Surviving Emma

by Jen Atkinson

  I set my phone to the side and drove down Main to start my route, but I ended up pulling up to the curb in front of Virgie Wire’s house. I got out of the car, my legs moving of their own accord. Did I have a plan? Why had I come? I could honestly say I didn’t know, but my body seemed to.

  I knocked and waited for Emma to answer, knowing she’d leave Virgie on her plastic covered couch to get the door.

  “Hey,” she said. She grinned and she looked so pretty. When had she become beautiful? Or had she always been and I just didn’t realize it? “What are you doing here so early?”

  “Just passing by.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes creased as if they were smiling too. “Wanna come in? Virgie is making me watch some terrible show. At least I don’t speak Spanish though. We can make up stupid things for each character to say.” Her lips cocked into another crooked grin.

  I parted my mouth, forcing my smile. “Nah. Sounds fun, but I can’t. I just didn’t want to forget to tell you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going home next month.” I waited for her reaction, but she just stood listening as if I had more to say. “I need to see my folks. It’s been months. I’m sure my mom is ready to ring my neck.”

  She chortled a short, curt laugh. “When do you go?”

  “Two weeks. The second week of May.”

  “Okay.” She crossed her arms over her chest with the swirl of a chilly breeze. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah. Well, I just needed you to know.”

  She shrugged a little. “You’re coming back, right?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  She shuffled from one foot to the next. “We’ll be fine. We lived for years without your cooking, I think I can handle things.”

  I pushed out a laugh, feeling my chest tighten with its falseness. “No, I know that.” I clapped, needing something to do with my hands. “All right. See you tonight.”

  “See you,” she said in a tone I couldn’t read. She didn’t yell and she didn’t whisper—she’d spoken somewhere in the indifferent middle. Emma covered the extremes of the spectrum. She never sat in the middle. I wish I knew her mind—did she care? If she hadn’t said goodbye, but asked me to stay, what would I have said?

  I sat back in my driver’s seat and ran my thumbs over the screen of my phone. I reread my message and hit send.

  Yes, Tess. I’ll be home in two weeks.

  Chapter 34

  Emma

  “It’s been a long day,” Carter said, as his hand ran down my back. I still felt a small urge to swat it away, more instinct than desire though. I didn’t mind his hand on my back, or his fingers laced with mine, or his lips, that tasted like honey, but my years and years of pushing people away still attempted to kick in. I forced it back though and looked at him.

  He’d acted strange earlier. He’d driven back to the house to tell me he’d be gone for a week. He could have just told me, now, tonight, after Taggart had gone to bed and Dakota had made it home. But he’d driven to Virgie’s and behaved strange and awkward. He said he’d be back—but he’d acted so bizarre.

  Dakota made it home, hugged her dad goodbye—as well as Mindy—ugh, and then things returned to somewhat normal again. But after Kotes went to bed, our normal turned into the memory of the earlier awkwardness we shared.

  “Dakota’s going to be in the school spelling bee.”

  “Oh, yeah? When’s that?” He sat on the couch beside me, his feet stretched out onto the coffee table. The quiet house had one lamp lit, creating dim spaces and more shadows than light. We both spoke just above a whisper.

  “The middle of May. Will you be back by then?”

  He looked away from me. Maybe he wouldn’t come back—but then, I didn’t think Carter would lie to me. And he wouldn’t let Dakota down, not if he said he’d be there. “Which day?”

  “The nineteenth.”

  His expression softened and his eyes glinted with… something, relief, maybe. “Yeah, I’ll be home by the sixteenth.”

  I relaxed. I could feel the tense breath in my body leave, and I knew he saw that, but I ignored it.

  “So,” he used that tone that said he had something to tell me, “I’ve been searching up scholarships.”

  “Scholarships? Are you going back to school.”

  He peered at me pointedly. “No.”

  “For me?” I held a hand to my chest. “What in the world for?”

  “Em. You can’t live like this. You can’t live in a home where someone is constantly telling you that you’re worthless. Dakota shouldn’t hear that, either.”

