Bitter End (32 page)

“I saw you talking to Maria,” he said. “Earlier.”

I shivered harder. How long had he been out here? My mouth moved as I tried to form words, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Let me guess what you two were talking about,” he said. “The weather?” He laughed bitterly at his joke. I pulled my car key
out of my jacket pocket and thumbed the locks open. He grabbed the key out of my hand and pushed the button to lock the doors
again.

“Cole,” I said, “give me my keys. I’m going home.”

Quickly, his arm darted out and grabbed the back of my hair. I made a noise, but he only pulled me in harder, twisting my
head back so I’d look directly into his eyes.

“That bitch tell you a bunch of lies about me?” he asked.

I tried to shake my head. “No,” I said. “We were just talking. Let go.”

Immediately, I hated myself for going right back to that place of just saying anything, doing anything to make Cole happy.
As if Georgia and I had never talked at all. As if nothing had changed. For a despairing moment I thought I’d never be able
to tell him good-bye. That we’d always come back to this place—Cole with the upper hand, always.

Cole let go of my hair, glaring at me. “Liar,” he said. “You’re such a fucking liar, Alex.”

Inside, I rallied my strength. I had to do this. I had to tell him good-bye. Stand up for myself. Stand up for my future.

“Shut up,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.

He arched an eyebrow and took in a deep breath. “What? I’m sorry, did my slut girlfriend just tell me to shut up?” he said.
“She wouldn’t dare, because she knows I’d kick her ass for even thinking it.”

He was up off the bumper now, leaning over me, causing me to stumble backward, farther and farther away from my car. “Don’t
touch me,” I said, shivering so hard my teeth were chattering.

I swear the pupils of his eyes glowed, every muscle in his body standing at the ready. His eyes slipped down from mine to
my neck, and for a moment I thought he was going to strangle me.

“I thought I told you to stop wearing this piece of trash,” he snarled, snatching Mom’s dream catcher off my neck and yanking
it free. I felt the leather strap pop, and for the first time since I was eight years old, I was alone, naked, the barrier
between me and my nightmares gone.

He held the broken necklace in his hand above my face and tossed it across the parking lot. I lost sight of it in the dark.
It was gone. Everything important to me was crumbling, breaking. Everything was gone.

Something snapped inside of me. I straightened up, the
shivering dying immediately, and shoved him in the chest with both hands, giving it everything I had. He stumbled backward,
his back popping the side mirror of my car out of place. It landed back in place with a
thwump
.

“You broke it!” I screamed, because I didn’t know what else to scream. “It’s over. Get away from me. Don’t ever come near
me again.”

He laughed. Like what I’d just said was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. Like my shoving him tickled. He threw
his head back and laughed, long ragged laughs into the night sky.

And then, when he straightened up, he reared back so suddenly I didn’t even see what happened until I opened my eyes again
and found that I was on the ground next to the tire of my car.

My face hurt. Not like it hurt before. This time it was different. It hurt and tingled and felt numb and hot. When I reached
to my eyebrow, my finger slipped into a gash, and my hand came away wet with blood. I had also bitten my tongue and tasted
blood in my mouth. I gagged, spat, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

“You think you’re all big now, huh? You talk to that crazy bitch, and you suddenly think you can just push me and tell me
it’s over? It’ll never be over, Alex, do you hear me? Get up! Get the fuck up!”

I rolled to my side, trying to figure out how to get up. I was dizzy and the world didn’t make sense to me. I must have taken
too long, because I saw Cole’s shoes take several
long strides into my vision, then saw one leave the ground, and the next thing I knew I was gasping for air, the toe of his
shoe buried in my stomach.

I couldn’t get my breath, but that didn’t matter to Cole, who was still ranting about me being crazy if I thought he was just
going to let me and Maria tell lies about him. He reached down and grabbed my arm, twisting it and pulling upward so fast
and violently I felt something pop. I cried out, scrambled, and got my feet under me.

“Please,” I started whimpering, just as I had that day in his bedroom. “Please, okay. Okay. Stop. Please.”

