Just Like Home(38)
She feels paralyzed. Getting up and walking home with all this blood running down her chin feels wrong, but she’s not sure when it’s going to stop bleeding, and she has to go home sometime.
It doesn’t even hurt yet.
Her bike lies on its side, half on the sidewalk and half in the road, one wheel slowly rotating. Her mouth tastes of brine and metal. Her knees and elbows are starting to sting, the skin an angry red under the smeary green of crushed grass.
She can’t believe Brandon said ‘fuck.’
Someone calls Vera’s mother—probably Jan Haverbrook—and it isn’t long before there is a pair of shoes in front of Vera’s bike. “Oh, Vera,” Vera’s mother mutters. She’s holding a pale pink plastic pitcher, the one that’s usually full of iced tea in the refrigerator. “Get up and come inside. You’re bleeding all over Jan’s sidewalk. What on earth happened to you?”
Vera thinks, but does not point out, that it isn’t Jan Haverbrook’s sidewalk. The sidewalk can’t belong to a person. It’s supposed to belong to everybody.
She stands in the street with her hands still cupped under her bleeding mouth, waiting. Her mother upturns the pitcher, dumping water over the sidewalk, washing the blood away and leaving behind a dark wet stain. Then they walk home. Vera’s mother pushes the bike by the handlebars. Blood drips from between Vera’s fingers, leaving a trail behind them.
By the time they walk through the front door, the bleeding has mostly stopped. Vera’s face is swollen and hot. The two of them sit on the edge of the tub in the upstairs bathroom, and Vera winces as her mother sponges blood from her chin with a wet dishcloth.
“What happened?” Daphne’s breath smells like old coffee. Their faces are close enough together that Vera can see the mascara clumps that glue her mother’s eyelashes together.
This what happened isn’t like the what happened Vera’s imagined friend would say, the friend who would comfort her and listen to her. It isn’t a what happened that anticipates unfairness, that invites the telling of a slightly-embellished story. It’s a what happened that’s already tired of the answer.
“Brandon pushed me,” Vera says. The lip of the tub digs into the backs of her thighs. It feels alien to snitch on Brandon like this, but the betrayal is so fresh that the words slip from her unbidden.
“Brandon did this?” Daphne’s surprise is mild, but sounds genuine, and it validates Vera’s own bewilderment at her friend’s sudden violence.
Tears well mortifyingly in her eyes as she nods. “Yeah,” she says, her chin twitching in that strange way it does whenever she’s about to cry. “I don’t know why,” she adds. “He, um.” The air grows heavy with the weight of what she’s about to say, the significance of it. “He kissed me.”
Vera’s mother pulls away from her, examines her hard, and Vera feels cold all over. She’s certain that she’s in trouble—the only question is, how bad is it going to be?
But when Daphne speaks, she doesn’t sound mad. “He pushed you down and he … kissed you?” Her voice is gentle in a way that’s more frightening than her anger would have been. “Did he hurt you anywhere else? Tell me exactly what happened, sweetheart.”
Vera cannot remember her mother calling her ‘sweetheart’ any other time, ever. It shocks her out of crying, and she’s so stunned that she almost forgets to answer the question. “No,” she says at last, shaking her head and then wincing at the way the movement makes her split lip throb. “That isn’t how it happened. He kissed me, and then I rode my bike away from him, and then he pushed me. And then”—she decides in an instant that she will not tell her mother about the fuck you, it’s too much to share the sting of that with any adult—“and then he said that Dad doesn’t love us.”
Daphne considers Vera for a long time, looks into her eyes with a bright, curious intensity that Vera does not understand.
“Now why would he say a thing like that?” she asks, and she’s still using that strange, soft tone, like Vera is an outside cat she wants to coax into the house.
Vera doesn’t move, not a single muscle. This is the side of her mother she so rarely gets to see, the side she so deeply longs for. There is the most softness and allowance here that Vera ever gets to see. This kindness, this interest. Vera wants to lean toward it like a flower turning toward sunlight. She wants to eat it.
But she feels that maybe if she stays perfectly still, it won’t end. It won’t change. “He said Dad’s cheating on you,” she whispers eventually. “He said … he said Dad doesn’t really go sugaring in the summer.”
Daphne takes the cap off a dark brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This is going to sting,” she says, and before Vera can even brace herself, her mother pours the clear liquid over the ragged patch of skin on her knee. It stings a little, and then it stings a lot. The hydrogen peroxide begins to foam and hiss. “That’s good, those bubbles,” Daphne says. “That means it’s working.”
Vera bites her swollen lip, fascinated, as the bubbles do whatever it is that they’re supposed to do. Her mother pours capfuls of liquid over both of Vera’s knees, the heels of her hands, her elbows. It hurts every time, a raw, immediate kind of pain that makes her suck air through her teeth. The hurt carves a deep valley into Vera’s heart because it’s braided together with Daphne’s attention, Daphne’s gentleness, Daphne’s care.