“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, it’s been a long time since—”
“I know, I know!” Heather said. “But to Robbie . . .” She sighed. “To Robbie it hasn’t. He still talks about you all the time. He still thinks about you.”
It made me wonder what Heather thought of Jessie. What she was thinking about me now. The fact that she said that Robbie still felt close to Jessie made me feel like she didn’t. Like there might be old wounds or bad feelings. I felt a twinge of rejection.
“I’ll try,” I said, desperately wanting to make up for everything Jessie Morgan had done.
“Thank you,” Heather said, squeezing my arm.
“Hallelujah!” Myra sang from the kitchen in a fake operatic voice. “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
“Are you done with the dishes?” Heather called from the step.
“Righto,” Myra said.
“Movie time!” Heather yelled, standing up.
“Right again!” Myra said.
We were all hanging out in the living room in our pajamas—mine borrowed from Myra—watching The Breakfast Club and eating popcorn with hot sauce and melted American cheese on it, reciting lines along with the movie, when we heard tapping on the window.
“What was that?” I asked.
Heather smiled.
“What?”
“Robbie mentioned he’d be stopping by. He said you guys had business to attend to.”
We hiked along a narrow dirt trail. Robbie held the flashlight steady in front, and whenever there was a rock or a root in the path, he’d shine it behind him to show me so I could step around it. I was still in Myra’s pajama pants and an extra Carhartt jacket Robbie had in his truck. It was heavy and lined with flannel, but it was so big on me that the damp, cool air snuck in all the gaps. It smelled like Calvin Klein cologne and gasoline.
There was a steep section with rocks. Robbie grabbed my hand to help me up.
“All right, there we go,” he said, when I made it over the rock. He held on to my hand until he was sure I had stable footing. We were in a clearing. The clouds were thick, but in small clear pockets there were stars, and off in the distance we could see the lights from Seattle.
He turned the flashlight off, and we stood in silence, letting our eyes adjust.
“God,” Robbie said, finally. “We snuck out here so much. I think I barely spent a night in my own bed in high school.”
“Yeah,” I said, worried suddenly that Jessie and Robbie had some kind of romantic thing going on that Heather didn’t know about. I took a step away from him.
But then Robbie said, “You were my best friend. Best part of my life back then was sneaking out with you and lying here.” He kicked his toe into the ground. “Staring at the stars, talking about stuff.”
Robbie pulled a tattered box of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his jacket.
“I don’t smoke,” I said; then, correcting myself, “I quit. Heather says you did too.”
“I did quit,” Robbie said. “These are the last two cigarettes from the last box I ever bought. We smoked our first cigarettes here. I saved these. Hoped we could smoke our last ones together too.” He pulled one out with his teeth and handed me the box.
I had never actually smoked a cigarette. I also felt like I was treading on something sacred. “I don’t know if I should, Robbie.”
“Come on,” he said. “For me. For closure or something.” He patted his pockets until he found his lighter. “I’m not sure I would have survived if it wasn’t for you.” I could hear the catch in his voice. “Just to have someone else know what it’s like when your dad gets trashed and turns into a monster. It made things a little better, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. I did know what that was like. It was a strange kind of comfort to realize that I wasn’t the only person in the world who grew up with Jekyll and Hyde for a parent. I’d given up so much to keep it a secret. It felt like my own private shame, but maybe there had been other people around me going through the same thing. Maybe if I hadn’t been so desperate to cover it up, I would have seen them. I took the cigarette and handed the box back to Robbie. We sat on the ground. The grass was wet, but Robbie didn’t seem to care, so I decided I didn’t either.
“Remember the night you broke our window?”
The dampness from the grass seeped through my pajama pants. I leaned on one arm and pulled Robbie’s jacket under my butt with the other so I wouldn’t end up soaked.
Robbie put his arm around me. “I think my dad would have killed me if you hadn’t thrown that rock. He was so out of control.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I said.
“He was so far gone. And I was the one who was ashamed of it. Like it was my fault.” Robbie took a deep breath, and it came out uneven, ragged.
I reached up to hold the hand he’d rested on my shoulder. I understood that exact mix of shame and misplaced responsibility.
We’d had an assembly in school in ninth grade. The police came in and told us to “just say no” to drugs. They warned us of the dangers of underage drinking and drunk driving. But no one told me what to do about my mother.
I even asked my father once, on one of my few and far between weekends at his house. I couldn’t make myself say the words about the wine bottles, the glasses of water that were not water. All I said was, “You know how she gets.” I breathed deeply and whispered, “And sometimes she drives.” They weren’t words I could say at full volume.
My dad took a swig of his beer and said, “I couldn’t control her when I was married to her. What makes you think I have a say now?”
In the filmstrip they’d showed us in the auditorium after the police left the stage, there was a small lump on the side of the road with a gray blanket draped over it. There were paramedics and flashing lights, and a broken tricycle. The person who drove drunk in the movie was a reckless teenage boy in a leather jacket, with slicked-back hair and a torn, yellowed undershirt. I’d been in the car with my mother when she’d been drinking. I’d held on tight to the door handle and bit the inside of my cheek when she slammed on the brakes at the very last minute to avoid hitting the car in front of us.
