by Meg Haston
It’s quiet for a while. Then he coughs. “Next step?”
“Primer,” I say, and we both get up.
He hands me an upside-down Frisbee that holds putty mixed with primer. Carefully, I paint the seam.
“You boys ready for dinner?” My mother’s voice sounds from the doorway.
“In a second,” Dad grunts.
“It’s ready now, Wilson. I made dinner and it’s ready now.”
“We’re coming, Mom,” I say. “Just give us a second, okay?” The sunlight’s streaming in behind her, and she’s nothing more than a shadow.
She turns back toward the house. My parents are masters with silence. They can mold it into the sharpest blades, hurl it at each other so it slices deep. They can do much more damage with silence than they can with noise. Bridge always used to talk about how lucky I was, having parents who were married. It’s not that simple, I’d tell her, and she’d look at me like I was the dumbest asshole on the planet. At least you know where you came from, she’d say.
I’d shut up then. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, knowing I had a father in Texas or China or maybe even a few blocks over. Knowing he was out there, part of me or me part of him or however that works. My own dad could be a jerk sometimes, but when you’re walking around with another person’s DNA in you, that means something. You don’t just cut the tie and bail.
Dad inspects the seam for longer than he needs to.
“Dad,” I press. “Come on. She’s waiting.”
He grunts and we wash up and go inside. Mom’s standing at the kitchen table in her work uniform: black scrubs and a nametag shaped like a tooth. Her lipstick is a neon pink that creeps past the corners of her mouth in a weird, constant smile.
“Smells good,” I say.
“Nothing special,” she says, hovering over a tray of lasagna. She’s lined an old plastic bowl with a paper napkin, the corners pointing at the ceiling. She empties a log of garlic bread into the bowl. There’s already a sweating pitcher of tea on the table.
Mom and Dad sit around the pine table my dad made my mom as a wedding present. Underneath one of the leaves, he carved their names and wedding date and the words We will go together, over the waters of time, which is from a poem. I never thought of my dad as a poetic guy, but those words are proof that my parents were real once. I used to hide under the table as a kid, usually when they fought, and close my eyes and run my fingers over the words again and again.
“This is really good, Mom,” I say over a mouthful, to make up for the sweatshirt remark.
“Good,” she says absently. “Oh. I almost forgot. You got something in the mail today, Wil.” Her knuckles whiten against her glass.
I raise my eyebrows at her. “What is it?”
“Something about a college fair in downtown Jacksonville. Lots of southern schools. The flyer said there would be representatives there to talk about scholarship opportunities and financial aid.”
“We don’t need financial aid,” Dad mutters into his tea.
Mom’s face doesn’t even register Dad’s voice.
“Now,” she says, “before you say anything, Wil, I know you think you’re not interested in college. But college will open doors for you. You’ll have options.”
“Thing is, I don’t really need options.” I should say Okay, great, thank you. I should end this. “I have the shop.”
“The shop.” Mom runs her tongue over her teeth and lets out this half laugh, half sigh that brings my dad’s fist down on the table.
The plates jump. Mom jumps. I jump.
“Where’d the UF sweatshirt come from, Henney?” Dad asks.
My mother doesn’t answer—swallows her tea and sharpens her Silence Weapon.
“Dad. It’s okay,” I say. I don’t want my lasagna, but I take a huge bite anyway, because everything’s fine and when everything’s fine, a person eats his lasagna.
“My boss is on the Board of Regents,” Mom says. She has gray in the same places my dad does, around her temples and streaked through her hair. They’ve made each other old. “He brought it back from a meeting. For God’s sake, Wilson, it’s a sweatshirt.”
Again, she looks at me with her tight smile. “They have club rowing there, you know.” She slides out of her chair. “Who needs a napkin?”
I hate it when they do this—fill the air up with so much anger and hate that it’s like breathing through a straw. “It’s fine, Mom. Tell Dr. Larkin I said thanks.”
