Brooklyn thomas isnt her.., p.21
Brooklyn Thomas Isn't Here, page 21
“I’ll wake up my mother when I get home.” That’s a hard pass. I’ll watch Dragonslayer and Emilie’s career-ending horror movie.
“Can I drive?” I’d been planning to take a car share home.
“Probably not,” the paramedic says.
Before I can object, another man whips through the door. Henry.
“This is a crime scene,” the male cop says, half-heartedly. “Who are you?”
Henry ignores him as he scans the room and rushes over to me.
“What are you doing here?” Once again, I’m falling apart in front of Henry. At least he’s a familiar face. Aside from Penny. I saw Penny. Then again, I might have a head injury.
“Some guy named Raj called me,” Henry says as he kneels next to me.
“Raj!” I crane my neck to yell at him. “Why?”
“His number was the most used in your phone,” Raj calls over the noise from the coffee machine. “You were out cold. I didn’t know who else to call. Figured he was your boyfriend or something.”
“You need to start locking your phone,” Henry says. His hair sticks up in every direction.
“It was locked,” Raj says. “I pushed her thumb against it while she was passed out on the floor.”
“Raj,” I shout, again. The shouting makes my head pain more acute.
“Did he wake you?” I say, turning to Henry, taking in his scruffy face and rumpled T-shirt.
“I was up.” Henry stands and pulls a chair up next to me. Our shoulders brush when he sits, and I lean into him. I point at my forehead with a tiny pout. Henry runs his thumb underneath the injury. “Aw, Brooklyn.”
The cops look impatient. “We need to finish up,” the female cop says. “And this store needs video security. When your boss sobers up, or wakes up, tell him the police department recommends he get a security camera. I’ll drop by later in the week and tell him myself. And you.” She points at Raj. “Next time you lock the door before you go to the bathroom. I don’t understand why a doughnut shop needs to be open late.” She’s almost grumbling by this point. “We’re here every other week dealing with something.”
“I’m so sorry, officers. And Brooklyn.” Raj’s eyes snap to mine.
“It happened really fast,” I say. “Wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” he says. “I can take some crappy shifts, or whatever.”
“What happens now?” I ask the officers, curling closer to Henry. I’ve had a shock and he’s toasty. I’ll swear him off for good tomorrow.
“We’ll look for anyone matching your description. It’s not the easiest thing, in this neighborhood,” the male officer says. “Call 911 if they come back.”
The officers leave, taking with them their reassuring red-and-blue lights.
“What do we do now?” Raj asks.
“We close,” I say.
“I’ll do it,” he says, quickly. “You sit.”
He rips through the closing checklist and makes Henry a latte before he cleans the espresso machine. While he wipes tables, Raj tells Henry the paramedics said someone needs to keep an eye on me.
“They want to make sure she doesn’t have a concussion. She’s supposed to go to a hospital if she starts puking or feels confused or has a seizure. Or loses consciousness.”
“You can stay at my place,” Henry says as he reassuringly strokes the top of my hand with his thumb.
I look at him like he’s lost his mind. Going to Henry’s is not part of the “avoid Henry” game plan.
“Kashvi went to her parents’ to study,” he says, quietly so that Raj doesn’t hear. “Said she’ll be back Sunday afternoon.”
Danger, danger. How can I resist?
Henry doesn’t let go of my hand. He lifts me to my feet and holds me against him as I sway. His heartbeat bumps against my fingertips.
“What do we do about Matt?” Raj asks as he unlocks the door for our exit. Matt is slumped over a baby-blue tabletop, his face propped up on his bicep. His mouth is open and he’s drooling.
“Leave him,” I say.
We turn on the motion-activated alarm and lock the door behind us. Matt is in for a rude awakening.
