by Ginger Scott
My father is sitting in his chair. It’s spun around toward the window, and he’s leaning back with both of his hands behind his head. He’s so still that if it were any other day, I would assume he’d passed out per his usual routine.
“I have questions,” I say.
His hands move from his head, but he stays facing the window. I don’t think he can look at me—he’s not ready for the judgment. And I have judgment.
“Where was she? Was she…with family?” I swallow hard after I speak, adding my own mental addendum to my question—was she with another family?
“Kevin was there. They had…married,” he says. I hear the heartbreak in his answer. I don’t hear the usual blame that comes along with it.
Kevin. The man I only met once—when my father barely missed me trying to kill him with his car.
I hate Kevin.
“Was it…I don’t know…fast?”
I don’t know how to talk about cancer. I’ve never had a relative battle it. My grandparents, my dad’s parents, both are alive and healthy. My dad’s problems are all self-made, and none of my friends have dealt with something like this.
“She battled for a year,” he says. His answer strikes something deep inside me, and a tear forms fast. I wipe it away and turn my head to look for my door.
“Did you go to her funeral?”
My dad is quiet for several long seconds, and I spend the time imagining her—what she must have looked like. Did she lose her hair? Did she have chemo or surgery? Was she thin and frail or strong, like I remember her? Was her hair still blond and her eyes hazel, like mine?
“No,” my father finally answers. “It…”
His shoulders rise with expectation, and I hold my breath waiting for him to offer more. To say he didn’t go because there wasn’t a funeral. That he didn’t go because my other grandmother told him not to, or out of respect for Kevin or a million reasons. He doesn’t have one though.
“No,” he says again, leaning back in his chair and pulling his hands behind his neck once more.
I stare at his knuckles. They’re dry and cracked. His hair is thinning. His body has taken so much abuse. I stare at him and think about her. My mom is dead. I can’t remember her. She didn’t want me. And I’m left with this man.
I’m left with a shell.
“Are you going to get sober?” I ask, my belly thumping with adrenaline and nerves. My chest squeezes.
“I’m trying,” he says.
I exhale quietly, running my hand under my eye to dry the last of the tears I’m allowing myself today. After a few minutes of silence, I nod to myself, and retreat to the quiet of my room. I drop my things on the floor by my door, kick my shoes from my feet and crawl on my hands and knees up my bed, folding half of my quilt over my body as I roll to the side.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I don’t look right away. It’s Wes, and I don’t know what to say to him. After long enough, though, I realize I don’t need to know. I just need him.
I’m still outside.
I read his text and my lips smile automatically.
I write back. Thank you.
Do you want to talk?
I think about his offer. I think about the millions of questions spawning millions more in my heart and head, and then I think about uttering them aloud. I can’t. There won’t be any answers to them. The questions are all for a woman who was supposed to love me more than the air she breathed. Now she’s dead.
No. But…don’t go. Maybe just text me about stupid things.
I picture him reading my text, propping his leg up against the door of his truck and tugging his hat lower, trying to think of something funny to write. My text box flashes dots for nearly a minute while he thinks and types. Eventually, his message comes.
Do you think there’s going to be a lot of gum on the slide Friday?
I laugh out loud, and the gleeful noise surprises me. I cup my mouth, and cry with the mix of sweetness of his text and the sadness coming to rule me.
Your dad just left. I waved to him. He didn’t look up at me.
My smile falls away and my hand rests against the bed with my phone clutched in it. My phone buzzes again, so I tilt my hand just enough to read his words.
Do you want me to come inside?
My body shivers from being alone. I reach my other hand to the side to type.
Yes.
In less than a minute, Wes pushes my door open, slips inside, and locks it behind him, climbing into my bed next to me and wrapping me in his arms. I exist there until the sun disappears and Wes kisses my head goodnight.
I never once fall asleep.
My father doesn’t come home.
