Pieces of Eight Read online

  And the words were there, repeating over and over in the forefront of mind so much that they could leave an imprint in my brain.

  But.

  I knew I was better now. I didn’t have to deliver a blow to all three of these people—even though all three of them were corrupt in their own ways. I didn’t have to tell them the news that would send us all splintering into a dozen directions.

  “You don’t,” I told Clay and then turned to Six. “Goodbye,” I began, his name on the tip of my tongue. “William.” It was inspired by the conversation we’d had once when I’d poked around his apartment.

  “Why do you call yourself Six?”

  “I don't. They do.”

  “Who's they?”

  “The people who need me.”

  That was why Victoria called him William. She didn’t need him. And neither did I, anymore.

  14

  “So, is this where you work?” Lala, my mother, asked when Six had left. I tried not to stare after him too long before turning back to her.

  “One of the places I work. I also work in a restaurant, the bakery side.” I didn’t want to tell her about the self-defense, lest she laugh at me and look even further down on me than she was already doing. She was walking slowing around the room, looking at it like it was in desperate need of new finishings and new floors and new walls and while that may have been true, the place wasn’t for looking at the walls or the floors or the trim. It was for looking at the art that hung on the walls, interspersed throughout the space.

  “Where are you living?” she asked, and I shook my head once. I was still restless, unsettled by the moments before. Everything was flooding back, sinking me further into the concrete beneath my feet. I couldn’t look at any conversation we had the same way.

  “Why are you even here?” I asked him.

  “You like to push, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m here because I want to be here. With you. If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Like when you kissed me.”

  “I kissed you because I wanted to.”

  “Everyone has ulterior motives.”

  A part of me had known then, right? That something was amiss? A man like Six didn’t hook up with a woman like me without a specific reason.

  He’d been paid to babysit me, essentially.

  “You look as if you’re doing better. Not such a mess these days?”

  Oh, I thought. You have no idea. None at all.

  “I am better,” I said, thinking that if I kept my tone up and she was assured of my mental stability, she’d leave me alone for another fourteen or fifteen years, or possibly forever.

  I tried to see the similarities in us: they were there, to be sure. The hair, the sharp features. But she held her head up with the pride of a woman not defined by her past, as I could not. Where had she found that kind of indifference? And why hadn’t DNA blessed me with that and instead had slipped her madness into me?

  “I’m seeing a therapist.” Irregularly, but when needed.

  She scoffed. “You. See a therapist?” She ran her hand over the counter and wiped invisible dust from her fingers. She glanced at me, not really interested in me anymore. She was already moving on to something else, something more important than me.

  “I am. He’s helping me sort through things.”

  “You’re an addict,” she said plainly, like I didn’t know. “What’s there to sort through?”

  “The fact that drugs were how I silenced the voices, or at least made myself numb to them.”

  “Shut up, Mirabela.” Her tone was low and she glanced over her shoulder at Clay, who hovered awkwardly. “Go wait outside,” she said to him. Few things had changed over the years, and her snapping to her family was something that remained the same.

  “Voices? Give me a fucking break.”

  I blinked, feeling anger unfurl in my belly. “You’re bipolar, surely you’re understanding of mental illness and how it looks different on different people.”

  “I was bipolar,” she said, as if she was saying, I was fat. As if her mental state had changed with the wealth she’d found herself with, as if beneath the fancy clothes and the caked-on makeup wasn’t a woman who had once tried to kill herself and her daughter too. “Or, maybe I wasn’t. What did the doctors know anyway?”

  “For someone so ambivalent about mental illness, you sure shoved me in front of enough shrinks over the years.”

  She raised one black eyebrow, wrinkling her forehead to the point where I could make out her makeup caking in the creases. “I knew you needed help, Mira, but I couldn’t do it.”

  I stepped back, not wanting to be so close to her anymore. Had I loved her once? As a child, maybe, before she’d hurt me the first memorable time. I wanted to feel for her, I wanted to long for her, but all I felt was an empty press against my ribcage, like I’d eaten more than necessary. “There were a lot of things you couldn’t do,” I replied.

  Brush my hair.

  Buy me clothes that fit.

  Buy milk for my cereal.

  Keep me safe.

  Tell me that everything would be okay, all the times I’d needed to hear it.

  Teach me how to love in a way that didn’t hurt.

  Be my mother.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, looking confused. There was little doubt in my mind that she blocked off all her active—and I say that loosely—parenting years. She didn’t remember all the years she’d chipped at my confidence, all the years she’d irreparably damaged me.

  “Nothing,” I said, because it wasn’t worth it. The panic attack had set me off, had numbed me to feeling just about anything. The power behind the brain to protect ourselves was, in a word, incredible. Even a brain as diseased and rotten as mine had managed to close down before charging up again.

  “Why are you in San Francisco?” I asked.

  “Clay has a business trip.” She folded her hands, one over the other, placed them on the top of the desk. “I wanted to check on you. I would’ve hired William for that, but he wasn’t available.”

  I’m glad you didn’t hire him, I said. I wanted to eliminate him from my life. I wanted freedom from thinking about him, but he was every other thought that popped in my head.

