Drawn To You (17 page)

I
’m not
sure how I manage to navigate through the tightly-packed mass of people in my cocktail dress and heels, but somehow I do. A hand reaches out to touch me, to stop me, and I jerk away and past it, banging my shoulder against the stairwell as I climb the steps as fast as I can.

Have I taken a breath since I saw Iris’s eyes? Does it matter?

The tears stinging my eyes send a fresh wave of agony over me as I leave the shop and hit the cold night air. The heating lamps are already disassembled and being packed away. For a moment, I stand near the street, swaying on my feet.

I recognized the shape of Iris’s mouth and the color highlighting her hair immediately. No one here knows about her, no one knows that I draw her to keep her close. No one but Ezra.

And he took her from me. Without asking. Without thinking.

What right did he have to see the way I memorialize her, how I preserve her on the page, and show her to the world? Of all the subjects for his public debut, he chooses her?

I can’t protect her this way.

There are a few people outside smoking and giving me odd looks. I can’t be here. I need to get away.

I pull off my heels and start walking barefoot down the sidewalk, not paying much mind to the pebbles beneath my feet. Maybe I’m bruised, maybe I’m bleeding. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is being not here.

Unfortunately, I only make it half a block before someone stops me.

It’s Ezra. Who else would it be?

For the first time, the sight of him makes me feel sick.

“Mia, what’s going on?” he says. “When I imagined all the different reactions you might have, bolting from the room was not one of them.”

My hands clench into fists at my sides. I make my voice cold as the Arctic. “You painted my sister.”

“Yeah,” he says, clearly befuddled. “I wanted to pay respects, to honor her. For you.”

“You shouldn’t have.” The words fall out of me dripping in sarcasm. I’m shaking. I squeeze my fists even tighter to make it stop.

He takes a step back and rubs his neck with one hand. A steady buzz of traffic mutes the world around us. “Look, why don’t we go back to the party, okay? You can give the painting the whole art nerd critique if you want. Pick apart whatever I did wrong. Duke and Leon will get a kick out of it.”

He doesn’t get it. He thinks I’m annoyed, not betrayed.

I twist my fingers into my hair. I wore it down tonight. For him, because he likes it better this way. I yank it up and feel the sting in my scalp.

A couple passing on the sidewalk slows to peer at us. They’re dressed up, ready for a night on the town, just like us. Unlike us, they’re happy, solid in their trust in each other. I glare at them. Ezra keeps talking, trying to keep it light like I’m not breaking apart inside. “Come on, Mia, lay it on me. Did I go too Picasso’s Blue Period with it, or what?”

My icy exterior breaks, fire taking its place. He wants me to lay it on him? I will.

I stare him in the face and say, “She wasn’t yours to
honor.
My sister isn’t a rung for you to climb on your way up the success ladder. You took something personal, something that was between us, and you displayed it on a wall for total strangers to see. You broke my trust without so much as a second’s thought.”

Hurt passes over Ezra’s face like a raincloud. “How can you say that? Of course I thought about it. I did this for you. I thought you’d love it.”

“I don’t!” I’m yelling now, waving my hands to hammer my words home. The people standing outside the gallery are rubbernecking, but I don’t care. “I don’t love it, and I didn’t ask for it.”

He reaches out for my hand and I jerk it away. I watch him flinch at the anger in my movements.

“I thought this would be a good thing,” he says, his brow furrowing in frustration. “Maybe sharing Iris with everyone will help. It’s a talking point, a way for you to let other people know what happened.”

I chuck my shoes at the ground beside me. “God damn it, Ezra, that’s not for you to decide. You don’t get a say in what I share or how I share it.”

“Well why not?” he yells back at me. “Why are you so damn closed off? You have people here who adore you, but you won’t fucking talk to anybody. How are you supposed to heal if you don’t let it go?” He hits his fist into his palm to punctuate every word of “let it go.”

It’s like he punched me in the solar plexus and I stumble back. I’m winded for a few seconds before I can respond.

He looks down at his hands and drops them like he’s only just realized what he did. But it’s too late.

“Who the hell are you to tell me how to mourn?” I say. “You’ve known me, what, a few months? She was my
sister,
and you have no idea what I went through when she died. What I’m still going through. I keep my sketchbooks hidden for a reason. They’re memories and dreams that belong to me, they weren’t for you to mine for inspiration.”

He holds his hands out in false surrender. “I’m so very sorry that I tried to create something special for my girlfriend. My bad for painting award-winning art in honor of your sister.”

It’s the first time he’s ever called me his girlfriend out loud, but I don’t care. His mocking tone makes me see red. I tense up every muscle in my body. “Don’t you put up that bullshit front with me,” I say. “Did you forget who had to twist your arm to even apply for this contest because you thought you weren’t good enough? This was supposed to be about taking a risk, but you’re still hiding. You borrowed my demons instead of revealing your own.”

