Shattered (8 page)

“Hey, Lyss.” The tone of his voice was hesitant, surely he knew I was in shock to see him. “How are you?”  It was hard to tell if he meant, “How are you?  It’s been nine months since I last saw you.” or “How are you after getting completely shit-faced last night?”  Just hearing his deep, raspy voice sent a ripple across my skin.  I really thought he was gone.

I looked up to see him standing beside our table.  He looked the same. He’d let his hair grow out, just a little bit longer, but it was same jet-black color and messy tousled look I remembered. The glow of his suntanned skin led me to believe that he’d been hiding out somewhere sunny as opposed to what I’d assumed, which was that he must have crawled under a rock and died, or fell off the face of the earth.  Why else would he have just completely disappeared from my life? Everything that had happened the night of Garrett’s accident flashed in my mind.  I couldn’t even begin to form a complete sentence.  Instead, I pushed out of the booth and looked directly in the eyes I’d tried to forget. “Don’t,” was all I could come up with before I ran out of the diner.  

“Alyssa, please.” He followed me out the door. “Can’t we just talk?”  

“No!” I yelled out, not breaking my stride as I walked across the street.

His hand stopped mine before I could pull the car door open and escape.  The contact of our skin sent a shock up my arm. “Please.” I turned to see the desperation in his eyes.  He pulled his lip between his teeth and brushed a stray hair from my cheek.  His hand rested on my cheek.  I caught myself turning my face into his strong, warm hand and quickly pulled away.  As much as I wanted to fight it, everything that I’d felt for him was still there.  I still wanted him to touch me.  To kiss me.  The guilt and anger that accompanied the desire was too much.

“I can’t do this, Jesse.” I pulled my face from his and quickly sunk behind the wheel of my car.  I drove away, leaving him alone on the street.

I wasn’t ready to talk to him.  To ask him the string of questions that had been running through my head for months.  To explain my erratic behavior the night before.  I wasn’t ready for any of it.  So, I did the only thing I could think of to avoid the entire situation.  I went home, opened the desk drawer and retrieved my new foolproof method of not dealing with it.

I hadn’t planned on sleeping the entire day away, and I definitely didn’t plan on sleeping for the next two.  Yet that’s exactly what I did.  Aside from a few trips to the bathroom and a couple stops at the desk drawer, I completely cut myself off.  The sleep was a welcomed release, broken only by the thirty minutes that it took for each pill to dissolve into my system.  It was in those few brief interludes that I allowed myself to think about Jesse and Garrett.  I thought about all the heartache that was now attached to the two people that used to bring so much joy to my life.  They’d pulled me, a girl whose best friend had found someone else to occupy her time, whose mother was intolerable and whose father would rather sit alone in the cab of a tractor than spend time with this daughter, out of obscurity.  They’d given me the closest thing to family that’d I’d ever had and the only thing I thought I’d ever need.  The existence that I’d now created for myself was unbearable.  I’d become so used to having them around that I still couldn’t figure out how to function without them.  I thought back to how I used to let the most mundane ideas flood my brain.  

I was fifteen, just a few months shy of getting my license.  I’d begged Jesse for the entire summer to teach me to drive his Jeep.  It was a stick shift and I swore that if I didn’t know how to drive one I wouldn’t be able to survive life in the country.  “What kind of farm girl doesn’t know how to drive a stick?” I’d asked him in my dramatic rants.

“You’re not driving it,” he’d simply say as we continued our destinationless trip through the countryside. “You never listen to what I’m saying.  It would be impossible to teach you.”  He was right.  We were constantly butting heads.  Neither of us admitted when we were wrong and especially didn’t admit when the other was right.

“Pleeeeease, Jess,” I begged, sticking out my bottom lip, letting him know just how desperate I could be.  I needed to get behind the wheel of that Jeep.  The only driving practice I’d had was the couple of hours with the school driving instructor and the soul-sucking sessions with my mother.  Her idea of teaching was constantly criticizing my every move.  The last straw was when she told me my posture was comparable to that of a “wet cornstalk.”  Being in the same house with her was hard enough, and there were two-thousand square feet there.  The close confines of a car were impossible.

   This was on one of our “Sunday Funday” trips, as Garrett liked to call them.  We’d pack a cooler, with whatever beer we could rustle up without getting caught, and road trip on the backroads.  Drinking and listening to music.  

