Authors: R. K. Ryals
He edged away from me.
Maybe it was the ease in which he left—as if
what I’d told him was just another burdensome part of life and not
like someone had just died—that made me ask, “You’ve never lost
anyone, have you?”
“Going now,” he repeated.
“It’s weird, you know,” I babbled, not even
caring if he stayed. “It’s like they’re there, and then they’re
just not. Like turning off a light switch. With my mom, it was so
unexpected that the only thing I can remember is the weight of it,
like I was being crushed by a boulder or run over by a truck. Like
I’d been ripped into a tornado, spinning and spinning and spinning.
This time—”
Eli paused at the roof door, his shoulders
slumping. “Okay,” he mumbled. “I’m staying, okay? This is me,” he
moved back onto the roof toward the parapet, “staying.”
Shaking myself, I glanced at him, surprised.
“What? You don’t have to stay. I’m not asking you to stay.”
I didn’t want him to stay, did I? This
fire-breathing, snarling stranger trying to escape the crazy that
was me?
He snorted. “Tansy? That’s your name, right?”
I nodded. “Well, Tansy, seeing as I’m still waiting on a ride, and
I happened to be the unlucky guy standing on the roof when you
obviously needed sympathy, I suppose I’m kind of it. That’s not
saying a lot. I’m an ear, but I’m one unsympathetic son of a
bitch.”
“Good,” I answered, surprising us both. “I
don’t want sympathy. I want … I want …” A hiccup escaped, the sob
barreling up my chest, choking me. “He suffered. A lot.” My gaze
fell to my toes. “So much blood.”
Eli flicked a lighter, drawing my attention.
An unlit cigarette dangled from his fingers. “This is where I tell
you that the subject of bodily fluid should remain off the
table.”
A single, muted tear slid down my cheek. Eli
pretended not to notice. Holding out the cigarette, he offered it
to me.
“I don’t smoke.”
He shrugged and lit it.
My gaze took him in. “So your family has
money?”
“Oh, we’re talking about me now?” he asked,
exhaling smoke.
“You said no bodily fluids,” I reminded
him.
A smile touched his lips. A hint, nothing
more. “Shitloads of it,” he answered. “My family has shitloads of
money. Tons of money and not a lick of give a damn.”
My heart beat a steady
rhythm against my rib cage. One thump. Two. With each beat, it
yelled,
“You’re still alive. Breathe,
Tansy.”
“I’m trying really hard to feel sympathetic,
but I got nothing.”
“Good,” he answered, throwing my words back
at me. “Because I don’t want sympathy.”
We stared at each other. He was older than
me; maybe my brother’s age.
“My heart hurts,” I let slip.
Eli froze. “Yeah, well … that’s another topic
I’m completely incapable of discussing.”
Approaching him, I leaned awkwardly against
the stone ledge. It came up to my chest, so even if I wanted to
hang over the world, I’d have to climb up to do it.
How would that feel, hanging over the
world?
“Hearts aren’t your thing?”
He laughed, the sound short. “Not even a
little.”
I glanced at him.
“What
is
your
thing?”
“What’s yours?”
My hands gripped the ledge, the gravel
digging into my fingers, leaving little rock impressions.
“Knitting,” I answered. “I like to knit, and I like gardening.”
He stared, aghast. “You sound like my
grandmother.”
“Because I like to knit things and play in
dirt?”
“Yeah.”
My face heated, but I welcomed the
embarrassment. It distracted me from the pain, from the chaos I was
going to have to return to.
“And yours?” I asked. “What is your
thing?”
“Boxing,” he answered, “and boats.”
“Toy boats or boat boats?”
“Boat boats.” He spread his hands wide, ashes
falling from the cigarette. “The bigger, the better. Small works,
too, though.”
My brows rose. “I’ve got a few words for you.
Titanic? Lusitania? USS Arizona? Bermuda Triangle?”
Eli leaned toward me. “I’d be more impressed
with your nautical knowledge if you hadn’t just spouted off a
flawed liner, two ships that went down after being attacked in
wartime situations, and a mythical location.”
“I don’t pretend to know a lot about boats
other than well-known disasters.”
