Drowning in You (5 page)

Wishing can be a funny thing
because I bet I could sketch her face from memory.

It still wouldn’t be as hurt
and disappointed in me as she really is.

Now, with a pounding chest and
a splintered heart, my punishment is finally real enough to
feel.

5. Pick-up Truck

Dexter

Elliot and I sit with our asses
glued to the sofa for so long I get cramps in my butt. It doesn’t
help that the living room is only wide enough for one sofa and a
lamp along the back wall and the rest is piled with junk.

Elliot drops his controller and
links his fingers behind his head at the same time I do.

“
Had
enough?”

“
What else do
you wanna do?”

Stupidly, I look around as if
this cramped, messy room will suddenly have something fun to do in
it. “Meh. We can play another round?”

He cracks his fingers and toes
and starts a new game. He picks the Zonda again. I pick the
Lamborghini. We choose a different track to race on.

“
So. Nothing
more with the cops still?”

“
Nope. Been
told I’m cleared.”

“
Do you trust
‘em?”

“
No reason not
to.”

“
Don’t think
they’re playing you?”

The moment I try to gauge where
he’s going with this my half-a-million-dollar car swerves and I
save it just before it hits the guardrails. “I don’t know. They
said there’s not enough evidence and that’s that.”

I sound believable out loud.
Some other part of me is standing in the corner of this room and
evaluating me. My knees are bent and my toes shoved under the
fringe of the rug, and I’m glued to the TV because this is the race
I need to win if I want to be able to show my face to Elliot again.
I know I seem carefree because of careful evaluation. I’m good at
hiding what I want.

Why would Elliot suspect
anything? That police investigation is all over.

After the game finishes, he
says, “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, you know that.”

I get to my feet. Standing, I
have the urge to run. “Sure do.”

Then he says something about an
article that labeled me a druggie. I can’t hear more of that shit
today. I can usually block it out, but all I can think about is
Charlee suddenly hating me because of this particular story.

“
I’ll come
back with some soda,” I tell Elliot and stumble into the kitchen,
knocking over a pile of Lego blocks in the process. I pick a
handful of them up and close my fist on them but they’re too small
and too well engineered to crush and snap in my fist. Doesn’t mean
I don’t spend the next thirty seconds bashing a few under my foot,
slamming my heel on the blocks until pain won’t stop shooting up
the back of my ankle and calf.

“
Hey!” my
sister yells, hands flailing as she drops to my feet. She picks up
her kid’s mess and bundles it in her hands. “Why the hell are you
breaking Adam’s toys?”

“
Give it a
rest.”

Tahny slams her palm to the
wall, creating a barrier between the kitchen and me. I shrug her
off. Her one year on my age stopped being a problem at
thirteen.

“
What are you
doing back here? Isn’t your new dude’s place too far to drop by
annoyingly like this all the time anymore?”

“
Funny,” she
says, unamused. “I’ll answer that when you tell me why you’re
breaking my child’s toys. You’re a shit uncle. You know I can’t
afford to buy him new toys, let alone have to replace this stuff.
Aghhh!” she mumbles. “You and Dad are just the same.”

Finger pointed at her face, I
say, “I’m not doing this.”

“
You are!” she
follows my trail as I peer into the empty fridge, devoid of soda,
and adds, “Like now. You can’t admit you’re wrong and you’re an
asshole.”

I must have rolled my eyes at
her because she’s staring at me even more pissed, veins popping
from her neck.

“
What?” I
say.

“
You think
he’s so horrible for being at the bar and on his phone and watching
TV, but you do it too. You’re at the gym or with Elliot or on the
guitar. Adam could need someone and you’d be in the same room and
not notice.”

Tahny sighs, the fire suddenly
gone. The Lego blocks clink and clank all over the table and she
seems tired, so far from the bitch sister she was a moment ago.

Adam comes waddling around the
corner holding a toy stuffed with a god-awful rattling thing
inside. I glance at Tahny but she’s crouched down, her butt
sticking out from under a counter, so I turn away.

“
Get him will
you,” she tells me.