Garrett finally convinced him that I could do it. “She’ll be fine,” he said, “let her drive.”  Jesse  folded and pulled off the side of the road to switch seats with me.  He sulked into the backseat deciding it was better to let Garrett be the teacher and avoid any further confrontation between the two of us.

“Great job, Lyss!” Garrett said as we cruised down the gravel lined roads.  I glanced into the rearview mirror and caught Jesse smiling as he took a drink of his beer and leaned his head back letting the summer sun shine down on his face.

“How am I doin’ Jess?” I asked, knowing that I’d surprised him.  Hell, I’d surprised myself.  Garrett was a great teacher, never once raising his voice or attempting to grab the wheel.  He was much more patient than Jesse would have been.  I’d breezed through his tutorial and was shifting gears like Danica Patrick.  The excitement really began when Jesse told me to take the field road down to “Bridge Out,” aptly named for the fact that the bridge had literally been washed away years ago and was never replaced.  Now, all that was left was the creek bed that ran the length of the one-hundred acre field.  The empty ravine was usually just a sunken dirt path, but the thunderstorm that popped up last night had left it an off-roader’s dream.  The mud was just slick enough to make the drive down the path a whole lot of fun.  As I pulled down on to the muddy pathway, I paused before pushing down the clutch. “You sure about this?” I looked to Jesse and Garrett, wanting the confirmation to shift.

They looked at each other and smiled.  Their daredevil nature was seriously rubbing off on me.  The two of them were constantly seeking out adrenaline rushes.  They’d mastered racing and jumping four-wheelers, could often be seen climbing the highest tree along the edge of the Reynolds’ pond to jump from, or scaling the town water tower to spray paint the now infamous graffiti on it.  It was birthday present for me.  “Happy Birthday, Princess,” was scrawled across the silver tank for the entire town to see.  The village officials were pissed.  It didn’t help that they had used the most obnoxious shade of hot pink they could find.  Since then, I think the town had applied three or four coats of silver over it.  Once it dries and the sun hits it, those pink words creep back up.  It made me smile every time I drove by.

Usually, I just stayed behind and watched with bated breath as they did their thrill-seeking, but today I was eagerly anticipating the go-ahead to join them.  “Gun it, Sis!”  Garrett excitedly announced before I slammed my foot down and we took off, mud flying.  The next five minutes may have been some of the most fun I’d ever had.  The sound of the roaring engine as I fishtailed through the mud was awesome.  The windshield was completely covered with a thick sludge so I didn’t see the huge rut that lay up ahead.  That’s how we got stuck.

When the jeep finally came to a stop the sounds of laughter was replaced by spinning tires.  “Son of a bitch, Alyssa!” Jesse fumed as he jumped down to assess the situation.  As I watched Garrett and Jesse try to figure out how to get us unstuck, I felt the tears start to well up in my eyes.  Leave it to me to screw up a perfectly good time.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to Jesse as he stood outside the driver’s side window. “I’m sorry if I ruined the jeep.”  I was certain that I’d done some sort of irreversible damage.  The jeep was buried.

I could tell he was just getting madder by the second, “What were you doing?  Didn’t you see the…?”  He stopped his rant when he saw the first tear roll out of my eye.  “Don’t do that.” He stepped up on the sidebar of the Jeep and wiped the wetness from my cheek, simultaneously smearing mud on my face from his hand. “It’s fine.  We’ll get it out.”  He could be really sweet when he wanted to be.  Jess always had a temper and sometimes he let it get the best of him.

“Thanks,” I snickered, trying to get the dirt off me.

“Way to go Jess!  You made her cry and got her dirty!” Garrett hollered and gave Jesse a mean stare, as he attempted to dig the thick mud out from under the tires, which were now completely unmovable in the thick crevasses they’d dug out.

“Oh, sorry princess.” He laughed, “I’d hate for you to get dirty!”

“Why should I have to get dirty too!?” I pointed at the two of them now completely covered in mud.  It was true.  I hated getting dirty.  

 “You’re right.” He smiled, “I’m sorry for yelling at you,” he added before returning to the ground to help Garrett.  “If this is the worst thing that happens today, we’re doing alright.” He flashed his mile-wide smile and I knew I was forgiven.

