All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

by Bryn Greenwood

  Ironically, he left just as the circus was winding down.

  Two guys, one in a suit and one with a big black medical case, showed up with legal papers to get a blood sample from Donal. Leslie and I were teenaged and indignant, saying, “They can’t do that, can they?”

  It turned out they could, because Sean Quinn had filed for custody, claiming he—not Liam—was Donal’s father. The evidence had been there the whole time. Aunt Val had always said that Donal’s birthday was January 21, but his birth certificate said March 21. Liam couldn’t have been his father, because he was in jail when Aunt Val got pregnant.

  Some judge we never met decided Donal should be with Sean.

  The last night of the circus that was our lives, a lawyer came to pick up Donal, because Sean Quinn was a coward. He wasn’t brave enough to face Wavy and watch her hug Donal good-bye. She shook all over, while Donal cried and tried to comfort her.

  “I’ll come visit. You can send me letters. I’ll come for the summer. Uncle Sean says so. That I can come for the summer.”

  When I started to worry the lawyer would have to pry them apart, Wavy took her hands off Donal and stepped back with a horrible, empty look on her face. While the rest of us went to the door to see Donal off, she crawled into the closet under the stairs.

  She stopped eating. Really stopped. She got thinner and paler, walking up and down in her nightgown. Mom threatened to take her to the doctor.

  One day I got to the cafeteria at school and opened my lunch box to find half my sandwich gone. Sitting next to me, Angela looked at the half sandwich with one eyebrow up.

  “Going on a diet?” she said.

  “I think maybe Wavy’s going to live,” I said.

  Wavy did live. She kept eating, secretly, and she went to school. In her dismal white pin-tucked dresses, she looked like a consumptive child from the nineteenth century, transported to the raucous hallways of a public school. She caught up on the course work she’d missed and survived her freshman year of high school. Survived being stared at and whispered about.

  Every week she wrote two letters: one to Donal and one to Kellen. Sometimes she got a short note or a postcard from Donal, but nothing from Kellen.

  Eventually Mom sat Wavy down at the kitchen table and handed her a stack of letters. Every letter she’d sent to Kellen, all returned from the prison marked UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE.

  “The judge says you’re not allowed to write to him and he’s not allowed to write to you. He’ll get in trouble if he communicates with you.” Mom sounded almost sorry. Wavy gathered up the letters and carried them to her room. She never said a word, and I never saw her write to Kellen again. She usually wrote to Donal after she finished her homework in the evenings, and she always signed the letters, “See you soon. Love, Wavy.” See you soon. See you soon.

  Donal didn’t come for the summer that year. Or any other. Wavy’s sophomore year, her last letter to him came back stamped: NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. NO FORWARDING ORDER.

  10

  DONAL

  April 1984

  I wasted too much time at the sandwich counter waiting for Sean to come out of the bathroom. The counter guy came by twice and said, “Where’d your dad get to?”

  “The bathroom.” That’s what I said both times.

  “He’s been gone a while, hasn’t he?”

  I shrugged, like Wavy, because what was I supposed to do? Sean always took a long time in the bathroom. Sometimes I had to go get him, and he’d be asleep on the toilet with his needle in his arm.

  So the counter guy wouldn’t ask me again, I got up and walked over to the gas station. That’s when I saw the postcards. I ran out to the car and looked for money. We didn’t have the Corvette anymore and the new car smelled bad under the seats, like gas and rotten stuff. The carpet was sticky from where somebody spilled a pop. Not me.

  I found enough for the postcard, a pretty one of the Grand Canyon that Sean said we didn’t have time to see, but I didn’t have enough money for the card and a stamp. The lady at the cash register said, “That’s okay. I can spot you four cents.” She was nice. I was glad I didn’t steal the card.

  Then I had to borrow a pen, because that was how life was with Sean. I liked it better when I lived with Sandy. I didn’t always have to beg or steal things.

  I wrote as fast as I could, but I didn’t want it to be messy.

