by Kyla Stone
My breath stills in my chest. “You mean the girl at the fraternity party. When you were pregnant with me.”
Ma’s eyebrows pinch together. “You’ve been talking to Bill.”
“He said he told you, tried to warn you.”
She gives a short, hard bark of laughter. “He did. Frank already told me himself. That girl wasn’t special. She wasn’t the first, and she was far from the last. Your daddy didn’t love any of ’em. They were trash, shiny toys to play with and throw away.”
“She was just a kid.”
Ma shrugs, like that doesn’t even matter. “He loved me. He always came home to me.”
“I don’t understand. Then why did you do this?” I spread my hands out, gesturing at us, the concrete walls, the guards, Ma’s drab prison garb, everything.
“Him being gone nearly killed me. But something happened, I don’t know. Something clicked in my head. I thought I wanted to die, too. I wanted to lie there next to him and put a bullet in my head. I thought I couldn’t breathe without him, couldn’t survive the days without him with me. ‘Til death do us part.”
I blink. My vision blurs. “That’s why you told me to get out.”
Ma doesn’t even have the decency to blush. “At first, yeah. I didn’t want you between us, in the way even in death. It should’ve been him and me, always and forever. I told you to leave. I was on my knees. I put the gun to my head. I put it in my mouth. But I couldn’t do it. I kept seeing your face in front of me. And I knew what you’d say, what everybody would say, when they arrested you.”
“What?” I whisper.
“It would all come out. The whole bloody, ugly mess. They’d call me a terrible mother. I knew how it’d look. How the whole world would judge us. All those ugly, despicable secrets, mine and Frank’s and yours, splashed on the front page for everyone to see. I couldn’t bear it. There was still something I could do. I could still protect him. How could I not? So, I shot him again, for GSR and forensics and everything. I’ve watched enough TV to know how it goes.”
“You did this for yourself?” Finally, finally we’re getting down to the bottom of it, the lies unspooling themselves around the cold, hard nugget of truth.
“For all of us. Do you want it out there? Plastered on every newspaper, website, and evening news show? Tarnishing Frank’s good name?”
“His good name? Are you insane?”
“Five minutes,” the correctional officer warns.
She sits back in her chair, crosses her arms. “Frank would want it this way. His reputation was always so important to him. It’s the last thing I can do for him. It’s not so bad in here. I still get to watch my favorite soaps. I get my cigarettes.”
I stare at her. The snarl of feelings, the tangle of dark and light threads, the resentment and the longing, the anger and the love, the moments of happiness and the years of bitterness—they clump into a knot at the base of my throat. I have my answer. Even in death, Frank wins when it comes to my mother. She sacrificed to save him, not me. She didn’t sacrifice anything, ever, for me. And in a strange, complicated way I can’t explain, that frees me.
“I’ve tried to hate you my whole life.”
“Tried?” Ma raises her eyebrows.
“I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.” I don’t know if a daughter can ever completely hate her mother, no matter what she’s done. There is too much between us. The hollow ache in my heart tells me I still love her. Some small, lost, and lonely part of me will always love her, or at least, the idea of her, what she should have been.
She smiles a slow, satisfied smile. “You gonna come see me again, then?”
I shake my head. I stare at her, at the hard angles of her face, the shift of her eyes, her darting gaze never landing on my face, never looking at me straight. Never really seeing me at all. As I watch her, it hits me. She’s not the one who needs my forgiveness. She doesn’t even want it. No. The person I need to forgive the most isn’t my mother, or even my father. It’s me.
I feel something, like the whisper of a breath on the back of my neck. The universe is expanding, growing larger around me, encompassing something more, something higher and bigger and better than myself. I think of Arianna’s God, of the beautiful concept of grace, of love, of mercy and faith and all the things I thought I lost but can find again. But I won’t find them here. I won’t find them with her.
“No, Ma. I’m not going to visit you.”
“What?” Her face contorts. “You hate me now? After everything I’ve done for you?”
