Asking for Trouble (The Kincaids)

by James, Rosalind

  “He told me to do it.” The words were coming whether he wanted them to or not. “Before he left. He told me to look out for the two of you while he was gone. He told me,” and he could barely say it, “that I was the man of the family now. Some man. Some man.”

  “He shouldn’t have said that,” Cheryl said. “I know how much you idolized him. I loved him too. He was more of a dad to me than my own dad ever was. He treated me like his own, always. I loved him, but he was wrong. You were eleven years old. You don’t make an eleven-year-old boy responsible for his mother. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right.”

  Joe moved restlessly, wanting so much to get up and leave, but he didn’t. He owed Cheryl that. He owed her a lot more than that.

  “Go get help,” Cheryl said. “I did. Get help to let it go. Not for her sake, or for mine. For yours.”

  “I had therapy,” he said. Now he was sure how he felt about Alyssa being there. He hated it. “I had a whole long year of it. I’ve been through it all. I’m done.”

  “Think about it.” Cheryl looked at her watch. “I have to go. I wish we’d met under better circumstances, Alyssa. I hope we still can.”

  She got up, and Joe rose too. Cheryl reached for him, and this time, it wasn’t a brief embrace. She held him tight, and he wrapped his around her, too, held her for a long minute, and felt the emotion threatening.

  “I love you, Joeby,” she said, pulling back at last, her own eyes moist, a couple tears making their way down her cheeks. Cheryl didn’t cry either, not that he’d seen, not for years. They were both survivors. But she was crying now. “Please find a way to let it go. I want my brother back.”

  He was silent as he and Alyssa walked back to the car, as he held the door for her, got in, spiraled down the endless ramps of the garage. She didn’t talk either, to his relief. Alyssa always talked, and he could sense the tension in her, the eagerness to ask. But she didn’t. She sat still and waited.

  He spoke at last. “She’s my half-sister.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  “When my dad left for Kuwait, I was eleven, but you know that too. You heard. She was fifteen. That was a big difference. We weren’t that close, not then.”

  “And then your dad died,” Alyssa prompted when he didn’t go on. “He didn’t come back.”

  “No. He didn’t. He died. He was on a cargo flight, and the plane crashed. He was a mechanic. Mechanics aren’t supposed to die in wars, but he did.” His hands gripped the steering wheel tight, and he pulled onto the on-ramp heading north, gunned the big engine.

  “And then something happened?” she asked.

  “It was all right for a year or so. I mean, it wasn’t good, but it was all right. But then my mom got this boyfriend. Dean. I wondered how she could stand to be with somebody like that after my dad, because he was nothing like my dad. My dad,” he said, and it was running away with him now, the need to tell, to say the words. “My dad was a good man. I mean, people say that, but he was a good man. He was a supervisor, in charge of a whole shift. He was respected. He was . . .” He hesitated. “He was loved.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I see.”

  “But Dean . . .” His hands continued to flex, and he was driving too fast, staying in the left lane, but she didn’t seem to notice, and the speed felt good. “We couldn’t figure it out at first, Cheryl and me. We were so stupid. He’d be all full of energy, all up and pumped, and my mom was that way too. And then he moved in, and everything changed. She stopped going to work. She told us she was sick, and she looked sick. So did he. And it just got . . . worse.”

  “And you ended up in foster care.”

  “Yeah. But not right away. Not until it got worse.”

  It had been the spring of eighth grade, that first worst night. He’d been trying to do his homework, and it was hard to focus, because he was hungry. Lately, his friend Michael’s mom had been packing extra lunch for Michael to share with Joe, which embarrassed him, though he ate it all the same. But he was still hungry, so he worked on his Algebra homework and waited for Dean to leave so he and Cheryl could come out of their rooms, get into their mom’s purse and find enough to go to McDonald’s. His mom had already crashed, but Dean was still wired, so he waited.

  Instead of the sound of the front door shutting that he’d been half-listening for, he heard something else. The thud of a fist on the door of the room next to his. Cheryl’s room.

