She pulls away from the wall and heads to the bedroom.
I’m so confused by her statement that it takes me a second to process it. My life isn’t perfect; it hasn’t been for a very, very long time. Though I always try to make the best of it. You have to, don’t you? If you get given a shitty hand in life, you do what you can and you make the best of it. You work to turn things around.
I had to wait twenty years before I could turn my life around. Before I was free. I was a good boy; I was let out for good behavior. I wasn’t a threat anymore. Carrie’s body was never found, and I got a new lawyer who said that without a body they couldn’t prove she was actually even dead.
They couldn’t prove what really happened that night, with no witnesses.
Carries mom had lied and couldn’t be believed.
My fingerprints were on the knife, but so were Carrie’s.
Lawyers could twist the truth to however it suited them, I suppose.
I’ve got myself a job, and an apartment, and though I still see my parole officer and therapist once a month, and they dictate a lot of my life still, and though my mom and dad still don’t want anything to do with me, I still feel lucky. At least relatively so. There are people in worse situations than me out there. Think about that homeless guy near the hospital the other day. He didn’t have a job or a roof. He didn’t have cans of soup in his cupboards. But I do, therefore I made my life better.
But Carrie,I want to say.Carrie, my life is far from perfect. I thought once I found you that it could be, but I see now that I was wrong. I see now that you would only spoil my life, not make it better. And do you know how I see that, Carrie? Should I tell you why? Because you’ve done nothing with yours. You just wallowed in your own self-pity. You became your mom. Your windows are dirty and your paint is peeling, and underneath all of that is a very ugly person.
I follow her into the bedroom, where we made love last night. I want to put my arm under hers and help her again, but she seems mad and I know that you should leave people alone when they are mad, so I don’t touch her, and I don’t say any of the ugly words inside me.
Inside the bedroom she goes to her wardrobe and she pulls out some clothes. Again, she doesn’t bother with underwear of any kind—no panties or bra—and I wonder if she knows it’s gross to do that. That she’ll give herself a bad reputation if she walks around with no underwear on and people see her nipples beneath her shirt. She may be a whore but does she really have to advertise the fact?
She sits on the edge of the bed while I get dressed, her eyes watching me the whole time. Once I’m dressed, she starts to speak again, and I think it’s strange that she waited for me to get dressed before she spoke. Like she needed the protection of clothing separating us before she dared voice what she wanted to say.
But I beat her to it, because my curiosity gets the better of me, so before she speaks, I speak.
“My life isn’t perfect, Carrie,” I say. And I mean for the words to come out strong, but they sound weak to me. And they must to her too, because she sneers at me and shakes her head.
“No, but it was.”
I frown and look down at the floor. I haven’t put my socks on and my bare feet are on her dirty carpet. It feels hard underneath my toes, not soft, how my bedroom carpet used to feel all those years ago.
“It was perfect, wasn’t it, Ethan?”
I look back up at her; my earlier rage has simmered to confusion. “When I lived at home with Mom and Dad?” I ask.
She nods her head, and her eyes dart around the room as if they can’t hold my stare. “Perfect life and perfect mom…” She looks away before finishing. “…and perfect dad.” She sounds bitter, especially when she says the last part.
“No one is perfect, Carrie. There is no such thing as perfect. It’s an illusion. A camouflage we use to protect ourselves.” I use Mr. fucking Jeffrey’s words, because they seem to fit right now…just like Carrie and I used to fit.
She seems angry and hurt all at once. She opens her mouth to speak but the words don’t come out. It’s almost like the words are sitting on her tongue waiting for the right time, but she closes her mouth.
I take a step toward her, and I kneel down by her. I look up into her face. She’s wheezing painfully, her face is battered and bruised. Her lip is cut. Her forehead is swollen. But all of those things are inconsequential because it’s her eyes that hold the most pain. She looks at me like she doesn’t want to say the words that are supposed to come next, yet her cruel, black heart does.
In her eyes a war is raging. A battle of wills. I’m not sure who won out in the end when she finally opens her mouth and says,
“I hated you for having such a perfect life. And I knew deep down I could destroy it.”
I frown at her.
I don’t like this Carrie.
“Your dad used you as a camouflage, Ethan. He used your perfect life, and your perfect home, and his perfect job to hide who he really was.”
I frown. I feel it pull tight across my face. “Who was he really then?” I ask.
“He was a bad man,” she says without hesitation, a steely determination in her tone. “He was a bad man, just like my dad.”
