Nobody but Us (10 page)

“Classy,” Will says as he comes in draped like a coatrack with our stuff. “I like the sunflowers.” He tilts his chin at the gold-framed poster of van Gogh’s painting above the bed.

“It all matches your car.”

“Ouch.” He dumps our stuff in front of the heater and pads over to me, taking me around the waist and locking his knees for us both to lean against. “My car’s a classic. Or it will be, someday, when I’m done with it. But this room? It’s a dump.”

“It doesn’t smell like dead bodies.”

“At least there’s that.”

We stand for a time, sorting the comfort from the nerves. His smell, his steady breathing, his arms are familiar and calming. The still air in the room, the bed, the expectations, they nag at the back of my skull and suck the moisture from my throat.

“Everything okay?” I ask. He nods.

“I wish I could sing. Or play the guitar or dance or something. Well, not, like, dance. I’d write you a song and play it for you.”

“You don’t have to write me a song. I’m impressed with you already.”

He tucks his hands on the back of my head and rests his mouth on my forehead. I close my eyes.

“I could stand here forever,” he says.

“In this place? This oh-so-classy motel room?”

“That’s the thing. It don’t matter where.”

There is silence in the room, thick as clotted cream. It bears down on us like it wants to enter our lungs and remove us to a place where the world would stay hushed and still just for us. I hear my breath, short bursts through my nose full of his skin and his clothing and his holding me.

My lips are at the same level as his collarbone, and I nuzzle under his shirt to reach the warmth there.

“We’re gone,” I murmur into his neck. “Free. We never have to go back.”

“There ain’t no one coming. We’ve made it this far. We’ll keep going. We’ll make it, as far as we want.”

“I can’t wait to find our place. Remember when you asked me to come with you?”

“I can’t forget the way you looked at me like a little zoo animal, all hungry to get out of your cage.”

I nip his skin, and his arms tighten around me. “That’s me. The caged tiger-girl.”

“I just wanna make you happy. And learn all about this tiger-girl you’ve been hiding from me.”

I laugh and he pulls us down to the bed, where we lay on our sides facing each other. “And the first time I ate lunch with you?”

“Ate? You sat there staring at us like we were planning on roasting you for lunch. You didn’t eat nothing.”

“I was so nervous.”

“I remember what your dad did when he found out you’d skipped half a day of school to see me.”

“I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to think about that anymore.”

“That was when I first figured I wanted to get you outta there.”

“You hardly knew me!”

“There was just something about you. Like I’ve always known you. Like we’ve always been supposed to meet or something. Even if you don’t believe in fate or soul mates or any of that stuff, I still feel like there’s something.”

“That’s just lust speaking for you,” I tease.

He drags me closer and throws his leg over my hip, wrapping himself around me like a blanket. “My lust has all kinds of things it wants to say to you. You wanna hear about it?”

“Long as it doesn’t shout in my ear.”

“I can manage that,” he whispers as he touches my face and tucks me under him. “I can be soft as you want.”

He brushes my lips gently, briefly, before pulling away. I’m surprised at this. I expected more. More kissing, more touching, more expectation and pressure. But he looks at me like I’m this precious gem he’s just picked up off the ground and wants to pocket and keep. I love this look, though it makes me want to hide myself in his shoulder, under him, in a black hole.

It scares me. These things that I thought were real a week ago—feelings that felt so big, so overwhelming—now seem like they were a fairy tale, a little girl’s imagining of her Prince Charming. But these moments, every second more I spend with Will, show me how flat, how untrue, the fairy tale is. How much better—and worse—real life is.

I want to kiss him. I want to not be scared.

I can’t think of anything to say, so I make him talk.

“Was it all bad? Every home, all the time?”

Will releases me and settles on his back and pulls me along with him. He ponders for a while and I listen to the relaxed thump of his heart in his chest.

