Torn Away

by Jennifer Brown

  I pondered that. Our whole lives, the lives of four people, tossed in a landfill with all the other garbage. Why do we spend so much time collecting stuff, anyway, if that’s what it comes down to in the end?

  “So are you still living at the motel?” I asked.

  “If you call it living, sure,” he answered.

  “Is there power in Elizabeth yet?”

  “Yes.”

  I sipped my soda, feeling the cold sink down into my fingers and toes, the sugar and carbonation rushing to my head. I kicked off my shoes and held my feet under the floor vent, letting the air-conditioning dry my sweaty toes. I’d run out of things to ask him. He wasn’t going to give me answers—not real ones, anyway—so what was the point? We both slipped into silence. I leaned my head against the window and watched the lines being eaten up by the front of the truck, until my eyes were too heavy from watching and I fell asleep.

  I awoke when my body sensed that we had stopped moving. I sat up straight, stretching my stiff neck, and looked around. We were in a parking lot, but not one I recognized. I peered out the window. We weren’t in Elizabeth, I could see that much. Ronnie had put the truck into park and was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands resting on the bottom loop of the steering wheel.

  “Where are we?” I asked on a yawn. I grabbed my soda and took another sip. It had gotten warm and watery, but it still tasted like heaven. A sign on the side of a nearby building said WAVERLY PUBLIC LIBRARY.

  “Waverly,” he said, as I made the connection. His voice was rough and scratchy. He was born in Waverly, Grandfather Harold had said of Clay. About an hour thataway.

  “Waverly? Why?”

  Waverly was about an hour southeast of Elizabeth. We’d driven through it once or twice on road trips, and Mom had always pointed out that she’d grown up there.

  “Godforsaken hellhole,” she’d always say. “Hold your breath. You don’t want to breathe in judgment. Oppression is contagious.” And even though we had no idea what she was talking about, we’d always make a game of it—see who could hold their breath the longest. See if we could make it all the way through the town without taking a breath.

  Ronnie picked at the steering wheel with his dirty thumbnails. “At the funeral…” he said, and then he paused so long, I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. He reached up and wiped his jaw with his hand a few times, then went back to picking. “Some people showed up, Jersey.”

  “I wanted to be there. I should have been.”

  “I was trying to keep you from being hurt.”

  “My mother died. It’s too late to keep me from being hurt. I should have been there.”

  “Your mom’s parents came,” he said, leveling his eyes at me at last.

  I sat back, stunned. I had never met my mom’s parents. Mom hadn’t seen or talked to her parents since before I was born. They’d told her that if she wanted to run off with that drunk troublemaker Clay Cameron, she no longer had a family to come home to, and Mom had taken them at their word. She had been glad to do so. She always talked about how they judged her, how she was never good enough for them, how they never understood her and forced her to be a perfect little princess when all she wanted was to be normal. When they disowned her, she was glad to be done with them. To hear her tell it, she had no idea where they lived, much less if they were alive or dead. I think in our hearts we all assumed they were dead.

  But they were alive.

  And she was the dead one.

  Ronnie went back to picking, I think because it kept him from having to look at me. “They didn’t even know about Marin,” he said. “They knew about you because your mom was pregnant when she ran away. But they didn’t even know Marin existed.”

  “She didn’t run away. They disowned her,” I said, not caring a bit. “That’s their own fault.”

  “They live here in Waverly,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, and my insides started to turn cold as all the pieces fell into place. Mom growing up here, telling us to hold our breaths so we didn’t catch the oppression and judgment alive and well in Waverly. Ronnie was driving me to the very town where my grandparents lived. “They’ve always been right here. They still live in the same house your mom grew up in.”

  “But they didn’t bother to come by until now?” I wanted to keep him talking, to turn the conversation around. Maybe I could stop what I knew was coming. Maybe if I made him understand how much Mom hated them, he wouldn’t do what he was about to do. Again. “They didn’t care enough to try to see us until after she was dead?”