“Bullshit, Wil.” Dad shoves his chair back and stands up. His voice is getting softer, but his energy almost blows me back.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now. Please,” I say.
“Wil doesn’t want to go to Florida, Henney. He doesn’t want to go to Florida State or University of Miami or Central Florida. He doesn’t. Want to go. To college.” He follows Mom around the counter and into the kitchen. “Would you look at me, goddamnit? Look at me.” He grabs Mom’s shoulders and whips her around.
“You guys!” I yell.
“How does he know if he wants to go to college?” She’s shouting now, so loudly my ears are buzzing. “We don’t always know what we want at seventeen, do we, Wilson? We don’t know that we could go to college, that we don’t have to get married right away! We’re too young and stupid to know!”
“Mom.” I taste bile. “Mom.”
She keeps going. “Sometimes we make choices at seventeen that we regret for the rest of our—”
My dad lunges. The crack sends an earthquake through me.
Everyone is still, and the house is filled up with silence.
My stomach heaves and heaves again. No one moves. The whole damn world can hear my heart. I get up, and my glass tumbles toward the floor. I watch it shatter. I leave it there. I walk through the kitchen, calm and slow.
“Wil,” my dad says. “Son.”
“It’s okay,” my mom says with a bloodied lip. “It’s okay.”
I open the door. I slam the door. I heave my lead body across the yard, and I duck into the workshop and he better not follow me. He better not.
I circle the sawhorse, my breath coming in ragged gasps. I scream at the weathered walls and the perfect floor. I scream until my throat is pinched and my temples throb.
I stop and bend over the boat. My hand slides over the mallet and the electricity flows through me. I lift it over my head and bring the mallet down again and again, destroying perfect wood. I watch the seams pull apart; watch the wood splinter like I’m watching time in reverse.
I don’t stop swinging the mallet until the boat is a pile of splinters on the floor, and I slide down to the concrete and, fuck, my hands. I stare at them, the dark blood running down, and they don’t look like my hands. They are someone else’s hands, hands that are capable of destruction. His hands.
You and I are the same, he said.
He was right.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
WIL was wrong, I think as I twist the shower nozzle. It screeches, and I hold my breath. I’m up extra early, while the moon is still suspended in midair outside the bathroom window. I duck under the spray and twist the nozzle again, making the water as hot as I can stand it. I haven’t cried since Wil kicked me out of the shop last night. I can feel the tears trapped beneath the surface, waiting.
You think you know about my family, he said. You know nothing.
The backs of my calves and thighs are bright pink, my knees and shins dead white. I turn and face the spray until every inch of me is humming with heat. It’s useless. The tears and the knots in my neck and shoulders and back don’t budge. I repeat all the truths I already know: Wil is grieving. Angry. Irrational. A dead father gets him those things.
But still. There are plenty of things I don’t know. I don’t know what Wil saw that night when he woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. I don’t know the sound Henney made when the killer pressed his hands around her neck. But I know Wil Hines, and I know his family. I
know that Ana will never understand him better than I do.
I turn off the water and reach for the waffled resort robe Mom gave me as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. I twist a towel around my head. In the hallway, the smell of burnt coffee hangs over the top step. I stop for a second and listen for the thick hum of early-morning quiet. Instead, I hear the clang of pots tumbling.
“Nonstick piece of—” Mom hisses.
“Morning, Mother,” I call out. I find her downstairs in the kitchen.
“Did I wake you?” Mom’s in a robe that matches mine, her hair sticking out of her head at strange angles. She fell asleep in her eyeliner again. She’s pretty still, in an undone way. Books and papers and the used laptop Leigh let me have when she got a new Mac litter the kitchen table.
“Why are you up so early?” I ask, capping a pink highlighter.
“No reason,” she says in the voice she uses when she’s lying. She drags a spoon through a mixing bowl on the counter. “I was just up studying, and decided to make some breakfast.” She hands me a mug of coffee.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Pancakes will be ready in a sec.” She turns back to the stove. “And then I thought we could talk.”
