“What he was like before.”
A poutiness seeped into her expression, and I feared I was encouraging Crybaby Carla to make an appearance. “Oh, um . . . I don’t know. He was just . . . different. Like, he’d always say he was excited about Little Man, and kiss me when we’d just be sitting there watching TV, and tell me I was beautiful . . .” She looked away shyly. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”
I bit down on my tongue. “It sounds like he really liked you.”
“I thought he did.” She shrugged, her eyes vaguely scanning the heaps of baby crap piled around her. “Maybe I just wanted to believe he did. I don’t know.”
“He did. And he probably still does.”
I barely knew why I said it, or why there was an almost rude-sounding confidence in my tone when I did. Carla’s blank stare met my angry one, and it annoyed me that I couldn’t unscowl my face.
“Did he say something to you?” she asked defensively.
I managed to loosen my jaw long enough to say, “No. It’s just kind of obvious.”
She placed her hand on the table behind her and leaned against it, her belly and chest inflating with her breath. “I just don’t get him. He loves me, then he doesn’t love me. We’re making out, then we’re breaking up. His mood swings give me serious whiplash.”
They’re not mood swings, you idiot! I wanted to yell. It was so clear to me as someone who was constantly shifting, drowning, that there were reasons behind his douchebagness. But for a person who’d never felt it, depression couldn’t be watered down to a game show–style Q&A.
Question: What makes a person go from “this indescribable happiness is what it means to be alive” to “this is so painful it might just fucking kill me”?
Answer: Depression.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, pushing herself back onto her feet. “Point is, he changed. And maybe I did too, I don’t know. Whatever, I’m sick of talking about it.”
A salesclerk interrupted us, ogling Carla’s stomach and leading her to a rack of designer baby clothes in the front of the store.
I stood motionless and a little sick, clinging to Carla’s memories, hating that she got to have them. Worse, hating that she had to keep them. I knew what harboring memories felt like. It felt like owning the most expensive item you could get your hands on and having it taken away and replaced with an inferior version of itself. You recognized the imitation, the smell, the texture, the design, but it was off. It was a replica of the expensive thing, but not the thing. Just a shitty version of what you wanted.
Checking to make sure Carla was still distracted, I hurried to the back of the store and hid behind a tower of children’s books. My thigh was sore from holding the weight of my phone, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I slid the screen and dialed the number.
One ring.
Two rings.
Three rings.
The fourth ring was my death sentence. Always. But I needed it. Some sickness inside of me was fed whenever I heard the phrase.
This number is no—?
“Reggie?”
Carla stood beside the books, a pack of blue onesies draped over her arm. A panicked look kicked into gear and her lips parted as she spotted me shoving my phone in my pocket.
“You weren’t calling Snake, were you?”
“No, Carla—”
“Did you tell him what I said? God, thanks a lot. Now he thinks I’m over here going on about how I still have feelings for him.”
“I wasn’t on the phone with Snake,” I said.
I stared at her feet and not her eyes, because it was too hard to look at them knowing that Snake had seen them smile and liked what he saw. Knowing that my phone wasn’t finished damning me, and if I stayed here long enough, completely subjected myself to it, Carla had the power to damn me a second time. There was nowhere to look but down, so I did.
“I didn’t mean that,” she mumbled. “I don’t still have feelings for him.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. I don’t want you to think I’m like, replaying all of this stuff in my head all the time. I’m not hung up on him. I just . . .”
“Wish it were easier to let him go,” I finished.
She relaxed, her shoulders slouching, seemingly relieved that I got it, whatever it was and however the hell it made things better.
“It feels wrong to be with him, and it feels wrong not to be,” she said, brushing her hand through her fiery hair. “And now I’m not. And I should be happy or whatever, but I really just feel like shit.”
There was only one illusion with Carla, and I don’t think it was that she was genuinely afraid Snake had never loved her. I think it was that she was afraid that he had, and it scared her that someone could be there and whole and yours and then be somewhere else entirely.
“Take it from the girl who considers ‘shit’ her favorite emotion. You can feel like shit whenever you want, and you shouldn’t let people make you feel bad about it,” I said.
She bowed her head and rubbed her hand along the bottom of her bump.
I gestured to the clothes on her arm. “Those are hideous, by the way.”
She giggled and stuck out her lips. “I think they’re adorable.”
“You would.”
She stared at me too long, Snake-long, and that time, I looked into her eyes. They were hopeful and terrified and downright lost, and it didn’t strike me as strange that all those feelings, as different as they were, could be observed in equal measure.
“We should hang out more often,” she said.
All I could do was laugh it off. It was so much easier that way.
“No we shouldn’t.”
Chapter Twelve
THE DREADED DAY OF RECKONING (see: family bonding) had arrived. A chilly breeze attacked my hair, which was annoying because I had actually taken the time to style it. I didn’t have much of a choice, considering it was Sunday, and according to Karen, you had to look presentable in church because all those Bible verses about the state of your soul being superior to your outward appearance were obviously just filler chapters. My brother, Frankie, and his wife—?I called her Blondie—?were sitting beside me on the picnic blanket as baby Killian drooled a mucus river between my legs. I didn’t like children. I only semitolerated Killian because he did kind of have a cute gap between his teeth, and I was a sucker for chubby, gap-toothed babies. Other than that, he was just drool and stench.
We were having a family picnic by the pond. The rich kid pond. The enchanted swamp of fish piss pond. Snake’s pond. I could see his house from where I sat next to a tree that smelled like sap and bark and other gross outdoor smells. When I’d asked Karen if Snake could come, she basically quoted half the book of Romans along with a number of inapplicable metaphors.
“I’m sorry, Mama K,” Blondie said after Killian spat up all over my mother’s new blanket. She smiled behind her bright pink lipstick. “He hasn’t been feeling well, car sickness and everything.”