Split (21 page)

chapter 33

t
hree days later,
Dakota is at the customer service desk, typing something into the computer. When she sees me, she stops. We haven’t talked since the night of the party. When I got back to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving, expecting to see her, she had changed her work schedule. To avoid mine, I’m guessing. So I waited another week and then showed up while she was working. I walk around the Christmas book displays and stop in front of her.

“Hello,” she says.

I go behind the counter, put my hands on her hips, and turn her around. I lean in and kiss her long and soft. She wraps her arms around my neck and slides her tongue between my teeth. Mid-kiss, she lets go and pushes back.

“Okay, I like that, I do. But I am working. I get off in an hour. Wait for me?”

I say yes and head to the café with a photography magazine. I sit and leaf through the pages, thinking about what she will say. When she comes in, she puts her hand in my hair.

“Your hair is fading back to blond.”

“I’m okay with that. I don’t really like this half-and-half look, though.”

“It does look pretty bad,” she says.

“Oh, there’s that great feature of yours. That unadulterated honesty. Don’t worry. I’m going for a crew cut until it’s all blond again.”

“So …,” she says while she sits down.

I look around the café. On one side of us, a boy is sitting next to his dad, a book in front of them, his finger tracking the letters and his mouth trying to work the sounds into words. On the other side of me, two women in black shirts are gossiping, and without even trying, I could find out why their “friend” is getting a divorce.

I say, “Not here.”

Dakota follows me into the storeroom. We walk between the rows of boxes to a little dusty table-and-chairs set that must go outside in the summer.

“I want to go out with you,” I say.

“Yeah.” She puts her fingers to her mouth. “I got that.”

“I’m sorry about before. You were right. You get to decide whether to date me, but you can’t make an informed decision until you have all the relevant facts.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“I’m sure I do. Know why? My father is a judge.”

I dust off one of the seats with my shirt sleeve. I gesture to it, and she sits down.

When I open my mouth, it’s like I can feel the thread that has sewn my lips shut tearing out. I half expect to suck on that coppery taste of blood. I sit down on the other chair and tell my story.

I begin with the night Christian first started taking blows for my mom. I tell her about the hammer and the antifreeze; how everything changed when Christian ran; how I hung that crystal in my bedroom, praying for his return while I took as many of my mother’s beatings as I could.

I pause. I wipe my sweaty palms against my jeans. I don’t want to finish because I know that I am defined by what I’ve done, not by what’s been done to me.

So I tell her about Lauren.

Dakota’s mouth opens wide, and I’m sure she will walk out. Why wouldn’t she? I look down so I don’t have to watch her leave. But when I look up, she’s still there.

“I’m not telling you about my dad to excuse what I did,” I say. “I’m telling you because it is where I’ve come from, but not where I’m going. I decide that.”

“Finish,” she says.

I take a breath, and I go on to the Q-tips; attacking my dad; nineteen hours on the road; seeing Christian again. I tell her everything: the turkeys; Lauren’s warrant; the trip to Chicago and all I left behind; even those queens that got lost somewhere.

Finally I’m out of words. She fidgets with her sleeve and won’t look at me. The silence stretches out. She’s too polite to get up and walk away. Maybe she wants to run.

Then she says, “I don’t know what to say. I didn’t expect …”

“Yeah, I know.”

“This is in a whole different class. I thought that you were just bitter about your last girlfriend, just scared.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to string you along. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, and I couldn’t trust myself to ask you out, either.”

“But now?”

“I’m rewiring.”

With her finger, she draws a design of squiggles in the dust.

“You were right.” I say. “You get to decide whether you date me, but only after you knew this. That’s why I—”

“What you’ve told me is amazingly honest,” she says.

“I promised to work on the honesty thing.”

“You’ve been working on a lot of things. You’re into confessing, aren’t you? Stealing, lying, now this. Anything else?”

I shake my head.

“I always thought that as long as someone was honest with me, I’d … But this is …”

“It’s okay to say no, Dakota. I’m not sure that I—”

“I really don’t know what to say, Jace. I need to think about it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And you’ve got to know that I’m not like Lauren. I wouldn’t forgive you; I would bring the law down hard and fast, and I would make it stick.”

That’s an assurance that I used to need.

“Okay.”

