This Sky (20 page)

     “That rail turn was killer!”

     “You tore it up!”

    “Super solid, man.”

    A guy I recognize from the jetties in Oceanside approaches. I think his name is Dominic.

    Grabbing my shoulder, he says, “You haven’t lost a shred of your dominance, man. I saw you once in competition in Huntington Beach and you pulled some of the gnarliest shit I’ve ever seen.”

    “Thanks,” I say, shaking the water out of my hair and taking in a jerky breath.

    “Word floatin’ around lately is that you’re planning to make a return.”

    I keep my response evasive. “That’s always the word.”

    “Here’s to hoping,” a new voice says.

    “I’m stoked to see you back, Young!” I feel the gentle bump of a fist against my shoulder.

     “That was sick!”

     Looking out over the beach, I see Gemma racing toward me. I hold my hand up so she can see me and I extract myself from the crowd before anyone can say another word.  

    “Hey!” Gemma calls out. She’s breathless from running. 

    The sun is halfway above the cliffs now. The new light makes her eyes shine with gold and reveals the pinkness of her cheeks. God, she’s so pretty that she seems almost unreal. She’s wearing an old sweatshirt of mine. It’s about fifty sizes too big but I love seeing her in it. As she closes in, I reach out to catch her hand in mine and reel her in for a kiss.

    “You’re so cold,” she says into my mouth, her lips shaping the words against my skin and her hands pushing salty water from my face.

    “You’re so warm,” I whisper back and she laughs. 

    Our tongues connect and for a moment I am lost in the moisture and the heat inside her mouth. I close my eyes and cup her face and kiss her long and slow, reveling in the fullness and the closeness of our bodies. Gemma lifts her arms to my neck and clings to me, pressing all of her weight against mine.

    Eventually, she makes a sound of regret and stops to catch her breath. She’s smiling. So am I.

    “Well, everyone seemed impressed with you, didn’t they?”

    I grunt.

    Gemma blinks and turns her face away. “So, have you ever thought a
bout it?”

    “About what?” I ask, even though I understand what she’s getting at.

    She shrugs and sweeps her arm out over the ocean. “About doing
this,
Landon
.
It’s obvious that you’re great at it. Maybe better than great.”

    Keeping my expression hard to read, I pull away from her and pick up my dropped board. “I can’t.”

    “What do you mean?”

    I hesitate. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. Truth is, I think about trying to get back on the tour almost every day. But I’m not sure I’m ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. “I just can’t.”

    She accepts my statement with a nod, but then her eyes move over my shoulder questioningly. “Those people,” she says, fingering a long strand of hair. “They acted like they knew you.”

    I don’t look back. With an ache of tenderness, I run my thumb over her bottom lip and press a quick kiss to her mouth. “They don’t know me. They only think they do.”

Landon

On Tuesday morning, Abby answers the door in ripped jeans and a pink baby doll t-shirt that looks like it should be part of the wardrobe of a seven-year-old girl. Her blond hair is pulled away from her face into a sagging ponytail, exposing the dark circles under her eyes and the yellow pallor of her skin. She’s got a cigarette stub between her lips.

    “Finally,” she says, taking a drag.

    “I had to stop,” I say. I hold the items I picked up at the hardware store in the air like a flag of truce.

    “Whatever.” She won’t make eye contact with me, but she nods and pulls the door wider.

    The apartment is filthy. It reeks of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. Tepid air circles from a creaky fan. A faded beige couch that’s probably on its fifth or sixth owner fills most of the small living room. A TV blaring sitcom voices and a laugh track sits on a plastic cart. No happy family photos adorn the walls. No throw pillows or floral arrangements or other “homey” touches color the space. 

    A coldness seeps inside of me as I make my way to the kitchen. The counter is messy. Dirty dishes fill the sink. There’s an empty bottle of vodka next to a stove caked with brown residue.

    This is exactly how Claudia and I grew up. Different place. Exact same scene.

    The faucet is broken. I test the knob a couple of times then I slide to the floor and haul myself under the sink. It’s not hard to figure out what the problem is and after about ten minutes, the water is hissing from the nozzle in a steady stream.

    “Anything else?” I ask her, wiping my hands on my jeans.

    She leans back against the refrigerator and looks at me with sunken eyes. “So, how’s your sister?”

    “Fine,” I answer stiffly. I don’t want to talk to her about Claudia. It never goes well.

    “Hmmm… Y
ou haven’t been checking in as much lately,” she observes. “Has the jailer finally gotten himself a life again?”

