He tilted his head, waiting for me to get on with it.
“Thank you,” I told him. The paper bag crackled in my tightening grip. I searched for something else to say that wasn’t so dumb, but the same words rolled off my tongue. “Just—thank you.”
Alex glanced from my stomach to my face, making me blush. He wasn’t checking me out, I reminded myself. He was taking my craziness in, or perhaps my sincerity. He was reminding himself that I was likely pregnant, and a complete and utter mess.
“You’re welcome.” His voice was softer than I expected, and in that moment, Alex was calm water in a dark storm, and his kindness sent a tear over the brim of my lashes. “I owe you one,” I whispered, offering him a small smile.
He didn’t nod or shake his head. Instead, he continued down the hall to his uncle’s apartment. “Good luck, Sophie,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” I whispered again, though I didn’t think he could hear me. His broad shoulders seemed to slump the closer he drew to the apartment, his stride less confident. With a deep breath, he opened the front door and disappeared inside, the door latching behind him.
5
Alex
December 7
Before the door even closed, Jimmy was glaring at me. Amidst the scent of stale beer wafting from the empty beer cans in the kitchen and on the side table in the living room, there was a hint of freshness in the apartment, like Jimmy had just gotten out of the shower, again. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
Jimmy had been sober when I’d first arrived, and as the days went on and he drank more and more, his mismatched but tidy apartment turned into a garbage pit. I couldn’t help but wonder if he thought showering hid his drunkenness.
I lifted my burrito. “Lunch break.” I walked around his recliner and couch, and into the galley kitchen. Judge Judy blared from the TV on the entertainment stand. It was janky, both the TV and the stand, but I didn’t expect much from Jimmy. Everything he had looked like it had been salvaged from the community dumpster.
“You didn’t bring me a burrito?”
I rolled my eyes. “I figured you’d still be at work.”
Jimmy groused from his recliner and lay further back, making the springs squeak. “I decided to work a half day.”
“I didn’t realize you could choose your own hours.”
He shrugged. “There’s been an issue with the stupid heater for months. Can you believe they had some guys I’ve never even seen down there working on it over the weekend, like I can’t do my job or something?”
I couldn’t help it, my eyebrows lifted of their own accord. I feared he was asking me the question seriously, and I had to refrain from answering it.
“If they keep getting me the wrong parts, then of course it ain’t gonna get fixed—simple as that. I swear someone tampered with the gas manifold. It’s like they’re trying to get me fired.” Jimmy tossed the rest of his beer back and sighed. “Now they’re gonna undermine me and bring in some fancy engineers from the city? I’ll show them,” he muttered.
Why did the Ortiz family seem to think anyone from the city was considered fancy? I’d lived in a lot of city neighborhoods, and none of them were fancy. My mother’s words to me the day I’d told her I wanted to go to college had stuck with me since she said them.
“You think you’re better than this life—that some fancy college will take you? Who’s going to pay for that, your abuela? That woman turned her back on me when I needed her, she’ll do the same thing to you.”
Jimmy came from the same gene pool as my mother, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, though the memory of both her and my grandma sat too close to the surface for comfort. I’d gotten used to pushing away the darker memories, but being around Jimmy made it more difficult. His eyes were like my mother’s, dark and deadened in a way that had been seared in my mind since the day she died. While she might’ve been a meth-head, he was clearly a drunk. I knew there was a difference, but it was hard to see past that when Jimmy’s first question to me after Digs had left me in Jimmy’s care was when he could expect his first check.
“I need a nap,” he said with a stretch.
“Must be nice,” I muttered, unwrapping my burrito.
“What was that?” he growled.
Cereal bowls were crusted with old milk and dried flakes. Beer cans were overflowing from the garbage bin. Of course none of that had been there when Digs dropped me off Friday to see my temporary home.
“Nothing,” I muttered.
“Give me half of that,” he said, his eyes glued to the TV.
