Lie to Me (23 page)

What.

I feel Marcus behind me, his abs to my back, his arms nearly around me. I can tell he wants to hold me. His breathing is fast, shallow.

“What is this?” I say.

“What it looks like.”

“You really did spy on me?” I say, grabbing the folder and moving away from him, turning around, walking backwards into the living room. I need distance. “That wasn’t an exaggeration? You paid someone else to spy on me?”

“No,” he says, his voice catching. I watch his hands ball into fists, then release again. “Not like that. I didn’t spy on you; I just needed to know that you were ok. That you had everything you needed.”

I stare at him. That I had everything I needed? What kind of bullshit is that? He wanted to make sure providence somehow rained luck and money down upon me?

“What would you have done if I didn’t have everything I need?” I ask, hardly believing this. My head is spinning.

“I would have made sure you did,” he says, his expression changing. “I would have taken care of it.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s too absurd. “So you can leave—that’s cool, right? You can just break my heart and leave, but God forbid I can’t make the electricity bill. That would have been the last straw. That’s totally reasonable.”

Marcus takes a deep breath. “It’s not that simple.”

“Oh, good. Because I was going to say that maybe you should have just asked me which thing I preferred. Having you around, or having you pay someone to tell you I wasn’t starving to death.”

He’s just standing there, taking this from me, not offering up any more explanation. He’s seething, like he has so much he wants to say but won’t. Like why he would have to do this instead of actually stick around. I blow out the air in my lungs in an exasperated puff.

“Marcus, I don’t even know where to begin with how screwed up this is,” I say, and I rifle through the papers, pulling out another one at random. This one catches my eye because of the P.S. on the bottom. “I made the donation to Dillinger’s school, as discussed, from an anonymous benefactor.”

Oh, are you freaking kidding me?

Dill’s school has only had one donation from an anonymous benefactor, and it was a big one. I wave the paper around. “
You
? You bought Dill’s school a computer lab?”

I can’t even look at him anymore. I collapse on the couch, put the folder down on the floor next to me, and rest my head in my hands.

He’s taken away my ability to be mad at him and feel good about it, is the thing. It’s not any more satisfying to know he was watching me, thinking about me, trying to find ways to provide for us the whole time. I thought it would help to know what he’d been up to, but it just makes me realize how much I really needed him. Just him.

Just. Him.

He comes and sits next to me, his weight dipping the couch, pulling me toward him. I don’t fight it.

“Are you upset?” he asks. His own voice is still shaky. He’s not making me talk about the attempted rape, but I can tell he’s still thinking about it. That he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight, his arms. It might take him awhile.

“Lo, are you ok?” he asks again.

I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t know if I feel violated by his spying, just frustrated, or humiliated that Marcus knows these things about me. I’m thinking about all the dark times, the times when I really did struggle, when I was terrified, when I needed him most of all. I missed him and I was furious with him, and I was brokenhearted and betrayed, but at least I had the solace of knowing that all that suffering was in secret. At least I still had my pride.

And now I know he saw all of that. I mean, it’s one thing to tell him. I still control that. It’s another to know someone was watching.

“I don’t know,” I say.

He puts his hand on my back, and damn it, there it is again. That feeling, the longing for him—it swells right back up with no regard to what’s happening. To the fact that my head is spinning, that I should be beyond freaked out to find out Marcus watched me all those years. To find that out on the same night he somehow happened to be here to protect me from a freaking
home invasion
. His fingers burn a brand into me into me anyway, and his scent, the warmth of him, pulls me into the hollow underneath his arm.

I have so little self-control with him.

And for some reason, I like that.

“I wish I knew what to say to make it better,” he says.

He doesn’t finish. I wouldn’t know what to fill in there, either. Instead I stand up, pulling myself away from his touch, like pulling against an elastic band, and make my way toward the stairs.

