Precise (18 page)

I
t’s homework time. I watch over Ella as she colors in the letters of the alphabet; Liam helps me fill in my A, B, C, D, Es.

Why did you let him come over, Katie? Please do remind me.

I felt bad refusing his help after he spent four nights at my place on the sofa over a couple of weeks after my intake session. He cooked dinner, and played scrabble, amongst other activities.

Earlier today, he arrived with a bunch of flowers. He walked in the door with the stems as tall as his torso, and a shirt that hugged his chest. When he opened his mouth, I’d nodded and agreed to whatever he said.

Turns out he asked if I wanted his help with the Automatic Thought Record I’d explained from my intake session with Leena. My ATR involves me dissecting things I’d rather not talk about—Paul, the rape, Mom’s miscarriages—but apparently I should talk about traumatic events.

Apparently it’s good to die and come back alive ten times over.

Apparently it’s healthy to feel like your heart’s being squeezed to death.

Leena has said this in different words.

Weirdly, I’m starting to believe her.

I use one of Leena’s relaxation tips to keep my cool. I practice the suck in, hold two, three, four, five, slowly exhale, hold, and repeat. The table, Liam, Ella and my ATR seem to return. Ella is already on her “B for Bees” page. Her arm curls around her book.

“And you haven’t even started on your ‘A’,” Liam says, eyeing my page.

I snap out of a transfixed glare at the bee Ella colors in and try to catch up to speed. My Automatic Thought Record. “A” is for activating event. My “A” always meant avoid.

I sip at the caramel latte Liam made from his coffee machine. That machine is one of the many reasons Ella loves this place. And why not? He makes her a babyccino exactly how she likes it, every time.

I pull my finger out of my glass and lick the sweet liquid. The smallest things can trigger a feeling. Right now, sucking my caramel latte off my finger reminds me what it feels like to laugh, the unstoppable feeling of having to let it all out and only stop making sounds until I’m done. Of a time when Katie felt free enough to do something as simple as
really
laugh.

“I feel stupid doing this table.” I pick up the page and look at the first blank square I need to fill in with the event at the core of my PTSD: finding Paul unconscious. I hold a breath, but Liam interrupts before I finish my count.

“Leena suggested this would help. Talking minimizes the initial anxiety related to the memory. Like learning to ride a bike the first time is mighty scary, but the fear lessens the next ride. I did similar communication exercises with my dad.” Liam looks from Ella’s half-colored B for Bee to my empty A. “Except, I didn’t have to do my A, B, Cs.”

“D and E too.” Writer’s block hits me square in the head. No ideas. No inspiration. No words. And I’m not even inventing fiction. “I know this’ll only make things worse. I’m not very good at talking . . . about it.”

“It’ll make all the difference,” he says. “It validates that what you’re feeling is okay.”

Hearing Liam talk like this . . . It’s weird I’m only now getting to know this side of him. The one with a wealth of knowledge on feelings and emotions. I thought that was my job as the girl. But I’ve never been good with that mushy stuff anyway.

The thought of mushy, girly stuff draws my eyes to Liam’s body in the chair next to me. While I crush the pen in my hands, I notice Liam’s shoulders lined up with mine. How close is his shirt to my skin?

Why am I thinking about this?
Stop
.

Liam takes a breath so deep that it looks like someone fills up his shoulders with an air pump. Ella is still coloring and the room seems unchanged, but Liam has aged in the seconds I was “away”.

He says, “Would I give up my house, my car, my savings to bring Paul back?”

“What do you mean?”

He holds up a palm to the air then and gulps.

I nod, folding my hands on the table in front of me.

Liam’s face hardens. He looks to Ella coloring a black line on her last bee before I can study his expression further. He crosses his arms, perking up his shoulders. Somehow, he seems smaller than before, though.

“He didn’t deserve to die.”

“Liam—”

“There’s a moment from the last time I saw him that keeps replaying in my mind.” He pays no notice to my protest. Just picks up my homework and flips it onto the blank side. He tucks his chin in. I’m not sure if his eyes are closed. “We’re playing PlayStation.”

Liam’s eyes snap open. He’s demanding my gaze, stripping my breath away, inches from my face. “You know I can’t think what the game is? Not for the life of me. What’s that game?”

“Which one?”

“You know, that war game with the missions and guns and soldiers.”

“I actually spent most of my time blocking out that lovely game so I only remember weeks of cleaning the house by myself whilst Paul and you were glued to the TV.”

