Drowning in You Read online

  Drowning in You

  Rebecca Berto

  Copyright © 2013 Rebecca Berto

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  ISBN: 978-0-9874566-1-8

  Cover design copyright © Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations.

  Cover photo copyright © Jacqueline Barkla

  Formatting by JTFormatting

  Table of Contents

  Prelude: From a note tucked under her pillow

  1. Killer Crush

  2. Distract Dexter

  3. Love the Drug(gie)

  4. Want, Wish

  5. Pick-up Truck

  6. Cups, Color, Candy

  7. Making Mistakes

  8. Spilled Milk

  9. Reservoir Revelations

  10. Sensuality and Sizzling Secrets

  11. Happy = Too Hard

  12. Alcohol and Women

  13. Crushing Confession

  14. Deadly or Delicious?

  15. The Hypo Hero

  16. Mourning Mom

  17. Run, and You Shall Find Trouble

  18. Catching Charlee

  19. Loving and Losing

  20. Well, I Never!

  21. Ungluing and the Gluing

  22. Hot Mess Wreck

  23. Wishing for Walter

  24. Hacking and Chatting

  25. Romeo and Juliet

  26. Ask. Answer.

  27. At the Heart of the Hollingworth

  28. Beachball Blues

  29. Uncover Us

  30. Define Dad

  31. Jack of All

  32. Rosalicious

  33. It Goes a Little Something Like This

  34. Finding Forever For Us

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Excerpt from “Precise”

  From a note tucked under her pillow:

  Dexter Hollingworth “killed” my parents.

  1. Killer Crush

  Charlee

  As per all the fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds at our school, I started crushing on Dexter Hollingworth around the age of fifteen. There was one girl who hated him, but she was into girls.

  From the football field sidelines to graduation day and beyond, my best friend Rosa and I have wanted him. But guys like Dexter don’t notice girls like us who spend most of our time talking about cool people like him.

  At twenty years old, I still “love” him.

  I love the way his body personifies what a male God should be without looking like Fabio.

  I love the way his perfect tanned skin is inked and how he wears those aviator sunglasses and how he’d use up his lunchtimes to teach the little kids in our school guitar lessons.

  But I hate the way I love him.

  I hate how Dexter was the one controlling the ski lifts at Mason’s Ski Resort the day my mom was killed because it also put me here, in this position, praying to a God I’ve never believed in to spare my dad’s life.

  In this hospital room, the air is as quiet as the still of night and my dad’s languid breathing and drawn-out, heavy movements remind me that my perfect family life was never meant to be forever.

  If I’m being honest, it seems like things are already over. Dad’s skin keeps a yellow color—at best—from the IV drip. His meds help with the simple tasks his heart and other organs can’t. My thoughts wander again. I don’t let myself consider the alternative—that maybe it’s wishful thinking. I go with this:

  “Dad,” I say, jealous my little brother, Darcy is holding our dad’s hand—the hand he can squeeze with. “Look at you.” I wink.

  “Is she okay, Dad?” Darcy asks, sounding as though he’s confused.

  “Charlee?” The confusion is contagious, but Dad’s patient zero—not Darcy.

  There are bars that raise and lower around Dad’s bed, and they’ve been raised forever. Surely they must be there because they’re too hard to put down in their scratched, old state. My dad doesn’t need silly bars around his bed! My dad owns Roycroft Engines.

  “I think you’re squeezing Darcy’s hand too tight,” I say.

  “Wha-at?” Darcy says. He’s staring at me with squinted eyes, probably thinking what’s wrong with my sister? She’s supposed to be the adult.

  It hurts smiling like this, the creases halfway up my cheeks. But maybe it’ll work. “Isn’t that right, Dad?”

  Dad’s eyes are like I remember them now. There’s vibrancy in the rich brown color, like my eyes. I bet he’s thinking is his daughter crazy? He tilts his head to the side—

  Injured people don’t understand things like this. Injured people don’t get what’s unsaid. Dad’s not that injured.

  —as it clicks. Dad shakes out of Darcy’s grip and waggles his finger at him. “That nurse…”

  “Lisa Hollingworth,” I say.

  “Yes, Lisa. That nurse Lisa said motor function is good. Squeezing someone’s hand uses up a lot more strength than you think, son.”

  Darcy’s mouth flops open and stays that way. He checks out Dad, who’s nodding, and me—should I nod?—so I nod also.

  “Squeezing your hand probably takes Dad twenty muscles and millions of brain cells just to do something like that.”

  “No way!” Darcy grins and punches the air. “Dad, that’s cool.”

  And just like that, Darcy has that same face on as he had when Mom told him she had to wait three hours in line to buy Desert Warcraft and yeah, she really, really got it for him.

  That face is why I haven’t downed twenty sleeping pills yet. God knows these last weeks have felt like months, which actually felt like years. That makes me the most ancient twenty-year-old alive.

  Why, Dexter? Why did it have to be you in that seat, in that room, at that time?

