“Oh, no,” I said, lifting both hands. “No, thank you, I mean. I don’t like chocolate.”
He stopped what he was doing, going as still as ice. The wrapper crinkled ostentatiously, curling back where there was no force to hold it down. “You don’t”—he was looking, no definitely gawking at me, the bafflement and incredulity reflected on his face—“you don’t like chocolate? How can anyone not like chocolate?” He continued to shake his head deplorably, staring at me as if I had told him I lived inside a walnut, or enjoyed an occasional glass of blood. A second later, I realized for certain I hadn’t been too far off. “That has to be one of seven deadly sins, or at least illegal in all fifty states.”
Almost instantaneously his eyes squeezed shut—only for a fraction of a second. When he opened them, they were not only a brilliant blue, but sincerely contrite.
He bit into his lip and shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it’s fine, I understand.” It wasn’t the first time someone had reacted with theatrics. In fact, the day Jake found out, during one of the rare outings with him and Emily to a Ruby’s Diner, he looked very similar to someone having a brain aneurism.
“No, that was rude,” he said, with a definitive nod. He began to unfold the wrapper again. “I don’t even know why I said that. I’ve been told my mouth often functions without first consulting my brain.” He regarded the candy bar with fondness, and then turned as if he’d suddenly thought of something. “You know—I think it’s just that I haven’t ever met anyone who doesn’t like chocolate before.”
“It’s very weird, I know,” I agreed.
“No. No, not at all, actually,” he countered and sounded as if he meant it. “Now that I think about it, it’s really no weirder than someone who doesn’t like spicy food, or fish.” Hm . . . to be honest, I hadn’t ever thought about it that way before; I’d always just assumed it was another anomaly separating me from the rest of the world. Wording it the way he did, I found myself somewhat agreeing with the logic behind it.
“I guess you’re right,” I said, though I would need to think on it later when my head didn’t feel like a storm cloud.
“I hate fish, by the way,” he added, with a grimace. “But, for chocolate . . . for chocolate I’d be willing to give up or trade pretty much anything—a sibling if necessary.” The stoic face crumpled into laughter when I laughed. I thought seriously about asking him how many siblings he had, but he spoke again before I could muster up the courage. “I’m not lying, though, when I say that if I don’t have at least some every day—even if it’s just chocolate milk—I’m a terrible human being.” He smiled then abashed, and we both turned away, burying our nerves in laughter, and acutely aware of the irony that statement held.
He hurried to fill the silence, sharing more about his obsession with all things chocolaty, while I was more than happy to do nothing more than listen for a few minutes. He spoke with ease, and I noticed this seemed to be easier for him when he wasn’t looking directly at me. But still, it was as if all of a sudden we were no more than two people having an ordinary conversation, rather than what we actually were. What that was, however, I honestly didn’t know.
Still carrying on with amiable placidness, conversing mostly with the candy bar, he paused, shaking his head lightly. “And . . . I don’t know why I just told you all of that,” he mused, sounding both surprised and annoyed with himself. He glanced at me, brows set low and smiling lopsidedly. Like clockwork, his eyes tensed and tightened around the edges. “Why don’t you take those before I start driving,” he suggested with a nod at my right hand, where the pills still remained cupped inside my palm.
For a moment, I had actually forgotten I had a headache. Strange how that happens, how pain could lessen or intensify depending on whether your mind was distracted from it or focused on it. As if summoned, a dull throb began to poke at the inside of my temples like the bony, bored tap of a skeleton finger.
Chomping off a hunk of the candy bar, Dominic shifted Hattie into drive and pulled into the nearest lane. He still had the cap to the water bottle in his hand.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, peering over his shoulder before moving into another lane. He eyed the burrito speculatively. “It looks like you have . . . something here.” Still wrapped tightly in foil, he lifted it to his nose and took a strong whiff, then another. “I think it’s still good.” He handed it to me.
I propped the water bottle between my legs. “Thank you.” I laid it in my lap, idly fingering the foil, and toying with the idea of unwrapping it. “You’re going to make a left at the next light,” I instructed.
