Phantom Limbs (30 page)

“I’m right here, obviously,” I said, scooting away from her.

“Why are you being so mean?”

“I’m not being mean. I just don’t know why this is your first stop after fucking your boyfriend.”

“What?” She sounded confused — and a little indignant.

“I know you’re no spatial genius, but I’m right below his room.”

“We weren’t . . . God, Otis.”

“I have ears, Meg.”

“Well, I don’t know what you think you were hearing, but it wasn’t . . .
that.
”

Silence. Then, sniffling.

“Are you crying?”

“No,” she said, in the most tear-soaked voice I’d ever heard.

“Hey,” I said, reaching out for her. My hand made contact with some soft fabric, and I patted it reassuringly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just assumed . . .”

She sniffled again, then scooted closer and lay down next to me. I could feel the heat coming off her body, only inches away from mine.

“Otis?” she whispered.

“Yeah?”

“You smell like chlorine. How is that possible?”

I shrugged. “It’s in my pores.”

More silence, then:

“Are you naked?”

“What if I am?” The smell of her hair combined with her speaking the word “naked” was not the thing I needed just then.

“Seriously, what are you wearing?”

“Boxers.”

“That’s it? Just boxers?”

“It’s like a thousand degrees in here. And I wasn’t expecting company.”

Her hand slid down my arm and found my hand, nestling inside. I was glad it was pitch-dark, because the idiot pig was starting to poke out of the barn, so to speak, and I didn’t even have a sheet over me.

We lay that way for a while, neither of us talking. Finally I whispered, “What if your dad checked on you and didn’t find you in your room, so he went looking for you in Jeff’s room . . . Imagine.”

“I know. But he won’t check on me. He has no idea how to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Parent. Without my mom.”

I thought about that. “Yeah, I can see that. I mean, even with my own dad, my mom is in charge of discipline.”

“Ha, as if you require disciplining.”

“You’d be surprised. I really piss her off sometimes.” After a moment I asked, “Was that part of the draw of Willow Grove? Less discipline? Easier with your dad?”

“Nothing would be easy. Anywhere.”

At this point I realized I wished she would just say it. That she wasn’t coming back. I wished she’d just fucking say it.

“So? What’s going on?” I asked.

“There was no sex, Otis.”

“I heard stuff . . .”

“It wasn’t sex. In fact, for the record, I’ve never had sex with Jeff.”

Before I could even begin to soar on this happiest of news, she let go of my hand and shifted. I figured I’d blown it, but she lifted my arm and laid her head on my shoulder, leaving my arm with really nowhere to go but around her.

“Why does this shoulder feel like the safest place in the world?” she whispered.

“Why do people think I’m so safe?” I grumbled.

She settled her head a little lower onto my chest.

This had to have been the most nearly perfect moment of my life. I was so completely nearly happy. And yet. “Meg? Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

She exhaled. “We broke up.”

I started to sit up, but of course her head was on me, so I lay back down. “What?”

“That’s what you were hearing. Arguing. Not sex. Jesus. Is that how you have sex?”

I smiled a little. “I don’t have sex, remember?”

“Well, maybe that’s a good thing, if that’s how you’d do it.”

I could hear the smile in her voice, despite everything. “What happened? And what’s going to happen tomorrow? Is he going to stay?”

I felt her shake her head. “Give me a minute. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t know about tomorrow. This sucks. There are no airports around here. We’re kind of stuck. He really shouldn’t have come — we weren’t in the greatest place anyway. I told him I wanted to be friends, but — I don’t even know. This isn’t fair to him. But it wasn’t fair to me, either.”

We lay there for a while in silence, and I started wondering if she would ever say anything, or if maybe she was falling asleep. It was so surreal to have her there with me. It was surreal that the boyfriend upstairs was apparently history. It was surreal that we were in bed together. Or
on
a bed, anyway. Technically.

But most surreal of all was the fact that we’d spent three whole years apart, living entirely separate lives, having all these experiences that the other person knew nothing about.

“I don’t understand it,” I said, as though I’d been thinking aloud this whole time. “I don’t understand how there can be three years where I didn’t know you.”

