Save Yourself (18 page)

How many places, she thought, since she’d left Margot’s house? How many new starts? Five, ten? She didn’t count. It would just depress her. And always, always, trying to wedge herself into somebody else’s life, occasionally a roommate, but usually a boyfriend. Time after time: finding room in the closet for her clothes, room in the bathroom for her makeup. She thought of clean, empty cupboards, shelves waiting to be papered. Thick, creamy sauce, golden brown bread crumbs. White ceramic with cheerful red trim.

Caro wanted that desperately. A
real
clean start this time, a place as much hers as anyone else’s. Maybe more than one unsolvable problem could be dealt with here; surely Patrick would want to get out, too, to get his own place, and then they could all start over. The Great Apocalyptic Mistake could fade peacefully into the distance and they would never have to think about it again. Just her and Mike—stable, sane Mike, who maybe drank too much and wanted too little but who got up and went to work every day regardless, who asked nothing of her but clean laundry and love. No Patrick, with his horror movies and outdated metal, his sulks and silences, the wounded-puppy set of his shoulders; with his legs that always seemed to be in his own way, his eyebrows that laughed before the rest of his face, and those too-clever hazel eyes that saw things, always
saw
things—

All at once the panic was back, coming up behind her closer than it had in years. She jumped to her feet. “Get up, get up.” She grabbed at Mike’s hands. “If we’re going to get drunk, let’s go do it in a crowd like respectable people.”

Mike’s face was surly and already stupid with alcohol. “I’m happy here.”

“Oh, come on.” She smiled with mischief she didn’t feel and pulled harder, his body a dead weight on the ends of her arms. “There’s no food in the house anyway, and we’ve got to eat, right? We could go to Jack’s.”

“They deliver.”

But Caro cajoled and flirted and eventually, grudgingly, he stood up and put on a clean shirt and they left. They drove to Jack’s Bar and Sandwiches—or rather, she drove; he’d kept drinking as he dressed and was already too blurry to drive. The Bar part of Jack’s was dreadful, with a boring jukebox and chronically broken toilets and the same half dozen drunks roosted on the same half dozen bar stools; the Sandwiches, though, weren’t bad. Fat hoagies on warm soft bread served with fluorescent pepperoncini on the side. Mike and Caro had met there, and now every time they went in, Lecia,
behind the bar, winked and smiled smugly at the two of them, as if any happiness they shared belonged partly to her, too. When in reality, all she’d done was say,
I don’t care what people say, Mike’s a good guy
. Later, in the parking lot, he’d told Caro that his dad was in jail. She hadn’t cared. Lots of people were in jail. She hadn’t even cared that the old man had killed someone. Lots of people were dead. Later that night they’d done it in the back of his truck, and after that he’d taken her home and they’d done it again. God, she’d been so drunk. She remembered feeling surprised at how good it was. She remembered how happy she’d been. The first time was always the best, with anyone.

That night, Mike had taught her the two-step, made her laugh. Tonight his anger was diffuse and formless and landed anywhere that would hold it. He munched it the same way he munched his chicken parm sandwich, grim and relentless. Fucking mozzarella on his sandwich, fucking bosses at work. Fucking jukebox playing fucking Warrant, fucking Great White (all those people in Rhode Island died at that show and somebody got rich and how many people paid for it, fucking corruption, it was everywhere).

“You’re not mad about Great White. You’re mad about the house,” Caro finally said. She leaned across the table, put a hand on his. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, though. Moving.”

His shoulders slumped, and he picked at the cheese on his sandwich with one chewed, callused finger. He’d asked for provolone and hadn’t gotten it. “Me and Patrick were born in that house. I mean, at the hospital, but whatever. We’ve lived there all our lives. I remember Patrick sitting in his high chair at the kitchen table. My mom died there, practically. You know?”

Gently, she said, “People are supposed to leave home. They’re supposed to grow up and move out and have their own lives. We could do that. We could have our own place, that we chose together. Our own stuff that we bought together. Not me living with you in your dad’s house. The two of us living in
our
house.”

She could see him thinking about it, turning it over in his mind. “What about Patrick?”

“Patrick can get his own place.”

Mike snorted. “Right.”

“What? He’s not an idiot.”

