“I’m perfectly fine with you and with what happened,” I assure him. And I am. For a moment, everything is absolutely perfect.
“Would you shut the fuck up?” the guy shouts as the woman sings to herself over and over again. “We need to get out of here.”
“Lean into me. Lean into me. Take. Help me. I need to understand. Help me. I can’t do this without you,” she cries as he holds her weight in his arms.
“Stop singing that fucking song!” he yells with rage and kicks one of my toys across the room. “Get your shit together and let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t,” she says through hysterical sobs. “What if someone saw us?”
“No one fucking saw us,” he says, shaking her like a rag doll. “I already checked the house.”
She glances around my toy room and I swear her eyes land on me in the dark corner. Does she see me? She has to. Is she going to tell? “Lean into me. Lean into me. Take. Help me. I need to understand. Help me. I can’t do this without you.” Tears flood her eyes over and over again and I start to cry to as he starts smacking her over and over again, the lyrics and slaps haunting my head as I wait for the monsters to find me. Hurt me. Because that’s what monsters do.
I wake up in a panic, like I always do, my arms flailing as I sit up, my surroundings distorted as that song echoes in her head. I gasp, clutching my neck, breathing loudly as I search the dark room, my mind searching for something familiar, and finally it lands on my teddy bear on top of my desk.
Luke sits up, rubbing his eyes as he places a hand on my back. He’s become so used to this it doesn’t even faze him anymore. He smoothes his hand up and down my back, allowing me to regain my breathing as I clutch the sheet to my naked chest, telling my heart rate to settle. I have to work not to do it the way I’m so used to doing—by seeking an adrenaline rush through danger. I know that the only reason I’m not running to the window and contemplating jumping is because he’s here touching me. Calming me down. He’s the one doing it now.
After I settle down, he pulls his shirt over me, slips his boxers on and lies us back down in bed, wrapping his arms around me. “I wish you’d tell me what you dream about,” he whispers against my forehead as he kisses it. “Maybe I could help.”
“Talking about stuff doesn’t help,” I whisper with my hands on his chest. “And trust me, you don’t want to hear about it.”
He combs his fingers through my hair and I feel his neck muscles move as he swallows hard. “I have nightmares, too, sometimes about… about shooting up my mom… I actually really hate needles and doing that stuff… Well it still gets to me.”
“But you’re a diabetic?”
“Yeah, it’s a great inconvenience.” There’s forced humor in his voice.
I rack my head for something to say, but I can’t come up with anything. I could make a joke, create an elaborate story—those things are always easy for me to do. But he keeps telling me things about himself, without me even asking. Dark and screwed-up things, like the ones I’ve been holding inside me for thirteen years.
“It’s about that night,” I say and his muscles stiffen, but he continues to run his fingers through my hair. “I saw them…”
His fingers stop moving and he catches his breath. “You saw the killers.”
I nod, looking down at the foot of the bed. “I did, but at the same time not really… I guess it was more like I heard them… they were noisy fuckers.” My tone is light but everything else inside me feels like bricks tumbling down, crushing me, trapping me. “They didn’t know I was in the room, so they didn’t even bother to be quiet.”
“Did you tell the police this?” he asks.
“I told the police everything; what I could remember happening, the shoes the lady was wearing… I even described the sound of her stupid voice… the way it sounded when she sang that messed-up song.”
“She was singing a song?” he asks. “Really?”
“Yeah, it had some really fucked-up lyrics,” I say, summoning a deep breath. “ ‘Lean into me. Lean into me. Take. Help me. I need to understand. Help me. I can’t do this without you…’ ” I trail off. “It’s what I hear every night in my dreams.”
He’s silent for a while, the sounds of cars rolling by the only noise in our room. At first I think it’s because he’s taking in what I said, but then I realize how stiff he’s gotten and how it doesn’t even sound like he’s breathing.
I peer up at him, wondering if it was a mistake to tell him. “Luke, are you okay?”
“What the hell did you just say?” he whispers.
I definitely shouldn’t have told him. “That was the song she was singing.” I push up from his chest, trying to decide whether I should bail out before he throws me out. “I’m not even sure what song it is because I’ve never been able to find it anywhere.”
The length of his silence seems to stretch on forever. He doesn’t budge. Breathe. And I grow more panicked.
“That’s because she made it up.” His voice cracks and then he shoves me off him.
I roll to the side as he gets up and storms out of the room. I lay in the bed for a moment replaying what he said and what he could possibly mean. Who made it up? Does he know something about the song? Does he know the person who… Oh my God… I jump up and chase after him as he slams the bathroom door shut. I jerk on the doorknob but he locked it.
I bang my fist on the door. “What do you mean ‘she made it up’? Luke… Please answer me…” I hammer my hand against the door over and over again until it’s swollen and throbbing. “God damn it, please just say it again. I need to know… I need to know that I heard you right.”
He doesn’t answer and his silence is enough to know the painful, blazing, slicing, ugly truth. I sink to the floor as things start crashing around on the other side of the door. Glass. Walls. My heart. I wait for the truth to be revealed to me, just like I waited that night, hoping it’s not what I’m thinking. That Luke doesn’t know the person who was there that night my parents were killed, singing that god-awful song. But deep down I know I’m wrong.
Knowing the horrible truth and the emptiness that lies ahead of me.
Luke
I hammer my fist over and over against the wall, watching it fall apart, crumble against the tile floor, turn into a pile of dust. Then once the hole is big enough, I crash my fist into the mirror. Glass shatters. My skin splits apart. I bleed all over the floor, drops of blood staining the tile along with the broken fragments of glass. This can’t be happening. It isn’t real. I just want a fucking decent life without my God damn past owning me. Without her owning me. A hot burst of heat burns the inside of me and I crane my arm back and ram my fist into the nearest thing still intact, which happens to be the bathtub. The tile stays intact, but my fingers feel like they break. But it’s not enough. I need more. I don’t want to feel like this. I can’t… I can’t accept it… Tears start to slip out of my eyes as I collapse to the floor. I’m bawling like a fucking weak and pathetic loser, the kid who used to do everything he was told. I’m drowning in my past, drowning in the thought that I’m going to lose Violet.
I let myself cry until the tears stop, until I know there’s nothing left to do but move again. Sweaty, bleeding, and raw, I get to my feet, the glass cutting the bottom of them as I move toward the door. Violet’s sitting leaning against the door and she falls onto the bathroom floor when I pull the door open. Her hair is surrounding her head as she lies there in the middle of the pieces of wall and mirror, staring up at me with dry eyes.