by Amy Reed
there.
My mother’s body draped over the too-large armchair. “Mom, wake up.” I shake her. Nothing.
you.
Your tears were so loud, they drowned everything out. My thoughts, my feelings—just whispers compared to your screams.
there.
Tinfoil everywhere, tiny blackened crumpled silver. Junkie confetti.
there.
Blinds pulled. The house dark. Black, except for the tiny red ember of my mother’s cigarette. I hear her inhale and the red glows, illuminates her face.
“You’re not supposed to smoke in here,” I say.
She says nothing.
you.
Evie, you were right in front of me, but I couldn’t find you.
there.
She puts the cigarette out on the arm of the chair. The living room smells like burning leather. “Are you happy now?” she slurs, and I have to find my way up the stairs in the dark.
you.
I thought if I loved you enough, if I came running every time you called, maybe that would save you. If I said yes every time you asked for anything. If I never said no.
there.
His tooth is brown and rotting. I can smell it. I try to convince him to go to the dentist, I am sure Dad will pay for it, but David refuses. “I don’t need his dirty money,” he says as he snorts a pile of brown powder with a rolled-up dollar bill.
there.
Mom, don’t you know you’re killing him?
here.
Razor blade edge. Red blossoms turn into a stream. There is nothing but this blood, nothing but this clear, simple pain. Unambiguous. Perfect. Comforting. Mine.
there.
A few days later, the tooth is gone. David chewing on a bloody handkerchief. “See?” he says. “Fuck Dad. I can take care of myself.”
here.
The only thing that can take away this pain is a different kind of pain.
you.
Your face when you were sleeping. The only time I trusted you not to go away.
here.
No love, no pain.
there.
David’s death, permanent on my skin. He joins the other scars. So he’ll be with me always. So he can never leave.
here.
Again. A razor blade between my fingers. This old bully, resurrected. A promise to myself, broken.
Each cut, a good-bye. Each cut, the only truth I can speak.
The pressure, the break through skin, then the sting. The moment of fear mixed with anticipation, the moment before the blood blooms.
Each scar on my arm is a memory.
Then the relief. The sigh. The letting go. My pounding heart, the blood going whoosh inside my head.
Gone, gone. Everyone gone.
The moment of calm when I cross through the space in between pains.
Each scar is a point in time when everything else disappeared.
Now. Old scars reopened.
Whatever problem I had bleeds away.
I hide behind the blood.
I fall asleep before the shame sets in.
here.
NEON LIGHTS REFLECT OFF SCUFFED LINOLEUM FLOORS. Metal wheels squeak. Carts clatter. Phil Collins’s eighties heartbreak song “Against All Odds” crackles over the loudspeaker. Dad hums along cheerfully, as if he’s completely unaware that this is one of the saddest breakup songs ever written. I’m embarrassed that I even know this song. Dad’s bad taste in music must have seeped into my subconscious over the course of my childhood.
“How can you just walk away from me?” Phil Collins sings.
How could you, Evie?
I’m leaning against the back of the shopping cart, following Dad through the aisles of the grocery store. Since my run-in with the cops, he’s been overdoing it in the parenting department, as if making a sudden heroic effort to pay attention to me will make me behave the way he wants, as if watching TV next to each other on the couch will get me closer to becoming a miniature version of him. There’s no use grounding me since I don’t have a life, so he has made my punishment more “family time,” but I cringe every time he says it. I don’t know how he can justify calling the two of us a family.
The fresh cuts on my shoulder throb beneath their bandage, and my dad has no idea. Even after a couple of days, the wounds are still raw, still seeping. I woke up this morning and the old familiar shame was right there waiting for me, pounding in my head with every heartbeat. I had to throw away my favorite T-shirt, had to hide it in the bottom of my trash can so no one would see it. Nothing can get that much blood out.
I promised myself a year ago I wouldn’t do this anymore. No one is worth this blood. No one is worth hurting myself over. But I still did it. I still thought it would fix something. But Evie is still gone and I am still empty.
“Marcus, where do you think we’d find marinated artichoke hearts?” Dad’s looking at a list Monica gave him for dinner tonight, but neither of us know how to find anything outside the frozen food aisle.
“How would I know?” I say. I grab a jar of spaghetti sauce and a pack of noodles and throw them in the cart. That’s all the cooking I know how to do.
“Eggplant?” he says. “Radicchio? Is this a joke?”
“Why don’t we just order a pizza?”
“Monica is an amazing cook. It’ll be worth it, I promise.” He picks up a jar of capers and inspects it. “Damn, this is a good song.”
“Phil Collins? Dad, you are so white.”
“This was a big hit my senior year of high school.”
“Did you slow dance to it at prom?”
