“Carrie?” I said her name and she took a step toward me.
She collapsed in the door and I caught her in my arms.
“I’m okay,” she mumbled. “I’m okay.”
But she didn’t seem okay.
I helped her inside. She winced when she sat on the stool, so I took her to our living room. She still winced, but less so, when she sat down on our sofa. It was soft and comfy. It had large arms that Dad leaned on when he read the newspaper. Carrie used them now to rest her head on.
“What happened?” I ask, but I don’t want to know. I can tell before she speaks that I don’t want to know.
She shakes her head because she doesn’t want to me to know too. She doesn’t want to speak about it. And I breathe a sigh of relief and I’m about to ask her if she wants to get an orange juice and go upstairs. Because the last thing I want is for my mom to come home and find Carrie in the house again.
“I don’t think I can do it anymore, Ethan,” she whispers.
I put my arm around her. “It will be okay,” I say, and I kiss the side of her head like Dad does to Mom when she’s stressed out.
“It won’t. I can’t—” Carrie takes a deep breath. “I’m going to leave.”
“Don’t go,” I automatically say, and then I realize that she means she’s going to go go. Not just from my house, but from her house too.
“I have to. He’ll kill me if I don’t.” Her voice sounds rough and I can tell she’s been crying.
“He’ll kill you if you go,” I say.
And it sounds cruel, but it’s the truth. She ran away before and her skin was purple for a week. If she leaves again and he finds her, he’ll hurt her more than that. I just know it. I can tell from the way he looks at her.
“I’m working on something,” I say. And I am. I have been. I wasn’t planning on telling her for a little longer. I’m only fourteen. But by the time I’m fifteen, or even sixteen, I’ll be a man, and then I will be able to stop Carrie’s dad from hurting her.
“What is it?” she asks, but she doesn’t look at me.
I stand up and I lift up my shirt. I pull it over my head and she stares at me blankly. I flex my arms and I grin, from ear to ear, like my mom says sometimes.
“I’ve been working out,” I say proudly. “I’m getting muscles so that I can stop him. Soon I’ll be strong enough. Just you wait and see.”
Because everyone on our street knows that Carrie’s dad hits her. And that her mom is a drunk. Everyone knows that Carrie’s house is a bad place. None of the kids play near there, because you can sense the evil in it. It’s not just the dirty windows and the peeling paint, or the porch swing that squeaks in the wind. It’s something else. Something unexplainable.
Maybe it’s the men that frequent the house. They don’t look like good people. That’s what my mom always said. I’ve had the same feeling about our house, I want to say.
Carrie smiles at me. I can see from her face that it hurts to smile, because she winces and a fresh drop of blood drips out of the cut on her lip. She stands up and places a hand on my chest. “You’re too good for me, Ethan Cowells.”
“I’m not!” I say. “I’m not, Carrie.” And I mean it too.
She smiles and her hand moves to my face. She strokes her palm along my jawline. There is soft hair growing there now. ‘You’re becoming a man’, my mom said. ‘I’ll show you how to shave,’ my dad said.
“You’re too good for me.” She says it again, but her eyes are far away. “Can I have some orange juice?” she asks, and I say yes and then we go to the kitchen and I pour her a glass, and she says she has to go. She sees I’m disappointed and she lets me touch her breasts before she goes.
“So long, cowboy,” she says as she leaves through the back door.
The door shuts behind her, and I stand at the kitchen window and I follow her with my eyes all the way back home. She stands in front of her own back door for several minutes and I will her to go inside, to not run away again, but after five and a half minutes she turns and walks away from the door.
And I’m left wondering, not for the first time, if I will ever see her again.
Chapter forty-four:
“He’ll be here soon,” I say to her.
She looks confused for a moment, and the recognition crosses her face. I look at the watch on my wrist. It’s eleven a.m.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
I shake my head and shrug. “I don’t know. What time does he normally come around?”
