The Healing (The Things We Can't Change Book 3) (32 page)

A fury, so strong and all-consuming it feels white hot and actually blinds me for a moment, fills me. I’m shocked to realize that I’m actually trembling. Only years of forced control over my emotions keeps me from exploding on Clarissa for what she did, from screaming at her to never lay a hand on Evie ever again.

Evie is breathing rapidly, still cradled against me, not moving from her half-slumped position as she stares at Clarissa. Her stepmom is staring right back, composure lost for a moment before she regains herself, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, mask in place. She can’t, however, so easily erase the stink of wine and the red-rimmed edges to her eyes.

“Evie,” she says, her voice venomous. “Get into the
car
.”

“No.” Evie straightens up, staring at Clarissa with hate in her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere with you, and you have no right to touch me like that. I don’t answer to you.”

Clarissa’s eyes bulge for a moment, and then she whirls around and unsteadily walks to her car, getting inside and peeling out of the parking lot. Once she’s gone, both Evie and I expel a long, relieved breath.

“Shit,” I breathe. “That was intense. What the hell is wrong with her, anyway?”

“Pretty obvious,” Evie says, not looking at me as she dusts off her clothes. The wind picks up for a moment and ruffles her skirt, showing a lot more thigh than normal, and I swallow and quickly look away. “She’s been drinking like, like a…” She throws her arms up in the air. “I don’t even know like what.”

“Like an alcoholic?” I supply, because that much is pretty clear. “What’s with the women in your family? Cutting, drinking, how did someone as normal and easygoing as your dad end up with people like you guys?”

Evie sniffs at the barb but luckily doesn’t seem offended. “He got stuck with me. I don’t know what he was thinking when he met Clarissa. That’s a question I ask myself all the time.”

I sigh and focus on the problem on hand, namely that Evie is stuck at the country club and clearly has nowhere to go. “Do you need a ride?” I ask, even though it’s really a rhetorical question. “Although, you probably shouldn’t go home.”

Evie shrugs, looking less troubled by this than she might have a month ago. “It’ll probably be safe in an hour or two. She’s just going to go home and drink some more, and she’ll be passed out soon enough. Our paths hardly cross when we’re home.”

“Right,” I say, and then gesture toward my dad’s car, shitty and battered though it is. “Well, I’m going to a party in a little bit, but I have to go home and shower and change. You can hang out at my house and I can drop you off on my way.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Evie doesn’t even look askance at the old car as I lead her up to it, and we get inside and take off, leaving the country club behind.

Evangeline

72

It takes the entire drive back to Grandview for me to get my temper back under control. I can’t help but wonder if maybe Zeke telling me that it’s all right to get mad sometimes was a mistake, because lately the only person I’ve been getting mad at is Clarissa, and the tension between the two of us is finally getting to an absolute boiling point. I know she has flagrant disrespect for me and refuses to believe everything that has happened to me, but I’m still amazed she actually tried to drag me to the car.

I know she doesn’t like me. And I know things are tense. I know she’s grieving for my dad and having trouble dealing with it, just like I am. I know she probably feels alone, just as I do. But this time she’s gone too far and something needs to be done. I’m just not sure what. I told Uncle Greg about her drinking, and he tried to talk to her about it but Clarissa denied everything and he told me it’s very hard to get an adult person into rehab or anything like that, because for the most part, they have to do it willing. What went unsaid between us was that Clarissa would die before scarring her reputation with something as scandalous as rehab.

So we left it an impasse and Uncle Greg told me to let him know the instant anything changed, and I know I’ll probably call him tomorrow when he gets back from Cincinnati. I don’t like the thought of a volatile Clarissa in my house, but I don’t like the thought of leaving it, either. It’s my home; even though terrible things happened in there, it’s my connection to my dad, even to my mom and many more good memories than bad. I don’t want to give it up. Especially since I’ve finally begun to exorcise the demons that haunted it.

