Safe With Me (7 page)

His tone was gentle, but still, Olivia sucked in a tiny breath, suddenly self-conscious.
Am I getting fat?
They’d eaten out at so many fantastic restaurants in Tampa, indulging over candlelight dinners in buttery pastas and rich desserts. Perhaps it
was
time for her to scale back her diet. She smiled and nodded at him. “That’s right. I probably shouldn’t.”

He smiled, reached over and squeezed her hand, then passed her a bowl filled with quartered lemons. “Here,” he said. “With these and a little pepper, you won’t even miss the dressing.”

Now, thinking back to her arrival into James’s world, Olivia is dumbfounded by how easily she overlooked those red-flag moments. She sits at the same dining room table almost two decades later, and wonders how different her life would have been if she had walked out right then, that first day in this house. If she had stood up when he refused her the salad dressing and told him to go fuck himself. If she had understood that that was only the beginning of what she would face.

But then she looks at their daughter, born just a year after they married, sitting across from her now with bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a properly functioning liver—so much stronger and healthier a year after the transplant—and she knows that every sacrifice she has made has been worth it. Staying was the right thing to do. If she tries to leave now, there’s no doubt that James will file for full custody of Maddie, so Olivia
knows that she can’t walk out the door until her daughter turns eighteen. She almost lost Maddie once—she won’t risk it again.

“But I don’t
want
to go to an actual
school,
” Maddie says to her father, who is sitting, as always, at the head of the table, the two of them flanking him. “What’s the
point
?”

“The point
is,
you are healthy enough to start living a normal life,” James says, aiming a thick finger at his daughter. “The point
is,
I’m your father, and I say it’s time for you to start living in the real world with real people instead of being on that damn computer all the time.”

“She only has two years left until she graduates,” Olivia says quietly. “Maybe she’ll be fine with the tutor.” She and James agreed that for the first year after Maddie’s transplant, she would continue to be schooled at home so she could heal more effectively and be at less risk for infection. But now that her health is so much better, he is insistent that she attend Eastside Prep, the same elite, private high school he attended over thirty-five years ago.

“Maybe
you
shouldn’t butt into a conversation I’m having with my daughter,” James snaps, and Maddie’s eyes grow wide. Olivia cringes, hating it when her daughter witnesses James’s temper; she’d sheltered Maddie as much as possible from his darker side.

“Mom’s right,” Maddie says, dropping her fork to her plate with a clatter. “I’ve done fine with Mrs. Beck. I aced my SATs, right? I even took them early. That’s because of her.”

James shakes his head. “That’s because you’re brilliant, like your father.” He winks at Maddie, who only frowns. Olivia breathes a silent sigh of relief that the pendulum of his mood seems to have swung back in a positive direction. To make sure
it stays there, she decides the best thing she can do in that moment is to back up her husband.

“I think maybe your dad has a point, honey,” Olivia says, tucking her hair behind one ear. “You are brilliant, but you missed out on so much while you were sick. I don’t think you even realize how much.” She glances at James, who gives her a brief, approving nod. The knot in her stomach that formed when he snapped at her relaxes.

Maddie rolls her eyes. “Yes, I do, Mom. I get it. I spent the last eight years doing nothing but think about everything I was missing. But that’s totally my point. I already
missed
it.” She waves a dismissive hand in the air in front of her. “Going to some stuck-up prep school where all the kids have known each other since they were like, in
diapers
would only make it worse. I’d be the weird, puffy girl who’s carrying around a dead girl’s
liver
inside her. I’d be a freak.”

“That’s not true,” Olivia says. “And the only way people would know about the transplant is if you told them.”

Maddie sighs. “As I’m taking eight hundred pills a day to ward off rejection. Sure, no one will notice
that
.”

Olivia tries again, ignoring her daughter’s exaggeration. “Well, some of the kids you’ll know from elementary school. Maybe you can reconnect with old friends.”

“Yeah, right,” Maddie says. “Like the bonding we did over Play-Doh and hopscotch will just carry right on over to being BFFs now.”

