remembered the feeling of driving off into the sunset, defiance a balm to the pain.
“How long will you be gone, Scarlett?”
I glanced at Ace. “I’m not sure.”
“Are you okay? Is he hurting you?”
“No.”
“Scarlett, you’re scaring me. Where are you?”
“Texas.”
Ace stood up, snuffing out the cigarette with a twist of his boot, coming closer.
“Where in Texas?”
I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see me.
“Scarlett? Do me a favor. After we hang up, act like you’re still on the line with me. If you don’t want to tell me where you are, you don’t have to. Just…just say it. Say it after we hang up. So he has an excuse to think we know where you are.”
“All right.” In reality, I couldn’t. I had no idea where we were, just that we were somewhere in the Lone Star State.
I heard thumps on the other line, Violet whispering to someone else, and then silence for just a second.
“Scarlett.”
“Brando.”
“Time to go, darlin’,” Ace said, going to take the phone away from me.
“Tell me where you are.” I almost dropped the phone from the strength of his demand. “Scarlett. He’s—”
One final yes was managed before the phone was taken from my hand, the receiver put back on base, and the connection severed.
I had once read an article about girls and body image. Some girls starved themselves. Some girls overate. But all the same, it was a way to establish control in one’s life. I guess we all have our vices, our ways to cope, even if they are unhealthy.
After Elliott died, I didn’t sob. I didn’t work myself into a fit and wail. All I felt was panic. Everything around me, inside of me, raced. The entirety of me raced to be free from the oncoming slaughter. It was only a matter of time before it caught up to me. Until then, I’d outrun it.
I didn’t cry when the police showed up. I didn’t sob during the funeral and at the gravesite. I didn’t wail when I was alone in the darkness and silence clawed and screeched at the window. That’s what silence does when it knows that it’s not welcome and you fear it. I feared it because I knew that in the silence, a soul-crushing pain I was too weak to fight waited for me. It tapped its claws against the stillness of life, a reminder that time ticked in its favor.
I held on to defiance with both hands, claws digging in even harder in the sand, because it’s all that belonged to me. Brando had his rage. I had rebellion. It was the only thing in my life that I could control.
Then one day, while visiting Elliott at his grave, a tear leaked from my eye. I didn’t even realize it had happened until a cool wind blew and the drop stilled between the corner of my eye and my cheek, too fat to make it out without a blink.
I knew that if I started, I would never be able to stop. Somehow, more of me would die with my brother, but instead of the kind of death that took the pain, I would have to live with it on earth.
A living nightmare, that’s what it was. I had tasted it. The poisonous swallow terrified me.
The same defiance that refused Brando’s shunning came from the same place that refused to accept Elliott’s death. It was a defiance born out of reckless spinning due to a plea for some semblance of control.
One foot over the threshold of the motel, and somehow every ounce of defiance became lost on me. All I could think was my how good that bed looks… Sleep called to me. So did the first tear. It was time to let the pain catch up to me, to release the ache that wallowed deep in my bones. In comparison to what I had lost, it had to be easier.
After that night in the snow, I found myself reaching for Brando. As absurd as it would seem to the world, the humming confirmed that whatever existed between us was not the norm. The connection constantly pulled me in his direction, though I had decided not to approach him until he spoke to me first. But even the thought of him had made me feel comforted somehow. As if he stood in the darkness with me, a shield against all that could harm me.
Now I had been left alone in the darkness, in the silence, in the awful stillness.