Breathe (7 page)

“Fuck you,” she spat back. “I’d rather walk.” And she did, stalking right by me. I turned and reached for her, grabbing her by the upper arm and spinning her around to face me. She shrunk away from me as if she thought I might strike her and like the sky before me, I broke. Shattered into a million pieces. Wished I could be washed away in the rain with the rest of the dirt.

I pulled her to me and encircled her body with my own. At first, she resisted, pounding against my naked chest with her tiny ineffectual fists. But then I felt the fight leave her body and she collapsed into me, resting her head on my slick chest. I don’t know how long we stood there, wet and freezing in the rain. But I felt like it might be me that was the only thing holding her together and she the only thing holding me. So we stayed there, clinging to one another for as long as we could.

Chapter Seven

Abby

Sunday morning brought more rain. A wild storm that scratched at the windows and made it impossible to sleep. I laid there for hours in the dark, silently urging the sun to rise so I could find the will to get out of bed. So I’d want to exist. Part of me wished the bed would open up and swallow me whole. Take me somewhere other than that moment. I’d spent the last four hours staring at the ceiling, replaying the events of last night in my head. The things Garrett had said to me. The things that I’d said to him. It was maddening. There’s only so much time a person can wander around in their own head before they begin to wonder if they’re crazy.

I rolled from bed around seven and stumbled down the hall to the kitchen, following the warm aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. Maggie sat at the table—now clean and free of unpaid bills—sipping from a ceramic mug. She turned her head in my direction when she heard me approach.

“What are you doing up?” I grumbled.

“Well good morning to you too, sunshine.”

Mornings were hard enough. Did I really deserve to have to deal with Maggie so early? Especially after the night I’d had? I’d stopped wishing she’d get up and eat breakfast with me every morning around third grade. When I’d gotten tired of running to her room to wake her up only to find she wasn’t alone.

“Just surprised to see you up while the sun’s still shining that’s all,” I said, turning my back to her and pouring myself a cup of coffee.

“I thought I’d go to church with you and Uncle Jim this morning,” she replied and I nearly spit coffee all over the newly washed countertop. I didn’t think Maggie even knew Little Bend
had
a church, much less what time Sunday services were.

“You?” I balked. “In a church?”

To my surprise, she laughed. “Well sure. Why not?”

“Well, you’re you.” I had trouble picturing Maggie in a church—having to compete for attention against an even bigger martyr than herself. “Won’t the Virgin Mary statue start crying tears of blood? Or the holy water start to boil or something?”

“I really don’t need any of your lip this morning. Besides, church isn’t for the self-righteous like yourself. It’s for the sinners like me.”

“Is that right?”

“Without us there’d be no evil, the world would be heaven, and there’d be no need for religion. It’s folks like me who keep Pastor Williams working.” There was no arguing with Maggie once she’d set her mind to something, so she came with and Uncle Jim smiled like he had in that picture behind the bar.

After service, on the steps of the church, people reached for Maggie’s hand. Folks who’d looked down their noses at us. Who’d called her a whore or crazy or worse. People who’d stopped me in the aisles of Howell’s grocery store when I was younger to show me pictures and ask if I’d ever seen their husbands or sons at my house. These same people stroked the bony side of Maggie’s skinny hand and offered empty promises. Hollow if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos.

They didn’t know about Tom. Not the way they thought they did. They knew him only as a man whose life had been cut short. Side effect of consorting with people like my mother they would figure. They couldn’t know what I knew. They weren’t there when he’d moved in with Maggie and I. When the work dried up and the drinking began. They hadn’t had to watch as lack of utility soured a decent man. Rotted him from the inside out. They’d never had to push him off and race down the hall. They didn’t know the fear that could build inside a person when they were forced to listen to the pounding on a door they’d barricaded with a flimsy dresser. They never sat trembling, wondering when it would give. Wondering when something inside them would give and they would break.

One night he’d forced his way into the bathroom while I was showering. I could still feel the sting of the leather where it met the wet skin on my back. Force against splitting flesh. Welts and bruises I’d had to hide for weeks because I’d left the lights on in the bedroom and he couldn’t afford my carelessness. Didn’t matter much that I’d been paying the electric bill since I’d learned to bus tables. That the money he gave Maggie never went anywhere but a till in the cash register at the local liquor store.

