Breathe (5 page)

“Excuse me,” I said as I brushed past her and crossed the clearing.

“Garrett,” she called after me, but I didn’t turn back. Even my name floating from her mouth sounded hollow, as if it meant no more than the hundreds of others she’d said in her lifetime. 

In the woods, I searched for Abby. Followed sounds I didn’t want to hear. In a moment, Abby’s sweater was beneath my foot. I leaned down, picked it up. In front of me, backed up against a tree, Abby stood with Jeff. Her turquoise tank top sat crumpled atop a pile of leaves at her feet and Jeff’s mouth was on her collarbone, his hand cupping her breast.

“Hey,” I shouted as I moved toward them.

Jeff’s head shot up, his eyes flicking to me as he took a step back. “What the hell man?”

Pushing Jeff away from Abby with one hand, I shoved the hoodie I held in the other into her chest. “She’s drunk douchebag,” I spat at Jeff.

“What are you, her mother?”

“Nah, her mother would care as little as you do.” I picked up Jeff’s T-shirt from the ground and tossed it at him. “Just get outta here.”

“Don’t think that’s your call to make.” Jeff stared me down, his eyes hard. It was the most determined I’d ever seen him. I imagined that if brought that kind of passion to the pool he might win a race or two.

Turning back to Abby, I waited. She pulled the hoodie on over her bra and zipped it up to her chin, her bottom lip trembling. “Go, Jeff,” she ordered.

I turned a self-satisfied smile in his direction. “You heard the lady,” I told him.

“Abby…” he pleaded.

“Just go,” she said.

His expression turned sour. “Fine,” he snapped, walking away and pulling his t-shirt over his head, glaring at me as he passed. Fuck him.

“Jesus, Abby,” I breathed once he’d dragged his sorry ass back to the bonfire. 

“Nothing happened.” She refused to look at me. Kept her gaze fixed on the ground. On the tank top beside her. She hadn’t put it back on.

“What if I hadn’t come looking for you?”

“Nothing happened,” she insisted, still staring at the shirt.

“It didn’t look like nothing from where I stood.” 

She bent over, picked up the shirt, and threw it at me. “Look at it,” she screeched. 

My stomach knotted. To be honest, I was afraid of what I might find, but I unfurled the shirt anyway. Small, splotchy stains peppered the front. I’d expected something a little more shocking. “Okay, Ab, what am I looking at?”

“I’ve washed it three times,” she told me.

“Okay…”

“It won’t come out.”

“But what is it?” I still couldn’t understand how a few stains on a tank top had anything to do with letting Jeff Walker grope her in the woods.

Abby raised her eyebrows, creating small creases in the smooth, pale skin of her forehead. “It’s his,” she insisted as if I should have known the answer all along.

I glanced again at the rust colored stains and finally understood what she was attempting to explain. It was
his
. It was Tom Ford’s blood.

Chapter Four

Abby

I’d met Tom Ford about a year prior to his death. “I’ll have a beer,” were the first words he said to me. Lounging in a low-back barstool surrounding a small round table with three other guys, he had handed me his credit card and told me to start a tab.

“Large crowd for a Tuesday,” I leaned over the bar and remarked to Uncle Jim.

He’d looked up from his crouched position behind the bar and stopped shelving freshly washed pilsner glasses. “Biggest crowd we’ve had in weeks,” he’d agreed and pulled himself up to his full height. It always amazed me that Uncle Jim and I shared the same genes. He was massive and I was slight, like my mother. “What d’ya need?” he asked.

“Four bottles of Miller Light for the guys at table seven.” I’d placed the credit card on the bar top. “Oh, and the tall one says to start a tab.”

Uncle Jim eyed the group at table seven, turned, pulled four bottles from the refrigerator behind him, and then placed them on a tray. “Have Becca take ‘em their drinks.”

“What?” I’d laughed. “Why?”

He’d glanced at the group again. “’Cause I don’t like the looks of ‘em.”

I’d chuckled then, thinking my uncle was merely being overprotective. “You just don’t like strangers,” I’d replied and looked over my shoulder at the four men. “They seem harmless enough.”

