Living Backwards (15 page)

“Oh,” Grace added, clearly disappointed. “Well, I guess you can go on your own if they’re only measuring you. Do you have it narrowed down, Jillian? Maybe I could help?”

Grace was nothing if not genuine, but I needed to intervene before this got out of control. Jillian was staring down at her empty plate uncomfortably. I decided that she had enough torture for the evening.

“Actually, I promised I’d help Jillian with a final paper she’s working on. We should probably get started. I don’t want to put it off much longer.” Not catching on, Jillian looked at me curiously.

“What’s it on, Jillian?” Carter asked. She froze for a minute, and I was about to spout off some bullshit before she beat me to it.

“Um, it’s on…Joan of Arc,” she managed to reply. “I love…Joan.”

“Oh, Joan of Arc,” he replied, as he raised his brows. “She was a remarkable girl.”

“Yeah,” I replied looking at Jillian. She was.

“Well, it was a pleasure meeting you,” Grace added. “And I’d love to see you all dressed up on Thursday. Maybe you could stop by here on the way?”

“Of course,” she agreed. “I mean, if that’s okay with Luke.”

“That’s fine,” I quickly replied because we needed to make our escape as soon as possible. “Let’s get out of here fast before she offers to take you dress shopping,” I whispered to her.

Jillian said her goodbyes and headed toward the front door.

“We’re going this way,” I corrected her as I walked through the kitchen.

“That was a great save in there, Chambers,” she added. “You probably should’ve warned me to keep my mouth shut about the prom, though.”

“No big deal,” I said as I opened the door to the garage. I grabbed my extra helmet and tossed it at her. She caught it and stared at it wide-eyed.

“What are you doing?” she asked, panicking as I fastened mine on.

“We’re leaving,” I replied.

“On your bike?”

It was nice to see her drop the bravado for a change. “What is it with you and my bike?”

Swinging my leg over the seat, I sat down and looked over at her. She was still staring at it like she’d never seen a bike before.

“You gonna hop on?” With a final look of determination, she strapped on the helmet and stood before me nervously.

“Um, I don’t…I’ve never done this,” she stammered.

“Put your left hand on my shoulder and swing your right leg over so you’re straddling the bike.”
Or me, whichever you like.

I braced myself for the impact and the assault on my senses. I knew I’d have to contend with the weight of her hand on my shoulder, the smell of perfume surrounding me, and the heat from her body as she struggled to get comfortable. I wanted it.

“Hang on,” I added, adjusting to the feeling of her body molded against mine. She placed her hands lightly on my hips. I knew once we took off, her grip would tighten and I would lose my mind, but I wanted this. I wanted to feel her wrapped around me.

I hopped up to kick-start the bike and felt the familiar rumble. Jillian tensed up behind me. I knew where I was taking her. I just didn’t know if it was the right call.

“Remember,” I called over the roar of the engine, “hold on tight.”

Just as I suspected, as I took off out of the garage, Jillian let out a small yelp and wrapped her arms tightly around my waist. My need for the girl made me dizzy.

“Where are we going?” she yelled from behind me.

“You wanted to know about my tattoo,” I replied. “I’m gonna show you.”

I headed for the cliffs and prepared to tell her what I hadn’t spoken about in almost five years.

I could find my way to the cliffs blindfolded. Coming here with Carter as often as I had, I knew the landmarks as if they were in my own backyard. With Jillian trailing behind me, I ducked under the bushes in the corner of the parking lot and walked along the trail towards the hollowed out tree I’d passed many times. In silence, we followed the path as it twisted and turned before slowly giving way to a clearing, hidden away from the highway not two miles from here.

No matter when I came here, alone or with Carter, it was always completely undisturbed, free from discarded bottles of Ole English and cigarette butts. Maybe there were others who chucked their trash off the ledge and sent it plummeting into the ocean below. Maybe we weren’t the only ones who came here. But it felt that way.

Once the path opened to the rocky ledge, I heard a gasp from behind me. “We haven’t been walking very long,” she marveled. “I couldn’t even hear the waves from where we parked.”

“I know. It’s crazy,” I replied, looking up at the sky. It wasn’t dark enough yet. “It’s completely silent. That’s one of things I love about this place.”

“I don’t understand, though. What does this have to do with your tattoo?” she asked. She sounded so sincere. It seemed like such a crime to dampen the mood, but she had asked so I’d tell.

“It has a lot to do with Carter. I didn’t always live with them…Grace and Carter,” I began slowly. “I moved here when I was thirteen. Before that I lived in a small suburb a few hours outside of Boston with my parents. My dad is…
was
…Carter’s brother.”

I glanced over to gauge her reaction. She sat down cross-legged on a small patch of grass by the rocky ledge with her gaze fixed on me. Our conversations were usually pretty light, and I didn’t know if she had any idea what she was getting into by asking the questions she had. She seemed anxious to hear the rest so I sat down next to her and took a deep breath before continuing.

