The Bargaining (14 page)

“I'm sorry,” he says. “Look, I got this sense that maybe you wanted to talk the other day. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I don't know how to tell anymore.” He laughs, but there's no humor in it. “I'm nineteen and I run a business. I'm not supposed to be running a business. I'm supposed to be, I don't know, irresponsible or something.” He looks at me. “Right?”

I shrug. I thought he just worked at his dad's shop. I didn't think he actually owned it. Then I remember what he said about how his uncle looks after him now that his folks have passed away.

Suddenly, Miller seems a little more screwed up than me.

“You're so asking the wrong person about normal,” I say. “I think normal people can have a basic conversation without biting the other person's head off.” It's my version of an apology. I'm clearly as good at saying sorry as my mom is.

He lifts the Pulverizer. “I'm going to install this for your stepmom so she'll like me. Then I'm going to go back to the store until we close up for the night. Why don't I come back around eight? I mean, if you're interested in that whole relearning how to talk thing.”

I eye the Pulverizer box while I consider everything he just said. Then I look at Linda in my hands. Miller's face is
still the last image showing on the screen. The digital version of him looks past me into the woods.

It would be nice to be around someone who doesn't know everything about the last four years, who doesn't look at me and see what I could have done differently.

“Eight o'clock,” I say before I can understand what I'm saying.

He backs away, turns, and heads for the house, a smile buried behind a distant gaze.

As he leaves, I raise Linda to my eye, point, and click.

In a warm car under a busted street lamp with a guy I barely know.

Wet clothes plastered to my body under a jacket that isn't mine because I was too stubborn to bring one, even though I knew it would probably rain. But because it was the last thing Mom said to me on the phone, I left my jacket on the hook.

This is probably one of those scenarios I should be avoiding. The kind I used to find myself in whenever I hung out with Rae. Guys we didn't know, guys Rae invited into the car to get to know better. One for her, one for me. And I was done with that long before she knew it.

Rain hammers the roof and windshield, assaulting Miller's car with random fury.

“How can you not drive in the rain and live here?” I ask, sipping the rich coffee from a Ripp's to-go cup.

“I said I don't
like
to. I can, but you don't know the roads here like I do,” he says. “The ones leading into the woods are the worst. I have four-wheel-drive, and it's barely enough. I think the real question is why
you're
afraid of getting wet. Aren't you from Seattle originally?”

“I don't
like
to stand under a downpour without a jacket. That's different than being afraid.”

“Well, you have a jacket now,” he says.

“You can have it back.”

“It's cool. I was getting too hot anyway.”

“You don't say,” I mutter.

“What's that?”

“Nothing, it's just . . . I don't want to give you the wrong idea. When I said I'm going through some stuff, I wasn't lying.”

I had planned on telling him that the minute he drove up to the Carver House, but it never quite felt like the right time to say it, and the nicer he is, the stranger this all feels.

“I didn't think you were lying,” he says. Now he's squirming, and I've made him feel awkward, and this is exactly why I shouldn't have agreed to go anywhere with him, especially not to his weird uncle's coffee shop, which he clearly had no
idea would be the beginning of this exceedingly uncomfortable night, with his uncle giving me the evil eye the whole time until we finally had to take our coffee and sit in Miller's car behind Scoot's.

“It's just that I'm—”

“You're screwed up. Yeah, I get it,” he says. “Penny, my parents both died before I turned sixteen, and my grand­parents died right after I turned eighteen. What do you think that does to a person?”

There is no possible answer that could fill the gaping space Miller's confession just left.

“So just get it over with and tell me so we can move on to something else.”

I try not to feel wounded, but my face must give away some of my struggle because Miller follows, a little more ­gently, with “Relearning how to talk. Remember?”

The pines outside the window bend and bow against the wind, stoically enduring the abuse. I wonder if they even feel it anymore.

I try to remember anyone ever making me an offer like that. Anyone ever telling me they'd just listen. They'd just let me say it. All of it. Someone who hasn't heard the back story third-hand, who didn't know me before I came to Phoenix, who didn't know me after Melissa Corey. Who didn't need
to see me as something just so they could make sense of the next something I became.

Rob made the offer once, but I shut him down flat.

I try to remember the last time I opened my mouth to say anything that meant anything. Suddenly, my jaw feels rusted shut, a hinge unpracticed and lazy.

“Rae.” Just hearing her name on my lips is enough to make me want to get out in the rain and walk home.

But saying her name. Not saying her name. Either way, she's with me every day. The hinge loosens a little in the silence that follows—as Miller listens—and I try a little more.

“She was my best friend. Basically my only friend after I moved to Phoenix.”

Miller doesn't say anything, so I keep going. I've already come this far.

“It was cool hanging out with her at first. She was like me, but not at all like me, you know? She was the version of me I wanted to be. I mean, I guess I thought I did. But then . . .”

I lose my way, and for some reason, the only thing that brings me back is the sound of Miller sipping his coffee two feet away.

“Then she wasn't what I wanted to be like anymore.”

