Nobody but Us

by Kristin Halbrook

  Why am I telling her this? Why’s she looking at me like she wants to know? She don’t wanna know this. But my mouth keeps moving, like I ain’t master of it no more.

  “I lived with them for a year, almost. Ate a lot of weird casseroles, but that was all right. Mr. Tucker always wanted me to call him Tom, like we could be buds. And we were, kinda. He did computer stuff from home, showed me how to take apart a tower and put it back together again. Tried to teach me computer languages but gave up on that pretty quick. Nerdy kind of guy, but cool. I thought … I thought maybe, for once, life had something good waiting for me, you know?”

  I feel her fingers tracing the outside of my ear. It puts me in a trance and I can’t stop talking.

  “Anyway, it was a Saturday in October and Tom had gone and filled the minivan with wood for the stove. It was stacked all over in the car, in the way of the windows, everything. He’d parked it in the driveway, ’cause he had to unload it to the side of the house. I was gonna help him with that, but then he got an emergency call from a guy he worked for, so we had to do it later. It was nice out, so Toby, this other kid that was with us—he was almost the same age as me—said we should move the van and throw a tennis ball against the garage door. Butts Up, ever heard of it?”

  I wait to see Zoe shake her head before going on. Anything to stall.

  “There was another kid there, too.” I swallow. His name gets stuck in my throat, so I force it out. “Ben … little Ben. He was two. He was a meth baby, but by the time he got the Tuckers, he was doing real good. The courts had finally signed him off for adoption. His mom had gotten into too much trouble, so they took him away for good. The Tuckers were doing all the paperwork and visits and all that so they could keep him. Adopt him, you know? Not every kid ends up in the system forever. I was a little jealous. Maybe a lot jealous. I mean, I never got signed off ’cause they couldn’t never find my mom. Not that I’d wanna keep most of the families I lived with. Or that any of them would wanna keep a teenager. All they wanted were babies. That’s all right. But, still.”

  It’s dark, but I close my eyes anyway. I gotta have a darker black than this.

  “So here’s this Ben, cute kid, running around everywhere and got these two messed-up jerks to look up to. He wants to play with us, but I don’t want him around right then. He couldn’t play the game, you know? And I didn’t feel all big brother. I told him to piss off. He took it kinda hard, probably didn’t know what I was saying, but he figured it out. He ran off. I thought he was in the house.”

  I clench at Zoe’s shoulders. I need something to hold on to. She’s gotta feel some of this pain with me if she wants to understand me. I thought Ben was in the house.

  “I get in the van, put it in neutral. Toby gives a push backward, and all that weight from the wood just pulls the car out of the driveway. And there’s a bump.”

  “No,” she chokes. “Don’t tell me anymore.”

  “You wanted to know. You can hear it.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “He was there. Ben. Right behind the car. I thought he was in the house. He weren’t. He ran to hide behind the van when I was shitty to him.” Zoe tries to squirm away from me, but I hold on tight. She’s gotta come with me through this thing. “I didn’t kill him. He’s not dead. But his legs. The tires went right over them.”

  I feel a slow growth of dull pain in my own legs, as though the van were going over my legs, but from the inside out.

  “Crushed his legs … I crushed his little legs.” My legs shudder. “He can’t walk no more … ’cause of me.”

  I’m still gripping her and I know she wants out so bad. “You want to talk about a fucked-up life? How about a kid born on drugs, then when things are about to get good, some bastard”—I make a noise ’cause there ain’t a word bad enough—“runs over his legs and puts him in a wheelchair for the rest of his fucking life.”

  “You didn’t mean to.” She can barely get the words out, and I can barely hear them. Her face is buried in me, like she could hide from me in me.

