Chasing Spring(26)

“Why do you think that?” I asked, curious about why he still felt connected to me after all these years. I was nothing like the girl that he’d known back then.

“I've seen you cry and laugh and throw fits. I've seen you naked,” he laughed.

I hated that I blushed when he admitted that, but I was helpless to stop the reaction.

“When I was like seven...” I reasoned, trying to point out the flaw in his thinking.

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you still have that little freckle on your left butt cheek,” he declared, turning toward me with a sly grin. I decided to play his game.

“And I’ll bet you’re still the same size down there that you were then.”

He tossed his head back and laughed, a loud, rich laugh that tugged at the corners of my mouth.

“It wasn’t that long ago that we were best friends. What changed?”

I backpedaled, scared of the guilt creeping its way up my throat. “What are you talking about? Everything changed.”

Silence fell after that and I knew I'd hurt him. I never seemed to know how to handle myself around him since my mother’s death. Instead of apologizing, I tore off half of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and held it out to him. It was an apology wedged between two slices of white bread, and he took it.





Chapter Thirty


Lilah





After school on Tuesday, I didn’t walk home; I headed in the direction of my mom’s old apartment. It was on the other side of Main Street, where the houses were a little smaller and the tenants were more rough around the edges. After she’d left when I was seven, she’d moved into a one-bedroom apartment that smelled like bleach every time I went over to visit on Saturday afternoons. My dad would drop me off at her door, only leaving when he was sure I was safely inside. From there, I had five unsupervised hours with her.

She was never genuinely happy to see me. At the time, I hadn’t noticed, too blinded by my own excitement to pick up on the subtle signs. She'd turn on the TV, plant me on the couch, and then go in the other room and talk on the phone or flip through a magazine—anything to avoid me.

A year or two into our Saturday afternoon visits, there was a knock on her apartment door. I was coloring in the living room and even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I peered over. There was a man standing at the threshold, pressing the door open with his hand. A cigarette hung between his lips and a scar stretched from his eyelid down to the top of his lip. Small scabs were littered across his cheeks and chin. They looked like the scabs I got when I scratched too much at a mosquito bite. I wondered how he could have managed to get so many bites just as he bent down to grip my mother’s neck in his hand.

His cigarette fell to the floor, burning ash into the fake wood as I jumped up to stop him. I wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, but she waved behind her back, warning me away. I clenched my fists, trying to think of what to do. The phone was in the kitchen and I couldn’t figure out a way to sneak past without him noticing.

I stood scared and frozen in the living room as he bent low and whispered something only she could hear. She pleaded with him, begging for more time. Then as quickly as he’d arrived, he unwrapped his hand from my mother’s neck and left. When she shut the door, I swiveled back to stare at the TV, trying to pretend like the last few minutes had never happened. I picked up my crayon and tried to make my hand stop shaking. She walked into the living room and turned the TV off. The screen faded to black as she told me she had to leave. I asked her over and over again where she was going, but she ignored me as she gathered up my coloring books and shoved them inside my backpack. I wanted to yell at her for crinkling the pages. I wanted her to stop pushing me out the door.

I cradled my toys and snacks in my arms as she gave me orders to sit at the curb of her apartment complex until my dad came to pick me up. Then she disappeared inside her old red car. There was a giant dent on the back, near the bumper; I stared at it as she pulled away. My bottom lip quivered as the car got smaller and smaller in the distance, but I couldn’t cry. If I cried, someone would think I needed help and my mom would get in trouble.

I had to be a grownup.

For an hour, I sat on the cement with my coloring book unopened on my lap. Any time someone would walk by, I’d tell them that my mom had run back to the apartment to grab something so they wouldn’t think I was alone. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to finish my Capri Sun; I wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone.

When my father arrived a few hours later, I tried to lie and say my mother had just left, but he wouldn’t listen. He was in an absolute rage to find me alone and locked out of my mother's apartment. I begged him not to do anything, but that was the last time he let me go see my mom for a visit. The court rescinded her visitation rights without contest. I wished I knew what had pulled her away from me that day, who or what had been more important than her flesh and blood.

I walked along the sidewalk and then stood across the street from her apartment complex. The building had been worn down when she’d lived there, but it’d become condemnable in the years since. Trash littered the ground and most of the windows were duct-taped and boarded up. Weeds had claimed ownership of the yard a while back but no one seemed to mind. My hand itched to clear them out, but there was no point. If no one cared that they were there, no one would care when they were gone.