The Bargaining (28 page)

I venture another look at the mural. The grass practically swallows the boy, his hands, dimpled at their ­knuckles
and opalescent in the abrasive moonlight, covering his eyes.

I remember throwing the mattresses back last time. I see my own hands—hands that are not over my eyes but lifeless by my sides—tearing the fort down, exposing the thing that drags behind those mattresses, edging closer to the doorway of the closet, the place the boy in the mural can't bear to watch now that it's been found.

I see my bravery return, over and over, and feeling begins to awaken my hand. It tingles, and I form a fist against that dragging, that horrible scratching edging toward the closet. I can feel the floor beneath my feet.

But just as I take my first step toward that hideous sound, a new one takes its place, and every ounce of blood halts in my veins.

A deep exhale, grumbling so low at first I think it's thunder. But then, the lowest register of a voice utters two words at the tail of that breath: “You're it.”

A shriek cracks the air, and the room feels like it might cave under the sound of it.

The boy in the mural refuses to uncover his eyes, but his mouth hangs so low his jaw dips to the middle of his waist.

The mattress tunnel collapses as though the floor has disappeared beneath it. The bed skirts and floral sheets flutter
under the wind that whips through the room from the open window. Then, like a wave pulling back from shore, the wind recedes, dragging the curtains and papers in its wake with it before the window slams shut.

Hands on my shoulders whirl me around. Hands on my shoulders shake me. Hands on my shoulders move to my own hands and struggle to pry them from my face. Struggle to free them from my grip over my eyes.

“Penny! Penny, stop! Stop!”

April is yelling over me, but I'm the one shrieking. I'm screaming so loudly my throat is seared.

April's hands are on my head now. She's holding my face still. She's making me look into her eyes, even though my own eyes are still trying to adjust to the darkness of the hallway.

“Penny, my God. What . . . what?!”

But I can't find my voice. I can't believe that was my voice screaming a second ago, but the burning of my throat tells me it was.

“What is this?” April looks at the pile of mattresses. She looks to me to explain it. But all I can do is look to the boy on the wall, whose eyes are once again staring at the closet, though now they could just as easily be staring at the wreckage of the room, the wreckage April thinks I created. The boy's hands are back at his sides, his body
unburied from the grass that consumed him seconds ago.

That laughter. That voice.

“Oh my God,” I breathe, staring at the boy who won't stare back at me.

“Penny?”

I turn to look at April. I beg her to understand, even though I've given her absolutely no reason to. “It wasn't just a horrible mistake.”

April turns me back to her, my shoulders now squared with hers.

“Penny, listen to me. Listen to me,” she says, catching my eyes shifting back to the mural. “You have to stop blaming yourself. It
was
a horrible mistake. That's all. A night full of mistakes, few of which you could have avoided. It wasn't your fault. What happened to Rae wasn't your fault. You have to stop this.”

I start to shake my head. “April, you don't understand.”

But she's pulling me down the stairs, mumbling something about the toilet again, and I know she's pissed as hell because she thinks I trashed the room. But there's no way April could understand what I do now.

Because now I realize what Miller was trying to tell me, what he was so desperate for me to find so he didn't have to say the words. It wasn't just a horrible mistake that all those
parents made. It was a decision. And his parents' decision was the most horrible of all.

The brother I've been seeing this whole time on the wall, in my half-waking moments, in Miller's canvases—it hasn't been Jack.

The child Miller's parents traded for their son was Danny. They traded one of their own children for another.

21

Dear Rae,

Here's something I didn't know about me before there was you: I have a ridiculously high tolerance for pain.

I didn't know that until we were sitting across from each other in the vinyl chairs that day and I'd already gotten my ink and you were waiting to get yours. You bit every last fingernail off while you watched me, and when it was your turn, you shrank away from Chewy the tattoo guy every time he raised the needle. You told me afterward that I was insane, but I knew you wished it was me who'd flinched under the pain.

I think that's why I never understood how you could push a needle through your vein without even blinking, how you could smile at me when you did it, like you were so glad I was on the outside of feeling whatever you were feeling in that moment. Remember that time you said, “Sweet little Penny. You're way too precious to sink this low. But I'm higher than you'll ever be. I'm the only one who can make a unicorn appear.” Everyone else was high, so they thought you sounded like a poet. But I knew you were just lying again about winning Troy at the fair.

It's just that you always made me so aware of what I owed you for acknowledging my existence when I first moved to Phoenix. And it's exhausting to always feel like you're repaying a debt.

Penny

I press the notepad to my forehead and hold it there. I press harder and harder until the pressure of my fist threatens to cave my skull in, and then I press a little harder.

With the pad this close, I can still smell the smoke from the bonfire that night. The odor makes me light-headed, but the pain in my forehead keeps me grounded. And it keeps
last night's discovery at bay, since I still can't understand how in the world I'm supposed to process what I just learned about Miller's family.

She didn't believe me when I told her between all the smoke and dust that night that the letters weren't the full story of us that I'd written. Instead, she got the benefit of careful revision and erased pencil marks that formed the words I wanted to say perfectly, but left out all the doubt about what I was writing, which was just as true.

A soft knock on the the open door announces April. Who knows how long she's been hanging out there in her fleece and her practical clogs, the wrong attire for summer anywhere other than chilly, dank here.

“So that's what I'm smelling,” she says.

I glance at the notepad, which I've let fall to my lap. “You're smelling the house.”

“Yeah, well if I'd ever been able to get a structural engineer to come out and take a look, maybe I could have agreed with you. I'm headed into town to drop in on one today. He won't return my calls, so I'm thinking it's time for an ambush.”

“Sounds like a pretty good strategy,” I say.

