Black Iris (30 page)

Instead I said, “It was my fault, Donnie.”

The words were hot smoke in my mouth, a fire in my lungs eating all air, but I made myself go on.

“Remember how they said she shouldn’t have been on antidepressants? She wasn’t supposed to be. I switched out her meds.”

“Why?”

My whole chest ached. “To make her manic. To destabilize her.”

This was so much harder than I thought. Not saying it, the mechanics of it, but taking the blame.

“I knew,” I started, and had to gather myself and start over. “Bipolar people who go on antidepressants have a high risk of becoming manic. And if you go straight from depression to mania, there’s a danger of violent behavior. Of self-harm.”

“You made her do it,” he said.

“Yes.” It was strange. Confession almost felt good. A justified ache. A deserved one. “Yes, I did. Dad was going to leave us. He was going to leave you alone with her. I had to do something.”

His shoulders shook. The brightness in his eyes made its way down his face.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. I wanted to press on the place that hurt, close the wound, but it ached, and ached, and wouldn’t stop. “I didn’t want her to die. I just didn’t want her to get custody.”

“That’s what she said,” he mumbled through tears.

“What?”

“She didn’t want Dad to leave, either. She was scared of being alone with me. She said weird stuff about driving off a bridge, or parking on train tracks. That I was too pure, that it would be better if I died before something ruined me. It freaked me out. I don’t think Mom would hurt me, but I don’t think she realized we would both die, you know? Like I was just part of her, like a hand or foot.”

Her son, her figurative sun. The good part of herself, the part she wanted to preserve, even as her thinking got more unstable, deranged. We’d become a living metaphor for her illness.

“When did she say this?”

“The night before she did it. She came to talk to me.”

“What else did she say?”

He wiped a sleeve across his nose. “That she was sorry. That she saw herself spiraling down, but couldn’t stop. There was no one to catch her. We slowed her fall for a while, but then she dragged us down, too.”

“Donnie, why didn’t you tell me this?”

“I tried.” A sob lurched from his throat. “I called you a million times. You didn’t answer. I went looking for you at Zoeller’s and saw you there, with him.”

In his trailer. Fucking him. While my mother wrote me a suicide note.

“It’s not what you—”

“You said he was your enemy. You said you liked girls. You made me feel so bad for you.”

“He was. Is. And I do.”

“Well, I thought you lied. I was so mad I turned off my phone. I wanted Mom to catch you sneaking back in. And now I think, If I wasn’t mad, if I got your texts, everything would’ve
been different. I would’ve gone downstairs and seen her and we could have saved her. We could have saved her, Laney.”

My hands covered my mouth, tears spilling over in warm threads.

“It was never your fault,” I said. “It was mine. I just wanted to keep you safe.”

For a while we simply cried, separately, miserably. When a lull came, I spoke.

“Why were you following us? The pics, the blackmail. What did you want?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t really plan it out.” His leg swung, nervous. “I wanted you to tell me about the meds. If you were trying to help her. I kept hoping you’d been trying to help. But you never told me the truth, and then you got obsessed with this revenge plan. You’re scary when you’re obsessed.”

I looked again at the gun and bat lying beside him.

“You didn’t bring those to hurt yourself,” I said slowly. “You brought them to protect yourself. From me.”

He lowered his head.

“God, Donnie. How’d you know I’d come here?”

“I texted Blythe, to apologize for the pics. She told me everything. I knew you’d come home eventually.” He sighed. “I’m sorry for what I did, but you wouldn’t stop. You took revenge on everyone to cover up your guilt about Mom. If you’d just told me, I would’ve forgiven you. You could have let all this bad stuff go.”

“I can’t let anything go. I’m a bad person.”

“No you’re not.”

“I am. I’m full of hate. I hate everything. Myself, and everyone who’s hurt me. The way I am. Borderline and queer and all of it. I never asked to be this way, and if I could change it I—”

I stopped. For so many years I’d wished, desperately: Make me normal. Make me the cheerleader, the Homecoming
Queen, the girly girl who falls in love with square-jawed boys. Make me a happy little robot. Anything would be better.

But if I was normal, I’d never have met Blythe. Never fallen into this crazy, all-consuming love. Never plunged to the depths of myself and found something hard and enduring there, an unwillingness to die. The grit that Mom was missing.

“When did you start following me?” I said.

“Summer. I saw you with Blythe. Me and Hiyam figured it out, but she never told anyone. She talked to me. She’s a lot nicer than you think. And she said sometimes people do bad things, but you can’t intervene. You have to let them see the wrongness on their own. Otherwise they won’t learn and they won’t change.” He fidgeted, shoulders hunched. “I should have listened to her. But all you cared about was hurting people. You didn’t want to feel better, you just wanted everyone else to feel worse. You hated Zoeller but then you became just like him. You forgot he was the enemy.”