  I fluttered my eyes to the ceiling. How would a scholarship change that?

  “It’s only a matter of time before he starts telling Dakota those same things.”

  “He wouldn’t.” I sat straighter and turned my body to face him. “I’d kill him and he knows it.”

  “Okay…” He paused, thinking, “he still shouldn’t say those things to you.”

  “Do you think I care?” I sat back into the cushions of the couch, and he moved an arm around my shoulders.

  “I care.”

  I turned my head to face him, breathing in the sweetness and mint his body seemed to produce. My eyes scanned his and then moved to his lips. It seemed he did care. “Why?”

  His eyes examined my face as if he searched for an answer and then he leaned in and kissed me. Pulling back, just a smidge, so that our noses still brushed, his eyes darted to Taggart’s chair. “I can stay,” he said.

  I pecked his lips. Didn’t he see that I didn’t need rescued? But maybe he wanted to save me, anyway. “Taggart won’t be up for hours. Go home. We’re fine.” I ran my thumb over his plump bottom lip, thinking about the honey flavor that it somehow produced. “I’m not afraid of Taggart.”

  “I know.”

  “One day we’ll get lucky and he’ll die.” I grinned at the cruel words and Carter shook his head before standing to go. It was close to midnight and I had told him to leave. Still, the space where he’d once sat felt empty. A chill raced from my spine down each of my arms and legs.

  “I’m emailing you links.”

  “Links?” I stood too.

  “Yeah. For scholarships.” He nodded once toward me—a silent, remember I told you this. “You could get scholarships, Emma. You could get out of here.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets.

  “Promise me you’ll open them. Promise me you’ll fill them out.”

  I shrugged. Did I really have time to fill out forms that would lead to nothing?

  Carter

  “Why do you have to go tomorrow?” Dakota asked me. She sat at my small kitchen table, a book in her hands, but she hadn’t turned a page in more than ten minutes.

  I couldn’t deny the swell of warmth that her question gave me. She hadn’t even asked Keith that. “I have to visit my mom, Kotes.”

  “Why can’t we come?”

  Emma read over the scholarship information I’d printed and forced her to sit in front of. My laptop sat just behind it, waiting for her to fill out an application. But her head popped up at Dakota’s question. “Kotes—” she didn’t finish her sentence though.

  “Maybe you could another time. I bought this plane ticket a long time ago.”

  “Before you knew us?”

  “Yes, actually.” I bought it the day I moved to Dubois, ten months and two weeks ago.

  Emma set her head in her hand, propped up on the table by her elbow. “Really? Is it a special event?”

  “An event?” Twelve months ago I would have called it an event. Today, I didn’t know. I’d call it a mystery more than an event.

  “You know,” Dakota said, holding out her hand and listing on her fingers, “a birthday, an anniversary, Easter—ooo, is Easter this week?”

  “No baby, we just had Easter.”

  “Right. Carter made a ham and Mama burnt a pie.”

  “That’s how you remember Easter?” Emma shook her head and wen
t back to reading.

  We’d held the meal at my house. I’d hid eggs all over the place for Dakota to find. I couldn’t decide who enjoyed it more, Dakota loving it all, or Emma watching her daughter’s first egg hunt. Taggart hadn’t allowed plastic eggs in his house since he stepped on one of Emma’s almost twenty years ago.

  “So, a birthday?” Dakota asked, bringing my mind back to the present.

  “No.” My eyes darted to Emma, and I hated the guilt brewing in my gut. She’d been the one to say none of this was real. “I just knew after a year in Wyoming my mom would be missing me.”

  Dakota smiled. “I bet. Mom would never let me leave her for that long.”

  “Don’t you forget it.” Emma tickled Dakota’s sides. “Don’t worry, though, Kotes. He’ll be back in time for the spelling bee.”

  Back. I would be back. I’d talk to Tess and then I’d come back. Probably.

  I’d never been this unsure in my life. It ate away at my insides.