  Ronnie shrugged. “They said they tried. When you were a baby. But according to them, your mom called the police to have them escorted off her property. She told them she never wanted to see them or speak to them again. Of course, this was when she was still with Clay. They… gave up.”

  “You don’t do that,” I said, and I realized that I wasn’t sure if I was talking about my grandparents or about Mom or about Ronnie himself. “You don’t give up on your family. You don’t just… leave… when your child… needs you.” My breath hitched every few words as tears and dread fell over me.

  “I’m sorry, Jersey,” Ronnie said, letting his hands rest limply in his lap. “I called them this morning. They’re willing to take you in.”

  “No,” I said. My nose dripped and soaked into my jeans. I clutched at his elbow. “Please, Ronnie. I want to go home. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t cause any problems. Ever. I don’t know them, and Mom hated them. This isn’t fair. Why do you hate me so much? Why do you think it’s so bad to have me around?”

  He shook his head and put the truck into drive. My hand slipped off his arm and landed in my lap in defeat. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “But I can’t take care of you. Every time I look at you, I see her. Every time I hear you talk, I think about how I let everyone down. I think about how I couldn’t save any of you. Not one.” He glanced at me as he turned down a side road, the street sign reading FLORA. The houses were tidy, landscaped, painted. Not big, but bigger than our old house. “What good am I to anyone if I can’t be there when it most matters?”

  “But I’m still alive. You can still save me. It matters now.”

  He pulled into a driveway. My tears slowed as I took in the white-and-brown Tudor-style house, flowers blooming in orderly raised beds surrounding the swept sidewalk. More flowers blooming in quaint window boxes. A saintly-looking statue on the front porch. The door opened slowly. I wiped my face with my palms.

  “I know you don’t understand,” Ronnie said. “But you’ve got to make this work, Jersey. I’m selling the property, anyway. Going back east. I’ve already got the transfer okayed at work. You can’t come home. There’s not going to be one.”

  I tore my eyes away from the pale hand that still clutched the door. The hand must have belonged to one of my grandparents, but the shadows kept me from seeing who.

  “You’re not going to stay where they’re buried?”

  “Every time I look at that neighborhood, at the house, at every business and building I pass, I’m reminded of how I failed them. I can’t live a life that way. I’ve got to go.”

  “So you’re abandoning all of us,” I said, not a question, but a statement.

  “I’m saving myself,” he said very quietly.

  It dawned on me that on some level I had expected Ronnie to change his mind. To get a little distance, heal, see his mistake, want me back. In some ways, I was more aghast at the realization that he would never change his mind than I was at seeing Mom’s lipstick smeared across Meg’s and Lexi’s faces. I was more insulted by this than I’d been by Clay and Tonette insulting me and saying I didn’t belong. I was more shocked by Ronnie’s selfishness than I had been by the tornado itself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way. He wasn’t supposed to choose himself over us.

  “You’re a coward.” But before I could say any more, a gray-haired man wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball c
ap knocked on Ronnie’s window. My mouth snapped shut. The man had a large, bulbous nose and huge eyebrows. But he also had wet, pouty lips that sort of reminded me of Marin’s, and out from his cap, several curly strands of hair snaked around his ears.

  Ronnie rolled down the window.

  “Thank you for this,” he said to the old man, and the anger returned. I wanted to punch Ronnie. For casting me out, for abandoning Mom and Marin, for being so dry-eyed and cavalier about the whole thing.

  The old man nodded. “Not a problem. She got any bags?”

  “Not really. Just a couple up here she can carry. We lost everything, as you saw.”

  My jaw tensed. Ronnie had taken them to my house? To Mom’s house? How could he? Mom would have been furious. She’d kept them away on purpose.

  “You get any word from FEMA yet?” the old man asked, and as Ronnie answered, I tuned him out, turning my gaze to the woman standing in the front doorway, wringing her hands, a melon-colored sweater hanging over a lighter melon-colored tunic. Even from the truck, I could see that she shared my knock knees, my rounded shoulders, my thick waist. All this time I’d been wondering who exactly I looked like, when the person I resembled most was right here in Waverly.