“Well, you didn’t know me before. I mean, before I was nine.”

“That’s different. You didn’t exist for me yet. Everything changed after that. There was life before you, and then life with you. There wasn’t supposed to be life after you.”

She squeezed my hand. “I know.”

“I always wondered what you were doing. All that time.”

She lay perfectly still. Then: “They weren’t my best years, Otis.”

“Well, sure. I mean, I can imagine.”

“I could tell you about it. But you won’t like it.”

I felt the chill of dread, the familiar urge to turn away to protect myself from something I didn’t want to hear. But that was the very thing that had cost me Meg in the first place. If I wanted to convince her to stay, to show her we could be okay, this was my chance.

“Tell me.”

“Okay . . .” She took a deep breath. “After we moved, I wanted, I don’t know . . . I wanted to start over, I guess. I wanted to separate myself from you. From everything that happened. But no matter what I did, I still felt you there. None of it went away. I did so many stupid things, trying to get away from everything, from you . . . There was this one thing. I’ve never told anyone.” She hesitated. “I want to tell you. I think I need to.”

“Okay.” I squeezed her hand, although I didn’t know which of us I was trying to reassure.

“So when I started at my new school, I went straight to the wrong crowd. Drinking. Smoking pot.”

“In
junior high
?”

“I know. It’s awful. I actually dyed my hair black that year.”

“What?” I tried to envision Meg with black hair. I couldn’t.

“My parents weren’t doing so great, either. My mom was falling apart because of . . .”

“Because of what happened.”

“Yes, but . . . Not just that, Otis. Your mom cut my mom off. And it just about killed her.”

It occurred to me I didn’t know what the hell my mom was doing at that time. She stayed in bed a lot. She cried all the time. And she “if only’d” constantly:
If only I hadn’t said he could have his nap at the Brandts . . . If only we’d used the monitor . . . If only the Brandts had never moved here . . .
She pushed both my dad and me to our very limits. Losing Mason was hard enough. But living in the vortex of her grief every day, while she continually replayed what had happened — it was too much. But I knew now that as awful as she’d made it for everyone else, it was probably nothing compared to the hell she herself was living through.

“You okay?” Meg asked quietly.

I realized I’d been quiet for a while. “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s all just . . .”

“I know,” she whispered.

“Anyway, you were saying . . . ?” I prompted.

“Right, yeah. So, by the time I started high school, my parents and I were fighting all the time. I’d come home drunk, get grounded, act horrible. One night I sneaked out and went to this party. And . . .” She paused for a moment. “I’m just going to say it: I ended up having sex with someone there. Someone I didn’t even know.”

Her words filled me with anger, jealousy, confusion — and, yes, disappointment. I fought the urge to pull my hand from hers.

“And it was awful. I didn’t like the way he kissed. I didn’t like the way he touched me. I didn’t like any of it. And I went kind of numb, and then it was like I was watching myself. Part of me was thinking,
I shouldn’t do this, this is going to be a horrible mistake . . .
But part of me was, like, cheering me on.
Wanting
me to do it.”

I did pull my hand away then. “Why?”

“Well. I could say it’s because I was drunk. And maybe that helped. But it wasn’t just that. I think part of me wanted it. Part of me wanted to change myself so I wouldn’t be the same person, wouldn’t still be mired in everything that happened in Willow Grove. It’s like I was walking around as this broken, fucked-up version of that person. And I wanted to be someone else, I wanted out. My therapist says the act was like a burial for my old self. I think he’s right. I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.”

I wasn’t sure I understood it. I mean, I was broken, too, but I didn’t try to fix myself by having sex with strangers.

“Afterward I thought,
Well, now I can forget about Otis. He would never want me now.
”

“Because you had sex?” I mean, no, I didn’t like it, but it wouldn’t stop me from wanting her.

“No, not exactly. It was more because it wasn’t sex that meant something. It was kind of trashy, right? And you would never go out with a trashy girl. So, I thought,
It’s over.
And I
wanted
it to be over so I could move on — from you, from Mason, from all of it. But I still couldn’t stop thinking about you. And I hated myself for what I did. And I thought you’d hate me, too.”

