Page 52 of The Quiet Tenant

“There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s just a ride. Okay? We’re just going for a ride.”

You want to be reassuring, but there is an edge in your voice that creeps you out. You are losing patience.

Do you make a run for it by yourself?

If she won’t let you save her, do you save yourself without looking back?

One last try.

You sit back down next to her. You look into the eyes that are half his.

“Listen.” You speak in a low tone, your breath hot and damp, fog on an invisible window. “It’s nothing. Just a little trip. It’s okay, you know. To spend time without him. It’s okay to want that.”

She curls into a ball, crosses her arms over her shins. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

You do not want to tell her your theories about what goes on at night. You know you might be wrong. You know you know nothing.

You soften your voice as much as possible. “I liked spending timewith my parents, too,” you say. “When I was your age.” Your throat tingles. She is here, anchoring you down like a barnacle on a rock. You need to tear yourself away from this house. Tear her away from him. Shuck her like an oyster, one snap and a shell opening, strands coming lose.

“I loved my parents, too,” you tell her. “I still do. I love them, too. But it’s okay to be your own person. It’s okay to leave him. Just for a little while.”

She looks up at you. Her cheeks are red-hot, her eyes black with fury. Daddy’s girl.

“You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything.” It costs her, being mean to you. She twists her fingers into anxious knots, white knuckles and scarlet skin. “You have no idea what it’s like.” She looks up at the ceiling, and your heart breaks into a million shards. She’s holding back tears. “No one knows,” she says. Her voice shakes like a plane falling from the sky. “No one gets it.”

“Listen.” You have to say it. You have to go for it. “I know, okay? I know what he does to you.”

She looks at you blankly. “What?”

There is nothing else you can do to trick her. This clever girl, fiercely loyal. All she wants is to love and be loved. And you have backed her into a corner. You are making her choose, and she hates you for it. You do not blame her.

Every fiber of you pulls you to the outside world, and every fiber of you pulls you right back to her.

You can’t do it. As much as you wish you could, you can’t leave without her.

You must choose for her.

“All right.” You get up. Clasp her arm and start pulling. “Let’s go.”

You try to give your voice the weight of authority. You try not to squeeze too hard, to pull in a way that won’t tug at her shoulder. You do not want to hurt her. Not now, not ever.

You succeed, partly. She’s forced to get up from the couch. But she resists you, pulls in the opposite direction.

“What are you doing?”

Her tone is outraged more than panicked. You grab her other arm with your left hand and double your efforts.

You are stronger than you thought. Maybe it’s all the food you’ve been eating. Maybe your muscles have grown. Maybe you are done being breakable. Most likely it’s the adrenaline coursing through your veins and the pull of the night air outside, the call of the asphalt you will soon drive on.

You gather your strength and tug at her arms one more time. Something goes wrong, a miscalculation—her ankle catches on the coffee table with a thud. She gives you a look of such betrayal you have to avert your eyes. You have hurt the girl. The last thing, the very last thing you wanted to do, in this life and all the ones to come.

Before you can apologize, a sound rises through the house, wounded, primal. It’s as if your own anger and pain, all five years’ worth of them, are passing from your skin to hers like an electric current. She screams and screams and screams. Her mouth is wide and her eyes are wrinkled shut and she does it louder, longer, and with more fury than you’ve ever heard. You want her to stop and still you are with her, so close to her throughout this moment. When you think she’s about to run out of air, something in her opens, a new influx of breath, and she starts over. She screams in a way that frightens you but also secretly, fleetingly, liberates you. She screams enough for the two of you.

CHAPTER 34

Emily

We stand next to each other. For a few instants, all I notice is the absence of his hands in my hair, of his chest against mine, still heaving after we’ve been torn apart. His breath rises, warm droplets in the icy air.

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