  “That’s what the Tuckers said. Mrs. Tucker held Ben until the ambulance got there. Ben screamed. And she held him, just like she held all those babies.” I loosen my grip on Zoe’s shaking shoulder. “And she said it was an accident. But she cried … she couldn’t help it. And I never seen her cry before. Not when those babies screamed for two days straight and she could hardly stand up, nothing. I made her cry and I ruined Ben. ’Cause I was dumb and selfish. He was two. And just about to get a good life. Bad stuff happens around me. Bad stuff happens because of me.”

  “That’s not the way it is.”

  “Listen to me, Zoe. I can ruin a good thing. I should’ve checked where he was. Hell, I shouldn’t have been in the damn van in the first place. I was thirteen. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

  “You didn’t mean to,” she repeats. “It was so long ago.”

  ZOE

  I MADE HIM TELL ME, SO I GUESS I DESERVE THIS HEAVY, molten blackness in my belly.

  But he doesn’t deserve to feel the way he is now, the way he felt all those years ago. Not again. It’s my fault for not letting him keep his memory to himself. I’m torn between knowing he needed to tell me, that he couldn’t scare me away, and wishing he could suck it back inside him like a layer of dust to settle at the bottom of his lungs.

  “This doesn’t change things.” I press into him again, this time not because I feel like I need to hide but because I want to get as close to Will as possible. Let him see that I don’t want to run from him, that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

  Because it hadn’t.

  “Do you want to tell me anything else?”

  He makes a sound of disbelief.

  “That wasn’t enough?”

  “I mean, is there anything else you need to … deal with?”

  “This ain’t a counseling session, babe.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way. Like you’re better than me.”

  “Me?” His voice pitches high, then lowers again. “It ain’t even like that. I never thought I was better than you. Smart as you are? I just wanna move on, you know?”

  “Me too.”

  “You still wanna be with me? After what I told you?”

  “It doesn’t change anything, Will. It happened a long time ago. And it was an accident. We have to learn how to … I don’t know … live. Survive these things.”

  “Survive. Yeah. But not just that.” He sucks in a breath and blows it out, hard, as though he’s casting away a demon. “Like, really live, even with it all breathing down our necks. You ready to really live?”

  I nod and he leaps to his feet, pulling me up with him. “When’s the last time you jumped on your bed?”

  I struggle for balance, thrown off by the question, by his quick movements. It’s been a long time since I jumped on a bed. I tried it once. A few months after my mom died. It was loud and he could hear it downstairs and didn’t like the sound of it, and I never did it again. I can’t imagine how Will can switch like that, how he can go from that story to jumping on a bed. Sometimes his quick changes, the way he goes from calm to angry, from happy to sad, sends my head spinning.

  I shake my head at Will and he starts bouncing. Little hops, where his toes don’t completely leave the mattress but the waves of movement force my own heels off the bed. I grasp him to keep my balance.

  “The … guy at … the office … is going to … hear … us,” I gasp in between bounces.

  “Not … through … the logs!” Will yells.

  I give in, just a little. Just enough that I can feel gravity protesting my calves, my butt, my breasts moving against it like illegal friction. We’re not on the same bounce wavelength, and my teeth chatter as Will speeds up his bounces, building height so that his head is inches from hitting the ceiling.

  “Let go!”

  I need to. I need to let go and let this fun, let this childish action that never fit anyplace in my life, take
me over.

  I bend my knees and spring of my own volition, no longer using Will’s jumps to set me in motion. Our bounces are still off; we land a quarter of a second apart and I think my ankle is going to roll under my leg as I stumble, but Will hangs on to me and we build a rhythm. I coil and I leap, launching myself toward the popcorn pieces glued overhead with a forced abandon.

  I will do this. I will have these fun moments and these forward-thinking moments and this future.

  We hit our stride, finally, Will going up as I’m coming down, our breath passing the same space in the blink of an eye. He’s grinning every time I pass him and watching me with overly bright eyes so that I wonder how much of his elation is real and how much is forced.

  We can do this. We can have these moments. It is allowed.