  “What is it?” Emma sat in front of the newest application I’d pulled up on my laptop, but her eyes studied me, trying to figure me out. She’d seen right through me.

  I shook my head and gave her a reassuring smile. “Nothing.” I pointed to my laptop. “You’re avoiding filling this out.”

  She sighed, groaning louder than necessary. “I’m old.”

  “You’re twenty-four.”

  “I won’t get it. I have no credentials. Why would they choose me for a scholarship?” She held up the paper with the multiple scholarship opportunities listed on it. “And I can’t move, get an apartment, and pay for school all on…” she looked back down at the paper and then the application on the laptop screen, “five hundred dollars.”

  “That’s just one scholarship. If you get ten of those, you could.”

  “Ten?” She huffed, her hands crumbling down onto the keyboard. “That’s impossible.”

  “Dakota,” I sang, “who is the smartest Mom in all the world?”

  “My mom!” She held her hands out like a conductor.

  “That’s right.” I pulled Emma until she stood and then spun her around in the kitchen. Her hair flung out like a poodle skirt, and she let out a little giggle. I tugged and she twirled back into me. I held her tight against me but tilted my head toward Dakota before singing, “Her mom.”

  Emma flicked her gaze upward. “You two are so weird.”

  I pecked her lips, not thinking about Dakota’s prying eyes.

  “No,” Dakota said, her face screwed up in wrinkles, “you two are the weird ones.”

  Emma

  Dakota slept with her head in my lap. I strung my fingers over her forehead and through her fine blonde waves. Carter stretched his long legs onto his coffee table and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.

  “Are you packed?” I asked him, his chest rose and fell with even breaths.

  “I am.”

  “And you leave at…”

  “My plane leaves Riverton at 8 a.m.” He blinked open his tired eyes.

  So early. He left so early, and here I sat close to ten at night on his couch, keeping him up. “We should go.”

  “No,” he held a hand out to me, resting it on Dakota’s side. “It’s fine. Let her rest.”

  “Carter—” I started, right as he said my name too. I breathed out a small laugh. “Go ahead.”

  “I just wondered how you felt about me leaving.”

  Carter leaving. How did I feel about it? My head ached with the question and my body strained with nervous twinges of pain.

  So, I wasn’t thrilled.

  I mean we’d gotten used to him—more than that, we liked him. I even depended on him—which I swore would never happen with another man. They’d only let me down up to this point. Logic screamed at me—why should he be any different? Only every fiber of my being proclaimed his that he was. But I wouldn’t keep him from his family. We were friends, he didn’t owe us anything. It didn’t really matter how I felt—my feelings were insignificant.

  I shrugged. “Ah, fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Um, yes. Go see your mom. It’s not a big deal.”

  He nodded, and though I’d given him what every normal man would love, the string of come and go as you please, he looked oddly annoyed. “What were you going to say?”

  “Oh,” I shook my head, embarrassed now that I’d thought about the words for more than two minutes. “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  I shut my eyes. Oh, how I hated looking stupid—and vulnerable. I’d never been weak, and I didn’t want to sound weak. “I just. I don’t know.” I licked my lips and laid my head back, keeping my eyes on his ceiling. “Do you really think I could do it?”

  “Do what?”

  I growled out a sigh.

  “School?” he quickly said. “Yes, you can. You can do this.”

  “I just need Taggart to die.” I laughed at the words—the wish I’d made on every star, on every birthday candle, and on every blowing dandelion.

  “No you don’t. You’re braver than that. You need to leave him.”

  “He wouldn’t eat if I weren’t there.”

  He sat up and scooched closer to Dakota and me on the couch. He set his arm out across the back of the couch and touched my face with his fingertips. “Yes, he would, and more importantly, you would show him that he can’t rule you.”

  “He doesn’t—” But I stopped. In a way he did. Tears pricked at my eyes, but I held them back.

  “You have to do this before that old man dies. You have to walk into that house and tell him he doesn’t own you. You can and you will do what’s right for you, what’s right for her.” He nodded toward Dakota’s still, sleeping form. “You need to do that for yourself—not him.”