Now I stood in the woods, Garrett holding my bloodied shirt, wondering what Uncle Jim had seen in those first few seconds that I had escaped my notice. 

Garrett face was crestfallen. Looked as if I’d kicked him in the gut. In a way, I suppose I had. He couldn’t have expected to find me in the woods with Jeff Walker. Hell,
I
hadn’t expected to find me in the woods with Jeff. Not after last week. Not after we Garrett and I…

“I’m sorry,” I apologized.

Garrett gawked at the shirt in his hands. “You wore this here?” He was practically shrieking at me. “What in the hell were you thinking?”

The plan had actually been a simple one—wear the shirt to the bonfire and somehow toss it in. But sitting around, the crowd growing thicker by the minute and Jeff refusing to leave me alone, I’d had no opportunity to remove it. “I needed to get rid of it,” I confessed. “I figured the fire was my best bet.”

Garrett slid down the trunk of the tree behind him, coming to a rest at its base. I moved across the small clearing to crawl beside him and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders. Pulled me closer. A week ago, I’d wanted nothing more than for Garrett to hold me. A week ago, I’d thought things between us could change. But a week ago I didn’t have Tom Ford’s blood on my clothes.

“I wasn’t about to strip in front of the entire crowd and I thought it would be weird if I disappeared into the woods myself,” I tried to explain.

“Why didn’t you just ask
me
to help you?”

I watched him ball my tiny shirt up—he easily concealed it in one of his large hands—and I knew he was right. If I’d asked for his help, I wouldn’t have had to let Jeff Walker fondle me. I wouldn’t even have had to wear the disgusting garment again. But then I would have had to admit that I couldn’t handle things on my own.

The silence between us grew louder with each second I failed to provide an answer. I concentrated on the little twitch in his jaw that appeared when he was upset and tried to remember to breathe. Inhale and exhale. Just like swimming, fluid and exact. 

Moments later, he withdrew from our embrace and stood, extending his hand to help me to my feet. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

He always did. When all else failed, I knew Garrett would take care of it. And so I waited alone in the truck while he returned to the bonfire, and wrestled with the images from that night a week ago in my mind—the river cold and black beneath the moonless sky. The way the water fell from Garrett’s hair. His smile. His lips nearing mine. I’d wished then for the ability to stop time, to freeze that image, so I would always know that look in his eyes. Now I didn’t know if he’d ever be able to look at me that way again.

I turned the rearview mirror in my direction and studied my reflection in the dark. It scared me how much I looked like Maggie. We shared the same deep-set green eyes. Same heart shaped face. My large forehead and high-arched brows, were her forehead and her brows. My thin, straight nose, full lips, pale skin, even the freckles that dotted my face—all Maggie. If not for the assistance of a few bottles of Loreal, we’d even have the same hair color.

Of course, I knew our resemblance went much deeper than the shade of our skin and our bone structure. There was disquiet in our eyes. Like a war veteran who knew and had seen too much to ever be fully settled. You wait, constantly on edge, for something to go wrong, for someone to confirm your suspicions. For the world to prove you right. I didn’t want to look like Maggie. Wanted even less to be like her. But I couldn’t fight my DNA.

While smoothing the lines beneath my tired eyes I caught a glimpse of Jeff Walker in the rearview mirror passing behind the truck with an arm slung over the shoulder of a girl whose name I didn’t know. Probably the friend of a local kid, visiting for the weekend. He’d certainly moved on quickly.

I was thinking how grateful I was that the night was dark and he couldn’t see me inside the truck, when the driver’s side door opened and clicked shut. Garrett’s scent, mingled with the smell of charred wood, filled the interior. I counted his breaths. Seven before he turned toward me. I lifted my eyes to meet his gaze and in an instant, his mouth was on mine, hot and frantic, searching. As if somewhere in my mouth laid the answers he was looking for.

