Everything I Left Unsaid

by M. O'Keefe

  Those lips were like…I didn’t even know. They were beautiful lips. On such a harshly masculine face those lips were like a wink from God or something.

  The caption under the picture said: Dylan Daniels before the accident.

  That was Dylan? My Dylan.

  I leaned in closer to the screen, as if I could see him better. If I could reach through that screen, I would.

  He was beautiful. Intense. Those eyes…those lips. The combination was nearly painful. Divine and wicked all at once.

  I skipped ahead to the article.

  The world of stock car racing was totally foreign to me and my brain was buzzing, but I understood that in a second-tier series NASCAR race four years ago, Dylan lost control of his car and crashed. He’d been burned in the fire. Badly.

  I sat back and gasped for air. I’d been holding my breath. There was a photo of a car in the green area at the center of the track engulfed in flames. A crew in the corner, rushing toward the fire.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  I clicked through and there were dozens more of those photos, the fire from every angle. Crews spraying down the fire, a body being removed from the window.

  Dylan. That’s Dylan’s body.

  There were tons of pictures of Dylan before the fire, of that man with the lips and the intense dark eyes and that chin that looked as if it had been carved out of granite. A thick, powerful body. He was often with a tall and willowy brunette, with a giant rack, their arms around each other.

  I stared at those pictures, burning them into my brain because I was if nothing else a glutton for punishment.

  What did you think was going to happen? I wondered. That by pretending to be someone else you would actually be someone else? You’re still you.

  And what I had always been was unwanted.

  “Excuse me, miss?”

  Pulled from this strange horror show, I looked up to see the librarian behind the desk looking at me.

  “Your time is up.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You signed up for a half hour. It’s up. If you’d like more time you need to sign up again.”

  The library was nearly empty. There was no one standing behind me, itching to use the computer.

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “We need to prove that the—”

  “Computers are an asset. I know.” Truthfully, I needed to get going. I had a backseat full of groceries. And I’d found out what I’d come to find out. Dylan Daniels had been a handsome, playboy race-car driver.

  But after the fire? Nothing.

  Not a single image. Not a single word.

  It was as if he vanished.

  “I’m going.”

  On my way out, I bought three more books from the book sale.

  “Hey!” a voice said as I was leaving, and I turned around and saw a smiling blond guy walking in the door as I was walking out.

  “Hi,” I said, stepping back.

  I had, over the years living in the same place surrounded by people who were not stupid—who probably, if they didn’t know specifically, had a very good idea of what my life was like with my mom, and probably with Hoyt—learned how to keep this small sea of distance around me. By keeping my face calm, my eyes distant, by giving no one any reason to think that I cared about their concern, I could usually keep the questions at bay.

  Years of practicing this face—and this guy didn’t seem to notice.

  “We met here at the library a few weeks ago,” he said. “I was…I’m a cop. I was wearing my uniform. My name is Grant.”

  I glanced down at his red shirt. The black shorts. Under his arm was a stack of books.

  “Right,” I said. He’d knocked on the window and asked if I was all right while I’d been having my freak-out. “Good to see you again, Grant. I’m…ah, I’m Annie.”

  “Good to see you too, Annie,” he said. God, he was like a golden retriever. All bright eyes and wagging tail. “You have something good?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Books.” He pointed at the stack of books cradled against my chest. “I come in every week. I’m like a library frequent flyer.” He flipped his books around to show me. The one on top was the next one in the series of the thriller I’d just bought on sale.

  “Hey, look at that,” he said, noticing the same thing. Really, he was very…smiley. “It’s really good. You’re gonna love it.”

  “Thanks. I read one of his earlier ones a long time ago.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the aliens and the hotel.”

  “Oh, God, I loved that one. With the kid…”

  “And the drawings. Yeah.” The smile came before I could stop it and he grabbed hold of it with both hands.

  “You know, if you’re not busy, it’s my day off and I can drop these off and we could go get lunch.”

  “It’s ten a.m.”

  “Breakfast, then. Coffee?”

  A date. He was asking me out on a date.

  I’d never been on a date.

  Not in high school. Not when Hoyt was…God, I have no idea what you’d call those six months before he proposed, but you couldn’t call it courting. Softening me up, maybe, for the horrors to come?

  The closest thing I’d had to a date were the phone calls with Dylan. And those weren’t real. They weren’t anything.

  This man and his offer of coffee might as well have been asking me out to see the dragons. Or raft the Nile. They were on the same spectrum of impossibility.

  Why impossible? that voice in my head asked. This thing you’ve had with Dylan…that wasn’t impossible.

  I could lie to this smiley, book-loving cop with the red shirt, the arms of which were pulled taut over pretty impressive muscles, just as easily as I could lie to Dylan. But I wasn’t even tempted. Not a little.

  Dylan operated in a separate place, far removed from my reality.

  Christ, I was just beginning to realize how fucked up I was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “Sure,” he said, waving his hand, even taking the rejection with a smile. “No problem. Maybe another time.”

  “Sure,” I lied, scared of giving him false hope, but finding it impossible to do anything else.

