Honey, When It Ends: The Fairfields | Book Two

by Lennox, Piper

  “Any big projects?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Science fair, I guess.” I set the remote down and stared at his reflection in the black background of some movie credits.

  “Wow. Didn’t know first grade did science fairs.”

  “They moved me to third grade.” This was recent news, but I was still surprised he didn’t know. Actually, I was angry. Mom probably told him, and he forgot.

  “Really?” His smile changed his entire face. “That’s amazing, Mara! Good job.”

  My pride tangled with embarrassment, forming a ball in my chest I wanted to spit onto Uncle Danny’s clean rug. “Thanks.”

  “Third grade. That’s when you learn cursive, right?”

  I nodded and studied the dirt under his nails. Maybe it was grease. Maybe it was just the way his skin looked, now, decaying from the outside in.

  Mom came home in a feel-good flurry, all tiptoed steps and big, sparkling smiles. There was an edge to her voice when she told me I could stay out here and watch whatever I wanted for a while; homework could wait.

  As soon as the bedroom door locked behind them, I pulled out my assignments and got started. Dad promised he’d help with my science fair project before he left on his next job—three weeks away, for a month and a half in some shipyard town—but now I regretted telling him he could. I’d do it myself, starting right now. I filled page after page with ideas and plans: volcanoes with baking soda and vinegar, foam solar systems, bean sprouts in little Dixie cups.

  “‘Why Water is Best for Plants,’” I wrote at the top of a blank page. Then I made a list of all the things I’d give my test subjects: black coffee, orange juice, cola, sweet tea, blue toilet water from Danny’s bathroom. I’d start with Mom’s stupid prickly pear cactus on the patio. Then the impatiens she loved so much. I’d save the toilet water for her sunflower, lone and taller than me, in an orange pot by the backdoor.

  When they emerged, hours later, it was dark out. I’d finished my homework and planned my entire project. I’d fed myself dinner, too: a packet of Pop-Tarts and two juice boxes, even though it meant I wouldn’t have any for lunch.

  Mom’s eyes were glassy. Dad could barely keep his open.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” Mom whispered, and kissed the top of my head while I fought every urge to shove her away. I hated them both. But I hated him most, for coming back and making her like this.

  “Pizza?” she asked, and I nodded. I wasn’t hungry anymore, but I wanted to eat with her. I wanted to see food enter her mouth and I wanted to see her chew it. I wanted to see her sweaters fit just a little better.

  While we waited, Dad drank some coffee and told Mom he missed her. She sat in his lap and invited me to join them, but I said I was too cold to leave my blanket.

  Truthfully, I just hated sharing her.

  It was always strange to see my parents together, because she was twenty-four and looked sixteen, but he was forty-two and looked fifty. Strangers whispered about them when we went out. Old ladies thought we were three generations, not two.

  But my parents acted like they loved each other. I guess they did. It wasn’t something I liked to think about, really. He’d hold her hand and she’d kiss his forehead, or he’d grab her waist and she’d giggle, running her fingers through his beard. They always looked so happy, when he came home. I wondered why I couldn’t be, too.

  The pizza arrived. I washed my hands.

  They disappeared again while the pizza cooled. I tried to get myself a piece, but it didn’t lift from the others.

  “Stuck,” Dad noticed, as they drifted from their room like zombies. “Honey, where’s the pizza cutter?”

  She passed it to him. His wiry fingers wrapped around the handle.

  I don’t remember him tripping on anything. That’s what he and my mom would tell the police, social services, and the doctor who stitched my face and the gash between two ribs: his foot caught on the leg of a dining chair. He’d tripped. It was an accident.

  What I remember is suddenly looking up from the pizza to see that spinning, silver wheel carving the air in front of me. Dad’s eyes, heavy and glazed, but open. That’s what I couldn’t understand. He saw what he was doing. He had to.

  The rush of weight against me, his body leaning into mine as he went limp, hurt most. It felt like a boulder thrown on top of me.

  The cut to my face came first. One dull, swooping arc of pain, right down my jaw.

