Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “No one pushed me out of a car. They were in a hurry and I tripped,” she said, and took a big gulp of water.

  I thought back to when I was in high school, when my teacher had seen me “tripping,” not getting pushed by my boyfriend. “Corrie,” I started, then stopped myself. Now, with Tanner there, was not the time. “Check it out,” I said instead, and opened the back door. “Look at the progress.”

  Both of them looked out into the yard. “That’s progress?” Tanner asked, just as Corrie said, “It’s a lot better.”

  “I have a ways to go. The important thing is to try, right? To try to make a start, an effort. Because other people will help you, if you just reach out, a little.”

  Corrie moved her eyes to my face, then quickly to the floor. “I’m going up to my room. I’m tired.”

  Both Tanner and I watched her limp up the stairs.

  “Who is that? Who did that to her?” he demanded.

  “That’s Corrie, my roommate. Her boyfriend did it, I’m pretty sure,” I explained, and sighed.

  “She lets her boyfriend treat her like that?” he asked incredulously.

  “It’s not that simple. Come out into the back yard and I’ll tell you some things,” I said, suddenly feeling very, very old. Tanner listened as I talked about boyfriends and girlfriends and how sometimes, you ended up in a situation that was something so different from how it had started. How sometimes, those situations were very tough to walk away from, for so many good and bad and vital and stupid reasons. After a moment, Tanner started working, too, taking the clippers from my hands and cutting back huge swaths of dead grass, brown and tough in the summer heat.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  “Other people will help if you reach out, right?” he said, and when he smiled, I saw so much of his brother in his face.

  Chapter 9

  There. I brushed the spiral binding with my nail and made a little frustrated noise. It was just out of my reach.

  I blew out a breath and stretched a little further, reaching and trying to hook my fingertips in the edge of my school notebook, the one I had thought was gone for good. I had Japanese class in an hour and I wanted to bring it with me, like the responsible, accomplished student that I was. That I was trying to be, I amended.

  I had looked in my desk at work, under the seats of my car, and even called to see if I had left it on the bus on the day that I hadn’t been able to find my car keys either. My Japanese class notebook hadn’t been anywhere, and I had been trying to resign myself to the idea that it was gone, like the new pots and pans that I had bought for the kitchen. I tried to be ok with that, too, repeating the mantra that someone had needed them more than I did, and how uplifting it was to let things go. But it was a little hard, and I was feeling like I was in a bit of a downturn over everything that was missing.

  When I got home on that Monday after work, I lay down on the floor of my studio to take a breather, and something had told me to turn my head. There, in the thin space under the cabinet where I kept my art supplies, I saw a flash of color, the turquoise cover of my notebook. I could almost reach it. Almost.

  My phone blipped a notification and I scooted back out, my arm covered in dust, to look at what it said. It was a message from Cooper, checking to see if I was going to class, because he had something important to tell me. “About business,” he stressed, in case I would get the wrong idea, but I got very excited anyway. I had a feeling it was about his potential clients in Japan, and that would be great, amazing news. I felt like I needed some good news. I wrote back that I would absolutely be there, early even, because I was on pins and needles to hear what he had to tell me. I also wanted to talk to him about what Augusta had said, about how she had maybe given him some business. I felt like things were really going in a positive, light-filled way for Cooper.

  Things with me and Fox were taking the opposite path. He had said ok to giving me time and not pressuring me to get physical, but then he had started to get antsy, asking why, and when. But those weren’t the right questions! After I had been given the carboard sign in my backyard excavation, I had realized that. “Who?” the sign had asked me, and that was really the issue at hand. Who?

  Well, I knew the answer. Fox was not Who, despite the convenience of us dating, despite the length of time we had lived together. I could finally read my own feelings, and they were telling me that I needed to break up with Fox.

  He had the ability to read me, as well, because as soon as I had made my decision that we would have to go back to being just friends, he seemed to know. He had come home on my yard clean-up day, taken one look at me and picked a fight about something silly, and taken off again in a huff. “Who was that guy?” Tanner asked, leaning on the rake we had unearthed.

