99 Percent Mine: A Novel

I inexplicably wish for Jamie. He’d walk in and fill this expanding awkward silence with talking, jokes, and insults. I feel like I’m fast-tracking a total implosion of my relationship with Tom. When it happens, I’ll have lost another person.

Loretta, my parents, Jamie, Tom, Truly. How many more special people do I have left? I itch to walk out. No one can leave me if I’ve left first. This disturbing thought knocks a little air out of my lungs. Loretta died when I was suspended over an ocean in an aisle seat. Maybe my strategy sucks.

Maybe I should be holding on to people I love with white-knuckled intensity.

Tom checks his phone. “Are you going to be here tomorrow afternoon? The power’s going to be off for a bit.”

“Not sure.” I consult the calendar on the fridge. It’s been refreshing to go analog. “I’m helping Truly do some sewing late in the afternoon.”

“So you’re sewing tomorrow? Not losing your temper and hightailing it to the airport?” Tom sounds so hopeful that it puts a little crack in my hard old heart.

“Am I that impulsive?”

“You are the most impulsive person I know.”

What did he say before? He likes making me happy. Let me try it.

“No, I still can’t find my passport.” It doesn’t ease that tension in him. I try again. “I’ll stay a little longer.” It was the right thing to say. I can’t handle it when he looks at me like this. Right now, in this moment, the rest of the world fades away. We’re suspended in a golden, fragile bubble. Pleasure is glowing in his eyes, candle-bright.

He clears his throat and now I’m his client again. “I really think I need you to stay until we’ve all agreed on how this place should look.”

I nod. “I’ll start packing the house tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get some of the guys at work to help move the furniture.”

Now I’ve altered the ions in the air. He looks at my bruised wrist and says in a bass snarl, “Are you kidding me?”

“Most of them are fine.”

“Would you dig a grave for me?” He repeats my earlier joke without humor.

“You know I would.” I go into my bedroom and tap a few of my chalky pills onto my palm. They have indeed expired. I’m sure it’s better than nothing. “I’ll dig it real slow so I don’t aggravate my crappy old heart.”

Behind me, Tom is still vibrating. “I’m moving the furniture.”

“Well, you clearly feel very passionate about it, so go ahead.”

He’s in the doorway now, leaning on the door frame, watching me sort through my wardrobe. “Where are you going?”

“Up the ladder. I’m going to go sit on the roof for a bit.” I pull a short dress out and shake the wrinkles out of it. My little smart-ass quip has him relaxing a little.

“It’ll be cold up there.”

“Of course that’s your first thought.” I circle my finger.

He twirls on the ball of his foot to face away. He knows this drill by now. “You were never very good at closing your bedroom door,” he says, voice heavy with resignation. “Who’s this guy, then?”

“What guy?” I quickly pull the dress on, tug on my boots, and treat myself to a few dots of the perfume oil Loretta made me. She didn’t use recipes, so it’s irreplaceable. A label on the base of the bottle, in her handwriting, reads: LIQUID DYNAMITE.

“Who’s the guy you’re putting perfume on for?” He rotates to face me again. He hasn’t fully shape-shifted back into human form yet.

“I’m putting it on for myself, not wasting it on male nostrils. He’s no one,” I say more forcefully when I see the frustration on his face.

“I’m trying to make conversation with you, about what’s going on in your life. Who are you dating?” He sounds like he’s reading from a script. At gunpoint. Did Jamie tell him to report back?

“Someone you wouldn’t like, and I wouldn’t call it dating,” I reply flatly, and duck out of the room under his arm. “You can sleep in my bed again tonight. I’ll take the couch when I get home. There’s a Thai place that delivers, the menu’s on the fridge. Say hi to Megan for me.”

Behind me, his boots are following.

I grab my keys, bag, and jacket in fluid swings of my arms and keep on walking. There’s no way I want to stay and marinate in this awkward tension. I’ll flag down a cab from the main road near the convenience store. Out the door, up the path, he’s behind me.

