I opened my mouth to speak and heard my dad’s voice in my head, followed my Kael’s, then my dad’s again. I didn’t have enough time to figure out what I felt, or what I was going to do.
“You can’t be here. I need time, Kael,” I told him just as he reached the grass. My back hurt as I stood there with one hand on my hip and one blocking my eyes from the burning sun.
“The yard looks good.” He looked and pointed past me, ignoring what I said.
“Kael. You can’t be here.”
“Karina, please,” he pleaded. I only caught a tiny glimpse of his face, the sadness in his eyes as he used them to steer me back to him. I moved my hand down, like a coward so I couldn’t see his face.
“I need time. I’m not the kind of girl who likes to be chased, Kael. I won’t tell you again,” I said the same thing to him as I did to Estelle when she called to try and butter me up. At that point the only people who I could trust were Austin and Elodie. And with the way my luck was with people, they were probably going to betray me too.
Kael was staring at me, I could feel it. He was registering everything I was feeling, absorbing it, the way we both do when it comes to people.
“Let me fall in love with you, Karina.”
His voice was so soft that I was skeptical whether I heard him correctly, or not.
“What?”
He stepped closer and I walked backward, putting even more distance between us.
“I’m so close, Karina. Let me fall in love with you. You know me.” He touched his chest and I shook my head profusely.
How dare he throw that word around like it’s nothing, like I was going to just forgive him because he used that word.
“Don’t you dare use that against me,” I spit into the night air between us.
The trees shook as my anger grew. I told myself it was Mother Nature helping me out, giving me strength for this.
“I’m not, Kare,” he said, coming closer again. I dug my nails into my closed palm until I was close to breaking skin.
“Don’t you call me that,” I warned him. “That house in Atlanta? You were going to move without telling me!” I didn’t care how loud my voice was or who heard it. “I don’t know you at all,” I said, mimicking his signature flat tone. I wanted him to hear it and feel the sting of it. He must have found something in my expression when my eyes finally met his that told him to back off, because he put his hands in the air and turned around and walked away.
I collapsed in the grass after he pulled away and stayed there until the stars dried my tears and moon glared at me to go to my own bed and leave hers.
MALI WAS OKAY WITH ME the next day. I thought that maybe she’d give me a hard time, but she knew something was up and gave me the space I needed. I concentrated on my clients, on making them whole. They didn’t need to feel as broken as I did. My shift passed uneventfully. Slow, but uneventfully. The short walk home was hard. I kept thinking of the last time I had taken the same steps, how I had started out in joy and ended in despair.
Life went on like that for a couple of days. I worked. I slept. I may have watched a couple of movies with Elodie. I can’t be sure. Really, everything was a blur. I’m not sure when it was, how many days post breakup, that I had come home from work to find Austin waiting for me.
His face was red and his hair was a mess. His hands were rigid, white fingers shaking. There were no cars in the driveway or parked on the street, so I couldn’t figure out how he got there.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I asked, mildly panicked. He’d only been to visit once since he got back.
He shook his head. “Me and Dad got into it.”
I sat down next to him on the cold cement. “Into it yelling? Or into it, fighting?”
“Both. I swung on him.”
“Austin!”
“He charged at me though. He made me lose it, Kare. You know how he is. He sits there like he’s high and mighty. Do this. Don’t do that. When I was your age …”
“I know, I know. I’ve had my share of lectures, believe me.”
Austin continued his rant as if he hadn’t even heard me. “You know, he doesn’t care about her. He doesn’t give a fuck about her. When I asked if she’d been in touch or anything he just laughed. I swear Kare, he fucking laughed. Right in front of Estelle. You don’t think he’s heard from her, right? You still haven’t?”
I shook my head. I was used to shaking my head when it came to my mother. She. Her. My mother. I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“No.” My insides were scalding.
“She’s close though. I know she is. I can feel it.”
“Austin.” I reached for his hand. We were never a touchy family, except for our mother. When we were little she would hug me for the smallest thing, like a happy face sticker on a book report, or cleaning my room without being asked. Even when I got older she would run her hands down my back almost every night before bed. Sometimes she’d trace words over my pajama top with her long nails.
Nite nite.
Love you.
Kare bear.
“You can’t worry about her, Austin. She’s an adult. She’s made her own choices. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you obsess over her.” I was such a hypocrite.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother, no matter how hard I tried. I’d see her in line at the grocery store. I’d hear her voice in my head as I washed the dishes. I’d climb into bed at night and cry myself to sleep. She was everywhere. She was nowhere. And I was so Goddamned pissed at her and the world. How could she take off like that? How could she leave and not get in touch with us? How could she have this relentless hold on us?
“I’m tired of this place, Karina. I just want to go somewhere else. Not back to Rudy’s, just … somewhere else. Don’t you feel the itch anymore?”
Wow. The itch. That brought me back.
