The Healing (The Things We Can't Change Book 3) (4 page)

Dirty, filthy, damaged goods. Not a person; not any longer. I am just… nothing. I wish I could become a nothing. No feelings, no sense of shame or dirtiness or feelings at all. It would be so much better than all of this.

“Go away,” I sniffle, raking my nails down my arms and then along my thighs. I wish I could rip it all off, disassemble every part of my body so someone else can look at it and figure out what’s wrong with me. Then they can fix my broken parts and put me back together the correct way, so I can be a whole person again.

But I know as I reach for the knife, needing to release the pressure of the dirtiness inside me, that I can’t be fixed so easily. Nothing can be. Maybe it’s time I accept that I just can’t ever be fixed and I will always be broken, and that’s something I can’t change.

Ezekiel

48

Sunday morning I’m rudely awakened yet again, though this time it’s not by my dad. My bed trembles and the world shakes and I jerk upright, wondering how there can be an earthquake in central Ohio. Then I see Koby jumping on my bed and Dominic taking a running leap toward me, and I fall back down with a groan.

“Get out,” I say into my pillow. “I need a break, I’ve been working my ass off.”

“Cameron got picked up for possession!” Koby crows. “And he’s over eighteen, so he’s going to the big house!”

This causes me to sit back up, instantly wide awake. “What did you say?”

Dominic isn’t respectful enough to shed his shoes the way Koby did, and just begins jumping up and down, arms raised as a buffer between his head and the ceiling. “Cameron Fuller is doing time in the big house!” he says. “Picked up last night, no one to pay bail. The Fuller threat is done. You can walk freely about Columbus with no fear.”

“Like I was scared of him,” I scoff, though it’s not a one hundred-percent truthful statement. Still, relief steals over me, invisible manacles lifting up off my wrists, a weight of worry and a stress off my back that I didn’t even realize I was carrying.

Cameron, put away. And with him, hopefully, the barely there-but-still-present threat that we all were the last to see Ian Parker before he was shot. I fall back onto my pillows and breathe a sigh of utter relief.

Koby and Dominic hang around for a few hours, and then we all troop to Dom’s house to watch him pack to spend the next month at his grandma’s house in Akron, as he does every summer. Of course, ‘packing’ to us mainly involves tossing half our closet into a duffle bag and calling it a day. So it doesn’t take long and we all end up in front of the Xbox like always. We play until Dominic’s dad kicks us out so they can pack up the car. Koby and I have to leave for our shift at the club anyway.

When I get home, my dad is there but in the kitchen. It’s late, and I head upstairs to bed without saying hello. He doesn’t call after me. I strip off my work clothes and get into a pair of gym shorts and collapse onto my bed.

My head is spinning around and around, much too heavy and full for my taste. As always, Evie is a huge part of it. I wonder how she’s doing. Clarissa left on Thursday with Hunter and so far as I can tell, they haven’t returned and Evie is all alone in that house.

Raped.

I still have trouble swallowing it. I don’t want to care at all, but it just goes on the already massive list of the ways the world has screwed Evie Parker over. Most people don’t go through the amount of emotional trauma she has their whole lives, let alone in seventeen years.

No wonder she doesn’t want anyone to touch her and always looks ready to jump out of her skin. I can’t blame her at all. I can’t believe Ian Parker didn’t kill the guy. He’s not the kind to take a family threat or harm lightly. I can’t believe that Tony is still alive.

My own hands tremble as I think of what he did, an all-consuming rage that makes me see red. I try to keep it contained, tell myself it’s all just because what he did is unnatural, against the most basic laws and rules of humanity. But I also have visions of myself beating Tony to a bloody pulp and grinding his face into a tile floor as I make him scream how sorry he is to Evie.

And to me, for killing my sister.

It’s getting to me, being in that house, knowing how close she is and what a wreck she’s become—with just reason, I have to admit. I need a break. More than just two days where I spend most of my time at the club. I need a day off, to get my distance back and my shit together and my walls up once more. I fall asleep thinking of my idea, wondering, daring.