“We’ve got company,” Garrett pointed out the County Sheriff’s car that was pulling along the embankment that followed the creek bed.  Apparently, getting stuck in the mud was not the worst thing that was going to happen.  Not only were we trespassing, we were sitting ducks with a cooler full of beer.  The boys were already out of the Jeep and couldn’t jump back up to hide the cooler without looking obvious. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep us from getting in more trouble than we were already in.  I carefully slipped into the back seat and pushed the red cooler out the back, unbeknownst to the police officer that was approaching.  When it hit the mud, I followed and quickly began digging my hands in the muck literally burying the evidence. Luckily, by the time the cop reach us the small cooler was nowhere to be seen.  It was now deeply sunk down in over a foot of mud. For all he knew, I‘d been trying to help dig out the tires.   

We ended up calling Garrett’s dad. He showed up a few minutes later in his tow truck and pulled us out.  The cop gave us a stern warning and told us that if he caught us out here again, we’d be spending the afternoon at the county police station.  Garrett’s dad assured him that the three of us wouldn’t be giving them anymore trouble.

“So much for not getting dirty,” Jesse laughed.  I looked down at my once spotless appearance and joined in the laughter that was now not only coming from Jesse, but Garrett and his dad as well.  I looked as if I’d just won the county mud wrestling finals.

“I guess you’re our little mud princess now, Lyss.” Garrett wrapped his arm around my neck before tapping a dollop of mud on my nose.

“I guess I am!” I said, smearing the only clean spot on his face with my muddy hand.

When we made it back to town, Garrett’s dad took the Jeep to repair the small amount of damage I’d caused.  “Hey kid,” he said to me as we were walking out the door, “next time you hit a deep spot in the mud, don’t spin the tires in so far.   The boys probably could have pushed you out.”  I just smiled.  Of course, he knew I was the driver.  Neither Garrett nor Jesse would have ever gotten stuck.

“Ok,” I smiled, “I won’t.”  I was thankful when he didn’t give a long lecture or harshly scold me for my actions, which my mother would have undoubtedly done.  “Thanks, Mr. Reynolds.”

“And don’t trash my cooler next time,”  he hollered out as he slid underneath the Jeep. “You could have just dump the beer into the mud.”  The three of us just looked at one another and tried not to laugh.  Of course, he knew.

I would have given anything for my biggest concern in life to be getting stuck in the mud.

By Wednesday morning, I decided it was time to return to the living.  I threw on a pair of jean shorts and a Harrington Hawks t-shirt to go into the flower shop and work in the back room for a few hours.  I’d just walked out the door, still pulling my loose curls up into a ponytail, and started to get into my car, when I saw my dad pull up on a tractor with a rack full of hay bales behind it.  I watched as he and the two hired men began unloading the bales into the pole barn on our property.  It was a typical workday for them.  What wasn’t typical was seeing Jesse pick up a bale and throw it down to my dad, waiting on the ground.  What part of “I can’t do this,” did he not understand.

I slammed the car door and walked over to where they were working.  “What are you doing here?!” I yelled up at Jesse, breaking his concentration and causing him to stumble with the bale he was manhandling.  The white t-shirt he was wearing with the sleeves cut off flaunted his lean physique and the way his jeans hung just right on his hips almost made me forget my original question.

“What’s it look like?”  he sarcastically replied as he offered me a smile that sidetracked me almost as much as the jeans. “What’s up?”  He pulled the bottom of his t-shirt up wiping the sweat from his brow, letting me sneak a peak of the sexy vee shaped that his ab muscles formed just above his waistline.  He dropped his shirt back down, pulling me from my ogling. He tossed the bale down to my dad, who now took notice of my presence.

“Morning Alyssa,” he said, never once breaking the conveyor belt-style method they had for unloading the hay.

“Dad.” I turned to him, needing to break my view of Jesse, “Why is Jesse working here?”

“Well,” he held up his hand to Jesse, letting him know to hold the bale. “He needed a job and I needed a worker.” his matter-a-fact response was not helping to calm my anger.  He motioned for Jesse to continue.  As much as my father’s answer annoyed me, I knew he hadn’t hired him to piss me off.  Finding capable employees in a small town was a hard task, it wasn’t like in the big city where the unemployed waited outside of office buildings, resumes in hand.