Chapter 25 Heart Strings
TWENTY-FIVE
Heart Strings
Eliza Holloway is a bookworm who reads far beyond her grade level.
She has an iPad but only ever uses it for the Kindle app.
If we let her, she would stare at the screen for hours through her blue-light glasses, swinging back and forth on my porch swing, drinking root beer through a straw.
She also enjoys talking to me about art.
She has a particular interest in Renaissance Italy because she’s read The Da Vinci Code.
She makes me show her every work of art described in the book.
It’s fun to watch her frowning at a picture in one of my art books as though the image is all wrong.
“That’s not what I expected at all, Archer,” she’ll say.
Her younger sister Kate is a sweetheart with a mess of bushy brown hair she never brushes and a rotating gap between her teeth.
She’s also a sports fan. She never complains about the amount of baseball we watch.
That could just be because of how much she likes to snuggle, though.
There seems to be no time limit for how long she’ll curl contentedly up next to someone on a couch.
She knows exactly how to fit in the most comfortable places.
Lucky for me, Joey doesn’t seem to mind me, or the chain West and I now wear, shackling us together at the ankles.
She says she dated an identical twin before, and we act more or less like the twins did.
I take this as a compliment, even though it probably hints at an unhealthy attachment.
Unfortunately, it also reminds me of what Tristan once said about his relationship with Connor. “You can think of us like twins.”
West makes absolutely no apologies for me, the fifth wheel, so in that respect, Joey never really has a choice. And she claims to like me. She says I remind her of a Dickens character.
My point is, I have a life now. One that gets schedule-y and complicated. Sometimes I pick the girls up from school, and sometimes Joey or West run late coming home. On the day of the appointment Connor and I have with his therapist, they both run late.
I try calling Rivershore, but I keep getting a fucking fax machine. I arrive about fifteen minutes before visiting hours end. When Connor comes down to see me, one look at his face tells me I should have put the girls in the car and brought them with me.
“Connor, I’m so sorry—I had a babysitting crisis.”
He shrugs and sits down on the nearest couch.
I sit next to him and put my arm around his shoulders. Where my personal boundaries went, I have no idea, but I want to blame Kate.
Connor leans against me, not minding the arm. His face is splotchy from crying, his eyes puffy and red.
“I thought…” he starts but doesn’t finish. He shakes his head again and wipes the new tears away.
“I tried calling, but I couldn’t get through. Seriously. I’m really sorry.”
He rests his head on my chest like it’s the heaviest weight, and I run my hand over his short hair. “Babysitting crisis?” he asks.
“Right. West has this girlfriend with two little girls. I’ve gotten…involved.”
“That’s really cute,” he says.
“It’s something to do.” Other than hate myself and curse my inability to turn back time.
“You’re not still working?”
“No, I am, but I took a lighter class load this semester.”
“Because of what happened?” he asks.
I sigh. “I guess.” I’m not sure how much I want to heap on Connor in terms of the ways I’m suffering.
Deep down, I know I’ll survive it, even if some days suck much worse than others.
“But it’s been good. The girls are sweet.
They’re fun.” Life-affirming is the word I want to use, but talk of life and death feels like another bad idea.
“Can I meet them?” he asks.
“If you want. They’d like you.”
“How do you figure?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. Connor’s mysterious, though, and Eliza, especially, loves a mystery.
We’re quiet for a few minutes, where I keep rubbing his head, and he keeps his ear pressed to my heart.
It’s comfortable in that homecoming way.
In that way it was when he fit himself to me in the fever dream of flu and soft violet watercolor paint.
“Do you want to talk without the therapist?” I finally ask.
He doesn’t say yes or no. He just starts talking. I don’t even have time to prepare myself.
“I have this tendency to make excuses for her. Like she must have been really incredibly unhappy or hurt to do the things she did.”
I’m glad I let my own therapist talk me into taking anxiety medicine. A smooth calm filters through me just in time. It isn’t natural, but it’s good enough. It puts a damper on the dread. And when I say dread, I mean—
DREAD.
“But he says I can’t always let myself do that.
