The Truth About Keeping Secrets(75)
We looked at each other.
‘I dropped it,’ she said again. ‘I believed him. And then I tried to break it off again. A couple of months later. And I almost did it too. I drove away, the whole thing. Five minutes later he texted me a picture of an empty bottle of pills. So I went back. He was bluffing, obviously. But he spun it like, “See, you came back, so you do care about me.” ’ June stopped, and rolled over as best she could manage. She tried to read my face. ‘I know you think I’m crazy.’
‘Why would I think you’re crazy?’
‘Because –’ she fought back tears again – ‘because for the past few months I’ve just envisioned myself telling someone this story, and, like, trying to figure out how to phrase it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like I’m fucking insane for not doing something, or, you know, for not standing up for myself. I thought I was being strong, and sticking it out, because I’m busy fixing him, and you think, like, it’s not like he’s hitting me, or anything, so you feel like maybe you’re making a big deal out of nothing, or that you’re a bitch, or something –’
‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ I said, and meant it. ‘He would want you to think that. Right? You’re not crazy. You’re not a bitch. It’s his fault.’
‘I know.’ She exhaled. ‘I know. It’s just, like, when it was good, it was good. There’d be, God, like months at a time where things would be fine. Perfect. He’d be loving and gentle but then it’d all go to shit again and I had to deal with it. And the best way I can explain it is … that you forget what normal is. You forget how people are supposed to treat you and talk to you and … touch you. You forget what that’s like. And with everyone else gone, there’s no one to show you or to tell you. So slowly you start living in this fucking upside-down world except there was no rabbit hole, no, like, point of entry, it just happened around you and you never stopped to think, well, shit, what the fuck is happening here?’ She took a breath. ‘Until you, I guess.’
My stomach leaped.
‘So, all this was happening, and I was like, OK, a breakup can’t happen, and I felt like shit all the time, so, yeah, that’s when I started to see your dad. Middle of junior year, I think.’
‘What did you tell him?’
She shrugged. ‘Everything I knew, at the time. Like I said, I thought there was something wrong with me. And I wasn’t withholding anything from him – honestly, I just didn’t realize. So, Ben – ha. Sorry.’
I grinned, a foreign pressure on my cheekbones.
‘He diagnosed me, I guess, and I – I had a deadly amalgamation of shit going on. I was depressed and anxious but I think I already knew that. But then he was like –’ she mimicked Dad’s voice – ‘it seems like you have symptoms of PTSD. And I was like … what? PTSD? What trauma am I post? And then, I … yeah. I kind of realized.
‘Because your dad’s smart, and even though I never explicitly told him, he clued in to what was going on. He basically pieced it together just from me having mentioned Heath in passing a couple of times. Figured everything out. Our sessions became exclusively about abusive relationships. And at the time, I was like … abusive relationship? That term seemed too extreme. Way too extreme. And it terrified me. Like, that didn’t happen to people like me. I was too smart for that. Too strong for that. Right? But I’d spent years rationalizing away the whole thing. Heath made me think this was all normal. Your dad confidently told me that it wasn’t. Ben was the reason I finally figured it out, how I remembered that this wasn’t the way one human is supposed to treat another. And, you know, I realized it had nothing to do with being smart or strong. Nothing at all.
‘I confronted Heath about everything when senior year started. And we – God, I don’t even remember what I said. We fought. It escalated. And escalated. So, yeah. He, uh, grabbed me. Hard. You know, like, round my arms?’
My chest bubbled with rage. Suddenly I felt like we were back in the car, and I wanted to crash it again, except this time we’re two degrees more to the right or left, and a rogue branch decapitates the driver.
‘It bruised really bad,’ she continued. ‘And I knew if your dad knew, he’d do something. And I just didn’t want … God. I can barely even put myself back in my headspace from that time because it’s all just so ludicrous, but I guess some of me still wanted to protect Heath, and I … I don’t know. I wasn’t even planning on telling your dad at first. But he could tell something was the matter, and I just needed to tell somebody, so I spilled everything that had happened. He said he was going to – that he had to – file a CPS report, because I still wasn’t eighteen.’
‘Oh, God.’
June nodded gravely. ‘And I told Heath after, obviously. That he knew. He was … livid. That was the beginning of September. And then a couple of weeks later –’
‘He was dead.’ We both understood who ‘he’ was.
Dad. Everything – all of this – was about him. I wished so badly that he was here. To tuck my hair behind my ear and put his hand on my ankle, not because the girl broke my heart but because she broke all of me, and I broke all of her, too, and now we were here trying to put each other back together without any more bloodshed.