If You Really Love Me Page 13

  “I’m gonna drive Ellis home,” Saul says.

  “No, you let your father do that,” Mrs. Brooks replies quickly. “You’re coming home with me.”

  Surprisingly, Saul doesn’t argue. He just squeezes my hand and follows his mom out of the police station.

  MR. BROOKS follows the directions I give him and, in no time at all, we’re parked in front of my apartment building.

  “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Brooks.”

  He nods at me. It’s strange, seeing him at the wheel of Saul’s car, like looking at a wall that was always painted white and suddenly seeing it painted purple.

  “Is it okay if I call Saul?”

  “Not right away. His mother and I have to talk to him first.” He blows out a tired-sounding breath, which shows just how much he’s looking forward to that conversation. I notice now that Saul doesn’t just look like his dad. They have the same voice and the same heavy way of sighing when they’re worried. “Maybe you should just wait and let him call you later.”

  “Okay.” I open the door and start to climb out.

  “Oh, and Ellis….”

  I stop. “Yes, sir?”

  “Thanks. For not hurting Saul.”

  I smile at him. Never.

  I’M LYING on the sofa in the living room. The television is on, but I’m not watching. I’m amazed that I’m not afraid anymore.

  It’s almost nine o’clock at night, and Mom isn’t here. Being alone in the apartment at night always freaked me out a little. Part of it was crazy little fears that someone would break into the apartment, not knowing that I’m here, and kill me or something when they see me. Part of it was that I was just so used to Mom being here, keeping everything together for us. But now she’s got this whole other life without me, and I’ve got this whole other life without her, yet we still love each other. That’s how it’s going to be when I finally move out and go off on my own. Cary’s living hundreds of miles away, but we’re still like brothers. All of that’s okay because it works. I see that now.

  One of my worst fears came true today—Saul getting arrested. Outside of Mom, I always leaned on Cary for strength in times like this. I haven’t talked to Cary at all about Saul’s arrest. I don’t have to. I got through it. I survived it without having to hear Cary tell me I could. I’m still worried about Saul. There’s still a court date and whatever comes from what the judge or jury decides. There’s still the whole thing with his obsessions and compulsions and getting treatment for that. But I will survive that too. I have to be strong for Saul.

  The lock suddenly clicks, the door opens, and there’s Mom. “Hi, El.” She closes the door, tosses her purse on the table, and starts getting out of her jacket, gloves, and cap.

  “Hi, Mom.” I sit up on the sofa. “You look tired.”

  “I just finished a double shift. I am worn out. Did you have your dinner?”

  “Yeah. You want me to fix you a sandwich or something?”

  “No, I’ve already eaten. If you’d get me a glass of wine, that would be great.”

  I go to the kitchen and pour the wine. By the time I get back to the living room, she is sitting in the chair with her shoes off and her sock-covered feet propped on the coffee table.

  “Thank you, son.” She takes the glass, takes a sip, then puts her head back and closes her eyes.

  “You’re not going over to Breeze’s tonight?”

  She shakes her head. “Our schedules clashed. She’s working third shift at her job tonight and tomorrow night.”

  She looks so worn out. I sit on the sofa again. “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “What did you do?” she asks without opening her eyes.

  “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you. All of it. Breeze. That thing I did at school back in ninth grade. I’m sorry for all of it.”

  She sits straight up in her chair, puts the wine glass on the table, and looks at me.

  “I was wrong about you and Breeze. I thought you were, like, using her or something until a guy came along again, and then you’d take up with him and Breeze would get hurt. I didn’t think you were really into women. But now I know that you are. I know you’re not using Breeze, and I’m sorry I made things tough for the two of you.”

  Mom is staring at me, waiting, as if she knows I have more to say. I do have a lot to say, and I want to get it all out now while I’m not scared. “I feel okay about you and Breeze because now I know about you and Auntie Jeanne. And I think it’s great about you and Auntie Jeanne, only I can’t figure out why you didn’t tell me you two were in a relationship way back when.”

  Mom finally seems to find her voice. “Frankly, after you got older, I thought you’d figure it out for yourself. Cary did. For Christ’s sake, why did you think you were calling a woman ‘Auntie’ when she is absolutely no blood relation to you? It’s not easy for me to discuss my sex life with you. It freaks me out, as you’d put it. I feel the same when it comes to your sex life. I want to be sure that you’re being safe, but beyond that, I don’t want to think about it.”

  “You don’t have to worry. Saul and I are always safe. But I want you to know that I’m really glad you found someone who makes you happy.” I take a deep breath and plunge on. “There’s something else I have to say to you. I’m sorry about that thing I did at school. It cost you a lot of money, and I hate so much that it happened.”

  “Ellis—”

  “No, Mom, just let me say this. What I did was wrong, and I don’t blame you for getting mad at me. I don’t blame you for hitting me. I deserve it—”

  “Stop,” Mom says flatly. “Ellis, you don’t deserve any such thing. I lost my temper with you that day. I’ve lost my temper with you many times since then. But I was wrong to ever hit you. I’ve been taking out my frustrations on you since that happened, and I know how wrong that is. I’ve gotten mad at other people—Jeanne, Breeze, Cary, my coworkers, even some of my customers—but I never hit any of them. So why should it be okay for me to hit you? Yes, you do stupid things from time to time, but so do I. Everyone does. I’ve been working on keeping control of myself when I get angry with you. I promise to keep working on that. And I’m so very sorry for all the times I hit you.”

