Precise (Pulling Me Under)

by Rebecca Berto

  PRECISE

  Rebecca Berto

  Copyright © 2012 Rebecca Berto

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  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN (eBook): 978-0-9874566-0-1

  Cover art © Silviya Yordanova (“Morteque”)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  A Note to the Reader

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Pulling Me Under: A Novel (Book 2)

  I am kind and beautiful. I have a soul.

  It’s better to be known for what I am not. Isn’t that how the saying goes?

  Chapter One

  Paul pins me on our bed with his knees. He knows I can’t escape him like this. As I look up at his chest, he launches his fingers at my stomach.

  Sickness stirs inside me. I’m accustomed to the feeling twisting my insides out, the bitter taste at the back of my mouth. I swallow repeatedly, still squirming, but it’s helpless. I’ll vomit, right here, all over us.

  When Paul and I mess around, I’m like we were at sixteen. I laugh from the pit of my belly. And I like sharing part of me with my husband. But I’m going to ruin this moment. I hate myself, like my mom hates me, for this.

  Squirming under him, the sunset pierces my eyes, just at the right time of the day. I can’t move up because Paul’s knees are clenched beside my legs. I shut my eyes and shoot a look to our door, which might as well be locked now with how I’m trapped.

  He smiles his banana-like grin, so big that at times like this I just want to rip it off his mouth. He’s proud—he thinks he has me tickled to the point of torture.

  “Pauly,” I mumble, curling my legs half to the side, my shoulders turned in.

  He notices this reaction isn’t normal. Usually, when he traps me like this and pleasures from my pained reaction I’d call him names, but I wouldn’t have a pale face, a sour expression or look this desperate for escape. I’m sure that’s exactly what I look like.

  “Kates?” he asks, crawling backward down the bed.

  I sit up—mistake.

  Paul back steps to the carpet, hands frozen on either side of him. His eyes dart around the room. While another hit prematurely makes me heave, Paul searches.

  On my desk are the piles of sketches and designs still waiting to be filed away from when I was in school four years earlier. There are trophies surrounding that pile. Ones I won at inter-school competitions where Dad drove an hour to watch me walk to the stage and grab my trophy while Mom always happened to have too big a day at work or her allergies had flared up again, rendering her bedridden. There isn’t much else to my room besides those. I guess it makes me useless because I was only ever good at drawing and I don’t do that anymore.

  After another moment, which has only been a couple of seconds despite my drawn-out panic, Paul launches at my cowboy hat hiding under a corner chair and thrusts it under my face.

  I dart to the bathroom with the hat sticking under my chin to catch the vomit.

  Mom’s afternoon tea sandwiches? They come up in time to thoroughly coat the sink in the bathroom.

  Why did I have to throw up? If Mom sees … I should not throw up. It’s disgusting, but more than that, it shows that I don’t respect the trouble Mom’s gone to for me, Dad and Paul.

  Maybe it was my fault for playing with Paul. If Mom knew I’d been sick all this time and I still chose to risk ruining her room—not Paul’s and my room, but hers—she’d have me pay for dry cleaning to fix up the carpet and grout in the tiles if I’d marked either even remotely.

  Ducking under the sink, I search below. My sickness doesn’t seem to have ruined anything. I breathe, relaxing, but my breath shudders as a reminder to harden myself in case Mom comes in.

  A few days ago, I wasn’t as lucky. I told Mom I was feeling off after being sick but she reminded me of how much pain it’d cause her knees to bend, and that her wrist was sore and any self-respecting daughter would help their Mom. That the least I could do was wash, scrub, rewash and rescrub the counters after my mess. The chemicals set off my stomach. I’d tried to hold it in, but she shoved the sponge and bucket away, forcing me to throw up in my hands.

  At least my best friend, Liam, didn’t hate me. In fact, he cleaned it all up last night when I visited and he forced me to rest, claiming he’d been cleaning up after me since we were kids anyway.

  Hearing a noise behind me, I say, “Pauly?”

  “It’s me, Katie,” Mom confirms. She’s never called me by my nickname ‘Kates’ as everyone else does. I guess it’s too personal for her. Mom’s arms are shoved into each other, the look on her face much the same.

  I’d like her to say it’s okay, and ask me if I need some water or to sit down. With my energy spent, it’s hard not to care that my mom seeing me like this causes her more frustration at my hopelessness than anything else.

  She grumbles through closed lips. That’s how much I anger her. I’m not even worth a full-on noise of frustration.

  I’d like to say Mom storms up to me, but in those stilettos she wears around the house, it’s an unmistakeable strut. At a four-foot radius marker, she hits the invisible wall and screws up her face.

  “You look horrible, Katie. You’re just horrible,” Mom says, and struts off, mumbling something about ‘regretting’.

  “Hey,” Paul says, when he joins me.

  He kisses my forehead. Paul bends down and gazes at me with a soft look. So I flinch. Paul’s more likely to blowfish on my lips—which is a lovely hot mouthful of air blown into my mouth disguised as a kiss—than anything romantic.

  “Shh, baby.”

