PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  She wasn’t making any sense.

  “Why would Owen liking me back make me afraid?” I asked, like it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. Cause it was.

  Dr. Conyers placed her pen on her pad and then put the pad on the table beside her, which she only did when she meant business.

  “Cresta, you’ve been through a very tumultuous period. In the past two years, your entire life has been uprooted, shaken around, and rearranged. I know you think you’re strong, and you are. But even the strongest of us needs time to heal properly. You’re finding your footing here, just finding it. It’s natural that, on some level, you would be apprehensive toward any changes. You can’t let that fear hold you back though. You can’t let what happened to you, what happened to your father, define you for the rest of your life.”

  I shot straight up in my chair, every muscle in my body tensing, the beanbag rolled under me like waves on an angry sea.

  “Can we not talk about my father,” I asked. My voice was low but terse, like a stifled cough.

  “This is your session. We can talk about whatever you like,” Dr. Conyers said, but she picked her pen back up.

  I hated this; the way everything seemed to come back to my dad. I didn’t want to think about him. I didn’t want to be reminded of what happened to him, of what happened to both of us.

  But it was too late. Just the mention of him and I was gone. I was back on that bridge on the last night I ever saw him, the last night I would ever see him.

  It was clear in my mind, as clear as a movie playing before my eyes. I was with him in the car. We were going over the Clark Street Bridge, headed toward the loop. We had just left Giordano’s, which was regardless of what anybody tells you, the best pizza place in all of Chicago. Mom was working, but we had three pieces of pepperoni in the backseat for her.

  I could never remember what we were talking about, but we were laughing when his favorite song of all time ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ by the Beach Boys came on the radio. He started swaying behind the wheel, dancing along with the song.

  He looked over at me; his eyes free of anything but light and said, “You know what?”

  I didn’t ‘know what’, and it turned out I never would.

  Later on, when everything was over, the police would tell me the driver of the semi in front of us fell asleep, causing him to skid across three lanes. I didn’t see any of that though. All I saw was my dad,the wall of the bridge coming up toward us, and then the water.

  I remembered the force as we veered off the bridge, as gravity pulled all the blood to my face. And then we hit the river. It shattered against the car, splitting like we were driving through a plate glass window.

  I remembered the water seeping in, slow at first and then quicker. I thought it would be a haze. I had heard stories, seen movies about car accidents, about people who go through horrible things. They all say time plays tricks on you, that it either speeds up or slows down; that’s it’s over in a flash or that it drags on forever in slow motion.

  None of that happened though. It was all clear. I knew where I was. I knew what was going on. And, watching ice cold gulps of the Chicago River pouring in, I knew we were going to die.

  Dad was unconscious. He must have hit his head on the driver’s side window, because blood was pouring down over his closed eyes. I pulled at my seatbelt. It whipped off. I pulled at my father, but he was heavy and the water was starting to creep up at our waists. The sounds of the Beach Boys echoed through the car’s ruined cab. They told me not to worry; that everything would be alright. They were wrong. I pulled at my father again. He barely budged. So, I screamed at him.

  “Dad!”

  “Dad!”

  Daddy.

  He didn’t respond. I grabbed for his seatbelt, but the water was everywhere now. It pooled up around my shoulders. I tried to open the door but, like my father, it wasn’t complying. The water grew higher. It invaded my mouth and then my nose, drowning my screams. I opened my eyes. We were completely submerged. My dad lifted off his seat, his blond hair, hair like mine, floated like a halo around his head.

  I pulled at him again, thinking he might be lighter now that he was completely underwater. I was wrong. I pulled hard. Losing my grip, I slammed against the door. This time though, it opened. The current of the Chicago River reached for me, pulling me away from the car, pulling me away from my father.

  I saw the lights of the city toward the surface, but I swam away from it, back toward the car. My eyes started burning; my lungs caught fire. The chill in the water cut through my skin, down into my bones. But I kept going. I wasn’t going to leave him here, not down in the dark all alone like this.