  “Not my boyfriend,” I answered. “That’s for sure.” I had pointed at the carboard sign that I had hung on the porch railing, but Tanner didn’t seem to get it. “He’s my roommate.”

  “Lazy ass won’t help us?” Tanner muttered, then dropped the rake, tore out a gigantic, dead bush, and threw it into the driveway like a discus. Thank goodness he had come along to help me.

  Fox had arrived home with a big crowd on Saturday night, some of them playing instruments as loudly as they could until Sania blew a gasket, and on Sunday he was just gone, nowhere to be found. I had worked on the yard more alone and I was almost over to the shed, or where the shed used to be.

  So he was MIA, but Corrie was there. Unfortunately, she had sequestered herself in her room for most of the weekend and she wouldn’t talk to me at all. I was giving her time and working on accessing my most patient heart, which was difficult, because I had heard her crying through the door, and also heard her in a heated debate on her phone with someone who I assumed again was her boyfriend. The door had been closed and the room was quiet when I had gotten home from work that afternoon.

  Now I sent a picture of a rainbow to Cooper to remind him to let his colors show then I stretched out again. I almost had the notebook. Almost.

  “Ione?”

  “Hi, Corrie!” I was so glad she had come out of her room. “Give me one second. I’m trying to reach—”

  Someone grabbed my ankles and yanked me back, hard. The notebook flew out with me as I was dragged, bumping across the floor. I gasped and blinked and looked up at a man I didn’t know, I had never seen. Corrie took his arm but he shook her off.

  “Who?” I said, still so shocked, and he leaned over me.

  “You don’t know who I am, you little bitch?”

  I shook my head, but I did know. Her boyfriend. The one who knew where I lived because he had pushed her out of the car at my house.

  “You’ve been fucking with me and Corrie and I don’t like it.” He reached out, casually, and slapped me. I gasped in surprise and pain and Corrie did, too.

  “No, don’t!” she told him, but without even looking he reached back and shoved her so that she stumbled away. Then he stood up straight, and just as casually, picked up my easel and threw it against the wall, my big, heavy easel that my grandpa had built. It crashed and broke and the wet canvas I had been working on fell face down. He swept his arms around, knocking off my brushes, my supplies, everything into a heap on the floor. Wood and glass broke and shattered everywhere and without thinking I covered my face so it wouldn’t cut me. Between my fingers I watched him, and when his back was turned, I made a break for the door.

  He had my hair before I made it halfway there and yanked me back, back onto the floor. I hit the ground hard and my shoulder connected with the fat wooden leg of the couch, making me gasp.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Corrie yelped and he turned to her and held up his thick index finger in her face. He told her to shut the fuck up and find my purse. Slowly I got up, but my legs were shaking, and I tried to rub away the pain on my head where he had grabbed my hair, and I shook out my arm because hitting my shoulder that way had made it numb.

  “I don’t have anything…” I starte
d to tell him, but Corrie looked at me with her eyes huge and shook her head, no. She handed him my purse.

  He thumbed through my wallet, taking my money and ATM card and stuffing it all in his pocket. Then he dumped out the rest of the bag onto the floor and stepped on everything with his ugly, heavy boot. “What else? Where’s your jewelry? Guns? Drugs?” His finger was in my face now, jabbing at me, smelling like cigarettes.

  “I don’t have any guns. I don’t wear jewelry. I don’t have any drugs, nothing,” I told him, but he shook his head too, like didn’t believe me. He cracked his hand across my face and my head snapped around.

  “Where?” He struck me again.

  “No, nothing,” I tried to say again, but there was blood in my mouth. Then he was hitting me more, without stopping, and when I fell, I thought maybe he was kicking me too, but I wasn’t thinking because everything hurt so much, I was just like an animal acting on instinct and trying to get away.

  But I couldn’t, and the last thing I remembered hearing was someone screaming, maybe Corrie, but maybe me.