This is what Maggie had always wanted. To be accepted. To be part of a town that loathed her. I’d just as soon leave the lot of them behind. They weren’t worth the mud on my boots. But Maggie wanted their approval. Craved it. Even more than she craved her next drink. So she lowered her eyes and faked a tear and I wondered if she truly missed him. If she truly loved him. If she’d ever really known him at all. I couldn’t imagine living with someone I didn’t know. Someone violent and unpredictable.

Part of me hoped she had loved him. Then at least I could accept what she’d done. How she’d looked the other way. How she’d chosen a strange man over her own flesh and blood. Was I so unlovable I hadn’t deserved her protection?

“It’s been hard,” I heard her say and inside I winced because it’d been anything but. Until his body had been found—until it had washed up on shore as if to haunt me—it’d been four nights of peace. Nights I’d spent sleeping instead of cowering. An unfurling of limbs and spirit that I hadn’t known in months.

Later, at the bar I counted my measly tips while Maggie wiped down tables and served beers to the few customers who came on in Sundays. I folded the bills and stuffed the wad into the back pocket of my jeans. We didn’t normally work together, Maggie and me. But she’d insisted on coming in. Insisted on working my tables and playing to a sympathetic male audience.

Garrett didn’t stop by for lunch like he usually did on Sundays. He’d sit in a booth in the farthest corner of the bar drawing circles on the tabletop with his index finger and poring over a textbook. He would always order a sandwich from the kitchen and insist that I eat half—his subtle way of ensuring I didn’t starve to death. But he wasn’t there today. Just the ghost of him in my mind. And he didn’t call. I waited until well after my shift ended, wiping down tables and restocking glasses. I waited until Uncle Jim demanded I leave.

“Don’t you have better things you could be doing?” he joked as he pried the rag from my unwilling hands then used it to wipe down the bar. “At least go have Becca make you something to eat.”

I hadn’t eaten all day. I’d been waiting on Garrett. There were times I thought I’d wait on him forever. He was the one thing that made life in this town bearable. Plopping down in a booth, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked it one more time. No calls. “Okay, I’ll go,” I said with a heavy sigh.

Uncle Jim peered over at me from behind the bar. “Everything okay, darling?” he asked.

“Depends on your definition of the word.”

Uncle Jim stopped cleaning and moved to sit down in the booth across from me. “Where’s Garrett?” he asked. “I didn’t see him around today. Don’t tell me you two are fighting.”

I folded my hands on the table and picked at my cuticles. “It’s complicated.”

“Is it?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at me. “Or are you just making it harder than need be?”

My uncle knew me better than anyone. Even better than Garrett. Or at least it seemed. Garrett would never call me on my crap the way Uncle Jim did. Well, he never would’ve before. Lately Garrett had been a completely different person.

I glanced at Becca, standing behind the bar counting the money in the registers and preparing for the busy night ahead. Her shoulder-length auburn hair fell in her face as she worked. “You ever do something you couldn’t take back?” I asked my uncle.

He followed my gaze to Becca then turned back to me. “When you love someone—truly love ‘em—I don’t think there is such a thing. Might not be easy, but you can always find a way to forgive ‘em. The trick is knowing when they’ve hurt you more than you love them.” Rapping on the table with his knuckles, my uncle stood up to leave. “Call him,” he ordered.

“C’mon now,” he laughed when I gave him a questioning look. “You think I didn’t notice you checking your phone every five minutes?” Offering another reassuring smile, he placed his hand on mine. “Whatever it is, I’m sure he’ll forgive you. I don’t think there’s an amount of hurt greater than the amount of love that boy has for you.”

I knew he was right. For Garrett forgiveness would never be a problem like it was for me. I was more concerned about his capacity to forget. Would he always see the blood on my hands? The stains on my clothes? Would he look at me and see Tom Ford?

Not for the first time, I wondered how it was the two of us came to be friends. We were so different. He lived on the good side of town in a house three times the size of the small apartment Maggie and I shared, with parents who cooked dinner every night and remembered little things like their children’s birthdays. Garrett had been born and raised in the city, transferring to Little Bend after his father took a job teaching Geometry and coaching the high school swim team. He hadn’t spent his life in this soul-sucking hellhole, wondering whether he’d have been better off if his mother had gotten an abortion.

