Chapter 15 #3
“Yeah, and you shouldn’t have to. You had to take me on and jump into being the solution. You got yourself away from your family but you were out of the frying pan, into the fire. My situation is even worse and I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”
He did look sorry and also, he looked very, very sad.
I wasn’t sure what to say back so I got a sip of water from the drinking fountain to buy myself some more time.
I swallowed, dragged the back of my hand across my mouth, and then wiped my eyes.
“I get it,” I said. “I’m going to leave.
You probably have to get back to work, too. ”
“I do, but can we talk about this later?”
“Sure. See you later,” I said briefly. I walked back in the direction that I had come and, by following a group of people who were probably Woodsmen employees, I managed to get the hell out of that maze of a building.
I ended up on the wrong side of the huge complex, unfortunately, and I had to walk about thirty miles to find my car.
The summer sun beat down on me as I did but I hardly noticed the heat or the distance as I moved fast. I never, ever wanted to come back here.
When I finally found my car, I didn’t know exactly where to go. I wiped my eyes on the T-shirt in the back, Shane’s, and then called my sister again.
“Hi,” she answered. “I’m here at Walter’s and it was a great day. They did this promo—”
“I need a place to stay,” I said. “I don’t want to spend money on a motel because I’m going to use everything I have to buy myself a plane ticket to Egypt to see the pyramids, so do you think I can come stay at the house with you and Mom? And Dad, unfortunately?”
“Are you drunk? It’s not anywhere close to happy hour.”
“No, I’m not drunk. If I sound weird, it’s because I’m crying,” I explained.
“Why? Is this because of Shane?”
I couldn’t talk, wipe my face, cry, and drive at the same time. I didn’t answer and that let her draw her own conclusions.
“That rat bastard,” Morgan said angrily. “Arschloch!”
I tossed aside the T-shirt and just let the tears fall. “It’s kind of complicated,” I told her. “I did mess up pretty bad, I think. I’m going to get my stuff out of his house.”
“Are you there right now?” she asked.
I said I was on my way and she replied that she would meet me.
I didn’t think to ask how she would arrive, since I was currently driving the car that had been “ours” (but I had paid for) and she hadn’t yet gotten one of her own.
When I pulled up to Shane’s house, I saw my sister with someone who surprised me.
“You made Max bring you?” I asked and sighed inwardly, because I didn’t want to deal with him right now. He had always been quick to point out when I made a mistake, like with the video from the party, and I didn’t want to hear it.
“I offered,” he told me. “Dad and Mom are fine at the restaurant. You have to get your stuff? I’ll help.”
I nodded, wary of his motives but glad that we had another set of hands. This would go even faster and then I’d be out of here, gone forever. “Hold on,” I told them, and reached for the T-shirt.
“What did he do?” Morgan asked. She hugged me.
“He doesn’t need me,” I told her. This time, I cried all over her T-shirt instead.
My brother had left us on the porch and gone inside, but my next-door neighbor came out to check on things. He gave me a popsicle and said that things would get better, and he suggested I might want to hold one of his cats.
The popsicle and animal did help a lot. He mentioned that he was moving out, too, since the landlord had found out about his pets. I thanked him for his help and for being a nice neighbor, before I went to point out my belongings to Max.
“None of the furniture is mine—no, actually the folding table is from our garage and so are these books.” Shane had just built a shelf in some of his scant free time to store all the volumes that I’d been reading with him in the way that had made him feel stupid, although I’d believed that we both liked it.
“Molly, it’s ok,” my sister said quietly. I sniffled and got myself under control.
In the bedroom, I definitely had more clothes than I’d brought over here a few months before.
I had some pictures on the walls, one of the lighthouse that he liked to visit so often, and another of Woodsmen Stadium with a pink and apricot sunset behind it.
“We can leave those,” I said briskly, but I pulled off the dirty sheets to bring along.
One thing I had liked about Shane was that he did a great job of making his bed every morning and, if I left before him, he had also made mine with perfectly square corners.
There were so many things that I liked about him.
My sister said my name again, “Molly!” This time, it sounded like she was getting a little annoyed with the crying and I decided that it was time to go.
It was strange to be back in my former home, in the room that I’d had lived in for twenty-three years.
It felt small and foreign now. I stayed in there for the rest of the afternoon, although both my siblings left to return to Walter’s, and I didn’t come out for dinner even though I had skipped most of my lunch.
Maybe the missed meals would show up as slimmer thighs the next morning, but I thought not.
Probably all I’d see in the mirror would be my swollen eyes.
I was still in my bed when I heard everyone else arrive later that night. “I brought you a burger,” my sister announced as she walked right into my bedroom. “It’s cold.”
“Thank you,” I said, sitting up. “How was the dinner service?”
She complained a little but it all sounded normal to me. “Max is stepping up more in the kitchen, which is good. He’s learning how to manage things, but not as well as you did,” she concluded. Then she wanted to know: “What is going on with you?”
I had thought about what to tell her. Shane’s private, medical information wasn’t mine to share but she deserved some kind of explanation. I gave her the outlines, that he had an issue with his health that was getting worse, that I had tried to help, but then I had made everything worse.
“Unless there’s a lot more that you’re not saying, I don’t really see how you did that,” she said.
“By being controlling, like I was with you. You used to cry and get upset,” I reminded her.
“You did hurt my feelings,” she acknowledged. “Mostly, I got upset because you were right about a lot of it. I had to take steps, I had to face that something was wrong and work on it.”
“I went about everything in a dumb way,” I said and she shrugged in agreement. I put down the half-finished burger and flopped back onto my pillow. “I bet that someone recorded us arguing today. They’ll probably post it as some big, emotional moment.” It had been.
“If starts getting shared, I just scrub it again,” Morgan said. “No big deal.”
“What do you mean by ‘scrub?’ And what do you mean, ‘again?’” I asked.
“You know. I could make it go away,” she told me.
“It takes a little work but now I know how. Remember Daniel? He’s really good at that kind of thing and he showed me some tricks.
He helped me squelch the video of you at the party.
Now, it’s almost impossible to find, even if you search for it really specifically. ”
“You did that for me?”
“That whole thing sucked,” she answered. “I figured that I could do something for you and Daniel did a lot, too. Er ist ein guter Kerl.“
“What?”
“Are you feeling better?” she asked, and I sighed. No.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
My sister left, and I got up and went to the window. I saw the same moon from the night before, but it looked lesser now. The light had definitely dimmed.