“It’s weird.” If not for his brief glance at my lap, the ambiguity of the declaration would have made it hard to decipher. He bit off another monstrous bite of candy bar, chewing industriously and swallowing before speaking again. I waited patiently, watching him slide his tongue over his front teeth to remove food remnants. “Your burrito”—he lifted a pinky off the steering wheel, and aimed it toward me—‘it doesn’t smell like anything.”
“Oh . . .” I smiled self-consciously. “That’s because it’s tofu. Tofu is odorless.”
“You’re a vegan?” His question was posed evenly, without any voice inflection, so I couldn’t tell whether or not this surprised him. As we passed a golf course on our left, I realized where we were and gave him the next batch of directions. He nodded, signaled, switched lanes, and then gave me a look indicating he was still waiting for an answer. Flustered, I rushed to give him one.
“Um . . . sort of,” I said vaguely.
“How can you sort of be a vegan?” He interrupted just as I was about to continue, chuckling amusedly.
It was a very good question. Unfortunately I didn’t have a very good answer. “My parents raised me vegan, but occasionally I, um, eat meat—but only from certain places and not very often,” I explained quickly, realizing as I told him this, it sounded as if I were confessing to a heinous crime.
“So, you like tofu?” There wasn’t any accusation in his tone, just curiosity.
“Not . . . exactly.”
“I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Well,” I sighed, exasperated with myself for having not just made things simple by avoiding the full truth. “It’s a bit complicated.”
“Is it?” This time I did hear a hint of feigned innocence outlining the question. Sensing my chances of side-stepping this conversation weren’t very good, I decided I might as well just tell him the truth. I’d been doing that all day it seemed.
“I haven’t told them.” I busied myself with the bottle cap, screwing and unscrewing it to give my anxious hands something to do.
“Mm,” he murmured with sincerity, “I understand.” I turned toward him, curious. After finishing off the candy bar, he crumpled the wrapper in his fist and shoved into one of the front pockets of his jeans, looking suddenly grim. “I have a friend who has really strict parents too,” he said somberly. “His dad screams at him so loud the walls shake, and his mom just leaves the house or goes into another room and pretends like it isn’t happening. He once came to school with a black eye”—he gave me look of pure disgust—“and I’m pretty sure his dad’s fist was behind it.”
I had been staring at him for the last fifteen seconds, horrified, listening as he painted a terribly depraved picture, making a correlation between this friend’s parents and mine. Had I not been stricken into silence, I would have already interrupted by now; as it was, I was so ashamed I’d led him to this conclusion, I could hardly open my mouth.
“No,” I whispered. I was shaking my head in small emphatic movements, so utterly aghast, that I began to stutter. “N-no. It’s not like that. Oh, I didn’t mean for you to think—my dad would never—they aren’t anything like—” I mashed my lips together to silence the incoherent rambling. Dominic continued to watch me, puzzled, trying to make some sense from what I was poorly telling him. But he had thought . . . well, I knew what he thought and it was entirel
y my fault that he did. “I am”—I took a breath, staring sightless into my lap—“I am so sorry for your friend. That sort of thing—it doesn’t make sense to me,” I added hastily, clumsily wording the atrocity of how I truly felt about child abuse. I was struggling to explain myself and fairly confident a graceful explanation wouldn’t be arriving anytime. I decided that a factual answer was the best I could offer. “My parents would never hurt me,” I ended quietly.
I would never need to fear for my safety or question their discipline; however, there were days when I came home from The House of Hope after a particularly heartbreaking or grisly case was brought in, and before I did anything else, I walked straight out to the greenhouse to find my parents. The first time I had taken each of them into my arms, holding them tightly around their necks and whispering, “Thank you for loving me,” in their ears, I had scared them into silence. Not more than a few seconds later, my mom, sagacious as always, quickly put two and two together, while my dad waited for me to repeat the sordid story of the three-year-old who had been left at the front gate with a broken collar bone and cigarette burns covering her entire body. I had fallen apart then, in my mother’s arms, letting her cradle and soothe me on the cool adobe brick of the greenhouse. It never happened that way again—not yet, anyway—but it wasn’t the only time I made a point to hold and thank them; nor, I doubted, would it be the last.