I look at the floor below me,
hoping Elliot doesn’t mind waiting. It’s not that I hate Adam. It’s
the opposite. I scoop him up and prop him over my forearm as if he
were a doll on display. He bounces in my arms, so I give the little
daredevil a scare and he slips through my arms two or so inches
before I wrap him tighter into me.

Tahny pokes out of the cupboard
with a colander and spoon thing to scoop out spaghetti with—guess
she’s making dinner since Dad is who-knows-where and Mom must be
working a late shift at the hospital—and grins at Adam and I.

The feeling hits me square in
the chest, rocking my feet off-balance.

I try to avoid having too many
moments where it’s just Adam and me. Spending time with Adam is
like

a thousand pick up trucks
shattering against a tree trunk.

a thousand times letting Jack
walk away without getting to say goodbye.

Spending time with Adam—with
the same round eyes, freckled skin, and gaze—makes me relive the
day my little brother Jack and my girlfriend Lily left to go pick
up some groceries and were run off the road by some asshole and
left for dead. And reminds me that there was absolutely nothing I
could do about it.

Two years later, it still
doesn’t seem fair that Jack died and Adam replaced him because I
wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my brother.

I slide Adam down my body and
tell Tahny I really have to get back to Elliot who’s waiting for
me. I tell her this because seeing my dead brother in my little
nephew reminds me of the pain Charlee must be going through when
she sees her dead mother and dying father in me.

As much as I can’t stand to see
Adam, he’s my last link to Jack and I can’t let go of him.

It kills me that I can’t get
inside Charlee’s head to know if she feels the same.

6. Cups, Color, Candy

Charlee

Nana Betty is the type of
person I want to be when I’m seventy-five. She doesn’t say much to
me, just takes Darcy whenever I drop by and doesn’t ask if he’s too
much for me or if I want him to stay with someone who’s stronger
than me. For this I bring over a plate or packet of
something—usually chocolate-dipped cookies for her, Pa and Darcy—as
a replacement for my absence as I take off in my car.

Rather than risk running into
Dexter, Dad, or any of the nurses I’ve come to know, I stop by The
Crooked Shelf, a restaurant near the hospital. It’s a
new-age-styled thing with a crooked double door at the entrance,
and waiters and waitresses who wear spiked boots, wet-look leggings
and T-shirts with stuff like upside-down monkeys on them.

I’ve come here many times with
Mom. There was a stage when she was doing some freelance work from
home and my swim teaching was taking place during random hours. My
eyes glaze over the guests and ornaments and conversations. My legs
are taking me to the table in the corner closest to the back where
if we—I—am quiet enough, I can overhear the gossip from the
kitchen. This time, I won’t have Mom to talk with, though. Although
no one sits opposite me, I still sit on the wall seat because Mom
always gave me that “special” one. It’s the type that looks like a
couch cushion stuck to a wall. I’ve loved it since forever.

After a while
the usual gossip, the routine, can’t stop
it,
and scenarios like Dad dying and
Mom’s warm body on the snow, but soulless from the first moment of
contact when she hit the ground, fill my head. Then it’s Dad’s
voice—telling me not to lie to Darcy, too. That I need to “face
facts”. That he believes in my strength to make it even when I
don’t.

Just as I’m about to lose it, I
hear “Excuse me, ma’am.”

I shoot up, aware that my arm
was curled around my head, my cheek pressed to the scuffed table
top, me listening to the sounds traveling up the table leg through
the wood. I think I’ve found my savior.

“
Oh, um. Yes.
Wai—what?”

The guy chuckles. I think I’ve
seen him before but I’m not sure. All I know is he’s the type of
guy I should like. Standing average height, with shortish blonde
hair, no piercings, and clean-shaven face he is a much better
choice than Dexter. And the only normal person here.

“
Would you
like a menu…?”

“
Charlee,” I
finish for him. “No, thanks. Just a bubblegum milkshake with
marshmallows and cream in a cup.”

He pops his notepad back in his
apron without noting anything down, and says, “Hmm, I haven’t seen
you here before.”