“What makes you think --”

“This wasn’t in honor of my sister. It was a way for you to stay anonymous, and you used me to do it.”

He deflates under the weight of my words and I feel both victorious and ill over it. When he opens his mouth again, the anger’s gone out of his voice.

“Mia, that’s not… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Yeah, well, intentions mean fuck-all,” I say. “You took something that didn’t belong to you, and you have no idea what it’s like not to be able to protect your kid sister.”

His hand goes to the side of his ribs, like they’re hurting him. “You’d be surprised,” he says.

“I don’t want to be surprised anymore,” I say, my fury finally draining out of me and leaving me weak in the limbs. There’s nothing more to say. I hurt down to my very soul. This is what I get for trusting someone. I’m alone, betrayed, and devastated. Again. I turn around and walk away from him.

“Don’t follow me,” I call over my shoulder.

He doesn’t.

As soon as I get inside the apartment, I dump my shoes unceremoniously on the floor and immediately strip off my dress on the way to the bathroom. I run the water in the shower as hot as it will go and struggle to unhook the garter stockings. A sobbing laugh bubbles out of my throat and I wondered why I even bothered to wear them tonight. I told Audrey they weren’t me.

I’m not sure I even know who “me” is anymore.

Once I’m naked, I stand beneath the scalding water and let it turn my skin pink. It’s easier for me to ignore my tears when I’m being pelted by hot water and steam.

Afterward, I barely manage to crawl into a pair of sweats and sit on the floor near the foot of my bed. My fingers itch with the need to draw, so I pull out one of my sketchbooks and grab a piece of charcoal.

I hold it over the white page.

Nothing comes to me.

I’m burning up inside with the need to spill my emotions out, but my hand won’t cooperate. I try to force it and the lines come out stilted and wrong. It’s a jumble that amounts to exactly nothing.

In my mind’s eye, I struggle to find Iris’s smile.

There’s nothing there. It’s all slipping away.

Ezra broke so much more than my trust tonight. He took the art from my hands.

A
s the morning
light starts to turn the horizon orange, I pull into my parents’ driveway.

I drove for three hours in the cheapest rental car I could find and now I can’t force my hands to release the steering wheel. I’m gripping it so tight that my fingers ache. I didn’t tell my parents I was coming, but I can’t imagine they’ll mind. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that this is the first time I’ve been home since I moved to Portland, and that’s intentional. Every time Mom’s tried to get me to come back, I’ve pulled out excuse after excuse because I know coming home isn’t only about coming back to the familiar – it’s about coming back to all the pain I left behind. Now that I’m here, I know Mom will try to convince me to visit Iris’s grave, and that’s not something I feel ready to do, even after all these months.

But now Iris is fading from my memory. Her laugh is less loud, her eyes less bright. I couldn’t even draw her last night, and that’s not something I can lose.

I don’t deserve to forget.

Time to bite the bullet. I get out of the car and grab my hastily-packed duffle bag out of the trunk before I head up the walkway to the front door. Even in the pale sunlight, I can see that Mom’s planted her yearly red and orange mums in pots along the path, and the white dahlia bushes near the house are bursting with flowers.

A wave of nostalgia washes over me so strongly that for a second I think I might vomit. This is why I haven’t come back. If I tilt my head and squint my eyes, it’s like nothing’s changed at all. I’ll walk through the door and Iris will come bounding down the hall to throw her arms around me.

But everything’s changed, and Iris is gone, gone, gone.

I touch one of the dahlias. Its petals are soft and dewy under my fingers, and I’m tempted to crush its beauty out of existence. Before my fist closes, I back away and turn to the door.

My hand lingers in midair over the knocker. I consider turning around and driving directly back to Portland, pretending I was never here, but I have to stay. The wound Iris left is infected and aching, and I need to scald the rot out of it. What better place to do that than by walking directly back into the fire?

I hit the knocker one, two, three times, and wait.

My mother answers almost immediately, which catches me off guard. I thought for sure she’d be barely awake, but she’s dressed in a tracksuit and running shoes, her gray-streaked hair tied back in a ponytail. Her face looks drawn and tired, but when she realizes it’s me, her eyes go wide in surprise.

“Hi, Mom,” I say.

In place of an answer, she crosses the threshold and pulls me into a tight hug. I don’t react right away, mostly because I’m confused about why she’s dressed like a jogger, but then I wrap my arms under hers and bury my face against her shoulder. A cavern opens up inside me and my sadness starts spilling into it like a waterfall. It’s all I can do to keep from slumping against her.

Then she lets me go and I pull myself together.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Mom says. “I’d have laid out breakfast.”

“Sorry. I should have called.”

