Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  A long, hideous silence followed. Bernese was looking at Fisher as if she couldn’t quite understand what she had heard, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Then her mouth crumpled in, her lips all but disappearing, and her eyes widened, the pupils dilating as if she were in physical pain. It was as if all the air had been kicked out of her. There was dead silence for another endless five seconds. She got her breath back, and I remembered what I had learned from Lori-Anne the night before. Bernese, wounded to the core, was about to tell Fisher. I could see it. She was about to tell Fisher that she’d been sold by her own mama. I could not allow it. I would kill Bernese before I let those words come out of her mouth and rip into my girl. I stepped forward, pulling Mama with me so that the two of us were standing like a wall between Bernese and Fisher.

  “Don’t say it,” I yelled to Bernese. “Do not speak. Fisher, go upstairs and brush your teeth. Go. Go. Go now. Do you hear me?

  Now. Go.” I kept yelling it, louder and louder to keep Bernese from speaking over me, and, almost violently, pouring it all out into Mama’s hands. I yelled at Fisher to go until I heard her run for the stairs and then pound up them. Then I stood blocking the doorway and said to Bernese in a quieter tone, “You think a minute. You think a minute and take a deep breath. That’s a baby up there. That’s a five-year-old baby, and you will not unleash whatever’s in you on her. You will not.”

  Good girl, Mama signed, and then again, Good girl, good girl.

  When Fisher was all the way upstairs, Bernese drew in a shuddering breath, and then she said, “Excuse me,” and tried to push past us, out of the kitchen.

  “Let her alone,” I said.

  “I’m not going up to Fisher,” she said. Her face looked gray, set in exhausted lines. “I need to go sit down.”

  I stepped aside, and she walked down the hall and into the den. Mama and I followed her. Bernese went to her plaid sofa and sat down, her back to the bay window. I put Mama’s hand on the back of the matching love seat across from Bernese, and Mama felt her way around it and sat. I sat beside her to interpret.

  Mama signed, What’s gotten into you? You didn’t used to be this way with Fisher. What has changed? You are damaging that child.

  Bernese was listening to me, but her eyes were on Mama, and it was as if I weren’t in the room.

  “She didn’t used to have such a mouth,” Bernese finally answered, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  She’s just giving you your mouth back, Mama signed. I interpreted, but then I added, “And Bernese, she’s growing up. You keep on like this, you’re going to break her.”

  Bernese turned a baleful eye on me and said, “Why don’t you use that great flapping hole in your face to interpret for my sister? No one has asked your opinion, Nonny. You don’t get to judge me. You haven’t been here. Half of Fisher’s problem is she depends on you, and you’ve been too busy screwing up your life to notice how bad she’s pining. She misses you like nuts, so she acts like a brat. And I get stuck with that.”

  “You are the one—”

  I heard Lou loudly clearing his throat at the top of the stairs, and I fell instantly silent. Mama started to sign, but I interrupted her, signing, Wait. Fisher is coming down.

  Behind Lou, Fisher took one stair at a time with her eyes downcast. She was practically dripping sorrow from every pore, her posture a sharp contrast to her cheerful yellow shorts set covered in orange slices and the bright green frog-shaped backpack she had slung over her shoulders.

  Lou said, “Hon, I’m going to walk Miss Fisher here to the bus stop.”

  “Don’t forget her lunch,” said Bernese.

  Lou trit-trotted to the kitchen and got Fisher’s brown-bag lunch out of the refrigerator. Fisher waited in the foyer, not looking at any of us. He unzipped the frog backpack, slipping the lunch into it, and the added weight pulled the backpack down so it drooped from her shoulders like exhausted wings.

  Everything in me wanted to go to her, pick her up, and squeeze her tight, but Fisher hated to be touched when she was unhappy.

  I knew if I tried it, she would go stiff in my arms, like a cat does when you pick it up against its will. With Fisher, I had to wait until she was ready, and then she would come to me.

  As she went out the door, I could not help but call after her,

  “You have a good day at school, Woolly-Worm.”

