Drowning in You (20 page)

“
Cookie?” I
prompt Dad.

He shakes his head and asks for
the milkshake. I hold it to his lips and he sighs after a weak
slurp at the straw.

“
You had fun,
didn’t you?”

“
Yeah, it was
good to get some air,” I say. “But it’s better being
here.”

Which I find strange. Elliot
seems like a nice distraction, but for some reason I’d rather feel
twisted in knots with my heart weighing a ton than nothing at
all—unlike my usual self.

Why does this bring back the
thought of Dex when he had me in his arms, plastered to his lean,
soaking chest, and then standing together at my front door, our two
fingers linked?

Oh, that’s right; Dex makes
pretending to be in anything other than his universe
impossible.

And this? With Elliot? I think
all it is, is me trying too hard for “happy” with him.

Yeah, I feel it; the
smokescreen is disappearing—and it’s being replaced with the
truth.

18. Catching Charlee

Dexter

Dad’s footsteps are thuds
pounding toward my bedroom. He chucks open my door and says he’s
doing this and do I want this, too?

“
Nah,
whatevs,” I reply, replaying chords, then continuing, finding my
rhythm again.

Your hand is my warm when I’ve
spent the night in the cold / My hands fit your curves when you
lean into my body / My lips are the puzzle fittin’ the crook of
your neck / Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a wreck.

I clamp my hand down,
suffocating the echoing ring from my guitar. The door just slammed.
Did Dad leave?

Before I forget them, I
scribble the lyrics on my makeshift paper-wrapped blackboard. The
pen keeps drying out while I write. I try to revive it, shaking it
in the air, banging it on my bedside table, until it makes a
cracking sound and physically snaps in half. Royal-blue ink
splatters onto my bare chest and blurts the paperboard like I’ve
sliced open the pen’s aorta. “Fuck,” I mutter, jerking back. “Fuck,
fuck—”

Then it hits me, reeling me
back like a yo-yo string curling around its base. The car is making
its usual dying, gurgling sound off in the distance. And I’m home
alone.

I cross to the door, ink
following me in the form of a thin blue print. I shove my feet into
my military boots and grab one of my workout rags from a basket of
dirty stuff.

Do you want
something from the store, bud?
That’s what
Dad asked me, I think. I’d know if I had paid attention.

How long is he going to be out?
Do I have time?

Dad and I, we
haven’t always stared daggers at each other’s backs. We used to
play hoops in Chicago with Jack, and sometimes Dad would teach Jack
and I how to steer the wheel of the car, making engine
noises
with his mouth, which at five and
seven really sounded like a car idling. Tahny would roll her eyes,
faking interest in the back seat, squealing at her
Seventeen
mag.

Fast-forward fourteen years and
Tahny has a toddler and no boyfriend, Dad has us in debt and
possibly wants to steal money from Walter yet feels guilty about
it, and Jack is under my skin on one forearm, woven through the
forest on the other tricep, and six feet under.

After I’ve washed as much of
the pen ink from my hands as possible—some has seeped into my skin,
temporarily adding new tattoos to my fingers—I pad down the hall to
the end room. I grit my teeth, bracing for disappointment, but the
lock pops. The door swings in and bounces off the stop.

At first I don’t move because
I’m just imagining this luck, that Dad couldn’t have left the door
to the room where he’s keeping his secrets wide open. But I’m
inside, so it must be real. It’s funny that the inside of this
spare room looks so different compared to how I imagined it before.
The bed is more an instrument for his mess than a possibility of
somewhere for a guest to sleep. There’s an open cardboard box full
of junk on top of the mattress, the contents all gray with years of
dust. There’s a peeling paperboard filing cabinet we assembled from
a Walmart box years ago, that I swear had been long trashed. Papers
escape it as if they’re hands trying to claw their way to freedom.
The desk holds a computer tower, one of those old ones from years
ago, but it’s become a catch-all for pens, junk, trinkets, tools,
and keys now. The power button is covered, too.