I put down my coffee and slide my arms around her waist, hugging her from behind. “I wish I could,” I say. “But I have to get to school. Trig test. Haven’t had much time to study.” The lie slides off my tongue. Talking means my mother asking a million questions I don’t know the answers to. And I don’t want to explain: I’ll never know the answers. Wil wants nothing more to do with me.
“Oh. God, you’d think they’d cancel all the tests after something like this.” Mom turns around and scrunches her nose. She yawns and switches off the stove. “All right, then. I’m going back to bed. Be careful out there,” she says.
“Got it.” I kiss her cheek and head upstairs again, her words ringing in my skull. Be careful out there. It’s been her sign-off for as long as I can remember. I think it’s supposed to make me feel safe or empowered or something. Grown men are being killed in their homes for no reason at all. But as long as I know to be careful out there.
At school, Wil is so close. If I wanted to, I could reach out and touch the back of his neck, the place where his curls meet his collar. I could lean into him as he unearths his Spanish book from his locker. But I can’t ask him what I really need to know. What he meant when he said those things to me yesterday afternoon. Whether he meant them.
Leigh is quieter than usual, watching me watch Wil, doodling little hearts on her sketchpad; a drawing of me in a Superwoman cape with generous bazooms, as Minna would call them. But after third period, Leigh explodes.
“That’s it.” She slings her bag over her shoulder and points at the door with both hands, like a pissed-off flight attendant pointing out the emergency exits. “You need to get away from here for a period. Lunch at Nina’s. On me. Let’s go.”
Leigh is a respectable human being in most cases, and so she waits until we’re wedged into the window booth at Nina’s Diner with a platter of sweet potato fries and coffee before she says it: “Want to talk?”
“Nope.” I blink out the window. “I just—I can’t stop thinking about what happened in that house. What Wil saw, you know?”
“Channel 12 says he didn’t see anything.” Leigh tries to reassure me. “Says the guy had hit Wil’s dad in the back of the head and gotten the hell out of there by the time Wil made it to the kitchen—”
Tears fill my eyes. I feel sick. “I can’t. Can we talk about something else?”
Leigh jumps in without missing a beat. “So, I have three days to submit the final proposal for my senior art project, and I have no idea what I’m doing.” She arranges her fries in a greasy bouquet before cramming them in her mouth. “It’s, like, twenty-five percent of my grade.”
“You girls doing all right?” Leonard, the owner of the place, stops by our table and fills our coffee mugs. Leonard is in his mid-sixties, bald, with a potbelly that looks like it might topple over the rest of him any second now. There is no Nina, not anymore. Leonard told me that once, a million lives ago, he was engaged to a lady named Nina. When she left, she took almost all the money he’d saved up for his restaurant. He was forty-two by the time he’d resaved enough to open the 50s-style diner, and he was pissed. He named the place after her. A reminder that women were dangerous, he said.
“All good. Thanks, Leonard,” I manage.
“How’s Wil?” Leonard wipes his hands on his apron.
“Hanging in there,” I say, like I know. Wil and I came on our first real date here. We were freshmen, so we had to ride our bikes. We chatted with Leonard and played songs on the jukebox in the corner. It was just like every other afternoon we’d spent at Nina’s, except I was sweatier than usual. Before we left, Wil etched our initials into the table, next to the initials of other couples that probably didn’t exist anymore, either.
“Nice kid. Shame. People are animals.” Leonard goes back behind the counter and turns on the mini black-and-white television next to the waffle iron.
“As I was saying,” Leigh starts. “Senior project. I’ve narrowed it down to two options: spray-painting the underpass next to the Target, or going mainstream and actually asking permission to paint the exterior of the school. The wall facing the courtyard.”
“I like that idea. Giving back. Plus, a substantially lower chance that you’ll get arrested.”
“I don’t know.” She grins. “I kind of think showing up to art school with a record would be a badass move.” Her eyes snap to the door. “Uh-oh. Incoming.”
