She only made it a few steps away before the tears started. She swiped them away quickly with the heel of a hand; she had to pass through a dozen old classmates to get to the house, including Matt’s best friend, and she would rather die than be the girl crying at her best friend’s birthday party. Everyone would probably think she was wasted. Funny how people could be around you for so many years, and be so off the mark.
She went in through the back door, taking a second inside to stand, inhaling, trying to get control of herself. Weirdly, although Bishop’s whole property was a junkyard, the house was clean, sparsely furnished, and always smelled like carpet cleaner. Heather knew that Mr. Marks’s longtime girlfriend, Carol, considered the yard a lost cause. But the home was her place, and she was always scrubbing and straightening and yelling at Bishop to take his dirty feet off the coffee table, for God’s sake. Even though the house hadn’t been remodeled since the seventies, and still sported shag carpet and weird orange-and-white-checkered linoleum in the kitchen, it looked spotless.
Heather’s throat tightened again. Everything was so familiar here: the Formica dining room table; the crack running along the kitchen countertop; the curled photographs stuck to the fridge with magnets advertising dentists’ offices and hardware stores. They were as familiar to her as any she had ever called her own.
They were hers, and Bishop had been hers, once.
But no more.
She could hear running water, and muffled TV sounds from the den, where Lily was watching. She stepped into the darkened hall and noticed the bathroom door was partly open. A wedge of light lay thickly on the carpet. Now she could hear crying, over the sound of the water. She saw a curtain of dark hair appear and disappear quickly.
“Nat?” Heather swung the door open carefully.
Water gushed from the faucet, and steam was drumming up from the porcelain bowl. The water must have been scalding, but Nat was still scrubbing her hands, and sniffling. Her skin was raw and red and shiny, like it had been burned.
“Hey.” Heather forgot, for the moment, about her own problems. She took a step into the bathroom. Instinctively, she reached out and shut off the faucet. Even the taps were hot. “Hey. Are you okay?”
It was a stupid thing to say. Nat was obviously not okay.
She turned to Heather. Her eyes were puffy, and her whole face looked weird and swollen, like bread that was rising wrong. “It’s not working anymore,” she said in a whisper.
“What isn’t?” Heather asked. She felt suddenly on hyperalert. She noticed the drip-drip-drip of the faucet, and Nat’s monstrously red hands, hanging like deflated balloons by her side. She thought of the way that Nat always liked things even, straight down the middle. How sometimes she showered more than once a day. The taps and tongue clicks. Stuff she’d mostly ignored, because she was so used to it. Another blind spot between people.
“That’s why I froze on the highway, you know,” Nat went on. “I just . . . glitched.” Her eyes were watery again. “Nothing’s working.” Her voice wavered. “I don’t feel safe, you know?”
“Come here,” Heather said. She drew Nat into a hug and Nat continued crying, drunk, against her chest. She gripped Heather tightly as if she worried she might fall. “Shhh,” Heather murmured, again and again. “Shhh. It’s your birthday.”
But she didn’t say it would be okay. How could she? She knew that Nat was right.
None of them was safe.
No more. Never again.
dodge
DODGE HEARD VOICES IN THE LIVING ROOM AS SOON as he opened the door and immediately regretted coming home directly. It was just after eleven, and his first thought was that Ricky was over again. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with Ricky grinning like an idiot and Dayna blushing and trying to make things not awkward and all the time shooting Dodge dagger eyes, like he was the one intruding.
But then his mom called, “Come in here, Dodge!”
A man was sitting on the couch. His hair was graying, and he was wearing a rumpled suit, which matched his rumpled face.
“What?” Dodge said, barely looking at his mom. He didn’t even try to be polite. He wasn’t going to play nice with one of his mom’s dates.
His mom frowned.
“Dodge,” she said, drawing out his name, like a warning bell. “You know Bill Kelly, don’t you? Bill came over for a little bit of company.” She was watching Dodge closely, and he read a dozen messages in her eyes at once: Bill Kelly just lost his son, so if you’re rude to him, I swear you’ll be sleeping on the streets. . . .
Dodge felt suddenly like his whole body was made of angles and spikes, and he couldn’t remember how to move it correctly. He turned jerkily to the man on the couch: Big Bill Kelly. Now he could see the resemblance to his son. The straw-colored hair running, in the father’s case, to gray; the piercing blue eyes and the heavy jaw.