Fourteen
“Heyyyy,” Taryn says, stretching the end of the word into a fade, as if somehow by saying the word slowly, hanging the y, makes me feel less like shit about my dead mom.
“Just drive to school,” I say, pursing my lips and dipping my head to climb into her car. I stuff my backpack between my knees and pull my seatbelt on. I sense her still staring at me, so I huff and twist to the side to glare back at her. Her mouth makes the same straight line as mine, and we mirror each other for a breath before she finally turns back to her steering wheel, shifts her car, and pulls away from my curb.
Wes asked me if I wanted him to tell TK, Taryn, and Levi. In a moment of weakness while he sat with me in my room Sunday afternoon, I told him yes. I regret that now. I’m the girl with the fuck-up drunk, genius coach father, and dead mom. I’m ripe to get picked for a reality show; I can tell my story in a broken voice for the editors to play sappy music behind to get the audience to vote for me, to root me on. I bet I’d win with this story.
There is no audience in real life though. But there is someone rooting for me. He’s the reason I came to school today. Maybe the only reason I keep going. He makes me believe there’s a corner somewhere, that I’m going to turn it—and that I deserve more.
Taryn doesn’t ask if I’m going to the library this time. She pulls into the spot near the gym and we both get out. The door is closed, and I hold my breath when we step up on the curb, listening for some sign of life inside. I hear the faint clanking of weights falling back in place, but that’s all. No voices.
My father’s in there. I see his car. He couldn’t bother to make it home this weekend, but he managed to show up for his precious baseball team.
“You ready?” Taryn asks, her hand on the door handle, her eyes full of sympathy.
“Nope,” I respond. I nod for her to go ahead and open the door anyhow, because I’m not ready for a lot of things that happen to me, yet somehow, I survive them.
My father is sitting at the desk near the front, his feet up on the desk as he works on lacing someone’s glove. I look at him just long enough to see there’s a smile on his face.
“Seriously,” I mutter under my breath.
Kyle’s spotting Wes, and I move over to the dumbbells, picking out the ones my father wrote on the paper for me. I watch Wes lift what looks to be about two hundred and seventy-five pounds from his chest easily, Kyle’s fingers doing nothing more than tapping the bar lightly at the top to count each rep. When he finishes, he leans his head to the side, finding me. His smile is lopsided, or maybe it’s just the way he’s laying on the bench. If we were alone, I would lie down next to him and be content looking at him in silence.
With my small weights in my hands, I begin my workout, moving my arm slowly across my body first then punching back behind me. I notice Wes and Kyle move to another station behind me. They’re both giving me space, but they’re guarding me too.
“So, it’s pretty weird that those two are getting along, huh?” Taryn says, folding her legs up as she sits on the stack of mats next to me. TK is busy working out with someone, so she’s decided to follow me around this morning—or maybe it’s her turn to watch over me. I look at her, waiting for her to bust into talk about my mom and questions if I’m all right, but she doesn’t.
> “Yeah, a little,” I say, switching the weight from my right hand to my left to repeat the same set of ten.
“TK said it was weird that you went to Kyle’s…” she trails off, looking down at her lap, her mouth too slow to stop the flow of thoughts from escaping. I let the barbell fall down to my side and tilt my head.
“What does that mean? I’m friends with Kyle,” I say.
“Yeah, I know. That’s what I told him, he just…” she stops, scrunching her face. I hate it when she gets like this—it’s borderline gossipy. Only this time it’s about me.
“He just what, Taryn?” I speak a little louder, and I notice it catches Wes’s attention. I smile at him with tight lips, but I’m a horrible bluffer. His eyes narrow and his mouth pulls in on one side. I look back to Taryn. “He just what?” I say quieter.
She leans her head to the side and breathes out, almost frustrated with me.
“Wes mentioned it. To TK. That’s all. When he told him about what you were going through, the last thing he said was ‘when she found out, she went to Kyle—not me.’”
