A Breath of Eyre (13 page)

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Authors: Eve Marie Mont

BOOK: A Breath of Eyre
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“I’d like to schedule an appointment with you,” Dr. Reese said.
“And you’re ... a psychologist?” I said.
“A psychiatrist.”
“So you think I might be depressed or something?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “There’s a stigma associated with psychiatric therapy, but believe me, it’s very common. All I want to do is talk to you. Get a sense of how you’ve been coping since the accident. You might find it liberating to talk to someone about your experiences.”
“But I don’t remember anything.”
“The therapy might help.”
“Are you going to hypnotize me?”
“No, nothing like that. Sometimes, in the act of talking, memories come back. Think of this as another step in your recovery. Just like you need physical therapy to help you regain your physical balance, you need mental therapy to help you regain your mental balance.” I glanced at my father for support, but his eyes were still cast downward.
This was Barbara’s idea, I knew it. She wanted desperately to find something wrong with me, to prove that I really was “troubled.” I was so tired of my father taking her side, of him not standing up for me. And even though I was feeling pressure from all fronts to buckle under, I refused to consent to an appointment. Not yet, not when I’d barely had time to make sense of things myself. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to some stranger about it.
Then again, my father was the one I really wanted to talk to, and he’d been a stranger to me for years.
C
HAPTER
14
G
randma Mackie came over on Christmas Eve, and we all sat by the tree, drinking eggnog and listening to Christmas carols and trying to act festive. Barbara made dinner: butternut squash soup, citrus-rubbed pork loin, and garlic mashed potatoes. What actually ended up on the table were four bowls of orange sludge, blackened hockey pucks, and some piles of white potato-flavored paste. My dad and I gritted our teeth and moved our food around our plates so it looked like we had eaten.
That night I couldn’t sleep—either residual effects of believing in Santa Claus or the fact that I was still starving. I got out of bed and went downstairs to make myself a snack, nearly screaming when I turned on the light and saw my grandma at the table.
“Laura?” she said. She’d been sitting in the dark with a drink, staring into space.
“No, Grandma, it’s me, Emma.”
“Oh.” Her eyes were cloudy, almost opaque.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Thinking.” I studied her face. There was something distant and disturbing about her expression. “She just left the house and walked right into the ocean,” she said, muttering to herself.
“What?”
“It was her birthday.”
“Grandma, are you talking about me? About the time I went swimming last August?”
She wouldn’t answer, but she seemed like she was going to cry. “I should have stopped you,” she said finally.
“Grandma, you couldn’t have stopped me. You didn’t even know I’d gone.” A tear escaped onto her cheek. “Grandma, look. I’m here now. And I’m fine.”
“I should have stopped you,” she said again, and I wondered just how many old-fashioneds she’d had. “I should have listened. We never talked. I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know what, Grandma?” She stared at me, like she was recognizing me for the first time, and I felt a little frightened for her. Grandma had always been a bit eccentric, but her behavior now verged on full-blown senility.
“I didn’t know how sad you were,” she said.
“I’m not sad, Grandma.”
“I never asked.” She looked down at the table, lost in her thoughts.
“Come on, let me take you back to bed,” I said. I helped her up from her chair and took her back to the den and got her situated on the pullout couch. Then I kissed her good night, made myself a Pop-Tart, and took it upstairs to my room.
The whole conversation left me feeling unsettled. I didn’t want to lose my grandmother to dementia. There were few enough people in the world who really knew me and understood me. If my grandma stopped recognizing me, I didn’t know what I’d do.
The rest of Christmas week was unbearable, as I was still feeling pretty listless and empty. And despite wanting to be mature, I continued to hold a grudge against my dad for allowing Barbara to steamroll him about the psychiatrist. Thankfully, the Newmans came to visit on New Year’s Day, giving us a welcome distraction from the humorless drama playing out in our home. I was nervous about seeing Gray again, especially as Michelle kept telling me that something had happened between us that night at the bonfire, something I couldn’t remember.
