Collared(60)

The closer I get to accepting I was tied to nothing—free to go whenever I figured that out—the more confined I feel. The smaller my sense of safety shrinks. The longer I think about it, the more scared I become. How am I supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t when nothing is as it seems?

How am I supposed to be free of the past when I hadn’t known what freedom felt like the moment Earl Rae slid that padlock free?

I don’t want to leave the house. I don’t want to leave my room.

Here there are no cameras or uncomfortable questions or people to stare at me. I’m safe.

At least I think I am. I’m not sure if I remember the way safe feels anymore.

“Jade?” My mom’s muffled voice comes from outside of my door. “You need to come out, sweetheart.”

“I’m not ready.” I curl lower into the rocking chair and draw the stuffed elephant tighter to my chest.

“You can’t stay in there by yourself. It’s not healthy.”

I double-check the lock on the door. It’s still turned over. “I spent months in a dark closet, crying on an old mattress and shitting in a metal bucket. Don’t tell me what is and isn’t healthy.”

“Jade!” Dad’s voice booms followed by a hard pounding. “Come out. Enough of this. Now.”

I don’t say anything. I just keep rocking, staring at the same patch of carpet I’ve spent all morning watching. I’m pretty sure it’s where Torrin kissed me for the first time. I keep trying to conjure up the image, but I can’t get a firm enough grip on it. The moment it starts to surface, something pulls it back down.

All I can remember is that we were laughing about something and then, the next second, we were kissing. I don’t remember what he was wearing or where my hands settled on him, but I remember his hands weaving into my hair and pulling me toward him, holding me close.

I remember these shadows like the girl in them is someone else because she’s so different from the one slumped in this rocking chair that they can’t be the same. I replay the shards of the memory like I’m jealous of the seventeen-year-old version of this girl and think about how I’d trade my life for hers in an instant . . . then I kill that wish. I don’t want her happiness to come to an end any sooner than it already did.

I might have been that girl, but there’s too much poison in me now. It killed her off, and she can never come back. I’m stuck with this. Me. Whoever that is.

“Don’t make me kick this door in, Jade, because so help me God, I will do it.” My dad’s voice quivers as he pounds on the door again. It seems to shake the whole room.

“Just do it then. Go ahead. You wouldn’t be the first person to take away my freedom.”

The pounding stops, and I think I hear Mom cry, but I cover my ears because I’m so tired of tears. I’m so tired of knowing I’m responsible for them. I’ve heard so many, late at night when they think I’m asleep, that I’ve started wishing my family had found me dead. At least they’d have had some measure of peace once my body was laid to rest.

At least they could move on. But now, alive, I’m dragging them under with me.

I’m still covering my ears when I hear more knocking, but this kind is different. It isn’t the same thud of knuckles on wood—it’s lighter. Clearer sounding. I lower my hands and look in the direction it’s coming from—my window.

When he sees he’s caught my attention, he stops tapping at the glass and waves. When he smiles, my chest seizes. I haven’t seen Torrin in days. Seeing him now, even through a sheet of glass, makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay. I feel like that for a few seconds.

Then I notice his priest’s collar, then my neck burns with phantom pain, and I realize the sheet of glass separating us isn’t the smallest thing keeping us apart.

When I stay in the chair, he lifts his hands like he’s waiting for me to say something. Or do something.

Torrin and I used to climb the roofs to each other’s bedrooms so much as kids that my dad had threatened to grow thorn bushes on this side of the house when we became teenagers. He planted them the day we went on our first “date” to the pizza parlor on Lake Washington. Except he didn’t realize the climbing rose bush he’d planted was a thornless variety. It didn’t keep Torrin from climbing up here, and when they were in bloom, he always snagged a rose on his way up. So yeah, Dad’s plan had totally backfired.

How nice it must be to wind up with roses when you were expecting thorns.

After a minute, Torrin shrugs and takes a seat. He doesn’t turn away though—he just keeps looking at me through the pane of glass.

I don’t last more than a minute before shoving out of the rocking chair and moving toward the window. After unlocking it, I lift it. When I step back so he can climb in, he doesn’t move.

“Can I come in?” he asks.

He isn’t ordering. He isn’t demanding. He isn’t forcing. He’s asking.

“You can come in,” I reply.

When he climbs inside, the air moves in my room like the heaviness of it is escaping out the window. He leaves the window open and stands in front of me. The last time Torrin and I were in my bedroom together behind a locked door, he laid me down on my bed and kissed me until I felt that spot where this world recedes and the curtain to the other side starts to lift.