“It’s ok,” he called as he came back into the dining room. “It was raccoons in your neighbor’s garbage. The man next door is out there now, chasing them away.” He sat, then lay back down next to me. “Do you think you can sleep?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been having a hard time with sleep lately.”
“Let’s try. Do you ever count sheep? Picture them in your mind and put a number on each one.” He put his arm around me and I rested my head on his chest, my hurt arm on his stomach. He put his hand over it, as if he was protecting it.
I started to try his trick, imagining fluffy sheep with bright numbers on their sides, like racecars. “One. Two,” I said, and I kept going up, and somewhere along the way, I fell asleep.
I woke up in the morning when I heard the alarm keypad beeping, then I heard soft voices in the living room. I sat up and listened to Cooper quietly explain what had happened last night.
“Mother fucker!” someone exclaimed. It was his brother.
“Tanner, can you keep it down? She’s still sleeping. She needs to rest.” They muttered together for a while and then I heard Cooper say, “That’s a good idea. Let’s do that.”
I pulled on the robe, wondering what they were planning for me. “Good morning,” I called, and walked out into the living room. I immediately went to Cooper, because I just needed to, and he looked so tired and handsome and worried and appealing, all at the same time. “Hi, Tanner. Is your mom ok?”
“Are you?” he asked. “Coop says that psycho girl who jumped out of the car when I was here called you and threatened you in the middle of the night.”
I pulled away from Cooper’s side but he didn’t let go. “No, that’s not what happened. Corrie, the girl who got pushed out of the moving car when you were here, called me to warn me.”
“Warn you of what?” he asked.
I felt a shiver go through me. “Of…I don’t know. I just need to be careful.” I shivered again. Because somewhere, probably not too far away, that man was out there, hating me. Wanting to take his knife or his razorblade and cut me, again, to make another mark on me.
“Ione?” I looked up into Cooper’s face, with the stubble from the morning dark across his cheeks and chin. “Did you hear me? I was asking if you’re hungry.”
“Because I am,” Tanner announced.
I put my hand against on Cooper’s cheek, brushing the sandpaper of his new beard. “I guess. I can make some breakfast. I have so much food, because Reid doesn’t know what to do to help me, so he keeps stocking my fridge.”
“Let’s see what you have,” Cooper said, and we all went together into the little kitchen, which seemed like a good idea to me. There was safety in numbers.
There was enough food in the house to feed an army, which meant that I was barely able to cook enough for Tanner without him starving to death at the new table that his brother and I had put together. He told me about the girl he was seeing, who he was now admitting was slightly more than a friend. All the details were apparently news to Cooper as well, because he kept going back and asking more questions. I tried to signal him to be quiet and let Tanner talk, because you usually heard more when you weren’t thinking about what to ask next.
“Her parents are ok. I liked them. Her dad has a bike, too,” Tanner mentioned, and took another piece of toast.
“You met her parents? When?” Cooper asked. Tanner shrugged. “Where do they live? What do they do? What’s their last name, again?” Now Tanner closed his mouth and looked a little sulky.
I tried to get the story back on track. “What kind of bike does her dad have?” I put in, and that made him start talking again. Gradually, he filled us in on more details while we drank coffee. They all lived in Huntington Woods. She was going to college in the fall, which I could tell made Cooper very happy. Her big brother worked with Tanner in the garage.
“He told me if I messed with her, he knew where to bury me so I wouldn’t get found,” Tanner said, and laughed. Cooper did not. Instead, his hand clenched around his coffee cup.
“But you get along with her brother?” I asked quickly, and Tanner explained how her brother had introduced him to this girl, how he also had been teaching Tanner so much about cars, how they ate lunch together almost every day. I patted Cooper’s arm. It was all right, he didn’t have to worry about Tanner getting murdered.
I stood to start clearing things, but both the Hughes brothers got up quickly too, and said they would do it. “I’ll go get in the shower,” I said, but I didn’t move. The bathroom seemed far away and I wouldn’t be able to hear them. They wouldn’t be able to hear me. “Cooper, could you come?”
His mouth dropped open. “In the shower with you?” Tanner’s eyes also bulged. “What if you left the door open and we don’t walk by?” Cooper suggested. He stared hard at his brother. “I’ll be able to hear you from the living room if you call. Or something happens.” Very casually, he picked up my hand. “Nothing will happen.”
“Ok,” I said reluctantly. It did feel very far from the living room to the bathroom, but also, I had been thinking that it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing to see Cooper naked, anyway. I let go of his hand and got dressed as fast as I could.
By the time I was ready, the kitchen was mostly cleaned up, and Tanner was out in the back yard looking angry. I squinted out the kitchen window at him. “What is he doing?” I asked curiously. He seemed to be mostly stomping around.
“Sweeping,” Cooper said briefly. “I wanted to talk to you without him here.”
“I think his girlfriend sounds wonderful,” I said immediately. “Can we have her over for dinner?”
“Oh, sure. That wasn’t it…”
“And you need to be really, really careful with what you’re saying to him about college.”