The recollection had an effect on me that I was strangely unable to control. I could only assume this had to do with my weakened state, both mentally and physically. Thankfully the dampness in my eyes was only that, damp, and easily hid from Dominic. I waited until I was sure I could speak without faltering.
“I don’t think I could have been given better parents than the ones I have,” I said, with full sincerity. Still, I infused my voice with buoyancy to offset the hoarseness.
Dominic slowed to a red light, saying nothing. I could feel his eyes on me and lifted my head, smiling reassuringly. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said, the second our eyes met. This admission seemed to stir up some emotion in him. He looked away, gazing plaintively out the windshield until the light turned green. “So, why not be honest with them?” he asked, over the accelerating engine. “Your parents—if they are those kind of people—accepting and understanding—why not tell them the truth?”
The truth . . .
When phrased that way, it sounded simple enough. And with the exception of me, of course, Dominic seemed the type of person who wouldn’t have difficulties being honest, regardless of the situation. For me, however, there were few things more frightening than the whole, untampered truth.
“I think . . . I think it’s just easier this way,” I said conclusively, hoping the conversation would end there.
“I see.” His tone gave nothing away. I was tempted to peek at him, and see if there was more to the pithy answer. Instead, I leaned my head back against the seat, blinking slowly as I fought heavy eyelids.
At the sound of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, they shot open wide with blurry disorientation. I couldn’t have closed them for more than a moment; Dominic was just about to make the third left. I went to reach into my tote, quickly finding that I couldn’t move forward more than a couple inches. Believing me to be in danger, the seatbelt had locked into place, oppressively digging into my sternum with warranted force. At first I tried to handle the problem covertly, with discreet tugs and yanks, hoping to repeal the mistaken seatbelt. If there was such a thing as a correct way of doing this, I didn’t know about it. Normally, when I was sitting on the driver’s side, enough random jostling and the problem would right itself. This recalcitrant seat had different opinions on the matter.
With my phone continuing to blast the seven-second classical loop, decorum became less of a concern. By now, it was clear to Dominic—and anyone who had happened to look through my window—that I was having serious issues. I thrust myself forward, expending an extreme amount of energy and getting absolutely nowhere. Small, frustrated grunts slipped through my lips, but I was never granted with anything more than a bruising beneath my sweater and the banging of plastic against plastic. I gasped as Dominic’s large hand whipped out in front of me, loosely fisted. Using the side of his wrist, he pressed it just below my throat, gently forcing me back against the seat. My skin was still a bit damp and cold, but where his wrist touched, I felt incredibly warm. His long fingers easily wrapped around the shiny gray swath near my right ear. I gave an involuntary shiver when his knuckles brushed just under my jaw. Half a second later, he gave one firm yank on the seatbelt and let go. I waited a second to be sure that was it, sidling my eyes toward him without moving my head. He smiled encouragingly at me. I couldn’t look away—his eyes, they were always beautiful, but especially like this, when they were free of all the greater emotions like worry, anguish, and anger.
The corner of his full lips curved up into a smirk. “It’s just a hunch, but I think someone might be trying to call you.”
“Oh, right!” And when I dove forward, there was zero resistance. I had just flipped my phone open when it slipped out of my hand and slapped shut, but it didn’t hang up on whomever was calling me. I opened my phone and was met with Emily’s voice.
“Hell-o? Foster? Did you drop the phone again?”
I brought it to my left ear. “Em? Hi. Sorry.”
“Hey, what are you doing today?”
I caught Dominic’s attention and signaled for him to turn right. “Oh, not too much, really . . . just in the car . . .” I said, choosing my words wisely. But not too wisely.
“Are you driving?” Emily demanded.
From a young age, Jackson and Samantha Donahue ingrained in both their children that the law was to be taken seriously. Jake had once lost his driving privileges for two months after his mom saw him pulling in the driveway not wearing his seatbelt. Due to the nature of their work—especially Samantha, who handled a majority of drunk driving cases—a zero tolerance policy existed in the Donahue household.