I struggle through four more days of exhausting work at the Parker house, quickly chased by hauling my ass to the club afterward. All the while my idea flutters in my head, daring me, asking if I have the courage. When I wake up on Friday, suddenly and breathing hard from my nightmare, I decide what the hell, I’m just gonna do it. Today, Zeke is playing hooky.

I want it to be a day where nothing reminds me of anything. I want to separate myself from all the memories, all the bad times, everything. I start out by going across the street to Caribou and getting myself some expensive coffee, a rare treat indeed, one I never splurged on before because I was always paying for Cindy. Now, though, it seems I’m rolling in money, all my extra time at the club and with no bills at all to pay. It’s an empty realization, though. All those damn philosophers were right; money is only good when you have someone to share it with, happiness is through people not money, blah, blah, blah. And I realize I’m thinking of Cindy already.

I push out of Caribou with new resolve and meander down Grandview Avenue for a bit, and then head down toward Fifth and the opposite way from Evie’s house, checking out secondhand furniture shops and getting myself stuffed on pastries from a bakery. My good time of avoidance grinds to a halt, however, when I find myself exiting a store and seeing the dance studio right across the street.

I freeze. I stare at it, at the glass windows with the little girls twirling around, arms moving gracefully, looking like a movie or a dream. I take a few steps closer, hypnotically drawn, as if their dance has netted me, caught me hook, line, and sinker and they are reeling me in.

Emotion-free day, remember?
I tell myself angrily, knowing I shouldn’t indulge again, shouldn’t torture myself this way. I shouldn’t. It was a disaster before. But I can’t stop myself and before I realize I’ve crossed the street, I’m pushing open the door to the studio. Madame Bella waves to me but wisely doesn’t approach, and I wave back and then take a seat where I’m mostly hidden.

These girls are young, probably all third grade and below since it’s so early in the day, and they giggle as they dance and Madame Bella allows it, but even I can see they are dancing superiorly for their age. She insists on excellence, and she gets it, or else. I don’t know how long I sit there, but it’s a while. I think about Cindy. About how much I miss her. And I think about Evie, and how she seems to be completely losing it.

Finally, I force myself to get up from the chair and leave the studio, waving a goodbye and telling myself that I need to stop this, that I can’t be torturing myself. I angrily punch the button on the crosswalk, and look up and meet eyes as green as my own. Two pairs, staring at me out of a car.

A window rolls down and Dad and Uncle Alex stare at me accusingly, and I wonder why life can’t ever seem to give me a break, just
once
.

If I had been only a few years younger, I’m sure my dad would have spanked me. As it is, he and Uncle Alex tag team it and rip me a new one as I sit at the kitchen table. The lecture varies, starting with my total irresponsibility, including my carelessness for anyone who cared about me, my failure to exploit my talents, and ending with the usual disappointment in me and how they just want to see me be all that I can be, and all that.

I sit stonily through it, only half-listening. I watch my dad and Alex together, picking up where the other left off, playing off one another, equally united in their anger and frustration with me. They don’t always get along, only see each other about once a month or so, but the family bond is still there, deep underneath. I find myself getting more and more angry as I think about their relationship, and compare it to Cindy and me. They still have each other, still have the other sibling and they barely see each other, barely talk deeply or help one another out.

I wish I could scream and rage at them that they don’t understand what it’s like, how it feels to have someone, your family, your sister, stolen from you and have to live without them forever. I would scream what a disappointment
they
are to
me
, and how they should understand from Cindy just how fleeting life can end up being.

I don’t, though. I just sit through it in silence, until after nearly an hour they run out of steam. Then comes the worst part, that dreaded question that they always use to sum up a lecture, and to which I never seem to have a satisfactory answer.

