Almost Home (20 page)

“She was just always hanging on to you and those stinky-ass boys, that’s all. And then I came back in town, she wasn’t around no more. That’s all I’m saying, damn.”

“Yeah, well, maybe she had someplace she wanted to go,” I say, and even as it comes out of my mouth I feel sick, not because I’m sober but because I know I’m lying. Eeyore didn’t have anyplace she wanted to go. That’s the whole fucking problem. The only place she wanted to be was with me, which I know because she told me, and I took off. I took off for Venice and I didn’t take her with me. I told myself I didn’t want to bring her into it, but really I just didn’t want to be reminded of the shit she made me think about. She kept talking about staring at the ceiling and hands that break you open and he started showing up inside my dreams again, my fucking dad, and Ruthanne still stuck back in that bed, all soft skin and closed eyes, and it bubbled up until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to go. I had to get away from the shit inside my head, my bedroom and the night sweats, and I didn’t take her with me, I just left her there. And now I’m leaving her again.

I look down at the bottle, still in my hand; it’s slippery with my sweat, wet against the hard cold, sharp at the edges.

I tuck it into the pocket of my hoodie, mouth end out, careful not to cut myself. “I gotta go,” I say, not looking at Bianca. “See you later,” even though I know I won’t.

“Guess I won’t look out for anyone no more,” she goes. I walk away. “Yeah, fuck you too,” she yells after me as I head east.

I get over to the 101 as quick as I can and stick my thumb out fast. I don’t want to risk walking: on foot, you can always turn around. But once you slam the door and slouch down in the passenger side you can’t get out. In a car you’re a part of what’s already moving, fixed in one direction, on your way to wherever the road dumps you. I get picked up by some guy in an Acura. He tries to talk to me. I look out the window and finger the glass in my pocket.

When he lets me off I don’t even close the door behind me, I just run. Trying to keep up with the highway. I go at least ten blocks before I’m out of breath; by the time I slow down I’m too close to turn back. It’s early still, probably six; the sun’s barely up but the trucks are out, backed up to the warehouses, beeping. I’m sure Rob’s still asleep.

I’m all ready to break in through the window but I try the door first and it’s open. How stupid can you get? The hinges creak when I push it; steel scrapes against the concrete floor, but I go slow so they won’t hear. Rob’s got his mattress laid out between the door and Eeyore’s corner, like he’s guarding her or something. He’s on his side, in his clothes still, drooling on the pillow. I’m just glad he’s not in bed with her.

I tiptoe over to the corner. Eeyore’s curled around her backpack, clutching it to her chest like a teddy bear. I watch her breathe for a minute, black-rimmed eyelids casting shadows on her sunken cheeks. That first morning I left, she looked like a baby: chubby face, bow mouth with the pin through it. Now she’s a husk. I touch her hair. This time it wakes her up instead of putting her to sleep. Her eyes flutter open and she startles to see me; “Shh,” I say, right before she talks. “Put your backpack on and be quiet,” I whisper. “You’re getting out of here.”

“Where?” she says, still bleary.

I hadn’t thought of that. “Somewhere better” is all I can come up with.

She rubs her eyes and wakes up more; then she looks over at Rob. “I don’t know,” she says.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? I’m getting you out of here. Come on.”

“But what about you,” she whispers back. “Rob told me you need the drugs. You’ll just come back without me later and keep everything for yourself.”

I can’t tell her it’s not true. It probably is. But I just know I have to get her out. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” I say. “Come on. You shouldn’t be here.”

She looks at me for another second that stretches on and on and on. Half of her is with me out the door; the other half’s stuck in a habit, poured into a groove, curled up here with Rob. I can practically see the line traced down the middle of her. I know if I say anything it could push her either way. I just stare back at her. I don’t look away.

Finally she whispers “Okay” and starts to lift herself up. My whole chest fills with relief.

I’m still crouched down, squatting, and she leans on my shoulder to stand. I lose my balance; the bottle drops out of my pocket and clinks on the concrete floor. I flinch. Rob’s up right away.

