What I Had Before I Had You (14 page)

“Don't have to what?” The pull goes out of her hand, but she leaves it there, on the back of my neck. She closes her eyes, and the corners of her mouth turn down in a tense little frown.

“If you don't tell Kandy about Jake, I'm going to.”

“No, don't. Pam, don't.”

Pam scrambles to her feet and brushes the grass off her T-shirt. She looks at me with broad disgust. “I can't believe you haven't told her. Jesus Christ.”

I shrug.

“Are you kidding me?” she says. “You're such a chickenshit.” She stalks off. I think she is going to get something from her car, but then I hear the motor start and the gravel crunch.

Kandy leans in the doorway. “What's her problem?”

“Beats me,” I say.

WHEN THE HOUSE
is clean—or as clean as it needs to be—we open a bottle of my mother's cabernet, and James makes a toast: “To health-code compliance.” Kandy laughs her “haw” donkey laugh. That night, kids tramp through the kitchen and into the living room in twos and threes, refugees from the adult world. They explore the house, locating the beds. The one room we did not clean is the nursery, which was more or less clean already, though changed in what I considered subtle and insidious ways. I duct-tape the door shut and tack a sign on it that says,
THIS ROOM CONTAINS AIDS
. People know just enough about AIDS to laugh but not enough to go in the room.

James doesn't leave. At first I think he is trying to chaperone me, or spying on me for my mother, but then I see him smoking a joint. He winks at the boys and chats with the girls, and everyone thinks he is strange until he goes out and comes back with a case of vodka, and then he is a hero.

I let people into my basement darkroom, where I have hidden all my expensive stolen chemicals and my prints. Kandy nicked an Oriental carpet from her parents' storage attic, and we threw as many mismatched cushions down the stairs as we could find. It looks like an opium den and quickly becomes the most popular spot in the house. There must be thirty kids down here, watching a stocky boy with the brass nose ring of a bull ink a fairy tattoo onto a girl's wrist. The girl lies with her arm flung out across his lap, trembling and sweaty, and a team of friends pour shots of vodka down her throat.

It is strange to see James down here; nobody else knows this as a private space. My mother has always defended my right to disappear down here without fear of intrusion. For years, James has needled me about what I do down here, and it has been my pleasure to torture him with vagueness. Now he peers into the metal cupboards in the corner and pokes at their contents with pleasure. When he squats to pull out the bins in which I have hidden my prints, I separate myself from the crowd on the floor and walk over to him. He shuffles through the prints, smiling at some. He is careful to hold them at the very edges.

“You're a talent, kiddo,” he says. He fixes his gaze on a print of Laura and Courtney on the beach. He smooths his hand over his beard. “Are these they?”

“Who?”

“Your
sisters.
The girls who got you so wound up.”

I nod.

James studies me. “I do see a resemblance.”

Pam speaks from my side; I didn't know she was there. “I thought your sisters were dead.”

I feel caught, though I haven't lied to anyone.

James says, “Did you ever ask them anything?”

“I tried. They kept running away.”

Pam says the thing that has been wavering darkly at the edges of my brain all summer, and then there it is, out in the open: “If they're just random strangers, why would they run away from you?”

I shrug, pivot, and charge up the stairs to the kitchen, where I have a particular bottle of tequila in mind. I shout, “Tequila shots!,” and kids break off from other groups to follow me. I can't think about my sisters. I throw my head back and let the tequila soak through my tongue to my brain, to soften the edges of all things and cast over me a sweet incandescence.

The night wears on, wild and interminable. Kids leave on strange missions and return in different numbers, with supplies, with stories, with grass stains. Jake shows up late, and we are both too far gone to pretend distance. We are in the kitchen standing and talking with a bunch of kids, and the secret keeping is too much for me, the warmth of his shoulder as it bumps against mine accidentally on purpose, over and over again, his hand on the small of my back as he moves past, muttering, “Excuse me.” I fling open the back door and stumble out for some air, some relief.

