Book Read Free

Us Kids Know

Page 22

by JJ Strong


  And helping Nana with the mask was a simple enough, routine action. One day I went with her to the doctor, who told us that people her age with lung issues—lifetime smokers, especially—might suffer sleep apnea to the point where they stop breathing and their bodies don’t start up again in time. Of course I wasn’t home every time Nana fell asleep, but for the times I was, I slipped the mask on her to be safe. I’d done it so many times now it was like a reflex.

  And Brielle saw it.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said, and my breath tripped when I said it.

  Little by little, for reasons I couldn’t explain, everything in me was suddenly going soft. All the walls were coming down. I tried my best to hide it, but Brielle must have noticed it. She scooched across the couch and leaned her head on my shoulder.

  “I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” I told her.

  “Seems like you two are doing okay.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about Nana anymore. It wasn’t until Brielle said what she said that I was forced to identify the source of the feeling. The thing I’d been ignoring all week.

  “With Amir, I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “So stupid,” I said. “So, so stupid.”

  We listened to the rain. At some point I sighed, and she tilted her head to kiss my neck. Her hair was wet on my shoulder. I noticed her shirt and pants were still soaked through, and I told her so, and right away she stood and shimmied out of them. I put my head against the cushion and closed my eyes to her unbuckling my belt. She jimmied my legs out of the jeans, and then she was bare-bottomed and on top of me, adjusting me into her, wincing at first, then sighing. It never occurred to us that I still wore my shirt or that she still wore her raincoat.

  She shifted rhythmically in my lap, and the weirdest thing happened. Something I didn’t think could happen to me in a thousand years. I’d had sex all of eleven times in my life, with two different girls, including Brielle. The other one was this girl Carmen who I dated for a little junior year, and every time we did it—every single damn time—it lasted maybe ten seconds. Maybe. And the first time with Brielle, same thing. But now, in this moment with Brielle, it seemed like it might go on forever. I could hardly even feel it.

  The problem was that I started thinking. Partly about Nana. And about Amir, and Ray. But also about her. What was in her head right now? Why, after all I’d done, was she on top of me like this? Was she enjoying it? And what was her exit plan? I wasn’t wearing a condom. Was she even thinking about that? Did she really like me? And if so, for Christ’s sake, why? Wasn’t Brielle O’Dell—the girl I’d been obsessed with all those months leading up to the moment I leaped in front of her car—wasn’t she smarter than this? Wouldn’t she be better off without me?

  She leaned over and breathed into my neck. I stared at the paused video game on the television, then closed my eyes and tried to get back into it, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  She put two hands on my shoulders and looked at me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This is not . . . okay,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t . . .” I couldn’t explain whatever realization I’d just had. At least not to her. Not yet.

  “Am I . . . does it feel good?” she said.

  “It’s not that.”

  “Well, then what?”

  “I don’t know, Brielle. It just doesn’t feel right.”

  She shoved off me. Stood and pulled her pants up.

  I did the same.

  “Whatever.” She pushed wet hair from her face. “I felt bad for you, Cullen. It’s not like I’m . . .”

  She waved away the rest of the thought. The part she’d said stung, though. Never imagined myself the beneficiary of a pity-fuck. Still, I wasn’t sure I entirely believed her. There was something else simmering beneath her desire to have sex with me in that moment. Something bad inside her. Something I wanted her to see for herself. But how to show it to her?

  A wind gust sent rain against the tiny ground-level window near the basement ceiling. “Listen,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Is that a waterbed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God.”

  As in Oh my God, how pathetic you think that’s cool. As in Oh my God, I can’t believe I fell for the shtick of a boy who thinks a waterbed is cool. She laughed, rolling her eyes. She was doing her best impression of those girls she used to worship so much, and I couldn’t stand it.

  I glared at her. There was a long, uncertain pause before she continued.

  “Look, I just need a favor,” she said. “And then I’ll go.”

  “What is it?”

  “For Ray. I think he’s going to turn himself in. For Amir.”

  “I don’t think he’d do something like that. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He will,” she explained. “I know he will. I said I think, but I meant I know.”

  “How?”

  “I just know.”

  She was shivering again, and her hands were jittery.

  “Okay,” I told her.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, I’ll think of something.”

  “He can’t turn himself in. You can’t let him do that.”

  “I know.”

  “You owe him that, at least.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll help him. I promise.”

  She nodded and did the quick breathing-in thing again. Like someone had pushed a fistful of air down her throat when she least suspected it.

  “You can go out the hatch, if you want.” I unlocked and tossed open the cellar doors. Freezing rain slammed into the room.

  At the top of the stairs, standing outside in that same frigid pose as she had on the front stoop, she said, “Your front yard is still a mess.”

  “I know.”

  “You should fix it.”

  “Yeah.”

  She gazed up into the rain, blinking against it. She looked at me again for an extra moment, and then she threw her hood on and splashed away.

  I stood there with the door open, staring at the space where she had just been, letting the rain dump on me.

