Nobody but Us (16 page)

“I was stealing.”

“So what? So he calls the cops or whatever,” I shout, even though I know that’d be the worst thing. No cops. Can’t have no one coming after us. “But people don’t just have the right to treat you like that! Don’t you get it?”

I’m yelling. My voice pings off the windows, the ceiling. But if she would just stop letting people do that to her. What happens when I’m not there, I’m working and something happens? She just gonna lie down and die?

“You gotta be stronger than that. Don’t let people do things to you. Fight!”

“I never learned to fight!”

“So learn! Figure it out. You ain’t gotta be your mom!”

She kinda pops—this noise—and her hand’s over her face and she’s crying and my heart is shredding. I’m angry. ’Cause she don’t fight. ’Cause I can’t hold my damn tongue when it matters, ’cause I can’t take back the things she’s already heard.

“Shi—Zoe, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“No, I
am
like my mom.”

I can’t drive no more. The steering wheel’s too heavy in my hands. I let go.

“Will!”

She lunges for the wheel as the car swerves away from the curve in the road. We’re headed for the rocky desert, nicking a shrub before she can get us back on the road again. Her body is draped over me and she’s trying to steer. She’s mad or frustrated or something, but I don’t even notice. All I notice is her smell, her hair tickling my chin.

“Stop it, Will!”

I ain’t sure if she’s talking about the car or how I’m pissed at myself for being such an ass, but I figure she means the car. I put one foot on the clutch, the other on the brake. Zoe steers us to the side of the road. We’ve completely stopped.

She freezes, both hands still on the wheel.

“She died when I was six. Want to know how?” Her voice is hysterical and I know I gotta shush her but I wanna hear this, too. Need to know everything.

“The stairs in my house are so steep. They’re like that in old houses. Steep and hard all the way down. She fell down the stairs and broke her neck. I watched her fall. My dad and I both. Him from the top, me from the bottom. I don’t know how long he’d been there, but I was hiding behind a chair while they fought. And then she fell. It sounded like … I don’t know.”

She grabs her mom’s chimes and shakes them. Listens hard to the sounds of steel on steel. Her eyes are glazed over like she’s just taken a hit of something.

“Like nothing I’d ever heard before. I heard the thumping of her body and her limbs … they all hit at different times … one right after the other. Sometimes two thumps at the same time. Her neck broke on the way down. I heard that, too. It sounded like … a firecracker. A faraway firecracker. It was muffled by her thumps and her whimpers.”

“Maybe you imagined it, Zoe. Hearing her neck break. That ain’t normal.”

She turns her head toward me, still strumming those fucking chimes. I force them out of her hands and toss them onto the backseat. They land with an ugly sound.

Zoe keeps on. “And when she got to the bottom of the stairs she threw her arms and legs out and stared into the living room, right at the front door, like she still needed to get a little farther to get all the way out. And that’s where I was. She looked through me, but my dad looked right at me. And he raised his finger in the air and pointed at me.” She raises her hand, just barely, like she probably don’t even notice she’s doing it. “But he didn’t say anything. Not a word. Nothing until he called an ambulance. He said she fell, and when they asked me if I saw anything, too, I couldn’t speak. He was looking at me the whole time. And breathing … breathing his whiskey breath like a fire-breathing dragon.”

She pauses. Hunches over. Her voice drops to a whisper. “I’m like her, Will. He pointed his finger at me and made me like her.”

I put my arms around her to pull her up, but she don’t wanna budge. I stroke her hair instead. Something. Anything to stop feeling useless and lost.

“Remember what you said to me? About how I don’t gotta be like my mom? Same thing with you. You ain’t her. You’re Zoe. And your dad’s hundreds of miles away. You don’t gotta be like that.”

“It’s just who I am.”

“You don’t gotta be,” I repeat. I don’t know what else to say. Sometimes people don’t wanna hear what you have to tell them. She listened real good when I said what I didn’t mean, but now, when it’s important and true, she won’t hear me.

I force her to sit up, but gently, taking her wrists and pressing her palms against my mouth. I raise her head and her shoulders and lean them against me so I can hold her close, so she can hear the beat of my heart. I breathe steady as I can, slowing the pace for her. I gotta hope she can slow down with it, catch herself, or let me catch her.

“It took a lot of guts for you to run away, you know. To jump out that window and trust me. You took a chance, a big risk. Just being here shows how strong you are, how you ain’t that person. You were just trapped for a while, but you’re free now.”

I got no idea if she’s listening to me, even if she’s just hearing me. But I say it anyway ’cause I want her to know how strong she is. She is, really is.

I want her to believe it, even if she doesn’t.

HE PULLS OFF AT A REST AREA AND CUTS THE ENGINE. I’m wiping my face furiously because it’s not fair to make him feel so bad over problems he didn’t create. It’s not his fault that I’m spineless and weak. Not his fault that I haven’t figured out how to be the kind of person that stands up for herself and doesn’t let everyone walk all over her.

I hear him rummaging around in the back of the car. He’s laying a blanket across the backseat, arranging pillows. I swallow back the fullness in my throat and stifle a hiccup. I won’t feel sorry for myself. I won’t. Will’s put all this effort into getting me out of that town, out of my dad’s house, and he’s so patient with me. Always, I see the way he loves me.

He sticks with me. Has from the very beginning. Before this, before he asked me to leave with him, I wasn’t sure how long Will would be in my life. With the school year ending in a few months, I’d assumed he’d leave as soon as he could, just like everyone who didn’t have the burden of family or poverty tying them down to North Dakota. I’d figured my time with him was nothing more than a sweet intermission in a life orchestrated by the never-ending cacophony of tinkling chimes and thumping bass notes.