“My parents probably shouldn’t have gotten married. I’m obviously not an expert on marriage so I’m not judging anyone, but they really weren’t…right,” I began, struggling to find the words. It had been so long since I had spoken about them to anyone aside from Carter. It wasn’t easy to say certain things out loud, even this many years later.

“They started dating when they were in high school. Young and stupid. It wasn’t long before she got knocked up, and they were forced to get married. It’s not easy being told at eighteen that any chance you had of getting out of your small, nothing town was gone. They had a baby to think about now….responsibility. They had to make sacrifices that neither one of them wanted to make.

“In the beginning, I think they held it together for me. They hid a lot of things or maybe when you’re a kid, you just don’t see it.” The memories flashed like snapshots in my head—the broken glass, my mother crying, a knock at the door.

“I think they always fought, but were able to hide it when they weren’t so screwed up. By the time I was ten or eleven, there was a pattern to their fights. During the week, they seemed to stay out of each other’s way. He was a carpenter and he worked long hours. For as long as I can remember, he’d come home, sit down in his recliner, turn on the news and watch TV with a cold beer. Every night except for Friday because on Friday, he’d trade in the beer for something a little stronger, usually vodka tonic,” I recalled, remembering what became his weekend staple.

“By eleven, the yelling would have woken me up. They’d fight over the stupidest things. ‘You left your socks on the floor’, ‘You forgot to pick up the dry cleaning’, ‘You didn’t say
Bless You
when I sneezed’. It’s the same ridiculous shit other people deal with, but at that point, I don’t even think they
liked
each other anymore so the same ridiculous shit became this continuous epic battle.

“And my mother…God, my mother. She loved throwing things. I got pretty good at figuring out what she was throwing,” I added, looking over at her. “If I could hear the pieces scatter for a long period of time, it was a platter or maybe a serving bowl. If the crash was sharp and quick, it was probably just a saucer or a mug. She was all about equality,” I mused darkly. “As long as it was breakable and could possibly hit my dad, she’d throw it.

“Then on Monday, like we were in the Twilight Zone, everything would go back to normal like nothing ever happened. He’d go off to work, come home, watch TV and have his beer. But on Friday, the cycle would begin again.

“I started to find bottles stashed around the house. The first time it happened, something had rolled under the couch. I don’t remember what…but I reached under and felt glass. When I pulled it out, I saw that it was an empty bottle of whiskey. And it’s funny. I assumed that it was my dad’s,” I laughed sadly. “It didn’t occur to me at the time that my dad was pretty open about his vodka.

“I found a few more over the next few months, stuffed into the garbage cans out back and in the recycle bin. Then one day I came home from school early, and my mom was sitting in the kitchen. She was crying and nursing a glass of the whiskey I’d been finding hidden around the house. When she saw me, she scrambled to hide it, but it was too late. I don’t know if she started drinking because of the fighting, or if she was just better at hiding it than he was. Either way, they were both pretty messed up and the fighting just kept getting worse.”

I watched as she absently pulled at the blades of grass in front of her, taking in everything I said.

“Have you ever had to go around the house and make sure all the windows were closed because you didn’t want your parents to broadcast your shitty life to the whole neighborhood?” I asked. “It was a nightly ritual in my house.

“So I was almost thirteen, I think, when I decided that I had enough. Every weekend we’d go through the same cycle of vodka and whiskey, fighting and screaming, broken platters and broken saucers. You’d think they’d run out of the shit. Then one night after I was pretty sure I heard a whole set of glasses shatter against the wall, I stormed down the stairs just ready to end this shit. And for the rest of my life, I’ll remember the look on their faces while they listened to their twelve-year-old kid tell them to cut the shit and get their act together,” I winced, remembering their pained expressions. “Just humiliated.

“After that, they were on their best behavior. At least that’s how it appeared. Even weekends weren’t that bad. There were fights here and there, but dishes were staying in the cabinet and I figured that was a decent start.

“So one night a month or so later, my mom told me that they were going to a party at her co-worker’s house. She asked her friend Trina to stay with me while they were going to be out. She was nice enough not to say that she was babysitting me,” I laughed softly. “God, I was so pissed, too.

“I was half asleep when the phone rang and Trina was still downstairs watching
Melrose Place
or one of those stupid shows. She was always loud so I could hear what she was saying to the person on the phone. ‘How long ago did they leave?’, ‘Was it bad?’, ‘Who started yelling first?’ I knew right away that they had gotten into it at the party…”

I trailed off thinking of how defeated I felt, knowing that I’d have to listen to the sounds of breaking glass all night. I thought about packing up and leaving. I even started planning where I’d go.

“And then Trina said to the person on the other end that my parents should have already been home and all I could imagine was that they pulled over on the side of the road and started beating the shit out of each other because to me, that was the next step.”

I remembered the panic on her face when I walked into the living room. They had left over an hour and a half earlier, and her co-worker lived only fifteen minutes away.

“When the doorbell rang, I knew. I didn’t need to listen to what the police said. I didn’t need to hear where the car went off the road, or how they thought it happened. I knew. They held their shit together for me, but you can only hold back the inevitable for just so long. You can’t stop it. The only saving grace was that I didn’t need to witness their last blow up.”