“I still hate him. He pretended to be my friend, but he was screwing with me the whole time. He hurt—” I changed what I was going to say. “He made my life hell.”

“Lane, it’s okay. I get it now. Sometimes you love and hate the same person at the same time.”

Armin.

Mom.

“Is that how you feel me about me?”

“I never hated you, Rainbow Brite. You’re my big sister. I always looked up to you, even when you were down.”

My throat burned. “You are so much better than me.”

This had all started as a means to protect my little brother, and I ended up becoming the thing he needed protection from. Just like her.

I was just like her.

“I hate myself,” I said again.

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m worse than she ever was. I’m a monster, Donnie. You shouldn’t be around me.”

“What?”

“I need to go away.” I tried to stand, made it to my knees. “You’re almost in college. Once you have a job, your own life—you’re the only thing I stayed for. I don’t want to be on this fucking planet anymore. I hate it. All I feel anymore is hate.”

“Stop it.” He sat forward, fists balled. “I still love you, Dad loves you. And Mom loved you, too.” He was crying openly, struggling to get the words out. “You didn’t even ask. The very last thing she said.”

“What was it?”

“She said, ‘Let go of pain, not people.’ She had to let go, but she wanted us to hold on. And I will, Laney. I’ll never let you go.”

You’ll feel it, the moment you crack. When the brittle hardness finally shatters. When the anger, hatred, resentment, loathing, everything crumbles, and all that’s left standing is the little girl who’d built those walls, wide-eyed, covered in dust.

I tried to rise but I was too tear-blind. Donnie slipped off the table and knelt with me, a watery shadow. He put his arms around me the way he had that morning. I held him as tight as I could and cried,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
, to him, to her, the ghost inside both of us. And I know I didn’t imagine this part. I was lucid. It was real. He said the words but somehow I heard her voice inside his, an echo of her.

I forgive you
, they said.

APRIL, THIS YEAR

N
o rain that anniversary morning. I drove east toward the Chicago skyline, the buildings tinted pink-gold from a sun still rising. Donnie and I sat side by side in silence.

Navy Pier wasn’t open yet. I parked nearby and we walked to the Ohio Street Beach, pulling our shoes off, barefoot in cold sand. Skyscrapers reflected on the lake in smudged pastel sticks of color. In another lifetime I’d come here with Armin and Blythe. Some of the footprints chiseled in the sand might still be ours.

“Do you remember that day?” Donnie said.

He meant the photo, the one in the Moleskine he gave me. Me and him on the pier. I was fifteen. Mom had decided to be maternal that weekend and insisted on photographing us everywhere, riding the Ferris wheel, eating hot dogs, glaring at her with teenage superiority. We made goofy faces. We photobombed each other. At the end of the day, exhausted from our brattiness, we slouched on the dock sharing a pop and she snapped us covertly.

“Mustard mustache,” I said, and we both grinned. Mom didn’t even notice till she had the prints done: Donnie lurking in the background of my portraits, a neon yellow squiggle over his lip. In contrast I looked way too intense, quietly volatile, already harboring the pain of realizing who I was, who I loved,
how the world would hurt me for it. Mom took so many photos of me that day. What was she searching for?

Donnie had his camera, too, but he only got one shot of Mom, gazing at the lake while waiting for us to return from some ride. He caught just the right angle so you could see the sun reflected in her eyes, a distant fire.

If only I’d seen you that way, Mom. If only I could have looked past my own pain to yours.

Our grins faded into solemnity. I blinked away tears.

I’d become a lot more emotional these days. It was unsettling.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“No.”

Like I’d ever be. But I took the paper from my pocket anyway.

We walked to the shore and dropped our shoes. I shivered, but it came from inside. I pulled out my lighter.

“I don’t have to read it,” I said. “I can let go without knowing what it says.”

“It’s the last thing she ever wrote, Lane.”

I owed her that, I guess. Someone should bear witness.

I gave Donnie the lighter. My hands shook so hard the name on the front blurred.
Delaney.

She always knew it would be me.

I unfolded it with exaggerated care, afraid I might tear it accidentally, or purposely. I’d carried this for a year, her final words to me. Right there against my skin. Whispering to my blood. I held the paper so we could both see. In my head I heard her voice reading.

You set me free. Now let me go.

I grew you well, my little black iris.

Only those two lines. I reread them, confused, but Donnie pulled away from me, inhaling sharply.

“Laney.”

“That’s it?” I shook the paper, as if I could force more meaning out. “That’s it?”

“Don’t you get it? She knew.”

I stared at him.

“She knew what you did. The pills.” Relief suffused his voice. “She knew.”