What does Dad do in here?

Papers are scattered over the
bed, creating weird kind of comforter. The first papers are bills.
All types, from personal cell bills to credit cards and house
utilities. And not just Hollingworth statements. There’s one there
with Walter May’s name on it, listing bank account details.

Other sheets are blank, and
some scribbled on. I maneuver through the junk on the floor and
lean over the bed, spreading the papers, moving and digging under
the layers.

I pull out one
paper. Underneath are stacks of family photos. Not
our
family but the Mays.
I can see where Charlee got her looks from. Her mom looked like a
model back in the day—blonde hair like Charlee, a dress that shows
off her tiny stomach and long legs. Walter stands behind her, his
chin jutting over her shoulder and big hands encircling her waist
from behind. As I flick through, there are others of them, and in
the end I can’t look at any more.

Other papers
show statements for Mason’s. Some are two years old, back when Dad
was managing part of the ski resort. At the oldest date, two years
and two months ago, a statement has
+
2%
beside an equation. In monthly intervals
further equations are marked. I realize these are profit
statements.

The page ends,
and I pick out surrounding papers, reading in order. Each month,
markings like

1%
or

4%
are
common, and only one “+” marking sits next to the month in the
middle of winter, the busiest season at the ski resort. Even in
summer, when family activities are scheduled and other rides open
for the hotter months, figures plunge again. By this stage, Dad is
booted from his managerial position.

I’ve never
taken a business class in my life, but it’s clear Dad’s life is
déjà vu all over again. This is the mess from Chicago, except this
is karma. See, you don’t embezzle money from the parents of dying
children and expect to live happily ever after. It doesn’t matter
if you do four years and eight months’ time for the crime. That’s
human payback, but the universe has still gotta get you for what
you’ve done. This is the cycle. Dad’s battling to stay on top of
payments though he hasn’t stepped out of line in years, I
think
.

As I sort deeper through the
pages, a car door slams from the carport.

I’ve gotta get out of this
room, run to mine, and pick up my guitar before whoever that person
is—Dad—crosses the few feet between the car and inside the back
door.

Hating myself, I leap across
the room. The thuds of my military boots are muffled, thankfully,
by the carpet. I bolt down the hallway, slowing my step a fraction
before it touches the floorboards, hook my hand around my door and
pull myself in as the back door rips open.

Heart hammering in my throat,
clouding the clues I’m trying to put together in my head, I grab at
my guitar and fall straight back into the song I wrote for Charz.
But the words are lost on me as footsteps escalate in volume up the
hall.

Dad’s at my door again, saying
“Weren—” but stops himself, looks at the murder scene in my room
with the blue blood splattered everywhere and rolls his eyes. He
looks at my guitar finally, and says, “Never mind.”

I look up to the board, the
words I spent hours piecing together and scribbling out in my head
a whisper in the wind, and a jumble of mess.

It’s true how
they say you remember the first and last thing most. The last
line,
Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a
wreck
, is the first thing I remember
singing when I look to the paperboard.

At the same time I hear the
faint click of a lock from the room at the end of the hall.

The car ticks incessantly
again, spluttering down the driveway and down the street in a quiet
memory of what just happened.

I lose myself
in the lyric, in
Charz
. I don’t move this time with Dad out again. I strum the same
chords and sing the same line:

“
Still somehow
we ain’t nothing but a wreck.”

* * *

When I arrive at Charz’s house
on my dirt bike an hour later, my tongue might literally have
Repetitive Strain Injury from repeating those lyrics. It numbed and
throbbed until I couldn’t feel the words on it anymore.

At Charz’s house, I chance it
and walk up the wide, never-ending path cut out of the colorful
rainforest that is the May’s front yard. I walk up to the front
door and say “hi” as I turn the knob. I want to be her normal, want
to see anticipation and happiness, not shock or surprise on Charz’s
face, when I come by. I’m drawn here, drawn to her. I want her to
feel like it’s natural for me to be in her environment. I’m
juggling the right thing to do, to not come here, with my need to
see her. I hate it, but a very un-Dex feeling throbs inside of me.
Not in my gut, or my heart, but someplace in me that is somehow
both my gut and my heart without being either.

