Damage (9 page)

You keep thinking about her all the way home, through the evening. There is definitely a tender little edge of hurt peeking out from underneath Heather’s shining exterior. You’ve always known it’s there, somewhere way underneath. You recognize it because you’ve got one, yourself.

Heather doesn’t wait for you after practice the next day. And when you call her in the evening, her phone rings and rings until you realize she’s either not home she turned it off.

Around nine-thirty she finally answers. Mom’s heading off to bed; she gives you the evil eye to remind you keep it down and not stay up too late.

You take the cordless and hole up in your room. “it’s me,” you begin, real low—but Heather slaps you right away with brightness and chatter, acting like nothing
unusual happened yesterday.

She hardly even pauses for breath: She just got home from shopping with Melissa—a new Contempo opened up in Fort Worth, which she doesn’t expect you to excited about, but you should be, and they had the soft opening this week before the grand opening on Saturday, and she and Melissa were finally able to get some
real
clothes.

She describes what
real
clothes are. You wait for chance to talk about something more important—exactly what, you have no idea. You figure it’ll come to you when Heather lets up. She’ll have to let up in a minute; nobody could keep this up for long.

Heather can. Just when she seems to be running out of steam, she says she hasn’t finished her homework; she’s got to go; sorry to keep you up late, see you tomorrow!

And then the dial tone is buzzing in your ear.

That night you toss and turn. Not like those nights when you used to wake and lie there with your mind crusted over by a dull wish that everything would just go blank—no, this is sleeplessness with a purpose. Something about you and Heather is lacking, it’s missing a connection. It’s missing
something,
only you don’t know what to do about it.

You keep thinking about her description of her first time. One more item in the long list of things you fail at
that, quite often, you “just keep going” with Heather. She’s never seemed to mind—in fact, she’s always encouraged it—but now you see that she’s done everything your benefit, sexually; Heather gives, gives, gives—you’ve been eager to receive, receive, receive.

Next opportunity, you decide, you’re going to more for her. You’re going to take your own sweet time with Heather Mackenzie. You won’t hurry or rush the count. You’ll tease her the way she always teases you—Heather’s the one who forgets everything but being touched.

Here’s the play: You’ll start out with kissing that will gradually move lower and blur into touching, and you’ll listen to her breathing—or the way she holds her breath—that, and the tension of her body will tell you what she likes best.

You decide to run the play on Friday after school because that allows plenty of time—no practice today, and game tonight because this week is one of two in the season with a Saturday game.

So you take her for a Coke at the Dairy Queen, then home, where you start all the action outside on the front porch, not even trying to get inside her clothes—not yet. Keep both hands firm on her back. Do not stick your tongue in her ear. Not yet. She’s teasing you a little, nibbling on your lips before going for the deep kiss.

When your hands slide down to her rear, she rubs you through your jeans, and at the catch in your breath she gives that low laugh and presses closer. But when your own hands move out of her neutral zone, she puts both her hands on your shoulders to push you away.

You can almost feel her thinking. She enjoys taking you to the edge—and occasionally over—in places where you can’t—or shouldn’t—react. Right now she’s got you upright, standing on concrete, outdoors, in plain view the street. There’s no reason to push you away.

So she doesn’t.

You take your time, and after awhile longer your hands are spending time in places they’ve more or less passed over before, zeroing in here and there, and after awhile she’s trying to press herself up against your fingers, trying to get you to stop somewhere and focus. She’s forgetting to kiss you back and her hands have forgotten what they’re doing, and then she’s forgetting to breathe—she’s clinging to you, and when air comes bursting out of her in a shaky sigh, you hear yourself give a low laugh that sounds familiar.

She hears it. Her whole body grows stiff. She puts her palms against your shoulders and
shoves
, so hard you have to step back to keep your balance.

She’s upset. And now you have to fight against vacuum that wants to suck your body onto hers; your whole body is leaning forward, wanting to tackle her,
drive her down onto the concrete porch and peel jeans off and do what needs to be done.

Something’s wrong. But you have no idea what it is. It’s not like you’ve never touched her before. And you not imagine the way she was clinging to you. You did imagine that little explosion of her breath against your neck.

You will burst, if this is it.

She fumbles in her purse for her keys with one hand and with the other makes a swiping gesture at her mouth.

As if she’s trying to wipe off your touch.