“Nah, not always. There was this lady, she was Sioux, and she did the holiday shifts. Like, she took the foster kids for a couple weeks at a time so the regular parents could get a break from us. Keep their sanity or whatever. Anyway, I went to her twice a year for a couple years and she was cool. She liked to tell us all her tribal history and get all pissed about the white man. We all got into these huge shouting matches about how much we’d been screwed over by whatever. ’Cause all of us felt like we’d been screwed by someone, you know? It was hilarious. Everyone trying to yell louder than anyone else about their crappy lives.” He releases a soft stream of laughter.

“But it was good. She baked cookies. Every freaking night. Chocolate chip, peanut butter, this gourmet stuff I ain’t never seen before. She’d gone to pastry chef school when she was younger, but she went back to the res to take care of her dad when he was dying and she never got back out after that. She made us help with the cookies. It was fun. She was all, ‘Stir, stir,
more stirring
, make the butter smooth, you shouldn’t be able to feel the sugar crystals anymore.’ I thought my arms were gonna fall off sometimes. But they were damn good cookies.”

I reach for his hair and run my fingers through it. See in my peripheral vision how his eyes flicker to my face. “I’ll make you cookies.”

“That’d be good. I’ll help. She taught me how to help.”

The room is warm and so’s the bed, and I rub my eyes with my thumbs, gouging the sleep away.

“So that’s it? A couple weeks a year of good things?”

“No, there was …”

“There was what?”

I wait, but he doesn’t say anything. Not for a long time.

I SHOULDN’T HAVE BROUGHT IT UP AT ALL. SHOULD’VE kept my damn mouth shut. She wants to know about good things, and once upon a time I had a good thing to talk about. Before I messed it up.

“Never mind.”

“Tell me. I want to know everything.”

“You don’t wanna know this.”

“Will.”

She thinks she wants to know, but she don’t wanna know, not really. Not her, with the way she loves little kids and doing good and all that. It’s the sort of thing that’ll turn her off me. The sort of thing that’ll make her wonder why the hell she thinks she loves me in the first place.

Might as well know now if she can handle it.

“All right. Remember I told you about the baseball bat? After they got me outta there, I went to this new family. The Tuckers. Husband and wife, like in their forties. Real nice people. Real Christian, but the okay kind. Went to church every Sunday, and that was weird at first, but I got used to it. Didn’t believe none of it, but it was all right.” I stop, let that sink in. Stall for time. I shouldn’t be telling her this shit. I gotta forget it ever happened.

No. I can’t forget.

“Actually, I believed one part of it. That there’s saints. ’Cause Mrs. Tucker was one of them. She took in the worst of us. Kids like me who got in trouble. Addicted babies. Oh my God, those babies cried all night long. But you go in there and she’s just rocking them in the rocking chair, her eyes closed like she’s asleep even though she got the kid screaming in her ear. They screamed like that all the time. All the time. They didn’t wanna be touched. They didn’t wanna be fed. And she was peaceful through all that like I don’t know how.”

Why am I telling her this? Why’s she looking at me like she wants to know? She don’t wanna know this. But my mouth keeps moving, like I ain’t master of it no more.

“I lived with them for a year, almost. Ate a lot of weird casseroles, but that was all right. Mr. Tucker always wanted me to call him Tom, like we could be buds. And we were, kinda. He did computer stuff from home, showed me how to take apart a tower and put it back together again. Tried to teach me computer languages but gave up on that pretty quick. Nerdy kind of guy, but cool. I thought … I thought maybe, for once, life had something good waiting for me, you know?”

I feel her fingers tracing the outside of my ear. It puts me in a trance and I can’t stop talking.

“Anyway, it was a Saturday in October and Tom had gone and filled the minivan with wood for the stove. It was stacked all over in the car, in the way of the windows, everything. He’d parked it in the driveway, ’cause he had to unload it to the side of the house. I was gonna help him with that, but then he got an emergency call from a guy he worked for, so we had to do it later. It was nice out, so Toby, this other kid that was with us—he was almost the same age as me—said we should move the van and throw a tennis ball against the garage door. Butts Up, ever heard of it?”

