If I Fix You

CHAPTER 2

My eyes went wide as they met his, and all I could do was stare. At him, his bloody hand, the broken glass from my stupid, stupid pop can.

“What the hell? Did you break my window?”

I flinched like I’d been hit. My stomach teemed with slimy snakes as I stared into a pair of royally pissed-off eyes.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hit your window.”

“No?” He stood, turning the glass over in his hand. “What were you trying to hit?” Glancing toward his house then mine, he tracked the distance between them, between the fighting and me. When he hunched his shoulders in realization, the stance was so much like Dad’s that any trace of fear I’d had vanished completely.

“I was trying to distract you, or really, just your mom. I thought something banging against the wall might bring you outside, or her, and things could cool down.” I said that last part as I was literally sweating from every pore on my body. I exhaled. “I didn’t think it through. I just didn’t want...anyone to get hurt. I’m sorry. It’s not any of my business. And I will pay for the window.”

“Forget it.”

Maybe all the years spent listening to my parents fighting had anesthetized me to clipped and angry speech, but the slimy slithery feeling in my gut was dissipating.

“At least let me—”

“I said forget it.” His anger was fading as quickly as my unease, but I preferred his initial hostility to the defeat that hung heavily from his limbs as he started walking back to his door. “Don’t bust any more of my windows, yeah?”

“Wait.”

He paused and looked at me over his shoulder.

It hadn’t been long enough yet. I knew from experience that if he went back inside, she’d more than likely be waiting for him. Whenever Dad had tried to walk back too soon after a fight, Mom got her second wind. With Neighbor Guy’s mom, I didn’t want him to find out what her second wind might entail.

I was betting it would hurt a lot more than a thrown lamp.

“Don’t go back in yet.” I swallowed. “I mean, I’ll go inside. You can stay.” I swung my legs off the edge of the roof and was preparing to roll onto my stomach when he stopped me.

“Hey, don’t.” He held up his hands as he approached the wall dividing our yards and tripped the motion lights on the side of my house. “Just stop, okay?”

I stopped. The shifting clouds had kept most of his features in shadow, but in the harsh, unforgiving floodlight, I got my first good look.

The cement block wall was close to six feet high, and he could have rested his chin on it. He was also older than I’d initially thought, though his age was hard to pinpoint since he looked several days overdue for a shave. But more than anything, I noticed the reddened outline of an open palm on his cheek.

Seeing the mark on his face made the fighting more real than the moving shadows and sounds had earlier. His mom had hit him...a lot. I didn’t care how old he was; that wasn’t okay. Especially since it was obvious to me within a minute of talking to him that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He was visibly distressed by the thought of me, a complete stranger and admitted vandal, jumping off a one-story roof.

It’s not okay.

I mentally shook that thought away when I realized that the shadows that had abandoned him were no longer surrounding me either. And his eyes were trailing just as freely over me, my too-small old gym shorts and faded Jim’s Auto Shop tee, up to the tangled mass of dark blond hair piled on my head.

I tried to imagine the view from his perspective and hit the brakes when the picture of a vagrant twelve-year-old formed in my mind. A feeling of inadequacy wrapped around me like a sweaty hug and I almost jumped down just to get away from it. And him.

“What are you doing up there anyway?”

I doubted he could see the dark sleeping bag I kept up there, so he couldn’t guess that I slept on my roof more nights than I slept under it. More important, he didn’t need to. “I like to look at the stars sometimes.”

He looked at the sky and then back at me. “Stars? Seriously?”

I didn’t bother looking up. There weren’t any stars that night. The sky would have looked blank if not for the moon, although even that was in the process of being swallowed up by clouds.

“I said sometimes.”

“And the other times?”

“I just like to get out of my house. It’s quiet up here.”

He smiled. “You mean usually.” It wasn’t a big smile. More of a quirk of his lips on one side, a brief flash of teeth. It was the weak smile more than his words that brought me right back to feeling awful for him.

I bit the inside of my cheek and tugged at the hem of my shorts, trying to cover more of my legs. Then I sat on my hands to keep from pulling my stupid bun down.

His eyes flicked down to track the movement of my legs. He took a step back, then half turned before facing me again. “You can’t go around jumping off roofs, okay? You’ll break your leg or something.”

I bristled at his words and let them fuel an equally flippant response. “As opposed to my hand?”

I couldn’t actually see his injured hand with him standing that close to the wall, but I saw his shoulder lift and assumed he was flexing it. The muscle in his cheek—the one that was still red from being slapped—twitched. I immediately felt responsible. Not just for a thoughtless comment, but for reminding him of what I’d witnessed.

