Page 22 of Across His Line

I like silent days.

Not quiet ones. Quiet is just the absence of noise, and you can have quiet in the worst places in the world. Silent is something else. Silent is when my body finally stops listening for something. When my shoulders come down from around my ears without my having to ask them to, and my stomach unclenches, and my heart forgets, for a little while, that it’s supposed to be counting. It goes all the way to the bottom of me, the way a pond goes still when the wind stops, and you can finally see what’s underneath.

For most of my life, I didn’t get days like that. I didn’t know there were days like that. Because my mom was an addict.

I still don’t say it out loud. I’m saying it now to the ceiling, inside my own head, with two people asleep ten feet away, and even here, it makes my chest go tight. I don’t like to think about it, but I think about it often.

It started in middle school. Or that’s when I noticed, which isn’t the same thing. I learned the sounds of our apartment. Her keys in the door at the wrong time of day. The bathroom fan running too long. And the hush after she came down from whatever she’d taken or smoked, which wasn’t peace. It was the opposite of peace. It was a held breath before something broke.

On those days, it didn’t matter what I did. If I made a sound, I was too loud. If I asked for something, I was too much. If I just stood in the kitchen and breathed, I was in the way. She always found something. And she always made sure I understood that the problem wasn’t anything I’d done. The problem was that I was there at all.

So I stopped being there.

I learned how to disappear in plain sight. I learned which boards in the hallway creaked and how to step over them. I learned to close a door so the latch didn’t click. I learned to be in my room so quietly that she’d forget I was home, and on the good nights, she did. That was the goal. Out of sight, out of mind. If she couldn’t see me, I couldn’t be the reason.

I was eleven, and I was very good at it.

Right before high school, she sent me to live with my grandma.

I don’t know if it was mercy or exhaustion. My grandma’s house was small and smelled like Pine-Sol and old coffee. She gave me the room at the end of the hall that used to be her sewing room, and she took me in without a single question. I have never stopped being grateful for that. Not for one day.

But she was already raising my cousin. She’d had him since he was little, and by the time he was a junior in high school, he had developed his own drug addiction.

Somebody told me once that you shouldn’t be mad at your parents for how they turned out; you should be mad at your grandma because she raised them. I turned that over for a long time. I couldn’t blame her. She was the only one who opened the door for me.

So in that house, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I made myself small. My grandma had enough. My cousin was more than enough. Every envelope on the kitchen table and every night she sat up by the front window waiting for headlights was enough. I wasn’t going to be one more thing she had to worry about.

Silence is where I learned to be safe.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to tell the difference between being quiet and being nothing. My life was an inconvenience to everyone in it. That was just the truth.

And then, Woodbury.

Here, it’s been easy to have silent days, because Kylie is almost always with Nash. I have a routine. I get up before anyone. I make tea in the little kitchen at the end of the hall while the floor is still asleep. I go to class, come back, and sit at my desk with the window cracked. Nobody needs anything from me, nobody is coming down from anything, and nobody is sitting up by a window. For the first time in my life, I have peace.

I didn’t know peace like this was possible. I didn’t know it was allowed.

The thing about silence, though, is that it leaves so much room. My thoughts come rushing in to fill it, and if I don’t catch them, they just circle, around and around, like birds that can’t find anywhere to land. So I journal. I write everything down. There’s a stack of black composition notebooks under my bed, years of them, every page full, and nobody on earth has ever read a word.

Right now, it’s too early to turn on a lamp, so I reach for my phone. I turn the brightness all the way down and open the Notes app.

I type: He came last night.

I stare at it.

Four words, sitting there on the dim little screen, and my heart starts to race like I’ve said them out loud. One knock. A shadow under the door, two dark shapes breaking the strip of light. I know you’re in there, little Tessa. I counted to sixty with my phone on my chest, and he stood there for every one of them.

I type: I don’t know what to do.

I put the phone face down on my chest and look at the ceiling.

And just like that, the silence is gone. It was here a second ago, all the way to the bottom of me, and now it isn’t. Now there’s just my heart, counting again, and the chain on the door, and the knowledge that three rooms away, behind a door that opens stiff and closes hard, he’s awake, or he’s asleep, and either way, he knows where I am now.

Going to that hockey game was the worst mistake I’ve made since I got here. One hour. Kylie bargained me down to one hour, and I said yes. I sat in a plastic seat, and I let him see me. Two months of being nobody, being nothing, being a door he walked past twice a day without reading, and I gave it away.

I’d take it back if I could. I’d take it all back.

Now I’m paranoid I’ll run into him everywhere.