Though in the end I’m glad I fight the impulse. I think I would have looked pretty stupid trying when five minutes into the drive Tommy asks, “So is he your boyfriend, Bea?” and Serge replies with this:
“Keep that thought out of your head, kid, got it?”
And yeah, I no longer think he means stuff like that in the bad way. I get that he just wants to protect me or maybe not admit something to my silly kid brother. It could even be that he is a little ashamed of himself for doing what he did to me quite possibly in front of Tommy. But even with all of that, it kind of stings a little. It makes my face flush hot when I think about the hand I almost put over his.
Then even hotter when Tommy adds:
“But you know she likes you, right?”
He just makes me sound like a fumbling middle-schooler with a crush on some gorgeous, amazing college guy, and he does it without even really meaning to. His tone is not teasing. He seems small and grave about it—maybe even a little hopeful. But the embarrassing side of it just shines through anyway.
And it keeps on shining, too.
“Yeah, I know she does. I also know that she’s got enough violent bullshit to deal with without me adding to the mix,” Serge says, which is honestly fine. It just seems like a variation on things already said, mainly echoed to get Tommy to pipe down. I can convince him otherwise—I know I can. What I cannot do, however, is erase what Tommy says next.
“She told you about our dad, huh?” he says.
After which I have to wonder if mortification can kill a person. My face tries to burn me alive. I think my heart lurches against my breastbone, and I turn so fast I know I give myself whiplash. My neck will be hurting days from now, but I don’t care. He needs to shut up. He needs to shut his mouth and I need to make him—with my eyes and my snarled warning and my hand slapping down hard against the back of my seat.
Though I know none of that is enough. I can tell just by taking the emotional temperature in the car. It seems to have dropped about seventy degrees in the last thirty seconds, and it actually gets worse after I snap out that Tommy. Now not only has all that been revealed to the last person I want it revealed to, but I have confirmed it.
I have confirmed my worst secret to Serge.
He knows now that I am not, nor ever will be, normal. Any shred of hope I had of passing myself off as someone who can be strong is gone. I am the weak, pathetic damsel in distress, and he is the tough, badass protector—or so I think until he answers.
Oh, God, the way he answers the question.
“She doesn’t need to tell me, kid. Like knows like,” he says.
Then I feel the second stitch, as it slides into my side.
—
I wait until Tommy is safely ensconced in a place that looks more like a hotel than a rehab center to say anything. Mainly because I want to concentrate on where he will be, and how they will look after him, and whether or not he’s happy about everything first. I want to hug him and make sure he will be okay.
Doing all of that would be too hard with that one thing at the forefront of my mind. I can barely cope with it during the gravel-crunch-punctuated silence we walk through to get back to the truck. It seems to buzz between us, maddening and insistent.
Or at least, it buzzes through me.
Like knows like, I think, then weather the avalanche that follows. Did he mean it the way he seemed to mean it? Was he suggesting that he had a violent father, too? I think he might have been, but how can I know for sure? He gives off none of the signs that I would look for. He never crouches or creeps or seems wounded—though I realize as soon as I have this thought that it might not be strictly accurate.
He never physically crouches or creeps or appears wounded.
But it could be he does in other ways. He rarely seems to think anything of himself or the things he does. His first instinct is to imagine people are disgusted or repelled by him, that they could never want him, that they are justified in thinking this. And of course he will always be right, because of the tattoos and the hair and the muscles and the clothes.
Who would ever try to look past the tattoos and hair and muscles and clothes? I think, and then this terrible arrow of feeling gets me right in the gut. I almost forget my nervousness and take his hand right there and then. The only thing that stops me is the fact that we are already at the truck, and he just opened the door for me.
But it doesn’t get in the way of me asking.
Nothing could get in the way of me asking now—not even the music he flicks on the second I turn his way. He judges it perfectly, picking something so weird I should really stop to ask about that instead. Anyone would ask about it. He looks as though he’s into thrash metal by bands called stuff like Throat Slit and Death Rattle.
And instead all of these haunting waves of electro-synth sweetness come floating out of the stereo. They ripple and flow and remind me of a million beautiful movies about neon-drenched, far-flung futures, but I hold my nerve. This is what we have to talk about now. Not his taste in music.
“Am I allowed to ask what you meant by like knows like?” I ask, just as the female singer—the one who should really be a man with a beard—breaks her voice in two to reach the top of some heartbreaking lyrics. Lyrics I think I recognize from the fleeting look at his back, lyrics that make this harder and easier at the same time.
In the crush of the dark I’ll be your light in the mist, she sings, about a second before he answers me in the loveliest possible way.
“There is no allowed. You ask what you want to, Bea.”
“Okay, then—so tell me what that was about. Tell me what you meant.”
“You already know what I meant. Just like I already know about you.”
“Yeah, but my guesses are coming a little late. Yours must have come…when? When did you know? When did you get it?” I ask, so sure he will say The conversation in the woods.
But I’m wrong about that. Oh my God, am I wrong.
