In Her Skin(32)

The lady in the front seat sneaks a look and snickers. I look out the window, embarrassed.

You sit up suddenly and twist toward the door, palm against the window.

“I feel sick,” you whisper.

“Pull over!” I scream. The driver’s eyes flash in the mirror and he swings to the curb. “Get her out!” he yells. You get out on the empty street and I slide out behind as you dry-heave into a bush. I hold your hair and stroke your back and remind you that you are dehydrated, and call to the driver, asking if he has water. He shakes his head disgustedly and gets out to check if you puked in the backseat. The car door alarm chirps, a shrill ding, ding, ding.

“Are you okay?” I murmur, rubbing your back.

You nod gratefully. “So much better.”

The lady in the front seat yells to the driver, “Leave the hoes!”

You straighten. “What did you say?”

The lady hangs out of the passenger seat and pokes her taffy hair out the window. “I said, we should leave you, hoes!”

You charge at her. I try to catch you, but you’re already on top of taffy hair in the front seat, pummeling her lumpy arms with your fists. The driver hops up and down and threatens to call the cops. You manage to drag the woman out of the passenger seat and hurl her to the ground.

I grab your wallet off the seat and throw a ring of bills at the driver, crying, “You’ll drive when I say drive!” Only after I see his shocked face do I realize the bills are hundreds. I scramble back to the street and grab you, now kicking the woman in her ribs, by your waist and throw you in the car, still kicking.

The driver screeches away from the woman.

“You say she started it! That is why I left her!” he warns over the front seat, and I promise we will. I try to soothe you, but you’re glaring out the window, itching for more action.

Finally, you turn to face me. Your look is too intense and I wish you’d speak.

“I guess you crashed?” I say, trying to make light. Your dead seriousness scares me.

“I call it my bloodlust. The sensation of hitting, pummeling, crushing. I crave it sometimes.”

“How often is sometimes?”

“Only when I witness something unfair.”

“I see.”

“You’re the same, you and me. I can tell. A natural-born killer,” you say and laugh darkly. You lie back down in my lap and become gentle again, and I love seeing you framed like this, hair all around, the heat of your head.

“Only when there’s a right to wrong,” I kid.

You waggle your finger at me. “See? We’re cut from the same cloth. I knew the first moment I saw you.”

“When we were little?” I say.

“Mmmm.” You seem to fall asleep. In the half-light, your face is damp and feverish. When I am sure you’re passed out, I blow lightly across your face. You smile with closed eyes.

We wind down Memorial Drive and across the Mass Avenue bridge in the predawn glow. At a stoplight, I watch as a mother and her kid step out of a bus, so painfully early, the kid begging to be carried. The mother is young but life has worn her face. I imagine she is taking her daughter to a place where she’ll pay to have her babysat while she works for that same money. She carries a vacuum cleaner. The daughter’s starfish hands reach up, and the mother drops the vacuum and meets her daughter’s hands, swinging her side to side, mustering sweet, tired words.

Inside me, the old rage puckers and releases. Biding its time.

*

You crave risk and you crave bloodlust. I crave protection and I crave you. Nine days have passed without you. The excuses range from rehearsals to weekends at friends’ vacation homes to tutoring sessions, and I am busy with Zack, too, but he leaves at two o’clock and then—that is, now—there is nothing. I am as underscheduled as you are overscheduled, and the Lovecrafts seem determined to find even more things to keep you busy. I am left alone for entire afternoons just like this, my saddest hours, though I am always happy to shed Zack. I have taken to wandering, watched by the plaster angels. Old habits are hard to break, and so far I have tallied about seventy thousand dollars of stuff worth stealing.

Yet I will not steal, because that would be stupid, but also because Mrs. Lovecraft’s kindnesses have pried open the fist I’ve made of myself. She opens me up in other ways, too. Everywhere, I see mothers. In the growing belly of the housecleaner. In the waiting room at the dentist Mrs. Lovecraft takes me to. On the streets of Boston, pushing strollers that look like drones. Everywhere, mothers tending to daughters. I begin to remember. The sounds in the tiny house where I was born. Its shade of French’s mustard, what Momma called a happy color. Where the front door was always open to let God’s air-conditioning come in. Momma’s boyfriend then, a good man named Jackson who worked two jobs and drove a Chevy Impala and swung Momma around every time she walked in the door. Then later, the Impala and Momma’s old self gone, and the apartments in Jasper, Homestead, Blountstown, and the last one in Immokalee, as we worked our way closer to the casinos, where marks grew like kudzu.

Mrs. Lovecraft and I talk a lot about how one little event can change the course of someone’s life, and it’s like she knows about Momma, and the person she was, and what our life was like before she met the Last One buying butts at the Timesaver. He told her he drove Everglades tours for an airboat company, but driving isn’t the same as casting the ladies’ lines and gutting their catches and keeping the beer on ice for tips. The Last One saw something in Momma, something actressy that liked to perform. More importantly, he saw a little seed of anger at the world for not treating her right, something he could grow. She saw something in him, too. He was a preacher and a teacher. He railed against the dangers of doing drugs, and as the dealer who didn’t use, she thought him a model of self-restraint, given her own weaknesses for anything that numbed her. As a teacher, he brought her game up to a whole new level. They’d pretend to be that local couple in the bar at the fancy Chart House, charming the tourists with lies about his time in the Coast Guard and wrestling gators. People would invite them to dinner, and they’d skip out on their share of the bill. That sort of thing. Pretty soon they got known in Belle Glade and we had to leave the happy house behind. Around the time we moved on, the Last One began to notice my potential. By the time I turned fourteen, I’d gone to five schools, answered to five different names, and driven a getaway car.