“Lunchtime,” she says, but I don’t know if she’s telling me the truth. I wonder if she’s ever told me the truth. Probably not.
We lapse back into silence, neither of us sure of the other person anymore. I was always her sure thing. I was always there to catch her if she fell. I was always there, in the background, thinking about her, loving her, needing her.
And she was always there for me. She wasn’t my world. She was the world. She was perfect and broken. She was perfect and used. She was perfect in every way. But now that I see she’s not perfect, I don’t know what to do. Now that I know she doesn’t love me, how do I cope?
Now that I don’t know who she is anymore, I don’t know who I am either.
The world is topsy-turvy. It makes no sense anymore.
I have her phone in my hand. I open it and go through her messages. He’s sent her seventeen since Friday.
Jesus, Adam, go spend some time with your fucking wife already.
Most of his messages are asking her to send him filthy pictures. And looking back through her messages I can see that she normally does. With each message he gets more and more annoyed, until the last one.
That one simply says, ‘I’m on my way.’
Well, that’s not good, I think.
“Okay,” I say. “You should put some clothes on.” I stand up and look down at my naked self. I’m not embarrassed and I’m not shy. You end up being naked around people all the time in prison and the hospital, so nudity is second nature to me. Still, “I should probably put some clothes on too.”
Carrie doesn’t look like she’s going to run away from me anymore—almost like she’s given up. There’s a look of resignation on her face. Maybe she knows there’s no point. Maybe she finally sees that everything I have ever done, I’ve done to protect her. I’m still protecting her even now, even though we both know she doesn’t deserve it.
I don’t trust her, and I don’t think I can ever trust her again, I realize. And that’s hard to come to terms with, if I’m being honest with myself. And I always try to be truthful with myself, because like Mom used to say, ‘if you can’t be truthful with yourself, who can you be truthful with?’
I’ve always trusted Carrie, even when she seemed untrustworthy. Even when everything dictated that she was bad. I trusted her with everything I had. My heart, my soul, my body.
But now…now I know I can’t.
I help her to stand, and I can hear that she’s wheezing painfully with every breath. The old me would have apologized for hurting her, but I’m not that Ethan anymore. I have to be a new Ethan. I have to be stronger if I’m ever going to be free of her.
So instead of apologizing and begging for her forgiveness—because kicking her so hard that I think I cracked her ribs wasn’t by accident, and it wasn’t her fault. It was mine. Because I got angry and I lost control. Instead of saying sorry, I say, “Come on, let me help you up.”
She looks at me with glossy eyes. Her back and side are bruised really badly. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel bad when I see those ugly bruises, but I know that she deserved it. It was wrong to hurt her. ‘Violence is always wrong, Ethan’—that’s what my therapist-slash-counselor-slash-Mr. fucking Jeffrey used to say. And he’s right. Again, I think with a sigh. ‘But she did deserve it,’ a small voice inside me says, and I choose to listen to that one instead of letting any more guilt into me.
We make our way out of the living room and up the stairs. Carr
ie leans on me the entire time; her knotty hair brushes against my shoulder and makes me shiver. We have to take the stairs one at a time because it hurts her to move. And even though I know Adam is going to be here soon, I let her take her time, because I’m considerate like that.
At the top of the stairs she asks to take a breather, and I let her lean against the wall. I notice, as she puts her head back and closes her eyes, how awful the wallpaper is. It’s not just ugly (like everything else in this house), it’s dirty, and I can’t fathom for the life of me why she lives like this. She’s trying to take slow, even breaths, but her eyes are open now and she’s looking at me.
“What?” she asks.
I shake my head, because I don’t want to be rude. What we think and what we say are two different things, and Mom always said that we should only try to say nice things.
“Go on, spit it out.” She’s glaring at me now, as if she can read my thoughts and see what I really think of her home. She smiles at me, but it’s a fake smile and I don’t like it. “Turned out just like my mom, huh?” She says it like it’s funny, but it’s not funny and I want to tell her so.