As easily as if I’d called them, the snakes slithered back inside.

Neighbor Guy nodded, to himself or to me, I didn’t know, and left without another word. He didn’t go back inside, which relieved me to no end. Instead I stood and watched as he walked around the side of his house and got into a navy Jeep parked in his driveway. With an urgency that rocked his vehicle, he backed out and hit the brakes hard before he turned and drove off, a grinding noise echoing behind him.

The solace my roof usually provided abandoned me after that. I no longer felt like I’d helped him, not in any substantial way. Uselessness gnawed at me for hours before I moved to the flat part of my roof, which covered the patio, and drifted into an uneasy sleep.

The grinding noise roused me sometime before dawn. I didn’t function well at that hour, but as I watched him park and enter his house, something occurred to me that was so obvious, I wondered how I’d slept at all.

I slipped silently off my roof—without breaking either of my legs—and through my window. In my room, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk and found a stack of coupons wrapped in a rubber band. Mom had designed them back when she’d decided all the shop needed to thrive was a little advertising. She said people still had to drive, even in a bad economy. Coupons, flyers, we’d even done a commercial...it was pretty awful, but she’d been so happy the day we shot it. The advertising did help, but her enthusiasm had waned when the business didn’t boom the way she’d anticipated. We hadn’t seen a coupon all year.

I thumbed through the stack and pulled one free. Before I lost my nerve, I scribbled a few words on the back and hurried out the window so Dad wouldn’t hear the door.

I knew what that grinding noise meant. He needed new brake pads like, yesterday. Probably not the most important problem in his life, but it was the one I could fix.

I walked up to the Jeep and clamped the coupon underneath his windshield wiper.

I did owe him for the window, after all.

CHAPTER 3

The sky was beginning to lighten as I climbed back through the window. My T-shirt snagged on the latch, jerking me back, and I kicked my desk lamp trying to regain my balance.

The lamp didn’t break, but the accompanying crash as it hit the floor was loud enough that I wasn’t surprised when my bedroom door swung open and Dad burst in brandishing a baseball bat.

“Jill, what...?”

Under different circumstances, a father catching his daughter sneaking into her bedroom in the wee hours of the morning would be followed by a lot of yelling. Dad took one look at me crouched on my desk and sighed. “Still with the roof?”

I could hear the weariness in his voice. He didn’t get enough sleep as it was without me waking him up early. He worked all the time, partly for the money—stupid Pep Boys had opened a shop two blocks from us and we were starting to feel the pinch—but also so he wouldn’t have to think about Mom leaving him. Leaving us.

“Sorry, Dad.” I closed the window behind me and hopped off my desk.

He raked a hand over his wild mess of dark, bent tangles. It was getting long in the back. Mom always had him keep it neat and short, but it was starting to brush past his collar. “You can’t keep doing this. Not at five o’clock in the morning. Only serial killers get up this early.”

I didn’t try to follow that line of logic. “Or cross-country runners. You remember which one I am, right?”

Dad yawned wide enough that I could count the fillings in his teeth. He shuffled farther into my room and set the lamp back on my desk. “Didn’t Dahmer run track in high school?”

“Ha-ha. You’re funny at five o’clock in the morning.”

“I should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning. You should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ll be quieter next time,” I said. “Promise.”

Dad made an odd growling noise as he yawned again and arched his back until it cracked. “Mmm...would it kill you to sleep in the house again? It’s gotta be ninety-five degrees and the sun isn’t even up.”

I didn’t care how hot it was. I wasn’t ready to come back yet. I watched him, waiting for him to say it, to bring up Mom.

But he didn’t.

He never had. Not in the five months since she’d left. Not a word, like it was totally normal for us to wake up one day and find her gone. Had he known she was leaving? Did he know why? Did he want to? I didn’t know the answers, and I really didn’t know how to ask the questions. So we lived like that. We pretended and ignored the little and not-so-little reminders of her that we inevitably encountered every day.

Slowly but surely she was disappearing from our house just as she had from our lives. Sometimes I’d notice a picture missing, or a pillow. We were both doing it. Purging her. Last month I took her favorite coffee mug up on the roof with me and dropped it on the driveway to watch it break apart. If Dad saw the pieces, he never said anything. I was going to break her reading glasses next. Maybe back over them with Dad’s truck.

But she wasn’t gone yet. There were the things I couldn’t get rid of as easily as dropping them from the roof.

The things I saw in the mirror.

Sean.