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he asked, rapping me on the back of the head twice with his knuckles.

“Cole,” I whimpered. “Please. Just let me go home.”

“Home to Zack?” he shouted in my face, wrenching my arm up tighter. I cried out and he shoved me backward so hard, I felt
light and floaty when the back of my head hit the pavement.

I don’t know how long the beating went on. All I know is I ended up curled into a ball on my side, his feet connecting with
every inch of me that they could reach: my ribs, my tailbone, my cheek, my ear.

This is it
, I thought.
Maria was right. He’s going to kill someone and it’s me. I didn’t get out fast enough. It’s my own fault
. And just when it started to not hurt anymore and my thoughts started to drift to other things, he stopped.

“Hey,” a voice shouted. I opened one eye as far as it would go and saw Georgia running toward us, dropping
her purse and her deposit bag and her keys on the sidewalk while she ran. “Get off her! Get off her!”

Cole stepped back and held his hands up, as if he’d never been touching me to begin with, and Georgia shoved between the two
of us, holding her arms out to shelter me.

I could only open one eye. But even through that one eye I could see that the look in Cole’s eyes was like no other I’d ever
seen on him before. He looked crazed.

He’s going to kill us both
, I thought, and I wanted nothing more than to have not brought Georgia into this.

But he didn’t. “Okay, okay!” he shouted, breathing hard, as if beating me had given him a good workout. “You’ll be back, bitch,”
he said, but I didn’t respond. I was too busy closing my eyes and drifting off to the place where my bones weren’t broken
and I wasn’t draining blood into the cracks of the parking lot feeling like a split sandbag, splayed out on the blacktop,
sure I would never move again.

I floated in that black place, hearing Georgia’s voice barking The Bread Bowl’s address into her cell phone and crooning to
me that everything would be okay. I heard her say, “Your daughter’s been hurt,” too, and I wondered if it was bad enough that
someone would have to wash my brains off the pavement. And I heard the sirens and voices talking to me and felt myself being
carried, but I never opened my eyes through any of it.

As black as it was behind my eyelids, it didn’t seem anywhere near as black as the world would be if I opened them again.

There were visitors. A lot of them. Kids from school. Cousins I hadn’t seen in ages. Neighbors. Bethany and Zack, who looked
sad and grim and tried to crack jokes, but left too quickly. I wanted them to stay. I missed them more than ever.

And there was Brenda, who came in, sheepishly carrying a pot of flowers, which looked so vibrant against her skin it was almost
like those photographs, all in black and white but with one thing in color. She set the pot on the windowsill and then just
stared at me, wringing her hands.

“They arrested him,” she said, barely a whisper.

I was still not moving much—not even opening my eyes much, they were so swollen—but I nodded. I already knew this. Georgia
had been at my bedside as soon as I opened my eyes, and it was the first thing she’d told me.

Brenda scratched her arm where the flowers had just been, and again I was struck with how skinny she was.

“He said you pushed him first,” she said. Then she shook her head and gazed out the window, as if she regretted saying it.
And then she just walked out. And never came back. I guess she needed to see for herself what her son had done this time.
I guess what she saw must have hurt even to look at.

Celia had come in, too. With Shannin and Dad and the grandmas. They brought Dad’s birthday cake and we had a small family
party in my hospital room, which Celia looked so bitter about it made my heart ache, but later, when Dad and Shannin and the
grandmas went down to the cafeteria in search of coffee, she came back, carrying a book in her arms.

She held it out to me. It was a photo album.

I looked up at her, searching her face, then held up my splinted arm. “I can’t…” I said.

She looked unsure for a moment, kind of wavering in place. Then she came around to the side of the bed, climbed in next to
me, just like we used to do when we were little kids, and opened the album in front of us.

I gasped, pressing my good hand to my mouth. The photos. They were all there.

“Where did you…”

“I slept in your bed last night,” she said. “I thought you were going to die. Leave us like Mom did. And I… I just happened
to find the box in the space between the bed and the wall. I didn’t even know these existed anymore.”

She turned the pages—
flip, flip, flip—
and there they were. Mom and Dad, beautiful and happy and together.