The sting of rejection that I recognized in his eyes when I was the first to pull away stabbed at my heart. I guess he didn’t find what he needed. It was probably for the best anyway. If I was going under, no way in hell I was dragging Garrett down with me.

Chapter Five

Abby

The next morning the swim team traveled to Clarksburg where we had our asses handed to us by their mediocre team. Guess they hadn’t all partied the night before and shown up hung-over. I swore I could see fumes rising from Coach Scott’s bald head.

The medley relay was almost comical, with some of us forgetting to go when the swimmer in the pool touched the wall. Jeff took the worst of it. When he clocked in on the fifty-meter freestyle at almost a minute, Coach near about had a stroke.

“You’re gonna have to do better than that if you want to impress Penn State, Rhoades,” Coach Scott had shouted at me after I failed to win the one hundred meter butterfly. I pushed harder just to prove I could, winning my next three events and losing the fourth.

I had driven down with Uncle Jim and Becca in Becca’s maroon Chevy Tahoe. Garrett hadn’t called since he dropped me off the night before and he hadn’t been at the meet. So as we drove back home I wondered if he was still angry with me over the Jeff thing, or the him kissing me and me not reciprocating thing.

I tried not to think that the last time I’d made this trip, it had been with Tom. It was the week Becca’s dad had moved into hospice, right before the lung cancer took him, and she and Uncle Jim were in Pittsburgh spending what time was left with him. Garrett was driving down with his father and though Coach Scott would surely have given me a ride had I asked, Tom had volunteered to take me. It was the first time anyone other than Uncle Jim and Becca had shown the slightest interest in my swimming.

I won that day—every event I swam—and racked up pool records that remain unbeaten to this day. And when it was over Tom took me out for a celebratory dinner. “I swam in high school,” he’d told me over my mouth-watering meal of lasagna and Coke. “Back in Danville.”

“Really?” I’d asked and I’d been genuinely interested. Tom had been nothing but nice to me since he’d begun seeing Maggie a few weeks prior. When he showed up for dates and brought Maggie a dozen roses, he’d always have a single calla lily (my favorite flower) for me. And since they’d started going out, Maggie seemed sober more of the time, like she was trying to keep herself together. I remembered wondering what a man like Tom—tall, muscular, handsome, and so put together—had seen in someone like Maggie. I’d learned the answer later but by that point it had been too late.

He called over the server, a young plump girl with curly orange hair and a gnarly overbite, and he ordered a bottle of wine with two glasses. She never even bothered to card me. Tom was younger than Maggie by a few years, maybe only thirty or thirty-one. I imagined I must have seemed older, sitting there with him under the dim lighting, my long hair curling from being wet and not blown dry. Maybe she thought we were together, I told myself. I pretended we were. That it was our first date and Tom had brought me a bouquet of calla lilies. That I’d laughed at his jokes because I wanted him to think I was funny and mature. Because I’d wanted him to like me.

It became our regular thing—Tom taking me to meets and stopping to eat along the way. Then one night I drank more than I should have. I was never one to really drink, let alone get hammered. Maggie made alcohol seem like a crutch. Something weak and disgusting that I wanted no part of. But when Tom insisted I try a certain type of wine, I drank it to make him happy. Followed by another and then another.

By the time we headed back to the car, I was a little tipsy, stumbling here and there. Tom wrapped an arm around my waist to hold me steady. And when he suggested a dip in the river so I could see how good a swimmer he was, my foggy mind thought it seemed liked a fun idea. We stopped at a public swimming area a few miles outside of town. When Tom stripped down to his boxers, I tried not to look. Heat rose to my cheeks, my skin was warm to the touch, and I was thankful the only light was from the moon and he couldn’t see that I was blushing.

I felt foolish, like a child instead of a sixteen-year-old girl. A child that couldn’t even look at a half-naked man without getting all flustered. I sat on the shore while he’d paddled out. He turned after a few feet and waved at me. “Come on in,” he hollered.

“Nah, I’m good right here,” I laughed and shouted back. Last October wasn’t as kind weather wise and I knew the water must have been cold. But he begged some more and I relented.