“You look like you’re running away from home, Darce. Worried you’re actually going to have to think about the wine bottles and your heart?”

If he keeps pressing me, I’m going to tell him what the problem is: Primarily, that I want to unzip his pants. Second problem, I’m the worst fucking person to be having these thoughts about an almost-married man.

Third: I’m so jealous of Megan I’m going to rev the engine of a combine harvester and convert her into a bag of bloody grain.

But these have always been my problems.

“I think you should stop following me.” I turn and walk backward. “Unless you want to come out. That might be too much fun. That might actually classify as living life.”

Valeska badly wants me back behind the picket fence where nothing bad can happen to me. I can see it in him—the strain of his body, the hands folded at his sides. Guard and drag, that’s what he wants to do.

“I have to start early. Darce, please stay in tonight.”

No way am I going to indulge myself in his overprotective Princess Mode. It’s too succulent, too lovely. I can’t be under the same roof as him alone. “Nope.”

“I promised everyone I’d look after you,” he tries again, before realizing what he’s done. Saying that will only make me walk faster.

“I can’t,” I call back to him. “I don’t trust myself anymore.”

I turn as his jaw drops, and now it’s just the sound of my boots. I don’t have to look back to know he watches until I’m out of sight.

It’s what he does.

* * *

TOM IS WRITING JAMIE SPORTS onto a box of my brother’s sports gear. We are attempting the impossible: emptying his room. “So, how was your night? You must have come in pretty late.”

“Barely midnight. I guess that’s pretty late for an early bird like you.”

“Did you have a good time?” He’s quite formal.

“Sure.” Not even for a second did I have a good time. I didn’t see Vince, or anyone I knew. I travel alone overseas, so I’m used to my own company. But something has changed.

I was desperate to get back home. I wanted to lie on the couch with a movie on, listening to Patty’s claws clicking and Tom padding around. His fingers tousling my hair and the clink of a teaspoon in a mug. To quash this weird domestic fantasy, I sat in McDonald’s and ate hot-fudge sundaes, then I got a cab home when I felt confident he was asleep. I’m a McCoward.

I need a new place to sleep tonight, Tom said as I was brushing my teeth this morning, and I’m glad my mouth was full of toothpaste. I might have reflexively replied, No you don’t.

He has charitably erased that weird moment last night. He’s good like that.

I try to do the same. “Jamie’s sitting at his desk, poking away at a calculator. Witness me, officially working harder than him. He sure does like books about dudes being framed by the government.” I’m stacking them into a box.

“Books with short chapters and briefcases of cash,” Tom says, dragging crap out from under the bed. He’s read plenty of Jamie’s discarded books in his time.

“Women with glossy red lips. Speedboats in Monte Carlo.” I pick up one with a revolver on the cover, and it flips open a little too easily to a dirty bit. I read it, leaning against the bed frame.

Tom looks up from stacking some dumbbells together. “Your hard work didn’t last long.”

I hold my finger up. There’s a foaming, grunting climax and I wrinkle my nose. “And now Jamie and I have read the same sex scene. It’s in both of our brains.” I have a full-body shiver. “Why can’t I stop disturbing myself?”

“No idea,” Tom laughs. He takes the book, and to my surprise he reads the entire scene too, flipping over the page with a crease on his brow like he’s studying for an exam.

I watch his eyes move side to side, sweaty words in his head.

My heart wrings itself out, gives me a new flush of blood, and I think I have pink cheeks. If I’m this scandalized just watching Tom read a sex scene, I’d better not let my brain take the logical next step.

Too late. Look at those big hands. Knuckles like walnuts and nice clean nails. They’re the kind of hands that you want all over. And now I’m picturing the huge upward push of his body, locking himself into me, 100 percent deep—

He snaps the book shut and snaps me out of my reverie.

“Well, that was remarkably straightforward.” He tosses the book in the box, his eyes giving me no clues. Is that scene a reasonable proposition to him?

“The guys in these books are drilling for iron ore.”