“Oh, sweetie,” Simona said when I met her at the door on crutches. “Look at you. How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
She came inside and gave me a big hug. When she released me, I lost my balance for just a moment. Gray caught me by the elbow and propped me back up. I smiled shyly, feeling awkward in his presence.
“Simona, thanks so much for the flowers you sent to the hospital,” I said, testing out the theory I’d had. “They were—”
“I didn’t send flowers,” Simona said. I looked at her, perplexed.
“Gray did!” Anna said. “I helped him pick ’em out.”
“Oh,” I said, glancing at Gray, whose face was infuriatingly impassive. “Well done. They were beautiful.”
“Hey, Em, can I try your crutches?” she said, already bored by the flower discussion.
I sat down on the sofa and handed my crutches to Anna, who placed them under her arms and tried to walk. She ended up just dragging them behind her like faulty wings. Gray picked her up and placed her on my crutches so she was dangling by her armpits. “Ouch,” she said. “Crutches hurt.” Gray and I laughed.
Simona joined my parents in the kitchen, and Gray turned to me and smiled strangely. He seemed a little nervous too.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Everyone keeps asking me that. I guess I’m fine. It’s just this stupid walking thing that’s a problem.”
“Do you want to practice on the beach?” Anna asked, looking very earnest.
“No, thanks.”
“Why not?” Gray said.
“Um, because it’s January.”
“It’s not that cold out,” Anna said.
I looked down at her hopeful face, unable to come up with a good excuse. “All right, I guess. Let’s go for a walk.”
I didn’t really feel like sitting around the table drinking coffee and listening to Barbara blather on about the real estate market anyway. Lately, she’d been obsessed with her new project, which involved tearing down the old cottages on Cedar Point and building an upscale condo community. I could already hear her telling Simona, “I thought of the perfect name, Mansions on the Mer. Isn’t that fabulous?” I popped my head in the dining room and told them we were taking Anna for a walk on the beach. Simona smiled at me, but Barbara didn’t even skip a beat in her story.
It wasn’t exactly warm outside—forty degrees at most—and the sun was trying to burn its way through a thick layer of clouds. I loped along next to Gray on my crutches while Anna ran on ahead of us. I felt a little self-conscious since neither of us was saying anything. When we got to the end of the block, Anna was already scrambling over the dunes. Gray followed me as I hobbled onto the beach.
The water and sky were virtually the same silver color, and the ocean looked so wild and dangerous I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to swim in it again. At the same time, the roar of the surf and the smell of salt water made me a little giddy. I’d been cooped up inside the house for far too long with virtually no contact with the outside world.
Anna was playing that game where you stand as close to the surf as possible, then run away when a wave sweeps in. Gray sat farther up the beach, and I stood with my back to him, staring out at the fuzzy horizon, thinking back to that sailboat I’d watched last summer. I turned around to find him staring at me.
“Come sit,” he said, patting the spot next to him.
“I’m not a dog,” I said.
“I wasn’t implying that you were,” he said, laughing. “I just want some company.” I shrugged my shoulders and hopped over to where he was, attempting to sit down next to him, but falling onto him instead. He laughed as I tried to recover.
“See why I didn’t want to sit down?”
“I thought you just didn’t want to sit next to me.”
“You’re right.” I gave him a teasing smile.
And then at the same time we both said: “Cooties.”
“Jinx!” I said, making him laugh.
It felt good to be on the beach with him, joking and laughing like we were kids again. He must have been feeling nostalgic, too, because he said, “Hey, do you remember those play dates we used to have when we were little?”
“Yeah.”
“Our moms would always try to get us to play together, but you’d always be off climbing a tree or reading a book. I’d ask if I could play with you, and you’d shriek and run away.”
“I didn’t trust you.”
“You didn’t trust me?” he said, making a falsely indignant face.
“Well, you did punch me in the nose.”
“True,” he said, chuckling and looking down at the sand. “And what about now? Do you trust me now?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He glanced over at me, his eyes narrowed. “You don’t think much of me, do you?”