“I could never hate you.” I found her hand again. “Were you . . . ?”

“He used a condom.”

“No, I mean . . . I don’t know. Are you okay?”

She laughed bitterly. “What’s ‘okay’?”

“I’ve never really known.”

It was quiet for a while. Then she said, “There was this night — it was the night I met Jeff, actually. I was still kind of a wreck. I was at a party, and I was hanging out in the living room with some people, and suddenly I noticed that there were pictures of this little boy scattered around the room. He looked so much like Mason, Otis. And I just started to freak. My friends tried to calm me down, but I couldn’t stand being there for one more second. I ran out the door — and right into Jeff, literally. And he was so nice to me, so caring. And he made me laugh.”

I sulked in silence.

“He was really good to me. And I’m not easy. I have a lot of hang-ups, a lot of weird triggers from the PTSD.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder? Like war vets? You have that?”

“Yeah.” She shifted, and I heard a quiet
snap
. “You’ve probably noticed the rubber band? It’s part of my therapy. I’m supposed to snap it whenever something sets me off. It’s supposed to ground me in the present.”

“Does it work?”

A sigh. “It helps. I have things I say to myself, too. Like my name and my address — things like that. Just to remind me where I am.”

I couldn’t believe how damaged she was by what had happened. How could I never have had a clue? All I knew was that those days of ignorance were gone. It was time to hear all the answers to the questions I’d never dared ask — answers I’d never wanted to know. “Tell me, Meg. Tell me what happened.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve thought about telling you a thousand times,” she said. “And you know what? I don’t think I can.” She found my hand again. “You and I were so close. When Mason died . . . I felt your pain like it was my own. Because you were part of me.”

She was excavating the raw wound inside of me, all my losses bundled up into one tender spot, and it burned and ached.

“You need to, Meg. I need you to.”

She was silent for a while, then finally she said, “Okay. I’ll tell you.” She took a breath. “It was my Easter candy. I still had it in my room in that basket on my shelf. There were chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs in it — probably stale by then. I found the wrappers.”

Breathe.

I remembered that woven pink-and-green basket, remembered exactly where it was on her shelf. Mason would have had to climb for it. He would have been so thrilled at the discovery of the candy inside.

She started sobbing then, her mouth pressed into my shoulder to stifle the noise. “I’m so sorry, Otis!” she wailed. “I wish I hadn’t left candy in there! I wish I’d thought of the monitor! I wish I’d —”

“It wasn’t your fault.” The words were automatic, but of course my mind was already playing the same game: If only she hadn’t left candy in there. If only she’d thought of the monitor.
If only if only if only.

But I knew from watching my mom that this was a game with no winners. And so I shut out the
if only
s — which left only the pain.

Time passed. It was impossible to say how long. Finally, rational thought returned, and I asked, “Is that why you don’t eat chocolate anymore?”

I felt her nod in the dark, heard the movement of her head against the sheets. “It’s a trigger. I can’t stand the sight of it, or even the smell.”

Sort of like me with
SpongeBob
, although I knew her things must be ten thousand times worse. I thought for a moment. “What about screaming? That seems to be another trigger, but . . . if he was . . .”

If he was choking, how could he scream?

“Not Mason.” Her voice was a whisper. “Your mom.”

My gut twisted. My mom — God, my mom. “And the windows?” I asked, my voice tight in my throat. “I’ve seen you rubbing at spots on windows. Is that a Mason thing, too?”

“Yes. Because of the . . .” She paused, then continued in a shaky voice, “Because of the handprints.”

“What handprints?”

“Oh God. I don’t want to tell you!”

“Tell me.”

“He must have tried to get out, Otis. The sliding-glass doors — you know how they would get stuck . . . There was chocolate on them, handprints . . .”

The images — it was unbearable. And poor Meg. The things she had seen . . .

“We were all in the backyard when it happened. Mr. Esposito was mowing his lawn — if it hadn’t been for that, we might have heard Mason banging on the glass.”

As Meg wept, I tried to block the images. Mason panicking, unable to draw a breath, banging at the glass . . . My mom, right there through the door.