“
I’m an old
regular.” And that’s all I manage before my throat gets tight and I
realize what an insensitive person I am for coming back to this
restaurant. I should wait for Mom to come back with me… Okay, now
I’m losing it.

“
And I’m a
relatively new employee,” the guy says. I sense he told me his name
before this but I’m too embarrassed to ask him to repeat
it.

He comes back with my cup and
for a quarter hour I use my spoon to swirl it until the electric
blue flavoring mixes with the cream and marshmallows. The result is
a murky, dull liquid that’s impossible to pretend to enjoy. I sit
there like this, finger poised on my spoon, watching guests come,
eat, chat—even witnessing what appears to be a first kiss by a
couple—and then leave. My waiter walks by. The first couple of
times he smiled and tried to get me to reciprocate but has long
given up.

At one point I
open my bag to pay for my still-full drink and notice my cell
phone. It’s somehow saying three
pm,
but it was only one
pm
twenty minutes ago.

There’s a shadow lingering over
me, and I look up to see my waiter. I think. I do a double take and
notice his sweatpants and ordinary T-shirt. No neon badge, no
apron, no nothing.

“
Charlee, it’s
on the house,” he says, smiling when he says my name, and pressing
his hand on mine to stop my fingers scrambling through my
bag.

“
Sorry?”

“
Your
disgusting milkshake. It’s on this crazy place because I’d never
make a pretty girl like you pay for something she didn’t
drink.”

My cheeks burn up. He has
caught me off guard and I seem to have forgotten what “on the
house” is. I need to rest. I need to cry for hours and then pass
out under my warm flannelette bed sheets.

“
It wasn’t
disgusting!” I say, rushing. “It was nice.”

He glances between the drink
and back to my eyes and shakes his head. “I do believe the glass is
still full. You can’t have had any.”

Sure enough it is. There’s this
line near the rim inside the tall glass and the liquid is just
above it. I’m so caught.

“
How about I
take you out for a better one now my shift has
finished?”

My first thought is to pull my
clothing up over my head and run out of here, hoping I don’t crash,
but then I get an idea. I’m not the type of girl to two-time guys
so spending alone time with this guy has to kill my unnatural
interest in Dexter. Right?

I oblige his offer, saying the
drink is unnecessary but I’d like to hang outside. We sit on the
edge of the outdoor seats. A train of advertised signs serve as the
barrier between the seated area and the road. It’s a quiet
afternoon with clumps of families and couples and friends walking
by us. Everything’s much more normal out here.

Except I answer on average with
two words to everything this guy says, masked by the fact I feel
silly asking for his name again.

“
I’m sorry I’m
such horrible company,” he mumbles at one point. “My old man did
always tell me I’m terrible at impressing the pretty girls and
you’ve just proved him right.”

This is when I burst into
tears. He leads me away from the curious customers and we walk
around the corner to where a bus stop with a public seat hangs by
the curb. Even I surprise myself. I sob into this strange guy’s
T-shirt. I’ve completely wet the logo on his chest. But he holds me
in a hug, enveloping me in his arms. Sometime around this point I
start to pull away.

“
I really
don’t…” I look for a tissue and find nothing around us so just
settle for sniffling, and continue, “this is really embarrassing.
I’m—I’m sorry…”

“
Elliot,” he
says for
me
this
time. Suddenly I’m half-crying, half-spluttering and the air is
easier to breathe and my chest and throat feel lighter.

“
The first
date I go on in longer than I can remember and the girl bursts into
tears and doesn’t remember my name.”

I laugh again, and I can’t stop
laughing with this guy. Maybe I have lost my mind. “I’ll try not to
soak your T-shirt with my tears again. And I promise to remember
your name…Elliot,” I say, teasing. “But I do need to go.”

That I “need to go” is
something that comes to mind as the words come out of my mouth.
Yes, I need to go see Dad. If I’m in this mood, then now is exactly
the right time because every other time is a struggle to convince
myself to walk through that hospital. The smell. The slouched
people from sixteen to sixty-six in wheelchairs. The distraught
loved ones. Their pain is my pain.