Tessa’s heart raced. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, pulsed between her ears. She clenched her teeth, the way she used to when she was small and her mother would take her to the pediatrician for a shot. Sometimes, Tessa would drop down from the examining table and hide from the nurse beneath her mother’s chair, the smell of rubbing alcohol thick in her mouth, her bony knees raw against the floor. But they always found her. No matter how many times she’d wished herself invisible, she’d always get caught.
Tessa hung her head and her hair fell before her face, like a night-darkening shade. Was this what it felt like to be dead? In perpetual darkness and hidden from sight, but also safe, because the worst had already happened. You had nothing left to lose. Her whole body shook, a last-ditch attempt to hang on, hold on, never let go.
Abby tucked Tessa’s hair behind her ears. Sunshine flooded Tessa’s face, Abby in the center of the light. “Shh, shh,” Abby said, soothing, as if she already knew. As if it really didn’t matter. “It’s okay if you’re not ready. I can wait.”
A staccato burst of air released from Tessa’s mouth, an almost laugh. Luke had given Tessa the same speech, verbatim, when she’d told him she was still a virgin.
Tessa had always been a sucker for other people’s patience. Crouched under the plastic examining room chair, she’d grow bored of staring at her mother’s jeans-clad legs, the nurse’s green scrubs, the faces that cajoled and pleaded. Finally, they’d bribe her with red lollipops, waving the candy beneath the chair the way Abby lured Sadie with rainbow ribbons.
Luke had had his own methods of whittling away Tessa’s resolve to delay intercourse, making love to her in every other way possible, until her virginity was nothing but a technicality.
Out on the bay, the sun gleamed off the navy water, and Tessa imagined herself swimming. The cold numbing her body. Her arms straining against the tides. Then she’d crawl from the water onto a sandy beach and collapse, utterly, blissfully, spent. Then she’d feel nothing.
Tessa slipped her hand from her thigh.
This time, a burst of air came from Abby, a sober, reverent “Oh.” More than Luke had uttered in response to seeing Tessa naked for the first time. He’d treated her scars the same as the rest of her body, kissing every inch to make them all better, no questions asked.
The clang of a bell buoy punctuated Abby’s sigh. “Why, sweetheart? What made you want to injure your precious body?”
Sweetheart, precious, terms of endearment. Not a single word of disgust was directed toward Tessa. Not a hint of anger laced Abby’s tone. Head down, Abby focused on Tessa’s thigh, as if Abby were a magical princess, willing her gaze to heal the ugly lines Tessa had carved into her flesh.
“I don’t know,” Tessa said, which wasn’t exactly true. But whenever she’d posed the same question to herself, the reasons led her down the same twisted path and made as little sense to her as when she’d first held her father’s purloined razor blade over her perfect, unmarred skin.
One glance from Tessa, and water edged Abby’s eyes.
Was Abby crying for her? That made no sense, since Tessa had gotten exactly what she’d deserved. She’d tried to erase the scars, slathered vitamin E oil over the bumpy surface. But then her thigh would glow, the oil highlighting the raised flesh instead of erasing it, the skin reddening beneath her touch. Her father was right. Some people created their own problems. And others—Tessa—made everything worse.
Abby lifted her chin to the sky, the same cute way she’d scanned the horizon for yesterday’s storm. “When was the first time you cut yourself?”
The pulse in Tessa’s thigh jumped to life.
Tessa had been worried about this moment for years. She’d always known she’d do something careless. Slip on a bikini for the beach and fail to add swim shorts. Change in front of Dina and forget to turn to the wall. But she’d never imagined anyone asking for details. She’d never thought anyone would want to hear her story.
Pretty much the reason she’d done it in the first place.
“Um, I was thirteen, I guess.”
“Wow,” Abby said. “You were just a baby.”
“Not really,” she said, but then she considered one of her prized possessions.
