Heart Like Mine (19 page)

“He doesn’t
love
you, Kel,” Nancy told her as they stood next to each other in the bathroom, fixing their hair before heading to their next class. “He used you to get laid.”

Kelli blushed. “He did
not
. He told me he loved me.”

Nancy turned and frowned at her. “Please. Boys will say anything to get in your pants.”

Kelli blamed herself. Maybe she didn’t play hard-to-get long enough. She should have made him wait. She should have
made him take her on a real date. The only place her parents would let her go was the library, so for the next few weeks, she went there after school and scoured back issues of
Cosmo
for articles about what to do to win Jason over.
Want to make him jealous?
one article said.
Flirt with his friends and he’ll realize how much he cares.

Perfect
, Kelli thought. The following day, she approached Jason and his friends Rory and Mike at their table in the lunchroom. “Hi, Mike,” Kelli said, purposely not looking at Jason. She knew she looked pretty—she’d borrowed a tight blue sweater from Nancy and a pair of Levi’s that had been pegged at the ankles. Every curve on her body showed.

Mike, another tall boy who wasn’t quite as handsome as Jason, smiled at her. “Hey, Kelli. What’s up?”

“Not much,” she said, lifting her shoulder and pushing out her chest. “I was thinking . . . do you maybe want to study together later? I could use some help with algebra.”

Mike glanced over to Jason with a strange smirk on his face. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard you are
lots
of fun to, uh, ‘
study
’ with.” Mike made invisible quote marks in the air, and seeing this, all three boys burst into laughter.

Kelli felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She didn’t know what to do. Her eyes burned with tears, and she looked over to Jason. “You
told
them?” she whispered. Her voice fractured as she spoke.

Jason lifted his jaw and shrugged. “Yeah, well, you’re a church girl, right? You should have known better.” They all laughed again and Kelli raced out of the lunchroom. She hid in the bathroom for the rest of the afternoon, crying.

When she got home, her father was standing in the living room, waiting for her. She stopped short, unused to seeing him
before the bank closed at six o’clock. She knew her eyes were red, so she dropped her gaze to the floor, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Where’s Mama?” she asked.

She felt his eyes on her. “She’s in our bedroom. She got a call this afternoon from the school secretary. You weren’t in any of your classes after lunch.”

Kelli’s stomach clenched and she looked up at him. She’d never skipped class before—she didn’t even think about the fact that her parents would get a phone call. “Daddy—” she began, but he held up his palm to stop her.

“I don’t want to hear it. You are a disappointment to me, young lady. You are a liar.” He paused and pushed his black-rimmed glasses against the bridge of his nose. “Your behavior is unacceptable and you will be punished for it.”

Kelli nodded, feeling the tears well up behind her eyes again. She longed to be able to ask him for help—to find comfort in her father’s arms—but she knew it was pointless to hope for this. “How much longer am I grounded?” she asked quietly.

“Grounding you didn’t work.” He took a breath. “Go get the wooden spoon.”

Kelli’s breath caught in her throat. He’d only spanked Kelli a couple of times—once when she was four years old, after she had grabbed her mother’s favorite crystal vase to admire it and accidentally dropped it to the floor, and then again when she was six and, in a fit of anger, cut off all the blossoms on her mother’s roses. “Daddy,” she said again. “Please. I promise it won’t happen again.”

He nodded, pressing his lips together into a white line before speaking. “You’re right. It won’t. And this time, you’ll remember why. Get the spoon.”

She was fourteen; he couldn’t do this to her now . . . could
he? “Mama?” she called out, and her father took a step toward her. Kelli took a step back.

“She agrees this is the proper punishment.” He stared at his daughter. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

Kelli felt a wave of anger rise up inside her. She clenched her hands into fists at her sides and straightened her spine. “
No
,” she said. “I made a mistake. I was upset and crying in the bathroom and I lost track of time. I didn’t do it on
purpose
.” She knew he wouldn’t ask why she was so upset. He didn’t care about that. He only cared that she had broken a rule. He only cared how
he
felt, not her.

