All the Rage(23)

“What are you doing, Romy?”

I look up and Holly is looking down at me, like I’ve done so much that’s wrong tonight. I open my mouth but nothing comes out and she says, you can’t stay in this booth like I didn’t know that. I stare at my hands, at my nails until they blur red.

“Romy,” Holly says. She sounds different now. “Are you all right?”

I move out of the booth so fast, she has to step back. I push through the door and I run into the parking lot. The thin roar of Penny’s Vespa engine reaches my ear.

I watch her leave.





NOW





a wolf is at the door.

He’s not wearing his uniform. It’s strange, seeing the sheriff not in his uniform but this doesn’t have to be anything official, yet. I’m just here today, parent to parent.

Her mother. Doesn’t know what to do, hasn’t known what to do since she found her daughter in the shower, under the running water, still drunk and crying, babbling the truth to the tiles. That next morning, her mother, in tears, asked about it.

Romy, you said something last night. I need to be sure of what you told me.

A truck bed and a boy.

A text, later, from her best friend: YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING STUPID, DID YOU?

Devastation roots her family if denial is not moving them forward. Her father disappeared, couldn’t handle it, and she stayed inside with her mother, trying to figure out what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. She’s any girl and they’re any family, but this boy. He’s special and his family is special.

And now, a wolf at the door.

So let him in.

Paul was at the bar the other night and laid out some pretty serious accusations. You know how word travels around here. He said my son raped your daughter. And then, as they process this one thing, her father (sleeping last night off upstairs) taking it to the world before she knew if that was what she wanted, the sheriff says, of course, no one believes it but that still doesn’t mean he can go around saying it. I want to know why he’s saying it.

God, they are so flustered, so sick, so looking for direction, any direction, they invite him in, they sit him at the kitchen table, they let the conversation start out with coffee, with one sugar or two and do nothing when it moves to the crush she’d been nursing on his son these months and you can’t deny you were attracted to him.

No, she can’t, is what her silence says back to him. She can’t deny that for months she imagined his son’s hands on her body, in that truck, in a bed, anywhere. She pictured it over and over except in her head, she wanted it and her eyes were open.

She hates her heart, that misguided organ in her chest.

Why didn’t it warn her?

You were drunk at my house, Friday night. I’ve talked to my sons and I have talked to Penny. No one else was drinking. You’re underage. I could pursue it, if I wanted. But I won’t.

Because he’s just here today, parent to parent.

Thank you, her mother says, without thinking.

He says, they say you chase after him. That you wore an outfit, hoping that you would catch his attention. Short skirt, skimpy shirt. They? And, reaching into his pocket, unfolding a piece of paper, tell me about what you wrote in this e-mail here: Penny, I want him. I dream about him.

This cuts a thousand times, her e-mail in his hands. There’s only one place he could have gotten it. The betrayal is more than she thinks she can bear; the one girl who believed in her, doesn’t believe her.

You know what they’re saying? They’re saying Paul’s telling people my son raped your daughter to get back at Helen for firing him. Now maybe they fooled around and maybe she was a little too drunk at the time, but rape? You can’t just call it something like that.

Then what do you call it?

He says, nobody believes it. They think it’s ugly. I think it’s ugly.

He says, I hope we can get this sorted out before you make it worse for yourselves.

He says, but I want to understand, Romy, so you tell me what you think happened.

And it’s not that she tells him it didn’t happen, it’s that by the time he asks, she no longer has a language of her own. But that’s enough. It always is.

Every time I close my eyes, there’s a memory. Every time I open them, I’m still on the road. I’ll never get off this road, not alone. But I’m not alone, I remember. The footsteps stopped. A shadow across my body. Maybe someone nice—but I’m too afraid to look.

“You with me?”

Dirt against my hands. I’m so heavy with heat, my head struggles against it, tries to tell me important things like this is not a safe place and leave.

But I can’t leave if I don’t know how to stand.

“You with me?”

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know anything except this, the air—too dry—the small movements I’m making—hurt—the sun—hot—the sky—it makes me dizzy. I finally squint up at the face above and am relieved to find, not a wolf, but a woman, just like me.

Until I see the uniform.





“romy grey, you hearing me?”

The deputy crouches, setting a bottle of water in front of me. It teeters on the ground, the water sloshing against its plastic sides before settling still as anything, as still as the—lake.