“Dude, this is my lunch. I’m hungry. Have another bowl of cereal or something.”
Jimmy sneered. “Digs told me you were ungrateful.”
“No, I’m broke, there’s a difference.”
“Not too broke to buy a Pepsi with it,” he countered.
“If you had more food in the house, I wouldn’t have to spend my last five dollars on said burrito and Pepsi.” I might’ve had a few more bucks than that, but Jimmy didn’t need to know.
“Oh, so you’re a smartass,” he grumbled. “Fantastic.”
I wanted to growl back at him, but I let it go. What the hell was I going to say? Yeah, and you’re a douche, so we’re even. The least he could do was make sure there was food. I had exactly twenty-eight dollars left to my name after buying that pregnancy test, which I hadn’t expected to do, or for it to be so expensive. But then, I’d never bought a pregnancy test before.
I pulled my burrito out of the microwave and sat at the counter, wondering if Sophie was at her place, taking the test right now.
While I didn’t think I should care if she was pregnant or not, I still couldn’t help but wonder. She was a stranger, for the most part, but I saw the horror in her eyes, the fear. Even if I’d never had to worry about being pregnant before, I’d had plenty of other scares in my life—fights that could’ve ended much worse than they had, near misses and arrests, a broken heart when I was sixteen, or so I thought at the time—and I knew better than anyone that it wasn’t easy steering clear from bad decisions all the time, and hindsight was a complete bitch.
Plus, my grandma would roll over in her grave if I hadn’t helped Sophie.
I took a warm bite of beans, cheese, and flour tortilla as Jimmy’s cell phone rang.
“This is Jimmy,” he said with a yawn. “You mean those yahoos from Anchorage didn’t fix the furnace over the weekend? What do you mean?” He paused to listen, and I continued to inhale my lunch. I only had ten minutes until I needed to be back in class.
“I’m talking about the guys I saw in there yesterday.” Jimmy threw his arm up. “I’m not lying, Mayor,” he ground out. “Fine, but I can’t look at it until tomorrow. I’ve got too many house calls today. Threaten me all you want, Tessa, but I’m all you got. Tomorrow. Yeah, fine.”
Jimmy dropped his cell into his lap and sighed as he lay further back in his chair. “Grab me a beer, would you?” he said over his shoulder.
I glared at his lazy ass in the recliner, wondering how a guy who showered twice a day could still be so gross. His hair was greased back, his clothes too big. People had to know he was a lazy piece of shit, right? Clearly he had this job because the building manager—and even the mayor—had no other option. Even I could do a better job than him, and I knew nothing about HVAC and boiler rooms.
I stared at the balled up paper bag on the counter and took another bite of burrito. I needed a job while I was here. Something to get me out of the house and put some money in my pocket, because clearly I was going to need it. And while Whitely didn’t seem like the sort of place with a list of employment opportunities for teenagers, Sophie might know where I could find work. She did say she owed me a favor.
Jimmy’s recliner creaked. “That beer?” he prompted, nodding to the fridge. “Grab one, would ya?”
With a swallow, I stood up and grabbed Jimmy a can from the fridge. I refrained from tossing it at him and walked it over.
He didn’t bother looking up from Judge Judy. “Stupid fuck,” he grumbled at the plaintiff, then he laughed.
Yeah, stupid fuck indeed.
6
Sophie
December 7
Negative.
I sat on the vanity countertop in the bathroom, staring at the second pregnancy test. Fear. Cowardice. Whichever it was, I couldn’t bring myself to take the test during lunch, knowing I’d have to go back to class and likely have to pretend everything was okay, when it was far from it. So I waited until I got home from school, and for what? Had all the fear and hesitation really been for nothing?
