His face was red from the whiskey, and the first two buttons of his dress shirt had popped open. He swayed when he stood. But the words that tumbled out of his mouth surprised me in their eloquence.
“I think we all know love is rare,” Landon started. “It's a scary thing, to even ask someone you like those first questions: do you want to see me? Do you want to see me for a few more hours? Do you want to put your mouth on my mouth? Do you want to wake up next to me?” The small crowd tittered, but I felt my cheeks start glowing red again. I suddenly couldn't look at him. I looked at my napkin, instead.
“Pop, I remember how you called me at football camp—just a few short weeks ago—to sing Anya's praises, 'I've found the one son!' you told me.” Landon had started gesturing with his tumbler. Its contents seemed perilously close to sloshing over the sides. I watched Zora's grin tighten. “And here's the thing—it's magic, isn't it? There is an element of the divine to this thing called love, and it's that urgency, that total inability to explain yourself, that makes it right.”
Anya was crying gently into her napkin, and Carson, beside me, was rolling her eyes. I should have figured she wouldn't buy into any of this lovey-dovey hooey. My sis was too cool.
“Sometimes, it's this simple: you meet a girl, and you know. It's right. And you think to yourself: hey. We fit, me and her. There's a feeling, a magical, freaky feeling that you share before you even exchange names.” I knew his eyes were on me before I looked up. Shockingly, awfully, it was then that Mr. Dempsey chose to slide his palm across my back. His gesture felt somehow protective.
People were still applauding when our eyes finally connected. Landon looked like he was trying to smile for a second, but couldn't muster.
Chapter Seventeen
Ash
September 13th
One lazy Friday, after a botched orgo pop quiz, I rode out to visit Anya. I figured she'd been putting in more than enough time at the dorm.
I knew something was wrong before my cab-driver had given me the change. Though I didn't subscribe to a lot of the superstitious astrology BS that, say, Carson liked to blab about, I was shocked when conviction tiptoed over my skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. I knew something was wrong, I just knew it. At that point, my imagination shut down. I shut out the specific possibilities, and felt my body go on autopilot as I made my way up to the house.
The driver was still trying to give me my change when I found my feet had carried me to the open doorway of Anya's condo. The house was silent. I couldn't even hear the dull murmur of the TV, or the rasping of the wall clock. Walking slowly into the kitchen, I found my first explanation—the kitchen clock had been prodded off the wall with some blunt instrument, and lay in punctured, shiny ruins on the floor. Broken glass covered the linoleum, so it almost looked like rushing water. My breath caught in my chest.
“Mom?” I asked the silent house. Then I made my body rigid, just in case her reply was small and faint. No dice. I left the kitchen and turned down our long hallway, which seemed unbearably long today. “Mom?” I repeated. My footsteps fell lightly on the carpet. In retrospect, it might've occurred to me that we'd been robbed, that the first sensible thing to do might be “call the police”—but I didn't hear reason. I was just about to call her name again when the house made its first gesture toward me. When I reached the bathroom door, I heard the unmistakable sound of water running from a slow tap.
“Mom!” I cried again, hearing the panic in my own voice.
I'd gotten good at blocking out some of Anya's and my worst memories, but here they came again, like a parade: all the wretched possibilities. Like how once, in a small town in Nebraska, my mother had found her way to the roof of a barn while tripping balls on LSD. I'd gotten the call in the middle school nurse's office, under the pitying gaze of a Ratched disciple. A robotic-sounding orderly had informed me that my mother had leapt from the rooftop into a field, and “thank God, only broke her sternum.” I'd spent two days at her hospital bedside, answering the requisite, terrible questions from nurses who were deciding whether or not to call CPS.
She had always been reckless. She had always been accident-prone. She was happy to be addicted, to this day, and even from the wagon could make the occasional spiel for drugs and alcohol that the whole program thing was effectively designed to halt. Once, my mother had told me—on the downswing from a night on E—that she believed people were meant to exist under the influence. “I pray to God that someday you feel this alive, baby,” she'd said, her pupils big as the moon. I'd been fourteen, and getting ready for school.
Mom was a mess, a mistake, unfit—and yet, she was all I had. I'd pulled her out of the ruins many a time, sure, but even so—it was impossible to imagine my life without her. She was my best friend. She was my worst enemy. I loved her more than anything, despite our whole miserable history. And I knew, with a shaking but deep conviction, that if anything happened to her that we couldn't bounce back from...I'd crumble.
I gripped the rickety brass knob of the bathroom door and twisted. It wasn't locked, but the light was off. With quivering hands, I reached for the switch. “Mom,” I whispered.
She was buck naked, sitting in the bath-tub. The tap wasn't opened all the way, and the drain was only half-in, so just as the tub was filling up, the water was slipping away. She sat in a pool that just barely grazed the tips of her hips. The wasted stream reminded me of something we'd been studying in my Intro to Classics course—that figure Sisyphus, from Greek mythology, who was always pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom again. But I shook off this nonsense. Now was so not the time to be thinking about school.
It was a relief, for a moment, to see her sitting upright—that is, until I saw her face. When she tilted her head up toward the light, I realized that half of my mother's face was tomato red, like skin that's just been burnt. When she tried to smile at me, everything got worse.
The skin around her left eye was swollen, even broken in some places. The wound was wet-looking; it looked like she'd tried to dress the slices on her skin with nothing more than a few handfuls of bathwater. I went to kneel on the grubby bathmat, deciding not to be fazed about seeing the naked body of the woman who'd given birth to me. Up close, the eye was even grislier. Somebody had clocked Anya good. Though it didn't look like she could open wide, what little I could see of the whites of her eyes were shot through with broken blood vessels.
“It's not so bad,” she croaked, cautiously. He'd gotten the corner of her mouth, too—I could tell from the way her lips moved as she spoke. The whole left side seemed...inflated. “Really, baby. It looks way worse than it feels.” But no sooner was the lie out than the rest of my mother's face seemed to collapse in on itself, making the most terrible picture. I leaned forward and pressed my mom's wet head against the front of my shirt.
“Where is he now?” I asked, after her sobbing had subsided. We both kept our faces pinned in the direction of the dripping faucet, as if it would be too hard to look at one another square-on while having this conversation. Anya sniffled, but didn't say anything. I repeated the question.
“Mom, you need to tell me.”
“But there's an explanation,” she whined. For a second, a white flash of fury wracked my bones. The very idea that she could protect any man who was capable of this…monstrosity, made me unbearably sick. If I were a praying lady, I'd have pulled a Scarlet O'Hara right there by the bathtub: “as God is my witness, I will never let a man lay a hand on me in anger. Not unless he happens to be tired of having testicles.”