If Miller is following, he doesn't say a word. And maybe
right now, he doesn't think I'm horrible. Maybe right now, he thinks this is all pretty ridiculous. But the rain is starting to let up, and if I'm going to tell him all of it, at least I know I could probably walk the road home and find my way back to the Carver House if he tells me to get out of the car.

“This girl got beat up.”

My heart cracks against the impact. A confession I have never, not once, owned out loud.

“I let it happen,” I say after the cracked pieces have fallen to the floor of the car, the destruction nearly complete. “This girl, she didn't do anything . . . but Rae hit her like she did. And I let her. Afterward . . .”

Miller says nothing, and I force myself to keep going.

“I knew I was done after that. I couldn't tell if I hated Rae or me more.”

I try to swallow the knot in my throat, but it refuses to budge.

“I wrote some things she wasn't supposed to see. Nobody was supposed to see. But I should have known that she would find the notepad because Rae was always going through my stuff. She had this thing about secrets. How they were worse than lies.”

I take a sip of my own coffee, but not because I want it. Because I just need a second more before the final
­confession. I'm not Catholic, but I wonder if this is how it feels behind that little curtain. And if it is, I wonder how Catholics repair their hearts each time. If they have a special glue that mends things by the time they pull the curtain and step out.

“She confronted me, and it was awful. And she got super high because of it, and I didn't stop her when she went off on her own for a walk. I just let her go.”

My face is wet. I think at first it's because I never dried the rain off it, but my throat hurts, and now I know I've been practically screaming my story at Miller, who has let me scream and sob my horrible story of my horrible self, and he hasn't said a word in response, which is how I know that everything Rae said to me that night was true.

“Some girl she didn't even know found her.”

Miller lets me cry. He lets me shiver under his jacket and wipe my face on the sleeve. He doesn't touch my shoulder or clear his throat or offer me those empty words of ­recycled sincerity I got from everyone else after it happened. He doesn't even sip his coffee anymore. He just sits there next to me while I empty my soul. I didn't think I had any tears left to sacrifice to this pain, but they must have been there all along, tricking me into believing they'd run dry. And maybe it's because he doesn't know what to say to someone
who doesn't really deserve to be crying these types of tears at all. Because it's not like I'm some poor victim. I could have stopped every single thing that happened. I could have led Melissa Corey away from the equipment shed. I could have ripped those pages from my notepad and shredded them to fine strips.

I could have stayed with Rae that night instead of letting her wander into the desert by herself.

When I finally wipe the last of my unearned tears away, I notice that it's stopped raining completely. That's when Miller finally says something.

“So who's in Phoenix?”

I turn to face him now. “What?”

“You're from here, but you moved to Phoenix, and now you're back here. So that means either your whole family moved back so you could get away from what happened, or someone decided you needed to be . . .”

There's a sharp edge to his voice, and even though I'm trying to stay away from anything that can cut me after Rae, something about the way he says it makes me think he might know what it feels like to be—

“Returned,” I say. “My mom. She brought me back. Like a sweater with a snag in it.”

“Yeah,” he says.

We sit in his car for an hour and a half and do absolutely nothing but sip our coffees. The trees dance so hard, they make their own music under all that creaking.

We don't say another word the whole drive back, and the sound of the car door closing behind me echoes in my ears until sleep takes me several hours later.

11

T
HE BOY FROM THE PAINTING
calls to me by name, invading my sleep with uninvited familiarity. At the end of my first exhale, I'm in the room at the end of the hall, standing before the mural. I spot the swing in the corner on the tree, the muddy hand of the boy before me, and I know I don't want to be here.

But the boy doesn't care. The paint that holds him to the wall cracks and crumbles to fine dust, leaving snowy peaks of debris atop the discarded wallpaper below. He's sitting in the grass painted below his brushstroked feet, legs crossed over each other, kneecaps jutting to each end of the room.

“How are you talking to me?” I ask him, my pajamas too thin to block the night air passing through the open window I can't believe April or I didn't shut.

“I have to show you something.”

“I want to sleep,” I tell the boy.

“Maybe you are sleeping. Do you know the difference anymore?” he asks me, challenging. He's younger than me, but authoritative. Dominant. His emerald eyes bury me under their weight.

“Well, what does the difference feel like to you?” I ask him.

He looks toward the open window, silent for a moment before muttering, “It all feels like I'm walking through mud.”

I look at his hand again, and as though he sees me noticing, he curls it into a fist, concealing the evidence he already left behind.

I continue to stand there, growing less aware of the chill creeping beneath my pajamas and more aware of the blades of painted grass on the wall that bend and sway impossibly under the breeze sliding through the open window.

“I have to show you,” he insists, and something about his eyes, wide and familiar, make me walk toward the wall, my legs like lead, my own eyes lazily searching the wall for what he wants to show me.

The brushstrokes bend backward and swirl in opposing directions, reconstituting to create an entirely new picture, one that I can see because I'm a part of it now, witnessing the moving painting beside the boy who recedes to a corner just out of sight. But he's there, watching. Showing me.

We're in a house I've never seen before.