  Dear Wavy, we had to move and I don’t know where yet. I will write to you again when I know where. See you soon. Love, Donal.

  “Who’re you writing to, sweetie?” the cashier lady said.

  “My sister.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I wished she would be quiet, because it was hard to remember Aunt Brenda’s address. Before I could write the zip code, Sean put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Whatcha doing, Don?”

  “He’s such a cutie. He’s writing his sister a postcard.”

  “Come on, buddy. You can finish that in the car,” he said.

  In the parking lot, he took the postcard and put it in the trash. He squeezed my shoulder hard and said, “Don, didn’t we talk about how it’s not safe for you to write to your sister?”

  “I didn’t tell her where we were,” I said.

  “I don’t want you sneaking around behind my back like that again. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. Wavy was right. Sometimes you have to nod, even if you don’t agree. She was right about a lot of things.

  11

  WAVY

  1986

  After Kellen was UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE, and Donal was NO FORWARDING ORDER, I felt dead. I woke up in the mornings surprised my heart was still beating. The food I snuck at night tasted like nothing. I stole a whole red velvet cake from Mrs. NiBlack that was for a charity auction. It tasted like dirt. That was what I imagined it was like being dead. Feeling empty with the taste of dirt in your mouth.

  Whatever Val felt now that she was dead, I couldn’t think of her as Mama anymore. I wanted to take her flowers like Kellen had done for his mother, but I couldn’t stand to go see her now that she was lying next to Liam.

  Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire. The only thing that made it hurt less was moving my hands. Like Kellen washing dishes, making his head empty. I sliced and knitted and ironed and sanded and hammered and typed, trying to make my heart empty. Home economics class. Typing class. Woodshop class. Homeroom, where I volunteered to make decorations for dances.

  The questions never stopped, but in high school, I learned a new way to deal with them. No matter what the question was, I nodded.

  Were your parents really murdered? Yes.

  Did your boyfriend kill your parents? Yes.

  Is it true you were gang-raped by some bikers? Yes.

  Aunt Brenda told the story to her book club and they told someone else, who told someone else, and on and on and on, getting less true every time it got told. Even less true than Aunt Brenda’s version.

  I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

  I also liked watching people. The girl who was pregnant changed the way she moved to hide it. The boy who looked at people like they were bugs scribbled angry things in his notebook. The teachers kissing desperately in the storage room weren’t married to each other. Amy stood too close to the Spanish teacher when she worked the football concession stand. Leaning over, she brushed her arm longingly against Mrs. Ramirez’s arm.

  Watching and doing made things bearable. Also, time passed, even while I slept. After I turned twenty-one, Aunt Brenda wouldn’t be able to frown and say, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate way to spend your trust fund.”

  Even before that, I would be eighteen. I could find out things Aunt Bren
da didn’t want me to know. Where was Donal? How long until Kellen was free?

  In the meantime, the things that hurt other people healed me.

  At the end of my freshman year, a girl in my class was raped. Held down and raped by two boys in a bullpen at the city baseball diamond. The rape made other girls nervous, but it reminded me that Kellen loved me. He hadn’t raped me. I slipped secret notes in the girl’s locker. Notes to say, “You’re very good at math,” and “Your hair is pretty today.”

  During my junior year, a boy in Amy’s class killed himself. He had terrible acne, purple welts like bee stings all over his face, and he went home from school and hung himself. I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less. If I lay very still in bed at night, I remembered how Grandma’s house smelled. The taste of mint ice cream on Kellen’s tongue. Donal jumping on the bed to wake me up.

  For everyone else, the boy killing himself was scary. It made Aunt Brenda hug Amy harder and tell Leslie it was okay if she wanted to move home from the dorm, where she was lonely, even though the college was only twenty miles away. It made them go to church more, hoping God would comfort them.

  I didn’t think God could comfort anyone, but I was content to go and sit in the sanctuary. People stared at me sometimes, but they had to follow the rules and I didn’t. God made everyone else stand up and sing, sit down and pray, stand up, sit down, pray, sing, pray. God didn’t seem to care if I read novels or knitted scarves.

