Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  “Check out our water view,” Lorraine would say to the men she brought home, in a voice that was supposed to be funny.

  Nessa and Tanya could hear them talking from the living room, where they spent most of their time those days, watching television and movies. When they heard the front door open after one of her dates, Nessa turned down the TV and listened. She liked to know what the man’s voice sounded like, to hear what Lorraine’s voice sounded like with him.

  Before bringing him to the kitchen Lorraine always poked her head in to check on them. “How’s it going, girls?” she asked. “Did you eat enough?”

  They would nod and smile her away. Their mother felt guilty about leaving them alone, but Nessa understood Lorraine needed those men. Since their father left, Lorraine’s loneliness had taken root and bloomed into something wild and frightening.

  Lorraine was always in a better mood when she was seeing someone—that was when the best parts of their mother came out, and she was goofy and affectionate and laughed at all of Nessa’s and Tanya’s jokes. But her moods could come crashing down with no warning, and then she’d disappear into her room for days, where she’d complain on the phone to her friends about the latest breakup, and sometimes to Nessa, too, when Nessa would bring her up snacks and chilled bottles of seltzer.

  As odd as it was having strange men in the house, their mom was happier with them, so Nessa preferred it that way, too. Tanya never liked it, though. It didn’t matter to Tanya who the man was or what kind of mood Lorraine was in around him. “They all suck,” she commented to Nessa, “compared to Dad.”

  * * *

  —

  NESSA WAS TALL enough then that she no longer needed to hoist herself up on the counter to see the water view from their kitchen window. In the night, the swamp looked black and soft, like a hole you could fall into. This was the spot where Lorraine kissed the men she brought home. She showed them the water, then turned around and let them press her against the counter, let them run their hands up and down her sides and her back. Nessa didn’t know how she knew this was what happened, but she did. Their voices stopped and a certain kind of silence radiated from the kitchen into the living room that only Nessa could hear. She could tell by the way Tanya sat beside her, not bothering to breathe quietly, that her sister didn’t notice it.

  Alone in the kitchen, Nessa would turn around so her back was pressed against the counter and lean back, pretend that she was about to be kissed. She would close her eyes and wrap her arms around herself, let her hands linger over her brand-new, miniature breasts. She loved them, more than anything else about herself. The soft way they felt under her palms, but especially the way they looked, hidden but not hidden, beneath her shirts.

  * * *

  —

  BECAUSE NESSA WAS OLDER, she slept on the top bunk. She liked being up there, in her cocoon, where the wall met the ceiling and she couldn’t sit up straight without hitting her head. When she leaned over the side of the bunk she could reach out and touch the ceiling fan. She used it as her own personal place to store her things. Whenever she needed something, she just leaned over and spun the fan until the blade she wanted was closest. She kept her lip gloss and nail polish and compact mirror on one blade, her art supplies on another, and a pack of cigarettes she found in her mother’s purse on the third. Lorraine started smoking after their father left because she thought it would help her lose weight. Her mother would’ve been upset if Nessa knew about the smoking, so Nessa pretended not to notice when her mother’s breath and hair smelled of it, or when she disappeared into the side yard for five-minute spurts. Sometimes when Nessa was alone in the house she would take a cigarette out of the pack and purse it between her lips, blow pretend smoke into somebody’s pretend face, and whisper her name to the ceiling. I’m Nessa, she’d say, as though someone had asked her who she was.

  Lorraine’s bedroom was down the hall, but ever since their father moved out, she didn’t like sleeping in there alone. Sometimes she slept in their room, on the bottom bunk with Tanya. She said she would sleep up top with Nessa, but she always had to pee in the middle of the night and she didn’t like climbing down in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  LORRAINE WORKED IN A CENTER for adults with developmental disabilities, called Stand Together, helping them do things like dress and eat and bathe. Some of them needed support to make meals or apply for jobs, and she helped them do things like that, too. On Fridays they went out on trips, to local parks or to Dunkin’ Donuts. Lorraine’s days were long, but she said her work was meaningful, helping those in need live happier lives.

  Lorraine said there were two types of people in the world: givers and takers. She was a giver, and their father, apparently, was a taker. “That’s what made it work, at first,” Lorraine explained, “but also what made it fall apart.”

  The way Lorraine talked to Nessa, like she was an adult, Nessa knew her mother thought Nessa was a giver, too. Lorraine thought they were the same that way and it made Lorraine feel connected to Nessa, in a different way than how she was connected to Tanya. What her mother didn’t realize back then was that Nessa was a taker. She took more than anybody realized.

  Sometimes it was little things: dollar bills in Lorraine’s night table drawer, or hats and mittens she found in the school lost and found. During art class she slipped glitter glue pens and erasers into her pockets, and one time she walked out with an entire box of markers and no one noticed. After Halloween that year she snuck Tanya’s candy so she could save hers, make it last longer.

  In the free hour she had after school, before Tanya or her mother got home, Nessa really went crazy. She liked to eat an entire microwave pizza, plus a handful of cookies, and then she’d take a bag of goldfish up to her room with her to snack on while she did her homework. By the time dinner rolled around, Nessa was stuffed and bloated, but she still ate whatever her mother put on the table, even if it was another microwave pizza. They had to go to the grocery store twice as often those days.

