The Healing (The Things We Can't Change Book 3) (44 page)

You can’t change the past.
The words drift through me, and for the first time, I don’t want to. Because this moment, here, relaxed with Zeke sleeping next to me, seems to make up for it. At least in some way, some form, I was rewarded for the suffering and pain I went through. I got Zeke, and he is a very good consolation prize indeed.

I look out over the water, seeing it again as my thoughts come back to the present. I remember the first night Zeke saw Tony hit me, the wedding, where I wore that stupid green satin dress. I remember everything about that night in vivid detail; Tony’s hand on my neck, my desperate plea to his ego, dancing with him a few times even though I thought I would crack in half from the pain in my ribs. I remember thinking how badly I wanted to run away, run to a beach and scrub myself with sand and roll around as the surf pounded me, beating and berating me but not leaving a mark or ugliness the way Tony did.

I stand up and head back into the water, sinking my toes into the soft wet sand and welcoming the bathtub-temperature water as it pulls me in deeper. I go out waist-deep and sink down to my neck, floating weightlessly for just a moment, and then diving under to pick up handfuls of sand.

I scrub my arms first, washing away Tony’s hold on me, all the times he jerked me around, grabbed me hard enough to bruise. My ribs underneath my shirt come next, all the bruises and cracks he gave me when he would kick me, though I’m careful around my tattoo. My back, where I laid when he raped me. I wash away the feeling of the sheets rubbing against my skin, the feeling of being pressed down into the bed. Then my legs, which for so long he claimed to admire, but which I wasn’t allowed to show, wasn’t allowed to wear short skirts or shorts in public.

I do my face last, gentle against the skin that’s already tender from the sun. I scrub the face that drew Tony toward me, attracted him in the first place that day in English class so long ago. I scrub my entire body, scrubbing out Tony and his hold over me, his ghost hands and marks, and the dirty feeling inside me as I’ve dreamed of doing for so long. My skin is raw and pink when I finish, not in a harmful way, but just a thorough job. I stand up and see Zeke is sitting up on the blanket, looking at me.

I head up the beach, job done to my satisfaction, and collapse down on the blanket next to him once more. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he replies, eyeing me carefully. “How do you feel?”

I close my eyes, looking for the right, truthful answer. Finally, I open them again and look Zeke levelly in the eye. “Clean.”

He smiles slowly, and then hands something to me. “Then I think it’s time.”

I carefully accept my phone, staring down at it warily. It’s as though Tony is actually inside and could jump out at me at any moment. “Right,” I say, taking a deep breath to gather my bearings and then dial my voicemail and put it on speakerphone.

We listen to the whole thing. Tony’s final, pleading words and claims of love, the desperation as he tells me he can’t live without me, even Zeke’s voice in the background, screaming at Cindy. Zeke is looking out, staring at the ocean but I still see a tear fall out of the corner of his eye, though I pretend not to notice. There’s no way he can miss my tears. Three of them fall. One for Tony’s life, ruined and wasted, one of regret, for everything that was and could have been, and one of relief as I hit the number seven, and the message vanishes into cyberspace.

There’s a long heavy moment where I’m torn between the urge to burst fully into tears, and the urge to laugh with relief and giddiness.
Free
. The solemn moment is finally broken as Zeke looks at me, his eyes still a little damp but smiling nonetheless.

“Proud of you,” he says, and gives my shoulder a small shove.

It reassures me, and I smile back, the urge to cry gone as I toss my phone aside. I lie back on the blanket and close my eyes, letting more sun sink into my pores. I’ve almost fallen into a doze when Zeke speaks and wakes me up.

“You know this isn’t over yet, right?”

I crack open an eye and look at him. “What’s not over? What do you mean? Do you really think I’ll ever go back to Tony? Like, really?”

“Not that.” He scowls and I sit up because he looks serious. “The end of… everything. Of the process. You know. Healing. Being healed. Whatever.”

“O-okay,” I say slowly. “What else is there to work on? Are you still having nightmares?”

