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“If that’s what you’re supposed to tell me, what are you actually going to tell me?”
“If you absolutely need to be away from him for a while, Triss, I’ll help you,” she said and sighed. “I really will. I don’t think anyone would blame you. I can set you up to hide from him. For a little while, anyway. I don’t think I could misdirect him for the rest of your life. Once he decides something – or someone – is his, there’s really not much undoing that.”
“Is that what you think I should do?” I asked, and wanted to cry all over again.
“I don’t think I get to decide that for you.”
“It’s my fault anyway,” I said and turned away from her again. “He told me more than once that he wasn’t okay and that he didn’t want to touch me because I make him emotional and that’s when he gets worse.”
“None of that makes it your fault, Trista. He was in a bad way before you were ever in the picture. He was just alone then. So it really didn’t matter that so much brokenness existed inside a very lonely man. I don’t think he even remembers how to be with other people.”
“I don’t want to leave, Memphis,” I finally said and just started fucking crying again. “I’ve never had —. Everything I wanted pretty much depended on —.”
“Trista,” she said quietly and squeezed my arm again until I rolled back toward her.
“I haven’t had a family since I was six. I didn’t get to have friends. Now, I thought —. I don’t know. I feel like I have you guys. But everything I thought I could have eventually, it all kind of centered around Jersey. He was the reason to keep running, to stay hidden while he was gone, to get him back here. I didn’t bother making plans or even thinking about the future before him because it was just running. I wanted to think that if he was around, there could be more with him.”
“He wouldn’t hurt you consciously,” she said, then she paused for a second and started laughing.
“This is funny now?” I choked out.
“It’s insane. That’s what it is. He wouldn’t hurt you consciously now. Like he didn’t also want to murder you a couple months ago over the tires on the car. Like he didn’t toss you into the trunk every chance he got. Like he wasn’t pissed off beyond measure just for having to let you ride in the seat beside him. I know you probably don’t believe me when I say that he didn’t mean to hurt you after you experienced all that. But I believe it. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was ready to just be tortured until he died to give us a chance to stay alive. I don’t know what it feels like to be in love, but I can imagine it feels something like that.”
“What would you do if it were you, Memphis?”
“I think —,” she said and paused to sigh. “I think if you want to make this work, you probably need to realize that everything that’s already happened was likely the easy part. Giving him the chance to repair himself, to figure out how to be better for you — getting through that will be the hard part. That’s the kind of healing that takes years, Triss, and even once you think it’s done it manages to resurface when you aren’t ready for it. So, you can let the world crush you right along with it when it all comes crashing down on top of him. Or you can do what you asked of him, and you can survive it for him. With him. You can be the thing that gives him the strength to keep standing back up and to keep trying. If someone looked at me the way that he looks at you, I think I’d be ready to fuck up all his demons on his behalf.”
“Everybody doing okay?” Kyle asked from the doorway to the kitchen. “That kid asked me to come in here.”
“That kid,” Memphis repeated and laughed. “What is it with Utah and you old Marines?”
Kyle made a noise and Dandy trotted right across the room to sit next to the couch.
“You gals need me to stick around?” He asked, while he was already turning to try to leave.
“What happens to him?” I asked quickly. “Does it happen to you too? Do you have an uncontrollable urge to devastate the people around you sometimes just for the fuck of it?”
“Trista,” Memphis snapped.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m not in a very beat around the bush kind of mood right now. I just want to understand, and he only knows how to speak once every three weeks.”
Kyle sighed and came into the living room to sit on the end of the sectional that curved back around so that he could face us but still leave plenty of distance between himself and the sobbing girl who I’d become.
“I haven’t hurt anybody in years,” Kyle said. “But you can’t hurt anybody if you don’t keep anybody around.”
“Is that why you stay here?” Memphis asked.
He looked down at his own hands and his dog moved right back to his side when his leg started to bounce up and down. He had no intention of answering Memphis.
“Are you happy?” I squeaked out between my attempts to strangle the sobs. “Living this way?”
He sighed again but he stayed quiet while he looked back at us.
I pulled the collar of Utah’s shirt up over my nose to try to hide while I cried again. I knew the weight of feeling alone all the fucking time. I carried that shit everywhere I went for years. Something about having to imagine Jersey wandering alone around this world aimlessly for the rest of his life trying to digest what had actually happened to his family was more than I could handle.
“That’s why he’d fucking do anything for you,” I mumbled through the shirt to Memphis. “That’s why he’d flip his shit and try to shoot some guy just for honking at him on the road when he was upset about you. That’s why he’d just sit in a room and let someone beat him to death.”
“He did what when somebody honked at him?” Memphis asked.
