Save Yourself (34 page)

The door swung wide and she heard a damp glassy clank as he put the beer bottle he was carrying down on the nightstand. Beer in bottles: Mike was breaking out the good stuff. A vague sense of dread bloomed in Caro. She felt the bed shift as he curled his body around hers, slipped his arm around her waist. His breath smelled like alcohol. “I heard you come in. Why’d you use the back door?”

“I thought you might be asleep.”

“No, I was waiting for you.” His unshaven cheek felt scratchy and unwholesome on her neck. “You missed a hell of a night around here.”

Caro’s eyes flew open and she rolled backward, looking up at him. Her chest was fluttering, nervous. “Why? What happened?”

“That chick Patrick’s seeing, that high school girl?” Mike pulled a piece of her hair out of her face and smoothed it back. “Her dad showed up looking for her. Had some GPS thing proving she’d been here, you believe that?” Mike’s words were crisp enough, but the look on his face was almost merry. She couldn’t tell how drunk he was. “He actually came right out and asked if Patrick had slept with her. Right there in the living room.”

The fluttering intensified. “What did he say?”

Mike laughed. “Nothing. Patrick’s too much of a pussy for jail and he knows it.” Shrugging, he added, “The guy said he wouldn’t
press charges, but Patrick still kept his mouth shut. For once in his life.”

Caro’s chest felt tight because she hadn’t been breathing and now she made herself inhale. “Well. That’s good.”

When she’d rolled toward him, Mike had thrown an arm over her. He’d been massaging her hip gently through her skirt as he talked and she’d barely noticed, because she’d been thinking about Patrick. Now he started playing with the lower buttons on her blouse. “So, where are we going this weekend?”

“I don’t know. I might have to work.”

“Ask for the night off. You never take off. That guy owes you.” His fingers moved up her chest, toying with a button and then the one above it, until they were between her breasts. “Starting over, remember? We’ll go out, have fun. Next week we’ll start looking for our own place, maybe, like you said that night at Jack’s.”

Jack’s. She’d been so panicked about the house that day, the world had felt like it was falling away under her feet. There had only been one Great Apocalyptic Mistake, not a dozen of them. She remembered thinking about turkey dinners and lawn sprinklers, cherry sourball drawer pulls with matching dish towels.

Mike was still talking. “Patrick said he’s cool with getting his own place.”

I want to stay right here
, he’d said to her, the morning after she picked him up at that Citgo.
I don’t ever want to move
. He hadn’t meant the house. “He did?”

“Well, I kind of told him he had to.”

She stared at him. “I thought you said you didn’t want to do that.”

“I’d do it for you,” he said. “I’d do anything for you. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met and you just drive me crazy. Even right now.” Mike’s fingers pressed and the button beneath them popped open. When she looked down she could see the tiny bow at the center of her bra, the lace at the edges of the cups. He rolled on
top of her. Caro was frozen, she didn’t know what to do. His mouth was on hers, his tongue pushing its way behind her lips, his knees angling and nudging to part her legs. She tried to find that gentle place of resistance that would communicate
not now
instead of
stop
, but he was too drunk to pick up on it. The hem of her skirt rose to the tops of her thighs as her legs spread apart, and then his erection pressed against her through his jeans, hard enough to hurt. She felt not aroused but sick. Her bare legs felt exposed; the hot fog of his mouth on hers was suffocating. She tried to turn away. His mouth chased her.

All of this took seconds.

If she gave him her body, things would snap back into place between them like a dislocated shoulder going back into joint. Sore, but functional. It would take five minutes but the thought—the thought that she was having the thought—made her teeth and fists and toes clench. When she was twelve, she had let Brent take her clothes off not once but multiple times, because in her television-fueled vision of the way the world worked, you had sex, and you fell in love, and you got married, and somebody took care of you, and you were safe. Lies. Lies. She wasn’t safe. She had never been safe.

Suddenly furious, she bucked and pushed and he fell off her with a surprised grunt. She yanked her skirt down and moved away. “No,” she said, and discovered that her voice was shaking with rage.