“Soon as you jerked back when I went to hit the guy who touched my bike. Soon as you looked at me all marveling when I walked around you careful-like, after bringing your brother back. Soon as you said thank you, as if you never had anyone do anything nice for you your whole life. You hide it pretty well, like that accent and the things you like that no one else does—but not from me,” he says, and I almost don’t keep going.
I know my voice will sound broken when I do.
Yet somehow the urge to understand wins out over my shame.
“Why not from you? Why is it not from you?” I ask, and sure enough there is the crack in me right down the middle. I think I might even be afraid of what he is going to say—and I am right to be. His words are a mirror.
“Because I want to do the same things, too. I resist it a little better than you do, but all of that is still there underneath. The idea that everyone has a broken bottle behind their back or maybe a belt or fist—I reckon he went after your hair a lot because of the way you grow it all extra-thick and wild, but I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong on a lot of things,” he says, so utterly open and honest and right I am rendered speechless.
But for only a moment. Just one little moment, and then some kind of dam breaks.
“You’re not wrong on anything. Not one little thing. There were times I had to wear a hat to cover the places where the hair was missing. And he used to sneak up on us with it. Lash out when we least expected it. You never knew what would set him off—he had so many rules and regulations that we could never hope to anticipate. It was like when he stopped being in the army he started his own personal one, with just two hapless members,” I gush, unable to hold anything back once I get going.
Not that he minds. Oh, no, he doesn’t mind at all.
He picks up my thread, as though the end is wrapped around his wrist.
“And even if you managed to follow the rules right…”
“He would just change them. I spent an entire summer terrified that the skirt h
e made me wear might ride up too high on my legs, so that when he got the tape measure out to see if it was the correct distance from my knees, it would be an inch out. I pulled it down so often I started to get these rubbed raw marks where the waistband was—but the worst thing about it is that it just did not matter. I could have Super Glued that skirt to the right place on my legs, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because if he found it in the right place but was in that awful mood of his, he just found something else. I remember once it was my side parting. You know, the parting of my hair?” I ask, but I don’t wait for him to say Yeah, sure, absolutely or even No, I don’t have a clue. I just keep going. I have to keep going, to get past my own terror at saying all of this out loud. “He told me I had done it too far to the left and only sluts did their hair like that—which is ridiculous, I know it’s ridiculous, but at the time I was just too terrified to understand. Even now I sometimes look back on it all and think it was my fault for not doing the right things, and flinch at the thought of what my punishment will be. I kissed a punk so I have to pay, and the price this time will be too high. Instead of four months down in the dark of that basement it will be four years, four decades, forever.”
“He kept you down in the basement for four months?”
“He kept Tommy down there for that long, after he was suspended from school. It wasn’t because he was suspended, though. It was because after that, he could get away with it. No one was there to wonder where Tommy was—except for me, of course, and all I could do was make sure he had food and listen to him calling out that he was sorry. All that time he was sorry, as though he really had done something so bad he deserved to be locked in a basement. I guess it never crossed his mind, either, that the whole thing was never about us being bad or obeying our father. It was never about getting anything right,” I say, then have to take a breath. I need a second to gear up to it, even after all this time and healing and distance. Part of me still wonders if I’m right about it all, and imagines everyone else will think differently. Serge seems to agree, I think.
But maybe now he’ll say Well, Tommy was suspended.
Or ask if I was ever suspended, too.
Or tell me that my skirt must have been too short.
Tell me I could have done more—yeah, that’s the one I always think about, when I imagine saying this to anyone. You could have done more to avoid his wrath, my mind whispers to me, about a second before Serge does the best thing of all the best things he has ever done. He goes ahead and finishes the sentence for me.
“It was about him wanting to hurt you. About him being in charge,” he says.
And then I just about burst with relief.
He gets it. Of course he gets it.
How could he not when the answer to my next question is so clear?
“Was that what it was like for you?” I ask, voice half broken and half healed, heart pounding over all the things I never knew I wanted to share quite so badly.
Oh, I wanted it so badly that my body just about sings when he responds—haltingly at first, but then better. Stronger. Just like me.
“My old man was never in the army, and he had no rules, but he loved being the boss of us. He liked seeing us cower. The first time he pointed a gun at me was when he realized I was getting awful big. Hit six foot before I was thirteen—though I had no idea what that meant until he raised it. Seeing that pistol was the scariest thing that ever happened to me, but it was also the best. I knew then for sure that the tables were turning. That pretty soon I would be twice his size, and sure enough I was.”
“So he backed down after that?”
“You could say so,” he tells me, voice so flat and final I know he wants me to finish there. He wants me to stop, before he has to get into the really bad things. The punch he probably landed on his old man. The knife he might have put in his gut.
As though any details like that could ever possibly put me off.
He has to see that they would never possibly put me off.
“I wish I had understood all of this the way you understood about me. I wish you had told me. I wish you had so much.”
“What does it matter, really?”