“I don’t want to burden you. You keep rescuing me like I’m a pathetic loser.” I wrinkle my nose. “Or a damsel in distress. That’s even worse,” I say, trying to give Henry an out once we’re in his car, which is illegally parked across the street. The neighborhood’s frenetic bylaw officers have offered him a boon: Henry is miraculously without a parking ticket. His car is immaculate, except for six to-go coffee cups stacked in the cup holder on the driver’s side. Most of them are the hot-pink cups from Cute Lil’.
“First, you’re not a damsel in distress. You’re a person who’s dealing with some pretty horrible things and doing her best, and everybody needs somebody. And, second, you’re not a burden. I rushed over here to see what was happening.” He grips the steering wheel and stares out the windshield. “Raj wasn’t super clear on the phone. He said you were out cold. I jumped in my car. I didn’t even think. I ran a red light.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who should be sorry, because I’m glad I could rush over here and see you because Kashvi is at her parents’, and because I fell asleep in front of the TV instead of going for drinks.” He hesitates. “I would have come no matter what.”
“If you’d been out drinking?” I ask.
“If Kashvi had been home,” Henry says, like a confession.
“Oh.” What does it mean? What does he mean? What does any of it mean?
Uncertainty flickers on his face. “I’ve been trying to give you space, to give me space, to see if whatever I was feeling would wear off, and instead I just kept wondering what you were doing, and how you were doing, and when I could see you again. And it’s only been a couple of days.”
Want. We both want impossible things. Or at least, hard things.
I want to say, “Let’s go. Let’s pretend you don’t have a girlfriend and that I’m not dead-ish. Let’s pretend we’re happy and in love like characters in those made-for-TV Hallmark movies starring Emaleigh Taylor, before she got super famous.”
What I say is, “I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“You won’t,” Henry says. He sounds resigned. “I’m doing it all by myself.” He looks so despondent that I drag out my best marketing lingo.
“Let’s shelve this snackable content, and instead focus on a hard pivot with a targeted, scalable audience and low-hanging fruit within an intuitive context.”
“What?” Henry asks, but there’s a grin attempting to break out of the corners of his mouth.
“I mean, let’s go see your fancy apartment,” I say, and attempt to saucily lift my chin. It stings my forehead. “It is fancy, right? And clean? Your car is so clean.” I reach out to pet the dash in front of me.
He starts the car.
“Henry.”
“Yeah?”
“You can change your mind. About all of it. Drive me home. It’s not too late.”
“Sure it’s not,” he says.
Chapter 21
We drive past clumps of club-goers and night owls and, as much as I don’t want to see them again, I search for the men who came into the store. It’s too dark to see faces standing in alleys or between streetlamps and already the details are fading. The evening air is cool and smells of ammonia and sewage until Henry turns onto a side street off a main road.
I let my mind wander in the silence. I saw Penny. My imagination conjured her when I needed her most. She forced me to wake up.
Henry lives in an older part of the city, where towers went up in the ’60s. They have basement laundry and dim, carpeted hallways. He lives in a coveted corner unit on the fifteenth floor with two bedrooms and picture windows in the living room.
“You have a view?” I ask.
“A sliver of Pacific Ocean that way. Lots of buildings in the way.” He flicks an arm in a westerly direction.
The apartment has light-gray furniture and yellow throw pillows. Across from the large windows, a bookshelf runs along an entire wall. There’s a Henry-sized bike in the hallway. Kashvi’s shoes are mixed in with his. Aside from that, there’s little evidence of her. There must be more hidden spots where she’s made her presence known, medical texts next to studies of subway systems and battered George Orwells.
I gaze out the window as a cat winds himself around my ankles. He’s not a posh cat; he has a scar on his head and only one eye. Most of the other apartment buildings leering in the distance are dark. But the odd light is on, and I get glimpses of televisions, people, coatracks, kitchens, and houseplants. I’m seized with longing—the longing to have whatever it is that these people have. Their apartments look full and complete. They’ve figured out how to be happy and whole, while I keep stumbling around my small and shrinking life.