He grunts. “No.” He puts his fist to the table, but there’s no force behind it. As if his strength has been zapped.

He mutters, “What was it?” which I take is a curse to himself. That this is him feeling incompetent maybe? He’s slumped over and there’s something shocking about his huge shoulders seeming smaller than mine.

When he resumes, I’m conscious of his loud breathing. “Anyway, we both choose the same guns, the same back-up. The same
everything
.

“He’s winning at first. Like he always does. At one point, I’m so fed up of being embarrassed that I can’t kill him, not even once, that I drop my controller and throw a punch to his shoulder, then to his gut.”

Liam is drawing circles on the back of my sheet. He must mean to sigh but his teeth are clenched and so the sound is more of a hiss. Although I don’t care for what he does to my sheet, I want to grab his hand because the friction on the paper must be scalding by now. I need his calmness.

Doesn’t he know this?

“Paul throws back decent punches. I had constant reminders of purple and blue skin for ages. Ages of . . . ” Liam halts when the paper rips open from the middle. He stares like that long enough for Ella to look up, quiz him with her eyes, and shrug it away. Liam clamps two open palms on my paper. His knuckles are white and the tendons in his neck are bulging from pressure. Sitting here with our shoulders so close, I’m scared he’ll blow up into pieces and it’ll shower over Ella.

“Suddenly I’m winning the game. He kills me once but I sniper, bomb, and execute the shit out of him a dozen times. The first and last time that was.”

Another pause. With shaky fingers, he pulls out Ella’s crayons, begins to re-align them in an order. I wonder if I’m shaking too, or if I can feel the trembles through him.

“‘An effing n00b, this clown,’ Paul says. Later he says, ‘You’re so shit.’ He doesn’t look me in the eye when he says that. I’m so darn proud I’ve won for once. I think he’s embarrassed. God, I feel good. ‘Takes ten minutes to kill me’ was his excuse. Yeah, I think, that’s all he can do: insult me. He’s never lost before, doesn’t know what to do.”

This time, Liam finishes arranging the colors: pink, magenta, red, orange . . . He tries to speak twice and either thinks better of it, or can’t say anything yet. “When I leave, he says the strangest thing: ‘Sorry, man. I’ve had a killer headache. Kates is gonna take me to the doctor tomorrow after Ella’s swimming lesson. I told her don’t worry but—’ ‘Yeah,’ I say, cutting in, ‘she’s too bloody organized.’ Then Paul says three last words to me: ‘It’s probably nothing.’”

Liam trembles and knocks the crayons. They scatter and slip off the table. I grab him close before he blows up into pieces; at this point, that may actually be possible. His breaths against my chest are heavier than they had been before when I was looking at him. The heat from his face on the nape of my neck seeps into me. The sadness of Paul’s premature death is a fire engulfing us.

I’m not ready yet. I don’t know what to do. Don’t want to talk about Paul because, hey, what the hell am I going to say?

Paul was everything to me. How do I explain my whole damn life?

Liam and I grab each other tighter. At the same time my skin burns up, and my eyes feel heavy. Will he cry too? Maybe it’s a shift in reactions: me emotional, and Liam high on rage.

This is odd. Why am I holding him? Something magnetic flutters inside me. It makes me pull Liam close to my chest, where I can protect him; connects us irrevocably in this moment.

After a while, Liam looks at my eyes, patting down my hair as if he is styling me with comfort. I don’t care if he sees my eyes, which must be ugly, red puffs of things by now. Having him here, and realizing he’s here to support me, is all I want.

He cups my cheeks and brings his lips to my forehead. I expect to feel a quick kiss, but he holds his lips there and it’s exactly what I wanted, really, because I hate when Liam disconnects from me. Anxiety builds up at times like these otherwise.

It took me a while to see why Leena asked me to do this: talking. Why it matters. After I read Ella a bedtime story a couple of nights ago, she smiled and then paused before saying she loved me. She didn’t say or do anything else, but I felt something in me. Something that is the opposite to angst. Something I hadn’t written down in my daily diary but I read from my writing when I looked over it afterward, the insinuated meaning.

Because Ella is here, I should hold back to be strong for her, even if she hasn’t noticed anything but the letters and animals on her page. Though stopping my tears at the moment is like trying to stop a car accident whilst it’s flipping, I manage to hold back.

Liam extends a hand over Ella’s shoulder and curls his other hand over the back of mine. My breath slows with his touch.

Before this conversation, I didn’t know what Liam had just told me. Why hadn’t he told me this?
Why
? I think once more, but it isn’t his fault.