When Tessa’s mother had taken off, she’d left behind the family photo albums, as if Meredith Lombardi had been trying to cast off not only her daughter and husband, but all of their memories. Whenever Tessa rifled through the albums, she’d focus on the last pictures of her mother. She’d wonder at Meredith’s seemingly genuine grin; she’d search for traces of sadness in her mother’s dark eyes. But she’d barely noticed herself at her mother’s side. Mouthful of braces, hair hanging in two sloppy French braids, and half a head shorter than her mother. At thirteen, she was always craning her neck and trying to catch her mother’s attention. Tessa had never put the two together.
Her mother had given up her baby.
“What happened?” Abby asked, jolting Tessa back to the pink-tiled bathroom Meredith had hated.
Tessa had rifled through her father’s side of the medicine cabinet, not caring if she was making a mess. Not caring if her anal father actually counted the replacement blades for the fancy shaver her mother had given him for Christmas, and found one missing. At first, she’d sort of hoped he did.
“I didn’t mean to,” Tessa said. Closer to the truth, she hadn’t meant for it to continue for so long. She hadn’t known the secret thing that was all hers, the one thing she’d thought she could control, would spiral out, until the cutting controlled her.
When Tessa tilted her head, the maple’s branches and leaves spun in a circle. Sunlight glinted into her eyes. She bent her head to her knees, wrapped her arms around her legs, held on.
Beside her, Abby secured her filmy white skirt around her knees. “Tessa, no. I meant, what happened to you before you hurt yourself? Was something going on in your life that upset you? Was someone bothering you?”
“My mother,” Tessa blurted out, and then wished she could take it back. Just reach out to the air in front of her, grab the words she’d spoken, stuff them in her mouth, and swallow them back down to her center. Keep them with the rest of the lies she told herself. The truth was, Meredith Lombardi had stopped being her mother the day she’d booked a flight across the Atlantic. So what if, nineteen years ago, she’d managed to squeeze Tessa out from between her legs? That was totally irrelevant.
Mother was a verb, too.
Abby’s eyes bulged a tiny bit, her mouth set in a grim line. “Did she? Did your mother hurt you?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, she promised she wouldn’t leave. . . .” It sounded so stupid. Who cared if her mother had broken a promise? Everybody lied.
“And then,” Abby said, “she left?”
Tessa had awoken to the smell of the Belgian waffles Meredith cooked every Sunday. She didn’t cook a lot, so when she did, she made a big deal of it. Meredith cheated with Aunt Jemima mix, but she always heated real maple syrup, browned six sausages in a fry pan, and set the table with cloth napkins.
Dad had set the table and warmed the syrup. But a stack of waffles sat on a transparent-from-steam paper plate, drooping and cold, as though they’d come off the iron hours ago. And four shriveled sausages lingered in the coated fry pan, stale-smelling and sticky with congealed grease.
That day, Dad had become Professor Lombardi, a pontiff who’d stated the facts and clarified the new reality. Tessa’s mother was gone. Other than that, nothing had changed. Then Tessa had watched, transfixed, while her father choked down his breakfast and left the dirty dishes in the sink for her mother to scrub.
According to her father, Lombardis put their heads down, got their work done, and never whined.Who needed a mother when you had every advantage?
Tessa yanked up two handfuls of grass, tossed them on the ground. “Yeah, she left. She never came back. End of story.”
“If that was the end of the story, then why did you cut you
rself?”
“Because,” Tessa said. “That was the only way I could tell.”
Abby’s gaze dropped onto Tessa’s scars. Several were white with age. But one stood out, pink-hued and angry and screaming for attention.
“I stopped a long time ago,” Tessa said. She knew that other girls in her grade would rush home from school, lock the bathroom door, push their jeans to their ankles, and steal a few precious minutes of self-service relief. That wasn’t her thing. Who would’ve thought, after everything that hurt, slicing through your flesh would come as the biggest relief of all? Who would’ve thought something that relieved her stress would create her greatest shame?
Until ninth-grade art class.
Who would’ve thought telling stories through sketches and painting would feel better than carving her flesh? She’d even tried her hand at sculpting reliefs, cutting stone to give the illusion of elevation. Those reliefs she didn’t have to hide.