I weighed my next words carefully. “I know you have a history.”
“A history of what?”
“Of being a player.”
“Ancient history,” he said. He turned his gaze toward the water and clenched his jaw. “I’m not who you think I am, Townsend.”
I squinted up at him, blocking out the sun with my hand. “Why do you care what I think of you anyway?”
“I don’t know. I guess I want you to like me.”
My heart swelled. “I do like you,” I said, my voice faltering. “It’s just, we’re so different.”
He turned to face me, touching my wrist for a second, then pulling away like my skin had burned him. “You really think we’re that different?” he said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I spend my free time with my head in a book, and you ... spend your free time with your head in a beer bong.”
“Not fair,” he said, laughing. “I told you, I don’t do that anymore.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Gray, I’ve heard the stories.”
“That’s all they are, Townsend. Stories. You believe too much in stories.”
A memory surfaced suddenly: Gray standing over me, bending down to look at my necklace. The heat from his body had felt like fire. His lips had been inches from mine. He was about to kiss me, and ... oh God. I had pushed him away, hadn’t I? Why had I done that? I would have given anything for him to try and kiss me now.
“Hey, do you remember the last time our moms took us to Six Flags?” I said.
“Yeah.” He got a sad look on his face, possibly remembering that it was the last time he saw my mother alive.
“I was finally tall enough to ride the roller coaster.”
“Barely.”
“Shut up!” I said, laughing. He turned to me and smiled, and I noticed how unusually green his eyes looked.
Gray and I had sat in the first car of the roller coaster, our moms right behind us in the next car. I remembered that nervous thrill I’d felt as we approached the top, the clicking sounds marking the increments of our ascent. I had looked over at Gray right before we reached the summit, and he’d grabbed my hand for just a second as we crested the peak, right before my heart lurched up into my throat.
I looked down at the sand now and saw that our hands were almost touching. All I’d have to do was move mine two inches.
“Your mom was so cool,” he said.
“You remember her?”
“Of course.”
“Because sometimes I feel like I’m forgetting her. I can’t even remember her funeral. Isn’t that strange?”
“Not really. You were pretty young when it happened.”
“Do you remember it?”
“I remember that my mom read a poem. Something about not being sad that someone had died. But she was crying the whole time she read it.”
We both fell silent. I liked that Gray knew how to be quiet with me. “Well, they were like sisters,” I said.
“I used to wish they were,” Gray said. “I used to wish that we all lived together, your family and mine.”
“Really?”
For a minute, I imagined what it would have been like to grow up in Gray’s house, to eat meals with his family around the kitchen table, to roll down that enormous hill behind their house, to help Anna with her homework, to watch Gray walking shirtless through the hallway at night. Whoa. Bad idea.
“My parents seemed so much happier when your mom was around,” he said. “Like she made them forget they were supposed to be fighting all the time. Your mom made everyone smile.”
I nodded. “She did make people smile,” I said. “But there were other times. Times when she could be so sad. Times she didn’t want to be with anyone, including me.”
Where did that memory come from?
“But everyone has times like that,” Gray said. “Times when you need to get away from the world. When you think they’d all be better off without you.” I snuck a glance at him, and his eyes had gone wistful again. “Like your sweet sixteen party,” he said.
“Oh, thanks so much for bringing that up. A day that will live in infamy.”
“No, seriously,” he said, trying not to laugh. He was attempting to make a point. “You were having one of those moments then. Why else would you have decided to leave your own party?”
“I don’t know. I was just feeling ... sad.” I studied his expression, trying to guess what he was thinking.
“Don’t you think that’s a strange way to feel during your birthday party?”
“What are you, my shrink now?”
“No, it’s just I understood how you felt. I was worried about you. When I found out what happened at the beach, I kept wanting to call you to make sure you were all right, but I never did.”
Damn it. Why didn’t you?
“Why didn’t you call, Gray?” I asked, emboldened by his unexpected intimacy.

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