In my head I do tell her. I say, Why are you laughing, Carrie? You did turn out just like your mom, and you always promised that you wouldn’t. But again, I don’t actually say anything to her. The ugly words stay buried inside me, where all the ugly things stay hidden.
“You know what? Fuck you, Ethan,” she rasps. Her face is angry but her tone just sounds painful. “Fuck you and your perfect life.”
She pulls away from the wall and heads to the bedroom.
I’m so confused by her statement that it takes me a second to process it. My life isn’t perfect; it hasn’t been for a very, very long time. Though I always try to make the best of it. You have to, don’t you? If you get given a shitty hand in life, you do what you can and you make the best of it. You work to turn things around.
I had to wait twenty years before I could turn my life around. Before I was free. I was a good boy; I was let out for good behavior. I wasn’t a threat anymore. Carrie’s body was never found, and I got a new lawyer who said that without a body they couldn’t prove she was actually even dead.
They couldn’t prove what really happened that night, with no witnesses.
Carries mom had lied and couldn’t be believed.
My fingerprints were on the knife, but so were Carrie’s.
Lawyers could twist the truth to however it suited them, I suppose.
I’ve got myself a job, and an apartment, and though I still see my parole officer and therapist once a month, and they dictate a lot of my life still, and though my mom and dad still don’t want anything to do with me, I still feel lucky. At least relatively so. There are people in worse situations than me out there. Think about that homeless guy near the hospital the other day. He didn’t have a job or a roof. He didn’t have cans of soup in his cupboards. But I do, therefore I made my life better.
But Carrie, I want to say. Carrie, my life is far from perfect. I thought once I found you that it could be, but I see now that I was wrong. I see now that you would only spoil my life, not make it better. And do you know how I see that, Carrie? Should I tell you why? Because you’ve done nothing with yours. You just wallowed in your own self-pity. You became your mom. Your windows are dirty and your paint is peeling, and underneath all of that is a very ugly person.
I follow her into the bedroom, where we made love last night. I want to put my arm under hers and help her again, but she seems mad and I know that you should leave people alone when they are mad, so I don’t touch her, and I don’t say any of the ugly words inside me.
Inside the bedroom she goes to her wardrobe and she pulls out some clothes. Again, she doesn’t bother with underwear of any kind—no panties or bra—and I wonder if she knows it’s gross to do that. That she’ll give herself a bad reputation if she walks around with no underwear on and people see her nipples beneath her shirt. She may be a whore but does she really have to advertise the fact?
She sits on the edge of the bed while I get dressed, her eyes watching me the whole time. Once I’m dressed, she starts to speak again, and I think it’s strange that she waited for me to get dressed before she spoke. Like she needed the protection of clothing separating us before she dared voice what she wanted to say.
But I beat her to it, because my curiosity gets the better of me, so before she speaks, I speak.
“My life isn’t perfect, Carrie,” I say. And I mean for the words to come out strong, but they sound weak to me. And they must to her too, because she sneers at me and shakes her head.
“No, but it was.”
I frown and look down at the floor. I haven’t put my socks on and my bare feet are on her dirty carpet. It feels hard underneath my toes, not soft, how my bedroom carpet used to feel all those years ago.
“It was perfect, wasn’t it, Ethan?”
I look back up at her; my earlier rage has simmered to confusion. “When I lived at home with Mom and Dad?” I ask.
She nods her head, and her eyes dart around the room as if they can’t hold my stare. “Perfect life and perfect mom…” She looks away before finishing. “…and perfect dad.” She sounds bitter, especially when she says the last part.
“No one is perfect, Carrie. There is no such thing as perfect. It’s an illusion. A camouflage we use to protect ourselves.” I use Mr. fucking Jeffrey’s words, because they seem to fit right now…just like Carrie and I used to fit.