“I used to wander around the city at night and sneak peeks into people’s windows,” I say to Henry, who hands me a glass of water when he joins me. “I would imagine what their lives were like, based on their dogs, or their artwork, or their sports equipment.”
I’d stopped because the risk of bumping into Spencer on my way back into the house while my parents slept was too high. It was safer to hide in my room and lock the door than to slip in and out. When I moved out and started working full time, I was too tired for whimsy.
“You were a creepy stalker? A peeping Tom?” Henry asks.
“A voyeur. Creepy, for sure.”
He points to a neighboring building where a living room light is still on. “They fight all the time. I’ve seen her throw things at him. They were eating dinner on the deck and she stood up, grabbed her plate, and threw it at his head. He ducked and it went over the edge. They’re on the eighteenth floor or something. She could have killed someone below.”
So much for happy.
“Sounds dangerous,” I say.
“I had a girlfriend who was a thrower. Threw a shoe at my head once. One of those insane shoes with metal studs on it. I dodged. It knocked over a plant. She told me to clean it up and stormed out.”
“What did you do?”
“I swept up the dirt and dumped it in her bed. Then I left and never saw her again. That kind of behavior is bullshit.”
“I had a boyfriend who could verbally annihilate people without raising his voice. Before him, I didn’t understand that verbal abuse was a type of violence.” Because I’d only known one kind—the kind Spencer meted out.
“Why do people do that to people they’re supposed to love?” Henry asks.
If I knew the answer, I could fix it. My family could be normal. At Christmas, the worst thing that could happen would be someone puking from too much hot buttered rum instead of ending up in the hospital with a deep thigh gash from an “accidently” dropped carving knife.
“My stepdad hit my mom and she blamed herself,” Henry says, after drinking from his water glass. “She left him, but it took years of therapy before she stopped making excuses for him.”
“Did he hit you too?” I ask, carefully. It’s none of my business; it’s too close to home.
Henry shakes his head, his face tight with anger. “If it meant he wouldn’t hit my mom, I would have let him.”
It’s an opening, a moment to be honest about why I’d reacted so badly to those men in the doughnut shop. I can explain how they reminded me of Spencer; how their body language promised violence and injury, how anyone can seem like a threat when people who were supposed to be safe never were. I can pluck my past out of my body and share the burden. Stop suppressing it, stop putting it aside like it doesn’t matter. Henry would understand. But it’s unfair. We’re already too intertwined emotionally, and he still has a girlfriend that we’re both sidestepping and it’s not right. Henry could slip away tomorrow and be nothing but a number in my phone history holding my biggest secret. If I’m being honest, telling him on top of what has been the Brooklyn shit show since the moment he rescued me from the Chief feels abhorrent.
Besides. Henry is not the person who needs to hear about Spencer.
I bury my admission, swallow it, even though it shreds the lining of my throat all the way down. There’s an excruciating lurch in my gut that dissipates quickly. My stomach is used to digesting the past. It’s reinforced and girded with secrets.
“I’m sorry your stepfather was an asshole,” I say. “The only person whose fault it was is his. You know that, right?” Easy to say. Hard to accept. On some level, I blame myself for what’s happened to me. I’ve allowed it by remaining silent. My brain knows this isn’t the whole story, that relationships with the people you love are complicated, but chooses it anyway.
“Sometimes, I think Kashvi and I have stayed together because of her dad. He’s the best. Kind and funny. I needed to see that there are great dads, since mine was gone and my stepfather was an asshole.”
“I wish that families were like the ones in the movies,” I say. “They fight, but by the end everyone loves and understands each other.”
Henry laughs. “Right? Whose family is like that?”
“Mine’s okay. Except Spencer.” Spencer is too close to the surface. He’s slipping out. “I’m a horrible letdown to him, and my mom.”
“I can’t imagine why.” Henry flushes high up on his cheekbones.
