Chapter 16
VEER GETS US A ROOM WITH TWO TWIN BEDS.
It smells like vanilla body spray and bleach smeared over vomit and cigarette smoke. The side-by-side beds gaze impassively into the black mirror of an old TV. I swing my duffel bag onto the foot of the bed farthest from the door.
I’m not sure what the room means, or if it means anything at all.
Veer hasn’t quite looked at me since we parked, a handful of sideways glances instead of her full-bore high-beam stare.
Still, there’s a deliberateness to the way she sets her stuff—a battered backpack, massive silver water bottle, and a baseball hat embroidered with Off Duty, Save Yourself—down on the other bed, like she knows exactly where I am without having to look.
But she doesn’t talk. And I don’t quite know how to fill the silence.
I want to. Or, I think I want to. What does she think of me? What does she want? What is she waiting for me to do?
I pull off my shoes without bothering to untie them. Desert dust has crept into the creases in the leather, making them look even more beat up than usual. Out there, the wind and the cold and the fading light made my mom feel very far away. Now, I can’t stop thinking about her.
Veer coughs, kicks off her sneakers, and suddenly I can’t hold on to all of it alone anymore.
“My mom’s sick.” It comes out of my mouth before I can think it through. “She’s losing her mind.”
Veer freezes in place, hunched over, one hand pulling her foot free from her sock. White with pink polka dots. Then she snaps back to life again, straightens. Rubs the back of her neck.
“Losing her mind?” She says it carefully, like she doesn’t want to assume.
“Alzheimer’s. Early onset, I’m not that old.” I laugh a bit, but it sounds hollow. She does the kind thing and doesn’t laugh along.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s just, sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind too.”
I sit down too fast on the bed, and it squeals in protest. I thought sharing secrets was supposed to feel good, but all I can think about is how now there’s no taking it back.
Veer slides next to me and picks up one of my hands by the pad of the thumb, her grip loose enough that I could shake her off if I wanted to. “It’s just you and her?”
“Yeah.” Well, there’s Uncle Bill too, but it’s not the same thing. And he’s gone now.
“She loves me,” I say, because that will realign my compass. “She loves me so much. And I try to love her. I try so hard, okay?” My voice cracks, betraying me, and I swallow to hide it. “But sometimes I just want to quit.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to dig inside myself and sift out all the things I owe, until I find the gleam of what I want. Wouldn’t it be nice to wonder what will happen tomorrow instead of already knowing.
“Forget it,” I add quickly. “I know that’s a messed-up thing to say.”
I only feel Veer shiver because I’m pressed against her side.
“I don’t think it’s messed up,” she says. Then she sucks in air and mutters, “I’m gonna shower.”
She doesn’t wait for me to acknowledge it before sweeping a plastic bag out of her backpack and heading for the bathroom. The door slams behind her like a slap in the face. I stare at my murky reflection in the darkened TV screen. I should have held my tongue.
As the shower sputters to life, I fish the used syringe and empty vial from their cocoon in my sweatshirt and place them side by side in one of the motel-provided paper cups.
I wrap it all in a washcloth and bury it at the bottom of the trash can.
I try sitting on the bed again, but I hate the way it squeaks whenever I move.
It feels too much like I’m waiting for Veer to come back, so I slide onto the ground, then stretch out on my back.
The muscles around my spine release one by one as my wary animal paces behind its prison door.
I think back to kneeling in the shower, the way it leapt at my call.
The agony, like I’ve never felt before. Sudden temptation flutters at my fingertips.
To let my animal’s snarl line up with my teeth, to touch for a second the inhuman depths of my own power, and then to cage it again. How’s that for control?
I dig my fingers into the carpet, tracing the faded pattern of red swirls, gone soft-edged and brownish with wear. The shape and the color, together, look a little like bloodstains. I remember the dark patch congealing in Uncle Bill’s office, and for a second, all the air is sucked out of my lungs.
I pinch the skin on my stomach, where a bruise stretches wretched under the seam of my jeans. Don’t think about it. It’s not real.
When the shower stops, I pinch myself again, then scramble back onto the bed.
Veer comes out of the bathroom, hair slicked back and dripping, the excess water running rivulets down her neck and shoulders into the towel wrapped around her chest. It’s long enough to cover her whole torso, but short enough to expose shins and knees and thighs.
There are more of the tick-mark scars on the insides of her legs, and a yellow-green quilt of faded bruises ring one knee.