Tom laughs. “And the ones written in the seventies always mention a brassiere. I was at least seventeen when I realized that was just a bra.”

“You were quite a naïve boy. There are always puckered peaks and nests of curls,” I grunt, lifting a second half-empty box up. “And the women all orgasm after eight hard thrusts. Oh, Richard! Give me a break.” I write on the box: JAMIE’S FUCK BOOKS.

Tom takes the marker and crosses out the middle word. “I seem to recall that Loretta liked her books on the spicy side.”

I snort. “While you guys were off being wholesome and skiing, I was here, warping my brain on her soft-core porn novels. Explains a lot, huh. I’m the person most likely to have a thousand dollars’ worth of sex toys in her dining room.”

“I peeked in her books occasionally,” Tom confesses, the corner of his mouth curling.

“You didn’t.” I laugh in delight. “Well, good for you, Tom Valeska, you dirty kid.”

“When Jamie was in the bathroom or Loretta was making sandwiches, I’d just read a paragraph. I got my sex education right in this house.” He’s stacking junk into a new box. “A bit disjointed, but I eventually pieced it all together. It did give me some . . . unrealistic expectations.”

I want to know what he means very badly, but I just say, “You and me both, buddy.”

I write a lot of checks that my body cannot cash. A heart like mine doesn’t let me get too vigorous, and the guys I choose have no idea. I write on the second box of books: JAMIE’S TWISTED FANTASIES. I hoist the box onto my hip and the edge of the box snags my nipple piercing. I grab my boob and howl.

“Are you okay?” Oh dear, he thinks I’m having a heart attack.

“It’s the piercing. No matter how much time passes, it likes to remind me that it’s there. I’m pretty sure it’s hot-wired straight to my brain.” I watch Tom process this information. I can’t tell if he’s repulsed. “It’s a pain you feel in the roots of your teeth.”

Faint, he says, “Why get it?”

“It’s pretty.”

Tom plucks the box out of my grip with uncharacteristic violence. He walks out to the garage with me trailing him. “There’s no point in wrecking yourself. You’ve packed most of these. Not even Jamie could accuse you of not putting in effort today.”

I walk back into the house for the other box.

“I’m taking it. I’m-taking-it.” I do a quick systems check. Heart’s rock-solid. Everything’s fine. Except Tom’s parked his muscles in the doorway. “Move it.”

He takes the box. “Yeah, yeah. I’d rather you be mad than unconscious.” Off he goes.

In defeat, I fill a box with Jamie’s shoes. “Maybe I can handle a box of fucking shoes,” I say to Diana, who has jumped up on the windowsill. I bet she has big plans to sleep on Tom’s bed. “Live the dream, girl.”

I don’t bother packing these carefully; Jamie would have a whole new wardrobe of shoes by now. When he left, it was with one suitcase. That’s how fast he had to leave before he committed homicide.

Tom returns. “Thanks for letting me use your room. I don’t think I’ve slept so well in years. Your mattress is . . .” He can’t even think of a word. I know what he means.

“If I marry anyone, it will be that bed. It’s why I sleep so much.” I’m getting more wiped out by life. When I travel, I have to lie down in the afternoons. Together, we flip the generic mattress on Jamie’s old bed, and we make the bed with fresh flowered sheets. “When I travel, I miss my bed more than most people I know.”

“You must love traveling to leave a bed like that.”

“As hard as it is for you to believe, yeah. I do. I swear, if Jamie took my passport I am never going to forgive him.”

“Sure you would,” Tom says tentatively. He’s got a rawness in his expression. “You’re exaggerating, aren’t you?”

“Anyone who knows me, knows that that would be the worst thing to do to me. I hate being forced to stay.” I wish my brother would stop intruding on my limited time with Tom. “Are you even going to fit on this little bed?” Jamie didn’t get a lot of action when living here; hence the books.

“I’m sure I will. Don’t forget, I’ll be out in my tent when the renovation starts,” Tom says after a beat. “Hey, what’s this?” He’s pulling out a large canvas from under the bed, and we lean it against the wall. It’s my Rosburgh Portrait Prize–winning portrait. Of who else but my brother.

