Page 41 of Shame
They want me to prove myself. I’ll fucking show them.
I make my way home and face plant on my mattress, tired beyond reason. It’s as if my bones have turned brittle, as if my muscles are ash. I feel used up.
Her head falls off her neck and lands on the brown vinyl floor with a little crunch. There’s no blood, which I find a little odd. Her hair is long and brown. Curly. It doesn’t make sense. Icy fingers grip my heart as I fall to my knees and turn up the face.
Carmen’s unseeing eyes stare back up at me. I throw myself back, scrambling to get away. I didn’t do that. I didn’t cut off her head. I never killed her! It doesn't matter. My horrified mind has kept repeating the ‘what ifs’ since that fateful night. The only time I find some calm is when I’m with Carmen. And now that’s over.
“It’s okay, Lucas,” says a soft voice. Her voice. “I have peace. You must find your way. Find me.”
I wake, sweaty, shuddering, my head pounding. My mouth is dry and the voice keeps repeating for me to find my way.
Find me.
Did dream-Carmen mean herself? But she made it very clear she didn’t want me around. I shake my head. A dream is just my own subconscious. I want her. I want to find her. But I can forget that.
I stagger to the kitchen and drink a glass of water, greedily gulping down the cool liquid. Then I toss down two Advil and pray the heavy headache will subside. Unwanted images of what Carmen’s doing right now flits through my mind. It’s four o’clock. They haven’t called yet, so the fucking monster is probably still at it. Is he raping her? Or is she in on it? I have to force myself to unclench my fists. I want to down a tequila, or two, but it’s not the wisest idea. Instead I try to distract myself with cable TV. Old reruns of Friends.
When my phone rings, I almost fly through the roof. My heart pounds at a hundred beats per minute. Fuck. I don’t want to see her. If someone had asked me a while back what would scare me the most, I wouldn’t have thought it’d be picking up a girl in my car.
I splash my face with ice cold water and hop in my jeans and a new T-shirt. I haven’t showered after the little stint at the bar, I was too tired and now it’s too late.
Thirty minutes later, I pull up on the neatly combed gravel outside the front door. I’m too numb to get out of the car. I don’t want to see her. And I want nothing else than to take her in my arms and never let her go. Can’t she see that this is destroying her? Once again my heart blackens as I think of the monster that lives here, who ruins everything he touches. I want to hurt him back, but I just don’t know how. I’m in his clutches like everyone else and I do want to live. Carmen is right that we’d be in constant danger, and I don’t know which life is worse. A life of certain destruction here, but alive, or a life on the run, with an almost certain violent death? And it is like she says; he’d probably drag her back and punish her every day for the rest of her life for disobeying him.
I stare in front of me at nothing. I have no idea how much time has passed when the front door opens, and I have an eerie, agonizing feeling of déjà vu.
She walks on her own feet this time, though, wearing a gray oversized T-shirt. The door closes behind her. I sit as if frozen. I don’t know how to get out. I don’t know how to face her pain. Or my own.
I watch as she hesitantly walks down the stairs, clutching her arms over her chest, every step measured. She looks like she’s in pain, her eyebrows knitted together as if she’s focusing hard. I jump to action, I can’t just sit here, but before I can get out, she has opened the back door and slid in, laying down on her side on the rear seat.
I twist and look at her, meeting her dulled gaze.
“Just drive, Lucas,” she whispers.
Holding her gaze a few moments longer, I then turn the ignition and get us the hell away from the house of unmentionable horrors.
After a few minutes in silence, she buzzes me. There’s a speaker through which the passengers and the driver can communicate. I turn it on.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
My heart jolts, but I don’t want to think anything, or feel anything. “For what?”
“For saying those things. I didn’t mean them. I just needed you to let go.”
“It’s nothing. It’s okay. I didn’t believe you anyway.” I did. What she said broke my heart. But I’ll take it.
“The thought of you was the only thing that kept me sane through the night.” She sounds so tired it kills me. I pull in at an abandoned parking lot by a closed mall in some nondescript neighborhood.
The silence stretches, then I sigh and turn, pulling the divider to the side. “Do you want me to come over?”
Carmen nods and despite how awful everything is, I can’t help the joy that spreads through every limb, as if carbonated soda flows in my veins instead of blood. Hopping out of the car, I fling open the door and climb into the back, sitting opposite her.
I take in the state she’s in, the goosebumps on her legs, the tremors that run through her, and shrug out of my pilot style leather jacket, carefully covering her with it. She’s curled up like a little baby under it.
“You smell nice,” she says.
I grimace. “I smell of booze and a bar fight. Sorry.”
