by R. K. Ryals
Hetty went to the kitchen. She spent a lot of time sitting at the table at night with her paperwork, reading glasses, and tea. She found comfort in it.
I laid on the bed with the lights out, my knitting next to me, my eyes on the ceiling. Rain beat the roof, like someone tap, tapping a window, and I listened to it, my hands above me, a knitting needle pressed into my palm.
“Cry, damn it!” I begged myself.
I pressed harder, the needle digging into my skin until the sting was unbearable. My eyes watered.
Come on!
No tears came, but the pain filled me with peace. It was the pain I needed, not the tears. I needed the pain because it needed me.
Stop it, Tansy! It isn’t your fault.
“Yes, it is,” I told the room.
Snow whimpered, jumped on the bed, and nudged my hand, dislodging the needle. A red spot. No blood. Would it feel better if there was blood?
“Why didn’t I stop him?” I asked Snow.
She circled and plopped down next to me, her head on my stomach.
I shoved her away, antsy dread filling my gut as I sat up and threw my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up, I left the room, walked into the kitchen, picked up my grandmother’s cordless phone, and said, “I’m going to call Jet.”
She didn’t look up from her paperwork.
Very few people had a landline anymore. My grandmother was one of the exceptions, which was good because I didn’t have a cell phone. My brother did, though.
Stumbling into my room, I slammed the door, rejoined Snow on the bed, and dialed his number.
Three rings, and then, “Hello?”
A moment of silence.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Jet,” I whispered finally.
“Tansy?”
He wouldn’t have Nana’s number programmed into his phone. Until now, he hadn’t needed it.
“Yeah,” I said, my grip tightening on the phone.
More silence.
“Look, Tansy, I’m at work—”
Garbled words rushed out of me. “I’m sorry I said you were like Dad.”
“What?”
“I’m sor—”
“I heard you, Tansy. I just … are you okay?”
“You are a lot like him,” I babbled. “You’ve got the pull, you know? But you’re not him, okay?”
Something moved over the phone, muffling it, a distant, “I’m taking my break early. It’s my sister,” coming across the line.
Rustling, and then, “What’s up with you, Tansy? Everything going okay at Nana’s? Is it Deena?”
“Why is it always Deena!” my mind shouted.
“No, Deena’s okay,” I answered.
“And you?” he asked.
I’m suffocating.
“How do you feel about Dad?” I asked.
A sigh came over the line. “Tansy, come on now. Really? Dad’s gone. I thought you got that. More than Deena. She’s fighting it, I think, but you … we’ve got to let all of this go.”
“Is it that easy for you? Really?”
“Am I grieving? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Maybe.”
“Then yeah, I am a little. Not like with Mom. Dad is different. I don’t feel as sad, I guess. I just feel weird.”
But not guilty because you weren’t there that last year. You were gone. In college. Forgetting us.
“Okay,” I murmured.
“Tansy—”
“I shouldn’t have called. I know you’re busy.”
“God, Tansy, why are you doing this?”
“I love you, Jet,” I said, hanging up.
I may have been wrong to call him, but life had taught me to never hang up without saying, “I love you.”
Laying the phone on the bed, I let my gaze drift to the window, to the splotches of water against the glass. They mocked me. Nature’s tears.
This time, when I placed the knitting needle against my palm, I pressed hard enough to draw blood. It took a lot of pressure. It brought a lot of pain. It brought a new me.
I didn’t know this Tansy, but she was there inside of my head and under my skin. She’d crawled there, waiting with Dad to die. Now that he was gone, she was trying to dig her way out, breaking me.
If Eli knew this Tansy, he would hate her.
TWENTY-FOUR
Eli
Glitter. Jewels. Rainbow prisms. The orchard turned into an entirely different world after it rained. Blindingly beautiful. Enough to make Tansy’s shitting sun babies look tame in comparison.
The rain had stopped, leaving behind cool breezes and clean smells. The van from the Rescue League rattled down the lane, tempting me from the bed I was loathe to leave. What was the point really? This summer was full of work and dealing with emotional issues no one wanted to deal with.
