No Such Thing as Perfect (12 page)

He pauses, but I don’t speak. I don’t think he wants anything but someone to listen to him right now. His hands knot the bed sheet and he tries to remain stoic.

“So he’d come home and it was summer and she wouldn’t get up. He kept screaming, but she just wouldn’t move. I offered to help and she ignored me. My dad ignored me and continued to berate her. Eventually, she started to laugh, and he picked her up and threw her out into the driveway. Literally threw her, like trash. She landed on the ground and I thought she had twisted something, but she just sat on the ground, laughing. My dad told her not to come back until she got her shit together and I didn’t see her for the rest of the summer.

“Eventually, the cops brought her back to us. She didn’t look any different and she didn’t get her shit together, but my father had no idea what to do. Nothing changed. She didn’t even make empty promises that they would. We just went right back into the routine. Dad tried at first to stay home more, but then he almost lost his job. My grandmother offered to help and to look after me when he couldn’t. If it wasn’t for her, who knows what would’ve happened? Dad worked, Mom got high, and I was just in the way.”

“She’s your dad’s mother?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “My mother’s. But everyone knew what my mom had become. She wanted to help, since she couldn’t help her own daughter. Everyone in town knew, everyone at church knew, everyone at school knew. Everyone except me. Even if they’d tried to explain it to me, I wouldn’t have understood. I still loved her, despite it all. I didn’t know any better. I just knew she was my mom. You have to love your mom, right?”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I tell him. “Maybe another day.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Do you want to tell me about... when it happened?” I ask.

“You got to understand - that was just one time,” he says. “It was always like that. All my memories are some version of that mess. She did something and ended up high and when he came home, he freaked out and threatened her, but nothing ever changed. I don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable what he did, but she was still my mom. I loved her. I
still
love her, and he took her away from me. You don’t forgive certain things.”

“Who said you have to?” I ask.

He sighs. “Everyone. But it’s easy to say, isn’t it? It’s easy to forgive theoretically, but they weren’t there. If they hated each other, why didn’t he just leave?”

He gets up and turns on music. It’s not loud and I can’t even make out the song, but I get that he needs to do something, to move, to keep himself grounded in the present while he works through telling me this. I prefer to keep my own memories to myself, too, but they seem stupid right now.

“The last time,” Jack says, “I was fourteen. It was the same thing as always. I mean, it wasn’t like that day was somehow worse, until it was. By then, I’d learned to take care of myself so my grandmother wasn’t around as much. Mom still did nothing. Dad came home after being gone for almost a month and she was a mess. They fought, but they always fought. I was sitting in the living room and doing homework and trying not to listen, trying to tune out the screams and the cruelty they flung at each other. I don’t know what changed for him. I don’t know why it was different.

“Their fight became more violent than normal. Hitting each other had never been out of the question, but this was something else. I don’t even really know who started it, but eventually, he stopped it. I was trying to learn about ions and then he was choking her. She stared at me and I think it was the only time I remember after a certain point when I believed she saw me. She looked at me and her eyes were asking me to help her, but I couldn’t. I was too small, too scrawny, and I screamed and pleaded with him. I begged him to stop, but he just kept holding her down while she faded out, and then he snapped her neck in the middle of the living room. I saw the entire thing and there was nothing I could do. After that, I came to live here with my grandmother for good. I still freak out about ions.”

“I’m sorry.” It’s a weak thing to say, but it’s true and it’s the only way to express how I feel about what he’s gone through.

“Yeah. I hear that a lot,” he says.

I’m about to say something else when he looks at me and his eyes break my heart. In them, I see that little boy – the dirty eight-year-old who didn’t understand why his mommy left him all summer. I see the teenager who couldn’t save his mother, not only from his dad but also from her own destruction. And I see the man he’s becoming. I see this guy who has every reason to be angry, who could have been cruel when we met or at least closed himself off. He’s still hurting inside but he’s kind in a way I have never experienced.

“I don’t want to end up like him,” he says.

“You won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I barely know you. I know that you are facing demons that I can’t even imagine outside of a bad movie. I know that you’re scared and that you aren’t really sure about letting me in, but I also know that you genuinely cared when it was late and I was lonely. You didn’t have to sit and have coffee with me that night. You didn’t have to walk in circles around campus and talk about fall. You certainly didn’t have to help me with my essay or invite me here, but you did. You’ve been my friend.”

“You know,” he says. “When I moved out here, I had to start high school all over again. So, that meant that not only was I the new kid, but I was also the killer’s kid. High school sucks and it’s bad enough for regular people. It’s unbearable for people like me. People shunned me and, worse, there were those who didn’t. They used to remind me every day of what I was. It took me forever to make friends. I had two for the rest of high school. Two friends. I couldn’t wait to get away, to go to college, to not be that kid anymore.”

“Has it helped?”

“College?” he asks. I nod. “Helped with what?”

“With escape.”

“Yes and no,” he admits. “On campus, I have school, the band, and even a few friends. Well, acquaintances. I still have to try not to get close to them, though, because I know what will happen if they find out. So, it’s escape, but I always need to be on guard.”

“I found out and I’m still here. I’m sure most people would give you a chance.”

“Percentages seem to dictate otherwise,” he says.

I feel sad for him, for what he’s been through, for the way he’s been treated. I know he doesn’t want my pity, but I can’t help it. It’s just so much to put on someone so young. “There will always be people like Dave and Alana,” I say.

“And you?”

“And me.”

“I worked so hard in high school,” he says. “Grades became everything, because if I did the work, I could get a scholarship and get out. Never underestimate the value of homework, I guess.”

I can’t help but laugh. Our worlds are vastly different, but in this way, we are exactly the same. “I still have to figure out Marianne and all her drama,” I say, since my paper is sitting on my laptop, incomplete. I have always loved the novel, but now I feel ironically connected to it more than ever. However, my professor isn’t going to care how relevant it is if I don’t get my shit together and write about it.

