The Way Back from Broken (2 page)

Mrs. Tatlas shook her head as if clearing away a fog. “Where did you say the kids go?”

“Downstairs. With the art therapist. I'll show her.”

His teacher looked down at her daughter as if she hardly recognized her. “Okay then. Be good, sweetie.” She disentangled her hand from her daughter's grip and joined the other moms.

Rakmen crouched in front of the girl. “What's your name?”

“Jacey.”

She was nine or ten with oversized front teeth and growing-out bangs that refused to stay behind her ears. Her gray eyes analyzed him from head to toe, as if checking for radioactivity.

“I don't bite,” he said.

“I know that.” She spat out the words. “I'm assessing damage.”

Rakmen stood, held his arms out, and spun a slow, irritated circle as if showing off his outfit. “Satisfied?” he muttered.

She frowned, but apparently he'd passed some kind of test because she slipped her pudgy hand into his. “I'm ready now.”

Her palm was warm and damp, and he did not want to be this close to anyone. Halfway down the stairs, his phone vibrated. Rakmen slipped from her grip and fished for it in his pocket.

“Head on down,” he told Jacey.

She glared up at him. “You're supposed to stay with me.”

He shooed her off and read the text from Juan.
How's Blondie?

Jacey shot him another scowl and huffed down the stairs.

Blond,
he texted back. They all needed to lay off this shit.

I'd like to get some of that.

Rakmen shoved the phone in his pocket. It had been ten months since the thought of a girl had even made him hard. Juan could keep on trying to get laid but not with Molly. Not ever with her. Juan wouldn't understand how her sister Rissa was still there, behind the scar on Molly's forehead, in the empty seat at the table.

From the parlor, he heard Mrs. Tatlas's voice.

“My name's Leah. I . . . um . . . I was pregnant.” A soft murmur rose from the other women. He did not, did not, did not want to hear this. No amount of Kleenex or therapy circles or talking would change anything.

Rakmen closed the basement door and slumped down the stairs, avoiding eye contact as he stepped into the low-ceilinged room. The formal upstairs made Rakmen feel out of place, but downstairs matched him exactly, from the stained shag carpet to the torn pool table. The buzzing white fluorescents almost always smothered the crying upstairs.

And then there were the others, his sort-of-friends. After months of trying not to know their names and stories, he had learned them anyway. At least he knew the bits and pieces dragged out of them by Keri, the art therapist, who smiled too widely and gestured him toward the cast-off school tables clustered in the middle of the room.

“You're here,” she said as if that were cause for celebration.

The twins, big as grown men, sat shoulder to shoulder on kid-sized school chairs. They bent over a short-legged table, inking their names in tagger lettering on its edge. D'Vareay wore cornrows and D'Mareay had his head shaved to almost nothing, but otherwise they were identical from their empty expressions to the matching tattoos on the napes of their necks.

D'Shawn—Never Forget.

Molly sat across from them, flanked by two younger girls who had her drawing unicorns. Her eyes flicked up and met Rakmen's. The look was both a secret handshake and a plea. Molly was quicksand-trapped sure as the rest of them. Since the crash, her parents' hyper-vigilance had gone through the roof. Molly hadn't been let out alone in a year.

Jacey sat separated from the rest, sucking on a lock of hair like her life depended on it and staring at him.

“Well,” said Keri, extricating herself from the huddle of little ones playing with hand-me-down toys in one corner. “Shall we get started?”

Rakmen could hardly wait.

The twins covered their graffiti with a piece of art paper. Molly pulled herself to attention, trying too hard as usual. Rakmen knew the drill, but falling in step didn't help. It never got better.

Keri spread out markers, paints, colored pencils and modeling clay. “I thought we'd start with a really open-ended statement:
I feel the most in charge when
. . . You can address it in writing or visually, if you want.” The moms upstairs got Kleenex; the kids downstairs got art supplies. In the end, it all wound up in the trash.

“We can talk too,” said Keri, nodding encouragingly at each of them.

Nobody said anything.

