When My Heart Joins the Thousand(81)

“I don’t want you to end up like him.”

“Uhhh.” The moan slides out of my mouth, thick, like syrup.

Chair legs scrape the floor as Mama stands. She walks around the table toward me and places her hands on my shoulders. I sway, woozy. I try to ask her what’s going on, but all that comes out is another moan.

“Shhh.”

She lifts me out of the chair. I hang like a rag doll from her arms, head and limbs flopping as Mama carries me over to the sofa and sits. She hunches over, cradling me in her lap, and holds me tightly as she rocks me back and forth.

My head rolls to one side. Everything is fuzzy. The world spins slowly around me, like I’m on a carousel. Mama strokes my hair.

Usually, she smells like honey and vanilla shampoo. Now a sour, stale smell clings to her, as if she hasn’t washed for a while, and she’s clutching me so painfully tight. Her fingers dig into my ribs, like she’s afraid I’ll float away if she loosens her grip. “I love you so much, Alvie,” she says. “Do you understand that?”

I open my mouth, but all that comes out is more drool.

Something is really wrong. If I could just think clearly, I’d know what it was, but every time I try to hold on to my thoughts, they slip through my fingers, like I’m trying to grab wriggly little fish.

I try to form words: Mama, what’s going on? but my lips and tongue are numb and all that comes out is uhhh, wuh ruhh.

She starts singing. It’s the song she used to sing to me sometimes when I was little, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” But now she sings it with my name. “My Alvie lies over the ocean . . . my Alvie lies over the sea . . .” Tears fall on my face. “My Alvie lies over the ocean . . .”

A gray haze closes around me. I’m falling, and her words follow me down.

“Oh bring back my Alvie to me.”

I open my mouth to tell her that I’m here. But the gray fog swallows me whole.

For a while, I float.

When I surface from the haze, we’re moving. I can hear the car and feel a seat belt across my body. I try to lift my head, but it feels like it’s filled with cement.

“Just relax,” Mama says. Her voice is soft and faraway. “We’re going for a ride. I’m going to take you to your favorite place.”

My eyelids are made of stone, but I manage to pry them open a crack. Mama is driving, her face bathed in the faint glow from the dashboard, her eyes wide and blank. “Everything is going to be okay,” she says.

I don’t know what’s happening. I struggle to put the pieces together, but it’s like looking at a jigsaw where none of the edges quite line up. If only I could think. Why can’t I think?

Within, a small, cold, clear voice whispers, The juice. My heartbeat quickens. I have to move. I have to get out of here. I don’t know what’s happening, except that everything about this is wrong and I have to get out. But my muscles are like spaghetti. It’s like that feeling when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m only half-asleep but my body won’t move—sleep paralysis—and my eyes won’t quite open and my mind is still fogged with dreams, and I think, Just move one finger, and I try very hard to move my right index finger, but nothing happens.

Move. Move. Move. Move.

I can see out the window. I see the sign that means we’ve reached the lake. This is the place where Mama usually pulls over and parks. But we keep driving, toward the wooden pier that juts out like a finger over the lake.

And my body still won’t move.

It would be easy just to let go and fall asleep. Maybe if I let go, everything will be okay. Maybe I will wake up in my own bed, and this will all be a dream.

As I sink deeper into the warm darkness, her voice follows me: “Whatever happens, it’s because I love you.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


Silence falls over the room. Stanley is still holding my hand, but he says nothing. There is no sound except his unsteady breathing.

“She kept saying she loved me. That whatever she did, it was because she loved me.” I stare straight ahead. I’m floating, still empty, because if I allow myself to feel anything now, I will shatter. “If that’s love, then how can love be good.”

He draws in a deep, slow breath. Then he touches my cheek, turning my face toward him. His eyes are vividly blue, wide and filled with tears. “That’s not what love is, Alvie.”

I stare back dully.

“Even if she did love you, what she did that night . . . that wasn’t an act of love.”

“Then what was it.”

His shoulders sag, and he suddenly looks very tired. “I don’t know. Fear, maybe? I can’t understand why she did it. But I can tell you this much. It was not your fault.”

“Yes. It was.” The numbness has started to fade. Inside me, something is awakening, and it hurts. “I made her miserable. If I had tried harder . . .” The breath rattles in my chest. “If I’d done things differently, if I’d been different, maybe she’d still be alive. And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that I’ll always be like this, no matter how I try to be better, that it’ll happen all over again, and I—and you—”

He seizes my hand in his, so hard I look up in surprise. “You can spend your life playing guessing games, trying to imagine some other world where you made different choices and everything turned out another way. But there’s no world where it’s okay to drug an eleven-year-old girl, strap her into the seat of a car, and drive into a lake.”