I know it’s risky, but I can’t help sidling up to my father’s house and unlatching the gate to his small backyard. I just want a glimpse of Joanne. I’ve been gone for only a few hours, but I still want to know she’s all right. I tiptoe down the steps and sneak over to the patio door, and suddenly I’m looking at her: my little sister sitting alone in the middle of the couch, her hands clasped in her lap. She’s watching television, and her face is sad. It’s surreal to be spying on her like this, to find this sheet of glass marking the line between our worlds. I want to run and I want never to leave her, both at once. I want whatever she’s watching to make her smile. If I could just see her smile—
I wait, and her face is so still, and the longer I stand there, the greater the heaviness that presses on me. For a second, the clock winds back, and I remember her standing behind the balcony door of our parents’ apartment, waiting for me to come home from school. I can see her dark hair. I can see the shape of her, the roundness. I was in second grade then, and she was still too young for school. She was also too young to pronounce my name properly, so she called me Bee, and though I couldn’t hear her as I made my way toward our building from the bus stop, I knew that’s what she was saying as she pointed her chubby finger excitedly and pressed herself against the glass. From the moment Joanne was born, she was the light I came home to.
But now I’ve left her, and she is sitting alone watching television, and the basement lights are spilling out onto the patio, and behind me it’s getting dark, and I don’t know if I should sneak away or stay here watching her. Overhead, birds are making their final trails of the evening across the sky. It’s time to do something.
I knock gently. Joanne doesn’t hear me over the television, so I knock a little louder and whisper her name, and this time she looks. She sees me, and a moment of recognition, deep and visceral, passes between us. As she comes to let me in, I put my finger to my lips to ask her to be quiet, but as soon as she slides the door open, she starts speaking normally, almost authoritatively. “Where have you been? Dad called the police and said you ran away.”
“Shhh,” I whisper. “Please.”
I try to hug her, but she folds her arms against her ribs. She whispers back, “Why do I have to shush? Why can’t you just come home already?”
I crouch down to hide behind the love seat. “Because I can’t.”
“Why not, Rita? Why not?”
I don’t know how to answer, so I ask her to bring me something to eat instead.
“Why should I bring you something to eat if you’re not coming home?” She’s on the edge of tears, I can tell, but holding firm, her arms locked across her.
“Because I’m hungry,” I say, looking up at her.
“Fine,” she says, dropping her hands to her sides, and as she goes up to the kitchen, I start regretting how easily she gave in.
She returns with an ice cream sandwich. “Thank you,” I say, unwrapping it quickly. Sweet cold fills my mouth. “What’s Dad doing?”
“I don’t know. He’s up in his room.” She crouches down next to me. “Is it good?”
I nod. Joanne has always loved food—not only eating it but watching others eat it, and in this regard, she and I have been great partners. When it came to French fries, I ate the soggy ones, and she ate the crisp ones. I sucked the chocolate off peanut M&M’s, and she ate my spit-out peanuts. I licked the cream out of the Oreos, and she ate the cookies. Anyone else would think this was gross, but not Joanne. She watched me wide-eyed and hungry, and whatever I discarded, she ate with gusto—pizza crusts, meat, empty ice cream cones.
I offer her a bite of my ice cream, but she shakes her head no. I sense the wrongness then, not only of this moment when, for the first time, she’s refusing something I’m giving her, but also of our lives, and how neither of us has the power to fix it. “I’m sorry—” I start, but just then I hear the heavy plodding of my father’s footsteps overhead. Startled, I jump up and drop my ice cream on the floor. Joanne and I look at each other, not sure what will happen next, but then my father’s footsteps are coming closer, and I panic, and I bolt. I slip back out onto the patio, but before I take off, I look over my shoulder. Joanne is standing behind the glass, crying.
I love you, I mouth to her, and then I’m gone.
As I pound through the neighborhood at top speed, I’m aware that I can’t possibly get far enough fast enough. Still, my sneakers mark their quick and steady rhythm on the pavement, and I think that maybe if I run hard enough, the air will catch me, and I will fly.