He smiles and puts the jar of capers back on the shelf. “As a matter of fact, I did.” He gets a faraway look on his face. He sways his hips to the music. “Ah, Gina Edwards. She was so fine.”
“Gross,” I say, but for a second, I imagine my dad, thirty years younger, with a sculpted Afro, big ears, an eighties-style tux and tacky boutonniere, an awkward teenager under a disco ball during the ugliest style period in history. That cheers me up a little.
It’s Friday night, and I’m hanging out with my dad at the grocery store, but I am beyond caring about cool. At least I’m somewhere besides my room with the walls crushing in on me. At least there are things to look at and smell and hear, to distract my senses. I’ll take anything to get out of my own head. Anything to drown out the spiraling thoughts in my mind, the scene on repeat, over and over, of Evie standing there and saying nothing.
The truth is, spending time with my dad the last few days hasn’t been all that bad. I must really be losing my mind.
“You’re the only one who really knew me at all.”
Fuck you, Phil Collins. You are so not helping.
Dad’s mouth is moving, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. My mind cannot comprehend his voice, does not recognize it without its usual tinge of anger and exasperation. Something is wrong with his face. It is too soft, too kind. His lips curl up at the edges.
Monica leans over and kisses him on the cheek. “Marcus, your dad is so funny,” she says.
“Huh?” I say, poking at a purple vegetable I do not recognize.
“He was just telling me a story from when you were a kid.”
“Remember that time we went camping?” Dad says, laughing.
I shudder at the memory.
“We went camping one time,” he says. “And that was enough to convince us to never do it again.”
“What happened?” Monica asks.
“First of all, it rained. It started as soon as we pulled into the camping spot. I had never set up a tent before, but I was determined to do it. Renae suggested going home, but of course I would not admit defeat.”
“Of course not,” Monica says with a playful roll of her eyes. I study her face for a moment and see the glimmer of something real, even likable.
“I was going to succeed no matter who I took down with me,” he says, and something warm and unexpected spreads in my chest. What is this
new self-effacing humor? He meets my eyes for a moment, and I’m the one who looks away first.
Dad chuckles. “I tried to build a fire with wet wood for about two hours while everyone else hid in the tent.”
“We had an okay time,” I say. “Mom brought lots of books and games.”
“Yeah,” he says with a sudden sadness. “I remember hearing you all laughing. I could have joined you, but somehow I thought it was more important to build a stupid fire in the pouring rain.”
Monica reaches over and puts her hand over his and they share a look between them that I never saw between him and my mother. Monica gets him. He’s letting her get him.
I take a small bite of my dinner. It’s good, like restaurant good. Way better than the frozen crap we usually stock.
“What do you think, William?” Monica says with a smile in her eyes. “Is now a good time?”
Dad takes a deep breath. “It’s as good a time as any.” He wipes his mouth with the cloth napkin from his lap. “Marcus,” he begins. “Monica and I have something we want to tell you.”
And just like that, I am numb. I have no feelings. Doors shut. I am closed for business.
“We’re getting married!” Monica says, bursting with happiness.
What am I supposed to say? I want to warn her. She has no idea what she’s getting herself into.
“Marcus,” Dad says, “I would be honored if you’d be my best man.”
“Okay,” I say blankly, in shock. I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what I feel.
“I know this must be a huge surprise for you,” Monica says. “And you probably have a lot of different feelings coming up.”
Nope. No feelings. None at all.
“We love each other very much,” Dad says, and even if it’s true, it sounds like bullshit.
My phone rings. Perfect timing. I pull it out of my pocket and see a number I don’t recognize.
“I have to get this,” I say, standing up. Dad’s dopey in-love face shows a glimmer of the more familiar angry-dad face.
“Hello?” I say as I walk out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Marcus?” says a girl’s voice.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“My name’s Kasey,” she says. “I’m a friend of Evie’s.”
My heart stops. All the feelings I wasn’t feeling a moment ago come rushing into my body at once like some kind of toxic storm. I feel everything there is to feel. I am light-headed. I need to sit down.
“How is she?” I ask, leaning against the wall. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s great, actually.”
Something releases inside my chest. I exhale and close my eyes. When I open them, tears cut a river down my cheeks.
“She wants to see you.”
“Why didn’t she call me herself?”
“She wants to talk to you, but she didn’t want to do it over the phone.” The voice named Kasey sighs. “Do you want to talk to her or not?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.” A million times, yes.
A tiny glimmer of hope. The world stops ending.
you.
SO MUCH SPOKEN IN WHISPERS. A SECRET LANGUAGE between us.
You said, “You see me.” And in those moments, I believed you. When your shoulders would fall away from your ears. When you would close your eyes and breathe into my neck, and we’d curve around each other like swans, and I would find the places made for my lips.
