Save Yourself (26 page)

Patrick wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and his hand on the thigh of his jeans. He stayed where he was, crouched down with his head hanging between his knees; staring at the black ground in front of him, listening to the wind in the trees. The sky had been cement-colored and pregnant with rain all day and if he looked up, he knew he would see nothing. No stars, no moon. There was nothing to see.

He shouldn’t have had sex with her. He shouldn’t have had anything to do with her. She was as broken as a doll with the string
pulled out of its back. He’d known it all along and he’d been stupid to ignore it.

But after a long time—or maybe it wasn’t so long—his legs began to cramp and he became aware that he was crouched over a pool of his own vomit. He could smell it, the bile and the beer, and bent over like this he could smell the sex he’d had with Layla, too, the peppery smell of the last time he’d touched her. His fingers had a sticky-powdery feeling from the dried residue of her blood. His hair was too long, it fell in his face, it tickled. Whoever he was, whatever he’d done, he was still here. The world wasn’t going to fade to black and his legs hurt and there was nothing to do but stand up. So he stood up.

It took him forty minutes to walk to a place he recognized. Halfway there, the sky started to spit hard needles of rain down at him. Soon he was shivering, his toes numb inside his soaked sneakers, and it occurred to him that this was the first time it had rained since he’d stopped driving. Eventually he came to a closed Citgo station, where the twenty-four-hour pumps blazed under white lights and drops of water jeweled the plate-glass windows. Taking refuge under the narrow concrete overhang outside the garage bays, he pulled out his phone.

To his credit, he did try both Bill and Mike before he called Caro. Her Civic pulled into the parking lot a half an hour later. When she leaned over to unlock the door for him he saw through the rainspotted window that she was wearing her pajama pants, black flannel with red skulls on them. Once he’d thought they were hilarious. Now they made him think of Layla and he wished she’d worn other clothes.

“Get in before my car dies.” She sounded annoyed. “You are making me miss the most amazing show about sharks.”

“Sorry. Can you turn the heat on?”

She turned it all the way up. “Are you drunk?”

“I don’t think so.” He unlaced his shoes and took off his sodden socks. “I slammed a beer earlier, but I threw it up.”

“That explains the smell,” she said, aiming the vents toward the floor.

“Yeah. Sorry about that, too.”

Then there was silence. Road-silence, the steady hum of tire on road. Caro’s stereo was broken, it had been broken as long as he’d known her. He felt like he had to talk, to empty his brain the way he’d emptied his stomach back in the woods. “Tonight—”

“Did you know that a great white shark can smell a dead great white shark from miles and miles away? They did this experiment, where they distilled dead shark into, like, dead shark extract, and one tiny little drop—”

“Caro.”

“One tiny little drop, and all the great whites for miles just vanish. It’s the world’s best shark repellent.”

“Caro.”

“Can you imagine that being your job, dead shark distiller? Can you imagine what you’d say at your high school reunion?”

He lost patience. “Caro, will you listen to me?”

“No.” Her voice was higher than usual. “I will not listen to you because you’re going to tell me that you had sex with that girl, that
child
, and I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to think that about you, that you’d do something like that.”

“I had sex with you, didn’t I?”

“Oh, god, please shut up.” She sounded desperate, almost moaning.

He ignored her. “You’re my brother’s girlfriend and I slept with you without even thinking twice about it. Would it be a worse thing to do than that? I called the cops on my own goddamned father. We didn’t even call a lawyer first. Would it be a worse thing to do than that?” He discovered that he was angry. “She kept coming at me and
coming at me and coming at me and maybe there’s a guy out there who’d keep saying no, but what the hell makes you think that guy is going to be me?”

“Because you’re good!” She pounded the heels of her hands against the steering wheel in frustration. “Because you’re the only person I know who thinks about things before he does them! Because you’re too smart and too decent to have sex with that child and then come to me with this bullshit about how much she wanted it when you and I both know that she doesn’t even know what she wants, that what she wants is a date to the goddamned prom and somebody to be nice to her—and you—
asshole
!”

