Chapter 10
Makhi
Ilift my head off the dining table.
Blinking blearily around me, I struggle to identify what woke me.
When the kitchen stays silent, I reach for the bottle of whiskey on the table in front of me, top off my glass, and knock it back.
“Drinking won’t fix anything,” a Southern drawl comes from the doorway, making me jump.
I refill my glass and knock back the contents. “Jealous I’m hogging it all?”
It’s a low blow Vonn doesn’t deserve.
His soft footsteps move toward me. The scrape of a chair against the hardwood floors warns that he’s sitting down. The bottle of whiskey is pulled away from my loose grip. Though it’s not so much of a loose grip as a drunken clasp.
“I won’t punch you again, so whatever way you want to punish yourself for Byrdie being hurt won’t be with my fist or this bottle. Go talk to her.”
When I need to think, I get on my bike, but I’m not looking to think tonight. I’m looking to forget.
I nudge my empty glass away from me. With Vonn laying claim to the last of the whiskey, it’s a wrestling match I don’t foresee myself coming out the winner. My eyes feel gritty, and my mouth, given I’ve been knocking back shots for the last two hours, is surprisingly dry.
Vonn’s jeans, t-shirt, and boots suggest he couldn’t sleep either.
Sleep has always come more easily to me than to Vonn, who likes to sit at the kitchen table and take his gun apart and put it back together to focus his mind.
All while eyeing his security blanket: a bottle of whiskey. Like a psycho.
“What kind of person drives someone into the desert and leaves them there to die?” I ask Vonn a question that no amount of whiskey can help me figure out.
Stabbing someone, pushing them off a roof, or shooting them in the head makes sense to me. I get that. Being left in the desert to die of heatstroke or however else a desert slowly kills a person feels too much like torture for me to understand.
I’ve never been tempted to torture a person, not even my POS dad or the mom who spent more time climbing into a bottle of Jack than she spent raising me.
From the pause because Vonn speaks, it’s as much of a puzzle to me as it is to him.
“A sick one,” he eventually says.
I reach for the bottle of whiskey. He drags it further out of reach, and I mutter a curse and sit back in my seat, accepting defeat. “The guy said something about a sweatbox. You pushed right past it like you already knew what it was.”
When he starts eyeing a bottle he hasn’t drunk from in well over a year, I know whatever this sweatbox thing is, it’s bad.
“Yeah,” he says, attention fixed on the bottle I’ve nearly drained dry.
“So?” I prompt.
He shakes his head. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to, Makhi.”
“So, this is a war thing?”
He doesn’t talk about serving or the things he saw. They keep him up at night, but he never says one word to Nash or me. Just sits in the almost dark kitchen at night and takes his gun apart and puts it back together again.
For hours.
Then he gets up and goes to sleep for however many hours are left between the time he came down in the night until seven, when I hear heavy impact sounds of weights in Nash’s home gym.
“This is a thing you don’t need to know about, especially a quarter of a bottle of whiskey deep. Leave it alone.”
“I’m going to assume it involves a box or a room with no windows,” I say.
“Don’t, Makhi.” There’s as much of a warning as a plea in his voice, and if it were anyone else, I’d push, but Vonn is a friend.
More family than a friend with nearly five years of living together and having each other’s backs.
We all have our sins and our crutches, and I don’t want to push him to reach for a bottle to escape more nightmares he can never outrun.
The biggest source of his nightmares is the wars he survived. He lost more people than I have family, and it drove him to roam after he got out of the army until he settled in Massey.
The more I think about what someone could have done to Byrdie, the more I realize he’s right. I don’t want to know about this sweatbox because what I’ve come up with in my brain is already too much.
The thought of Byrdie being locked up in a dark, windowless room with no water or food, after I chased her out of this house, makes me want to fight Vonn for the bottle and drain it dry.
“I see why you do it now,” I say more to myself than to him. Then I push back from the table, saying, “I’m going for a smoke.”
“You should see her tomorrow. Apologize,” Vonn calls after me. “She might not respond, but she will listen.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me.” I stop in the kitchen doorway, my back to him.
It’s as much to stop my world from spinning after too much whiskey as it is to hide my guilt from him.
But Vonn is perceptive. Too damn perceptive, with a bigger heart than a person who can kill as easily as he can. “You saw what happened in the truck.”
I got in the backseat beside Byrdie, and she froze up. We all saw it. She blames me for what happened to her, and she’s right to. What happened to her is on me. All of it.
Now something is wrong with her. We saved her and brought her back, but she’s a shell of her former self.
Whenever I pass by the living room that Nance turned into her bedroom, she’s sitting in her bed or in the armchair Vonn pushed in there, always staring at nothing.
Nash took a speaker in for her to play music she liked.
We were all outside her room when the music stopped.
We looked at each other, knowing she’d gotten up to turn it off.
Nash thought he could reach her through the music she loved.
It didn’t work, and none of us knows what to do.
Hence the reason I’m climbing into a bottle of whiskey to escape from the guilt eating me alive.
