Fifteen
Two hours later, we’re sitting at one of the dozen or so black wrought iron bistro tables outside Slice of Heaven, munching on two slices of double cheese pizza. My feet, clad in new pink flip-flops, swing back and forth. The warm breeze on my toes must be what freedom feels like.
I watch Sam pick a piece of burnt cheese off his crust and flick it to the black birds hopping around a few feet away. They fight over the crumb, squawking and nipping at each other until one of the smaller birds snags it and flies off toward the trees in the parking lot.
James’s truck pulls into one of the open spaces several storefronts away. I gasp and quickly scoot my chair away from Sam’s, gesturing frantically towards the truck.
“I’m going, I’m going,” Sam grumbles and pushes his chair away from the table. The painful screech of iron grinding against concrete has nothing on the hard look on Sam’s face as he picks up his pizza plate and walks into the building.
By the time James flops into the chair next to mine, Sam is gone and I’ve managed to fill my head with mostly non-embarrassing thoughts. Like how good Sam looks today, and whether the waitress who followed him inside was noticing, too.
James reaches over to tousle my hair and tap my chin. “Hey, was that Sam I just saw walking away?”
While he’s smiling, I hear the warning lying just beneath the words. I force myself to laugh. “I don’t know. You told me to stay away from him.”
“Guys are bastards,” my brother says. “It’s for the best, trust me.”
“
You’re
a guy.”
My brother snatches the last of my pizza from my plate and shoves it into his mouth. “Yeah, but I’d never hurt you. You should’ve left me a note, by the way,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you for hours.”
I hardly think leaving a note telling my father where to find me would’ve been a good idea, but I’m not going to tell James that. “Sorry. I left in a hurry.”
He freezes. “Why?”
Heat rises in my cheeks. I hadn’t wanted to tell James this part. Not at all. “Dad opened our door looking for me—”
“How do you know? You should’ve been gone before he woke up.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I told you to leave before he got up!”
The daggers in his voice prick my skin all over, even through my long-sleeves and jeans. “He got up early. I didn’t know he’d get up early!”
“So, what, you just welcomed him into our room?”
My mouth falls open, but before I can lash out, Sam appears beside me. He plants his palms on the table and leans toward my brother. “Stop yelling at her!”
James rockets to his feet. “Mind your own fucking business!”
Two tables over, a group of mothers chatting over smoothies glares at us as they get up to push their strollers away. The busboy from inside the pizza joint pokes his head out the door.
“I don’t care whether or not you want me and her to be friends. I’m not going to watch you treat her like shit,” Sam says. “Let’s go, Sarah.”
He holds out his hand to me. A challenge, a hot fierceness I so desperately want to wrap myself up in, flashes across his face. If I take his hand, James will go ballistic. I won’t risk Sam getting hurt, or him deciding that dealing with my overprotective brother isn’t worth it. We haven’t even been together a whole day.
“It’s okay,” I say, looking anywhere but at Sam. “Don’t you have to leave for work?”
His hand drops to his side. I meet his eyes and the disappointment I see swirling in their gray depths hurts. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
I watch him walk away toward his car, which we left parked on the other side of the mall. Where he had stopped at the little shoe store to buy my flip-flops. I feel like an awful person, but why didn’t he stay away? I was stupid to think we’ll be able to hide this from my brother.
“You lied to me,” James says quietly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t want to make you mad.”
“Is something going on between you and Sam? First the sweatshirt last night, and now…whatever the hell that just was.”
I shake my head a little too urgently. “No, nothing’s going on. He forgot to tell me something and showed up right as Dad was waking up, so I got in his car and we took off. We were at the park for a little bit, and then we came over here and walked around for the rest of the afternoon.”
James’s gaze turns appraising. I feel him dissecting every detail of my expression, feel his eyes slide further down, to my neck, my rumpled shirt, and finally to my arms clasped tight around my knees. “You sure about that?”
No, but I’m not about to tell him what we’ve been doing. “Sam’s your friend. Why can’t he be my friend, too?”
James grunts. “I don’t like the way he looks at you.”
“You can’t be my only friend forever.” I reach for his hand and squeeze. “One of these days you’ll meet ‘the one’ and you won’t want your little sister hanging around. And then, when you get married…”
He’s staring at our hands, a hint of the frustration and the need I saw on his face last night in his eyes. He laces our fingers together. “That’ll never happen.”