    “What is that supposed to mean?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

     “You know what it means,” she snorts and shakes her head as she grabs a fresh pack of cigarettes so she can chain-smoke them.

    I watch her hit the pack against the flat of her palm and pull out a new cigarette. Her cheeks hollow when she flicks a black lighter against the tip and sucks the first draw of tar all the way to the back of her throat.

    I’m not sure if I should tell Abby about Gemma. I’m not sure if she cares one way or the other, but even as I think this, the words come waltzing off the tip of my tongue. “I met someone.”

    If she’s surprised, or if she cares about my news one way or the other, she doesn’t let on. She just looks over my shoulder to where the TV is still squawking in the living room and takes another long draw from her cigarette. Grey smoke seeps out of the side of her mouth. “I got a new job,” she says.

    This is a surprise. She hasn’t had a real job in almost three months and even that job was a joke. “Really?”

    “Yeah, really,” she says haughtily.

    “What are you doing?”

     She shrugs. Her jaw twitches and just like that, I know. That’s the truth of it. I know exactly what she’s doing and I wouldn’t call it a job. I’d call it a death sentence.

    “You’re dealing again?”

    She reaches her arm across her body to tap out the cigarette ash into the kitchen sink. Her eyelids flutter but she remains quiet.

    “You promised,” I say grabbing the cigarette from her hand and tossing it into the sink. My fingers circle her bicep. I don’t bother looking for the pinpricks on her skin. There are thousands of places to hide the bite of a needle. “You promised.”

    Abby drops her chin to her chest and sloppily pulls out of my grasp. “What’s your problem?” she hisses, swiping at my hand. 

    “My problem?” I ask, my voice sharp as broken glass. The edges of my vision are going blurry. My pulse is tapping fast and solid against the underside of my skin. “My problem is that you’ve been borrowing money from me for months under the condition that you stay away from this.”

    “You’ve got to chill,” she says, not even trying to look sorry, just going for a new cigarette.

   
Chill?
My stomach is folding in on itself. My thoughts are gaining furious momentum. My heart is a hard drumbeat inside of me.

    “Claudia warned me not to trust you. She told me you were never going to change.”
And she was right.

   
I move quickly and quietly toward the bedroom. I don’t need Abby to guide me. My entire life, she’s never been particularly creative about hiding her stash so I know exactly where to look.

    And everything is there
like I knew it would be. Powder and pills, small and white, separated into plastic bags of about twenty capsules each. In the back of the drawer, rolled into tight balls and secured with rubber bands just like in a mob movie. Jesus Christ.

    I pluck on
e of the bags of pills between my fingers. I fight back the bitter taste of disappointment and stand.

    What a joke. And I can’t believe I fell for it again. How many times do I have to learn the same lesson?

    In the kitchen, Abby is exactly where I left her. She’s almost to the end of the cigarette. Her shoulders are hunched forward. She doesn’t react when she sees the bag in my hand.

    “We had a deal,” I say and I hate the sound of my own voice. “You said that if I helped you with rent and food, you’d stop. You swore.”

    Even to my own ears, I sound pathetic.

    “Oh, get off your high horse, Landon. An opportunity came along and I took it,” Abby growls out. “What do you know anyway?” 

    I know that I can’t do this with her anymore. I can’t keep trying and failing. I can’t keep walking myself in circles, always ending up in the exact same spot.

    I hold the bag over my head. “I know that you need help. And I know that you’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up.”

    “Shut the fuck up! You’re no Pollyanna,” she seethes and lunges for the pills.

    I step back, just out of her reach.

    “Stop!” I heave, my fingers curled tight around the plastic bag.

    “I need this,” she shouts at me. Spittle is pooling at the sides of her mouth. “And it’s none of your business what I do. It never was!”

    When I don’t give her the pills like she wants, she starts bashing at my chest with the side of her fists and scratching her nails sharply into my skin. She’s making angry grunting noises and kicking my shins with her bare feet. This goes on for almost a minute.

    Finally, when my back is flush with the counter and Abby looks like she’s about to start in on me with her teeth, I give in and launch the baggie across the room. It lands with a smack and the top of the bag open
s. Some of the pills flip out, skidding across the floor and disappearing under the refrigerator. With an affronted wail, Abby dives for them.

     “Do you know how much this costs?” she screeches, raking up the drugs
with her fingers.

    My throat tightens. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do here. I’m panting and sweaty. I might even
be shaking. My body is a disordered mess of misfiring neurons and resentful impulses. I want to hit something. I want to lash out and smash through glass and break down the walls of this shitty apartment.