  “Ready?” the old man said, and I realized he had been peering past Ronnie over to where I sat.

  “Huh?”

  “You ready?” Ronnie said.

  I glared at him. “No. But I guess I don’t have a choice,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “you don’t. You’ve got to make it work this time.”

  He went back to his picking on the steering wheel, and the old man slowly maneuvered his way around to my side of the truck. I clutched the top handle of my backpack and pushed Marin’s purse tightly up my shoulder. My grandfather opened my door and I slid out.

  “Have a nice life,” I said to my stepdad.

  I knew I would never see him again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  My grandmother said my name in pretty much every sentence. “Jersey,” she kept repeating. “Jersey, would you like some coffee cake? Jersey, let’s put your things away. What time do you like to wake up in the morning, Jersey?” It was like she couldn’t get enough of it. It was driving me crazy already.

  I followed behind her in my burr-covered socks, my shoes left by the front door next to theirs. She showed me to my room, a lavender-and-white monstrosity of ruffles and gingham and scented soaps and fabric flowers, so different from the porch at my other grandparents’ house it made my brain ache. A plate of cookies sat on the nightstand. I could smell them from the doorway. My stomach rumbled.

  “This used to be Christine’s room,” she said, stepping aside to let me pass. I shuffled in, trying to imagine my mom in such a space. Trying to see her stretched out across the cloud of bedding, her feet kicked up in the air behind her as she talked on the phone. Trying to imagine her pushing out the window screen and shimmying through to meet Clay, kissing him on his boozy mouth.

  It was getting harder and harder to call up mental images of Mom. Especially any version of Mom that might have lived here—this was so different from the Mom I’d known.

  There was a framed photo on the dresser. A little girl on a man’s shoulders, his hair a mess, the little girl holding a baseball cap proudly in the air.

  “That’s Christine and Barry,” the woman said, and when I continued to stare at her blankly, she added, “Barry’s your grandpa. I’m Patty. Did you know that already? I don’t know what Christine shared with you.”

  I said nothing. She didn’t want to know what Mom had shared with us about them. And even if she did, I wasn’t in the mood to tell her. The eight-year-old inside me was afraid to breathe in this house, afraid of catching the oppression Mom had always talked about. Afraid of being judged. How did I know who this woman really was? How did I know she wouldn’t turn on me the way Dani’s mom had, or give up on me the way Clay had, or lie to me the way Mom had, or cast me out the way Ronnie had? If I’d learned anything from the tornado, it was that I couldn’t trust anyone but myself. My new grandmother might want to pretend that we were all one big happy family, but I knew the truth. One framed photo of a little girl mugging on her dad’s shoulders a decade before being kicked out of the family does not make up for a lifetime of being cast out.

  In that regard, Mom was the same as me, I realized. We were both motherless. The realization flooded my heart, made me feel closer to her somehow.

  My grandmother interrupted my thoughts. “You can call me Grandma, though,” she said. “I’m so happy to finally meet you, Jersey. We both are.” I stared at her, unmoving, until she finally withered back from the doorway. “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom’s right across the hall here. Feel free to take a nap or explore or do whatever it is you want to do. We’ll have dinner at six, but if you get hungry before, you can have those cookies there.” She pointed at the plate. I refused to look at it. “Or we can get you something else. Just holler, Jersey.”

  She shuffled out and closed the door.

  The moment she left, I devoured the cookies, greedily, guiltily.

  Once they were gone, I stood by the night table, not sure what I was feeling anymore. The room was nice. It smelled good and it was bright and cozy. My mom had a history here, so in a way it felt comforting. But she’d hated that history. I was torn. If I decided to be happy here, wouldn’t I be betraying Mom’s memory?