I’m jolted from my thoughts as Zeke turns into a parking spot and the car jerks to a halt. I look up and see that we’re parked in front of an apartment building across from Caribou Coffee on Grandview Avenue. Jenny and I used to go there and do homework a lot, especially before we could drive, since it was within walking distance of the high school. My heart gives a pang at the thought of Jenny, and I turn away, focusing on the apartment building.

“Is this where you live?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Zeke says, pausing for a moment inside the car. He looks over at me, and then says in a very emotionless voice, “It’s not much.”

I get that he’s comparing it to my own massive house, and guilt swarms over me as I try to figure out the right words. “You should know by now that a big house doesn’t make it a happy one,” I finally say, and it sounds terribly cliché.

“Yeah.” Zeke gives a small, humorless laugh but then he moves out of the car and comes around and opens my own door for me. “Let’s get going.”

He leads me up to the front stoop where there are two chairs facing out on Grandview Avenue. Zeke was right across from me all those times I sat inside Caribou sipping my cappuccino, and I never had any idea. I wonder how many other times we missed each other in those early years, and I wish that much, at least, could be changed. If we had been friends a long time ago, I have a feeling I never would have sunk as deeply as I have, and maybe he wouldn’t have either.

They are heavy thoughts and I try to shift my focus to Zeke and the door that he’s pushing open, and gesturing for me to enter as he holds it. I murmur a thanks and step into the house, and feel a thrill go through me as I realize I’m seeing his home, Zeke’s
house
, for the first time. I take a few steps inside, my heels tapping against the scarred wooden floors, and stare around in wonder as Zeke steps in as well, pulling the door shut behind him.

It’s plain, a living room with two couches and an old television against the walls, a few family photos, clearly old influences leftover from his mom. I step up to one, because there are four people in it. I’m surprised to see that both Zeke and Cindy got almost one hundred percent of their looks from their dad, even their light green eyes. I would have expected that part to come from their mom, but her only contribution seems to have been their lighter skin tone. They are all smiling in this picture, and Zeke looks almost exactly the same, just younger and more innocent, no tattoos or ear piercings, his hair a bit longer. Cindy is practically a toddler.

Zeke pretends not to notice that I’m staring at the picture and just walks past me, toward the stairs on the far side of the room. Through a single hallway I can see straight into a dining room with dark wood table and chairs and a china cabinet, and at the end of it, a tiny galley-type kitchen. It’s a small apartment, just the three rooms on this floor and undoubtedly ones about the same size above us.

Zeke is standing on the first stair, looking back at me expectantly. “Do you want to wait down here or upstairs?” he asks.

“Upstairs is fine,” I say, and follow him. I have a vision of sitting on the couch when his dad walks in, and I dislike the incredibly awkward feeling it gives me. I’d rather be found in his bedroom, Zeke at my side, than alone on the couch. Then I realize how bad
that
would look and just sigh and go with it. Besides, the real issue is that I’m dying to see Zeke’s room.

He leads me down to the end of the hallway, and I see one door at the opposite end with a door cracked open to reveal a bit of a large bed, and assume it’s the master bedroom. The middle door has a piece of notebook paper taped to it, written in big block letters and covered in crayon flowers, bearing the name
Cindy
.

I stop in front of it, my heart hurting a little bit. It isn’t fair that Cindy died the way she did, that she was pulled into the middle of something that had absolutely nothing to do with her. I feel a flash of guilt, and I embrace it, but I try not to let it tear me down.
Wrong place at the wrong time,
I tell myself. It’s hard to believe, especially when I hear Tony’s message echo in the back of my mind, and always in the undertone, Zeke’s words to Cindy.
Don’t worry about your fucking legs!

I shudder and take a page from Zeke’s book; I repress the memories and quickly turn and follow him into the door at the other end of the hallway. Zeke’s room. It’s fairly bare and plain, but I expected that much. Pristine in its neatness, something else that I expected. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Zeke from the gardening project, it’s that he’s a bit of a perfectionist and the last word to describe him would be
lazy
.