“Well?” Alex demands, and my father picks up right where he left off.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

I don’t speak, just stare at each of them in turn. This has always been their way, pushing and prodding and berating and just yelling their way around. Never gentle and cajoling, the way Dr. Parker undoubtedly always was with Evie. I can picture that scene easily, and I wonder how different my life would be if my dad was that way. He isn’t, though. And it’s probably much too late to change him, embittered by life as he is. I guess that much, at least, we will always have in common.

“Nothing at all?” My dad presses, and I just can’t take it anymore, the anger coursing through me, the grief this always brings up because I can’t help thinking of Cindy too.

I stand up sharply, the chair squeaking behind me against the cheap linoleum floor as it slides back several feet. “Nothing,” I bite out at them, my hands trembling with anger. “Nothing at all.” I turn to go, pausing when I hear my dad’s voice, which is shaking just as much as I am.

“Where do you think you’re going, boy?”

I look at him over my shoulder, and I know my eyes are hard, my face expressionless. “Out,” is all I say, and then I push through the kitchen door and don’t look back, even when both he and Alex call my name.

I get out to the pavement and just walk, my feet moving automatically as I talk to myself, gesticulating wildly as I argue with my dad, say all the things I had kept locked inside while he was lecturing me. Nasty, biting, heat-of-the-moment things that I would never say aloud, things I wouldn’t allow myself to even think most of the time, because they involve
feeling
and I just can’t deal with it. But like always, after a fight with my dad, or more appropriately, just a lecture since I said nothing to him in return, I’m on edge, angry, feeling everything and disgusted by it.

My feet slow down and I look to my left, and see that I’m in front of the bridge. The old one that I used to tag all the time with Cameron last year during school. I stare at it, my hands shaking with the need of release. Get it out. Don’t feel a thing. Stay detached. Don’t care for anyone. All my rules to live by, and yet more and more it’s hard to keep them in mind, remember them all.

I used to deny myself the pleasure of art because of my mom, and lately because of Cindy, only doing the guilty pleasure of spray painting, of graffiti for the thrill of getting everything out of me. Now it just seems like any kind of painting or drawing is a betrayal to myself. I can’t keep any promises, I can’t hold my head up and my dad is right about everything; I’m a disappointment. A failure. Selfish.

The whole bridge is covered in marks and I can’t stop staring at them. I want to dig around in the dirt. I want to go around and search until I find something I can use to make a mark on the bridge, for something that will allow all of this to get out of me. I can’t though.
You can’t!
I scream at myself, shoving my hands in my pockets so they stop shaking like a fucking drug addict. Can’t get into trouble again. Can’t get sent away, can’t be far from everything I have left that reminds me of Cindy.

I face down the bridge, force myself to turn away at last, and then just keep walking. I’m still muttering to myself, fake arguments with my dad where I actually talk back, argue with him, yell and scream back at him with all the feelings and emotions I always keep buried deep inside. I’m waving around my hands wildly, and people who drive past me probably think I’m on drugs or mentally ill.

I just keep walking, trying to run away from the feelings just like always. I should know by now that it won’t work, that there is no escape. Finally, I stop walking and find myself before the Parkers’ house.

Still breathing heavily, I stare up at the big hill. I’d wanted to skip today. Wanted to take just one blessed day off to relax and try to recover. As always, fate has foiled my plans. My cell phone tells me it’s a little past two; almost my usual quitting time.

I return my phone to my pocket and contemplate my trembling hands. If I can’t run away from my demons, maybe I can work so hard that I’ll forget about them for a while. I nod once, circle the house and get back to work.

Four hours later I’m trembling in exhaustion, not emotion. I desperately need some water and also to tell Evie that the pond is ready for installation. I know it’s late and they probably don’t expect me to still be here, but I decide some water is the least they owe me, and I have the insane urge to check up on Evie after the scene with Clarissa last week. Clarissa’s and Hunter’s cars were both absent from the driveway, so I feel the coast is reasonably clear for me to enter the house without an exact invitation.