“You’re a dick that needs to quit pitying himself so much for what happened. People pity you enough as it is,” Lincoln’s voice rang through my head, making me wince.
“Fuck you,” I murmured because he was right. Hell, Jonathan was right, too. What Mom did was wrong, but beyond that I had a stable family. It was time to make some changes. Train harder. Do more. Prove to everyone that I wasn’t just a ghost from my mother’s past.
I got up, dressed, and found coffee before moving onto the porch, my hands hugging an old black coffee mug. Steam rose, rising over a damp landscape touched by sparkles. To the side of the house, her cut-off shorts clinging to her backside, Tansy stooped, her hands pulling at weeds among the azalea bushes.
“You’re early,” I called.
Glancing over her shoulder, she gave me a forced smile. “Better than being home, I guess.”
Something about her voice threw me, and I sauntered down the stairs, my eyes narrowing. “You didn’t want to come, did you?” I accused.
The screen door on the porch creaked, and Pops stepped out, hands behind his back. “You planning to help, or are you here to get in the way?”
Tansy’s wary eyes flicked between us, and I grinned. “Oh, you know me, Pops.” I winked.
His brows arched, his gaze on me, his words for Tansy. “Let me know if he gives you any trouble.”
The screen door swung shut, his thudding footsteps fading into the house.
“Back to my earlier question.” I stepped over a pile of weeds to reach her side, lifted my mug, and swallowed back the coffee. Black and strong. “You don’t want to be here, do you?”
She glanced at the screen door, hoping I assumed, to find Pops standing there. “Honestly?” she asked finally, her eyes dropping. “I’d rather be anywhere but here, and not just here at this orchard, but here. As in this town.”
The confused Tansy I’d seen on the hospital roof the day we met, the one that often disappeared behind a pretense of strength, reappeared.
“It’s a little on the boring side,” I admitted.
She shrugged.
Dipping my head, I caught her eyes. “But that’s not the only reason, huh?”
She returned to the weeds. “I’ve got work to do.”
Setting the coffee mug on the lawn, I bent next to her. “I don’t know shit about this kind of stuff, but tell me what to do, and I’ll help.”
She glanced at me. “And if I don’t want your help?”
“Then I’ll just start pulling up the bushes.”
She snorted, her lips pressed together in an attempt to suppress her laughter. “I’m having a hard time picturing you gardening. I see you as the dark bars and women type.”
“That’s me back in Atlanta. You get the ‘forced into the country’ Eli. It’s still the same church no matter where you visit it.”
Her laugh escaped, full, throaty, and loud. “Do women really fall for the church line?”
“I’ve only tried it on you, but I have no doubt they would. Now,” I nodded at the bushes, “what do I do?”
Holding up a stringy-looking plant, she told me, “You want to pull these up, being ex
tra careful the closer you get to the azaleas. Try pulling the weeds up first, but if that doesn’t work, there’s a trowel near the stairs to get to the roots. There are gloves, too. Sometimes I use them when the weeds are too prickly. It’s best to do any weeding when it’s wet, so the rain last night made this an ideal day to do it. Remove any old leaves or mulch, too, when you see it.”
As she talked, her face grew animated, glowing beneath the darkening sunburn. She was definitely going to peel.
“You really like this stuff, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She leaned over, threw some shriveled leaves out of the flower bed, and said, “Don’t ask me why. I don’t really know. It calms me, I guess. I see the dirt and the leaves and the flowers, and I start to think about the earth, about how this entire planet is just really one big garden—the parts that aren’t covered by water—and I suddenly feel connected to people everywhere, to life, to this idea that the more beautiful we make things, the better everyone is, you know?”
Water soaked into the knees of my jeans as I sank to the ground, my hands joining hers in the flower bed. Tugging, pulling, and digging. “I can see that.”