“
J
iii
m!” An
elderly lady appears from the kitchen, gripping a dinner plate in
both hands for dear life. “Who are you?”

“
I’m Dexter,
ma’am,” I say.

Jim’s footsteps are coming
towards us, but the lady shouts his name again, never taking her
eyes off me. “What are you doing breaking into my son-in-law’s
house?”

A man comes around the corner,
rubbing an eye, shoulders slouched. Mid-yawn, he freezes and ushers
the lady to the side. “Call the cops, Bet. Go, go!”

“
Wait.”

All three of us spin to face
the voice coming from the doorjamb of another room. Darcy jogs to
me, even while the lady shrieks, and shakes my hand.

“
It’s Dexter,
Nana. It’s okay!”

Darcy’s nana finally lets her
arms relax, her face still full of questions. Jim, Darcy’s
grandfather, comes up to me, prodding me back, away from Darcy,
with two fingers to my chest.

“
Now you get
away from my grandson, Dexter. I don’t care who you
are.”

His face is that of a Dad who’s
just caught some bloke fucking his daughter and I’m set on pissing
my pants right there, just shriveling up into a hole.

“
Not even if
he’s Charlee’s
boy
friend?” Darcy adds, nudging his hip into my side.

His nana rests the plate on a
counter and makes this noise that I suppose is her laugh. Even
Darcy’s grandfather is slapping at Darcy’s shoulder and laughing,
glancing between my face and his wife, who is still chortling.

I let out a meek cough-laugh.
Somehow the mix-up isn’t that funny for me yet.

After that, the grandparents
grudgingly let me go off with Darcy into a room that’s about the
size of half my house. The rug is an imitation grizzly bear—an
imitation because there’s a sign saying “we love animals” on a wall
nearby—and has an overstretched wood-and-glass coffee table on it.
There’s a bookshelf two cars long and one car high stretching
across one part of the back wall, and two paintings facing each
other off on opposing walls, one of them in between windows taller
than the length of my room.

“
Here,” Darcy
says, pulling me to a rug. We fall onto the rug and Darcy pulls out
two iPads. “Now, you know this game, right?” he says, tapping the
screen. I nod without knowing I’m nodding, and he tells me we’re
playing in three, two, one.

This stick figure takes off,
and I kill him within one and a half seconds by shattering him
against a pole.

“
So you just
walk in here to see your
girl
friend now, do you?”

I clear my throat, choking
suddenly. “Um, Darcy?”

He starts pulling back from his
game, but there’s a delay before he pauses it and meets my
eyes.

“
I’m not her
boyfriend.”

“
Then what are
you doing here?”

Good question. It’s taken a
ten-year-old to make me wonder why I didn’t check her house first
to see if she was here, or just call her up to tell her about my
dad. But maybe every phone—Mom’s, Tahny’s, mine—are tapped and it’s
not safe to speak about this stuff. Or maybe I’m being a fucking
psycho.

“
How long is a
piece of string,” I answer.

Darcy eats up that one. He
chews on it until the question is soggy and he forgets what he was
doing and we go back to the game.

“
So where’s
Charz then?”

Darcy sniggers in his palm.
After a moment I remember he thinks my nickname for his sister is
funny. “She’s still with Dad. Nana and Pa came by quickly and then
told me we had to leave her there with him.” He finishes by
shrugging his shoulders.

Darcy puts down the iPad again
and comes back with a jumbo cup from The Crooked Shelf where Elliot
works. He slurps at the milkshake. I know it’s a milkshake because
Elliot brings half the stuff from the menu home with him. Somehow I
doubt that they make milkshakes and hand them out, but he still
maintains they have exactly two left after some of his shifts that
he needs to take with him.