Save Yourself (31 page)

He stepped back. Her face fell. “Wait here,” he said. “Just wait.”

Downstairs, the television was tuned to Comedy Central—some stand-up comedian in front of a brick wall—and the laughter from the studio audience made the room seem even grimmer than it already was. Caro sat on the couch in her work clothes, legs crossed, looking pissed. The cooler was closed and presumably empty; Mike sat in the armchair next to it. He seemed somehow incomplete. It took Patrick a moment to figure out: no beer. Mike wasn’t drinking.

“Hey,” he said. Layla upstairs, Mike and Caro down here, the horse-faced girl back at the bar—he didn’t know what else to say.

“Do you smell hand lotion?” the comic said. It was a punch line. Only the TV people laughed.

“Hey,” Mike said. “Do I seem drunk to you?”

Patrick glanced at Caro, who stared at the TV screen with nothing on her face. All her doors and windows were closed. “I don’t know. I just got here.”

“Caro thinks I was too drunk to drive.” Mike’s tone was contemptuous, but Patrick remembered the beers Mike had slammed at Jack’s, and who knew what else while he was with the horse-faced girl. All in less than two hours. Yeah, Mike probably had been too drunk to drive. And he’d picked up Caro, driven her home. “Don’t know, wasn’t there,” Patrick said, although the words stuck in his throat. He had to get Layla out of the house in a way that would not encourage her to destroy his life. He had been hoping, somehow, that Caro would be able to help him with that, since she clearly had more experience than he did with messed-up teenaged girls, but looking at her face he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

“If I was too drunk to drive, Patrick would notice,” Mike said. “Nobody’s a bigger pussy about drunk driving than my little brother.”

Booted feet tromped down the stairs and Patrick’s heart fell through the floor. When Layla entered the room she was pulling at her shirt as if she’d just put it back on and all of his sympathy for her, every misplaced shred, vanished into a thick cloud of rage. “That was fun,
honey
, but I have to—Oh, hello!” she said, exactly like she hadn’t known full well that Mike and Caro were there.

Mike stared at her. “Hey. You must be Patrick’s girlfriend.” Caro’s coat lay on the end of the couch. He leaned over, grabbed it, and threw it on the floor. “Don’t run off. Stay. Hang out.”

“She has to go,” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

“I have a few minutes.” Entirely too pleased with herself, Layla sat down not two feet away from Caro. Whose face was a black hole, who wouldn’t look at him.

Mike seemed oblivious. “Want a beer?”

“Absolutely,” Layla said.

“Absolutely not,” Caro said.

Layla gave her a quick, desultory glance. “Don’t be a bitch, Caro,” Mike said.

“Not being a bitch. Just trying to keep the number of felonies we commit tonight to a minimum.”

“I’m sorry,” Layla said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Layla. You must be Mike and—” She turned to Caro, her expression sweet. “Carrie, was it?”

“Charmed,” Caro said. “You still can’t have a beer.”

“Jesus, since when are you such a prude?” Mike glanced at Patrick. “You going to sit down or stand there like an asshole?”

“I’m going to stand here like an asshole,” Patrick said.

Layla laughed. “Why does your brother want so desperately for me to go, do you think?”

Mike grinned at her in his amiable Mike way. “I have no idea.”

“Maybe he’s afraid you’ll get grounded if he keeps you out past curfew,” Caro said.

“He’s definitely afraid that
somebody
is going to get in trouble,” Layla said, and that was it, Patrick was going to get her out of his house if he had to drag her by her intestines. She must have read his intentions, because she sighed and stood up. “But I suppose he and Carrie are right. We’ve probably had all the fun we can legally have in one night.” Standing up, she blew Patrick a kiss, and left.

Patrick was so angry he couldn’t move.

“No wonder you wanted to race right home,” Mike said.

“I didn’t know she was here,” Patrick said. “She broke in while we were at Jack’s.”

Mike laughed. “Yeah. Sure she did, you goddamned liar. Not that I blame you. She’s hot even if she is jailbait.”

Outside, Patrick heard Layla’s car rev up, the pounding heartbeat of her music, thought again of the bloody wreckage of her ribs and wanted to rip himself in half, set himself on fire. And then do the same to her.

