by Neliza Drew
“Who really shot you? Your mom or the boyfriend?”
The waitress dropped off another beer and he nodded thanks at her without warmth.
“She didn’t…who am I kidding? There was a moment when I thought she was coming to save me. And then I realized her anger wasn’t for him. It was for me. She didn’t mean to shoot me where she did. She meant to kill me. And in some ways, she did.”
He stared at me for what felt like a long time. “Your mother shot you?”
“She was high. They were freebasing. She can’t handle her uppers like that.”
“Why?”
I felt myself shrink at the question, felt the words Nothing, I’m fine form on my tongue automatically. “He didn’t handle his uppers well either. He hit her one too many times. I tried to stop him. He turned on me.” I swallowed only to find a desert in my mouth. “He raped me.”
His expression darkened, his eyes shiny.
I put my finger to his lips. “It wasn’t… It shouldn’t have… You don’t know everything about me. What hurt that night was Charley’s betrayal. I’d been pretending so hard I was like you; I forgot I wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?”
“To protect Charley. Because I didn’t want you to know.”
“What? Why? What about him? Why not tell on him?”
I put my hand on his. “I got my licks in. It would’ve been his word against mine. My record works against me. There’s no sense pushing for a case, if you’re the one who goes on trial.”
He covered my scars with his hand.
“At the time it didn’t matter, and now it only matters because I let him get away with it.”
“How could it not matter?”
The waitress dumped off my potato and a cup of beans. I stabbed a bean with a fork and ate it. Salty.
“You don’t understand. Your parents lived together. You had your grandmother. Who cooked family meals on Sunday after church. My dead father’s one-time lover willed me a box of guns and shot himself. My mother’s a washed up singer, painter, whore, and addict. You were in the Boy Scouts and spent summers at camp. I once lived in an abandoned car. My mother almost got us all killed in a bar shootout, of all things. I’ve been arrested. More than once. I’ve been a prostitute. A girl like me wasn’t supposed to be in a relationship with a guy like you. Nowhere in your childhood is there any frame of reference for mine.”
He took my other hand in his and ran his thumb along my new cuts and scrapes.
I jerked it free. “I don’t know how to explain this. I don’t know how to explain how numb—”
“It’s okay.”
“Cut the platitudes. Remember when we first had sex and you told me you were a virgin and I told you I was, too? One of us was lying.”
“We both were.”
“Who?”
He looked sheepish. “Becky Sanderson. We went out the year you moved to town. She kind of talked me into it.”
“That’s it?”
He nodded, embarrassed.
I leaned back and pointed, for some reason, at the calamari. “See, that’s why.”
He glanced at the plate.
“High school girls, they’re either virgins or sluts. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t make the stupid rules. But there’s a reason you went out with Becky and everyone in school knew what it was.”
He turned pink.
“We were supposed to be permanent here. We were supposed to be different. And you were different. And I was trying to be. I wanted to be.”
“So you weren’t a virgin eight years ago. So what?”
“I’ve been a lot of guys’ Becky Sanderson.” I looked from him to the table and back. I thought about draining my beer, but I wasn’t hungry and I had to drive. “I first had sex when I was eleven.”
He dropped the chip he’d picked up and leaned back. His mouth worked a little, but no sound came out.
“Yeah, see, that’s why I don’t tell people that.” I rubbed my triceps, felt the muscle under my too-thin shirt. It felt too strong to be part of me.
“Davis, it wasn’t your fault.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You were eleven. It couldn’t have been.”
I picked up the abandoned chip and examined its edges. Jagged. Raw. I bounced it off the far end of the table and watched it skid under an empty table.
“Davis?”
“We were foster kids for a few months, at the time. Charley in jail for prostitution. There was an older brother. Sixteen. Kept sneaking into our room at night, looking to fool around. I cut a deal with him to leave Nik and Lane alone. I did that.”
His jaw worked independently of the rest of his face, like it was stoking the fires in his brain.
“So, no, legally, I couldn’t make that choice. But I did.” I looked at the brick wall beside me. It wasn’t any help. “Except he took it too far a couple of times. And I never knew how to draw the line between what was okay and what wasn’t. What I agreed to and what I didn’t.”
“Davis…” He let his mouth open, but couldn’t seem to find any more words.
“It’s so much easier for people outside to label everything, to just throw it all in one box and say ‘here’s your rape collection.’” I gave him a smile that didn’t quite make it all the way to my lips. “But those people didn’t spend four days in juvie with me that month. Those people can’t understand how I walked out of there feeling lucky. And trapped. Those people never agreed to be Becky Sanderson for a group of high school nerds so they’d have enough money to get out of town.”
He stared at me.
“Two of those kids were seniors. Eighteen. Wanted to get laid before they went to college. The law says they were in the wrong, but I took their money.” I picked up a garbanzo bean. “Law says I was wrong, too.”
He looked pale. “You never told anyone?”
“Who would I tell, Craig? The law doesn’t protect people like me. And it sure as hell wasn’t protecting any of the girls I met in juvie. The girls do the time while the johns walk free.” I took a sip of beer and realized it was warm and nearly gone.
