Breakable (12 page)

She swallowed like she was summoning courage and stretched closer, curiosity in her unguarded eyes and lightly puckered brow. She didn’t know me – a fact evidenced by her question: ‘S-so what’s your major?’

Ah, fuck.

I wasn’t ready for this fantasy to end – and end it would,
as soon as I told her I was the guy she’d been emailing with all week – her tutor, who wasn’t supposed to touch her like this, let alone the ways I really wanted to touch her.

‘Do you really want to talk about that?’ I asked, knowing she didn’t. It was just an opening for more. More that I couldn’t give.

‘As opposed to talking about what?’

This was what you got, when you became too cocky about how principled you were, walking that straight and narrow. You slammed right into the one thing you couldn’t have, just because it crossed your path while you were focused on your almighty integrity. Jacqueline Wallace wasn’t mine to take, and her needs weren’t mine to uncover and fulfil.

‘As opposed to
not
talking,’ I said, wanting one slice of time with her, unspoiled by the secrets between us.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, a slight blush in her cheeks. But she didn’t let go. And she didn’t pull away.

I drew her closer still and leaned to inhale the scent of her again, committing it to deeper memory. ‘Yes, you do,’ I breathed, my lip grazing the soft skin just behind her ear. She gasped gratifyingly, and I couldn’t decide if that reaction was the most enchanting or the most unfair thing I’d ever heard. ‘Let’s just dance,’ I said, holding my breath, waiting for her answer.

She nodded once as another song began.

When I started racking up detentions for tardies from sleeping in and my grades began slipping, the consequences I’d expected didn’t happen. I thought Dad would try to ground me or yell at me. I thought he’d set up a parent conference with Ingram or take away my allowance. But nothing changed.

Sometimes Grandpa grumbled at me, but most of his griping happened when I didn’t pick up after myself or pitch in on chores, so I figured out how to run the washer and help cook, and I kept most of my crap stuffed into my room.

Over dinner one night, Grandpa said, ‘You need to learn a vocation, son. Might as well be fishin’, what with the gulf so handy and all.’

As he plopped a spoonful of potatoes on to his plate, Dad scowled, but didn’t contradict him – which was weird. So when summer came around, I was conscripted into working on the
Ramona
– named for my grandmother.
Getting up early sucked, because most nights I partied on the beach with the guys and staggered home late, no longer bothering to sneak out or in. I only got three or four hours of sleep before Grandpa woke me up, which he’d taken to doing with a pan and serving spoon when my alarm didn’t do the trick. Nothing echoes like a metal pan in a tiny room with no windows.

Dad never took a day off. He was gradually transforming Grandpa’s commercial fishing business into chartered fishing and sightseeing tours only, setting up a lame website with pics of rich tourists in front of the
Ramona
, showing off their catches – guys willing to pay a thousand bucks to spend a day drinking and being pointed to a boat-attached pole whenever it jerked from some poor fish taking the bait. All summer long and into the fall we transported skilled and wannabe fishermen to the best sites to throw down lines for redfish in the bay or kingfish offshore – fathers and sons or couples who bonded or spent the day trapped and pissed off at each other, elite executives who came alone or brought VIP clients, frat guys who did more drinking, cussing and sunburning than fishing.

I baited hooks, filled the tanks and supplies, cleaned and gutted fish, hosed down the deck, and took photos. By the end of the summer, I was darker, harder and at least an inch taller than my grandfather, unless the wispy white hair drifting above his head like fog counted as height. (Grandpa claimed it did.)

Grandpa nearly came unhinged when Dad added sunset cruises for couples, dolphin-sighting tours for families and
whooping-crane excursions for groups of little old ladies. But the money increased, and the workload was easier – especially with me for free labour, so there was only so much he could protest.

‘I was thinking.’

I feared Boyce was about to turn philosophical, and I was way too tired for that shit. I’d only had one beer before nearly falling asleep while making out with a hot chick who’d be gone tomorrow, so I decided to quit drinking before I ended up face-first in the sand. Boyce stopped in solidarity of the fact that we were the only two in our pack who worked our asses off during the day. Me on the boat, him at his father’s garage. We carried threadbare beach chairs down into the surf to escape the others, who could be annoying shitheads, especially when they were high and we weren’t.

‘Dangerous, Wynn.’

‘Ha. Ha.’

I focused on the cool waves lapping over my feet and the ceaseless, lulling hum and crash of the rolling water. The tide was still coming in. If we remained in this spot, we’d be waist deep by midnight.

‘
I was thinking
that I’ve never seen you without your wrists covered.’

