Heartsick (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Mandy and I get over ourselves, and I somehow even manage to drag myself to my afternoon lecture. The professor said he wouldn’t take attendance. He understands some of us may not be up to learning about postmodern art today. But I want to be there.

When I get home, Mandy’s waiting for me. “Want to go to the cemetery?” She means the old Civil War cemetery. The one where there are Confederate flags and shit.

I like to go there to think. It’s not as busy as the new cemetery (and by
new
I mean it’s only one hundred years old). It’s on the edge of town, where the recently deceased are buried. No one has been buried in the old cemetery, which is in the heart of Allan, since 1962. I don’t have any special inclination for the Confederate flags, but I do toward solitude. It’s where I can be alone. Only, I don’t mind when Mandy’s there too. I never mind when Mandy’s there too.

It’s where I told her about my uncle. And it’s where, a few weeks after my uncle stories stumbled out, she told me more about her dad. That night, we leaned against Private Jonathan Grier’s gravestone sipping Stellas.

But I don’t want Stella tonight. I deliberate in front of the mini fridge at the Wawa that catty-corners the graveyard. Neon signs and late night sandwiches next to the skeletons and cool tombstones. I pull out bottles of hard lemonade. “I feel like our innocence is slipping away from us,” I say, pointing to my eye.

There are several spots in the graveyard that you can use to hide from the world. Anyone walking on the street won’t see you, or hear you, as long as you keep your voice soft. It’s a pretty expansive graveyard for being in the middle of Allan.

We find one of our favorite gravestones, a marker for a Lieutenant Pillow. This is fitting as we now rest our heads on the side of it. I take my shoes off so the corpse-infused grass can touch my feet.

“I used to be worried the cops would find us out here one night,” Mandy starts. “But now, I guess all you’d have to do is give Luke a wink.”

She jabs her elbow into my rib.

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I rest my chin on my hands and stare into the dark dirt. “A fucking cop.”

“What’s so wrong with cops?”

“Since when are you all pro-cop?”

She clinks the glass of the lemonade against her teeth. Poor aim. A sign she’s getting a little buzzed and sugar high. Once she gets it right and takes a swig, she passes it back to me. We always share and keep the rest in a bunch of plastic bags filled with ice in a book bag. Yeah, we basically represent class itself.

“I’m pro you being happy and, well, even though he was sort of a dick that first night, you seem to be happy.”

“Well, until I learned he was a cop.”

“Again with him being a cop,” she says, snatching the bottle, which I had been “nursing” for, what, thirty seconds?

“Mandy.” I twist to face her, my palms on the grass in front of me. “Cops have guns. Luke has a gun.”

Her chin wrinkles, and in the bright light of the full moon it almost looks like the side of a large peach pit. “I thought neither of us was going to get scared anymore.”

I sigh and rub my face. I rub it hard enough that the skin burns, before looking back at her.

“I know, it’s just hard.”

Mandy is the only one who knows about my uncle. The way my mom decided that he was getting better when I was in preschool. The way she let him hang around the house after he had gone to rehab. The way, slowly, my parents let him watch me, when I was seven or eight, after he had proved he had been fine. He was fine. He was. He let me win every game of Monopoly and taught me chess. (He didn’t let me win that though. “Chess,” he said, “is a gentleman’s game.”) He taught me how to make collages and we’d spend whole afternoons getting sticky with glue and cutting up piles and piles of magazines to make our masterpieces. And he’d take me to museums and tell me why a painting was famous. Why a painting was expensive. He’d explain how the artists would blend paints or blot dots to make an image.

I loved him. I still love him, even though I’m still so afraid sometimes because of him.

It was a long weekend. I was eleven. My parents went to our beach house. They deposited me at my uncle’s place. They didn’t seem to notice that his pupils were tiny even in the dark hallway. I had just learned how pupils worked in class but convinced myself that my observation was just in my head. My parents left, and he rambled about all that we would do. But he used words like
fuck
and
shit
and even
cunt
— words that I had only heard from the sixth grade boys on the bus. Never my uncle.