  Mom screamed his name. Whether she was angry at him for hurting me or worried because he’d fallen, I didn’t know.

  The cut into my ribcage happened when we landed. I hit Uncle Danny’s clean, bright blue rug and felt the dampness of blood first, my shirt sticking to my skin, before I felt any sting.

  His forehead landed squarely in my eye socket. It was already swollen and purple by the time we got to the hospital.

  “You should leave the room for a moment, while we’re stitching her up,” the doctor urged them. They kept wringing their hands and taking deep breaths, like they were the ones in pain.

  Mom hesitated. Looked at me.

  “Lots of blood,” the doctor added with a half-smile. “We make everyone leave, as a precaution. Can’t have people fainting and needing stitches of their own, right?”

  The door shut. I shivered on the cot and closed my eyes when they brought out the needles.

  “Mara,” the doctor whispered. I liked him. He looked like Andy Griffith and kept a wad of peppermint gum at the back of his mouth. “I need you to tell me something.”

  Through the dizziness settling in, I nodded.

  “Do your mommy and daddy ever hit you?”

  I opened my eyes and stared at him through the buzzing lights. The nurse seemed to be waiting for my answer, too.

  “No.”

  “Do they...I don’t know, ever touch you? Where people shouldn’t touch other people?”

  “Your privates,” the nurse prompted.

  “No.”

  “Do you ever see them smoking, or using needles? Doing anything you think they shouldn’t?”

  I watched him snip the scabby black thread on my side, all stitched up, good as new. Like a torn doll.

  “I don’t know,” I said, while they covered it with a bandage. He touched my forehead gently and turned my gaze to the wall. Time to fix the doll’s face.

  We were silent. The room felt smaller and smaller, every second.

  “All done. Wow, that was mighty brave of you!” The nurse squeezed my hands and gave me a lollipop, then an entire roll of stickers. I wished I’d brought Kiki with me, so I could stick some on her.

  “Listen, Mara,” the doctor said softly, and for some reason, I had to glance at that closed door, “if anyone comes to visit you soon, and they want to know what your parents are like—you tell them the truth. Okay?”

  I furrowed my brow. I had told the truth: everything he asked, I gave the best, most honest answer I knew how. Why didn’t he believe me?

  “Okay,” I said. Then I smiled at them the way they smiled at me, even though it pulled the tape on my bandage and stung my skin.

  The scar never did heal properly. Mom dabbed at the loosening stitches with peroxide when it oozed from infection, until I cried and Uncle Danny took me to the doctor.

  “I’m serious, Josie. Either you leave Collin for good, or I’m taking her away from you.”

  I huddled in his backseat under my coat and silently begged him to do just that. I wanted him to take me away from her, from both of them. I wanted to be far, far away.

  “Collin’s gone. I promise.”

  She’d promised it before. He still always came back.

  “Uncle Danny?” I sniffed, on the way to the doctor’s office. “Mom’s lying.”

  His dark gray eyes flashed to me in the rearview. “I know.”

  During the drive, I told him everything. The time Dad crashed our car coming home from Christmas at Aunt Brenda’s. The time he swayed too far left, passing me on the stai
rs at our old boarding house, and knocked me down all the way to the bottom. I’d had to skip picture day that year, because my lip was so swollen I couldn’t even smile.

  Danny listened without a word while I detailed every instance I could remember. For good measure, and because I was furious at her, I even included the time Mom forgot to pick me up from a slumber party because Dad had just come back into town. My friend’s parents let me stay through the weekend, when I couldn’t remember my address and the phone kept ringing without any answer.

  “Do they....” Uncle Danny pulled up the parking brake in the lot of his doctor’s office, a small building that looked more like someone’s house. “They never hurt you on purpose, do they?”

  Suddenly, I felt bad. It seemed wrong to tell him all these things at once, eager to get my parents in trouble—eager for him to take me away from them, like he’d promised.

  “No.” I wondered if this made it all better, if now he wouldn’t follow through, because I saw his hands relax on the steering wheel.

