Waiting on Justin

by Lucy H. Delaney

  Lizzie was staying with ShamRae, her popular, rich, classy friend with soft-hearted parents who gave her anything she wanted. What she wanted was for Lizzie to stay with her, so Lizzie moved in. I was invited over a couple times, but it was too perfect for the likes of me. They mowed their lawn in pretty diagonal rows, their couch wasn't ragged or torn up, their fridge had plenty of food, and they had pictures on their walls just like Gramma Diaz, a sore reminder that I was the different one, not them. I didn't fit there, and I knew it was better for Lizzie if I drifted away, so I did. Our lives were more different than they had ever been. She was made for a house with happy pictures in shiny frames; I was made for a raggedy couch and weekend ragers.

  What was worse than my two best friends making their own ways in life and leaving me in my pit of despair was that I never had anyone else. I never made even one other single friend. For a while when we were lots younger, Mom and Clayton's friends would bring their kids over, but they were never part of us. They were kids to play with, not friends. We were the Three Musketeers. It was always and only been Justin and Lizzie and me. Now that they were both gone, I was alone, and I had no one to tell about it.

  If that wasn't bad enough, it got worse for me and Justin, not better. When we could be together, which was hardly ever, we had to be extra careful around the house to avoid Clayton freaking. Just because Justin proved he was stronger didn't mean we were free to let our feelings be known. There was more danger now because we both knew Clayton could kick Justin out for any reason he wanted, and then I would really be alone.

  The only time we had together to be us was when Mom and Clayton went out and stayed out for the weekend, but we never knew which weekend they were going to the bar and coming back sometime in the night and which weekends they wouldn’t come home. When I was a kid it seemed like their disappearing acts were few and far between, but age taught me otherwise. They were gone at least one weekend a month, and in the summer usually more. All their friends liked Cam's house—it was even more secluded than our place, and I heard they had bonfires and crazy, good adult fun out there. Only on those rare Saturdays when they didn't come home and Justin didn't work could we enjoy being together.

  That was the only time I felt happy. When they stayed gone, Justin would come home greasy and tired but just as happy to be alone with me as I was with him. He would come in and kiss me—tall, strong, and smelling of tires and Eternity. He would shave and shower away the work of the day, and while he cleaned himself up I would get dinner ready. He usually brought home a prepackaged meal from the store like lasagna or Hamburger Helper, but other times I'd make something from scratch. I played house, pretending we didn't have a care in the world. We were too old anymore for baby make-believe adventures, but I think he liked to pretend it was still us against the world too.

  We would eat at the table together like families are supposed to and wash dishes together, not because it was a corny bonding thing but so the parents wouldn't guess we were cooking fancy dinners when they were gone. Afterward, we’d sit together on the old blood and dirt-stained couch and cuddle, his arms wrapped tightly around me, pulling me right into his soul. I never felt safer than in his arms. I still don't.

  Even with things changing so much, some things stayed the same. Justin still loved science and sci-fi, so we mostly watched Star Trek or rented videos about space and time travel. Every so often he would play the guitar all night or read out loud the way he used to when we were younger. He was always reading but I think he read even more after starting college. His taste was expanding and refining too. When we were little he only had eyes for sci-fi novels from the greats and not-so-greats, but he started to read about real things and people too: Chuck Yeager, WWII fighter pilots, NASA space missions, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Air Force requirements and missions. To be honest, I missed the books we used to read, but it didn't really matter because I could listen to him read a car manual and be happy. I’d lie there in his lap looking up at his perfect face while he read. Sometimes I missed the context of what he was reading, but I never forgot the way his lips moved or how his index finger, stained from his greasy work, caressed the page when it was a good part.

  Even when Mom and Clayton were gone, we never spent the nights together, it was still too much of a risk. But there were plenty of times we fell asleep, locked in each other’s arms, on the couch. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I stayed as close to him as I could and tried not to wake him. I listened to his heart beat strong and steady, felt his rhythmic breaths, mimicked them with my own until I fell back asleep. If he was the one to wake before morning, it was different. Justin would take me to bed, kiss me good night, and walk away to sleep in his own room, leaving me alone, waiting for what he promised would come when the time was right. It would have been easy for us to take things further, and it would have happened if Justin were any other kind of guy. But he wasn't. He insisted that I still wasn't ready. I wasn't—I know that now—but at the time I wanted him desperately. All he would ever allow was what he was strong enough to control.

  We had fully clothed make-out sessions every time he was home and they were gone. They left me wondering and wanting to know what he would feel like moving inside me and not just on top. But we never dared to take anything off except his shirt—partly because of Justin's rules and also because if we did and the parents came home we'd be dead meat for sure, and we never knew when they would show up. Sometimes, when they were gone, I attacked him as soon as he got in the door. The uniform shirt he wore with his name embroidered on it never stayed tucked in for long. I would unbutton the buttons and push it off his shoulders and sneak my hands up under his T-shirt and pull it up and off and trail my hands down his sides and abs. He was toned, ripped, so good to look at by then. Sometimes he stood there letting me kiss his lips and his neck and his chest while I touched him, feeling him under my fingertips in all the ways I wanted to.

