How to Love

I blink. “Okay.” I hold the screen door so he can get inside and let it slam behind me, dump the diaper bag at the bottom of the stairs with an unceremonious thud. The first thing I do is turn off the AC: I absolutely, one hundred percent cannot bear one more breath of recycled air.

I take Hannah with me, balancing her on my hip and flinging open window after window one-handed, letting the outside in. I have gotten very good, this past year and a half, at doing things one-handed.

“Hey,” he says, coming up behind me in the dining room. “Need help?”

“Couldn’t breathe.” Maybe that’s the truth, actually, now that I think about it. Maybe I haven’t had a decent amount of air in my lungs since before dinner. Could be I’m brain-damaged, oxygen-deprived.

“Let’s get this lady to bed,” Sawyer suggests. I nod, willing to follow for now, and get Hannah changed and into the crib without much comment. “Down for the count,” Sawyer says, rubbing a fast hand over his bristly head, when she’s been breathing deeply for a few moments.

“Nicely done.” I sink down into the rocker, exhausted.

“Go put your pajamas on,” Sawyer says, noticing how tired I am. I probably look like garbage, though I can’t exactly bring myself to care. “Are you hungry?”

I shake my head. “I ate, like, three packs of M&Ms while we were waiting,” I tell him, accepting the hand he offers to help me to my feet.

“I know,” Sawyer says. He closes the door to the nursery behind him as we step into the hallway, leaving it open a crack so that a sliver of light falls onto the gray carpet inside. “I watched you. You’re an impressive woman. You want real dinner, though?”

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, since you feel so strongly about it.” He grins. “I’ll run downstairs and see what’s in the fridge. You go take your clothes off.”

“Shut up.” I pad down the hallway to my room and change, hastily rebraid my hair. By the time I make it down the stairs, Sawyer has warmed leftovers from tonight’s dinner—Stef must have cleaned up while she was waiting for us, and there are several neat Tupperware containers stacked on the counter. Sawyer’s tuned Soledad’s little radio to the university station, and Billie Holiday croons about her bad, bad man.

“Wanna get tanked?” he asks, poking his head out from behind the fridge door. He is holding out a bottle of white wine.

I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you don’t drink anymore.”

“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t.”

“No thanks.” I hop up onto the counter as he replaces it. “Did you go to a program?”

“Hmm?”

“To quit drinking.”

“Oh. No. I just kind of stopped.”

“Wow.”

“I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was just stupid.” He shrugs elegantly. “The Oxy, though, that I needed a little help with. What?” he asks, of my presumably gobsmacked expression. He nods as he eats a forkful of rice out of one of the containers. “I went for, like, a month in Tucson.”

I blink. “Before or after the farm?”

“Before.” He glances at me, amused. “Is it so hard to believe?”

“That you went to rehab? Kind of.”

Sawyer shrugs. “Don’t spread it around, okay? Don’t want people to think I’ve lost my edge.” He smiles, looks out the window at the shadowy yard. “But it was good. I had quite the habit when I left here, kiddo.”

No kidding. I think of the not-aspirin in Sawyer’s shoe the first night we were together, of Animal and Lauren Werner and the low-slung stucco house. I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I’d ever really had him at all. “Yeah,” I say slowly. “I remember.”

We’re quiet for a minute, the both of us. Finally I clear my throat. “Do your parents know?” I ask him, my voice sounding loud in the empty kitchen. “That you went?”

“Nope.” He shakes his head. He took his ridiculous tie off at some point, dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar and sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows. “Nobody does. I mean,” he amends. “You do, now.”

I think about that for a minute. “I wish you’d said something.”

“Really?” He looks interested.

“Yeah,” I reply, smiling a little. “I might have hated you a little less.”

Sawyer grins back. “Probably not.”

“Well, no, probably not.” I pick a bit at the food on my plate. “But it couldn’t have been easy.”

“I mean, it didn’t tickle.” Sawyer shrugs. “They had a twenty-four-hour Slurpee machine, though.”

Aha. I wrinkle my nose. “There’s that lightbulb,” I say, feeling sort of embarrassed and not entirely sure why. There’s still so much about him I don’t know. “Cheaper than booze.”

“Cheaper than a lot of things,” he tells me, and we sink into silence after that. Still, I’m glad he’s here. I’ve relaxed: My heartbeat has timed itself to the rhythm of the music coming from the radio, syrupy slow, and that realization is all it takes to send me into a fresh panic. I sent my father to the hospital today. I humiliated my family. I’m a mess, miserably and in public, in so many senses of the word.

“Hey,” Sawyer says. “Cut it out.”

I blink. “Cut what out?”

“You didn’t give your dad a heart attack.”

“What?” For one crazy moment I think he’s actually read my mind, but Sawyer just shrugs.

“That’s what you were doing, right?” he asks. “Kicking the shit out of yourself for speaking up for once in your life?”

I consider denial, decide it’s worthless. “Among other things.”

“Well, cut it out. Look,” he says. “You know I love your father like he is my father. I know he freaking hates me now, and that’s fine, but he was never anything but good to me when I was a kid, and I don’t hold it against him. But I know how he works. And I know how it must have been for you. Everything you said to him tonight?” Sawyer shakes his head. “He more than had it coming.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe,” he says. He steps forward, right into my personal space. My breath hitches a little. “I’m telling you the truth.”

There’s a lean—oh God, there is definitely a lean here, so close I can see the amber flecks in his green eyes—but in the end I jump down off the counter, evading. This day has gone on for years, and I don’t need one more dangerous thing.

“I think I’m going to try bed,” I tell him, putting a safe amount of space between us, the clean expanse of kitchen tile. “Want me to get you set up on the couch?”

Sawyer raises one dark eyebrow. “I think I can manage.”

“Okay then.” We load our plates into the dishwasher. I give the counters a perfunctory wipe. The moon washes in through the window, silver-pale.

38

Before

It wasn’t long after the night he snuck into my house that Sawyer started taking me to parties on the outskirts of Hollywood—crowded affairs in rented bungalows far from the shoreline, thirty-racks of Bud Light in the fridge. “We’ll just stop by for a minute,” he always said before we got there, but in the end a minute usually took an hour or more. He held my hand at first, introduced me to a friend of Animal’s or a girl who’d graduated from my high school a year or two ago, before he drifted away, promising me he’d be right back, always, that he just had to talk to this guy really quick, take care of this one thing.

“Unless you want to …,” he always began, then trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks on my own: unless I wanted to relax, finally, to let go of my mad grab for control and be, finally, finally, like everyone else. To pull off my armor. To make him happy. Unless you want to.