How to Disappear(50)

I try to convince myself that coming out with it would have a strategic advantage. If I go with the truth about this thing, it will make me look honest as hell. I could be the trustworthy guy who gets to unhook the bra.

Okay, there’s that. I’m trying to have sex with her, which, under the circumstances, makes me a monster—a respectful monster, but a monster.

I say, “I tell people my brother and I were playing with a broken saber.”

“But that’s not true?” I’m not sure if this is a question or a statement.

Suddenly, I’m not turned on. She’s put my T-shirt on herself, snuggling now at my side. The shirt hangs like a charcoal gray tepee, which on her could still be arousing. It’s not arousing now.

“My dad had an anger-management problem.” The words come out slowly. They feel stuck in my mouth.

“That’s one way of putting it,” she says, her fingers still wandering the surface of my back, between the shoulder blades and down my spine as she curls around me. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She can say that, but she’s waiting for something.

“My dad beat on me.” It doesn’t even sound like my voice. “Not often. Jesus.” She’s moved to where she’s next to me, holding me, touching my face. My face is in her now-black hair where it gets fluffy around the neck, soft as a cat.

Her arms wrap around me. She says, “I’d never have kids if I thought I’d do that once.”

“You don’t think anyone can lose it if they’re angry enough? If everything lines up, perfect storm?”

She’s hanging on to me from the side, straddling me, clinging the way those stuffed animal toys with hinged arms and legs cling to the ends of pencils. “You seriously think anyone could beat on a kid with a meat cleaver?”

I have to stop myself from saying You should know or Got hypocrisy? or What the f*ck were you doing with a knife and Connie Marino’s jugular vein?

But I don’t say any of it. I say, “Belt buckle.”

I’ve told the other story so often that the truth feels like a lie. Having Don shred my back sounds a lot more plausible than my dad losing it. Of course, my dad losing it isn’t what happened either. My dad always did what he intended to do. He didn’t lose it.

It’s hard to breathe because my throat is closing. I force words out across my tongue and through my lips, which are freaking quivering—quivering! I don’t get like this. I will not.

I say, “It wasn’t his anger-management problem. He didn’t realize how much it would show. It was a big PR disaster.”

Maybe I can’t breathe because she’s holding me so tight. She’s pressed against me so hard everywhere, I couldn’t get any closer unless I were literally inside her. But I’m the opposite of turned on.

Her hands are kneading my shoulders. She has a lot of hand strength for a small girl: surprise, surprise. I lean forward, away from her. The places we were skin to skin peel apart with a little stripping sound.

I’m making satisfied noises against my will.

She says, “Do you want to keep having this conversation?”

“No! I don’t ever want to discuss this again.”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Sorry.”

“When I was joking about wounded, sensitive guys? The part where I said they can’t stand me and they make me sick. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not wounded. And I’m not sensitive. Give me back my shirt.”

She pulls it right off, slides it fast over my head and down my shoulders. Once my eyes are uncovered, there’s the pink polka-dotted bra. It’s a don’t-touch-me, purest-girl-on-the-cheerleading-squad, don’t-think-about-going-all-the-way bra.

I wish beyond wishing that the truth wasn’t true. I wish Connie Marino were alive and well and acing nursing school in Michigan. I wish this girl with the unfettered evil streak didn’t make me feel this way—this crazy protective want-to-be-with-her-all-the-time way.





51


Cat


Pull on the snag, and the sweater unravels.

Everyone knows that.

I know that.

I didn’t mean to unravel him. I would knit him back up if I could. But all I get to do is hold him, sensitive and wounded, leaning back against me on the bed.

I want to say, Be all right. Don’t let me mess you up. I can knit. Let me fix this.

I know there’s no way to fix this.

If I could face down the man who did this to him, the so-called father with the belt, I would—with my own hands, with the rush mothers get that lets them lift boulders off their half-crushed babies—give him what he deserves.

I hum and stroke J’s head, the babysitting move that puts the kid to sleep.

He relaxes into me.

I want to be a real girl holding a real boy. Not a fake person from a fake trailer full of fake religious zealots pretending to care about someone she’s going to ditch ASAP because her whole life is all me me me, staying alive.

The plan is to slide from place to place. Score a birth certificate. Get a real job. Save up. Go to college online. Get plastic surgery. Do everything intentionally missing people on TV shows do, and come out as a living person who’s not me.

The problem is, I hate this plan.