  When I pushed for more than he would allow, he would take over, moving my hands, my face, my body where and how he wanted, telling me what I could and couldn't do and finding little ways to give me the release I needed without crossing his lines. I obeyed and followed his lead.

  His hands, too, liked to find their way under my shirt to touch my bare flesh. He would push my shirt up and my bra down but never took them off—just in case they came home. It saved us more times than I can say. Sometimes we didn't even know they were home until we heard Clayton's truck doors slam shut. There's no way I would have had time to pull my shirt back on, let alone redo my bra. He could justify his being off if it was hot enough, but there would be no explanation to appease Clayton for mine being off. And anyway, I didn't want Clayton to have the chance to see me shirtless.

  We always kept the TV on or his guitar nearby so we looked like we were doing something else, too. They were necessary precautions, but they didn't keep his hands from having their way with me. Justin especially liked the curve at my hips right at my waist and would tease me there and make me crazy. His thumbs crept down inside my jeans enough to make me catch my breath and press into him harder.

  Our eyes closed when we kissed, but when we touched we liked to watch each other—eyes meeting eyes, souls intertwining, speaking our love without words. I was never timid or afraid with him, nor was he with me. We belonged to each other: he was mine to look at, to touch, to love and arouse and desire. In the same way, I was his.

  I wanted him to see me and know me, know how his hands and mouth could work me into a frenzy. But whenever a groan escaped from his throat, I knew it was over. That was the line he would not cross, for if he did, all his strength to wait would be lost. Sometimes he let it out when he was touching me and I hadn't even done anything to him; most of the time it was when I pushed him too far, which I learned to be careful about. It was a primal sound I learned to love and hate all at the same time—guttural and low, the last bit of his strength to restrain our passions in one breath. It was never a harsh rejection but more of a
stoic acceptance of what must be done, what he had to do. He would let me go gently, sit up or stand up, and close his eyes and breathe in deeply—inhaling reason, reality, and rationality, stretching his arms up high into the sky, exhaling the urges he would not fulfill. By then I knew better than to question or beg, but I did get good at holding him at bay as long as I could to make our time together last longer.

  And that was how my life went. My worst times and best times were in that house. Other than an occasional movie or dinner at Skippers, we didn't really go out that much, even when Mom and Clayton were gone. It suited me fine because it meant Justin and I could be close and tempt fate.

  I think it was more about the money for Justin than the making-out though. He had a plan for every cent of it— our plan—and the sooner we saved it all up the better. He said he would work and save and get me out of the house, and that's what he was doing. Mr. Reyes told him about the financial aid office at the community college, and they helped him find grants for most of his school expenses. So except for food, gas, and the rent Mom and Clayton made him pay (and books he couldn't keep from buying), he saved all his money and grew his stash in secret. He had it in a bank where Mom and Clayton couldn't touch it, and he was so proud to watch it accumulate.

  In six months he managed to save over a thousand dollars. He had his bank statements sent to Coffee's house and would bring them home to show me. “I'm going to get us out of here, Haylee,” he would say and flick the paper proudly. I knew he would, and I couldn't wait for the day we could walk out that door and never have to depend on Mom or Clayton ever again.

  Then my mom died, and everything changed again.

  CHAPTER 9

  I CAME HOME from school one day to find my mom passed out on the couch. It was nothing new; I'd seen her like that a million times before. Like usual I ignored her, grabbed something to eat from the fridge, and went straight to my room.

  My radio was playing Blind Melon's happily, depressing song “No Rain” when Clayton pulled into the driveway a couple hours later. I had a test the next day in my science class, and I wanted to make Justin proud with a good grade, so I was intermittently working on a study guide between painting my nails and daydreaming to my favorite songs. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but I don't think it was a Monday. It doesn't matter. The point is that my mom wasn't passed out; she was stone cold dead.

  Gone, just like Karina all those years before. No note, no goodbye, no hint she was leaving, just plain dead. The only difference was I had no hope she would ever get better and come back.

  Real death isn't like in the movies. It never felt real to me when I saw someone dead on TV. I could watch the actors on the screen and feel their grief, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it wasn't real and that they were being paid to pretend to be dead; their lives were going to go on when movie was over. That's not the way it was when she died. When Mom died she was dead, for real. She didn't come back; she didn't get revived. She was gone, and I knew she would never be alive again.

  Clayton screamed. It's all he knew how to do. He screamed for me to come downstairs, he screamed into the phone when he called 911, he even screamed at my dead mother on the couch to wake up—which of course she wasn't going to do, no matter how loudly he screamed.

  Then he cried.

  I couldn't shed a single tear. I stood there like a statue with half the fingers on my left hand painted chocolate brown, staring at her lifeless body, and not one single tear came out.

  Clayton's cry turned to bellowing. Somewhere deep down inside he must have loved her. I thought back on their times together. I remembered the hugs, kisses, and butt pats I had tried to ignore. I remembered that they went out together a lot. So what if it was to party and get stupid? They were together all the time, except for when he was working, like Justin and me. I realized Clayton had just lost his mate. The fights, the hatred they would spit at each other during their bouts, the poverty they shrouded themselves in—none of it mattered. He was a broken man who had just lost his lover.

