Girl in Pieces (42 page)

I like living with Blue. I like having a friend, a
girl
friend, again. Ellis is still inside me, and she always will be, but Blue is good in her way, and kind.

Sometimes, when I get home from my shifts at Grit, we take the bus to the midnight movie and buy salty yellow popcorn and chilly, overly iced sodas. I'm pleasantly surprised by Blue's endless supply of money. She shrugs whenever I ask;
My father feels guilty,
she says.
Money is his salve.
“It's weird,” she says, her face assuming a complicated texture of pain and grief. “I don't want to talk about it. Maybe we can talk about it someday. Can we get extra butter on the popcorn this time?”

I can't sit at the card table weeping or in the tub staring at the ceiling, thinking of ways I could have done better, could have helped Riley more or gotten out sooner, saved Ellis, made myself better, because all those things are wrong, I realize; they solve nothing, wondering what could have been done; I know that now.

I have to wait my bad feelings out and that means staying busy, means working at Grit, means spending time working on my comic, rereading Louisa's composition books, thinking about who might want to read her story and mine.

It means going with Blue to meetings. It means sitting in the brightly lit basement of a run-down church on hard chairs that scrape the cement floor, drinking muddy coffee and listening to people stutter out their stories. It means really
listening
to them, and thinking about them, and thinking about myself.

Blue and I look around for a group like us, cutters and burners, the self-harmers, but we can't find one. Blue says, “Heh, I guess we'll just have to keep talking to each other, then, huh? Who would have thought it'd be us, eh, Silent Sue?”

I miss Casper, but I understand now why she had to let go. Maybe I was, in the end, just one more hurting girl for her, but she was kind to me, and she has to be kind to others, too, because even that small kindness, even for such a brief time—it was something.

It was something.

One night Blue comes home with a shiny new laptop. Once she gets it set up, she makes me get a Facebook account. Laughing, she says, “Social media is perfect for you. It's totally for people who don't like in-person interaction. But Twitter isn't you, because it's chatty, so don't go there.”

I don't do much on it, mostly just scroll around the news or look at Blue's page. But one night I see I have a friend request.

It's Evan.

I don't feel scared that he's contacted me, or nervous. I feel fucking grateful, in fact, that I can press Accept with all my heart, because he's
alive,
and I thought for sure that he'd be dead.

The first thing he messages me is a newspaper story. The story is a few months old, but it has a photo that stops my heart.

Evan writes,
EVIL HAS BEEN CAPTURED.

The house, Seed House, was shut down, Fucking Frank arrested for selling underage girls for sex, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, and so much, much more. In the photo, his face is gaunt, no longer full and angry. He looks frightened.

And then Evan says:
In other news, this is day 92 of sobriety for me. How the hell are YOU, Charlotte?

I can't stop smiling as I write back.

The
panadería
pastries sell out every day. Linus and I had the idea to get them for a discount before they threw the leftovers in the Dumpster. Julie lets Linus work on a new lunch menu with more healthy items, less reliance on potatoes, grease, and cheese. She agrees to a punch card for coffees. One day as I'm clearing dishes and lugging my tub from table to table, I look up and see a new splotch of real, vulgar graffiti on the fake brick walls of the coffeehouse. I stand, looking at the walls for a long time, turning, taking in the whole space, the amount of light from the windows high on the walls, thinking about how we can fix this.

Blue comes in one night to help paint the walls and the bathrooms, arriving with cans and rollers and brushes from the shed at Leonard's. Temple helps me haul out ladders from Julie's office and push the tables and chairs into the center of the room. Randy and Tanner work on the tops of the tables, painting them different colors, adding different patterns to some, sanding and gluing old postcards to others. Blue and Julie and I paint for hours, a soft wheat color that glows in the morning and looks ethereal at night. “But now there's nothing on the walls,” Julie says. “They look so empty.”

“Not for long,” I answer.

I'm working the counter on Temple's smoke break one evening when Ariel comes in, tentatively, as though unsure if she's in the right place. Her mouth opens in pleasure when she sees me. “You! What a lovely surprise. I was at your show, but I didn't see you.”

I take a deep breath. “I stole your cross. It was me. And I'm sorry.”

Ariel dips her head. “I know. I understand. Thank you for returning it.” She reaches out. “May I?” she asks. I nod.

She lays her hand carefully over mine. “I lost my son, so I know what it is like to be…empty, but full, with hell. I know you know what that means. That's all I want to say about that. But I want you to know that I am glad you are okay. I am so, so glad.”

I nod, trying not to cry. She pats my hand, asks me for a double espresso. I'm relieved to be able to turn away and do something so she can't see the tears falling. She walks around while I work the machine.

“I haven't been in here in years,” she shouts over the noise of the machine. “It had gotten so grungy. My friend told me to stop by.” She peers at the walls. They're hung with brilliant, intricately woven landscapes: women working in fields; complicated cityscapes; a tawny mountain with a sun hovering just above.

“My goodness,” she says breathily, moving closer to the walls. “These are rather exquisite. Who did them?” Her voice rings out in the new, clean café.

“The cook,” I answer proudly, swiping my face dry and turning around with her demitasse. “Linus Sebold.”

Linus asks to me to find a new box of order pads for the waitstaff in Julie's office. It's a busy evening; we've been packed with a different, older crowd since we made changes. The art kids still come, but we've lost some of the rockers. I miss them, but Julie needs this thing to run, so Grit needs people who buy food and drinks, not throw up on the floor.

As I'm puttering behind Julie's desk, searching through boxes, it appears before me, tucked plain as day underneath the corner of her office phone.

A piece of paper, a phone number, his name, scribbled doodles and circles and stars.

One moment I'm looking at the paper and the next I'm saying, “May I please speak to Riley West?”, feeling myself high above, floating near the ceiling, watching my hands shake as I press the phone to my ear. On the other end, there's the sound of slow feet, a heavy sigh.

“Yeah?”

Can he hear my thudding heart through my body? Does he know it's me by my silence? The words clog in my throat. Is that why I hear him sigh again, why he says, “Sweetheart”?

“Riley.”

“You can't call me here, okay? Listen, you can't—” His voice is measured, careful, soft. He's trying not to attract attention, I bet. I feel a flush of anger and try to bat it down, but before I can, it's up and swinging. It's out before I can stop it.

“Do you even remember being with me, Riley? Did you even care, at all, like,
ever
?”

Adrenaline forces me along. “I mean, was I just a freak show for you? Was I?” I feel scared, I feel loose and lost, but each word that comes out feels powerful.

A sterile, automated voice cuts into the line.
This phone call will reach its limit in four minutes.
That's right. I remember that; at Creeley, the community phone shut out after ten minutes.

“Charlie.” He's crying, a childish whine, like something a person does when they don't want other people to hear. The sound of his crying sneaks into me, scratches at my heart. He says my name again. I scrape at my wet face with the back of my hand.

“I
loved
you, Riley.” It hurts, saying it out loud, letting it balloon up and away from me.

“Please,”
he cries,
“baby—”

The line goes dead.

I open the drawer in Julie's desk: a stapler; heavy, gleaming scissors; thumbtacks. Roll call of easy elixirs.

On the drive back from Santa Fe, Linus said to me, “My life is like a series of ten-minute intervals sometimes. Sometimes I want to give myself a fucking medal for making it through an hour without a drink, but that's the way it has to be. Waiting it out.”

I slam the drawer shut. I have to make myself wait it out, this thundering inside me, wait it out in ten-minute intervals, five-minute intervals, whatever it takes, always, now, and forever.

I gather the order pads in my arms and walk out the door, shutting it firmly behind me.