I tried not to react, but my hands clenched the aluminium arms of the chair. As tanned as I was, my wrists were as white as my ass – they never saw the sun. Ever. I wrapped them in bandanas and wristbands or the watch I seldom wore any more. No one here had ever noticed the fact that
all that stuff was masking something else. At least, I’d assumed they hadn’t.

I turned my head to look at him. ‘And?’

He chewed a bit of dry skin on his lip. ‘I was thinking you could probably get tattoos to cover – y’know – whatever you’re … hidin’.’ He shrugged, closing his eyes.

I stared out at the moon’s reflection rippling across the water and felt my insignificance to my core. Nothing was important enough to strive for – nothing but the need to keep my past pushed too far down to feel. There was nothing else to be done with it. No other way to avoid it.

I’d never considered his idea, which seemed abnormally genius for Boyce. ‘Don’t I have to be eighteen?’

He laughed, low. ‘Nah, man – don’t you know me at all? I know a girl who’ll do it.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

He shrugged. ‘Let me know. I’ll hook you up.’

Her name was Arianna, and she was in her mid-twenties. One arm was sleeved in colourful ink, and the other had only two scripted lines on her inner forearm that read:
New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings ~ Lao Tzu
. We’d come an hour after the studio closed, since I wasn’t old enough to get a tattoo without parental approval.

‘If you want the tattoo to sort of cover the scars, like a smokescreen, then the scar tissue is inked. But you could also incorporate the scars into the design – leave them inside the negative spaces. They’d be hiding in plain
sight – like camo.’ She examined my wrists, turning them to and fro and brushing her fingers across the disfigured pink tissue. I felt nauseated and exposed, but I couldn’t move. Boyce was uncharacteristically silent. ‘We could also tat all the way around. Make it look like wristbands.’

I nodded, liking that idea. We looked over a few designs from a scrapbook before I pulled a sheet of paper from my back pocket. ‘Um. I sketched a couple of ideas … I don’t know if you can use them.’

She unfolded the sketch and smiled. ‘I can absolutely do this, if it’s what you want.’

I nodded.

She sketched and transferred the two designs on to my wrists – one for the right, one for the left, and then readied the equipment and snapped on latex gloves. It hurt like hell, but it was a bearable pain. Boyce was so skeeved out – I assumed from the blood, though my blood all over his fists a few months ago hadn’t bothered him – that she ordered him to go sit in the waiting area until we were done.

‘So why are you doing this?’ I gritted my teeth as she worked over the bone at the side of my wrist, and tried not to think about the needle stabbing me over and over. ‘For me, I mean.’ I knew Boyce had filled her in. She hadn’t batted an eye when I removed the bandanas.

Her eyes didn’t waver from her work. ‘Because having the ability to make my skin my own again saved my life.’ She wiped the blood away and examined the link she’d just filled in. Her eyes met mine. ‘Some of us can begin to heal
the damage people have done to us by escaping the situation, but some of us need more than that. Tattoos make statements that need to be made. Or hide things that are no one’s business. Your scars are battle wounds, but you don’t see them that way. Yet.’ She pumped the machine back to life with her foot.

I felt the burning prick of the needle as she began another link. ‘This ink will make your skin yours again. Maybe some day, you’ll see that your skin isn’t you. It’s just what houses you while you’re here.’ She paused as a roll of chills ran over me. ‘You’re an old soul, Landon. Old enough to make this decision. Just like I was.’

I went home with bandages round both wrists and strict care instructions. ‘This is like a wound of its own,’ she warned me. ‘Do
not
get a sunburn on top of it.’

For the rest of the month, I kept them hidden, same as always. When the sun touched the bare skin of my wrists for the first time in almost two years, I felt naked. The reactions of most of the people I knew was some variation of
Cool tats, man
. Some people assumed I’d been hiding them under the bandanas all along, which made me laugh.
Yeah. The tattoos are what I’ve been hiding
.

Girls thought they were sexy. Sometimes they asked, ‘Did it hurt?’

I’d shrug. ‘A little.’

Dad and Grandpa had similar reactions – a quick flash of the eyes to the ink when it was noticed. A grunt of disapproval. No words spoken.

My next tat didn’t cover a scar – not a visible one.
Arianna put a rose directly over my heart. I didn’t need to add her name,
Rosemary Lucas Maxfield
, to say who it memorialized. Dad didn’t need her name, either. His face mottled purple the first time he walked into the kitchen and saw me in my board shorts and no shirt. He stared at the tattoo, still new and shiny with medication, and his fists clenched. Slamming through the back door, he hadn’t said another word about it until a couple of weeks later, when we were out on the boat.

I’d just baited a kid’s hook. He was ten or so and looked like he would pass out if he had to do it himself. Poor kid. He’d probably rather be building sand castles or slurping a snow cone on the beach than fishing with his dad and uncle. Instead, he would be stuck on this boat all day. I knew how he felt.