But eventually I get tired of running. Then I get tired of walking. I settle onto a back staircase of an apartment building and close my eyes. But I can’t shake that last image of my sister; I can’t stop seeing her face.
Once, when I was in the sixth grade, my gifted and talented group went to a library, where we were told to think of any question in the world we wanted the answer to. We all wrote our questions down on little slips of paper, and when I brought mine up to the teacher, she stopped and looked at me as if I’d offended her somehow. My question was Why do parents hit their children? She folded my paper up and handed it back to me, then told me I should think of a different question. My questions now are no easier to answer: How could I leave my sister like that? How could I stay? So I change the question: How can I sleep here tonight? I curl up on one side, just below the top step, and rest my head on my arm. The night is cool, the concrete steps like a vacuum sucking the heat from my body. I briefly consider trying to sneak back into my father’s house and grab a jacket. No going back, I tell myself.
But the night is rough. No matter how I turn my body, the stairs dig into my ribs. Every so often I’m jolted by late-nighters coming home. “I’m just waiting for a friend,” I mutter, sitting up straight and trying to look awake, though they don’t seem to care.
In the morning, I find a church and go inside because I’ve seen in movies how people get saved in churches. Though they’re too far away, I want to touch the stained glass windows, the glowing colors. One of my favorite toys ever was the Lite-Brite my grandmother gave me for my fifth birthday, because you could push into the black and find light, and because you could actually touch the light—those jeweled pegs—as opposed to the one time I touched a lightbulb and blistered my finger.
So I sit on the wooden bench watching the light change on the windows and waiting for someone to come and tell me about God. But no one comes.
Eventually I walk back up Rockville Pike. I call Cindy from the lobby again, and this time she answers the phone. I ride the elevator up, and she sneaks me into her room, and we spend the night giggling in her bed, and while she’s in school the next day, I hide in her closet. For eight hours I sit beneath her dresses and whisper songs into the darkness—sweet dreams are made of this—until she comes home and we eat hot dogs and call boys and pluck our eyebrows in the mirror.
But that evening, the police find me in her room, and this time instead of taking me home, they take me to a group home called Open Door, where I spend two weeks with girls who tease me for being a virgin and who make my short experience as a runaway seem laughable. But we cook tortellini together in a big kitchen, and that’s sort of fun. In order to be released from the group home, I have to promise I won’t run away again. So I promise, and then it’s summer, and Joanne and I go to stay with our mother, and Joanne and I are still in our different worlds even when we’re right next to each other, and she starts spending most of her time with her best friend’s family across the street, and my mother is like a giant beanstalk of anger, cracking things as it grows, and when I start wearing a bra, my mother starts saying I’m just like a hooker, especially when I’m sitting down and forget to cross my legs, and now she’s raging through the house, flinging books and candles around and yelling at her boyfriend, telling him he’s a dumb fuck and why does he have to be such a dumb fuck, and then at me, wanting to know why I’m
such a slut and why I have to wear so much eyeliner. I don’t know why my eyeliner makes her so angry. But I can’t stop remembering that once, for a little while, she loved me.
“I’m going outside,” I say.
She puts her hand on her hip and looks toward the window. “You better not go farther than where I can see you.”
The air outside is balmy and slightly sweet. A streetlight emits a small halo into the dark, while summer lingers around everything—my bare shoulders and legs, the occasional car that whooshes by, the silver half-face of the moon. There’s something exciting about this stillness, about the slow air settling on my skin. I sit on the hood of my mother’s car and tilt my head back to watch the sky.
Someone has turned on music, and Roger Daltrey’s gravelly voice comes surging from an open window into me. He’s singing about teenage wasteland, and the force of his voice, surrounded by the power of the guitar and drums and even a violin, is like a dozen hands on my body, lifting me. After the song crescendos, I feel its last note resound inside me, and though whoever turned the music on has now turned it off again, all I can feel is the lasting vibration of it. The stillness that, a few minutes earlier, was welcoming, now seems stagnant. And suddenly I can’t stop thinking about the road outside our apartment complex. All I’d need to do is cross a field to get to it.