Keri was always trying for meaningful conversation. It made Rakmen's stomach churn. Their perky therapist was the only one in the room who didn't walk with the dead day in and day out. She was woefully ill-equipped to facilitate anything.

“Well, you know what I always say,” Keri said to the silent room. “Words are short, but art is long. Let's draw.”

“Art is a pain in the ass,” Rakmen muttered, burying his nose in the newspaper that Keri brought to protect the table. He jotted headlines in his notebook.
Broke rancher leaves 120 horses to starve in the Wallowas. Flood of toxic sludge engulfs town in Hungary. Coast Guard abandons search for three fishermen missing on the Columbia Bar.

“Doing some writing, Rakmen?” Keri asked, leaning over his shoulder.

He slid a hand over the page.

She backed off as if he'd bitten her. “Private, I know.”

He wrote things down to remember. Forgetting was dangerous. Bad stuff kept coming, and you had to brace for it. He pulled the itchy collar away from his neck.

Keri sat down by Jacey and got sized up and down. “So your mom is probably having a really hard time, isn't she?”

Jacey nodded.

D'Vareay rolled his eyes at Rakmen and went back to drawing bloody knives wreathed in black roses. From the fine spray of colored paint on the thighs of both boys' jeans, he figured they'd already found their artistic outlet for the day.

“The group upstairs,” Keri said to Jacey, “it will be good for your mom. Talking about things—and time—that's what helps.”

Molly gave Rakmen a wan smile. That particular lie was as much a part of the Promise House basement as the buzzing fluorescent lights and the ugly carpet. They could sit here forever and nothing would change.

“What are you going to draw?” Keri asked Jacey, ever persistent. “When do you feel in charge?”

“I'm a kid,” said Jacey, her voice flat, her face blank. “I'm never in charge.”

“Well . . .,” Keri gulped. “I'm sure you can . . . just . . . draw something. Your favorite animal?”

Jacey put the sodden lock of hair back in her mouth and stared at Keri until she turned away. Then Jacey stood and picked up her chair. For a moment Rakmen thought she might throw it. Instead she carried it around the table and wedged in next to his. He turned to the obits, ignoring her.

An undulating wail from upstairs fractured the uneasy pause.

Even the little ones bickering over toys in the corner fell silent. Jacey shifted closer to Rakmen. Keri gasped, froze. So much for her being in charge.

The crying rose a notch, and Molly shot a pleading look at Rakmen. Do something, she mouthed.

His limbs were leaden, but he pushed back from the table. If he could help anyone, which he doubted he could, he would want to help Molly. He turned on the crappy old dehumidifier, which rattled even louder than the lights buzzed, muffling the sounds from upstairs. It was the best he could do.

Exhaustion poured through Rakmen. This day needed to end. But when he turned back to the group, they were all watching him. He leaned against the wall and tipped his head back to avoid their eyes.

Every day ended like this, and every day he wondered how he could survive another one.

“Here's the deal,” he said, talking to the ceiling tiles. “We're all in a club no one wants to join. We hang out. Our moms cry.”

Jacey whimpered like a kicked dog.

“At least here, everybody knows you're missing something.”

“Like a leg?” Jacey asked, her need for answers a gaping wound.

Keri opened and closed her mouth like a fish. The worthless woman was swimming in the wrong pool, but Rakmen knew exactly what Jacey meant. “Yeah, it's exactly like you're missing a leg, but no one can see that it's gone.”

The stuffy basement was suddenly crammed full of the dead. Molly was digging her nails into the soft flesh of her upper arms. The girl next to her blacked out the unicorn drawing in long steady strokes with a Sharpie. The twins looked ready to break the table in half. The little ones playing blocks began to cry.

“How do we walk?” Jacey whispered.

Even though he could barely hear her, Rakmen felt her question in his bones. He thought he might sink through the floor into the heavy earth. Maybe then he could rest.

The girl started to sob. She was looking to him for answers he didn't have.

“I don't know,” he pleaded, “with a limp, I guess.”

CHAPTER 2

Even after Rakmen retreated to his room that night, the girl's question gnawed at him. She'd burrowed into things he kept tucked away and expected him to have answers.

