The Danger of Being Me (26 page)

"Okay," she said into my throat.

Neither of us moved.

"Okay."

9.

Amber took me home in her mother's Mazda MX-5.

It was almost eleven by the time we made it back to her dramatic Queen Anne in Brookshire.  We made popcorn in the microwave, then settled into the living room couch.  Amber curled against my side, her head on my shoulder, her gentle russet curls brushing against my cheek, and I knew what it felt like to be her derivative.  Lying tangent to her curves.  She fell asleep on me five minutes into the first quarter of the Sixers' game, and almost immediately after I realized it, I was asleep too.  I had no dreams.

Her parents let us sleep, and midnight had come and gone by the time I woke up again.  The game had ended; Philadelphia had beaten the Wizards 112-91.  Now Rich Eisen and Stuart Scott debated whether Allen Iverson's 30-point game had been more impressive than Derrick Coleman's.  I traced the gentle curve of Amber's hip, and marveled at my staggering fortune.

Amber woke then as my fingertips trailed across the delicate skin above her jeans.  She tilted her head up to look at my face for a moment, then flashed her beauteous smile and climbed over me and off the couch.  She pulled her sneakers back on.

"You can't stay here overnight," she explained.

I sat up, dropping my feet to the floor.  "Fair enough."

"It's not that I don't want you to," she said, then trailed off.  A scarlet flush crept out of her collar, but she turned to me once her second shoe was on.  "House rules."

Amber stood, turned off the television.  I followed as she crossed through the foyer.  When she quietly swung the front door open, I smiled at her.  "Rules are rules."

She nodded, and we left.  She drove me back to my house.  It was almost one on the morning of April second by the time she pulled to the curb of the rowhome at the corner of Perennial Drive.  She put the car in park, leaned over the gear-shift to kiss me quickly, fully, on the mouth.  Even now, her lips tasted like spearmint and lime.

I kissed her again as she backed away, then climbed out of the car.  She dropped the vehicle back into gear and rolled away up the narrow street, and I turned up the dark walkway toward the house.  Icy April air pried its way into the layers of my jacket, but a soft heat radiated inside my chest.  I climbed the stoop to the front door, and I imagined that things might turn out alright after all.

I slid my key into the lock, turned it, twisted the knob.  The door opened inward with its familiar creak, and the sound was oddly comforting.  It was the sound of home.  I passed from the glacial darkness of the stoop to the warm obscurity just inside the living room, and pushed the door closed with a muted click.  I smiled at the sound.

A fine film of ephemeral light overlaid the sleek silence of no-time darkness as gray moonlight fell through the front windows across my feet.  I stuffed my keys back into my pocket, picked my way across the living room.  Despite a two-hour nap, I heard the distant whispers of exhaustion calling to me.  I felt myself smiling at the chance to dream, and the thought of what dreams may come in that sleep.

I nearly reached the short hallway that led to my room when a scratchy voice slurred its way out of the shadows from across the room.  "Where the fuck have you been?"

I didn't flinch.  I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised to hear that voice.  Not even a little.

I stopped outside the short hallway and turned.  The gray light from the front windows reached just to the edge of the dining room.  A figure slumped in a chair next to the table.  A collection of mismatched bottles stood on the faux-wood tabletop.  I counted a dozen longnecks catching the moonlight.  Of course, there may have been more.

"Mom," I said, my voice weary, and that was a mistake.  "You didn't have to wait up."

"You can't call?" she spat.  "You're so fuckin smart, but you don't know how to dial a fuckin phone?"

I sighed.  Another mistake.  "I didn't think of it."

"You never fuckin think," she hissed.  She grabbed a longneck off the table, found it empty, banged it down, grabbed another.  This one had enough left in it, and she threw her head back, tilting the bottle up to her lips.  She swallowed hard, then set the bottle back onto the faux-wood tabletop where it clinked against its colleagues.

"You're so fuckin smart," she said again, and laughed.  It was a hollow, humorless sound that made me think of black ice.  "If you're the smart one, we're all fucked."

I wondered if Regina was upstairs.  I hoped she wasn't.  I hoped that in the waning hours of the Day of Fools, my sister had seen the parade of beer bottles and anticipated this confrontation.  That she had escaped to the quiet of one a friend's house to weather this bleak storm.

