All We Can Do Is Wait(36)
Some nights, Skyler was able to convince Kate to do it, Kate looking frustrated as she drove to West Roxbury or Hyde Park or wherever it was that Danny was stranded. Other nights, Skyler would have to say no, and Danny would send angry texts, calling her a bitch and threatening her with the names of other girls, saying Ashley so-and-so or Meghan so-and-so would pick him up instead.
Skyler hoped that once the summer was over and Danny was back in school, things would calm down, he’d have his place and she would go over there as much as she could, as much as Kate was willing to cover for her with her grandparents, really. But the summer ended and Danny moved and things only got worse. There were some scary nights when Skyler and Danny were alone in the apartment and he’d start thrashing around, demanding to know what she was doing all day. “I was in school, I was in school,” she would say, crying, but Danny would demand to see her phone, convinced she was cheating on him with someone.
The first time he pushed her against the wall and punched it, barely missing her head, he’d been immediately apologetic, saying, “Baby, baby, baby, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I fucked up.” By the end of his first semester, though, stuff like that had become routine. He threw a lamp, he cracked her cell phone while slamming it down on the night table after finding nothing incriminating on it. He was getting in fights with random guys at parties most weekends, heaving and bloody-nosed and wild-eyed, stomping around the apartment afterward while Skyler tried to calm him down.
She didn’t tell Kate about most of this, but her sister could sense something was wrong. She’d started asking more pointed questions about Danny. She’d heard stuff too, of course, from the diffuse circle of friends who’d all known each other in high school. Kate had started at Lesley and was supposed to be living her own new, independent life, but she spent an increasing amount of her time checking in on Skyler, texting to make sure she was O.K., knocking on Skyler’s bedroom door when she heard her having some tearful late-night argument on the phone with Danny.
“He’s abusing you,” Kate finally said, in February, the two sisters riding the 39 bus downtown to go shopping for a birthday gift for their grandmother. Kate couldn’t see the deep purple bruises on Skyler’s arms from when Danny had grabbed her the night before, furious about some imagined slight. (By then he’d all but dropped out of school, selling weed and, Skyler suspected, other things out of the apartment.) It was a sad kind of relief, hearing her sister say it out loud.
Skyler began to cry softly, turning toward the window of the bus, not wanting her sister to see how bad she’d let things get. How ashamed and afraid she was.
Kate turned toward her sister and then looked away. Skyler was scared it was out of disgust.
“You just have to end it,” Kate said, matter-of-factly. The bus rumbled down Huntington Avenue, such a familiar route for such a strange conversation. But there it was. Skyler didn’t say anything, hoping her sister would keep going. Kate being Kate, she did. “You know you can, right? You’ll be O.K. We’ll get a restraining order if we have to.”
That sounded so harsh, though, so severe, so criminal. Danny was just . . . having a hard time, Skyler rationalized to herself.
“I don’t think we need to do that,” Skyler said quietly. “It isn’t that bad.”
Kate made a scoffing sound. “It isn’t that bad? Pull up your sleeves then, Skyler. Show me your arms.”
“Kate . . .” Skyler pled. But she wasn’t sure what she was pleading for. She didn’t want Kate to stop. It felt good to have someone finally say these things, even if it wasn’t her saying them. “Things will get better. I’ll talk to him. He’s not a bad guy, Kate. He’s not a bad guy.”
Kate threw up her hands, sighed in resignation. “If I . . .” she started and then trailed off. They sat the rest of the bus ride in silence, stop requests pinging and the doors wheezing as passengers got on and off. By the time they got downtown, neither was much in the mood to shop, and they wandered Copley and the Pru aimlessly, finding nothing for their grandmother. With a cruel irony that almost made Skyler laugh, or maybe cry, all of the shops were decorated for Valentine’s Day.
It was almost like Kate could sense the night coming. Just a few weeks from then, on a windy, wet March night that felt far more like winter than spring, when she got a frantic, panicked phone call from Skyler begging her sister to come to the Roxbury apartment.
Earlier in the night, Skyler was having a perfectly fine evening at Danny’s. He was relatively placid, playing Xbox and drinking rum and Cokes. Skyler was doing homework—just staring at her books, really—trying to avoid another session of summer school. She heard her phone trill, a text message. She looked around for it, but it was nowhere on the little kitchen table where she’d set up her laptop.
“Who’s Boli?” she heard, coming from the living room. She must have left her phone on the coffee table, while she and Danny were watching the Celtics. (They’d won, hence Danny’s decent enough mood.)
“Huh?” Skyler replied, turning around in her chair. Of course she knew who Boli was, but Danny would seize on any little vibration of tension in the room, so she wanted to keep things as calm as possible for as long as she could.
“I said, who. Is. Boli,” Danny said in his menacing, deliberate sing-song, the tone that meant he was probably about to lose his shit.