Can't Help Falling

by Cara Bastone

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting Kylie’s reaction to be. But he’d kind of assumed there’d be a reaction. Her face didn’t change a whit; her eyes went from Ty to Fin and then to the table. “Okay.”

  The longest three seconds of Tyler’s life passed. “Um. Nothing is going to change, really. We might see Fin a little more than usual. But for the most part, it’ll all be the same.”

  “Right.”

  “If you have any questions?”

  “It’s not exactly rocket science. I know what it means for two people to be together. I’m gonna finish my homework and check in with Mary about my schedule for the rest of the week. Thanks for dinner.”

  She rose up, leaving Fin and Ty in her dust. She cleared her plate and was gone. There was nothing left on the table to even show she’d been sitting there. It was like Tyler and Fin had been alone at the meal. All he could feel was the gaping cavity where she’d just been.

  “Shit.” He dragged a hand over his face.

  “Yeah. Shit.” Fin stared down the hallway, her hand finding its way into Tyler’s.

  “Was that as bad as I think it was?”

  “I haven’t seen her this closed off since Thanksgiving.”

  “I don’t get it,” Tyler mumbled, picking up Fin’s hand and pressing it flat against his cheek, barely registering that he was seeking the feeling he got when their energies mixed. “I kind of thought she’d be excited. She’s made comments here and there about us getting together.”

  “To me too. But I’m sure the reality of it is way different than the dream of it.”

  “I’m gonna try again.”

  “You want me to—”

  “No.” He shook his head with certainty. “I think it needs to just be me and her.”

  Tyler stood up, took a deep breath and strode to Kylie’s closed door. “Ky?” he called, knocking twice and swinging her door open.

  He froze, all the blood leaving his face when he saw her sitting halfway on her bed, clutching something in her hand.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked, his voice hoarse. It was a ridiculous question considering he’d already easily identified the thing in her hand as an obscenely large wad of cash. His eyes wide, his throat closing, he tried a different question. “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “I—” Her mouth opened but no words came out. The money was halfway shoved back into the little fabric envelope, like her body was rejecting the idea of having it out in the wide open.

  On some sort of autopilot, he strode forward, holding out his hand.

  He didn’t even have to tell her to hand it over. With a look half terrified and half irate, she slid it gingerly into his grip.

  “You can’t just come into my room,” she said, but her vehemence was undermined by the childish wobble of emotion in her voice. She was still frozen on the edge of the bed, like she didn’t want to move and make herself even more visible.

  Tyler felt the blood pinprick down out of his arms and legs as he ruffled through the cash. “There has to be—Jesus—three thousand dollars here. Kylie...”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “Well, I know that Mary isn’t paying you in cash, so you better explain, fast, what the hell you’re doing with thousands of dollars hidden in your room.”

  “Mom gave it to me.”

  Tyler instantly felt sick, his heartbeat banging all the way down to his toes, pumping nausea and adrenaline to the four corners of his earth.

  Her mother gave it to her? When? Had Kylie had it the whole time? Brought it from Columbus? Or, God, had Lorraine been contacting her secretly? Mailing her money...for what? To run away?

  “She left it for me, I mean,” Kylie said, her shoulders caving. The only thing keeping Tyler’s heart from squeezing down into a raisin at that moment was the fact that Kylie looked perfectly miserable. Like there was a chance, a chance, that she understood just how screwed up this whole thing was.

  “When she left earlier this year,” Tyler said slowly, scrabbling for clarification. “She left you a bunch of cash.”

  “Spending money. So that I could order food. That’s what...” Kylie folded forward and looked even more miserable. “That’s what she always did. When she’d leave for a weekend or something, I’d come home and there’d be two hundred bucks on the counter and I’d know I was on my own for a bit.”

  “This is not two hundred bucks.”

  “It was six thousand when she first left. So, I knew she was going to be gone for a long time. I was careful with it. I didn’t order in. I got cheap stuff from the grocery store so I wouldn’t run through the money.”