She reaches out to touch my chin, her fingertips barely grazing my face. When I look at her, I can see wrinkles that weren’t there before and a mouth that smiles far less frequently than it used to.

That’s my fault, too. Mom and Dad never say as much, but I feel like they must blame me for bringing Damien into our lives at least as much as I blame myself.

Guilt is thick and bitter on my tongue.

“Come inside,” Mom says, stepping aside and waving me in. “I’ll make tea.”

As I walk into the foyer, I’m frozen in place. It’s like a time capsule of
before.
Everything looks and feels exactly the same as it always has. A familiar scent washes over me – candles that my mother buys from a vendor at the holiday craft fair every year. It’s cranberry and something herbal. It’s so completely normal that it reminds me how far from normal we are.

Nothing’s changed except for the Iris-sized hole in our lives. It’s the hole I’ve been trying to avoid all this time because I don’t know what’s on the other side.

My heart clenches in my chest.

My mom doesn’t notice, so she walks through the kitchen’s archway like nothing’s wrong. I put my things down, take a deep breath that feels like it stabs between every rib on the way in, and follow her.

Mom stands on tiptoe to pull down a box of tea from the cupboard. While her back’s to me, I sink down into a chair and clench my jaw shut. I’m worried that if I don’t, everything will come spilling out until I’m a howling mess.

I glance around nervously. The same knick-knacks are lining the shelf above the cupboards, and the same mega-old rotary phone is hanging on the wall by my dad’s beat-up work desk in the corner. It’s so strange how the more your childhood home stays the same, the more out of place you feel when you come back. Or maybe that’s just me.

“You didn’t answer when we called for your birthday last weekend,” Mom says, bringing me back to myself.

I put my hands on my legs, digging into the fabric of my jeans until I feel nails against my skin. “I was working, and then I forgot to call back. Besides, twenty-two isn’t a big deal.”

It’s true. No one cares about turning twenty-two, and we’re avoiding the real issue. I’m not sure what I expected. To pick up right where we left off before I moved to Portland? I’ve been gone too long. The sadness in my mother’s eyes makes guilt swirl in my stomach.

The kettle whistles and Mom goes to get it, bringing mugs and tea along with it when she returns to the table. She pours us both a cup and I inhale mine before sipping. Peppermint. That’s welcome, since I was such a mess when I left that I forgot to brush my teeth.

“We’ve really missed you,” Mom says. She’s holding her mug in both hands and staring down into it like it’s going to tell her fortune. “It’s been too long.”

I gulp too much tea and burn my mouth. That’s just as well, since a million questions and sorrows are threatening to spill off my tongue. Sorry, Mom, I let someone in and he plastered Iris all over a gallery wall. Can you forgive me for letting another one of my boyfriends near her?

When I can speak again, all I can say is, “I know, I’ve been busy with work.”

She shakes her head and looks at me with tired eyes. “Your dad and I really needed you this year. You’re all we have left.”

“Don’t say that, Mom.” I press my palms against my mug, ignoring how much it burns.

“It’s the truth, Mia, and I’m sorry you don’t want to hear it. We’ve been waiting for you to come back one month, any month, so that we can go visit Iris as a family.”

I scrunch my eyes shut and turn my head away. I knew this would happen. To be honest, I need this to happen. I’ve been running away like a coward when I should have been here dealing with the guilt and the pain. I deserve all of it and worse. It’s because of me that she’s gone. It probably should have
been
me, but it wasn’t. I’m still here, and abandoning my family in their time of need was self-serving. Another thing to add to my tally of misdeeds.

Mom let’s me breathe for a few seconds before she starts in again. “This is hard on all of us. She was our baby,
my
baby.”

“I know,” I say, my voice tiny.

She leans forward to put her hand on my forearm. “And so are you. I need to have you in my life, sweetheart. What’s kept you away?”

I push away my mug and slump back in my chair. I don’t want to talk about this, but Mom’s not going to let it go. Not while she has me cornered.

“She was in the car that night because she wanted to talk to me, and I was too angry to let her. It’s my fault. I thought that you shouldn’t have to be around me.” I stare at the floor, my throat aching with unshed tears. There it is. The truth.

Mom blinks too much and I realize she’s trying to hold back tears of her own. She opens her mouth to say something and thinks better of it. Instead, she stands, gathers up our mugs, and dumps them in the sink. She turns on the water to start washing. My compulsion for cleaning things when I’m trying to avoid a hard conversation didn’t come from nowhere.

She’s only a few seconds into washing a mug when she drops in into the sink and turns off the water. She leans against the counter with her head bowed. When she looks back at me, a tear rolls down her cheek and she brushes it away.

“Mia, do you think your father and I haven’t spent the last year wondering what we did wrong?” she asks softly.

I don’t understand, so I shake my head. The lump in my throat isn’t letting me speak.