“You’re missing out,” he informed me. “The
sea is a bea—”
The roof door slammed open, my brother
bursting through it; a twisted jack-in-the-box I wanted to push
back into the box. “Tansy?” His narrowed, grief-stricken eyes slid
from my figure to Eli’s and back again. “I thought you might be
here,” he murmured, ignoring Eli. “There’s nothing left to keep us
here. We need to go.”
I stepped away from the parapet. “Dad—”
“They’ve taken him. We’re leaving with—”
“I don’t want to go with her.”
Jet sighed. “We don’t have a choice. Think
about Deena. Come on, Tansy.”
Reluctantly, I edged toward my brother.
“Hey,” Eli called, stopping me. “You’re going
to be okay, right?”
I glanced back at him. “I thought you didn’t
do sympathy?”
He shrugged.
Throwing him a soft, weary smile, I mumbled,
“Quit drinking, rich boy.”
He flicked his cigarette over the side of the
building, his body leaning against the parapet, his gaze on the
street below.
Jet motioned me inside the hospital. The
doorway was a monster waiting to swallow me whole. Rather than run,
we stumbled straight into the belly of the beast.
Eli
I was a magnet for emotional baggage. It
didn’t matter how fast or how hard I tried running.
It began when I was a
toddler sitting next to my weeping mother. Running her manicured
nails through my hair, she’d whisper,
“Everything is going to be okay.”
Over
and over again. Broken, wheeze-tainted word-sobs. I didn’t know
whether she was trying to convince me or herself, but ever since
then, I’d been
that
boy, the one who was there when shit went down. My mother
primed me for it. I’d been bred to keep Kleenex everywhere; my car,
my room, and my pockets.
As soon as I graduated high school, I
developed a new motto: see tears, hand over Kleenex, run, and
repeat.
With my mother, the tears had always been
over inane things. A temper tantrum over a piece of jewelry or a
pair of shoes my grandfather wouldn’t buy her, a wailing fit over a
new wrinkle on her face, or a sobbing mess over one of her numerous
failed affairs. Mom wasn’t just good at crying, she was good at
falling in and out of love very quickly.
There were two kinds of tears in the
world—the kind that mattered and the kind that didn’t.
The girl on the roof, I think that tear
mattered.
One look, and I’d had her mentally pegged a
misguided, unfortunate disaster, my irritation growing the longer
she stood on the roof. There wasn’t much to her. A slight frame. A
wrinkled, hooded T-shirt hanging over a pair of cut-off shorts. A
diamond stud winked at me from her nose, and her eyelids were lined
in smeared kohl, highlighting her emerald irises. Her short brown
hair was jagged and layered, the strands overwhelmed by screaming
red highlights. Random, unprofessional, chunky pieces.
“This spot is taken,” I said.
Upon closer scrutiny, everything changed. Her
face was a grieving landscape born more of regret than sadness. A
connoisseur of tears, I thought I knew how to read them all, loss
included, but hers spoke a new, disturbing language.
The talking threw me, not because words kept
coming out of her mouth but because I actually stayed to listen. I
didn’t do personal small talk, and she wasn’t my type. The girls
that tempted me were tall, curvy, and older. Even if I had been
persuaded to offer a shoulder hoping I’d get laid, she wasn’t my
modus operandi, and since sex was off the table, there shouldn’t
have been anything left to keep me there. After all, I had women
issues. My mother and former fiancée had made sure of that.
With a sigh, I pocketed the last two
cigarettes I’d bummed off of a visitor in the hospital and made my
way off the roof.
The stairwell and the halls it led to all had
the same sterile smell—a scary, antiseptic odor that promised more
than healing. It promised pain. Pain and death.
Cringing, I ducked onto one of the floors,
located the elevators, and sped the rest of the way down. A
middle-aged woman at the front desk stayed glued to her computer as
I swept past. Electronic doors swished open, blowing in humidity
and city smells. Atlanta, Georgia. Distant sirens wailed.
“Eli!” My younger brother, Jonathan, waved
wildly from a red Porsche in the parking lot.
Shoving my hands into my blue jean pockets, I
hunched my shoulders, and wove past a group of nurses, my tennis
shoes thudding against cracked pavement. Car horns honked.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a
man cried. “You can’t park here!”
More voices. More car horns.