It felt so long ago, those days when we’d plan our escape. We plotted everything right down to the last detail. I’d wait tables and he’d change tires and pump gas, depending on where we’d land. I’d find a nice restaurant with gingham table cloths, and a sassy older waitress named Phyllis who would call me “kid” and take me under her wing. Austin would work hard and stay out of trouble. He’d be early for his shift most days. The proprietor of the gas station would notice what a good employee he was and after a while would show him how to fix cars. Austin would be good at that, fixing cars. If only he’d put his mind to solving problems, instead of creating them.
We came up with so many adventures back then, hanging out on the futon in Austin’s room, an hour past bedtime. We knew they wouldn’t notice. They never came in to check on us anymore. We were just kids and already we thought of our parents as they. As them and us.
I told Austin that they didn’t come in to check on us because we were older—almost twelve, then thirteen and fourteen. He was fifteen when he stopped asking why. We’d talk for hours, dreaming of our future travels, the small town where we’d make our home. We’d learn to fit in, be whoever we wanted to be. He’d be that mechanic. I’d be that waitress. Or maybe he’d be a musician and I’d be a painter. Or a glassblower.
I wanted Austin to believe more than I wanted it myself. I spun the words tightly around him, pulling him in closer until I could tell he had accepted the possibility of a better future. And when I could feel him attach to the dream we were drawing for ourselves, I’d relax my own breathing and sometimes even I could believe in that glorious future. I spoke in a loud whisper those nights, cupping my hands over Austin’s ears to distract him from the waves of misery coming from our parents’ bedroom down the hall.
“Where is there to go?” I asked him.
“Arizona. Barcelona. Anywhere. Hell, I’d go live with our grand—”
“Do you even know where your passport is?” I asked.
“Yes. And yours. They’re both at Dad’s, in the drawer.”
Before our orders to Georgia, my dad told us we were going to be
sent to Germany. My mom was as close to happy as I’d seen her in a very long time. She had always wanted to visit Munich; apparently one of her friends had moved there after high school.
We rushed to get our passports. Mom spent her time mapping out trains across Europe and learning basic words in German. It was guten morgen, when she woke us each morning, and guten tag when we returned from school in the afternoon.
“Kare,” she said to me one day. “Listen to this: ‘Schönes wetter heute, nicht wahr?’” She was beaming from ear to ear. “I just said, ‘It’s lovely weather today, isn’t it?’”
“Mom,” I kidded her. “It’s raining.
“Oh, don’t be so literal,” she said, laughing. How about this one: “Das sind meine kinder, Karina und Austin. Ja, sie sind sehr gut erzogen. Vielen dank.”
Austin ran into the room when he heard his name. Mom beamed at him. “I just said ‘These are my children, Karina and Austin. Yes, they are very well behaved. Thank you.’”
“You just said that Austin is well-behaved? Mom! You’re hilarious. You can’t deceive those poor Germans like that. I give Austin three days before he’s breaking some international law or something.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Karina,” Austin said.
We laughed and my mom made homemade spaghetti that night.
It was easy to remember that happy time. There were so few of them.
MOM WAS BACK. She was lively without being manic. Clear and in charge without being hyper-focused. Understanding and forgiving, she was like those TV moms who always seem to know the right thing to say. She spent her time cleaning and sorting, boxing up all our stuff. Her collectable dishes and vintage jewelry. Our toys and clothes. The TV hadn’t had a break like that since before she started to fade.
“They’ll be worth something someday,” Mom said, going through her old magazines. “Once the printed word is completely extinct.” She liked to warn us about the future almost as much as she liked us to know how well-prepared she was for it.
I was sitting at the kitchen table that afternoon; Mom was standing behind me, pulling my hair through a sadistic highlighting cap. I suffered through it gladly, though, just to have hair like the girls named Ashley and Tiffany. Our house was packed up well before the movers were scheduled to pack everything for us. Mom kept her vinyls out though, and even started singing along again when Alanis Morrissette was at her feistiest.
“It only takes two hours from Paris to London. Can you believe that?” she asked. She was dancing around me wearing those weird plastic gloves. When “You Oughta Know” came on she punched her hands through the air like it was her fight song. I remember how she looked that day. She was wearing eyeliner and had decorated her long brown hair with little braids randomly scattered. She was beautiful, happy.
“Karina, we are going to have so much fun. Imagine the people we will meet. Everyone is different there, mixed around, and no one cares like they do here. People won’t judge us. It’s going to be incredible, Kare,” she promised.
Why is it that happiness is always so short-lived when despair seems to stick around like an unwanted guest?
It was the next day while Austin and I were at school that my dad broke the news. We were no longer going to Europe. A change of command meant that we would be stationed in Georgia, just two states away. My dad said it was better for his chances of promotion. My mom said it was worse for what was left of her soul.
The next morning, I found an empty bottle of gin in the bathroom. I bagged it up and carried it outside to the big trash can, helping her hide the evidence. Enabling, I think they call it. At that point with my mom, it wasn’t the empty bottle that worried me, it was the fact that since it was gin, it meant she must have run out of vodka.
“DO YOU WANT TO STAY here for a little bit?” I looked at Austin and for a second, I could see her in him, something around the eyes, about the shape of his mouth. We’d always be a mash up of our parents and that horrified me.
