Breaking Glass (22 page)

I stare at the network of dots drawn onto the graph paper and let my eyes blur, hoping the answer will leap out at me from the grid.

The longer I keep my mind occupied, I realize, the longer I’ll be able to hold back the avalanche of pain the sadistic Dr. Kopeck unleashed earlier today.

Thinking about the session is like touching an infected bedsore, so instead I fixate on the large red X I’ve made to indicate the day of my accident, the day Susannah disappeared.

The X grows until it swallows my vision, a single glowing red eye. My fingers are made of rubber. I can’t feel the pen anymore and it drops from my grasp.

The room fades to black and I’m blind to my surroundings except for the burning red eye.

Panicking, I flail at the darkness and wonder if my head injury has spawned a fatal blood clot. These could be the last few moments of my conscious life.

My searching hands brush skin. Velvety soft, heat-kissed skin. I trace the swells and folds of her body and a thrill of electric pleasure shoots through me. It only takes an instant before I’m an arrow of white-hot desire.

Jeremy
. The disembodied voice is both next to me and apart from me all at once. But the touch. The touch is real and immediate.

I moan as gentle hands torture me into a state of exquisite agony. “Susannah?”

There’s no reply. Only her touch.

Oh, her touch.

“I can’t see anything,” I gasp in staccato bursts. If she stops, I’ll burn down to ash. I might as well be blind right now, and I don’t fucking care. “Are you here? Why won’t you let me see you?”

Fingers plumb the contours of my face, the hollows of my eyes, my lips. My heart crashes against my rib cage. I think of her eyes the last time I saw them, in the theater lobby the night she disappeared. Sorrow rushes to shore, a breaking wave.

I’m making love to an echo. A memory.

“Is it really you?” No answer, only soft fingers traversing my skin.

I squint into the black heat of my room. I may be dead, too, for all I know, making love in hell. Or I really may be crazy. Totally, Dr. Kopeck-sign-the-papers-lock-the-door-and-throwaway-the key crazy.

I’m simmering all over again, my bare skin sheened with sweat. “Can you speak?”

Nothing. Just a lightening of her touch, as if she’s pulling away.

“Please don’t leave yet,” I moan and rake my hands through hair I’m not sure is real or in my imagination, desire eroding my veins, melting me to a pulsing core of want.

I am crazy, I think. Or this is the final hallucination of a dying boy.

Either way, I don’t care. If this is insanity, I’ll take it. If I’m dying, this is worth it.

In the pulsing dark, I see a form, dust particles floating in sunlight. A girl made of stars. I crush her against me, and laugh.

It’s the ultimate cosmic joke. I’ve found the love of my life.

Only she’s dead.

Your mother says…
, says a disembodied voice, barely louder than a summer breeze through grass.

Cold dread shivers down my spine. I’m suffocating, trapped in this way station between life and death. “What?”

I claw at the dark, my throat closing, lungs filling with cold water. There’s no air. No breath.

A nightmare. I’m having a nightmare.

…to look in the attic, Jeremy
.

The attic? Why the attic?

Go look in the attic
.

Lamp light filters between my lashes. Shattering pain pounds my skull. It’s four AM.

I’m seated in the wheelchair, slumped over on the desk exactly where I was before, my hand slack around the red marker.

A blotch has formed in the place where its point has bled into the paper. On closer inspection, I see it’s a word scrawled into the shape of a tiny red heart.

Truth
.

C H A P T E R
t w e n t y

Then

The winter of our sophomore year was an endless blur of snow and ice. For some reason, Ryan had abruptly decided to start talking to me again. I figured he was as bored as I was, and since I was tired of clawing at the walls of my cage, I accepted the unfreezing of his cold shoulder without judgment.

But Susannah was still freezing both of us out. I was secretly glad that I had company on Susannah’s shit list, but I didn’t tell Ryan. The spring musical hadn’t been cast yet, and without Susannah and track to occupy him, Ryan also had a lot of free time on his hands.

We spent our weekends together playing poker with the guys, playing violent bloody video games, and cracking immature jokes like old times. I watched my friends get drunk and high, but only indulged when I was alone, as always.

And, as always, I studiously maintained my 96 average. It was that spring the teachers started murmuring
scholarship
, Dad started thinking
scholarship to Cornell
, and my coach started thinking
track scholarship to any school you want
.

Without Susannah to wedge herself between us, Ryan and I had quickly reverted to the great friends we once were.

Susannah, meanwhile, had started dating a slick and handsome guy in his twenties, Reingold Sheehan, the manager of Riverton Arms, the fanciest of the three restaurants in town. He was also supposedly an exhibiting artist with gallery shows in Manhattan, which possibly explained why she’d bother with him. We didn’t know because she wasn’t talking to us.

I nearly chewed through my lip when I saw her step out of his black Volkswagen Jetta each morning and climb back in after school. The thought of his groping twenty-something-year-old paws on her tender skin had me praying every night that someone would arrest the creeper for statutory rape. It bugged Ryan just as much as me, but as the winter wore on, and Susannah kept seeing Sheehan, dissing them just got old, so we stopped.

Mr. Wallace had arranged for Susannah to have one of her sculptures entered in a juried show, and her work,
Mother Figure
, the grisly plaster figurine with a gaping mouth of broken razor teeth, won third place, netting her $1,000 and a lot of buzz around the school and community. The piece was installed in a permanent showcase and the whole thing was written up in the local newspaper.

Ryan said nothing, apparently unfazed by all the attention she was getting. But I was stewing in my own stomach acid.