I looked back at the words in bewilderment. I wanted an essay, an explanation. Why did you treat us this way, Caitlin? What did you want me to become?

Why couldn’t we save you?

Only those sixteen words, insubstantial as air.

I was trembling uncontrollably. Donnie took the paper.

“Laney, it’s okay.” He pulled me into a hug. “She forgave you.”

I stared past him to the white disc rising above the horizon. Some massive force seized either side of my ribs, cracking me in two.

I’d wanted, needed more.

But this was it. All she’d left me with.

We both put our hands on the paper, and Donnie touched the lighter to it, and we held as long as we could, till the orange tongues licked our skin. Then we let go, watching it tear itself apart and fly on the breeze like flaming feathers, vanishing into ash, water, wind.

My hand stretched out vainly, grasping nothing. Just a kiss of smoke on my fingertips.

———

Umbra without Armin was a strange place.

It was the first time I’d been back since the truth came out, and I felt a million years older. I walked through stone halls filled with black lights and ghoul grins, dry ice, monster shad
ows, skewed echoes, and it all seemed so small, so quaint, like going back to high school. I wandered through the Oubliette and never lost my way or felt afraid. No shadow followed. I still didn’t know if it’d been Blythe or Donnie or my own drugged-out imagination, and I didn’t want to know. All that mattered was that it was gone.

I wasn’t sober. You don’t quit a bad habit in a few weeks. But I’d cut back. I could sleep now with a clear head, though I didn’t sleep much. Most nights I lay awake, stroking Orion’s ginger fur, staring at the constellations of city lights on the ceiling and remembering. Remembering all of it.

Me, and him, and her.

“Everything is so fucked-up,” Hiyam said, lifting her soda. We sat on a divan in the Aerie. The disco ball galaxy spun slowly above us. In a twist I found morbidly amusing, we were actually becoming friends. “Like, in what universe am I the straight arrow?”

The official story was that Armin got into X while deejaying, got hooked, broke up with me when I refused to swan-dive headfirst to the bottom with him. He’d withdrawn from grad school, checked into outpatient rehab. Resigned from Eclipse, which was in recess now while they reorganized. And his sister, the ex-junkie, was taking care of him.

It unsettled me. Some nights I lurked in the alley outside his building, my hood up against the rain, watching little pills of neon light scatter and roll on the wet streets, wondering what we’d say if we saw each other. Wondering what it was I even felt.

Did you really love me once, Armin? The way you loved her?

Did I ever really love you?

I recalled those moments when, in the thick of my revenge, my lies and machinations, he’d reached through it all in his
gentle, precise way and touched some raw red place in my chest. Made me feel things I should not have. Made me feel.

Like Zoeller.

I had told Armin I wanted to break his mind and his heart, but I wasn’t so sure anymore about the latter. Not sure it was entirely vengeance that drove me to let him close. Or that his was the only heart broken.

All three of us. We’d broken each other. Me. Him. Her.

At the thought of Blythe, my lungs tightened till every breath was an effort.

She’d never been gentle. She’d flipped my life over, destroyed my self-control and complicated everything, terrified me and intoxicated me and thrilled me, and I missed it like hell. Girls get under each other’s skin. We get too close, too attached, too crazy, and then we can’t let go. Our claws sink too deep. When we separate, we tear each other apart.

I missed it. The blood under my nails. The wildness. The highs and lows.

I missed her.

“He needs you right now,” I told Hiyam. “More than he ever has. You have to be there for him, like he was for you. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’re good for him.”

For a second something passed through her face, not her usual superior knowing but a flash of wisdom, of burgeoning adulthood. “I know, Keating.”

It was the closest she’d ever get to
thank you
.

“Know what’s scary?” I said. “We’re more alike than you think.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You’re not really my type, but if that’s an attempt at flirting, I’ll play.”

“You’re the last person on earth I’d flirt with, Hiyam.”

“You’re a total freak.”

“You’re a complete bitch.”

“Hate to break it to you, Keating, but I think we’re actually flirting.”

I laughed. So did she.

God.

I didn’t want to ask the question that had burned on my tongue all night, but the drunker I got, the less likely it seemed I’d stay in control. Before I got too ripped, I decided: fuck it.

“How’s Blythe?”

“Ask her yourself.”

Hiyam stood to hug somebody and the world went still. Seeing someone you once loved is like falling in love for the first time all over again. Those bare shoulders vibrant with ink, the sweeping grace of her movements. The low, easy laugh at some exchange I didn’t even process. I felt drugged. Hiyam left us with a look that uncannily resembled her brother’s
be good
.

“Anyone sitting here?” Blythe said.

“You are.”