“Turn around now,” I instructed, twirling my finger in the air. No way I was gonna strip down to my underwear with him watching. I knew my black cotton bra and underwear were no more revealing than a bikini would have been, but still I felt uncomfortable with him seeing me near-naked. He laughed, covered his eyes with one hand, and turned his back to me.

I shivered as the river surrounded my body but I kept going. I kept going because he’d wanted me to and I’d wanted to please him. We played and splashed in the water like children, not getting out until our lips were blue and I was pretty sure I couldn’t feel my toes.

Tom ran to the car and brought back a blanket, which he used to wrap around my trembling body. He ran his hands up and down my arms, trying to warm me. He stopped abruptly after a few seconds and looked at me with such intensity my entire body lit up like it was on fire. I swear I could feel the flames licking my skin, the cool breeze urging them on.

“You’re so beautiful,” he’d told me and I think I was flattered that he even thought of me in those terms. Me. Some sixteen-year-old girl who’d never turned a head in her life. What girl doesn’t long to hear those words? And I’d gone my entire life without anyone ever speaking them to me except my uncle.

The first time Tom kissed me that night, I pushed him away. The second time he leaned down and touched his lips to mine, I didn’t object. I didn’t kiss him back, but I didn’t object. All of a sudden something was happening and I had no idea how I’d gotten there. Stuck in that place. Stuck in that moment. But I knew it must’ve been my fault. A nice man like Tom wouldn’t have kissed me unless I’d given him reason to think I wanted him to.

His hands slid to my waist, resting there a moment. When they continued south, I jerked away, stared at my feet, unsure of how to respond. There’s no training for that kind of thing. They teach us all about the effects of drugs and alcohol, and how the reproductive system works. But no one ever tells you what to do if you find yourself alone on a beach on windy night with your mother’s boyfriend’s tongue down your throat.

Afterward, in the car on the way home, he’d apologized profusely. Blamed it on the wine and the way I looked with my hair wet and my skin glowing in the soft moonlight. I was just naïve enough to accept that for an excuse and the next time he came to take Maggie out, I got an entire bouquet of calla lilies.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Uncle Jim suggested dinner so we stopped at a steakhouse along the way. My stomach growled as our server, a tall, bony boy whose voice shook when he spoke, handed us our menus. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Garrett and I had lunch together on Friday but I’d mostly just pushed my salad around in its bowl. I’d been too concerned with the rumors floating around to eat.

I ordered a steak, well done, and a baked potato with butter and sour cream, then convinced Uncle Jim that we should split an appetizer. A few minutes later our waiter delivered our nachos. The mouth-watering aroma of grilled chicken and melted cheese assaulted my nose and I was suddenly all too aware of the force of my hunger. My stomach ached, dull and low, and I shoveled food into my mouth to calm it.

“Slow down there, champ,” Uncle Jim chuckled. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

“Don’t pay him no mind,” Becca countered, splitting her auburn ponytail and pulling to tighten it. She smiled at me, her teeth a vibrant shade of white surrounded by pearly pink lips. “He just wants more for himself.”

I liked Becca, even though she reminded me of the girls from my high school that I hated. All pretty and sweet and perky. She also had this way of cussing that wasn’t really cussing. Exclamations like ‘fudge’ or ‘son of a biscuit’. Like a grown-up version of some PC character from a Nickelodeon show. It would’ve been annoying if she hadn’t also been one of the nicest and funniest people I’d ever met.

She’d worked at the bar and been my uncle’s girlfriend for as long as I could remember. When I was younger, she’d played Barbies with me in their one bedroom apartment above the bar. Then when I’d gotten my first period and Maggie had been too drunk to run to the store for tampons, I’d called Becca to bring me a box.

She smiled now and excused herself from the table to use the restroom while Uncle Jim and I fought over a particularly good-looking nacho. “You
must
be starving,” he remarked when I stuffed the chip he’d let me win into my mouth. “I’d thought with the way things went at the pool today…”

“You thought because I lost, I’d be too disgusted with myself to eat?” I bit into another chip then licked my greasy fingertips. “I’m sorry, have we met?” Uncle Jim should know me better than that. We’d been fighting over food since I’d started swimming and burning several hundred extra calories per day.