“You can have the couch,” I say.

chapter 14

HARLOW

Sometimes all you need is time to put things in perspective. Sometimes a memory helps, too.

I’m lying awake in the relative dark of my bedroom, the only light coming in from the window by my bed and falling softly on me in a square of pale light against the darkness. It probably looks pretty, but it means I can’t quite see into the shadows of my room. Shouldn’t matter, right? I’m a grown up. I shouldn’t be afraid of the dark.

Except once I get over the shock of Marcus’s briefcase revelations and my own emotional meltdown, I’m right back to being in shock about the attempted home invasion. And those shadows are terrifying.

I start to think about whether I could have called 911 in time. I start to think about whether I could have used any of the skills Marcus taught me, whether I could have kicked the guy’s ass before the cops got here, and it’s horrible to have to admit that I couldn’t. Even without the weak ankle, I’m out of shape, and I was never good enough to take on a fully grown man. I already have ample evidence of that, thanks to one horrible night in a bar.

Weirdly, the only thing that gives me some comfort is that, whether Marcus admits it or not, I’m convinced it had to do with this stupid real estate development. If it had been random, if it had been someone out to attack a woman alone in her house, that’s a whole different order of scary. It can’t be that.

Not that this isn’t terrifying enough. Because that’s what happens; the anxiety slowly grows, builds, takes on different shades, gathers weight, until it’s full-blown terror. Until it’s terror wrapped in anger that someone would do this to me, and for such a stupid, shallow reason.

The only other time in my life I’ve been this scared was right after my parents died, and I couldn’t sleep because of it.

It’s so strange to think back on how drastically grief and depression affected me. I’ve never really tried to explain it to anyone else, because every time I try to put it into words, it sounds so delusional, so truly ill, that I just give up. It’s hard for me to understand it now, because even then I knew it was irrational, but it didn’t matter. Only the fear mattered. I would lie awake, rigid with that fear, unable to move because I thought that if I did it might somehow disturb the order of the universe, that it might somehow anger fate, and the end result of this in my grief-crazed mind was always something terrible happening to Dill.

It really made no sense at all.

I couldn’t move because Dill might choke in his sleep. I couldn’t let myself fall asleep because Dill might fall down the stairs. I couldn’t tell anyone because it might get back to my Aunt Jill, and she would take Dill away forever.

I couldn’t even talk, couldn’t explain what was happening to me. I was too afraid.

And it was Marcus who figured it out.

It was Marcus who realized I wasn’t sleeping. I don’t know, maybe other people noticed. But he was the only one who did something about it.

That’s when he started sneaking into my bedroom at the Mankowskis at night, just a few days after the accident. The first time he tapped on my window, standing on a milk crate at the side of the house, I was actually relieved. I mean, I felt a jolt of terror at any kind of stimuli, any creak of the floorboards, any screech of tires, anything at all. But part of me was relieved that something was happening, that I had something—anything—to focus on besides the horrible scenarios that kept playing themselves out in my head.

 Marcus climbing through my window was the only thing that got me to stop living those nightmares over and over again until my mind burned out on itself.

I think most people, myself included, would have taken one look at me and backed away slowly, because what was happening to me was overwhelming. I had bitten my fingernails until they bled; I had scratched holes in my sheets. I was sweaty with the effort of holding myself completely, rigidly still, my whole body one giant knot.

I haven’t been able to remember what it actually
felt
like to be that scared in so long, like my body wouldn’t let me. Like there was a block. I could talk about it, I knew the facts, but I couldn’t feel it. Like it happened to someone else, some other version of me, and I was mostly grateful that I didn’t have to be her anymore.

Until tonight. Tonight, it’s coming back.

And the only thing that helped all those years ago was Marcus. He didn’t say anything or do anything special, there wasn’t some magic word or anything. He just climbed in through that window and stayed.

I remember him touching my cheek.

I remember him lying down next to me, so gently, trying not to disturb me.