  “I’ll be in town a few days longer, if you want to meet again,” she said.

  I didn’t nod or say anything affirmative. I just waved and said, “Bye,” before turning around and picking up one of the paintings behind me. It was as if she’d been just any old person, not the woman who loved to torment me. Through the windows, I watched her rejoin her husband and wondered at what their relationship must be like. Clay had cheated on his wife, more than once, for sure. Between Emerald Dress and when I’d met him for Old Fashioneds, he’d definitely been a man that I’d never had guessed had a wife.

  What made her stay with him, despite him being unfaithful repeatedly? Was it the money and the security it offered her? Was it her pride?

  Mostly, I wondered how I could look at her and feel nothing, and look at Six and feel everything.

  Dr. Brewer sat across from me, legs crossed, notepad open on his lap. Everything, from the graying hair on the top of his head, to his sweater vests and loafers said soft.

  But when he spoke, his words were strong. There was no doubting that he was resolute in what he said. He was first and foremost a listener, a healer. “What’s been going on?” he asked.

  What a loaded question. “Uh…” I thought.

  I recently stumbled across the former love of my life.

  Oh, and he’s engaged. To this person who can’t possibly be real.

  I accidentally offered to cater their wedding.

  By the way, I fucked up three years of sobriety.

  And I just found out that he’d lied to me. That he wasn’t the man I remembered him being, because my memories are lies.

  “It’s been a weird couple weeks.” Understatement of the year. I re
capped the last two weeks slowly, and Dr. Brewer made an occasional note on his pad but stayed attentive to me the entire time.

  “I’m assuming Jacob already came to see you. He said you missed a few times going to the Dry Run.”

  I nodded. Dr. Brewer was cool. He didn’t bullshit. He just listened and asked simple questions. “Yeah.” I picked at the loose threads on my jeans. “And, he kept telling me to get back in touch with mommy dearest, which I did.”

  His eyes grew wide and he looked at me with surprise. “Oh?”

  “But it was kind of the worst timing ever.”

  “How so?”

  “Because I have so much going on. I had her meet me at the gallery. She came with her husband, the guy who pays all her bills. The guy that Six and I had baited.” I rubbed my fingers across my forehead. “And, I just realized that the money Six had paid me from that job was provided to him by my mother, whose money came from the guy we baited. How fucked up is that?” I laughed once.

  “It would certainly cause a lot of confusion.”

  “It gave me a panic attack. At least, that’s what Six called it.” William, I told myself. Maybe if I used his real name, I’d be able to think of him abstractly, lessen his importance in my life.

  “That must have been exhausting.”

  “Uh, yeah. As soon as he left, I did not have it in me to fight my mom. I wanted her gone. It was like there was just nothing there, nothing left to argue about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there wasn’t even a bit of love there.” Empty. She’d broken me so many times that I’d stopped putting the pieces together again until Six had come along.

  William.

  “But that still doesn’t erase how fucked up it was, that I fucked over my mother yet again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. Fair’s fair, right? She fucked with me, so I fucked with her. When I was a child, barely first grade.”

  Dr. Brewer set his pen down. “Tell me.”

  I first experienced how much I poisoned those around me when I was seven years old. My mother was my first victim. So I told him. I told Dr. Brewer about that one time I’d broken up my own mother’s upcoming wedding.

  My mother was gulping on her cigarette as if it provided her very oxygen, hands shaking so much that ash fell all over her white dress, smearing gray into the satin. “Mira,” she said between huffs, “you’ve ruined my life.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sat in the passenger seat of our car, inhaling her cigarette smoke with my hands clasped in my lap to keep them from shaking. The seatbelt was broken, and the car was covered in dust and ash, the backseat a dumpster for soda bottles and fast food trash.

  “He was so good to me,” she choked. My eyes met hers, and I swallowed. Her eyes looked like marbles, sunken into their sockets and surrounded by smeared black eye makeup, running trails over her cheekbones.

  She slapped the steering wheel; ash the length of my thumb fell onto her skirt. “Mom, your dress is getting dirty.”

  She looked down and brushed the ash away in haste, causing it to smear darker into her skirt. “What’s the fucking use?” she laughed bitterly. She sucked on the end of her cigarette again and looked over at me. “It’s not like I’m gonna get married after all,” she growled.

  An hour earlier, we were waiting in a church when I finally answered my aunt Tracy’s question as to who’d given me my split lip.

  “Rick,” I’d whispered in the room full of people. My jaw was in my aunt’s hand, and I felt the tightening of her fingers with my admission.

  “Rick did this?” my aunt asked. I remembered thinking that she didn’t look surprised.

  “Rick…” Emboldened, I continued, looking around the room. Women were flocking to my mother, pink organza brushing against their legs while they helped her button her gown. They weren’t paying attention to my aunt and me. “Rick - he told…” I faltered, embarrassed. I didn’t want to talk about Rick, but I knew I needed to say this. I met my aunt’s eyes, wanting a hundred things. For my aunt to be my mother topping the list.

