Beyond the Break
Page 26
We stared at each other in silence for a few minutes until I collected enough courage to lean forward and press my lips to his. Only our lips touched, no other part of us. I inhaled his breath, trying to connect with him, and then, keeping my arms folded at my chest, I scooted toward him until my body pressed fully against his. His breath quickened and his body tensed, and I felt him harden against my abdomen. “Hazel, no. Not like this.” He pulled away. “I’m not taking your handouts. I won’t.”
My neck and chest burned with the surprise sting of rejection. “I’m trying.”
He rolled out of bed and stood facing me, ignoring the erection that betrayed the conflict between his mind and body. “Did you have to ‘try’ with Claire?” He clomped to his dresser and yanked out clothes, slamming the drawers with enough force that the heavy piece of furniture rocked on its supports.
“Please.” I sat up. “Please stay.”
He snorted and turned to me with his clothes wadded up in his hands. “And you want to play this game with me now. This game where you try to kill yourself to see if I’ll rescue you? This isn’t a fucking game, Hazel. And if you’re so obsessed with Claire that you feel like you have to ‘try’ just to tolerate touching me, kissing me, fucking me, then don’t bother. I don’t want your sloppy seconds.”
I felt suddenly exposed and humiliated sitting naked on the bed with nothing to hide behind. I pulled my legs into my chest.
“Fuck.” Oren’s face flushed deep red and he jerked around and put his fist through the drywall behind him. He pulled it out slowly, clumsily, and bits of plaster and drywall dust rained down on the floor. “Fuck,” he said again, and he went to the bathroom and slammed the door.
Tuesday, a phone call from Iris interrupted me while I was standing at the kitchen counter with the ceramic blade of a knife pressed into the flesh of my upper thigh. It was the only place I could think of where I could hide the wound from Oren.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”
I contemplated the knife for a moment, as if it wasn’t my hand holding the sharp blade, but the hand of some other unstable person who could not be trusted. “No, you’re fine,” I said, but I didn’t set the knife down. “What’s up?”
“I thought you’d want to know that you didn’t kill that man in Italy.”
I dropped the knife. It missed my bare toes by an inch, and the ceramic blade snapped in half when it hit the tile floor. “How do you know? Are you sure?” My hands shook uncontrollably. I had been shrinking from the memory, pushing that bludgeoned face from my mind, but I’d been terrified that I had killed him. I fumbled with my phone and managed to put it on speaker before it clattered down against the counter.
“Their newspapers are online. I suck at reading Italian, but I knew his name, at least, just his first name, and there was a story about him. I couldn’t translate it very well, but it looked like he’d accused a man of attacking him, like a mugging. He was hurt pretty bad, had to go to the hospital and everything. I have a friend of a friend who knows Italian, and he said I understood it right.”
I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him. I bent over the counter trying not to hyperventilate.
“Anyway,” Iris continued, “It seems like he was embarrassed that you’d clocked him so good, or maybe he was afraid that he’d get caught for the rape stuff, you know? So he lied to the cops, I guess. The Italian cops. Anyway, you didn’t kill him, and I figured you’d want to know. Hazel? Are you there? Is it okay if I call you Hazel and not Mrs. Duval?”
That made me laugh, her trying to be proper about my name while we discussed whether I’d killed a man in a dark alley. “Sorry,” I said. “I just…I’m not sure I realized how worried I was about it. I’m having a moment over here.”
“Oh,” she said, and was quiet for a minute. “Do you want me to send you the link to the article? I’d be happy—”
“Oh god, no. I would like to never ever think of that again.”
She sighed into the phone. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m seeing a therapist, by the way. I figured I should get my shit together so it doesn’t fuck me up later on. Oh, sorry, I just said ‘fuck.’” She let out a self-conscious laugh. “I keep forgetting you’re like, a teacher. Anyway, my therapist is super calm, and everything she says makes me feel calm too, or validated, or not crazy or something. It’s the weirdest thing how just talking to someone can make you feel better, you know?”
I sniffed and shook my head in wonder. “Yeah, weird.” Weird how, even now, Iris’s valley girl chatter was lifting my spirits when I wasn’t really in the mood to have my spirits lifted. I’d been ready to slice myself open and watch the blood trickle down my leg. The blade of the knife still glinted in the sun, as if beckoning me.
“Well,” Iris said into the pause, “I guess I’ll let you go then.”
“Okay,” I said, bending to pick up the two halves of the knife. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Iris.” I lined the pieces up neatly on the counter. “And thank you for taking the time to track down that info and let me know about it.”
“Oh, you’re so welcome. Anytime. And thank you, you know, for what you did. You’re my hero.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and then she laughed, embarrassed.
“You don’t have to thank me, Iris. And you call anytime, okay?” My voice sounded so cordial and sane—not at all how I felt. I picked up the knife by its handle.
“I will, thank you.”
“Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
The shortened blade was now cut at a primitive, awkward angle—sharper and more alluring than before I’d broken it. I lifted the hem of my shorts and set the edge of the blade against the skin of my outer thigh, and, though my pulse roared in my temples, though my insides were coiled up in a tight knot of desperation, my hand was steadier than if I’d been drawing my bow across my violin. I pressed and pulled and breathed. The sting only lasted a second, and then there was something else—not relief or distraction or euphoria as I’d expected, but calm, spreading through my veins like a drug, dulling not just the pain of the cut, but all the other hurts, too.
Oren sat on the couch watching TV that night, and I snuggled up next to him with my head on his lap. He stroked my hair and did not ask me to talk. He was too patient, too forgiving, too good for me. The day before, he’d patched the hole in the wall where he’d punched it. I’d sat cross-legged on the bed while he worked, watching him paint over his handiwork. He’d turned to me and said, “See? Good as new!” as if fixing holes were the easiest thing in the world. I’d stared at him and thought, as I’d thought so many times before: I don’t deserve you. It meant something different now.
I laid a hand on the wound hidden beneath my shorts, now bandaged and treated with antibiotic ointment. I wanted to tell him about the man I did not kill; I wanted to tell him about the knife. I was both afraid and oddly proud of what I’d done. It takes commitment to make yourself bleed—to make anyone bleed.
I did not mention the ceramic knife or the cut on my thigh, but that night, as Oren and I lay quiet in bed, the only noise in the room the low hum of the air conditioner, I whispered the story of the man I did not kill. Oren didn’t gasp in shock, or sigh, or offer any indication that he was even listening. But I knew he was.
That night, in a dream, I wandered the grey streets of a ruined city, dodging mounds of filled-to-overflowing garbage bags and stepping around homeless people huddled beneath blankets on the cold sidewalk. Dirt-smeared children stood barefoot amid the trash and filth, spreading their hungry palms at me. I wanted to help them. I reached in my pockets again and again, only to find holes in the bottoms.
Eventually, I came upon an old, silver-haired woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk among the detritus and downtrodden. She held up an arthritic finger and beckoned me into a dark alley. I followed her deep into the shadows, where she pulled out a knife very similar to the one that had broken when Iris called, but this one had a machete blade.
The arm belonging to the half of her that still held the knife reached out to offer me the handle. I took it from her to see what kind of knife could slice a person in two without causing any pain, but when I focused on it, I realized it was a spoon. What am I supposed to do with a spoon?
I looked back at the two halves of the woman.
“Stupid girl,” she said. “You obviously don’t know what you’re doing.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Weeks later, the day before orchestra rehearsals were set to resume for the new season, I came home from a run to find Claire sitting on my front porch, covered in sweat. My heart rate was already up from eight miles in the blistering heat, so when I saw her, I thought it would explode in my chest. I put my hands on my hips and smiled at her with phony confidence, hoping the limp from my shin splints wasn’t too obvious. “Why didn’t you just wait in your car in the AC?”
She shrugged and used the back of her hand to wipe beads of sweat from her hairline. “It’s busted.”
“Oh.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. She felt like a stranger. I wanted to reach out, touch her, relearn her topography.
“Should I come back later?”
Later? Later was a thousand years. “No. Stay. But give me a few minutes to shower?” I led her around to the garage door where I pressed the four-digit code on the keypad to let us in. “Go ahead and grab whatever you want from the fridge.” Shower with me! Fuck me in the shower!
I showered alone, but slowly, and left the door unlocked. Lovesick fool.
When I came out, she was sitting on a stool at the bar, slouched over with one leg folded underneath her, plucking grapes from a bowl. I wanted to look at her, but I was afraid that if I did, my knees would give out.
She spoke first, through a mouthful of grapes. “I probably could have used a shower too, as sweaty as I just got out there. It’s like Satan himself is blowing his rank breath all over Conch Garden.”
“You could have showered with me,” I mumbled, staring down at the counter.
She made the kind of huffing noise someone makes when they’re smirking, and I could feel her eyes on me. “Oren was right. You have lost weight.”
I jerked my head up to look at her. She pursed her lips. Wild Claire, uninhibited Claire—suddenly dead serious.
I understood then why she was here. This was a rescue mission. Save Hazel. Crazy, pathetic, falling-apart Hazel. My eyes narrowed. “What did he tell you?”
“I’ll tell you what he said, but only if you promise to hold your fucking shit together.”
My cheeks blazed. “What did he say? Tell me.” He’d gone behind my back. He’d talked to her without my knowledge, without me, been in her presence, heard her voice, seen her skin and her eyes and her lips without me. Worst of all, he’d done it out of fear, like I was an out-of-control addict who needed an intervention. Claire wasn’t here because she missed me; she was here because she had to be. I wanted to rip the granite top off the cabinets and send it smashing through the window.
“Promise,” she said. “Promise you won’t lose your shit.”
“Fine. Promise.” But my chest was spasming with hot rage and an unquantifiable degree of humiliation.
“He said…that you were having a hard time. And that he is scared for you. He doesn’t know what to do.” She lowered her eyes to the countertop like she was afraid to see my reaction.
