Chapter 4 #3
“It’s empty and I wouldn’t bother to call the cops. If the robbery’s not in progress, they probably won’t show. Want to come up and look?”
No, I did not, but I turned off the engine and slowly got out. Lyra jumped from the back and hopped over to her brother, and he took her hand. I walked on her other side for safety as we went back to my apartment.
It was an utter mess. First I saw that everything had been pulled out of the cupboards and all my pots and pans lay scattered on the floor of the galley kitchen.
The toaster had been thrown at the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the greyish paint, and it lay mangled on the floor.
My plates and bowls were shattered into a mound of ceramic shards in the sink.
The silverware had been flung into the living room where the couch was ripped open, every cushion split and leaking foam.
My little dining table was overturned with two legs broken off; it seemed like the chairs had been raised up and then smashed down, so that they lay crumpled.
Silently, I walked through to the bedroom and bathroom, and it was worse.
My makeup had been tossed around, broken, and crushed, making streaks and smears of colors across the walls.
All my clothes were strewn on the floor and I could see that a few items had been ripped or torn.
The picture of me with my parents had been flung like the toaster, but the metal frame had stuck in the wall so that it was impaled above my bed.
I pulled it out and hugged it to my chest.
“The TV is still here,” Silas said, and I jumped in fright. “Sorry.” He spoke more quietly as he and Lyra stepped over a pile of clothes to join me. “They smashed it rather than take it, but it’s not worth much. Can you tell if anything’s gone? Did you have anything of value?”
“Not really.” I had turned so they wouldn’t see me crying, but he must have heard it in my voice because he put his hand on my shoulder.
“This fucking sucks,” he said, and to my horror, Lyra repeated that phrase exactly.
“Oh, no,” I said, and I wiped off my cheeks on a shirt I picked up from the floor.
“This is bad but we won’t use that language.
We’ll clean up and keep going. I mean, I’ll clean up and keep going.
Y’all don’t have to do it.” In my current state, I was letting my Kentucky accent emerge, and I had learned in law school to keep that in. Neutral, indeterminate speech was best.
“We’re going to stay and help,” he told me, and Lyra started to protest. “You can for a while and then read your book,” he said to her.
“Do you think it’s safe?” I asked. The door was off the hinges and there was no way to keep anyone out—of course, the door hadn’t done that even when it had been locked.
“I think the person accomplished his purpose,” he said. “We should be fine.”
“Silas won’t let anyone hurt me,” Lyra announced again, and I gave in. I didn’t want them to be in danger but I sure didn’t want to be alone, either.
“You were right,” he mentioned about half an hour later, as he slid my torn mattress back onto its bent frame. “You said you don’t have much stuff, and you really don’t.”
“And as far as I can tell, now that it’s neater, none of it’s gone,” I said. “Do you think that Dax…” I glanced at his sister, because somehow I felt unwilling to impugn my ex within her hearing. She didn’t know anything bad about him yet.
“I don’t think that wet washcloth has the strength to do this on his own,” Silas answered. “I bet that he sent some friends. Do you know your neighbors?”
“There’s only one other tenant on this floor and when I moved in and said hello, she cursed me.
A real curse, like she was trying to hex me and not just using bad language,” I explained.
“She must have heard this going on but she wouldn’t have intervened.
The guys who live below this unit have huge parties every Saturday night.
The base would sometimes shake Dax’s leopard picture off the wall, so they probably wouldn’t have noticed any commotion up here. ”
“Yeah, this is a great place for you.” He snorted. “Good thing you’re done.”
“What?”
“You can’t stay,” he said, speaking slowly. “There’s no door.”
“The landlord can fix it.”
“Do you mean the landlord who hasn’t fixed the elevator in five years?” he asked, and yes, that was the same person. “Nah, this is dumb.”
“It’s dumb,” Lyra agreed.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I sounded just like my mother. “Please don’t speak to me that way. But you’re right that I can’t stay here until the landlord makes some repairs. And I probably won’t want to stay here after that,” I acknowledged further.
“Great. Lyra, let’s pack.” The little girl nodded like she was on it, but then she shrugged. I would have bet that she’d never needed to fill up a suitcase herself and had no idea where to start.
And, by the way, the two of them weren’t going to start on anything. “Excuse me,” I repeated. “No one needs to pack for me. I can do it.”