She punched him, driving her closed fist deep into his thigh. Her other hand stayed on the wheel. The car never even swerved. His leg seized and cramped and he grabbed it but didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything. It hadn’t been playful. She’d meant it to hurt, and it had. The pain was brutal and he couldn’t argue that he hadn’t deserved it.

For a few minutes there was no sound but the road-silence.

Finally she let out a long sigh. “Oh, Patrick.” She shook her head. “Why couldn’t you just leave her alone?”

“I know you don’t believe me, but it really was the other way around.” He rubbed his leg. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve been way too miserable about you to chase anybody.”

Sounding fairly miserable herself, she said, “This is my fault. If I hadn’t—”

Patrick’s anger rose again. “How is it your fault? Were you there tonight? Did you crawl inside me and make me have sex with her?” After the accident, he’d never told Mike about the garage, about the baby tooth. He’d never told anyone, because the words were too horrible to say. Now he wanted to tell Caro about Layla, about the cuts on her ribs and the way she’d made him touch them but he couldn’t do that, either, couldn’t tell her how the ridged flesh had been swollen and hot under his fingers.

“If I hadn’t come into your room that night,” she said, “you wouldn’t be so pissed off about everything and you never would have got involved with her. I messed everything up. Things were good before that.”

“Things were not good before that. Things have not been good for a long goddamned time.” As if a key had turned, everything unlocked, his tongue and his brain and everything, and he found himself saying, “She lets her boyfriend cut her. Drink her blood, and—other stuff—Jesus, I knew she was crazy but I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t—”

The words tumbled out of his mouth like broken teeth. Caro pulled the car over and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “This is bad, Patrick. You could go to jail. I don’t know what the age of consent is in this state.”

“You think I’m a scumbag?” Patrick said, quietly.

Caro dropped her hands. She stared out the front window. “Yes. No. I think—” She paused. “I think you’re like me.”

“I love you,” he said.

“You can’t possibly.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s nothing to love,” she said, and pulled back onto the highway.

They didn’t talk again the rest of the way home. When they got there, Patrick took a long, scalding shower, and scrubbed his entire body twice. Then, leaving the water running, he got out and crossed dripping to the cabinet under the sink, where he found the stuff that Mike used to clean his hands when he’d been working on the truck. He used the whole bottle. It smelled like turpentine and cologne and as he scrubbed he could feel it stripping the moisture from his skin.

Back in the living room, Caro was sitting on the couch, one leg drawn up to her chest and the other tucked beneath her. The television was on and he heard splashing and shouts and ominous music; the light cast on her face by the screen was flickering and beautiful,
but her expression was distant and sad. He didn’t know what to say to her but he wanted to say something.

“We’re losing the house,” he finally said, and then felt like a jerk, because that was a lousy thing to drop on her, on top of everything else.

But she surprised him. “I know. Mike got a letter. Your brother has a profound talent for ignoring things he doesn’t want to deal with.” Caro turned the television off and placed the remote control carefully on the cushion next to her. Then she looked up at Patrick. “What you asked me the other day. In the backyard.” Her voice was steady. “Ask me again.”

A wave rippled its way up his back and across his arms. A long moment passed before he said, “I’m not sure I should.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “I’m not sure you should either.”

Mike worked in the morning, Patrick knew that. He could hear his brother snoring from here, the sound faint enough in the living room but surely deafening upstairs. Mike only snored like that when he was drunk. Caro waited on the couch in her flannel pajamas, watching him. He wanted her. Not just somebody, not just a cessation of loneliness, but her, specifically. Caro: funny, fucked-up Caro, who hid her hands in her sleeves, who knew things about sharks. Who had come into his room that night, so brave and stupid, and torn what was left of his life right down the middle.

“No,” he said. And then, trying to explain—“I can’t keep screwing up, Caro. I have to be—better.”

She put her hands to her face. He remembered standing in this exact spot, telling his brother and his father that he’d just called the police. Mike had said,
Why, Pat? Why would you do that?
in a voice turned querulous with disbelief and injury, but the old man had only put his head in his hands, just like Caro was doing right now. And he’d felt like the worst person in the world but he hadn’t felt like this. He hadn’t felt—

Wrong.

