If I Was Your Girl(45)

“You’ve shared some things with me, and now, I want to share some things with you,” I told him softly.

“Thank you,” Grant said. I saw the outline of his head lean down and then back up. “What is this?”

“It’s everything,” I said, my mouth and throat dry. We were both silent for a moment. “Just, ahead of time, I wanted to let you know—if you’re upset with me for letting things progress like they did, for being with you … I’m sorry for that too, and I understand.”

He stood there for a long time, unreadable in the darkness. My heart started racing again and my stomach flipped back and forth, so I focused on the pavement beneath us, tracing its infinite cracks. When I looked up again Grant was gone. My heart hammered for one horrible moment before he came back outside, carrying the unopened envelope and a metal bucket.

The small flame of a butane lighter flickered to life. The orange glow flared brightly as Grant held the lighter to the envelope and it caught fire. I gasped and started to ask what he was doing, but he dropped the envelope into the bucket, where its warmth and light bathed both of us. I felt myself starting to cry until I looked at his face and noticed he was smiling.

“I’ll never regret being with you,” he said, reaching out for my hand. “And I could never, ever hate you, no matter what.”

“But—” I said.

“I never needed to know,” he said, shaking his head. “I just needed to feel like you’d given me a chance.”

He pulled me around the fire, wrapped me in the tightest embrace I could remember, and kissed me like the fire burning brightly beside us.





SIX MONTHS AGO


I took a dose of hydrocodone when I was done dilating. Everything between my thighs and my hips felt like it had been run through a wood chipper, the dilation ritual was a degrading chore, the painkillers reminded me of the time I tried to kill myself—and I still couldn’t have been happier. I was finally a girl on the outside too; there was nothing separating me from my body anymore. As the painkillers kicked in I swung my feet off the bed, winced, and shuffled slowly into the hall. I stopped halfway to the bathroom when I heard the soft sound of crying from down the hall. I made my way to the den and found Mom huddled up on the floor beside a single dim lamp, photo albums spread open around her.

“Mom?” I said. She jumped and cried out, then put a hand over her heart and closed her eyes when she realized it was me. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head and wiping her nose. “Just reorganizing our photos before I go to bed. Now scoot, you need your rest.”

“No,” I said. I winced again as I slowly knelt. She looked like she wanted to snap all the albums closed, but she left them where they were. One was open to pictures of me, Mom, and Dad at the beach when I was three or four. I was running happily through flocks of seagulls, squealing in delight as I ran away from waves that seemed so large at the time. Another was open to me in preschool, with my shaggy little ringlets and my smile missing its teeth. The rest were open to my pages as well: a photo of me winning a spelling bee; graduating from elementary school; looking distracted at Rock City and Ruby Falls in Chattanooga the day we left Dad, up to the last pictures where I still looked like a boy.

“I miss him,” Mom whispered, her eyes cast to the side.

“Dad?” I said.

“No,” Mom said, and I heard her throat clenching. A tear streaked down her cheek, but it wasn’t followed by any others. “No, I miss my son.”

“Oh!” I said, dropping the page I was holding. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” Mom said, shaking her head and swallowing. “I’m sorry, really. I thought you were asleep.”

“I’m still me,” I said, trying to catch her eye again.

“It ain’t that simple,” Mom said, opening her watery eyes and returning them to me. “I know I’m supposed to say it is, but it ain’t. You look different, you act different, you sound different, your hands feel different when I touch ’em. Hell, you even smell different. Do you know how important smell can be, how the way your baby smells when you hold him gets locked in your head?”

I clenched my fingers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You tried to kill yourself,” she said, rolling her eyes up to heaven and biting her knuckle. “Andrew Hardy was gonna die one way or the other, and one of the choices gave me a daughter in exchange while the other left me with no one.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said. “I never thought about—”

“It ain’t your responsibility to comfort your parents,” she said, shaking her head. “’Least, not until I start needin’ my diapers changed.” She started closing the albums again. “And anyway this ain’t the first time I mourned my baby.” She took a shuddering breath.

“What do you mean?” I tried to help her stack the albums back up and put them away, but she slapped my hands and quickly did it herself.

“No strenuous activity!” she said, and then she lowered herself into an overstuffed chair by the bookshelf and closed her eyes again. “When you were a year old I looked at your baby pictures and cried. When you were three I looked at the pictures from when you were one and cried. When you went to kindergarten I looked back and cried. Kids constantly grow and change, and every time you blink they turn into something different and the kid you thought you had is just a memory.” She rubbed her face and sighed. “Five years from now you’ll be a grown woman graduatin’ college and I’ll look at photos of you now and grieve my teenage daughter.”