“Enough!” James bellows, startling both Olivia and Maddie. His eyes go dark as he glares at them; his brows furrow together into a deep V. Olivia can see the muscles along his jaw working in a tight motion, and she knows this means he
is trying to restrain himself. She braces herself for what might come next.

After a moment, he shoves his chair back from the table and stands, pulls on his jacket, then walks over to Maddie. As he puts his hand on the back of her neck, Maddie freezes. Olivia holds her breath. “You’re already registered,” he continues, a cool edge in his voice. “I let Mrs. Beck go with a generous severance package. When school starts next month, you
will
be there. End of discussion.” He squeezes his fingers on her neck once, and Maddie flinches, closing her eyes. A single tear slips down her cheek, and Olivia’s heart aches at the sight. They are both silent, hands in their laps, as James grabs his briefcase and strides out the door.

After he leaves, Maddie opens her eyes and looks at Olivia. “I
hate
him,” she whispers.

“No, you don’t,” Olivia says. “You’re angry with him. You’re disappointed. You’re scared.” Feelings Olivia is all too familiar with when it comes to her husband.

“What a fantastic way to feel about my own father,” Maddie says with a sniffle. “
Please,
Mom. Don’t make me go.”

“You’ll be fine, I promise.”

“No, I
won’t,
” Maddie groans. “I won’t be able to
stand
it!”

Olivia twists her face into what she hopes is an encouraging smile. “Yes, you will,” she says. “Believe me, honey. When it’s for the right reason, you can handle more than you know.”

My mother is wrong,
I think as I stomp up the stairs to my bedroom.
I
do
hate my father. If
she
had any backbone at all, she’d hate him, too.
Slamming the door behind me, I grab my laptop and plop down on my bed, quickly logging in to Sierra’s Facebook profile to write a status update. “Parents are soooo LAME,” I type. “Why do they think they can control my life?!”

After a few people “like” the post, I decide it sounds too immature and I delete it. I’ve listed Sierra’s age as twenty-one, and I’m pretty sure by that point, most girls aren’t constantly bitching about their parents. At least I hope not. Now that I’m fairly healthy, my plan is to get the hell out of this house the minute I turn eighteen. Two more years of dealing with my father will be enough; now, I have to deal with five hundred other kids at a school I don’t want to go to? Kids who won’t know me or want to know me, because even though I feel better than I did a year ago, my hair is still stringy and my body has a weird shape. I’m not an hourglass; I’m a barrel.

This thought is too depressing to deal with, so I decide to log in to my favorite gaming site instead. I discovered Zombie Wars about six months ago, when I was still stuck in bed a good part of the day and about to go out of my mind with boredom. It’s an online, alternate reality game set after the apocalypse, where you can create an avatar to join forces with other players to fight brain-eating zombies. I thought it was a little dorky at first, but once I got past the first couple of levels, I really started to get into the challenge of playing. Like pretending to be Sierra on Facebook and Twitter, I could pretend to be a butt-kicking zombie assassin who might just save the world. Maybe it
was
dorky, but it was definitely better than numbing my brain with daytime TV.

I click on my profile’s inbox to see if any other avatars have interacted with mine, and suddenly, an instant message pops up on my screen: “Hey Sierra. I’m Dirk. Saw you take down that giant zombie yesterday with one shot between the eyes. Nice work. Want to build an alliance?”

My fingers poise over the keyboard, hesitant. I tend to only message with other girls in the game, forming virtual friendships with people I will likely never meet, but this is the first time my avatar has been contacted by a boy. How could I
not
respond? His avatar is handsome, a blond-haired, black-leather-clad boy with bright blue eyes and a strong jaw. It’s almost eerie, how human he looks. In Zombie Wars, you can design how prominent you want your cheekbones, the shape and color of your eyes. Computer graphics are getting
crazy
realistic, and it’s totally what I want to major in when I get to college.

I check out his avatar again and wonder if he’s this attractive in person or if, like me, he has a reason to hide behind the
screen. “Thanks,” I type, and for some reason, my heartbeat speeds up. “I like yours, too. Been playing long?”