He was crouched in front of her in two steps, pulling her hands away and sinking his own into her hair and kissing her. She was like water pouring over him, like ocean water, deep and teeming. He had to quit screwing up. He had to be better than he was. For the dampness on her cheeks and the clutch of her hands on his chest and the fierceness that he felt catch fire inside him, for all the long days that stretched before them.

Eventually, he did ask her to come upstairs with him, but by then, he already knew the answer.

She had to sleep in her own bed because she had to be there when Mike woke up, but after he was gone she came back to Patrick. And he didn’t care at all that she’d just come from his brother, that she smelled a little like him and the sweat on her body was part his. In fact, he cared so little that he sort of marveled at it—but not for long, because Caro was with him, and he had other things to think about, other things to do. There was this scene that happened in your lousier horror movie, when in the middle of closing the gate to hell or fleeing from the demon parakeet or whatever, the two protagonists stopped to have sex. Whenever he saw a scene like that Patrick always groaned and thought, Who stops to screw at a time like that? But that morning, when Mike could get sent home at any time and Layla could be sitting at the police station right that minute filing a report with her parents and somewhere in some legal office their house was undeniably, inexorably being taken away from them—somehow, all of that seemed to stop existing entirely. The sun streamed through his window, glorious and warm; the eggs he fried for their breakfast flipped over perfectly, and although his eyes were sandy from lack of sleep he wasn’t tired at all.

Later, he stood shirtless at the refrigerator, staring at the empty shelves and seeing only a lone piece of leftover mushroom pizza he
hadn’t liked the first time around. The refrigerated air was cool on his bare chest. Caro came up behind him and leaned against him with the whole length of her body; her head on his shoulder, the smell of her sweet and hot, outdoorsy, because she’d been sitting outside in the sun and she’d carried the air and light and warmth in with her. He turned, wrapped his arms around her, and told her she was very, very beautiful—which she was—and she pushed him away and asked him if he had any idea how many times she’d heard that, how much she hated it. He laughed but she said, “I’m serious, I don’t want to hear that shit, not from you,” and he saw her face and the way her chest was rising and falling too fast and the pink cast to the skin on her nose. He stopped laughing immediately but it was too late, the spell was broken. She apologized but it was too late for that, too, and anyway, it wasn’t her fault. In life there were problems and in humans there were scars and the world was what it was, and you couldn’t lie around screwing your brother’s girlfriend in a warm patch of sunshine all day, even if it felt good, even if you were in love.

You could, however—Patrick discovered—spend an entire night shift at a convenience store reliving that patch of sunshine. Over and over again, even as the rain drummed on the asphalt outside.

By Sunday morning, Patrick’s exhaustion finally caught up with him. He walked home from work in the rain and went straight to sleep. When he woke up, the air downstairs felt moist and cool. The rain was still coming down and Mike had the back door open. He was sitting on the threshold with a beer can in his hand. The dog next door was barking, the sound sharp as hammer blows.

He gave Patrick a forced, wry smile. “You want to go out to the mall with me today? Return an engagement ring?” He shook his head. “If that isn’t the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Sorry.” Patrick was a little surprised to find that he felt no joy when he spoke the word, that some part of him was, in fact, sorry. Caro hadn’t mentioned the proposal at all. “When did you ask her?”

“Friday night, while she was at work. Got down on one knee and
everything. Wore a tie. You should have seen me. I looked like a goddamned idiot.”

“What did she say?”

“She said no, you stupid shit.”

“Besides that.”

For a moment Mike said nothing, just sucked on his beer and stared at his feet. Then he said, “Just that she wasn’t ready to get married, she didn’t think she was the marrying type, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.” Mike scratched his face. “Me, I think she’s screwing somebody else.”

Patrick’s insides turned to liquid. Mike knew. They’d messed up, Mike had figured it out. Then he realized that if Mike knew, they would not be sitting here calmly discussing it. “What makes you think that?”