Bitter End

by Jennifer Brown

  “Shut up,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

  He arched an eyebrow and took in a deep breath. “What? I’m sorry, did my slut girlfriend just tell me to shut up?” he said. “She wouldn’t dare, because she knows I’d kick her ass for even thinking it.”

  He was up off the bumper now, leaning over me, causing me to stumble backward, farther and farther away from my car. “Don’t touch me,” I said, shivering so hard my teeth were chattering.

  I swear the pupils of his eyes glowed, every muscle in his body standing at the ready. His eyes slipped down from mine to my neck, and for a moment I thought he was going to strangle me.

  “I thought I told you to stop wearing this piece of trash,” he snarled, snatching Mom’s dream catcher off my neck and yanking it free. I felt the leather strap pop, and for the first time since I was eight years old, I was alone, naked, the barrier between me and my nightmares gone.

  He held the broken necklace in his hand above my face and tossed it across the parking lot. I lost sight of it in the dark. It was gone. Everything important to me was crumbling, breaking. Everything was gone.

  Something snapped inside of me. I straightened up, the shivering dying immediately, and shoved him in the chest with both hands, giving it everything I had. He stumbled backward, his back popping the side mirror of my car out of place. It landed back in place with a thwump.

  “You broke it!” I screamed, because I didn’t know what else to scream. “It’s over. Get away from me. Don’t ever come near me again.”

  He laughed. Like what I’d just said was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. Like my shoving him tickled. He threw his head back and laughed, long ragged laughs into the night sky.

  And then, when he straightened up, he reared back so suddenly I didn’t even see what happened until I opened my eyes again and found that I was on the ground next to the tire of my car.

  My face hurt. Not like it hurt before. This time it was different. It hurt and tingled and felt numb and hot. When I reached to my eyebrow, my finger slipped into a gash, and my hand came away wet with blood. I had also bitten my tongue and tasted blood in my mouth. I gagged, spat, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  “You think you’re all big now, huh? You talk to that crazy bitch, and you suddenly think you can just push me and tell me it’s over? It’ll never be over, Alex, do you hear me? Get up! Get the fuck up!”

  I rolled to my side, trying to figure out how to get up. I was dizzy and the world didn’t make sense to me. I must have taken too long, because I saw Cole’s shoes take several long strides into my vision, then saw one leave the ground, and the next thing I knew I was gasping for air, the toe of his shoe buried in my stomach.

  I couldn’t get my breath, but that didn’t matter to Cole, who was still ranting about me being crazy if I thought he was just going to let me and Maria tell lies about him. He reached down and grabbed my arm, twisting it and pulling upward so fast and violently I felt something pop. I cried out, scrambled, and got my feet under me.

  “Please,” I started whimpering, just as I had that day in his bedroom. “Please, okay. Okay. Stop. Please.”

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked, rapping me on the back of the head twice with his knuckles.

  “Cole,” I whimpered. “Please. Just let me go home.”

  “Home to Zack?” he shouted in my face, wrenching my arm up tighter. I cried out and he shoved me backward so hard, I felt light and floaty when the back of my head hit the pavement.

  I don’t know how long the beating went on. All I know is I ended up curled into a ball on my side, his feet connecting with every inch of me that they could reach: my ribs, my tailbone, my cheek, my ear.

  This is it, I thought. Maria was right. He’s going to kill someone and it’s me. I didn’t get out fast enough. It’s my own fault. And just when it started to not hurt anymore and my thoughts started to drift to other things, he stopped.

  “Hey,” a voice shouted. I opened one eye as far as it would go and saw Georgia running toward us, dropping her purse and her deposit bag and her keys on the sidewalk while she ran. “Get off her! Get off her!”

  Cole stepped back and held his hands up, as if he’d never been touching me to begin with, and Georgia shoved between the two of us, holding her arms out to shelter me.

  I could only open one eye. But even through that one eye I could see that the look in Cole’s eyes was like no other I’d ever seen on him before. He looked crazed.

  He’s going to kill us both, I thought, and I wanted nothing more than to have not brought Georgia into this.

  But he didn’t. “Okay, okay!” he shouted, breathing hard, as if beating me had given him a good workout. “You’ll be back, bitch,” he said, but I didn’t respond. I was too busy closing my eyes and drifting off to the place where my bones weren’t broken and I wasn’t draining blood into the cracks of the parking lot feeling like a split sandbag, splayed out on the blacktop, sure I would never move again.

  I floated in that black place, hearing Georgia’s voice barking The Bread Bowl’s address into her cell phone and crooning to me that everything would be okay. I heard her say, “Your daughter’s been hurt,” too, and I wondered if it was bad enough that someone would have to wash my brains off the pavement. And I heard the sirens and voices talking to me and felt myself being carried, but I never opened my eyes through any of it.

  As black as it was behind my eyelids, it didn’t seem anywhere near as black as the world would be if I opened them again.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  There were visitors. A lot of them. Kids from school. Cousins I hadn’t seen in ages. Neighbors. Bethany and Zack, who looked sad and grim and tried to crack jokes, but left too quickly. I wanted them to stay. I missed them more than ever.

