Between the Sheets (13 page)

“Would you like to go get dinner?” he asked. “I mean … we should maybe …”

She seemed to be considering it, as if dinner with him had some serious weighty implications that needed to be measured before an answer could be given.

“No, thank you,” she finally said and a soft sigh of air left his body. The sound that usually accompanied a fist to the gut. “I need to get back.”

She gathered up the mugs and the bottle of bourbon and took them down the dark hallway. While she was gone, he put on the rest of his clothes. Tucked the used condom back in its wrapper and decided he’d throw it away at home. He didn’t want any kids to see it in a garbage can.

When she came back into the room he didn’t feel quite so naked, but he still didn’t know what was going on.

She needed to get back? Back to what?

She was pulling her hair back into a ponytail. Once the elastic was in, she pulled the hair tight, and he winced on behalf of her scalp.

“Shelby,” he said. “I don’t know what to say …”

“Good night, I suppose.”

“Good night? Just like that?”

“What do you want?” She asked him as if she really didn’t know. As if she was totally clueless to how dates normally went.

“Well, I wanted to take you out for dinner.” He hadn’t expected to be dismissed like this. Didn’t want to be dismissed. But his sarcasm had the likely result and she boarded herself up tight against him.

Shit
.

“I’m sorry I forced you into having sex instead.”

“Shelby—”

“You had a condom, Ty. You must have at least thought the night might end this way, so we just cut out the boring dinner.”

“Boring?” Now he was offended. “Right. Well, thank God we didn’t have to bother with getting to know each other before you put my dick in your mouth.”

She flinched, and his anger popped like a balloon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He reached for her, thinking maybe if they were touching they wouldn’t get their wires crossed so badly. But she stepped out of reach.

“I think maybe we should just say good night.” When she said it like that, there was no arguing. It was as if she’d pushed him right out of the room. But then, that ghostly smile showed up again and he was totally off balance. “But … thank you … for this. I really did enjoy it.”

This
. Some of the most intense, conflicted sex of his life and she called it “this.”

“Glad to be of service,” he said flinging sarcasm around without care.

Again he was met with that brown level stare and he refused to be cowed. She was the one treating him like a piece of meat. “I would appreciate it,” she whispered, attempting to sound strong and tough but failing miserably, and something pinged in his chest. A small warning bell that said,
pay attention. Pay attention right now
. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about this.”

Just when he thought he couldn’t be more offended. “Who do you think I am, Shelby? Of course I won’t tell anyone.”

She nodded once and then grabbed their coats from the low table. His wallet slipped to the floor and they both reached for it, nearly bumping heads. He stood
back and then she did and he leaned forward, only to nearly get clobbered in the head as she did, too.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he muttered and grabbed his wallet. “It’s been just about the weirdest date ever. And that’s saying something for me. Good night.”

He stormed out of the barn, but at the door he heard her say, “Good night, Wyatt.”

Chapter 8

The door clicked closed behind Ty, and Shelby sagged against the couch, a sobbing breath tearing out of her throat.

Oh, that had been a mistake. A terrible amazing mistake.

Her fingers shook as she touched her lips, then the hollow of her throat where her heart still pounded. If she ran her hands down her body, she worried there would be parts of her missing. Her hips, her breast, the back of her leg. Giant chunks of her gone, or rearranged, because there was not a single bit of her that didn’t feel touched and different.

The sex had worked, the pressure in her life was now under control, but something else had shifted. Something that seemed important and worrisome.

Panic flooded her and she couldn’t pinpoint the cause, as if the source of the river was deep underground and grown over with vines and trees.

Go to dinner? She nearly laughed at the thought. She wasn’t sure she could get back to her house without falling apart. Without falling down. And she’d been cruel, she knew she had been, but it seemed the only way to get him to leave, to get him to stop being polite or interested.

So she could get on with the business of putting herself back together.

Only now, the silence she usually loved … felt very lonely.