I make my move.
Out on Liberty Road, I hitch a ride back to Rockville and check my reflection in the pay phone outside a 7-Eleven. Here there is motion, every minute a new car, a new face, the sound of tires moving over the asphalt. I waste no time calling Cindy.
“Guess what!” I practically yell. “I’m on Rockville Pike!”
“What are you doing here?” Her voice is guarded, and it crushes me instantly. “I thought you were supposed to be at your mom’s for the summer.”
“Yeah, but she was going psycho again, so I took off.”
“Wow, girl, you’re crazy! What are you gonna do now?”
A car pulls in behind me and lights up my legs. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, I’d tell you to stay here, but you know what happened last time. After the whole police thing, Uncle Frank would throw a fit if he saw you.”
“I guess he’s home, now, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s here all right. Look, Rita, I really wish I could help you, but—”
“No, I totally understand.” My voice comes out too high. “Besides, the police would probably check there again anyway.” I scrape at the sidewalk with the front of my sandal.
“Do you need any money? I could meet you,” she says, apologetically.
I push through the makeup and scraps of paper in my purse and collect my change. “No, I’m fine. I’ve got money.”
“Okay. Well maybe we can get together soon, meet at the mall or something.” We both know this won’t happen.
“Sounds good. Thanks, Cindy.”
“Be careful, you.”
I stand leaning into the phone booth for a minute, trying to think. Cars keep driving by and it’s late and warm and I’m getting tired. I consider walking back the mile to the apartments near my father’s house, but I can’t bear the thought of another night on those steps. I dig through my purse again and find a phone number I’d been keeping, just in case.
Fifteen minutes later, a Rolls-Royce pulls into the 7-Eleven, and I get in. The car reeks of cologne.
“I’m so glad you called,” says Mr. Malekzadeh, stretching out the last word. “I thought you probably got rid of my number.”
“Why would I do that?” I ask, looking out the window at the buildings passing by. I know I should feel nervous, but I don’t. I feel resigned.
We drive the rest of the way in silence, and this time in the elevator I don’t pretend to be glamorous. This time, I know where I’m going.
Out comes the wine, the pot, the tongue—and now I don’t resist. Now I will know what Cindy knows, what the group home girls know. Mr. Malekzadeh unties my halter and shoves his tongue inside my mouth. But when he unzips his pants, I step back. I don’t expect it to be so big, so aggressive-looking.
“Put your hand on it,” he says.
But I can’t. “I’ve never done this before.”
Mr. Malekzadeh’s pursed lips curve to a smile, as if he’s seeing me for the first time. “You’re a virgin?”
I nod.
“Then we’ll go slow,” he says, taking my hand and leading me into the bedroom, where he takes off the rest of my clothes and lays me down on the bed. There’s a window behind me, and I tilt my head back to see the moon, a halved pearl.
Mr. Malekzadeh reaches for the bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion on his nightstand and pumps it into his hand, slathering it on himself and on me. The scent reminds me of baby diapers, a thought quickly knocked out by the force of him pushing against me. But it won’t go in.
He becomes relentless with the lotion, pumping, then trying to push himself in again, then pumping, then pushing. It seems as if a week goes by. And then suddenly something breaks. There is the moon. There is Mr. Malekzadeh on top of me thrusting and grunting. There is the moon. There is the pressure, the pain. There is the lumbering sound of my father’s footsteps; there are my mother’s glazed eyes. There is the moon. There is the screaming in my mind with every thrust: Fuck you, Mom! Fuck you, Dad! I can’t say it enough. We are both relentless.
When it’s over, there’s a fire between my legs. Mr. Malekzadeh lies back sweating and lights a cigarette. I smoke one, too, and grow older. Our smoke curls toward the ceiling, swirling up to a single haze over the room. On the sheets, my blood is smeared into a sloppy star. There’s a power in the destruction, a strange satisfaction in the proof.
