Page 85 of There Are No Saints

My skin feels stiff like plastic.

“What if I took it off? And you didn’t like what you saw underneath?”

Mara slips her hand into mine. Her fingers interlock with mine. They fit together like links in a chain.

“I shouldn’t like you now,” she says. “But I do.”

I shouldn’t like her, either.

But I do.

I walk along beside her, holding another person’s hand for the first time in my life.

It feels outrageously public, like we’re shouting for attention. But also intensely intimate, the energy running down my arm and up into hers in a bond more powerful than sex.

Mara often makes me feel two things at once. I’m not used to that. My emotions have always been simple, easy to understand. I’ve never been confused about what I want.

We’re passing Alta Plaza Park. A woman sits on a public bench, her stroller parked beside her. She’s taken her infant out of the stroller, setting it against her breast. She nurses the baby, singing down to it softly.

Mara turns away from the sight, lips pressed together.

“You don’t think she should nurse in public?” I say, surprised by her prudishness. Usually, Mara is actively antagonistic to the concept of modesty.

“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s the singing.”

“Explain,” I say, curiosity piqued.

Mara takes a deep breath.

“My mother is a piano teacher. That’s how she makes money—when she’s working. If I was sick or hurt, she’d sing to me. It was the only thing that comforted me.”

She swallows hard, her skin pale and sickly-looking. The force of recollection nauseating her.

“Those were my best memories. When she sang to me, I thought she loved me. But later I realized . . . she just likes singing. It was never for me. Or if it was, only to shut me up.

“Randall would make me stand with my nose to the door for hours. I don’t mean it seemed like hours—I watched the time pass on the clock. If I annoyed him, if I was too loud, if I talked back to him—and talking back just meant answering any way he didn’t like—then it was an hour against the door. If I moved for even a second, if I had an itch or I just got dizzy, the hour started over again. No food. No drinks. No going to the bathroom.

“While I was standing there, I’d hear my mother singing in the house. In the kitchen, upstairs, out in the backyard . . .

“It would be two, three hours later, and I’d hear her voice drifting through the air, perfectly content. She wasn’t singing for me, to make me feel better. She forgot I was standing down there at all, legs shaking, trying not to piss myself or move my nose a millimeter from the door so the hour wouldn’t start again.”

Mara glances back toward the park bench, pale lips pressed together.

“The things she’s said to me. Always in that soft, sweet, voice . . . She poisoned it, like she poisons everything. I can’t even listen to a mom in a movie anymore. It makes me want to puke.”

We’re walking toward the marina. I can see all the way down to the water. The sun is breaking above the bay, blazing up the road, glinting on the chrome bumpers of the parked cars, flaming on glass windows.

It burns on Mara’s skin, in the tiny filaments of hair that float above the rest.

The sadness on her face doesn’t match her beauty in this moment.

And my disgust at her mother doesn’t match what I feel in my chest. I’m used to anger and repulsion. The emotion gripping me is something different. A heat in my lungs, a burning behind my eyes . . . a desire to squeeze her hand tighter in mine.

I don’t know what to call this one. I’ve never felt it before.

I look at Mara and I don’t know what to say.

My lips form the words anyway.

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