Us, Again

by Elle Maxwell

  “Wake the fuck up, Wyatt. We have to get out of here. Your car. Now.” He presses the barrel of the gun harder against my body for emphasis, a clear message of what will happen if I don’t comply. So I do.

  My mind goes fuzzy again, and I move in a daze. Walk to my car. Unlock it. Get in and sit behind the wheel. Look to my right, seeing Curtis already in the passenger seat.

  “Drive!” he orders. I do.

  The next few hours have a dreamlike quality to them. Everything moves slowly and disjointedly, flashing before me in choppy images. The ringing in my ears persists, a monotonous underscore. All other sounds are muted. My body feels far away, and I watch its actions in a state of detachment. My hands turn the wheel. My foot instinctually presses the pedals. Gas, break, gas. Red and blue lights in the rearview mirror. High-pitched siren breaking through the white noise in my head. Officers in black. My body slamming against the side of a car, metal closing around my wrists, rough hands digging through my pockets. A bag of unmarked pills shoved in my face. A monotone recitation of words that resonate through my fog with vague familiarity. Do you understand? The question repeated loudly until I nod.

  Then a car, walking, finally left in a room that’s too bright. The door opens, closes. Angry voices that blur into static. Faces. The bag of pills again, thrown onto the table. A laptop slammed down right in front of me, screen showing a scene that looks familiar but strange. It hits me that what I’m seeing is the gas station, from security footage taken by a camera that must be on top of the building. I focus on it, rapt. Recognize my own form from behind, then Curtis facing me. The quick movement of the other man appearing. Curtis shifting so we’re standing side by side, both turned away from the camera. Movement as Curtis’ hand raises. The sudden spasm of the man’s body as the bullet enters his head. His body crumpling to the ground. Somehow, it’s even more horrifying to watch the second time. Then two dark shapes walking away together toward a dark SUV. My form disappearing on the driver’s side. Curtis on the passenger side. Driving away.

  They leave me alone in that room for a long time, the hard steel chair beneath me and the metal cuffing my hands cold. That coldness slowly spreads throughout my whole body until I start wishing they would give me back my coat. My ass goes numb from being pressed against the hard seat for so long, but I don’t get up. The discomfort brings me back into myself. Slowly. The ringing in my ears fades, replaced by the earsplitting silence of this room.

  Hours go by. I’m aware of time passing only as it’s marked by the burn in my tired eyes and the rising protests of my empty stomach. And the return of that internal ache, that pressure. I try to search my pockets with still bound hands until I remember they’ve been emptied. My throat thickens as awareness that I have no pill or powder to give me relief makes the pain intensify twofold. It makes my situation finally sink in, as nothing else has been able to.

  Mackenzie.

  I think about her for the first time in hours. She’s right there at the top of my mind as soon as I fully shake the strange haze of shock. Her beautiful smile, smooth white skin, silky pale red hair, her hands on my body. The clear mental image sends a sharp stabbing sensation straight through me, compounding the agony already gripping my insides with crushing force. My thoughts darken.

  This is all my fault. I’m a fuck up. She’s better off without me. I don’t want her to see me like this. If Mom and Dad could only see me now. Worthless fucking idiot.

  I will myself to slip back within the fog. I decline my phone call, agree to charges I barely hear. The officers leave me in that same room to wait to be transferred to jail. The door slams shut, the sound too loud as it reverberates through my bones. This room might as well be a coffin, that door clicking shut a lid closing on the life I once had.

  33. ARE WE OKAY?

  Mackenzie

  I’m crying, though I couldn’t say at what point in Graham’s story it started. I wipe at the tears with my bare palms, breathing in and out through my nose to slow the tide. He’s finally finished talking, caught up through the events of yesterday, and we’re sitting in silence letting it all slowly settle around us like a cloud of dust. I can barely wrap my mind around all the things he just told me, every revelation and clarification. On top of that, everything hurts. I woke up to find every minor bump and bruise and strained muscle from yesterday’s altercation had coalesced and become an ache I feel throughout my whole body. Not to mention my throbbing head, which makes the knife wound on my arm seem nothing more than a minor scratch.

  A knife wound. Is this my life? I would laugh if I didn’t think it would open the door for a flood of tears that might never end.

  “I still don’t understand how our entire town—the sheriff, my parents—ended up believing you killed him?” I try to grasp onto something tangible. Facts, details.

  While he was talking, Graham remained seated and still atop the bed, making eye contact with me most of the time but occasionally looking off toward the distance as though lost in thought. Now he rises and starts pacing, his legs eating up the hotel carpet for a couple of long strides before pivoting and retracing his steps in the other direction. His path is not long, his position always as close to the bed (and me) as it seems his agitation will allow. He looks like a lion trapped in a small cage, powerful muscles meant for open spaces. I’d bet anything he’s dying to run a couple of laps full speed right now.