  I don’t realize I’ve been silent all this time, concentrating, taking short puffs of air, until the first giggle escapes me and shatters my glass box. It’s a strange sound: broken and delighted and free all at the same time. And it gets bigger and louder with each leap until I’m trying to match the strength of my jumps with the strength of my joy.

  I lift my knees to my chest as I jump and Will spins around completely as he jumps and we’re doing the craziest things with our arms and he hits his head on the ceiling with a cracking noise but doesn’t stop, just hollers “OW!” and laughs and we’re flying, shaking the blood in our veins like a baby’s abused rattle, and my brain starts to hurt. But I don’t mind. It doesn’t matter until Will collapses in a pile of heavy breathing on the bed and I crumple next to him.

  We reach for each other at the same time and kiss, gasping for air in quick spurts and still laughing because this is life. It happened to us before, terrible things, and even not-so-terrible things, but now we’re going to happen to it. We’re going to decide and create and play and laugh and forget how to draw air in because we’re so consumed with beauty and with possibility with each other.

  Will’s eyes are sparkling and there’s a flush of color in his cheeks. I can only imagine how pink my face must be.

  This is life.

  We found it.

  WILL

  I’M HIGH. SOARING FROM THE ENDORPHINS, SOARING away from things I did a long time ago.

  I’m hungry, too.

  I kiss Zoe again ’cause, damn, she tastes so good and she’s so happy right now. But I gotta get real food.

  “Let’s get something to eat.”

  She pokes out her bottom lip, but I press it back in with a kiss and pull her to her feet. My stomach gurgles, and whatever this room and one bed and me and her lead to, I ain’t gonna be doing it while my stomach makes sick noises like that.

  “We’ll run down and get some food and come back and I’m gonna kiss you all night, ’kay?”

  “Yes, please.”

  We walk to the Denny’s, just a couple of blocks down the road. The hostess-waitress woman don’t give us a second look when she seats us, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding in. Feels like there’s always someone, something, tracking us, grabbing at us, pulling us back to places we ain’t good enough to escape.

  “I’ve never eaten out so much before,” Zoe says as she opens and looks at her menu. I drum my fingers through the silence between us.

  “Hey, you think we’re crazy?” I scratch my ear and look around at the people in the diner. Free people. “Doing this?”

  She stops reading her menu for a second and I wish I hadn’t asked her that question. What if she says yes? What if she says she don’t really want to be here? With me, going someplace, starting something with me. But then she shakes her head. Stops and nods.

  I laugh. “It’s like that?”

  “Yeah. It’s like that.” She says it the way I say it, making fun of the way I talk. It’s pretty funny. “It’s crazy that we got out of there and we’re in the middle of nowhere and are just sort of hoping everything will turn out okay. But it’s not crazy, too. It’s not crazy to be with you. It’s not crazy to think we can do this. We should do something really crazy. Like run down the road naked.”

  “Ain’t it too cold?”

  “Or win the lottery.”

  “Yeah, that’d be nice. But you gotta play first. I’ll buy you a ticket when we get to Vegas. We been lucky so far. Maybe it’ll keep up. We’ll win a few million, set us up for a while.”

  She’s cute and her eyes are twinkling at me. I like the idea of our whole life being set up in one day, with one piece of paper with silver scratch circles.

  “We’ll travel, when we win. You ever wanted to travel? We’ll go to the rain forest or on a safari. Take a cruise or something. You and me. Sound good?”

  She shrugs. “Go, stay. I don’t care. Long as I’m with you.”

  “See? You’re already thinking crazy.”

  “I’m thinking it’s time to order,” she shoots back, shoving me with her shoulder and nodding at the waitress making her way to our table.

  ZOE

  WE ORDER, AND I WATCH HIM FOR A MINUTE. HE sips his water. Peeks out at me from under his lashes. I think about his face and how it’s like a mixture of everything.

  He smiles at me. “What?”