  Ten minutes later, he’d packed up my sleeping girl and buckled her in the car. “You could stay. A night away from him would do you some good.”

  “Ha. Ha. You’re hilarious.” I stood on the porch, the glow from his house lamps lighting his face.

  “Fill out every one of those applications while I’m gone, okay?”

  “Okay.” I didn’t know how to say goodbye to someone who wasn’t mine. I’d miss him. My insides ached in this strange, awful way at the thought of him going, even for a week. But I couldn’t pine or cry or mourn for what didn’t belong to me. That wouldn’t be fair to him—or to me. I had more pride than that. I filled my chest with air and let it out in a swoop. “Well, see you.”

  He put a hand on my cheek, but didn’t lean in to kiss me. “See you, Emma.”

  Chapter 35

  Carter

  I’d be the first to call myself an idiot. I put my car into park and glared at the little cabin. Why had I gone to Emma’s before going home? I wouldn’t tell her that’s what I’d done, but still. I’d been gone an entire week. We hadn’t texted or called once. And in some ways I felt like part of me had gone missing, but did she feel that way? Emma wasn’t exactly forthright with her feelings, and Tess’s words kept running on a loop in my mind. How had she said it again? “We can make this work. We owe it to ourselves to try.” It would have been the perfect time to tell her about the nest egg I’d been building for us. It would have shown her that I wanted to try. But the words wouldn’t come. Every time I thought to say them, images of Emma would cloud any words that formed. They’d disappear in a fog of Emma’s face, Emma’s touch, Emma’s voice—even the tone she used when calling me an idiot, or the physical pain of being hit in the face or pushed off the bed would overcome me and I couldn’t speak a word.

  I left her confused, but not unhopeful. I hadn’t said yes, but I hadn’t said no. I couldn’t say anything. I’d wanted Tess for so long, so not having her at the top of my priority list confused me. I still cared for her. I still loved her in a way. But I’d changed over the course of several months, and I couldn’t deny that.

  I stepped out into the cold, instinct making me hit the lock button on my key fob
, before I realized Emma’s car was missing. I’d somehow pictured her and Dakota in the kitchen baking me a cake like we’d done for Keith. They both knew I’d be home today. My mind ran through a list of excuses the car might be gone and Emma still home, so I jogged up to the porch step and knocked once on the wooden door.

  No one answered.

  A slight tapping caught my attention and I turned toward Virgie’s house. Virgie peered out the window of her living room, tapping on the glass. When she saw she’d caught my eye, she called me over with a beckoning finger.

  I waited in front of the door, but could hear Kotes holler from inside—I couldn’t quite make out the word until the door flung open. “CARTER!” She pitched herself into my arms and squeezed me as tight as her little muscles would allow, something I’d take over any welcome home cake. “Holy cow, I’m happy to see you.”

  “Yeah?” At least one of the Sunday girls had missed me. “Where’s your mom?”

  “Taggart had to see the doctor in Riverton.”

  “Ah.” That couldn’t be a fun trip.

  “She was so grumpy this morning.” Dakota’s eyes went wide. “She even yelled at Keith when he drooled on her shoes. He always drools on her shoes, he can’t help it.”

  “She’s been mopey and irritable since the day you left.” Virgie lumbered into the hall entryway. “Well, come in, Deputy.”

  “Virgie, it’s Aiden.”

  Kotes took hold of my hand and led me along the plastic path from the hall to Virgie’s living space. “Why don’t we call you Aiden?” She wrinkled her little nose.

  “I don’t know, but you can, or Carter’s fine.”

  She thought about it a minute, while I took a seat on Virgie’s couch. A Latin couple embraced on the TV screen. Dakota sat next to me, curling her stocking feet in a criss-cross on the couch. Virgie didn’t complain, she only touched plastic protecting the floral printed sofa. Dakota tapped her chin. “I like Aiden. I’m going to call you that from now on.”