He’s sitting upright now; he puts one hand on the floor and pushes himself into a standing position. Suddenly he’s looming over me, but there’s no threat to him, neither implied nor explicit. He couldn’t hurt me, not ever.
And yet he looks crushed. I did that to him, and I did it without even trying. So much for him protecting me from Scanlon; as it turned out, he was the one who needed protection.
‘Do you really think that’s what it was?’ I ask. ‘Really?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.’
‘You’d disappeared, Hale. No, it was worse than that. You didn’t disappear. You ran away. You ran off without letting me know where you’d gone, or if you were OK, or anything else, and that just about broke me in half. And then my Dad died, and things at the Diner really turned to shit, and… well, that’s the position I was in. Five years later, I was alone, and I was looking for just about any chance I could find to beat up on myself. Turns out, when you look in the mirror and really, really hate what your life has turned into, a guy like Scanlon starts to seem real useful.’
‘So you fucked him,’ he says. ‘Scanlon. Of all people. I mean, Jesus, Carrie… you knew what he was like. You saw what he did to me. You saw what a complete shit he was back then – and he hasn’t changed. You saw all that, and you decided to fuck him anyway. What the hell am I supposed to make of that?’
His voice is calm and measured, but I can see him clenching and unclenching his fist; every time he does, the raw skin on his knuckles tenses. There’s no way it doesn’t hurt him – but of course, that’s the point. It gives him something to focus on. The pain is a distraction from what’s really going on.
But I don’t have any such distraction.
‘For your information,’ I say, already feeling the hot anger in my cheeks, ‘and not that it’s any of your damn business – no, I didn’t fuck him. He found me at a bar, drunk off my ass, and started hitting on me. I figured, why not? It wasn’t like my evening could get any worse. We got back to his apartment, I realised that no matter how bad I was feeling I wasn’t willing to sink that quite so low, and I left. He all but begged me to stick around, but I didn’t. Not that that stopped him telling everyone we slept together anyway. That’s just the kind of sleaze he is. Don’t think you’re the only one who knows it.’
I take a step forward, so I’m practically pressed against Hale. I want him to hear this. I don’t want to have to say it again.
‘But do you know what the funny thing is?’ I say. My voice is low, practically a whisper. ‘I could have fucked him. I almost did. Because he was here, and you weren’t. Do you get that, Hale? You. Weren’t. Here. And as far as I’m concerned that gives you precisely zero right to judge me for any shitty decisions I made in the last ten years. Christ knows I spend enough time judging them myself. You don’t get to chime in just when it suits you.’
By the time I finish, my jaw is sore from clenching it so tightly and my cheeks are wet with tears. I didn’t want to deal with this tonight, not with the limited time I might have left with Hale. The truth is, I didn’t want to deal with it ever, if I could help it.
But now I’m angry. Angry at him. Angry at myself. Angry at everything that led us to this point tonight. The silence between us dares one of us to make a move, but Hale’s not the only one who can be stubborn.
‘Carrie?’ he says at last, like he’s checking to see I’m still here.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t, Hale,’ I say. ‘Not now. Just… don’t.’
‘I mean it.’
And then his arms surround me, pulling me close enough to him that I can feel his heartbeat in his chest, squeezing so tight that I think he’ll never let go.
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to –’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I want to. I was an ass. You’re right. Even if you had slept with Scanlon… I wasn’t here. I made my call. That’s why I came back.’
‘What do you mean?’
He smiles, and looks around at the trailer. ‘You really think I came back for this heap of junk?’ he asks. ‘Come on, Carrie. I could have got a lawyer to sort this out. You know it. I know it. Hell, I could have just handed off the keys to anyone else in this park and I wouldn’t have missed the it. It would have been worth it to just be rid of the whole thing.’
‘Then why?’ I ask. ‘Why, after so long?’