“He really worked the room like a celebrity that night,” I say as we stare at Jamie. He stares back at us.

Objectively, it’s a phenomenal image. I clicked the camera, but I didn’t do it alone. That’s just the way Jamie’s face interacts with light. That night of the award, he was drunk on his own beauty and cleverness. And champagne, naturally. I felt like he’d won the prize, not me. I had to give short interviews as the youngest award winner and watch Tom fading into the sidelines, Megan hooked onto his arm.

“He slept with two different cocktail waitresses that night. Two.” Tom is dumbfounded, like it is scientifically impossible. It occurs to me that Megan is his one and only. The combine harvester keys are in my hand, so I begin to babble.

“Well, if you insist on carrying the boxes, you could move those five, and the room’s basically done. Jamie won’t believe I helped, probably. Maybe I should soak a handkerchief in sweat and he can get it verified by a lab.”

“You’re obsessed with proving you can work harder than him. It’s just a permanent battle with no ending.” Tom regards the portrait with an expression I cannot read. “You two are so tough on each other. Why don’t you try being friends? When you are, it’s amazing.” He grins at a memory.

“I have to prove myself. Every time I call someone out of the blue, they’ve got this tremor in their voice. Hello? Like they’re imagining me making an emergency call with my blue half-dead hand. That’s why I like guys like Vince. They don’t treat me like an invalid.”

“Vince,” Tom says, seizing on a name at last. He turns it over in his mind like one of Loretta’s tarot cards. “Vince. Not Vince Haberfield from high school.”

“Yeah, Vince Haberfield. He either doesn’t know about my heart, or he forgot, so when we hang it’s not this huge deal.” I don’t really care for Tom’s expression so I go into the kitchen and unearth a takeout menu. “Should I order a pizza for you before I go over to Truly’s? Silly question. Of course I should.”

He’s now sitting on his new bed. “You’re with Vince Haberfield? How’d that little piece of shit turn out?”

“He’s still a piece of shit. And I’m not with him.” I hold out my hand until he realizes what I want; he gives me his phone. I order a pizza I know he’ll like and hand the phone back. “Say something.”

He’s just sitting there. I don’t know what he’s processing, but it seems like a lot. I pat him on the shoulder. “I can see you’re not exactly overjoyed. Bad news to report to Jamie, huh?”

“I’m not reporting anything.” He says that with a tight jaw. But he’s still himself. I don’t get that hint of wolf that I thought I might when we look into each other’s eyes.

“Hey, don’t judge. Dating is an absolute nightmare. Be glad you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I thought you weren’t dating him.” He’s got me there. “Well, I have to worry about it now.” He rubs his hand on his face.

“You are not looking after me,” I tell him in my most firm voice. “No matter how much you want to, I’m not yours to look after.”

I watch as something like a wordless protest twists up out of him, and he’s groaning and putting his face in his hands. He’s miserable. I’m breaking his brain just being in this house.

Time for me to get out of here. One wrong move and he’ll be jamming his stuff back into his suitcase like Jamie did.

“I’m going to Truly’s now for a while. Save me some pizza.” I don’t need to change my dusty clothes. Keys, wallet, shoes, I’m out the door. I am the queen of the instant exit. I’m practically jumping out a dog door. “Bye.”

“Wait,” Tom calls from back in the house, surprise in his tone.

Patty slips out behind me. “Hey, come back!” I chase her up to the pavement and scoop her up. “Naughty.”

There’s a car approaching, and it’s not a pizza delivery car. That’d be one instant miracle pizza. It’s a noisy, black car. I know this car. I set a sprint record running back to the front door, my blood whooshing in my ears, and stuff Patty into Tom’s open hands. “Bye.”

The black car stops at the top of the drive, blocking my car in, and the ignition is turned off. The driver’s door opens.

Vince has either perfect timing, or the worst timing of all time.