Her shoulders sagged. “The past few years, especially lately, I feel like I’m playing tug of war with the world. Like I’m drawing things and people into my life, and then shoving them away.”
I thought about the way she straddled me the other night in the orchard compared to the offhand way she looked at me this morning. “I hadn’t noticed.”
She elbowed me. “I’m not trying to be that way.”
“I’ve got nothing against it, roof girl. It’s habit for you. I get that. I push people away all of the time. The whole jerkitude thing, remember? After a while, you just don’t realize you’re doing it anymore.”
We worked in silence, the words hanging between us. The pile of weeds grew, and I suddenly saw them the way Tansy did. With each weed, we yanked the bad stuff out of the garden. The garbage away from the pretty.
“This is about as far as you can get from a bar, huh?” she asked on a laugh.
Not missing the insinuating joke, I stiffened. “I’m not an alcoholic.”
She paused, her gaze settling on my face. “That conversation you had with your mother and Mandy last night … you said they were the reason you’ve been in treatment for alcohol twice?”
Sitting back, I let my gaze meet hers. “My mother has some emotional issues. I’m sure you’ve noticed. She sees therapists when we can get her to go. She cries a lot. She needs people to see her all of the time, to notice everything about her, to pamper her, to tell her how beautiful she is, and to put her above any other problems they might have because hers is more important.” I glanced at the house. “She had just broken up with one of her boyfriends late one night—she’s always in a relationship—and she called me crying. ‘I need you, Eli,’ she said. I’d had a few beers, told her I didn’t need to drive, but she insisted. I wasn’t drunk, but I’d had enough I didn’t want to get caught on the roads. It was late, and there was a road block.”
I shook my head. “The second time, I was at a party when a guy I knew called to tell me he’d seen my girlfriend making out with some guy. At the time, I didn’t know it was my cousin. I was supposed to crash at my friend’s place, but after the call, I wanted to get home. Again, I’d had a few beers, and I was speeding.”
A breath huffed out of me. “I deserved to get pulled over both times. I get that, but I’m not an alcoholic. A drinker? Sure. Smoker? Yeah. Alcoholic? No. And I’m not in denial. I really don’t drink that often.”
“Just unlucky, huh?” Tansy asked. “And it gives you more of a reason to dislike women.”
“Not to trust them,” I corrected, my gaze falling back to hers. “I like them fine.”
“I can see that,” she replied, throwing my words back at me, a smile playing along her lips. “I think I like you better for it.”
I laughed, startled. “What?”
“As much as I hate that you were done the way you were, it shows you have the capacity to be hurt. It means you had enough in you to care in the first place.”
I stared. “You’re a weird one, roof girl.”
She pulled a face. “That’s not a new description of me.” She waved her hand at the garden. “There’s a lot to do.”
My gaze caught on her dirt-covered hand, and I squinted. “Hey,” I said, catching her wrist. She tried pulling away from me, but I held on and flipped her hand over. There, in the center of her palm, was a shallow wound, red and covered in soil. “What happened?”
Face flaming, she jerked her wrist out of my grip. “Nothing. I’m clumsy.”
Being a boxer, I’d seen a lot of wounds over the years. This wound, being in the center of her palm and a perfect circle, was methodical.
“What are you doing, Tansy?”
Standing, she glared at me. “Thank you for your help, but I think I have it from here.”
“Tansy?”
“Leave it, Eli.”
I stood. “Did you do that to yourself?”
She cringed, silence separating us, and then, “If I told you I did, what would you think?”
My chest tightened, my gaze falling to her hand, the fist now clenched against her stomach. “I’d ask you if you’ve done it before.”
“And if I told you I hadn’t? Not like that anyway.”
My eyes rose to hers. “I’d ask you what made you start.”
She stumbled away from me. “I can do the rest of this myself.” Her cold, matter-of-fact voice hit me like a bucket of frigid water.
“Tansy—”
“Stop,” she insisted, her voice full of tears that wouldn’t come.