I remember how hard I cried when I finally worked up the nerve to say, “Dad, what if she kills someone?”
“Jenny,” my father said, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, “you’re worrying about people we don’t even know,” like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
I squeezed Robbie’s hand hard and hoped he couldn’t tell I was crying.
“Oh man,” Robbie said, “all the times we snuck out here. Trading stories about what freaks we were. You saved my life.” He took his arm back and pulled a handful of grass from the ground, throwing it away one blade at a time. “Remember when we tried to build a fort out of tree branches?” He laughed. “At, like, three in the morning.”
“That didn’t go well,” I said. It was an easy guess. I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands.
I thought about the nights alone with my mom when things were so bad that I would sit in my closet and try not to make a sound. I wanted her to forget I existed. I didn’t want to give her a reason to come in and scream and break my things and tell me how sorry she was she ever had me. I didn’t even want to exist anymore. I would have given anything for a Robbie, for failed attempts at fort building, for someone to hide with.
He lit his cigarette and then reached over and held the lighter out for me, shielding it with his hand. I sucked in, the way I’d seen smokers do, and the paper started to burn.
“I missed you, Jess. You’re like my sister.”
“I missed you too,” I said, trying not to choke. In the strangest way, it was true. I missed out on having someone like Robbie in my life. I didn’t know how to pic
k the right friends or the right boyfriends. I didn’t know how to choose things for myself, because I couldn’t trust anyone. I’d never learned how. But Jessie, she had Robbie. She had someone who loved her in the right way for the right reasons. She had a friend to be a freak with. If I had a friend like Robbie, I would have thrown that rock too. I would have fought for him. I would have had someone to fight for.
My lungs burned and my eyes filled with tears again.
We lay on our backs on the ground.
Robbie sucked hard on his cigarette, blowing smoke up to the stars. “God, these are stale,” he said. “It’s like smoking a basement.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I had no idea what a cigarette was supposed to taste like. My head buzzed. The sky was big. Robbie scooched over so I could use his arm for a pillow, and his body heat kept me warm.
I’d always wanted a big brother. It’s what I used to wish for when I lost an eyelash, or the clock said 11:11, or I threw a penny in the fountain at the mall, even though I knew it was an impossible wish. Lying there with Robbie made me feel safe the way I’d always imagined having a big brother would.
“Does your dad still drink?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” Robbie said. “My mom left him. Finally. My brother won’t talk to her. He took my dad’s side. It broke her heart, but she’s doing okay.”
He sighed, and I felt his chest expand next to mine. “It’s like she has to learn how to be a person again. She was a hostage for too long. My dad still lives in that house.” He blew smoke out of his nose like a dragon. “I drive the long way home after work so I can pretend he isn’t even there.”
“My mom still drinks,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever said it out loud.
“Jesus,” Robbie said. “I didn’t know your mom drank too. Your dad was bad enough for two parents.”
I gasped but turned it into a cough and pretended it was smoke related. “I guess because he was worse, I didn’t notice her problem, you know?” I didn’t know if Jessie’s mom was a drinker, I only knew that mine was. I’d never really talked about it before. I wanted to. I wanted to say the words out loud and have a witness.
“What about your dad?” Robbie asked.
I didn’t want to make up more than I had to about Jessie’s parents, so I said, “My father is irrelevant,” because it was the truest thing I could think of to say. He was.
I hadn’t even talked to my father since last Christmas, when we made stilted conversation over an artisanal cheese course at his girlfriend’s favorite restaurant. I had to leave before the meal, to go to my mother’s house, where she accosted me for choosing “that man” and his “chippie” over her. She didn’t even have dinner for us. We ordered Chinese. She passed out by six thirty and called me a waste of genetic material when I tried to get her into bed. I gave up, threw an afghan over her on the couch, and tried to push her over on her side before I left.
When I got back to my apartment, Deagan called from Telluride to tell me how his mom had baked a full turkey in the chalet they’d rented. “Yeah,” I told him, “we had turkey too. Christmas tradition.” Deagan didn’t notice that my voice was flat and dead, that there was no enthusiasm to be mustered. Part of me wanted him to ask what was wrong, but part of me was terrified that he would. I’d have to explain, and it would make me seem like one of those people with problems that needed to be whispered about.
He didn’t ask.
When Deagan said good night, I hung up the phone and cried until the lady who lived upstairs pounded on the floor for me to shut up.
Robbie and I were quiet for a long time. Watching the stars. Watching our smoke circle up into the air.
“Last one ever,” Robbie said, sitting up to stub out the end of his cigarette on the sole of his boot. “Right?”
“It’s a pact,” I said.
He took mine from me and stubbed it out too; then he put both butts in the box and put the box back in his pocket. “Ha, look at us being all responsible. Not littering.” He pulled a blade of grass from the ground and started tying it in knots. “Where did all the time go? When did we grow up?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting up, leaning against him. “I thought it would be . . . different. To be this age.”
