A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,32

I had to break her in and bridle her. I had to make her listen. Your woman should listen to you. And she just wouldn’t. Then one day, she was gone.”

You sat up, leaned forward, eyes dark. “She left me…” you said, pointing at yourself, “because of you.” Your finger then turned on me and even though there was distance between us, I felt like you had stabbed me.

“You have some of me in you, sure,” you said, leaning back in the seat.

Click, open. Click, shut. Jaw clenched, and unclenched. “But I see it in your eyes. That need to go, to get away, that restlessness…” He says that last word and he rolls his shoulders as if he is shrugging off revulsion. “… is from your momma.”

I felt like I was going to cry. To say I’m sorry. I felt like I was going to bolt for the door and never come back. But you had found Momma, and you would find me too.

Your voice was as soft as a lullaby as you said, “And you will never leave me like she did.”

24

August,

And I never did.

That’s what I think as I look at you in the barn bridge.

The same day that Father told me how I would never leave him, you came to my house for the first time. I was upstairs.

I didn’t go downstairs, but I did peer down through the banister. No one, NO ONE, ever came knocking at our house. The lonely house four down from the corner. But that night at 7:09, someone did.

And that someone was you.

Your second round of door taps was interrupted by Momma flinging the door open to poke her head out.

“Is Ellie home? I was supposed to meet her—” you said.

“Oh, young man, Ellie won’t be able to go out and meet you on Mondays anymore.”

There was a silence and then your voices were hushed whispers. After a moment, Momma closed the door and caught me watching.

She gave me an apologetic look.

I was slammed with anger, with shame, with one million bits of frustration.

She stayed with him. She brought him into our lives. She had been too wild and restless. She had a voice like velvet.

Her.

Her.

Her.

And that is when instead of nodding or trying for a smile, I glared at her and mouthed I HATE YOU through the banister bars. I was in prison and she’d put me there.

It didn’t matter that we were warriors in our wonderland, August. In the Real world, we were just kids stuck on the opposite sides of my house’s old oak door.

* * *

School let out for the summer shortly after that day and I barely saw you for weeks. I had felt guilty all summer long. I had felt like I had abandoned you, betrayed you. I thought it would be different when I went back to school.

But it only got worse. It wasn’t all at once—the break. It was slow. Bit by bit.

I remember you yelling “Hey, Boney!” at me at school one day in early autumn. It had recently become your nickname for me. I didn’t mind it. It was pretty accurate. I wasn’t like other girls in our grade. I didn’t have boobs or hips. I hadn’t even gotten my period yet. My bones jutted out from my shoulders and my hips, and my legs were like sticks that I shoved into my pants and shoes. It wasn’t because I didn’t eat. It was my body. I was just … that way. You knew that and you knew that it didn’t bother me when you called me “Boney.” It sounded like a term of endearment from you.

But when Britney sneered it at me in Anatomy class, it wasn’t endearing at all.

“Hey, look! This is what Ellie looks like!” she said, laughing as she pointed at the skeleton named Carl who was hung up at the front of the classroom with a top hat and bow tie. Other girls looked between the skeleton and me and started laughing. “Oh my gosh! It does!”

“Shut up, Brit,” I said under my breath.

It was seventh grade, a time when everything felt awkward and I was somehow a loser for not emerging from summer a sort of slutty Barbie doll. I still wore jeans that were ripped at the knee, a T-shirt, and hand-me-down sneakers. I had already found my white Converse shoes and had started writing on them, but they were under my bed, too big for me.

I had grown—just not in the boobs-and-hips