“It’s not that hot,” I said. Which was comparatively true when we considered how hot it would get, but not really the point, and we both knew it. I could tell by the pinched frown on Dad’s face that he wasn’t happy with my response. Neither was I, but sleeping inside wasn’t going to change that. The utter silence in the house at night crawled under my skin like tiny fire ants biting and stinging whenever I tried. And sometimes I’d hear Dad pacing at all hours. Maybe he wasn’t able to sleep in their bed alone. Maybe the quiet ate at him too. Either way, I couldn’t stand to hear it. Or not hear it.

I pulled a smile onto my face. I didn’t want Dad to have to worry about me any more than he already did. “And I promise not to ritualistically murder and eat anyone this morning, no matter how great the temptation is.”

Dad’s own smile took longer than I would have liked to match mine, but it got there. Better. I needed to find a way to keep it there.

“You want me to make you something—” he yawned “—for breakfast?”

I raised an eyebrow. Mom was the cook, which maybe explained why I’d never wanted to learn. Dad’s culinary skills were only slightly less hazardous than mine, which meant we were on a first-name basis with all of the take-out restaurants within a fifteen-mile radius of our house. Still, he tried. Or at least, he offered.

In response to my undisguised skepticism, Dad half smiled, half yawned and then stared again at my still-made bed. He let out a soft sigh and looked at me.

I held my breath.

So did he.

But all he did was sigh again. “I’ll leave the cereal box on the counter for you.” Then his face scrunched up. “I forgot to get your Froot Loops. Sorry, honey. We’ve got some chocolate-sugar-cinnamon things though. You like those, right?” He kissed the top of my head and disappeared down the hall.

I shut my bedroom door and leaned my palms against it.

We were never going to talk about it.

Why she left.

CHAPTER 4

My dark red Schwinn was parked in the garage next to Dad’s current project. I eyed one with disdain and the other with enough desire to make my mouth water. The truck was a big, beautiful beast. Large enough that I had to hop up when I got into it. Driving it was like trying not to get bucked off a wild animal. No power steering and the brakes were a tad temperamental. Little by little it was becoming street safe, but not, according to Dad, daughter safe yet.

Details.

The bike was the same one I’d had since junior high and I took it as a deep, personal insult that I still had to ride it most mornings even though I had a driver’s license and a revolving supply of vehicles in varying stages of drivability at my disposal.

Dad had yet to agree. I’d keep working on him.

The wheels clicked softly as I rolled my bike out of the garage. At least the temperature hadn’t reached lethal limits yet. The wind that whipped my ponytail around didn’t feel like a hair dryer in my face. That fun would come on the bike ride home.

I turned into my high school parking lot ten minutes later and saw a lone figure jogging around the track by the canals. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid with a few wispy curls escaping around her face. She looked like she’d stepped out of a toothpaste commercial with her big blue eyes, white-blond hair and matching smile.

She’d been my best friend since the day her family moved in down the street from my old house. She’d knocked on my door with her mom in tow and introduced herself to my mother. “Hi, I’m Claire Vanderhoff. Do you have any kids I can play with?”

She’d been six at the time and was still every bit as forthright at sixteen.

She waved and hurried to meet me.

“Hey! Look at you almost being on time.” Claire bounced in front of me, her body in perpetual movement. “Be careful, waking up this early is addictive. I alphabetized my entire pantry already this morning, and tried out a new juicing recipe. Here.”

My hands were balancing my bike as I walked it to the rack, so I had no choice but to tip my head back when she lifted the thermos to my lips. The blackish-green liquid that hit my tongue tasted like super bitter—and chunky—grass. I mostly concealed a gag.

Claire rolled her eyes and took her thermos back. “That’s your body crying out for more than milk shakes.”

“Do I look like I pedaled through a drive-through on my way here?”

“No, but that’s probably your plan for the ride home.”

She had me there. “What did I just drink anyway?” I nodded toward her metal thermos.

“Wheatgrass, kale and gingerroot.”

I grimaced. “Seriously, Claire?”

“What? It’s supposed to help detox and give you all this energy.” Claire took a whiff. “I found the recipe on this diabetes website that’s pretty good.”

I noticed she was quick to put the lid back. “You need to start your own site. You could make something a million times better and it wouldn’t have to taste like grass and dog piss.”

Claire widened her eyes, uncomfortable with anything that even hinted at crude language. She did brighten at my compliment though, which was completely true. In the two years since her type 2 diabetes diagnosis, Claire had transformed from an overweight spectator to a rather impressive athlete with an ever-expanding nutritional knowledge base.

“I’ve been thinking about starting something...maybe.” She smiled at me. “I could definitely make a better juice.”

“And I will definitely watch you drink it.”

“So,” Claire said after I chained my bike, suddenly very interested in a rock by her foot. She nodded toward the end of the parking lot where a forest green Jetta was idling, its driver fast asleep behind the wheel.