As composed as she could manage to be, she locked up the barn, walked across the moonlit backyard, and let herself in the back door of her house, hoping that Mom and Deena would be in the living room, giving her a few more moments to find the pieces of herself that had gone missing.

“Well, hello, Shelby,” Deena said from the kitchen table. Her smile was carefully knowing and Shelby could not look at it. “What have you been up to?”

“A few drinks, that’s all.” She looked instead at Mom, wearing a purple sweatshirt over her nightgown.

Evie was smiling at her, present inside herself. “You should go out more,” Evie said. “You look like you had a good time.”

Carefully, feeling as if she’d been scattered on some hard wind, she put her fingers against the counter to keep herself upright.

This. This was the underground source of the tears. The things she could not look at too long or too carefully.

She’d been told when Mom was first diagnosed that routine was key. Any changes in environment or schedule could disorient her, cause an episode. And Shelby had embraced that particular prescription. Routine allowed her to lock herself away from the world; it gave her reasons to turn down drinks with co-workers, book club invitations, lunch with girlfriends. What a relief it was not to
try
.

And now, here she was, her body sore and somehow totally liberated, and she felt guilty. She felt awful.

For everything.

For treating Ty like that.

For not knowing how to say
thank you, but this is all I have for right now. This is all I can spare
.

For not taking better care of her mom. For the way her own life had shrunk down to this house and the
barn behind it. Which she knew was totally unfair because she’d agreed to it. She’d signed up; she—most of the time—relished their solitude. Their routine.

Quickly, she got herself a glass of water with shaking hands.

This is the reason not to see Ty again
, she thought.
I cannot process all of this. My life has no room for this version of me in it
.

Even as a voice in her head whispered that was untrue, that believing it was simply easier than trying to change her life.

But the beautiful sex and the terrible way she’d ended it was all so fresh—a wound the blood from which she could not stanch.

“Shelby?” Deena asked, and Shelby gulped down the water so fast it spilled out the sides of her mouth.

Too much. That was the problem with Ty. He was too much. The sex, the way she felt, all of it. Too much. She felt better at the thought. She knew what to do with too much—reject it. Deny it. Trim it back to nothing.

“Thanks, Deena,” she said, wiping her mouth and turning to smile at her friend. “Thanks for making me go.”

“Well, he was too good-looking to leave standing on your porch.” Deena began to gather her things. “I’ll see you next time, Evie, and we’ll get to work on that album of yours.”

“That would be fine, Deena. Thank you.” Evie said it with such grace, totally aware that she needed care. It was such a shocking moment of clarity that Deena and Shelby shared a look.

“She was calm the rest of the night?” Shelby asked as they walked to the front door.

“I wouldn’t say calm, but the last twenty minutes she was doing just fine. Real clear.” Deena put her hand on Shelby’s arm and as electrified and out of sorts as she
was, she fought the urge to shrug it off. “Honey, you’ve got to think about a consistent system of care. You can’t keep cobbling things together and hoping for the best.”

“It’s working—”

“Barely. You look worn down to the bone.”

Shelby bit her tongue and smiled. “We’ll go see Dr. Lohmann next week.”

Deena nodded. “And look, if you need any more help in the evenings …” Her big brown eyes twinkled in a way that made Shelby incredibly uncomfortable. “You let me know.”

“Thanks, Deena.”

Shelby showed her out before going back into the kitchen with Mom, who was poring over her old Kodachrome photos. Behind Mom the windows were black with night. Her silver hair was matte in the stark light from the overhead lamp, her face was washed out, her purple sweatshirt the saturated color of a bruise.

She looks like a picture. A moment in the past already gone
.

She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her mother’s head.

“What is that for?” Evie asked, laughing, cupping her hand over Shelby’s cheek.

“Because I love you.”

“I love you, too, Shelb.”

“I’m going to go change my clothes,” Shelby said.