There was no reason for Garrett to like me. He was kind and good in all the ways that I wasn’t. Yet, Garrett wasn’t just my friend, he was my best friend. My only friend.

“Any luck?” Uncle Jim asked me later.

I shook my head. Two phone calls straight to voicemail. Neither of them returned.

“Why don’t you go get in the car? I’m gonna get my keys, then we’ll go for a ride.”

I hung my apron on a hook by the rear entrance. The weather had changed from warm to bitter following the rain so I grabbed my jacket before exiting through the back door to the small alleyway that existed between my uncle’s bar and the veterinary office next door.

Large, chain-link cages lined one side of the alleyway. Dogs pushed their snouts against and through the holes, snarling and yapping, clearly annoyed by my presence. I reached into my jacket pocket for the dog treats I kept there then approached the cage farthest from the door. Inside, curled up into a quiet ball of fur, was the ancient and scraggly Labrador I’d named Charlie. “Com’ere, Charlie,” I called as I crouched down and extended my open hand through a link.

Charlie stirred, hobbled over on his weak legs, and sniffed at the treat in my palm. It had taken a long time to gain this tentative level of trust between Charlie and I. When he’d first arrived six months ago he’d been sick, beaten, and angry. An abandoned dog that had been used, abused, then left to die. Gave us a lot in common.

Dr. Cross had fixed Charlie’s body best she could but she hadn’t the tools to repair his spirit. At first we’d only stared at one another, I perched on the stoop outside the door and Charlie in his cage. He’d never growled, merely eyed me suspiciously, like he thought I was after his food. I’d taken it slowly, each day speaking to him more and more as I inched closer and closer to his cage. The first time I’d reached in to pet him I’d done so with a fistful of leftover meat. When he’d finished his meal, he’d allowed me to stroke a spot behind his ear. That is until the bar door had opened and Uncle Jim had called my name. Startled, Charlie had snapped at my hand, taking a few scraps of my flesh before retreating to the back of the cage.

Now I could reach in without fear. I knew that if I tried to hurt him, or made any sudden movements, our friendship would mean little. He would snap. But I was aware of the risk before I stuck my hand through the fence. It would never surprise me. In this way, I suppose it was the most honest relationship I’d ever known.

“You ready to go, darling?” Uncle Jim asked as he appeared behind me.

I nodded, wiping my hands on my jeans as I stood. “Where we going,” I asked.

“We’re gonna go visit grandpa.”

A while later, Shady Acres appeared before us tucked into the side of the mountain to the right of the interstate. It looked more institutional than the residential community it purported to be. I’d always thought of senior care centers as human public storage. Like the old and useless things people tucked away in metal crates, Shady Acres was a place to store someone you weren’t yet ready to let go of, but who you didn’t want hanging around your home, cluttering up your space.

Grandpa Rhoades had been in storage since I was eight, when his mind had gone and they’d found him wandering half-naked down Main Street during the Independence Day parade. I remember tagging along with Uncle Jim when he’d brought him to live there, unsure why the man who always kept butterscotch in his pocket for me was being sent away. Like the puppy Uncle Jim had bought me earlier that year that Maggie’d left on the side of the road one day because it’d done its business in her bed. As if a little puppy urine had been the worst thing to happen to her sheets.

Maggie hadn’t gone that day either. Uncle Jim told me once that Maggie and Grandpa Rhoades hadn’t spoken since the day Maggie tried to run off. To follow the English teacher who’d gotten her pregnant to California. The day I was born and ruined her plans.

I wasn’t much better though as I hadn’t been back to visit him since the day we dropped him off. Uncle Jim came religiously once a week on Sundays to read to him or sit with him, but I’d never returned after that first time. Uncle Jim always said it was just as well. Grandpa Rhoades usually couldn’t remember what day it was or who anyone was. Too many faces confused him.

I don’t think I’d have gone that day either if I hadn’t needed something to distract me from Garrett. It was either go to Shady Acres or sit at home staring at a phone that refused to ring. So, I’d hopped in the car and driven hours away, listening to Uncle Jim sing George Jones and Merle Haggard. Unlike the other members of my family, who couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket, Uncle Jim had a smooth, deep voice. I suppose in another life he could’ve made a living with music. It seemed an awful shame that the only people who ever got to hear him sing were me and Becca. Then again, it seemed me and Becca were all the fans he ever needed.