Page 88

And I think, for the first time, with the road going by too fast and the bridge humming under my tires, how many times did she look like that because of me?

I don’t have time for it. I push it down. I push the gas down with it.

Nine minutes.

Seven.

The gray sedan is still in front of the house, half on the curb. Every light in the place is on.

I don’t pull into the driveway. I stop in the street behind the sedan with two wheels up on the grass, and I leave the engine running, and I’m out of the car before I’ve decided to be, and I don’t shut the door.

I can hear it from the walk.

The TV, too loud. A man’s voice, laughing. An old woman’s voice, high and thin, saying a name over and over like she’s trying to call a dog back from the street. And something knocked over hitting the floor.

And then her. “Grandma!”

It’s muffled. But it’s her. I’d know it anywhere.

I don’t knock.

The front door is unlocked. I don’t even feel the handle. I’m just through it, into a smell like weed and old smoke and gravy, into a living room so small I could cross it in four steps, with a TV screaming about a football game in the corner.

And I don’t see anything else but the fucking couch.

He’s sitting on her back. He’s got one knee on either side of her, and his whole weight on her spine, and his hand spread out on the back of her head, fingers in her hair, pushing her face down into the cushion. And under him, Tessa is fighting. Her legs are going. One hand is clawing back at his wrist. Her whole body is bucking under him, trying to get one breath, trying to get her face out of the couch.

That’s all I see. A man on top of Tessa.

I’ve been angry my whole life. I know every kind of it. I know what it feels like on the ice when somebody takes a run at Kennebeck. I know what it feels like when my father picks up the phone. I know what it feels like when it’s good, when it fills you up and you want to hit somebody because it’ll feel like breathing.

This doesn’t feel like any of that.

This feels like being terrified.

I cross the room and get two hands in the back of his hoodie, and I pull, with my legs, with everything, the way you lift a guy off your goalie in a scrum. He comes up off her like he weighs nothing at all.

“Whoa—whoa, what the fuck—”

He doesn’t know what’s happening. To him, this was a family thing. A fight with his cousin. And then something came through the front door and picked him up by the back of his shirt.

I throw him.

He goes sideways off the end of the couch and into the end table, and the lamp on it goes over, and he goes down with it in a crash of cheap wood and glass.

And I don’t look at him. I don’t care where he landed.

I drop down next to the couch.

“Tess.”

She’s coughing. She’s on her stomach still, with her face turned to the side now, and she’s coughing so hard her whole back is shaking, dragging air in in these awful scraping pulls like it hurts going down.

“Tess. Hey. Are you okay?”

She turns her head. She looks at me.

Her hair is everywhere, wrecked, half of it stuck to her face. There’s a red mark across her mouth and her cheek, the shape of fingers, where somebody held a hand over her face. Her neck is red, all the way around the front, an angry blotchy red. Her left hand is curled against her chest, and there’s blood on one of the fingers, a ring of it, like teeth. Her wrist is red. Her eyes are wet and wide and not quite looking at me.