“Why’d you pick up?” Emily made a disapproving noise. “Foster, do you know how many accidents are caused each year by people talking on their phone while driving?”
I heard her winding up, and clamored to stanch the lecture before she really got going. “I’m not driving.” I cringed. There was a fifty-fifty chance she might ask me who then was driving. I held out hope she would just assume I was with one of my parents.
“Good,” Emily said. “Anyway, Jimmy Eat World tickets went on sale yesterday. You want to go with us, right? They’re only in town for two days, Thursday and Friday, so I was thinking Friday. Does that work?”
Last summer Emily had talked me into going to a concert. I couldn’t remember the name now—Disturbed, Demented, Dysfunctional . . . something like that. After being puked on within the first five minutes after arriving, I was then hoisted into the air to do what Emily later informed was called, “crowd surfing.” We became separated after that for about an hour. I was alone when a man in his late forties and wearing a white tank top with, “Free Kisses,” Sharpied on the front, staggered up to me and wrapped his sweaty arms around my waist, weeping inconsolably into my neck, “I finally found you, Jean,” over and over again.
I vowed that concert would be both my first and my last.
“You there?” Emily asked.
“Sorry, yes, I’m here. I was just checking to see if I had plans that night.”
“I haven’t told you the date yet.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s the 25th. Can you come?”
“The 25th,” I repeated quietly, pretending to mull it over. My actual voice and the panicked one shouting, Are you crazy? Absolutely not, were nearly at equal volumes. “Sure,” I announced with bright intensity.
What have you just done, Foster Kelly?
“Sweet. I’m gonna order them right now before they sell out.” She sounded distracted. I could hear a faint clicking in the background. “See you tomorrow, k?”
&n
bsp; “Bye, Em.” Stunned into despair, I pressed the end button, and leaned forward to put my phone away.
“Jimmy Eat World, huh?” Under the circumstances, I understood he hadn’t much of a choice about listening in; without a radio to focus on, obviously there was only one place for his attention to go. “I didn’t peg you as the concert-going type.”
“Oh, really?” I said, working to keep my voice light. “Being outdoors is nice.”
“Yeah,” he intoned, “if you can stand the smoke, the crazies, and don’t mind having your personal space invaded.”
That sounded about right.
“I like their music, though.” He turned to look at me as he stopped at a red light, a curious expression on his face. “Jimmy Eat World—they’re a good band. I liked their Bleed American album. What about you? Do you have a favorite album or song?” I scoured his face, searching for the source of my intuition.
“To be honest,” I began, speaking slowly as I built a careful truth. “Emily is a much bigger fan than I am.” I caught the twitch of his lips and stammered over my words, not understanding the meaning behind it. “I don’t—I mean . . . I’m not too familiar with their music.”
“Oh, I think you’ll like them.” His voice was clipped with a cheerfully, defunct sincerity. It was different from how he had spoken to me when we first met, or even right after we crashed. There wasn’t any cruelty, and the sarcasm was extremely subtle, but still I could detect it—like a wrinkle in an otherwise smooth rug. He switched to using his left hand on the steering wheel, letting his shoulder slouch into the rain spattered window, and angling his head at me. “And, like you said . . .” He paused, smiling, a gesture that excluded the rest of his face. “Being outdoors is nice.”
I shifted in my seat, thoroughly uncomfortable by this bizarre conversation. It was as if he was out to prove a point, determined to prove I was not a true fan. But I had already said as much, hadn’t I? What was he getting at? What was I missing?
We were getting close now; driving down a two-lane street behind a semitruck, large unharvested strawberry fields flanking us, I imagined the fruit stands that would start to show up ubiquitously within the next couple of months. After that, there would be pumpkin patches, followed by Christmas trees—all of which I would get to take the kids to. There was hardly a word for their faces last year when I announced that each of them could pick out their very own pumpkin to carve. I don’t think I’d ever had a better Halloween than my first spent at The House of Hope. Not since I was very young, anyway.
Awakening Foster Kelly Page 29