Chapter 16 #2
“I don’t know. Maybe, I guess. But the same day we stopped hearing from him, someone broke into his house. There was blood in his office. Like he’d been in a fight.”
Veer’s fingers brush the inside of my wrist. “Did you call the cops?”
Our family doesn’t call the police. They wield cages like weapons, and once we’re in cages, things always get innumerably worse.
“Whoever broke in didn’t take anything,” I say, because I can’t explain that to her. “I doubt the cops would help.”
“Yeah,” she says ruefully, “maybe.”
“Anyway, he was into some shady shit. Nothing big, but, you know. Wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.”
“Sure.” She squints, considering. “If it makes you feel any better, people who are into shady shit are usually pretty resilient. He’s probably halfway to Mexico or something.”
“His truck got picked up on the side of the highway. Way out in the desert, abandoned.”
The sheets rustle. She doesn’t have an answer for that.
“Maybe he is okay, but I honestly…” I draw in a shaky breath.
When did my throat get so tight? “I don’t think so.
But I still keep getting ready to pick up the phone to call him, or think I’m going to drive to his house, or, you know, and then I remember he’s not there anymore.
And I just want to cry. I miss him. But I never missed him when he was around.
Sometimes I think I do hate my mom, but what if when she goes, it’s just like my uncle, only worse? ”
When she goes. As if I’ll have the gift of such distance, as if it won’t be me and a kitchen knife.
Veer’s fingers close over mine. “It probably will be.”
I jerk my hand away. That’s not what she’s supposed to say. She’s supposed to promise me it won’t be, supposed to go for the easy answer, supposed to lie.
Then I catch myself. Is that really what I want?
Or is it this, the brutal blow of honesty, the relief of someone else saying, Yes, yes, you’re right to be afraid, and when this thing you dread comes true, you’ll have to learn to live with it.
It will be just as bad as you imagine, and still you’ll survive it.
Veer pushes herself to sit, twining her arms around her knees. “You know, I was glad when my dad died.”
I sit up too, surprised. She’d talked for hours in the car and never once mentioned her dad. I hadn’t noticed it at the time.
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically.
Discomfort lances across her face. “Don’t be.
My brother bashed his face in with a baseball bat when I was eleven, I saw the whole thing and it probably fucked me up for life, but trust me, Ellis: he fucking deserved it.
” She flops back onto the bed, swaying with the squeak and bounce of the decrepit mattress.
“Maybe you will be glad when she dies. Family’s complicated. ”
She blinks slow and deliberate, and I breathe her deep into my lungs, smell her furious mix of wrath and regret.
“That’s, um.” She blinks again, swallows, stares up at the ceiling. “I’m going to visit him, actually.”
“Your brother?”
She nods.
“He lives in Lovelock?”
Her eyes flick toward me, daring me to laugh, then away again. “He’s in prison.”
“For, um…” Is it wrong to ask?
“No, not for my dad. That was self-defense.” A dry polyester rasp as her legs scrub up and down the top sheet.
“He got into some fucked-up shit after, though. Held up a gas station, ended up in a youth center. When he got out, my mom put him in one of those, you know, go-out-to-the-desert-with-ex-military-fuckos. Troubled-teen camp, or whatever. He got out a couple days before my junior prom. He was supposed to… ”
She wraps her arms around herself, fingers drumming at her pockmarked triceps.
“Anyway. He didn’t come home, and I was so pissed because I’d gotten all done up in this sparkly blue dress with my hair curled, so I left him this long, nasty voicemail about how I never wanted to see him again and he was such a fuckup and, you know, and my mom’s all mad at me, saying it’s not his fault, and I mean, now that I’m older I get it, but she was such a pushover all my life and always wanted me to be her little dress-up doll baby girl and I just… ”
Another long breath. “Next time I saw him was at his arraignment. He tried to rob a casino with a fuckin’ box cutter. Blinded the floor manager.”
She grabs me without warning, fingers closing over mine with such force that I wonder if she wants to break them.
“He wasn’t always a fuckup. I know I should just be grateful for what he did and, like, forgive him for all the other bullshit.
People talk like forgiveness is so easy, but it’s not.
So, no, I don’t think you’re a horrible person for thinking, you know, whatever about your mom.
I wish I was better at letting things go too. ”
“Family’s complicated,” I echo.
Veer raises our intertwined hands to her mouth and kisses my knuckles one by one. “It’s not fair.”
“Nothing’s fair.” They’re my mom’s words. But they’re also true: there’s no balance to any of this, no reason. It just is.
“Do I scare you?” Veer murmurs.
I pull back without thinking. Her grip tightens into something demanding. Her front teeth trace the curves of my tendons.
“Or”—she twists my hand, so the pad of my thumb sits between her canines—“do you wonder what I’d be like, if it had been me with the bat?”
“No.” I wish she’d bite down. I wish she’d eat me alive.
“It should have been.”
“Veer.”
Her nostrils flare. “If he did something, I could have.”
“You were eleven.”
“And my brother was fifteen. Come on.” She nips my thumb. “You know the most pathetic thing? It never even occurred to me that I could. Or should. I thought that was just what it was like to be a kid.”
An abyss in the shape of my mom’s voice clogs my throat.
“We have to take the good with the bad,” she’d hissed. “We take care of each other, no matter what. That’s what families do.”
She’d said that on the drive to Vegas, that first one, while I hunched over a math workbook in the back.
She knew I didn’t want to leave Colorado Springs, and maybe that was why she kept talking for hours about how good it would be, how happy Uncle Bill would be to see us.
How this was the start of a new life. Maybe that was why she accused me of deliberately forgetting my workbook at a rest stop.
Maybe that’s why she still remembers that one moment, that one story, even as the rest of my childhood fades.
I don’t think she remembers the look on Uncle Bill’s face when we pulled into his driveway that first time. The disappointment, and resignation. But I do. It became a part of my armor: the understanding that it was always like this for us. For all of us.
“Does that freak you out?” Veer’s voice is casual, her eyes pinpoints of intensity.
“No.”
Her jaw tightens. “It should. I’m all fucked up inside, Ellis. I keep trying to unfuck myself, but it’s, like, built in. Like there’s poison in my blood.”
I press my lips to the base of her thumb and look into the black holes of her eyes. “I’m not scared of being poisoned.”
Veer catches me by the chin, and for a second, I’m scared I’ve said too much. Then she pulls me into her and kisses me like a tidal wave, like an unfurling of compressed pain into my mouth. When she lets me go, I’m gasping.
“You’re one deep, dark, scary girl, Ellis,” she whispers. Her fingers find the bruise on my hip and press, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to feel her presence. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”
I shiver. I’m supposed to smell danger, to panic that she’s feeling around the edges of the truth and that my throat aches to tell her the rest. I’m so tired of secrets and manipulation. I’m so tired of being alone.
It’s too much to grapple with, this and my mom and Uncle Bill and the future, and suddenly my throat is filled with metal spikes and each breath catches on them and I will myself not to cry, but my eyes sting and then it’s too late to stop.
Veer’s arms are around me, her fingers stroking evenly across the back of my skull, and I cling to her as she pulls me in tighter and tighter, the vise of her arms the only thing keeping me from fracturing.
“Hey,” she murmurs into my hairline. “Fuck everybody, okay? Fuck love.”
I sniff, then laugh, horrible hiccuping sobs that feel like absolution.
“Fuck love,” I repeat. It feels good. “Everyone I love makes me feel like shit.”
“Goddamn right.” Veer laughs and kisses me again.
We fall asleep like that, tangled up in each other, and I dream of things I don’t remember.