“I was talking more about you, but now that you mention it, not really,” Zeke says with a frown. He shrugs off whatever thought had distracted him, and looks me levelly in the eye. “You need to work on standing up to people. To your old friends, to Clarissa, to everyone. Especially since we’re going back to school. You need to stop being a doormat.”

I open my mouth to argue with him, but end up closing it without saying anything because he’s right. I do need to work on it, or else I’ll just end up sinking back down again.

I take a deep breath, swallow hard, and nod my head. “Okay. You’re right. It’s something to work on. And you…” I consider him for a long minute, hesitating because I know he’ll probably get irritated. “You need to work on your emotions. Especially the ones that concern your… dad.”

Zeke gives a loud snort. “Yeah, right. I’ll go up and give him a big hug right when we get home. Because he won’t be pissed about this little trip or anything either.”

“I’m serious,” I insist. “Have you ever thought about the fact that perhaps you always fight and resist your dad so hard as a defense mechanism? To keep you from caring about him so you don’t lose him, too? Isn’t that your philosophy? Everyone you care about, you lose?”

“That’s ridic-” Zeke begins, but trails off, the stunned look on his face no doubt mirroring my own of a moment ago.

“Exactly,” I say, concealing my satisfaction. Then more kindly and slowly, “I have lost both my parents. And if there’s one thing I think we’ve both learned in the past year, it’s that life, that happy times and moments are fleeting. And we should seize them while they are here and available to us. If you lost your dad, you would hate and regret it, but you might hate yourself more for never even
trying
to get along with him. You’re all the other has now. He lost Cindy too, and your mom. Did you ever think about that?”

There’s a long pause, and finally Zeke mutters, “No, not really.”

“There you are then,” I say self-righteously, and silence falls as we stare out over the water. It’s an easy silence, but I feel compelled to break it anyway. “So, I’ve picked something for you to work on,” I begin. “What’s something you’re going to work on? Something
you
feel you need to make effort on?”

Zeke makes a vague gesture with his hand. “What is it with you and these questions and games?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “But we both know there’s more than one thing we need to work on still. You’re right. We’re not fixed so easily. We’re just… better than we were. A lot better, granted, but still. There’s room for improvement.”

“Fine.” He heaves a sigh and thinks for a long time, and I have to clench my fists in order not to push him, but it’s worth it in the end.

“I… I’m going to talk to Mr. Bryant when we get back into school. And… get myself into some art classes.”

“Really?” It comes out as a squeal and I cough and force myself to temper my voice. “Seriously? That’s great!”

Zeke laughs and pushes me so I nearly fall on my side into the sand. “Dork. Your turn.”

I have new appreciation for his long silence, because it takes me a while to get my own thoughts in order. “I’m going to figure out my life,” I finally say, and he snorts with laughter.

“Good luck with that. I think many people have said the same thing and not really succeeded.”

It’s my turn to push Zeke, though he barely moves and we’re both laughing.

“I mean, my future. I always wanted to write, I don’t know if I would teach or what, but I pretty much had to do whatever Tony dictated to me. And so now, I have the chance to figure it out for myself, only I don’t have any idea what I’d like to do, where I want to go to college. And my dad’s business. I own half of it now, but I know nothing about running it. So I need to get my act together with that too. It’s just…” I trail off and stare at my feet, then look up into Zeke’s intense green gaze. “My dad did great things. And I want to do great things too.”

He nods immediately. “I feel that. I think it’s a good one.” He stands up, dusting sand off the bottom of his damp shorts, and then extends a hand out to me. “Now that all our business is taken care of, what do you say we have some fun in the sun?”

Evangeline

81

We stay at the beach all day, leaving only once and that’s just to go to one of the restaurants across from the water and eat a late dinner, and then we return to the beach with virgin strawberry daiquiris and toast as we watch the gorgeous sunset. We don’t even leave then, just sit in the darkness for at least an hour, listening to the ocean.