  “Because you had no idea how long she was going to be gone for.” His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

  He thought of the sheer quantity of Easy Mac and cereal that had been at that house. He thought of Kylie’s nest of blankets in the upstairs bathroom where she’d been locking herself in, terrified to sleep alone in the house. He thought of her getting ready for school every day. By herself. Making her own lunch. Catching the bus. Coming home and turning on every light in the house. Eating shitty processed food and counting cash. Rationing.

  Even now, Tyler could look back and see how she’d been rationing everything since he’d met her. Money. Her energy. Even her affection. He’d naively thought that it would just take time to get her out of her shell. Like a turtle who needed to get comfortable with the temperature of the water. But now he saw the money clenched in his hand was a harsh physical symbol of reality, that it had all been so much more complicated than that.

  She wasn’t ever going to give more than she thought she could. Because this kid had been taught to protect herself at every single turn. Because there’d been no one there to protect her.

  “Kylie,” he asked gently, sagging backward to sit on the edge of her desk. “Why were you counting it just now?”

  She eyed him, like she knew a trap when she saw one. “...I wanted to know how much was there.”

  “Why would you need to know how much cash you had when I’m the one who pays for everything for you? Why now?” He knew the answer but he needed her to say it out loud.

  She glared at the floor, her face red, her breaths coming fast and then faster. He wished she’d move, pace around, throw her hands in the air. But she just sat there.

  “I was hoping this would happen, Ty. I wanted you to get with Fin. I saw how much you liked her right away. And her, you. It wasn’t as obvious, but I thought, maybe she likes him. And pretty soon, that became pretty freaking obvious too. I showed her the videos of you dancing because I knew she’d like them. I talked you up because I knew she was stubborn and didn’t like to see the softer side of you. I basically pushed you two together. And I always knew what would happen next. Okay? So. Congrats. Congrats to you two, congrats to me. It doesn’t have to be some big reveal. I get it.”

  “Kylie, the money. Why were you counting the money?”

  Still frozen, she spoke in a low, composed voice that was so much worse than yelling.

  “I just wanted to make sure I knew how much freaking money I have to my name before you sent me back.”

  He thought maybe his brain had just cracked in two, cleaved cleanly down the middle by his irrational sister.

  “Hold on. Just stop talking. Everybody stop talking!” Tyler yelled, although it was just the two of them and he was the only one talking. “Send you back? Send you back where? To what? You think that just because Fin and I are together now, that I won’t want to be your guardian anymore?”

  She shrugged, her angry chin pointed at the floor, her arms finally coming unstuck from her sides and crossing over her chest. “No one wants their kid sister around when they’re starting the life they really want. You’re gonna want to get married, Ty. Have kids. I’ll be in the way—”

  “I don’t want k
ids!” Tyler shouted. “I—You’re—I’m not fucking sending you away, Kylie. And not as a matter of principle. But because you live here. You live here. This is where you live. With me. In this condo. I want you to stay here.”

  “Oh, stop it!” She put her hands over her ears, and it was then that he saw how bright her eyes were, like she’d accidentally rubbed hot sauce into them. “Don’t insult me. I know exactly how excited you weren’t to drag me back to Brooklyn. I know exactly how much you didn’t want your sister taking up your home office. I heard you in Columbus, Ty. ‘Please let Lorraine come back. Please let Lorraine come back.’ You didn’t want me then. And I’m just supposed to believe that you magically want me now?”

  Tyler blanched, realizing that she’d heard his pleas to a higher power. His highly personal mantra for that horrible time in his life, in Kylie’s life. “Yes!” he roared. “You’re supposed to believe it. Because it’s true!” She was as still as an ice statue, but he paced from one side of her room to the other. “Yes, I wanted your mother to come back. No, I wasn’t prepared to be your guardian. No, I didn’t want your entire life to get turned on its head. But you know how long I felt that way? About one freaking week. And then you know what my new mantra became? ‘Please let me get custody of her. Let me take her back to Brooklyn.’ You know how many times I said that to myself? Probably about a thousand times a day. Dammit!” He tilted his head to the ceiling and shouted a question at the universe. “Why the hell couldn’t she have heard that part?”

