Forty-five
Labored breathing. The chilling hair-standing-on-end feeling that I’m being watched.
Fighting my way back to consciousness, I shift away from the nightmare threatening to drag me under. I will not have this dream again. I won’t let myself.
But I do.
A rough palm caresses my cheek. Another touches my breast and trails down my stomach to slip under my shirt. A heavy mouth covers mine. Hot, impatient breath forces its way into my lungs, breath that tastes of beer. I try to fight him off but his touch only gets rougher.
I’ll always love you and make you happy,
If you will only say the same.
But if you leave me to love another,
You’ll regret it all someday.
I wake suddenly, sitting up and screaming into the blackness.
4:42.
He tackles me back onto my pillow. “Shhh!”
Unable to breathe beneath his weight and with his hand crushing my nose and mouth, I stare at the dark, man-shaped shadow. He isn’t supposed to be here, not tonight, not when I’m alone. Seconds before I suffocate, he shoves himself away from me and staggers to his feet.
“How could you, Sarah?” he asks, words slurred. “How could you fuck Sam?”
“James?” Everything inside of me goes still when the stench of sour beer blasts me in the face. I push myself up on my hands, numb to the pain in my hip. “Are you drunk?”
“What’s it matter to you?” He takes a big step closer, slams his knee into my cheap metal bed frame and nearly crumples. He manages to stay upright but only barely. “Say. His. Name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say weakly.
“Stop lying to me!” he bellows, then grabs his head as if the sound was even more deafening inside of it. “I can smell the fucking condoms.”
My blood turns to ice in my veins, crackling and splitting, until I’m sure I’m going to have some sort of frozen aneurism. I barely remember the forced lovemaking session after the night I’ve had. What did Sam do with the condom?
James’s fury shifts to despair and he drops to his knees. “God, Sarah, do you hate me so much you had to fuck him in our room?”
In the faint moonlight, I can see the misshapen lines of his face. The fight. “I don’t hate you. And I’d never purposely hurt you. I love you.”
He shakes his head, his big shoulders trembling. “No, I love you. You’ve never loved me, even though it’s supposed to be me and you, forever.” He reaches for my waist and buries his sticky face in my stomach. “Why can’t I be enough? I want to be enough so fucking bad.”
“You are enough!”
“I’ll never be enough and you know it.”
This is horrible. More horrible than I imagined. I close my eyes and stroke his crusty hair, very quietly singing our lullaby.
His shoulders stop trembling halfway through the verse and by the end I think he’s humming along with me. I hope so. I scoot farther down on my bed so I can reach him better and because his lumpy face pressed into the bruises on my lower stomach hurts.
“I’m sorry about Leslie,” he mumbles into my shirt, which is bunching up around his face as I wriggle lower. “She doesn’t mean anything to me. Promise.”
I couldn’t care less about Leslie and I am about to tell him so, but then he turns his head, moving my thin t-shirt out of the way with his big hands, and I realize how bad an idea it was to scoot lower. He nuzzles into my bare chest instead of coming higher into my arms, breathing me in and pressing his lips to my skin. I gasp and shove at his shoulders.
“Damn it!” he roars. My hands fly to my ears because he’s right there in my face, tiny drops of spit flying. “Don’t you understand? Do you understand anything?”
He hauls me off the bed and throws me over his shoulder. I scream, a short sound I can’t keep in no matter how hard I try because his shoulder is digging into my hip and it’s almost as painful as the boiling water that burned me in the first place. I shut up immediately though, because he throws open the front door and staggers toward his truck.
“We’re going to the beach,” he says, dumping me into the passenger seat. “Right now, tonight. You’re going to be with me and we’re going to camp on the beach.”
He’s hardly making sense, which reminds me that he’s drunk at the very least. “Wait, you’ve been drinking. And Leslie—you were at Leslie’s. Are you on something?”
He laughs—a cold, unfriendly sound—and slams the door shut in my face. I lean across the seat to smack his lock down but I’m too late.
“Please,” I say and grab his arm. “I don’t want to go tonight. Can we go back inside and talk? I’ll stay up as long as you want and we’ll talk until we figure this out.” I have no idea what I’ll say to calm him down, but I have to come up with something. With him this messed up and pissed off, he’ll drive straight to Sam’s and kill him if I tell the truth.
“No more talking.”
He backs out of the driveway herky-jerky and then peels off down our street. I close my eyes and pray for a cop to be sitting on the corner by the park. Detective Lilly, even. Maybe we’ll get pulled over and James will get tossed into jail where he’ll have no choice but to cool off.
No cops, of course. No Detective Lilly when I actually need him. I buckle my seatbelt and hold on tight as he roars toward I-5. “Where are we going?”
At the last second, when the Interstate onramp is less than ten yards away, he cranks the wheel to the left and veers off toward the hills instead. The truck skids through the intersection, its tires screeching on the pavement. “Camping,” he repeats calmly. “But not at the beach. I changed my mind.”
This is way worse than the Interstate because the roads up here are steep and windy. James is having a hard time keeping the truck on the road let alone in his own lane, so I’ve been curled up in my seat, chewing my nails for the last twenty minutes. We’re going to get creamed when a logging truck flies around one of the corners—I just know it.
Desperate, I try again. “Please pull over and talk to me. You’re not okay.”
He shakes his head.
“I’m scared.”
I’ve used the same voice, the same words, hundreds of times and every time, I was either already in James’s arms or he immediately pulled me into them. I’m counting on the same reaction. When he glances over at me, his swollen brow furrowed, I know I’ve got him.