“Dad put them in order,” Celia said. “Last night. And he added these. He’s been keeping them in his closet.”

She flipped a couple more pages and opened the book again. Wedding photos. Dozens of them. Page after page after page. Mom
and Dad so happy. In love. Perfect.

A few pages later were more additions: baby photos. Shannin’s, mine, Celia’s. Mom looking tired and in love. Dad looking so
proud. Toddler photos, school photos, photos of us in pumpkin patches and sliding down slides and at birthdays. They were
all there—proof that our mother loved us.

Proof that I had it right all along.

Later, when the grandmas took Celia out to dinner, Dad sat by the bed and flipped through the album silently. More than ever,
he seemed heartbroken.

When he got to the photo of Mom holding the flower on her head on the side of the road, he just chuckled, touching the photo.

“Where was that, Dad?” I asked. “What mountain is that?”

He stroked the mountain in the background. “Cheyenne Mountain,” he said. “Colorado Springs. We went there on our honeymoon.”

Cheyenne Mountain.

“She always said the last time she felt whole was when we were in the mountains.”

“Is that why she wanted to go back? Because she missed your honeymoon?”

God, that couldn’t be it, I thought. She couldn’t have
killed herself just to get back to the mountains for sentimentality’s sake.

He shook his head and closed the book. “Alex,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, “your mother was mentally ill. And after
you girls were born, she just got sicker. She wasn’t thinking right. Said she loved you girls so much, every time you cried
she felt like a piece of her was being chipped away. She was convinced that she wasn’t a good-enough mother.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why Colorado? Why a spiritual healer? It doesn’t make sense.”

Dad shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. He had her convinced that if she would just get back to the last place she felt whole,
she would be all better and could be a better mom to you girls. Sounds crazy, and it was. But she believed it.”

My mind reeled. She wasn’t leaving us. She was leaving
for
us. She was going to come back to us, all better. She was trying to heal herself so she could love us better.

I couldn’t help wondering how different the past year would have been if I’d known this. How different my whole life might
have been. Why couldn’t Dad have just told me this before? Why couldn’t he come out of his own grief to tell me the one thing
I needed so desperately to hear—that my mom loved me. That I mattered. That I was important.

That Mom’s death was all just a big, sad accident.

After Dad left the room, I curled onto my left side, which hurt less than my right, and cried. Mom was gone, and we’d never
bring her back.

But I was still alive. There was still hope for me.

I’d been home from the hospital exactly four hours when he called my cell.

The first calls I ignored. I lay under my blankets and shivered, like I was right back to that night. Ignored the voice mails
he left.

But he wouldn’t give up. Every few minutes he called, his cell phone number popping up in the ID. He was out of jail already.
He was back home.

The thought made my spine go cold.

But I was curious. Even after everything that had gone on, I was curious. And I wondered how awful it had been for him. How
awful it would still be. Would he have to go to court? Would my dad show up? Would my dad try to sue his family?

By the end of the day, I had given in. When he called, I answered.

“Alex,” he said, his voice muffled as though he was leaning hard into the phone. “My Emily Dickinson.”

He didn’t say anything more. I didn’t say anything. Just sat there, the open-air sound of the phone line stretching between
us.

And it occurred to me that curiosity wasn’t enough. I just… didn’t have anything to say. Not anymore.

“God, I’m so sorry,” he said, at last, and I pulled the phone away from my ear, hung up on him, turned the phone off, and
put it in my nightstand drawer.

And it stayed there.

We waited a year. Part of that time was to let my stitches heal and my bones get strong again and let me make peace with the
internal scars that would be my forever companions. Part of that time was to work—get myself back to a place of normal, or
at least as normal as you can get when you’ve been through what I’d been through. Part of that time was to speak out—to travel
to all the schools I could get to and tell them my story. The therapists all said it would help. I guess they were right.
It felt like the right thing to do, anyway. Even if it sometimes made me feel like a freak and sometimes made me miss Cole
and sometimes left me sobbing in the driver’s seat of my car, unsure how I would ever get home.