Authors: Lauren Gilley
“Never, I’m telling you. Never.”
“ – she’s getting this cake.” It was hard to tell in the shadows, but she looked like she bit back a smile. “Jordie.”
“How ‘bout I take her the cake, and you never say that again?”
“No deal.” But she at least climbed in the Jeep and handed out the cake box. “Tell her I had a lovely time - ”
“You told her that five times.”
Her face went blank in the overhead dome light of the car, lips pressing together.
He was touchy, he knew; every time he blinked he saw Vaughn in his office, heard the smug lift to the bastard’s voice.
“It’d be a real shame if your career were cut short so soon.”
But the Ellie staring at him now wasn’t the nervous mess she’d been the night she’d crumbled at the bowling alley. No, she trusted him now. She didn’t think he would hurt her.
“I’ll tell her,” he amended, and headed back to the house, one of Paige’s fancy black and pink cake boxes in his hands.
Mom was still in the foyer, lingering at the peephole, waiting to watch their taillights slide around the corner, or trying to spy on an impromptu makeout session in the car, or whatever. Jordan gave her a
really?
look when she opened the door.
“I can stand at my own door,” she defended, pulling at the halves of her sweater as she tried to peer around his shoulder. “Is everything alright?”
He started to sigh, and then realized he’d been doing that all night. And that he was the only unmarried kid left in the family and that Beth was just excited by the possibility of it all. “El forgot to bring this in before.” She took the box like it was jewel-crusted. “Her roommate’s trying to start up a bakery and they’ve got cakes churning out round the clock.”
She plucked at a corner of the box and peeked inside, eyes wide. “Oh, she didn’t have to do that.” Her gaze panned up to his, beaming with maternal approval. “Tell her she didn’t have to do that.”
“I will.”
She wanted to say something else – subtlety was not her strong suit – and he’d watched his older brothers blow off her shifting glances and thoughtful inhaled breaths long enough to know that it was always better to hear her out in the moment. It didn’t take much to keep her happy. So he waited, until she gathered that last, final breath and gave him a soft, motherly look.
“Jordan.”
“Hmm?”
“I like her.”
“I’m glad.”
“What about you?” She twitched a smile. “Is your heart in it this time?”
Do you love her?
That’s what she wanted to ask but didn’t dare. The uncertainty that went rippling through him was…shocking. And disappointing. For years now his mom and sisters had pried at the edges of his tightly contained love life, wanting to know if the girl who’d left a lipstick smudge on his cheek was a keeper; if he could invest himself in whoever had raked his hair into a curly mess. And for those years, he’d known the answer before the questions finished leaving their lips: no. No he wasn’t invested, no she wasn’t worth keeping. No, he didn’t love her, nor could he.
Standing in the glow of the porch lights, children’s laughter ringing down the street behind him, his head was a revolving diorama of Ellie: her creamy legs under his flannel shirt, the way her eyes turned to half-moons when she laughed, the stray, chocolate hairs he pulled off his clothes, the way her sheets felt on his skin, her pink razor and the sight of her black-nailed hands running down his stomach. The clear, sweet sound of her voice when he was inside her and she said, “Please.” He saw all of that – memories that came equipped with surround sound and physical stimulation – and he was so uncertain it frightened him.
His boss said he couldn’t be involved with a student if he wanted to keep his job, and here he stood on his mother’s front stoop, caught somewhere between
yes
and
I don’t know
on the great big terrifying L-word issue.
“We’ll see,” he told Beth and watched her smile go up to her eyes.
**
They met Jo and Tam at Steak ‘n’ Shake for, appropriately, shakes, and a recap of Jessica’s annual Halloween party. Mr. and Mrs. Wales had streaked washable, bright red paint through their hair and had put pieces of their everyday wardrobes together to pull off convincing rock star getups.
“You guys should have gone,” Tam said as he and Jo shared a plate of shoestring fries. “You coulda been Bruce Jenner and one of the Kardashians.”
It was after eleven when they pulled back in at Ellie’s house. Almost midnight by the time she cleaned up and locked up and dragged her stocking toes up the stairs, ankle boots dangling from her fingers. Jordan was standing at her bedroom window, hands in the back pockets of his jeans, staring out at the dancing black leafless trees that tickled the siding. It wasn’t the first time she’d caught him waxing thoughtful that night, and it was starting to prickle at her nerves, make her wonder if she should be worried.
“Everything okay?” she asked as she set her shoes down at the end of her bed.
“Mmhm.” But he chewed at the inside of his cheek and kept staring.
