Love Like Crazy

by Megan Squires

  “I don’t need my damn inhaler, Eppie,” he almost growled. Still not facing me, Lincoln fought out the words through desperate gasps of air. His entire frame trembled. “It’s not an asthma attack.”

  I couldn’t speak, and I wondered if that was my reaction, like how Lincoln’s was to stop breathing. I had no words, he had no air. So there we stood, mostly silent except for the grating gasp of Lincoln attempting to get his lungs under control.

  I’d rather us be screaming at one another, truthfully.

  That once-magical sunlight was slipping away into the horizon beyond us, dropping quickly out of the sky. But it didn’t feel golden and warm anymore. It burned like an inferno, sweltering and suffocating. I fought against its heat, but sweat coated my skin and fever rushed through my body in nauseating tumbles.

  “Lincoln,” I spoke. I reached a hand out to him, needing to touch him, but then tugged it back into myself and crossed my arms instead, unsure. He still wasn’t facing me. It was like he couldn’t look at me. It was like he couldn’t be near me. It was like I’d ruined everything before we even had a chance to start.

  Swallowing felt similar to razorblades slicing through my gullet, but I managed one and tried to speak again. “Lincoln, I’m so sorry,” I actually cried. “God. I’m so sorry I humiliated you back there.”

  Tears shouldn’t be audible. They should slip silently down your face without making themselves known in any other form. They already gave away so much just through their presence alone. But when they coupled with your voice and added hiccups and gasps into your speech, it was more than crying.

  They should have a word for that, when your whole body cried.

  Maybe they did. Maybe it was hysteria.

  Maybe I was hysterical.

  It was as though all sound was sucked out of the world as we stood in the field. No birds crowing, no cars driving by. The only thing I could hear in our pause was my failed effort to keep my tears silent. Even Lincoln’s breathing had regulated slightly. It was almost completely still.

  And then the grit of dirt under his shoe echoed against the rubber tread as he turned slowly around.

  His eyes did more than just look at me. He’d used them before to read me, but now it was as though he needed me to read him. Tears welled up in them, and the lines already streaking down his face in salty rivulets tore my heart open and then shredded it right in front of me. His eyelashes were slick and stuck together and he swiped a finger across his nose as he sniffed back his emotion. When his mouth opened, I expected the words to blast out of him, charged from that scene back at his parents’ house and the getaway in his bus. But they didn’t. They were silent, barely audible. He took two small steps toward me. My chest tightened and my hands shook.

  “Is that what you think?” he whispered. “That you humiliated me?”

  Tucking my quivering bottom lip into my mouth, I bit down and nodded.

  “You can’t be serious.” These were angry words, but still, he didn’t shout them.

  He had both hands on my shoulders. For a moment, the tense look in his eyes made me think he was about to shake me. About to shake me out of my senses, about to shake some sense into me. But that was projecting again. Like Phil so often reminded me, I had the horrible habit of doing that.

  Lincoln didn’t do those things.

  Pulling me into his chest, he buried me in his arms and clung to me so hard that my lungs gasped for air as my body crushed against his. His pulse matched the rhythm of mine completely and I couldn’t decipher whose was whose; they’d morphed into one. He raked his fingers over my back, into my hair, down my neck, his movements frantic, anxious. I gripped onto his waist and wound my arms so tightly around him that I felt like they could wrap around twice. If I just held him there, if I never let go, then he wouldn’t be able to leave. He wouldn’t be able to leave me if I didn’t let him.

  Then Lincoln’s lips were on my skin, just as frantic as his fingers had been. They pressed onto my forehead, my cheek, the corners of my eyes, kissing away my tears, over and over. But the more he did so, the more they spilled, and I also felt the ones falling from his eyes as they skimmed down my cheeks when he dropped kiss after kiss onto my skin. Even our tears kissed one another.

  “I’m so sorry,” he started saying in between presses of his mouth to my face. “I’m so sorry, Eppie.”

  I couldn’t understand this. I couldn’t understand why he would apologize when I was the one who brought all of this about.

  He cried out the words, as softly as the water that continued rolling down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry I brought you there. I knew better.” Another kiss into my hair. “I said you wouldn’t fall, but instead I just watched as I let them push you completely over the edge.” He gripped my jaw with his hands and pulled my eyes up to his. If I hadn’t been crying before, this would’ve sealed that fate. The pained tightness in Lincoln’s voice and the deep hurt held in his eyes was more than I could take. I shook my gaze from his, but he forced my eyes back up. “Look at me,” he demanded, though his volume remained quiet. “Look at me, Eppie.”

  “They think we’re all crazy, Lincoln.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I don’t care what they think.” He grabbed my face again because I’d let it fall back away from him. “They’re also the ones who think Dan would be better off dead. I’m sorry, but I don’t get my mental stability assessments from them.”

  I slunk further into his arms. My body was giving up at the same time as my mind. Everything was shutting down. Or maybe it was finally starting up. It was a weird in-between.

  “But they’re right. About her. About me.” I felt each piece of who I really was slipping out in my words. I felt the truth beating in my chest and pumping through me. “She was ill, Lincoln. It’s been nearly ten years. I’ve never even once visited her.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this. I’d never told anyone this. “They say she’s crazy because she actually was crazy.”

