Chapter 40 #3
I recognize my mistake too late. She’s too tenacious, too protective, and she can’t stop until she knows.
“You need the money?” she asks into her hands. “Since when?”
“He found me in June. That’s when it started.” I know that’s not the answer she’s looking for, but I don’t want to give her the right one. That I’ve needed the money since the day she came home.
She sits up, drags her hands down her face, and then leans slowly back into her seat. “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”
“Mary,” I say softly. Her real name. Our real name.
“You’re selling yourself to a man who hurt you. Because of me.”
“It’s not that simple,” I try to explain. I hate that I’m driving right now. I want to look at her. I want her to see my face, understand that I mean what I say. “It’s not that…stark.”
“How can it not be that stark, Mary?” It’s my turn to hear my real name, both of us incised and resected down to the very origins of ourselves.
Two Marys, identical but no longer the same.
“You have no idea how many times I’d be in the worst place imaginable, desperately trying to get out, and the one thing I’d hold on to was that you’d never have to live through anything like it.
That you’d never have to know what happens in cheap motel rooms and in the backs of strangers’ cars.
At least Birdie is safe at home. I’d think that like a prayer.
Birdie is safe at home. Birdie is safe at home.
I never wanted you to have anything to do with the awful places I found myself in, and I never wanted you to have to make any of the same choices I did, and now you’re telling me that the price of my own mental health, my own place with a shower that works and a door that locks, is you?
You have to pay you for me? And you’re telling me that’s not stark?
You’re telling me that’s not the bleakest thing you’ve ever fucking heard? ”
Hurt curls the edges of her words and makes them waver and break. The anger is pouring off her—anger at Ryan, at me, at herself.
But I’m angry too.
I’m angry and I’m misunderstood and I’m suddenly so fucking tired of being the good twin, the patient twin, the one who absorbs everything negative, a lead shield for her unending radiation.
When do I get to radiate? When do I get to fuck up?
When do I get to have someone come pick up the pieces and pay any price just to see me safe and sound?
“Stop,” I say. My knuckles are white on the steering wheel.
“Stop it. Stop acting like you’ve kept me safe all these years, like you did something noble by staying away.
You didn’t keep me safe, Mary. All you did was make it harder and more expensive to rescue you when you needed it.
Back home, people shook me down for money you owed all the time—I had three of my fingers broken because of you, and I slept with Grandpa’s pipe wrench under my pillow until the day I moved in with Ryan.
I might not have sold sex, but I still sold things that hurt me to sell.
I sold my sleep and my time to make art.
I sold my feet and my knees and my stomach lining and my back.
I sold my pride over and over again, and I sold the part of me that was able to hope…
I sold the part that thought of the future with anything other than dread.
I had to sell it all at market value, at whatever the going rate was, and I had to sell it cheap.
I sold it because I love you, and I’d do it again, and I’d sell myself to Ryan in every lifetime if that’s what it took, because that’s what love is, that’s what laying down your life means, and I’m sorry that moving in with a person who wants to cook my meals and wash my hair and buy me blocks of wood sounds so much worse to you than sixty hours a week at Buddy’s carrying shrink-wrapped flats of oil and scraping gum off the floor.
I’m sorry that I stumbled into paradise doing the same things you did when you stumbled into hell.
I’m sorry for that. But I can’t change it. And I won’t.”
She sucks in a long breath. She’s crying.
And we’re pulling into her complex.
I turn off the car and unsnap my seat belt, and she unsnaps hers, but we don’t look at each other. We don’t move.
“You should have told me,” she says through leaking, sniffling tears. “You were supposed to tell me.”
“What would have happened if I told you, Mary? You saw Mom with your own eyes, you saw her come apart while I was trying to keep her held together, and you left anyway. You fucking bailed. Why should I think you cared about what happened to me?”
She starts crying harder, turning her face to the window.
I close my eyes, which are surprisingly dry. Too much has happened—Kaitlyn, the trust, Busy learning the truth—and I’ve clamped into survival mode. Made myself numb and empty and hard.
“I love you,” I say after a long time, long enough for the car to start baking under the September sun. “But you are the last person who can judge how anyone loves me. And if you want to, you should start with yourself.”