  “You didn’t want me,” she said stubbornly. “You told me so yourself.”

  He sagged backward onto the desk again. “What? When the hell did I tell you that?”

  “You told me, point-blank, that you’re as much at the whim of the judge as I am. You only did this because you had to.”

  He remembered her confusing reaction to his statement. That she’d blanched, winced back like he’d slapped her. He hadn’t understood it at the time because it had never even occurred to him that she’d take it so far from the way he’d meant it.

  “Kylie, that is not what I meant. I didn’t mean that the only reason I was taking you was because the courts were making me. The judge didn’t hold a gun to my head. He simply said, ‘Look, Tyler, it’s you or the foster system.’ And I said me. It’s me. It’ll be me and her. That’s what I meant.”

  She said nothing.

  He had no idea if now was the time to be quiet or keep talking, but because he was Tyler, he kept talking. “I admit I was freaking terrified at the beginning. My feelings about having you here have evolved. Are you going to punish me for that? I want you here. I want the two of us to live here together. We make a good family.”

  “No!” She sprang up, moving for the first time since he’d come into her room. She didn’t look as furious as she had a second ago. Worse, she looked overwhelmed, desperate, wild. “Don’t say that. You said that before. You said that I was a good family member. And I don’t get it.” She covered her wild expression with both hands. “I don’t fucking get it.”

  He knew she was crying behind those hands and he moved toward her. “What don’t you get?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t get the pattern. But I’ve never understood the pattern, and I’ll drive myself insane if I try. I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

  “Kylie.” He moved toward her and took her by the shoulders. Her hands stayed firmly over her face. “What don’t you get?” He repeated the question.

  “You say I’m a good family member?” Her hands finally dropped, and shiny tears had trailed down her cheeks, her lips pulled down at the sides almost like an infant’s would. Her hair was wispy at the temples but brushed back over her shoulders, making her look both young and mature at once. She gasped for air over her jumping breaths. “You say that I care about your life and your friends and eat dinner with you. You think that makes me worth keeping around? Makes me good family? Well, you think I didn’t do any of that for her? You think I didn’t try my ass off to be good for her? Kind to her? Easy to be around? I did everything. Everything! And still! All she leaves me is a note and that.”

  Kylie pointed toward the wad of cash on her desk. She shook free of Tyler’s hands and strode over to the money, carefully rolling it back into the neat wad it had been in before Tyler had ruffled through it. She stared at the money in her hand.

  Tyler watched helplessly as tears dripped from her chin and onto the front of her zipped sweatshirt.

  “I can’t figure out what it is that I did that made her leave, Ty.” She was whispering now, like there was no more voice left inside of her. She wiped her tears with the back of her wrist, still talking to the money and not facing Tyler. “I mean, I know, I know. I’ve been to the therapy. It’s not my fault. Blah blah blah. But logically, Tyler, I had to have done something that put her over the edge.”

  “Kylie, no.”

  She cut him off. “She wasn’t a good mother. I get it. She’s not patient with me. She doesn’t like whenever I made things hard. It makes her so mad. But I knew that if I just went to bed when she told me to and ate what she put on the table and didn’t complain or ask for too much then she was gonna at least keep being there. At the very least. And I don’t get it. What was it? I don’t understand what I did that was the last straw.”

  “Do you know what arbitrary means?”

  She glared at him. “Yes.”

  “It basically means something that doesn’t correlate with anything else, right? It’s almost random.”

  “You’re saying she randomly chose to leave me?”

