In Her Skin(41)

“Above the gush of water, the sound of plastic ripped from plaster.

“The screams come and come and then stop, a hand over a mouth. Open windows, dining people. The danger of it. There will be no time for screams.

“Windows are shut. Hammering, the dragging and placing of heavy furniture. The smell of wooden floor cleaner. A building permit sticker repositioned prominently in the window. The girl’s hands are finally bandaged and she is put to bed. Nerves are soothed and phone calls are made.

“The girl smiles, listening to her parents speak to the police officers below. This time, she is sure they will not leave her again.”

*

You kick your feet and jump off the bureau, pulling the shirt you’re wearing over your head, hair spilling over your back. Fully aware of your nakedness, as you dig too long for a big T-shirt to pull on. When you rise, you flip your hair back to perfect and sigh.

“Now it’s time for you to tell me a story,” you say.

“You know my story. Your father hired a private investigator and he pulled everything on my life in Florida.” If you have a shred of feeling for me in your heart, this is the time for me to find it and use it. “You know exactly how much my life sucked.”

“I understand completely. On her own, Jolene Chastain has nothing. She needs food. Clothes. A place to live. A phone. A computer. An education. She got these things, plus something she didn’t know she wanted until she had it.”

I say nothing.

“And what would that thing be?” you tease. “C’mon, say it.”

“Temple…,” I say softly.

“That’s right! Me! Your soul mate.” You grab my hand and drag me into the bed. My heart races. We’re head to head again, this time, in your bed, and you aren’t letting me go anywhere. “Now I want that story.”

We lie for a while. You are patient when you know you’re going to get something. Every time I blink, I see Vivi reaching high on her tiptoes, a smack to the back of her head, blinding pain, starfish hands reaching out for a mother who isn’t there.

“Vivi? The story.”

I swallow thickly. “I always knew she would die.”

“The year, please.”

“What?”

“When did she die?”

“You already know this. You know everything.”

“Tell the story properly, please.”

I exhale hard. “It was 2016 when she died.”

“When she died, or when she was killed?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“That’s an important distinction, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t that the point of the whole story, Jolene Chastain?”

You wrap your arm around mine and snuggle against my shoulder. What have I gotten myself into? The sensation of falling, into the bed, through the bed and through two floors, through the room below where the real Vivi’s bones are encased in a wall, past her bones and through the earth, to its molten core, where you and I will burn together. Wolf couldn’t have saved me from the streets, or even the Last One, but he could have saved me from you.

Wolf is gone, and I am a fool.

“It was 2016 when my momma’s last boyfriend killed her,” I say. “My life was about keeping her alive. She had my love, and still she thought she should die. Every drug. Every scheme. Every boyfriend was laced through with danger. But this story is about the one thing that finally did kill her. He had a name, but I’m not gonna use it, because he doesn’t deserve a name. I call him the Last One.

“In the end, I believe Momma wanted to live. Otherwise she wouldn’t have tried to escape. While she didn’t care about her own life, she cared about mine. When she started to realize that the Last One would take mine, too, that made her ready to run. But he cut her down.

“The weekend before I left, we made a good score. He wanted to celebrate. She never saw him touch me until that night.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t tell her. It would have made her run with me sooner.

“But it wasn’t like that. We needed enough money to get away first, and besides, she wasn’t in any shape to leave. She was still getting clean off meth, tapering her doses, and a mess so much of the time. Sleeping, depressed. He took advantage of her sleeping to come to me, and it was everything I could do not to kill. I kept a knife under my pillow so I knew it was there, and when he was on me, I’d fantasize about plunging it through the hard gristle of him, then a pillow of blood as it pierced the heart, a whoosh. I’d slip out from underneath his still body and walk away, like Carrie White, covered in his blood, strong and straight-backed and avenged.

“But killing boyfriends would’ve given us another problem.

“So I sent myself to another place to get through it. I focused on weaning Momma from using every day to twice a week, from a quarter gram to an eighth of a gram, and pretty soon she’d be clear. The Last One didn’t care: he was glad for it. Thought she was useless high. But she took so long to come out of it, ate and slept so much it pissed him off, and pretty soon he’d carved Momma out of his scams so it was him and me, operating as a team, or what he thought was a team, since my eyes were only on the money.

“Arrangements were made online. I’d wait, alone, watching the TV but really listening to the sound of the highway outside—there was always a highway right outside—behind the heavy curtains. The sound of cars rushing by was the sound of escape. A flash of headlights through the curtains, a careful knock on the door. I always had to be something different, a call I had to make on the spot. If the mark had a squirrelly look to him, it meant that this was the first time he had done something like this, and he needed proof that I knew what I was doing. The ones that asked my age straightaway wanted a young girl, so I’d tell him I was nine, but an early bloomer—there was something magical about single digits. They were the same ones who wanted to get down to business right away, and were the hardest to stall. They were the reason I had a code phrase—‘Would you like to take a shower first?’—that meant Mad Daddy needed to burst into the room that very second.