  “You just wait until he kicks your butt at Desert Warcraft.”

  “They have that here, too?”

  I coax Darcy’s shoulder. “No, Darce. At home. Dad will have to come home soon with all these improvements.”

  “Charlee…” Dad says, shaking away the words with his head as soon as he’s said them. As if I’ve taken a joke too far.

  Darcy forgets Dad’s silly slip in our charade after a second and says, “When, Dad? Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Char—”

  “Slow down, cowboy,” I say. I laugh so hard my tummy hurts. It’s my tummy hurting when I laugh like this, it’s not my heart ripping and combusting into a million pieces, each a shard of glass tearing my soul apart. No, Charlee, this is what it feels like to really laugh. “Maybe in two weeks, though, Dad? Huh? Two weeks?”

  I prod Dad with my gaze. Hopefully my long blonde hair hides my face from Darcy so I can telegraph a message, making my brain
work so hard it hurts. Dad…do you see this face? Can you see what I’m saying here? My eyes don’t usually pop out of their sockets like this.

  “No, no.” Dad sighs, coughs.

  It racks his whole body. For a moment, I am afraid he’ll spit up blood and Darcy will think I’m lying to him, but, no. It sounds like it was only spittle.

  No blood.

  “Charlee is forgetting I’m still injured.” Dad watches me impassively, the same way you’d regard a passing stranger.

  Darcy slumps into his chair. “So not for a long time.”

  “Darce—” and Dad waits until Darcy stops picking at the arm of his chair and stares at him “—go get that nice lady, Lisa, and tell her I’m ready for my medicine in a few minutes, will you?”

  Darcy whirls to me, Dad, then back to me. He has to leave? Why does he have to miss out on this chat? I know you guys are gong to talk about me the minute I step out. That’s what his face says.

  “Where is she?”

  “Just pop down to the reception desk. Should be there.”

  Darcy drags his feet out of the room, arms crossed over his chest.

  Dad and I look at each other at the same time and I need to speak first or else I’ll cop it, I know I will, and I need to explain that I was just being silly and I’m doing the best I can to be nice for Darcy.

  However, getting in first, Dad says, “I’m never getting out of here.”

  He doesn’t rub my shoulders or pull me to the bed so he can lean in, trembling with the effort, to kiss my forehead like he used to before a bedtime story. There’s no contact, no connection.

  I want my mom. I don’t want to be Darcy’s mom.

  There, I thought it. Did you hear that, Dad? I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready because Mom shouldn’t be dead and you’re not dead yet. You hear me?

  He just says, “Charlee? You hear that?”

  I bop my head up, left, down. It started as an I-don’t-know but I’m not sure what I did in the end. My brain didn’t compute his message. Refuses to compute it.

  “Oh, Charlee.” Dad sighs a ragged breath.

  This shouldn’t have happened. My best friend Rosa’s dad isn’t like this, so why should mine be? My dad’s not even fifty and hers is fifty-five! Dad winces as he tries to push himself up in bed and it’s so feeble that I can’t watch the same man who used to pin me down and tickle me ‘til I had cramps of pain from laughing struggle like this. I can’t watch, so instead his grunts pierce my ears because I close my eyes. I clench my fists by my thighs until he stops making those God-awful sounds and…

  And would you look at that! My father is sitting upright.

  “My liver now isn’t—”

  “Dad!” Darcy hooks his arm around the doorjamb and skids to a stop inside. He puts his hand to his chest and says, “She’s coming right now.”

  “Okay, okay. Come here. Whoa, did she give you coffee?”

  “No, I just came here as quick as I could, Dad. I promise she said she’ll come real soon.”

  “You’ve done great. Come sit down.”

  Darcy, smiling and satisfied with what he’s achieved for Dad, trots over to his chair and sits on the edge. He pulls out his handheld game from his pocket and starts jamming buttons. Then, apparently remembering something, pulls out his cell from his other pocket and starts texting.

  Dad’s eyes say come here so I scoot closer.

  “He’s a smart ki—” Dad starts, but footsteps are approaching our door. He says, “No tomfoolery with him. You tell him straight up, Charlee. You’re Melissa now and I am —”

  “Walter!” someone says from the door.

  It’s Lisa. She’s my favorite, because she sometimes has a sour candy for Darcy to suck on, and she always says how Dad’s improving, giving him smiles and pats on the back.

  As Mom to Dexter, Lisa has the same shocking blue eyes as he does. She wiggles her hips at the door, fingering her pocket. She has a somewhat round face, whereas Dexter’s is square and bulging with veins and all that sexy stuff I could only dream of touching, but Lisa Hollingworth is cute, in a Mom way. I bet if Dexter never opened that potty mouth I used to hear while I ogled him from the sidelines of the football field he’d look like a Mama’s Boy, too. But when he opens that mouth, his voice is sex oozing from those luscious lips.

  “Watermelon,” she says to Darcy.