In that moment, that exact moment, I broke. I realized with startling clarity why I shouldn’t have gotten out of my car that night at the animal rescue, why I shouldn’t have walked over to the girl in the empty lot and invited her into my life, but I’d done it. Now I was here, in this moment, and even though I knew I shouldn’t have let her in, I found I couldn’t regret it. For the first time, I wasn’t looking at a girl because I wanted to fuck and leave. I wanted to help a friend, to understand her pain. I wanted to blame it on being in the country, on boredom and having nothing to do, but truth was, I liked Tansy.
My hands rose, surrendering. “Hey, we won’t talk, okay?” I promised. “I’ll just help you pull weeds. No conversation. Nothing.”
Tansy froze, her kohl-lined eyes staring at me, wide and suspicious. “No talking?”
“None.”
After a moment, she walked past me, stooped, and dug in the soil around the azaleas. Birds called to each other. Bugs buzzed. Wind rattled the leaves.
Slowly, I joined her, keeping a fair distance between us, my fingers in the soil. The earth spoke in smells and touch, and even though I didn’t really understand the appeal gardening had for Tansy, I understood what she meant by the connection it gave people. Each time she touched the ground a few feet away from me, I felt it, too. Not physically. Emotionally.
“We all walk on it, you know?” she asked an hour later.
We’d moved down the side of the house, pulling weeds from adjoining flower beds.
“The dirt,” she explained. “We walk on it, we live on it, we die on it, and eventually, we’re buried under it.”
My mouth remained shut because she was talking, and I was afraid if I said anything, she’d stop. Tansy wasn’t weak, but somehow she wasn’t strong either. She wasn’t the spit and fire personality her sister was, but she was just as angry as Deena in her own way even if she couldn’t admit it to herself. She’d turned her anger into something quiet and dangerous.
“My mother was this really loud personality. So loud that she sort of filled up a space when she was in it, filled it up so much that if you were inside a room with her, it felt like the room couldn’t hold her. Like the walls would explode if they tried to accommodate her,” Tansy continued, glancing at me and then away. “Our house was li
ke a choir. Mom was the director, the one conducting the music, and the rest of us sang when she told us to.”
She inhaled, exhaled, and said, “The choir fell apart when she left. We became this really terrible group of people, all of us. But I was the worst.”
Tansy stood, ran her soiled hands down the back of her shorts, and cringed. “I’ve accused them all of being like Dad. Jet and Deena … but it was never them. I was the one like Dad. Like him, I gave up everything when Mom died. Little by little. My life, my friends, school … just like him. I blamed it on everyone else. Especially Dad. It was easy to blame it on him, you know? Because he gave up, and so it was nothing to say he needed me when really we were both hiding.”
She looked at me, and I stood, slow and cautious. “Okay … so you hid,” I agreed. “And now? Are you still hiding?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think I remember how not to hide.”
“You stopped living.”
Her body stiffened, and before she could push me away again, I rushed to say, “Make up for that now. Live, and then decide after you start living whether or not you hate it.”
Her eyes met mine. “I’ll make you a deal, roof boy. I’ll start trying to live if you confront your mother.”
I winced. “How about I promise to quit avoiding her?”
She gave that some thought. “Okay.”
Brushing my hands together, I grinned. “How about we go do some of that living thing now?”
“I have work to do,” she protested, taking a step away.
Rushing forward, I grabbed her arm, bending so that my lips rested near her ear. “Come on, roof girl. Blame it all on me.” Walking, I urged her away from the house to the lane leading into the orchard. “Remember that pond you saw when you were here the other day?”
She nodded.
“Let’s go see it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Tansy
Life in the city had been about fast moments. Even locked away in our house after Mom’s death, time flew. Stress and uncertainty had replaced chaos, but life remained fast. From one frame of living to the next in a blink. Each blink a new frame. Like at the theatre when the person upstairs forgets to change the movie reel, and the screen suddenly becomes a skipping mess of black and white before going out completely. I kept waiting for that moment in my life, the one where the black and white appears right before the end.