Hear Me Roar

by Katie Cross

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  Halfway out, Lizzy stopped on the appropriate stage mark. Then she turned to the audience, opened her mouth, and—

  —said nothing.

  “I am princess of the mer people,” Mrs. Jameson recited under her breath, as if Lizzy could hear. “C’mon, Lizzy…”

  Lizzy’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. My entire body turned cold. An eternity seemed to pass while she stood on the stage, mouth bobbing open and closed. Someone in the audience coughed. One of the mermaid attendants nudged Lizzy and murmured under her breath, but Lizzy had frozen. Not a single part of her body moved, not even her chest.

  After an interminable pause, Lizzy sucked in a sharp breath, threw her hands over her eyes, and ran for the curtains. Seconds later, she barreled into my arms with a sob.

  “I can’t!” she said. “I-I-I can’t go out there!”

  Mrs. Jameson snapped into action, calling for a girl hanging back in the shadows. On stage, the other kids shuffled around uncertainly. Frantic parents hissed commands back and forth. Another elegant mermaid with curly black hair appeared from the shadows. The understudy.

  “Go ahead,” Mrs. Jameson murmured to her. “Pick it right up.”

  Ecstatic, the girl marched out with total confidence, looked right at the crowd, and enunciated her line. Except for a lone crab scuttling the wrong way across the stage, the rest of the children snapped out of their gridlock, and the play began to flow again. Lana burst through the crowd of children at the side of the stage.

  “Where’s my sister?” she bellowed. “Everyone back!”

  Lizzy sobbed in my arms. “Please, Mom,” she whispered. “Please take me home. I can’t do it.”

  Mrs. Jameson put a hand on my shoulder. “Go ahead,” she said. “We can talk later.”

  I warred with myself for several seconds. I didn’t want Lizzy to give up, but she clearly couldn’t remember her lines. The night that was supposed to be her night was ruined. Her dreams had been shattered.

  And a small part of me had wanted it.

  A humid darkness fell as we hurried through the parking lot.

  Lana stomped forward and mumbled under her breath, casting concerned glances at her sister every now and then. Lizzy kept her head down as she shuffled along in her costume, sequins glittering in the poor lamplight. Her sobs had subsided. My thoughts had gelled into numbness.

  “We need ice cream,” Lana muttered once we stopped at the car. I stopped the words we don’t eat our feelings and silently agreed.

  We did need ice cream.

  Just as I found my keys and unlocked the door, a bright red Jeep screeched to a stop behind us. Daniel threw himself out of the driver’s side and ran around the front. A handful of flowers filled his hands. They were limp, struggling for breath, as if he’d grabbed them from a gas station on the way over.

  “I’m late!” he cried. “I’m so sorry. I drove as fast as I could but—”

  His work clothes were skewed and rumpled. Even his hair was strangely slanted, as if he’d run his hand through it over and over again. He stopped a few steps away. Lizzy shifted behind me, still sniffling.

  His brow grew heavy.

  “Wh-what’s going on?” he asked, breathless.

  I opened my mouth, but not trusting myself to contain the torrent of hateful words inside me, closed it again. Lana folded her arms across her chest and turned her back on him. Lizzy kept her gaze on her toes.

  “We’re going home,” I said.

  “But—”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the school and then back. Behind us, the car thumped with a loud song.

  “We’re going home, Daniel,” I said. “Maybe you should just leave it at that. We can talk about why later.”

  “I—”

  “Go away!” Lana cried. I reached over and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Get in the car, girls. I’ll talk with your dad.”

  “Lizzy,” he said, reaching for them. “Lana. I’m … I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be late—”

  They scrambled into the car and shut the doors behind them. Lizzy lay across the seat. Lana yanked part of her costume off and threw it in the front, then folded her arms across her chest and leaned back.

  Daniel looked at me. “What happened?”

  “Lizzy was waiting for you to show up. She said something about roses and how she’d finally have her dad at one of her events. When you weren’t there, she became emotional. Then, when she walked out on stage, she couldn’t remember her lines.”

  The words flooded out of me in a strangled torrent. I wanted to drive them into him like nails and let him feel the full weight of what he’d ruined. Just like everything else.

  His eyes widened. His face was pale.

  Even when we’d met the first time after he’d filed for divorce, he hadn’t looked this horrified.

  “Listen, a few things came up that I couldn’t control and—”

  “I’m sure they did. Yet again.”

  His eyes tapered. “Bitsy, you know I didn’t do this on purpose. I’m not the bad guy here, no matter how much you want me to be. This is life. Things happen. I’ll apologize to Lizzy and make it up to her.”

  “With another amusement park day? I think you’ve used those up.”

  “No! I—”

  He ran a hand through his hair in aggravation, making it stand up on end, and let out a low growl.

  “I was only a few minutes late. I could have seen most of the play … I would never intentionally hurt them.”

  “Right.”

  I hissed the word like an angry cat, hardly recognizing myself behind it.

  His nostrils flared. I recognized the dark side that consumed his eyes. The festering, livid part of him that I had seen only when we were married. Never with Jade.

  Never with the girls.

  Just me.

