Damage - A. M. Jenkins [40]
“What?” you ask after a moment.
“I want to tell you something. I don’t know if it’ll make any difference—I don’t know if it will even make sense. But I want to try to tell you.”
She waits, staring at you. “Go ahead,” you tell her.
“When I was real little, my father said he would take me fishing on the lake. And I was all excited because I’d get to ride in a boat. You know how water looks from shore, all sparkly in the sun? I thought it would be so cool to go skimming along over that. But it wasn’t that way at all. We had to stab worms with hooks and drown them. And when I caught a fish, it flopped around and the pointy part of the hook was poking out from one of its eyeballs. And by the time we went back to shore, I knew that the water still looked shining and beautiful, but underneath it was full of all these slimy fish with staring eyeballs, and half-eaten bits of worm.
“That’s the way my whole life has been,” Heather adds. “Everything. And it’s every guy I’ve been out with.”
She lets the words drop. They hover there, sad and angry.
“Except for you,” she says.
And then she stands up.
Her face is set now, determined. She takes your hand and gives you a gentle tug, so you obediently stand up, too. She leads you down the hall and into her room, dark except for a light shining from the open door of the closet. She takes you over to the bed. Pulls you down to sit beside her.
“Okay,” she says in a breathless voice—but then doesn’t move. Her thigh presses along the length of yours. Her hand squeezes yours so hard it’s like being caught in a claw.
“Nobody knows this,” she adds, still not moving. “I’ve never told anybody—you’ll be the only one. And then you can use it to hurt me, if you want. And we’ll be even.”
You don’t say anything. After a moment she grows still. You feel the deep intake of her breath, before she gets up.
She walks over to the dresser. Pauses in front of the mirror—for a second you think she’s going to stop and fluff her hair—but instead she opens one of the middle drawers and pulls out the wooden box with the duck on the lid. She’s moved it since you found it that time.
She opens the lid and takes out the paper. Bears it to you, holding it in her palm like something made of glass.
“This is the note he wrote to my mom. Before he died.” The closet light makes her skin seem like it’s glowing. “You should have seen the look on my mom’s face when she tore it up. She walked away before the pieces even hit the bottom of the trash can. Like that was that, end of story. She thought it was all gone—she never knew I dug out every last piece. She doesn’t know I still have it. I used to lock my door and take it out and read it sometimes.”
She holds the note out, not for you to touch, but to read again if you want, in the dim light:
it’s better this way i know Heather will forget i hope you will forgive
“He did it after my mom told him she wanted a divorce. He was living in the garage apartment out back. Whenever I went to see him he was just mostly sitting in his armchair, staring into space. He didn’t care if I was there or not.”
Sort of like the way you’re behaving now.
When you look up, Heather’s staring sadly at the paper.
“Maybe he was tired,” you offer.
“All I know is every time I went out there I asked if I could spend the night with him, and he just said not tonight, Pumpkin, maybe another time. If he answered at all.”
“Maybe he was depressed.”
Funny how your mouth doesn’t trip over that word. Your mouth think it’s just another set of syllables to say.
But your heart knows better. It starts beating shallow, fast.
Depressed.
The last time you heard that word, Becky was the one who used it. She said she was depressed because she had a pimple on her nose. But that’s not what you mean when you say that word. Not at all.
“No,” Heather’s saying, “he was bitter. He hated my mom, because she made him move out. She said it was the ultimate act of