That impish smile. She sat. Closer than Hiyam but still a good two feet off, far enough that those things I craved, the blackberry perfume, the warmth of her breath, were beyond me. I wore a tee and jeans; she was in a sleek black dress like that first night, eons ago. I’d always known she was beautiful, but it’s something you don’t fully appreciate when someone is yours. Even miracles become routine. It hit me hard now, the lazy way she flicked those piercing blue eyes at me, a girl toying with an infinitely sharp knife that could carve your heart out.

In my head I’d rehearsed a million things to say. Bits of brilliance. Quotes about love and loss. A whole fucking Tumblr post. Instead I stared awkwardly, then drank.

You are so close and so far away, I thought. Is this how it is now, forever?

“Do you want to dance?” she said.

I nodded.

It was better like this. We could say so much without speaking.

When we stepped together on the floor there was a moment of electric proximity, a buzz between our skin, uncertain how to touch but needing to. Her arms slid around my waist, mine around her neck. I laid my cheek on her shoulder, my mouth beside the lily.

I didn’t know what the song was. I didn’t know what anything was. I closed my eyes and felt nothing but the body against mine.

“How I missed you, little wolf.”

I was just drunk enough to touch my teeth to her skin, lightly.

Blythe laughed. Her arms went tighter, pulling me close.

We’d danced like this a hundred times before but always hid what we really felt, really were. Afraid of Armin. Of the world’s judgment. Afraid of unraveling the tangled web we’d spun around ourselves, these lies we told to manipulate, destroy. To survive. It still kicked fear into my heart, but some of that fear was really exhilaration. No more hiding. We could be anything we wanted, now.

I just wasn’t sure what that was anymore.

As we danced I was acutely aware of the people around us, boy-girl pairs. Stubbled jaws and lipstick smiles. Newness shining in their eyes. Unbrokenness. Blythe felt me stiffen and put her mouth near my ear. Her voice was low.

“I still feel the same about you.”

“I’m still hurt, Blythe.”

“I am, too. We’re very good at hurting people. Especially each other.” She ran a finger under my chin. None of her usual mischief. She looked tired, longing, like someone who misses home. “ ‘Pain has an element of blank; it cannot recollect—’ ”

“ ‘—When it began, or if there were a day when it was not.’ ”

“But it doesn’t hurt now. This moment.”

“It will again,” I said.

“Does that mean there’s an again?”

I didn’t know. “I wish we’d met in another life,” I said, wistful.

She winced, but in a second it was gone. “This is another life. We’re strangers. Brilliant writers who meet by chance, dancing at a club.”

“Who are you?” I meant it half-seriously.

“Blythe Spencer McKinley.” Her old wryness ghosted over her lips. “Nice to meet you. I like your accent.”

“Delaney June Keating. And I like your face.”

She started to laugh, but the tremor of sincerity in my voice made it too real.

Blythe laid a hand on my cheek. We had slowed, stilled, while the world revolved around us, voices and flashes moving at light speed as this moment between us crystallized.

“I don’t want to be strangers,” I said.

“Neither do I.”

“This is who we are.” My fingers curled in the filmy silk of her dress. “Even the worst parts. Especially those.”

“You know, when I met you I had this crazy idea that I’d be the one to save you, not Armin. That I’d show you how beautiful life is. Make you feel alive, the way you made me feel.”

I took a strand of her hair and drew it between two fingers.

“You did,” I said.

Our eyes met.

“I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness. To hold my hand as I fell.” I wrapped that lock of hair tighter, pulling ever so gently. “I didn’t need you to hold me back from the edge. I needed you to take the leap with me.”

“We fell bloody hard.”

“And it felt amazing. Even when we hit the ground.”

Something stormy shifted in her expression. “Will you trust me like that again?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” I let the lock uncoil. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know. How did things end with you and Elle?”

This time she didn’t avert her face. She held my gaze, showed me the hurt in her smile. “She broke my heart.”

“How?”

“There was someone else in her life. I was a rebound, a stop on the road. Poetic justice, really.” Blythe looked so much older than me then, so haunted. “It’s rare enough to find someone in this world you can love with all your heart. To have it reciprocated is a bloody miracle. And we throw it away, because it’s not perfect. Because we make mistakes.”

My chest felt weird. All twisted up inside.

She leaned closer, spoke softly. “Do you remember the night you came to me on the roof and said, ‘It’ll always be you’?”

I blinked.

A smile flitted over her face. “I heard. And I held on to that. No matter what happened, I knew it would always be you.”

I had to laugh, because otherwise I was going to cry. “I meant it. I meant everything.”

“Me too.”

“God, we’re ridiculous. You’re bipolar and I’m borderline. We’re fire and oil. Who could stand us without getting burned?”

Armin couldn’t. I wonder if he always knew that.

“We were good together,” Blythe said.

“We were bad together.”

“That’s what I mean.”