Upstairs she quickly got out of the uncomfortable underwear and washed the makeup off her face. Her lips were swollen and she had beard burn across her neck, the tops of her breasts. She turned sideways and saw the red mark on her ass where Ty had grabbed her.

With the tip of her finger she touched the edge of that red mark; it was her imagination, she knew that, but where he’d touched her, her skin was hot. Where he hadn’t, cold.

Ridiculous
, she thought and pulled on her thin sweatpants, a tee shirt, and her robe.

In the hallway she heard her mother in her own bedroom.

“Mom?” She leaned against the doorway, watching her mother curled up on the bed with more photos.

Her father had been the one obsessed with the camera. With cataloging every moment, as if without proof people wouldn’t believe they were a happy family. Or they themselves might forget the story they were supposed to be telling.

Shelby hated the pictures. Hated Mom’s fascination with them. The smiling father with his mouth full of nonsense and hate. The scared but dutiful mother. The seething girl. That was all she saw behind the first-day-of-school shots and Christmas portraits.

She had no idea what her mother saw.

“Shove over,” Shelby said, moving aside the pictures to sit down beside her against the headboard.

Mom smelled of roses and bedsheets. Good smells. And when she looked up at Shelby, recognition was bright and comforting in her eyes. Mom forgot more things than she remembered, but she always knew Shelby. Perhaps that’s why she felt that no matter how bad things seemed, or how cluttered the house, or how little sleep she had, they were okay. Because it was still the two of them against the world.

She knew the day would come when she didn’t recognize her. Didn’t remember who they were to each other. When Evie would look at Shelby with that blank face. She didn’t know what would happen when that foundation collapsed.

There is enough trouble today
, she told herself.
You don’t need to borrow tomorrow’s
.

“Thomas after they built the church.” Evie held up a grainy picture from the early eighties. It was Dad’s brief
mustache phase, which, she supposed, made him look a little like Tom Selleck. Without the short shorts.

“He was very happy,” Evie said. Her hair had come slightly loose from the bun and a thick curl rested against the pillow.

“What are you looking for in the pictures?” Shelby whispered as she twined the curl through her fingers.

“What do you mean?” Evie was distracted by another stack. “Oh, here’s one!” Evie held up a picture of the two of them, just after Shelby’s junior high graduation. Mom, in a halo perm and a green polka-dot dress, was beaming hard at the camera with such pride she glowed. Shelby, wearing a blue cap and gown, looked at her mom as if the sun were rising upon her face.

It was the two of them together, in a perfect bubble of time and happiness that excluded anyone but them. That was the way they had been for as long as Shelby could remember.

But the day after that picture had been taken, Dad preached from the pulpit the sins of pride. How it distracted people from truly understanding God. How those with too much pride would never know love. In a twenty-minute sermon he crushed Mom from his position, crushed the two of them and their happiness that had not welcomed him.

And that was only a minor trick of Dad’s.

Anything Mom accomplished—her promotion to manager of the plant, her raises—he had to diminish. He had to make her smaller and smaller until she disappeared.

Shelby was seven when she realized that no matter what she did, how hard she prayed, how good she was, it wouldn’t matter, because her father would never love her. Not really. From that moment he no longer had any power over her; he could beat her until she bled but he couldn’t touch her. Not where it mattered.

So he turned his attention to his best audience, the person he could reduce to rubble with only a glance.

Evie.

This is your fault
, he’d say to Shelby while Mom scurried across the floor to clean up broken dishes. To wipe up blood, holding closed the torn sleeve of her dress.
All your fault
.

But instead of giving him what he wanted and drawing his disastrous attention away from Mom, Shelby withdrew even further and became a knowing, willing accomplice to the systematic abuse her father heaped upon her mother.

The thought of it—the memory of it—made her sick and she closed her eyes, pressing her face against her mother’s hair.

If I could change the way I was, Mom, I would do it. I would do anything to change the past
.

“I look at these photos and keep thinking I’ll see what I saw,” Evie whispered. “I’ll see why I married him. Why I felt like he was all I deserved.”