  “What, baby?” she asked. Her hands came to mine and squeezed. She was squatting on the floor, wrinkling the maid of honor dress she’d wear down the aisle.

  I glanced sideways at where my mom was getting ready and sucked in my bottom lip in contemplation. It stung, and I let it go, the memory coming back to me in stunning clarity. “Rick told me to t-t-touch him.”

  There. I’d said it. Embarrassment heated my cheeks, and I blinked, hoping my aunt would let go of me. Heat burned through me, like the first time he’d told me to touch him.

  “What do you mean he told you to touch him?” my aunt asked, but by the look on her face she knew.

  I looked at my mom again, took small comfort in the distraction of the woman buttoning her into her dress. I turned back to my aunt and looked down. “You know,” I whispered.

  “Tell me where.”

  I let go of my aunt’s hand and circled around my private parts.

  I was so ashamed. The shock that spread from face to face made me want to bolt from the room, but I knew my mom would make me regret it if I did. Like she always did.

  After a few more questions, my aunt Tracy cleared the room of everyone but my mother and me. And then, I watched as Aunt Tracy took what was my mom’s happiest day and turned it into her darkest. My mom looked at me with narrowed eyes and the first word she uttered was, “Liar.”

  She looked at me as if I was the devil incarnate, put on Earth to make her life hell. She’d said as much later, when she all but tossed me into the car, bony fingers clamped tight enough on my arms to leave bruises.

  My head followed her as she paced in front of the car, trying to decide what to do about Rick, about me. About the fact that Tracy had called the police. She’d stopped pacing a time or two to glare daggers at me, with lips moving a hundred miles a minute as she talked herself into what she had to do, not what she wanted to do.

  And so we sat in the car, my mother’s wedding dress wearing tears and regret more pungent than any smoke she exhaled.

  She stabbed out the first cigarette with one hand while reaching into her pack for another, barely pausing to put the second cigarette in her mouth before she was greedily sucking on its end. “Why, Mira?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. So I stayed silent, gripped my hands harder in my lap. My dress was getting itchy in the stifling car, and I wiggled a little. The rustling was loud in my silence; my mother barked at me again.

  “Mira. Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?” I finally answered.

  “Why’d you lie?”

  I turned my head to look out the window to escape her glare.

  She laughed behind me. That bitter, short laugh. Not the laugh she shared with Rick when he would kiss her and throw her over his shoulder. I knew the laugh well, because she’d laughed the same way right after she’d hit me in the face with a candlestick. Thus, splitting my lip.

  My mother had been the one to split my lip. I’d lied. Rick had exposed his private parts to me – that was true. And my mother had caught him. And, convinced it had been my fault, she’d hit me in the face with a candlestick and then had laughed.

  But I wanted my mom to hurt. And the only way to do so was to lie.

  That was only the beginning of my lying. Only the beginning of my path to cause someone else pain.

  I was seven.

  After telling Dr. Brewer the memory, I sat back and waited for his response. His pen was still flat on his notepad, but his eyes were on me.

  “I think you expect me to be shocked.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Your mother hurt you. You wanted to hurt her back. That was what you knew, that was the way your mother gave you attention. So no, I’m not shocked that you broke up her marriage. I’m shocked that you think you’re some kind of villain for it.”

  “I could have told people the truth, what really happened. I li
ed,” I protested. I wasn’t saying that my mother wasn’t culpable for her sins, but I was fully aware of what I was doing at age seven, lying to my aunt and my mother’s entire family. I wanted my mom to feel pain. She’d hit me, she’d caused me external pain. I’d wanted her to burn from within; I wanted to break her heart.

  “Mira, I think you need to realize how much you’ve grown since our first meeting.”

  I remembered. I’d flipped the very table I now had my feet propped up on. “I know I have grown. But I still feel…” I halted mid-sentence. How did I feel?

  “Stuck?” Dr. Brewer offered. “Confused?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel whole.” I pulled my feet off the table and set them flat on the floor. I knew how I felt, but I didn’t want to say it aloud.

  I feel like I’m walking around with a piece of me missing. And I want it back.

  “This isn’t a race, you know. It’s not a marathon. There is no ending for this, for you, Mira.” Ending. The way he said it sent ice cold chills down my spine. “You’re going to fight this forever. You’ve made significant progress. You know your triggers. You know Six is one of them.”

  My head snapped up. “I had triggers long before I met Six. And, besides, I’ll never see him again.”

  The knowing smile that curled the side of his mouth told me he and I both knew that was a lie. “I’m not saying I’m rooting for you two, but I don’t think that you’ve gotten closure there. And closure is what you need, to avoid ruminating.”

  “I don’t need to see him. I’ve been doing just fine the last three years without him in my life.”

  He nodded. “You have. But seeing Six again caused you to drink. You were sober until you saw him again.”

  My jaw clenched, but I remained silent.

  “It’s important for you to remember to be aware of your thoughts and emotions. You were controlled by your emotions before, so controlled that you were, in fact, out of control.” He set his notebook and pen aside. “Internally, you’ve grown significantly. Those triggers aren’t as strong as external factors, like seeing Six again was.”