Eat Your Heart Out (18 page)

Oh, fuck it. Who needs shoes?

When I turn
the corner, the pavement feels smooth and cold beneath my feet. I want to run home, eyes closed.

I used to love running home from school as a very little girl. I used to go so fast that I swore I was flying. I told the other girls at school that I could fly, that I did fly home every day. I was convinced that what moved me, what pushed my feet one in front of the other wasn't me. It was something bigger than me. Something I didn't control. Maybe I did fly.

Running doesn't feel like that anymore. I have to move myself forward. I have to lift my feet. I have to control it. I miss those wings.

My feet sound like horse's hooves beneath me. I turn down my street, opening my eyes.

And then I see him, in the distance. My blood runs cold.

Michael.

My shadowy giant.

He's walking toward
me. His broad shoulders, his dark hair, his long legs, all coming closer and closer to me. It's him.

My breath catches in my throat. I take one of my curls and pat it down against my face. I don't want him to see me like this. Not for the first time since everything happened. He isn't going to love me anymore, not like this. My heart beats so quickly. It's like an orchestra in my ears. I can hear his laugh.

He walks closer, and then closer still.

Suddenly he's in front of me. I grab for my purse, my lipstick, anything for him not to see my face.

Only, it's not him.

At least three
times a week I think I see him. Every time, I don't. Every time, I'm breathless, consumed by thoughts of what he's like now. It's only been a year since I've seen him, but I'm certain everything's different. Is he working at the bank with his father? What does he wear? What does he watch? Who does he share a bed with?

Can he feel that I still love him?

I cross the street. I don't want to pass this stranger now. Looking at him closer and closer is just making me angry.

I'm crying. When did I start crying?

I kick a small stone on the sidewalk, hard. It ricochets across the dark street, bouncing back and forth, landing in the golden light of a street lamp. It seems brighter than it usually is. The grass beneath it looks glazed.

I realize I'm shaking my head. There's no one to look at me right now, but I've become self-conscious just imagining what someone might say if they saw me, so I straighten up. I try walking more easily. I want to cling to whatever is left of that happiness from earlier.

I'm drunker than I was just a second ago. It's hard to keep my balance, even with my shoes off.

“You just have to put one foot in front of the other and not fall down on the way home, that's all you have do,” I tell myself.

That's all I do.

By the time I'm closing the front door behind me, dawn has risen and the sky is a judgmental orange. I close my eyes tightly and lean against the door, still trying to catch my breath.

I'm winded.

Now there's no fucking way I'll be able to paint tomorrow.

It's strange being
back home, both good and bad. It reminds of visiting my elementary school when I was halfway through the eighth grade. Everything looked so much smaller than I had remembered. The stairs that were so tiring to walk I could climb in two steps. I was suddenly taller than my old teacher. She looked frail, fragile even. I remember telling my best friend that we weren't possibly as small as the new kids were when we were their age.

It wasn't an altogether unsettling feeling, though. I had new appreciation for the place. I felt proud there. I'd earned being comfortable between those walls. I liked it more than I had remembered.

Being home again, it's not so different. When I'm falling asleep at night, looking around my room, I feel too big for my blankets. Once I'm asleep, though, I don't stir in my bed. I don't have nightmares anymore, not since I've come home. I don't think I dream at all.

Only it doesn't really feel like home. Not how I remembered home feeling, anyway.

I don't miss New York, I don't miss school. I'm smart enough not to look back.

This morning, I
am sitting with my mother for breakfast. The heat finally broke and the restaurant feels so cold. I wish I'd brought a sweater.

“Why are you shivering like that?” my mom asks me.

I look up from my plate at her. My whole life, people have told me we look alike. I don't see the resemblance.

“It's cold in here.”

We go back to eating, in silence. It's not the silence between two people who don't need to talk anymore. There's a strange universe between us now.

“Do you like your omelette?”

“Yeah, it's fine,” she says.

“That's good. The coffee's nice.”

She looks at me and smiles, and I smile back, but her stare lingers too long.

“How are your friends?”

“They are all good, getting ready to go back to school.”

She nods. I nod. She won't look away.

“Your makeup looks too thick today.”

I take my starched cloth napkin, dip it in her water, and move it all over my face.

“Is that better, Mom?”

I watch her now.

“You are such a beautiful girl, Grace. All that makeup just hides how beautiful you are.”

I would love another cup of coffee. With the hangovers, headaches are blunt.

“So I think your father and I are going away this weekend. Can you remember to water the plants? Grace?”

“I'm sorry, what, Mom?”

“Are you all right, Grace? You seem out of it.” Her eyes narrow and a judgment is passing.

“I'm fine.”

There is an edge in my voice; I can feel it more than I can hear it.

“Are you hungover?”

“No.”

She can still read the nuances of my face, and I can still read the nuances of hers. I know she knows I'm lying.

Before the gloves come off I see Diane, my mother's old friend, and I wave at her. I used to play with Diane's son, Jeremy, but he was a few years younger than me, and I rarely think of him now. He must be almost a man.

“Grace, Susan, how nice to see you both!”

“Nice to see you too, Diane! How is Jeremy?” my mom asks.

“He's great. He's just starting his last year of high school, can you believe it? And he just got his licence. Grace, how are you doing? You must be getting ready to start school again. When are you going back to New York?”

I hate answering that question. I hate it more than anything. When people ask me when I'm going back, I'm reminded that I had to leave in the first place.

“I'm not sure when I'm going back.”

“Grace is just taking a bit of a break,” my mom offers. She's trying to help me. I should try to appreciate it.

“Oh,” says Diane.