  My father’s eyes flipped open as I got closer. His face got animated, panicked, realizing what had happened. He reached for his seat belt. It stuck. He was trapped. My fingers felt pinpricked as I jerked at his seatbelt. He pushed me away.

  He screamed something. It was drowned in the river, but I didn’t need to hear him to know what he said. It was in his eyes. He wanted me to leave him.

  I shook my head. There was no way in hell that was happening. We’d find a way. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. What I hoped would be a pocket knife or nail file, anything to cut through the belt, turned out to be a little gold necklace. It was thin with a heart shaped locket at the end. It looked old, but I had never seen it before.

  He gave it to me along with a look. Again, I didn’t have to wonder. I knew what it meant.

  You have to leave me.

  I’m your father. Do what I say.

  I love you.

  Now the lack of air wasn’t the only thing setting me on fire. I looked at him for another moment, for the last time. I kissed him on the cheek, and then-

  “I think we’re done for today,” I said. My hand was up around my neck, stroking the locket my father gave me. Maybe our hour was up. I had no idea how long I had been sitting there, lost in the moment. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t do this anymore; not right now.

  ***

  It was raining when I left Dr. Conyers’ office; the sort of rain I didn’t know existed before I moved out of the city; hard and driven by unbridled winds. I put my IPod on shuffle and cranked the volume way up. I didn’t care what song came on, so long as it was loud and I didn’t have to think about anything else.

  Seeing Dr. Conyers always drained me. It forced my mind into a dark place. Still, she had helped me in the past. She had forced me to look at things, helped me make sense of it all, and guided me away from the bad choices I made after my dad’s death.

  Five miles outside of town, and halfway through the Lumineers album I had downloaded the night before, I caught sight of a car pulled over alongside the road. The rain was beating like bullets against the windshield, but I didn’t need to see much to know who it was. I had memorized that car years ago, along with the guy who drove it.

  Owen stood bent under the open hood, soaked to the bone. I pulled over beside him and lowered my window. If possible, he looked even more out of sorts than he had this morning. Water ran off him in sheets, dripping from his hair and face down to the engine below. He looked frustrated, which made sense. Not only was he stranded in the rain but, given what I knew about Owen, he’d have a better chance of cajoling that car into starting than he would of fixing whatever was wrong with it.

  “Owen!” I yelled over the rainfall.

  “Cresta?” He seemed shocked to see me. He leaned into my open window, dripping all over the door. “Thank God. I’ve been here for twenty minutes. Would you believe you’re the first person who’s come by?”

  In this metropolis, who’d have thought?

  “Get in,” I told him.

  “Are you sure? I’ll ruin the upholstery.”

  “I don’t care about the upholstery. You’re gonna catch pneumonia,” I swatted at him.

  I rolled my window up and he ran to the passenger side door and hopped in. He shivered and, for a second, I thought h
e was going to shake the water off like a dog that had just come in out of the rain. Instead, he put his hands in front of the heater and started rubbing them together.

  “It’s freezing out there,” he looked at me. Even in this state, looking like a drowned rat in his gray fleece hoodie and jeans, he was pretty cute.

  “Not your day,” I smiled.

  “The moon’s in Capricorn,” he said, as though it was an explanation. “Do you have a blanket or something?

  “Actually,I do.” I reached into the backseat, where Casper kept all of overnight necessities and handed him the fluffy blue blanket with floral prints that Casper had owned since way before I knew him. “Keep in mind, it’s Casper’s. So . . . ”

  “Noted,” he said through shivering teeth. He stripped off his gray jacket. The rain had seeped right through it and the black t-shirt he wore underneath was wet and clung to him like skin. I tried not to stare.

  “What’s up with the car?” I asked, picking at my steering wheel cover. I always did that, fiddled with things when I was nervous. To date, I had ruined half a dozen sweaters, two laptops, and my grandfather’s dog tags, which made it through Korea but couldn’t survive the standardized testing jitters of ’07.