Mike looked confused. “Why not? We’re getting our own place. I thought things were okay.” When she looked at his face, she saw the same Mike he’d always been. His face was a boy’s face, a yearbook face, the kind of face that seemed made to pose with sporting equipment: kneeling with a football, baseball bat poised and ready, holding a big dead fish on a string or a limp-necked deer with foggy eyes. He loved sports. Sports were clear and defined. They had rules. You scored points. You won.

“Because I don’t want to,” she said.

He made an exasperated noise. “That’s a bullshit reason.”

Which wasn’t what he meant, exactly, and she knew that, but all the same anger burst from her like vomit and her hand darted out and slapped his arm so hard her palm stung. He snatched at her wrist and twisted her arm over and now they were fighting, actually fighting. He was stronger than she was. He held her to the bed, steel grips on both arms as she twisted under him. Her head full of radio static, rage and frustration grown inarticulate with the passage of years; spitting words—not even words, half words, guttural animal noises—up at him. Her own hair was in her eyes and her mouth and nothing she did made any difference, he was just there, solid as a building above her. It was like attacking the ceiling, doing battle with a brick wall. Her anger turned to panic and she fought harder, she had never fought like this, not once: thrashing her legs at the mattress, making the headboard slam against the wall.

Mike pinned her arms against her body and lifted her off the bed. “You’re—not—making—any—sense!” he shouted, right into her face, slamming her down against the bed with each word—it didn’t hurt but the impacts made her dizzy, the world lashing sickeningly over his shoulder. One final slam and he was back on top of her, his legs between hers, and she gasped and the hair in her mouth went down her throat and she started to choke. Air. She couldn’t get air.

Above her, she saw dim alarm dawn on his face. “Jesus.” He pushed himself up on his arms so her own arms could move. His legs still held hers apart but her hands could claw the hair out of her throat and she could draw in deep gasping breaths. “Jesus.” He was helping her, pulling strands of hair gently out of her face. “Are you okay? Caro? Honey?”

She couldn’t talk.

“Are you okay? Jesus, did I hurt you? Can you breathe?”

She nodded and was in fact filling her lungs with air again and again while he hovered above her, his eyes watching her anxiously. He
pushed her hair back again, running his hand over her skull. “Jesus,” he said again, and then dropped his head to rest on her breastbone. As if he was the one who needed shelter.

“Get off me,” she said, when she could talk.

His head lifted and he looked at her. “This has gone all wrong.”

“Get off.”

But he didn’t move. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry. I just— Say you’re not mad. Say it’s okay, okay?”

And still, that desperate part of her whispered that if she did it, if she told him it was okay—just this one time—but when she looked at him she saw the bartender from the burger bar, she saw Brent the landlord; she saw herself, eyes as dead as Margot’s, every time she’d ever given it up out of desperation or hope. Not just sex. More than sex. Every backseat, every blanket, every meal she’d cooked, every toilet she’d cleaned. Every time her ass had been pinched and she’d said nothing, every lobster she’d heard dying in a pot of boiling water. I’ll bring the cock, you bring the tail. All she had ever wanted was a world she could count on and every time she thought she had it somebody took it away from her, somebody kicked her out or traded her in or walked away without a word. She never learned. Nothing ever changed. That sad sick little part of her was urging her to stay, to try to fix it. Say,
oh, honey, it’s okay
, and then he would get up and she could leave and she would never have to do it again.

But the rest of her knew that wasn’t true. She would always have to do it again.

“Tell me who it is,” he said. “Tell me who you’ve been with. I’ve been trying to figure it out but I can’t. If it’s not Gary—or someone from the bar—”

And then the hand she’d been allowing to drift toward the nightstand wrapped around his beer bottle and she brought it down on the side of his skull.

The beer inside sprayed over the bed in an arc. He yelped and fell to the other side. Grabbing at his head, rolling back and forth. She’d
intended to hit him with all her might but at the last minute she’d held back. The bottle hadn’t even broken.

“Jesus!” His voice was thick with pain. “Jesus, what did you do that for?”

“I told you to get off me and you didn’t listen,” she said. “You never listen. Nobody ever listens.”

He stared at her, drops of beer sparkling in his hair. “Are you fucking crazy?”