He says it’s helpful in terms of moving on, but that I need to process through my own feelings about it first. I don’t know if you had this same experience or something like it, but for me, she was like an emotional vampire.
Like stirring up emotions—and it didn’t matter whether they were good or bad—only to make herself feel something.
She wanted the bad ones more, I think. But sometimes to get to the really bad ones, she had to create good ones first.”
I can’t look at him. I don’t want to hear any of this.
My therapist and I have barely scratched the surface of my family history, and this is like getting shoved into the deep end.
What he’s saying reminds me of that relieved plunge into sleep and then a pillow over my face.
Her laughter when I’d struggle and push her away.
The evil I felt radiating off her when the blanket burned, and I stared at it, and she stared at me, waiting for me to cry. Or to go into the fire after it.
Because I’m still unwilling to tell him what happened to me, I don’t have any right to ask him for details. I just say, “I know what you mean.”
He goes on. “I went back and forth a lot growing up—over whether I loved you or hated you. Whether I missed you or whether I wished you’d stay gone.
She told me you wanted nothing to do with me.
And then, once she was done scaring the shit out of me about you, she liked to tell me about how talented you were.
How tall and strong and handsome. And what the hell would you want with a scrawny little limp-wrist like me.
And I think you and I both know limp-wrist wasn’t the word she always used. ”
I shift, needing him off me so I can look at him. “That wasn’t a thing for me. That was never a thing I thought.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t when you came home. When you saw me all helpless and broken in the hospital. When you met Tristan. I figured you’d probably know immediately he was gay and I was gay, and I didn’t want you to think that made me weak.”
“You survived,” I remind him. “And anyway, I knew you were probably gay way before that.”
“Yeah?”
I nod.
“And?” he asks. “Is that why you stayed away?”
I scoff at that. “Of course not.”
“Then why did you?”
“They kept me away from you.”
“How?”
I shift, trying to make peace with this conversation—trying not to run from it or resist it. “Well, by sending me out of state for one. And then when I was home in the summers, there was like—an incentive system.”
He frowns. “What kind of incentive?”
“Money. Mom gave me five hundred bucks a week to keep me out of the house. She told me to stay away from you. She told me that from the first time I saw you. She never stopped telling me that.”
Connor blinks his dark eyes, a crease forming between them. “Did you ask why?”
“I didn’t have to. I figured she didn’t want me trying to turn you against her, and to be honest…” Fuck. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this without a professional.
“What?”
I take a deep breath. “You say you went back and forth between missing me and wanting me gone. I went back and forth between wanting to know you and resenting you. It was complicated, and by then I was just enough of an asshole to want the money more than I wanted to bother fighting her about it.”
“She pitted us against each other,” Connor says.
“She tried. But it ended up I didn’t resent you.
That last summer, I was pretty worried about leaving you with her, actually.
My head was starting to clear, and I was starting to see a life beyond that place—beyond her influence.
” I run a hand through my hair and sigh. “Also, she stopped paying me.”
“Oh.”
I feel the need to defend that particular choice. It’s one I haven’t thought about in a long time. “Every time I saw you, you seemed okay.”
“Tristan was always with me when you saw me.”
The mention of his name is like salt in a raw wound on my heart. I wince, still only remembering seeing Tristan with Connor that one day in the pool. “At least she let you have that.”
“During the day she did,” he mutters.
I look at him sharply. “What does that mean?”
Softly, he replies, “He didn’t get to spend the night.”
I need to talk about something else. Suddenly the knife is too close to the bone. “Anyway, I saw it as all or nothing. If I couldn’t get you out of there, then I had to believe you were okay. And there was no way I could get you out.”
“I understand,” he says quietly. “I mean, I didn’t at the time, but once I was living with you, I got it.
I was eighteen then, and fucked up in my own way, and I remember you in that hospital room telling me about how you were eighteen at the time, and what the fuck else were you supposed to do—that you were only thinking about yourself more or less, but I finally realized there would have been consequences to kidnapping a twelve-year old.
And now, in hindsight, I have to recognize you were at least as fucked up as I was.
Even if you had wanted to take me to Seattle with you, your hands were tied. ”