  I’m so shocked right now that I can’t even move. Mom reaches out her hand to me. After a moment, I take it. And in a single squeeze of our hands, there is a world of forgiveness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I’M IN bed, unable to sleep, when the call from Saul finally comes through.

  “Hey.” His voice sounds worn down. “Did I wake you up?”

  “No. Are you okay?”

  There’s a pause. I can just about feel him shrugging over the phone. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks for being there today. A lot of people would’ve just walked away.”

  “No way I’d do that to you.”

  “So… you’re not gonna dump me?”

  “No, Saul. But I want you to get help.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m serious. I’m really worried about you. You have to do it. You have to get better.”

  “I know, El. I’ll work on it.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence stretches between us, but that’s okay because it feels like the cozy silences that sometimes fall over us when we’re cuddling each other.

  “I’m so tired,” Saul says.

  “You should get some sleep.”

  “I wish I was there with you.”

  “I wish you were here too.”

  “I can’t stay on very long. Mom’s giving me fifteen minutes, then she’s coming in and taking my phone.” He sighs. “Man. The whole thing was so dumb. I went in that store and the clerks had left this display case open. The security guard was in there to keep an eye out while the clerks transferred the store’s receipts to the safe. I grabbed a pocket watch out of the case, and the guard saw me. The store wants to press charges because the watch cost fifty bucks.”

  “There’s no w
ay a watch for sale at a gas station convenience store would cost that much.”

  “Well, this one did. God, I’m so fucked up. I figured once people knew that, nobody would want me.”

  “That’s not true, Saul.” I have to get this out in the open between us. “Your dad told me about Wayne, your first boyfriend.”

  Another pause. This one is not cozy or comfortable at all. “Oh.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it’s embarrassing. I can’t stand to even think about it. I cried for like, two days straight. Wayne dumped me after just three little months. He dumped me because I wasn’t hot enough.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He didn’t have to tell me anything. Wayne was hot, and Kirk, the guy he left me for, was even hotter. And there I was, just a skinny twerp. I wasn’t good enough for Wayne. Why else would he dump me?”

  “Maybe because he’s king of the jerks. Did you ever think of that?”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Saul, I’ve got something embarrassing too. It’s something I haven’t told you. But I want to tell you now because I don’t want us to keep things from each other anymore. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s about why none of the kids at school talk to me.”

  “You mean the thing about you breaking that guy’s arm when you were in ninth grade?”

  This time the silence is on my end. “You mean… you already know about that?”

  “I got word of it when I first transferred in. Some of those losers at school warned me to stay away from you because you’re crazy.”

  “I think I did go crazy. This guy—his name was Jonah Mullins—he was always after me about something. He’d take my money, he’d throw my lunch and books in the garbage, he’d rip up my homework. He took a baseball cap Cary gave me for my birthday that year. There was this little stray dog that hung around the school, and I sort of adopted it. I couldn’t take it home or anything because I live in a no-pet building, but it waited for me at the front gate of the school every morning. I’d give it treats and play with it and stuff. When Jonah saw how much I liked that dog and how the dog trusted me, he took it and threw it into the garbage can like he did everything else of mine. The dog howled and I just snapped. I went crazy. I started screaming, and I knocked Jonah down, and then I jumped on his arm until it broke. It was a really bad break. When I saw the broken bone poking out of his arm, I got sick and threw up all over the teacher who was trying to get me off him. None of the other kids would come near me after that.” Including Ray and Jaime, two guys I thought were my good friends.

  “Well, nobody bothered to tell me about the part with the dog or how that asshole was coming down on you, but I did hear the part about you breaking the guy’s arm and throwing up on the teacher.”

  “You knew that and you still became my friend?”

  “Why not? There are two sides to every story. I figured I could make up my own mind about you. Besides, I saw how you were in school. You didn’t seem like the kind of dude who gets off on going around breaking people’s arms.”

  “But everybody said it was crazy to do that to Jonah over a dog that didn’t even belong to me.”

  “The way I see it, you stood up to a guy who was crapping all over you on a regular basis. Come on, what were you supposed to do? Just keep letting him do it?”

  “I got suspended from school. And it cost my mom a lot of money. She had to pay Jonah’s medical bills. That was the only way his parents wouldn’t press charges against me.”

  “Jeez. That’s a bummer. And so wrong.”

  “And you’re actually okay with what I did?”

  “El, I’m okay with you. Period.”

  There really is nothing else for me to be afraid of.

  “Here comes my mom,” Saul says in a rush. “I gotta go. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

  “You bet.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE DAYS are getting warmer. It’s March, and we’re closing in on spring break. Mom and Breeze are taking Saul and me to a cabin in the mountains for three days. There’s fishing, which I’ve never done before, and the cabin has lots of games like air hockey, table tennis, and video poker. We’re going to grill, hike mountain trails, and take a bike-riding tour of the local town. I’m looking forward to it. We all are.