Because Janice would be manageable come daylight, even with a brutal hangover, but tonight, goaded by her entourage of longnecks, she wanted a fight.

"Mom," I said, straining for civility.  "You're drunk."

And that was my third mistake.

Of course, that was two more than I usually get the chance to make.  So I suppose that I must have wanted a fight myself.  Janice swung her arm blindly toward the table, caught two of her groupies by their mouths.  They obediently clattered across the faux-wood, rolling off the table onto the carpet.  One thudded against the wall.

"Am I?" she demanded.  Knowing she was; convinced that she wasn't.  "I'm drunk?"  She threw herself against the back of her chair.  It started to protest, then thought better of it.  "I work all fuckin day."  She laughed.  "I'll drink in my house if I wanna drink in my fuckin house."

"I know you will," I said, and that made four.  I guess I was shooting for the moon.

"Fuck you!" she bellowed.  I didn't flinch, because it didn't surprise me.  Not even a little.

She swatted at a third bottle, backhanding it off the tabletop.  It skipped across the carpet, rattling against the kitchen tiles.  I waited at the entrance to the hallway, sure that she had more to say.  She always had more to say.

"I lost track of time," I said before she could continue, hoping that for once, just once, Occam's Razor would be sharp enough to cut off this confrontation.  Knowing that it wouldn't be.  It never was.  "I was out with a friend, mom.  That's all.  She just—" I said, then snapped my mouth shut, regretting the admission.  I had said too much.

"Oh, what," she said with sarcastic concern, "some fuckin whore?  Some cheap—"

"Hey!" I barked, and I flinched at the sound of my own voice.  I didn't recognize it.  It echoed out of a long, dark tunnel that reached all the way down into the forgotten pit of my id.  Fury and hatred and every malevolent impulse swirled there in the murky tar of human darkness.

Janice had gone silent like someone had hit the mute button. A car droned by outside. My heartbeat quickened inside my throat, hammering recklessly inside my chest, thumping against the side of my neck.  The force of that voice had startled me, and the intensity of the fury and hatred boiling in the depth of that pit terrified me.  It had always terrified me.  It had always been the deepest, darkest, deadliest part of me.  The inhuman part of myself that I wasn't sure I could control if I let it loose.

But what terrified me more than that ravenous rage was just how brutally wonderful it felt to hear it again.  I had buried it so far down into the bottom of that murky pit so long ago that I had forgotten the intoxicating thrill of that neurochemical charge in my veins.  Now I felt the distant whisper of its voice, and it sounded so much like my own voice that I shivered in the darkness.

And in that silence, I saw the white gleam of Janice's malicious grin flash drunkenly in the moonlight.  Because she knew.  Of course she knew.  The creeping darkness that slithered through my veins slithered through hers.  It had been her horrific gift to me.  My birthright.

She picked up a bottle from her entourage, emptied whatever was left down her throat.  She smeared her arm across her mouth.  "I hope she was worth every penny."

That sweltering scarlet veil swirled, churned, rose up inside my brain like a bloody thunderhead.  Brimstone and cordite scorched the back of my throat, and I saw veins of lightning crackling through those bloated crimson clouds.  Heat radiated out from the base of my skull.  Goosebumps raced up my back, down my arms as the electrical storm in my head built toward a staggering crescendo.

I imagined Regina lying in bed upstairs, awake and silent, staring at the ceiling.  Listening.  Hoping only that the violence would be quick.  The image didn't clear my head entirely, but it was enough to keep that veil from smothering me.  And that was good.  Because if that veil tightened down on me in that precarious darkness, the violence would not be quick.  But that veil fluttered, red on black, full of fury and hatred.  Signifying nothing.

"Don't you fuckin talk about her," I spit.  my heartbeat kicked up another notch in my throat.  So I wanted a fight after all.  "You don't get to talk about her."

"She's so fuckin precious," Janice snapped, her voice shrill.  "She's so fuckin perfect.  Fuck her."

"Fuck you!" I erupted before I bothered to think, the force of my voice cutting across the silence like a divine ultimatum.  I sucked in a hot breath.  Now it would come.  The cataclysmic detonation.  The fury and the hatred and the violence.  At least it would be over for tonight.

But it didn't come.  She just sat there in the darkness, her diminishing collection of longnecks standing guard, wondering which of them would be the next to fall.  She laughed.  It was the rueful, hateful sound of her shadows.  "I shoulda taken a hanger to you in the womb."