Uncle Jim chuckled again, his eyes crinkling at the edges. He rubbed his jaw line with one hand, moving from his ear to the prominent cleft in the center of his chin. He looked so much older than I remembered him being. I’d never noticed before that moment but the hair along his temples had faded from dark blonde to an almost white.

A moment later, the lightness in the air evaporated and Uncle Jim turned serious, folding and unfolding his hands on the table and looking at me like he was afraid I’d bolt for the door at any minute. “I know Tom’s death can’t be easy on you,” he finally managed to say to me. “You two were close, I know that. And Maggie, well, she’s no help, now is she?”

More than anything at that moment, I wanted to remember a time when Uncle Jim and my mother were happy together. When he spoke of her in a way that didn’t reek of exasperation. There was a picture behind the bar from when I was a toddler—one Becca had snapped and told me once was her favorite shot of my uncle. It was just Uncle Jim, Maggie, and me. There was a campfire in front of us and in the background a large khaki-colored tent set against a backdrop of a darkening and dusky sky. They were all smiles, me in a frilly pink dress not intended for the outdoors sitting on Uncle Jim’s lap, and Maggie behind him, her arms around his neck and her chin resting atop his head. I guess they were happy then.

“All I’m saying is,” Uncle Jim continued as if I had been paying attention. “If you need someone to talk to, I’m here. Becca’s here.”

“I’m fine,” I blurted out just to make him stop. I didn’t want to talk about Tom Ford any more. He was dead and I didn’t want to pretend I wasn’t happy about it. But my words came out too fast and Uncle Jim eyed me warily. “Really,” I tried again, slower this time. “I suppose it just hasn’t hit me yet.”

He nodded in what he thought was understanding as Becca returned to an uncomfortable silence. “You told her without me?” she accused. Uncle Jim fumbled a response and Becca turned to me. “Abby, honey, I know it’s a shock but this is a really good thing.” Her eyes were as bright as the yellow light overhead when she spoke and I wondered what the hell she was talking about.

“I mean,” she continued. “You’ll have a cousin. A little girl or a little boy that you can teach to swim—,”

“You’re pregnant?” I shrieked and all around us heads snapped to gape in our direction. I lowered my voice and repeated the question.

Becca palmed her stomach and nodded while Uncle Jim stared down at her, his eyes moist with a mixture of pride and awe. I wondered what it would be like for that kid. To be born to two people who loved it before it was even real. Before it even had a chance to show them who it was. Before there was really any reason to love it at all.

I racked my brain for an appropriate response but, “I thought you couldn’t have kids,” was all I could manage to come up with. I knew that they’d tried before and failed. And I knew that it had nearly broken my uncle in two.

Becca’s gaze fell to the tablecloth, a red and white checkered thing with stains I hadn’t noticed before but now couldn’t stop staring at. “I didn’t think I could,” she said. “Your uncle and I, we had a few near misses that I thought would ruin us. After that, we just quit trying. I guess at the time it seemed more important that he and I remain intact than it did for us to grow.”

Our entrees arrived on a massive round tray. The waitress set our hot plates before us and cleared the forgotten appetizer while Becca sipped her water. It dawned on me that I should’ve realized something was up the second she hadn’t ordered a Coke. Becca drank Coke like it was her job. I was sure it was the source of her perkiness.

“But last year,” she continued when the waitress departed. “After I lost my dad, and with you going away to college soon…I don’t know. It just seemed like the right time to start trying for a family of our own again.”

I stuffed a piece of steak in my mouth to avoid saying something stupid again. “How long have you known?” I asked between mouthfuls a while later. As shocking as the news was, I had to eat. There’d be no food at home. If I didn’t remember to go shopping there’d be nothing in the fridge except vodka and cranberry juice.

Becca cleared her throat, ran a hand across the front of her neck nervously and took another sip of water. “About twelve weeks,” she finally confessed.