  Youth group was harder to get through. Charlotte, the youth pastor, was a hugger. She was big and blond, with an enormous mouth full of teeth to hold her big smiley voice. Once, she visited the house, so she and Aunt Brenda could discuss her concerns about me not being baptized. Swimming in a stock tank under the full moon didn’t count.

  “I know you’ll be discreet,” Aunt Brenda told Charlotte. “So I’m just going to tell you the whole sordid story. To help you understand. So you can be sensitive to Wavy’s situation.”

  Only Aunt Brenda didn’t tell the whole sordid story. She never told anyone about the deposition, but especially not Charlotte. As much as Charlotte loved crying and hugging, she loved to talk about sex more. Or she loved to talk about how you weren’t supposed to have sex.

  “God made your body a temple to honor him and he wants you to cherish that gift. He doesn’t want you to put drugs in it. He doesn’t want you to hurt yourself driving recklessly. And He doesn’t want you to share yourself with just anyone. The gift of your temple is for you to share with the special person God has chosen for you.” Charlotte always looked so happy when she talked like that. Ecstatic.

  God also didn’t want you to “pollute yourself.” Touching yourself for pleasure wasn’t what God designed your temple for, according to Charlotte. Either God was stupid or Charlotte was confused, because my temple was clearly designed for that.

  “When you get married, the purity of your temple will be a gift you give not only to your spouse but to God. The gift of honoring His commandments.” Charlotte wasn’t married and sometimes I caught her looking at Kellen’s ring on my finger.

  I wondered, was Charlotte saving her loud-mouthed temple for someone?

  The girl in front of me had a better question: “But what about people who aren’t virgins when they get married?”

  “Our God is a merciful God,” Charlotte said. “If a person honestly regrets what they’ve done—”

  “But what if it’s not their fault?”

  “Yeah, like what if a girl gets raped?” Amy’s best friend Angela said. She sounded mad.

  Charlotte’s mouth made a big O.

  “That’s not the same thing,” said Marcus. He had a crush on Amy, but he might as well have been at home polluting his temple as sitting there mooning over her.

  “Marcus is right, that’s not the same thing.” Charlotte’s voice went into its pre-cry quaver. “God understands that bad things can happen to good people.”

  “But it still means you’re not a virgin,” said the girl in front of me.

  “God can make everything right if we trust Him. If we pray, He can take cancer away. He can bring people back to life.”

  “So God could make you a virgin again?”

  People laughed at the girl for asking that, but Charlotte said, “Why is that so funny? God parted the Red Sea and Jesus resurrected Lazarus. He can do anything.”

  When everybody broke for snacks, I stayed in my corner reading. Sometimes Amy and Angela sat with me, but Leslie was there that night, wanting to run away from college and sneak back into her safe high school life. The three of them were at the refreshment table, when Charlotte walked over to me.

  “Can we talk, Wavy?” Without waiting for an answer Charlotte sat down and scooted her chair up as close as she could, so no one else would hear. Like I would want to have a secret with her. “I want you to know that I believe what I said with all my heart. What happened to you, God can heal you of that. Because He knows that in your heart, you’re still pure.”

  Charlotte’s hand swooped toward my arm, but stopped short of touching me.

  “Will you let me pray with you? Ask God to heal you? To take away what was done to you and make you whole?”

  “I don’t want your god to make me a virgin,” I said.

  12

  AMY

  1986–1987

  Wavy said it loud enough that everyone in the youth group lounge heard her. Then she walked over to Leslie and held out her hand.

  “Car keys?”

  “Wavy, she’s just trying to help,” Leslie said.

  Charlotte hurried up to us and gasped, “Will you ask Wavy to come into my office to talk, Leslie?”

  Wavy snapped her fingers angrily at Leslie. I could see in Wavy’s eyes that she had maybe only ten seconds of calm left. Angela saw it, too, and said, “Jeez, Les, give her the keys.”

