“I don’t know, I don’t remember. It seems to be a few years old.” He exhaled, his ribs expanding over my open palm, covering the whole tattoo.
Of course he wouldn’t.
When I shifted, he did too, and we sat side by side, backs against the bed, my hand still on the tattoo. He didn’t ask me to stop touching him. I toyed with that idea of telling him the meaning behind the tattoo.
The whole scene played in my mind.“Actually, Linc.This is the song I was listening to when I first saw you. It was my dad’s favorite song. And I was suffocating in grief, so I’d listen to it on repeat.”
While responding, he’d stare into my eyes, making me understand the truth of his words.“And I inked it on my skin because meeting you wasn’t meaningless. Hurting you wasn’t a passtime.”It wouldn’t make it okay. It wouldn’t ever excuse his treatment of me, but it’d make sense of that horrible senior year and of his entitlement during Infinity Weddings and all other projects where I’d fought him tooth and nail.
It was pointless, though. He couldn’t remember. For all he knew, his first girlfriend had good taste in music and that’s why the bird was there. He wouldn’t soothe those wounds.
I exhaled and pulled my hand away. Answers were a nice fantasy, but they wouldn’t pay the bills or heal the soul.
“Do you miss your mom?” I asked, trying to distract myself from the sickening feeling.
His eyes cast downward as he played with the loop of tied string that kept the box on his lap closed. When he opened it, there was a large photo album inside, with little rocks, jewelry,and other trinkets keeping it company. The cover was decorated in a DIY style with laminated handprints in different sizes. Glittery childlike letters read “Linc ? Mom” and “Mom ? Linc.” He took it out of the box with the care of someone holding onto the last thread of their own sanity, worried it’d disintegrate if handled too roughly.
He opened the album. Photos of a woman and a boy, from baby to teenager, flooded the pages.
“You said she’d be proud of me. But I don’t think so. I’ve read things on that phone, Nina. I don’t think I’ve been a good person.”
I didn’t know how to handle this. I felt the urge to excuse him; sometimes, we made bad choices. However, Lincoln Carter had made more than bad choices, and I’d carried the pain of his decisions for a long time. In some ways, I still did.
My silence was louder than anything I could have said.
“I don’t think anyone who hasn’t gone through it can understand what losing a parent does to you,” Lincoln said.
I agreed. I’d had so many people tell me they couldn’t imagine it happening to them. I’d screamed at a few. They needed to stop trying to imagine it and let me grieve in peace. Lincoln didn’t have to imagine. He knew it intimately.
“Do you know where my father is?” he asked, his forearms tensed, showcasing the veins trailing up his biceps.
I shook my head. “I think your situation with your dad is… complicated.”
He chuckled. Sour and acrid. “What was it like between my dad and me once you moved in with Vinny?” He swallowed. “Because if it got any worse than what I remember…, it wasn’t complicated, it was impossible.”
We were so close my hair brushed his shoulder when I turned toward him. “My room shared a wall with yours.” I hated that side-by-side structure where there was only a wall between Lincand me. I was barely able to sleep most nights. “Yelling, thumps, and crashes loud enough I heard them. Sometimes, it carried onto your yard.”
Lincoln looked away from me, cheeks red. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds pretty impossible to me.”
He then looked at the photos in front of him and told me about each one. Stories of his mom filled the silence, and sometimes, I’d respond with a story about my mom. We spoke for a long time. Sometimes, we even laughed.
“Nina…,” he murmured, as if he was conjuring a wish.
I knew our truce had come to an end.
I stood.
“I know you felt it,” he said, on the verge of sounding accusatory. He didn’t move, though, just sat on the floor, letting me have all the power of standing over him this once.
“I felt nothing.” I lied.
“You did. You felt how good we could be.”
He was right. I had. It could have been good with him. We could have been healing each other’s orphan hearts together. If only he hadn’t done what he had or been who he was in high school and then the past year at 3D’s. Now it was all up to me to remember not what it was or what it could have been but how ithadbeen.
“You don’t have a clean slate with me.”
“That’s fine. I don’t need a clean slate.”