  She darted her eyes at me, and I was rewarded with a faint upward twist of her lips. Then she was gone.

  The second the door closed, I was ready to pick it up right where I had left off, but Mama felt my hands begin to move as I was readying to speak, and she shook her hand no, quieting me.

  Let me, she signed. Tell Bernese that I know it was a bluff. I know she never expected Lori-Anne to call her on it.

  I wasn’t sure I knew what her point was, but that wasn’t my job. The interpreter in me kicked in, and I spoke it to Bernese exactly as Mama had expressed it.

  Bernese seemed to sag down even deeper into the sofa. “Of course it was a bluff. Lori-Anne wouldn’t talk to me at all. She was eating and drinking herself to death, drugging, too, I bet you.

  All those men. Any man who’d have her. And then when she did finally come to talk to me, it was to ask for money. Again. I only said it as a wake-up call. I thought it might jolt her into seeing what she was doing. I never thought for a second she’d really trade all her chances to ever have Fisher for some money.”

  Don’t you talk now, Mama signed to me. She must have felt the tension in my hands. This is not your conversation.

  I shut my mouth, and Bernese went on. “I can’t let it happen again, Stacia. I know I may seem hard on Fisher, but she and Lori-Anne are of a piece. Lori-Anne was that same kind of sullen, willful thing, and I never knew what she was thinking. My boys never gave me a lick of trouble. But Lori-Anne growled and stomped and fought me six ways from Sunday. And then when that didn’t work, she nodded and said, ‘Yes, Mama. No, Mama.

  Oh, I see, Mama,’ and then she’d lie and sneak. She got into a thousand times more trouble than all three of the boys put together. Now, Lori-Anne is going to keep on till her heart bursts or she drives drunk off a road into a tree, and there isn’t a thing I can do except make sure Fisher won’t go that way.”

  Even if it ruins her? Mama asked.

  Bernese wasn’t listening. “Isaac understood Lori-Anne better than I did. He set up the trust to protect me and her both, while I stood there like God’s biggest fool swearing to him up and down that he didn’t need to write it up. I said we only needed a wad of paper with a lot of small print that looked legal so’s I could wave it at her. I said it didn’t matter because she wouldn’t ever ter-minate her parental rights.”

  Fisher has to be protected from this fight.

  “I haven’t told her a thing about it!” Bernese protested.

  Maybe not, but she can tell something has changed.

  A little color came back into Bernese’s stone-gray face, and she said, “Things have changed. She’s my responsibility now, forever.

  Lori-Anne’s never going to straighten up and be her mama, so it’s all on me. I got three good sons just like their daddy, and then Lori-Anne happened, which I never planned for or expected.

  That girl was born wayward. Got pregnant at fifteen like she wasn’t raised right, and to this day she hasn’t told me who Fisher’s daddy is. Doubt she knows. And you three sit all comfy next door and say what I should and shouldn’t do. Bunch of aunts, cluck-ing and tutting like dern-fool chickens. But I can’t be that way, not anymore. From here on, I’m all the mama Fisher’s ever going to get. And I can’t fail her.”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. I said, “Don’t act like we’ve abandoned you or stuck you with Fisher. You picked this before she was born. Lori-Anne wanted to give Fisher up from the get-go. You bullied her, even though me and Mama and Genny and Lori-Anne herself told you loud and clear that she wasn’t ready to be a parent. And when you said you couldn’t stand to
farm your grandchild out to strangers, I told you Jonno and I would take her—”

  Mama was frantically shaking her hand no even as Bernese interrupted me. “Yes, and if we had done it your way, Fisher’d be in the middle of your divorce.”

  “Okay. Let’s make you killing Fisher’s spirit about my divorce.

  Everything else is about my divorce, why not you abusing Fisher, too?”

  You are exasperating me, signed Mama.

  I didn’t answer Mama. Interpreting was easier than trying to have a three-way conversation, and once I had started speaking for myself as well as Mama, it was all I could do to say what was needed and still keep Mama in the loop.