“So, this is about it,” Zeke says from the doorway, and I turn around to look at him.

“It’s a home,” I say with a shrug. “Maybe there are fewer things here, and less space than I have, but a home is a home. It’s about the people that live there, not what you have inside. Mine hasn’t been the same since my dad died. He’s gone, and it’s… different. I’m guessing yours is the same way since Cindy… died.”

“Yeah,” Zeke says, the same way he did in the car just before we came into the house, oozing cynicism. “It’s pretty much just my dad and me arguing, every day all day. I’ve gotta shower.”

He crosses the room, avoiding eye contact as he goes into the closet and pulls out some clothes, and does the same with dresser drawers. In one of the nicer gestures he’s shown me all day (aside from driving me around and offering to take me home, of course), he tosses the remote onto the bed.

“You can watch TV or something if you want. It won’t take me long.” And then he’s disappeared into the hallway.

A moment later I hear a door close and water turn on. I get a flash of panic at the idea that only a single wall is between a naked Zeke and me, and immediately turn those thoughts away.
Television, Evie, television!
A small flat screen that I’m guessing is a pretty recent purchase is on his low dresser, and I flip it on and channel surf for a while, but I can’t find anything good and eventually get up to circle Zeke’s room restlessly.

It occurs to me that I’m still a little miffed at his behavior at the club when I tried to talk to him. I consider myself in the mirror above his dresser, examining myself critically. I spent hours getting ready today, combing through all the new clothes that I bought and putting together the perfect outfit, though with the advice a quirky cashier at Hot Topic had given me in mind. Hip, in style, and something
I
liked. Tony would never have approved of the skirt, he wouldn’t have liked the bright lipstick which, admittedly, I’d stolen from Clarissa’s bathroom because I only had light pinks and neutral shades. He wouldn’t have liked the brightness of my tank top either.

In a final act of defiance, I had styled my hair is big, giant curls, using the tedious process of my giant rollers. It had been Tony’s favorite style, the first time I’d worn them because I
wanted
to, not because he told me to. When I had finally stepped out of my bathroom, in shoes he never would have approved of but that I liked, I felt like I was really making progress. Despite the stupid voicemail message lurking in the back of my mind, I’d been ready to take a big step going public with the image that
I
wanted, the person
I
wanted to be, had been ready to be before Tony had pounded me down into the dust. And with just a few words, Zeke had almost shattered all my progress.

I don’t know what made him say what he did, what drove it. But as I assess myself over again in the mirror, I decide I don’t give a shit what he thinks about my new look, because I’m not out to impress him, or anyone else for that matter. I’m done caring what people think about me, and I’m not giving him the satisfaction of feeling any shame about it. Besides, I don’t plan on dressing this edgy all the time. It would give me attention that frankly, I don’t want.

I hear the water turn off and freeze again, and then resume my nervous pacing. I don’t want to go home and face Clarissa, but I know I have to eventually, even if I was able to escape it this evening. We still live together, and it’s unavoidable.

I’m going for my fifth circuit around the room when Zeke finally steps in, tossing his work clothes onto his bed, though they’re neatly folded. I study him and feel a few goosebumps grow along my arms, because he looks like the Zeke of old, back in school when he scared me and made me nervous. Baggy jeans, heavy steel-toed boots that clomp when he walks, a big white t-shirt and a black sweatshirt he’s left unzipped, since it’s still pretty warm outside.

The feeling intensifies as he picks up a pristine hat from his dresser and puts it on his head, swapping his earring studs for ones with diamonds as big as my pinky finger. It’s tough Zeke, and I’m sure this is the image he usually projects when he goes out to parties and mingles with people, especially people like Dominic and Cameron. He feels a little foreign to me, but I remind myself this is still the Zeke I’ve known for the past two months, and clothes and a hat can’t ever change that. I’m just used to seeing him so casual and loose, in gym shorts and dirt-smeared t-shirts that don’t scream,
I’m tough! Don’t touch me!