Thursday, January 6th
Ronan
It’s the dead of night when I’m awoken by taps on my bedroom window. A quick look at the digital alarm clock that’s adorned my bedside table since I was ten years old tells me it’s close to one in the morning. I groggily roll out of bed before wandering over to the window.
I open my window and stick out my head just in time to get a pebble to the forehead.
Miranda busts up laughing. “Oh my god, Rony,” she squeals as quietly as possible. My grandparents’ bedroom window is right underneath mine. “I’m so sorry,” she wheezes, doubling over.
“Yeah, you sound like you’ve never been sorrier in your life,” I say, rubbing my forehead.
“I didn’t think you heard me, so I thought I’d throw another rock,” she breathes through her laughs. “Will you… will you just come down, please?”
“Randi, it’s one in the morning.” My breath comes out foggy against the freezing air and I have goosebumps all over my bare upper body.
“Since when has that ever stopped you?” She’s alluding to the last time I was in Montana when this was exactly what we’d do. She’d drop by randomly in the middle of the night and I’d often end up sneaking out with her to do god knows what. “Come on, for old time’s sake,” she goads, squinting up at me.
I sigh, duck back into my room, and shut the window. I’m dressed in less than five minutes and slowly creep downstairs where I pull on my jacket and boots, then quietly slip out of the door.
I find Miranda where I’d always find her after she woke me—sitting in her Chevy parked by the barn—far enough from the house that my grandparents don’t hear her rolling up—singing along to some country song—and I slide into the passenger seat, slamming the heavy truck door closed behind me.
I look at her expectantly. “Where to?”
She just grins and shifts the truck into drive. We don’t travel far—maybe ten minutes from my grandparents’ ranch—and I recognize the spot immediately. She shuts off the ignition and turns to me, her eyes glinting with their usual mischievousness.
I chuckle quietly. “You’re so proud of yourself right now, aren’t you?”
“Kind of,” she says. “So, you remember this place?”
Of course I remember it. I’ve been to this lake many times, both with and without Miranda. It’s one of my favorite spots in this world. It’s nestled amongst a patch of dense woods, and I’ve ridden here to escape the house when I was younger. I’d sneak away and hide here when I needed some time to think or wanted to do things I knew I’d get in trouble for.
“How could I forget this spot,” I say, and give her a half smile.
“It’s where I took your virginity,” Miranda says with a playful grin.
“I remember,” I chuckle. It happened just days after I turned fourteen when Miranda and I were hanging out by the lake one afternoon. I didn’t see it coming, but I obviously didn’t say “no” when she just… took matters into her own hands.
“You were so innocent, Rony,” she says. “And so, so bad at it.” She starts to laugh.
I shrug. “Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience at fourteen.”
“That’s an understatement,” she says, gasping for air as she holds her sides, in stitches from laughing so hard. “But hey, you learned really quickly.” She stops laughing, her eyes focused on me, pupils widening as she draws her bottom lip between her teeth. Oh shit, I recognize that look. “And you got really good, really fast.”
She puts her hand on my knee, gliding it up my thigh an inch, and I tense. I have a pretty good idea what Miranda’s end game is tonight. After all, this is how it usually went the last time we were together—she’d wake me, then we’d either sneak out or she’d climb in through my window, and we’d inevitably have sex.
“God, I still remember that one time we did it in your grandparents’ barn after the fall festival…” She blushes, giving my leg a little squeeze.
That’s a new one for me. Miranda doesn’t blush, and the pink hue on her cheeks, illuminated by the light of the truck cabin, makes my heart ache painfully for the girl who blushes so easily, so perfectly, and who’s all the way back in New York. I have to stop this before Miranda gets any ideas. Things are different now.
I move Miranda’s hand off my leg and she studies me, analyzing my face. “Sorry, Randi, but…” I want to let her down easy. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but she needs to understand that there’s not a chance we’ll hook up again.
She nods knowingly. “There’s a girl… and you’re in love with her,” she states rather than questions.
“Very much,” I say, holding Miranda’s gaze.
She nods again, a flicker of disappointment mixed with embarrassment crossing her face. “Sorry, Rony, I didn’t mean to overstep. If I had known, I wouldn’t have—”
I hold up my hand. “It’s fine. You couldn’t have known.”
“Tell me about her. Is she here?”
“No, she’s at home, in New York,” I say with a heavy heart.
“How long have you two been together?”
“Just over seven months, but a lot of that time I’ve… not really been there,” I say, acutely aware of how much I miss Cat.