“Every day for weeks after the accident, we would look at old family pictures and ask ourselves what we could have done differently to prevent it. We were torturing ourselves, and it wasn’t healthy.”

“Mom,” I say, my voice cracking.

She comes closer and takes my hand. “There’s nothing we could have done, and there’s nothing you could have done, either. We don’t blame you, honey. It breaks my heart to know you ever thought we would.”

I lift Mom’s hand to my mouth and squeeze my eyes shut. “If I’d only come home a day later like I was supposed to, she’d still be alive.”

“There’s no way to know that,” Mom says. “I’m not going to pretend to know what happened that night, but you have to forgive yourself. We all have to forgive each other.”

“I’m not upset at you and Dad,” I say.

“That’s not who I’m talking about,” she says. “Damien stopped by the other day. He said he tried to get in touch with you.”

My blood goes cold in my veins, making me tense up.

“I don’t want to talk about Damien,” I say, folding my arms tightly around myself.

“He came here to ask for our forgiveness as part of his program. We gave it to him.”

I look into her face, my jaw slack in shock. When I regain my composure, I sputter, “Why? How could you?”

She tries to squeeze my hand tighter, but I pull it away. “It’s not for him,” she says. “It’s for us. The anger and pain has been eating us from the inside out. Your father hasn’t slept through the night since the accident. Forgiving Damien gave us the closure we needed because we didn’t have to hate him or ask ‘what if’ anymore. It was time.”

I stand up, the chair screeching against the tile as it slides back. “Not for me. I’m going to my room. I need some sleep. Thank you for making tea.”

As I leave the kitchen, she says, “I love you.”

My feet cement themselves to the floor and I turn back to look at her. A small smile plays at her lips even as another tear gathers itself on her lashes.

“I’m never letting you walk away from me again without telling you so,” she says.

My throat hurts something awful. I think of how I never got the chance to tell Iris that I loved her, that she was always the most important person in my world, no matter what. I can’t let that happen again, so I manage to say, “I love you, too.”

I drag my duffle bag down the hall toward my room. Not sleeping last night is catching up with me, and my body aches down to the marrow of my bones. Photographs line the walls of the hallway and I keep my eyes forward so I don’t have to look at them. It’s not as if they aren’t burned into my mind’s eye, anyway.

My room feels stale, the way it always did every time I came home from school. There’s a lingering smell of little girl perfume and strawberry chapstick that I’ve never quite been able to air out, and my walls are still covered in high school class pictures and experimental sketches of cartoon characters and crushes. I drop my things and walk to my bed, picking up an old fluffy blue pillow and squeezing it.

There’s one more thing to do before I’ll let myself sleep. The wound inside me is aching, and I’m pretty sure the only way past the pain is to go through it.

I toss the pillow aside and walk to the room next door.

Iris’s door is closed, still sporting all sorts of band stickers and cutout letters. Dad yelled at her for an hour about how they’d have to replace the door if we ever moved.

My fingers brush the doorknob, and I can’t tell if the metal’s cold or if my fingers are freezing. The door whispers over the plush carpet, the same way it did for every midnight conversation. My entire body feels weak and brittle, as if I’ll shatter to pieces once I step inside.

But if I have to break apart to rebuild, then that’s what I’ll do.

If my room’s a time capsule of my childhood, Iris’s is a time capsule of the night she died. Everything is exactly as she left it, down to the dresses piled up on the floor near her closet, tried on but never rehung. I don’t think Mom or Dad have even been in here. It’s like a shrine.

My breath catches in my throat and lodges there like a chunk of ice, choking me. I can’t help but think of how that pile is probably from that night. How hours before she lay broken in a wrecked car, these clothes were pressed against her still-warm body as she admired herself in the mirror to figure out which one made her look the best.

I take another step into the room.

There’s a very faint odor of weed beneath the scent of Nag Champa incense, reminding me how very eighteen she was. I picture her smoking on the floor beside her bed and hiding the ashtray beneath her side table.

Another step.

Unlike my room, where posters and photos and sketches are taped directly to the wall every which way, Iris used frames to create a matrix of imagery on her wall. It’s symmetrical, showing off ticket stubs in shadow boxes and framed pictures of her with friends, with Mom and Dad, with me.

There’s one of the two of us when we were twelve and fourteen directly in the center. We’re wearing swimsuits and smiling in the sun, the light highlighting our identical wet curls.

One more step.

Something cracks under my foot. In slow motion, I pick it up.

It’s a plastic jewel ring, the kind that you get out of the quarter machines at movie theaters or arcades at kids’ restaurants. The jewel is purple, and a piece of the band is missing, broken from when I stepped on it.

My hand shakes. I recognize it, because I had a dozen rings just like this before I threw them all away.