Sean.

Unlike Claire and me, this was the end of his day, not the beginning. He came to the track straight from his summer job—the night shift working security at his dad’s construction site—so someone usually had to wake him. I kept waiting for the morning when the simple question “Do you want to get him today, or should I?” wouldn’t swirl misery through my gut.

We’d been running together for five straight weeks, and I still didn’t know why Sean had agreed to run with us when Claire told him she wanted to go out for cross-country. There were days when I barely knew why I did.

Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew exactly why.

Sean had been sitting on my front porch the morning after my mother left, eyes as bloodshot as mine, waiting for me before I left for school. I hadn’t been surprised to find him there. He’d been calling and texting all night until I shut off my phone. He wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily. Growing up with four older siblings, he couldn’t afford to.

But it had hurt, the sight of someone I used to love mired in a memory too fresh and painful to bear.

He’d been wearing the same clothes from the night before, wrinkled and slept in; he hadn’t even fixed the button Mom had undone.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I’d said, in a voice that sounded stronger than I’d felt. I’d shut the front door behind me and kept a death grip on the knob.

Sean had jumped up, never taking his gaze off me. “You don’t have to talk but I need you to listen.”

I’d shook my head, feeling tears pricking my eyes as he drew closer.

“I’m sorry.”

And they’d spilled over, streams running down my cheeks. I’d wanted him to deny what I’d seen the night before. I’d needed him to make me believe my own eyes had lied. To tell me something, anything, that meant I could keep him, keep us. I’m sorry was a confession disguised in an apology.

I’m sorry I was with your mom.

I’m sorry you found out that way.

I’m sorry I couldn’t love you back.

I’m sorry you can’t tell your dad why his wife left him.

I’m sorry your family was destroyed.

I’m sorry.

“I shouldn’t have left you last night,” he’d continued. “I panicked and I ran.” He’d taken a middling step forward. “I need to tell you what’s been going on. Your mom—”

“Is gone.” My chin quivered. He was so close I’d had to look up. “And she’s not coming back.”

His brows drew together then smoothed, and that easy acceptance had galled me. When he opened his mouth, I’d cut him off. My lips curled back. “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry again.”

He hadn’t. He’d shook his head and reached out a hand, brushing the back of his fingertips against mine. “I didn’t know. She said some things last night, but I didn’t know.”

I’d pulled my hand back, breaking the contact with his skin. “I’m not talking to you about this.” I’d lowered my voice. “My dad is a mess and he doesn’t even know—” bile rose in my throat “—what I saw. That is the only reason I’m out here and not inside.”

The muscle had tensed along Sean’s jaw. “That’s the only reason?”

I hadn’t answered him; I didn’t have to. My cheeks were wet and my chin kept twitching.

“I am sorry. It shouldn’t have happened. I should never have let it happen. But you have to believe that I—”

“No!” I pushed his chest, but he’d caught my hand and kept it there, eyes unblinkingly focused on mine. His heartbeat had been wild beneath my palm. Guilt would do that. I’d pushed again and yanked free. “I don’t have to do anything.”

I hadn’t push him hard, I hadn’t had the energy, but he’d staggered back a step. His eyes wet and welling up by the second.

“How long have you known me? How long have we been—” he’d swallowed “—us? You won’t let me explain?”

I’m sorry.

He’d already said it. Nausea rose fast and high, forcing me to press a fist into my stomach. “My mom is gone and my family...isn’t anymore.” That bald admission had scraped at my throat and fresh tears needled my eyes. I’d dashed them away and blinked hard to keep any more from falling. “She was practically on your lap the moment it happened and there is not a single thing you can say to change that.”

He’d bit both lips, nodding first at the ground and then at me. “Nothing I can say now or ever?”

I couldn’t imagine a time when his words would change what had happened or the way I felt, but the anger and the sadness had burned through me and in their wake I was numb and done. “If I say I don’t know, will you leave?”

He hadn’t, not right away. I’d watched the internal conflict flit back and forth across his features and expected him to rally for round two. But for once, Sean had done exactly what I asked, and like a masochist, I’d watched him leave.

I wish I could say I hadn’t cried over Sean after that day, but I had. Like, Alice in Wonderland–level tears. I’d flooded my entire house and street and every place I’d ever stepped. I knew all the so-called stages of grief, so between pathetic bouts of sobbing, I’d waited for anger. I’d begged for its cleansing rage to overtake me and break me free from the fetal ball I reverted to whenever I was alone. I’d wanted to get to the stage where I burned things and cut his face out of photos.