The Healing (The Things We Can't Change Book 3) (13 page)

“If you’d maybe tell me what needs to be fixed,” I force myself to say, against my better judgment, “I could try and help you out. If you remember me working in the yard, I’m pretty handy with the tools.” I don’t know where the gimmick comes from, I just know it’s cheesy as hell and it at least gets me a smile, though it comes with a loud sniffle and wrinkly chin.

“Everything needs fixed with me,” she whispers.

“O-okay,” I say, because this is getting to be more than I think I can handle. “Why don’t we start with this little thing?” I lift up her hands. “At least tell me what this is about, Evie. Because I’ll admit, this is a little weird. Even for me. On a certain level, I understand the cutting thing. But this is… strange.”

She stares at me for a long moment, and I realize, idiot that I am, that calling her ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ probably didn’t help anything. Sure enough, her chin gets all wrinkly and wobbly again and her shoulders begin to shudder and jerk as she takes in great heaving breaths, sounding more like choked hiccups than actual breaths of air.

“It-it’s b-because I’m d-dirty!” she wails and it’s like the floodgates open. She’s sobbing uncontrollably, practically choking on her tears as she crumples toward the floor.

I bend my knees as she falls and just manage to catch her, hauling her against me with very little grace and even less tact. One hand is tangled in her hair and probably pulling on it painfully, while the ring and pinky finger of my left hand accidentally dipped into her pants.

Shit, Zeke.

She’s shaking so hard it’s difficult to keep a good grip on her but with some maneuvering and fancy footwork I finally manage to get us turned around and sink onto the toilet lid with Evie mostly on my lap. Feeling more awkward than I ever have in my life—I don’t think I ever even held Cindy while she cried, because she just wasn’t the crying type—I give Evie a few pats on the back and work on getting the tangle of hair out of her face.

I can’t think of a damn thing to say, partly because I don’t totally understand and partly because I feel so out of my element. My place is and always has been on the sidelines, commenting sarcastically and from a safe distance. Playing an active role in anything is foreign to me and it’s clear it won’t be coming easily.

“You were dirty earlier in the week, and I remember telling you so,” I finally say in an overly light tone. “You seem pretty clean to me now.”

I was going for humor to lighten the situation, but it is clearly the wrong path, which I realize as Evie begins to shudder in my arms.

“It’s n-not dirty on t-the outside,” she hiccups, her voice muffled since her face is buried against my shirt. “It’s dirty… d-dirty on the
inside
.”

And suddenly it all becomes perfectly, crystal clear to me. I call myself an idiot ten times over for actually trying to crack a joke about this. Of course she feels dirty on the inside. Another common abuse or rape hang up.

Way to step in it, Zeke,
I think angrily.

“You know,” I say cautiously, “washing your hands won’t make you feel cleaner on the inside.” A stupid, common sense thing, but it has to be said.

“I kn-know,” Evie sniffles.

And that’s just it. She knows. I know she knows that it doesn’t help, and yet still she does it. I don’t get it. Why continue harming herself if it doesn’t actually
help
?

“Then why do any of it if it doesn’t make it better?” I abandon all pretenses of possessing tact and just ask the questions that are in my head.

Evie finally looks up at me, her eyes huge and glassy in her small face. “Because it helps me
deal
,” she whispers brokenly. “Just for a little while. I should be crazy for doing all these things. But the truth is,” her eyes fill with tears again, “the only time I
don’t
feel crazy is when I’m doing them.”

I force back the fresh wave of panic that accompanies her fresh wave of tears, and instead use a prime opportunity to touch her hair, tucking it behind her left ear.

“So, something makes you feel crazy, and doing…
this
stuff makes you feel better?” I try to clarify.

She hesitates for a moment, and then slowly nods. “Sort of. Sometimes, yes.”

“What made you feel crazy tonight?” I ask, genuinely curious.

Evie’s eyes dart furtively around the small room. “I-” she begins, but I give her my hardest look.

“
Tell me
,” I demand, and she flinches but I force myself not to feel bad. It’s all for the greater good, I remind myself.

Evie wipes her eyes and takes a deep breath. The look on her face is one I recognize and generally avoid at all costs—the look of a woman about to spill her guts.

“It was you and Koby,” she finally says, and I frown.

I can’t think of a single thing Koby or I may have done to make her uneasy. In fact, I was very explicit in my warning to Koby when Evie came with us, and told him that under no circumstances was he to touch her.

“What-” I begin, but Evie immediately shakes her head and I fall quiet.

“It wasn’t anything you did,” she says. “It was all… it’s all me. I woke up and I was just… trapped inside my own head. Sometimes I have trouble shaking Tony off, out of my head. And not feeling guilty about things that would have made him mad. And there I was, sleeping in the same room as two boys. And it was just starting to eat away at me, how Tony would feel, and I kept trying and trying to shove it away-” Her voice catches on a sob, and on pure instinct I lift a hand and rub her back.

“I just kept thinking of what he would do to me if he ever found out,” she says, though it’s a little garbled. “He would hit me and smack me if he thought I even glanced at another guy. If he found out I spent the night at a guy’s house, he would kill me. Or punish me with… something else.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the ‘something else’ would be and I feel sick inside. I want to hug the empty look out of Evie’s eyes and make the tears go away. But she’s still talking as though she can’t stop, and besides, I’m not the hugging type.

“And so I was thinking about…
that
, and it made all the memories come back and I was going crazy lying there, feeling dirty, feeling so disgusting inside and I couldn’t get it
out
of me. So I was trying to wash it off. Sometimes it helps me feel better, but it always comes back.” She lifts her eyes to me, brimming with tears. “It
always
comes back, no matter what I do. I still have him hanging over me. All the memories. I still feel like I answer to him, I still care what he thinks and I can’t shake him. I can’t get him to let me go, Zeke.”