Caro abruptly stood up and walked into the kitchen. Mike said,
“Ignore her, she’s been a bitch all night,” and Patrick made some vague noise that he hoped could be interpreted as supportive, or whatever it was that Mike wanted him to be. He could hear the clash of dishes in the kitchen, the slamming of cabinet doors. The neighbor’s dog was barking and the comic on the television screen pranced around the stage, body contorted, arms bent and elbows pointed to the ceiling. Patrick waited for what he hoped was an appropriate period of time, staring at the screen but not really seeing it, and then said in what he hoped was an appropriately casual voice, “We got anything to eat?” and went into the kitchen.

She was standing at the stove, staring down into a frying pan where a cracked egg congealed in a slick of butter. Two slices of bread, an unwrapped slice of American cheese, and a jar of apricot jam sat on the counter next to her. Caro ate apricot jam on almost everything. The egg frying in the pan might as well have been cooking under the heat of her scowl.

Patrick heard nothing but commercial jingles from the living room. He came up behind her—choosing the side farthest away from the spatula she gripped in one hand like a weapon—and put a hand on her other shoulder, so his arm was almost around her.

“That girl is trouble, Patrick.” She didn’t look at him. Her voice was acrid.

He pressed his face into her hair—shampoo, hot butter, a vague oceany smell that was probably lobster—just in case she was about to tell him to go to hell and he never had the chance again. “I didn’t ask her to come here.”

“I hope not.” She tried to flip the egg over with the spatula. It refused to flip, folding on top of itself like a greasy half-moon. “Goddamn it. I suck at frying eggs. It repulses me that you slept with her.”

“Nothing happened tonight, if that’s why you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“You’re mad at something.”

“I’m mad at everything.”

“Caro,” he said, “how much longer can we do this?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Her chin sank and her shoulders crept up toward her ears. She picked up the pan and dropped it to another burner with a clatter. Yellow yolk promptly oozed out around the hardening white.

“I ruined my egg,” she said.

Her voice was thick. Gently, Patrick took the spatula out of her hand. “Go sit down. I’ll make you another one.”

Tears spilled over Caro’s eyelids. Patrick wanted nothing more than to wipe them away, but she dashed at them with her fists and took the spatula back. “Never mind. You’ll be late for work. Just go.”

So he went upstairs, put on his candy-striped shirt, came back down. Where Mike was moving the cushions off the couch. “I have a feeling I’m sleeping down here tonight. You want a ride?”

Patrick stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

Mike tossed a pillow down with extra force. “I’m telling you, dude, I’m sober, no matter what she says. Come on. Get in the damn truck.”

Patrick didn’t have it in him to argue, not that night. Once they were in the truck, Mike bent over the steering wheel for a moment with his hands covering his eyes. When he sat up, Patrick realized, incredulously, that Mike was crying. “Why did you let me go after that girl tonight?” he said. “What the hell is wrong with me? I love her, man. I love her so much. Everything’s such shit.” Wiping his eyes, he ground the truck into gear, and turned around to back out of the driveway.

The next seven minutes were among the longest of Patrick’s life. All too soon—by the time they’d reached the end of Division Street, in fact—it became abundantly, harrowingly clear that Mike was hammered. Patrick tried to remember, as he clutched the door, if he’d ever been in a car driven by somebody so drunk when he wasn’t at least as drunk himself. He didn’t think so. Mike drove too fast, missed corners, bounced over curbs. Stopped for stop signs halfway
through intersections or not at all. When they reached the two-lane highway Patrick was transfixed by the way the center line drifted beneath the truck’s tires. The thing was jacked up so high his perspective was skewed, he couldn’t tell how bad it really was. And all the while, Mike talked—
I don’t know, man, she’s been through some messed-up shit, she won’t talk about it, maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to get married, we can just live together for all I care but she’s been so goddamned weird lately
—and Patrick tried to figure out how he’d gotten here, in this truck on this night. How he could have avoided it. How many things had gone wrong.

When they finally got to Zoney’s, Mike let the truck roll to a stop, coming dangerously close to the gas pumps. Patrick opened the door and the air outside hit him like a song. Before he could get out, Mike said, “Dude, she trusts you. She talks to you, right? If there were somebody—if she were fucking around—you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure.” Patrick was half in and half out of the truck, his foot dangling uncomfortably in midair. “I got to get to work.”