April's mouth tilts into a half smile. “You going to be okay alone?”

Neither of us really went back to sleep after last night. I
woke up feeling mostly guilty for robbing April of the first solid REM cycle she's had in what would appear to be a century, judging by her under-eye bags, her constant companions these days.

I look down at the letter to Rae. “That question doesn't mean anything at all if you really think about it. It's not like anyone ever really wants to hear the answer.”

That's exactly the sort of thing I thought I was done saying to April. What bothers me the most is the way it just came out. I didn't even mean to say it. It's that it doesn't occur to me to be careful with her. Not like I am with my own mom, who hasn't called in so long, I'm starting not to feel the loss of her.

“I think they have their own strategy,” April says, fully passing over my last comment and returning to the contractors. “I'm sure they have a vague idea of what they're doing, anyway. The gods are against me on this one. The gods and this whole messed up little town. Anyway, I'm not stupid. I know a money pit when I step in it.”

She eyes the notepad in my lap, and the bags under her eyes take on the tiniest bit more weight.

“When I was fifteen, I had this friend named Summer,” she says, sitting at the end of the bed. “The first thing she ever said to me was that her parents loved her so much,
they named her after a whole season, not just one month.”

“What a bitch,” I say.

“She was,” April agrees. “She didn't know that my name was actually Lindsay until my mom died.”

I look up. I never knew. Of course, I'm not sure how I would have known. It's hard to know something like that about someone when you haven't ever,
ever
had a conversation like this with them.

She shrugs off all the questions I know I should ask but don't.

“I was two when she passed,” she explains. “It's not like I remember. I couldn't really even say my own name yet.” She grins this odd kind of grin. “My dad had it changed legally in a moment of grief, and much later on, he told me he never should have done that.”

She's still smiling for reasons I'll probably never understand, and I smile too, because I still can't think of what to say, and I'm at least relieved that we can agree on a mutual smile.

“My point,” she continues, “was that even if Summer had known about all that, I'm not sure it would have mattered. That wasn't the worst thing she ever said to me. She also told me I was stupid to have a baby at eighteen.” She squares her jaw, pulling her ears back. “And I let her say that and worse for six solid years while I called her a friend.”

I shake my head. She's trying, and I don't mean to shoot her down, but she has no idea. “It's not the same.”

That familiar stone in my throat. I swallow, but it lodges there, and my eyes tear up from the strain, and April mistakes that for making me cry, and I feel even worse because I'm not actually crying.

Even still, she puts her hand on my foot, which is half-tucked under my leg, and she does it timidly, like she's afraid I'm going to snatch her hand off of her wrist and devour it. The one person who hasn't thrown me away, and maybe that's only because she's actually just afraid of me. And who could blame her after my epic freak-out last night?

Still, she keeps her hand on my foot, and even though it's starting to make me uncomfortable, I don't move.

“You can think about all the ways it might have happened differently. I'll let you do that. But I'm not going to let you believe you could have changed the ending,” she says.

I've never heard her talk in terms of what she'd “let” me do, and she asserts herself boldly. Maybe too boldly. Which is why I twitch my foot to let her know that I know she's holding it, and then I match her weird smile a little closer than before. She squeezes my foot before letting it go.

“Rob wasn't a mistake,” April says, her bluntness shocking me out of my trance for a moment. I try to say something,
but every word I could say would be grossly out of place.

“I'm sure plenty of people besides Summer thought so. And I'm sure plenty of people wanted to hear me admit it.”

I'm having such a hard time following the direction of this conversation, I decide to stop trying. I'm embarrassed for us both, and I think maybe April's relishing that a little. There are probably many, many things she's wanted to say to me in the years she's been married to my dad, and probably hundreds of additional things in the months since I've been living in a family that isn't fully my own.

“But he wasn't a mistake,” she keeps going. “He is one of the only things in my life I don't regret. I'm full of wrong decisions. I have so many stacked up inside of me, sometimes I think I'm not going to be able to see over the pile at some point.”

April runs her finger over one frayed edge of a fingernail. It's such a small movement, the only movement I can detect in the whole room.

“I'm not ashamed of my mistakes, though. They go with me everywhere. They're my little buddies.” She laughs a raw laugh. “But Rob's not one of them.”

I continue to say nothing, and maybe that makes me sound patient, but the truth is I'd give anything to know what to say right now. Luckily, April doesn't make me grapple for very long.

“I'm going to harass the engineer,” she says, pulling us both to the surface again. “Wish me luck.”

“Give him hell,” I say, forcing the smile to stay long enough for her to turn the corner and head down the hall.

The rattling of April's keys chases the clomping of her clogs, and for the first time since my dad remarried, I understand what he meant when he said once that he didn't care if April understood him. He just cared that she wanted to.

And for the first time in four years, I miss my father.

It comes out of nowhere and smacks me squarely in the mouth, and I can almost feel the sting of it as I find his number in my phone, the picture box next to his number blank. I've never chosen an image to put inside it.

Your wife is weird,
I type. I stare at the text for what feels like hours before I finally hit send, my brain still trying to catch up with my actions.

I don't expect to get a response, so when I do, I immediately get nervous thinking of all the ways he might have answered a message that didn't even make sense to me.

Miss you guys.

I stare at the words for a very long time, uncertain I enjoy the feeling of relief. It doesn't match the emotions I've allotted for my dad. So I set the phone aside and search out a more familiar feeling.

I pick up the notepad sometime after I hear the motor of April's jeep struggle to turn over before finally igniting.

I read the letter eight more times, then land on the last sentence and let my eyes run over it until they burn. I remember writing those sentences. How forming each
T
and
L
and
R
felt like peeling off layers of clothing, the kind that scratches and chokes.