I remember him taking my hands in his when I tried to scratch at them.

I remember the first time he held me when I cried like that, not about anything, just from the frustration of constantly being afraid. He was careful, leaning up on one elbow, gently lifting up my head until he could get his arm around me. And then he pulled me against his chest, which was the safest place I’d ever been.

I think it was his silence that allowed me to eventually speak. It wasn’t the first night he came in through that window that I could talk about it. And I don’t remember sleeping that night, though Marcus told me later that I did a little bit. I don’t even know if it was the second night he was with me that I could talk about it. I just remember the terror slowly receding, the knowledge of Marcus lying next to me, calm, steady, certain, slowly replacing the looping visions of my little brother’s death in my mind.

Until one night I just spoke out loud. I told him. I told him, and I wasn’t afraid that saying it out loud would make it come true.

I just said, “I’m afraid that she won’t watch him and Dill will smother in his sleep.”

I think most people, in that situation, might try to get me to talk about it. Or they would try to reason with me, to convince me that nothing was going to happen to Dill, that it was a totally irrational fear. But I knew all of that already. I knew it was completely irrational, and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because I’d been thinking about it nonstop for hours already. The last thing in the world I needed to do was talk about it some more.

But Marcus was not most people. Marcus just kissed me on the temple and said, “I’ll make sure he’s ok.”

And then he climbed back out of my window. I was paralyzed with fear until he came back, but the key is, he did come back. Marcus climbed back in, smiling at me.

He said, “I checked on him. I climbed that tree—you know the one next to that side of your house? He’s not even sleeping with a blanket. He’s all stretched out.”

I actually smiled a little bit, my relief was so profound, but it was twinned with this sense of doom, like I couldn’t see any way for it to get better. I said, “Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“Lie to me. Tell me I won’t always have to feel like this.”

“Don’t have to lie,” he said, and pulled me back against his chest. “You’re going to be ok.”

It sounds so stupid, I know. Like such a simple thing. But that was the first time I remember letting go, even a little bit. I have tried and tried and tried to figure out why it worked. Why in the end that Marcus was the only thing to get between me and my fear of losing my brother, or between me and my fear of never getting better. Why I would believe it when Marcus said that Dill was safe, but wouldn’t believe my own lying eyes, my own common sense.

I think, in the end, I just trusted Marcus more than I trusted anyone else. Even myself. He was always there. He was always in control.

And he did this, check on Dill for me, every night. He would check on Dill, and then he would lie next to me until I fell asleep, every night, for months. He’d have to wake up before the Mankowskis and sneak out, and he’d stay up late until I fell asleep. He couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours of sleep a night the whole time. And he just kept doing it until slowly my fear began to recede, until slowly I began to regain some degree of control over my wildly terrified mind.

He made it seem like he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

So since my parents died, lying next to Marcus Roma is the only way I’ve ever felt truly safe. It’s the only time I haven’t been afraid of what the world might do to me or the people I love.

So I’m thinking about all of this again because now, tonight, I finally remember the full body of terror of those nights when only Marcus could comfort me.

Lucky me.

I feel the ghost of it every time there’s a sudden noise. Every time the neighbor’s screen door bangs in the wind. Every time a leaf scuttles down the street.

It’s not even that I’m afraid that the man will come back and break in. It’s the old fear, the irrational one, only this time it’s broadened in scope. It’s no longer specific things happening to Dill; thank God I’ve managed to train myself to stop doing that. It’s looser than that, amorphous, this thick, insidious black cloud of dread that I can feel closing in on me when I think about the house. About the developers. About everything that’s happening.

Because I’m losing control of my life again.

Let me be clear: I think of myself as a rational person, albeit one sometimes beset by irrational feelings. And I know that I’m not actually in control of my own life, or at least not very much of it. But pretending that I have some say over what happens to Dill and me is what gets me through each day. And anything that shakes that illusion sends me right back on this path to sleeplessness.