  “We’re back to this, are we?” he snapped. “Back to my big mistake. Back to me as the horrible person because of what I did. Well, newsflash, Bitsy. No matter what I did, it was never good enough for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He stared at me, arms crossed, eyes narrowed like a fighter. “It means I’ll always bear the scarlet letter.”

  “You put it there!”

  “I know! I messed up. I’ve long accepted the fact that I made stupid decisions and tore our marriage apart. I know I did that, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ruined your life. I’m sorry that you can’t move on. But don’t you get it? Even this hellish nightmare is preferable to our loveless marriage. The girls would have been worse off if we’d toughed it out. We weren’t good together.”

  “So you cheated and then ran away to let your lawyer tell me?” I cried. “That’s the noble way to make things right?”

  “No. I didn’t … that’s not what … I was never good enough for you, Bitsy! Never! I never would have been.” He waved his hands back and forth between us. “We were constantly doing this. You’ve always been so stressed about everything being perfect. The house. The girls’ hair. The way we acted in front of everyone. It was exhausting. It was a damn lie!”

  His voice rose, stopping me. Daniel and I had never spoken about his infidelity face to face, nor the months of pain behind it. He’d taken away my right to reckon with him and his decisions by having his lawyer tell me about the divorce while he ran across the country. Except when we finalized it—and he’d barely looked at me then—we hadn’t said a word.

  This was my chance.

  He wouldn’t take it away again.

  “It was the best I could do!” I hissed. “Everything was falling apart at home. You were always gone. We had bills stacking up from your grad school. I was barely scraping by with our two young babies, and you were out sleeping with your secretary!”

  The words had coiled up in my chest for so long that I recognized them the moment they burst out, along with all the anger and rage that had swallowed me that h
orrible year. The release felt tacky and awful, like the depths of hell rushing up after me.

  Daniel paused, staring hard at me. “I did,” he murmured. “And I see now that you’ll never forgive me for it. Now you have what you want, don’t you? Proof that I’m a bad father. Proof that I don’t deserve any time with the girls?”

  The raw quiet that stretched between us clung to my nerves, irritating me. I wanted to lash out at him—claw his eyes out, preferably—but I could barely move. I felt as if my hands and my feet had weights in them. My entire body stood there, immobile. What I really wanted was to hurt him as much as he’d hurt me.

  And it still didn’t feel as good as I had wanted it to.

  “I never said that—” I started, but stopped myself. I couldn’t lie.

  He scoffed. “You didn’t need to.”

  “It’s more than just the girls,” I whispered. “You never loved me, did you? You never loved me the way you love Jade now. You never looked at me like that.”

  “You never let me.”

  Because you never would have.

  “Why did you do it?” I whispered. It rushed out, unbidden, unwanted. I sensed he dreaded the question as much as I did. Tears sprang into my eyes. “Why did you do it and leave me alone to pick up the pieces? You didn’t even have the guts to say it to my face. You took away my right to have a say. That was almost as bad as you cheating.”

  He closed his eyes for a second. “I don’t know. I felt trapped, I guess. Terrified that I’d become my father. I don’t know.”

  “Do you feel trapped with Jade now?”

  He hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

  “No.”

  Was it something about me you couldn’t stand?

  My jaw tightened. Whatever it was about me—or our marriage—I hadn’t been enough for him. Even though I hadn’t wanted to be at the time, I’d been the indomitable Bitsy then, too. I’d always been taking care of myself. Or, rather, not taking care of myself.

  Would self-care have changed that?

  No.

  He drew in a deep breath, staring straight into my soul. “We weren’t good together, Bitsy. Even you have to admit that. We’re too alike. Jade is my opposite. She completes me. You and I were … battering rams.”

  A rebuttal swelled in my throat. His gaze didn’t waver, and I found myself unable to deny it. He was right.

  “Right?” he asked.

  “Right,” I whispered, hoarse. It was true, and that hurt. He stacked his hands on his hips and looked away. This painfully electric feeling, cutting right into my heart, was familiar. We’d lived with it most of the time.

  He rubbed a hand over his face.

  “This isn’t about us anymore, Bitsy. It’s about the girls. I’m sure they think they hate me now, but I can prove to them that I’m not a bad father. There were circumstances tonight that I couldn’t control. Once Jade and I can explain it—”

  His pained expression, the strain in his voice, broke through my rage. There was real anguish in his eyes.

  “Maybe … maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I am my father.”

  “You’ve certainly proved that,” I muttered.

  He winced. His father had been a wretched man who delighted in playing mental games with Daniel and his mom. Daniel was a far cry from that.

  A bowl of worms wriggled in my belly.

  The sound of running feet broke the silence. Jade appeared, breathless and wide-eyed. A robin’s-egg blue dress twirled around her knees. In her hands were one torn ticket stub and one unused one. My heart dropped again.

  I should have told Lizzy that I saw Jade in the audience before I sent her out.

  “Daniel?” Jade asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Bitsy? Is Lizzy okay? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I wanted to see her after she ran off stage. I…”

  I gestured to the car. Lana glared out the back window, her chin stacked on her hands, with no Lizzy in sight.