He doesn’t talk; just turns toward the noise and sees us. He can tell I didn’t come back here to work. He looks at Eeyore’s zipped-up backpack and the blankets thrown off, and heads right in our direction. Eeyore crouches down, knees tucked into her chest. I start to get up, moving slow so Rob won’t pounce. I squat on my heels, one hand back toward Eeyore and the other held out in front of me like Critter when he was trying to calm me down. I smile. “It’s cool, man,” I say.

He doesn’t care. “You’re not taking her,” he says.

I’ve had this hot feeling beneath the middle of my chest since Hollywood, right above the sick. Now it hammers like a heartbeat, hard enough to move my skin. I stop worrying about whether or not I’m going to turn around; I’m moving now, on a highway headed somewhere I can’t stop. I swallow hard. “Fuck you I’m not,” I say.

I’ve always kept up my end of the trade-off with Rob, known the rules and stayed inside them. With guys like him, as long as you do that you’re pretty much safe, and as soon as you stop it they snap. Eeyore’s foot moves away from my hand; I hear cloth scrape on concrete. I glance over my shoulder, see her huddled in the corner, as far away as she can get without running. I slide sideways in front of her, scoop the bottle up and slide it back into my pocket too fast for Rob to see.

He’s right above me now, breath sour: I can smell it even from down on the floor. Sweat rides his forehead like a wave; his face reddens. Eeyore presses back against the wall. She’s never seen him mad. I stand up, blocking him.

He pauses for a second, weighing whether to push me or tell me to move. I almost shove him to the side and run, but I stop: I don’t know what he keeps in his pocket, and by the time I could grab Eeyore he might hurt both of us. I have to do something, though, or else he’ll just push past me to Eeyore and that’ll be it.

Before he can move I reach my hand down, slip my finger in his belt loop, pull him toward me. I hold him there, his zipper pressed against my stomach; I blink my eyes up at him slow, turn them into magnets, curl my lip into a smirk. I’ve done it so many times I can slip it on like clothes. It always works: they never see the sick beneath that face, or the nauseous, or the hate. All I have to do is slide my tongue across my teeth and they think it’s the truth.

In my head I say to Eeyore,
Run
. I say it so loud it hurts inside my ears but she doesn’t hear me, just stays stuck to the concrete wall, curled in around herself, too scared to move. I pull Rob closer, finger locked in his jeans, buying time; his eyes dart back and forth from me to Eeyore, speeding up, and then they fix on me. I can tell he half knows what I’m doing and it makes him mad, but he still likes it. I lick my lips. He gets that lost-animal look I know from Critter and so many other guys, when they can’t tell whether to fuck you or hit you. Really they want both at once, but they think they have to choose. And the
hit her
wraps the
fuck her
like a rope, pulls tight enough to make their brains go red like tied-up flesh; they keep trying to untie that rope inside their heads when really all they want is it to pull until it cuts the circulation off. That’s what that look is. You usually wind up getting the punch in the face.

He yanks away and hits me. For a second everything is black and sharp and wide and I almost fall backward, but my hand stays in my pocket on the glass.

I stagger forward, squinting through the spots in my eyes; when I get close enough I raise my arm and bring the bottle down across his cheek. It opens like a faucet. It’s amazing how much faces bleed. He clutches his hand to the cut and blood pours through his fingers, soaking the floor. Now I say it out loud.
“Run,”
I yell at Eeyore. “Get the fuck out of here.”

She’s still standing there, holding on to her backpack like it’s her only friend. “Are you coming?” she says. “I’m only going if you come with me.”

I don’t answer. I just grab her by the hand and drag her out.

Outside we run until we’re winded, past beige houses and the minivans. The whole time I keep her hand in mine, tight around her little fingers, afraid of where I’ll end up if I let go. When we cross the 101 and come up to Cahuenga she looks south toward Hollywood, all the places that we know. She slows down for a second, not knowing anyplace else to go, but I pull her arm and steer us past the turn and we keep moving east.

The roads start to slant up and curve, and we end up in those hills I always watch from the smog-cloaked highway, thick with palm trees and juniper, bougainvillea and figs. It’s green here and we wind up through the hairpin streets, passing signs for roads I’ve never heard of, dodging too-big cars snapped fast around corners, stumbling to the curb just in time. Where the hills get really steep the houses stop: the ground’s too sharp to build anything solid on, too rough to pour foundations, settle in. It’s just wild, the way that it’s supposed to be, snake vines strangling the cottonwoods, orange sand and gravel, broken glass. We turn off the street and scramble over wire fence and up the hill, tearing through the yucca like some kind of desert jungle, watching for poison ivy and burglar alarms, and the dust washes up on our jeans and turns us brown, and the hill’s so steep it’s almost like a mountain, and we climb, Eeyore and me, scraping our palms on the rocks and staying together.