“We can head back soon. You can come over? To write the paper?”

“Yeah. How’d you get a single anyway?” I ask.

“The university doesn’t want the legal obligation of explaining to some kid’s parents that they paired him with a convict’s kid. I didn’t really want a roommate anyway and I requested a single. Turns out it works well for everyone.”
Good thing you asked about that,
I admonish myself.

“Does it get lonely?”

“Not having a roommate?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, thinking of Kristen. I feel like she was crucial in getting me through the homesickness and sadness that filled my days at the beginning of the semester. Although maybe Jack didn’t have anything to miss.

He shrugs. “Sometimes, but I’m good at lonely. It’s easier not to see the way people look at you.”

“They’re missing out.”

“Come on, Elinor. Let’s get you back on track. You don’t need this nonsense.”

I don’t argue with him and we head back to school, the conversation light – music, TV, classes – but I can’t help feeling like everything in my world is different because of him. Where he thinks something is wrong with him, that people believe the worst, I just see someone who has made me feel normal. I see a guy who makes me feel more like myself than I’ve ever felt with anyone.

M
y parents didn’t really fight. Everyone else’s did, but mine got along. All the time. The only “discussions” they ever had involved me, because my dad felt my mom was too hard on me. But she wanted me to be better. She meant well and I needed it. I needed to be better. To be perfect.

When you’re young, you don’t think of your parents as people and it wasn’t until I was in high school that I understood what it was like to feel betrayed by someone you trusted. Like I said, they didn’t fight, but they did have passive aggressive conversations that I didn’t pick up on until I understood nuance. So even when I witnessed it in middle school, it didn’t register as an argument. It was just who they were.

It was the summer after freshman year. One of those stupid days that was too hot to do anything and no one was going anywhere. Except my dad, because he had to work. Since my mom was a guidance counselor, she had more time off in the summer. Everyone thought she was always off, but that wasn’t true. Still, she was home more, so Jon, my mom, and I were trying to clean because at least there was central air. Dad had said he might be late for a meeting or something and Jon was already complaining that he was hungry.

“I don’t want to wait until he gets home. Why can’t I just eat something now?” he asked my mother. She’d just come upstairs from the laundry room and was carrying a basket of clothes. It was a casual afternoon and there was nothing extraordinary about my mom doing laundry. When Jon asked about dinner, though, she lost it. She threw the laundry basket across the kitchen, socks and underwear freefalling around the appliances, and then she slammed the basement door.

“Do what you want. Who cares? You’ll do it anyway, won’t you?”

Jon didn’t know what he’d said, but he stopped asking about food and grabbed a granola bar before disappearing into his room. He muttered something about women being crazy as he went and my mom threw a plate after him, which shattered against the wall.

My mother never broke. She was perfect. She smiled and she said the right things and did the right things and everyone listened to her, but I was trapped behind the island in the kitchen, where I’d been filling a glass of water, and I had no idea what to do. I didn’t think she even saw me standing there when she collapsed onto the floor, crying. My brain was telling me to get out, but my heart broke watching her cry. I didn’t want anyone throwing a plate at me, but then again, I couldn’t walk away. I hated her for so many reasons, but I couldn’t watch her cry and not hurt.

“Are you okay?” I asked, which was stupid but there aren’t a lot of ways to address your crying mother.

“You need to work harder, Lily. You can’t let them down.”

“Who?”

She looked up at me and handed me something. It was a small locket and there was nothing inside of it. Silver that was scratched from running through the dryer and no chain. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. “Who am I letting down?” I repeated.

She didn’t answer. She looked at me and at the locket in my hand and then she stood up, cleaned the clothes and broken pieces of plate, and put everything away. For the next three hours, I followed her around and helped her clean the house because her emotions were scaring me, but I had no idea what to say or do about them. We ended up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I made in the darkened kitchen when it came time for dinner.

My father made it home a little after nine. Jon hadn’t come back down at all and I was still sitting with my mom at the table. I’d picked up our plates, so it was just us, the empty table, and the locket resting between us.

“What’s going on?” my dad asked, not making note of how dark the house was, and he opened the fridge. Usually my mom made him a plate when we ate and he peered in and then looked over the door at her. “Dinner?”

I loved my dad. He really wasn’t the kind of guy who thought women had to stay home and cook while men worked, even though the question was rude. I knew it was truly a question of surprise, because if there was one thing no one could beat my mother at, it was structure. Everything followed an order and nothing was ever out of place, so when there wasn’t a plate of food, the question was innocent even if it was dumb.

“How old is she?” my mom asked.

“Who?”

She picked up the locket and threw it at him. It hit the fridge and bounced off. He watched the slow arc from freezer door to floor, but he didn’t reply. Not at first. Then he closed the refrigerator and turned towards us.

“Lily, go to your room,” he said.

“She can stay. She should know.”

“This isn’t about her,” my father argued.

“Of course it is. She’s your daughter. Don’t you want her to know what it’s like? Don’t you want her to know it will never be good enough? That sooner or later someone will be better? That someone will replace her? How old is she?” she repeated. She was yelling, something she never did. Even when she was mad at me, it was still in a lilt.

“Maureen, it was a mistake. Two weeks. It lasted two weeks.”

“Where were you tonight then?”

“I told you. I was at work.”

“Why do you still have her locket?” she asked him.

He stood in the dark kitchen, a silhouette of a man I had grown up worshipping, a man who had taught me to play softball and who had helped me study and who was supposed to be the standard by which I judged all future men. I watched him shift back and forth uncomfortably and then he said, “It fell off and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“Fell off when?”

“Please don’t make me say it,” he said. “You know when.”