As I turned to open another bucket of bait, Dad said, voice low, ‘It’s illegal for you to get those without parental consent. I checked.’ He stared where a dark red petal peeked out from the neckline of my white tank.

I waited, silent, until his eyes, ghostly silver in the bright sunlight, met mine. ‘It’s
my
skin, Dad. Are you going to tell me I’m too young to mark it
on purpose
?’

He flinched and turned away. ‘Dammit, Landon,’ he muttered, but didn’t say anything else. Every few months, I added something new. Black flames licking over my delts, following the sharp lines of my biceps. A gothic cross between my shoulder blades for my maternal Catholic ancestry, with Psalm 23 scripted round it. Mom hadn’t been full of religious devotion, but she’d possessed an
innate spirituality I envied now, and we’d attended mass often enough for me to have an idea of what it was about. I wondered if it would bring me peace to think of her in heaven, instead of in the ground.

Probably not.

On the second anniversary of the day we buried her, I got my eyebrow pierced. Dad railed satisfactorily while my grandfather seemed baffled that anyone would pierce a body part deliberately. ‘I’ve gotten enough hooks through various parts of my anatomy to not wanna put a hole through m’self on purpose!’ He had a scar near his eye where a hook at the end of an inexperienced fisherman’s pole had almost rendered him half blind. ‘Half an inch more and he’d have yanked my eyeball plum out!’ He was fond of telling the story, and I’d heard it enough times to
almost
keep from pulling a squeamish face at the imagery.

Come fall, the Hellers were suddenly much closer, because Charles accepted a tenure-track position at the top state university – two hundred fifty miles inland. While their new place wasn’t the twenty minutes we’d been accustomed to when we all lived in Virginia, it wasn’t an impossible distance for a weekend trip. Except to Dad, who refused to make a four-hour drive to see his best friends in the world. His excuse was work, same as always.

I figured then that people never change. Dad might have quit his high-powered banking job, but he brought his workaholic personality with him when he left Washington.

Even though the teaching position was a step up for Heller’s career, Cindy had to look for a new job, and Cole and Carlie had to make new school and neighbourhood friends. I knew they’d done it with us in mind, but Dad closed his eyes to the sacrifice they’d all made. For him. For me.

His silence seemed to blame them for what had happened, though maybe just being around them reminded him. Maybe my presence – which he couldn’t ditch as easily – reminded him, too.

I didn’t need a reminder. I knew who to blame for us losing Mom. Myself, and no one else.

Dad dropped out of Thanksgiving at the Hellers’ place – big surprise. Since I was fifteen and carless, he drove me to the bus station pre-asscrack of dawn. I could have refused to go by bus, alone, just to be an asshole, but that would have been a pointless rebellion. I wanted to go, even if I had to board a bus with a collection of broke degenerates who took one look at me and concluded that I was the most menacing guy on board. Silver lining: no one sat next to me.

The bus stopped in four piece-of-shit towns to pick up more transportation-challenged losers before arriving in San Antonio, where I transferred to an identical crap bus with a matching set of losers. The total trip would have been less than four hours by car – straight shot, no stops. Instead, after six hours, I arrived at a station that smelled like the combination of a poorly run rest home and areas of Washington, DC, that my friends and I had been
forbidden to venture into on our own. Charles was waiting to pick me up.

‘Happy Turkey Day, son,’ Charles said, wrapping me in an easy hug that pinched my heart with a single, abrupt awareness – my father hadn’t touched me since the funeral. Even then, I remember clinging to him, unleashing my grief into his solid chest, but I don’t recall him reaching for me on purpose.

He’d never uttered a word of blame, but there were no words of pardon either.

Remaining within Charles’s embrace a beat longer than comfortable to clear the moisture from my eyes, I shoved at the never-ending guilt in my mind and wished it would fall silent, just for today. For an hour, even. For a few minutes.

‘You’re gonna be Ray’s height, I think,’ Charles said then, drawing back to take my shoulders in his hands and inspect me. I’d grown since I’d seen him last; we stood eye to eye. ‘You favour him quite a bit, too – but you got Rose’s dark hair.’ He crooked an eyebrow. ‘And lots of it.’

Charles had been a military guy before he went to college. I’d never seen a hair on his head longer than an inch. If it even got close to that, he joked that he looked like a damned hippie and went to get a haircut. It amused the shit out of him to harass Cole and me about our hair length whenever he got the chance.

‘You’re just jealous that we
have
hair,’ Cole smarted off the last time his dad had grumbled that he couldn’t tell him apart from Carlie. I’d spat milk through my nose.