  Darcy drops his electronics on his chair as if they are plastic toys from a McDonald’s Happy Meal and grabs the twenty-cent candy from her. Shame, really. That kid doesn’t know value. But there’s something comforting in that; Darcy is still learning, and I guess I can still tell him our Dad is going to be fine.

  “Pink and green.” Darcy nods his head in an impressed way as he checks out the candy. “Nice.” He points outside to the hall and walks out.

  “How you doing today, Walter?”

  “Same, I guess.”

  “You look well. Great to see.”

  I smile at Dad. See? See, I wasn’t lying. You’ll do just fine.

  “We’ll do more tests today. Doc is still worried about your internal bleeding. That’ll be after your regular dialysis,” she’s saying, but I stand up, and they both face me.

  I step into the hall because I’m such a sook. I bet every one of Dad’s millions I couldn’t say “cry” without choking on the word and heaving in fits of embarrassing sobs. I’m the best crier there ever was and that’s a curse. As I said: a sook.

  Outside the room is almost the same as being inside. I manage to hear sentences from Dad and Lisa such as “Well, we’ll just do the tests first and then see if that’s the case,” and “Melissa would have been so proud of you and that’s the truth because you’ve done well to come back from the dead, Walter.”

  I can imagine Lisa winking at my dad after that last bit.

  The corner at the end of the hall is here suddenly, and I almost topple over Darcy’s sneakers. He jumps back. His gaze is straight to his feet.

  “I didn’t hear too much,” he says.

  Mom would have pinched my arm and dragged me back for what I’m about to do, but you know what? Mom died when the wires from that ski lift snapped and fell to the bottom of the mountain and she can’t stop me now. No one can.

  As I walk out of the hospital with Darcy’s fingers thrashing in my fist, shouting but I didn’t get to say bye! I’ll only be a sec! Pleasepleaseplease! Dexter’s shocking blue eyes are the only thing I think about because I don’t believe what everyone says.

  Dexter Hollingworth didn’t kill my mom and maim my dad, and injure those other two dozen skiers. Eyes that blue don’t belong to someone so cruel. Eyes that blue are peaceful and stunning and I know, in my heart, it really was an accident those wires snapped because I’ve loved that boy from a distance since he started sprouting facial hair and there’s no way the son of that woman caring for my dad in the ICU could have knowingly allowed that ski lift to operate in that condition.

  That’s the worst part. My mom was the only one to die, my dad the only one injured this badly, and I won’t believe what everyone else thinks.

  I can’t believe Dexter Hollingworth did that to my family.

  Most days, I think that makes me stupid.

  2. Distract Dexter

  Dexter

  “Dexter!” Dad yells. “Don’t you fucking walk aw—”

  I whip around. This natural feeling explodes inside me, my fists pumping together by my jeans so I don’t punch Dad out. Stepping into his space, he should get this message. I’m twenty-fucking-one and no, I don’t have enough money to rent a place, but yes, I’m 101-percent certain I am not going back to Mason’s Ski Resort to work.

  “Give it a rest. You could act like you give a rat’s ass about the charges.”

  Dad’s crooked nose, from when his business partner in our old home, Chicago, popped him one, is inches from mine. “You mean the charges that were dropped.”

  “I step back in that resort and I’m only stirring up trouble.”r />
  Dad’s eyebrows perk up. Like, Really? Like, Dexter, you’re really going with this?

  I step in closer, feeling the air escape from between our noses. He grabs my shirt collar and yanks me in. If I’d been shorter he would have raised me to eye level. Like when I was fourteen or so. But I have an inch on Dad.

  Which means nothing.

  My shoulders do this involuntary thing where they convulse, without me remembering I asked them to rip myself from his grip. Guess I’m used to defending myself against Dad.

  Fear jolts through me as if it were electricity. “Get off, you fuck.”

  “This,” Dad says, snickering at my shirt, “this is my shit. My wages bought you this top. Now go back to Mason’s and help out because they need you.”

  Right, his wages stopped paying me a year ago when he was demoted, almost went broke, and lost control of Mason’s Ski Resort. Some other head honcho paid the wages for my winter job there. It’s really too bad Dad hasn’t let his pride down. Instead? He’s settled, for now, as just another worker there. He’ll be owner of Mason’s again. Apparently. His words.

  “Melissa May died in that accident. Walter May was saved by some miracle. But look at you,” I flick my nose up at him, thinking he’s pathetic. “You wouldn’t think someone died and dozens were injured by how distraught you are.”

  “Right. But Walter did not die.”

  “You’re…” But the words die in my mouth. Hopeless? Messed up? Crazy?

  He’s not worth it. That’s what he is. I’m lucky the police ruled the Mason’s disaster an accident. That, or they didn’t have enough evidence to charge me with it. But I’m not stupid enough to tempt fate by punching Dad out. Instead I head the other way.

  “What? Get. Back. Here,” Dad growls.

  I’m at the door already, free from his grip. I’m driving away. More, I’m moving out.

  But I don’t have the money.

  And I don’t even have a car to get me someplace, any place, far from here.