“Hi,” she says, peeking at me from under her brows.
“I have to shower too,” I blurt out. I haul my entire bag to the bathroom and run the water as hot as it goes.
Once I’m done scrubbing the desert off my skin, it occurs to me that I’ve done the wrong thing again.
I should have kissed her, not run away. I lather the length of my arms before the sliver of motel soap snaps in half and vanishes down the drain.
Veer left a bottle of travel-size shampoo in the corner of the shower.
I snap it open and pour a bit into my hand before I can think twice about it.
As I use it to wash the rest of my body, I wonder if she’ll notice that I smell like her.
No, she won’t. She’ll notice my purpling wrists, my cracked toenails, the broken blood vessels spattering my stomach like spider bites. She’ll notice the stains my leaping curse punched into my hips, my shins, my spine, a canvas of black and blue that should remind her to be afraid.
I don’t want her to be afraid of me. But I couldn’t bear her pity either.
The showerhead sighs and the water pressure slows. Maybe that’s a sign. I don’t want to get out. I don’t know how to face Veer. I want her to look at me and see the sharp edges and sharper claws, not the facade those things hide behind.
When I emerge from the bathroom, Veer is sitting on my bed, changed into an oversize tank top and tiny green shorts. She shifts, and the mattress squeaks. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I slip down onto the bed, not right next to her but close enough to know that she smells like mineral water and scented dryer sheets. I want to be closer. I want to know how each of her vertebrae taste.
“Look.” She pulls back one of her tank top straps to expose the front of her shoulder. A length of skin scraped raw from her fall. She leans forward, and I smell brake dust and cinnamon gum, hotel soap disintegrating between fingers, things that are easy to feel and hard to say.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Her face tips up and her eyes swallow me, huge and dark and luminous. “Don’t be.”
I slide over, and as our thighs meet, she tenses, barely visible, a tiny ripple of tightening muscles. I wait for her to grip me by the throat or push me to the floor, but she doesn’t. Just leaves that raw expanse stretched before me in expiation.
I lean in and surrender to it.
My tongue traces the constellation of marks, and fireworks light in my throat.
Her free hand meets my shoulder, strong fingers digging into the ridges of my collarbones, plowing toward the base of my neck.
I’m enveloped by the rich, reckless heft of her blood, like a burning building, like a blooming flower, as she grips my hair and guides me off the edge of the bed.
Cheap carpet scrapes my knees, and Veer pushes back the hem of her shorts to expose new tracts of raw pink and bruise yellow and I bend my mouth again to lick her wounds.
“Ellis,” she gasps, and I wish my tongue had a razor edge so I could cut my way into her, so I could make her veins smell like my sweat and devotion.
She shifts, calves wrapping around my torso. I bend to her again, mouth no longer seeking blood but a different kind of wetness, and for the first time in too long I know exactly what I want.
Later, I lie on my back and examine the motel ceiling. Its uneven maroon is marred by peaks and valleys of hastily slapped-up stucco. You could probably quiz everyone who’s had this room for the last six months, and they wouldn’t remember the color.
“I’m scared,” I whisper to the ceiling.
Veer stirs slightly and presses her face into my neck. “Hmm?”
“Nothing.”
Her forehead nudges my shoulder. I wish we could go back to when it was my teeth and her skin, when the animal in my bones knew what to do.
“Come on,” she urges. Not a demand. A plea. “Tell me.”
If I say no, the moment will end. I know it, and she knows it too, and that’s why her voice sounds like that, like she’s holding on to the end of a fraying rope. She wants it to stay us, together in the cocoon of flaky paint and someone else’s linens, the world past the dead bolt dim and unreal.
I want it too.
“My mom.” It takes me a while to find the words. “What if I’m glad when she’s dead? I told her I hated her, right before I left. She smashed up my car, and I was pissed and I just…”
Veer says nothing, doesn’t move, just blows out a long, low breath.
“I think my uncle’s dead too.” It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, and it’s a relief, even though it’s also another piece of me carved off, another hollow space dug out.
Veer rolls over to face me. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“He did a lot for me, and I’m grateful, but I don’t know. He’d say he loved me, but he always had some catty remark when I did something he didn’t agree with. Which was like, all the time. I just tolerated him and I thought that was it, but then he kind of disappeared, and…”
“Disappeared? Like, skipped town?”