13. Clocks & Canvas
Clocks my hair is flung in my face, my eyes just as incensed as hers are now.
Her jaw clenches before she steps closer to me. “It’s just who he is. You knew before you agreed to date him, Audrey. Don’t play stupid now.”
My stomach drops, the bruises he left on the back of my neck still aching and fresh.
She’s asking me not to say anything. Again.
Of course she is. He’s her big brother. What am I?
A girl she fucked a few times. Her friend?
It was the same last time. Last time, when he got a little too rough, too pushy.
He’d never done this, though… not like this.
With a wobbling chin, the effect of the alcohol and the early morning light takes its toll as I gather up my things.
Like a walk of shame, but worse.
She just stands there, she and I stuck in this uncomfortable silence together as I jerk the sheets off her bed searching for my underwear, quickly deciding they aren’t worth the time it would take to find.
My chest is heaving as I redress, my tears and slobber drenching the pillow from where he suffocated me, that panic still ripe in my chest. I clench my thighs, my tears spilling over when I realize it doesn’t feel like he did anything to me there.
But the relief flooding me is brief. I’d forgiven him so easily last time. So fucking stupid and lonely.
From my bones to the skin covering them, I feel nasty.
Their mom lets out a small shriek as I round the path from the back of the house, surprising her in the garden. “Oh my god.” She laughs, her dirty gloved hand slamming to clutch her chest before she actually looks hard enough to see me. “Audrey, are you alright?”
The question only makes the lump in my throat swell until it’s choking, lodged deep inside. “Tell your son I want all my shit back by the end of the week!” I spit as I stalk past her. My work clothes hastily put back on, my hair knotted, and my face probably run over with mascara.
The older woman scrambles up from the pad laid down in the dirt, her face shocked if not a little pale, before she storms toward the shack behind her home.
Soon after, the sound of arguing fills the morning air.
It’s too much like home. Too familiar, too heavy with the weight already pressing down on my chest. The Jordans moved here only about a year after Gideon left.
They’ve always been shit friends but… I was desperate. But this? Again?
Fuck them and their weird co-dependent bullshit.
I clench my flats in my palm, ignoring the gravel digging into the soles of my feet as I stalk across the driveway. My overfull bladder presses in on me as I climb into the truck, hoping like hell Gideon is nowhere in sight when I get home.
He wasn’t home.
Where I thought I’d feel relief at that fact, saving myself the embarrassment of him seeing me when I looked like fresh hell, I only feel…
raw. The hot water of the shower beats down on me as I scrub furiously at my skin.
Already, the frayed state of my nerves is loosening bit by bit, washing down the slightly clogged drain.
I don’t know if I liked the anxiety and adrenaline more than the bitter sadness that I feel now.
I don’t know why I thought Jess would come to my defense; she never really had before.
Not when he cheated on me the first few times, or the first time he screamed and put a hole in the wall beside my face.
Not when he pushed, prodded, and negotiated his way between my legs.
This was just… scary. I won’t pretend I’m not at least a bit glad to have a glaring reason to end that relationship.
I never really saw him like that anyway.
I cringe, my blonde hair creating waterfalls as it hangs in sheets by my face, the water running down it and splattering onto the dated shower floor.
Little nonslip fish stickers underneath my feet, worn down to nearly nothing with time.
When the faint sound of the doorbell filters into the open door of the bathroom, I have half a mind to ignore it.
But what if it’s Gideon?
Even more reason to ignore it, but I scramble out of the bathroom all the same, leaving the water running and puddles marking my path down the hall.
When I jerk the door open, I frown, staring at the empty space in front of me.
My eyes immediately go to the very still, dark funeral home across the street, noting the absence of a fancy black car in the drive.
The disappointment I feel at that is uncalled for.
When I step back to shut the door, there’s a bundle of brown paper and a note on the doormat that makes my pulse jump.
I tighten my now soaked robe before I bend, picking it up, digging my teeth into my bottom lip as I step back, letting the door swing closed.
I test the package’s considerable weight in my palms.
The handwriting is just as severe as the man who wrote it, and god, why do I have flutterflies? How could I in a moment like this?
“It seems I’ve gotten no better at talking to people.”
-G
The aching in my neck is forgotten as I tear into the brown wrapping paper, a little gasp leaving my mouth unbidden.
The heavy, ornate mantle clock that used to sit on the accent table in the foyer is just as beautiful as it was when I was a kid.
The mermaids sculpted around the clockface always seemed so out of place there.
A sad little laugh bubbles up from my throat, remembering the number of times I tried to barter random things in hopes Mrs. Bell would give it to me.