  “I think it’s the fuel pump,” he answered, snuggling into Casper’s blanket.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Cause the guy at the garage said it was the fuel pump,” he shrugged. “I was on my way to Cold Creek now to pick one up. But, like I said, Capricorn.” He pointed to the sky. “I’m so glad you came by. I have zero cell signal out here.”

  “I know what you mean,” I glanced at my own useless phone sitting in the cup holder.

  “What are you doing out here anyway?” He asked.

  “I-I had to bring my mom some stuff,” I stuttered. Owen wasn’t like the other kids at DeSoto. I didn’t think he would look down on me for going to therapy or anything, but I still didn’t want him to know about it. I wanted him to think of me as a girl who had it together, who knew what she was doing, who was confident and maybe even sexy. I certainly didn’t want him thinking of me as broken.

  “I can give you a ride back. You can call Triple A when you get back into coverage,” I suggested.

  “You’re a saint,” he smiled. The heat was giving him a little of his color back, putting a flush in his cheeks. He turned to me as I pulled back onto the road. “What did you want to talk to me about something this morning?”

  I hoped he would attribute the flush crawling up my cheeks to the heater as well. I looked at him, with his expectant blue eyes staring back at me. This was it. This is where I was going to tell him.

  “Um . . . Chicken,” I said.

  Yeah, that was about right.

  Maybe Dr. Conyers was right. Maybe I was letting my fear get the better of me, or maybe I was waiting for a perfect moment that didn’t exist. Still, there had to be a better one than this; with Owen sopping wet, wrapped in Casper’s blanket, and the moon in Capricorn.

  Besides, the idea of him rejecting me was bad enough. I didn’t want to have to drive twenty miles back into town with him after he did.

  “You wanted to talk to me about chicken? Like, the bird?” He seemed confused, which was reasonable, given that, at this point, even I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Right. Yeah. No!” I said, trying to make it make sense. “The food. Chicken, the food. As in, my mom making chicken.”

  He smiled. It was uncomfortable, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Your mom doesn’t cook,” he said.

  “She does!” I said louder than I should have, realizing I had actually stumbled onto a piece of truth. “She just started.” My mind flashed to this morning and way too much bacon. “And it’s just me and her. Well, sometimes Casper, but he doesn’t eat that much.”

  What? That was true, if you measured in metric tons.

  “And well, I was sort of hoping you’d come over tomorrow. For chicken, I mean.”

  I swallowed hard. That was better. That would be better than here, than today. I could bring Owen home, force feed him what would almost certainly be the worst chicken imaginable, and I’d tell him there. Yeah. I’d have home field advantage. I could set things up the way I wanted; get my mind right and roll it out the right way.

  “That’s it?” He reared back and started laughing. “I spent the entire day thinking you were gonna tell me you had cancer or something, Yeah, sure. I’ll eat chicken with you.”

  I’m not sure if it was his laugh, the heater, or the fact that I actually had a plan, but I started to feel a little better, a little warmer.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. There it was; his fingers on me, one of those little cues Dr. Conyers was talking about. Now I knew exactly what it was that was making me warmer.

  “I don’t know why you made such a big deal out of that,” he said, grinning at me. His face, dripping wet and all, took my breath away. “You know I’d do just about anything you asked me to.” He winked playfully. “I mean, how could I say no to a face like that?”

  My God. Those were like cue cards. He was flirting with me. He did love me back. I could see it in those blue eyes. I could feel it in those nimble fingers. He must be dying waiting for me to say something. All I’d have to do is tell him and then, everything would be okay. We would be together.

  The rest of our ride went by in a blur of jokes and music. Like me, he loved indie stuff, so we turned up the Lumineers and jammed out to Dead Sea and Charlie Boy. Before I knew it, too soon, we were back in Crestview. The rain died down, receding to a mist that left the usually boring bone dry Georgia town simply boring.

  “Want me to drop you at home?” I asked reluctantly.

