If I Fix You

When I got home and spotted his Jetta, I was practically giddy to the point that I ignored the ajar front door, which made the contrast all the more devastating when I walked into the living room and found...my mom and my... Sean.

It was like one of those optical illusion pictures where all the lines cross and intersect but don’t seem to originate from anywhere. A trick. There was no other explanation for seeing Mom curved on the armrest of Dad’s favorite chair, legs crossed, leaning over Sean so that her blouse gaped open and skin and lace spilled free.

I watched her toy with the button on his shirt, trace the edge with her fingernail. My vision shrank to a pinprick when I saw her lips moving toward his ear.

When her free hand slid to touch his thigh, it was like the world exploded. All at once there was a rushing sound in my head and my bag slipped through my fingers, hitting the floor with a dull thud.

I’ll never forget Sean’s eyes when he jerked his head up and his gaze met mine, wide and utterly devoid of the warmth it usually held for me.

Ice and fire burned inside my chest in the split second before he shot out of the chair and bolted to the door, leaving Mom holding his jacket in her hands. He said something to me, words that ricocheted off the dead thing inside me and fell to the floor between us. I couldn’t hear anything until the door shut behind him.

He’d just been sitting there, not leaning in or touching her back. Later I wanted that to mean something, but there was no killing the insidious and relentless thought that slithered around in my head, refusing to die no matter how many times I stabbed it:

Sean didn’t leave until I showed up.

And Mom. My mother.

I didn’t know that betrayal was a thing. I didn’t know that it could paralyze while it quietly devoured light and sound and the air itself.

She was still holding his jacket. She was still sitting in Dad’s chair.

Dad.

And it started again. Only it was his pain on top of mine, crushing and constricting, and I made a noise that wasn’t a word.

I stood there with my fingers twitching, longing for the feel of my bag and the ability to move backward in time. Not just before this night, this moment, but months and years. Back to a time when she loved us enough not to annihilate everything, only my memories dissolved before I found it.

I had no defense against her words, nothing to shield myself with. She could have pierced my heart with a single syllable. But she didn’t, and that was worse.

She didn’t even try.

Mom slunk silently into her room. Her final words to me were scribbled on a Post-it note I found on my pillow the next morning. My eyes blurred so much while reading it that the only thing I noticed was, she spelled the word suffocating wrong.

CHAPTER 1 (#uca7d5d2e-0d22-5107-98c3-09c161cbdf4e)

JULY

Falling was such an elastic word. It was basically horrible. People got hurt and died, falling. There was force and pain and fear, if the height was great enough. Even sometimes when it wasn’t. The terror of not finding something solid underfoot was just as real for half a second as it was for twenty.

Yet fall was the word most often coupled with love, falling in and falling out of. How was that even possible? They couldn’t be the same. One fall ushered in delirious, stupid happiness; the other fall expelled those euphoric emotions with blood and tears and scars. Bliss and agony. Fall and fall. It wasn’t the same. There should be a better word.

Above me, a falling star shot across the sky. Except it wasn’t a star. It was a piece of rock burning up as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. It was beautiful as it flared bright against the night and died.

But it was too hot to be thinking about anything burning up, even beautiful things.

And it was too quiet.

Five months should have been long enough to acclimate to the silence, to embrace the thing I’d sought for years. It was mine now. Silence so stark that it wriggled under my skin.

Stretched out on my roof, I was searching the sky for more stars when all-too-familiar sounds punctured the silence. For a moment I thought the fighting was coming from below me. I shot up like the shingles had shocked me, but the voices weren’t coming from my house.

It was so messed up that that realization disappointed me.

I drew my knees up and rested one heat-flushed cheek on them. A prickle of perspiration needled across my skin as I studied the nearly identical house beside mine. All the houses on our street looked the same. Ranch house after ranch house, with drab beige walls, barely pitched roofs and graveled yards. I hadn’t given much thought to the moving truck parked next door yesterday, but it was hard not to pay attention to the rising voices.

I’d gotten good at eavesdropping on fights. Not a skill I’d ever wanted to master, but I hadn’t wanted to still be an A-cup at almost seventeen either. The new neighbors were amateurs. They’d left their window open. A few more minutes and Mrs. Holcomb across the street would be calling the police. She’d probably still be up watching her “stories” from the previous day.

A tiny part of me died inside because I knew that. The highlight of my evening was watching an old woman watch TV.

We didn’t get nearly enough stars over my particular patch of Arizona, and I needed to watch something.

A tiny breeze puffed warm air over me, causing the loose strands from my bun to tickle my cheeks. I pushed them back, focusing on the open window next door. The blinds were lowered so I couldn’t see much, but I heard enough, and it was nothing I hadn’t heard before. She was miserable and angry. He was frustrated and angry. It was his fault; it was her fault. Rinse and repeat. It wasn’t an even fight. He got quieter as she got louder.

Things got more interesting when they moved and I saw their silhouettes through the window. She was much smaller than he was, and shaking with rage.

“Explain it to me then,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can blame—”

His head snapped to the side as she slapped him. He took his time turning back to her and when he did, I was almost positive she spit in his face.

“They should have arrested you.”

Whoa. And yep, spit. He wiped his face. “You don’t mean that. Mom, look at you!”

Mom? That was...interesting, except that wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t anything interesting about someone getting slapped and spit on. Still, if he was some kind of criminal and she was scared of him...but so far, she was the violent one. He hadn’t so much as lifted a hand to defend himself. Not that I had tons of experience, but that seemed decidedly uncriminal to me.

She screamed incoherently at him after that. They moved back out of view and I heard a crash, like a lamp breaking against a wall, followed by him grunting. And all the while she was shrieking, until more crashes drowned her out.

I was up on my knees at that point, eyes wide, ears straining. This was so much worse than anything I’d heard from my parents. They’d yelled, sure, but that was it—words. The fighting next door was bad, like someone-getting-hurt bad, and from the sound of it, not the petite woman with the wicked arm. Where the hell was nosy Mrs. Holcomb?

More silence, then another crash. “Throw anything you want,” he said. “I’m not leaving you—”

“You stay away from me.” Her voice quivered.

Surprise colored his words. “When have I ever hurt you?”

“You arrogant little...” Her voice lowered into a hiss I couldn’t make out. “If I had any choice, you think I’d be here?”

“You’d be dead if you had any choice. Just stop. It’s over. I’m not the one in jail.”

Which meant somebody was in jail—the wrong somebody, according to the mom. But she was the one hurting him, while he thought he was saving her life...? Either way, I couldn’t just sit there and hope her arm got tired before she hit something vital.

Half turning on my roof, I squinted in the darkness, looking for the unopened can of pop I’d brought up with me. I heard yet another crash seconds before my fingers brushed against the cool aluminum.

I crouched down as close to the edge of the roof as possible and hurled the can across the ten feet or so that separated our houses.

I figured the sound might distract them.

I hadn’t figured on how badly my aim might suck in the dark.