Drowning in You (11 page)

She holds my gaze and replies,
“You’re way too late to uninvolve me from you, Dex.”

She leaves me there. I sort
through my thoughts and decide I have to fix up the issue that
holds her from me: the accident.

Then I get on the bus to go
home to grab something to eat since I’m still starving. When I come
out the side door after raiding the fridge, with every intention of
catching the bus again, something catches my eye. A dirt bike, mine
from years ago, is still leaning between the carport and the
neighbor’s fence. I’d found it a while back and had started working
on it on the odd weekend up until the accident.

I close my eyes for a second,
praying it still starts, that it has enough fuel, that…yes, the
keys are hanging off a wheel spoke. I rip off the cover wet with
rain and throw my leg over the saddle. My leg kicks back, one, two,
three times until it catches and idles, then I rip at the handle
and it roars to life.

I shake out an old helmet,
dislodging a spider that scurries away. Then I pop on the helmet
and disappear into the night.

I’m going to visit every pub in
town, and every town around this town, until I find my drunk ass of
a Dad.

Then it’s on.

* * *

This body follows where the
dirt bike takes me. With this huge black helmet I bet I look like a
marshmallow head, but I don’t care and no one can see me. Just how
I like it. I skid over damp roads while the drizzle settles into my
clothing.

The speed, this rush, is what I
love. Even the mixture of wind tearing at my clothing and the
dampness can’t deaden the thrill. My usual resistance to the cold
turns into a long-ago memory. The sensation is so far from the
feeling of needing to collapse, to pass out when my sugar levels
drop and I have my hypos. When it feels like the world has drawn
out my strength until I’m nothing more than a pair of knobbly
knees.

I’m sure riding a dirt bike
like this on the roads would turn a cop’s head, but I don’t care. I
need this now.

I stop at each bar I find,
making sure I keep my hood up and my hair a bit messed in front of
my eyes. Not that it matters.

Dad isn’t in any of them, so I
take the long way back home. I stop at a restaurant where there are
gas heaters above the chairs and tables outside so maybe I can gain
feeling in my fingers and toes before I take off again.

I kick the
stand up and lean the bike near the wall out front. Inside, there
are clusters of people drinking, leaning over tables and laughing,
and stabbing at pieces of food. And
Dad.

A kid of about eight whizzes by
me and I grab hold of his shirt. He whirls into me, almost toppling
over.

“
Hel—” he
starts to scream.

I clamp my hand over his mouth
and withdraw a twenty-dollar note from my pocket. This was meant to
buy me lunch for a couple of days at work, but I’d trade an empty
stomach for answers any day.

The note attracts the boy’s
hand. “For me?”

I mime a zipper shutting my
mouth, then hold up that finger to him. “One task and you can have
this.” I look around but no red-faced fathers or squealing mothers
have tried to attack me yet, so maybe I can actually pull this
off.

“
There’s a man
in there sitting at the bar with a green shirt and short black
hair.” I whip out my phone and start recording. “I need to you stop
nearby and pretend to play with something, or do your shoelace.
Whatever. Just stand nearby for a minute.”

The boy has an incredulous
face, mirroring the exact feeling of idiocy surrounding this plan
also in the small, rational side of my brain. “You want me to just
stand there?”

“
Do you know
what ‘blending in’ means? Hide in a corner, or play a game on the
floor, but don’t stand and stare. And make sure you’re somewhere
near that guy. Now go and take this.”

The boy snatches my cell and
runs off, fully into his specialized mission. You wouldn’t know
he’d been running in pointless circles just before I caught him. As
soon as he nears my dad, he drops to the ground and starts
crawling, picking up bits I can’t make out from here with one hand
and holding my cell in the other.

It’s funny how society works.
Everyone’s afraid to be the first one to stand up to the weird or
unusual. Two teenage waitresses step over him, giving him nothing
more than a puzzled look. Meanwhile, this kid hangs pretty close to
the seat where Dad is sitting. Just Dad and his beer and a phone
conversation I am going to hopefully hear part of soon.