“But—”
“Don’t give me that. Please. Don’t.” I flexed my nostrils and tried not to cry because it wasn’t worth it. “Don’t think I haven’t second-guessed myself and pictured every other person he may have hurt because I didn’t stop him. I was eleven. I had no one to turn to but my twelve-year-old sister and I didn’t want her to know.”
He reached for my hand and I jerked it away. “I’m sorry?”
I finished my beer and sat the bottle at the end of the table. “I fucked up.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“Don’t tell me who I can blame either. I made my bed.” I rolled my eyes, partly at my words, but mostly to try to keep the tears in. “I played my part. And I wasn’t old enough. And I didn’t want to. But I did. We needed money. And I got us money.”
“I’ve never—”
“No. You never. That’s what I’ve trying to tell you.” I put my forehead in my palms and wracked my suddenly tipsy brain for a way to explain, to describe. All that came were tears I thought I’d run out of. I watched them drop soundlessly onto the hardwood table. Squinted my eyes shut trying to make them stop.
He put his hand near my elbow but didn’t touch me.
I looked at him, glared, trying to find the me that had put all this shit in a box with Phil and Jackie and Daddy and a dozen other things. “You know, in some neighborhoods, it’s almost a rite of passage. Which is fucked the fuck up. Cause you know what sucks more than your own pain and fear and shame and blame? Sharing a room, locked in the dark, with a twelve-year-old who’s had a train run on her. Who wakes up in the night screaming and tearing her hair out at the root. Who gets laughed at by the other girls from her ’hood cause it’s already happened to them or a friend and it’s all they know anymore.”
He stared at me with just enough self-control not to let his
jaw hang open.
I swallowed hard and thought about draining his beer too. “And you know, that normalizes it. For all of us. And it becomes a sliding scale of ‘at least not that.’ ‘At least he didn’t do that.’ ‘At least it wasn’t my uncle.’ ‘Or my dad.’ ‘At least it was just the once.’ ‘At least I didn’t get pregnant.’” I smiled my deranged smile. “And you realize most of the older girls are hooking to support drug habits to dull the pain, to forget. They’re being pimped out by people who’re supposed to love them. Or they’ve attached themselves to some abusive guy who feeds into their little ‘at least’ world. And ‘at least’ was that I called my own shots. Even if it meant a few times I found a knife at my neck or a gun in my mouth and my money walking out the door without me.”
“I had no idea.”
“I know.”
The waitress picked up my empty bottle and left a full one, avoiding eye contact.
“Look, I know you want to tell me the special episode lines or reassure me, but it’s not so easy. It doesn’t all fit in one box. Not for me. Except, I say that, it takes away from other victims. It implies blame I don’t intend. Implies apologies I’m not offering to people who’ve done terrible things. To say that I exploited my own abuse makes it seem like I’m diminishing the abuse of others. It lessens the hurt for me to admit my part, even when my choices were very limited. But I fear it takes away legitimacy from people who need justice to move on.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”
“It’s something I do in those small hours of the night when other people are sleeping.” I looked at the garbanzo beans for help, but they just sat there. “I don’t want to cry about this shit anymore. I don’t want to have to keep lying to myself, because the older I get the more I know better.”
“Crying is okay, Davis.”
“No. It’s not.” Stray tears fell from my eyes. “Because it means I regret things I can’t regret.”
“We all have regrets, Davis.”
“We had what we needed. I paid our way when Charley lost or spent all our money.” I looked down and realized I’d pulled the hem out of the napkin. I didn’t remember doing it. I pushed myself to the end of the booth. “I can’t do this. I can’t look at you looking at me like that.”
“Please. I’m trying.”
“I don’t know how to make you understand.” I leaned across the table and lowered my voice. “I was a prostitute for more than three years before I met you. For two more later.”
He reached for my hand, but I slid it away. “It’s expensive to be poor. Unbelievably so.”
“Couldn’t you guys get food stamps or something? Subsidized housing? Isn’t that what that stuff’s for?”
“We had trouble staying put long enough to get approved. And even the cheapest rental wants a deposit. We usually took off when that ran out. Probably lived three or four days every month in the car.
“Something snapped in Charley when our dad died, like she’d been hoping for a year he’d quit the ‘gay thing’ as she called it and come back. They used to play in a club in San Francisco. Hit the road a few years before Lane. She’d sell brightly colored paintings of instruments and people dancing at fairs and those trendy little galleries. They’d sing in bars and clubs. And then they weren’t they. Just her. And she started to fall apart.”
“She paints?”
“Not in years.”
He reached out a hand. “Your dad died when you were ten, right?”
I took his hand, squeezed.
“Does Nik even know what you did?”
“I never told her.” I glanced at the condensation dripping off my water glass. “She knows enough. She’s probably guessed the rest. Every hit I’ve taken is one she didn’t have to. Which is maybe why I can’t talk to her about it.”
He looked sad. Heartbroken. “I keep picturing my daughters at that age.”
“I wasn’t your daughter. I thought I had it all figured out.” I grabbed the napkin off the table and twisted it. “Nik survived our childhood untouched, untainted by the things I did. Most days, that’s enough.”
