by Maggie Wells
“Breakfast!” Dad yelled through the bathroom door. “Eat up and we can hit the road.”
“I’m not hungry, Dad,” I said weakly. I stood in the bathroom, afraid that if I opened the door the kitchen smell would overwhelm me and I would be sick again.
“Luciana!” Dad yelled. “Breakfast! Let’s get a move on!”
“I’m not hungry!” I managed to yell this time.
I need to get a pregnancy test and find some place to take it. I could not imagine driving all the way to Batavia not knowing for certain. But then again, spending a whole weekend in the car with Dad and knowing that I was pregnant scared the shit out of me as well.
I know just what he’ll say when he finds out: ‘I’m not angry. I’m disappointed.’ Of course not; he never gets angry. Not Dad.
But angry would be so much better.
Warm summer rain spattered the windshield and the wipers slapped, slapped, slapped, not quite in time to the country music on the radio.
“How far is it to Batavia?” I asked.
“About three and a half hours,” Dad said.
“I need to stop at a drug store,” I said. “Female stuff.”
“Right now?” he asked. “Couldn’t you have taken care of it yesterday?”
Yes, I could have, I thought. But I didn’t.
“I guess I can wait until we get there,” I said.
I stared out the window at the rolling fields of corn. Every few miles we passed a weathered farmhouse cradled in a grove of trees, the shady yard sprinkled with a few sheds, maybe a rusted-out truck and a dog or two. As the road undulated, mile after mile, I imagined riding my bike clear across Iowa, the road carrying me like a surfer on a wave. Then the sun came out and I rolled down my window. The July air, heavy with the smell of the rich black earth, blew my hair back from my face. I caught my reflection in the side mirror. I had my father’s nose and chin, but otherwise my features were dark, not at all like his. He had clear blue eyes and sandy blonde hair. Since leaving Mom, he had taken to buying everything at garage sales: his furniture, even his shoes. On this day, he wore a threadbare sweater and baggy jeans that I feared he had dug out of some dumpster.
I trained my iPhone on him.
“You know, Dad,” I said. “If you died in your apartment all alone, and your cat and dog were starving, your cat would eat you before your dog would.”
“I guess that’s why I have always been partial to dogs,” Dad said.
That video only got five thousand views.
Eventually, we lost the signal on the radio and I had to scan the dial until we picked up a Caribbean station. Dad turned up the radio and beat the steering wheel in time, bouncing a little on the seat. I laughed and we sang along in a foreign language we didn’t know.
After a while, static overpowered the signal and I couldn’t find another station so I switched off the radio. I experimented with filming the farmland rushing by the car window.
“I need to tell you something,” Dad said. “About your Aunt Sofia.”
“What’s that?” I asked idly.
“Well . . . she killed herself,” he said.
I was shocked. I felt as though the world had suddenly tipped on its axis. Sofia? The aunt whom I adored? Whom I had always wished had been my own mother? Sofia was Dad’s half-sister; Dad was the youngest boy in a family of eight and she had always doted on him. Aunt Sofia had six kids and her house was always filled with activity, joy, and laughter—so different than the vacant, sullen, accusatory atmosphere that I had grown up in. Everyone in Aunt Sofia’s family actually seemed to like each other.
We had visited my cousins in Illinois every summer for as long as I could remember and I loved sleeping in the same bed with Sofia’s daughters, Bonnie and Cindy. We would stay up all night playing truth or dare until Mom would come in and shush us. Never Aunt Sofia. She never scolded us. She was everyone’s favorite aunt: so generous, always quick with a warm hug, a soft shoulder.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She walked into the river and drowned,” Dad said.
“How can you just walk into a river?” I asked. The very idea terrified me—allowing the water to rush into your mouth and lungs, and fighting the urge to swim to the surface.
“It was about her mother,” Dad said. “My mother—I never told you that she was murdered.”
“You always told us that your parents had died of cancer,” I protested. “Before I was born.”
“It was easier to tell you that story,” Dad said. “Who wants to tell his children that their grandfather had murdered their grandmother?” His voice took on a hard edge. “My father was a mean bastard.”
I was shocked to hear the anger in his voice—I had never heard him use that word before.
“They fought all the time,” he said. “He beat the shit out of all of us. And my brothers beat the shit out of each other—and me. Bastards! I hated them all.”
It all started to make sense to me. Why my dad never raised his voice and never showed affection to my mother or me. What if you didn’t know any other way to relate to your kids and your wife?
“What about your sisters?” I asked.
He grew quiet.
“When he was drunk and in one of his rages, he would drag one of the older girls upstairs and do only God knows what. Not Irene and Susie—they were too little. But all of us kids fled the farm as soon as we were of age. Flo ran away to Chicago when she was fourteen or fifteen, I think. Mom sent Sofia to live with her grandmother on the farm up in northern Wisconsin. I enrolled in NROTC and went off to college at seventeen.”
We drove in silence for a long time.