He plopped all the magazines down, ready to do our normal collages, before he slumped over and fell asleep. I knew it was just sleep, because his breath was making marks on his coffee table. White mist would spread, retreat, and spread again in a rhythm. He slept for hours as I paced around the apartment, wondering if I should call my mom.
But it’s so good for them to get away. It’s so good for them to get a break from parenthood.
From me.
Isn’t it nice how Uncle Steve and Quinn get along? Peas in a pod.
I found some crackers in the back of a cabinet and moved aside a few shoes, most of which lacked laces, and sat cross-legged on the ground as I ate crackers and peanut butter and watched a bunch of
Cheers
episodes.

Until my uncle threw up. It got all over the coffee table. I cleaned it, doing little ew-this-is-gross dances that no one could see. Because it was just my uncle and me. And he was still passed out.

It grew dark and I went to bed. I somehow managed to fall asleep. I told myself he had the flu. That’s all. When I woke up, my uncle was awake, leaning back in the couch. And he had a gun in his hands. I had never seen a gun before. Well, outside of TV.

“Uncle Steve,” I said, the words feeling mushy in my mouth.

“Hey, Quinny,” he said. “Come here.” His neck seemed like rubber. He jerked it, and it billowed in response. He patted the seat next to him and rubbed his hand in a circle. I crawled onto the couch, tentatively.

“You see this?” He held the gun. “It can make everything okay. You understand?” I nodded. He took the gun and rubbed the barrel against my cheek, dragging it slowly downward. Every millimeter of that cool metal felt terrifying.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I have never made. I hope you understand that. I didn’t make you. Gigi made you. I hope you don’t have a single ounce of me.”

Gigi was the nickname he had for my mom when they were growing up. “Gigi does it right,” he continued. “She does everything right. I’m a fucking mess.”

He started to cry and then he put the pistol into his mouth, wet tears falling over the gun. My small, pale, fifth-grade hands came over his and gently pulled. I did it so slowly. I didn’t want to spur him to jerk again, or fumble and click the trigger. I cried and whimpered and drew it away. I took that gun away from his mouth. I placed it on the coffee table.

I saved him from himself.

Once he slept it off, he apologized. He got down on his knees and grabbed me to him, sobbing into my belly. “I don’t deserve to be your uncle. I don’t deserve to be Gigi’s brother,” he said. The front of my dress got damp with salty tears. In some ways, him holding me in that position, the moisture on my clothes, it felt more disturbing than the gun. Almost.

I forgave him.

But a few hours later, he was at it again, brandishing the gun. The terrible gun. As though he was some homicidal maniac from TV. I hid behind the armchair while he ranted about paychecks and success and being something. While he ranted about Gigi’s perfection.

He pulled it together, somehow, once again, before my parents picked me up. He said he would give me five hundred dollars if I didn’t tell my mom. “Gigi can’t know,” he said, rubbing his hair so fiercely I wondered if that’s how men went bald. “She can’t.”

I said fine, and I only took the cash because he stuffed it in my book bag. I’ve never used it. I still have it in an old pink wallet in the bottom of my junk drawer back home.

My parents suspected nothing. The smile on my mom’s face was so proud.
Steve has really recovered, hasn’t he?
I couldn’t tell her. I can’t tell her.

He moved to California. On the day he left, he stuck a note into my hand. He wrote about how grateful he was that I never told my mom about his relapse. He told me he wouldn’t let us down again but he also didn’t want to be bad. He didn’t want to hurt anyone he loved anymore. He was going to California for a job, he told my mom. But he told me in the note that he was really going to another treatment center.

Three years later, we got the word. He died in a posh Beverly Hills hotel. Gunshot wound to the head.

Self-inflicted.

I wasn’t there to save him. The gun won.

I turn to Mandy in the graveyard. “Luke’s a cop, so he has a gun. It is what it is. I won’t be afraid.”

“Good,” she says.

With all the mind fucks my uncle sprinkled on my young, delicate brain, I still love him. I still forgive him.

“Do you forgive your dad?” I ask. It seems like a dumb question as soon as the words fly out of my mouth, but sometimes dumb questions have a way of being not so dumb.

“No,” she says as though it’s a reflex. “You can’t forgive a monster. Someone has to have the capability to be human. The capability to improve, for you to forgive them.”