  “And you think they’re not?” Lincoln’s chin tucked back sharply into his neck. His tone was accusatory and sudden. “You think they’re not crazy?”

  I gave him a blank stare.

  “Maybe not clinically, but it’s crazy to belittle someone you just met. No sane person does that.”

  I stroked at his jaw, swiping away a damp tear with the pad of my thumb. I held it there, not wanting it to coat his skin anymore, but needing to feel his raw emotion again on my own flesh somehow. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together until it was blotted away. “It’s also crazy to belittle someone you’ve known your entire life. Your own flesh and blood.”

  Lincoln closed his eyes and shook his head. “They’ve always been that way, Eppie. They’re the first to throw stones. The first to point out faults. I’ve dealt with it my whole life. And I should’ve known they would do it to you. I’m not like them, and they hate that. They don’t love me like they love their political ideologies and their upper class mentalities. They just don’t love who I am and what I represent. Or maybe what I don’t represent. They never have.” It surprised me that the tears had stopped, because if anything, this felt like the time for crying. But maybe all of Lincoln’s tears had already been used up over this. Maybe he didn’t have any left. It made me grateful to have kept just one of them for myself—to tangibly feel what he felt in that vulnerable moment. “They don’t love me, so of course they could never accept someone I love.”

  There was no mistake in his words here. Lincoln knew what he was saying, and I was in tune with every syllable.

  “I’m just so sorry that I thought things would be different.” The grain waved around us, brushing against my bare legs. Crickets chirped and dusk had completely fallen. The sky was a watercolor painting of purples and blues that splashed over us in a canopy of pastels. I shivered in Lincoln’s arms, so he pulled me in closer. “I was hopeful, though, you know?” His voice caught. “I was hopeful that they would see what I see in you, Eppie. That they would recognize how diff
erent you are from them. That you would be their epic revelation or some sort of realization that all of their beliefs about what truly mattered were wrong. That somehow, meeting someone like you would make them human again. Some kind of beautiful metamorphosis.”

  I laughed against his chest. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on me, don’t you think?”

  “No, I think it’s actually more pressure to put on them. To ask them to suddenly change into something they never even were to begin with. I should’ve known they’d never be capable of such a dramatically positive transformation.”

  I shivered again and Lincoln took notice.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I nodded. There was more dark than light around us now, and the cold crept in with the sun’s exit.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Home.”

  It was strange that the first day I’d met Lincoln, I’d told him I was still searching for home. But I didn’t think I was searching anymore. It turned out that what happened within those four walls didn’t make it any less of a home. I wasn’t sure home was always meant to be a happy place. I think it was just the place where life was lived out.

  Because life wasn’t always happy. I gave Dan a hard time about that—about letting his experiences shape his hopes and his happiness. But I think that’s exactly what they did. I didn’t know how I could have ever thought otherwise.

  So I wanted to go home, even though my home wasn’t all that different from the home Lincoln was raised in. We all had our own brand of crazy. But for the first time in my life, I preferred the crazy I grew up with.

  “I’ll take you back to your place. I just want to stop by the duplex and grab one thing first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My guitar,” he said as we trampled through the tall grasses. “I think this time we’re going to need more than just your voice to drown out this latest dose of pain.”

  TWENTY

  “There’s nothing wrong with her!”

  I watched the blinds on my window. How could they possibly shake when no one was even touching them?

  “Dammit, Mark!” Mama screamed. The window didn’t shake when she yelled. I looked, but it didn’t even rattle. Her scream was less screamy than Dad’s. “You’re not the one who takes her to all of the appointments! You’re not the one who holds her hair back when she’s up at two in the morning! You’re not the one who has to tell her she can’t go on the field trip to the tide pools because she’s too weak and it isn’t safe! You’re not the one who is there for her, I am!”

  My blanket slipped from my shoulders. I knew I was too old for a blanket. Most eight-year-olds didn’t need one anymore. And I probably didn’t need it. But I still wanted it, and luckily, Mama rescued it from the garage sale box last summer before Dad had the chance to set it out on the driveway.

  “I think I’m too old for a blankie, Mama,” I’d said, hoping she’d disagree.

  She did just that. “Oh, Eppie. It’s not a blankie.” She swung it over my shoulders and knotted it loosely at the neck, then admired me with her head tilted. “It’s a gorgeous knit shawl, lined with the finest satin. All the rage for fall, I hear.”

  I’d pulled it tighter to my small frame.

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, dah-ling.” Her grin was genuine and wide. “Anything for fashion,” she’d winked.

  Mama and Dad continued screaming downstairs. I hugged the blanket around me again, wrapping under it like it was clothing.

  “I’m going out.” I heard Dad’s keys jingle from their hook on the wall. “I can’t do this with you any more tonight.”

  “I think you have a problem, Mark.” Mama’s voice was much louder than earlier. I didn’t like the sound of it when it was this loud. It was like her volume was turned all the way up. “You’re drinking more and more lately, and I don’t think it’s healthy.”