“Because I didn’t think Caro was like that.”

“No, of course not.”

Mike rubbed his eyes. “Why’d you let me go after that slut at the bar, man? Why didn’t you stop me?” His voice was sad, pleading, with a hint of whine. This was just like talking to the old man, and Patrick reacted the same way he always had.

“Sorry. I should have,” he said, automatically; dismayed by how quickly he fell back into the old, placating patterns, and chilled by how comfortable and familiar those patterns felt.

“Without her, I got nothing.” Then, as an afterthought, “And you. Just her and you and that’s it. I love you, little brother.”

Patrick managed a laugh. “You’re drunk as shit. You want me to call somebody? I could get you a cab, call Caro to come get you.”

But of course Mike didn’t want a cab and Caro’s car was dead, so Patrick watched him drive away, wondering who he’d kill on his way
home and knowing that this time, without a doubt, it would be his fault. Mike was dangerous, and Patrick had let him go.

The no-time of Zoney’s was a relief.

By the time his shift was done, he was wiped out. When Bill showed up to take over he asked Patrick if he wanted to go smoke a joint, but Patrick didn’t need chemicals to feel out of his head. He stumbled home in the glaring faraway world to a silent house. The tangled blankets on the couch and the nearby litter of beer cans told Patrick that Mike had, indeed, slept there the night before. Patrick tapped on Caro’s bedroom door but there was no answer. When he opened it a crack he saw the slash of her hair across her pillow and decided to let her sleep. He told himself he was being considerate, but actually, it was just easier.

Downstairs, he let himself fall into the beery mess of blankets on the couch so that he’d wake up when she left for work. They would talk. They would figure something out. But when he woke up, it was almost six. He’d slept for ten hours, and the bedroom was empty. Patrick showered and got dressed in silence. The house had changed. All of their stuff was there, but it already felt abandoned.

He wished Caro had woken him up before she left. He wished he’d woken her up that morning, that he hadn’t been too cowardly and tired to deal with whatever fallout remained from Layla’s little performance the night before, from Mike’s adventures with the horse-faced girl, from the broken egg. The thought of her hair on the pillowcase stung him and if he could have kicked his own ass he would have.

He couldn’t do this much longer. He couldn’t do any of it.

Mike came in with a greasy bag that smelled like hot wings. “Dig
in,” he said, dropping it on the coffee table. “I had the worst goddamned hangover of my life this morning. I think I was still drunk when I got to work.”

Patrick didn’t feel like eating. “Hey, what ended up happening with that girl last night?” he asked, instead. It seemed important, somehow, to know if Mike had cheated on Caro.

“Nothing.” Mike ripped open the bag. “The real question is, what happened with
your
girl last night? Did she really break into the house?”

“Yeah. And she’s not my girl.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“Actually, it’s kind of creepy.”

“You got no sense of adventure.” Mike ripped a wing in two, stuck half of it into his mouth, and sucked at the meat. Then he took the bone out of his mouth and dropped it back in the bag. “Listen, man, when we get kicked out of here, how do you feel about finding your own place?”

Mike’s tone was casual, but from the way he looked at Patrick out of the corner of his eye, Patrick could tell that this conversation was one Mike had been thinking about. “Sure.”

“Cool. It’s just, I think maybe Caro and I should get our own place. I think things might work a little better if it was just the two of us.”

For a dreadful instant Patrick was afraid he would laugh.

They ate the wings and watched some television and it was just like a thousand other times when one or the other of them had been surly about some girl. Mike didn’t mention Caro and Patrick didn’t mention Layla. It lulled Patrick into a bleak, familiar stupor, and even as he hated it, the stupor was hard to shake off.

At eight, somebody knocked on the door. Patrick knew immediately that the man standing on the porch was Layla’s father. The resemblance was strong: Layla’s chin, the shape of her face, her round
cheekbones. His clothes and the car parked at the curb both looked expensive, but his face was haggard. He was younger than it seemed like he should be. In one hand, he held a sheaf of papers.

“I’m Jeff Elshere,” he said. “I’m looking for Layla.”

They could sit and drink beer all they wanted; outside, the world continued to spin. Behind him, Patrick heard quick footsteps as Mike made himself scarce. “She’s not here,” Patrick said.