“Come here.” He beckons toward me and I lock the doors and climb into the backseat with him. He holds me so gently and completely that I risk crying again. His smell and his warmth comfort me the way home is supposed to. His symphony soothes me.

“You know all the stuff I know about my mom. So tell me about yours,” he whispers.

I think for half a second it’s his way of avoiding talking about the bag of money sitting in the front seat. But that’s not the way Will works. I close my eyes.

The car is quiet for a long time after he speaks, as I compile what I’d like to say about her and what I’d like to forget, the anger and hate and love and pain that surround her memory filling my body. Will’s arms steady me.

“She died.”

He doesn’t respond to that, just waits.

“I was six. She fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”

I press my cheek against the window, pretend it’s the hard of a polished wood floor.

“She had full lips. I can’t remember if they were just like that or if it was because they were swollen all the time. I don’t have her lips. I have my dad’s, and it scares me to look in the mirror sometimes. I can twist my mouth the same way he does. But I can’t ever make my eyes look like his. There’s something missing in mine that he has.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

His words startle me out of my memory. I find his hand, entwine my fingers with his.

“I love her so much, Will.” I splay my other hand next to my cheek on the window and dream that my fingers melt through the glass, break through it like it’s liquid diamonds, and reach to the sky. If I could just touch one of those dusky stars, I could touch my mom and bring her back to me, to a place she’d be safe. We would leave like we were always meant to.

I was always meant to leave. I never thought it would take so long.

I try to grasp at the sobs before they escape me, but I might as well touch the moon.

“I love her, and I hate her. I hate her so much.” I’m dying to press everything through the window. I’m so trapped here, in this car, in this life, in my hatred. I need to get out and bury myself in the ground and rise again, another girl in a new body.

“I miss her. I needed her, all the time. How could she leave me when she knew how much I would need her? Didn’t she know what it would do to me? How I would love her and hate her, too, and hate me and him and be so filled with hate that I can’t even cry it out? I hate everything!”

I gasp, sandy air lodging in my throat.

Just a little more. Just a little push more and I can slide through and fall to the trembling desert floor and sink in. This body is sand, dug in and stepped on. I belong there. I scream, scream, scream, and the scream feels angry and good. I pound my palm against the window and choke on tears.

“How come we didn’t leave? She was a mother. She was supposed to take care of me. But she didn’t. She didn’t every time she let him get away with it. Why didn’t she leave, Will? Why can’t I stop hating her?”

“Love and hate are practically the same thing.”

“Is that what you believe? Like what you feel about me is close to hate? I don’t hate you. Not even close.” I turn away from the window to face him.

“I hate that my mom abandoned me.”

He pulls my hand away from the window and holds it in silence because there are no answers. Only motions. I close my eyes against his shoulder and stop worrying about my tears soaking into his shirt. Will can hold them. He can hold them and be better for it.

But I will never be more than what I am. My dad made me what I am: a weakling, pushed around by the smallest breeze, like chimes. But she did, too. And no mom should do that to her daughter. Girls should be strong together. Strong like steel, merry like the tinkling of chimes dancing in the wind.

“I’M GOING TO WASH UP A LITTLE.” SHE COVERS HER yawn with her hand and gives me a smile. It ain’t as real at the eyes as it used to be, and she’s got circles there that remind me of things we left North Dakota to forget, but I push that away ’cause she don’t need me being pissed right now.

“Okay. I’ll be at the counter.”

We tried to sleep, wrapped together, for hours. Actual sleep didn’t happen much. She talked a lot. And tossed a lot. But I stroked her hair until she fell back into her dreams. Or her nightmares. I fill with rage, wondering if I’ll ever feel okay about letting her dad live after all. What would’ve been the best thing for her? She told me not to kill him. Begged, really. But anyone who hurts my Zoe deserves hell quick as I can serve it up.

I stand in the doorway for a minute, watching her walk down the side hallway to the restrooms. I run my hand through my hair, check out her figure in her jeans and shirt. My hands fit just right in the curve above her hips. I wanna chase her down and touch her now. Tell her again that everything’s gonna be okay, but instead I head to the counter and slide onto a stool. We’ll get through this. We’re tired. It’s time to get to Vegas.

“Morning, stranger. Coffee?”

The waitress is one of them chipper people who likes mornings. I rub my hand over my face and nod. She flips a mug over and pours, then passes me a bowl of creamers. I ignore the bowl and take a drink, loving the way the liquid burns hot and bitter in my throat.

There’s a couple of old-timers at the counter. Regulars, I guess, ’cause the waitress chats with them for a minute before coming back and sliding me a menu. In a corner above the counter, a flat-screen TV plays the morning news. It don’t fit, that TV, shiny and black against a backdrop of wooden paneling and old people in plaid shirts with rolled-up sleeves.

I shake my head and wonder if there’s anyone else in the women’s bathroom. I wanna lock Zoe in there with me and hold her until she forgets anyone ever meant her harm at all.

The oldies down the counter laugh at something the waitress says. I open the menu and close it again. Places like this got pancakes and eggs and bacon, maybe good biscuits and gravy. Ask for anything else and you’re gonna get a look from the waitress that says you’re in the wrong place, kid.

The weather report’s over and the newscasters are getting into the local news now. I fiddle with the edge of the menu and look toward the bathrooms again. I wanna see her when she walks out. I wanna make her know I’m waiting here, just for her. I wanna watch her walking toward me and smile at her so she smiles back. For real, this time. But she ain’t coming yet.

The oldies are shaking their heads at their plates now. I look at the TV screen and freeze. That face—the one in the rectangle above the news guy’s talking head. I know that face. That’s the face of the man that grabbed Zoe last night.

My first instinct is to ask the waitress to turn it up. To ask the oldies what happened. But it’s typed out across the screen and I think I’m gonna be sick.

The waitress stands in front of me with a pad of paper.