The surprise on his face urges me on, and I give him a flirtatious wink. But I’ve forgotten the world I’m in and who I’m talking to. Ryan is no school boy, nor is he impressed with my ability to banter. The amusement is gone, and so is the shock. In their wake is an intensity I can’t process. Swiftly, he takes the bottle from my hand and drops it on the wooden floor. The farther he leans over me, the farther back I have to lean in order to avoid bumping heads.
He places his right hand on the bed beside me, his left knee coming up beside my outer thigh. As he hovers over me, I do everything in my power to keep my heart from straight-up beating out of my chest and to stop myself from losing consciousness. With his free hand, he grabs the back of my neck, squeezing so hard I worry he’ll leave a bruise. Maybe that’s what he wants. Pulling me in, our noses collide and a rush of pain shoots up between my eyes. My ears heat from the stinging sensation. With labored breaths, my lips part. My chest rises and falls and suddenly, I can feel my beating heart everywhere. From my wrists to my neck to my lower belly.
“What are you doing,” I whisper. His warm breath wafts over my face, coating me in the sickly sweet scent.
“I’m going to fuck you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
I pull away and push on his chest, but it does me no good. The more I push him away, the closer he gets, bringing his body directly on top of mine, his pelvis resting between my legs. Unable to meet his eyes, I focus my attention on the marked wall over his shoulder.
“Please, no,” I whimper. He angles my neck, forcing me to look at him.
“Don’t worry, I don’t fuck little girls,” he sneers. Releasing me, he crawls off the bed and storms out of the cabin, leaving me to my thoughts. I scramble to the center of the bed and curl into myself. He’s not who I thought he was. No matter what impression I got of him, clearly, it’s just what I wanted to see. He’s not lonely; he’s just a bastard.
Chapter 11
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis
WE LEAVE SO early the next day that the sun isn’t quite out yet. After Ryan left last night, I lay in that bed, staring at those words on the wall for what felt like hours. I fell asleep eventually. It was sometime after I heard Duke’s voice at the door.
WHERE SOULS SPOIL AND HEARTS ROT.
There’s so much I’ve wondered about in my lifetime as far as my father’s family goes. Like, how can these men go out and do these horrible things, then come home to their families? It always happens, you see. A wise guy goes to work and things happen on the job. Maybe it’s a slow day and all he’s got to do is threaten somebody. Maybe it’s a busy day and he’s got to teach somebody a lesson. Maybe that lesson has the guy ending up like Sal, with a bullet hole in his throat. But when these guys get home, they’re all hugs and kisses to their wives and children. They talk about ballet recital and hockey practice. They dispense words of wisdom about how important respect and earning a quality education is. But they don’t talk about life the way it really is—bloody and painful. They don’t talk about where the money comes from to pay the mortgage or what truck their wife’s fur coat fell off of. We all know, but they never talk about it.
It wasn’t until I had been staring at those words on the wall for so long that I was worried I’d slipped into some kind of coma that I finally understood how people do such awful things and then manage to play the part of the loving husband and father. They just let a piece of themselves die and when they’ve done enough screwed up stuff, I think they just stop caring. Because it only matters—all the death and pain—if you let it. So in that bed, I made a vow to myself and to God that I would stop letting it matter. If Ryan, and my father, and all of my father’s men can shut off the guilt, then surely I can shut off the pain.
We’ve been in the van for hours and hours on end now. Morning passed and bled into afternoon. That was around the time we crossed the state line into California, which was, apparently, a big deal as horns sounded from all around us and echoed in the silence inside the van. Duke said once, a while back, that we had about an hour or so left. The excited buzz from the men is starting to rub off on Ruby, who has been particularly silent today.
The highways have gone from wide and expansive to narrow and winding a few times since we made it into California, but this has got to be the worst yet. Driving on the side of a mountain—which Duke insists is a small mountain—that twists and turns and has a small shoulder is making my stomach a little flighty. My knuckles are white as my hands clamp down on the torn fabric seat beneath me. About ten minutes back, I decided to stop looking out the window. The highway is, mostly, one lane going in each direction, with the occasional rest stop carved into the dark brown rock of the mountain. Trees, taller than I can see, line the highway, their trunks dug deep into the ground at least a hundred feet below the concrete.