I wait to see Zoe shake her head before going on. Anything to stall.

“There was another kid there, too.” I swallow. His name gets stuck in my throat, so I force it out. “Ben … little Ben. He was two. He was a meth baby, but by the time he got the Tuckers, he was doing real good. The courts had finally signed him off for adoption. His mom had gotten into too much trouble, so they took him away for good. The Tuckers were doing all the paperwork and visits and all that so they could keep him. Adopt him, you know? Not every kid ends up in the system forever. I was a little jealous. Maybe a lot jealous. I mean, I never got signed off ’cause they couldn’t never find my mom. Not that I’d wanna keep most of the families I lived with. Or that any of them would wanna keep a teenager. All they wanted were babies. That’s all right. But, still.”

It’s dark, but I close my eyes anyway. I gotta have a darker black than this.

“So here’s this Ben, cute kid, running around everywhere and got these two messed-up jerks to look up to. He wants to play with us, but I don’t want him around right then. He couldn’t play the game, you know? And I didn’t feel all big brother. I told him to piss off. He took it kinda hard, probably didn’t know what I was saying, but he figured it out. He ran off. I thought he was in the house.”

I clench at Zoe’s shoulders. I need something to hold on to. She’s gotta feel some of this pain with me if she wants to understand me. I thought Ben was in the house.

“I get in the van, put it in neutral. Toby gives a push backward, and all that weight from the wood just pulls the car out of the driveway. And there’s a bump.”

“No,” she chokes. “Don’t tell me anymore.”

“You wanted to know. You can hear it.”

“Please don’t.”

“He was there. Ben. Right behind the car. I thought he was in the house. He weren’t. He ran to hide behind the van when I was shitty to him.” Zoe tries to squirm away from me, but I hold on tight. She’s gotta come with me through this thing. “I didn’t kill him. He’s not dead. But his legs. The tires went right over them.”

I feel a slow growth of dull pain in my own legs, as though the van were going over my legs, but from the inside out.

“Crushed his legs … I crushed his little legs.” My legs shudder. “He can’t walk no more … ’cause of me.”

I’m still gripping her and I know she wants out so bad. “You want to talk about a fucked-up life? How about a kid born on drugs, then when things are about to get good, some bastard”—I make a noise ’cause there ain’t a word bad enough—“runs over his legs and puts him in a wheelchair for the rest of his fucking life.”

“You didn’t mean to.” She can barely get the words out, and I can barely hear them. Her face is buried in me, like she could hide from me in me.

“That’s what the Tuckers said. Mrs. Tucker held Ben until the ambulance got there. Ben screamed. And she held him, just like she held all those babies.” I loosen my grip on Zoe’s shaking shoulder. “And she said it was an accident. But she cried … she couldn’t help it. And I never seen her cry before. Not when those babies screamed for two days straight and she could hardly stand up, nothing. I made her cry and I ruined Ben. ’Cause I was dumb and selfish. He was two. And just about to get a good life. Bad stuff happens around me. Bad stuff happens because of me.”

“That’s not the way it is.”

“Listen to me, Zoe. I can ruin a good thing. I should’ve checked where he was. Hell, I shouldn’t have been in the damn van in the first place. I was thirteen. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

“You didn’t mean to,” she repeats. “It was so long ago.”

I MADE HIM TELL ME, SO I GUESS I DESERVE THIS HEAVY, molten blackness in my belly.

But he doesn’t deserve to feel the way he is now, the way he felt all those years ago. Not again. It’s my fault for not letting him keep his memory to himself. I’m torn between knowing he needed to tell me, that he couldn’t scare me away, and wishing he could suck it back inside him like a layer of dust to settle at the bottom of his lungs.

“This doesn’t change things.” I press into him again, this time not because I feel like I need to hide but because I want to get as close to Will as possible. Let him see that I don’t want to run from him, that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.