He was not a carefree, invincible sort of guy, and that was one of things she appreciated about him; he had a lot going on behind his eyes, and that was a quality she hadn’t dared hope for in a man. But sometimes, like now, she debated her instincts. She watched him a long moment, uncertain, and then finally settled for what she’d wanted to do in the first place; she slipped up behind him and put her arms around his waist, tucked her cheek in against his spine between the hard, flat planes of his shoulder blades.
“Thank you for taking me to meet your parents,” she said against his rumpled blue oxford.
“They loved you,” he said in his quiet voice. His just the two of them voice. And it sounded like
love
got stuck in his throat, like it surprised him the way it did her.
She felt him starting to turn and loosened her arms, passed her hands up his chest when he was facing her, not sure what she’d find when she lifted her head and met his gaze. He still looked thoughtful. Troubled. Eyes full of shadows. “Are you okay?” she asked softly, playing with the buttons of his shirt. “Did I…I didn’t flub tonight, did I?”
“No.” His smile was genuine, not at all connected to whatever was churning through his head. “You were perfect, baby.”
A warm flush started at the top of her head and went all the way down to her toes, pulsing in the feminine places that were hungry for him. “Do you really think sweet talk’s going to get you somewhere?” she asked, but was already sliding her arms around his neck, fingers threading through his hair.
“I know it is.” His smile went sideways and he dipped his head. Her eyes fluttered shut in anticipation, heartbeat quickening…
But he paused, his lips just skimming against hers, the lightest of touches. “Are you in love with me?”
Her eyes went slamming open, breath catching. Jordan’s hand came up to frame her face, his thumb smoothing along the ridge of her cheek.
He pulled back a fraction, far enough that she could watch the shadows in his eyes coalesce into a solid, sticky kind of fear. The kind that gummed up a person’s brain until he couldn’t keep it to himself anymore.
Ellie had no idea what he wanted to hear. She felt a tremor lick through her body; she wet her lips, and pulled the truth, kicking and screaming, out of the vault where she kept it. There was only one reason indignant outrage had flared to life when she’d thought about what his ex had done to him. Only one reason she listened to Paige wail about having a fulltime boy in the house with a smile on her face. She hated it – she’d begun the semester so sure that her emotional walls were without cracks – but now here she was, so sure of what she felt for the man touching her face.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Jordan traced her eyebrow with his forefinger, slid it down the soft, white skin of her temple. He wasn’t seeing her, she thought, staring at something faraway he thought lay beyond her eyes. “Okay,” he said, and she watched his Adam’s apple work in his throat.
When he kissed her, she pretended he was in love with her too.
28
D
isplays aggressive and antisocial behavior. Refuses to become involved in classroom discussion or group activities.
That’s what his eighth grade homeroom teacher had penned at the bottom of the conference form that had come home in Melinda’s purse. Tam had waited in the passenger seat of the Malibu that day, knees drawn up, sneakers braced on the vinyl, chewing at a ragged thumbnail while he waited for his mother to come back outside. There’d been a hard, hot knot at the base of his throat because he’d known the picture Mrs. Abel would paint of him. He’d envisioned her face: her pasty blue eye shadow and that great hooked nose of hers that looked like a summer squash growing out of her face, the way her lipstick had thinned in the middle and caked up in the corners of her mouth. He’d recalled the way she’d loomed over him that afternoon, the sharp way she said
Tameron
like she might say
shit
.
“Why in the
world
would you hit Tommy?”
she’d asked, and he’d had the knot in his throat then too, mortified to feel tears at the backs of his eyes – fourteen-year-olds didn’t cry – because he couldn’t tell her
why he’d hit Tommy
.
Tommy Parkinson had downy soft, blonde baby hair and brown doe eyes that all the girls giggled about in the corners of classrooms. They were all crazy about him, their voices the high-pitched, sharp, scared squeals of band groupies, their smiles desperate and heartbroken. Tommy had his pick of the pack, why would he choose just one? The teachers loved him too; his hand was the first to shoot up when a teacher asked a question; his discussions always went off topic until he had the whole room hanging on every stupid damn word about his stupid damn baseball game at which he’d thrown the perfect stupid winning damn pitch. At Christmas time, he’d brought each of his teachers not just one gift, but a whole gift basket full of fancy soaps, imported chocolates and gift cards to every conceivable store at the mall.