But Caro was already up, already running. Her car was dead in the municipal lot downtown but Patrick’s keys were on the end table where she’d left them, there was a pair of sandals by the door, her coat, her purse. Dimly she was aware of Mike behind her, stumbling a little—from booze or the blow from the bottle, she didn’t know—and leaning against the wall. He kept saying her name, over and over. “Caro. Wait, please—baby—” but it was like she was hearing Margot talk to her imaginary wall-gnomes, like he was talking to somebody who wasn’t there.

THIRTEEN

Dad was out late into the night looking for Layla. The house phone rang again and again; again and again Mother ran to the computer, double-checking the report they’d downloaded from Layla’s GPS unit. Looking up addresses, finding phone numbers. They didn’t know that Verna had warned Layla about the wilderness camp. They thought she wasn’t coming home because she was afraid of being punished for what she’d done to Toby. After Dad found her car abandoned in the high school parking lot, her phone in the console, he came home. It was almost one o’clock in the morning but he came into Verna’s room, woke her, and asked if she knew where Layla was. Verna answered, honestly, that she didn’t.

“Verna.” Gray hollows nestled under Dad’s eyes and spilled coffee spotted the front of his shirt. He sat on the edge of Verna’s bed; Mother stood in the doorway. “I know about Toby. I know everything. You can’t help Layla by keeping her secrets anymore.”

But it was not just Layla’s secrets that Verna was keeping. She told him nothing. He asked her if she was sexually active and Verna shook her head mutely, feeling like a liar. Mother took a step into the
room and said, “Jeff,” but Dad stared at Verna as if he’d never seen her before. She felt like he was peeling away her clothes, her skin, her muscles, down past her skeleton to whatever made her who she was. With the feeling came a sick, bilious shame.

Then Dad said that he was having a lot of trouble believing anything she said right now, and they left her alone. Verna lay awake long into the night. Her twin bed seemed huge, her blankets flimsy, and her eyes kept moving toward her door. She could never remember a time like this, when she hadn’t been comfortable in her own bed, when all of the wrongness in the world seemed so irrevocable. She tried to pray but the act felt just as cheap and worthless as everything else. A motion she went through, an echo in an empty room.

The next morning, he was gone again, with the latest printouts from the GPS website. “Dad didn’t mean anything by last night, Verna,” Mother said in the car, on the way to school. “He’s just worried about your sister. And he’s worried about you, too, because you’ve been spending so much time with her.”

“I know,” Verna said.

“You really don’t know where she is?”

Verna shook her head.

“I believe you.” But Mother sounded as if she was trying to convince herself more than Verna. She pulled into the parking lot, stopped at the curb, and told Verna she would pick her up at the end of the day. With a faded smile, she added, “Don’t worry, honey. Everything is going to be okay.”

But
okay
had become some distant land that Verna could hardly even imagine. Before the first bell, she went to the loading dock even though she knew nobody would be there and ate an apple even though she wasn’t hungry. She didn’t know what else to do. When she lay down, the hard concrete was rough against her back. In the distance she heard the thrum of industrial compressors, forcing air into the building; beyond that the swell of traffic on the highway down the hill. Verna felt anesthetized, insulated from the rest of the world. It
wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Like at the dentist’s, how they wrapped you in that lead blanket, and it was heavy and awkward and smelled funny but felt almost good when they draped it over you, like a hug.

In Algebra, she stared down at the page of numbers and symbols in her book and they made no sense, no sense at all. She didn’t even try. She didn’t see the point. The school schedule was staggered; halfway through class the bell rang and the halls filled with voices. Suddenly a great thump shook the building, as if a book the size of a parking lot had fallen on the roof. The panes of glass in the windows trembled in their frames and a few of the girls squeaked. Verna’s algebra teacher just had time to say, “Oh, my,” before there came a second impact, and then a third and fourth. Outside the classroom a door slammed, and somebody cried out, and the fire alarm went off.

Mrs. Bergman looked confused. “All right, everyone. Fire drill. Let’s go.” As they crowded out into the hallways, there was a strange smell in the air, like burning paper and matches, and teachers and students alike looked nervously over their shoulders. One of the other math teachers put a hand on Mrs. Bergman’s shoulder, whispering in her ear. Her face went white.