She seems angry and hurt all at once. She opens her mouth to speak but the words don’t come out. It’s almost like the words are sitting on her tongue waiting for the right time, but she closes her mouth.
I take a step toward her, and I kneel down by her. I look up into her face. She’s wheezing painfully, her face is battered and bruised. Her lip is cut. Her forehead is swollen. But all of those things are inconsequential because it’s her eyes that hold the most pain. She looks at me like she doesn’t want to say the words that are supposed to come next, yet her cruel, black heart does.
In her eyes a war is raging. A battle of wills. I’m not sure who won out in the end when she finally opens her mouth and says,
“I hated you for having such a perfect life. And I knew deep down I could destroy it.”
I frown at her.
I don’t like this Carrie.
“Your dad used you as a camouflage, Ethan. He used your perfect life, and your perfect home, and his perfect job to hide who he really was.”
I frown. I feel it pull tight across my face. “Who was he really then?” I ask.
“He was a bad man,” she says without hesitation, a steely determination in her tone. “He was a bad man, just like my dad.”
Chapter forty-five:
I get up from the floor by her feet and I take a step back.
But there’s fire in her eyes and she sees me dissolving before her. She closes the gap that I just made. She places a hand on my chest.
“Are you just like him too?” she asks, and there’s such misery inside of her. I see it in the air surrounding her, the way she bends the universe to her will.
She’s using me, abusing my trust. She’s an expert at that. I guess that makes me an expert at being used.
Well I don’t have any trust for you anymore, Carrie, I want to shout, but I don’t, because when I open my mouth to speak it’s like she’s stolen the air from the room. Her fingers reach inside my mouth and her fingers stretch down my throat where she grips my voice, strangling the words away.
“I bet you knew,” she says, and I shake my head in horror, still uncertain of what she’s saying but petrified of the truth. “I bet you knew that your dad was a pervert too,” she says with her acid tongue.
I sort of knew what her dad did. I sort of knew what he was like. I sort of heard people talking about her. And she sort of hinted so many times. She hinted though, and never spoke the full truth. Was she protecting me all this time?
But my da
d?
My dad?
I didn’t know. I don’t know. I don’t understand.
“I bet you knew and it got you off.” She laughs but I don’t think it’s funny, and she doesn’t look like she finds it funny either. “Do you know what he liked to do best? Should I tell you?”
I shake my head no, but her eyes are far away and she isn’t listening to me anymore. She isn’t even here anymore. She’s gone, back to then, away from the now, and you should always stay in the now and never look back. That’s what I was told. That’s what I was taught. Though I know sometimes it’s tempting. Too tempting. To take a peek at what was. To let history open its doors to us. To let them creak on their hinges blowing dust motes into the air as the past invades the present.
“Do you remember the day you left me in the kitchen with him?”
“Yes,” I say. My stomach feels funny. It hurts and aches. It feels both sick and numb as I picture my childhood home and the kitchen with the sunny yellow blinds at the window and the pans that stacked up together in formation next to the stove, one-two-three, their red handles neatly tucked away.
“I asked him to help me. I cried when he said there was no helping girls like me. That was the first time. But I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I’d seen the way he had looked at me. It was the same look that my dad gave me when he saw I was growing into a woman. When my breasts were barely breasts and my hips were nonexistent. And I knew then that all men were the same.” Her face looks angry and bitter. It’s not nice, but it matches her bruises which are ugly and dark, just like her childhood.
“I wasn’t like that,” I say quietly. “I wasn’t the same. I’m not.”
“Weren’t you? Aren’t you?”
I shake my head no. I’m defiant in this. No, I’m not like that. I never have been.
“You were just a boy. But look at you now, all grown up.”
“I’m a man now,” I say, but I think, Am I the same as my dad? As Carrie’s dad? Carrie’s dad was bad, but mine was good. I don’t know what he’s like now because I haven’t seen him in so long.
Beautiful Victim Page 19