I take a big breath, compensating for all the shallow ones since we walked in here.

“You’re taking this pretty well,” I say.

“Yeah, I am.”

Her eyebrows draw together, and she looks both surprised at herself and a little worried.

“Well,” I say, resisting an urge to touch her hand, “you know what I want, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“Take my time?”

“Yeah.”

She nods. “Good.”

“Okay. But can I keep stalking your schedule?”

“Yes.” She pauses and not-a smiles at me. “Sir.”

Even though the air is practically crackling between us, I’m not back in the street outside of Starbucks. I’m right here, right now.

When I get home, I walk into our new apartment. Christian’s boxes are still packed up. I walk through the cardboard maze and look at his labels on them: BOOKS (C), BOOKS (J), CLOTHES (C). A pile of assorted junk lies behind an empty box. I glance in my bedroom and see the covers lying neat and untouched. A yellow Post-it is stuck to my door. In Christian’s perfect, un-doctor-like print, it reads,
Meet us on the roof
.

I climb the last flight of steps and push on the long metal bar to open the door. The cold night air settles on my skin. Something about it reminds me of the time Christian and I climbed the mountain and sat at the top.

Christian and Mirriam have dragged up chairs from our apartment. They sit with their backs to me, looking out over the lights of Albuquerque. She leans against him, and her long black hair curtains his shoulder blade. When the door closes, they turn around.

“Hey, Jace,” Christian says, lifting a plastic martini cup filled with bubbly amber liquid. He sips it and stands up. “Come here. We’re celebrating. We had a good mail day.”

“What, no bills?”

They are giddy enough that even this makes them laugh, and I chuckle along.

“Even better,” says Mirriam.

From an empty chair, Christian lifts an envelope, scattering the gravel that had been holding it down. When he hands it to me, I open it.

The return address is from Phoenix—the Phoenix Marathon. I pull out the insides and read.

CONFIRMATION OF PARTICIPATION

He is scheduled to run in October of next year.

“It’s a qualifier for Boston,” he says.

Mirriam hands me a plastic martini cup and fills it from a green bottle. I sip and am startled by the sweetness. Not champagne—sparkling apple cider. I should have known they wouldn’t give me alcohol. It’s fizzy, and the bubbles pop on my tongue and ricochet off the roof of my mouth.

“What about Dad? He watches the Boston Marathon on TV,” I say.

He hesitates and looks at Mirriam. “He does, huh? I guess the likelihood is low the camera would air me.” His voice is steady, but he pulls his elbows into his sides, and I get that he’s terrified, but he’s trying. “Maybe he’ll find us, maybe he won’t, but I can’t let him dictate what we’re doing anymore. You okay with that risk?”

I think of Christian crossing the finish line. “More than okay.”

I hand him the letter back, and our knuckles knock together. I look out over the lights of Albuquerque. They are lined up, neat and ordered.

“I’ve got some serious training ahead of me,” Christian says, “for the marathon.”

“Yeah?”

“Tomorrow morning?” he asks.

“Aren’t you working the early shift?”

He hesitates. “Yeah.”

“You have to be at the hospital by six?”

“Well … yeah.”

I imagine us running together in the dark. “If I’m gonna haul my ass out of bed that early, I get the first shower.”

He glances at me aslant. “Sure, okay.”

I look at him and know I’ll have to race him for it.

chapter 34

a
week later,
my body has adjusted to his early shift. It’s still dark when I wake up, hearing Christian in the bathroom that sits between our two rooms in our new place. The boxes are unpacked and heaped in a corner.

When we moved downstairs, our shag carpet upgraded from pink to green. The kitchen has an island, so we’ve ditched the table and chairs and have only the couch and desk in the living room. Our furniture looks like an archipelago in a shag green sea. On the wall over the couch, I’ve tacked up a shot that I took from the mountains. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I suspect that this apartment will come together.

While I’m threading my legs into my running shorts, Christian leans in the doorway and throws me a pair of running tights that he shrunk in the laundry, and a new pair of running gloves.

“Thanks.”

I peel off the label and snap the plastic thing that keeps them stuck together. They are light and warm.

When we’re both ready, when our watches have been strapped around our wrists, our gloves drawn over our hands, and our keys tucked into our pockets, we head out the door at a jog.