He stopped wiping crumbs from the table into his hand. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, the more you talk about college, and how he has to go, the more he pulls away,” I explained.
“He has to go to college.”
“No, he doesn’t. Not right away, but not ever, if he doesn’t want to. Do you see the look he gets when you talk about him starting in the fall?” I put my hands on Cooper’s cheeks. “It’s the same look you get. You’re determined that he will, but he’s determined to say no to you. You have to let him say yes by himself, you can’t force him. Even if you really, really want to.”
“I really, really want to,” he admitted.
“I know. I can see that.” I smiled, and it felt like I hadn’t in a while.
“You and your vision.”
“No,” I said, and shook my head. “That’s not right.” I let go of him and stepped back. “I just know that if someone is always trying to tell you something, you stop listening. You don’t want to hear it anymore. That was what I did with my grandpa when I was growing up. He was a very strict person, and I just tuned him out and went the other direction.” That was what he had done with my mom, too, and she had acted the same way—but went even farther than I had. “I don’t mean that Tanner is going to run and do bad stuff, but let him have a little space to choose. Don’t make him sweep my driveway, for example.” We both looked outside, where Tanner was creating giant tornado of dust by beating my driveway into submission.
“I see what you mean.” Cooper hesitated. “I’ll try. I think that’s the best I can do.”
“That’s the best anybody can do. What did you want to talk to me about, since I know it wasn’t to get more of my advice about your brother?”
“No, I wanted to talk about you, and where you’re going to stay.” He got the same determined look that he did when he ordered his sibling around.
“Here.” I felt my own chin set. “I’ll stay here.”
“What about moving in with a friend? Temporarily?” he asked, but I was already shaking my head.
“No, they have their own stuff going on. And I want to be here, in my house.”
“But I can’t stay h
ere with you. I have to be home, with my mom and Tanner.” He rubbed his temples. “I can’t be everywhere.”
“Oh, Cooper. I know that! I’m sorry that I’m making demands on you. I know how much else you have going on. I don’t want to add to your problems.”
“No, you’re not making demands. You haven’t asked me for anything, except to hold you tighter.” He looked at me for a moment, then he reached and hooked his finger through the belt loop of my cutoffs, and pulled me to him again. “Like this, right?”
I rested my head on his chest and it felt like everything was right with the whole world, if only for this moment. “Exactly like this,” I agreed. I closed my eyes and just enjoyed it.
Chapter 13
Apparently Cooper and Tanner had planned for me to go back to their house, at least for the day, and they hustled me out to the driveway to make that happen. “You can talk to my mom,” Cooper mentioned. “She’s been wanting to meet you.”
“I told her all about you,” Tanner said. Cooper had gone out and apologized for making him sweep and through the kitchen window I had watched them shake hands. He put on his helmet now and waved, and his motorcycle roared off down the street.
I wondered what he might have said to his mom about me. I watched Tanner disappear around the corner, then realized that I could still hear his engine, even from a few blocks away. “I guess that motorcycle is a little loud,” I said, looking now at the house next door to mine. “I never really noticed how quiet this street is. It makes more sense now, how mad Sania got about him riding by, because he was doing it kind of frequently.”
“How frequently?”
“Like, every hour? Every couple of hours,” I amended, when Cooper got that angry face again. “But he’s not doing it anymore.”
“Speaking of your neighbors, we should talk to them,” Cooper said. “They can keep an eye out for anyone coming by your house, anything suspicious.”
“I don’t want to scare them. I feel sorry enough that those two little girls live there, and I was bringing criminals around.”
“Ione, you didn’t bring him around.”
“Yes, I did. He was there through me. But really, it could have been anyone.” All those people coming through. Fox had said it before; I had been too blind to see that they were stealing from me, using me, and then hurting me. They were terrible people and I had allowed it to happen. I looked at Sania and Devesh’s neat house and felt a wave of guilt. “I’ll talk to them when I get back. Not right now. I feel too sorry and I would cry.” I got into Cooper’s car and shut the door.
He backed out and drove for a while before he spoke. “I’m glad that you’re rethinking the open-door policy.”
“Oh, definitely. That’s a thing of the past. I’m never going to open my door, not to anyone,” I assured him.
“What I was going to say was, I’m glad you’re rethinking the open-door policy, but I don’t think you have to shut the door on everyone. You don’t have to be scared of people,” he explained. “That’s something I admire about you a lot, how you’re so open. I hope you’re not going to stop being that way.”
I thought for a moment, watching the streets go from Hamtramck to Detroit. “I don’t know how I am,” I said finally. “Look what happened, Cooper. You keep saying it wasn’t my fault, but I don’t think so. I think I deserve a lot of blame.” It made me want to cry again.
“No one, no matter what, deserves what happened to you. But that’s what I don’t understand, I really don’t. Why are you so ready to blame yourself and at the same time you keep defending Corrie?”