  Mom has been true to her word. She hasn’t hit me since that time she beat me with the spatula. She got really pissed at me the other day for leaving the burner on after I boiled a couple of hotdogs for my dinner. All the water boiled out of the pot and the pot burned and smoke was everywhere. Mom yelled at me for something like fifteen minutes, about how I could have caused a fire and burned down the whole building, and how I had to start being more careful. I apologized because I knew she was right. But all she did was yell.

  Saul’s helping me study. I have to take the ACT at the end of the month. I’ve put in a college application, and they need my ACT score to make a final decision about admitting me. This is all sort of last minute, and I have to do everything in a rush, but it took me a while to decide what I want to do with my life. I want to be able to help people who have emotional problems. When I told him that, Mr. Roberson said I should consider being a clinical psychologist. I read through the pamphlets he gave me, and now I’m convinced that’s the career for me.

  I’ll have to go to the college here in the city. Based on Mom’s income, I’m eligible for both state and federal grants, but together they don’t come anywhere close to covering the costs of attending an out-of-state school like Dartmouth. Saul wants to go to the local college too. He doesn’t like the idea of us going to separate schools any more than I do. But his parents still want him to go to Dartmouth, and I just want what’s best for him. I believe Dartmouth would be the best school for him. We’ll have to find a way to keep our relationship going long distance. I know it can work because Cary and I keep our relationship going long distance. Some things are hard, but you find a way to do them for the people you love.

  I still want to get a part-time job somewhere, any kind of job. I’ll be a janitor, mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. I’ll wait tables, like Mom. Or stock store shelves and bag groceries. Cary may be living with his grandfather for now, but he buys his own food, his own clothes, and he pays his grandfather rent. When he’s saved up enough money, he’s going to get his own place. I want to be like that. I want to pay Mom back all the cash she had to give Jonah Mullins’s parents. I want to take care of my own needs. And most of all, I want my own personal space, a little sanctuary that’s all mine. Saul has said he’ll definitely be coming back here, every fall break, every winter break, every spring break, and every summer break. Every chance he gets, he’ll be coming back to Ravenna Point. He’ll come to see his parents, and he’ll come to spend time with me. We’ll go out and do things, of course, all the things we do together now. But we’ll also need a place to be alone with each other, where we don’t have to wait until his parents or my mom go off to work or something or worry about them coming back unexpectedly. I probably won’t be able to afford an apartment anytime soon, but maybe I can get a room in a dorm.

  Saul is seeing a psychiatrist, and he’s on medication to help him with his obsessions and compulsions. He told me his family lawyer, a woman with a reputation of being compassionate but lethal in the courtroom, met with the prosecutor and explained to the guy that Saul’s OCD caused him to shoplift. She also said she’d have plenty of expert witnesses to back up the diagnosis made by that doctor Saul saw once (and refused to see again). The prosecutor agreed to drop the charges if Saul agreed to go into long-term treatment. He has a long way to go. He still works out too much some days, but the sessions aren’t as long. Sometimes I can talk him into skipping a session altogether, and he doesn’t freak out like he used to. He’s not shoplifting anymore. He’s getting better. Everyone can see that.

  “You’re gonna ace that test, man,” Saul whispered in my ear on
e Saturday morning, the last weekend in February, when we were sitting side-by-side at a table in the back corner of the library near my apartment complex. We had the ACT study guides spread out in front of us, and he was taking me through the practice questions at the back of the guides. I was nervous when he first brought the guides to me and I started studying from them. I kept telling him there wasn’t enough time for me to go over all the stuff in those books and get enough of it in my head before the test date rolled around.

  But once I got started, I realized I already knew a lot of the material on science, mathematics, and English. And I’ve been getting most of the practice questions right. I’m not so anxious about the test now. “I kind of feel that, too,” I whispered to Saul, looking at him with all the confidence I felt. “The test won’t be as hard as I thought it would.”

  He smiled at me. I could see how happy he was, and for the first time, I realized how much he had been holding back. I finally understood that the blank looks he kept on his face in the beginning and the don’t-give-a-damn attitude he projected were his way of protecting his feelings. He was just as afraid as I was back then. He was opening up at last, letting the real Saul come through completely. And I believed he wasn’t worried anymore that his obsessive-compulsive disorder or anything else would drive me out of his life. Maybe that wasn’t completely true, him not being worried, not yet, but I sure felt it was. And if it wasn’t totally true, I was certain he’d get there soon.

  That made me so happy I just laughed. I could tell Saul understood what I was feeling, because he laughed too. “You know,” I whispered, “you are one good guy, Saul Brooks. I’m so glad to know you.”

  “Same here,” he whispered back. He reached over and slid his arm across my shoulders. “We’re gonna be okay, man.”

  THE FINAL bell rings on this Wednesday afternoon. I hurry out of class and head for my locker. Saul shows up there maybe ten seconds after I do.