‘You mean, was it my dad? No. No, it wasn’t my dad. It wasn’t the tour. It wasn’t Merry. It wasn’t Scanlon or his friends, or me wanting to get one over on everyone who was still here. It wasn’t even Eden. It was you, Carrie. You were the reason I came back. I needed closure. I needed you to not be here, so I could cut ties with this town completely.’
‘But here I am.’
‘Here you are,’ he says. ‘And believe me, leaving you that night was still the hardest decision I ever made. I don’t plan on making it again.’
It should be enough for me – I know it should be – and yet it isn’t. That’s the thing about decisions: sometimes, they’re not just things you make. Sometimes, they’re things that are made to you, and you find yourself stuck in an impossible dilemma and with a decision of your own. You wind up at a fork in a road you didn’t even know you were on, and then what? Pick a side and hope for the best? Or stay in the middle of the highway, too paralysed to choose one or the other?
Hale made his decision, sure enough. I’m not sure I ever got around to make mine.
‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘I mean it. Come with me, back to New York.’
‘You’re going back?’
He nods. ‘I have to.’
‘Right now?’
‘I just got in a fistfight in a parking lot, Carrie. If anyone there had a phone on them, I’ll be on TMZ within the hour. Someone at the label is going to have to run some damage control.’
‘Meredith?’
‘No. I told you, she blew it.’ Is that a flicker of doubt I see in his eyes, though? If it wasn’t for me, would it be Meredith he ran back to – Meredith the bitch, Meredith who was so good at her awful job as to be forgivable no matter what? Then again, I think, if it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Maybe she is the right call now.
I don’t know. All of this… I don’t understand it. It isn’t my world.
He takes my hand in his, his strong fingers ever-so-gentle with me, and I see the deep red grooves the fight has cut into the knuckles. This is what Eden does to him, I think. He was right then, and he’s right now. He can’t stay here. He was made for New York, for the life he carved out for himself. To have him stick around would be like locking a tiger in a cage too small for him – cruel and dangerous.
I can’t ask him to stay… but I could go with him, for a little while. I could do that. This doesn’t have to end now, here. It doesn’t. It can’t.
‘I don’t…’ I say, but I stop myself. ‘I’d have to check with Mom and Pete, see if they could cover the Diner without me for a week or so. I mean, I can probably….’
He’s shaking his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not for a week. A week could never be enough. I want this, Carrie. I want what we should have had ten years ago. We’ve waited too damn long.’
‘Hale…’
‘Come back to New York with me,’ he says. ‘For good. Move in with me. Get out of here at last. Start living your own life.’
‘Hale, please.’
‘The two of us, together. You and me. We could really do this. We could do this, Carrie. What do you say?’
What can I say? How could I possibly even begin to explain to him all the thoughts that are racing through my mind right now? I can barely pull them into order for myself, let alone put them in a way I think he’ll be able to understand.
Because that’s the problem. I know what my answer is – the only answer I could possibly give; the only right answer, no matter how much
it hurts.
It’s the same answer I gave ten years ago.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, but no. I can’t.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
The only thing that cuts through the silence is the sound of heavy raindrops breaking on the flimsy roof of Hale’s trailer. I wonder how long it’s been going on for, how long it took those few threatening droplets from the blackened sky to become a steady rumble like an earthquake in the distance, all without us noticing. How long it might take them to band together and become the kind of storm that might sweep me up into the air and away from here, like Dorothy’s tornado ride out of Kansas.
Because that’s what I want. I need to be anywhere but here right now, anywhere but standing in front of Hale. Anywhere I can’t see his face, even though I’ve carried almost the exact same picture of him in my mind for a decade. I recognise the expression he’s wearing, clear now as it was then. It’s exactly the same way he looked the last time I told him I couldn’t go with him.
Wherever my storm is, it’s not coming quickly enough.
‘I’m not going to lie,’ he says eventually, ‘I saw that one going kind of differently.’ He pauses, either to try and talk himself out of the little knife twist we both know is coming, or to make sure it lands with peak effectiveness. ‘Fool me once, I guess.’