Though I don’t want to lose him, the thought of my brother alone for the rest of his life makes me sad. I squeeze his hand. James and I have been joined at the hip for as long as I can remember. He’s always been there for me, protecting me, loving me. He deserves to have someone do the same for him. Someone other than his sister.
Gently, so he doesn’t think I’m rejecting him, I slide my hand out of his and stand up. “Triple Scoop’s running a special today. Buy one milkshake, get one free. Interested?”
“Do I ever turn down food?”
When he smiles at me, I see the brother from my memories. Maybe, if he stays this way, believing I can have the two things I want most—my brother’s love and Sam—won’t feel so impossible.
Sixteen
I’m having the strangest dream.
Like a ghost, my mother glides into the room. She picks up one of James’s CDs, sets it back down, and runs her palm across the bristles of my brush. The four-by-six picture of James and me on our dresser that has been listing to the left for months catches her attention next. She rights it, then drifts toward James’s bed.
A thin, white t-shirt drips from her tiny frame like silk, and the shorts she’s wearing look like ones James hasn’t worn since middle school. Her features are so soft in the dim glow of our night light, I nearly mistake her for a bruised-up, long-haired version of me. Or maybe that’s my mind’s way of filling in the blanks since I haven’t seen her for more than a couple seconds at a time in years.
If she sees me watching her, she takes no notice of it. I watch her gaze down at James and trace the outline of his foot hanging off the edge of the bed through the thin blanket. He stirs. I hold my breath when she pulls her hand away, but he doesn’t wake. Slowly, she moves to the head of his bed and touches his hair.
I want to wake up. Dreams like this do too much damage. Already, I can feel hot tears pooling in the corners of my eyes, remembering the shouts I heard coming from her bedroom earlier. Crying over a mother who couldn’t care less about us? I won’t do it. I refuse.
When she turns to me, I close my eyes and try to redirect the dream. She’s in here to steal my things like she always does when I’m not home—that’s all this is. If I open my eyes, I’ll see her rummaging through the closet, and since it’s my dream, she’ll be stealing James’s clothes instead of mine. The warmth streaking down my cheek onto the pillow isn’t real.
I can’t remember my mother’s touch. If not for James insisting I’ve blocked out all the good things about her, I’d swear she’s never touched me. Which is why, when I feel the first hesitant brush of her fingers on my cheek, wiping away a tear, I forget how to breathe.
Her fingers are soft and smell like old tobacco. I guess that makes sense since she’s always smoking. Against my will, I lean into her touch until she’s cupping my cheek and I open my eyes. There is an odd sense of wonder buried behind the bruises on her face. Pained, longing wonder. As she hesitantly caresses my cheek, her mouth turns up into a small smile so like my own.
“Sarah,” she breathes.
How can a dream feel so real?
Her eyes water when my trembling hand reaches for hers. I’m going to touch my mother. Even if this is a dream, every part of me craves this contact. Will her skin feel like mine? Will her knuckles be bony like James’s? Dream or not, touching her will change everything.
Before I’ve done more than feel the heat emanating from her skin, she yanks her hand away and shoots a terrified gaze at the door.
“Mom?”
Her eyes are frantic when she looks from the door to me and back again. She shakes her head, opens and closes her mouth like she wants to say something, but I can’t hear the words. I sit up in my bed and reach for her hand again, sniffling and scrubbing the stupid tears from my eyes.
But just like every other dream, no matter how hard I wish, what I want is just out of reach.
“Save James,” she whispers to me.
And then, just like that, she’s gone.
Seventeen
Screaming.
“Sarah, you gotta get up.”
I burrow deeper into my pillow and reach for James. He’s the only one who can make the nightmares go away. I find his arm and hug it to my chest underneath the blanket.
He groans. “Ah, God. Don’t do this now.”
The screams escalate into gurgling screeches that curdle the air in the room.
“Please,” James says in a broken voice. “Something’s wrong. I need you!”
Before I’ve opened my eyes, I’m on my feet. Stumbling, clinging to James as he drags me along, I make it into the hallway and down to our mother’s wide open door.
Nothing could prepare me for what I see.