  ∞

  “Ione? Jesus, Ione!”

  I didn’t understand what was happening or why Cooper was there. Everything hurt so much that it felt like a black wall of pain was crushing me, and my body was shaking and moving without my control. I tried to ask him if he could help me but all I heard now was a funny gurgling and bubbling and somehow I knew that it was coming from me. I wanted him to hold my hand so I wouldn’t be alone but then, the black wall covered me and I lost Cooper.

  ∞

  “Ione. Ione.”

  People kept saying my name and I wanted them to stop. I wanted them to stop jostling me, moving me, hurting me.

  “Ione. Ione!”

  But I got covered by the black wall, again.

  ∞

  “How are you feeling…” The woman checked the chart. “Ione? What an unusual name. It’s beautiful.”

  I mumbled a thank you. It was impossible to move my jaw too much because my face was so sore, impossible to move most of me very much at all.

  She kept talking, glad that I was awake, glad that I was answering because I had been pretty out of it before. I had lost track of the days, a little, but it seemed like I had been in the hospital for a long time, much too long. Karis had been there and Reid, too. Augusta, also. Other people, sometimes, but the events of my first few days at Elizabeth Blackwell Hospital were blurry in my mind.

  “Are you glad that you’ll be discharged tomorrow?” the nurse asked.

  “Very,” I answered, and she seemed to understand what I had said. She kept talking, but I fell back asleep a little, the strange, fitful sleep I had now where I didn’t dream, but instead just opened my eyes after a while and realized that time had passed.

  “Hi,” Karis told me when I opened my eyes this time. She leaned over me a little in the bed. She had been visiting a lot.

  “Hi,” I said back, my voice hoarse, and she immediately got a cup of water and held a straw to my lips. I thought I could do it myself so I tried to take the cup from her.

  “No, let me, ok?” She was kind of smiling at me but I knew Karis and it wasn’t real. “You look like you’re doing much better, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer, but charged ahead instead. “I wanted to talk to you again about tomorrow.”

  I was as healed as I was going to get, in the hospital, anyway. They didn’t want me there anymore. It was time to go home and back to work, to drive my car, to paint. As soon as I could use my right arm.

  “Reid and I were really hoping you would come to our loft and stay with us,” Karis said, and now her eyes looked bright and shiny because she was going to cry.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I want to go home.” I had been saying it all along, but they kept trying to convince me to do something else.

  “Oh, Ione…”

  “I need to go home,” I said, and I closed my eyes again. “I need to go home.”

  “Well, then I hope you don’t get upset, but Reid had a contractor at your house, and they put in new locks on the doors. And an alarm system. I know we should have asked you first but he felt like he had to do something…” Her voice shook.

  “Thank you,” I said, and made myself look at her.

  “Will you use them? The locks and the alarm? Please?”

  I nodded a little but it hurt. “Did they find Corrie yet?” I had been asking as often as I was awake, which was becoming more frequent.

  “Not yet,” Karis said. “They didn’t catch her boyfriend yet, either. That police officer who came by before keeps calling here. He says not to worry, because he’s going to get the guy.”

  “Ash,” I murmured. I thought about explaining how I knew Ash, how he was Digger’s friend and Digger was Cooper’s friend and Ash had a thing for Digger’s wife’s friend, but it just seemed too complicated, and I felt too tired. “I’m going to go to sleep,” I said, still talking in the messed-up way, and I closed my eyes. I lay in a weird state of not being asleep and not being awake, and I heard someone else come into my room, messing with the machines and the drips and everything as the nurses did so frequently.

  “I don’t understand how she’s supposed to go home tomorrow,” Karis said quietly. “She’s not going to be able to take care of herself or be alone.”

  “She will need help,” the voice told Karis. There was more movement around my bed and someone jostled it. “Has she asked to look in a mirror yet?”

  “No.”

  “Funny, with facial injuries like this, almost everyone does. It’s for the best.”