  I headed home, thinking of Dylan. Trying to put what I’d learned about him on top of what I knew about him, and all the answers that I had to the questions in my head only gave me more questions.

  How did he get into stock car racing?

  How did he survive the fire?

  What happened afterward?

  Fire…I couldn’t even imagine.

  And then I forced myself to try and stop imagining.

  Because I could cyber-stalk him all I wanted to, but I would never—ever—get the answers I really wanted.

  And asking the questions would only get me hurt.

  —

  At home I unloaded my groceries and on my second trip to my car for the box of wine, Joan was walking back from the laundry building with a basket in her hands.

  “Only the good stuff?” she asked, eyeing my box of wine.

  “Be nice and I’ll let you have some.”

  She lifted her eyebrows in surprise, and truthfully, I was pretty surprised too.

  “You want to bring it over to my porch?” she asked, shifting the laundry basket to her hip.

  “You have any food?” I was starving, and olives for dinner was a stupid idea.

  She smiled. “I can dig something up.”

  And just like that I had a date with a stripper.

  —

  Before heading over to Joan’s, I walked past the rhododendron to Tiffany’s trailer. Outside at the picnic table all three kids were coloring. Markers and crayons were in a shoe box in the middle of the table.

  “Hi, guys,” I said.

  Briefly they all looked up, blond hair falling over blue eyes, and then the girls bent back to their work. But Danny kept looking at me. “Hey,” he sa
id. The spokesman of the group.

  “Your mom around?” I asked, stepping toward the trailer and the closed door.

  “Dad’s here,” Danny said and I stopped. It was silent inside and there was no telling if it was a dangerous or a happy silence. It was just silence.

  I spun around looking for the car, only to find it parked in a different spot on the other side of the trailer, like it was hiding. I just caught a glimpse of its bumper.

  The car seemed ominous. Good lord. Paranoid, much?

  “Are you…okay?” I asked.

  “Fine.”

  “We’re going to McDonald’s,” one of the girls said. Her paper was a vast rainbow, stretching from side to side. “Dad said.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  I backtracked slowly, but before I passed the rhododendron I stopped. I might be imagining some of the devils, but at least one of them was very real. “Danny?”

  “Yeah?” He was working hard on a Spider-Man coloring book, the red wax of his crayon thick on the page. Shiny.

  “Do you know which trailer is mine?”

  He stopped coloring and looked up. “First one past the bush.”

  “Right. If you need anything…anything at all. If you’re scared or something. Come knock on my door.”

  He stared at me for a long time, those eyes of his so grown up, and then shrugged. “Sure.”

  I walked back to my trailer and grabbed the box of wine, thinking about all those people who’d tried to help me that I’d shoved away with both hands. With all my strength I’d shoved them until they never came back again.

  Joan had heated up frozen taquitos, which were among my top five favorite meals from a box. And she mixed sour cream and salsa together to dip them in—a brilliant combination I’d never once considered. And she had real wineglasses set up on her little table, the ashtray put away.

  “Well,” I said, stepping up onto the wooden porch. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. It was Joan after all. I felt like I was trying to make friends with a shark. “Aren’t we fancy?”

  “We are. Open up that box.”

  Box wine has a spigot, which cut the fancy down considerably.

  “So?” she asked, sitting back with a lukewarm glass of wine and a taquito. She was wearing thin yoga pants and a tank top, and even that somehow looked amazing on her. “This guy you’ve got…”

  “I don’t have him anymore,” I said, dipping a taquito into the sauce. “It’s over.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s probably…all right.” Though it wasn’t. Though I missed the idea of calling him far too much for it to be normal. “We weren’t ever going to be a thing, you know. It wasn’t real.”

  Joan snorted. “What’s real?” she asked. “I figure if you’re living it, it’s real enough.”

  I shook my head, unwilling to talk about Dylan. Unsure of what even to say. That photo and the article were still swimming around my head. He’d been hurt. Badly. And he was more handsome than I could even believe.

  “What about you?” I asked, wrenching the conversation into a new direction.

  “Me and men?” she laughed.

  “Yeah, the guy that I’ve seen coming out of your trailer—”

  She shook her head. “He’s no one.”

  “No one? Two times coming out of your trailer?”

  “A guy I work with. That’s all. And—” She pointed her taquito at me. “I am not talking about him with you.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. Smiling shirtless guy coming out of your trailer is off limits.”

  “Fine, you want to be nosey?” She sprawled back in her chair.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Too late. What are you going to do now?”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “You got away from the guy who hurt you…what are you going to do next? I mean, you can’t kill yourself in that field forever.”

  “I’m thinking of becoming a stripper.”

  Joan laughed. “Honey, you need a few thousand dollars in plastic surgery on those boobs before you’ll make a living.”

  I put a hand to my chest as if I were stung.