  Paul pulls me to his chest, melting me to him by tucking the top of my head under his with his chin. This isn’t weird of him. I practice repeating that. It doesn’t take long to seep into my thoughts because I need him. Mom’s face reappears like a floating buoy refusing to stay underwater. Her look is plastered with the disgust that only I’m capable of producing in her. It’s a scowl that would make someone think she was watching a movie where a child was abused.

  But, no. It’s just what I do to her.

  Here, Paul smells like a fresh breeze, a hint of fragrance in a stale room. I’m nuzzling his neck without realizing it, drinking in his scent. Or maybe him. All of him.

  “You’re gorgeous, ‘kay. It’s not you.” Paul’s lips brush my forehead lightly, or maybe it’s my imagination. I am carefree in his arms.

  After a minute or so, Paul stiffens and begins prying me off him. “Okay, Katie,”

  I know it’s bad. When Paul calls me Katie, it’s bad. Katherine? I run.

  He says, “I’ll leave you alone,” and shuts the bathroom door, echoing my solitude in this little room.

  What!? I didn’t marry him so he could walk out on me when it got hard. He’s put up with Mom accidentally cutting up his clothes because she thought my hooded sweater was h
is, and has been the physical barrier between Mom’s thrashing hands and me backed-up in a corner.

  Will he hate me like Mom does for embarrassing her? What if I never stop throwing up, huh? What if I have a bug that has me bedridden for weeks? Will he stay by my side then?

  I mutter to myself how silly I’m being. Paul’s the type to run to the store to buy me painkillers, a hot water bottle, a soft toy and movies to watch while I’m resting for days and puking my insides out. Paul would never leave unless I needed time to think.

  A realization hits me. I’m pregnant.

  #

  “Where are you going, Katie?” Mom calls, putting on her hot pink rubber gloves.

  Crap. I shut my eyes. “Just to the store.”

  “Sit,” she says, draping the gloves over the faucet.

  “Were you asking?”

  “Did it sound like I was asking?” She clenches her teeth, and fixes her hair, which won’t move anyway because it’s hairsprayed in place. “Yes. So sit.”

  “What’s been up the last few weeks? You seem …” I leave out ‘manic’ or ‘extra moody’. They would be the wrong words to tell a person with my Mom’s issues.

  She walks to the kettle, the water steaming and bubbling down as she pours it over the tea bags in our cups. “You, I believe. Let’s talk.”

  “I’m sorry about this morning.”

  And I am. The feeling has been pulling me down, like hands of the undead scratching at my calves to consume me. No matter that she’s hated me for my entire twenty-two years, I still want.

  I want my mom to love me.

  “What do you want me to say? I tell you to look after this house since I’m doing you a favor and you spit in my face. If you know you’re sick, sit by a bucket and don’t move. How stupid can you be?”

  “Do you want me to get your anti-depressants? They might help—”

  “You sound like a sixteen-year-old again,” she replies.

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “Still speaking over me,” she says, meeting my eyes and scoffing. “You are still that worthless little girl.”

  “Please, Mom,” I begin, but stop. I’m speaking out of turn again. Mom’s done when she tells you she’s done. Right now, when I’m worried she hasn’t been taking her anti-depressants, I should be tucking in my chin and trying my best to keep her happy. It works—sometimes.

  “This is about you and your tiresome mistakes,” Mom says, balancing our teacups. She places one in front of me, snatching up a nearby coaster and quickly placing it under my teacup. She does the same with hers. Wouldn’t want to ruin the tablecloth.

  Mom looks away. “Just—wait here a minute, will you.”

  It’s not a question. With my mom, questions are statements, ninety percent of the time. She emerges from the other room with her hand behind her.

  “Now don’t get your panties in a bunch,” she says, a smile playing at her lips that tells me otherwise, “but I had a feeling, so …”

  Mom takes a breath and produces a box. A pink box. With a picture of an electronic stick on it. And the words ‘two lines’, ‘proven results’ and ‘test’.

  “Just wait!” Mom calls when I scrape the chair legs against the tiles to leave.

  She’s fast. How did she even pre-empt this moment and buy a pregnancy test?

  “Are you stalking my life or habits or something?” I hold up a hand in surrender. “I’m not pregnant, so you can count your lucky stars you won’t be getting a grandchild any time soon.”

  She sighs. Like her chest deflates so fast someone must have popped her with a pin. “First I had to get Paul and you married to stop talk about you giving yourself up to your boyfriend so young. Do you know what Aunty used to say for years? Bet not. You don’t care about my feelings. Now you try to kick me again by getting pregnant? How will you look after a baby?”

  Mom glazes her eyes over my face, my shoulders, my body. It seems as though I should try to be a smaller person. That way she’d feel better.

  “You need to wait until you are worthy of having a child of your own.”

  She pats her hair down, which is rock hard. Her action is pointless, but she’s worried about appearances as usual. “And someone like you who’s responsible for killing my babies—your own siblings—is not worthy.”