There by the fire pit is Kandy, and there is James. The yard is a moonlit gray. Kandy is lying on her side on an inflatable pool lounger that someone has laid out as lawn furniture. I can't see her face; her blond hair sheets down on either side, and her gaze is directed downward, where James crouches at her side. His back is to me, but I can see his outstretched hand cupping the curve of the back of her thigh a few inches below the hem of her denim skirt, his thumb dimpling the smooth bronze skin. It is a tableau, a damning evidentiary photograph. I don't care what just happened or what will happen next.

I go back inside. I don't know if they've seen me. I need something. There are so many people in my house. Jake grabs my hand as I pass back through the kitchen crowd, and says, “What? What is it?”

I grab a bottle of wine from the table and pull Jake across the room, rip the duct tape off the door, and yank him into the nursery. I shut the door behind us and prop a chair beneath the knob. Alone. I breathe. The room spins slowly, which makes the mobiles above my sisters' cribs appear to be standing still.

Jake has never been inside the house; there has always been the chance that my mother might cage him, fatten him, and bake him in a pie. I watch him take in the nursery and then my mother's shrine. He pulls me in to him and kisses my forehead. “What happened to you?” he asks, and I breathe into his neck until I feel calmer. He is sweaty; he's used to air-conditioning. He smells like warm tea.

“Is it raining?” His voice or mine? We move to the window and put our faces to the glass. It has indeed started to rain: fuzzy gray verticals as if the world is suffering bad reception. The backyard is empty. How long ago did I see James and Kandy there? Everyone betrays, I think hazily.

Jake puts his mouth over my ear and breathes warmth. “I'm filling you with my air,” he says. I picture the air in my body blue and the air in his body red, blending purple from our heads down to our lungs. He slides his fingers down the front of my jeans, and from the way he twitches, almost imperceptibly, I guess that the other girls he's been with shave off their pubic hair. My mother says women do that to please men who wish, in the dark places of their hearts, that they were fucking wide-eyed little eight-year-olds.

We tangle on the nursery floor. Jake holds my head in both his hands. “I love you,” he says, and as he says it, I feel something strong and fierce, so I say, “Me, too.” He pulls off his T-shirt. A line of dark hair below his navel. His body pale and dimpled, fragile like the body of a dying saint in a religious painting. “I don't have a condom.”

“Shit,” I say, and find his penis with my hand. He stiffens and grunts. I pretend confidence.

“Um, do you think—” he starts. “Do you think your mom? Might? Somewhere?”

I laugh and laugh and can't stop laughing. I'm sure she does. But the party is still raging out there, and I don't want to leave this room, or for Jake to leave this room, ever again. So I say no, but it's okay, we'll use the rhythm method, even though I'm not really sure what that is.

We are naked, moving, entwined, and then our twining gains torque and purpose, and my knees splay out and he finds an angle. It is happening, for real. There is a sensitivity in my body like the inside of my mind—as raw-nerved and as subject to wild changes, from ecstatic to unbearable, from yes to no. There, on the floor of my sisters' room, I feel a bright and blinding pain. Jake keeps going; he doesn't notice. After a while, he slumps and we lie in the hazy warmth, breathing, drifting in and out of consciousness. When I shift my weight, I feel myself swollen, a deep interior rug burn. I roll over and bang into the legs of a crib, and I see that I have bled a dark stain on the powder-pink carpet, spreading, saturating, huge. The insides of my thighs are ropy with blood; I have never seen so much blood.

“Oh God.”

“Oh my God,” echoes Jake, sitting up on his elbows. “You should have told me.” And then, touched, feeling himself to be a special and chosen man, more softly, he says, “Oh my God, Olivia.” He grabs me around the waist and pulls me down to him, but I can't lie there, I can't roll around in that.

I pull my shorts and shirt back on, and my thought is that maybe I can get to the bathroom before the blood soaks into the cloth and starts to show. I bolt, and Jake is saying, “Jesus, close the door,” behind me. I hurry through the party, and everyone is too drunk and too absorbed in their own dramas to notice mine. Two boys are making out in the bathtub, and I have to yell at them to get the hell out. They stare at me, and at the darkening of my shorts, the blood drying on my legs, and they say, “Holy shit, what happened?” I say it was a knife fight and herd them out and lock the door behind them.