It doesn’t take long for us to get into our rhythm. There are few cars on the road, so we hit the asphalt for the even surface.

At first, my thoughts are still firing: Will the bookstore be packed with Christmas-frantic customers? How am I going to finish the three papers I have due this week? What if my dad does spot Christian, checks the number on his jersey, and gets our last name online?

But I focus on my breathing, and the little panicky thoughts recede, clearing the way for bigger ones. The road slopes downhill and curves away out of sight. The sky is changing at the horizon. The sun isn’t up yet, but color is coming anyway, a sort of whitish-gold. Beyond our path, I can see the smaller mountain ridges in the west. I don’t know their names yet.

Maybe I’ll ask Dakota to head out there with me, and she can draw while I shoot. She gets a focused quiet when she draws, all her thoughts attuned to the swoosh on the page. I wonder if I can capture her concentration in a photo. I hope she’ll let me try.

The sounds of running start to dissolve my thoughts, and I know soon I’ll hit the step, breath, wind rhythm that quiets my brain. For now, my thoughts interrupt in unrelated bursts.

… step … step … step …

I think about the October mornings so long ago when Christian and I would head out, him on foot and me on my bike. I didn’t know how much those mornings would mean to me once Christian left.

… step … step … step …

Last night Christian apologized again for not coming back for me. When he finished berating himself, I told him that I get it. We all screw up. We all wish we were stronger than we are, and not one of us will get through this life without regret.

… step … breath …

When we get back, Mirriam will be in the apartment. She has taken to coming over in the morning and eating breakfast with us. She will have made tea and will be perched on a counter stool, grading or reading. We’ll sit down together and eat before we splinter into our respective worlds, have our days, and then return again.

… step … breath … wind …
… step … breath … wind …

In the light cones from the streetlamps, snowflakes fall. My breathing becomes controlled and regular, and the chest-squishing elephant never shows up. Instead, the air slips through, in and out of my lungs, carrying on it the scent of dust and sage and frost.

We run and run and run until there’s nothing but sound and my brother beside me. I don’t know who is cuing off of whom, but when we’ve gone far enough, we turn around and head back, up the long rise toward home.

acknowledgments

t
here’s a consensus that writing is a solitary act, but it took a village to grow this book. I am indebted to the insightful and wise Mary Logue, who guided me on this project from the first word to the last and who always knew what to say to keep my pen on the paper. Julie Schumacher helped me see what this book was about and, more importantly, what it was not about. Pete Hautman helped me call myself a writer, always treating me as a professional.

H. M. Bouwman, Brian Farrey, Heather E. Goodman, Charlotte Sullivan, and Scott Wrobel have read this book repeatedly, commented astutely, and helped me keep my faith in my writing. Nicholas Kaufmann told me that I could make this career work.

Rosemary Stimola’s swift and patient responses made bringing this book to market and beyond a pure joy. My editor, Nancy Siscoe, gracefully led me through the long maze of publication. Her sharp eyes and acumen helped me give my characters the ending they deserve. The good people at Knopf—marketers, publicists, and designers—supported this book’s creation.

The Loft Literary Center provided me with rich experiences as a member and as a recipient of the Mentor Series award and, along with Hamline University, defined my writing community. The University of Minnesota’s creative writing faculty presented me with intelligent lessons on language and structure, and the English department provided me with the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship so that I could complete
Split
.

The brave clients of and dedicated staff at Domestic Violence Legal Clinic (formerly Pro Bono Advocates) helped me frame the questions of this book.

Deepa Dharmadhikari, Patrick Hueller, Amber Vangen, and Lois and John H. Yopp cheered loudly with me when I got good news and were appropriately despondent when I didn’t.

My children’s patience astonishes me. They not only braved days of maternal absence while I attended conferences, classes, and presentations, but also endured the innumerable times when I was lost in the world of the book.

For three years, John Yopp, my husband, ideal reader, and portable dictionary/thesaurus, listened intently to every single thought about this book, whether whole-book concepts or comma placement. He knew when I needed a sounding board and when I needed more. Now he can channel Jace’s voice so clearly that I sometimes eye him suspiciously, baffled by how he has constructed a direct line to my subconscious.

  Thank you all.