and started laughing.
“The only other thing he had to pay me was meth, and—”
“Gotcha.”
I just nodded. She did get it. She really did. I yawned, stretching as much as I could in the tight quarters of the front seat.
“You need anything?” I asked. She was eating the final slice of her pizza and just shook her head, eyes on the road.
“Nuh uh.”
“Coffee?”
She scrunched up her face in an adorable way and tilted her head, nodding. I handed her one of the thermoses Lena had packed, what...nearly ten hours ago?
Maggie swallowed her food, then took a long drink.
I yawned again.
“Take a nap,” she said gently.
“I need to help you stay awake.”
“You can sleep. I’m pretty wired.”
“I was, too, until just now, suddenly...” Again, I yawned, and curled up a little in the seat. It wasn’t so much a physical feeling as a mental one. This was a lot to process in such a short time. I was dog tired. Maggie must be, too.
“You know, we could pull over and I could try to learn stick.”
She laughed. “It took me three weeks and half a clutch to learn. It’s not something you just pick up in an hour or two.”
“But I’ll try.”
Maggie patted my shoulder as my eyelids drooped. “Sleep. The best thing you can do right now is to be well-rested for the concert.”
And within seconds I was out.
* * *
It was the kind of dream where you know you’re dreaming in your dream, and that seems perfectly normal. I was with Maggie and we were driving in a convertible, the wind whipping her rainbow hair behind her like a long scarf. Impossibly long, two or three car lengths on the wind, like a ribbon of multi-colored silk.
The sun was shining and the most perfect music I’d ever heard was playing on the radio. She laughed, the sound like a language I knew before I was the self I am now.
And then the car slammed into a giant boulder.
I jolted awake, my head banging against the car door. Maggie was screaming and the car was in the middle of the road at a strange, cock-eyed angle.
“What happened?” I shouted.
“Fucking armadillo!” It took me a few seconds to sit up and realize I’d really whacked my temple, but not from a full-blown impact. Maggie was shaking and twitching in her seat, livid. It was daylight, which meant I’d been asleep for a long time. I looked at the clock.
8:42 a.m.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “I slept forever.”
“Fucking armadillo!” Maggie turned the key. The car just ground down, the ignition not firing.
I quickly looked around. We were in the desert. In the middle of no-fucking-where. I couldn’t see any cars, but I could see for what might have been miles in the early morning light.
I rubbed my eyes and took a quick regrouping. Maggie didn’t look injured. All I had was a head bump. But the next car flying along this road at eighty-five miles per hour was going to hit us.
“Stay there,” I said, opening the door and walking to the front of the car.
Whoa. Damage. The car was at a diagonal and from the looks of it, I assumed she’d swerved to avoid the “fucking armadillo” and hit...something. There was a long streak of red paint on the guardrail. That matched up with the damage I saw on the car.
“What are you doing, Tyler?”
“Giving the armadillo mouth to mouth.” I could see it. She hadn’t missed it. The thing looked like a potato bug wearing armor, turned upside down and motionless.
“That’s not funny!”
“Put
the car in neutral.”
“What?”
“We need to push the car out of the way. Someone’s gonna hit us and we don’t need this day to get any worse.”
“Fucking armadillo,” she muttered. “Did I really kill it?” Her eyes were so bleak as they met mine that I almost lied, but she’d see the truth soon enough.
“Yes.”
And then the waterworks began.
Crying women are the worst. So far, through all the mess we’d been through in under twenty-four hours, Maggie hadn’t cried. Not once. And now she was bawling over a dead armor-plated rodent.
Fucking armadillo.
“Maggie! Maggie!” I called out. “Put it in neutral. I’ll push it back to the side of the road.”
She ignored me and just sobbed.
I sighed and walked back to the driver’s side. I tapped on the window. She lowered it.
“I’m sorry you killed the armadillo.”
“That’s n-n-n-o-t helping!”
What the fuck was I supposed to say?
“We need to move the car. We don’t want to make this situation worse.”
“It c-c-c-an-n get worse?” Her sobs dissolved into a weird high-pitched laughter combined with snot.
“If a semi takes out the car, yes.”
She moved the gear shift into neutral and started to get out of the car.
“No. You stay and steer.”
She listened. Small miracle.
It took a lot of muscle, and the next day my quads would be screaming, but we got the car off the road faster than I thought we could. Once we were out of danger I went to the opened window and checked out Maggie.
She was muttering the words “fucking armadillo” over and over, crying.
Oh, boy.
“Hey, let’s call someone.”
“Who? The armadillo undertaker?”
“I was thinking more like a tow truck.”
She reached into the console for her phone and stared at it in disbelief. “No bars! No fucking bars!”
I gently took the phone from her to confirm and—yep. No bars.
Another armadillo slowly made its way across the road, pausing to sniff the carcass. Maggie cried even harder, words coming out of her in a disjointed kind of babble.
“I’ve never killed anything in my life and I didn’t see the armadillo and I was going eighty-five and trying to get you to L.A. and I follow all the rules and now the armadillo’s wife is an armadillo widow because I was too stupid to tell Charlotte and Darla no and—”