I open the toilet tank and scoop out the last of the water with a plastic cup. As I clean myself, a hundred knocks on the door, a hundred what-are-you-doing-in-theres. The blood washes down my legs, circles the drain. I feel a pang of horror—my blood in my sisters' room. I leave my shorts balled in the corner of the tub. My mother's pink bathrobe is hanging on the hook on the bathroom door. I wrap myself in it and go back to the kitchen, clear a path through the crowd to the sink. I get bleach, some bottles of seltzer, and a bucket.

Jake has passed out, sprawled nude on the nursery floor. I kneel beside him and scrub my stain for half an hour with a wooden brush until it fades to nothing and the seltzer water turns to standing blood.

Outside, the rain pounds down. Gardens drown in mud, cats stay inside. The wind tears dead and dying branches from the trees.

IN THE MORNING,
things have come apart. Jake is gone. I still feel drunk, like I am swimming through thick air. I move through the sleeping house, kids camped out on the beds and chairs, kids in piles on the ground. Some are awake, and there is a bristling hush to their talk, a darting eye that follows me from room to room. It is only when I have made a full tour of the house and circled back outside and in through the kitchen door that I find my friends. Kandy is standing in the open door to the nursery, staring in. She turns around and her eyes are red-rimmed, little wet dots of mascara smudged below her eyebrows like an angry tribal tattoo. Her hair is mussed to dandelion fluff, her shoulders hunched forward. Pam leans heavily against the kitchen counter.

Kandy draws a deep breath. “You whore.” Four or five other kids are in the kitchen looking on, slack-jawed. Some girl I've never seen before puts her arm around Kandy and glares at me. I refuse to believe that Kandy cares more about Jake, who does not love her back, than she does about me. It is outside my experience, such wasted longing, and it seems unworthy of her. I feel disgust, and then the disgust sharpens to a point and becomes anger.

“Who are you?” I shout at the stupid stranger girl. And to my friends, “Who the fuck is this?”

Kandy bears down on me, unembarrassed now of her ugly, blotchy, wet-eyed rage. “I gave you everything,” she says, gesturing grandly, squeezing her eyes shut in pain. “And you shat on me. You shat on all of us.” I giggle at her grandiosity, and that makes it worse. Kandy's nostrils flare. Pam turns her face away. The thought occurs to me that Pam tried to keep this from happening, that Pam is the one who gave me everything, and I have been careless of her.

“Don't ever talk to me,” says Kandy. She turns to go but then, after a moment's consideration, whirls back around and punches me in the stomach. I'm not expecting it, and I fall hard. I can't get my breath. White pulsing heat in my gut. I gasp on the floor, a beached fish. When I have enough breath to sit up, the kitchen is empty.

I have Jake now and little else. I have Blanche. I have ghosts if I want them. I can't help but think how my mother would nod: See how love destroys. I clean the house again, slowly this time. Nobody comes, not even Pam. James pulls up in his rattling green car, and I am gone out the back door as fast as I can run. I don't want to see his face. It seems there is nothing for me in the world, and I cry when I am alone, fat stupid tears, and I hate myself for crying. It is August now. The city-boy lifeguards are as tan as the rest of us. The boardwalk vendors are giving away free corn to get people to buy the sausages.

I have been avoiding Allison Street and that house with its cutesy conch-shell cutout shutters, but now I start walking the street, up and down, up and down. The shutters are closed, the blue car gone from the driveway. The porch is organized in a final way, an until-next-year way. Each year it makes me sad to see summer homes abandoned, as if they have auditioned to contain families and been turned down. I imagine the auburn crown of a girl's head above the privacy fence as she washes off the sand in the outdoor shower. There is nothing to keep my mind from taking me there, into that lingering uncertainty—the redheaded girls, their running forms, the call of their blood.

Jake walks with me one day when I am feeling sad and bold and sorry for myself. I stare at the closed-up house. “Let's go in,” I say. Jake kisses my neck and says okay. Since the party, we have spoken less with words and more with our bodies. We have had sex in my house almost every day, though never again in the nursery. Each time is different, but each time since the first, there is a moment when I am vaulted out of myself for a fluttering perfect second. It feels too fragile to be an orgasm, as I've heard them described, but I can understand the French term now,
la petite mort.
It is a tiny death, a momentary reprieve from the world. I am insatiable for this feeling; as soon as the moment collapses, I am waiting for the next one.