Trouble (Orsen Brothers #1) (6 page)

“He’s dead,” she said, as though she couldn’t quite wrap her head around it herself. Her lip trembled. “They…they’re going to send the sheriff over to talk to us in the morning…”

Concern radiated off of her. I couldn’t stand it any longer. “No!” I shook my head and jumped to my feet. “You’re lying. He’s fine!”

“Venus…”

She studied me carefully, as though she was expecting me to explode like this. A full minute passed before either one of us moved. A cheerful sequence unfolded on the screen in front of us, clashing against the horrendous reality that had become our lives.

“I’m telling the truth V,” she said, breaking the silence.

I snorted and my eyes began to well with tears but I clenched my jaw and pushed them back. “V? You haven’t called me that since I was five.”

She sighed and pulled a pack of menthols from her apron that looked distinctively like my own, pressing one between her lips and lighting it. I only ever saw her smoke a handful of times.

“Just get out!” I demanded, holding open the door for her. “I don’t want to be around you. I want to be alone.”

She nodded and stood up, hesitating in the doorway with her back turned away from me. “I’m going to go call the mall…maybe they can page Jeff…”

“Just go,” I urged, studying my feet. “Please.”

She nodded and stepped out into the hall.  I slammed the door after her and locked it, collapsing to the floor as the movie credits began to roll. A framed picture on my bedside table caught my eye. I blinked back my tears and picked it up.

It was of my father and I at the pumpkin patch. I was sitting in his lap with a pumpkin in mine and we were both smiling, his dark eyes sparkling above bright white teeth. I couldn’t have been much older than six when it was taken.

I looked out the window. It was pouring outside. Raindrops hissed against the glass and thunder clapped somewhere in the distance. I set the picture back on the table and fished for a cigarette between my mattress, only to come up empty handed. Damn my mother for confiscating them when I needed one the most.

The funeral was three days later on an equally gloomy and depressing Tuesday. Not that I was complaining. Nice weather would have felt condescending.

I stood stone faced beside Luna, who crossed her arms over her chest and refused to express any emotion as our fathers casket was lowered into the ground. On the other side of us, my mother leaned against Jeff and cried fat crocodile tears into a scrunched up handkerchief. Fiona was not in attendance. Her mother’s death had made her impartial towards funerals.

I shifted on my feet and clenched my fists until my knuckles ached. There was nothing about the ceremony that my father would have liked. He wouldn’t have wanted us standing around in the rain mourning him. But I had come to grips with the fact that funerals were for the living, not for the dead.

Still, the worst part about his death was that it wasn’t unexpected. We all knew this day would come. It was just a matter of when. It was true what they said, after all; when you live on the edge you die on the edge.

At least he didn’t kill anyone else in the process.

A tear snaked its way down my cheek and found shelter on my lips. I licked it away and closed my eyes for a brief moment, feeling Luna squeeze my hand.

When I reopened my eyes, my fathers coffin was snug in the dirt and the pastor my mother had sought out was wrapping up his eulogy. Did alcoholics go to heaven or were they handled the same way suicides were?

I couldn’t be sure.

It wasn’t like our family was ever that religious.

Thunder rumbled and the rain began to fall even harder. Jeff opened the large umbrella in his hands and held it over our heads as people began to pay us their respects and shuffle towards their vehicles.

When everyone but our family was gone, Luna looked over at me with a question lingering behind her bloodshot eyes. She looked far older than her age and we both were drenched. Jeff and my mother had taken the umbrella and were walking up the hill towards our car.

I reached over and pulled her into a tight hug—and we stood that way for what felt like an eternity—the soft thump of our heart beats merging into one as the rain covered us in a cold blanket. When we got home, we dragged the dollhouse out into the backyard with Fiona’s help, drenched it in gasoline, and lit a match.

Chapter 7

—

“
Don’t you talk about him,” I whispered, pushing the bleak memory of my father’s death into the back of my head.  I cursed myself for signing that stupid contract. She didn’t know anything about me—not really—and if she didn’t have another contrived book to write about me I wouldn’t have been here.

She sighed and sat back in her chair, her oval face tinged with displeasure. “I just want to know why do you do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“You know.” She waved her pen at me.  “If you would just—”

“Oh god.” I snorted. “Here we go.”

“I’m saying,” she said, flipping my file closed, “off the record here, as your mother, you are letting a good thing slip between your fingers. Stephen is good for you. You are good for each other.”

I hated the satisfied look she got on her face every time she got into one of her spiels. What did she know anyway? For all her otherworldly knowledge about men—she had never even been with one for longer than five years—and that included my father and Jeff.

“Shouldn’t I be the one deciding that?” I retorted. “Besides you’re hardly someone who should be dishing out relationship advice…”

A dejected look flashed across her face and she sat up straighter. “You’re getting defensive. Obviously I’ve struck a chord…”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I just don’t want to see you make the same mistakes I did,” she argued, taking a sip of her lukewarm coffee. “Being noncommittal isn’t a good trait.”

“I’ve been with one man mother,” I reminded her, “we’re hardly even in the same league.”

“That’s right,” she bit back, “fixate on my shortcomings as a means of distracting from your own.”

“What?” I shook my head. “God do you even hear yourself sometimes?”

I looked up at the clock and stood up, pulling my cross body purse over my head. “Look,” I said, waving a hand at her. “This has been fun but can I go now?”

She rolled her eyes and stood up, sashaying for the door and holding it open for me. She was probably the only woman in the world capable of making Manolo Blahnik's appear comfortable. “Next week then,” she said, flipping through the calendar on her phone, “I have a free slot on Tuesday at 5 p.m.—should I be expecting Stephen as well?”