“Please,” I whimper. “You’re scaring me.”
He slams on the breaks and violently steers us into the dirt on the side of the road. We’re alarmingly close to Sam’s secret place. Suspiciously close.
“So talk,” he says, glaring at me in the darkness.
I consider getting out of the truck. If he snaps, I’ll be able to run into the trees and evade him long enough for us both to calm down. Then again, I’m barefoot and he’s not. He’d catch up even more pissed off than before.
“I love you,” I offer instead. “It hurts me that you think I don’t.”
He laughs but the sound quickly turns into shuddering sobs. After years of my brother never crying, to see him broken and hurting like this is a knife to my chest.
“Mom’s gone, Dad’s gone, and tonight, that fucking detective took Leslie away…” He scrubs the tears from his eyes and looks at me. “I could’ve handled losing them, but losing you is killing me.”
Seventeen years of pain reflects back at me from the shadows. In the dark, I can’t see his blackened eyes but I can feel the pain in the tense air between us, can smell it in his sweat, can hear it in his voice. If I lean across the seat and kiss him, I’ll taste it. “I am so, so, sorry,” I say and unbuckle my safety belt. “You haven’t lost me, though. I’m right here.”
He eyes me warily as I scoot closer. I touch his arm. He’s like a caged animal ready to strike out. I’ve never seen him this tightly wound, this ready to snap. His eyes dart from my hand on his arm to my face and back. I move to my knees, taking a chance because I know with all my heart he’d never hit me, and wrap my arms around his neck.
“I love you,” I whisper. “Only you.”
There’s no way I’m telling him the truth now. Not in the middle of a dark forest with him drunk and quite possibly high. To bury my pain, I whisper my love for Sam namelessly into my brother’s ear, over and over.
It takes him a minute, but James finally slumps against me. “You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“No.” Yes. And damn, it hurts.
He nods and turns his body toward me so we’re chest to chest and squeezes me tight. A sense of foreboding inches up my spine, following the path of his fingers, which keep right on going into my hair. Sam has held me exactly like this countless times, his mouth at my neck. With me on my knees and his hands locking me in place, all James has to do is lift his chin a few inches and we’ll be kissing.
“We should be together. You and me. Don’t you know?”
I do know. At least, I know he believes it. I hold my breath as he strokes my hair, trembling in his arms and waiting for the inevitable. When he finally draws my face to his, I close my eyes. I hate myself for ruining my brother. I’ll do anything to fix it. Seeing James destroyed hurts worse than torture.
But he doesn’t kiss me. No brush of lips, no shared breath, no anything.
“When you were really little, she used to braid your hair,” he says, rubbing a lock between his fingers. “Skinny yellow braids like ropes, but softer. Prettier. Mom used to get mad at me for sticking all my little army men into your hair, but watching you walk around with green things hanging off your head was hilarious. She never spanked me, though. Or you.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I know,” he says sadly. “I wish you did. Maybe then you would’ve loved her, too. Maybe you’d understand.”
I can’t fathom loving our mother or our father. Except for James and Sam, love is a foreign concept to me. When I think of braids and army men, the emptiness in my chest expands exponentially and I hate myself for wondering what if now that it’s too late. I almost hate James for forcing me to relive something secondhand I’d give anything to remember.
“I’m so afraid you’re going to leave me,” he continues in a broken voice. “With Dad gone, you don’t need me anymore. I don’t know who I am without you. I don’t want to. I need you more than Sam does, but you don’t need me. God, it hurts.”
Holding him, I’m struck by how childlike he is. How childlike he’s always been. I’m holding him to my chest exactly like he always holds me when I’m scared and no one can protect me but him. This isn’t about sex or any of the disgusting things my mind is trying to make it into. This is James. My brother. The one who has thrown away everything to save me.
Save James.
It’s time to repay my debt.
“I’ll always need you,” I tell him. The truth.
“Promise you won’t leave?”
There is no hope in his voice. He’s already given up.
“Promise.” Even if I have to give up Sam. My heart shatters at the thought, but I refuse to back down. I owe James this. “I’ll never leave you.”
“Mom said that, too.”
The dream I’ve tried so hard to forget tries to break out of where I’ve buried it and nearly succeeds. Her fingers on my cheek. My name on her lips, urging me to save my brother. From my father or from me, I’m not sure anymore. Eyes watering, terrified to believe what he’s about to say, I ask, “She did?”
He nods. “Until Dad made her stay away.”
I kiss his temple and keep my lips there so I can’t speak. Anything I say will open the floodgates I refuse to open. We stay that way for a long time until he drags one of his legs up on the seat and pulls me onto his lap.
“I was going to kill him,” he whispers. “When we went camping, I was going to sneak back home and kill him when you were asleep. That’s why I bought the gun. But then I couldn’t because everyone was there and they might’ve seen me leave.”
I pull away and search his shadowed face. “But you would’ve gone to jail.”
“I had to,” he whispers. “She made me promise.”
“To kill Dad?”
No answer. I suspect the alcohol and whatever drugs he took are catching up to him because his swollen eyes are half-mast, his minced mouth slack. I have to know what he means. Knowing what he means might change everything. I lightly smack his cheek. “James? She made you promise to kill Dad?”
“To save you,” he mumbles. “And her.”
I gape at my brother in the darkness, but he droops forward against my chest, eyes closed. Is that why he snapped? Because he couldn’t save her from our father? There are so many things I want to ask him. So many things I need to say.
But all I can do is hold him while he sleeps and wait until morning. While he snores against my neck, I stroke his hair and stare out into the dark forest.
This changes everything.