  Brielle

  IT WAS EASY TO KNOW that Ray was going to seek out some form of official, irreversible punishment for the subway accident. There weren’t any sleuthed-out clues. No diary entries or thread of Internet searches. No overheard phone calls. You only had to know Ray.

  I was grounded when I went to see Cullen about it, and so I had to sneak out. Again.

  I splashed through the woods in an old pair of Mom’s galoshes, my determination to be angry and unyielding only growing stronger when I saw on the lawn the muddy, tire-dug trenches that had delivered me into Cullen’s life, and the stoop that was still cracked and crumbling where Meghan’s car had smashed into it. And, of course, next to the stoop, standing there in her little shell overseeing the wreckage, the Blessed Mother Virgin Mary.

  Later, though, when Cullen was sitting on the couch in his basement-turned-bedroom, all alone with his grief, so handsome and so sad, I didn’t care what else had happened. I wanted to be with him. Needed to be.

  Even after I left—after the sex went all wrong, and after we tried to make each other feel worse than the other one felt about it—I still wanted to be with him. Could not stop thinking about him. It was the opposite of how people sometimes say, “I’m in love with the idea of him.” I hated the idea of Cullen Hickson. I hated what he’d done to Ray and Amir and how he’d no doubt thought he was doing the right thing all along. But I was irreconcilably enraptured with Cullen Hickson the tangible piece of matter. With his scent and his sound and his shoulders and his filthy, unwashed clothes and how his eyes got quiet and sad when he didn’t think you were looking at him. These real-life pieces
of him made me believe he was the only thing that could keep me from floating away.

  And I was so pissed at myself for believing that.

  * * *

  Dad was waiting for me when I returned. I emerged from the woods and climbed over the fence to find him at the back door, looking out at the yard. Lincoln did circles on the welcome mat outside, stopping intermittently to scratch at the door. But Dad didn’t open it. He waited for me to slog across the swampy grass.

  Apparently, we were overdue for a talk. He allowed me a brief interlude to dry off and change clothes—five minutes that I stretched into thirty, during which I brushed the memory of Cullen’s breath from my mouth, showered, shaved my legs, dried myself off, retreated to my room, and lay naked on my bed. While I lay there, not wanting to move at all, let alone move downstairs where Dad waited, I heard him step into his and Mom’s bedroom next to mine. A familiar scene played out. I couldn’t hear many of Dad’s words, but I could hear well enough to sense the tone in his voice—earnestness, pleading, desperation. I wanted to be on Dad’s side—wanted to root for him—but somehow I couldn’t do it. It made me so mad listening to him beg like that.

  A few months ago, around when school started, I found a newspaper clipping on the dining room table, which, due to its prolonged lack of use, had long ago been unofficially converted into Dad’s desk. The clipping was from September, when everyone was talking about the one-year anniversary of the attacks. The headline was something like “Never Forget? Some Wish They Could.” It told the story of people suffering from the trauma of having survived or been first responders during the attacks, and there were a number of quotes from Dad, whom the writer called “a New Jersey–based psychiatrist who has been commuting to Manhattan once a week for the last year to volunteer his time to first responders.”

  I admit that at the time I was proud to see him mentioned like this, but since then I couldn’t stop wondering why, even after cutting out the article and saving it for himself, he’d never shown it to the rest of us.

  “Karen, please!” came the shouting from the room next door. “We need you.”

  And I thought now maybe this is why he never showed us. Because he can help all these total strangers, but he can’t even get his own wife to have a cup of coffee with her daughter. It was pathetic, really, when you thought about it.

  When I heard Dad walk, defeated, back downstairs, I rose from the bed. I dressed in black jeans and an old, too-small, faded purple hoodie, pulled my hair back as tightly as I could possibly pull it, gathering it in a wet bun, stared at myself in the mirror for what felt like forever, tried to stop being angry, tried to decide if I was pretty, or if I even wanted to be pretty, cried, tried to stop crying, wiped my tears, rubbed my swollen eyes, applied the darkest shade of lipstick I owned so that my mouth looked like a plum-colored bruise, and then finally trekked downstairs, where Dad was waiting for me at the kitchen table with two cups of coffee.

  Dad didn’t know we’d been with Amir when he died. A week earlier, about our Christmas Day disappearance, I’d claimed that Ray and I had been invited to Katie’s ski lodge in the Poconos. I explained that Katie’s parents had flown to the Caribbean for the weekend but that Katie had to stay home for track practice—the field hockey season having ended weeks ago. She was throwing a secret bash up at the lodge, I told him. And I knew he wouldn’t have let us go. So we had to sneak out.

  It seemed like a decently believable tale, filled with enough random details and supported by a rebellious backdrop that made it seem more like a confession than an excuse. But it didn’t matter whether Dad believed it or not. All that mattered, from his perspective, was that we had left. And all that mattered now was that I was grounded and that, again, I had left.

  He pushed a cup of coffee across the table to me. I stared at it a moment. For all my recent ventures into the forbidden fruits of adulthood, I’d never had a proper cup of coffee. Dad nodded at me, acknowledging it was permitted. A gesture of respect, I thought. We’re both adults here, this offering of a hot beverage seemed to communicate.