‘That’s not fair, Hale.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I guess it isn’t.’ But there’s no apology to go along with it, not this time.
‘You know I can’t go with you. There’s Mom, and the diner, and…’
‘And, and, and. There’s always something, Carrie. Every time.’
He’s not angry; angry, I could deal with. If he was angry at me for refusing, I’d just walk out the door right now, and be done with it. The worst part is that he just sounds resigned to my answer, as though part of him never expected anything else. Like he’s almost disappointed in himself for getting his hopes up. He really does want me to go with him, I think. It’s not just something he’s saying. Now, just as much as he did then.
Fool him once.
‘Is that what this is about?’ I ask. ‘Ten years ago?’
‘No. Of course not.’ But he doesn’t look at me as he says it, even though there’s nowhere else in the trailer for his eyes to fall. I’m not sure he can.
‘For God’s sake, Hale… you knew I had to stay. You must have.’
He says nothing.
‘What was I supposed to do?’ I ask. ‘Run off into the distance with you and just hope for the best? At sixteen? No job, not even a high school diploma? No money worth a damn? No plan, even? It was crazy to even consider it. I’m not even sure you should have gone, let alone try to convince me to come with you.’
Because that was cruel, Hale, I think. Oh, that was the cruellest parting gift you could possibly have left me with – because you managed to make it all my fault. You somehow made losing you a direct result of my decision not to go with. It wasn’t about you running after that. It was about me staying. You gave me the thin sliver of hope that things might have worked out, but at what cost? What would I have had to give up to make that happen? You asked me to gamble everything on you, Hale, and you were surprised when the bet was too rich for me.
‘I did what I had to do,’ he says simply. ‘I didn’t have any other choice.’
‘There was always a choice. All you had to do was wait a little while longer – just another year, then we could have escaped together. We could have gone together, Hale. And you didn’t have to stay with your dad. There were options. You could have got a cheap room with the money you made at the building site, even just for a little while. You could even have come to the diner with us, if things got that bad. You know my dad would have helped you out if he could. But you didn’t. You chose to run. Don’t take it out on me just because I chose to stay.’
‘Carrie,’ he says slowly. ‘I. Didn’t. Have. Any. Other. Choice.’ Every word is a bullet, an accusation.
‘I had people here, Hale,’ I say. ‘I still do. That’s the difference between you and me. I had other people to think about, not just myself.’
‘And I didn’t?’ In that instant, it’s as though everything I thought I knew about Hale has frozen solid: the cold of his eyes seems to run through him, head to toe. His voice doesn’t have any warmth left in it. ‘Is that what you think? That I was just being selfish?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I do. Why do you think I left that night?’
‘You got into a fight with your dad. He hit you.’
He shakes his head. ‘That’s not it. He hit me a bunch of times. There wasn’t a day since I was seven years old that I didn’t have a bruise on my body somewhere thanks to him. Why do you think that night was the one that made me want to get the hell out of town? Why then?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. If I’m honest, I’ve never given it all that much thought; I was always more concerned with his absence than trying to figure out why, especially once I realised that he was never going to be around to give me answers. Maybe he just snapped. Stranger things have happened.
‘Do you want to know? Does it make a difference?’
I nod. Finally, at last, some closure. Better late than never, I guess.
‘I got in late from work,’ he says. His voice is slow and methodical, like a witness on the stand who’s been reminded to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. ‘About eight. A pipe had burst, and everyone had to pile in to help clear it up before it flooded the whole damn site. By the time I got home, Dad was already most of the way through a six pack, and it was showing. He was a real mean drunk at the best of times, but that night was one of the worst times I’ve ever seen him. He had a look in his eye, like he was jonesing for a fight and it didn’t matter who it was with. If I hadn’t come back then, I get the feeling he would have picked on the first other guy he found out there in the Grove, no matter how big he was. It was that kind of mood. But then I walked in, and suddenly he didn’t have to.’