  Then he twisted in his seat and stared at the bandage on my face. Blood and something yellowish kept seeping through, no matter how many times a day Mom changed it.

  “I might need you to...to tell these things to someone else.” He adjusted his watch. It lit up every hour with a fuzzy-sounding beep. I’d always wanted to see it up-close, but he said it wasn’t for kids to play with. “Could you tell the doctor what you told me? And—and maybe a policeman, or someone, if you have to?”

  For the first time since I told him everything, fear gripped me. “Will they put Mom in jail?”

  He let out a breath I hadn’t seen him take. “I don’t know. They might. But you need to be somewhere else, Mara. You...you shouldn’t be with people who hurt you like that. Even if it is an accident. Your mom and dad need help.”

  Somewhere else. The way he said it, I knew he meant “alone.”

  “I can’t stay?” I hated that my voice shook.

  “I’m nineteen,” he said, his laugh sounding strange and short. “You need real parents. You need people who know how to take care of you.”

  “I take care of myself a lot.” I felt my heartbeat churning in my chest. I didn’t want to go away if it meant I’d be with strangers. I wanted Uncle Danny’s clean couch and clean rug and his warm apartment.

  “I make my own breakfast every morning,” I added, while Danny shook his head and climbed out of the car, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. I scrambled to follow. “See, I undid my seatbelt myself, and—and look, I opened my door myself. I take showers now instead of baths, and I dress myself, and they put me in third grade ahead of my friends, and they let me go on the Williamsburg trip even though you have to be eight and I’m six—”

  “Mara.” Danny turned and stared me down. He looked sad, or maybe just tired. “I promise, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. If you go somewhere else, I’ll make sure it’s a good place.”

  I wanted to tell him his apartment was a good place. Danny could be my dad; I didn’t care how old he was or wasn’t. I wouldn’t be any trouble.

  “Let’s go get those stitches looked at,” he said. I watched his spent cigarette spin into a puddle before I took his hand.

  It didn’t make sense to me. If my mother could handle me as a baby at eighteen, why couldn’t Danny handle me now, when he was nineteen? An entire year older, and with a place of his own. And, most importantly, without my father popping in every few weeks to ruin everything.

  The doctor didn’t want to see me, at first. It was obvious this was a grown-up doctor’s office; no toys in the waiting room, and nothing but boring recipe magazines on the tables.

  “Please,” I heard Uncle Danny beg him. “You know I’d take her somewhere else if I could, Cam. She’s burning up, and it’s not healing, but my fucking sister won’t....”

  The sound of him crying made me hold my breath.

  Dr. Greenfield had cold hands. They rested carefully on my cheek when he peeled off my bandage, crusted again with ooze and blood, and turned my face in the light.

  “We can’t stitch it closed any more,” he sighed to Uncle Danny, “but I can clean it up and prescribe some antibiotics.”

  “Thank you. Really—it...it means a lot. I know you told me not to come to your work anymore. And I won’t. I mean...if it wasn’t an emergency—”

  “I know.” His voice was quiet. I studied the gray in his temples and wondered how Danny even had a friend so much older than him. For some reason, my brain imagined Danny meeting Dr. Greenfield at the same place my mother said she met Dad: the speedway across town, where my father used to work on a pit crew for a real race car driver. He saw my mother with her friends during a race, smiling and screaming in the track lights over the bleachers.

  “All set. The one on your side isn’t too bad, but I’d leave both alone for a while, if I were you. No picking, okay?” Dr. Greenfield apologized for not having any stickers to give me.

  “That’s okay. I don’t even like stickers.” I crossed my ankles and sat as straight as I could, hoping to show Uncle Danny how grown-up I was. How easy it would be to take care of me.

  We got ice cream before he took me to the police station. I could still taste hot fudge stuck to my teeth when I told them everything I’d told Danny in the car.

  I tried my hardest to sit straight, to keep my eyes dry and voice steady. I was determined to prove how mature I was. Danny didn’t have to take care of me at all, if he didn’t want to. All I needed was for him to keep me.