Dark had long since crept in through the bathroom window, and I flicked the main light on to be certain the shadows weren’t playing tricks on me. The second test read the same as the first one, and I hesitated to breathe. Was it fortuitous that Alex had gotten a two-pack of tests, or had he done that on purpose? More importantly, had I done something wrong, twice? The directions seemed simple enough. Yet, as the single blue line brightened on the indicator, I nearly cried with relief. False alarm.
I was not pregnant.
My life was not over—my mom would never have to know.
I waited for all of the coiled tension in my neck and shoulders to ease, for the churning contents of my stomach to settle, but aside from the prick of happy, grateful tears in my eyes, there was no physical relief. In fact, my stomach lurched, and I slid off the vanity and onto the bathroom floor, heaving up the crackers I’d forced myself to eat when I’d returned home.
My stomach twisted and I heaved again. After what remained of the crackers was out and my mouth was watering with nothing else to give, the wave of nausea passed. It would take time, I realized, for the anxiety to go away.
Climbing to my feet, I turned on the sink and slurped water from my hand, rinsing the bile from my mouth. I put toothpaste on my toothbrush and brushed my teeth, thoughts consumed momentarily by Alex. Part of me felt guilty for not thinking about Jesse instead, but I couldn’t help it.
Alex had surprised me. He’d said himself that helping me would add to whatever rap sheet he already had, and he’d done it anyway. And for who, a girl he probably looked at as the mayor’s spoiled daughter? I hoped that wasn’t what he thought. Especially since I’d already acted crazy, and he definitely thought I was rude. After everything he’d done, I hadn’t even offered to pay him back—something I hadn’t realized until I got back to school to find out Katie cancelled class due to her kids getting sick. Alex had bolted before I could even pull out my wallet.
Tomorrow. I would pay him back tomorrow.
I hoped my mom would be on her Skype call with my dad, so that I could disappear into my bedroom for the night without rehashing my attitude from this morning. She’d already sent me on errands all afternoon, calling me with a list of things she needed me to get ready for an impromptu city council meeting. “Consider it your apology.”
I stared at my reflection, comparing myself to Jeannie. Alex had been staring at her a lot. She’d made it easy for him with her dark fanning eyelashes and full-lip grin.
I rolled my eyes. It’s not like it mattered. I needed to think about Jesse. He still hadn’t returned my calls or texts. I was beginning to worry about him. I considered heading down to the eighth floor to see him and get rid of the pregnancy tests on my way down in the process.
I took the roll of toilet paper off the holder and grabbed the first test from the garbage. I wrapped it in paper until it was completely covered and looked like a fluffy white ball. I did the same with the other test. I wasn’t going to walk around the apartment with them, so I stashed them in an empty Q-tips box discarded in the trash, along with a toilet paper roll and some balled up tissue, and shoved the box in the trash for safe keeping.
As the nausea settled a bit more, and I could breathe without a writhing, clawing feeling inside my chest, I flicked the light switch off before I stepped out into the hallway.
The living room was quiet and lit only by the soft glow of the Christmas lights around the bay window and the overhead light above the stove, which hadn’t been cooked on in days. If it weren’t for my room, you’d never know people actually lived here.
The sapphire-colored throw pillows were perfectly fluffed and staggered across the tan, suede couch, positioned in the middle of the room. The TV remote was nowhere to be seen, which meant it was in its assigned drawer, and besides the honeysuckle candle placed perfectly in the center, there were no other signs of life or disarray on the coffee table. Earthenware coasters weren’t strewn around with dusty water glasses, like they would have been in my room, but stacked beneath my mom’s favorite Tiffany Falling Leaves lamp on the side table. Everything was always as it should be, my mom made certain of it.
Her desk, centered against the wall behind the couch, however, grabbed my attention. My dad’s mail stack was becoming more of a tower, and I wondered how much longer he’d be gone for work. Another three weeks? More? For my mom’s sake, I hoped it was less.
Everything was quiet and still. Until I heard a somewhat strangled, ragged breath.