When we get to the top we finally stop, panting, and the city spills out, water below us. The sun’s hot enough to burn off the smog and you can see between the branches all the way to the ocean, mountains ringed around the city like a moat, cars pulsing through highways like blood. Eeyore’s palm sweats into the lines in mine, and I can feel how soft the skin of her hand still is. I look at her; she doesn’t notice. Still catching her breath, she’s watching the canyon, her eyes little-kid wide at the hugeness of it.

“I used to come up here,” she says. “Before Brian . . . moved in. My dad would bring me up here after school and teach me the names of all the flowers. We used to live right down”—she squints and points with her free hand— “there.” I follow her finger down the other side of the hill to the house we broke into six months ago, white with a rust-colored roof, so close you can almost make out the doorway. “Or I mean,
I
used to. They still live there. I’m the only one that’s gone.”

The brand-new street-kid shell she’s grown is still fragile as a robin’s egg, too thin to hold the wet that’s welling up behind it. When she breathes out it starts streaking down her face and then she doubles over, fast, like someone knocked the wind from her. Suddenly she’s sobbing: tears hitting the orange dirt, turning it brown.

I crouch down next to her, breathe into her dirty purple hair. It’s weird to see a person cry—I can’t remember when the last time was—and even weirder to hold them while they do it. Her bones knock up against mine. She’s tiny beneath her sweatshirt. I don’t think I was ever that small.

After a minute the sobs slow down; she stops jerking in my arms so I don’t have to hold on so tight. All of a sudden my hands feel sharp and clumsy on her little body. She looks up at me, eyes shot through with red, chest caved in with the kind of tired that’s so huge you can’t let yourself feel it or else you’ll collapse. She’s so tiny. And I see it: it’s not just Rob she needs to get away from. She can’t do this.

“You’re going home,” I tell her.

Her eyes flash fast and hot with fear, but there’s something else behind them: a thing sort of like hope, or relief, or some other feeling I don’t really know the name of. Blood floods my face. “Listen.”

I make my eyes focused and straight, steady them on her. If I pause it’ll open up a hole she could fall into, so I talk fast. “You have to tell. Here’s what you do: you bring your dad up here and tell him what Brian did and that he has to make him leave. You just say it, just like that. Fuck Linda. Okay? Fuck Brian too. You don’t have to be out here anymore. You can go back home. You have to. It’s not safe out here for you.”

She looks up at me like some kind of baby animal waiting to get fed. She’s been hungry for too long, though; she’s not sure there’s food. She doesn’t talk.

“It’s hard out here, right?” I pick it back up, pull her along. I have to or she’ll fall. “Really fucking hard.” Her face answers yes. I nod. “Yeah. It’s too hard for you. You’re not like me; you don’t belong out here.”

It’s funny: the tougher she fights, the younger she sounds. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You don’t know what’s back there.”

“Yes. I do.” It comes out soft and still. “And there’s a million Brians out here. Down there, there’s only one.”

She breaks my gaze and glues her eyeballs to the dust. Shakes her head. “I can’t do it. I can’t.” Her chest hitches and her voice turns wet. “I can’t go back. They’re not gonna believe me.” There’s no question mark, but she’s asking.

“How do you know that? Have you tried?” It comes out hard. As soon as it’s out of my mouth I almost laugh—not like
I
tried. Not like I told. Not like I took my sister with me. I push it away. Eeyore’s different.

“I already know! Squid and I broke in. Linda caught us and he told her. She said he was lying.”

All of a sudden my breath goes shallow, panic flashes through. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m lying and they won’t believe her. Maybe I should have left her where at least she had a roof. The thought burrows like a drill into my chest but I think
It’s too late now
. I’ve brought her halfway; I can’t leave her out here. And I can’t let her go back there. If it’s a lie I have to tell it. “But what about your dad? You never told him, right?” I say it with a question mark, but I’m not asking.