  Bernese was talking again. “I’m not ‘abusing’ Fisher, and no matter how crazy she makes me, at least I’m not going to ditch her. She knows she’s mine, no matter what.”

  “That’s probably what’s upsetting her,” I said.

  “At least I’m not going to toss her away like you’re tossing your husband. I know what family means.”

  It was so hard to stay seated. I sorely missed Genny. Her nerves held us all hostage to decorum, and I missed her constant presence beside Mama, interpreting. Without her, I had to think in nine different directions while taking on Bernese, and I couldn’t stand up and scream loud enough for Bernese to hear what I was saying. I stayed where I was, letting all my pent-up rage out through my hands as I savagely signed what Bernese was saying to me. My interpretation was baldly accurate but with none of my usual detachment.

  I said to Bernese, “You sit here judging me, pointing at my speck, though how you can see it what with all the beams sticking out of your eyes is beyond me. And you don’t seem to give two craps that maybe it sucks for me to be in the middle of my divorce, and that maybe my marriage failing is not entirely my fault.”

  You are letting her change the subject, Mama signed. This is not about you, it’s about Fisher.

  I signed, Bernese needs to hear this, then said, “Do you know you have never asked me once why I’m divorcing him? You just assumed it’s some sort of childish whim of mine. Oh, ho-hum, what a drab spring, think I’ll toss my marriage away.”

  This won’t do any good, Mama signed.

  Bernese said, “Because it doesn’t matter why. We don’t get divorced.”

  “It does matter why,” I said, and even though Mama answered me by signing, This is a diversion, I signed back, Hush, I am showing her. Mama threw her hands up, then mimed washing them of me, but I went and got my purse anyway. I dug around in it until I found the empty amber bottle I had carried with me for a year now. I set it on the coffee table with an audible click, and then I sat back down by Mama and gave her my hands again.

  “What’s that?” Bernese said.

  “That’s why I’m getting divorced,” I said. I sounded very matter-of-fact, almost abrupt, but looking at it, this innocuous cylinder of brownish-gold plastic, safety-capped to protect the babies I didn’t have, almost undid me.

  The bottle had been full the night I ended my marriage. I was holding it in my hand when I heard Jonno’s keys in the door. I stuffed it in my pocket as he walked in. It was three A.M. or so, and he was fresh off a standing gig X. Machina had at McGoo-Goo’s on Thursdays.

  I sprang up from the sofa where I had been grinding my teeth and weeping myself into a redheaded state where all control went out the window and there was nothing of the Frett family in me at all. I was a frothing mass of Crabtree rage. I ran at him and kicked savagely at his shins, making him dance backwards out the door. He tried to come in again, and I screamed at him word-lessly, holding my hands up in claws, ready to take his face off.

  “Gig,” he said. “What’s wrong?” That made it worse. He called me his Gig, the one thing he’d always show up for, when things were good. If he didn’t realize things weren’t good, then I hadn’t kicked him hard enough.

  The apartment had built-in bookshelves right by the front door, and I grabbed a paperback and hurled it at him, pegging him dead center. He said, “Oof,” and bent over a little, and the next book beaned him in the head.

  “What, what the—” he said. I grabbed an armful of paperbacks off the shelf and followed him into the building hall, hurling them at him, driving him toward the stairs. He held his trum-pet case up in front of him, trying to block my shots, and I aimed lower, pinging books off his knees and thighs.

  “Quit it,” he said, finally sounding a little angry. “What gives?”

  I had one book left. I stuffed it under my arm and answered him by reaching in my pocket and pulling out the rattling bottle of penicillin. I didn’t have to say anything else, because I could see he already knew, and that made it worse.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.” He dropped his gaze, his long golden-brown lashes brushing innocently against his cheekbones. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I mean, I wanted you to see a doctor. You needed to, and I was worried, but I wasn’t sure yet how to put it. You know? Gig? How to put it?”