I take a deep breath. My fingers uncurl in my lap. I think the words through before I say them. I’ve seen the consequences of what people do when they’re controlled by their brokenness. They break other people. I don’t want to break anymore. I don’t want to break Aaron or Frankie or Zoe Rose. I want this to end, the generations of hurt and pain and abuse. I want it to end with me. “I don’t hate you. But you don’t have any power over me, either. Not anymore.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Even now, she’s still blind. I look at her and I see a future path I will not take. What I feel for her suddenly isn’t hate or anger. It’s pity. She is her own punishment. The four walls surrounding her are a prison of her own making.
The electronic doors buzz open. Two dozen women in blue and orange disentangle themselves from their families. They shuffle back through the double doors yawning open like a mouth, my mother with them. I watch her go.
I leave the prison an orphan, yet somehow lighter than I’ve ever felt.
46
It’s been two weeks since I went to the prison. Two weeks since I walked away an orphan. I know I’m free, but I’m not sure I really believe it yet.
On Thursday after school, Lucas convinces me to go on a date with him. He wants to blindfold me, but I won’t let him. We bundle into his car and while he drives, we talk about books and music and running. His pink rhinestone lighter rattles in the plastic cup holder.
I pick it up, flick on the flame and watch it shimmer. “How’s your mom?”
“Not good. The doctors say she has less than a month, probably. My dad says she’s not eating. She only talks to me on the phone, won’t Facetime anymore. She doesn’t want me to see her, what the cancer’s doing to her body.” His voice cracks, the skin around his mouth stretched taut.
Guilt spears me. He always seems so damn serene and cheery, it’s easy to forget I’m not the only one who watched my life implode around me.
I click the silver lid shut. “Do you wish you were there?”
“Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, not so much. Sometimes I feel like a crappy son for being happy here, when she’s suffering so much. Dad says he’s going to fly me down when it’s close to the end. So I can—so I’m there.”
This is one of those what-the-hell-do-I-say moments I’m terrible at. I keep flicking the lid open and shut. Click. Click. Click. I want to reach out and touch him. I want to ease the pain I see behind his eyes. But I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what normal people are supposed to do. I’m only me. And I pretty much suck at all of this.
Lucas keeps talking. “I think she’ll find peace now, though. She wasn’t a happy person. You know how some people wear their heart on their sleeve? She wears her disappointment with life on her sleeve.”
I imagine his mother in a hospital bed, barely breathing beneath thin blue sheets. I’ve never seen a picture of her, but I imagine an older version of Lucas with softened features and long, sleek black hair.
“That sounds depressing.”
“It was. She was—is, I mean. I’m not one for wasting time complaining about my life, but yeah. Sometimes it really sucks. As a little kid, you want to make your parents happy, you know? You think it’s your fault if they aren’t. You think you’re the cause of their disappointment.”
I know a little bit about that. “What do you do? When things are bad?”
“I run. And think.
Or I play my guitar.”
“You play the guitar?”
“I play. Badly, mind you. Like epically, terribly, makes-your-ears bleed awful. But I play for me. Just like I run for me, not for competing or winning or anything like that, much to my mom’s chagrin. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like to win. I like a trophy as much as the next guy. But it’s more for me. Running helps me work through all those bad feelings. I just let myself feel it, you know?”
I click the lighter. Open, closed, open. Stare at the little flame until my eyes blur. I don’t really know. The bad feelings are exactly what I’m trying to run away from. The memories, the nightmares still plague me, even after my confrontation with Ma at the prison. I don’t want to feel any of it. “What do you mean?”
“From my experience, going through it is the only way. You try to run away from it or go around it? It just stalks you, holds on tighter. So I use music to feel what I need to, to feel my way through something, to grieve.”
“So you cry? Like, on purpose?”
Lucas snorts. “You make it sound so terrible. There’s nothing wrong with crying. Tears are healing. They help you drain out the sorrow and anguish, so you can start filling yourself with more positive emotions, when you’re ready.”
