Before You Break

by Kyla Stone

  I have no clue how I’m supposed to respond to that. “Thanks, Isabel, for coming.”

  She blinks, staring off over my shoulder. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She turns and slogs through the dewy grass, her heels sinking into the earth.

  Eli touches my shoulder with his free hand. “You need some time?” Eli’s mom kindly offered to host a dinner at her house after the service. That’s where we’re headed now. How death and eating go together, I’ll never understand.

  My gaze slips past Eli and snags on Maria Gutierrez, still standing on the other side of the grave. A knot forms in my stomach. She’s the only person who hasn’t said a word to me. “Just a minute. I’ll be right there.”

  I walk toward her. “Maria?”

  Her shoulders hunch inward. She turns slowly to face me. “Yes?”

  Up close, I can see the woman’s features behind the netting of her veil: her small, pinched face incongruous with her wide, generous mouth. Her eyes are black and shiny as olives.

  Maria tilts her head, her eyes flicking to the side as if she’s searching for an escape route. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why not? You used to babysit us. You were friends with my mom.”

  She twists a handkerchief between her fingers. Her hands are the hands of an old woman, thin and veiny. “You don’t know who I am?”

  I just stare at her. “You’re Maria Gutierrez. Isabel’s mom.” But even as I say the words, I know it’s the wrong answer.

  She opens her mouth, closes it. “I should go. I’m so sorry.”

  “Wait.” As she turns, I reach out and touch her arm. She actually flinches. My stomach turns over. Whatever this is, it’s bad. “Tell me.”

  Her watery gaze searches mine. Then her shoulders straighten. She lifts her chin. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, here. It was never my intention to hurt you, please know that. But—I loved your father.”

  It’s like skipping a stair, that sudden disorienting rush of vertigo. The solidness you expected and trusted, suddenly, catastrophically gone. “What?”

  She opens her mouth as if to say something else, then closes it. She blinks rapidly behind her veil, her eyes gummy and streaked with mascara. “Your father and I had an affair.”

  “You’re lying.” But the truth settles over me like a cold, unrelenting fog. The puzzle pieces slowly click into place, one after another. My father’s guilt. The way he reacted when Isabel stopped by. The sins for which he so desperately sought forgiveness.

  I’m struck with the same gut-punch of betrayal Mom would’ve felt, if she’d known. It was true after all, the fear she’d gnawed and worried like a rotting tooth all those years.

  Something wrenches loose deep inside me. “When?”

  Maria clasps her hands, twisting the handkerchief between her fingers. “It started nine years ago. Your father ended the affair, but we never stopped loving each other. I never stopped loving him.”

  I close my eyes, force myself to open them. The sun is the same. The sky, the trees, the faint scent of manure and the soggy grass sinking beneath my heels.

  Everything is fuzzy, disconnected, like I’m actually somewhere else and this is all some horrible dream. But I’m not. It’s not.

  “When? When did he end it?”

  She hesitates for just a moment. “Right after your mother died.”

  Reality shifts beneath me like water, my memories realigning to fit with this new information, this ugly truth. My mind scrambles to connect the dots, link the timeline. “You were sleeping with my father when my mother killed herself.”

  “Eve didn’t know. Jacob—your father—he was sure of it. Eve couldn’t love Jacob, not like he needed. She was sick.” “No thanks to you,” I spit out.

  Her mouth tightens. “I told you. She didn’t know.”

  “How would you know?” My voice is rising, carrying on the wind. Mourners from a nearby gravesite glance our way. For once, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

  “We were discreet.”

  I can’t listen to this anymore. “You don’t belong here.”

  “You should know, I’ve barely spoken to Jacob in eight years. His choice. It was his penance, sacrificing our love. Your father had a real chance at happiness. Instead, he lived and died alone.”

  I barely resist the urge to slap her across the face.

  I can’t take in air through the vise constricting my lungs. I thought I wanted answers. I thought I wanted to know every secret of my past. I was wrong. “I need you to leave.”