  “Open up!” It was Dean’s voice, hard and loud and mean.

  “I’m studying,” came the answer. Cheryl, and she was scared, and Joe was, too.

  “Open the goddamned door.” Dean’s fist continued to pound, and Joe sat up on his bed, his notebook propped in his lap, frozen, listening.

  “No! I’m busy!” He heard the scrape of something large and heavy, and realized that Cheryl was trying to move her dresser. She was in there trying to barricade herself inside while he was cowering in here, and the shame of it flooded him, overcame the fear. He forced himself to get up, went to his own door and opened it.

  “What are you staring at?” Dean paused in his hammering to glare at Joe. His hair was lank, his face pitted with scars, his jeans hanging from bony hips, and Joe remembered his dad standing in this hallway, saying goodbye before leaving for work. Big and solid and tough as iron, but he’d kiss Cheryl goodbye, ruffle her hair so she’d complain, “Da-ad! I just fixed it!”

  Jack Hartman hadn’t been Cheryl’s dad any more than Dean was. But Dean wasn’t any Jack Hartman.

  “What are you staring at, punk?” Dean snarled again. His pupils were so big his eyes looked black, and Joe knew he was still riding the high, at his most buzzed, and his most dangerous. To be avoided at all costs, but there was no avoiding him now. “Get back in your room. Quit watching me. You give me the creeps, the way you’re always watching me.”

  “Leave her alone,” Joe said, trying to keep his voice, still a boy’s voice, from shaking, because Dean scared him, especially like this. But his dad wasn’t here, and he could hear Cheryl still shoving at her dresser, and he knew she was at least as scared as he was.

  Dean bared his yellowed teeth at Joe like an animal, turned his back contemptuously on him, lifted a booted foot, and rammed it into the door. The cheap lock burst, and Dean was in Cheryl’s room, with Joe right behind him.

  “Your mom’s taking a nap,” Dean told Cheryl. “A long nap, and I figure it’s time for you to step up to the plate. Time for you to start earning your keep around here. The two of you, fucking parasites. At least you’re good for something, not like Robo-Boy.”

  Cheryl had grabbed her lamp off the nightstand, backed away around the bottom of the bed.

  “Get away from me,” she said, and Joe could hear her voice shake, and the hand that gripped the lamp so tightly wasn’t steady either. “I mean it. You touch me, and I’ll kill you.”

  Dean laughed. “You going to fight? Ooh, I’m so scared.”

  Cheryl stood strong, waited until he got close, then swung the lamp, connected with the side of his head, causing him to stagger, and Joe was on him from behind, swinging wildly, punching at Dean’s kidneys, the back of his head.

  Dean didn’t even seem to feel the blows. He straightened, breathing in a loud hiss, pulled his arm back and backhanded Cheryl hard across the face, knocking her back in her turn, and then he was on her, pulling her up, slapping her again and again.

  It was a brawl, then. Cheryl was tall and tough, and Joe wasn’t either of those, but there were two of them and only one of Dean. Cheryl hadn’t let go of her lamp despite the brutal blows, and she hit Dean again, and he went down on one knee, and Joe kicked him hard in the side, wished he weren’t barefoot, that he was a man. That he could beat Dean up and kick him out of his dad’s house.

  “Run,” he gasped to Cheryl, hauling his foot back and kicking again as Dean struggled to rise. “Run.”

  Cheryl grabbed her purse. “You come too. Come on.”

  Dean was stagg
ering to his feet, and Cheryl grabbed Joe, pulled him to the door with her. “Come on,” she said. And they ran.

  That was the long version, but it wasn’t the version he told Alyssa. He laid it out, bare. Just the facts.

  “Turned out he’d been trying to get into her room for a while,” he said. “Rubbing up against her in the hallway.” He stopped, swallowed. “She couldn’t stay, or it was going to happen, and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it.”

  “So what happened instead?” Alyssa asked quietly.