After we press our cigarettes out, he gets up and, without a word, starts dressing, so I get dressed, too. He moves briskly, matter-of-factly, as he pulls his polo over his head. He won’t look at me. I feel suddenly forgotten, almost like a trespasser. The alarm clock glows 3:37 A.M., and I’m exhausted. I want to go back to the bed and close my eyes, to travel back and back, to a Halloween sleepover with friends, to dreams about water and boats, to an early childhood carnival spinning and glittering while trees stand quietly around it in the darkness and all I have inside me is hope.
FOURTEEN
It would be many months before I would stop at a roadside barn and ride my first horse—and even longer before I would meet Tommy and Shaddad. In these early months, I was trapped within my panic and could see no way out. I couldn’t write. I could barely dress myself without tumbling headlong into another panic attack. And though Larry would never say it, I could sense his disappointment. He would say you need to write; it’s your job to write. And I would say I don’t know how to write when I feel like I’m dying, and he would say you’re not dying, and I would say nothing is logical anymore; I’m not me anymore. And he would say you’re you. And I would say I’m not me if I’m not writing, and he would say that’s why you should write.
But it wasn’t just the writing. I knew Larry needed me—the neurosurgery department had been in much worse shape than he’d understood when he took the job—and in the past, he’d always leaned on me, and I’d always been strong enough to hold him. Now I needed him to hold me, but the timing was wrong. Also, I was vaguely aware that his holding me would require him to face what was happening to me: he would have to look straight at me; he would have to admit that his wife was coming unhinged. But by then we were already five years into a marriage in which we’d both tacitly agreed that I would hide certain parts of myself, that I would let him see only what he wanted, and that somehow this pact would keep us both safe—unsullied by my past. There were moments, though, that tested this arrangement, like the time he accidentally saw a page of a manuscript I’d left open. The sentences he read were about sex I’d had as a runaway. “I don’t like it,” he pouted, “that you had sex with other people.”
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“It’s not like I enjoyed it,” I pointed out. “But why should that matter anyway? You’re the only one I want to have sex with now.”
Larry shook his head. “I still don’t like it. I wish I could have met you when you were a virgin.”
“Sometimes I feel like a virgin.”
He shook his head again. “Sometimes I wish I could just put you away on a shelf, so nobody else can get to you.”
“But I’m right here with you. I’m alive.”
It took me days to console Larry after that, as if I were comforting a child who’d just woken from a bad dream. Except the dream was my life.
“Maybe if I go to work with you, I’ll be able to write,” I suggested, “in your office. Maybe if I’m not alone, I won’t be as scared.”
When we were first dating, Larry took me to work with him several times. I was a technical writer then, and I’d met him at a summer party thrown by my boss. The tipsy woman who introduced us joked that Larry was her landscaper, but I didn’t know it was a joke at the time. I didn’t notice at first how soft his hands were. Instead, I noticed that he had a paramecium-shaped scar on his knee that was similar to the two I had on mine. I noticed that there was a boyishness about him that belied his age. And I noticed that the fields around us were lit gold in the afternoon sun.
So for a short time, I believed this boy-man, whose hair kept flopping forward onto his forehead, and which he kept abruptly brushing away each time with the curve of his hand, was a gardener. I had never dated a man of the earth before, and as I flirted, I imagined his hands reaching into the cool soil. That’s when I eyed his hands—the clean, neatly clipped nails; the unmarked, supple skin—and the truth came out. Of course, it’s hard to be disappointed when you discover that the man you’re flirting with is not a gardener but a brain surgeon.
Immediately, I wanted to know more. I am nothing if not curious, which is how I ended up following Larry, weeks after we met, into the operating room in a pair of loose pink scrubs that could have easily housed two of me. I didn’t tell him about my squeamishness, and he didn’t tell me that the patient’s open skull would be only inches away from me when we entered the room. There would be no special viewing theater like in the movies—just the throbbing, bleeding brain of a human being. As we stood around the patient and the residents told Larry how the opening went, I was bombarded with thoughts, the primary being a question of math: what were the odds that if I fainted, I would fall directly onto this man’s head?
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