“Is something wrong?” It can’t be—she’s got to about to burst, too. You know she has.

“You think I’m going to fall at your feet,” she the words over her shoulder as her keys blunder, jangling around the lock. “You paw me a few times, and I’m supposed to beg you to do
it
to me. Like you’re
so
irresistible,” she adds, and gives you a disgusted glance. “You’re just some clumsy little high school boy. Except you drive
pickup.
Which makes you a clumsy little
hick.”

She’s like a nail gun, driving words in; it hurts breathe all of a sudden. You take a step back.

“That’s right, get out of here.” She gives the uncooperative key ring a vicious shake. “Damn it! I can’t find the right key!”

You’re already turning away, moving down the sidewalk in slow motion—it’s like wallowing through thick
mud, and you can’t walk away fast enough.

“Just remember, you were the one panting for it. me.” She hurls the words at your back as you step off the curb.. “Not me,” Heather says again, and it sounds somebody is strangling her.

The air has caved in on top of you.

Her perfume is wrapped tight around you like a cocoon, it’s woven into your shirt, laced over your and your foot presses harder and harder on the gas by the end of the block you’re going too fast to brake the stop sign.

No one hears the squeal of rubber on asphalt as you take the corner. No one sees. No one follows.

You are all the things you’ve ever failed at, sitting top of a couple tons of steel zigzagging in and out of traffic. If there is any justice, this pickup will get crushed like an empty Coke can.

But it doesn’t, and you end up at home, pulling up the gravel driveway to the back of the house. Mom’s car isn’t here; she must still be at work.

You turn off the engine. Get out of the truck. Shut
the driver’s side door and lean back against it. Take on deep breath. And another.

And another.

Your arms are folded; you unfold them and they fall immediately to your sides. The keys drop with a jangle into the gravel. Wind plays in the treetops along the fence. You just stand there letting the truck hold you up.

Far across the yard at the Hightowers’ house, a screen door screeches, then slams. Like some sick animal crawling out of sight, you start moving blindly toward your home.

You’ve dropped your keys somewhere, don’t where. Becky’s rubber boots aren’t in their place on t porch; she must be out in the barn feeding her calve That means the back door is unlocked, so you walk head through the kitchen. Go down the hall, past the doorway of your room, which is still and silent, and dark like a cave. Your arms are dangling at your sides, your heart is beating in uneven little scratches at the inside your chest.

You thought everything was okay. You thought you were okay.

Wrong—it took only one slight shift to break you into pieces.

Your feet carry you into the bathroom. When they stop, you are stranded in front of the sink. You don’t bother to look at the reflection. You know what he looks
like, eyes flat and muddy. Everything twisted.

“Oh, God,” you hear the guy in the mirror whisper. He sounds like he’s being squeezed.

You wait for the squeezed feeling to pass. It holds firm, coiled around you like a python. You’d like to slide down to the floor, lay your head down on the white tile and just quit feeling, totally. You don’t ever want to feel anything again.

So you lock the bathroom door. Watch your own hand open the medicine cabinet. And take out the box holding your dad’s razor.

The house is quiet. In the refrigerator, the ice maker kicks on with a lurch. You can even hear the faint trickle of water along the copper tubing—it scrapes you as you’re one long raw nerve.

You open the wooden box. The golden razor lies in state on red velvet. It is telling you to wind down, come an end.

If you pick up the razor, all you have to do is twist the end to open up the head. And then you can extract the blade.

Somewhere far off, a phone rings. It rasps away into the silence while you notice how translucent the skin over your wrist is, and how, close up, it’s infinitesimally wrinkled, like you’re a ninety-year-old man. The veins are buried blue but not so deep.

It wouldn’t surprise you if you didn’t bleed at all,
you were dry inside. If you didn’t feel a thing.

“Austy!” Becky bellows.

The phone has stopped ringing. You’re floating somewhere between intention and reality.

Socked feet pad down the hall. “Phone,” Becky calls from outside the door. When you don’t answer, she bangs on it. “Austy? Hey. You in there?”

The doorknob turns tentatively—but hits the invisible barrier of the lock, and stops.

“I know it’s you.” A rustling sound. “I see your feet under the door, you faker. I’m not going to fall for that stupid burglar routine again.” A light tap on the door. “C’mon, I know you’re in there.”

The words fall into silence. You can feel this dark thing still bubbled up inside you, trying to burst loose.