  “No. I’m saying the reasons she chose to leave were not ones you could have predicted. If she was going to leave, she was going to leave and there was nothing that you could have done.”

  “Because I’m a kid?” She finally tossed the money back down and faced him. He took her place on the edge of the bed, feeling the adrenaline from their fight course through his system like a drug. His legs felt jittery; his heart pounded in his throat.

  “Because nobody can control anyone else,” he said quietly. “Because you can’t make someone do anything. Ky, if Dad taught me anything, if my mother taught me anything, shit, if you taught me anything, it’s exactly that. You can’t control someone. There’s nothing you could have done to keep her there if she didn’t want to stay. Not cleaning the house every day. Not getting good grades. Not winning the freaking lottery.”

  Her face collapsed like a kicked-in tin can. She took a shuddering breath and scraped her eyes on the inside of her elbow, making the fabric of her sleeve dark with her tears.

  “Don’t tell me that it’s all random, Tyler. Don’t tell me that there’s nothing I can do but wait for people to just leave. I have to be able to do something about it.”

  She reached over and shoved the money to the ground, spiking it like a football. The rubber band that had been holding it snapped and half-curled bills spiraled across the floor. “Shit!”

  She slid down the side of the desk, folded up and sank her forehead to her knees.

  The guardian in him wasn’t sure if he should stay away or not. But the human in him, the brother in him, was crawling across the floor, arranging himself next to her so that their shoulders pressed together.

  “Kylie,” he said, pushing his weight into her. “I love you. I don’t say that enough. I just want you to know that in this moment, when we’re screaming at each other and everything is terrible, I love you.”

  She didn’t move from her tortoised-up position, her face hidden.

  “And I didn’t mean to make you feel powerless. I’m just trying to make it clear to you that you are not the reason your mother is looney tunes. And I’m not saying that to you in some school-therapist sort of way. I’m saying that to you as a logical person who has looked at the situation and made a judgment. I know what shitty parents look like. I had two of them before Dad died. And n
ow I have one. Just like you. Maybe I’m not supposed to say that to you about your mom. That she’s shitty. But I don’t know what I am supposed to say either. So, I might as well tell you the truth.” He sighed and realized that her position actually looked pretty good. He rested his own forehead on his knees and talked to the ground, finally saying everything he’d been thinking for months.

  “Leaving you the way she did makes her a shitty parent. And you know what? I hope to God she goes to therapy and parenting classes and rehab and turns her life around and can be a good mom to you. Because you deserve that. You deserve a good mother. But I cannot sit here and listen to you thinking that your mother could have been better if you’d been better. Because that’s just not the way it works. Please. If you can’t believe me yet, can you please just trust me that at some point, you will agree with me? Just trust me. I promise. Please trust me.”

  “I can’t trust you, Tyler,” she whispered, dropping the bottom out of his heart.

  “What?”

  “I can’t trust you because you won’t tell me. Why won’t you just tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” He’d have told her anything she asked at that point. If he’d had a diary, he’d have read it to her front to back.

  “Tell me what your last straw is.”

  “My last...” He groaned and banged his head backward a few times onto the desk behind him. “Fucking Lorraine,” he griped with so much vehemence that Kylie’s head popped up, blurry, red eyes and all.

  “What?”

  “Kylie, someday you’re going to realize that what I’m about to say isn’t a lie. Okay? Just, someday you’ll believe me about this. But I don’t have a last straw. Not when it comes to you. I mean, my temper has a last straw. I might yell at you. As evidenced by the nine-part opera that just played out in here. But please, kid, believe me. When it comes to loving you? Being there for you? Putting a roof over your head and food on your plate? I’m not measured in straws. Therefore, you’re never gonna find the last one. There is no last one. I’m measured in, I don’t know, whatever happened during the big bang. Some sort of material that is actually expanding. You’re never going to reach the end of it.” He sagged forward onto his knees again. “I’m not making sense, am I? My head is spinning.”