  “She was almost done with high school, almost eighteen. She stayed at a friend’s, graduated, joined up as soon as she could. Got out.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I went back. I had to go back. Nowhere else to go. Until it got too bad, worse. Until my mom kicked me out.”

  “Kicked you out? When you were thirteen?”

  “Fourteen.” He looked across at her. “Do you mind if we drive?” They were near her exit now, and he needed to drive. Normally, nights like these, he’d have got on the bike, ridden until he was numb with cold, until the speed and the noise had cleansed him. She was here, though, and he wanted her here. But he still needed to drive.

  “Yes,” she said. “Drive.” So he kept on, across the Golden Gate, through Sausalito, took the exit for Stinson Beach, and drove the twists and turns along the dark road, faster than he should have, needing the speed.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” he finally said. “That last night, when she kicked me out. She locked the door. I walked around for a long time, not knowing where to go. Finally,” he laughed, though it wasn’t funny, “I sneaked into the back yard and slept there. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  He had cried. He had lain down on the grass, chilled despite the warmth of Vegas in late May, wrapped his arms around himself, and cried. Cried for his dad, wishing like the baby he’d been that he would come back, that it wouldn’t have happened, that it wasn’t real, that things could go back to the way they’d been before. For Cheryl, who had escaped and left him behind. For his mom, who didn’t love him anymore, because she was gone, too. And for himself, because he was alone, and he was so scared. It was the last time he had cried.

  “And you ended up in foster care,” Alyssa said.

  “Yeah. She wouldn’t let me back in the house. She chose Dean. Or she chose meth.”

  “Didn’t you tell her what happened?”

  “She didn’t believe me. She said we’d always hated Dean, that we didn’t care whether she was happy, that we hated her too, for having somebody besides my dad, for having a new life. She said a lot of things. Bottom line, she chose them. The drugs, and Dean. She was sorry sometimes, after that. She’d show up, at first, for the hearings and whatever, cry and tell me she was trying to do better, always some story, and for a long time, I believed her. I still hoped. But she never came through. I couldn’t do anything about Cheryl, and I couldn’t do anything about her. Either one.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “You just told me how you protected your sister. She just told you how she felt about it. She doesn’t blame you. How can you blame yourself? How could you have done any more than what you did?”

  He shrugged, the weight of it, as always, too heavy to bear.

  “What happened to her? To your mother?” she went on when he didn’t answer.

  “He left her, eventually, I guess. Or he died, or somebody killed him. I don’t know. I did my best not to know. Cheryl’s the one who found out she was sick, hepatitis, other things too. She went and saw her. I don’t know how she could.”

  “But you’re the one who paid.”

  “Yeah. I did. Not for her. For Cheryl, because she asked me to. And for my dad. And is it all right,” he said, “if we don’t talk for a while? I’m sorry. I just need to drive.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and he drove.

  Alyssa wanted to put her hands over her ears and sing, like a little girl who didn’t want to hear, who didn’t want to know. She’d sat frozen as Cheryl had talked in the bar, as frozen and stiff as Joe had looked next to her. And when he’d told her his story, that had been even worse.

  She’d heard so many stories by now, every one a remorseless saga of destruction, of family disaster, of children thrown into chaos. Her heart had broken a little bit for every one of those children, but what she’d heard tonight had cracked it in two. She ached for the boy Joe had been, for the man he’d become, for the guilt she’d heard in the voice of somebody who didn’t deserve to feel any of it.

  They ended up at his loft again. He didn’t ask her if she wanted to go home, and she took that as a good sign, that he wanted her there, the way he’d seemed to want her with him while he drove. She cooked them eggs and made toast, about the limit of her skill in the kitchen, and sat with him to eat it, and didn’t talk.

  And then she comforted him in the only way she knew how. She took him by the hand, led him into his bedroom, took off his clothes the same way he had done to her so many times, the same way he was taking hers off now. And then she pushed him down onto the bed, came down over him. She kissed him, a soft thing, put her mouth near his ear and whispered, “Stay there for me. Let me do this tonight.”