  And there was Brenda, who came in, sheepishly carrying a pot of flowers, which looked so vibrant against her skin it was almost like those photographs, all in black and white but with one thing in color. She set the pot on the windowsill and then just stared at me, wringing her hands.

  “They arrested him,” she said, barely a whisper.

  I was still not moving much—not even opening my eyes much, they were so swollen—but I nodded. I already knew this. Georgia had been at my bedside as soon as I opened my eyes, and it was the first thing she’d told me.

  Brenda scratched her arm where the flowers had just been, and again I was struck with how skinny she was.

  “He said you pushed him first,” she said. Then she shook her head and gazed out the window, as if she regretted saying it. And then she just walked out. And never came back. I guess she needed to see for herself what her son had done this time. I guess what she saw must have hurt even to look at.

  Celia had come in, too. With Shannin and Dad and the grandmas. They brought Dad’s birthday cake and we had a small family party in my hospital room, which Celia looked so bitter about it made my heart ache, but later, when Dad and Shannin and the grandmas went down to the cafeteria in search of coffee, she came back, carrying a book in her arms.

  She held it out to me. It was a photo album.

  I looked up at her, searching her face, then held up my splinted arm. “I can’t…” I said.

  She looked unsure for a moment, kind of wavering in place. Then she came around to the side of the bed, climbed in next to me, just like we used to do when we were little kids, and opened the album in front of us.

  I gasped, pressing my good hand to my mouth. The photos. They were all there.

  “Where did you…”

  “I slept in your bed last night,” she said. “I thought you were going to die. Leave us like Mom did. And I… I just happened to find the box in the space between the bed and the wall. I didn’t even know these existed anymore.”

  She turned the pages—flip, flip, flip— and there they were. Mom and Dad, beautiful and happy and together.

  “Dad put them in order,” Celia said. “Last night. And he a
dded these. He’s been keeping them in his closet.”

  She flipped a couple more pages and opened the book again. Wedding photos. Dozens of them. Page after page after page. Mom and Dad so happy. In love. Perfect.

  A few pages later were more additions: baby photos. Shannin’s, mine, Celia’s. Mom looking tired and in love. Dad looking so proud. Toddler photos, school photos, photos of us in pumpkin patches and sliding down slides and at birthdays. They were all there—proof that our mother loved us.

  Proof that I had it right all along.

  Later, when the grandmas took Celia out to dinner, Dad sat by the bed and flipped through the album silently. More than ever, he seemed heartbroken.

  When he got to the photo of Mom holding the flower on her head on the side of the road, he just chuckled, touching the photo.

  “Where was that, Dad?” I asked. “What mountain is that?”

  He stroked the mountain in the background. “Cheyenne Mountain,” he said. “Colorado Springs. We went there on our honeymoon.”

  Cheyenne Mountain.

  “She always said the last time she felt whole was when we were in the mountains.”

  “Is that why she wanted to go back? Because she missed your honeymoon?”

  God, that couldn’t be it, I thought. She couldn’t have killed herself just to get back to the mountains for sentimentality’s sake.

  He shook his head and closed the book. “Alex,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, “your mother was mentally ill. And after you girls were born, she just got sicker. She wasn’t thinking right. Said she loved you girls so much, every time you cried she felt like a piece of her was being chipped away. She was convinced that she wasn’t a good-enough mother.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why Colorado? Why a spiritual healer? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Dad shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. He had her convinced that if she would just get back to the last place she felt whole, she would be all better and could be a better mom to you girls. Sounds crazy, and it was. But she believed it.”

  My mind reeled. She wasn’t leaving us. She was leaving for us. She was going to come back to us, all better. She was trying to heal herself so she could love us better.

  I couldn’t help wondering how different the past year would have been if I’d known this. How different my whole life might have been. Why couldn’t Dad have just told me this before? Why couldn’t he come out of his own grief to tell me the one thing I needed so desperately to hear—that my mom loved me. That I mattered. That I was important.

  That Mom’s death was all just a big, sad accident.

  After Dad left the room, I curled onto my left side, which hurt less than my right, and cried. Mom was gone, and we’d never bring her back.

  But I was still alive. There was still hope for me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I’d been home from the hospital exactly four hours when he called my cell.

  The first calls I ignored. I lay under my blankets and shivered, like I was right back to that night. Ignored the voice mails he left.

  But he wouldn’t give up. Every few minutes he called, his cell phone number popping up in the ID. He was out of jail already. He was back home.

  The thought made my spine go cold.

  But I was curious. Even after everything that had gone on, I was curious. And I wondered how awful it had been for him. How awful it would still be. Would he have to go to court? Would my dad show up? Would my dad try to sue his family?

  By the end of the day, I had given in. When he called, I answered.

  “Alex,” he said, his voice muffled as though he was leaning hard into the phone. “My Emily Dickinson.”

  He didn’t say anything more. I didn’t say anything. Just sat there, the open-air sound of the phone line stretching between us.

  And it occurred to me that curiosity wasn’t enough. I just… didn’t have anything to say. Not anymore.

  “God, I’m so sorry,” he said, at last, and I pulled the phone away from my ear, hung up on him, turned the phone off, and put it in my nightstand drawer.