The moon leaves luminous sparkles in her hair. She examines a piece of grass, plucking it and rubbing it between her fingers.

“Do you forgive your mom?” I ask.

“No, I hate my mom,” she says softly, a whisper among the spectral winds twirling her curls around in the moonlight. It’s as though she hadn’t decided yet if she wanted to tell me. Or as though she forgot I’m here to hear it.

But she isn’t done.

“I’m afraid I’ll make the same mistakes my mom did. Then I’ll become a shriveled up, weak version of a person who flinches when car doors are slammed. I’m afraid of it, but that will not happen to me.” Her jaw is tight, and she’s focusing on something in front of us. Like a ghost. Her lavender eyes glisten. “I used to freeze every time there was a knock on the door. When I was at a bar or restaurant, I had to face the door. I had to see who was going to come in. And every time that door opened, I looked. I was afraid that would be the day he’d make one of his random visits. As long as he can hurt me, I’ll be afraid. I’ll be weak.”

I know my line. “Don’t be afraid.”

“It’s hard. I wish I was invincible. I thought, maybe, we were. But...Danny wasn’t.” She looks at the blade of grass in her hand, drops it and stares at the ground.

“No, he wasn’t.” I breathe in and look at the cold grave ahead of us. I clutch at the grass, bringing up clumps. It will grow back.

“And he’s coming back, Quinn,” she says, her voice quivering. “He’s coming to see me.”

“I thought this time was different. I thought you were different.”

“I was wrong.”

As I shift my legs, grass claws against my skin. Mandy is struggling to keep her chin stiff. Her eyes look frozen.

“Be brave,” I say, almost under my breath. I put my hand on her foot, my palm covering her shoelaces. She is not ready for more than that, but I want her to know I’m here.

“I just want to feel safe,” she says, shaking her head as she cups it between her hands. “As long as he can find me...as long as he can hurt me, I’m not safe.”

“Remember, my uncle used to say you could be safe in the shadows.” A lone tear careens over my lip.

“Safe in the shadows,” Mandy whispers. She topples over, but it’s a controlled topple, leaning her head on my shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Once the lemonade is drained, Mandy says she’s going to see Zachary. That’s cool. I could use some time just playing around on my phone while some quality trashy TV reigns in the background. Perhaps that’s a good way to mourn.

But when I get home, there’s a figure on my steps. Hunched over. Waiting.

“Luke?”

“Hey.” He stands, almost like he’s at attention, except that his lips squish together and his chin and forehead are tense. He has the kind of expression that conveys,
hey, we all die, but it still sucks
. I walk up the path. I want to ask why he’s here and somehow let him know it’s cool if he doesn’t want to see me, but I’m not sure what combination of verbs and nouns would be right to get that across. Before a word comes out, his arms open, and he pulls me to his chest. His mouth is next to my ear, but blocked by a curtain of my hair, so when he talks, it tickles against my skin. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wish I could have hugged you this morning.”

I push my face into the crook of his elbow. His palm touches my hair. Something warms in my chest as his thumb runs along the back of my neck. I’m half listening as he says something about how he was working and needed to be professional, etcetera, etcetera. When he asks if I’d like to get a drink, my “yes” is muffled in his suit jacket. It makes us laugh.

It’s not really funny. We just need to laugh.

We walk to Sally’s. Members of the media buzz about outside. There’s a network news van. A reporter tries to catch students and townies alike to get their views on the strange occurrences around Allan. Luke blocks them for me as we head to the pub. The bouncer who usually gives me a wink doesn’t give me one this time. He stands up straighter and nods to Luke and calls him
sir
. But once we get in, most of the other people skid away from us. They see my purple eyes and they jerk to the left, or dodge to the right, afraid. I’m not the only person with purple eyes, but the others I spot also have a wide berth around them, minus a friend or two.

Luke nabs us a table, but it’s not really private—it’s practically in the center of the room. A girl a few years older than me comes by and places her hand on Luke’s shoulder. “I heard you were back in town.”

“Hey, Jenny,” he says. I want to smack that grin off his face.

