Clearer in the Night (9 page)

I didn’t want to run anymore. But I didn’t want to go home. I walked past him, smiling, and headed down the road. I’d catch a bus into town, and head in to work. I’d explain to Sarah, my boss, what was going on, and beg for a few days off. She’d understand. Probably.

A dozen steps along the road, I glanced back. I thought he’d still be there, watching me, but no. He was gone to wherever perfect men go when the women who don’t deserve them walk away.

The barista job I’d come by the usual way, but the job at Rainbow Playschool had been a complete favor, and I’d gotten it through church. When I’d gone to our pastor, Pam, to let her know that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with teaching Sunday School because of my course load at school, she’d given me a sad look that was about way more than Sunday School.

“Are you sure, Cait?” she’d asked, and I’d forced a smile.

“Yeah. The kids aren’t getting enough of my attention, and neither is my school work. I need to work to be able to have some spending money, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

I was lying, and we both knew it, but she was good at her job, and didn’t call me on it. “You get a lot of joy from working with kids,” she said. “And you’re good at it. You know what they need almost before they do. That’s a gift, and—lights under bushels. We’re called to share our gifts.”

I nodded. “I wish I could make it work. There’s nothing like being with the kids, and helping them turn such big things into understandable concepts. But I need to pick up another shift at the coffee shop, and I won’t have time to prepare for the class. The kids deserve better than that.”

She’d studied me for a moment, and then smiled. “What if I can find a way for you to use this gift, and get paid, too?”

“The church can’t afford to pay a salary, I understand that, I wouldn’t want them to.”

“That’s not what I have in mind. Let me make some phone calls, okay? Check in next week.”

I’d agreed, because I doubted it would come to anything. But when the pastor put her mind to it, she could move mountains, and three days later, Sarah Mitchell called me. She was another woman at church, but not one of the group that Mom was friends with. I liked her right away. She ran a preschool in town, and had been looking for a substitute teacher. Between my experience, and the recommendation from our pastor, Sarah not only decided to pay me to do something I loved, she also paid for the required coursework hours for me to get certified.

And, most importantly, I still had two jobs where, if I just up and disappeared one day, it would be okay. There were people there to fill in the empty spaces. No one was relying on me. That was important.

I called my pastor to say thank you, and she’d smiled right through the phone. “You just keep using that gift,” she said. “That’s the most important thing.”

My phone told me that it was six forty-five. Parents wouldn’t start dropping their kids off for another half hour, at least, but I knew Sarah would be there already. I caught the next bus into town, and was at the door fifteen minutes later. I let myself in, and went back to the office.

As expected, she was there, bent over paperwork, but she looked up when I came in. Her eyes lit up, and she wrapped me up in a hug before I could warn her that I was sweaty. She gripped me so tightly that she probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. “I’m so glad to see you. You look alive.”

I laughed. “At last count, anyway.”

“Sit down.” She gestured at the chairs in front of her desk; I took one, and she took the other, instead of going back behind the big, wooden monstrosity. It had been her dad’s, she said. She felt connected to him when she sat at it. He’d died when she was a teenager; she didn’t give me pity eyes when she talked to me. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was out for a run—”

“That’s not what I mean.”

She looked at me knowingly. I hated knowing eyes even more than pity eyes. No one had said it, out loud, ever, but it was common knowledge that Sarah was ten years sober, and I didn’t doubt for one second that that was one reason why my pastor had put us together. Sarah knew my life, and she never once told me I had to change, or do things differently, or anything. But she sat and listened a lot. I didn’t tell her much, but she listened anyway. Listened closely to what I didn’t have to say out loud.

“I was out,” I said. Out was a kind of shorthand, one she’d figured out quickly. She’d gone out, too, before. For different things, but with the same result. “I decided to walk home. And then things got fuzzy. I don’t remember. I was out for days, I guess. The doctors think I was sick and didn’t know it. But I’m okay now.”

“Were you drinking?”

“No, of course not. I don’t drink.”

“Drugs?”

“Sarah. Come on.”

“People don’t black out for no reason, Cait.”

“There was a reason. I had a virus.” If you tell the same story, over and over, it starts to stick in your brain. It starts to feel real. Maybe, if I told this one over and over, I would forget about the monster that had torn me up. That would be good. Very good.