Supposedly, swans mate for life. When they kiss, their necks form the shape of a heart.
But a swan song is not a love song. It is good-bye. It is a last act, a final performance.
Does a swan really sing when it dies? Is its pain really that beautiful?
here.
I’M WALKING TOWARD A COFFEE SHOP IN DOWNTOWN Berkeley, the kind of chain Evie and I would never have gone to.
I feel her before I see her. The back of my neck tingles. My eyes find her at a table in the corner, staring at me. My feet don’t feel the ground as I walk the miles it takes to get to her. Her smile is nervous. She seems to be shaking as she stands up to hug me. The hug ends before I even have a chance to feel her in my arms, before I have a chance to smell her. My body stings with her absence.
She sits down and so do I. “Do you want to get something?” she says.
“No, I’m fine,” I say. “What are you having?”
“Green tea.”
“That’s new.”
“Yeah, I’m trying not to do coffee anymore.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Trying to be healthy, I guess.”
“Me, too,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Evie’s toned down her look in the few weeks since her coma. She’s in a simple T-shirt and jeans, her face is bare of makeup, and her short blond hair is swept casually to the side. The hardness she had cultivated before is nowhere to be found. She’s more beautiful than ever.
“You look good,” I say. “Healthy.”
“I’ve been swimming a lot,” she says. “You cut your hair.”
“I needed a change.”
She takes a sip of her tea in the silence that follows. I wish I had bought a drink so I’d have something to do with my hands.
“This small talk feels weird,” Evie finally says. “We never had to do small talk.”
“So let’s stop talking small.”
She holds her breath for a moment before speaking. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to contact you. I know you must have been worried. It was cruel of me to disappear like that without an explanation.”
I say nothing. I wait for more.
“Even now, I can’t really explain it.” She’s looking at her hands. “When I woke up from the coma, the first thought on my mind was that I needed space. Not just from you, from everything that reminded me of cancer, of my life after cancer, everything that reminded me of getting high.”
“You needed to run away,” I say.
“No, Marcus,” she says firmly, looking up from her hands. Her pale blue eyes burn into mine. “I needed to stop running.”
“You could have told me,” I say. “I would have understood. You could have trusted me.”
She shakes her head.
“You didn’t trust me?”
“No. It’s not that.” She suddenly looks so innocent, so lost. “I didn’t trust myself. I knew if I saw you, I’d fall back into my old ways.”
“But I wouldn’t let you. If I knew that’s what you wanted. I’d help you, Evie.”
“That’s not something you can control. It’s not up to you.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t have everything figured out yet. But I think you inspire something in me.” She looks down. She cannot meet my eyes. “Something reckless.”
“You’re blaming this on me?”
“No. It’s—” She searches for words. “It’s how I react to you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
She stares at her tea, so rigid, so still, and I am a hurricane.
“You know my parents wanted to press charges against you?” she finally says. “They wanted to believe everything was your fault. I managed to convince them you didn’t know anything about the pills.”
“I didn’t.”
“Right. So you’re off the hook. You avoided the wrath of the Whinsetts.” She’s trying to be funny, but I cannot think of a worse time for humor.
“What happened?” I say. “How could you let it get that far?”
She sighs. “My dad’s father was a horrible alcoholic, and so was his grandfather. I never met either of them. They both died young. That’s why my dad doesn’t drink, why there’s never been any booze in our house. Dad vowed never to drink because of them. The disease is in my blood,” she says, “before drugs or alcohol even entered my body. I can’t ever get away from it. It’s like I was programmed to get addicted as soon as I tried so
mething.”
We’re both quiet for a minute. Even though I know addiction can be hereditary, it seems like such a convenient excuse. If it has everything to do with your family, why did Evie catch it and I didn’t?
Evie laughs a tired, ironic laugh. “What is it with me and diseases?”
I shake my head slowly. I cannot stop shaking my head. It is the only movement that feels right. “How could I not have known you were high all those times? How could I be so stupid?”
“There’s no way you could have known. I did everything I could to hide it from you. From everyone.”
“I should have noticed the signs. I know what they look like. There were so many.”
“Marcus, don’t.”
“The flu? Who gets the fucking flu in June?”
“That’s over now.”
“I could have helped you. I wanted to help you.”
“I know.”
“I can help you now.”
That’s when I notice the tears in her eyes, her bottom lip trembling.
“I’m changing, too,” I say. “I quit smoking pot. I have a really great internship this summer.”
“I’m happy for you,” she says sadly.
“We can help each other.”
“You can’t save me, Marcus.”
“We can save each other.”
“No,” she says. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”