  “Accessory isn’t as gossip worthy as full murder, or as easy to whisper, I guess. And the exact charges were hazy for a little bit, because the position of the security video made it look like we were in it together. I seemed complicit in the whole thing, and they thought I willingly offered to drive the getaway car.” He stops and shrugs a little helplessly, sad eyes meeting mine. “It’s not like I was correcting anyone. And later I talked to the state police, so the Westwood Police likely weren’t updated. If that would have even mattered.”

  I don’t think Graham has slept at all. He’s messing with his hair, pulling at the locks that have grown back out to nearly the length of my fingers, then pushing it away as it falls in his face. I reach over to the bedside table and rifle around in my purse until I find an elastic hair tie then toss it at him. He gives me a little sheepish smile, barely there on his otherwise grim face, before reaching up and fastening his dirty blond hair into a careless knot on top of his head.

  I watch his every movement, tracing the taut muscles on his raised arms with my eyes. Savoring. I’ve been doing this since last night, trying to capture mental images of every beautiful feature, memorizing all of his motions and expressions, cataloging each sensation of his skin on mine when we made love. I have that sensation in my stomach again, the one you get when the roller coaster is approaching a steep drop in the track ahead and your muscles tighten in anticipation of the plummet.

  “Why didn’t you ask for a lawyer? You could have afforded a great one.” There’s no point in going over this again now. It won’t change what happened five years ago, but I can’t help myself.

  “Doc Shady says I have some self-destructive tendencies.” The upward twitch at the corner of his lips lacks humor, and I easily read it as wry self-deprecation.

  You think? I silently respond with a roll of my eyes, and his almost-smile grows a fraction before disappearing.

  “I know I’m repeating myself, and it doesn’t do any good now, but I’m so sorry, Kenz. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, and that it got you hurt …” His hazel eyes are glassy, the remorse clear in every inch of his body.

  “I don’t blame you, not for this.” I reach up and lightly tap at my bruise mottled face then the bandage on my arm. “You wouldn’t have put me in danger if you could help it. You tried to protect me, and I’m sure you would have done more if you could.”

  I watch his face as he processes my words, obviously surprised by this bit of absolution. Hope enters his eyes for the first time this morning, and my heart drops a little.

  “Are we—?”

&nbs
p; He doesn’t finish his question, but the unspoken words hang in the air between us.

  Are we okay?

  Are we going to get past this?

  Are we still together?

  I carefully slide my legs off the bed and stand, dismissing him with a firmly held out palm when he rushes to my side offering assistance. I walk slowly but steadily over to the window. There’s not much of a view, only the dismal cloud-filled sky and the hotel’s parking lot far below.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t be in bed?” he asks.

  I wave him off. “I need to think for a minute. Just give me a minute.”

  Silence signals his agreement to my request, and I assume he’s sat back down on the bed when I hear its springs depress beneath his weight. He gives me the quiet I asked for, leaving me alone with my thoughts as I continue to stare out the window.

  My heart hurts after hearing his whole story. I understand better now what he went through back then, and even how he managed to hide it from me, from everyone. We all chalked up any unusual behavior to grief, considering it a normal response to his parents’ death. Grief and depression share many symptoms and characteristics, after all. But what Graham felt was deeper than the average person’s grief, darker. It is clear to me now, as it was to the “prison shrink” as he calls her, that he was clinically depressed. It’s understandable why he turned to drugs, but I wish with everything in me that he’d sought professional help. A doctor could have prescribed him antidepressants to treat the chemical imbalance he was trying to combat with illegal drugs. I’m only grateful he never used heroin and managed to avoid a long-term addiction to the drugs, but who knows what might have happened if he wasn’t arrested then? If he’d gone on with his drug use for more than those few months, he might have spiraled further. Likely would have.

  But it’s so hard to fathom. I can’t seem to reconcile my Graham with a boy so broken he gave up and accepted charges far greater than he deserved. Had he pled and proven his innocence for involvement in the murder, his sentence would have been a couple of years for purchase and possession of the drugs, probably less with good behavior, and an expensive lawyer might have even gotten him off on community service with court mandated rehab. But he didn’t speak up. All of my years studying psychology are proving insufficient to help me personally relate to that mindset, to being in a place so dark you would throw your whole life away.

  I can only thank God the therapy in prison helped him enough that he eventually gave evidence in exchange for an early release. He probably helped a lot of people too, making sure Curtis stayed off the streets. By sharing every detail of that night, he gave the police the information they needed to check hospital records and find the sixteen-year-old girl who died from the Fentanyl-laced heroin Curtis sold her. Curtis won’t ever get out, not with her death added to his charges. I’m so proud of Graham for that, for giving at least some justice to that poor family who lost both a son and a daughter within days of each other.