“Just a couple of months,” he responds. “A friend turned me on to it, since he knows how obsessed I am with
Zombieland
.”

“That’s one of my favorite movies!”

“Best movie ever made. Well, beside
The Matrix
. And
Star Wars
.” There is a pause, and then he sends me another message. “So, what do you think? Want to partner up?” He ends the question with a winking smiley face, and I blush.

“Sure,” I reply, and before I can read his response, there is a loud knock on my bedroom door.

“Maddie, honey? Can I come in?” This is a new thing for my mom, having to ask to enter my room. When I was sick, she just came and went as she pleased, oftentimes even sleeping on the bed next to me instead of with my dad. But once I had the transplant and started feeling better, I asked her to knock, and—probably more difficult for her—to stay in her own bed.

“I’m kind of busy,” I call out to her, trying to mask my sigh.

Dirk sends me another message: “R U still there?”

“One sec,” I type. “BRB.”

“Doing what?” She opens the door enough to stick her head inside. When she sees me with the laptop, it’s her turn to sigh. “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s put that away and go for a walk.”

“Later, okay? I’m journaling.” One of the counselors I had to talk with after the transplant encouraged me to keep a diary about how I was feeling through the whole process. She told my mom about it, too, so now, whenever she catches me on the computer and gives me a guilt trip, I tell her I’ve been writing about my
feelings,
which usually makes her back off. “Can you close the door behind you, please?”

She stares at me with the hazel bordering on light-green eyes she passed down to me, blinks a couple of times, then quietly exits. My gut clenches, hating that I might have hurt her, but wishing she had something other than
me
to keep her busy during the day. What will she do when I go back to school? Dad won’t let her work, I know that much for sure. The one time after my transplant that she suggested she was thinking about getting recertified as a paralegal, or how she might want to go back to school and become a lawyer, he totally lost it, throwing a chair across the room. A few inches to the left and he would have clocked her with it, which I’m pretty sure was exactly what he was trying to do. Not that she’d ever admit that about him. She’d make some excuse about what a tough childhood he had . . . how his father used to beat him and how he never really worked through his anger about that. “That’s bull,” I told her once. “Why don’t you just leave him?”

“Because I can’t,” she said quietly, staring at me in a way that made me think that there was a damn good reason she hadn’t left, and the only one I could come up with was me.

The message box on the screen blinks at me, and I look down to see that Dirk has asked me another question. “So, how old are you IRL? You’re not really some gross forty-year-old guy wearing underwear in his mom’s basement, eating Cheetos, are you?”

“LOL! No, definitely not,” I answer, then pause before addressing the issue of my age. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“That’s cool,” I type. “I’m nineteen.” I land on this age because it’s closer to my own than the twenty-one I’d listed as
Sierra’s, and it also gives him a chance to pass on hanging out with me in Zombie Wars since five years younger might be too much for his tastes. “Almost twenty,” I quickly add, and then I wait for him to respond.

“Maybe I can take you out for your birthday,” his message reads, and I smile wider, thinking how desperately I want to live in this world rather than my own.

The morning of the salon’s grand opening, Hannah drives to Sea-Tac airport to pick up her parents. They insisted on flying over from Boise for the event, but Hannah knows it’s really just an excuse for them to check up on her.

After Emily’s funeral, she went back to the farm for a few weeks, curling up in her childhood bed for most of the days she spent there. Her mother tried to tempt her with her favorite foods—fresh strawberry ice cream, bacon-wrapped meat loaf, and chicken potpie—as though calories could serve as some kind of magical antidote to grief. She managed to nibble on these offerings, but only to placate her mother. She couldn’t taste a thing.

In the evenings, Hannah sat on the wraparound porch with her father, numbly staring out at the blossoming vegetable garden. In the old wooden swing, its joints creaking with each push forward and fall back, he would hold her hand and talk about Emily. “Remember her face when she learned how to
open a pea pod?” her father asked. “ ‘Look, Pop-Pop,’ she said. ‘
Pea
seeds!’ ” His hands shook and a tear rolled down his creviced, sun-weathered cheek. “What was she . . . four, then?”