  And then I heard sniffing, like Karis was crying, but then I went back off into my strange sleep state and I didn’t get to ask her what was wrong.

  “Ok, you’re all ready!” Augusta said the next morning, very chirpy and bright. That was not how Augusta usually sounded. “We have to wheel you out, ok, Ione? It’s the rules, I guess.” She went on talking about leaving the hospital in a wheelchair after she’d had Phoebe, trying to convince me that it was ok, I supposed. It was fine with me. I didn’t think I could walk very far, anyway.

  Reid was there too, acting extremely calm and Karis was not at all calm but was trying to pretend. The three of them took me down to Reid’s car and helped me in and I didn’t groan or moan or even sigh, even though every bump was terrible. I leaned my head against the window of the front seat, and that was when I saw myself, reflected in the glass.

  I hadn’t thought about how I looked until I’d heard the voice talking about it the day before. My face had hurt, just like every other part of me, but most of me was wrapped up, or casted, or splinted, or covered. Now I could see why everyone had been so upset when they looked at me.

  It wasn’t me, Ione, in that reflection. It was a face, kind of, yellow and green and blue and black, with grotesquely swollen and misshapen features, and matted, dirty hair surrounding it, a bandage on one cheek that covered where something had sliced my skin. At first, I hadn’t been able to bathe because of the glued-up cut and the staples for the gash on my head, and then the thought of all the work needed to take a shower just seemed overwhelming. I needed to wash my hair, I thought, and put my left hand up to feel the coarse tangles. The woman in the glass moved her hand too, and she stared back at me out of heavy-lidded, porcine eyes.

  I remembered when I had been a little girl and my grandma had brought me to a Halloween store, with tons of scary masks and life-size dolls of witches and zombies and monsters. It had scared me a lot and had gotten stuck in my memories. And now, that was how I looked. My face reminded me of something I had seen in a display at that store, contorted and battered and bruised. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, even as Reid and Karis and Augusta talked to me, until I fell asleep.

  Reid helped me up the steps to my house, his arm around me, walking on my left side and avoiding the brace on my right arm. I would have it for a while, because the bones in my forearm had been very badly broken, and the surgery had taken longer and
was more difficult than they had envisioned. Karis had explained it to me. She had explained everything to me, again and again, until it seemed to stick.

  My house looked better inside. I turned slowly, surveying the room. It felt like it had been so long since I’d been there.

  “Did Fox clean the house?” I asked through the clenched jaw I was using to talk.

  “Is there any place for her to sit?” Augusta was asking. “Where is all the furniture?” Karis disappeared, looking around, and brought back a plastic lawn chair that I had gotten.

  “This was all I could find,” she told them.

  Reid helped me sink into it. “Is Fox here? Did he fix up the house?” I tried again.

  “Karis and I had some cleaning people come in,” he said, and looked at her.

  She knelt in front of me. “Fox moved out. He said it wasn’t safe for him. He came to see you in the hospital…and then he said he was moving out.” Now all three of them were looking at each other, eyes flicking back and forth.

  “It’s ok,” I tried to reassure them. “I didn’t want him for a boyfriend. It was nice to have a roommate, though.”

  “You can get new roommates,” Augusta said in the cheerful way she had adopted in her speech to me. “You just need a little furniture, and I bet a lot of people will want to live here!”

  “No,” I said, but then stopped. I was too tired to try to explain that I just wanted to be alone, now. “I want to go to sleep,” I said instead. “I want to go upstairs and go to bed.” That made everyone look significantly at each other again and made Karis tap her fingers together wildly until Reid took her hands to make her stop.

  “We got a new bed for you,” Karis told me. “It’s in the old dining room, so you don’t have to climb the stairs. Since you didn’t want to come to our loft, Reid and I are going to stay here with you. We’ll be right upstairs.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Just me, then.”

  I saw Reid open his mouth. “No,” I repeated. “I’m fine, Karis. You don’t have to stay. I’m fine by myself.”