“You’re probably right about her. Ok? You’re probably right, and she is in cahoots with him, and she wanted to let me die.” I wiped off a tear on my t-shirt. “I was just so sure that she…I don’t want to have been wrong, because that would be everything.” I was sniffing and Cooper handed me a napkin, because of course he had a neat pile of them in his glovebox. “I don’t want to be wrong about her. I don’t think I am, but I don’t know. I’m not sure of too many things right now.”
“But you’re sure you don’t want to go somewhere else, until that guy is locked up?”
“I need to be at my house.” Cooper was already frowning. “I need to be there to fix it. There’s a lot more to do.” I looked out the window rather than see his disappointment and worry. “I have a lot to do there,” I repeated. “I can’t leave. It’s mine.”
“I see.”
We were quiet, then I turned to look at him. “What I was thinking while I was in the shower was, why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would he want to bother me again? It doesn’t make any sense. He already took my money and used my credit card. He knows I don’t have anything to steal. He hurt me, a lot. Why would he still be angry at me, or want to come back at me again? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Maybe there’s no making sense of it.”
“People always—no, you’re right. I’m thinking like I used to, like I could understand people and how they acted. I was wrong about that but sometimes I forget how wrong I’ve been.”
“I don’t think you were wrong about people. You’ve been right about me.”
“Like what?” I asked curiously, but he shrugged. “Like how I knew you were stressed out? Anyone could have seen that. I was wanting to rub your back again,” mostly because he needed it, but also because I just wanted to touch him. “I like touching you,” I said. “When we get to your house I will. It will be harder with one arm but I’ll get your knots loosened up.”
Cooper reached over and took my left hand. “I’m looking forward to it already.”
The ramp was done at his house and the port-a-potty was gone. Tanner was already there, turning the hose on some new strips of grass laid out across the yard. He waved when he saw us but immediately dropped the hose and went inside.
“See?” I said to Cooper. “See how he does things when you’re not looking? That was what he did at my house, too. He came over and started working without you telling him to. He’s a good guy.”
Cooper picked up the hose to wind it. “I’ll try to be better with him. I promise, I’ll try to leave him to his own devices. I definitely will stop talking about college, and sending him all the articles. And signing him up for the tours.”
“Cooper!”
He held up his hands. “Ok, ok! I get it. Too much pushing. Come on in.”
Cooper’s mom was still in bed so he went to see if she wanted to come down, and I went with Tanner to fix a snack for him, because he was hungry again after the sweeping at my house and the thirty seconds of watering the grass. After a while Cooper came back down and invited me upstairs to meet his mother.
It made me a little nervous, which didn’t happen to me very much. “What if your mom doesn’t like me?” I asked, as we walked up the wooden staircase. “I want her to like me a lot.”
He stopped on the landing. “You don’t need to worry about that. Of course she will. I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t liked you, Io. My mom’s a little…sharp, though.”
“What does that mean?”
Then Cooper reached out his hand, and I took it. So I knew, no matter how his mom felt about me, things were already going to be fine. “It means that she says things that people sometimes don’t want to hear. She shoots from the hip.”
That didn’t bother me. What was bothering me lately was people not saying the things they wanted to say, afraid that I would break into pieces or something. This would probably be refreshing.
“You’re Ione?” Cooper’s mom asked when we walked into her room.
“Yes. Hello,” I said.
“You can call me Sarah. I’m pleased to meet you.” She nodded at a chair next to the bed but before I walked to it, Cooper squeezed my hand a little, then leaned down so that his cheek rubbed across my hair went I went by. It was a pretty hard not throw myself on him, when he did that. He sat on the bed next to his mom while she started to ask me some que
stions. But after the first few minutes, he could see that everything was going to be fine between his mom and me, so he left to go downstairs.
“I’ll be in the library, and I can hear you, if you need me,” he told both of us.
We watched him walk out, and his mom nodded, like she was satisfied. “He’s a very good boy. Man.”
I agreed.
His mom was sharp, in that she didn’t miss much, and Cooper had been right, because she didn’t hesitate to say things. At first, Sarah asked me a lot of questions about where and how I had grown up, what I did for a living, basic background issues. She asked me how I was feeling, because her sons had told her what had happened.
“I’m getting this off next week,” I said, holding up my arm. “And most of me is healed. I still have headaches, sometimes, but they’re less and less.”
“I didn’t know you before, but besides the little line on your cheek and your arm, I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong. Physically, you’re better,” she concluded.
I nodded, but then shrugged. “Physically, I’m much better.”
“But mentally, not yet.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Everything feels off. I’m not myself, not yet.”
“Maybe you won’t be that person again,” she noted. “Things that happen to you can change you. Not always for the worse.”
“Maybe.” I thought about the person I had been, because that had been on my mind a lot. “I’m not sure I want to be the same anymore, either, because look where it got me. But everyone expects me to act ‘normal’ and I’m not sure how to balance it all out. I feel like I have to be the same, unchanged, so they’re not worried about me. I hate that everyone is so worried.”
“That means they love you.”
I nodded again. “That part makes me very happy.” But I had a lot to figure out.
Love in Many Languages Page 19