“You’re so Zen about it. Like Yoda.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. ‘Do or do not. There is no try.’”
He brakes for a stoplight, looks to the left twice before turning on the deserted road. He’s so careful and deliberate about everything. He hasn’t gone a mile over the speed limit the whole way here, wherever here is.
“You should play for me some time.”
“You mean my guitar? I’d love to. But I left it back home.”
My jaw clenches at the word ‘home’, reminding me yet again his home isn’t here in Breakwater. And when his mom dies, he’s going to be gone. Poof. Out of my life. The thought jolts through me. I don’t want him to leave. I grip the lighter so tightly my knuckles turn white. “Are you going to stay in Florida, after the funeral?”
He shakes his head. “My aunt and uncle are letting me stay until graduation, since it’s my senior year. I need continuity, or something.”
Relief floods me. I let out my breath. “Do you want to stay here?”
He smiles without turning his head. “Of course.”
“That’s good. I mean, not that I care much, really. I mean, I do. Gah. I’m an idiot is what I mean.”
“You couldn’t be an idiot if you tried.”
“You’d be surprised.” I gaze out the window. “Hey, Lucas?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong with you? You seem too perfect. I’m starting to suspect you must be a closet serial killer or something. Like, do you secretly eat neighborhood pets or are you planning to join ISIS and blow up a library?”
He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Nope. I’m not planning any axe murders and I love the library. Satisfied?”
“Nope. Not even a little.”
“We’re here,” he says as we pull into a vast, empty parking lot. The sign says Silver Beach Parking.
“I hate to break it to you, but we’re a bit off season.”
His face is smooth again, cheerful and overly pleased with himself. He takes my hand. “Just wait and see. Bring your gloves. It’s cold enough out here to freeze the brass balls off a monkey.”
The wind snarls our hair and bites our cheeks, but the winter sky is a sharp, cloudless blue. Our boots crunch through clean, white snow. The beach is deep in hibernation beneath us. It’s hard to imagine flip flops and bikinis, sun screen and sand castles.
Once we reach the shoreline, I see why Lucas brought me here. Lake Michigan is frozen. Last week’s storms whipped the water into a boil, the surge and swell of the waves busting up the ice fields, jamming slabs of solid, foot-thick ice straight up into the air. Some stand five feet tall, others ten feet, still others fifteen or more. They thrust upward from the lake’s frozen surface like gleaming, jagged teeth.
“Let’s go out there.”
“It’s dangerous. The ice floes can settle, shift suddenly. We could fall in and freeze to death. We could get smashed between massive blocks of ice.”
“Details, shmetails.”
“I thought you might say that,” Lucas says dryly.
I pull him out onto the wind-scoured ice. We walk out one hundred, two hundred feet, until we’re surrounded on every side, lost in a labyrinth. The structures look like the splintered shards of a giant pane of glass hurled to the ground with great force. They’re blade-shaped, knife-edged, brutal in their beauty.
The ice is sleek, translucent blue, frost laced in filigree eddies and elaborate whirling spiders’ webs. Some are glossy, shimmering marble, others bristling with crystals, the scabs of crusted snow.
My breath snags in my throat. I’m walking across Lake Michigan. I’m an explorer discovering an otherworldly, snow-dazzled planet, an alien terrain of the strange, the astonishing, the absurd. My chest expands, filling with sharp shards of light. My fingers twitch. I want to draw this, paint it, consume it, fit it within my body somehow, bind it to my bones.
Lucas sees it in my face. His crooked grin spreads wide. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.
“Do you believe in God?” I ask him.
“I think so. Right here, right now, I really want to.”
“Me too.”
Lucas takes my hand again. He leads me through the jumbled maze of ice until we come out to an open space. The pier is a diminishing black line stretching back to the distant shoreline.
We’re nearly parallel with the lighthouse at the end of the pier. Only it no longer looks like a lighthouse at all. It’s draped in layer upon layer of icicles, every inch of it. It looks frosted, dripping with pearled icing, glimmering like an ice palace out of a fairy tale.