  Recently, she’d taken something bigger: a watermelon-flavored lip gloss from the convenience store, even though she had the money to pay for it in her pocket. It was easier than she expected it to be, just a matter of curling the little thing into her jacket sleeve and walking out, dumb and innocent, which was how she looked anyway. Every morning she took it down from the fan and dabbed it on her lips before school. It made her lips shine in a soft, pink way that reminded Nessa of the way flowers looked in rain. When Tanya asked to borrow some, she went back to the store the next day and took one for her, too.

  * * *

  —

  LORRAINE MET HER men on a dating website that her friend Wendy helped her sign up on. Nessa snooped on her mother’s computer sometimes—the dating site was usually open—just to see what might be coming. There were three pictures of her mother up there, two of them photos she’d seen before in the albums they had downstairs, one of them unfamiliar. In the first one, Lorraine was wearing her favorite leopard-print blouse, and she had her hand on her hip. She looked clean and pretty and a little bit annoyed, like whoever was taking the picture had made a stupid joke. Nessa imagined her father saying, Flash those pearly whites, babe, which was something he’d said before, back when he still called Lorraine babe. Then there was a close-up of Lorraine’s face, in midlaughter, her eyes squinty and sparkly. Nessa recognized it from a photograph her father had taken of her and Tanya and their mother on the beach, but the photo had been cropped so that all you could see of Tanya and Nessa were the tops of their tanned shoulders.

  The third one barely looked like Lorraine at all. She was wearing a black dress Nessa had never seen before and was gazing at the camera with big eyes and lips that were just barely touching, like she was about to lean in and tell you a secret.

  Nessa clicked around and saw that Lorraine was messaging back and forth with a man named Raymond. Raymond was balding and
had a soft bulgy nose and a smile that was nice but hesitant, like he wasn’t sure if he should show his teeth or not. He had asked Lorraine if she would like to get dinner with him, and she had answered that yes, she would. Then he listed four different restaurants they could go to, and though Lorraine hadn’t responded yet, Nessa knew that his list was probably disappointing to her mother. Lorraine didn’t like making decisions like that; she preferred the man to take charge.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A FRIDAY, which meant they were spending the night at their father’s. Nessa and Tanya packed overnight bags to bring over to the new apartment complex where Jonathan now lived. His building had an indoor pool and an elegant lobby downstairs with big comfortable chairs and vending machines and, to Nessa, the feeling of staying at a nice hotel.

  Their father had been away for work in Salt Lake City, and it was the longest that she and Tanya had ever gone without seeing him—six weeks.

  Nessa was in the kitchen with her mother when they heard him pull up and honk. Lorraine, who was chopping vegetables, shook her head and smiled angrily.

  “Nessa,” she said, without looking up. “Will you tell your father to please come in?”

  “Sure,” Nessa said, and she ran outside to get him.

  Her father’s car was out front, humming with heat and music. His windows were tinted and when he saw her he rolled his down and stuck his head out. “Hi, Ness.”

  Nessa waved. His face was shaved clean and his hair was shorter than the last time she’d seen him. She tried to smile, but it turned out feeling ugly, like when you smile for a photograph and you know without even seeing it that it came out poorly.

  “Mom wants you to come in,” she said.

  Jonathan smiled a little, like he was expecting Nessa might say this, and he turned to the passenger seat and that was when Nessa realized that someone else was in the car with him. “Give me two minutes,” he said. And though she couldn’t see who he was speaking to, Nessa knew by his tone of voice that it was a woman. The idea of her father with another woman made something painful tighten in Nessa’s chest. The truth was, it was an entirely different matter than her mother with another man, mostly because Jonathan was someone who knew what he wanted while Lorraine was someone who was still trying to find what she needed.

  Nessa ran ahead so that she could watch from the front hall as her father walked up to the house. It wasn’t often that she got to see him coming home anymore, and she wanted to commit it to memory.

  When he came inside, Lorraine appeared in the hallway with a fresh coat of lipstick and a spatula in her hand. “How was your trip?” she asked squeakily. “I wanted to touch base with you about Tanya’s medication.”

  “Still taking the heartburn stuff?” He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. “The trip was good, thanks. Busy.”

  Lorraine nodded. Her face was serious, the one she used when she spoke about her clients. “Yes. She should take it thirty to fifty minutes before eating. Not after she eats, otherwise it’s not as effective.” She glanced at Nessa. “Nessa knows the drill.”

  Her father smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Yup. Great. Same as last time.”

  “Tanya’s still packing. Want to come in?” She nodded toward the front door, which he had left open. “You’re letting in the cold air.”

  “Sorry about that.” He shut the door. “Is she almost ready?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lorraine started to say, but then Tanya appeared at the top of the stairs, her backpack so stuffed it was practically exploding off her back. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, and then without warning she swung the backpack off her back and pitched it down the stairs where it landed with a thud at the bottom.