He didn't have answers.

He didn't have anything.

Rakmen flicked off the light, abandoning the pretense of studying for tomorrow's biology test. Once he'd dreamed of architecture school. At this rate, he'd be lucky to finish high school. It was all so much empty effort.

The dishwasher gurgled in the kitchen downstairs. The orange glow of the street light illuminated the room, stripped to the bare essentials—twin bed, black desk, straight-backed chair. The stuff Rakmen used to care about—scale models of bridges and posters of snowboarders—were in a landfill somewhere. Tenuous heights and steep slopes made him think of snapped necks and shattered skulls. He hadn't been to the mountain since Dora died.

Rakmen slid into bed and pulled a pillow over his head to block the noise of traffic. When he finally slept, he dreamed of biology—deformed frogs and genetic mutations.

“
¡Despiértate!
” His mother shook him awake.

He couldn't have been asleep more than a few minutes.

“Huh? What?” Rakmen fumbled for the clock—almost midnight. “Yeah?”

Illuminated by traces of orange light from outside, she sat in his desk chair, cell phone muffled against her chest. The strain on her face brought him fully awake, chest thudding.

He sat up. “What is it? What's wrong?”

She shook her head, “I don't know. There's a little girl on the phone and says she has to talk to you.”

“Who?” he asked, rubbing his temples.

“Jacey. Your biology teacher's daughter.”

His head was thick with sleep. The gears turned slowly. Jacey. The girl from the basement. “What's she want?”

“She won't talk to me. Says it has to be you.”

“How does she even have your number?”

“I gave it to her mom after group last night.” She held out the phone.

He squinted against the screen's blue light and started to lie back down. “She needs to talk to you. Not me.”

“
¡Tomalo!
” His mother whispered the command. He shook his head. She tugged on his blanket and pushed the phone toward him. Every part of her body said
you will talk to her
.

Rakmen sat back up. “Fine.”

His mother sat back down in the desk chair.

“Hello?”

A long-held breath whooshed through the phone, followed by a sob. “It's you,” she said, her voice sounding younger than he remembered. Another deep breath. “Make it stop,” she wailed, loud enough for his mom to hear.

“What are you talking about?”

A series of breathy hiccups came through the phone. He waited. More hiccups. He yawned again, squeezing the bridge of his nose with a free hand and extending the phone to his mother. He needed to sleep, not talk to a messed-up little girl.

A tremendous crash exploded through the phone. Both Rakmen and his mother jumped. He snapped the phone back to his ear in time to hear another crash.

Jacey gulped like a drowning girl. “My mom's crying and breaking plates.”

Rakmen's mom raised her eyebrows in question.

Another plate hit the wall.

“So your mom's really missing the baby tonight,” he said, not bothering to make it a question. The answer was loud enough.

“Uh huh,” said Jacey. “And . . . and . . .” The words were traffic-jamming in her mouth. “Rakmen . . .”

“Yeah?”

“My dad's at work and . . . ” Another plate shattered. “ . . . and she's trapped!”

For a split second, Rakmen thought of calling 911. They needed professional help. Someone other than him. But there was no fixing what was wrong in that family.

He knew that from experience.

“You have to make her understand.” Jacey's voice shook. “I didn't mean anything bad.”

“What did you do?” Fear rose in Rakmen. He knew how unstable grief could make parents.

“I dreamed about Jordan—that's my baby—and us and you. And we were all okay. We were someplace sunny.”

“Then what?”

“I woke up and told her about it.”

Rakmen covered his face with one hand. “You shouldn't have—”

Another crash. There wouldn't be any plates left.

“You have to talk to her.”

“I can't.”

“You can.”

“It's the middle of the—”

“I'll take the phone to her.” On the other end of the line, he could hear Jacey getting up from wherever she was sitting. Another plate shattered. Rakmen was wide awake now. He imagined the star-like explosion frozen in mid-fall for the space between heartbeats, and then the shards clattered to the floor.

“Wait!” he shouted and heard her sit back down again. “Jacey-girl. I can't—”

Jacey cut him off. “You can! I had a dream!”