He ran his fingers softly over the whorls on my left palm. The smooth scarred flesh vibrated under the skin, where damaged nerves tried to make sense of what they felt.
He kept his eyes on my hand. “Who burned you?”
I shrugged and didn’t fight the urge to wince. “Random asshole. I got my licks in on him, too.”
He sat quietly a moment and fingered the edge of his plate, rubbing a grease spot around the edge. “Are you okay? I mean, really?”
I almost told him I was fine. Instead, I took a deep breath and winced. “I try to be. Most days. It’s a lot of years of crap. A lot of it bleeds together.” I looked at the scars on my hand. Fingered the one at my collarbone. “Even in the years since I last saw you. But, hey, you got married and had a couple kids.”
“Three.” He ran a finger down the edge of his beer glass. Wouldn’t look at me.
“I did my best to keep them safe. And then I left. And I fucked it all up. And it might get Lane killed.” And I wasn’t sure I could live with that.
“I…”
I glanced at him, the worry etched on his face, and felt my whole day collapse under my feet. “I did everything I knew to do.” I came out as a whisper. “It wasn’t enough.”
Chapter thirty-six
Once we had steaming cups of coffee from a shop around the corner, he asked, “How did you and Jackie ever end up friends?”
“She was getting hassled. We started talking. Got along.”
“I got the impression her mother was real religious.”
“I think she was at church more than the preacher. She once found out I’d tried cigarettes…” I raised an eyebrow and gave him a grin.
“How could you be best friends with someone who didn’t know you?”
“There’s more to you than a divorce, right? Look, by the time I met you guys, I was a different person. Or I thought I was. Wanted to be.”
“She never figured it out?”
Jackie had known more than Craig, but maybe that had been her undoing. Not directly, but in some small way, I tainted everyone I touched. “She knew I was a stripper in college.”
“Her mother said she died in a car accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident.” I sipped my coffee. “I’d moved to Boone. She called in a panic. Wanted me to come get her. Said she knew a girl going to meet her boyfriend in Raleigh. That she’d meet me there. Somebody’d beat her up. She wouldn’t talk about it.” I told him the rest.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“It’ll always feel like it was.” I left out Ryan and the frat boy and the fire. There was only so much I could handle reliving in one night and I was well past that point.
He put an arm around my waist and guided me as if I were a regular date. I let him, basking for a moment in the fantasy.
We were the only ones on the sidewalk and only about half the streetlights had bothered to stay lit for us. I could feel the wind on my cuts and scrapes through the shirt. “I’ve had a good time tonight, so you know.”
He said nothing.
“I have to be stronger than this.”
“No one should have to be, Davis.” He rubbed my shoulder near the stitches.
“The pain? It never goes away. It’s better when it’s something I can put a bandage on.”
He held me without comment. I let him, too tired not to.
“Every time I try to get away… “
He pulled me closer, shielding me from the cold outside. “It boggles my mind how you keep going when anyone else would give up.”
“It’s all I know.” I stared behind him. “Truth is, the times I wanted to die most never coincided with the times people most wanted me dead.”
We crossed the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car. Aside from the light from a stray sailboat and a string of half-lit Christmas lights on the patio of the Dock
House, we were alone in the dark. The water slapped the pilings of the boardwalk and the wind rattled the lines in the sailboat cleats.
“They say my father drowned.” I glanced over my shoulder at the black waters between us and Carrot Island. Other people were at home, snuggled into their beds watching TV, reading, or spooning loved ones. “They never found him. Phil, they found.” I looked back at him. “The dead can do all sorts of talking to the right person. The missing never say a thing.”
“You said you had a good time. This is your idea of a good time?”
I breathed him in and felt safe and warm for the moment. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
Chapter thirty-seven
When I opened the front door I could see that someone had downgraded Charley’s craptastic decorating scheme with destruction and spray paint. It was less than awesome.
Craig leaned over. “Why does the wall say ‘die bitch’?”
“Because my life sucks.”
Something crashed upstairs in Charley’s room. Footsteps ran down the length of the hallway toward my old room.
I let loose the kind of sigh only possible after everything that could possibly go wrong had been followed up by an asteroid in the living room.
“Go back to the car, Craig. Don’t get yourself shot or stabbed.” I took off toward the front staircase. Craig followed me. I stared at him. He stared back. I gave up. “Fine, stay behind me. And stay quiet.”
He nodded. “Maybe we should call the police.”
“Rural area. Sheriff. It’ll take forever. Sh!” I didn’t mention they might already be there.
I kept my footsteps light. Craig tiptoed like one of the Scooby-Doo gang. At the top of the stairs, I turned into the hallway and sighed at the broken glass glinting in the moonlight.
“You didn’t fix that?” Craig whispered.
“I did.” Now the glass was mostly inside instead of out.
Someone moved in the shadows near my old room. I caught a glimpse of metal in the faint moonlight. It moved closer and I slipped my hand behind me to pull out the gun I’d stuffed in my waistband when I got out of the car. Apparently I figured if I shot my own ass, no one else would do it for me.