Tommy wore his shirts tucked in and his khakis belted, his hair neatly combed, his fingernails clean and unchewed. Tommy cheated at kickball, bullied scrawny little Everett Hart into doing his math homework and bragged about the porn tapes he’d nicked from under his dad’s bed. He cut in line, he tattled, he bragged, he talked shit about everyone who wasn’t as perfect as he was. And Tommy Parkinson hadn’t ever spent the night shaking, tears coursing silently down his cheeks, a baseball bat jiggling across his knees while his mother sobbed and curled in on herself on top of her bed; while his father pounded on the locked bedroom door and screamed and railed and threatened to burn the whole goddamn house down if Tommy didn’t get his worthless little pussy self up and let him in. Tommy didn’t spend every waking moment wishing – with the sort of burning, restless heat that left his stomach growling – that he would only just
grow
, that he’d only just get
bigger
than his father.
Tam had never meant to hit Tommy…not that first time.
“Mama’s boy,”
Tommy had called him and the harsh chuckles of the other boys had cut like so many razors. He could still remember the fetid, Cool Ranch Doritos stink of Tommy’s breath on the back of his neck.
“Aren’t you? Little mama’s boy fag.”
The punch had come boiling up out of him, a rage that wouldn’t keep silent anymore, and his fist had snapped out and caught Tommy right in the soft spot below his sternum. It had been the most satisfying thing hearing the breath come rushing out of Tommy’s lungs, the fast, hard, blast of air that he’d forced out of him. That had scared Tam – liking it; he didn’t want to be that way.
Melinda said nothing after the conference, but he’d seen the paper jutting up out of the top of her purse, a sharp corner like a shark’s fin breaching the surface, and he’d wanted to see for himself, wanted to know the words adults used when they called him a freak and pretended they cared.
Tommy had been cocky after that; conveniently, it was forgotten that he’d puked all over his brand new Air Jordans and he’d rolled on the ground, clutching his chest. The girls had doubled their efforts, all
poor Tommy
and
are you okay?
and
how could he?
It should have been the end of it, would have been, if not for the spring that kept winding tighter and tighter inside Tam every time the little blonde bastard shot a smirk over the top of his math book. Every time one of Tommy’s friends whispered
fag
just low enough that no teacher could ever hear. Tam was hungry all the time and he was failing English; his back was stiff as an old man’s from sitting up nights inside Melinda’s bedroom door, with his bat and his scrawny fourteen-year-old arms, praying for some kind of justice or peace that would never come. Maybe if he’d accepted the extra dollar Mike had offered at lunch so he could have one of those Nestle Drumsticks the lunch ladies sold out of a trolley cart in the cafeteria. Maybe if he’d gotten just an hour of sleep the night before. Maybe…a lot of things…might have kept him from snapping the day he went climbing over two cafeteria tables to get to Tommy.
He’d had blood on his knuckles afterward, gummy lumps of mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak sauce on his clothes and in his hair from grappling across the floor. Beside him, in a chair in front of the principal’s secretary, Mike had been steak and potatoes covered too – his brother in crime who’d only been trying to break up the fight, but who’d offered to take the blame.
Melinda hadn’t come that day; it had been Randy. Shame had tasted like vomit in the back of Tam’s throat when they’d pulled up in front of the Walker house and Randy had sent Mike inside:
“Give us a minute. Tell Mom to set an extra plate for dinner.”
He’d watched Mike go bounding across the front lawn, all long legs and shoulders too wide, his messy blonde hair full of potatoes tossing over his ears. The house had blurred around the edges and Tam had blinked fruitlessly at tears he hadn’t understood.
“I…”
He’d hated to speak because the tears had gotten into his voice.
“I’m sorry, I…”
“It’s okay,”
Randy had said in a voice more gentle than he looked capable. One of his huge, weathered, dad-hands had settled at the back of Tam’s neck.
“You don’t have to say anything, alright? I get it. You just take all the time you need.”
His hand squeezed and he’d been the only thing grounding Tam to a world that didn’t make sense at all. A great big, Dad lump of rock to lean against in the storm that was his life. Randy said nothing else, didn’t snigger when the tears got too big and wild to hold back any longer.
“You’re a good kid,”
Randy had told him,
“no matter what those goddamn teachers say.”
And it had been the sort of thing he’d said over and over again to himself right up until the day he’d graduated high school.
Jo had been at the kitchen table inside, eleven, blowing bubbles in a glass of chocolate milk. Beth had French braided her hair that morning, but dozens of multicolored wisps had come loose since. She’d been in one of Mike’s flannel shirts and cutoffs, her bare toes wrapped around the rung of her chair, a big smudge of dirt across her forehead.
“Did you hit him hard?”
she’d asked, eyes positively glowing.
