It was impossible not to hear the anger in that last statement and impossible to ignore that that anger was because of me. Did he ever talk to his reflection about me? Was his voice this angry whenever he mentioned my name? I remembered that the other day I was sitting at the kitchen table and he asked me, “Do you want your eggs scrambled or sunny side up?” and I said, “Yeah, sure.” I used all the hot water in the mornings, and he never said anything about the cold showers he would take after mine. I ignored so many of his phone calls, our text conversations were filled with long, lovely messages from him and short, choppy replies from me, if I even bothered to reply. He got me roses a few weeks back just because, roses that I never put in a vase, just let sit in their wrapping on the windowsill slowly wilting until they were brown and their petals had fallen in a dead heap on the floor. I never saw him clean them up. I just woke up one day and they were gone.
I couldn’t stand looking at him anymore. I rolled off the bed and sank down to the ground, on top of a pile of dirty clothes.
A few seconds later, Billy was in front of me, on his hands and knees. He grabbed my face between his hands. “Are we okay? I just want us to be okay.”
I stared at Billy, the person I loved, the father of my baby. “We’re not okay.”
His hands slipped from my face, drifted down to the tops of my knees. “What does that mean?”
“Just that—we’re not okay.”
“You said that already. Can you say more?”
“I don’t know what else to say. We’re just not okay.”
Billy’s grip on my knees tightened. “Please stop fucking saying that.”
“Let go of me.”
He quickly stood up. “Okay, if we’re not okay, you’re the reason why.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? No, fuck you!” It looked like Billy was going to hit me, rage distorting his face as he brought both his fists up above his head. I closed my eyes and waited for them to come down against me. Nothing came. I opened my eyes and saw Billy back on the floor, crying into his fists.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you so much and I’m so mad at you and I can’t even tell you how mad I am at you. The other day I woke up and went into our bathroom and there was water all over the floor, you’d left the sink running all night. I went back into the room ready to fight about it, wanting to fight about it, but when I opened the door you were just sitting up in bed, looking out the window. I stood in the doorway for a full five minutes, and you didn’t even turn your head.” He looked up at me, tears dripping off his cheeks, and I wished he had hit me. “What do you do in the shed in the backyard every night?”
Hit me, I can’t have this conversation, hit me, please, anything other than this. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t feel you get up in the middle of the night and come back hours later?” He was still crying and his voice was cracking. He had to stop in the middle of his sentence to wipe his runny nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “I haven’t said anything and I haven’t gone inside the shed because I believe in privacy and I know you’re struggling, I know your dad dying has been hard on you—”
“It hasn’t been hard on me.”
“Why don’t you talk to me anymore? We used to talk all the time. We would just lie in bed holding each other and telling the other every little detail about our day, stories from before we knew each other, everything we hoped we would do together. Do you remember that? I think about it all the time.”
I did think about those days. Maybe not all the time, but I did think about them. I was hurt that he even had to ask, that he couldn’t trust the beauty of those moments, that he didn’t know that in those moments I had been so happy I was almost sad, knowing that those moments would end and I couldn’t live forever in that bed with him. “I do remember,” I said.
“I just miss you so much. I know you’re going through a tough time, but so am I, I hate this. Have I done something to get us here?” He pushed himself up and crawled over to me, grabbed my hands again, but softer this time. “Tell me what I’ve done and I’ll fix it.”
“You haven’t done anything.”
I wiped the tears from his cheek, ran my thumb over his bottom lip, and kissed him. He kissed me back and he tasted so like him—a taste that wasn’t describable, but made me think of comfort and how the roads smelled after it rained. I hoped before our kiss ended I could figure out how we could go back to before, to my bedroom when we had just met, and talking was as simple as opening our mouths and saying whatever thought popped into our minds, the words flowing out like Froot Loops from a never-ending box—colorful and sweet and so light that you could hold a whole handful without feeling like you were weighed down by anything.
* * *
—
WE DIDN’T TALK FURTHER, fell asleep before nine, before Mom was even home from her shift.
I actually did sleep, heavy and dreamless, but only for a few hours. I woke up at 1:32 a.m. soaked in sweat. I looked at Billy next to me and got out of bed as quietly as I could, pulled on my sweatshirt, and turned to leave, and Billy was awake and sitting up.
“Do you have to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
12
THE NEXT NIGHT, at 12:21 a.m., I was driving to Bakersfield with Billy’s gun in the passenger seat.
I’d planned none of it—I’d gone to my shift that afternoon and been called into Peter’s office. He asked me if I liked how he’d decorated it. I said that I liked the wallpaper and he said that there was no reason I should know what his fucking wallpaper looks like, that if I ever left work in the middle of my shift without getting his permission, I would be fired. “You do not want to see this wallpaper ever again.”
My shift felt purposeless knowing Jenny wouldn’t call. Everyone I delivered to seemed nice, but I couldn’t look at them without wondering what their lives were like when they closed the door behind me.
An old lady with hands so shaky she nearly dropped the pizza box—so many years she’d lived, how many people had she destroyed in her life?
A bearded man in a once-white T-shirt who I could smell from the doorway—did he ever leave his apartment, did people call to check in on him?
A teenage girl with bangs that covered her left eye—be careful, keep those bangs long, hide yourself.
An apartment window with an absurd amount of cactuses in front of it. They grew so tall I couldn’t see their ends past the top of the window. They were so dense that when I tried to look into the apartment in the thin spaces between them, I couldn’t see anything. I rang the doorbell several times and no one answered. I stood, a warmish Hawaiian pizza in my hands, and wondered if a man or a woman owned those cactuses.