  The ambulance came, the coroner, the body bag. I saw them looking around uncomfortably when they came into the house. We tried to keep it clean for Clayton's sake, but it was not the Plaza Hotel. Our furniture—all of it—was old, beat-up, and nasty. The man who painted walls for a living made us keep them free of dirt, but the house itself was falling apart and in need of repair. We had no handy men or maids to come in and make our place look nice, and with pathetic, ungrateful kids like us who never helped out, it had slowly deteriorated over time. I was so used to it I didn't see how bad it was until I looked at it through their eyes. I was suddenly self-conscious of the filth in the same way Lizzie was of her mom's messy apartment. I thought ours was the good house, but their furtive glances told me otherwise: we were just as bad.

  The coroner’s report said it was a massive heart attack. They tested her system, and no surprise to us, her blood alcohol level was something like six times the legal limit. They found traces of other drugs in there, too.

  I never knew how much life my worthless alcoholic mother brought to our house until she was dead. Without her, the curtains didn't open in the morning; dishes didn't get done, and the laundry didn't either. Without her, there was no one to greet Clayton when he came home with an ice cold beer. There were no nagging jokes about how stupid we all were that we could laugh at uneasily. It was quiet, bare, and lifeless.

  All that was left was Clayton. And all he had inside him was a mountain of grief that turned to anger quicker than I could get away from him when I saw it coming. He cried, then yelled; yelled, then cried. When Justin wasn't home I did my best to hide out in my room and avoid him at all costs.

  I used my mom's death as an excuse to skip a week and a half of school. We had her funeral on a weekend, I'm pretty sure, but those days all blur together for me. My mom had a sister, Aerin, who lived in a town a few hours away from Seattle, Washington. All Mom had ever said about her was that she thought she was better than us. Mom said that about anyone who could hold a job. I didn't take her too seriously until I met Aunt Aerin myself at the funeral.

  Mom's funeral was a sorry affair; for all the times my mom called me pathetic, she was the one who really was. There were exactly fourteen people at her funeral if you counted the director from the funeral home and the minister we got from the Diaz’s church for a $50 donation. Lizzie came; so did Brenda. I still couldn't cry. My mom was gone, and I took it all in stride, like it was just another day.

  At the time I thought it was because I had no love for my mom. But I know now that's not the case at all. I loved my mother; I only wish she had been a better mom. I try to remember the good times, like when she danced with Lizzie and me, and how she tried to make Justin feel better when Karina would take off. She had a beautiful singing voice, like a real star. I should have listened more when she sang. Back then it was annoying to me, but now I regret not listening to her more. I should have asked to fix her hair, too. A lot of girls do that to their mothers; I should have done that. Whatever—she's gone now, and it's too late. Accept the things I cannot change.

  Aunt Aerin saw me and smiled. I stared at her, stunned because she was thin, she looked more like me than my own mother, right down to the straight, light brown hair, only hers was graying, and blue-grey eyes that were darker at the edges. I knew who she was as soon as she walked in the glass doors. She went first to Clayton and tried to hug him. He stood stiff as a board and then started to cry again. She patted him on the shoulder and put her head to the side like she really cared. I wondered why, if she cared, she had never been to see us before. It was like my mom had said: she thought she was better than all of us. She certainly looked the part. She was wearing a knee-length, A-line black skirt with a dumb ruffly button-up shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. She didn't fit in with our kind of people; half of us were wearing our best jeans and whatever black thing we could find. I resented her for being there and hated her before she said one w
ord to me. I saw Clayton point me out to her and tried to pretend I didn't notice.

  “Oh man, here she comes. Quick, let's get out of here,” I said to Justin and Lizzie who were congregating with me in the back of the viewing room.

  “Don't you want to meet her?” Lizzie asked.

  “No, why would I?”

  But I didn't leave. I stood there as she approached. I wished for all the world that I could hold Justin's hand. It was like he knew because he put his hand on my shoulder reassuringly but in a way that looked strictly platonic.

  “You must be Haylee,” she said with pity in her eyes. Her voice was too sweet and sing-songy, not at all raspy like my moms, but I couldn't get over how much her face looked like mine and what my mother's had been before the weight deformed her features. I wanted to hate her, but I wanted to hear what she had to say even more.

  “Yeah, so?” I shrugged and crossed my arms.

  “Oh, honey, I'm so sorry for your loss. I can't even imagine what you're going through.” She hugged me in her bony arms, which were surprisingly strong for as little as she seemed.

  “It's whatever; people die every day.”

  My answer shocked her. She pushed me back to arm’s length and held me at my shoulders, looking straight into my eyes like she was searching to see if I had a soul. It was awkward. I looked away, glancing down, but then I caught her eyes again.

  “Do you need to talk to someone? I talked to your dad.”

  “He's not my dad.”

  “Sorry, I thought he and your mom—”