Her father’s dark eyebrows raised. “You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not.” Kelli saw her mother appear behind him. “Mama, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to skip class. Tell him to stop this.
Please
.” She was so scared, her voice shook. She’d never stood up to him this way.

Her mother looked over to her father, then back to Kelli. “Thomas,” she said. “Maybe it’s too much.”

Kelli’s father turned toward her mother. “You called me at work. You
asked
me to come home and do this.”

“Not to
hit
her,” Kelli’s mother said quietly. “Just to talk some sense into her.” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I should have just dealt with it myself.”

Kelli’s father’s body visibly relaxed and she seized the opportunity. “I’m so sorry, Daddy. It will never, ever happen again. I promise.” She began to cry, but neither of them moved to soothe her. After a moment, her parents left the room—her father out the front door to head back to work and her mother to the kitchen to start dinner. Kelli stood weeping in the living room long after they were gone, wondering if anyone in this world loved her at all.

*  *  *

Over the next couple of months, Kelli stayed quiet. She was quiet at school, quiet at home. She felt nauseous much of the time, tired in a way she’d never been before. All she wanted to do was sleep. She made polite conversation with her parents, accompanying them to church and attending youth group without a fight. She stayed as far away as possible from Jason—she even distanced herself from Nancy. Everyone in the school was talking about her—whispering about what she’d done. One boy cornered her at her locker and asked if she gave blow jobs in the front of trucks, too, and she wished she could simply close her eyes and disappear. She shut herself off from anything that might hurt her, and yet she cried every night in the dark, her face buried deep into her pillow. She wasn’t sure what she wept for, but the tears came whether she understood them or not.

“You’re losing weight,” her mother remarked one morning as they sat at the table for breakfast. Her father had already left for work. Since the day she stood up to him, he’d barely spoken to her at all. It was like he’d have preferred that she didn’t exist.

“I’m not hungry,” Kelli said, swirling her spoon around in her cereal. “I feel a little sick.”

Her mother reached over and placed the back of her hand against Kelli’s forehead. “No fever,” she said. “Have you been throwing up?”

Kelli shrugged. She had, in fact, just thrown up that morning. She’d been throwing up for weeks. Grief over all that had happened, she decided. Like one of the heroines in her novels—she was lovesick, devastated by how Jason had used her. How easily she had given herself away.

“Do you have your period?” her mother asked, her voice so soft Kelli could barely make out the words.

“No,” Kelli answered, and then her breath froze. She looked at her mother, wide-eyed. “It hasn’t come.”
Oh no. Oh please. It couldn’t be true. It was only once. It happened so fast.

Her mother’s face went gray and her shoulders slumped forward. She dropped her fork with a clatter. “For how long.” A statement, not a question.

Kelli tried to remember the last time she’d needed the supplies in the blue box under the bathroom sink. It was before Jason. Before her world as she knew it began to fall apart.

When Melody and I got to the house, Victor was on the phone with the restaurant, talking with his head chef. I pictured Spencer standing in the gleaming, stainless steel kitchen of the Loft. He was the muscular man who’d saluted me the night Victor and I first met. During a conversation with him a few weeks later, I thought he looked more like he belonged in a wrestling arena than a restaurant, but he was actually an incredible cook, blending ingredients in a way that seemed to hypnotize customers into returning for more.

“What did you do?” I asked him once after sampling a particularly decadent cream of wild mushroom soup he’d made. “Sprinkle cocaine in this? It’s totally addictive.”

“No, ma’am,” Spencer responded with a slow smile. “Only love.” For a big man, he was soft-spoken and a little shy—the consummate gentle giant and an excellent reminder that a person’s appearance doesn’t define the truth of who they are.

“Ew,” I joked. “Don’t tell the health department that.”

Now Melody and I unloaded all the food she had prepared the night before into the commercial upright freezer we kept in our garage, keeping out one lasagna and a container of cookies for us to eat today. After that, we put the suitcases in the kids’ rooms and went to go talk with them while Victor finished his conversation with Spencer. I carried the blanket Max had requested and
one of Kelli’s sweaters for Ava. When we entered the den, I saw that they were sprawled out next to each other on the curved leather sectional, still in their pajamas. Their glassy eyes were glued to the huge flat-screen across the room, but the TV was off. They were staring at nothing. Ava was loosely holding Max’s hand and seeing this unexpected act of tenderness toward her brother, I choked up again.