“Really?” I swat at him. “Every time we see each other, I’m in the middle of a disaster. Crying, throwing up, falling, fainting. You’re always cleaning me up and taking me home.”
“True,” Henry admits. “But I’ve never seen you lose your temper, or blame anyone else, or freak out. You keep your sense of humor, which is easy to do when things are awesome. You do it when things are falling apart.”
His words warm tiny places deep in my chest. Did I ever notice that about myself? Did I appreciate it? I’m being forced to see myself, lately. At least, I’m being forced to see someone I could be.
“I’ve had a bad year,” I say. “Or two. Or three. But I’m trying. I signed up for a writing class at my old university.” I want to appear stronger than I have been. Fake it till you make it. Too bad I can’t fake a heartbeat.
“A writing class?” Henry gestures me over to the couch and we settle at opposite ends. I fixate on the blanket folded on the foot stool, and Henry grabs it and tosses it to me. Our eyes skip over each other and focus on the darkness outside. “No more marketing?”
I don’t want to go back to my old job, or one like it, but admitting it, accepting it, is terrifying. I busted my ass at Lawrence Communications, poured myself into my job to prove I could do it and do it well. I didn’t connect with people. I didn’t keep in touch with college friends, and barely kept in touch with Penny. Long days meant I didn’t have the time to run or play sports much. I didn’t pick up a book on ancient Egypt or the American civil rights movement or famous centuries-old shipwrecks. I barely ate. And for what? I didn’t make a life for myself.
“I liked being good at it. I hated doing it.”
Henry smiles from his end of the couch and silent applauds.
“What?” I chuck a yellow throw pillow at him, embarrassed.
“You had this dazzled look on your face, like you couldn’t quite believe what you were saying.”
“I dread starting over again. Having to fetch coffee as an intern. More school, or retraining, if I can decide what I want to do.” I feign a shudder.
“It’s that, or spend the rest of your life doing work you hate,” Henry says. “Remember, I was going to be an adventure tour leader. But the bugs. The dirt. The tourists.” He mimics The Scream.
Do I have time to start over, or one day will I fade away completely and not reappear? How long can my body last? I don’t know what I’d even do, given a chance to do something new. I used to want to study history more than anything, but too much has changed. I’m not the Brooklyn who was obsessed with the past. Her needs and dreams are smudged with time and experience. History feels like a burden. At least, mine does, and it’s one I don’t know how to put down.
“I’m not sure what I want to do,” I say.
“You’ll figure it out,” Henry says.
His belief is fuel.
“I’ve been thinking about Penny,” I say, because she’s close to the surface too, and for the moment, I’m being brave. What I told Henry before was true: I am angry at her. But that’s not the whole story. “I was mad at her. But I’m also afraid of life without her. Even though sometimes I feel like she abandoned me, she made me live and do the things I was afraid of. Some of the best moments in my whole life only happened because Penny made them happen. What if…”
That’s as far as I can go. The rest of the words won’t take shape outside my body because if they do, I can’t take them back. But they rattle and form in my head anyway. What if I can’t find a way to live without Penny? What sort of life is left for me?
I wouldn’t have gone to Europe in high school if Penny hadn’t convinced me to ask my parents to let me. I wouldn’t have snuck out of our hotel room in the middle of the night to see Athens. I wouldn’t have jumped off a cliff into the ocean in Mexico. I might not have dumped Kyle if Penny hadn’t pointed out how horrible and stupid I was being, and how bad for me, for everyone, he was. I wouldn’t have had much fun—goofy, childhood fun. There are so many tiny moments I wouldn’t have had if Penny hadn’t dragged me along with her. I learned to ride a bike with her, how to swipe cookies from the school cafeteria, how to put on lipstick, how to drive. Tiny things. Big things. She tricked me into talking to my first crush; she made sure I never had to eat lunch alone in high school. She lived her life and thought I should live mine.
And I’ve been waiting, with everything on pause, for her to come back because I don’t know how to move forward without her. So, I take one step.
