35. Chapter Thirty-Five #2
Two words, and something goes through the middle of me like a skate blade through fresh ice, silent, all the way to the bottom.
Because I do trust her. I don't know when that happened.
I don't know the day. There wasn't a moment.
There was that first Hawthorne House party my freshman year and then a hundred small nothings after it, and at some point, that trust grew.
It happened without my permission, and now I'm here.
I get up. The four feet take about a second, and it costs me more than anything I've done all week. The mattress gives when I sit. My weight tips the bed toward me, and she has to put a hand down to stay where she is, and then she shifts back on the mattress, and turns, and puts her spine against mine. I’m confused, but I don’t move.
We’re shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I feel the small hard line of her vertebrae fitting into the channel of my spine.
Her weight settles until we're holding each other up and neither of us can see each other.
"There," she whispers to the wall in front of her. "Now you're not looking at me. You're just talking."
I don't know what to do. I sit there in the dark with Penelope’s back against mine, and I can't get a full breath in, and the reason I can't is that she's warm. Every time she breathes, I feel her back move against mine, and I forget everything else. I try to slow my heart down, try to stop the thoughts racing through my head –– the ones that are getting too excited, too nervous, too scared. My feet are flat on the ground like I’m ready to run at any given moment.
In for four. Hold. Out for six. It doesn't work. My heart’s going like something's chasing it, high and fast up under my collarbones and into my throat, and there's no way out. I put both hands on my knees and press down. Reste tranquille.
"I'll go first," she says. I feel the shape of the words in her ribs a half second before I hear them, and I'll never be able to explain what that does to me.
“I spent all summer being what my mother wanted. I was in Chicago, then two weeks in Portugal. Every dinner, every room, every moment was fake.”
I don't say anything. I've got nothing that would help.
"She called yesterday to tell me she's ashamed of me."
Her back goes stiff against mine, the kind you'd never see if you were looking at her from the front, and I get all of it because there's nowhere for it to hide.
"Not in those words. She'd never use those words." Her hands do something in her lap — I feel the shift of it through her shoulders. "That's why I'm not going home for Christmas."
She stops.
And I sit there with her spine against mine and there’s an enormous, useless need to turn around and look at her.
But I don’t. I've been trying to work out what's happening in my chest since she sat down behind me, and that's it.
It's so simple it's stupid: I want to turn around.
I want to see her face while she says it.
I want to know whether her eyes are wet or whether she's doing the thing where she squares her shoulders and makes it small so nobody has to carry it with her.
But she's sitting behind me on purpose. She's done me a kindness, and the entire time I'm sitting inside her kindness wanting to tear it down.
I stay where I am and don't turn around.
I don’t mean to let the silence go on for this long, but I’m trying to think of what she wants to know. She spoke about her mom, so I guess I can tell her about mine. It takes me a moment, but I finally say it when I feel her stop breathing.
"My mom left when I was young," I say. My voice comes out wrong. Lower than usual and flattened, like something's sitting on my chest. "I don't remember her."
Behind me, nothing. No sound, no shift.
"My dad." My thumb finds the inside seam on my jeans and starts working it, back and forth, over a thread that's already come loose from doing this.
"He used." The word comes out sanded down.
I've said it before, in offices, to people with clipboards, and it always comes out like that — one syllable, no emotion, the fact of it.
"It got bad."
Bad. Another one. Another word doing the work of the year.
I could give her the real thing. It's all there.
The apartment on Rue Sainte-Julie with the radiator that banged all night.
The sound of the front door at four in the morning and how you could tell everything you needed to know from the way it closed.
Learning at six years old to make a bowl of cereal without opening a cabinet.
How many minutes it takes a man to come up two flights of stairs and how many friends are right behind him.
"Really bad," I say.
She moves against me — a small adjustment, settling her weight back a little further into me, finally breathing again.
"The state took me at seven."
I say it to the locked bedroom door on the other side of the room.
"That one was when he broke my arm."
