Chapter 18 #2
“Well, I had a weird fucking encounter too. With my goddamn brother. Ever consider that?” She grabs my wrist and pulls it toward her, shaking me like a dog shakes a small animal it’s caught.
“And by the way, I didn’t have to. Nobody’s forcing me to see him, it’s not like I owe him a visit. I don’t owe him shit.”
My pulse flutters against her grip. Debts are supposed to be repaid, aren’t they?
“Right, Ellis?”
“Right,” I mumble.
The light turns green. Cars jerk forward.
We rumble past a teenage girl perched lonesome on the curb of an empty driveway, swallowed up by a sweatshirt with its hood up. I remember Veer folded onto the prison curb, her sharpest parts unsheathed.
“Tell me,” I say.
A long second, her nails nipping my wrist. I feel her weigh her options: Throw my hand away. Snap my bones in two. Open the car door and hurl me into the roiling ocean of pavement at sixty miles per hour.
Her shoulders slump. She relaxes her grip on me, sits back, eases off the gas.
“I love him, I really do,” she says. Starting quiet, but her voice grows in intensity as she continues.
“And I care about him a lot. I wanted to visit him, I came up because I wanted to, because I want this relationship with him. But it’s this shitty thing, where I feel like there’s so much I want to forgive him for, for not being there, for doing some really fucked-up stuff when I was in high school, because once I forgive him, I’ll forgive myself too.
But then I see him and it’s, like, all he wants is forgiveness.
Or, like, not real forgiveness, he just wants me to say, ‘I forgive you.’ He wants me to reassure him.
So I spend all my time telling him it’s okay, I still love him, and there’s no room for me to say, ‘It’s complicated.
I’m angry. And that’s okay, I’m here and I’m going to keep coming back, but I’m also really hurt.
You made my life really hard in a lot of ways.
’ But there’s no way to get him to understand that, no way that doesn’t end with me having to do all these emotional contortions to swear to him I don’t resent him.
” She sucks in a breath. “Which only makes me resent him more.”
I turn my eyes to the rivulets of rain threading fat fingers across the window. I know how that feels. I’ve felt it too, but I learned to call it failure.
“I just wish it didn’t still bother me,” she continues.
“I know it’s a sign of progress that I know that’s what’s happening, but knowing doesn’t make me feel like less of a piece of shit.
” Her fingers drum on the steering wheel.
“I’m not taking it out on myself anymore, you know, cutting, putting cigarettes out on my arm, acting like nothing hurts me.
Or like nothing can hurt me more than I can hurt myself.
But sometimes I feel like that was easier. ”
So this is what Veer meant when she said that there was poison in her blood. She meant that she isn’t afraid of pain, she’s afraid of pity. If someone hurts her, she’d rather join them in carving off pieces of herself so when anyone asks, Who did this to you, she can say, I did.
“I’m not a bad person,” Veer mutters. She fiddles with the windshield wiper control. Looking directly at her feels invasive, or maybe just too intimate, so I look past her at the rain drawing tear tracks through the dust on the window.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” The words are a slap on my outstretched palms. “You, like, barely know me.”
I glance at the GPS display on her phone. A few more hours until we’re back to Vegas.
“That’s true,” I say. “But I’d like to know you better.”
She’s quiet as we sit at a red light, dwarfed by the pickup in front of us with a bumper sticker showing two stick parents, two kids, and a curly-tailed dog. Just before the light turns, she whispers, “Why?”
“I like how you look at me like there’s nothing else to see.” Focus on the water droplets sliding down the windshield, not on the tightness around her eyes. Not on the clutch of her fingers around the steering wheel. “I feel good when I’m with you.”
The smell of the air shifts. Shit coffee and recycled air give way to a smell like a dry lake before a storm.
“And,” I finish awkwardly, “you’re, like, incredibly hot.”
Veer laughs. The tense lines about her eyes soften. “Damn right I am.”
She slips her fingers around mine, lifts my hand to her mouth at the next red light and holds it there as the highway opens up again. The monotone gray of the sky shifts a shade brighter.
“It’s a whole other world out there,” Veer whispers, her lips tracing my knuckles, her eyes on the craters of rock and sand and Joshua trees. “Makes you hopeful, doesn’t it?”
I roll down the window to smell the musk of the rain-kissed desert, to feel the pressure in my ears, to remind myself that this is all real.
Maybe. And again, out loud. “Maybe.”
Then, too soon, we’re turning into my apartment building, and it’s over.
“Hey.” Veer pops the trunk with a noise like a pneumonia cough. “Let me help you carry your stuff.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it.” I force myself out of the passenger seat, sling the duffel bag over my shoulder, and haul the cooler out of the back.
The trunk booms shut to reveal Veer, hands in pockets, waiting for me.
She smiles with half her mouth and pulls the cooler out of my hands before I can protest.
“Seriously,” she says. “You don’t want to ruin your mom’s stuff right outside the apartment, do you?”
On the drive, I told her it was some homeopathic stuff that calms my mom down. She kind of stuck her tongue out at that, but didn’t argue.
She’s right, though. I worked hard for that blood, and I can’t replace it. So I let her heft it under her armpit and follow me up the stairs. It’ll be fine. My mom might be in her bedroom or doing her hair. She might not even notice. If she does, she’ll forget it sooner or later. Probably sooner.
And, selfishly, I don’t want to say goodbye just yet.
Let it last just a little longer. Let it stay with us as we climb the stairs, as I stamp my sneakers over the welcome mat, as I fiddle with my key and notice Veer’s eyes scanning the run-down flooring and the identical rows of forest-green doors.
What does she think about me, knowing this is how I live?
It doesn’t matter, I remind myself, and take a deep breath as I push through the door.
And smell blood.