I hold her stare.
I did go to Kyle—out of habit, more than anything. I also went there in search of destruction, and an escape—also out of habit. I didn’t go there because I thought Kyle could save me. I went there because he would enable me, like he usually does. Only this time, I kind of think he would have stopped me if Wes hadn’t come. Because Kyle is really, honestly, a true friend. But he isn’t my heart. That’s someone else.
“I’m not going to make it to my morning classes,” I say to Taryn, turning away before she can ask me any questions. I put the weights back on the rack near the wall and catch Wes’s gaze in the reflection in the mirror. I tilt my head to the side, urging him to walk out into the hallway by the door. He says something to Kyle and steps over the bench, tossing the small towel from his neck to the floor.
My father’s eyes catch me as I walk along the far side of the room toward the door, purposely taking this long route so I don’t have to come near him. He watches as I step into the hallway. I know this from my sideways glances. I refuse to fully engage him.
I’m alone in the small alcove for a few seconds before Wes joins me in the darkened hallway.
“What’s up?” he asks, his hands in his pockets, his body guarded. I’m a fragile thing right now in his mind, and I don’t like that either.
“Do you have your wallet and keys?” I ask.
“They’re in my bag, in the locker room,” he says, brow lowered and suspicion painting his expression.
“Go get your things. Meet me at your truck,” I say.
He stares into me for a few seconds, his face still, and his eyes studying mine with question.
“Okay,” he blinks.
I slip through the door and walk to his truck, leaning on the passenger side, my teeth gripping at my thumbnail while I wait anxiously for Wes to finally appear through the opposite door of the boy’s locker room. He walks toward me, but his eyes keep falling to the pavement in front of him, then they scan the parking lot around us. He never looks directly at me, not even when he unlocks the door on my side and holds it open for me to climb in.
He moves to the driver’s side after tossing his backpack in the rear of the truck and turns the engine on to let the heat fill the cab. It’s only chilly here in the mornings. He holds his hands in front of the vent for a few seconds, then looks toward my own hands that are fidgeting in my lap.
“What’s up?” he asks.
I swallow, because I’m afraid of the dozens of tiny next-steps lying before me. I know the moment I take this first one, there won’t really be any turning back—the row of dominoes will fall. But I’m ready to push them.
“I need you to take me home,” I say.
His eyes come up at that, locking on mine for few seconds while he catches the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
“You forget something?” he asks, his hand moving to the gearshift, but not moving it yet. I watch his arm, the twitch of his muscles, the indecision and reservations he has. Those are about me.
“There’s something I need to do. And I need you there.” My eyes find his as I speak, and he holds me hostage again as seconds stretch into the feeling of long minutes. He nods slowly and turns his attention to the wheel, shifting and pulling us out of the parking lot.
“My dad’s going to be pissed that I ditched class. TK got his ass handed to him when Taryn talked him into it the other day,” Wes says. I laugh lightly, thinking back to the good boy who sat on Kyle’s sofa nursing sips of a beer at the first party he came to. He is so good—all that is good. I will test him; this—what he’s about to see—will test him.
I need him.
“Just tell him I made you do it,” I smirk at him, my stomach sinking the closer we get to my house.
“Oh, I will. I plan on totally selling you out,” he chuckles. I smile, knowing he wouldn’t even if his own life depended on it. This is why he’s the one I need. I feel selfish for it, but I think maybe it’s my only chance.
We pull into my driveway, and I slip out of the passenger side before he has an opportunity to move to my side to open it for me. I leave my bag in his truck, so he does the same. I lift the garage door and open the small toolbox with the spare key inside, unlocking the back door to let us inside.
“That seems terribly unsafe,” Wes says.
I look over my shoulder as we walk through the kitchen and down the hallway toward my room. “What could anyone possibly want from this house?” I laugh out.