  “It was hot,” Dad said, nodding at my mug.

  I sipped. “Tastes fine.”

  It didn’t taste fine—too cold and too bitter—but the caffeine would maybe help me stay alert during the upcoming lecture, so I gulped it down while Dad spoke.

  He talked about responsibility. About accountability. Trust. Love. He tried to remain calm at first, but soon his composure cracked and broke away. We’d pushed him to his limit—that much was obvious. He moved between flinging his arms around and shouting up at the ceiling at some points and, at other points, leaning over and earnestly searching my eyes for any measure of enlightenment, so desperate to have me see things the way he saw them.

  The words made sense, though the whole time I was thinking only about what I’d just heard upstairs. I hardly looked at him and remained silent, waiting for the lecture to conclude, drinking the terrible coffee.

  At some point Dad said, “Mom and I are very worried about you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Where is Mom?”

  He tilted his head and glanced once at his coffee and then back at me, running a finger over his eyebrow—a nervous gesture I was dismayed to know Ray had inherited.

  “She’s . . .” The finger rubbed and rubbed at the eyebrow. He couldn’t say.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what’s wrong with her, Dad?”

  “Bri . . .”

  “She’s depressed?”

  He gave me that earnest look again, like he wanted to reach a hand out to me but couldn’t, for whatever reason, do it. He took a deep breath, seeming to steel himself against the turmoil triggered by saying this one word: “Yes,” he said.

  “Why haven’t we talked about it?” I said. “Isn’t talking about stuff like this, like, your whole thing?”

  He sighed. I drank my gross coffee. His eyes darted back and forth, like he was wrestling with what to say and what not to say.

  “I’m sixteen, Dad,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Was she ever happy?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “Before me and Ray?”

  “Yes, then. But also with you guys.”

  He looked at the window, and to my surprise, he smiled briefly. Just the slightest bit. I’m not even sure if he knew it happened. Only a flash, though—gone as quickly and mysteriously as it had come—and then he turned somber again.

  “She was happy,” he said. “You know how people say to kids, If you keep making that face, it’ll stay that way?”

  I nodded.

  “When a person has a depressive episode—that’s what it’s called, like those months after she lost the baby, you remember that, I’m sure . . .”

  I nodded again, remembering the dismal days I had spent so much energy trying not to remember.

  “After one, they’re twice as likely to have another one. And after the second one, even more likely. The more you have, the more they come.”

  “So every time she goes into one . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a downward spiral like that? Forever?”

  “No. You can’t think that way.”

  “Well, then can’t you fix her? It’s your job!”

  “We’ve tried, we . . .” he said, then paused, resetting and finally—if only for a moment—letting go of his insistence that everything was going to be okay. “It sounds strange, but with things like this, I think sometimes the more you care about someone . . . the harder it is to help them.”

  Now it was my turn to stare out the window, trying to put all this together.

  “But you’re right,” he said. “It can feel like a downward spiral. And it’s worth saying . . . this is something, I’m
sure you’ve noticed, I’ve had a hard time admitting to myself, even. But you’re old enough now . . . I mean, you’ve been old enough for quite some time, and I regret not doing this sooner . . .”

  He went silent. Outside, the wind bent the trees in the woods.

  “What?” I said.

  Dad shook his head, hesitating, stalling. Because if he said it out loud, to me, that would mean he too would have to accept it as truth.

  “Dad, what?”

  “It’s not like she’s going to wake up a different person one day, Beaker. There’ll be good days. I do believe that. But . . . Mom’s sick. In one way or another she always will be.”

  I stood and stared into the far corner of the room. My chest went tight. I could feel him watching me. I wanted so badly to stop myself from crying, but I couldn’t do it. I felt childish. The tears came. Dad rose and stepped forward, but I moved away from him, shaking my head, begging him, please, don’t touch me, not right now, just leave me alone. I searched for the worst thing I could possibly say to him, and I found it.

  “Just because you’re terrible at your job doesn’t mean Mom can’t get better. And what about Ray? Is he a lost cause too?”

  He stepped back and looked like he felt sorry for me. “That’s not fair,” he said. “Look, we’ll talk tonight. How’s that? All four of us.”

  I shrugged and rolled my eyes. Because that was always the plan, wasn’t it? Forcing Mom to talk about things she didn’t want to talk about, as if that would make any difference at all except to make her pull even further away.

  “Fair?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  He sat back down and worked the finger over his eyebrow like he meant to erase it. He told me I could go. Reminded me I was still grounded until further notice, but we’d talk more tonight. All of us.

  I retreated upstairs to lie down, but with the caffeine buzzing in me I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to put music on, but I didn’t know what to play. All of the music I owned had been purchased because someone else—someone I thought was cool, or popular, or pretty—liked it: Shakira, Britney Spears, John Mayer, Phish. I didn’t even know what kind of music I liked. It might seem like a simple enough thought, but in that moment the realization was terrifying to me. I could make fun of Scarlett for singing along to NSYNC all I wanted, but at least she knew herself well enough to enjoy something on her own terms.

 

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