Chapter 30 #2
“Come here, babe.” I put my hand to the back of her head and pull her to me.
I press her so tightly, it’s like I wanted to merge with her so that she would take away the pain I’m feeling right now.
As if she hadn’t been the one hit, but me.
For a while, we just lie there like that, sadness in every breath, sadness in our hearts.
Then she says, “That wasn’t the worst though. Not the reason I left.”
“Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me everything.”
Her breath trembles at the slope of my neck. I don’t think she wants to say it, and at the same time I can tell she wants to at all costs. She finally wants to be rid of it, to tear down a wall that should have disappeared a long time ago.
I know a thing or two about those kinds of walls. They’re ugly. They should be forbidden.
“Last year, right before Skate America, I… I was ready. I intended to do everything right, not to make him mad, to finally make it. To participate. I did everything he liked. It made me sick, he made me sick, but I did it anyway. Everything went well. We were in the car, on the way to the championships, and I thought I’d finally managed.
Then he stopped in the trailer park. I knew that something was about to happen when he asked me to get out of the car.
I knew it, but I did it anyway. The cheap green fence made that sound when the wind blew against it.
I can hear it as if it was yesterday. That sound tore at my guts, and I knew that the best thing for me to do would be to stay put.
To not go inside, into the trailer park.
But Ivan pulled me. My sneakers stumbled past the junkies I still remembered from my childhood.
And then there we were in front of my old house.
Our trailer. Just the same as ever. Just three hubcaps.
Fuck the system over the door. In pink spray paint.
A can of Bud Light on the plastic table in the front yard.
He said, Go inside. I didn’t want to, but he pushed me. Go inside, Paisley. Go inside.”
“Did you?”
She nods. Her temples rub against my hoodie.
“And?”
“My mom was lying on the bed. A picture of me between her fingers. Bruises in the crook of her arm. Track marks. Her eyes were open. She was dead. Ivan knew it. He was in contact with her, drove out there every now and then. Brought her money after I’d begged him.
She was my mother, you know? Despite everything I always wanted her to be okay.
Ivan, he… He knew that she was dead, and he wanted me to see it. ”
“God.” My voice breaks. “Paisley, my God.”
My head is empty. I’m cold, but I want to be warm.
I want to warm her heart and kill these demons, want to protect her, make her feel safe.
I want to be strong, but right now I feel like the weakest deer in the woods.
When it comes to her, I’m weak. When it comes to her, I’m vulnerable.
And, fuck, her pain is my pain. Her pain hurts me so much, shit, I can hardly breathe.
“Paisley…”
“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay. I’m here now. Aspen is healing me. Aspen… You are Aspen, Knox. And I need you. I’ve resisted this for far too long.”
I bury my nose in her hair and breathe the fresh apple smell in deep.
Paisley traces the Abercrombie deer on my hoodie and asks, “What was she like? Your mom?”
I had expected the question to tear me apart.
Just like every memory of my mother tears me apart.
But it didn’t. Instead, I feel a kind of happiness thinking about Mom’s bright laugh and the way she’d always toss her light wavy hair over her shoulders just before she came to me with some crazy idea or another.
Eating hamburgers late at night. Tickle attacks against my sleeping dad.
Cotton candy before a hockey match. Drawing lipstick reindeer on the windows.
“She was like you,” I say. “Competitive. Strong. She knew what she wanted. Quick-witted. Grounded. She could always make me laugh, no matter how bad I felt. And she was…” My voice dries up midsentence. I have to try a second time, but this time it works. “She was a figure skater at iSkate.”
“I’m sure I would have liked her.”
I kiss Paisley’s temple. “You would have. And she’d have loved you.”
“That’s why you couldn’t stand me,” she murmurs. “I reminded you of her.”
The whole time I’ve thought how ill it is that Paisley reminds me of my mom and that I felt attracted to her all the same. But now that Paisley says it out loud, it doesn’t sound so sick. It sounds sad. And understandable.
“Yeah,” I say. “Among other things.” I take a deep breath.
And then I say something that has been weighing me down for years but that no one outside of Dad, Wyatt, and me know.
“She died out on the ice. On Silver Lake. It all happened so quick. She wanted to practice a jump, slipped, and landed on her head. There was blood everywhere. I wanted to help her but didn’t know how.
I took off my jacket and tried to stop the bleeding because I thought she would open her eyes, would say something, something like she always did, you know, something like: Knox, did you polish off my peanut butter?
She’d do it, with her crooked grin, I was so sure of it.
But she didn’t say a word. Didn’t say a single word.
The last thing I heard from her was a cry. Then she was dead. I was twelve.”
Paisley stiffens. I can hear her catch her breath before slowly letting it back out. Her hand wanders across my chest and up to my face. She runs her fingertips along the edge of my jaw. “That’s why you stopped playing hockey,” she whispers. “The memories are torture.”
“The memories. Her cry. What I felt at that moment…it’s never gone away. It’s been with me for eleven years.”
“Knox…” Her voice breaks. Her fingernails dig into my skin.
It burns a little, but it feels good. Especially as, at the moment, I feel numb, and it reminds me that I can still feel.
“Don’t let that happen. Don’t let the worst memories of your mom become the only ones.
I am positive she wouldn’t have wanted that.
I am positive she would tell you to remember the beautiful moments.
The peanut-butter moments. The happy moments.
All those laughing-so-hard-my-stomach-hurts moments.
Full of love. I didn’t know her, but I know you, and you have her heart, so I think that’s what she would have wanted. To see you happy, not suffering.”
I exhale in one go, as I am afraid of having to cry.
My chin has already started with that suspicious tremble, and when that happens, it’s not long before I fall.
And I don’t think Paisley would be able to catch me, because, typically, I don’t fall that slowly.
It’s quick and deep. I don’t want it to happen, but then it does because I’m just too weak not to when we’re talking about Mom.
The tears come quick. Raging waves, not soft and not loud.
My heart finds the sound pleasant. It snuggles into the melody of my grief and begins to come together, a little bit more every time I give space to my feelings.
And at the moment, with even greater impact, because Paisley is here, and Paisley is more.
She lets me cry. She holds me and I can tell from her irregular breaths that she’s crying, too.
The sun rises. The white sky turns a pink pastel. Holding onto each other. Crying next to each other. Crying silently.
Mute tears. The loudest pain.