I catch up to her on the fifth step down.
There are only eleven steps but I hear every painful thump as I grab her ankle and she falls down the other six. She lies at the bottom of the stairs, her arm bent out awkwardly. Blood dribbles from her mouth. Her eyes are closed again.
I come down the stairs slowly, and now I really want to cry, because I hadn’t meant to hurt her and it looks like that would have really hurt.
“Carrie?” I say, my voice really quiet. “Carrie, are you okay?”
She doesn’t answer me.
I get to the bottom of the stairs and I bend down. I can see she’s still breathing, and I’m all likethank fuck for that!And I want to laugh and cry and cheer, all at the same time. Because I thought maybe I’d killed her.
Or, not me, but she’d killed herself by running and falling.
I didn’t do that.
I only wanted to talk to her.
She was the one who ran and fell.
She groans when I try to move her. But I have to try and move her. I can’t leave her here like this. I pick her up and take her to the living room and I see a long gray sofa with floral cushions on it, and I thinkyou really have no taste, Carrie.Because she doesn’t. I mean, she was fucking Mr. Fancy Asshole after all, right?
I lay her on the sofa, and then I close the drapes. These ones match, even if they are brown and cheap looking, not heavy and expensive like I thought they were from the outside.
I see what you’re doing, I think.Matching drapes downstairs to help with the pretense, but upstairs is where the real you comes out.
I use the tiebacks on the drapes—one to tie her ankles together and the other on her wrists. I go out of the room and rummage around in the kitchen drawers for some masking tape to cover her mouth.
I feel like the worst person ever doing this to her. But it’s only temporary while we sort out the kinks of this mess. Because that’s what it is: a mess.
It was not supposed to go like this.
She’s still out cold, but she’s breathing.
She has a bruise forming on her cheekbone, and dried blood on her forehead, but she’s okay. It’s all just superficial stuff.
We can heal from the superficial stuff; it’s the really deep stuff that makes us suffer. The things that slip between our bones and creep into our veins. You can’t get rid of that sort of pain. But this? These cuts and bruises are nothing.
She’ll be okay.
I’ll be okay.
We’ll be okay.
I say to myself. And I know I’m right, because my mom said that same thing to me the last time she saw me.
“I can’t come to see you anymore, Ethan, but it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. I know you’re a good boy deep down. Just don’t forget that. Don’t forget who you are and not what she made you,” Mom said, and then she cried and blew her nose really loudly.
I had cried then, and I had looked like a pussy in front of everyone. And I got beat up for it too. The guards did nothing to stop them either. Fuckers.
“Please,” I begged her between tears. “Please, Mom, don’t do this.”
She cried then too, and she looked away from me. “It’s for the best.”
“Dad?” I asked.
She nodded but didn’t answer.
Dad hadn’t come to see me since all of this had happened. He had died inside when I had been arrested. That’s what my mom had said when she first came to see me. I had destroyed him with my actions. I didn’t understand until she explained.