“When did your family move back to Montana?” Miranda asks, her entire body turned toward me, her left elbow resting on the steering wheel while her right leg is hitched onto the leather bench seat.
“Just me,” I say. “A little over two months ago.”
“So, it’s true,” she says, a crease on her brow as she takes me in. “I’ve been hearing things about your mom… How bad did it get?”
I once again wonder who she’s been hearing these things from, who’s even talking about this stuff. I don’t think my grandparents are out and about telling everyone who’s willing to listen about the abuse I’ve endured. It’s a small town, though, and I’m not sure my aunt isn’t sharing some things with a close friend or two who might be eager to spread some juicy gossip, even if sworn to secrecy. People in small communities tend to latch on to drama, especially if it isn’t theirs.
I don’t answer right away, feeling Miranda’s gaze bore into my head. She’s the only one who knew, and I mean really knew, what my life was like with my mom.
“Bad,” I say after a few seconds of heavy silence.
“How bad, Rony?” She shifts her body forward, closing the distance between us as she looks intently into my eyes.
I tense, my walls going up like they do each time anyone tries to get me to open up about what my mom has done to me, how painful—literally and figuratively—my life has been until only recently. “Randi, I… I don’t—”
“It’s okay,” she says quickly, readjusting in her seat. “I know you. I know you don’t want to talk about it.”
“How about you?” I ask into the quiet of the truck. “How are things with you? I thought you had left town?”
“Your grandma told you that, huh?”
I nod sheepishly.
“She never liked me much,” Miranda says ruefully. “But yeah, I left a few months after you moved back to New York, right after my eighteenth birthday. I couldn’t stand it here anymore. You were gone and my dad was still a dick, so I just up and left. Packed my bags and hit the road.”
“What have you been doing?”
I admit, I’m envious that Miranda got away from her abusive, alcoholic asshole of a father. I don’t think he ever hit her like my mother did me, but that doesn’t mean Miranda didn’t suffer just as much as I did.
Miranda’s dad was the pastor of my grandparents’ church, until his parish got wind of his alcoholism and gently forced him out before replacing him with a younger, “cleaner” pastor.
Miranda’s dad started drinking heavily when she was only twelve and her mother died of an aggressive form of cancer. Things only got worse for Miranda from then on. Being the daughter of a pastor came with certain expectations for Miranda, who had always bucked authority. It didn’t help that, in order to enforce his beliefs and way of thinking, Miranda’s dad would emotionally abuse her—calling her names, telling her that, at the rate she was going, she’d get pregnant out of wedlock, that she was no good, and pretty much all the things I heard on a daily basis from my own mother.
The real difference between Miranda and me, though, is that her father’s abuse made her more rebellious, whereas I tried harder and harder to be the perfect son. Neither approach worked.
“Oh, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” she says, and bumps her knee against mine. “I’ve just been driving, hooking up with random bands to sing, doing open mics, auditioning whenever I get the chance. Still trying to break into music.”
“How do you survive, though?” I ask. “Hooking up with bands and playing open mics can’t make you that much.”
She shrugs. “Odd jobs here and there.” She forces a smile when I look at her doubtfully. “Don’t ask, Rony. You don’t want to know.”
A big part of me doesn’t want to let it go. Miranda has always been a pretty girl, and I worry about what exactly it is she does to earn enough money to get by. But the look on her face tells me not to push it, so I don’t.
“And now you’re back,” I say.
“For now. You know, just here to save you from yourself.”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
She laughs at me. “I got back to Montana right before Christmas. Just checking in on my dad to see how he’s doing.”
“And how’s he doing?” I ask, already guessing her answer.
“The same. I can tell he’s drinking heavily again, even though he says he’s not. I’m going to see if I can get him to go to AA or maybe rehab. I don’t know.” She shakes her head, her shoulders heavy.
“Then what?”
“And then I’ll head back out and keep chasing my dreams of being a fancy-pants singer,” she says, shimmying in her seat, smiling at me. “So, this girl of yours, what’s her name?”
My heart squeezes in my chest. “Cat.” I smile as I say her name. It’s almost as though I can taste her on my tongue.
“As in Catherine?”
I chuckle because everyone asks this question. I know it annoys the crap out of Cat who, again and again, is forced to explain that her parents indeed named her after the animal. “No, just Cat. Like the feline.” I close my eyes, picturing her beautiful face.
“You got a photo of her?”
I frown. “On my phone, which I don’t have access to.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“My grandparents took it away from me when I got here.”
“Okay, Rony, you’re obviously holding back. What the hell is going on?”