“Austin?”

You blink. Becky always makes a point of calling Austy, because it annoys you. Curtis is the only allowed to call you Austy.

“If you scare me, I’m going to call Mom.” Her voice quavers a little.

You look down at the razor. You’re not stupid, you know it’d hurt. It’d burn sharp and clear, like digging with an icicle.

“I’m not going to scare you,” you tell Becky, but comes out sounding strange, as if your throat has rusted shut.

“Are you sick? You don’t sound too good.”

“I’m okay.”

“Heather wants to talk to you.”

“Tell her I’m busy.”

You hear a couple of muffled words.

“She says to tell you it’s really important.”

It’s like clutching at the edge of a cliff. You can give up, let go, and drop completely.

Or you can keep hanging on.

You unlock the door. You can’t manage to lift your head enough to see Becky’s face, but you can feel the long startled look she’s giving you.

“Here he is,” she whispers into the phone, and holds it out. You take it from her, shut the door, and lock again. The phone now hangs in your hand.

“Austin?” Heather’s voice is thin and tinny, but you can hear every word. “Don’t hang up.”

You look at the phone. You look at it the way look back toward land as the current pulls you slowly to sea.

“I’m so sorry,” you hear her say. “Can you hear me?”

You bring the phone to your mouth. “Yeah,” you say and now all you have to do is listen.

It’s all about control, Heather says. It’s all about knowing exactly what’s going to happen to her, and when, and where. It’s all about having a plan. And knowing the
future. And not handing her life over to somebody else.

She’s never trusted anybody before, she says. You’re the only guy who’s ever really liked her as a person. knows that because you’ve always followed her rules, never pushed her to do something she doesn’t want to and you don’t tell everybody everything that happens in private. But what you did today freaked her out for second. It was like her body put on a performance you, while you stood there enjoying the show.

“It wasn’t a show,” you tell her, the first words you’ve said besides
yeah.
“It was just…us.”

“I know. I know. God, I can’t do this on the phone. I can’t tell what you’re thinking. I need to see you. I want make everything right, Austin. Can you come over Please?”

You already know you’re going to go. You knew the moment you took the phone in your hand.

“Yeah,” you tell Heather. And with the other hand you shut the lid of the razor’s box.

“Are you okay?” Heather asks.

She’s sitting beside you on her couch. You hadn’t noticed. “Uh-huh,” you answer.

She lays her head on your chest. “I can hear your heart beating,” she says, nuzzling the cloth of your shirt.

She’s said how sorry she is about a thousand times. And you can tell she meant it. It’s not her fault that every apology fell off you like rain running down a roof. Alarms are going off in the back of your mind, warning that you shouldn’t have come over, no matter how sorry she is. But the rest of you is afraid not to be here. Your pride has fallen in tangles somewhere around your ankles, but the rest of you is still clutching at the edge of that cliff.

“Do you remember the time we fell asleep together on the couch? That’s the only time I ever did that. I can
never sleep around anybody, much less a guy.”

When you don’t say anything, she raises up, examines you for a moment, before leaning in to kiss you.

“I love you,” she says—and seals your mouth so that you can’t say anything, even if you wanted to. A light flutter of her tongue, and then she pulls back to tuck herself into your side again. And plants yet another kiss on your chest.

It all feels vaguely pleasant. Sort of like background music, the kind that will leave absolute silence behind if it is gone.

“After you left—I’ve never felt like that. Like I was really completely
alone.
I thought, I’ve got to hear his voice. I wasn’t going to say anything—just hear your voice and hang up. But all the time the phone was ringing, I was so…”

She doesn’t finish. The TV is on, but the sound is down so low all the voices are just punctuated hums.

“You’re still mad, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You are. You’re acting like you’re not even here. You hate me, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“I wasn’t ready—I hadn’t planned to do that yet. Let you do that to me, I mean.” She takes a deep breath. “You can touch me right now, if you want.”

It’s the last thing you want to do at this moment. You
could almost feel sorry for her—Heather Mackenzie, scrambling to make things up to a guy who’s too empty and exhausted to respond. She gutted you, and now she thinks she can sew you up with one hand while handing you her heart with the other. What she doesn’t know is that you were already only half a person, before this evening even started.

When you don’t move and don’t say anything, Heather sits up, pushing masses of golden hair back from her face. “You know what?” Her eyes are red rimmed.