“No, but he’s got no damn common sense. You know what Dad used to say about him? All brains and no balls. Look what happened at work.”

All brains and no balls
. “What happened at work?”

“He quit, that’s what happened. One of the other guys made some crack about our dad and five minutes later Patrick left his jack in the middle of the dog food aisle and walked out. Later he tried to spin some bullshit about being afraid the ceiling was going to collapse, but that was a crock and we both knew it. He didn’t have the balls to work there anymore. Everybody looking at him, knowing what he did.” Mike shook his head. “He can’t live with himself, Caro. He can talk all he wants about logic and rational decisions, but the truth is that it’s his fault Dad is in jail and he feels so guilty he can’t stand it. He destroyed our family. He knows it, and everybody else knows it. I mean, look at him. Screwing around with a high school girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s trying to get himself arrested, you know? Like, subconsciously.”

Caro felt her brow furrow. The stuff about Patrick trying to get himself arrested, or the ceiling falling in, none of that was beyond belief, but she’d always gotten the impression that the Cusimano family had come predestroyed. That if it hadn’t, Patrick would not have been faced with such a horrible choice, and John Cusimano would never have forced him to make it. Did Mike actually believe that what had happened to the old man was his brother’s fault? Because if he did—if that blame was what dragged Patrick down—then why would Patrick even want to stay? Why wouldn’t he want to escape, to save himself before it drowned him?

There was a heat behind her eyes that she associated with crying,
but she wasn’t crying. Focus, she told herself sternly. Patrick is not your problem.

“If we leave him alone, he’ll kill himself or something. I’m the only reason he’s still alive, anyway. Anyone else would have kicked his ass to the curb by now.” But it wasn’t exactly worry she heard in Mike’s words, was it; he sounded calm and sure of himself and, so help her god, even a little smug. He looked at her. “You’re cool with him staying, right? You and Patrick get along okay. He’s not a bad guy, really. You can’t count on him for shit, obviously, but once you know that, he’s not a bad guy.”

“Of course he’s not,” Caro said.

“You know, the more I think about this, the more I like it. We could get a dog. A real dog, not like that barky little shit next door. I used to kind of want a dog, when I was a kid.” Mike squeezed her hand.

You could smile when you didn’t feel like it. Caro was a waitress. She did it all the time. “Sure. I like dogs.”

He grinned, hugely and electrically. “See, this is what I mean. Here I am, all pissed-off and mad at the world because shit is just about as bad as it can get, and then you come along and say something that makes it all right. You save me. All the time. You just save me.” And at that, Caro’s own smile settled in a little bit, and she pushed the hot-eyed feeling away. Maybe Patrick would want to escape, after all. Maybe he’d see this for what it was, an opportunity to clean up the mess, to walk away. She hoped he would. She hoped it would be okay. She hoped John Cusimano had never said that thing about all brains and no balls when his younger son could hear, because that wasn’t the sort of thing you should hear your dad say about you. Margot had used to tell Caro sometimes that her life force was draining and disruptive. She would make her sit facing an outside wall for hours, to angle the forces out of the house, and of course when Caro got older she realized that the life force thing was bullshit but when you were young, you didn’t know.

Back at the house (the house that would be nothing but a memory someday, all she had to do was wait) Caro went upstairs to take a shower. There was a knotted muscle in her back and she hoped the hot water would ease it. The finish was wearing off the bathtub and as she stood under the spray, looking down at the grayish-brown smear, she wondered how many women had stood there: Mike’s girlfriends, Patrick’s girlfriends, the old man’s girlfriends—did he have girlfriends? And before all of them, Alice, Mike’s mother. Alice Cusimano had been sharp-featured like Patrick, with the same guarded intelligence in her eyes. Caro herself looked like her father, or at least that’s what Margot had told her. Margot had also told her there was a kingdom of gnomes that lived in the walls of their house, logging the location and weight and body temperature of the two women every time they touched a moving metal object (like a hinge or a can opener or a doorknob; thus Caro’s habit, which Patrick had noticed, of pulling her sleeve down to cover her hand before she opened a cabinet or closed a door). Sometimes Margot would stand at the mirror, staring at her own reflection, and Caro would stand with her.
Is that me, Carrie?
she’d say.
Is that you? Are you sure? They could have switched us. It could be a trick
. The two of them would stand there for as long as it took. Sometimes it took hours.