  I feel a presence at my side. Eli, standing next to me. “Everything okay here?”

  He’s so strong, so warm and safe and steadying. I want to sag against him. I want to throw my arms around him, press my head against his chest and feel the beat of his heart. But I can’t. “This woman was just leaving.”

  Suddenly Isabel is here, too. She takes her mother’s arm. “Mamà, we need to go.”

  Maria dips her head, fresh tears streaking her cheeks. “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Lena.”

  Isabel tugs at her mother, and they both turn away. I watch them make their way across the grass toward their car. Isabel glances over her shoulder, throwing me a knowing look. Her expression is a mix of disdain, pity, and resentment.

  It hits me, then. This is why she despises me. She knows. She knows her mother ruined my family. She knows my father ruined hers.

  My stomach churns. Acid surges up my throat.

  “Are you okay?” Eli asks.

  “I’m fine,” I say, the words heavy as stones in my mouth.

  My bones are brittle, hollowed out, on the verge of cracking wide open.

  I barely make it through the wake. My face is a mask hiding the fissures opening up deep inside me. Dad cheated on us, on Mom. He betrayed her when she was at her weakest, her most vulnerable.

  When she needed him most, he was gone.

  And now here I am in my empty house, alone and trembling with fury. There’s no one to scream at, nowhere to aim my grief-stricken rage. He’s dead. He abandoned me in death just like he did in life.

  I need to leave. What’s left for me here? I gave up a semester of college to care for the man who betrayed my mother, who betrayed us all. A voice in the back of my head whispers, What about Lux?

  What about her? I made a promise to my father, but he broke every promise he’d ever made to his wife, his daughters. What binds me to that promise now? Misguided loyalty? The old burden of familial responsibility?

  I’m sick and tired of being the only one trying to hold this family together. It’s over. We failed.

  I failed.

  I throw my suitcase on my bed and smash my clothes inside. The gallery is in three days. I can still make it. I can slip right back into the rhythm that is my life, find my way back to the map of my future.

  I charted my way here, I can chart my way back. I write my own destiny. Not my mother’s or my father’s or my sister’s. Only mine.

  Lux doesn’t even want me here. She missed Dad’s death, skipped out on the funeral. Maybe she’s better off. The house is paid for, she can stay here. Get herself a job, pay her own bills. Live life on her own terms.

  It’s what she wants, anyway. She cut her ties to this toxic family. Now I’m free to do the same.

  I pause in the darkroom to grab my camera. A half dozen prints still hang on the rack. There’s one of Lux at four or five, grabbing onto Dad’s neck as he gallops around the yard. They’re both laughing, eyes bright. She’s so small in the picture, so young and vulnerable.

  That girl is gone. The girl I used to be is gone, too. Who we were, who we could have been. All those possibilities burned to the ground. There’s only our own fractured selves. Only now.

  By the time I sink into bed, I’ve already emailed Dr. Wells and booked a flight to Tampa for two days from now.

  Two days until I’m gone for good.

  36

  Lux

  Sunlight bleeds through the s
eams of the blinds over the front windows. I wake up slowly, my mind groggy and thick. The sun hurts my eyes. Everything aches.

  The events of the last few days come back jerky, in slivers and chunks, and then faster, like a spray of vomit. Dad died. He died and I wasn’t there.

  And there’s something else, some other fact I can’t seem to dredge up from the fuzzy mire of my mind. My head throbs like it’s been split open with an axe.

  I sit up with a groan.

  “Mornin’, Princess,” Reese drawls.

  Things blur and drift into focus. I’m sitting on the floor next to a fancy glass coffee table, my fingers sinking into plush white carpet.

  Reese sprawls on the leather couch on the other side of me, one hand stuffed into the pocket of his basketball shorts, the other gripping a remote. He flicks through sports stations on the massive curved-screen TV. This is Floyd’s house.

  “What happened?” My mouth feels stuffed with wet paper towels.

  “We partied,” Reese says.