  But as the hours dragged past and my fever returned, I couldn’t fight the urge to slouch. All their questions and quiet words made me grumpy. I just wanted to go home and sleep.

  Danny let me play with his watch when he went to a separate room to “talk things over.” I clicked the light button over and over again, keeping the face in a constant glow. It wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined. After five minutes, I abandoned it next to my apple juice.

  I would never set foot in Uncle Danny’s apartment again. An officer took me to a little room to nap when I told her I was tired. I slept under an itchy army blanket in the same clothes I’d worn all day, until another woman woke me with a long list of questions about my parents. When I asked where my uncle was, why he didn’t even tell me goodbye, she promised I’d see him again in the morning.

  I did, but just long enough for him to give me a hug and my backpack. He’d packed it with things I never would have chosen: a glittery pink shirt I hated, pants that rode too high on my ankles, a hairbrush with missing bristles, and two boring books I’d planned to ditch in the library return box at school.

  But he had packed Kiki, along with all her markers, and a new toothbrush. When I pressed a button on the handle, the whole thing lit up just like his watch.

  There was a note, too: Love you. Xoxo. Dan.

  I was lucky, the social worker told me: most kids had to wait a while before getting placed with a foster family. After barely a week in the group home, I moved in with Ms. Faye. She loved cooking and had a sprawling old farmhouse filled with foster children, all girls. I shared my room with another six-year-old who told me her mom left her at the grocery store and never came back.

  They all had stories to tell. Some girls didn’t share how they’d gotten there, myself included; the one time I dared speak up, an older girl told me it sounded like my parents were “junkies,” but wouldn’t tell me what that meant. I decided I hated her. And I decided not to tell anyone else about my family.

  There were girls who’d had it worse, too, which made me want to share even less. Girls who’d been touched in ways they shouldn’t have been touched. Kids locked in closets for days at a time. A five-year-old who was missing an ear, because her daddy burned their house down in a fire while she was sleeping. She didn’t have hair above the bump where her ear should’ve been, either. It made her cry a lot, not even having hair to hide her scars, like I did.

  “We can fix it,” I told her one night. It was the d
ay after Christmas. Ms. Faye had given us all new books and reading lamps for our bedrooms, so I let the girl read mine while I trained the lamp on her head. She sat cross-legged on my rug and breathed hard when she saw the scissors in my hand, stolen from the kitchen.

  “I can’t make it worse,” I reminded her, and she relaxed.

  It took me an hour to cut and comb her hair just right. At first, the sight of her scar in the bright light made me want to throw up. It was gnarled and pink, shiny patches beginning to form. I hoped mine wouldn’t look that bad, when it lost its fresh red color.

  Her hair lifted as I cut away the excess weight. Curls tumbled down her shoulders and onto the rug while my lamp flickered, the bulb loose.

  Finally, I was done.

  “See?” I took her to the mirror on the back of the closet door. “It’s fluffier now, because it’s shorter. And I put the part on the other side, so all this will cover the bad side.” The discarded hair tickled my feet as I stepped back. “Do you like it?”

  The girl turned her head from side to side. She was also missing part of her eyebrow, but with her hair the way it was now, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t tell anything was wrong with her at all, in fact.

  She cried when she hugged me. I didn’t even get in trouble for stealing the scissors Ms. Faye always tried to keep locked away. Everyone was just happy the girl was happy.

  After the house fell asleep around me, I went to the bathroom and stared at myself. I lifted my hair to one side, then the other, and piled it in front of my face.

  No matter what I did, I couldn’t completely hide the scar.

  At least the other one was under my shirt. It looked worse, the way it twisted with my body, but at least it could be hidden. The one on my face always managed to peek out, somehow. When I smiled, which I didn’t do much anymore, it looked like it grew. Like it wanted to be seen.

  The next day, my mother was allowed to visit. It was the first time I’d seen her since Uncle Danny took me away.

  “I miss you, sweetie,” she sniffed, and held one of my hands in both of hers. She smelled like perfume, the kind in the deep blue bottle that I loved; she only wore it when we were going somewhere special.