Hale doesn’t really talk about his dad – not ever, if he can help it. Even when we were younger, even when the beatings were regular and I could see the damage he did, all the scratches and burns and bruises, he’d play it off as if it was no big deal. Just one of those things. I could never understand how passive he could be when it came to the way his father treated him.
‘I came in, and I hadn’t even set my bag down before he started giving me the usual kind of shit. Talking about how I thought I was a big man now just because I had a paycheck, and how that didn’t mean a damn thing to him. For some reason I reckoned it was a good idea to point out that it was my money and not his social security that was paying to keep the lights on so he could afford his damn beer, and after that… well, all bets were off. He stumbled over and got right up in my face—and he wasn’t a small guy, either. He was bigger than me, even then. Stronger, too, despite the drink and the fact that I’d spent the summer working construction. Once he stepped up, I knew that something was going to happen. I figured he’d try and push me around, but he didn’t. Instead, he started talking about you. My new girlfriend. The bitch who probably thought she was too good for the kind of people who lived in a trailer. People like us. Like I was anything like him.’
He winces as he says the word; even the memory of it stings him. ‘You don’t have to…’ I start, but it’s too late. He’s been sitting on this story for too long. He could no more stop it than he could turn back the tides.
‘He said… he said that maybe he’d find you, when you weren’t expecting it.’ Hale pauses, as though even speaking it out loud brings bile up into his mouth. ‘Maybe he’d see for himself just what it was that had put a spring in my step. How… good you were. Maybe that would teach me that my old man was still on top.’
Fuck.
‘I always thought I hated that son of a bitch,’ Hale says. ‘But as soon
as he threatened you like that, I realised I didn’t know what hate was until that moment. Not even close. All I know is that when he took a swing at me, I wasn’t trying to defend myself. I was trying to kill him. One way or another, he was never going to lay a finger on me again – or on you, for that matter. Not a chance.’
So that explains it. The fight that Hale got in, the one he wouldn’t talk about. He had put up with a world of suffering at the hands of his father, but I was the step too far. Threatening me had been enough to finally make Hale lose his cool.
Just like it was with Scanlon. Just like it always was. No matter what the cost, Hale was trying to protect me.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘I don’t remember much,’ he says. ‘It was sort of a red mist situation. If it had been anywhere but the Grove, I’m sure the police would have been called a dozen times over, but no one wanted to draw attention to it. By the time we were done, I had a couple of cracked ribs and a bloody nose, but he was worse off. Every piece of furniture we had was in pieces, and he was just lying there on the floor, surrounded by bits of a smashed up chair, bawling his eyes out like a damn baby. That’s when I saw him for what he was: just a bully. Just another Scanlon. I was done with that. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay there anymore, so I packed a bag, washed my hands and face clean, and went straight to you. That was the last time I saw him – the last time I ever wanted to see him.’
‘But why didn’t you say any of this? Why did you just tell me to come with you? We could have worked something out.’
‘I wasn’t thinking straight,’ he says. ‘I knew I had to get away, and you were the only thing in the world I cared about. I was already losing my home, but I couldn’t imagine losing you too. Not in the same night.’
‘You wouldn’t have…’ I begin. ‘Damn it, Hale. Why didn’t you just tell me?’
‘I didn’t know how. I always figured I’d write you once I got settled somewhere. I must have started ten, fifteen, maybe twenty letters to you in those first couple of weeks, but I didn’t know how to explain what had happened. By the time I made it to New York and figured it out, I figured you would have forgotten about me. I mean, I was bussing tables at a couple of divey all-night restaurants, and you were going to college. What could I possibly have offered you? That was if you even would’ve wanted to speak to me again after I left. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to say to you.’
Reckless: A Bad Boy Musicians Romance Page 23