  Or you could come to my house.

  “No,” he answered. “I have a bunch of studying to do. Mr. Jacobs is killing me with homework. Can you take me to the library?”

  I scoffed. “I don’t get you and the library. It’s the information ago, O. You could just study in your room.”

  Or my room, if you wanted. That could be arranged.

  “I can’t focus at home,” he said, throwing Casper’s blanket into the backseat. “Besides, the FFA meets there on Thursdays, and they always have the best chess squares.”

  I pulled into the parking lot of the Crestview library; a small aluminum building that looked more like a double wide than a library. Its gravel parking lot was filled with the same cars I was used to seeing every day when I passed it; Mrs. Cleo, the librarian, Dr. Victors, the only ‘actual doctor’ in the entire county (a title he gave himself that always irked Dr. Conyers), and Mr. Shue, how always sat outside, telling random stories about random things to anyone who was unfortunate enough to find themselves in his crosshairs.

  Owen opened the door even before I stopped the car. Closing the door, he stuck his head, this time much dryer, though the window and said, “You’re a lifesaver. What would I do without you, Cresta?”

  “Let’s hope you never have to find out,” I smiled shyly. “Don’t forget about-“

  “Chicken. I know. I can’t wait.”

  “That’s optimistic of you,” I said, picking at my steering wheel again. “She’s not the greatest cook in the world, you know.”

  “I’ll be with you. How bad could it be?”

  Cues. GIANT FREAKING CUES.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” His electric smile cut through me, and he walked away. I watched him disappear into the library, sidestepping Mr. Shue gracefully. Driving away, I took a whiff from my inhaler. Being around Owen always left me breathless, and today was no exception.

  Now, assuming my mother was over the breakfast related insanity of this morning, all I had to do was convince her to cook a lavish chicken dinner with one day’s notice. That shouldn’t be so hard, right?

  I looked over longingly at the water stain Owen left on the seat. He really had ruined the upholstery. I didn’t care though. He could destroy the entire car for
all I cared, so long as he smiled at me while doing it.

  Moisture wasn’t the only thing Owen had left though. Owen’s phone sat on the seat beside me. I picked it up. I had to bring it back to him. How else would be call Triple A or his mom, or . . . or Merrin. I thought about keeping it for a second. After all, if he couldn’t talk to her for a couple of days, then maybe he’d realize how bad an idea a long distance relationship really was.

  No. I couldn’t do that. Nothing good would come from that. Knowing my luck, Owen would find out about and think I was some kind of sicko stalker. I had to bring it back to him. Of course, that didn’t mean I couldn’t at least check out the competition.

  I opened up Owen’s pictures and started scrolling through them. I readied my inhaler. If Merrin was half as pretty as I figured she was, I was gonna need it. There were no pictures of Merrin though. There weren’t any pictures of his family or even of himself. The only pictures Owen had were of me.

  I couldn’t believe it as I went through them; me at the county fair last November, me and my mom decorating our tree last Christmas, me reading a book on the bleachers at school.

  I didn’t even know he took most of these. It was like he had been watching me, like he had been admiring me. I jumped out of the car, leaving it running right there in the parking lot. Forget tomorrow. Forget chicken. Forget all of it. This was all the proof I needed. It was right here in these pictures. Owen liked me back, and I wasn’t wasting another minute.

  Mr. Shue’s eyes lit up when he saw me coming. “Cresta, did I ever tell you about the time I wrestled an alligator in the back of a moving truck?”

  “Not now, Mr. Shue,” I said, and pushed past him into the library. I held Owen’s phone in my hand, like it was Exhibit A in a murder trial. He wasn’t anywhere to be found though.

  There was the FFA. There were their chess squares. There was Mrs. Cleo, stacking books in giant piles on her desk. As I weaved through the aisles looking for him, my resolve began to waver. How was I going to tell him? Should I just show him the phone, present him with the incriminating pictures? Would that make him mad?