Don’t lie to me. You’re not you. It’s a trick. They’re very tricky. You’re not you
.

In the shower, Caro pushed her face under the spray, closing her eyes tight against the heat and the water. Stop it, she told herself sternly. You’re fine. You’re you. You’ll get a new place and Patrick will move out and everything will be okay, everything.

That muscle was torture.

“You okay?” Mike said, when she came into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. He was lying in bed, drinking a beer and watching the little television that sat on their dresser.

She put on a T-shirt and lay down next to him. “Just my back.”

“Roll over, I’ll rub it,” he said, and lifted the shirt.

But Mike always rubbed too hard, so she just said, “No, it’s okay.” Her shirt stayed bunched above her waist. Mike picked up his beer from the nightstand, propped his head on his elbow, and balanced the can on her bare stomach. The metal aluminum ring was so cold it burned but she knew he wouldn’t keep it there long.

“Let’s get married,” he said. Caro laughed. Mike didn’t. “I’m totally serious. We should get married and have, like, ten kids.”

“Ten?” The muscle throbbed. She didn’t want even one kid, kids were small and vulnerable and you could hurt them without even meaning to. You could hurt them just by being who you were. You could hurt them with your
genes
, your very DNA.

Mike drained the beer, crumpled the can, and set it down on the nightstand. He rubbed the place on her tummy where it had just been. “At least ten. You’d look so awesome pregnant, with your big belly sticking out.”

“No,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, misunderstanding. Probably not deliberately. He wasn’t the type to deliberately misunderstand things. “One kid. To start with. Unless you have twins.”

“I don’t want kids.”

“Everyone wants kids.” Excitement danced in his eyes. He got like this sometimes: a shiny idea lodged in him like a fishhook, pulling him along. “Come on, it’ll be like what you were talking about. Like how you were saying we should get our own place? We’ll start our own family. And we can do— What’s that thing that people do when they get married, when they tell people what presents they want?”

“Registering.” That knot in her back, it was almost making her weak.

“Yeah. We can register. Patrick can be best man. Maybe your mom would come.”

“No,” she said again. Meaning not just
no, my mom can’t come
—Mike knew almost nothing about her mother, and how could he since Caro had never told him—but also
no
to all of it.

But Mike was off through the water. “Sure she’d come. What mom wants to miss her daughter’s wedding?” He laughed with delight. “You know what? Don’t say anything else. I want to get a ring. I want to do this right.”

“I don’t want a ring.”

“Now that, I definitely don’t believe. Girls always say they don’t want engagement rings when they totally do.” He pinched her leg lightly. “This is the best idea I’ve ever had. We’re getting engaged!”

Later, when he was asleep, she thought again of Alice Cusimano, lying in that same room and staring up at that same ceiling; while inside her womb, the seed that would become Mike or Patrick or cancer wriggled and grew and settled in. Had she felt her life hanging above her, seen the glint of its edge; when she looked at the cracked plaster, had her chest squeezed as tight as Caro’s, had she ever opened her mouth to take a breath and found nothing there to breathe?

Sometimes Caro watched sitcoms on television where the entire twenty-three-minute plot began with some simple but potentially madcap misunderstanding. They drove her crazy. She wanted to grab the characters, shake them, yell at them to just stop moving for ten seconds and explain themselves, and everything would be fine. And yet, the next morning, when she lay in bed half-awake listening to Mike move around the room—he was scheduled for the early shift—she couldn’t make herself wake the rest of the way up, sit him down, and explain that she didn’t want to get married and have kids, maybe not ever and certainly not now. There was no question in her mind that she should do it. It just didn’t seem possible.

And so, while he was in the shower, she thought: maybe he was so drunk last night that he won’t remember. When he came back in, she
pretended to be asleep. The bed dipped and rocked as he sat down on its edge to put his boots on. She could feel every tug, every push, every tightened knot. Her eyes squeezed tight. When she won the lottery she was going to buy one of those mattresses you could put a glass of wine on, and then jump up and down and the wine wouldn’t spill.