Page 19 of The Wrong Side of Kai
“Uh. Okay.” I go quiet, still perplexed. I’m searching Kai’s expression for something more, but I can’t get past his calm, cool exterior. “You trust me enough to give me your bike?”
“What are you gonna do, Nessie? Pedal off into the horizon with it?”
I purse my lips and shove his bike into the backseat, slamming the door shut. I turn around once more, only to be polite, and give Kai a smile that evenfeelsawkward, so I don’t know how it must look to him. How do I say goodbye to him, a stranger but one who I’m now complicit with?
But the stranger does it for me. “Goodnight, Nessie. I’m sorry for leaving you behind.”
“It’s fine. Goodnight, Kai.”
He pulls a face, shaking his head. “No, Nessie, that’s not how this works. I want to hear you say it.”
“Goodnight—” I grit my teeth and lower my voice “—Captain Washington.”
Kai’s face lights up with that childlike glee again, and it makes me wonder what he meant when he said he hasn’t been doing the right thing lately. Other than witnessing him literally slashing someone’s truck tires thirty minutes ago, he doesn’t seem all that bad to me. But then again, would someone whowasn’tthat bad really set out to ruin someone else’s life? I guess we all have different sides. Right now, I just so happen to be seeing the wrong side of Kai.
We turn our backs on one another. Kai cycles off into his back yard and I climb into my car, and I definitely don’t dither. In a matter of seconds, I’m speeding away from his house, heading back to my own. As I drive alone in silence for the few minutes that it takes to get home, fatigue sinks in. All of the emotional stress from today has exhausted me.
My head is a war zone, so many different thoughts fighting with one another; the minute one comes out top, another jostles for position and shoves it to one side. The conflict of feelings is relentless.
I’m feeling fury at Harrison for betraying me by sharing something that was for no one else to see. But also anger at myself for being so stupid, for letting him record that video in the first place. But was I really so wrong to trust him to keep it to himself? A small part of me wants to believe I’m innocent, that I’m a victim in this, but it’s no match for the voice in my head that’s insisting it’s all my fault. Like, if I wind it all back to the start, I should have never hooked up with Harrison in the first place. That action was the trigger for all this.
It’s strange the way life works. You can feel comfortable about your decisions, content with them, yet the outside world can turn a single, unthinking moment into something so awful that you’re forced to regret it. I feel disgusted at myself – not for the hookup, but for not realizing what I was letting myself in for – even when yesterday I didn’t. What we’ve done to Harrison doesn’t wash that disgust away, not one bit.
I park outside my house and grab Kai’s bike from the back seat. I don’t want Dad heading off to work in the morning and spying it in the rearview, so I dump it in the yard and hope for the love of God that no one steals it during the night. Our neighborhood isn’t particularly sketchy, but we do get some weirdos roaming through on their way uptown. I don’t think Kai would be too impressed if I told him some stranger had taken his bike.
The front door is unlocked when I reach it. Dad always forgets to lock the front door at night, but I like to pretend he leaves it unlocked on purpose because he’s worried I’ll forget my keys or something.
“Dad?” I gently call out. All the lights are still on, so Dad must still be up. I walk into the living room, and there he is, standing on a step ladder and trying to balance some artwork on the wall.
“The painting fell down again,” he says without looking over his shoulder at me. For once, it seems he’s actually heard me come home. He stretches up higher and the ladder wobbles. “It’s a goddamn ugly painting, but Debra loved it, so I need to get it back up.” He tucks the artwork under his armpit and begins fiddling with the hooks in the walls. True, the painting doesn’t come close to matching our color schemeandit used to give Kennedy nightmares when we were younger, but our living room wouldn’t be the same without that murky lake with human faces beneath the water that Mom bought off one of her quirky art friends a decade ago.
I glance at the clock on the wall. It’s after eleven. Now is not the time for DIY. “Just do it in the morning, Dad.”
“No, Vanessa!” Dad snaps, his head swiveling around. His cheeks flare red as he clings onto the painting while balancing on the ladder. “Can’t you see that I’m trying to fix it? I’m almost done.”
Maybe, I think in despair, things would be different if Mom’s health had gradually deteriorated over time, if weknewwhat was to come. Maybe that extra time would have allowed us to prepare ourselves mentally for such a loss, but it didn’t happen that way. On the Wednesday evening, Mom was yelling at Kennedy and me for fighting over the TV remote and reminding us to bring our laundry downstairs. By the Thursday afternoon, she was pronounced dead in the ambulance. She didn’t even make it to the hospital. Our entire world changed in that moment. We had no time to prepare. No time to learn how to accept it. I just remember being pulled out of school and how all the air in my lungs was knocked straight out of me when my grandparents choked through sobs that my mother was gone. When we arrived at the ER, Dad was an inconsolable, untouchable heap on the floor, his knees hugged to his chest and his head in his hands. It was the first and only time I’ve ever heard anyone wail.
I stare at Dad now, totally mute. He loved her so intensely that he can’t seem to grasp how to continue through life without her. It’s like he’s stuck in limbo, frozen in an endless, eternal loop of time. He can’t seem to step out of it and move forward. At least Kennedy and I are trying.
Dad returns to the wall, trying to place the painting back where it belongs, and I feel my throat clenching tight as my eyes sting with tears. He wants so hard to keep her memory alive. I know he hates that painting too, but he’s fighting to nail it back in its prominent spot, but it won’t stay up, and it keeps falling back down, and Dad is growing more and more exasperated. . .
And then he grabs that ugly painting and throws it across the room in a wave of fierce, unprecedented rage.
I stare at Dad wide-eyed as he steps down from the ladder and fumbles in his jeans pocket for his pack of cigarettes. He has totally lost it. He’s grumbling under his breath as he walks over to the kitchen, pushing past me as though I’m invisible – which, figuratively speaking, I guess I am.
“The painting can just stay down, Dad,” I say gently, following him into the kitchen.
He slides open the patio doors and leans against the frame, lighting a cigarette and blowing the plume of smoke out into the cool night air. Mom never used to let him smoke inside the house, but she’s not here to enforce that rule anymore. Half the time, he doesn’t even make the effort to smoke at the back door. That’s why our house reeks of tobacco, and why Chyna rarely comes over more than once a week because she’s tired of her asthma flaring up as soon as she walks through the front door.
“She’ll be disappointed,” Dad mumbles with a cough. “She loves that picture.”
She’ll also be disappointed that he’s smoking in the house, so why does an old painting even matter?
“But Mom’s not here,” I say. “Things are never going to be as they were.”
He cranes his neck to look at me, appalled at my bluntness. Dad doesn’t like it when we say factual stuff like that. Half the time, he still talks about Mom in the present tense as though she’s off traveling the world and will return soon with gifts and hugs and tales of faraway adventures. If only.
“You can’t think that way,” he mumbles. “We still need to make her proud.”