“Randi, it’s… Fuck…” I groan and rake my hands across my face and through my hair. I know she’ll just keep pushing this if I don’t give her a real answer. It’s exactly how she got me to come clean about my mom hitting me in the first place. She just kept prodding, picking up on my hesitation, the little inconsistencies and red flags. And so, eventually, she got it out of me.
“Rony, how bad did it get with your mom?” she asks softly, her hand on my forearm.
I turn my head toward her, pressing my lips together as I contemplate how to respond without having to venture too far down that dark, scary rabbit hole. I’m still not in a place to deep-dive into my past, not even with my therapist.
“Four months ago she… I was in a coma for almost a week.”
Her mouth falls open in shock. “Are you for real?” Her eyes are wide before they narrow slightly. She lightly traces her index finger under my left eye. “Did she give you that scar?”
I nod. “I was in the hospital for over a month, and when I came home I… I struggled. A lot. So my dad sent me here. And as part of my recovery, I guess, I don’t really get to talk on the phone. There’s a method to the madness… or so I’m told.” I lower my head. I don’t expect her to understand.
“You struggled? Mentally? Like, you thought of hurting yourself?” she asks, not mincing words.
I just nod, unwilling to give life to my darkest thoughts now that I feel like I’m slowly coming up for air.
Miranda chews the inside of her cheek as she studies me, a warm empathy reflected in her blue eyes. “So, do you get to talk to your feline at all then?” she asks with a small smirk.
“Yeah, well, I finally got permission to call her a couple of weeks ago, but I’m only allowed to talk on the phone on Sundays for an hour.”
“Well, that’s fucking bullshit.” She lifts her hips off the seat and pulls her phone out of her back pocket. “Here, call her!” She holds her phone out to me.
“What?”
“Call her, Rony. Right now!”
“I can’t call her right now, it’s… almost two in the morning,” I say. “And almost four a.m. in New York.”
“So?” she says. “Don’t you want to hear her voice?”
“Of course I want to hear her voice, but—”
“But what, Rony? Are you afraid of breaking the rules again? You know I’ve never cared about that.”
“I’m well aware,” I say dryly and bite my bottom lip, my fingers itching to take her phone and dial Cat’s number. Even if she doesn’t answer, I could let it ring until her voicemail answers, and I would get to hear her beautiful voice for a few seconds; I could tell her that she’s constantly on my mind, that my soul aches for her not only when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep, too.
Finally I snatch the phone from Miranda’s hand, and she grins victoriously. She leans back in her seat and crosses her arms behind her head as I dial Cat’s number, which, of course, I know like the back of my hand. But she pouts when I climb out of the truck cab and shove the door shut behind me.
It’s fucking freezing, and I shrug my shoulders upward as the phone rings and rings.
“Hey, sorry, you missed me. But obviously you’ve done this before, so you know what to do. And if you don’t, well, figure it out,” Cat’s voicemail answers, and I smile at her sass. I almost hang up at the beep just so I can redial her number and listen to her voice again, but I take a deep breath instead and start talking.
“Hi baby, sorry to call you so late or… early in the middle of the freaking week, but I had the opportunity to leave you a quick message and I didn’t want to pass it up. I just wanted to tell you that… I miss you so much, it hurts. I can’t stop thinking about you, and I’m counting the minutes until Sunday. I love you so much, Cat. God, I fucking love you. I have to go. I’ll talk to you soon, baby. Have a good day at school. Tell everyone I said hi. I love you. Bye,” I ramble and hang up the phone.
I stand for a second, still contemplating calling her again, listening to her message once more, but I decide against it because I really don’t want to wake Cat. So I open the creaky truck door, clamber back into the warm cabin, and hand Miranda her phone back.
She lifts her hips to replace her phone in the back pocket of her jeans. “Did you pour your heart out?”
“As much as you can in ten seconds, I guess.” I cup my hands in front of my mouth and blow, letting my warm breath thaw my already-frozen fingers. God damn these Montana winter nights. “I should get back to the ranch.” I glance at Miranda. “My grandfather is going to walk into my room to ‘wake me’”—I make air quotes around the words—“in an hour. I should at least pretend to be asleep when he walks in.”
“Always the good boy,” Miranda chuckles, but nonetheless obliges.
“I’m playing a set at Sterling’s on Saturday,” Miranda says after rolling up quietly to the barn. “Stop by if you can manage to get away.” She leans across the bench seat and kisses me softly on the cheek. “See you around, Rony.”
“See you around, Randi,” I say, get out of the truck, and trudge the fifty yards through the snow back to the house.