  That was the past, though, things I’ve long since accepted even before I knew the specifics. But now there is this whole business with Eli. What has Graham really done wrong? There is this part of my mind that keeps asking, wanting to clear him. Graham assures me he hasn’t turned back to drugs, that he hasn’t engaged in any illegal activities. It would be easy, almost, to forgive him. To let his good intentions and my love for him outweigh his lies. But would it be the right thing to do? For me?

  I suddenly recall a long-ago conversation with my mom, back in junior high when I was angsting over one of my early experiments with “boyfriends.” The pre-adolescent infatuation didn’t last long, of course, but I’ve never forgotten what she said when I came to her complaining about some small flaw of his.

  “Well, is it a deal breaker?”

  “A deal breaker?” I ask.

  “You’re always going to find some flaws, or less than favorable characteristics, in a boyfriend. Do you think your father is perfect?”

  “No.” I giggle and roll my eyes.

  “Right. But we’ve been together for almost twenty years.”

  I nod, now totally engrossed in her words. Twenty years is an unfathomable amount of time to my twelve-year-old mind.

  “You’ll never be happy with a boy, or have a lasting relationship, if every time you find something you don’t like, you just give up. You have to decide what’s most important to you, and what behaviors or traits you absolutely can’t live with. The automatic relationship killers … the deal breakers. So, this boy’s breath, for instance. Is it part of a larger problem? Is he generally bad about taking care of his hygiene?”

  I scrunch my nose. “No. I think it’s because he eats Doritos at lunch.”

  I watch her bite back a smile.

  “So, if you really like him, if everything else about him is good—you enjoy spending time with him, he treats you well, he’s a good person—could you fix it by carrying around gum or mints to offer him?”

  I grin and nod. I never realized before, but my mother is a genius.

  “So, it’s not a deal breaker. What would be a deal breaker for you?”

  “I guess—if he was mean to someone. The way Mitchell Helvey picks on Jennie Maither because she has a stutter.”

  Mom hugs me.

  “As always, you never fail to surprise me with your maturity. I’m proud of you, honey. You have a good heart and a good head on your shoulders. I have faith you’ll make smart choices as you grow up, and that you’ll be strong enough to recognize a deal breaker and do the right thing even if it’s not easy.”

  I didn’t understand her then. Why wouldn’t it be easy to do the right thing? It was beyond my capacity to imagine at the age of twelve. But oh I understand now.

  Are we okay?

  It might be easiest in the short term to forgive him, to give in to my craving for him and fall back into his arms. To let love blind me to his flaws. It’s so tempting. A part of me is screaming insistently that only his arms, his love, will ease the sharp ache in my heart that’s currently making it hard to breathe.

  How did I let this happen? How did I get here?

  I promised myself I would never experience this pain again. I made an internal oath to stay away from the kind of love capable of ripping me apart from the inside out. I was determined to be stronger, to be smarter, to always love myself first. And all it took was a couple weeks of Graham Wyatt’s presence for me to forget all of that, to eschew self-preservation and self-respect and jump back into bed with him, back into life with him.

  But I didn’t do it completely blindly. I let him back in with a condition, one filled when I believed he had changed. He promised he’d never lie to me again, that he would never keep anything from me. And he broke that promise.

  I think I’ve known the truth all along but wouldn’t admit it to myself. This is a deal breaker. The deal breaker to end all deal breakers.

  I walk slowly back over to the bed and sit down beside him, keeping an arm’s length between us. I lift my eyes to his and find them already glassy. His pain and fear hurt almost as much as my own.

  This is where I have to be strong, even when it isn’t easy.

  Are we okay?

  I shake my head slowly, the slight motion enough to make a sharp pain lance through my skull that I try to ignore.

  “No,” I tell him softly, not pulling away from our eye contact even though it’s breaking my heart. “No, we’re not okay.”

  I drop my eyes to watch his Adam’s apple move as he swallows hard, adding his thick neck covered in a day’s growth of scruff to my mental snapshot gallery.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You lied to me,” I say. My voice isn’t harsh or angry—it’s resigned. Sad. “You promised things would be different, and then you went and did the exact thing that ruined us the first time.”

  “I’m so sorry. Please—” he begins to plead in a hoarse voice. But I stop him with another painful shake of my head.

  �
�You’ve said you’re sorry. I heard you, and I believe you. That’s not what this is about. I don’t think you lied about Eli because you were doing anything wrong or because you were trying to hurt me.”

  “Never,” he agrees fervently.

  “So, you didn’t tell me because … you were ashamed about the reminder of your past? You were scared and didn’t want to show me that weakness? You were afraid that it would scare me away?”

  His nod is slow, so slow, and paired with a heavy-lidded blink.

  “And that’s what it comes down to. The deal breaker. You don’t trust me.”

  “That’s not true!” He closes the space I’d left between us and takes my hands in his, eyes and voice beseeching. “I do trust you, more than absolutely anyone else. You have to see that.”