  “They’re in my purse.”

  “Oh, Wavy. Please, let me help you.” Charlotte was getting ready to cry.

  Wavy turned on her heel, crossed to where Leslie’s purse hung over the back of her chair. In one economical movement, she emptied Leslie’s purse on the seat and picked up the keys. Five steps to the door and she was gone.

  “She doesn’t want your help,” Angela said.

  “God wants to heal her, if only she would open her heart,” Charlotte said.

  “She’s fine.” Only as I said it did I realize it was true. Considering everything she’d been through, Wavy was doing pretty well.

  “We better go,” Leslie said.

  One of those rare occasions when Leslie and I agreed. She put her stuff back in her purse and we left. Behind us, Charlotte sniffled.

  When we got to the car, Wavy was curled up in the backseat. I got in beside her while Angela rode up front with Leslie.

  “What a witch,” Angela said. “She’s probably not even a virgin. Not that I can imagine anyone having sex with her.”

  “It’s not true.” Wavy’s voice was flat.

  “Charlotte’s right. I know you don’t like her, but she’s right. What happened to you doesn’t count,” Leslie said. I didn’t know if she wanted to reassure Wavy or reassert Charlotte’s ecclesiastical authority on renewable virginity.

  “I am a virgin.”

  Leslie flicked on the windshield washer. She didn’t have the nerve to ask but I couldn’t stand not knowing.

  “But what about—” I hesitated, because it wasn’t a name to be said lightly in our family: “Kellen?”

  “He never fucked me.”

  “Wavy! Watch your mouth.” Leslie’s perfect impersonation of Mom. I ignored her.

  “But the police report. Your deposition—”

  “His alibi.” Wavy hugged her knees more tightly, her white skirt bunching over her black-stockinged legs. That was the first time I realized that while Leslie and I were growing up, Wavy was staying the same. Staying f
ourteen. Not even that. Staying thirteen. In three years she hadn’t grown at all.

  “But your blood on the desk blotter.” Why was I arguing? To say, No, you can’t be a virgin? The police report said so. Kellen pled guilty.

  “He broke my hymen with his fingers,” Wavy said.

  “See? Really, you’re still a virgin.” Angela leaned over the backseat, trying to help.

  “I wish he had fucked me.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Leslie said, half-sad, half-disapproving.

  “No one could take that away.”

  I didn’t blame Wavy for feeling that way. The bike and the ring, they were just things. Donal and Kellen were all she cared about, and they’d both been taken away from her.

  In bed that night, I said, “What was it like?” It makes me sound like a morbid ghoul, but why else had Wavy offered that secret? She wanted to tell someone.

  “Wonderful. His hands are big and rough. He slid his ring finger into me. It burned. There was blood, but I wanted to have him in me. He wouldn’t.”

  “But your deposition.” I kept coming back to the Gospel. Wavy spoke in Apocrypha.

  “He wouldn’t. He was scared of hurting me and he wanted to wait until we got married. Rubbing against me made him come. On the desk. Between my legs. Not in me. He never fucked me.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I lay there and listened to the whisper of covers moving over her flannel nightdress. Tiny sparks leapt like lightning in a petri dish meadow. Wavy sighed and shivered and hiccupped. After sharing a room with her for three years I was used to the sound of her masturbating. I never got used to the sound of her crying.

  * * *

  I lost my own virginity at a party four months later. It involved a nice guy named Marcus, who thought he was in love with me, and too much alcohol. I felt like such a coward about that. Instead of going into it with my eyes open, I lied to myself. I thought if I was drunk it would be this magical thing that just happened.

  I’d had a huge fight with Angela, who was going to a different college on a track and field scholarship. She kept saying, “We’ll visit each other,” but then I found out she was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, who was going to the same school. Her ex-boyfriend who hated me. I knew we would never visit each other if she was dating him. When I told her she deserved better, she got mad.