Chapter forty-four:
“He’ll be here soon,” I say to her.
She looks confused for a moment, and the recognition crosses her face. I look at the watch on my wrist. It’s eleven a.m.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
I shake my head and shrug. “I don’t know. What time does he normally come around?”
“Lunchtime,” she says, but I don’t know if she’s telling me the truth. I wonder if she’s ever told me the truth. Probably not.
We lapse back into silence, neither of us sure of the other person anymore. I was always her sure thing. I was always there to catch her if she fell. I was always there, in the background, thinking about her, loving her, needing her.
And she was always there for me. She wasn’t my world. She wastheworld. She was perfect and broken. She was perfect and used. She was perfect in every way. But now that I see she’s not perfect, I don’t know what to do. Now that I know she doesn’t love me, how do I cope?
Now that I don’t know who she is anymore, I don’t know who I am either.
The world is topsy-turvy. It makes no sense anymore.
I have her phone in my hand. I open it and go through her messages. He’s sent her seventeen since Friday.
Jesus, Adam, go spend some time with your fucking wife already.
Most of his messages are asking her to send him filthy pictures. And looking back through her messages I can see that she normally does. With each message he gets more and more annoyed, until the last one.
That one simply says,‘I’m on my way.’
Well, that’s not good,I think.
“Okay,” I say. “You should put some clothes on.” I stand up and look down at my naked self. I’m not embarrassed and I’m not shy. You end up being naked around people all the time in prison and the hospital, so nudity is second nature to me. Still, “I should probably put some clothes on too.”
Carrie doesn’t look like she’s going to run away from me anymore—almost like she’s given up. There’s a look of resignation on her face. Maybe she knows there’s no point. Maybe she finally sees that everything I have ever done, I’ve done to protect her. I’m still protecting her even now, even though we both know she doesn’t deserve it.
I don’t trust her, and I don’t think I can ever trust her again, I realize. And that’s hard to come to terms with, if I’m being honest with myself. And I always try to be truthful with myself, because like Mom used to say, ‘if you can’t be truthful with yourself, who can you be truthful with?’
I’ve always trusted Carrie, even when she seemed untrustworthy. Even when everything dictated that she was bad. I trusted her with everything I had. My heart, my soul, my body.
But now…now I know I can’t.
I help her to stand, and I can hear that she’s wheezing painfully with every breath. The old me would have apologized for hurting her, but I’m not that Ethan anymore. I have to be a new Ethan. I have to be stronger if I’m ever going to be free of her.
So instead of apologizing and begging for her forgiveness—because kicking her so hard that I think I cracked her ribs wasn’t by accident, and it wasn’t her fault. It was mine. Because I got angry and I lost control. Instead of saying sorry, I say, “Come on, let me help you up.”
She looks at me with glossy eyes. Her back and side are bruised really badly. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel bad when I see those ugly bruises, but I know that she deserved it. It was wrong to hurt her.‘Violence is always wrong, Ethan’—that’s what my therapist-slash-counselor-slash-Mr. fucking Jeffrey used to say. And he’s right.Again,I think with a sigh.‘But she did deserve it,’a small voice inside me says, and I choose to listen to that one instead of letting any more guilt into me.
We make our way out of the living room and up the stairs. Carrie leans on me the entire time; her knotty hair brushes against my shoulder and makes me shiver. We have to take the stairs one at a time because it hurts her to move. And even though I know Adam is going to be here soon, I let her take her time, because I’m considerate like that.
At the top of the stairs she asks to take a breather, and I let her lean against the wall. I notice, as she puts her head back and closes her eyes, how awful the wallpaper is. It’s not just ugly(like everything else in this house),it’s dirty, and I can’t fathom for the life of me why she lives like this. She’s trying to take slow, even breaths, but her eyes are open now and she’s looking at me.
“What?” she asks.
I shake my head, because I don’t want to be rude. What we think and what we say are two different things, and Mom always said that we should only try to say nice things.
“Go on, spit it out.” She’s glaring at me now, as if she can read my thoughts and see what I really think of her home. She smiles at me, but it’s a fake smile and I don’t like it. “Turned out just like my mom, huh?” She says it like it’s funny, but it’s not funny and I want to tell her so.
In my head I do tell her. I say,Why are you laughing, Carrie? You did turn out just like your mom, and you always promised that you wouldn’t.But again, I don’t actually say anything to her. The ugly words stay buried inside me, where all the ugly things stay hidden.
“You know what? Fuck you, Ethan,” she rasps. Her face is angry but her tone just sounds painful. “Fuck you and your perfect life.”