Our mother lies skewed and twisted in the middle of her bed, one leg hanging off the side. Arching away from the mattress, she lets out another scream.
Agony
, my sleep-muddled mind tells me.
This is what agony sounds like
.
Her thin, white t-shirt sticks to her glistening skin and rides up around her thighs. I recognize the t-shirt by the ancient brown stain on the bottom hem. Years ago, my father wore it under his scratchy red flannel coat while working on his car. I remember that particular day, how dismal and drizzly it had been, because it had been one of the few times James didn’t show up in time.
The ancient brown stain is my blood.
Another shriek of agony. Convulsing that shakes the floorboards beneath my feet. James yells at me to call for help, to find our father, to get a neighbor, something.
I barely hear him. I’m too busy staring at my mother, trying to piece together the bits of my dream that are scattering in the face of her screams. Familiar bruises. Fingertips on my cheek. Her whispered words.
The memory is so vivid and painful, I refuse to hang onto it. To distract myself, I force my attention back to the room I haven’t set foot in since James and I snuck in to steal those pills. There are pictures on the wall opposite her bed. The old Las Vegas Strip, Times Square at night, the Hollywood sign—all magazine fold-outs judging by the creases—hang from multi-colored thumbtacks. I didn’t know she had pictures. Then again, for years, I’ve done nothing but open the door a crack and peek in to make sure she’s still alive.
Wadded up tissues, bottles, and empty cigarette boxes lay strewn all over the floor and sit heaped on the table next to her bed. Dozens of orange medicine bottles sit in various stages of emptiness on the old dresser that used to be James’s when we were kids. All but one of the knobs are missing now and the top drawer sits crooked in its track. The pair of silky blue panties dangling from the corner look completely out of place.
Cursing at me, James barrels out into the hallway.
Morbid curiosity draws me farther into the room, toward the ghost who’s inhabited my mother’s body for as long as I can remember. Her head wrenches right. Left. Though her eyes have rolled up into her head, I know they’re the same pale hazel as my own. Small, freckled nose. Same pointy chin James says makes me look like a pixie. Stringy dishwater blond hair so like my own sticks to her bruised face and fans out across the pillow, the strands changing patterns every time she thrashes the other direction.
Even our screams sound the same.
And then it occurs to me that this still might be a nightmare. That, this time, I get to watch myself die in a dingy, disgusting bed instead of experience it.
When James runs back into the room, he’s tearing at his hair and looking like he’s going to cry or throw up or both.
Save James.
I’m across the room and in his arms within seconds, trying to protect him from our mother’s screams by covering his ears. Clinging to each other, we watch helplessly as she clutches at the sheets, the last of her screams more gurgling screeches as she drowns in whatever is filling her body. Something white and sticky leaks from her mouth.
James shoves me away and throws up all over a pile of rumpled laundry at our feet. More t-shirts. An old pair of my pants. The shorts from my dream. My white Easter dress with its torn hem.
Before he’s done, the room falls into an abrupt, eerie stillness so alarming after all the shuddering and shaking. James climbs to his feet, wiping his mouth on his shirt, and stares at our mother. I’m staring, too.
She’s not dead. Not yet. Through the viscous white foam, she hitches and sputters through her last two breaths. Her fingers relax.
“Oh, shit,” James whispers.
I can hear the sirens screaming toward us. They’re probably rounding the corner by the park right now, and soon, our house will be overrun by uniforms and swirling red lights. They’ll be too late. Will the police come? Will they sense the bruises hidden under our clothes? Will they ask about the ring of burn marks that form a perfect band around my mother’s ankle? I sink onto the side of the bed and touch her bare foot. See the chipped nail polish on her toes. It’s the same sparkly blue color James bought me last year. The tiny bottle disappeared a few days later.
From the doorway, wearing a pair of old pinstriped boxers and a blue, beer-stained t-shirt, our father gazes at her now still body. I get up and move closer to James, who doesn’t seem to see anything but our mother, and study the complete lack of emotion on our father’s face. I expected him to gloat or at least crack open a beer and toast to his freedom. He just stares.
Sick as it sounds after what I just watched her go through, I’m relieved. My mother’s in a place where he can’t hurt her anymore.
His gaze meets mine and holds it for several long seconds.
I shiver.
And then he walks out of the room.