There's that look. The look that everyone I know has given me, every single day since I've come back. What happened to her? they are all thinking. What happened to her there that made her come back?

Diane's lips curl into a tight smile, and she looks at me differently than she had before.

“Well, I'll leave you two to your breakfast. It's so nice to see you guys. We should all meet up sometime, have a girls lunch.”

“Yeah, we should. Goodbye, Diane,” my mom says.

“Bye.”

I watch Diane
walk away.

“Mom, why did you tell her that? I've told you so many times that I don't want you telling people that.”

“What do you want me to do, Grace? Lie?”

“Yes, lie.”

“I'm not going to lie.”

“Why? I don't want people to know that I'm taking a break. It's embarrassing.”

“Grace, whether you want people to know or not, it's very obvious that you are taking a . . . break.”

“Why did you say it like that?”

There's the sharpness again. I can feel it and I can hear it.

“Don't speak to me like that. Grace, you are not on a break. You are just getting drunk every night.”

“That's not true, Mom.”

“What did you do last night?”

“That's not the point.”

“What did you do the night before?”

Sadness finds her face and settles around her eyes. I do still know my mother. She's disappointed and confused right now, I can tell. She's staring at me, trying to piece together how I changed from who I was to what I've become. She doesn't like what I've become.

We agree on that.

“I'm doing stuff.”

“You are doing nothing.”

“She's right,” a voice inside me says.

A violent wave of fuchsia feelings crawls up my body. Everything that's inside wants to break through the surface. For the next three seconds I have to push it down. Push it down, don't let it shatter the surface.

“Fuck you.”

And with that I'm out of my chair, out of the restaurant, out of my skin. As I'm leaving, I think I hear her ask me where I'm going, but the tears are here and they hurt my eyes and I can't turn back.

The first time
I got drunk was with Mike. I was wearing a T-shirt he'd bought me on a rugby trip to the States that said
BRUNETTES HAVE MORE FUN
. It was something I never would have bought myself, but I was touched that he'd tried. All I'd ever seen him wear was khaki shorts and a sweatshirt, but he noticed that I dressed carefully.

The T-shirt was the farthest thing from me, but it was his attempt at being like me. He considered me avant-garde. I liked his version of myself more than my own.

My head spun. I'd had two drinks and I couldn't stop laughing.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He moved closer to me and put his hand on my thigh.

“Yeah, this is so fun.”

He nodded and looked around at the crowd of people around his table drinking, laughing, playing poker.

“I had this party for you.”

I held on to him so tight and I don't remember letting go. I know I must have because I ended up being sick on his basement carpet. His dad had to get it replaced and Mike was grounded for a week. I woke up in his bed, wearing the T-shirt. He'd washed my face and covered me in blankets.

“Where did you sleep?” I asked when he shook me gently to wake me just after dawn. He didn't want me to get caught.

“The floor.”

He bent over and he kissed me. That day, with my first hangover, I painted a series of portraits all called “Mike” that won me the scholarship.

I gave them to him on his birthday. He sent me an e-mail the day I left for New York telling me he'd left them on my mom's doorstep.

If I had been older, even by this one year, I would have hung on.

When I'm outside,
I think about all the things that I should've said, that I could've said to my mother.

“You didn't say any of those things because you know everything she said is true,” that voice speaks again.

My mother's words repeat and echo in my head, and no matter how hard I try to force them away, they won't leave me. Like stubborn dirt under my fingernails, I can't pick her out. I don't have the wherewithal to fight with her right now. Feelings blur into one, twisting themselves into knots, and bang into each other with force.

Everything around me is moving in slow motion and I'm walking much faster than I should be able to. Time is out of joint. The bricks on the sidewalk mesh together and then with each tear separate again. Eventually I can see nothing but my two feet beneath me.

I need to let these feelings go and put them somewhere else, somewhere concrete. I need to transfer them to something real, something I can touch.

I need to paint.

The shed is
musty, still as musty as it was when I left. My breathing is ragged, and I think I should find a seat. Looking around, I see the old yellow lawn chair my dad used to take to my softball games when I was a kid.

“When was the last time someone was in here?” I ask the ceiling.

It's different than I imagined it being, sitting here. I thought it would be more emotional, more frightening. It doesn't really feel like anything.

I don't know how to behave between these walls anymore. I see visions dancing in front of me of how I used to be, but I don't know her anymore. I watch the memories of her move around like I would watch a movie, with a separation and a detachment.

I get up and look at my canvases that Mom has carefully packed up in the corner, hopeful that I'll open them up again.

I used to paint, in silence, for hours at a time. I couldn't tell you where that dedication came from. I'm not sure anyone could. But I felt so close to myself then, going into those strange and secret rooms inside my head and finding new pictures, pulling them out. That part of me is now fully separate from my body. Luckily, it's not a distance that's obvious, a distance that's known. It's subtle. It's numbing.

I see such a brightness in these paintings. I don't feel that brightness inside me anymore.

I used to wonder if my fingertips glowed.

Even in those good times, it felt fleeting. Talent is given, and it can be taken away. I didn't own it. It owned me.

I pick out a blank canvas. It's big, which I'm happy for. I rest it against the wall in front of me and stare at it.

Even before my brush touches the canvas I'm tentative. My arm feels disjointed and not my own. I feel the distance now.

“How did this happen?” I ask myself.

I make a few strokes, but they are cautious. Out of the corner of my eye I can see my old canvases. They mock me now. I will never be able to do anything like them again.

It's because he's gone.

“Stop telling me that,” I say to myself

The more I press upon the canvas, the more I hate it. Those paintings in the corner, they were so candid. Now, too many things watch. It's so loud in here.