Abby’s nostrils flared, as though sniffing out Tessa’s lie. “Are you sure about that? Because, if you’re still cutting . . . Sweetheart, it’s not good for you. I can get you help.”
“I’d never—” Nausea prickled the back of Tessa’s throat, the lining of her mouth. Her hand drifted to her belly. She knew she was losing her mind, because she was thinking of the last time that she and Luke, and Dina and Jon had played their favorite drinking game.
I never had sex in the university library. Chug. I never went down on my boyfriend while he was driving on Route 116. Chug.
“I’d never hurt my baby,” Tessa said.
“I know that,” Abby said. “I know that’s not what you’d want.”
Why should Abby believe her? The evidence was as obvious as the pink welt on her thigh, a long slash above all the others that pointed straight to the day Luke died. Blood dripping down her leg and pooling in her boots, she’d hobbled down Orchard Hill to Health Services. She’d begged them not to tell.
Three weeks later, she’d returned for prenatal vitamins.
“Right after Luke died, I didn’t know I was pregnant.”
“I know, Tessa. You told me that before.”
“Right after Luke died,” Tessa repeated. “That was the last time I did it.”
Abby squinted, and then her features broadened with understanding.
“I’m not crazy,” Tessa said. But wasn’t that exactly what a crazy person would say?
“Want to know a secret?” Abby said. “After Luke died, I thought I was going crazy. I was feeling desperate. It’s hard to be the one left behind.”
“After. After I knew I was pregnant, I was freaking out. I thought I was being punished and I was going to lose the baby, too. But I never told anyone about the, you know, what I did.” Tessa waved at her thigh, wished it were that easy for her to dismiss the hideous scars, the pathetic story of her life. “I came close to telling my best friend, Dina, but I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want her to think I was bat shit.”
“You’re not bat shit, Tessa. It makes sense that after Luke died, you turned to something that once made you feel better. Even though that something was really, really bad for you.”
Tessa inched closer. “Promise?”
Abby held up her pinkie.
Tessa wrapped her pinkie around Abby’s, and a shiver skittered up her spine. “Did you and Luke used to pinkie swear when he was little?”
“If by little, you mean when he was old enough to shave. Then, yeah. Luke was a big fan of the pinkie swear.” Abby secured her arm around Tessa’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze, as though welcoming Tessa into the Luke-and-Abby pinkie swear club.
Tessa rested her head on Abby’s shoulder, inhaled her hair. Sunshine and summer sand, and something she could only describe as a deep blue sadness. She touched a fingertip to one of Abby’s shining princess curls. “Your hair’s pretty,” Tessa said, and then she started to cry.
“Sweetheart,” Abby said.
That only made Tessa cry harder.
The day she’d cut herself too deeply, she’d stripped down and made herself stand in the shower under burning hot water, gritting her teeth so that her dorm mates wouldn’t hear her cry out in pain. Then she shut off the water and leaned against the dirty shower stall, shivering, until brown dots no longer danced before her vision and she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t pass out. She slapped a gauze pad on her thigh and immediately soaked through it, but the wet cotton provided enough of a cushion so she could struggle into a pair of sweats. Through the darkness, the light from Health Services shone like a beacon, a promise of relief.
A stocky nurse with lipstick on her teeth tore the bloody pad from Tessa’s leg and exposed her shame to the sting of the air. “Well, well. What do we have here?” she’d said, widening her eyes to take in the horror show. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself, young lady.”
Now, Abby rubbed Tessa’s back, rocked slightly to a rhythm both foreign and familiar to Tessa, like hearing a song you used to know. Heat came off Tessa’s body, waves and waves of heat that prickled her skin, coated her with sweat, and lightened her even better than creating art. Her pulse relaxed, settled. Lemons and summer sand. The curve of Abby’s neck. The pressure of Abby’s hand between her shoulders.
Who would’ve thought telling Abby about the second-to-worst thing Tessa had ever done would give her so much relief?
CHAPTER 10
The sadness of the day lingered, sticky as the homemade peppermint-candy ice cream Abby and Tessa had churned under the shade tree. Abby told Tessa the treat was for Briar Rose guests, too. That wasn’t a lie. But the chore was primarily a means to an end. Half an hour of rocking wasn’t nearly enough time to offset years of Tessa’s emotional and physical scarring.