I see the trays of food that Nance carries in. Full plates. Hours later, I see Nance carrying the barely touched trays back out again. None of us can reach her, and soon, whatever is wrong with her will kill her.
Because of me.
I have one last cigarette in my pocket. Halfway up the stairs, I pat my back jean pockets and stop. Cursing under my breath, I twist back around. I forgot my lighter. My head swims, and I grab the balustrade before I fall.
Go back for them?
“Too many fucking stairs.” I pat both my front pockets and grin when my fingers collide with something small and hard.
With a sigh of relief, I fish out my lighter, and continue up the stairs.
The door is open.
I frown at it, then shake my head.
I thought I was the only one who went up on the roof. Nash refuses to, and Vonn has never shown any interest in going up. Same with Nance, who’s getting to the age where she appreciates as few steps as possible. And Lydia?
Lydia is useless. I can see her coming up to the roof to play on her phone instead of cleaning, but that’s about it. She lives in town, and at nearly midnight, it’s too late for her to be here now.
I’d assume it was Byrdie, but after giving her a smoke and she slipped and nearly fell, I can’t see her up here either.
And especially not now.
At the top of the stairs, I’m fishing my cigarette from my pocket when I see her.
Byrdie.
She’s standing right at the edge of the roof, staring down as the wind whips her t-shirt around.
I stop breathing even as I drop my cigarette and charge across to her.
I drag her off the edge of the roof by the bag of her shirt, shaking her as I shout in her face. It doesn’t hit me until I stop shaking her that I’m shaking too.
“What the fuck is wrong with you!”
She stares blankly at me, and I shake her harder.
“How can you be so fucking stupid?”
Rhythmic pounding comes from a distance. My stomach is swimming with too much whiskey, and I shake her again, so fucking pissed at her.
“We saved you, and you’re like a fucking ghost doing nothing.”
Hands grab my arm, trying to pull me away from Byrdie.
Vonn shouts. “Let her go, Makhi.”
“What’s going on?” Nash asks.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I scream in her face. “You don’t fucking kill yourself. You fucking fight. Hit me.” I grab her right hand, ball it, and use it to punch my belly. “You fucking take it out on me. Me. I’m to blame for this. Not you. You don’t fucking die.”
Her face twists. Scrunches up. The first real tap against my belly, where I’m not pushing her to hit me, is so light I barely feel it.
I feel the next one though.
Vonn stops shouting at me as tears stream down Byrdie’s face. She’s smacking my belly with her hands curled up into not quite fists. She screams at me, shouting curses that don’t make sense, but I feel the impact of each word.
She’s hurting and she’s in pain, and she needs me to hurt too.
I get it.
I wrap my arms around her, taking each blow as it falls, leaning into them and wishing they were harder. Wishing it was me with pain so loud it silenced me.
Not her.
I keep my focus on Byrdie, catching her as she slumps to her knees. She’s sobbing now, no longer cursing or screaming.
I know all about the need to blow, of holding things in until you can’t help but explode.
I hold her against my chest as she cries. Out of the corner of my eye, Vonn is sitting quietly on the ground, head against the wall.
Nash disappears. He returns seconds later with a bundle in his arms. He drapes a navy blanket over Byrdie, who hiccups and shakes from the last of her tears.
I rub my hand up and down her back as Nash settles on the floor beside Vonn. Both watch me and Byrdie. Both are silent.
I hug her harder. My grip is too tight, but she doesn’t complain. Doesn’t push me away.
“I thought I would die out there and no one would care.” Her voice is husky from disuse and quiet with pain.
As I cradle the back of her head, her shaved hair feels bristly against my palm.
“You have us. I don’t always remember to use my brain, which is why I sometimes need Vonn to use his.
” I glance over at Nash. “Not sure what Nash brings to the table, but you can always count on him to do something helpful.”
He scowls at me. Vonn barks out a laugh, and when I peer down at Byrdie, she has a hint of a smile softening her beautiful, but too-thin face.
“He gave me a safe haven,” she says quietly, looking at him. “The thing I needed more than anything else.”
I drag her into my arms again, breathing in the scent of her skin. “Then I guess I should stop underestimating the guy.”
With a sigh, Vonn pushes himself up from the ground. “How about we move this inside? My ass is falling asleep, and those storm clouds look like they’re headed this way.”
We all get up, and I tip. Vonn steadies me.
Nash eyes me curiously. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Maybe one of us should keep a hold of him on the way back down the stairs?” Vonn suggests.
“That much, huh?” Nash says dryly. Then he sniffs me, scrunching his face as he leans away. “Jeez, you smell like a brewery.”
“Fuck off,” I mutter as we head to the stairs. “Byrdie didn’t say anything.”
Byrdie is walking beside Vonn, the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, when she says, “I was trying to be polite.”
Vonn nearly falls down the stairs laughing.
I’m tempted to push him, but Byrdie is smiling up at him, so I take the hit on the chin and hope I make it down these stairs because my vision is decidedly… blurry.