Where We Belong (48 page)

“I don’t know. I’ll find out. Just go back to work, okay?”

I opened the passenger door before she’d even completely stopped the car. When I looked up, Rachel was standing over me.

“Could you give me a hand, please?” I asked her. “I sort of hurt myself.”

“Of course.”

She nodded hello to my mom—they’d never been introduced, or spoken to each other—and took hold of my arm and helped me out. I stood there at the bottom of our stairs, bent over so I could hold pressure on my knee, trying not to be obvious about how little weight I could put on that ankle. I waved goodbye to my mom in a way that made it obvious I wanted her to go. She shook her head and backed down the driveway, when she just as easily could have turned around.

I looked up at Rachel.

“I was out looking for you,” she said. “I looked for you at the campground.”

“We’re staying in a motel this time.”

“I was going upstairs to leave you a note. What happened?”

“Just a stupid accident. Just me being uncoordinated and not very athletic.”

“Let’s get you upstairs.”

I had to wrap my arm over her shoulders. Which made it hard, because she was tall, and I wasn’t. I had to reach up at a weird angle. Then she wrapped her arm around my waist. I had to give up on holding pressure on my knee. I had to just openly bleed.

While she was helping me up the stairs, I thought about my mom. Sitting on her butt in the car while I hopped around and found a way to get in. Granted, she probably hadn’t known what was going on. But part of me felt like she should have. Like Rachel would have.

I unlocked the door, and we avoided the rug and left a little trail of blood on the nice hardwood floor as she helped me into the bathroom.

“Sit on the edge of the tub,” she said. And she helped me get there. “And wash it out as best you can. I’ll go get Paul’s first-aid kit.”

And I thought, See? Paul has a first-aid kit. Along with a flashlight for when the power goes out. It’s just who he is. And who we’re not.

I was sitting on the couch with my knee slung over the padded leather arm, an old towel under it to catch the blood and peroxide. My foot was propped on a stack of pillows on a chair, so it was higher than my knee. Rachel had wrapped my ankle in an elastic bandage from Paul’s first-aid kit. There was a plastic bag of ice draped over it.

She had her reading glasses on and was studying my knee closely, holding a tweezers, trying to pick out any last shreds of bark.

“Ah!” I said when she went after one. I tried hard to not say anything, every time. But some little sound always slipped out.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You have to stop being sorry.”

“I wish I didn’t have to hurt you. But it’s going to be hard to keep this from getting infected, because of all the dirt and bark ground in. I just want to get out as much as I can. Brace yourself once more.”

This time, all that came out was a breath. But it took some doing to hold it down to that. I had to sit on the pain, and hard.

I couldn’t stop trembling. I could only remember one other time in my life when pain made me shivery. I didn’t know why some pain did, and some didn’t. Something to do with how completely vulnerable it made me feel, I think. The peroxide she was using to flush out the wound between tweezing was sending needles of pain through parts of my body it couldn’t possibly touch.

I looked at Rachel and got that feeling again that she would have been a good mother, and that things would have turned out better for me if I’d had more of a mother for a mother. This time, I kept it to myself.

“Why were you looking for me?” I asked. “What was the note about?”

Something dark came into her eyes, a cloud that pulled her back from me.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s something bad.”

“I’m so sorry, Angie. I made trouble for you. I didn’t mean to. It was a stupid mistake.”

“Well, I can relate to stupid mistakes.”

I wondered why I was talking when I really wanted to hear what it was.

“I was tired last night, and sleepy. It was right before bed. Without thinking, I made reference to something you said when you came down to talk to me. Just an innocent little thing. About whether the fish are biting. And then, of course, he wanted to know when we talked, and about what, and why he didn’t know.”

I felt that creepy, tingling thing wash over my stomach. But it was so bad in there already. This new disaster didn’t add all that much to the pile.

“What did you tell him?”

“As little as I could. But now he knows you came to talk to me. I didn’t say much after that. I declined to answer some questions. But I didn’t want to look straight into his face and lie to him.”

“I never meant for you to lie to him.
I
wouldn’t, if he asked
me
.”

“Well, I’m sure he will ask you. I’m leaving you with cotton and the peroxide. Keep flushing it out for as long as you can stand. Then put a lot of this antibiotic ointment on it. And I’m leaving about five of these gauze pads and the roll of adhesive tape. You’ll want to clean it and change the dressings once or twice a day.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m so sorry, Angie. I feel like I let you down.”

“I knew the risk.” I was in that place again. That belly-up place. All was lost. I was no longer trying to shield myself in any way. Everything sucked, and I accepted that. “How upset is he?”

“Even more than I thought he would be. He doesn’t put his trust in many people, so I think that’s why this hit him hard. I’ll keep trying to talk to him.”

