Breathe (8 page)

A receptionist with poufy black hair greeted us from behind a large wall of a desk, her head nearly obscured by the flowers and brochures on the countertop. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rhoades,” she cooed at my uncle.

They conversed for a few minutes, the receptionist batting her long, overdone eyelashes and telling Uncle Jim that Grandpa Rhoades was pretty alert when she’d visited him that morning. I’d forgotten the affect my uncle could have on women, he’d been with Becca so long. But if I wasn’t mistaken, poufy-haired-big-eyed girl was flirting with him.

She ignored me completely, handing me my visitor’s badge without so much as a glance in my direction. Made me appreciate Becca all the more. She at least understood that my uncle and I were a package deal. Couldn’t have one without the other.

“What a witch,” I whispered to my uncle as we made our way to Grandpa’s room.

“Cindy? No, she’s a sweetheart.”

“Oh, Cindy, is it?” I teased. “Well maybe to you she’s sweet. I could’ve burst into flames and she wouldn’t have offered me a glass of water.”

Uncle Jim gave a small chuckle but he didn’t dispel my theory, just opened a door and ushered me into Grandpa’s cell. A small room with one of those adjustable hospital beds, a window and a single chair. At least it had a TV, mounted on the wall in a corner close to the ceiling.

It shocked me still to see Grandpa’s features. Especially as they were now, gnawed and twisted, shiny in the sunlight that leaked through the dirty glass. Patches of pink and red hairless skin existed where his face should be. The fire that mangled his body happened before the madness. Right before Maggie tried to leave town.

He’d tried to explain it to me once, my Uncle Jim. When I was younger. When I questioned the strange formation of Grandpa’s skin. He’d told me Grandpa had been a drinker before the accident. That he’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and a mattress doused with vodka. Maggie hadn’t been home, that was the day she’d run off. The day she would’ve left me, alone and crying, in a stall at the bus depot if Uncle Jim hadn’t stopped her.

Now I stared at my grandfather’s distorted features and wondered if he still felt the answer to all his problems lay at the bottom of a bottle. I wondered why there wasn’t a lesson in that for Maggie. Had she never seen her father as he was now? Not once? Not even in pictures? I’d stopped her from burning down our own apartment several times—removing bottles, wiping up spills, stubbing out cigarettes. Had Maggie had to do the same for her father?

I’d witnessed Maggie’s descent firsthand and wanted nothing to do with alcohol. Had she been like me at seventeen? Clean and sober? Wanting a future? A way out of this town? Was it a never-ending cycle? Would I be just like her in my thirties? Would I find solace in the empty numbness? Seek love from those incapable of giving it?

“Jim,” Grandpa croaked in greeting.

“Hi, Pop,” Uncle Jim replied. He took a seat on the bed beside his father and motioned for me to take the lonesome chair by the window.

“You brought Maggie,” Grandpa said and I knew that he meant me.

“No, Pop. This is Abby. Maggie’s daughter. Your granddaughter.”

Grandpa looked confused, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Uncle Jim. It couldn’t have been easy on him considering how much I resembled Maggie. Spitting image, folks in town had always told me. “Maggie never had no baby,” the old man argued.

“The nurses tell me you’re behaving yourself,” Uncle Jim said, trying to change the subject but Grandpa was fixated.

“Look at her,” he wailed, pointing at me. “She’s just a girl herself. She’s a good girl. She wouldn’t run around getting herself knocked up. No sir. Now would you, Maggie?”

Oh, but she would, I thought to myself. She had. I was warm-blooded, living proof that his Maggie wasn’t near as angelic as he wanted to believe. Poor old man. Maybe it would’ve been best if we didn’t shatter his illusions. Maybe Maggie could have remained forever—in one person’s eyes—perfect.

“Come sit by me, Maggie baby,” Grandpa called to me.

“I’m fine right here,” I answered at the same time Uncle Jim insisted, “That’s not Maggie, Pop.”

“It is too, Jim. You think I don’t know my own daughter?” Grandpa’s voice got louder with each word until he was practically shouting.