I feel good. I feel… healed. All my pieces put back together, glued permanently as I’d once told Zeke needed to happen. The past, I feel, is finally put solidly back into the past. Stuck there, unable to leap back out and haunt me. All the physical memories of my relationship with Tony are gone. Faced and battled and conquered, and for once, after my talk with Zeke, I’m looking forward to the future. I know going back to school will be a trial and extremely unpleasant, but I try to look beyond it, to the brighter future that will come afterward. I know that without a doubt, Zeke will still be there to help me through it.

By some unspoken agreement, Zeke and I stand up at the same time and shake out the blanket, fold it up and head back to the car. We stick it into the trunk and Zeke returns to the driver’s seat and then looks at me expectantly.

“Where to?”

“Hmm,” I say, biting my lip as the problem occurs to me for the very first time. “Don’t you have to be twenty-one to rent a hotel room? Or eighteen, at the very least?”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Zeke laughs. “Shit. I didn’t even think about that.”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “We’ll probably just have to sleep in the car. Except…” I look behind us, at the small backseat of my coupe. “It’s pretty small. Especially for you.”

“I know a trick for that part,” Zeke says, and he sounds upbeat, as though this is just another adventure, that we’re two underage teenagers stuck in a foreign state a thousand miles from home. “But there’s no reason we can’t be a little more comfortable. Let’s find a Wal-Mart or Target or something, we’re going to need pillows at least.”

“Right,” I say, and he starts the car and I’m content to let him take the lead, because I’ve never done anything like this before.

We find a Wal-Mart not too far from the beach and travel through it, grabbing anything we feel like. I find an outrageous fuzzy zebra throw blanket, and Zeke grabs two normal pillows and several more big ones, even a Hello Kitty and stuffed Buzz Lightyear. We debate buying new clothes, and then realize that there’s not much point because we have no way to take a real shower and we’re going home tomorrow anyway.

I know we look like the worst pair of tourists, sand still on our legs, faces burnt to a crisp, hair wild and stiff from the salt, but we’re laughing and giggling and I’m having a good time and I just don’t care about appearances at all.
Take that, Clarissa
.

We stuff everything into the car and Zeke pulls into a Pizza Hut that’s nearby and we gorge ourselves on stuffed crust and Dr. Pepper. Finally, it’s nearing eleven o’clock and we turn our attention to the issue of finding somewhere to park the car so we can sleep.

“Couldn’t we just stay at the beach?” I ask. “We want to go there in morning again before we leave, right?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be in the parking lot after dark,” Zeke says. “We might get towed or accused of vagrancy or something. We definitely don’t want to chance getting arrested. I don’t know about you, but my dad would probably just tell them to let me rot in jail.”

“Clarissa too,” I sigh. “What about a hotel parking lot? That’s kind of anonymous, right? We could say we were so tired we fell asleep before we got out of the car and checked in.”

Zeke shakes his head and I laugh. “Make sure you let me do the talking if we ever get pulled over or arrested,” he mutters. And then louder, “But the hotel lot is a good idea. If we cruise along the beach I bet we can find one.”

We do just that and finally find a hotel not too far from the beach, and Zeke chooses a spot right in the middle of a bunch of other cars, tutoring me in the lesson of being off by ourselves in a corner is much more suspicious than mixing with other cars. Then he gets out and I follow, watching as he pulls everything out of the trunk.

“What are you doing?” I ask, stifling a giant yawn. The day is finally catching up to me and I find that I’m absolutely exhausted.

“Readying your bed, princess,” Zeke says in a very superior voice that makes me roll my eyes.

Still, I watch with curiosity as he pops the releases on the back seats and lays them down flat, so the trunk is extended all the way up to the front seats. Then he breaks open the foam padding we bought at the store and lays it down over the hard seat backs, following by one of the plain blankets we bought. He stuffs some of the numerous pillows that we bought down in the foot area between the back seats and the front, so they’re level with the reclined seats, and finally throws the two normal pillows up there and covers everything with the zebra throw blanket, and gestures toward it with a flourish.