“What?” you ask after a moment.

“I want to tell you something. I don’t know if it’ll make any difference—I don’t know if it will even make sense. But I want to try to tell you.”

She waits, staring at you. “Go ahead,” you tell her.

“When I was real little, my father said he would take me fishing on the lake. And I was all excited because I’d get to ride in a boat. You know how water looks from shore, all sparkly in the sun? I thought it would be so cool to go skimming along over that. But it wasn’t that way at all. We had to stab worms with hooks and drown them. And when I caught a fish, it flopped around and the pointy part of the hook was poking out from one of its eyeballs. And by the time we went back to shore, I knew that the water still
looked
shining and beautiful, but underneath it was full of all these slimy fish with staring eyeballs, and half-eaten bits of worm.

“That’s the way my whole life has been,” Heather adds. “Everything. And it’s every guy I’ve been out with.”

She lets the words drop. They hover there, sad and angry.

“Except for you,” she says.

And then she stands up.

Her face is set now, determined. She takes your hand and gives you a gentle tug, so you obediently stand up, too. She leads you down the hall and into her room, dark except for a light shining from the open door of the closet. She takes you over to the bed. Pulls you down to sit beside her.

“Okay,” she says in a breathless voice—but then doesn’t move. Her thigh presses along the length of yours. Her hand squeezes yours so hard it’s like being caught in a claw.

“Nobody knows this,” she adds, still not moving. “I’ve never told anybody—you’ll be the only one. And then you can use it to hurt me, if you want. And we’ll be even.”

You don’t say anything. After a moment she grows still. You feel the deep intake of her breath, before she gets up.

She walks over to the dresser. Pauses in front of the mirror—for a second you think she’s going to stop and fluff her hair—but instead she opens one of the middle drawers and pulls out the wooden box with the duck on
the lid. She’s moved it since you found it that time.

She opens the lid and takes out the paper. Bears it to you, holding it in her palm like something made of glass.

“This is the note he wrote to my mom. Before he died.” The closet light makes her skin seem like it’s glowing. “You should have seen the look on my mom’s face when she tore it up. She walked away before the pieces even hit the bottom of the trash can. Like that was that, end of story. She thought it was all gone—she never knew I dug out every last piece. She doesn’t know I still have it. I used to lock my door and take it out and read it sometimes.”

She holds the note out, not for you to touch, but to read again if you want, in the dim light:

it’s better this way i know Heather will forget i hope you will forgive

“He did it after my mom told him she wanted a divorce. He was living in the garage apartment out back. Whenever I went to see him he was just mostly sitting in his armchair, staring into space. He didn’t care if I was there or not.”

Sort of like the way you’re behaving now.

When you look up, Heather’s staring sadly at the paper.

“Maybe he was tired,” you offer.

“All I know is every time I went out there I asked if I could spend the night with him, and he just said not tonight, Pumpkin, maybe another time. If he answered at all.”

“Maybe he was depressed.”

Funny how your mouth doesn’t trip over that word. Your mouth think it’s just another set of syllables to say.

But your heart knows better. It starts beating shallow, fast.

Depressed.

The last time you heard that word, Becky was the one who used it. She said she was depressed because she had a pimple on her nose. But that’s not what you mean when you say that word. Not at all.

“No,” Heather’s saying, “he was
bitter.
He hated my mom, because she made him move out. She said it was the ultimate act of revenge. And it was—that’s why he waited till he heard the car in the driveway, because he wanted her to be the one to find him. He knew he couldn’t manipulate her in life, so he tried to do it in death. Only it didn’t work out like he planned.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mom and I were just getting back from grocery shopping, and right when we pulled up in the driveway we heard this popping noise from the garage. It sounded like a firecracker. And I was just six, you know? I thought he had some firecrackers out there. So then—”
She touches the paper with the tips of her fingers, pressing the black-inked letters as if there’s something between the lines that can’t be seen, only felt. “God. This is so useless to talk about. What happened was, my mom went to see what the noise was, and it turned out he had shot himself.”

It’s too tremendous an effort to think of even a single word to say. You can’t even manage to raise your head again and look at her; you just keep staring straight ahead through the doorway into the dark hallway, watching the walls flash day bright, then gray for a split second, then dark, then gray again, because the television is still on in the room down the hall.

You sit there, letting the bed hold you up. Heather’s frowning down at the paper in her hand.