“So, what happened?” she asked softly. I hadn’t realized I had stopped talking.

“They drove off the embankment and the car flipped over. She died instantly. He died at the hospital the next day. Never woke up.”

Jillian’s eyes were glassy and her lips were drawn down. I don’t know what I expected, telling her the story. Great job, Chambers. Such a people person. Now I wished I could just take it all back. All of it.

“God, Luke,” she said sadly.

“I turned out just fine,” I added, not needing any pity.

“I know,” she replied. “Them, I mean. They wanted to do what was best for you, but the best thing would have been to split up. They seem so…misguided.”

“They were alcoholic, Jillian,” I corrected her solemnly. “Let’s not romanticize it.”

“I’m not. I’m just looking at it from their point of view. Sometimes the very best intentions have disastrous results.”

As much as I would have liked to have agreed with her, I couldn’t. They were selfish and destructive. They ruined each other and almost took me down in the process. I wasn’t going to argue with her though. She didn’t need to know how bitter I was.

“Carter and Grace flew out that night and took care of all of the arrangements. I spent all day in my room, not wanting to walk around the house. It was too quiet. When they asked me to move to Washington, I actually wanted to leave so much I didn’t fight it.

“At the airport, Carter tried telling me about my new room and what the schools were like. I wasn’t the most talkative kid at the time, though. They tried so goddamn hard,” I recounted painfully. “I wasn’t trying to be a dick, but I’d spent the last three years watching my parents slowly commit suicide. I had a hard time having a normal conversation after everything that had gone on.

“My first night here, Carter told me he wanted to go for a drive, and I just wanted to shut the door to my room and drown everything out. Carter’s persuasive, though, and he managed to talk me into going. He grabbed a long, thin black bag and hauled it into the car before we took off. He didn’t force conversation or try to say anything life-altering or profound. We drove in silence, but it didn’t feel awkward either.

“And he brought me here. When he got out of his car, he grabbed the bag and told me to follow him through the path. The whole time I was thinking
why the hell are we hiking in the middle of the night
.”

I laughed remembering how pissed I’d been. “When we got to the clearing, he opened up the bag and started assembling a telescope and I didn’t know what to say. My parents had been dead for less than a week, and he wanted to show me the moon? I probably looked at him like he was an asshole. He obviously could tell how irritated I was so he didn’t ask me if I wanted to use it; he just started looking into it himself.

“He had been staring up at the sky for a while before he mentioned that he and my dad would go to the park with my grandfather to look at the stars when they were kids. My grandfather taught them all about the location of the constellations and the mythology behind each of them. I just wanted him to get to the point, but he was going on and on about how he and my dad would pretend they were Perseus, sent off to kill Medusa. I had no clue at the time what he was trying to tell me, how he wanted me to see who my dad was before he broke.

“Then he told me about a smaller constellation called the Phoenix. You can’t even see it from where we are. It’s only really visible during the winter in the southern hemisphere. The Phoenix builds a nest, lights it on fire and throws itself into the flames. Then, it’s reborn from the ashes. When Carter was done telling the story, he looked at me with the saddest expression on his face, and I couldn’t believe how much older he looked. He said, ‘I’m not going to ask you to forgive him, and I’m not going to ask you to understand. But you don’t have to let this break you. You can rise above this’.

“I felt like the biggest dick. Here he is mourning his older brother, taking in his kid, and I was acting like a spoiled brat,” I explained, feeling guilty and embarrassed.

“You were a kid, Luke,” she added. “A kid who had to deal with a lot of adult problems.”

“Maybe. I don’t think I fully appreciated Carter until then, though. His message was loud and clear. I didn’t need to go up in flames. I could survive this.

“So it became a regular thing for us. If one of us had a tough day, we’d grab the black bag with the telescope in it and just catch the other’s eye. We usually didn’t need to say much. He’d grab the keys to the car and I’d follow. If we were in the mood to talk about what was going on, we would, but more often than not, we’d just look through the telescope or look out at the water.

“Right after my eighteenth birthday in April, I told Carter that I was getting a tattoo. He wasn’t thrilled, but he didn’t try to talk me out of it either. When I was leaving to go to Seth’s, Carter grabbed his keys and started walking towards the door. He told me that if I was going to get a tattoo, he was coming with me.”

“He went
with
you?” she gasped.

“I couldn’t talk him out of it! I just stood there for a minute, trying to picture Carter in his Brooks Brothers button down and corduroys hanging out in a tattoo parlor. But he wouldn’t back down.

“So when we got to Seth’s, I showed Carter the picture of the phoenix, and I was actually kind of glad that he was there. Until I heard him asking your buddy Dice about some drawing on the wall. Before I knew it, Carter is sitting at Dice’s station getting a tattoo on his shoulder blade.”

“What!” she exclaimed. “Uncle Carter has a tattoo! Of what?”

“The Chinese symbol for family,” I replied.

“Luke,” she sighed. “That’s really beautiful. You’re very lucky to have them.”

“I know…That’s one of the reasons why I’m going to Seattle.”