“No,” he sighed. “I don’t know. I need to figure my shit out. I can’t do that from your couch.”
“It’s cheaper than Barcelona,” I joked.
“I was thinking about staying with Martin.” His words punched me. A sucker punch.
“Martin?”
I was going to make him say his name.
“Kael.”
“Since when are you two friends like that?” I couldn’t even hide the hurt in my voice.
“I don’t know, a week or so.” He laughed. I couldn’t breathe. “He’s been at Mendoza’s a lot.”
“Seriously?”
I couldn’t believe him.
“Look, I know something happened between you two and I know it ended. And that’s all I know. You told me it was nothing serious, that the shit with Dad was a mix-up, right?” he looked me straight in the eyes. Daring me to be honest.
That was a dare I wouldn’t take.
“So unless there’s more to it, more that you want to share with me, I don’t see the problem with me crashing with him. He’s the only one beside Mendoza who just chills at home and doesn’t bring chicks home every night. He doesn’t get in trouble.”
I wanted to throw up. I was relieved and devastated. It was a wretched combination.
“I’m not saying not to be friends with him.” I let out a breath of frustration. “I just …” I couldn’t think of a valid reason to tell Austin not to stay with Kael unless I wanted to tell him everything and that just wasn’t possible. He would hate all of them, maybe even Mendoza too.
It was enough that I hated them.
“If you don’t want me to, just say it. Just know that I can’t stay at Dad’s anymore, Kare. I can’t do it.”
I nodded. I understood needing to get away from our dad’s. He should stay at Kael’s house. Or Martin’s house. I liked to think of him as Martin, as the soldier who was just doing what he was told, who had offered to help my brother when he needed it. Not the man who I fell for, the man I fell too deeply and foolishly for.
I hadn’t seen him for a while, except when I scrolled through my Instagram, looking at the row of pictures of us.
He had changed me so much in such a short amount of time. The captions seemed so clever then, “Atlanta refuses to see us now,” I wrote under a picture of us in the car, a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey on the dashboard. Preparing for the upcoming movie, I was doing a reread, and it was even more exciting when I had a man who liked to get bossy in my bed when I closed the book. My tire blew right as we were leaving for our trip to Atlanta, the trip that never happened.
I had to shake it off, to actually shake my head, to stop the thought of Kael invading my mind. My hands were trembling. I thought I was over this.
“Dad’s calling me again,” Austin said, changing the subject.
“Are you going to answer?”
“No.”
A car drove by, a little boy in the backseat waved at us. Austin waved back, even smiling for the child.
“I got a job, too,” Austin told me a minute or so later. The sun was going down and the sky was changing colors around us.
“Really?” I pepped up for him. “That’s great news,” I told him. I meant it. He hadn’t had a job since he got fired from the drive-in. “Where is it?”
He hesitated. “It’s with Martin.”
“Of course it is.” I hung my head between my knees.
“He’s flipping that duplex, you know? The one he lives in. He’s paying me, Lawson, everyone to help him. I’m going to get more hours in than everyone else since they all have to work during the week. It’s just like tearing up carpet, shit like that.”
I needed to be happy for my brother, even if he was wrapping his life around the one person I was trying to detangle mine from.
“You two are a lot alike, you know that?” he said, a smile on his face. It was the first time he looked even close to happy since I walked up.
I shook my head. “That’s so not true.”
“Whatever you say,
Karina.”
“How’s Katie?” I asked, flipping the attention back to him. I knew they were back together, I saw it on his Facebook. I guess her ex-boyfriend was out of the picture for now.
“Good. She’s good for me. She keeps me in line. And she wakes up early for school, so I go out less, you know?” He sounded so proud of himself and I let him be. We were two totally different humans even if we shared a womb.
“That’s good. I’m happy for you,” I said to him. I laid back on the porch, resting my head close to his. We were almost kids again.
“Thanks. I won’t bring him around if you don’t want me to, but he’s really helping me out.”
I stared at the sky, begging for the stars to come out and play. I wanted to know that I could count on them. I wanted to be certain of something.
“It’s fine. I’m seeing someone anyway.” The words slid from my tongue, devious as the lie itself.
“You are?” he asked.
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Austin, knowing he would shy away from anything complicated when given the chance.
“Okay,” he agreed. “So you can’t be mad that he’s picking me up here like any minute.” He said the words fast, as if it would change their meaning.
“Austin,” I whined his name, twisted it around my tongue. “Fine. I’m going inside. You really need to get a car.”
“I will, now that I have a job.” He beamed, easing my pain a little.
“I’m proud of you, really. And see, you didn’t have to join the Army after all,” I joked. I knew he wouldn’t have gone through with it, no matter how much our dad tried to force it on him.
I heard the roar of Kael’s truck before I saw it. My body reacted at the same lightning speed as my mind and I had to actively force myself to go inside the house before he turned on my street.
Go, I told my feet.
Now, I told them.
But he was out of the truck and walking up the grass before I had moved even an inch. His eyes were hooded. He wore a baseball cap. I saw the confusion flashing across his face when I didn’t run.