She buries her face in my shirt and starts crying again. I’m still for a long moment, because this is all the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I nudge her, poking and prodding and saying her name until she finally sits up a little and looks at me.

I take her face in my hands and say in my firmest voice, one where I don’t have to feign the hatred I feel, “Evie, Tony doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone. He may as well be fucking dead, and you shouldn’t waste another
second
of your life caring or worrying what he might think or do. He can’t touch you now.”

Evie shakes her head violently before I even finish speaking. “No,” she says. “No, no, no. You don’t understand, Zeke. He’s not dead, and that’s part of the problem. And even if he was… even if he was…” She’s crying too hard to continue.

I decide to drop this issue and focus on the one that I’m truly concerned about, the only one I’m committed to helping her fix, and then I’m bailing. Or so I keep telling myself. I grab her left hand and lift her arm up so the bandage is clearly visible.

“Okay. So tell me what this is about.”

Evie bites her lip and says nothing, just wipes her cheeks and grabs some toilet paper to blow her nose. I jostle her on my lap, and I know my eyes are hard and unforgiving.

“Spill, Evie. Or I swear, I’ll tell someone. I really will.”

“It’s not that easy!” she cries out, sounding frustrated. I’m grateful, because anger is much preferable to tears. “There’s not a simple explanation! I’m… I have issues.”

“No shit,” I snap, and then close my eyes and reign myself in.

Evie jumps off my lap, glaring at me as she stands against the opposite wall. “Jerk,” she snaps.

She tries to get to the door and leave, but I’m much faster and block the exit. I fold my arms over my chest and offer two words that don’t come very easily to me. “I’m sorry.”

She just keeps glaring at me.

I sigh. “I’m sorry. But… you need to tell me, Evie. You need to tell
someone
.” I don’t know why I keep pressing, because hell knows, I’ve got enough of my own emotional baggage to carry around and I don’t need Evie’s added to the weight. Countless times she’s offered me an out, told me to go away, and I just can’t make myself take it. I try not to think about what that might mean.

I just offer another word that I don’t often say. “Please.”

She glares at me a moment longer and then looks once again to the floor. “I can’t really explain something I don’t even understand myself,” she mutters.

“Give it your best shot,” I invite.

She swallows hard, once, twice, and finally speaks so quietly I have to hold completely still and strain to hear.

“It happened even when I was with Tony. Not the… the cutting. The reason behind it. Sometimes I… float away.”

“Float away?” I repeat blankly, though my whisper matches hers.

Evie gives a quick nod and I just stare at her, nonplussed. She swallows again.

“I think, I think it’s a defense thing. Of the mind. With Tony, it was all so awful, my mind would try and separate from reality. And it terrified me. Real, genuine fear. I had almost no control over it and if I… floated away, I had no way of knowing when I would come back into myself.”

I get tingles down my spine as she talks about it, tries to explain it. It sounds scary. Lapsing into a coma and losing all control?

“But Tony is gone,” I point out the obvious. “So you stopped doing it. Right?”

She gives a small jerk of her head. “No. Now… I feel so much, for everyone. All of this guilt, the fear, the loneliness. Grief over my dad, and so much of the blame for all of it is on my shoulders. Guilt over Tony, my dad, you and… and…” She swallows hard and finally looks up at me. “And Cindy,” she whispers.

My chest fills with ice and I don’t dare speak.

“My mind tries to escape again, so it doesn’t have to deal with it all,” she continues quickly. “But I hate it. It’s scary. And it seems like the coward’s way out, to escape where I don’t have to feel, when no one else can do that. I don’t let myself. And the only thing that helps, that keeps me grounded is… is…” she trails off again.

“Is?” I finally push, though the words exit through numb lips.

“Pain.”

The single word echoes through the bathroom, final and ugly, too loud and harsh, though it was quietly said.

The first thing that goes through my head is, incredulously, a flash of Evie being masochistic, into BDSM or something weird like that, wanting pain, but I banish it immediately. It’s stupid and naïve, and not at all what she means. It’s nothing to do with sex and I know whatever the need is, Evie doesn’t
enjoy
the pain.

Want versus need.

Evie looks as though she’s ready to throw up, but she can’t seem to stop herself from talking. “It used to be little ways, fingernails, pulling my hair, Tony hitting me. But the guilt has gotten so heavy and… and after my dad died I needed
more
. That’s the first time I… that I cut. It also makes me feel cleaner.”

“What?” I ask, because this makes no sense to me whatsoever. Cutting her arm open makes her feel cleaner?

Evie looks like she could keel over and die on the spot, but she doesn’t try to withdraw again. “It’s all on the inside,” she whispers. “What he did to me made me dirty
inside
. I feel… poisoned by it. So when I cut, I let out some of that poison inside me, and it eases the pressure of it all on me. And it makes me feel better. For a little while.”

“Why do something so damaging if it doesn’t fix anything?” I ask, repeating my earlier question that I still don’t feel has been answered.

Evie takes a step away, and it’s like I can feel her closing off from me, feel her walls come back up. All from one simple question, that I really already sort of know the answer to.

“You can’t understand,” Evie mutters, and the words make me want to shake her. “You don’t know what it’s like, to feel so crazy inside your head that you’ll do anything, go to any extreme. Even if it’s temporary.”

But I do. Oh, how I do know exactly what she’s talking about, and I’m filled with an all-consuming need to show Evie that this time, at least just this once, I
do
understand.

“Come with me,” I say impulsively, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the door.

“What?” Evie squeaks, automatically trying to resist. “Let me go!”