“It matters because every objection you raise to being with me is based on the idea that you are no good for me. That I am some sweet little thing you need to rescue when really, we are exactly the same. Everything you do for me is something you probably desperately needed at some point in your life, something you long for even now without knowing it. I can practically hear you calling out for it—so loud I wonder that I never heard it before,” I say, sure for a second that I have him now.
But he just shakes his head.
“The objections I raise are fucking sound, Bea. This is not some get-out-of-fuck-up-jail-free card. We are alike. I know what it feels like to have someone run you down so hard you think you might never get back up. But I never came out of that with a sensible head on my shoulders and an eye for college and a career and a life.”
“So you think that is where we deviate. I chose college and you chose…you chose…” I start, then have to stop before I get to the end. Mostly because I have no end to that, and he knows it. He sees the hole in my idea of him, and he exploits it to the fullest extent.
“Yeah, see, you can’t finish that sentence, can you? ’Cause you got no fucking clue how I earn a living. Well, I tell you what—how about I show you? Time I introduced you to my real life, instead of this fantasy where I just want to heal my wounds by saving you. Nothing is that easy, and now you’re going to see why,” he says.
And for the first time, I am afraid.
Chapter 8
The light is dying when we get there, which hardly helps my sinking heart. The convenience store of doom looks even more ominous in the near darkness than it did in bright daylight. All kinds of things could lurk in those shadowy corners, and down those dark little alleys that lie on either side of the building. The letter that hangs forlornly from the sign above the door now looks like a crooked fang, just waiting to bite. Every pothole and crack in the asphalt seems enormous and too dark, as though they disappear down to nothing and nowhere.
And then there are the people. All these men just waiting and waiting for Serge—because I can see now clearly that they are. I watch through the window as he crosses the parking lot, head down and hands in the pockets of his overalls as though this is something to be ashamed about, and they all go nuts. One of them whistles. I hear it through the glass, and in response my heart thuds too long and too slow.
Feels as if it might be about to stop.
Feels as if it could possibly burst.
What are they whistling for? Why are they forming around him like that? It must be because he has something they need, but I desperately don’t want to think about what. Whenever I do, my insides seem to crumple. They are the front fender of a car after impact, twisted out of all recognition and bleeding fluid everywhere. Please do not be a drug dealer, my mind aims at him, but I think my mind is about to be disappointed. He just shook someone’s hand.
That’s what you do when you exchange drugs for money, right? I mean, he barely had a chance to get anything out, and the kid who did it seemed to have an empty hand, but at the moment those things are not at the forefront of my thoughts. The kid and his general appearance are. He looks like Tommy, so much like Tommy with that lick of reddish hair and his big cow eyes.
My eyes, too—so dark someone could fall right down inside them.
Or, at least, I think they could now. I feel as though I’m stretching bone to stare harder. My hand is pressed so tightly to the glass I start to worry it might crack, but there is nothing I can do about it. I need to touch something, and I need to stare hard because now he seems to be stripping to the waist, and I have no clue what that might mean. The vague sense of him drug-dealing was bad. The place is bad.
This is somehow worse. I hold my breath the second he does it, and only realize when my lungs begin to burn. Every inch of my
body is sweating, but in a really awful way. The stuff seems to prickle when it comes out, and it feels incredibly cold. Reminds me of the time I was almost late home, only extra bad because at least then I knew my father was terrible and understood in what way.
Here I still can’t quite tell. Every new revelation is more confusing than the last, from the fingers some guy in a cheap suit holds up to the semicircle the crowd suddenly decides to make and the stuff they keep shouting. They just about penetrate through the glass to the muffled sort of safe silence in here, but the fact that they do means nothing. What does a Redwood have to do with anything?
What does any of this have to do with anything? Another big guy is taking his shirt off, too, but that barely makes any more sense than when Serge did it. I feel the urge to bang on the glass for clarification, like in some movie where the bad thing is happening but the people in the room don’t know it, so the heroine tries to warn them through a window. Only in this case, I am the person who needs to be warned. I need to be because just as I get to the very edge of my confusion and terror, feeling it rising and rising in my throat and straining at my muscles, he does something I could never have imagined in a million years.
Something awesome, something incredible, something that gets my heart in a fist and squeezes.
He takes one enormous step forward and hits the other shirtless guy. Only hits is not the right word. Step forward are not the right words. I have no right words for what this is. He moves like his shoulders have suddenly grown wings. His feet barely seem to touch the ground, and his arm moves without even really seeming to and oh, God, oh my God, I hardly know what happens to me. I jump so far up off my seat my head almost touches the ceiling. My heart punches me in the face. I make a sound.
It is not a normal sound. It reminds me of people watching someone suddenly drop off the top of a cliff, only instead of falling all the way to the bottom, he suddenly takes flight halfway down. The guy doesn’t even hit back. He goes down as though he just got hit by a sack of cement, and the moment he does, the crowd goes nuts. I go nuts, because holy shit, he fights for a living.
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