  I don’t even remember what I took. I’m falling fast and I know it. Liquor isn’t enough. Weed isn’t enough. The pills and the powder aren’t enough. Ever since Dad… I can’t go more than a day without the itch beneath my skin, my mouth going dry and metallic.

  I’m scared to look at myself in the mirror. The gray shadows beneath my eyes. The sickly pallor of my skin. I put on my make-up in the dark. “I feel like death warmed over.”

  He just laughs again, the sound sharp and unpleasant.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost noon. You got totally blitzed last night.”

  “I slept here?”

  “Yep.”

  There’s a string of drool stuck to the corner of my mouth. I wipe it away with the back of my arm. I can fit the last several days into my memory, but how I got here, what I did—those questions sink into a black void.

  The funeral. It’s today. It must be. Or was it yesterday? I remember getting ready, pulling on my tights, wrestling into the fitted black velvet dress with the rosettes along the bust line.

  But after that? Nothing.

  I shift, trying to find a comfortable position. My side aches. I’m sore all over. I glance down. I’m still wearing the black dress. It’s bunched up around my thighs, and my tights are ripped above my knee.

  I try to remember, my heart plummeting. “Did we—?”

  He shakes his head, his eyebrows flatlining. He looks angry. Like I did something wrong. Maybe I did.

  My ears are tinny. My mouth is dry. I need something to drink, but I don’t move. “What the hell happened?”

  His gaze bounces off me. He shifts uncomfortably. “You and Floyd.”

  “That’s impossible.” I scramble through my brain, trying to pull out any memory, but there’s nothing there. Fear and disgust lodge in my throat like I’ve swallowed a mouthful of staples. “No. I would never.”

  “I walked in and he was all over you,” he says in a strained voice, like he wants to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this.

  My stomach lurches. I scramble to my feet. The world is suddenly brittle, hollow, so easy to shatter. “Was I passed out? Did he—?”

  “Did he rape you?” Reese says. Something crosses his face—pain? Regret? Jealousy? “No, Princess. Not that. But I walked in and he—”

  I sense movement to my right. Floyd walks through the kitchen archway into the living room, rubbing what remains of his hair with a plush white towel. For a second, he looks like someone’s dad.

  Then he lifts his head and meets my gaze. His face is expressionless. His eyes are blank.

  Instinctively, I take a step back, my legs bumping against the coffee table. For the second time in as many weeks, fear settles in my stomach like a block of ice.

  “Did I just hear someone cry rape?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you think happened, but I would never—”

  “No one raped you,” he says, leaning in close. His breath stirs the hairs on my neck. “I doubt that’s even possible.”

  I try to swallow the fist in my throat. “Shut up.”

  He just shrugs.

  “Then why don’t I remember?”

  He comes closer, staring at me through half-lowered lids, like he’s watching for the pulse in my neck so he can strike. “Nothing happened you didn’t want to happen. You were asking for it. Screaming for it.”

  My brain says shut the hell up but I can’t stop myself. “You’re lying.”

  He circles my neck with his thick fingers, his thumb resting in the center of my throat. His fingers are cool and dry.

  I try to jerk my head away, but Floyd holds onto my neck, his bland face inches from mine. “I could do anything right now,” he says.

  I’m splintering, breaking apart, my mind severing itself from my body. This isn’t happening. He would never really hurt me. He looks like a stuffy librarian or the uncool high school history teacher. He looks exactly like the kind of person you forget you’ve met three times already.

  But my brain registers how dilated his pupils are, the flush in his cheeks. He likes this. He’s getting off on it.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  His smile is menacing.

  I remember the skulls in his display cases. I struggle to think over the shrieking inside my head. He is a bear, a wolf, a snake, a predator like any other. Maybe if I’m still as a corpse, he’ll lose interest and leave. The seconds tick by in my blood.

  After a long, agonizing minute, he lets go.