“Me too,” Robbie said, handing me the knotted blade of grass.
I remembered my promise to Heather.
“Heather says you don’t want to go get your swimmers checked,” I said. It occurred to me how weird it was to be talking about sperm with a stranger. Except that he didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.
He didn’t say anything. I heard him sniff. He dropped his head into his arms. His side shook against mine. I thought he was laughing for a second, and then I realized he was crying.
“Robbie?”
Nothing.
“Hey,” I said, nudging his shoulder with mine. “Are you okay?”
“I can’t,” Robbie said. His voice was blurry and muffled.
“Why not?” I asked. “They give you porn. It’s a free pass for porn, Robbers.”
“What if it’s me?” He looked at me and even in the dim light I could see how devastated he was. His cheeks were streaked with tears. “I don’t want to know if it’s me. If it’s my fault.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault, Robbie,” I said. “It’s just the way things happen sometimes.”
“But it’s Heather. She was born to be a mother. She’s the best wife,” he said, and even through his tears he smiled when he said it. “How could I tell her that I can’t give her a family?”
“I think,” I said, “what she wants most is you.”
“I don’t know,” Robbie said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know if that’s enough.”
“It’s not just about that, is it?” I asked, figuring he was probably feeling what I did when I thought about having kids. I realized for the first time that it’s probably what every kid with a shitty parent fears most.
“No,” Robbie said, shaking his head. “It isn’t just about that.”
“You’re not your dad,” I said. “You won’t turn into him.”
“What if it’s inevitable? What if having me is what turned my dad into a monster.”
“He had a choice. He could have gotten help.” My mom could have gotten help. It was a devastating, liberating thought.
“I guess,” Robbie said.
“It’s hard to look at it like that, isn’t it? Because if you can be a better parent than the ones you had, you have to face the fact that your parents had that choice too. If you’re not fated to be an awful parent, they weren’t either. And,” I said, feeling my throat tighten, “it’s easier to believe that we’re all just fucked than it is to know that there are choices.” I rubbed my hands together to try to get my fingers to warm up. “It hurts less to think they couldn’t have done any better than they did, doesn’t it?”
“How’d you get to be so smart, Jess?”
I laughed. “You guys are going to be great parents.”
“I want to be,” Robbie said.
“If you can’t trust yourself yet, trust Heather,” I said. “She won’t let you fall short. She loves you too much. You’re not your father, and Heather isn’t your mother. Right?”
“Jess,” Robbie said.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t disappear again, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t want to. We lay back in the grass holding hands, staring up at the stars until the sky started to brighten again.
It was almost daylight by the time Robbie and I made the trek back to Myra’s house. We snuck in. Heather and Myra were asleep on the couch, a head on each armrest, their feet tangled up in the middle. Robbie grabbed a quilt from the back of the rocking chair and sacked out on the floor next t
o Heather. I watched him kiss her cheek before he settled in. I pulled an afghan off the back of the love seat and curled up. I couldn’t have slept more than three hours before my phone started buzzing. In my sleepy haze, I accidentally answered it instead of turning it off. “Hold on,” I whispered into the receiver.
I could hear my mother saying, “Jenny? Jenny?” as I tiptoed through the kitchen and into the backyard. It was freezing outside. I didn’t have shoes on.
“What?” I said into the phone, allowing my voice to sound ever so slightly irritated, even though I knew I’d pay for it.
“I don’t like your tone,” she said. Her voice was dangerous, wounded. I could picture the look on her face too clearly. The sharpness in her eyes, the softness of her cheek as it trembled with anger.
“It’s still early here,” I said. “I was sleeping.”
“You haven’t called me back in five days.” She said it with the kind of accusatory inflection that other people would reserve for saying something like “You left me for dead on that desert island” or “You mass-murdered a school bus full of nuns before you ran over all those kittens.”
“I’m on vacation.”
“Well, I didn’t realize you needed a vacation from your mother.”
I wanted to tell her that she was what I needed a vacation from most of all. But instead I said, “I just need to go back to sleep, Mom.”
“Fine,” she said, “but . . . ,” and then she proceeded to tell me about every slight or perceived slight she’d experienced in the past five days: from the guy in the Cutlass Supreme who cut her off on 390 to the hairdresser who didn’t seem to take enough time bleaching her roots (“Like she was in a rush, Jenny! I mean, I had an appointment!”) to my dad’s latest infraction that had something to do with not sending her an engagement announcement, even though it would have sent her on a rampage of the “how dare he rub my face in his marriage?” variety if he had. I stopped listening about ten minutes in. I sat on the back step, rested my face against the splintery wood railing, and closed my eyes. I would have just put it on speakerphone if there wasn’t a risk of someone coming outside and hearing her call me Jenny. My butt was freezing, and my body ached from only getting a few hours of sleep curled up on a love seat. But hanging up wasn’t an option. Hanging up was never an option. It started an explosion that took days, if not weeks, to clean up. It set off a drinking binge. It made her my problem on a greater scale than she already was. Phone calls ended when she was ready for them to end, and not a moment sooner.
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