The sound mocking last night, along with a flush that has nothing to do with the hot shower I just fled from, flares across my skin.
“You remembered,” I whisper it to the empty house, like me standing here blushing like an idiot is a secret between only us. Just like before, Gideon erases the bad feelings, if only to supply Gideon-flavored ones.
I shouldn’t be surprised, the way he used to study…
take stock of me back then. It’s not hard to remember how intoxicating it was to be doted on like that, how much more it could be now.
It’s a stupid thought, but one I can’t deny liking.
We’re strangers now and he… left. No letters or calls.
Nothing. “He’s cleaning out the place so he can go home, Audrey. Don’t be a dumbass,” I curse out loud.
Still, I use the utmost care as I carry the old clock to the mantle next to the badge in the shadow box, along with Dad’s pens and stripes and the flag that was tightly folded inside.
That day is still burned into my chest in the form of an ever-present ache.
Mom was already well into a bender somewhere far away when the doorbell rang, followed by fists pounding on the door jolting me awake from where I’d nodded off on the couch.
My high school homework binder slid off my lap, scattering papers that were unfinished and due the next morning.
I never turned those in. My grade didn’t even take a hit, of course not, nobody is going to fail a grieving kid.
The unusually solemn and severe faces of Dad’s work friends greeted me on the other side of that door. The porch light attracting moths they didn’t react to as they fluttered around their heads.
I frowned at them, annoyed that they were here in the middle of the night.
They worked with him, I mean you’d think they knew when he wasn’t going to be home.
My mood further soured when they fidgeted, asking for Mom, refusing to tell me why they were here.
It was about then the sleep wore off, fully letting the panic set in, the realization.
Everything that happened next was done in a blinding haze.
I watched it from somewhere outside my body as they told me how he flipped his cruiser an hour earlier.
Chasing some stupid kids from out of town, joyriding in their mom’s van on back roads.
The cruiser slid after it flipped, slamming into a light post on the highway.
He died before the ambulance even got there.
My dad, the only stable thing left to hold our home together was gone.
It happened hours earlier as I sat and did my homework, eating a lukewarm TV dinner, paying more attention to a rerun of Out of This World than the papers.
The TV I promised him I wouldn’t turn on until my work was done. I’d promised.
It’d been blaring the second he’d pulled from the driveway.
It took them two days after that to find out where Mom had buggered off to.
That was the first time I’d set foot in the Bell Funeral Home since my best friend had left it.
Where I had seen his mother, and so many others before her.
It should’ve been Mr. Bell taking care of Dad, Gideon helping hold my hand while I stood numbly beside the casket.
I think that’s when the anger started, at the Bells.
At the Bell Funeral Home sign, that taunted me every time I went outside, every time I looked out of a fucking window.
I was a ball of grief and rage, walking the halls we grew up in without him.
Rubbing salt in an ugly, festering wound.
The distant cousin and new unfamiliar faces ran it just as well as the family had before, but it was colder.
Colder without the cold, angry boy who lived in it.
This clock watched me smile, blush, laugh, and sob.
It watched me grow up from its stoic place below the mirror in the foyer.
The world had stopped turning three years earlier when Gideon had left.
After Dad died, it kicked into hyperdrive.
Autopilot. Hours, months, and suddenly years passed in a gray haze, the lump never leaving my throat.
The guilt I felt at that deceitful tendril of hope, that maybe, just maybe, they’d return.
You know, to offer their condolences, to be there for me.
They didn’t. I had even heard a few people mention when Mr. Bell had stopped into town over the years, but I never saw him. I stopped looking for him or his son. Honestly, I stopped seeing altogether.
It’s the raw memory of that feeling that has me quickly running back upstairs, shutting off the water, mopping up the puddles on the floor with a hand towel, and heading into the abandoned office that now serves as a painting room.
I don’t want to forgive Gideon, not yet.
But I don’t think I’m ready to be without him again either.
Even if I’m only worse for it in the end.
Even if this sudden finality in my chest is just a way to think about anything other than the Jordans.
The canvases are dusty the further back I go, digging until I find the worn one.
Years of being handled over and over again.
Taken out, scribbled on and shoved away rougher than necessary.
I shift the current canvas off the easel Dad bought me, grabbing the colored pencils in the purple sparkled box I’ve had for just as long.
Avoiding the nubs that remain from Uncle Rodney’s set.
I don’t use them anymore, haven’t in years, but I keep them in hopes their prophecy still rings true.
Like they can infect the other pencils in the box with their goodwill.
It takes several deep breaths before I can look at it, the half-drawn picture of a little boy pushing an even smaller girl on a swing. She’s laughing, her curls dancing in the wind, oblivious to the frayed rope above her head.