  I snatched the last book out from under my arm and reared back with it, readying for a hard throw. He ghosted sideways around the corner. I heard him thumping down the steps and the bang of the building’s front door. I didn’t see him again for months. He called a couple of times, but I hung up on him before he could hit the O in “hello,” so I suppose he lacked the courage to come around. And that was good. I had to wait six months for my second HIV test to come back negative before I could calm down enough to be able to think.

  Waiting to take that test, I knew I was done with the marriage.

  After I got the results back, then I could see him, though I shocked myself by falling so immediately and with such relief into his bed. But even in the middle of that reunion, I knew.

  While I was unwrapping the oh-so-necessary condom, rolling it onto him, I knew that whether I loved him or not, there was no way back from that level of careless betrayal. The next day I got both of us out of bed and dressed by nine A.M., and I drove us downtown so we could meet with a lawyer.

  Now, looking at the bottle, I didn’t think I could say it all again, but Bernese was looking at me expectantly. “What’s that supposed to mean, that bottle?”

  “It means he cheated on me.”

  There was a long silence, and Bernese’s gaze on me was speculative, as if she was sizing me up. She blew air out between her lips like a horse and rubbed one hand across her mouth. Finally, she said, “Grow up.”

  I leaned forward, certain I must have misheard her. “Excuse me?” I said. To Mama, I signed, I think she just told me to grow up.

  Mama answered, Sounds like her, yes.

  “I said, ‘Grow up.’ ” Bernese’s face was carved out of implacable wood.

  “He cheated on me,” I said.

  “I got that,” said Bernese. “So he cheated. It happens. It happens all the time. In almost every marriage, it’s going to happen.

  You don’t get divorced.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said, and then my eyes widened in compre-hension. I leaned forward even farther, and my voice softened.

  “Aunt Bernese? Are you saying . . . Do you mean that Uncle Lou—”

  She interrupted me with a rude snort. “Lou? Please. I didn’t mean it happened to me. Don’t be an idiot. But it happens, I am sure, to other people all the time. That doesn’t mean you let some whore win and take your husband. You drag him home and make his life a walking festival of hell until he wishes he’d cut off his own man parts before he let them go wandering.”

  Mama’s hands felt stiff around mine as I interpreted, no doubt tense with the huge effort of not saying that she had told me so.

  I said, “When you’re married, there’s a trust there. There’s this vow. If you break that, if you let yourself get intimate, in whatever form, with another person—”

  My voice cut out abruptly. Over Bernese’s shoulder, through the gauzy sheers that covered the bay window, I could see Henry Crabtree advancing down Grace Street. He was too far away for me to re
ad his face, but he was moving fast, with long, purpose-ful strides, and his shoulders were set forward and braced. His sinewy body, thin as a blade, was probably whistling as he sliced through the air.

  “I’ve been married over forty years, Nonny. I have a notion of how it works.” She didn’t seem to notice my abrupt silence as anything more than a place where she could easily interrupt.

  “Did you even try to bring that dog to heel?”

  “He doesn’t love me,” I said. As Henry came closer, I could see his jaw was set and rigid. I tried to keep my eyes on Bernese, because I couldn’t imagine a worse time for the man I had kissed—

  in, by the way, strict violation of my still-standing marriage vows—to come storming up on some romantical mission.

  “Don’t be such a schoolgirl,” said Bernese. “Love-schmove.

  This is your husband.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t mean he’s not in love with me. This isn’t about romance.” I glanced at the golden-brown bottle and then back up to her face, carefully not watching Henry’s resolute progress toward the house.

  Mama was signing again, Forget this. You are supposed to be talking about Fisher.

  I signed back, I’m going to talk about Fisher, but until I settle my divorce with her, she won’t hear me on any other subject. She always drags it back to this.

  Mama subsided, unconvinced.

  “Why do you keep looking at that bottle? What’s that got to do with anything?” Bernese asked. She picked it up off the table and read the label. “Penicillin? What has penicillin got to—” The nurse in her kicked in then, and I saw her put it together in her head.

  I said, “If he’d cheated, yeah, maybe there’s a way back from that. But he didn’t use a condom with her. With all the hers, for all I know, even though we’d stopped using them at home.”