“I’ve lived here all my life. How have I never seen this?”
“It takes the perfect conditions. The water around the pier can’t be frozen yet. A cold front with strong winds needs to blow in for a long period of time, for hours and hours. Every time the waves crash against the lighthouse, a few droplets of the spray freeze. It happens again, and again, and again. Slowly, and then all at once. Until there’s this.”
I shake my head, bewildered, speechless. “How do you know all that?”
He shrugs and grins sheepishly. “Confession: I wanted to impress you, so I looked it up on Google.”
“I’m still impressed. Kind of.”
“I’ll take it.”
I kneel and brush snow from the mantle of ice skinning the lake’s surface. This ice is a murky brownish-green, thick and opaque. I imagine the deep water swirling below, cold, black, silent.
The white sun drifts down the sky. Blue shadows lengthen. The wind picks up, scraping over the great hunks of ice, gusting around their angles and slanted edges, spraying our exposed faces with pellets of snow.
The ice shudders and groans.
The slab looming above me shifts with a grinding, popping sound. A small fissure splits open beneath me. It gapes wider, large enough to fit my hand through, then my foot.
Lucas grabs my arm. “Run!”
47
We run, slip sliding across the ice. I stumble, jerk myself up, keep running, the sharp brittle air searing my lungs. We hit the shore, falling, laughing, collapsing into the snow in reckless relief.
Lucas pulls me up and we race to his Jeep. He turns the heat up as high as it will go. Our cheeks and ears ache, our fingers and toes are numb.
“Can I touch you?”
When I nod, Lucas pulls the gloves off my fingers and rubs them between his own. Slowly, we thaw. The windows steam up. Soon we tug off our coats, discard our hats, unwind our scarves. Lucas pulls off his hat, his black hair sticking up all over like he stuck his toe in a socket.
I look at him, at his kind, earnest eyes and shy, crooked smile. My heart is filled to bursting with wantin
g. It’s a foreign feeling, terrifying but exhilarating. It would be safer to shut down, withdraw, to make damn sure nobody cracks me open again. But I think of the beauty that can come from a breaking, a shattering of a thing that was whole, then broken, then reshaped into something else entirely. The memory of the ice, still pressed against the backs of my eyelids, shivers and sparks inside me.
It’s safer to stay off the ice.
To hell with safe.
Before I can think better of it, I wrap my fingers around the back of Lucas’s neck and kiss him, hard, on the lips.
“You’re amazing,” Lucas whispers.
I kiss him. I kiss him, and I kiss him again. He kisses me back. Champagne bubbles pop and fizz in my blood. My stomach explodes in a flurry of wings—sherbet yellow sulphurs, metallic blues, taffy orange hairstreaks. I lean into him. He wraps his arms around me. His warm hands rub my back, my arms, nuzzle my cheeks. They aren’t anything like Frank’s hands. This is something entirely different. This is something good.
I run my own hands through his soft tufts of hair. He touches my ear, the hollow of my throat. We’re kissing and I’m cracking open, little spider cracks smashing into jagged fissures of light, light pouring through and drenching everything.
We kiss for a long time. His mouth fits with mine. I tuck perfectly into his arms. Everything’s warm, safe, right. My skin tingles and my heart skitters and I want to pull him closer, kiss him harder. I want him to hold me forever and ever.
His fingers trace circles like rings of fire down my back. His hands slip beneath my shirt.
My whole body goes cold like I’m back out on the ice, only this time it cracks wide open, gaping like a mouth. I plunge through into the black depths.
I jerk away from him and scramble across the seat, fold myself against the door. I’m trembling, my pulse jittering in my throat. Images cascade over me, searing the insides of my eyelids. Frank’s eyes, piercing into me. Frank’s arrogant, predatory smile. Frank’s greedy hands, taking from me what I didn’t want to give. Frank’s words, scouring my flesh. Slut. Skank. Are you whoring around on me? I need you. You’re mine. Only mine.