I follow her gaze to the street. Micah and his buddies are shoving one another through the door. They are laughing loud enough that everyone in the place turns. My chest caves. He’s flown under the radar for the last few days since the funeral. For me. I was stupid to think it could last.
When he sees us, he makes a dramatic show of meandering over to our booth. “Bridge! Hey, guys, you remember my big sister? The one who keeps me in line.” He slumps into the booth and throws his arm around my shoulder.
“You’re supposed to be in class, Micah.” I try to elbow him out of the booth. A low chorus of Ooooohs oozes from his crew. His eyes go wide for a second, and I catch a glimpse of the real Micah, before he goes back to being a Jerkwad Who Doesn’t Give a Shit.
“I’m a lifelong learner, Bridge,” he says. “My learning cannot be confined within classroom walls. Right, Lenny?” he calls.
Leonard glares at the boys from behind the counter and I want to evaporate.
Micah’s friends crowd around the table by the bathrooms.
“So, is this what you do now?” Leigh says under her breath. I stare out the window. “You sneak out of the house to go to bonfires? You sneak out of school to come here?”
“What?” I cry. “You snuck out?”
“Leigh. Not cool. I thought we had something special.” Micah slumps.
“We don’t. Which frees me up to inform your sister that you were drunk and hanging all over Emilie Simpson the night of the senior bonfire.”
I don’t scream, You went to the senior bonfire and hooked up with a girl in MY CLASS? But trust me, I want to.
“Emilie Simpson and me are none of your business,” Micah tells Leigh.
“Emilie Simpson and I, dumbass.” I glare at him.
“She’s cool,” Micah says lamely. He runs his fingers through his hair, which is every teenage boy’s insecurity tell. “She surfs and stuff.”
I roll my eyes at Leigh. “She’s not cool. She’s too old for you. And she almost failed junior year for skipping too much.”
“Don’t be a bitch, Bridge.” He says it loud enough for his boy gang to hear. “Besides, are you seriously pissed at me for drinking when you got busted for the same thing last year?”
“Back to Emilie Simpson,” Leigh continues. “Just make sure you wear a life jacket. Hers are not uncharted waters, my friend.”
“Oh
my God. Leigh,” I moan. “He’s fifteen.”
“You can both die.” Micah shoves out of the booth. I watch him march back to his boys in a huff, the back of his neck flaming red. We redheads can’t hide it when we’re embarrassed or upset. It’s in our DNA—it’s the only way I know that he’s still in there.
“Go back to class,” Leigh yells after him. She pulls a twenty from her bag and tucks it under the napkin dispenser.
We walk back to campus and she doesn’t say a word about Micah, just like she doesn’t force me to talk about Wil. I’m glad. I love her for being pissed on my behalf, but I hate the little spark of defensiveness that flames when anyone rags on Micah. I know he deserves it.
We talk about nothing: how hot it is already and what we’re wearing to graduation, which Leigh already knows even though it’s still months away. Some kind of white caftan, but her mother is lobbying hard for a sundress, just this once. I can wear the sundress, she says. (I don’t even have to ask.)
I want to talk forever about white dresses and hot air—frothy, foamy things, things that tug my mind away from dead fathers and mistakes I can’t seem to undo and brothers I don’t know what to do with. I want to escape.
WIL
Spring, Junior Year
NO matter where I go, I can’t escape what my father has done. When I yank open the refrigerator door, the tired sucking sound is replaced with the crack of my dad’s hand. When I turn the hot water faucet to shave, the shriek of metal on metal is my mother’s sharp breath. Violence is coiled up tight in everything, I realize. The world is a fighting place.
My mother doesn’t leave the house for three days. She says she doesn’t want to talk about it. It! Too small a word for what’s happened here.
“It’s private, Wil,” she says one night before dinner. “A private matter between me and your dad. We don’t want you to worry.” She stares out the window and scrubs the lunch dishes for the third time today. Her hands are withered and red under the faucet.