In lieu of lunch, Abby and Tessa had gobbled ice cream, racing against the melting. Then they’d taken a long, leisurely walk into town, both of them unusually quiet. Abby sensed that Tessa had had enough sharing for one day, and they hadn’t spoken again about the cutting. But even now, Tessa’s revelation niggled Abby, like a canker your tongue couldn’t resist worrying.
Why would someone hurting you make you want to turn around and hurt yourself? After Luke’s memorial, Abby had been in that dark place, wanting to drown out her pain by drowning herself. She knew she’d never allow a friend—or a stranger, for that matter—to contemplate such selfish foolishness. Why was it so difficult to show yourself the same compassion?
Abby wanted to sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor and have herself a good cry until she’d drained herself of every emotion. Instead, she’d taken a long shower, fluffed and arranged herself into her version of a bombshell. A bombshell looking forward to her date with Rob and a little no-drama letting off steam.
That thought doubled the pressure.
Abby wore her hair down, thanks to copious quantities of summer curl-taming gel and spray. Gray eye shadow, once relegated to the back of her medicine cabinet, now graced her lids, highlighting her blue eyes. Mascara darkened her pale lashes. And she’d made sure she’d brushed the lint off the berry lipstick that lived at the bottom of her pocketbook before gliding the balm across her lips. She wore a hot-pink give-the-girls-some-attention sleeveless T-shirt and tight dark-wash jeans she’d purchased last summer.
She eyed the shoe choices. Flats were all wrong, but wear too high of a heel and you ran the risk of crossing the line from slightly sexy to seriously slutty. Considering she hadn’t had sex in two years, she didn’t want Rob to accuse her of false advertising. With that in mind, she shrugged into the white short-sleeved cardigan she’d, moments ago, slung across the arm of her bedroom’s peach club chair beside the seat’s pile of rejected T-shirts and blouses. On the dresser, her cell buzzed. Celeste smirked at her from the photo window, perpetually on the cusp of speaking her mind.
“Heels or flats,” Abby said, not bothering with a hello.
“Inch and a half. Two at most,” Celeste said.
“You think three inches i
s too slutty?”
“Too much for you to handle,” Celeste said. “But take off the damn cardigan.”
Abby clasped the sweater’s cotton neck, exaggerated a gasp. “I feel like you’ve known me forever.”
Abby had known Celeste long enough to be certain she was smiling through the phone. “Is that your best line?” Celeste said. “Is that what you’re going to use on Rob to seduce him on your first official date?”
“Yeah, I’m having a little trouble with that part.”
“What do you mean?”
Abby conjured the image of Hailstorm Rob, rain-soaked and sexy. When she pictured the way he’d deliberately run his gaze over her body, her T-shirt tightened against her chest and her back arched into a luxurious stretch. She wanted more. “Well . . . if this is our first date, then polite dinner conversation should lead to a polite truck conversation. Which leads to a walk to my front door and a good-night kiss. Absolutely no tongue permitted. But since we’ve kind of sort of actually been dating for over a month . . .”
“And his tongue has already familiarized itself with the inside of your mouth.”
“Right.”
“Huh,” Celeste said. “I see your dilemma.”
Sadie peeked out from under the pile of Abby’s castaway tops and jumped to the floor. The cat glanced up at Abby and then launched into a full-throated purr. She wound around Abby’s jeans leg, no doubt marking the dark-wash with several long gray hairs. You’re mine, she seemed to say.
If Rob didn’t work out, at least Abby still had Sadie. No matter how many men came and went, Abby could always depend on her cat to love her unconditionally. As long as Abby plied Sadie with foil balls, rainbow ribbons, and chicken-and-brown-rice kibble, no one got hurt.
“You still there?” Abby asked.
“I’m thinking! Okay, here we go. You need to seek a middle ground. More than a kiss, but less than full-out boinking.”
“Can you be more specific? I mean, there are a lot of middle ground options.”
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