Each night, after dutifully studying and completing my homework, I proceeded to drink myself to sleep. One night, when Dad had driven to a case two hours north, the light snowfall that had been predicted turned into an intense blizzard. Dad had to book a motel room and I was alone for the night, stuck in the drafty old house with my vodka and my night terrors.

I hadn’t ever spent the whole night alone, and even the vodka couldn’t dull the pulsing ache of raw loneliness that came bursting in like a flood-swollen river.

The recurring horror of my mother’s death, the nightmare plunge into the Gorge was nothing compared to life without her. To live with the knowledge that she had wanted to die. And she’d hoped to take me with her.

Was it so I’d never be this alone?

I drank that night until I passed out. And woke the next day at noon. Luckily for me, school had been cancelled due to the nearly two feet of snow that had fallen.

The hollow ache was still there, growing teeth, gnawing at me from within.

Who could I talk to?

I couldn’t tell Ryan that I was as raw as an exposed nerve. That every year, I was breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, and that one day all that would be left of me was a smudge of dust.

In theory, I could only tell Susannah. Not that I actually had.

But it didn’t matter anyway, because she wasn’t speaking to me.

I needed to get outside. I needed to run or I was going to suffocate under the weight of my own misery.

I threw on sweats, sneakers, and a wool cap, and braved the silent, white-blanketed streets of Riverton.

What I did was more like slogging than running. In minutes, my feet were frozen and packed with snow. My hands had gone numb.

But I couldn’t go back to that empty house.

So I trudged on, mile after mile, growing weaker, losing chunks of time. It wasn’t until I stood before the lawn full of crosses poking up from the field like a miniature mountain range that I realized I was in Susannah’s front yard. There was no car in the driveway. But there was a light in the window.

Sleepily, I trudged through the knee-high snow to the front porch, collapsed onto one of the snow-covered wicker porch chairs and fell asleep.

It couldn’t have been that long before Susannah discovered me, or I would have been dead from hypothermia.

“Jeremy! What the hell? Are you fucking insane?”

She yanked me to my feet, led me into the living room, and shoved me onto the couch, all the while keeping a running dialog about what a complete moron I was. She pulled off my soaked sneakers and socks, threw a blanket at me, and matter-of-factly told me to strip. She heated up water for hot chocolate while I lay under the covers in a daze, shivering uncontrollably and wondering how I had gotten there in the first place.

I had the chance to look around, and it dawned on me that I’d never been inside the Durbans’ house before. It was neater than I expected, and much more welcoming than our shabby man cave. The small living room was filled with antique furniture draped with lace doilies, frilly lampshades, old oil paintings of flowers, china cabinets bursting with knickknacks, and, most of all, crosses. It was as though Mrs. Durban had carefully preserved her parents’ house and squeezed her own additions into all the empty spaces. Crosses made from matchsticks, from old tin cans, from torn-up cereal boxes, Mexican tin crosses, and tiny ivory crosses covered every bit of space between the paintings and bric-a-brac. There was a shelf crammed with framed black and white photos, mostly of unrecognizable people in fusty old clothes. I picked up a photo of Susannah as a little girl in her mother’s arms, and was surprised by how strikingly beautiful Trudy had been. How her gray eyes blazed from her sculpted face. I put the photo down again, wondering what the woman could have been through to age her so terribly. Beside the photo, there was a framed yearbook page of a high school football team, a dried flower pressed behind the glass. Next to one of the smiling faces, the words
love you forever
were scrawled inside a hastily drawn heart. I pinpointed the guy’s name, the team captain,
D. Lewis
. This was Riverton High, yet the name didn’t ring any bells. The guy, whoever he was, must have had the good sense to move on and move away.

Susannah reappeared and tossed me a pair of sweatpants. “Sorry, I have no idea who these belonged to. But they’re dry, at least.” She set the mismatched mugs of hot chocolate on the upholstered bench that served as a coffee table, then sat across from me on a wingback chair, her legs tucked under her.

“Thanks,” I said, cupping the mug’s warmth between my freezing hands. “Your place is nice. Really cozy.”

Susannah glared at me, eyebrows drawn into a frown. “You could have died out there. Why didn’t you at least knock?”

“I didn’t think you wanted to see me.”

“So you decided to come and die on my front porch?”

I stifled a shiver and snickered. “I was out running and—I don’t know. I saw the light on. I’m not really sure what I was thinking. If I was thinking at all.”

“Jeremy, you’re really strange.”

“Strange, yet reliable.”

“Reliably strange.”

I smiled and sipped the hot chocolate. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. “Why on earth does your mother collect all these crosses?”

Susannah just shrugged. “My mother is a mystery. She never goes to church or anything. I mean, technically, she’s Jewish. Which means technically I am, too. It’s by the mother’s bloodline. So you’re not technically Jewish because your mother was…”

“Episcopalian,” I stammered and contemplated bounding back into the snow, but it had gotten dark and my clothes were soaked.

She must have noticed my squeamish expression, because she quickly changed the subject. “So when does team practice start up again?”

I gaped at her. “For fuck’s sake, Susannah. Do you really expect me to believe you give a shit about track practice when you haven’t spoken to me for months?” I slam my mug on the coffee table, emboldened, caught up in the heat of my hurt. “Was it something I said?”

She looked down into her mug. “You didn’t do anything. You didn’t do anything
at all
.” She swallowed and looked up at me, “Jeremy—I—you’re the best friend I’ve ever had and I should never have shut you out of my life. I just needed some space. That’s all.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

There I was, reading from the same dumbass script. Nothing ever really got said. Nothing ever really got resolved. I could have leaned over and kissed her. But I didn’t dare risk breaking the fragile bridge we were building between us.

“I met my father two weekends ago,” she blurted.

“You’re kidding.”