“We won’t leave you here alone,” Silas said, and I saw Lyra shrug again, as if maybe she was ready to leave me exactly like that. “You can come to…” He looked over at his sister. “Ly, can you go into the bathroom for a sec?”
“I don’t have to pee.”
“I need to talk to Camille without you hearing me,” he explained, and she obviously wasn’t happy but she did stomp her way to the bathroom. I noticed that she didn’t totally close the door.
So did her brother, because he took my arm and directed me into the other room, where we stood next to the shredded couch. “I have another idea. It’s a good one so don’t say ‘excuse me’ until I get it all out.” He waited for acknowledgement and I nodded. “Ok, you should come live with us.”
I didn’t say anything, but my face must have expressed my skepticism.
“Yeah, it would be good and it would work out for both of us. I need the money,” he told me.
“You would pay me rent and you could drive to the grocery store, because getting there and back is a real pain in the ass. We live in a great neighborhood, safe and with mostly nice people because my grandma chose well. You’d be around Lyra all the time so she could pick up more good shit from you, like how she shouldn’t be swearing.
And I would be there in case your spaghettini-dick ex-boyfriend and his pissy little posse tried to stir up more crap.
There’s no way in hell that he’d come over and do this to my house,” he said, looking at the trash bags that held my ruined possessions.
Then he turned back to me. “Ok, now you can say ‘excuse me.’”
I had something else to tell him. “I can’t live with you and Lyra.
It’s a terrible idea.” But I suddenly thought of the movies I liked so much, the ones I had watched on the TV that now had several jagged holes in the black screen.
This scenario, with the female protagonist moving in with the leading man, could have been how the two of them got together, and then—
I had started shaking my head, both at his idea and at my own thoughts.
My life wasn’t a movie. In the hundreds of hours that I’d watched, I didn’t remember ever seeing the character of an angry younger sibling, and I also didn’t recall any subplots that included an ex-boyfriend who wrote “fuck you” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.
I had wiped that off before Lyra saw it, because she was a good reader and didn’t need to get any ideas about additional ways to cuss.
Silas didn’t seem to hear my objection. “I’m actually impressed by myself,” he mentioned.
“I dropped out of ninth grade but maybe I should have stuck around there longer. This is a great plan and I’ve come up with a few of them in the last twenty-four hours.
” He smirked in a way that did look proud.
“What the hell is taking so long?” Lyra yelled from the bathroom, and he lost the smile.
“We’ll need a written agreement,” he said. “You have any paper?”
“Silas, think this through. Think about having a tenant in your home, a stranger around your sister.” And I thought about living in his pretty house with the two of them, about sharing a kitchen, about trying to help her, about hearing his heavy footsteps, and about the lack of a lock on the bedroom door. “That won’t work.”
“I wouldn’t charge you much so you’d save money on rent,” he noted.
“All of your furniture is destroyed but I have some, so you won’t have to buy new crap for yourself.
And you’d be helping a little girl who needs you while staying safe from your ex-boyfriend, who’s a card-carrying member of the International Society of Jackoffs.
Judging from what he did to this apartment, he might even be the president. ”
“Guys? What the hell?” Lyra called again, and I winced. Of course, I was still willing to be a mentor, but it was ridiculous to think that living with them could be a solution.
“Maybe I said it wrong before,” Silas told me. “I think you have a real problem with Dax Miststuck. The shit he did here isn’t the same thing as writing a stupid song and it’s not the same as him telling everyone that his ex is on medication that makes her have sex with strangers.”
“What?” I gasped.
“This is serious,” he told me. He picked up one of the couch cushions and shook it so that foam wafted to the floor. “This is violent.”
“Silas!” his sister yelled. “I’m coming out to be with you.”
I looked at him and he looked back, and I got ready to tell him “no.” No, I would say, no but thank you for the offer of protection.
No, that won’t work and I need to leave now to get a hotel room so I can remove this dress and then I’ll need to find someone with a burn barrel to take care of it, my bra, and these shoes.
Good luck with your sister, I would tell him, because I understood all too well how hard it was for a little girl in her position.
But I could mentor her from afar. Dax seemed to be getting violent—maybe, if he had been the one to do this to my apartment—but I would probably be fine.
No. No, and that was final.