Wes pauses at the entrance to my room while I walk inside, leaning on the side of the door. “You,” he says. I stop and turn to look him in the eyes. “Someone could want you.”
I suck in my bottom lip and nod. This is why I need him here today, for this.
“Come inside,” I say, patting the top of my mattress. I crouch down and slide out a plastic bin where I keep my secrets, and I take my place next to Wes on the bed, pulling the lid free and tossing it to the side.
The first thing I pull out are the few letters I have paper-clipped together. I unfold the one on top because it’s the most recently written. I penned this one when I was fourteen. I hand it to Wes and watch his eyes while he reads over the pathetic, desperate words of a naïve young girl.
“You wrote this,” he says.
I nod.
“To your mom,” he continues.
I nod again.
All of the letters are the same. I only wrote maybe five or six of them over the years, always late at night, always when I was at my lowest, when I wanted answers. I poured my anger and hurt into each one, asking her why she left, why she didn’t love me, where she went, and if she had a family she liked better. I never signed the letters, because I never really intended on sending them. I’d write them until I slipped into slumber, or worse—until I was high.
I pull the small wooden box out from the bin next, twisting the tiny lock with the three-number combination. I stole the box from Taryn’s sister—she used to hide her weed in it. I used it to hide pills.
I hand the box to Wes, the lid now open, and he pulls a few bottles out with names that aren’t mine. There’s a bag with a few blue pills inside too—oxy or some other prescription pill strong enough to make me sleep heavily and float in numbness for hours. The Ritalin bottles are almost empty. Those were my favorite. He shakes the few tiny pills left and twists the bottle in his hand so the label faces me. He doesn’t ask, but he looks at me.
That look—it’s heartbreaking.
“That’s what I was at the elementary school for that day—the day I met you and your brothers. I was hoping this guy would show up who sells. He’s always at the school,” I say, taking the bottle from his hand and running my thumb over the rough edge of the lid. “I know you saw some of these—that one night, in our bathroom cabinet. There were more, I…I did more than just take a few pills to sleep. I took lots of pills. I hid them. And I was almost out, so I wen
t to find more.”
His silence burns in my chest, but I keep speaking. I want him to know all of me—even the ugly parts.
“I wrote my last letter that night. It was the most honest letter I’d written, so I burned it when I was done. I hate my mother for leaving us. And now she’s dead.”
His movement is slow and careful. Wes lays out the rest of the things in the small box—a photo of my father and me, the stack of letters and the pen I’d used to write, the ink now dry. Then he dumps the few remaining pills out on the mattress, gliding his hand over them as if he’s spreading out ingredients. I’ve done this too—so many times—spread out my options to leave the pain. I’ve come so close to pushing the limits.
“I haven’t taken anything in months. But I could never get myself to throw it away. I wanted the safety net of the escape,” I say, my eyes coming up to meet his, my raw and most embarrassing secrets spread out between us. “But now I have you. I come to you, Wes. I went to Kyle because I thought he would let me fall into this…my old comfort, for just a while. But then I saw you—you showed up at his house. And you were all I wanted and needed.”
“Kyle wouldn’t have let you,” Wes says, his head falling to the side. “He…” Wes swallows hard. “He loves you too much.”
I suck in a breath hearing him say something I already know. My eyes stay on his.
“He told me,” Wes says, his attention looking back to the bedspread, to my addictions.
“I’m sorry,” I say, guilt that I’ve broken Kyle’s heart hitting me like a bullet in the gut. “I’m not sure why he told you that.”
“Because he asked me if I loved you just as much. He wanted to make sure I was for real, that I was in this for real,” Wes says, his hand gathering my things and stuffing them back inside the small box. He closes the lid and holds the box tightly in both palms.
“What…what did you say?” My body is pounding nervously, my heartbeat felt in my fingers, toes, and head—the rhythm wild.
Wes sets my past to the side and moves closer to me, his hand sweeping my hair behind my ear and his head coming to rest against mine.