    I suddenly think of Gemma and her soft grey-blue eyes and how fucking good and sweet she is and I want out. I want this whole part of my life to be over and done with. I want to push it into a
hole and lump six feet of sodden black earth over the top of it.

    “I need to get out of here,” I hear myself say out loud.

    From the floor, Abby shouts at me. “Good!” 

   
Running my hands through my hair and exhaling slowly, I straighten. I’m about to leave without another word, but as I cross the kitchen, something stops me. I turn around and I say, “You really do need help.”

     Her response is a surly laugh. She’s still crouched on the floor. The bag of pills is in her hands. Her face is blotchy pink. Her mascara is running. Now I see that the skin around her mouth is carved with deep grooves. She looks tired. She looks old.

    “I’m serious.”

    She blinks at me
and looks away. Her fingers slide over the seal of the bag twice.

    “Please?” This time, there is no anger in my voice. I’m a little kid again, begging for the world to be right.
I want what I’ve always wanted. I want this woman to not be a drug addict. I want her to go out and get a real job. I don’t want to watch her gamble away everything on pills and sketchy guys and get-rich-quick schemes. “Please?” Again. It’s a shot in the dark.

    But she doesn’t look up. She pushes off the floor. “You have no right to come here and tell me what to do.”

    “You’re the one who asked me to come over,” I remind her.

    “And I’ve changed my mind. Now I want you out.” She tucks the pills under her arm and shakes out another cigarette from her pack.

   “Don’t do this,” I grind out slowly. “There are other ways to live.”

   Her lighter flickers twice before catching. Her hands are trembling. “I said, get out!”

    Gulping hard, I say, “When I’m gone, I’m gone.”

    “That’s the point of kicking you out. You’re useless anyway,” she spits.

    Her words should sting, but they don’t. I’m used to them. “Okay.”

    I’m almost gone when her voice stops me. “I didn’t want you for a son.”

    “Yeah,” I reply as the door opens under my hand and sharp blades of light pierce through the dinginess of the apartment. “And I didn’t want you for a mother.”

Gemma

You know how when things are going well—too well—you get that finicky feeling at the back of your mind? That totally paranoid, neurotic thought like maybe things are too smooth? Too right? Too perfect? And you morosely start to wonder about all of the ways your life is going to implode? You worry about asteroids nailing the planet and skin cancer and falling into a pot of boiling oil and brain aneurysms and body snatchers and that overdue super geyser out in Yellowstone?

    Do you know what I’m talking about?

    Well, on Tuesday, I do not have that feeling.

    I am oblivious. I am damn near zip-a-dee-doo-da-dandy.

    I’m walking to my car, humming, playing with an inane video game app on my phone. I’ve been at it for over an hour and am currently stuck on level 213. I’ve got no defense other than to point out that in this game there’s a lot of freaking candy and it’s up to me to crush it all.

    Some of my recently earned tip money is folded inside my wallet and I’m headed to the grocery store to buy actual food. No more ice cream. No more chocolate. No more salty noodle packs or frozen pizza squares.

    As far as I’m concerned, at this exact moment, life is good.

    “Gemma Sayers!” 

    Bewildered, I snap my head around and try to make sense of the man coming toward me. He’s short and stocky. Royal blue tube socks climb up his thick tree-trunk calves. A faded red baseball hat is sitting cockeyed on his head. He has a dark mustache and heavy sideburns. I see a flash of black and silver in his hands as he speeds across the speckled asphalt. I crane my neck forward, squinting into the midday sun.

    “Look here!” he shouts.

    And even when I see him lift the camera over his head, I still can’t work out what the fuck this guy is doing or how he knows my name.

    It’s the snap of the shutter that gets me. That faint sifting sound feels like a swift kick to my ribs or a
small planet exploding over my head.

    CLICK.

    I cry out and throw my hands up in a poor attempt to cover my face from the needling camera lens.

    The photographer doesn’t care that I’m on the verge of keeling over. He doesn’t care that I can’t get oxygen into my lungs or that my heart is squeezing
tightly in my chest. He comes at me and asks in a conversational tone like we’re just two girls gabbing over a shared cupcake, “Do you have a comment about Ren Parkhurst’s apparent breakdown?”

    I’m standing there, unable to move wi
th my hands on my hot face. My heart is racing. My brain is shrieking. Everything is moving in and out of focus.

    CLICK.

     “Have you spoken to him? Are reports of the two of you getting back together accurate?”

    This is when I finally force my legs to carry the rest of me.

    The photographer keeps pace. Even though I’m not looking at him, I can feel the heat from his body and hear the coarse sound of his strained breathing just beside my left ear.