  Mom is the definition of a hypocrite. After Paul and I graduated from school, I refused to spend that extra time with Mom. That’s what I told Paul, anyway. What I didn’t say at the time was that I hated sleeping alone, knowing she could come in during the night and I’d have no defense.

  She gave us an ultimatum some time later that we get married, paid for by her and Dad, and stop disgracing her or we were out.

  With Paul’s parents overseas for his dad’s job at the time, we didn’t have much of a choice about moving out. Since Paul had been proposing to me since our first date, and seriously meaning it in that last year, it was a hard offer to refuse.

  Marriage? Apparently I’m allowed to do that. But who’s she to say when I can have a child?

  “Do I wait to start popping out babies when menopause hits?” I say.

  The words slap my cheeks like discipline to a naughty child.

  The tension shreds our surroundings away. It’s my mom and I facing off in the dining room. She leaks hurt as she puffs air through her clenched jaw. Her powdered eyes are narrowed, showing every bit of her sixty-two years. My body feels tiny, my mind goes back to when I was a teenager. I had just met Paul as a cute boy at school, and stood in this spot when Mom walloped me across my cheek for being a “dirty slut” for kissing him.

  Today, I’m worn. I’m an adult, and as long as Mom’s been playing these games, proving her power all her life, I’m too old for this. The moment weighs down on me, threatening to unstitch my seams and expose me to the world.

  I don’t have a witty remark, not even a wistful look. I turn and walk to my bedroom. When I’m crouched on the bed, I make exaggerated crying motions like dropping my jaw and attempting to bawl out my soul, even wiping at my cheeks, but no tears come.

  I resolve that’s fine. I pick up my bag and leave because Paul is somewhere else too. Me and him, we fit so well because I don’t bug him about sentimental, emotional issues, and he doesn’t bug me. We get that about each other. He knows I need to be alone.

  I take my beat up Honda for a drive until I find myself at the local mall with a supermarket and a few select boutique stores.

  As I throw my keys in my bag, it’s there. The test.

  Mom must have thrown it in my bag when I went to my room.

  In my hands, the box is nothing. I could crush it. I could crush this box and show her. I lean into it and scream wordlessly. My grip is taut. Instead of crushing, I find myself spinning it around, to the underside, flipping the top open and peering in.

  When I tell my brain to tell my hands to crush it for real? This is the moment I reckon I’ll remember when I couldn’t crush the pregnancy test because I had to know. Did I calculate my infertile periods wrong this month? Or, maybe this is a stomach bug.

  I’ve been strict on when Paul and I can and can’t do it. We both hate the feel of a condom and since we’re married, it seemed fine to steer clear of my fertile week of the month as protection.

  Maybe not.

  Do the middle-aged ladies on their mid-week grocery run know what I’m doing? Will people assume I must be pregnant to walk down the smelly hall to the toilets?

  I do. I feel like a walking shame. In school the only class I got A’s in was Graphic Design. That’s the only time Mom would praise anything good I did and it was only when my badge design was chosen for my school’s 100th year anniversary to replace the school’s original for that whole year. I assume she would have received a bad rep if she didn’t brag about that to her girlfriends. I know for a fact she only raved about it for that very reason because appearances matter, not me. Never me.

  Mom’s never congratulated me for that, ever. She’s on
ly mentioned how lucky it was I happened to inherit a good gene from her, even if she’s never picked up a pencil and paper to sketch in her life.

  Now I’m married, living in a room at my parents’ house because Paul and I are saving for a place, and I’m still hurting Mom: she only stops her medication when she’s angry at me. That’s when she has had it with life.

  My mom may be a bitch but if a girl’s own mother doesn’t support her pregnancy, there has to be some reason for that.

  When I walk into the mall, the walls are yellowing with God-knows-what seeping through the corners from the roof. Further down, there’s the woman on the toilet-door sign that has the sides of her skirt blacked out by some street kid’s artistry, so from afar she seems like a man. I hold my breath and walk in. I have to gasp, rapidly, when I enter the cubicle.

  The walls are touching my skin and the ceiling is four-feet high. I stoop to fit, but my head doesn’t touch the ceiling somehow. Looking down, I sketch the rust lining the bowl in my head, outlining the edges curling over the bowl, the scented air freshener hung on the inside and the dirty cream color which must have once been white.

  Just do it, Katie.

  I hold the stick under me, thinking of gushing waterfalls, river streams and splashing faucets. Eventually, picturing Paul telling me he’ll leave me alone is what does the trick.

  At first I count the seconds: one, two, three. Then I continue counting seconds, only stopping at 300, because I can never be too sure if two minutes means two minutes and I sure as hell ain’t looking down at this thing twice.

  I continue on to 309, in case. As I say 310 two lines—two black, no-way-to-mistake them lines—stare back at me.

  Chapter Two

  A week has passed since my pregnancy scare. ‘It’ is no longer a scare. Not after my doctor did a blood test and came back saying I’m absolutely pregnant.

  As I wait at the plastic tables outside McDonald’s for Liam, that’s all I can think about. Waiting to know was the kind of hellish feeling that seeped into my bones and would crush me into a crumpled ball when I ran into the wrong triggers.