My throat worked.   I might have believed that there was nothing that this woman could say to shock me, not after all the fights and all the years.  But here we were tonight with this freakish new thing filling the darkness between us.  It was a thing I could never have imagined, this poisonous, jagged, lethal bit of witchcraft that could take my breath away.  It was a priceless, excruciating lesson.  No one has ever cut me so deep.  With those few words, Janice was somehow no longer my mother.

"You should have," I wanted to scream.  The words came out hoarse.  They may have sounded lame, but that was okay.  "You could've done us both a favor."

"Woe-is-fucking-you," she mocked.  I took no notice.  "You and your sister.  You got it so fuckin hard."

I nodded, but she couldn't have seen it in the dark.  "Goodnight, Janice.  I'm going to bed."

Janice said nothing, and for one glorious moment, I thought she might actually let me walk away.  Down the short hallway to my bedroom and my drooping mattress and my
Infinite Regress
poster on the far wall.  I imagined that she might decide that I wasn't worth it tonight.

I got one step toward the hallway before her scratchy voice slurred its way out of the shadows.  "You're turnin out just like him."  The tone of mockery was gone, but that didn't mean anything.  She tested another bottle, heard the sudsy slosh of the last bit of beer on the table.  She raised the longneck to her lips, "You fuckin know that?"

I felt her eyes on me though they were barely open by now.  This time she tilted just the bottle up, pouring the last of the alcohol into her mouth.  She swallowed it, and sat back into her seat, the bottle still in her hand.  "You're gonna wind up some junkie scumbag like your fuckin
father
."  She turned the word
father
into a filthy slur.

"I wouldn't know," I said, shaking my head, exhausted.  I sighed.  "One night with you ran him off for good."

Somehow, after all the fights and all the years, that was what finally shoved her past the tipping point.  She sucked in a hard breath.  Blessed silence reigned for one glorious moment, and then it detonated like a nuclear blast.

Janice screeched, "
Don't you talk back to me!
"

I was just lucky she was drunk.

She grunted behind me, and I heard the bottle coming.  There was no time to react.  A stillframe image of a Yards Brawler logo flashed across the edge of my vision.  Then the bottle smashed against the wall at my right.  A mist of glass and beer exploded like shrapnel.  Furious heat bit into the side of my face.  I flinched away, but not in time.

Wet warmth bloomed on my cheek, and I didn't reach to it.  There was no reason to touch it.  Blood is blood.  But I turned toward the dining room, toward that specter in the darkness.  My jaw tightened so hard that my teeth creaked inside my head.  Something guttural and ancient rumbled in the back of my throat, and the heat-lightning surged through the thunderhead of crimson clouds.

Janice didn't move.  All I saw was the outline of her shadow, grey on black, and all I heard was her voice, low and tight.  "What," she said, taunting me.  Daring me.

I thought of Regina.  And I thought of Amber.  I thought of Helen and Phil and Winnie.  I thought of Ethan, dead and buried under a yellowed hill in Meadowbank overlooking the Firth of Forth while he stood in the sane light of an all-night convenience store at an intersection in Prophecy Creek.  He had come back, but not because he had something to tell me.  He had come back to remind me, because I had let myself forget my own truth.  Now I remembered.  That memory sliced through that scarlet veil like silver moonlight, showing me the only way out.

I spun away from the dark dining room, took four long paces down the short hallway, stepped into my bedroom.  Halfway there I heard Janice screaming.  "We're not done here!"  She stumbled out of her seat, charged through the shadows.  "I tell you when we're done!"

I was lucky she was drunk.  A corner of the hallway jumped out at her, and I heaved the door of my bedroom shut, throwing the bolt before she could make it through.  I had only installed that just lock four months before after coming home and finding Regina and a few of her friends using my computer.  I silently thanked my sister, and I resolved to hug her the next time I saw her.

That lock saved my life.  Regina saved my life.  Again.  Because if Janice had come through that door like shrill madness in a nightmare, she would have lashed out at me with fists and nails, struck at me and beaten on me and crashed her drunken fury down against me. And in the instant that the first strike burst across my face, that scarlet veil would have tightened down so hard and so fast that it would have exploded into an inferno of hellfire.  I would have drowned in red heat, gone blind from black wrath.  I might never have found my way back to the light.