Her breathing stops. It's not a gasp. She doesn't make a sound. Her ribs simply stop moving against my back, and they stay stopped, and the absence of it is louder than anything she could have said.
Three seconds. Four.
Then she breathes again, careful, like she's doing it quietly, so I won't hear that she had to start again.
She doesn't turn around. She doesn't say my name in the soft voice. She doesn't reach back for my hand, and if she had, I'd have gone out the door and down the stairs.
What she does is press her spine into mine. Harder. Deliberate. All the way through, until I can feel the individual bones of her, until my own weight is coming back at me through her, and she holds it there.
I have been touched by a lot of people. Doctors. Coaches. Two nurses in Sherbrooke. A woman with a laminated badge who put a hand between my shoulder blades to move me toward a car. Josh, in the doorway of that room, with his palm heavy on the back of my neck.
Nobody has ever pushed back before.
"I went back to him," I say, and my voice has gone to pieces. "Both times. Both times they took me out, I went right back."
I turn my hands over on my knees and look at them in the dark.
"Second time I asked to."
I wait for it. The intake of breath. The why.
It's what everybody does — there's always a why, always some adult with a folder trying to get me to say the reasonable thing, and I could never make any of them understand that at nine years old, my dad was the only person on earth who I ever had. On drugs or not, he was all I had.
She doesn't ask. She just breathes against my back, in and out, steady, and after a while I notice my own breathing has gone and matched hers.
"When I was fourteen."
I stop. I haven’t told anyone this part, and I don’t know if I should start now. I remember the day like yesterday, and it haunts me in my dreams which is why I don’t like to sleep.
I start again from further back. "We were in Maine by then. There's a gas station off the highway, about ten minutes from where we were staying. One of those ones with the green sign."
I thought my heart would be racing, but instead, it’s beating slowly.
"He pulled in and told me to wait inside for him."
He didn't say it like that. He said, attends-moi à l'intérieur — wait for me inside.
He said it with his hand on the back of my headrest in a good mood.
I always think about that day, about how he was in a good mood, and I remember being glad about that.
I remember thinking it was going to be an okay day.
I've never told anyone that. It's the last thing he ever said to me, and it lives in my head in French, and it's the one piece of him I've got left that hasn't been written down in a report. I told the authorities that I didn’t know who brought me there, that one of his friends dropped me off and told me to wait for him.
"I waited a long time," I admit, even though once Mike pulled out, I knew what he was doing. He was running. He was leaving Maine. He blamed me for not being able to return to Canada my entire life, and he was done with me. It didn’t make it hurt any less.
I stop talking. When I hear it out loud, I hear how pathetic it sounds, how I should’ve put the pieces together sooner.
I can feel the excuses for Mike stacked up in my throat.
How I waited for him, even though I knew in my gut that he was never coming back.
The guy behind the counter let me stand there for three hours before he picked up the phone.
I asked him for more time, but he didn’t give it to me.
He bought me a bag of chips and let me sit out front in the cold until the cops came.
I've never said any of that out loud. Not to the police. Not to the woman with the folder. Not to Josh, not once in four years I’d been with him.
He never asked, and I appreciated him and Mary for that in a way I have also never said.
I find out, sitting on the edge of my bed with Penelope holding my back up, that I can't say it now either. The words don’t come.
She doesn’t say anything for a while. Her back rises and falls against mine, and I lean into it. Her warmth and silence is the only thing keeping me together right now.
"After that it was foster homes," I say when I can get my throat open again. "A lot of them."
I press the heels of my hands together between my knees until it hurts.
"Nobody keeps you at fourteen."
I hear her swallow.
"You learn to stop unpacking."
I could explain it — about the duffel bag under the bed instead of in the closet, about how you keep the toothbrush in the front pocket, so it takes ninety seconds instead of five minutes, about how the first thing you do in a new room is find the nearest safest exit. I don’t explain it.
I say, "Then there was Josh."
The name comes out rougher than the rest of it. I hear it go and I don't fight it.
"Him and Mary. They kept me."
My eyes are stinging.