  And it stayed there.

  EPILOGUE

  We waited a year. Part of that time was to let my stitches heal and my bones get strong again and let me make peace with the internal scars that would be my forever companions. Part of that time was to work—get myself back to a place of normal, or at least as normal as you can get when you’ve been through what I’d been through. Part of that time was to speak out—to travel to all the schools I could get to and tell them my story. The therapists all said it would help. I guess they were right. It felt like the right thing to do, anyway. Even if it sometimes made me feel like a freak and sometimes made me miss Cole and sometimes left me sobbing in the driver’s seat of my car, unsure how I would ever get home.

  And part of that time was for Bethany and Zack to forgive me.

  When I say it that way, it sounds like they were bitter and hateful and didn’t want anything to do with me again, and it wasn’t like that at all. They were hurt. And I couldn’t blame them. And it took a while for that hurt to go away and for them to come back to a place of feeling as if… well, as if I belonged to them again. Cole had stolen me away and they had gotten me back, but it was as if they didn’t know what to do with me when the tug-of-war was over.

  Plus, life did move on. For those who weren’t lying in bed living on painkillers and wincing every time they tried to turn over and trying desperately to forget the good things about the guy who just a week ago was holding her hand, life did move on.

  There was prom and finals and graduation. There were summer parties. Movies. Mini golf and dates and college orientations. There was life, moving on, and I missed it. Not because I couldn’t go physically but because I couldn’t go emotionally. There were whole days when I couldn’t leave my bed, not because of the bruises and scars but because getting up and facing the world for another day felt too frightening and too pointless. In some strange way, Cole had given me what I’d so desired all these years. Because of what he’d done to me, I was finally able to understand why my mom had done what she’d done. Because of him I truly understood the meaning of bleakness. Of desperation. Of sadness.

  Bethany went to college, just as she always said she would. She was three states away, which, at times, felt like the other end of the world. She made new friends and got serious with a guy named Bryce and joined an environmental activist group and a sorority—“an academic one. You know me,” she’d said, but from the lilt in her voice I guessed that it was a very social academic sorority.

  And Zack got a job on a cruise ship—“just a waiter for now,” he’d said, but he was working hard for a part in one of their shows. He sometimes really was at the other end of the world. And he hardly ever called.

  But when they both came home for Christmas break, we went to the mall together, and over smoothies in the food court, I brought up Colorado and, though they gave each other that same hesitant look I’d seen them give each other so many times, they agreed.

  “It’s our gift to ourselves, remember?” I’d said, though the truth was I just wanted to see things through to the end. My questions about Mom had been answered. Now it was time for me to let it go, and part of me needed this trip so I could say I’d made it just like I’d always said I would. So I could adopt at least some of Bethany’s determination.

  The drive was like every road trip movie I’d ever seen. The three of us, rattling down the road in the RV Zack’s grandpa rented for us, all of us squished in the cab together, laughing, leaning on one another, playing license plate bingo, eating far more potato chips than could possibly be considered healthy, and switching off behind the wheel.

  Just past the Colorado state line, we pulled into a gas station parking lot and made sandwiches, then ate them in the loft sleeper, pulling the curtain shut and whispering just as we’d done in our bedroom closets so many times as kids.

  “When do you want to go to th
e mountain?” Bethany asked, pushing a wad of sandwich into her mouth. “Right away? Or…?”

  I sipped my soda, digging my bare toes between the mattress and the wall of the RV, and grimaced as the fresh tattoo on my shoulder rubbed up against the RV wall. I smiled. I still couldn’t believe we’d let Zack talk us into matching tatts after all. Georgia was going to throw a fit when she found out.

  “Doesn’t make any difference to me,” Zack said, answering Beth’s question. “This is Alex’s show.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Now that I’m out here, I kind of… I don’t know…”

  “Don’t want to do it,” Zack said. Statement, not question. “You’re afraid.”

  I nodded, tears welling up in my eyes. “What if I don’t feel her up there?”

  Nobody answered. We just ate our sandwiches, our faces shadowed by the gingham curtains, our legs intertwined, our backs up against the wall of the RV. We’d never, in our lifetime together as a threesome, considered what would happen if the trip was a failure.

  Turned out, all it took to make up my mind was seeing the mountain pop up in front of the windshield—one minute not there and the next so big it filled our whole vision—twinkling in the dusk.

  We all gasped. And then we got giddy. We practically had to force ourselves to pull in to the hotel parking lot and check in; we just wanted to keep driving, keep rattling up and up and up until the clouds were on our heads. After we checked in, while Bethany ordered pizza for a late dinner, I strode directly to the tiny balcony attached to our room.

  I watched. I waited. I breathed in while the breeze whipped my hair around my face. I looked for her. Felt for her.

  Nothing.

  After a while, the adjoining door between our rooms burst open and Zack plowed through, singing a song from The Sound of Music at the top of his lungs. Bethany giggled, joining in—something about the hills being alive—but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t take my eyes off the mountain. What if I missed something? What if she showed up and I missed it? It was as if I was looking at my whole life, jutting out of the ground in front of me. I couldn’t blink. Who could?