“Well,” she says, glancing at me before she leans over and whispers into his ear. I don’t mean she talks quietly in the vicinity of his ear, I mean she cups her palm and eyes me now and then over her gaudy red fingertips as she clearly divulges something I shouldn’t hear. There’s a mean edge to her eyes. Luke laughs.

“That is certainly something I never heard in Richmond,” he says. His tone is polite, but behind it there is this hidden sarcasm that you can only hear if you’re looking for it.

She gives a brilliant smile and an effusively gooey, “Well, keep it in mind,” as she walks away, her hand flowing off his back.

He observes her as she leaves, which makes me want to find some guy and stare at his crotch or something. I mean, he only looks at her for a beat, but sometimes, when I’m up on stage with my troupe, you miss one beat and the whole number is thrown off.

“What?” Luke says when he turns back and sees my slight pout and furrowed eyebrows, an expression I don’t make any attempt to hide.

“Nothing,” I say as I do a yoga breath and take a sip of the wine Sally got me generously fast, considering how busy it is. There-was-a-death-on-campus busy.

“I know that look.” He points at me. “You were jealous.”

“No.” I resist the urge to go on. A staccato “no” is better than a languid denial.

He leans back and folds his arms across his chest. God, he has nice arms. Nice police-trained arms.

“So...you aren’t jealous?” He’s no longer playful. Something has shifted and I don’t know what.

“No,” I say again, but all the oomph from the first “no” has meandered away.

His shoulders loosen and he leans forward. “Look, Quinn, if you’re interested in someone else, just tell me. It’ll hurt, but I’d rather rip off the Band-Aid now. Or at least know I’m competing.”

Competing? What the fuck? “I am not some prize to be won,” I say.

He swallows and moves his hands out, palms down. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He takes a few breaths. “I don’t mean to go off half-cocked. Can you just tell me what’s going on between you and that guy at the hospital?”

You mean Rashid. You mean the guy who kept trying to kiss me in his lab. The guy who held me as I tried to process Danny’s death.

“I don’t know.”

At least I’m honest.

Luke squints and he drinks a large portion of his lager, pounding the empty glass down. “Okay.” He leaves, mumbling something about taking a piss.

I look at how calm my wine looks when it’s just sitting there. Then I disrupt its peace and take a sip.

Sally bustles over. “Two more?”

“Um.” I don’t want to order Luke a drink when he’s clearly going to want to leave after this.

“I’ll just get you two more. A day like this needs it,” she says, squeezing my shoulder. She’s about to turn but a boisterous, ruddy-faced man leans toward her. “Hey, Sally, you sure it’s a good idea to serve someone like her?” He nods to me, and acts like I can’t hear him even though he’s yelling. My chest flushes. But the last thing I want to do is cause problems for Sally.

“I can leave...” I start pulling the maroon cardigan off the back of my chair, but she stops me.

“No, Quinn. You aren’t the only one. And anyway, we’re Allan. We’re in this together.” She frowns at the guy, who looks in his beer and wanders away. She gives me another shoulder squeeze, another leprechaun wink, another whisk of her tray, and she’s gone.

I’m not being paranoid. People are staring at me with their normal eyes. Whispering. Keeping their distance.

Luke comes back and instead of standing next to his chair and saying he’s tired or something, he settles back in. I had not planned on what I would say if he settled back in.

A big football-y looking guy comes over and slaps Luke’s back. Hard. He flinches a little before turning around.

“Mike,” he says, his voice like lavender. “I should have known it was you.”

“Of course, you big dipshit. What are you doing back in town?” He steps back, but stumbles a little. “Oh wait, your sister is going to die, I remember now.”

Luke’s smile lapses. Every other muscle in his face tenses.

“Oh shit,” this douche says. I reach under the table and grab Luke’s knee. He brings one of his hands to meet mine and holds on. “I didn’t mean it like that, I just mean, yeah, she’s sick. Which is too bad, I mean, she used to be hot.”

Luke jerks. I squeeze his knee harder. He looks back at the table. The douche jams in next to me. “Anyway, sorry man. That sucks.” Douche looks into his beer, as though he is contemplating all the suckiness in the world, which is apparently mixed in with some hops. Then his face springs up and his drunken red cheeks are aimed directly at me. “So, I’m Mike.”