That’s when a middle-aged man
appears from the kitchen, headed straight toward my spy. Like the
fool I am, I throw my arms up in the air, trying to catch this
kid’s attention. This kid whose name I don’t even know. By some
miracle, he looks up and sees my air punching and hand waggling and
stands up and walks out of the front doors as if nothing happened.
I indicate I’m heading off to the side of the building, and he
follows.

I hold out my hand.

Wrinkling his forehead, he
says, “Nuh-uh, I’m not stupid! Money first, dude.”

I hand over the twenty bucks
and he passes my cell back just as quickly.

“
You can go
now,” I say, waving him off with a jerk of my head.

As he turns to run, I add,
“Thank you. What’s your name?”

The kid smiles and puts his
hands on his hips. “Richy,” he says proudly.

“
Well, Richy,
thanks a lot.”

And the kid is gone. I don’t
see him again after that. I plug my earphones into my cell and
kick-start the bike.

And I press Play on my
phone.

Zipping along the shoulder of a
bend, I hear my voice first, saying, “There’s a man in—” I
fast-forward past our chat until I hear scratchy sounds. Likely my
phone brushing against the floor. Dad’s voice is in the jumble of
noise somewhere. I’m searching through the sounds, separating
everything that doesn’t matter into one section of my head,
ignoring the piercing wind and rain until Dad’s voice clears
up.

“…
I’d love
some of that cash. Get my grandson some proper equipment, my wife a
nice weekend away and a car. But I’m not stupid. What do you think
Lisa will say? She’ll ask where I happened to pluck out that five-
or six-figure sum. Tahny and Dexter will be clueless for a while. I
could hide it from them. But not Lisa. Not her.” Dad goes on to
talk about how this is exactly stealing money and it doesn’t seem
“fair”. Then he moves on to other details. “Maybe I was entitled to
the money. Back then, yeah, but not after all that’s
happened—all
I
’ve
done.” The time lapses where this other person takes ages to speak,
then, “You’re still planning to do it? That’s a cruel way to—” and
the recording cuts off. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered I’m not driving
back home. I’m…

I’m driving to Charz’s? I pass
the mechanic’s where I work and head down a street I think I’ve
been on before. Charz had her sixteenth here. I remember from years
ago when she’d invited me, shocked that being a year above her in
school and with only an exchange of half a dozen words meant I’d
scored an invite. But even then I had my eye on her. She’s all I
remember from that night.

I stand the
bike up and lean against it pulling off my helmet and reflexively
gasping for clean, fresh air. I have to wipe my face with my
sleeve, even though it’s damp too. But I can’t leave yet. Looking
down at my cell, I have hope until I see the time: 9:05
pm
. Too late
for friends
. Too weird to
show up at a house whose address I’m not supposed to know
for friends
.

I see her through a gap in the
curtains. It looks like she’s reading to that little brother of
hers the way her legs are bent on the side and she’s resting on her
elbow curled over him, holding something in their laps. Charz may
keep her head down and stay backed into a corner like when Raych
went off her rocker the other day on my lunch break, but she has a
helluva better soul than anyone I’ve known.

Darcy stares at her face, not a
blink, just awe radiating from that look as she reads from
whatever’s in their lap, her mouth making noiseless shapes. One
second they’re straight-faced, the next they’re turning into each
other and laughing in sync. Although I couldn’t be farther from
them than I am now, I’ve never been closer to Charz than this.

Around me she’s beautiful and
brave yet scared. Here I couldn’t label her if I tried. She’s just
being herself, a natural carer.

I decide that now’s the time. I
don’t know how this happened, but I perch the helmet on the seat
and walk up to the front door.

I stand at the threshold,
thinking, thinking…

I would knock and Charz would
leap through the door and wrap her arms around me. I’d tell her I’m
pretty certain my dad is planning something weird regarding the ski
accident with her father despite him possibly feeling bad about
that plan to steal his money, and I’d tell her all we need to do is
a bit of discussing, research, and then we could tell our case to
the police when we’d know what’s going on for sure. Charz would be
so thrilled I’d thought this out neatly. She’d link her wrists
around my neck, and I’d press her against my body and our bodies
would match together so perfectly we’d go upstairs together to just
lie in bed because we fit that well side-by-side and Darcy would be
sleeping anyway.