My jaw clenched so hard I worried I’d break a molar. If I cried, it would prove to Claire that Oren was right. I didn’t want her to know how much I was hurting—how much she’d hurt me. A pained croaking sound escaped my throat.
Claire slapped her palm on the granite, and I startled at the sharp noise. She glared at me with her normally placid face screwed up in an ugly way I’d never seen before. She looked mean. “You know what, Hazel? This is bullshit. Fucking bullshit. You don’t have a monopoly on suffering.”
I reeled backward, stunned at her anger, in as much pain as if she’d slapped me and not the counter.
She didn’t even register my flinch. Her face stayed twisted with anger. “You think you were the only one who got the wind knocked out of her in Italy? You think I don’t want to fall apart? Can’t it be enough for you to know that yes, me too? Do you have to fucking drown yourself to prove that you’re more hurt than I am?”
Oren had told her everything, then. I cast my eyes at the floor, every cell in my body burning with shame. “I’m not trying to prove anything.”
“You could have died.” Her voice broke on the last word.
It hit me then; I heard it, the other part of what she was saying. She’d suffered too. She’d felt the things I’d felt. I raised my eyes to look at her, needing to believe that I hadn’t been alone, that I hadn’t been deceived when I was at my most vulnerable.
“I thought…I mean, I saw you with Mike, and you were so happy. And your email…”
She sighed, loud and exasperated. “I was happy to see Mike because—” she inhaled deeply, “I was happy because, the night before we left Italy to come home, Mike called to tell me that our adoption agency had selected us to be parents. We had something to celebrate. And yeah, it was just between us at that time.” She plucked another grape from the bowl, but rolled it around in her fingers instead of eating it. Her fingers were trembling. “It wasn’t something I could share right away. Not even with you.”
I stood frozen, remembering what she’d said about wanting to start a family. I’d brushed it off as something far in the future, but now I realized there was a history behind this news, a long history to which I was not privy. I thought of our last night together, how she’d listened to me play my violin, how she’d touched me and kissed me and loved me, and how through all of that, she already knew. How had she managed to hide something like that so easily? I had a terrible, sinking feeling that, in spite of everything we’d shared, I didn’t really know Claire at all.
As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “If I’m being honest, I didn’t want to ruin our last night together. I didn’t want it to be about me, or worse, me and Mike. So I didn’t say anything.”
Me and Mike. Claire and Mike. Not Claire and Hazel. I had to be okay with this. “I’m sorry, I—adoption? I didn’t…I don’t know what to say. Congratulations?”
“It has been a difficult road. Mike and I have been trying for a very long time. Since we got married.”
“To get pregnant, you mean?” My mind reeled. I didn’t understand longing for a child, but I did understand longing. I also understood then that Claire’s longing was a hundred times more painful than mine ever was, and that she’d handled hers with infinitely more grace.
“I did get pregnant.” Her voice changed timbre again, bitter and hoarse now. She rolled her grape on the counter, pressing down on it as she spoke. “The first one was ectopic. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head.
“It means the egg implanted in the wrong place. For me it was in the fallopian tube. The fetus developed too much before they could catch it in time to save my ovary on that side. Now I only ovulate every other month, which makes conception more difficult.”
“You said the ‘first one’?”
“Yeah…” The grape split. She gave it a pitying look, then pushed it to the side and chose another. “So, I got pregnant a couple of years ago. It felt like a miracle, and I don’t believe in miracles. I was jubilant. Everything was fine for the first five months.” She popped the grape in her mouth and shrugged. “And then I lost it.”
I came around the counter and sat in the stool beside her. I love you I love you I love you. I wanted to say it, wanted her to know, even if she was unable or unwilling to
accept it. It would be enough for her to know. But I only took her hand between my own.
“It was so bad,” she said. “The worst thing I’ve ever experienced, Hazel. I gave birth to him, pushed him out, but he wasn’t…but they let me hold him.”
A tear slid down her cheek and she brushed it away quickly. “Sorry. I really hate talking about it. His bedroom is still set up in our house. It’s so stupid how we let it sit there gathering dust while we failed to get pregnant month after fucking month.”
“That’s not stupid,” I said. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry for Claire and all she’d been through, and I wanted to cry because I’d never had a chance to offer her comfort—because I hadn’t known. I ground my molars again and stared at the counter, feeling very small and very petty.
She sighed. “See, this is why I never tell anyone. I cannot stand for people to feel sorry for me.”
“But why wouldn’t I feel sorry for you? You’ve endured something terrible. Aren’t I your friend?”
She was silent for a while, lost in her memories. Another tear slid down her cheek, and this one she let go without wiping it away. “I don’t know what you are to me, Hazel. I would say you are more than a friend…” She flicked her eyes at me and my heart shattered all over again.
I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. She smiled at me in a sweet way that made me understand it would not be a good idea to try anything else, and I reluctantly placed her hand back on the counter. “So you’re going to be a mom, then?” I said, smiling.