  “No,” he said. “The girls are upset.”

  Jade looked at me. “Bitsy, we can explain—”

  “No,” I said. “Please. I need to go. I need to…”

  “Of course. That’s fine. Monday is the meeting for custody with the lawyers,” Jade said. “Maybe before then we can explain—”

  The panic flared all at once.

  “No. No. You can talk to the girls after. I think we all need a little break and time to think.”

  With that, I spun on my heel and yanked my car door open. Lizzy stared, red-eyed and sniffling, at nothing. Lana slid deeper into the seat, arms tight against her chest.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  Neither girl said a word.

  Chapter 15

  The Monster

  For a long time that night, I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea—my thoughts scattered like a thousand dust particles. The more I tried to gather them, the more they floated away in gossamer strands.

  Lizzy and Lana lay on the couch, curled up with their heads next to each other, breathing deeply. A cartoon flickered across the television, the sound turned low. They’d both nodded off less than thirty minutes after I’d started the movie. Lizzy had cried herself to sleep.

  The quiet house unnerved me, even though I was grateful they were asleep. Ugly monsters had risen up in my heart that I didn’t want them to see. If the girls saw the darkness within, they’d understand me in a way I didn’t understand myself.

  My laptop glowed, shedding light on the calendar detailing every mistake Daniel had made. It lay before me in damning truth. Instead of giving me confidence, it made me sick to my stomach. In some small way, I had wanted this to happen. Now I just felt ill.

  I closed my laptop and leaned back in the chair, head pounding. My tea cooled in the mug as I toyed with the string, replaying every moment of our confrontation in the parking lot.

  You never loved me like that.

  You never let me.

  I shuddered, my eyes closed. He was right. Maybe I didn’t let anyone love me. Not Dad, not Daniel. I hadn’t even told the Health and Happiness Society about all the ugly truth for the longest time.

  I didn’t let anyone in.

  The phone rang, pulling me from my spiraling thoughts. I swallowed hard and answered it without looking at the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Bitsy? It’s Jade.”

  My entire body turned cold. “Oh. I—”

  “Yeah, listen, I’m sorry. I know I’m the last person you want to talk to, and I know it’s getting late, but can we talk? Daniel didn’t send me. In fact, he doesn’t know I’m here, and I’d really rather he never knew. I made a promise to him that I wouldn’t get involved with anything between you two, but I have to break that tonight. It’s my fault he was late.”

  I straightened up as a pair of headlights shone into my kitchen. Her small, silver car pulled into the driveway.

  “Can we talk?”

  Five minutes later, Jade sat next to me on the porch, hands in her lap. She stared up at the stars. I focused on the cracks in the sidewalk. Paint frayed on the house to my left, chipping off in petal-sized chunks that littered the ground. I thought of Daniel’s mansion and sprawling backyard.

  This house was tired.

  “He was late because of me,” Jade said, shattering the silence.

  “You were there, Jade.”

  “Only because of luck and good traffic. He left a meeting early to join me at a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. At first, he said he couldn’t come with me because he was worried about having to stay late to deal with the ramifications of missing the meeting, but I begged him to come.”

  “But how does that—”

  “I can’t have children.”

  Her lips pressed together once she uttered the words. She blinked rapidly, head tilted back. I waited, uncertain what to say, sensing this would make sense eventually. Jade looked at me, and I got the sense that she had to force herself to meet my gaze.


  “I grew up dreaming of getting married, having six children, and settling into old age as a grandma. For years I’ve clung to that dream. Through my first divorce—my husband left me because I wasn’t getting pregnant despite all interventions—and now marrying Daniel. Today, I found out definitively that it will never happen. My doctors have suspected it for some time.” She waved a hand through the air, even though her eyes sparkled with tears. “We’ve been doing a ridiculous amount of testing to try to make it happen, but it was just confirmed today. I will never have kids. In fact, I may need to have a hysterectomy next month.”

  A tear slipped down her cheek.

  “Jade, I—”

  She held up a hand, stopping me. “Don’t. It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault, really. I don’t want apologies or pity or whatever. I just … I wanted you to have all the information. I had to have Daniel with me when they confirmed it because I already knew. Do you know what I mean? Have you ever just sensed something deep in your gut?”

  She sniffled and pressed a hand to her cheeks to wipe away the tears. Her voice was thick when she continued.

  “Daniel stayed with me afterward and held me while I cried. He was an hour later than he’d promised them when he returned to work because he’d stayed with me. He would kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but this evening, he left without permission to get to the play. Just … left a client meeting to get there. Just after we left the school, he got a call. They’re pulling him in front of a disciplinary board next week and have him on unpaid leave.”

  I winced despite myself. Jade let out a long breath.

  “Daniel isn’t perfect.” She laughed. “Far, far from it. But I didn’t want him to burn for this one. Not alone, anyway.”

  It’s so much more than just tonight, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. It was about more than tonight. But was it about his ability as a father?

  No.

  It was about my hatred of his decisions. Of him.

  The truth was a bitter pill that stuck in my throat. A metallic taste filled my mouth, as if I’d sucked on a penny.