  * * *

  —

  “GIRLS, THIS IS SIMONE,” Jonathan announced as Nessa and Tanya climbed into the backseat, Tanya singing, Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. When Tanya realized there was another person in the car she stopped singing and froze.

  “My friend from work,” he added.

  Simone turned around and smiled. She was pretty, not in the soft, flowery way their mother was pretty, but in a gorgeous way—in the kind of way that you can’t quite believe you’re looking at a real person. Her skin was olive toned, her features lush and dramatic—rosebud lips, eyes the shape and color of almonds, hair that was somehow brown and gold and bronze all at the same time.

  “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you two,” she said. She stuck out her arm to shake hands, but they both just stared at it.

  “Nice to meet you,” Nessa said, because someone had to say something.

  Simone tucked her arm back in the front seat with the rest of her. “You too, Nessa,” she said, and Nessa was surprised that the woman knew her name. Then Simone and her father shared a smile that made Nessa’s stomach hurt.

  Next to her, Tanya was squirming, trying to heave the backpack off her back and pulling at her scarf, which was knotted in the straps. Nessa reached over and helped untangle her. There was a heaviness in the car, coming mostly from Tanya, and Nessa knew how her sister was feeling. How stuck Tanya was and how much she wanted to cry but how useless that would be because this was their life now.

  “What do you want for dinner, girls?” her father asked. “Pizza?”

  Simone looked back at them and Nessa wondered if she thought by girls he was referring to her.

  “We always have pizza,” Tanya said darkly.

  “Pizza’s just an option, Tee. We’ll have whatever you want.”

  “There’s an excellent Indian restaurant right around the corner from your dad’s,” Simone said then. “Do you two like Indian?”

  Tanya stared harshly at Simone and then turned to Nessa and whispered, Pasta.

  “Tanya would like pasta,” Nessa repeated to her father. Then she smiled at Simone, who was still peering back at them. Part of Nessa felt proud that somebody so beautiful was looking at her the way Simone was, but Nessa had a feeling it had more to do with how handsome her father was than something to do with her.

  Their father was the kind of handsome that made women laugh and made girls shy. He had a smile that made you want to smile back. Nessa understood then that having that kind of handsome in your life meant something—it meant something huge to her mother. Without it, Lorraine was floundering, always looking around, trying to figure out who she was without it.

  “Pasta it is,” Jonathan declared, and suddenly the car was speeding up and they were on the highway that would bring them across town to where his apartment complex was waiting. They all went silent, and Nessa thought of her mother back home, still with that dark lipstick on and the spatula.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THEY ATE, Jonathan asked who wanted to go swimming and Tanya jumped up and yelled, Me me me. Nessa and Tanya went into the bathroom to change into their suits. They peeled off their clothing and left them in a pile on the floor, then danced around and made ugly faces in the mirror.

  At one point Tanya stopped dancing and stared at Nessa’s chest in the mirror. “Boobs,” she announced.

  Nessa smirked. “Jealous?”

  “No,” Tanya said, but Nessa saw the way she was staring at them.

  Nessa pulled on her bikini top and threw her hands behind her head and made a come-hither look in the mirror. Tanya copied her, but her face looked more like she had a burp stuck in her throat.

  “Do you think Simone is pretty?” Nessa asked.

  Tanya slipped her arms through the straps of her pink one-piece. “Simone looks like this.” She furrowed her brow and crossed her eyes and made buckteeth all at once and her face transformed into something so revolting that they collapsed on the floor laughing.

  * * *

  —

  THE ROOM WITH THE POOL was warm and echoey in a way that made winter outside seem
far away. The water was a bright candy-colored blue that turned a shade darker in the deep end and shimmered a little under the dim ceiling lights. Nessa and Tanya were barefoot, just in their suits, and Nessa followed her sister to the edge of the pool.

  Tanya sat and dipped her feet in, slowly swished her legs back and forth. Nessa knelt beside her and dipped her fingers in, touched the back of Tanya’s neck, and Tanya shrieked.

  Their father and Simone came over, him in his navy blue trunks and her in a yellow bikini.

  “How is it?” Simone asked Tanya.

  Tanya fluttered the water with her feet. “Cold.”

  Nessa lowered herself into the pool, sending shivers up her spine. She took a deep breath, squeezed her eyes closed, and dunked her head under. In the thick quiet of the water she stretched her arms and legs and propelled herself forward, sleek and weightless as an eel.

  Nessa was gliding toward the deep end when she felt a hand grab her foot. She lunged upward and burst out of the water, ready to pounce on Tanya, but when she opened her eyes, Tanya was still on the edge of the pool next to Simone and she saw it was her father who was in the pool with her, treading water and grinning.

  She gave him a look and dove toward him, searched blindly for his foot underwater. She found it and squeezed hard, felt his toes buckle inside her palm. She wriggled toward the surface, smiling. Bubbles exploded from her mouth and nose, like her happiness leaking out of her.

  When she opened her eyes, though, Simone and Tanya were both in the water paddling around and her father was no longer just hers. Tanya pinched her nose, took a big breath of air, and went under. Simone was drifting around as though in a bathtub, her long hair wet up to her neck but the top still dry and soft.