As if he would have fallen apart on me when I was broken myself.

I’ve shut him off, thinking the whole time it was the other way around. It turns out he cares about Ella and me more than I gave him credit for.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t be supportive for each other like this before.”

“This Liam,” I say, pressing my finger to his chest, “is a whole lot different to . . . you.”

“This is me, Kates.” He peels my finger from his chest and wraps his fingers around my hand, squeezing.

“I like this.”

“I don’t want things to change,” I say.

Rather, I’ll try harder. Liam’s been in this, through fights and my pushing him away, because of us. I know that I can never let anything happen to harm Liam. He’s my life now, him and Ella, and I couldn’t have picked a better best friend.

I owe him.

T
oday Ella and I go to my parents’ place after school. I don’t mind coming here nowadays for no particular reason. Although the weather should be heating up I haven’t felt much of a change, and the nights still darken early.

Weather aside, Ella’s park ritual never wavers. A couple of weeks ago we finished the last coloring book I had at home, so now we’re onto ponies and dolls. So much so that I have a favorite outfit for my favorite doll.

Walking to the park near Tim’s place, so close to the trees, shrubs and grass where Marco and I had been alone together made me anxious last week. I gripped Ella’s hand too tight, not realizing until she shook free. And suddenly I was out of breath—even when we walked at a sluggish pace.

Today, as we walk out of the house for a play at the park, I block thinking of Marco’s comments, my false belief of causing Paul’s death, and being responsible for my rape. I hum a song from one of Nickelback’s albums I’ve been listening to. A month after my intake session with Leena, Liam was right. My recovery is as he described. “Riding a bike”, in my case facing my issues, is easier with increased exposure to triggers.

As we walk, I maneuver the air in and out of my lungs in the same manner with which I’d handle one-hundred-year-old parchment. I loosen muscles around my shoulders.

“Mommy,” Ella says when we arrive at the path leading to the park equipment, “I’m running to the monkey bars!”

While I sit on the steps at one side of the monkey bars, Ella shows off her tricks: swinging all the way across and lying horizontal over the top. “Hey, look at this!”

The way Ella swings, and the words she says, trigger a memory. The images are like a random delivery to my house. Like I need to examine the package, open it and sniff around, before I understand why it’s arrived for me.

My mind is at the other side of the park with Marco. Cooper loops his hands over every other bar, just like my daughter.

Both Cooper’s and Ella’s arms swing to me. They keep the same rhythm.

I gasp. It’s my first flashback from Tim’s party in a month. More than that. This far, where Marco and I returned from our walk was meant to be lost. I’d accepted that I’d never remember more.

“Hey, come back here for a second, Kates,” Cooper said.

That old me is relieved because he gave me the chance to pull away from Marco. I see things in pieces, and all I feel is that this old me wants to stop being alone with Marco.

Why do I leave Marco to join a grown man swinging on the monkey bars? Has my relief pushed me from one trouble into another?

Bringing me back for a moment, Ella swings her arm again. She zooms closer to my end of the monkey bars where I’m sitting. One more pole and she’ll be hanging over me. Which again reminds me—

Hanging
.

Why does a grown man hang from play equipment like that? If Cooper liked coke, then who am I to rule out that as the reasoning behind his whacky behavior? And if he was that high on the stuff, he’d have no concept or understanding.

Cooper hopped down to the ground by me, tumbling, then picking himself back up. Before he hooks an arm around my waist and thrusts his lips toward mine, Ella swings again and links onto the last bar.

My time at this spot one month ago in my memory, dissolves. I pluck Ella’s arms off the bars and cuddle her into the best ball-like formation I’m still able to manage with her growing body these days. She squeals in delight.

Ella’s arms flail, so I hold them back. Her squealing makes my heart feel like it has wings—an urge to take off and fly with her. She tells me to stop, giggling so hard I almost can’t decipher her words.

I tickle her all over and when her squeal is sure to burst my eardrums, I say, “Shh, shh. Okay, enough.”

I’m lucky I get to do this
.

I push away the past like it’s decomposing rubbish, afraid it’ll destroy this moment with my heart and its wings pulsing to propel my daughter and I into the sky. The future.

Still, a part of me is weighed down. Great, I remembered that bit of the night, but how the hell is it going to save or change anything?

It’s not, so focus on what you can change.

I kiss Ella’s forehead, her nose—and although she pushes me back by my face because she knows what I’ll do—I force myself down anyway to kiss the four points around her lips.