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It is some time later, when my blood pressure has come back to something resembling normal, when I hear the three of them downstairs, their voices rising and falling in slow rhythms. I should go down, but I have stopped at the top of the stairs, where their voices come clear to me.
“. . . That’s all I’m saying, Dyl. Be careful. I know you care about her, but you really have to think about your future.” Jake’s voice is pitched low, but it still carries up the steps to me.
“I know,” Dylan says, his voice quiet, reassuring. “It’s not like we are dating. She’s just a friend. It’s just that her life is so messed up.”
“Yes. Very. People who come from that repeat it. It’s what they know.” My face flushes hot, and I step back into his room. My stomach in knots. That was Vaude. I feel so betrayed. It’s what they know? I repeat the words and sit on the edge of his bed, trying to put myself in check. Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe it wasn’t about me. But it was. It was them telling him not to love me. I am just rising, stealing myself for the inevitable facing up, when I hear pounding on the front door. I am at the top of the stairs before I hear my mother’s voice, shrill and angry. “Is she here?” she demands, and I duck back inside Dylan’s room, leaving the door cracked to hear what transpires. I hear Jake assuring her that he hasn’t seen me, and then I hear him stepping outside. “I don’t need you filling her head with shit,” she yells, her voice ricocheting. “She wasn’t born with a silver spoon like your son.” I’m not positive those are her exact words, but I am humiliated that there are any words like that. Dirty. The word bounces through my head, chased by its companion, trashy. Not sick, not broken, not sad. Their voices rise and fall for a few minutes before I hear her car backing down the drive. I make my way down to join them in the living room, for whatever conversation there may be, plastering a quiet face over the inner confusion and anger that is roiling against them all.
***
We are sitting on the sofa with a fire raging and hot chocolates waiting to cool on the coffee table. I reach out and wrap my hands around my mug, enjoying the warmth of the ceramic on my hands. It is still too hot to drink, but the aroma is delightful.
“No, I mean, really, what do you want in your life? What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s the second time he has asked me this, and I know he expects a better answer than “survival,” which was my first response. It’s a question I remember from my childhood, and it’s one that I haven’t thought of in a long time.
“I want to be an artist.” It is so easy, saying those words. It’s what I have always said when asked this question. “Maybe an art teacher,” I add because I’m really not good enough to be an “artist.” I definitely need something more down to earth. But college is required for teaching, and that is out of the question, so maybe what I should have said is that I want to work the line at the factory or I want to walk the streets as a prostitute—at least those would be more realistic. But really I don’t want to be anything. I just want to live from today until tomorrow without any chaos. I just want to sit somewhere and not move for days on end and watch the world go from light to dark on a repeating loop. I don’t want much of life, I see that suddenly, very clearly, and I’ve never looked at it so honestly. The art thing is just a thing, something I do that I’m tolerably good at, maybe not even as much as that. I haven’t thought of it in months; it just seems that it’s a dream, and not even one that I am much willing to strive for. It takes so much energy just to breathe in and breathe out every day that I can’t focus on anything more. I look suddenly down the road on my life and wonder if it will always be this strange mix of people coming and going, fighting and drinking and sexing. It’s all so futile. Just breathe. Just breathe. None of the rest matters anyway.
“Then that’s what you should be,” Jake says very matter of fact, and it takes me a second to refocus, to return to the conversation at hand. I nod as if I can be anything I want to. “You just have to remember that is where you’re going and don’t let yourself go down any other path.” I nod and smile at him, fucking hypocrite. I heard what you had to say about me.
I am thinking of my mother and the shambles her life has been. Did she ever have a dream, a place she wanted to get to, something she wanted to be? It haunts me thinking about her and her dreams, because I know I had to be the reason she lost them. Thinking of my father, wondering where he is, who he is. Thinking of Warren, thinking that the night with him made me less than the person I had thought I was. I drop my face into my hands suddenly. Is that what my mother had with my father? One night that created me and destroyed whatever hopes she may have had for the future? I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed because I know they are right to warn him. I am trash. I come from trash, and that is all I will ever be.
I look at Dylan where he stands by the fireplace, and I know that he is where I was going. He has always been where I was going. The shame is not strong enough to supplant the desire to touch him, to be touched by him, and to be part of “his.” It’s a shame that has enveloped me for so long that I didn’t even know it was there. The shame of knowing that I would have drawn Dylan into my quicksand, and I will yet, and taken him down with me had the clock not struck and drawn him to his senses. Then I would have killed his dreams, too. Killer. Vaude is sitting on one side of me, holding my hand, and Dylan is standing next to the fireplace, his eyes not meeting mine. Jake is my interrogator, sitting across the coffee table from the two of us, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers forming a diamond where they come together. It is a Dylan pose.
***
It is some time later still when it is decided that I will sleep in the guestroom tonight, and tomorrow we will figure out the next step. Dylan is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at me, and I ask him the question his father asked me. His finger slides lightly across my forehead, brushing my nearly dry hair from my face. “What do you want to be? When you grow up?” I ask. We smile, and air rushes out of us to meet in the space between.
“I don’t know. I’m still testing the water.” We place our hands together, palms touching, and he folds his finger down over mine. “We have a whole life out there, just waiting for us to get to it. I’m not in a hurry.” He is so much smarter than I am, so much older in all the ways that really matter.
“I am.” I laugh slightly, trying to make it all sound light and easy. I feel guilty that I thought I could make him mine, make his family mine, make them all keep me safe from my own life. Of course they don’t want me, but I want some future life now, anything other than my present one.
“That’s because of the way things are for you. They won’t always be like that.” He looks at me for a long moment. “Everybody makes mistakes.” For a split second I think he is talking about my mistakes, and I look quickly away from him, afraid that the reality of my dark self is plain on my face. “I learned that from Jake.”
“We all repeat what we know,” I say, my voice low, telling him without telling him that I heard them talking about me as if I were the local gutter rat. He doesn’t catch on, doesn’t realize what I am saying.
“Lots of mistakes were made in this house. I just watched.” He laughs quietly, and his fingers slip between mine, closing around me. “And lots of counseling.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead.
“Stay with me,” I say, holding his hand as he starts to go.
“I can’t,” he says, his brows furrowing.
“Please?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t. Jake and Vaude are just down the hall. I can’t.” He runs his hands through his hair, making it stand up in spikes, then he turns and leaves, flicking off the light as he goes. I lay in the crisp, fresh sheets of the Winthrop guestroom, frustrated and unsleeping. I can still hear small voices, low, speaking in other parts of the house. If I can’t love him, will I hate him?