“He was so selfish. And a coward. All he had to do was stick around a stupid garage apartment in Ohio. I mean, he had a kid, and it’s not like he had to climb a mountain or do something
hard.
All he had to do was stay alive.” Her shoulders give the slightest of shrugs. “So now you know. I wasn’t even enough to make my own father want to stick around. Hold it over my head all you want.”

She gives the note one last look before she crumples it into a hard little ball. She tosses it toward the corner wastebasket; it falls about two feet short, but she’s already sitting—collapsing, really—next to you.

You put an arm around her.

“I love you, Austin,” she says, just like before.

Only this time she looks at you, waiting for a reply.

Of course you have to say it. You must love her—you need her more than you’ve ever needed anybody. You’re so addicted that you’ll die if she withdraws. And she just told you she loves you. Of course you have to say it back.

She sits there with those big blue eyes, bright and clear as a little girl’s eyes, as a doll’s eyes, waiting to hear them: three, short, one-syllable words. Three little words—how hard could it be?

“Me, too,” you finally manage. Too late. She’s already shriveling a little and looking away.

You shrivel a little, too. You always figured that when you finally said that to a girl you’d feel great about it. All you can feel is that Heather Mackenzie tossed you something, and you were supposed to make one of those diving midair saves. But you—Pride of the Panthers that you are—fumbled it.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” you hear her say.

The two of you sit there. Heather’s so still that you can’t even see her breathe. You feel bad for blowing it, and after a few minutes when she turns and slides her arms around your neck, you’re ready to make it up to her, thinking she just wants to be held.

But what she wants is to take back control; her lips are everywhere, fierce, marking territory, and they follow her fingers as she releases each button on your shirt.
Nipping, sucking kisses as she spreads your shirt apart. And the next thing you know her hands are pushing you backward and her fingers are tugging at your belt buckle.

You are not in the mood—of course you’re not, after everything that’s happened. But you don’t want to hear or feel any more and you don’t want to think, and you sure don’t want to talk; and she’s determined, insistent, and after awhile the parts of you that Heather is touching begin to insist as much as Heather herself, and it’s much easier just to go along and try to comfort her this way.

Except that she won’t let you kiss her. And she won’t let you touch her. She just wants you to do it.

So you oblige.

It’s not till near the end that you look down to see tears in her eyes—and you know you should hesitate, but your body’s staked out a rhythm, and as it keeps on going you hear your voice gasp an “I love you” that sounds like an apology. And her eyes shut and she digs her nails into your back and that’s when she finally does kiss you, a hard and deep kiss that sets you quivering before it pushes you over the edge.

When you finish, her eyes are dry. She still won’t let you touch her, just rolls out of your reach and scoops up her clothes and says she has to go to the bathroom and she’ll be right back. You don’t tell her that your back stings where her fingernails left marks.

What you’d really like to do now is go home and get
in your own bed and go to sleep, but that seems kind of out of the question at the moment. So you continue to lie there alone and naked on Heather’s bed, and you’re suddenly very, very tired.

When she comes back in the room, she’s fully dressed. “I’m going to give you a test,” she says cheerfully, pulling the door shut behind her. “We’ll see how well you know me.”

The springs creak as she comes to sit beside you on the bed. She shuts her eyes.

“Don’t look—what color are my eyes?”

“Blue,” you tell her without much interest. Something’s not quite right; you missed a moment somewhere back down the line and now everything seems a little off, a little skewed.

“Really blue, or do you think I wear contacts?”

“I think they’re really blue.”

“That’s right.” She opens her eyes, gives you a smile. “Contacts won’t give you this color—you’re either born with it, or you’re not. And don’t think I’m being conceited, because I’m not,” she adds. “It’s just the truth.”

The crumpled note lies on the floor where she dropped it. She gets up, walks over to the note, picks it up, smooths it out. Puts it back in the wooden box. Places the lid on the box, and the box back in the drawer.

As she shuts the drawer, she glances at you. “You’re okay now, aren’t you? Everything’s okay again?”

Your problem is that you dwell on things nobody else would care about. You can’t seem to filter out all the silly things nobody else even notices. What’s one little missed moment, when the most beautiful girl in town can’t get along without you?

So you make yourself agree, from the depths of the bed. “Yes,” you say, as if saying it will make it true. “Everything’s perfect.”