“Maybe I should wait outside,” I said as I stood to take my leave. Uncle Jim nodded his approval so I went to wait in the hall, closing the door behind me while Grandpa shouted Maggie’s name. A few minutes passed before Uncle Jim went to find a nurse who came back and administered a sedative while Uncle Jim went to speak with the doctor.

“He’s asking for you,” the nurse told me when she finally emerged from Grandpa’s room.

“Me?”

She wrote something on the chart that hung on the closed door then placed her pen in a pocket on her shirt. “You’re Maggie, right?”

May as well have been.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “I gave him something to calm him down. Go on now. He won’t bite.”

Once she was gone, I opened the door and crossed the room to the chair by the window again. Grandpa’s eyes were droopy, folding in to his mottled skin. “Maggie,” he wheezed at me, the emphysema taking hold. “Come ‘ere, Maggie. Come sit with me.”

I didn’t want to but I also didn’t want to hear him call me her name again. So I moved to sit beside him the way Uncle Jim had done before. He patted my hand with his mangled, arthritic digits. “You still love your daddy, right, Maggie?”

Something in his voice set me edge. It was a tone I knew too well. A tone I’d heard oozing from Tom’s mouth.
Come on, Abby. Be a good girl, Abby. You love me, right, Abby?

“Give daddy a kiss,” he was telling me and pulling my cheek toward his lips. My empty stomach fell and turned in on itself as his cold, wrinkled lips made contact with my skin. He pulled on me until I leaned down, my ear practically touching his lips. “Did you think you would get away with it?” he asked in a whisper. “I know what you did.”

My head snapped back, my heart stopping then thumping back to life as the fear set in. How could he? He couldn’t know. No one except me and Garrett were there that night.

“You think I don’t know?” he shouted as I stood up. I tried to pull my hand away but he caught me by the wrist, a surprising strength to his bony grip. “Did you think I wouldn’t know, you little bitch?” His fingernails dug into the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. I pulled back farther, wincing as my flesh tore.

“Look what you did to me,” he accused. “Look at my face. And you think I wouldn’t know?”

I finally wrenched my arm away, stumbled over my feet and crashed against the wall. My spine screamed in agony.

“I don’t drink vodka, you little bitch. I never drank vodka. I know it was you who set that fire. Did you think you’d be able to get away. You’re mine, Maggie. You hear me? You’ll always be mine.”

He continued to spew vile words at Maggie. Or was it at me? I couldn’t tell anymore. We may as well have been one person for how alike we were. Each of us broken. Each of us harboring a secret about something terrible we’d done.

His accusations swirled in the air around me until finally, mercifully, the drugs kicked in and he drifted off to sleep. I sat there, hugging my knees to my chest and shaking for what seemed like forever. I considered placing a pillow over his mouth, pressing down, cutting off his oxygen until I forgot his words. Until he could no longer use them to hurt me or Maggie or anyone.

By the time Uncle Jim came to collect me, I’d found the will to stand and I managed to follow him quietly to the car. The ride home was much like the ride to Shady Acres, only this time Uncle Jim sang Elvis songs and tried to make me laugh. I played along—singing Suspicious Minds—until we got home. The sun had set and the river was calling me. I barely waited for Uncle Jim to shift the car into park before I took off, tearing my clothes from my body as I went. Through the woods. Into the clearing. Wading out into the river until I was deep enough to sink under.

At least now I understood why Maggie never went to visit her father. Why she’d screamed at Uncle Jim the one and only time he’d left me alone in the man’s care. “Did he touch you?” she’d asked me later at home while she stripped me naked in the bathroom. “Did he? You can tell me? I won’t let him do it again.”

I’d been too young then to understand. I’d thought she had been asking if he hit me, but I recognized the look in Grandpa’s eyes when he thought I was Maggie. The one that had pierced through me when he swore that Maggie would never escape him.

I’d told her no that day because he hadn’t touched me. Maybe he’d have tried if I’d been alone with him longer but Maggie had insisted that Uncle Jim go get me back the instant she’d found out he’d left me with my grandfather. She’d made him drive her to Grandpa’s house. She’d screamed at Uncle Jim the whole way home. She’d dragged me away from the nice man with the butterscotch in his pocket and I’d hated her for it.