Pulling the passenger side door open, I
climbed inside.
Jonathan grinned, ignoring the shouts from
outside. “And I’m supposed to look up to you?” he asked, as if we’d
just spoken yesterday. As if the world wasn’t a honking mess
waiting for him to move his ass. “Man of the house and all that.”
He laughed, inclining his head at the hospital. “Guess after that
last resort-like place you were in, Pops figured you needed a low
maintenance environment.”
Inhaling the Porsche’s leather interior, I
leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The world disappeared. Not
the sounds—those were getting louder—but the ugliness of it all.
“It’s my job to take the hits so the rest of you can fly under the
radar.”
“Sure,” Jonathan snorted. “How are you,
Eli?”
Jonathan was only sixteen. At twenty, I was
the oldest of three siblings. None of us had the same father, but
we shared a mother and a grandfather. I was the product of Mom’s
first marriage. Our eighteen-year-old sister, Heather, was the
product of husband number two. Jonathan had been born out of
wedlock, an affair Mom had after she remarried my father, making
Dad her third marriage. It was after her fourth marriage—a fiasco
which only lasted two months—that she swore off matrimony. But not
men. Never men.
“I’m just ready to get back in my apartment,”
I muttered.
My space. My music. My
punching bag. My cup of permanent markers, red and black, waiting
to scribble words on the bag, words I wanted to remember, others I
wanted to forget. Things I wanted to
beat
into my memory, and others I
wanted to beat out of it.
“Your apartment?”
At the hesitant question, my eyes flew open.
The world reappeared, the screaming outside suddenly matching my
mood.
Honk, Honk!
“What the hell, you idiot?” a man
cried.
“Yeah, my apartment,” I growled. “You know,
the one I moved into last summer?”
My brother, whose red hair and sudden
blush-infused freckles definitely came from his father, winced.
“About that …”
“Spit it out, Jon!”
“Pops let it go. You’re staying with him
now.”
The world stopped.
“You’re fucking with me,” I breathed. When
Jonathan didn’t say anything, I slammed my palm against the
dashboard. “Damn him! He’s sending me to the orchard, isn’t
he?”
Telling silence.
“Every single time,” I snarled.
“It could be good,” Jonathan murmured. “It
helped Heather a few years back after she ran away from home for
the fifth time.”
Falling back into the seat, I pulled my
seatbelt on and glowered. “I don’t know what’s worse … having my
kid brother chauffeur me, or being ripped out of my life.”
“You did it to yourself,” Jonathan pointed
out, pulling the car into morning traffic.
A collective cheer went up in the parking lot
behind us, cars honking in victory.
“Yeah, well, it won’t happen again,” I
promised. “I’m done with all of it. Women, especially.”
Pain crossed his features. “You might be done
with Mandy, but she’s not done with the family.”
I stiffened, my former fiancée’s name making
my skin crawl. “I was only gone a few weeks, Jon. Tell me it
doesn’t get worse.”
He grimaced. “That guy she was cheating on
you with … it was Lincoln.”
My body ceased doing anything, as if it
wasn’t sure which emotion was appropriate.
“Our cousin,” I whispered,
feeling
everything
and
nothing
.
“She wanted money that bad, huh?”
“She’s pregnant,” Jonathan blurted. “They’re
getting married.”
Maniacal laughter seeped out of me, bleeding
out of my mouth and skin. “All because I told her I wasn’t
interested in doing what Pops does. Brilliant.”
I needed a drink.
“None of us wants to do what
he does,” Jonathan admitted. “
Except
Lincoln.”
My jaw muscles jumped, my fists clenching.
What I wouldn’t do for my punching bag and permanent markers.
“Maybe the orchard isn’t such a bad idea.”
Lockston Orchard was an apple orchard. My
grandfather—Pops to the grandkids—had bought the property for my
grandmother two years before she passed away from breast cancer.
She’d loved the orchard; the dusty lanes, lines of trees, and
lingering bees. Even though no one in the family really knew what
to do with it, we’d kept it after Grams’ death. It wasn’t a typical
working orchard. Pops hired people to harvest and take care of the
apples, but the rest of the place was simply landscaped lawns,
weathered buildings, and a large, whitewashed colonial house with
too many rooms and too few people.