  “We should go see the town where you were born.”

  “Why the hell would we wanna do that?” The words are sharp and they sting. But he can tell and he backtracks, tries harder. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I understand.” I get why he, why anyone, would want to forget about the place they were born. Would want to pretend the incident of birth never happened at all.

  So many times—too many times—I’d wish my birth had never happened. Like when my dad was testing the strength of the walls with the back of my head. Didn’t my mom know better than to bring a child into that man’s world? What was she thinking, to get pregnant and then die, leaving a little girl to the mercy of a man who had no control? It’s so very, very easy to blame my mom for everything, just because she made the choice to have me.

  Now, looking at Will, at the way he’s rolling around my suggestion in the lobes of his brain, now I can feel grateful for my life. But this life-wanting is such a new feeling. Before Will, before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.

  Will tucks his fingers into my hair and kisses the top of my head. He’s avoiding my question, I can tell. But that’s all right. We all need our own time to deal with things. Maybe it will take Will years to come to terms with being abandoned. Maybe it will take forever. I’ll stay with him no matter how long it takes to prove that people don’t always leave, don’t always give up on you.

  “Is there anyone you wanna call? From back home?” He pulls his phone from his pocket and holds it out to me. “It’s prepaid. I put a whole bunch of minutes on it before we left. You can call anyone you want.”

  “Who would I call?”

  “I don’t know. Lindsay?”

  My best friend, Lindsay, and I met in the girls’ bathroom at school when we were twelve. I was hiding in a stall, scrubbing my hands raw with a wet paper towel, when she walked in. Humiliation drowned me with a tidal wave of red. I bit my lip, stifling sound, until I thought she’d left. But she hadn’t. She’d known someone was there and held her breath, waiting for me to whimper again, then knocked on my stall door. When I didn’t answer, she got on her knees on the filthy floor and crawled under, facing me with a jaw set in a determined line but eyes soft and pitying. Lindsay made the same face every time she saved something: a baby bird fallen out of its nest, a dog hit by a car, the houseplants her mom couldn’t help but kill with her lack of a green thumb.

  She lent me the skirt she was wearing, even though her shirt wasn’t quite long enough to cover the top seam of her leggings. We went to the nurse, Lin talking incessantly in the office when I felt too mortified to say a word. That year, she became the girl in my life who knew about things a motherless girl didn’t know, like periods and bras. We ate together at school and studied together in t
he library, but I never let her come to my house and I rarely could get my dad to let me go to hers. Sometimes I told my dad stories about after-school study groups or Brain Bowl competitions that didn’t exist just to have an afternoon where we could pretend we had a friendship like the ones on TV, where the girls giggle over boys and watch movies and eat popcorn and paint their nails. Always, I scrubbed off the polish and brushed away the scent of popcorn with mint toothpaste before going home again.

  “What would I say to her?”

  “Did you tell her you were leaving?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Could be she’s worried ’cause you missed school.”

  She’d probably wonder what he did to me this time, when most things he does I try to pretend aren’t that big of a deal, at least not big enough to keep me from the one place I felt safe. I never missed school.

  “Okay, I’ll call her.” I take the phone from Will and dial Lindsay’s number. It’s late enough that she would be home from drama club, the only part of the school day she liked.

  It rings twice. I don’t realize I’m frozen, eyes not blinking, lungs not filling, until I hear Lindsay’s voice on the other end and my muscles relax.

  “Thank goodness you picked up.”

  “Zoe?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  Lindsay doesn’t speak for a minute, but I can hear rustling and the heavy thud of feet climbing stairs on her end.

  “Lin?”

  “Shh!”

  Another minute passes and I hear some muffled talking. Lindsay tells someone I’m Gabe from school calling about an assignment. I have to listen, longer than I want to, to her sister, Blaire, tease Lindsay in her high-pitched voice about a boy calling. Finally, I hear a door close and Lindsay breathes into the phone again.