  “Seriously.” Joan poured herself more wine and the sun sunk down below Ben’s garden. I stretched out my legs, which were knobby and scratched. Looking at them made me think of Dylan’s lips, for some reason. Like the worst part of my body was connected somehow to the most beautiful part of his. Opposites—that why I thought of his mouth. We were a combination of opposites, the far edges of the beauty spectrum. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I barely graduated high school; all I’ve ever done is farm. I don’t think there is much I can do.”

  “That’s some grade-A bullshit, right there.”

  “Joan, you know nothing about me. You have no—”

  “I know you’re pretty fucking tough. I know you’re pretty fucking brave. I know you’re a little bit stupid, but all of us can be. The way I see it, you can do anything.”

  You know those puzzles, the moveable squares inside a frame, that when all lined up correctly make a picture of a cow or something? But they come scrambled and you have to move squares around to try and make the picture.

  They’re impossible, those stupid puzzles.

  But Joan moved a lot of squares for me when she said that.

  —

  A week passed quietly. Nothing but me and kudzu during the day. But at night…

  At night I thought about Dylan’s voice and slipped my hands over my body, finding new things I liked. The edges of good pain. The depths of real pleasure.

  I made up for some serious lost time on my bed, the curtains open, breeze fluttering over my body, cooling the sweat I’d made all by myself. Despite my imagination—which was also making up for lost time—I could not imagine anyone else’s hands on my body. It was just me. Over and over again.

  Another week and it was the middle of September. The nights were cooler. Just a little. We had a few days of storms that everyone seemed to think were out of the ordinary. Ben seemed to get better. Not that I saw him much. His oven sat out in the pouring rain, half finished. His garden growing, untended, into a jungle.

  Joan was not around either.

  I felt like we were all hunkered down, backs to the wind, preparing for something. I had no idea what.

  But my gut said it was going to be bad.

  —

  It started with an engine waking me up. Not Phil’s shitty muscle car, a different engine. Smaller. The engine came into the park and roared past my trailer before coming to a stop.

  Fuzzy-headed and bleary, I glanced over at the clock by my bed. Two thirty in the morning. On a Wednesday. If it were Friday, I wouldn’t think twice. Things got rowdy at the park on Friday. But it was Wednesday.

  I jumped when there was a sudden pounding against the outside of a trailer. Not mine.

  Joan’s?

  Oh God, had some freak followed her home from The Velvet Touch? She said that happened sometimes; girls got stalked. Renee had to call the cops and stay with her mother for like a month. Joan said they usually told the owner, some guy named Zo, and he had that shit taken care of, but that first night, the first time the guy followed a girl home—there was no Zo to protect them.

  I leaned over my bed and lifted my curtain, just a little to see outside.

  Joan’s trailer was quiet. Dark. Still.

  But there was a motorcycle outside of Ben’s trailer.

  “Open up, old man!” a man shouted and kept banging on the trailer.

  A dog on the far side of the park started barking. A kid was screaming.

  This was bad.

  Worse than bad.

  My gut didn’t have to tell me that.

  I slid from my bed and crept to the window over my settee. I could see things more clearly from there. I pulled back the curtain just in time to see the light outside Ben’s trailer turn on. Moths immediately flew in fro
m places unknown to buzz around it. Ben’s door opened and the man standing outside it, big and tall, wearing a black leather vest with some kind of design on the back, shoved his way inside and I saw Ben fall to the side as the man pushed past him.

  And then the door closed behind them.

  I stood up, my shaking fingers to my shaking mouth. What should I do? Call the cops?

  And then the yelling started.

  There was no way to understand what the guy was saying, but it was loud and it was aggressive. Ben was an old man. Frail and sick. That guy…that giant man could kill him. Easily.

  Back in my bedroom I grabbed the phone. The .22 was sitting there, in a small splash of moonlight. Terrified, freaking out, I grabbed it too and then ran out my door.

  The plan was—as much as I was able to make a plan—to listen to what the guy was yelling, and if it seemed dangerous, I’d call the cops.

  I ran out my door and circled my trailer only to find Joan standing in the dirt track between our two trailers. She wore her green robe and no shoes.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Making sure Ben’s okay.”

  “Is that a gun?” She was still whispering, but her voice had all the power of a shriek. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing with that?”

  I could see on the edge of her deck, in easy reach, her own gun.

  “The same thing you are,” I said, trying to sound bold. It might have worked if the gun felt natural or right in my hand. But it felt awkward and dangerous, and I probably projected that all over the place.

  “Look,” Joan whispered and stepped closer to me. “Go back inside and call Dylan.”

  I blinked, blood falling down to my feet, leaving me dizzy. Did she say Dylan?

  “How…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence, I was so shocked. I’d never said his name to her. Not once.

  Inside Ben’s trailer something crashed to the floor and I could hear Ben yelling, and I jumped, a small scream squeaking from my throat.

  “Go inside,” Joan said, her voice calm and firm. Her eyes locked on mine. “And call Dylan. Tell him Max is here.”

  “Max?”

  “Go!” she said, and for emphasis pushed me back toward my trailer. I stepped inside the dark and relative silence of my trailer and felt as if the walls I recognized were being pulled down around me, revealing darker shadows I didn’t even realize existed.