Page 47 of You Can't Hurt Me

“This isn’t some silly game, Tony. I’m taking my work on this book seriously.”

My phone vibrates and I hold it in my palm, angled away from Tony so he can’t see.

“Anna?”

But I’m distracted by the text.

Sorry hvnt been in touch. Back from conference in Oxford. Are you free tomorrow to work on book? Let me know. N

My heart beats in double-time.

“I have to go.” I am suddenly lightheaded, dizzy with childish elation as I slip my phone back in my pocket. “Work.”

“Anna—” he repeats.

“What is it?” I laugh briskly, on edge, trying to keep the strain from my voice. “You know I love you but I’ve got to go.”

“Funny, I’ve always wondered...” he muses, his tone contrived, too casual. “You meet Eva. Now here you are doing her memoir. Strange that order of things, don’t you think?”

I look up at the sunless sky, register a reflexive shiver through the thin nylon fabric of my tracksuit.

“What the hell do you mean?” I snap, desperate to leave. “I chatted to Eva a couple of years ago for a short interview. That’s it.”

“Really? I seem to remember you said how inspiring you found her. Didn’t she even invite you into a therapy session? You sure you’re not becoming a little too obsessed?”

I stare at him, bewildered.

“Please, Tony. I need to go,” I repeat, watching his fingers tremble slightly as he rolls another cigarette paper. His tongue darts along its edge, the half-moons of his nails stained with nicotine. When he is finished, he raises the rolled cig to his mouth, lets it rest there.

“And I don’t know what you’re getting at, but this is bullshit. I get a chance to do this thing that could change my career and you want to ruin it for me.”

Every time I try to claim a new world for myself, he somehow taints it. I glance down at my hands gripping the rail, pathetic and limp, and try to see myself through his eyes. As if I’m so eternally malleable, suggestible, someone whose life he thinks he can play with and demean.

“You really like him, don’t you?”

“What?” I retort. “Actually, scratch that. I don’t want—”

“It’s sweet. Kissing in the car like teenagers?”

My jaw tightens and I start to shake, humiliated. “You were there.”

I falter, the vision of Tony, my brother, watching from his car. Of course, the slam of that door breaking the moment, maybe when it got too much for him?

“Oh, c’mon, Anna.” He lets out one of his little laughs, reaches out to touch my shoulder tenderly. I push his hand away. “If I am your keeper, you only have yourself to blame.”

17

All About You

At first Eva’s lack of pain was something she didn’t notice at all and when she did, she thought about it as a liberation, released from the burden of her own biology. Childbirth, period pain, endometriosis. She would never have to suffer those conditions. Yet something changed as soon as she was diagnosed. She felt diminished, pitied rather than envied by those who read about her. And that didn’t suit her. She began to crave what was denied to her, the body’s siren when we’re drawn too close to the flame. But I wasn’t really paying attention as her craving grew. Burning, throbbing, aching. All she wanted was the gift of pain.

The next morning, in Nate’s house, we face each other across the kitchen island, the distance between us as solid as the cool flecked marble beneath my fingertips. I scan his face but it only mirrors the uncertainty he must see in mine. If I am a little distracted, it’s not for the reason he suspects. I try to tell myself it was coincidence Tony happened to slam his car door at the moment we kissed. Was he sitting there waiting for us to return?

As I lay in bed last night, Tony’s intimations and the sad reality of his words spun around me in the darkness. After my father died, it’s true that we became each other’s keepers, grief and guilt binding us more tightly than I ever would have wished.

Our past was shaped by one soundtrack. It’s there when I run, my body replays it in the tightening of my chest, the fire in my lungs, the struggle to inhale. I know it’s there for Tony too. That sound. The rasp of my father’s breath, followed by the compressed hiss of his inhaler opening up his swollen airways. Tony and I grew up witnessing the power of this small miraculous invention. Yet the night my father suffered his final fatal attack, when his last barely audible words were, “Help me,” we couldn’t find a fresh one. Waiting for the paramedics to arrive, we searched through the house high and low but there wasn’t one to be found, anywhere.

I catch Nate’s quizzical stare, haul my mind, like a dead weight, back to the moment.

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