“Hey, guys,” Melody said, stepping over to sit down next to Ava. “I’m so, so sorry to hear about your mom.” She reached out and rubbed Ava’s arm, and Ava jerked away. Melody didn’t pull back after Ava’s reaction; instead, she drew Ava closer and gave her an enormous hug. I expected Ava to yank herself out of Melody’s arms—they’d only met a few times when Melody happened to stop by when the kids were with us for the weekend—but instead, Ava began to cry and softened into my friend’s embrace. Melody held her close, rubbed her back, and pressed her cheek into the side of Ava’s head.

Seeing this, Max leapt off the couch and threw himself at me, his skinny arms tight around my hips. I stumbled back a step, surprised by this sudden outpouring of affection, but then found my footing and dropped down to the floor and took him into a tight embrace, wrapping his mother’s blanket around him. Neither child spoke a word, but Melody looked at me, tears brimming in her eyes. Ava looked over to me, too, and saw her mother’s red sweater in my grasp. I held it out to her.

“I thought you might like to have this with you,” I said, keeping one arm around Max, who was sniffling into my shoulder.

Ava hesitated, then slowly extricated herself from Melody’s arms. She stared at her mother’s sweater, an unreadable expression on her face. “That was her favorite,” she whispered. “Dad bought it for her.”

“Then you should definitely keep it.” I smiled gently, trying to ignore the slight twist in my stomach that arose with the picture of Victor and Kelli together. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but after seeing that book in her room, I felt the tiniest bit insecure.

Ava lifted her eyes to mine, her bottom lip trembling as she took the sweater from me. “She might be coming back,” she said, her voice slightly muffled as she held it over her nose and mouth. “Maybe the hospital made a mistake.”

Max chose this moment to look up at me, his nose running, his blue eyes bright with tears. “That happens, right? I’ve seen it on TV. They think it’s the person who died, but they’re wrong.”

I gave Melody a helpless look, and she stepped in. “I wish it worked that way, honey. But the doctors are sure it was your mom. I’m sorry.” Both kids began crying again, and Melody and I held them close.

Victor rushed in from the kitchen, cell phone in hand. He stopped short when he saw us. I gave him the smallest of reassuring smiles and mouthed the words,
It’s okay
. He nodded but still sank to the floor behind me, wrapping his own long arms around both me and his son. He pressed his damp cheek against mine and the heat from his body enveloped me.

As Victor held us, I experienced the briefest flicker of hope that I could do this. If I could be here now, in a painful moment like this, I could be here always. Maybe I would learn how to find my way through this
with
the kids instead of in spite of them. Maybe being a mother wasn’t nearly as scary as I’d made it out to be.

With most things, there were rules about how to act. I knew how to be quiet and pay attention to my teachers when I was at school; I knew how to laugh with Bree and how to be sweet to my dad when I wanted something from him. I had no idea how to act now. Mama was dead and nothing else mattered. Not how I looked or what I did or didn’t do. I could eat or not eat, cry or not cry, and nothing would change.
Brush your teeth
, my brain told me.
Walk down the hall. Sit at the table. Take a bite of toast.
I responded to these thoughts in slow motion—with stiff, stilted movements, like the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
when he rusted up after it rained. My body tingled the same way my mouth does after a visit to the dentist. There, but not there. Moving, but numb.
Empty.

We didn’t have to go to school, so Max and I basically spent the entire week sitting around the house. I colored with him and read him his favorite stories, pointless forms of distraction that did little to make either of us feel better.

“How are you doing?” Dad asked us every day—usually more than once—and I didn’t know how to answer him. How did he
think
we were doing? I couldn’t have cried again if I tried. I was tired in a hollowed-out way I’d never been. We spent every night with Dad in his room, while Grace made a bed for herself
on the living room couch. I don’t think any of us were really getting much sleep. The minute I closed my eyes, Mama’s face appeared and my pulse pounded noisily through my blood. I felt it throbbing in my head, my neck, my fingers—even my toes.