Staring at her closed bedroom door, I stepped further into the living room and strained to listen to the muffled gasps on the other side. My mom took a breath, loud enough for me to hear and I took a few steps closer.
I hesitated to reach for the doorknob. My mom and I were both the suffer-in-silence type. It was a trait I’d learned from her when I was young, but you had to be dumb as a rock to not know why she was so upset, and shouldn’t be alone. We’d both had a rough day, and if I was honest, we could probably both use some company.
Turning her bedroom doorknob, I peeked my head inside. My mom was tough, a hard-ass like no one I’d ever met. She pushed me when I was weak, which felt like all of the time, and she was a voice when the small, inconsequential town of Whitely didn’t have one. Yet, when she forgot to be that pillar of strength everyone else needed, she could be soft and kind, even if I rarely saw it. And curled into a trembling heap on her bed, she looked just . . . miserable.
It wasn’t me this time, weak and broken, the way it had been on so many other occasions. “Mom,” I whispered.
She sat up on her elbow and peered over her shoulder at me. Her eyes were red and her long hair fell in a dark, tangled cascade down her back. “Sophie . . .” She cleared her throat. “You should be in your room doing your homework.” She blew into the tissue clutched in her hand and tucked her hair behind her ear. Even now, in front of me, she was trying to make herself presentable.
Instead of explaining, I crawled onto her bed beside her, into the spot where my dad rarely slept anymore and looked at her. She smelled of orange blossoms and vanilla, and even the smeared makeup beneath her lashes didn’t dull her beauty. My mom was a lot of things, but she was smart and strong and beautiful, and my dad was an idiot. He’d pushed our Skype call back a couple hours and I’d only just realized the time. “Dad didn’t call, did he?”
With a sigh, she blew her nose. “He’s probably bombarded with custom party menus and last-minute requests.”
She and I both knew that wasn’t why he blew her off. The truth was we didn’t even know if my dad really worked as much as he said he did. Sure, the money kept coming in, but that meant nothing. The whole reason we’d moved from Florida was so they could work on their marriage in a place with less temptation. So he would stay away from Clarice, the chef who taught him everything he knew . . . and more. Not that they’d told me that. The information I’d collected about my broken family had been from their late-night arguments behind closed doors and underhanded comments to one another at the dinner table, which they thought I was too naive to understand.
“Maybe,” I said instead, but when her eyes met mine, her brow furrowed and she tilted her head. She knew I wasn’t stupid, and for the first time, it was like she realized I wasn’t just a kid anymore, and her eyes filled with tears again.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I breathed, and wrapped my arms ar
ound her shoulders as we lay back down on her bed, just as she’d done for me so many times. Like when I’d come home from school crying because the other kids were calling me Club Foot, or when I was so frustrated that I couldn’t be just like everyone else—that I couldn’t play like the other kids because of my leg braces.
She was hard on me, and overbearing most of the time, but whatever my mom’s faults, I realized it was because of her that I hadn’t felt shrunken and weak around others for a very long time. She pushed me to be stronger, and as irritating as it was, I knew a small part of me was.
For her sake, I wished my father cared half as much about appearances as she did.
“Your father’s a jerk,” she muttered, tempering her tone, though she didn’t need to.
“He’s an asshole, Mom—you can say it. A topnotch one at that.”
She huffed a laugh, and I tightened my hold around her. I might’ve had a gut-wrenching day or two, but my mom had been going through much worse for years.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut as I breathed her in. After the past twenty-four hours, I could understand the fear she had for me—and not just teen pregnancy. It was everything that might come after it. And I knew in that moment that had I been pregnant, she wouldn’t have disowned me. She wouldn’t have done to me what her mother did to her. My mom was harsh, but she wasn’t heartless. She would’ve done everything she could so that I wouldn’t have to marry a man out of obligation, only to have him betray me over and over, like my dad had done to her.
She patted my arm and kissed my hand. “I’m sorry too.”
The Longest Night Page 4