“Were you safe?”

“Always am.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow, and I tried not to squirm. I’d been perfectly safe, after all. No sex, just groping. You didn’t need condoms for groping.

“Apparently not.” She leveled a long look at me, and I met it. I wanted to drop my eyes more than anything, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “I want you to take some time off.”

“What? No way, Sarah, I’m fine. The doctors said I’m fine. I went for a run this morning and everything.”

“Take a week,” she said. “Get yourself together.”

“I’m together. I’m fine.”

Another of those long moments, and then she smiled, so kindly. “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, Caitie.”

“Don’t call me that.” She flinched at my tone, and I took a deep breath. “No one calls me that anymore.”

“Sorry,” she said, and she honestly meant it. She laid her hand over mine, and the pressure behind my eyes increased exponentially. “I want you to take a week off, Cait. I have been where you are, and when you start blacking out, things can go downhill fast. Take a week, think about where you are, and where you want to be. If there is anything in the world that I can do to help, I will. You know that, right? Day or night.”

“I don’t need any help,” I said, and she was graceful enough to just smile and let it go, instead of pointing out how incredibly fucked I was in that moment. “I’m staying with my mom,” I said, in my patented ‘changing the topic’ voice.

“How’s that going?”

“She’s really messed up, Sarah. Something’s seriously wrong.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard some worrying things.”

“I’ll help her get things straightened out. Okay? And then I’ll be back.”

“Ever hear of securing your own oxygen mask first?”

I rolled my eyes like a kid. “Good-bye, Sarah. Love you, take care, and call me if there’s an emergency, okay?”

“No,” she said, as she stood up and hugged me. “See you in a week.”

The bus ride home was awful. That twisting and turning had resurfaced, and I tried to ignore it. It was like ignoring the sun. I was going to shake right out of my skin. I curled up into myself and tried not to look any more like a drunk needing a fix than I had to.

There were things that Sarah and I didn’t talk about, not exactly. She never told me to stop dancing, stop sleeping with strangers. I never felt like she disapproved, or looked down her nose at me. I did feel like she knew where I’d been, and that she had somehow gotten past it. I thought that was awesome, and sometimes, I wished I could do the same. It wasn’t that the sex was bad. The need for it, though. The sense that I was only myself when I had some stranger throbbing into me. The truth that, more and more, I couldn’t feel anything unless I felt someone else all around me. I’d think of how Sarah had gotten free of it all, somehow, and I’d tell myself that I could do the same thing. I could think of myself as worthwhile.

And then I’d have a night where I was itching out of my skin with thoughts that I wasn’t allowed to have—about my mother, my father, my sister, my life—and what the hell else was I going to do to numb myself? Because it wasn’t possible to co-exist with my mind sometimes. I’d shatter into glass fragments, and no one would be able to put me back together again.

But the way she’d looked at me in her office, with those sad, soft eyes. It made me nauseated and scared. And like I might burst. Or collapse.

The ride into town had been short; the ride back took ages longer, it seemed. When I got off the bus and walked back to the house, my legs were cold, and my joints were full of ground glass. All I wanted was to crawl back into bed and sleep until tomorrow. Or the next millennium. Either would be fine.

At home, I pulled open the front door, and Mom descended like a whirlwind. Her sharp hands clutched my shoulders and shook me, hard, twice. “Where have you been? Where did you go?”

“Hey,” I shouted, pushing her away. She must have been off balance again, because she stumbled into the opposite wall of the hallway, rattling the perfect pictures that had been perfectly square. “What the hell, Mom?”

“Just take off, no word, no explanation. What am I supposed to think?” Mom rubbed at her shoulder, where she’d taken the blow from the wall, wincing a little. I wondered if she’d bruise. And then her words sank into my thick skull.

I hadn’t left her a note or anything. That probably would have been fine with just a run, but my trip downtown had taken another hour. It had been a long time since anyone had been keeping tabs on me. I hadn’t even thought. “I’m sorry, Mom, I should have left you a note.”

“You shouldn’t have gone. You should have stayed where I could see you.” She was twisting the hem of her cardigan in her hands. The buttons hadn’t been done up right. Her eyes were wide, staring.