“Mike said you fought Tommy Parkinson. I hope you hit him sooo hard. He’s a shit-weasel.”
“Joanna!”
Beth had scolded.
“Language!”
“Well he is! I go to school with his little brother Donnie and he’s a shit-weasel too.”
Through all the ready-to-label-him teachers and Tommy Parkinsons of his life, of all the gifts the Walkers had showered him with, Tam thought the best was the least tangible: the unquestioning silence. With Randy and Beth, with Mike, with Jordie and his Joey, he’d never once needed to explain.
“I know,”
all of them had said at one point, and they’d never made him give voice to all the wicked, clawed and poisonous things that lived in his head. They’d never wanted to lay him out on a shrink’s couch and pry out the hideous truth of things he wished he’d never seen, one ugly word at a time. They didn’t treat him like a freak. Their understanding was the raw, wordless stuff of soldiers and priests, like they knew what he needed and would never make him say it.
In the vacuum Melinda left behind, his relief had turned to a shaking sense of inadequacy with which he hadn’t known how to cope. He’d never
not
taken care of her. How did he go from worrying and visiting and looking after to just…nothing? How did all that hard work, sacrifice and desperation just…end? Up and down, heaven and earth, his own hands in front of his face – none of it had felt real. The night of the funeral, he’d filled the tub up to the rim with hot water and just floated for a while, watched the steam come up off the water. He’d ducked his head under – the heat tearing at his skin – and when he’d come up, eyelashes dripping, Jo had been sitting on the edge of the tub. Not worried, not afraid he’d try to drown himself, just there.
“You want me to leave?”
she’d asked and pushed his wet hair back along the top of his head, her nails sweet against his scalp.
“No.”
Because he’d needed her, then more than ever, more than the hot water or the condolences or the answers to all his childhood questions.
She was magic, and he hoped she knew that, because he wasn’t sure he could ever explain it to her. Even now, on an absolutely mundane Friday night, her magic persisted.
“Alright, Uncle Tam.” She’d sketched an aerial view of a bedroom on craft paper: a bed, nightstands, vanity and dresser. Little socks on the floor, pillows on the bed, and a cat curled up sleeping in a basket in one corner. She set it in the disposable tin casserole dish in front of him on the table. “Do your thing.”
Chase and Logan got up on their knees in their kitchen chairs, elbows on the table, the wild, volatile light of boyhood bouncing in their eyes. Chase’s homework had been to sketch a fire safety escape route for his home and somehow, during the completion of it, both boys had become unconvinced that smoking in bed was a bad idea. Jo thought they were thick; Tam knew they wanted an excuse to play with a lighter. Peace terms had been reached – there was to be a demonstration – and Jo had spent a half hour fleshing out her “room” so the boys might feel some sense of remorse to see it get burned.
It was a lost cause.
“Okay, ready?” he asked and watched their heads bob till he thought they might bob right off their necks. Jo rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell Grandma.” He stuck a cigarette between his teeth and thumbed on his lighter. “I’m not supposed to do this inside.”
They giggled conspiratorially.
He’d never smoked for all the reasons teenagers start smoking – it had been a coping thing – but guilt traced fingers up his spine as he lit up and watched his pregnant wife over the top of his cupped hand. He took one long, hard drag that got the tip flaring orange, then dropped it in the tin and turned his head to exhale over his shoulder, away from the pregnant woman and children. When he turned back, a long, thin gray tendril of smoke was curling up from the paper. It was just the cigarette at first, but then the paper caught with a sharp smell of deviance and a black ring opened up on the bed Jo had drawn.
“Whoa!” Chase breathed and he and his brother inched as close as they dared as an orange line burned across the drawing.
“See how fast?” Jo said, still trying to educate. “That’s how fast your bed would catch on fire – with you in it. You wouldn’t have time to get out.”
They turned toward their aunt, brows drawn together. “I’m
really
fast,” Chase protested.
“As fast at that? Look at your room.”
It was gone, black and orange and crumbling, thick bands of smoke lifting up toward the old brass chandelier hanging above them.
“Just goes to show,” Tam said. “Smoking will kill you, one way or the other.”
Logan made a
yeah right
face. “
You
smoke.”
“And I’m the last guy on earth - ”
“Walt’s here,” Jo said in a small, unhappy voice that wasn’t her own.
“ – you wanna emulate.” He twisted around in his chair and saw headlights slicing across the backyard, turned back and saw the dread that had come flooding into Jo’s eyes. “Guys, get your coats, I’ll walk you out.”