  The silence that followed hurt my ears more than their actual screaming. I wondered what they were doing in that silence. I wondered what their faces looked like when they yelled at each other like that, but I wondered even more when it was quiet.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Dad’s voice boomed suddenly, but he didn’t sound sorry at all. “You think I’m the one with a problem now, do you? You think I’m the one that’s not healthy?”

  “Mark.” She said Dad’s name like she was begging for something, like how you would say the word please. “Mark! Mark, don’t do this.”

  “I’m not doing anything, Gloria!” The front door squealed open. The hinges had been squeaky for so long. Dad kept forgetting to fix that. Maybe now he would remember. “I’m not doing a damn thing, and that’s the whole goddamn problem!”

  I cringed and my tummy twisted sharply. I didn’t like that word. It sounded so ugly and scary in the tone of Dad’s voice. It sounded mean, and I didn’t like that he was being this mean to Mama.

  I plugged my ears and started to hum.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “I want you to meet someone.” I slammed the door to the vehicle behind me as I lowered into the seat. The leather was hot on my skin, and even though it was just the beginnings of spring, it was unseasonably warm. “His place is just a few streets over. Off Crescent.”

  Phil glanced across the console, his eyes covered in those awful aviator sunglasses. I should tell him they weren’t doing his aged face any favors. That’s what a true friend would do. “Is this the maybe-boyfriend of yours that you’re having lots of underage sex with?”

  “Yes to the first, no to the second.”

  “That’s a relief. Just had to check.”

  I dropped my messenger bag to the floorboards and relaxed into the seat.

  “So tell me about him,” Phil said, eyes forward. “Gimme a five sentence synopsis of this guy.”

  “Five sentences?” I thought for a moment. How could you summarize someone who stole both your heart and your senses in one short paragraph? “He’s tall and works construction.”

  “That’s one.”

  “He’s prone to panic attacks that his family historically covered up as asthma attacks.”

  “Two.”

  I thought for a moment, realizing I hadn’t really described Lincoln much with those two wasted phrases.

  “When I’m around him, everything wrong in the world flips around to being right.”

  Phil slipped his glasses down and eyed me above their gold rims. “Three. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “He’s loyal to his heart and his friends, and likes to rescue both dogs and people from distress.”

  “Four.” Phil nodded. “And very interesting. A modern-day knight in shining armor of sorts.”

  I waited a moment as I worked to unscramble the many words fit to earn the prestigious title as Lincoln descriptors. Then I had it. “He knows about my mom and he knows I’m messy and have loads of baggage but I think he might actually be falling in love with me, despite all those things.”

  Wrinkles creased Phil’s forehead. His lips pursed tightly and his teeth moved behind them like he was literally chewing on his thoughts. “Very good, but I think you have that last one all wrong, dear. I think he’s likely falling in love with you because of those things.”

  “Who falls in love with baggage?”

  “Oh, Eppie.” Phil took the glasses off and tossed them onto the dashboard. Good call. “You don’t ever fall in love with the current version of someone, because I hate to burst your pretty little bubble, but that doesn’t exist. We’re the summation of our histories, so if this guy is truly falling in love with you, he’s falling for your past as much as he’s falling for your present.”

  Somewhere along the way, I figured Phil stopped adhering to his psychological textbooks and began formulating his own non-professional opinions. I liked these ideologies much more than some of the others he’d offered me over the years.

  We pulled up to Lincoln’s house five minutes later, and he was
already waiting for us on the porch. Both Herb and Dan were with him, and Dan waved with his hand, Herb with his tail, as Lincoln bounded down the tiered walkway toward Phil’s Datsun.

  I got out of the front seat to give up my chair, but Lincoln grabbed on to the lever at the base to fold it over and slide into the back, letting me keep shotgun. Like Phil pointed out, he really was a gentleman.

  “Lincoln.” Phil’s hand shot over the chair between them and Lincoln shook it, a casual, friendly shake. “Nice to meet you, buddy.”

  “Likewise,” Lincoln smiled. “Eppie’s told me a lot about you.”

  Giving me a fake, wary glance, Phil narrowed his eyes. “All good things, I assume?”

  “Oh, Phil,” I teased. “You know what happens when you assume.”

  “Yes. Someone makes an overdone, trite joke about the spelling of a commonly used verb.”

  A laugh burst out of Lincoln from the backseat. “I like this guy already.”

  Phil glanced to the review mirror to safely make eye contact. “Feeling’s mutual, son.”

  I caught Lincoln off guard. I’d told him we were going out with Phil, and he probably figured we’d be heading off to an early dinner or a cup of coffee down at Roast House. When we edged up to the newly completed two-story home Lincoln spent the last six months working on, confusion draped across his face.

  “We’re here!” I sang as I jumped out of the car. I waited for him to stagger out, my hand hooked over the door. I wasn’t sure how the speed of his movements was at all affected by the fact that he didn’t understand why we were here, but it was. He was like a turtle walking through glue as he climbed out of that backseat.

  “And what are we doing here?”

  Phil put those stupid glasses back onto his face and shaded his eyes with a flat hand to his forehead. “Eppie tells me you work construction.”

  Still, Lincoln looked about as confused as they come.