  “Frankly,” he says, his voice dripping with disgust, “If I knew you were just gonna lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  It’s like a sucker-punch to the gut. Hot sticky humiliation flushes through me. I sag to the floor, sucking in tiny clots of air.

  Floyd settles on the couch next to Reese, his legs crossed. Reese’s gaze skitters away from me and lands on the television. Both of them act bored, like nothing just happened, like the fabric of my world wasn’t just torn to shreds.

  I wrap my arms around my legs, tuck my chin into my knees, and rock. I squish my eyes shut and watch the white fuzzies dance across the back of my eyelids.

  I want to crawl out of my own skin. Acid stings my throat, my stomach churning. I need to get out of here. I need to be somewhere I can actually think.

  I wait until I can hear my own voice over the slamming of my heart. “Take me home, Reese. I want to go home!”

  “You sure? You sure as hell didn’t want to be home yesterday.”

  I glare at him. My head pounds so loud I can barely make out his words. “What are you talking about?”

  “You were crazy upset. Like, psychotic or something. Don’t you remember? You forgot your old man’s funeral.”

  My heart stops beating. “You’re lying.”

  “Check your phone.”

  My phone is sitting on the glass coffee table. I flick through the texts. And there they are, six or seven messages from Lena, dated yesterday afternoon.

  Where are you? 12:55 p.m.

  You’re late! 1:10 p.m.

  The service just started. Hurry up. 1:17 p.m.

  Get your butt here now. 1:26 p.m.

  I guess you really don’t care about anyone but yourself. 1:42 pm.

  I remember. I was nervous and guilty and ashamed. I got wasted, taking every single thing they handed me. I partied right through my own father’s funeral. Darkness swirls inside me.

  My thoughts skitter, stampeding across my brain. I scramble to my feet, stumble down the hall, and puke my guts out in the toilet.

  “Hey.” Reese stands in the bathroom doorway, his fists jammed in his shorts pockets. His face twists in a tangle of competing emotions— revulsion, guilt, regret. “You okay, Princess?”

  “What do you care?” I snarl into the toilet.

  “I do,” he says, his voice catching.

  “Go away.” I push away from the toilet and fall back against the bathroom wall. No. No, no, no. The self-loathin
g is like a living thing, black and ugly.

  I slam my head against the drywall. Lights streaks across my vision. I do it again and again. I can’t get the darkness out of me. I can’t get it out.

  “Stop! Don’t do that!” There’s something in his eyes, something I haven’t seen before. A flash of pain. He looks younger, sadder. “You were right, okay? You were pretty much passed out. You looked like a rag doll.”

  “Get the hell out!”

  But he doesn’t. He comes into the bathroom and squats down next to me. “He didn’t do anything, I swear. I was in the kitchen making a seven-layer bean dip. When I walked in, he was sitting next to you, pushing your dress up. He heard me. He stopped what he was doing, pulled your dress back down. He made some lame joke about girls always wanting it, especially when they’re unconscious.”

  I let out a low moan.

  “I kept an eye on you the rest of the night. I swear to you, he didn’t touch you. He wanted to, but he didn’t.”

  I clamp my mouth shut to keep the scream inside. “I can’t remember.”

  “Look, I know you think I’m a scum-sucking piece of crap. I’m a dealer, not a monster. Whatever you think of me, I’m not that guy. I wouldn’t have let him … He didn’t do anything, okay?”

  I shake my head back and forth, frantic. The vortex is opening up beneath me, that gaping black hole. I’m free falling.

  Here, Princess.” He hands me a baggy with three capsules. “This will help you. I promise.”

  I tear open the bag with trembling fingers. He has everything I want. Everything I need. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?

  My skin crawls. I’m filthy. I’m trash. People like Floyd know it. I’m cheap, something to use once and throw out, like garbage. This is who I really am. A nothing, a nobody.

  Everyone hates me. They should hate me. I’m a terrible, awful human being. I push away everything I love and wallow in the ugliness.

  All I do is hurt and destroy anything good in my life.

  I ruin everything I touch.

  I don’t deserve to live.

  37