  “Alyssa—”

  “Please.” She licked into his ear, felt him shudder. “Please. Let me do this for you. Let me light the candles and love you.”

  He didn’t answer, but he stayed where he was, and she kissed him again, then knelt beside him to put match to wick, set the heavy pillars alight on each side of the bed, turned off the lamp so only the soft candlelight shone. She turned back to him, saw him watching her, and smiled at him.

  “Roll over,” she told him, her voice tender. He hesitated another moment, and then he did it, and she straddled his hips, let him feel her over him, feel her rubbing herself against him. And then, finally, she began to touch him.

  Softly, but not too softly. Slowly, just as slowly as she could manage it. Down the bunched muscle of his shoulders, over the curve of triceps and biceps to the veins and corded muscle of his forearms, and back up again, as if she were exploring him, learning his body for the very first time. She scooted down a bit further, ran her hands down his back, enjoying the breadth of it, the firmness of him, felt him shudder under her touch, and knew that she knew how to please him, and that no matter what else he’d felt tonight, right now, all he was doing was anticipating being pleased even more. And she wanted to do more. She wanted to make him feel everything, to thrill him the same way he thrilled her.

  She slowed down, focused on the small of his back, massaging the area just above his tailbone, wanting to see if it felt as good to him as it did to her. She smiled in satisfaction at hearing his breathing become louder, more rapid, at seeing his fists clenching, his hands clutching at the sheet beneath him, and she did it some more. She took her time, because they had time. Because everything was better when you had to wait for it.

  When she was sure she had him wound up tight, aching for it, she ran her hands slowly down to his upper thighs and back up again, over every firm surface of him, and if he’d been sensitized before, he was squirming now. She kept it moving, kept him going, until, finally, she reached her hand between his legs and stroked everything within her reach, reading his body’s cues as he pushed off the bed to give her access, as the silence was broken by the harsh sound of his breathing.

  “Turn over for me,” she murmured at last. She pulled her hand away, saw him shudder at the loss, and sat back on her knees to wait until he rolled and looked up at her, his eyes glazed, his breath coming hard. She smiled at him, a slow, soft, seductive thing, and saw him respond to it like he couldn’t help it, because she could tell it was true. He was hers.

  She touched his lips with her fingers, traced them as she whispered, “Time for more?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he could barely say it. “More.”

  She crawled over him, touched him everywhere, licked him and kissed him and bit at h
im until he had his eyes closed, his hips moving, and she was pulling sounds from him that she hadn’t heard before, and she knew she had him past the point of thought, or of caring. That he could only feel this, his body’s response to her. Then, and only then, she reached for the condom, rolled it onto him, and lowered herself over him, and he groaned at the pleasure of it, his hands coming up to reach for her hips, for her breasts, wanting her so much. Wanting her with everything in him.

  He wanted her, and she gave him everything she had. She went slowly, and then she went fast, and when she could feel him getting close, she stopped and went slowly again. She didn’t want to make him work, didn’t want him to have to do any more than run his hands over her breasts, because she could tell he was loving doing that as much as she was loving the feeling of him doing it. So she used her hands on herself, too, drove herself up even as she pushed him higher.

  And she talked. She told him how much she had thought about this, how many times she had imagined him, all the showers she had taken with her hands on her breasts, her body, imagining it was him touching her, because he was all she’d ever wanted.

  He didn’t close his eyes, because he was watching her. He let her talk, but when she stopped moving again, because she was too close, because she needed to focus on herself, he reached for her hips and refused to allow it. She was on top of him, but he took control, held her and moved her over him, again and again, harder and harder, until she was over the top, crying out loud with the pleasure of it, and he was emptying into her, all the pain and all the emotion of the night resolved into this, and it was so good.

  She cleaned him up, afterwards, and he lay there and sighed, a deep, heartfelt thing that told her everything he hadn’t said. That she’d done it right. That she’d helped.

  When she was curled up against him again under the warm covers, her hand on his chest, she finally voiced the worry that had been on her mind ever since she’d heard Cheryl’s story.