And then what, Dex?

With fierce resolve, I walk
away and leave the Mays be.

It’s probably one of my few
smart choices for the night.

11. Happy = Too Hard

Charlee

I leave home early to pick up
Darcy from school and find myself staring up at a restaurant sign:
The Crooked Shelf. Smiling, I walk to the back table again and prop
open the menu. In a few seconds my eyes glaze over “cappuccino” and
I call over a waiter to take my order.

Elliot turns around, seeing me
flag him down. The cute waiter is here again.

The least I could do is restart
that idea to hang out with him and see where that goes. If I’ve
ever needed a distraction, it’s now because I do not need to fall
for…no, no I haven’t fallen for Dex—how could I?—but a guy like
Elliot who seems nice, and hot, isn’t something I should turn away
from.

“
You want that
disgusting milkshake with the marshmallows again, yeah?”

I suppress a giggle and shake
away the images of my tears all over this strange guy I didn’t know
a week ago. “No, actually. I’ve decided to stop punishing myself
and try a nice, normal cappuccino.”

He winks and says, “Coming up,
beautiful.”

Beautiful? He
called me
beautiful?
I comb my fingers through my hair. It’s loose and hangs over
my shoulders today, and I have a lower-cut tank on than I’d usually
wear, although I have a V-neck sweater to cover my arms. I guess
this could be seen as nice, but the B word?

In the minutes Elliot takes to
bring back my cappuccino, thoughts about Dad come to life around
me. They turn the man talking to a girl at a table nearby into Dad
talking to me. Thoughts about Dad’s death replace the elderly lady
with blue veins popping out of her skeleton hands into an even
frailer version of Dad. And every other child here is a
ten-year-old boy with a mushroom cut calling out, “Dad, Charlee,
Mom! Look at this!”

Death has a funny way of
possessing someone. When you go to school and feed your kids, and
bring home a check at the end of the week, death is invisible. Not
only invisible, but an intangible issue that’s too hard for most to
understand.

When death takes away your mom,
you’re surrounded by it. It’s in the silence when you hobble
through the front door, stinking of chlorine and riddled with want
for sleep. It’s in the headache you get when your little brother
takes a few dollars from your wallet and you don’t know how to
react as his parent would.

But then death promises it’ll
take your dad too and death isn’t here and there. It’s through your
bones, weighing you down when you hit the snooze button on your
alarm clock ten times.

And eventually, death becomes
the most attractive thing and your purpose for living, when you
accept it.

That’s where my dad’s wrong.
He’s too out of shape for death yet.

“
Here you go,”
Elliot says, sliding my steaming cup in front of me.

I thank him, dump in an extra
sugar packet for a boost and lick the froth. He’s still there.
Looking up, I smile and wobble my head, asking if there’s anything
else.

He peers over his shoulder and
seemingly satisfied, takes the seat next to me. “I’ve been thinking
of something since you came here last.”

“
Oh?” I gulp
at my coffee just to do something, then have to mask the
oh-my-it’s-scalding issue as a result of my awkwardness.

Elliot pulls out his cell on
the table and taps the screen. “There’s something wrong with
it.”

Confused, I
look at the unmarked screen, then turn it around in my hand,
feeling the edges. “Its electronics don’t work?”
More like, what does this have to do with
me?

“
It was fine
until last week but since then I’ve been dying to text or call you
and the problem is I can’t because I don’t have your
number.”

Again I scald my tongue, but it
pierces me with enough pain on top of my pre-existing burn that I
will not do it again.

I hadn’t expected this, but I’d
thought about it once when I’d seen him before. Not all week,
though. No, that was reserved for imagining tracing Dex’s tattoos
with my finger and wondering what the bar from his eyebrow ring
would feel like under his skin, and then the image of me that close
had me thinking about the way his square jaw would flex and work
when he got mad, which I’m too ashamed to admit is possibly the
sexiest thing.