We’d slept together that night in her bedroom, Maggie curled around me, her tears soaking my forehead as she stroked my hair and whispered promises to protect me in my ear. It was the only time I’d ever seen her cry.

I stayed in the water until I no longer had the strength to stay afloat and I drifted to sleep that night thinking of the time Maggie drove us to the house in the mountains where she and Uncle Jim had spent their summers as kids. It was rustic and homey, with walls of knotty pine and a deck overlooking an expansive lake where you could swim when the weather warmed.

Uncle Jim and Becca arrived before us. Becca’s maroon Chevy Tahoe was parked in the driveway, covered in a fresh coat of snow. We pulled in behind her in Maggie’s Toyota Tercel and I could hear the snow crunching beneath the tires. As we exited the car, Uncle Jim bounded down the steps to greet us, lifting Maggie off her feet in a big old bear hug and then carrying me and our bags into the house. It was the most excited I’d ever seen him.

“Becca’s making dinner,” he told Maggie as we ascended the stairs. “She brought her nephews,” he added for my benefit. “I think you’ll like ‘em. Henry’s ‘bout your age.”

In fact, Henry had been twelve, three years older and completely obsessed with a Sonic the Hedgehog video game he’d brought along and thoroughly uninterested in playing with me. Brett was seventeen but he was nicer. He’d played card games with me while the grown-ups got drunk on the deck.

Their laughter snuck in through the open door when Maggie entered to stumble her way to the bathroom down the hall. Even though Maggie was drunk, I didn’t care. Uncle Jim and Becca had clearly had too much as well and for me that made it okay. I remember thinking how much better everything was in the mountains. How much happier we all were. And I remember wondering if we could stay there forever.

“Want some popcorn?” Brett had asked. “I could make us some.”

“I do,” Henry called from his spot on the loveseat in front of the television.

I’d nodded as I captured his queen of hearts with a king of clubs. Brett stood and went into the kitchen to cook while I moved to take a seat beside Henry to watch him play. It wasn’t until the foul odor of burned popcorn filled my nostrils that I realized Brett had disappeared.

I turned the stove off and removed the tinfoil popcorn pan from the burner. Tossing it into the sink, I ran cold water over it until steam ceased to rise from the surface, then I went in search of Brett. I found him in our bedroom with his hand shoved down Maggie’s pants and his tongue down her throat.

Closing the door, I’d felt my throat constrict and tears began to well in my eyes. I fled to the kitchen where Uncle Jim stood at the sink examining the remains of our snack. “Where’s your mother?” he demanded.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wasn’t even certain what I’d seen. It didn’t matter anyway. Uncle Jim already knew the answer. He’d brushed passed me and entered the bedroom down the hall. Brett exited first, pulling his shirt on over his head and offering me a sheepish grin before going straight into the room he shared with Henry.

Tiptoeing down the hall, stopping beside the open bedroom door, I listened to my uncle chastise my mother. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” There was more pity in his voice than anger. It was almost as if he couldn’t hold Maggie responsible for her actions.

“Don’t worry,” Maggie replied. “I’m leaving.”

I could hear the thud of our suitcase as it hit the bed. The whir of the zipper being drawn. And then the rummaging through the drawers for our things. When the room grew still I ventured a peek through the door. Uncle Jim had Maggie pinned against a dresser with her wrists grasped firmly in his hands, preventing her from packing.

“I didn’t ask you to leave,” he whispered. “I just wanna know why.”

Tears brimmed in Maggie’s eyes and she turned her head to avoid making eye contact with my uncle. “Why what?”

“Why you always gotta go and ruin a good thing,” he spat. “We were doing good here, me, you, and Becca. Weren’t we? It’s like you don’t wanna be happy.”

Maggie wrenched her arms from his grasp and pushed him back. Uncle Jim was drunk and he stumbled a little, steadying himself with the edge of the bed. “He came onto me,” Maggie shot back.

“He’s sixteen.”

“So was I once,” Maggie screamed. “No one seemed to care.”

Uncle Jim blinked a few times looking as shocked as if she’d struck him. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” he’d asked.