“I’ll ask him,” I sighed, unwrapping a piece of gum and sliding it between my teeth, “I’m glad you can work me in.”

“Oh Venus…” She reached out to me and pulled on my jacket, attempting to smooth the wrinkles in it and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. I could read her expression without even trying. That was the problem with having shrinks for parents. They knew exactly how to look at you to get inside your head. They could say so much without saying anything at all. “You remind me of myself sometimes,” she finished.

“Oh god.” I grimaced and pulled away from her. “Please don’t ever compare us to each other. We’re nothing alike.”

She sighed and crossed her arms over her perfectly ironed dress, which was
not so ironically
the same exact shade of red as her lipstick. “You’re right,” she said, holding up her hands.

I raised an eyebrow at her and popped my gum against my front teeth, keeping my eyes focused on hers. Her expression softened and she cleared her throat.

T H E N

The appointment was on a depressingly beautiful Friday afternoon. I was silent the entire way there and the entire way home and Stephen kept his tail planted firmly between his legs and focused on the road. We didn’t talk about it at dinner, which was take-out Chinese that I promptly threw up. We didn’t talk about it as we were brushing our teeth and changing into our pajamas. And we didn’t talk about it once we were in bed.

I dreamt about a young girl with my unruly hair and Stephens’s eyes and I awoke in a cold sweat, stumbling into the bathroom as a sharp pain seared its way through my lower abdomen.

“Damn it,” I whispered, looking down between my legs.

Crimson dripped onto the white linoleum. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper and balled it up, using my foot to rub it up as I removed my underwear and tossed them into the trash. The woman at the clinic warned me about this but in a haze, I had forgotten to put on a panty liner.

When I looked up Stephen was standing in the doorway with an expression on his face that shifted back and fourth between shock and horror. “I’m sorry,” he gawked, breaking the stillness, “I shouldn’t have made you…”

“No.” I shook my head. I wasn’t about to give him the meek satisfaction of taking credit for this. “God, don’t even say it. You didn’t.”

He stretched out his arms to me and attempted to pull me to his chest but I wouldn’t let him. The words I had been storing inside of myself since we arrived home poured out of my mouth like foam. “You just never asked me what I wanted.”

He frowned and held me at an arms length, brushing his fingertips over the wetness on my cheeks. Was I crying? I hadn’t noticed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, clenching his jaw and looking away from me.

A dam inside me broke and I lashed out at him, pounding a balled up fist against his chest. “You never once asked me if I wanted our baby!” I yelled, although it came out as more of a shriek.

My thighs stuck together beneath my nightgown as I stumbled past him. I grabbed a suitcase from the closet and began to fling his things inside of it; a change of clothes, his toiletries, anything he might need for a few days away.

When I turned around he was standing right behind me, his expression tinged with something I couldn’t quite decipher. “Where are you going?” he asked.

I shoved the suitcase at him and shook my head. “Nowhere,” I said evenly. “You are.”

He frowned and tried to pull me to him but I slapped his hands away. “Venus, come on…”

“Leave!” I demanded, pushing him towards the door. “I don’t want to see you for awhile.”

He nodded and pulled his jacket from the closet, sliding his arms through it and reaching for his suitcase. I heard the front door slam shut a few seconds later and collapsed in bed, pulling my knees against my chest as I sobbed.

I slept for the better part of that week. Luna came and stayed with me but I barely registered her presence. I was more or less a vegetable and with her insistence, I started seeing a therapist who wasn’t my mother. A woman in Shoreline who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder and came highly recommended. She sat me down in a small loveseat across from her desk and handed me a box of tissues, encouraging me to “get it all out.”

So I did.

I told her about my father’s death, about Stephen’s adultery and my drinking, about my hasty abortion, and about how I worried that I was becoming too much like my mother. And she listened, never once interrupting me to give her own opinion.

It was liberating.

She asked me about the waxing and waning of my intense highs and lows and about any odd habits I might have. I told her that I preferred being alone to being around Stephen, that I couldn’t stand the idea of having sex with him, that I hated seeing babies and young children in public, and that I had lost all interest in food.

And she nodded and nodded and nodded, absorbing every fast spoken word that left my mouth as she jotted things down on her notepad. Then, she asked about my family history and my mother, who she remembered from college, and about whether or not I was suicidal.

I told her I wasn’t. That I thought about it from time to time but that I ultimately didn’t have it in me. I told her that I knew I couldn’t be happy the way other people were but that I thought I might be able to function just fine with nothingness.

She typed something into her computer and handed me a prescription for Lamictal, a mood stabilizer she said would help, “even if it did make me gain a few pounds.” And I stuffed it in the bottom of my purse but never filled it…

Chapter 8

—

I
pushed through a crowd of stagnant bodies towards a set of revolving doors in the front of the mental health building. Everything was alive outside—tinged in a hue of late summer orange—contradicting the dreary fluorescent overtone inside.

Leaves sagged from branches as though they were sweating. It was hot. Perhaps the hottest day so far that August. I removed my jacket and continued down the sidewalk toward the tiny brownstone I called home.

The mailman was walking up my front steps when I approached. He smiled at me and handed me a stack of envelopes before walking off.

I sighed and flipped through them. Bills, bills, and more bills. Shocking
.
I stuffed them in the bottom of my bag and fished out my keys, unlocking the door and dropping my bag to the ground in front of the large bay windows in my living room.