Chapter fifty-seven:
I am a pussy,I think as I cry in my hands.I am a God-damned pussy, and Benny would be ashamed of me.
Carrie says nothing while I let out my grief. I cry until I’m not even sure why I’m crying anymore. Is it the loss of my mother or the death of my father? Is it the memory of so much blood as Carrie’s knife tore through her father’s flesh, or the emptiness in her eyes when she walked away? Is that she let me rot in a cell? That she took my life and blamed me for it all? Or is it the loss of a love I never had?
“My dad is dead,” I say.
She says nothing. Because she knows; she was there, and she saw it all. How did I forget all of that? How did I make that memory go away? God, how I wish I could do that again.
He never came to see me in prison because I killed him. My mom moved away because she wanted to start afresh, away from the dead perverted husband and the murdering son.I hope she got her fresh start,I think.
“You never loved me?” I say through my pain.
“No, Ethan.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“No. Not even a little bit.” And the way she says it makes me know that she’s telling the truth.
“But you let me touch you!” I say through clenched teeth.
“I let a lot of people touch me,” she retorts with a laugh.
“We made love!”
She shakes her head. “No, you made love. I was fucked.”
Her words are cold and dead. Lifeless, just like she is.
“How could you be so cruel?” I shake my head and then I grab my hair and pull on it as if I could pull her answers out of my own skull. I don’t really expect an answer from her. How can you answer such a question? She took my life. Her father’s. And then she made me take my father’s too. She destroyed everyone and everything that night. Even if she just wanted to escape. To be free.
It could have been so perfect,I think
“I was made that way,” she says, and she stands, her foot touching the cold, hard floor as she looks around us. “I could have been anything,” she says. “I could have done so many amazing things with my life, buthetook it all away from me. He ruined me.”
“I tried to give it back to you,” I say, heartbroken words tumbling from me.
She smiles, and it’s the first true expression I’ve seen on her face since I found her again. “I know you did, but you can’t give back what you didn’t take away. He stole my innocence and my future. You didn’t. So you can’t give it back.”
“You ruined my life,” I say, and I feel like I’m drowning as reality and memories collide. “You ruined everyone’s lives, Carrie!”
“And everyone ruined mine,” she replies coldly.
And there is no love in her voice.
For me or for anyone.
I don’t know what to say to that. She’s right—this was all him. He did rob her of everything, but she got away, she could have started again. But she didn’t. She just became the very thing she’d escaped from. I don’t say that though, because what’s the point? There isn’t a point to any of this anymore.
Not to me, or her. Or an us that never really was.
I still love her though. That won’t go away, but I know it’s one-sided. I know that, yet my heart still reaches for her. It yearns for her love.
“Where are we, Ethan?” she asks, her voice sounding frightened.
The sun is beginning to rise and the soft orange glow of the morning burn is shining in through the hole in the roof. She sees the hooks and the metal tables and the rollers and the signs on the walls. And the odor that she could smell finally makes sense to her.
She looks at me with wide eyes and horror on her face.