  I finally shrugged my backpack down onto the floor and dug through it for some clean clothes. I pulled out a shirt and shorts from Terry. The shirt had a CCHS Captains logo on it, and for some reason, my old Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt popped into my mind.

  I wasn’t ever the biggest on team spirit. My friends and I were hardly athletes. In fact, we theater geeks never understood why anyone would want to run around in a field or in circles on a track, and the athletes never understood why we performing-arts-center groupies wanted to sweat under a spotlight reciting Shakespeare sonnets in language that didn’t make sense. It was a mutual misunderstanding that neither of us had any desire to rectify.

  But everyone owned spirit wear. We wore it on football Fridays, mostly. Even if we never exactly bothered to go to the game.

  Marin was obsessed with my Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt. She loved its cartoon bulldog and bright orange lettering. She’d drag it off my bed or out of the clean laundry basket and would dance around the living room in it, on her tiptoes, total Marin-style, the sweatshirt hanging to her ankles, the sleeves flapping in the air.

  I told her once that when I graduated she could have my sweatshirt. You’d have thought I’d bequeathed her a diamond mine, the way she whooped and hollered and jumped around the room. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that by the time she got into high school, the sweatshirt would be way out of style and ugly and old and she wouldn’t want it.

  Sitting on my mother’s old bedroom floor, with Ronnie gone and me having no choice but to breathe in Waverly, I was glad I hadn’t told her those things. I was glad she was still looking forward to things on the day she died.

  I sank to the floor and picked up Marin’s purse. Most of the lipstick had wiped off, but it was still rubbed into the cracks, the stitching. I grabbed a tissue from a box that sat on the dresser and scrubbed at the face of the purse. The lipstick was mostly gone, but if I looked hard enough, I could still see traces of pink.

  I pulled the lipstick out of the purse, then rubbed across the top of it with the tissue, too. The stick was no longer sharp, the way Marin liked it, but at least it didn’t have Meg’s and Lexi’s germs on it anymore.

  I dropped it back inside the purse and found a piece of gum.

  I drew a sweatshirt on the foil.

  Marin is a Barking Bulldog.

  I hid it with the others, noticing that the collection was getting pretty big now. Which meant that the gum supply was getting low. I didn’t want to chew the last pieces. To run out of Marin’s gum would seem
like an end that I hadn’t fully realized yet, and didn’t want to.

  I smoothed the foils from Meg’s and Lexi’s gum.

  Marin loves Minnie Mouse the most because she has a bow.

  Marin has tiny toenails.

  I changed into clean clothes and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the things I could write on foils for Marin. All the ways I wanted to remember her. I could probably start writing and never stop.

  But eventually there was a light tapping on my door and I sat up guiltily, as if I’d been doing something wrong. My grandmother poked her head in.

  “Would you like a snack?” she asked.

  I thought dinner was at six, I almost answered sarcastically, but then I remembered that I wasn’t speaking to these people—at least not yet—so I just stared at her. I held my breath.

  “I’ve got some strawberries,” she said hopefully.

  I let the air out through my nose, then took another silent breath in and held it again.

  “Would you like a soda, Jersey?” she tried.

  Nothing. I let my mom’s hatred fill my eyes.

  My grandmother chewed her lip. “We want to help you, Jersey,” she said. “We know this is hard for you.”

  I turned my gaze away from her then, pointed it straight at the photo of my mom. Did they? Did they really know how hard this was for me? To lose everything? To be bounced around to see who wanted me the least? To know that I would never have my life back again and that I was totally alone? It was like the tornado had ripped through my house and torn me away. It was impossible that they could understand the rage inside me. The confusion and guilt and surrender. The hard edges that had begun to rub open, raw sores onto my heart. Because even I didn’t understand it, and I was the one living it. And besides, if they really understood what it felt like to be inside my head, my heart, right now, they would run in fear. They would leave me alone.

  She stayed, propped up by the door, for what seemed far too long, then finally sighed.

  “Well, here, will this help, anyway?”