Page 25 of The Wrong Track

“I thought that you might be running away. I thought you might be afraid of your ex-husband and that was why I showed you the picture of what happened to him. I’ve wished that I hadn’t done that about a million times since then.”

“He wasn’t my husband,” I corrected automatically. Because I’d used his last name, everyone had the wrong impression. “Anyway, I thought we were talking about you and Lulu.”

“We can talk about you, too,” he suggested, and I turned. I was so tired of this!

“No. No, I don’t want to talk about anything. I won’t live here if you’re going to be like Hazel, prying all the time.”

“Haze is prying into your life?”

“Constantly, and if it’s not her, it’s her mom,” I said, and only then did I realize how angry and snappish my voice had been. I reached and turned off the water. Why did I always do this? Why hadn’t I learned?

“If they’re asking questions, it’s because they’re worried about you, not because they’re prying.” He did sound pissed off. I’d gone too far, as I often did, and now he was mad.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I take it back. I shouldn’t have said that and I was wrong. I’m sorry.” I walked out of the kitchen but I heard Tobin’s chair scrape across the floor, and then I heard his thumping gait as he moved towards my bedroom. That was where I’d headed because there was a lock in the door, I’d already checked that it worked, and it never made any sense to try to run outside. First, strangers usually didn’t want to get involved and help, and second, you’d have to go home eventually anyway. Sometimes, you could delay the inevitable by getting out of sight—but sometimes, hiding just made it worse.

“Remy?” He knocked. “Did you lock the door? You don’t have to. I won’t come in if you have it closed.”

“Ok, thank you,” I said. I stood with my back pressed up against the far wall. Cold seeped in from the window to my right and moonlight did, too.

“I’m going into the living room. You should come, if you want. Hockey’s on tonight.”

“Thank you,” I repeated. “I’m sorry for what I said.” I swallowed and waited.

“It’s ok,” he told me through the door. “That’s your opinion, and I know that Haze can be like a dog on a bone if she’s worried.”

“It’s a wrong opinion. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” he told me again, and I heard him thump back down the hallway.

I waited for a moment but then, when I put my ear to the door, I also heard the sounds of sports coming from Tobin’s TV. He really wasn’t coming in here. Hazel wouldn’t have let me move in with someone who would hurt me. She was too concerned about my medical issue to let that happen, and she wouldn’t have been friends with him in the first place if he’d behaved that way to other women in his past.

But you never knew, so I waited. I waited until I asked myself how long I planned to stay in this room, and the answer was not much longer since I had to go to the bathroom so badly. So I cracked open the door as quietly as I could and I scuttled out.

Tobin nodded at me when I sat down on the couch, next to him but leaving plenty of space between us. “How do you feel about hockey?” he asked, and I nodded back as if I liked it. I’d never actually seen a game in my life and I had no idea, not one, of what was happening except large men were moving fast and then slamming each other into the plastic barrier walls. He didn’t say another word about what had happened at the end of dinner or about Hazel or about me hiding, either.

A while later, when the game was apparently over, Tobin yawned and told me that he was going to bed and goodnight, and after I heard him get himself onto his mattress, I went to my room, too. Then I lay under the pretty quilt and told myself that I’d been silly. Tobin obviously wasn’t Kilian, wasn’t anything like Kilian. I’d shamed myself a lot by acting like a scared, little girl instead of a grown woman. No wonder everyone here thought I was crazy to want to move away and live on my own. I made my eyes close and tried to stop thinking that maybe they were right about that.

I’m deep underwater, but somehow, it’s ok—I can breathe, I guess, or maybe I don’t have to because I’m not choking or feeling that awful pressure in my lungs. Instead, I’m smiling as bubbles rush around me and the water feels like silk flowing past my body, my thin, normal body. I see beautiful fish, long and silvery, swimming below. Dolphins? They’re playing together, nosing each other, and it almost feels like they’re talking and laughing together. I smile down because they’re so beautiful, beautiful and free.

But it’s there, it’s there again. It has been all along. I open my mouth to say no but my lungs now fill with the water. Suddenly I’m sinking—no, something is dragging me down. It has me and I can’t get away, and it pulls me past the fish. I reach to them for help but now instead of laughing, they’re showing their teeth like sharks. I’m sinking, and sinking, and it has me—

“Remy! Remy.”

I jerked out of its grasp but Tobin was there. He leaned over me in the darkness.

“Are you all right? I could hear you from my room.” He flicked on the little lamp next to my bed. “Were you dreaming?”

My body jolted a few times with the last remnants of fear. I pushed up to lean on my elbows and reached onto the table. I found the inhaler and tried to take a puff, but it was empty. My asthma had been worse lately, I thought because of the cold, and I’d used it all up. I let myself rest on the pillow and tried to control the wheezing the way I’d done before medicine, by calming myself, by waiting it out and hoping it didn’t get worse. “It’s ok,” I told Tobin. The words sounded breathless, though.

He picked up the inhaler. “What do you usually take? What was this medicine? Are you having an asthma attack? Should I call for an ambulance?”

I shoved back the red quilt because it felt heavy on my chest and shook my head. I focused on breathing—trying to, and after a moment, I opened my eyes. This wasn’t going to turn into one of those attacks where it felt like my lungs were giving up, where the air was thick sludge that I couldn’t draw in. “It’s ok, I’m ok,” I told him again.

Tobin was looking at my stomach, where the sheet pulled tautly over my body. A round protrusion arose, like the back of a turtle that Lily and I had watched swimming in the creek near our apartment building. It was clearly not normal to be swollen and distended like that. His mouth slackened and his eyes got pretty big. He hadn’t known that it had gotten to this point. I watched him stand up straight and adjust his expression out of the shock.

I reached and turned off the light again. “I’m going back to sleep,” I said, and moved onto my side. I pulled up the quilt, billowing it out around me. After a moment, I heard Tobin leave, and then I sat up in bed and worked more on controlling my breathing and tried to forget the look I’d seen on his face.

It hadn’t just been surprise; it had also been horror. I completely understood his feelings.