He brings his hand up to shake mine. And you know what? I don’t give a shit if it’s rude. I don’t give a shit if this guy is just having a night. I cross my arms and stare at him.

Evidently, the proper Emily Post response to that is to squeeze the woman’s thigh, closer to the panties than to the knee, and say, “Why don’t you lighten up?”

Luke couldn’t see Mike’s hand, but I guess he saw the surprise in my face and my intake of breath. I guess he knows this guy. Luke stands up and takes my arm, pulling me to him more forcefully than I would like. I mean, unwanted leg touching is nothing to sneeze at, but I don’t need some man on a white horse to save me from it.

“This is my girlfriend,” Luke says, clenching his fists and glaring at Mike. I’m struck by two things simultaneously. One, I evidently don’t deserve a proper noun. And two, I get the girlfriend status without having agreed to it.

Mike sees nothing more of value in the situation. He gets up, ready to pursue his next skirt.

Luke puts his hand on my waist and tries to draw me close to him. I pull away.

“I’m going to go home,” I say. “It’s been a long day.”

“I’ll come with you.”

I can’t shrug this guy off. Aside from some blips, and aside from the gun, he is nice to me. And he has a sister who I adore, and another sister who is dying. Emily Post, where are you for shit like this?

We walk along the cold bricks. The three blocks home suddenly seem inconveniently far. And I normally love to walk.

“Why are you upset?” he asks.

“You said we were together,” I say. “We aren’t dating. Did we have some sort of DTR chat that I’m unaware of? We just hung out a couple times, that’s all.” The raw emotion rises in my voice.

“DTR?” He cocks his head in an annoyingly adorable way.

“Defining the relationship. This is not defined,” I say, my fists tight.

He stops in the sidewalk. I stop too, but I look to the side, at a tree, not at him. I don’t want to look at him.

“Okay,” he says. “I get this. You need time to realize that other guy isn’t right for you. You want to move slowly. I can move slowly.”

He moves like a mime, deliberate but in exaggerated slow motion, as he reaches toward my face and then, centimeter by centimeter, he brings his lips to mine. I twist away so he can’t see my smile. Once I’m sure my voice can be steady, serious, I say, “You shouldn’t kiss me. I might be contagious.”

“You’re probably right.”

I should hate that he admits this. But I don’t. He’s sensible. For some reason I like sensible. It makes my chest feel warm, even though I don’t like losing him. It makes too much sense.

“Yeah, so, I guess that’s that.” I start walking away from him, for good. While my cheeks tense with sadness, my shoulders relax. A weight is gone.

“What do you mean?” he says, jogging to get around me, stopping me in my path. The weight returns.

“We can’t do anything, so, well...” I say.

“I still want to hang out,” Luke says, his gaze hard. “And I don’t like you kissing anyone else.”

My heart beats rapidly and my jaw hurts from clenching it. Who does he think he is, steamrolling me into a serious relationship after a few fucking dates.

“I’m not looking for a relationship,” I say, mumbling into my chest, staring at my shoes. “I told you that.”

“Why not?” He opens his arms and steps back, as though the world is our oyster and I am free to claim him. But these are disjointed thoughts. If I was with him, I’d be confined. Trapped.

I hold my elbows. He rubs his eyes. “Look, my life is shitty right now. But when I’m with you, I feel good. It’s like all that other shit is manageable.”

“But don’t you get it, you’re happy because we were just having a good time. And this is never going to be more than that. Especially not now.”

He takes my hand, holding it loosely, his thumb rubbing my wrist. “We could still be something good.”

Dammit. He has a response for everything. He keeps fighting me. In a fury to win, I latch on to the thing that will get him to stop looking at me like I’m his savior. “We were never going to be anything, Luke. Don’t you get it? I’m a...well...it doesn’t matter who I am. But we know who you are. You’re just a townie.”

He drops my hand. His jaw tightens. His shoulders stiffen. His fingers clump into his fists. I wait for his riposte, but it never comes. Instead those sharp green eyes glisten in the moonlight. He walks away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” I say into the dark. But his figure keeps moving away from me, getting smaller and smaller until he turns a corner.