She cleaned the blood off the floor before she let herself out and left me alone.

Usually I liked being alone. But this time, it was too much aloneness.

Like I was alone in a lot more than just the apartment.

It was almost an hour before Paul came up. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs, I felt a strange sense of relief. Like when you’re waiting for the executioner. It’s one of those things. Better to just face it and be done.

He knocked, and I called out that it was open, and he should come in.

He looked down at me, half sitting, half lying, on that couch, with my leg up, a saturated ball of cotton dripping peroxide down both sides of my knee and onto the towel. The sharp needles of pain punctuated the moment. I had no urge to defend myself. If he’d pulled out a knife, I might have let him stab me with it.

He didn’t. He didn’t yell, either. I remember half wishing he would.

“You went down and talked to Rachel?” It was only half a question.

For a minute, I said nothing.

Then I said, “Remember that first day I met you? I stomped over to your house and accused you of calling the police on us. You said when you do something, it’s because you think it’s the right thing to do. So, then, you wouldn’t lie later and say you didn’t. You’d say you did it, and why you did it. Yes, I went back to the old place and talked to Rachel. Because you made it clear you were never going to. And I wanted things to work out for you two.”

“Which they might not have. You could have messed things up big.”

“Apparently, I did,” I said. “But my thinking was that if
I
told her, then if she didn’t feel the same, she could just pretend I’d never said anything. And the two of you wouldn’t have to be awkward around each other. And your friendship could keep going. Yes, I know it was dicey. I knew that all along. But I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do, even though I totally get why you’re upset. I knew I was gambling our friendship.”

He stood staring down at me for another minute. I couldn’t look at his face for long. Because I didn’t recognize it. He still looked like Paul. But he wasn’t the Paul I knew. He wasn’t my friend. That Paul had gone away.

“How did you hurt yourself?” he asked.

“It’s not important. It’s stupid. I was trying to climb a tree. That property is gone. They sold it already. We lost that. Not that we ever really had it, but…”

“Look.” His voice was so flat, it was scary. And sickening. “I get that you did the wrong thing for the right reasons. But you broke a confidence. That was the most sensitive thing I ever shared with anyone, and you took it to the most sensitive person involved. I get that you didn’t do it as gossip or out of meanness, but it’s just not something I feel I can forgive.”

Those last words made a sort of thump in my gut. I thought I was all surrendered in there, and nothing could pull me down another rung. Because there were no more rungs.

Wrong.

When I looked up, he was over at the door, his hand on the knob. His head was tilted down. He looked shorter. Like what was happening made him small.

“So,” I said. “I guess we need to get out right now, then.”

He looked over at me. His eyes seemed confused and far away. Like he had to dust the inside of his head for cobwebs before he could answer.

“I told you when you moved in that if it didn’t work out, you could stay until you found a new place. So I’ll stand behind my word on that. But as far as us being friends… my friends are people I can trust.”

Not to be mean, but I wondered who that was. Other than Rachel.

As if he could read my mind, he said, “Not that I have a lot of friends. Now you know why. I won’t be friends with anyone I can’t trust, even if that means being friends with practically no one.”

It hit me how badly he must miss Rigby. Probably the only friend who ever completely made the cut.

“I hope this doesn’t make a problem between you and Rachel. Things were just looking like they were going to work out. Don’t let this ruin it. Okay? Please.”

He leveled me with a look exactly like the ones he used to shoot through Aunt Vi’s fence. “What you still don’t seem to understand is that things between me and Rachel are between me and Rachel.”

“Right. Got it. Sorry.”

Then he let himself out.

My mom got in a little after three. Opened the door with her key and then stood there looking down at me like I was only doing what I was doing—which was not much, by the way—to make her life more difficult.

“You didn’t tell me you’d hurt yourself that bad.”

“You were kind of off somewhere.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. You just seemed like your head was somewhere else.”

She put her hands on her hips the way she always did when it was time to defend herself. “If the message here is that I didn’t pay enough attention to you when you were hurt, you might want to look at the fact that I always ask if you’re okay, and you always say you’re fine. Like you want me to stay out of it.”

I thought about that for a minute and then said, “That’s true.”

It wasn’t what she expected. It stopped the conversation completely.

After an awkward moment, she said, “Well. Come on.”

“Come on what?”

“Sophie will be home any minute, and then we have to go back to the motel.”

“Maybe not. We’re sort of thrown out already. So maybe we can just stay here quietly. I don’t mean thrown out like we have to leave right now. But we’re not invited to keep living here. So maybe it doesn’t even matter.”

“What the hell happened, Angie?”

“It’s kind of a long story. And I’ve had an incredibly crappy day. Can I tell it to you some other time?”