“Ma left the farm once the kids were all gone,” he said, suddenly. “She couldn’t take it anymore. She moved back to Milwaukee. My dad was never much of a farmer—so he sold the cows and the farming equipment, and what was left for him to do? He sat through the winter in an empty farmhouse on an empty farm. I guess he decided to kill himself.”
“But why kill your mom?” I asked. “How did that happen?”
“Somehow he got a note to her saying that he needed to see her,” he said. “She stopped by the farm on her way to Sofia’s house and he ambushed her. When Mom didn’t show up, Sofia got worried and went looking for her. She found the bodies.”
“The bodies?” I shrieked.
“He shot her and then turned the gun on himself,” Dad said.
Just then, the clouds opened up and big drops slammed against the windshield and exploded like water balloons. I rolled up my window and Dad switched on the wipers.
“I don’t think Sofia ever got over it—finding the bodies,” he said. “She carried this secret like a stain,” Dad said. “She never felt worthy of her husband. She walked into the Rock River and drowned herself—twenty years to the day after she found the bodies. The fourth of July.”
Just then, I realized that my phone had been recording the whole time. Hoping Dad didn’t notice, I closed the app.
SEVEN
I SLUMPED DOWN IN THE SEAT, PRETENDING TO SLEEP. I HAD completely forgotten about my problem, becoming fixated on the memories of the times that Dad had taken us to visit the old farmhouse where he grew up. And now I started to question what was going through his mind each time we visited. The last time we were there, the house was empty and we were able to sneak in through the kitchen door and look around. The house was really spooky—the kitchen still had the original cast-iron stove and scarred linoleum floors. The light switch in the stairway was cracked and the wallpaper was scarred with scratches that looked they had been made by fingernails.
As the exit for Batavia approached, I said, “Drugstore, Dad. Please?”
Dad used the men’s room while I rushed through the Walgreens checkout line with an EPT kit and a package of tampons, just in case. I took the test in the restroom, a weird place to do it, I know, but I thought taking it there would make it less likely to come out positive. I was wrong.
Of cour
se I was pregnant. They tell you that condoms are eighty-two percent effective and diaphragms are eighty-eight percent effective and even that the pill is only ninety-one percent effective. Well I must have been that unlucky one percent, because my partners and I used all of those and yet, I found myself pregnant. And I had no fucking clue as to who the father might be.
As I stared at the plus sign, I felt completely powerless and saw absolutely no way out of this situation. I had never known another girl my age who had gotten pregnant so I couldn’t think of anyone to call. Certainly not my mother and I didn’t really have any friends in Cedar Rapids. I thought about my sweet Aunt Sofia and suddenly I realized that I was not sad that she had died. I was jealous. I wanted to be the one in the coffin with everyone crying over me.
I sat crumpled on the floor of a filthy toilet stall in a Walgreens in bum-fuck Illinois. The feelings of rage, shame, and guilt rose in my throat like sour bile. The muffled noises of customers outside the bathroom door washed over me as the events of the past six months played back in my mind, over and over, an endless loop, as I counted the rivets that marched in a line along the ceiling over my head. Each time I heard someone pound on the locked door, I jumped. But secretly, I was hoping for an explosion, a pressure-cooker bomb tossed by a rogue madman, which would shatter the plate glass and engulf the entire Walgreens in flames. They would never find my scorched body, never be able to retrieve the fingerprints from the EPT stick that led to the perpetrator of the crime. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole, along with my guilt and my shame. I turned the camera on myself.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said. “I just found out that I am pregnant.” I turned the camera to focus on the plus sign on the stick and then back to my face, streaked with tears.
“I have no fucking clue who the father is. How fucked up is that? I don’t know how to tell my parents and I can’t even think why I should go on living; I feel so hopeless. I am such a failure!” I started to sob.
“I hate myself for being completely useless. Nobody loves me or wants me or needs me. I blame myself for believing all those boys who had told me they loved me. This is it. I am fourteen and pregnant and a total failure and a complete disappointment to my parents.”
Dad was waiting impatiently by the car when I finally came out.
“What took you so long?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. I climbed into the car and immediately put on my headphones so he wouldn’t even attempt to make conversation with me.
Here’s the thing about offing yourself. The people who are hurt the most are the ones who are left behind. I barely recognized my cousins when we arrived at the house. The boys were hanging out on the front porch, sprawled in the July heat on white wicker chairs. I sat down beside them, not knowing what to say. What I felt most was the silence—and I realized that I was the only one who was crying. Sofia, in ending her pain, created a lifetime of hurt for her kids and everyone else. This woman, who I had known to be so loving and giving, had taken everything from everyone. Having escaped the clutches of violence, she had created a happy family. And I believed that they had been truly happy. The happiest moments of my childhood were the times when I was embedded in her brood. Embedded and embraced. I felt love from that family that I never felt from my own. How had she maintained that façade of happiness for twenty years? And what made it come crashing down?
I looked around for answers. I looked at my cousins, numb in their silent misery. Their world had come to an end. The loss was unfathomable. I looked at my father. He had said all he was going to say.
“You look different,” Cousin Jimmy said.
Cousin Jimmy had driven out to Pittsburgh to visit us the previous summer in a Vintage Pontiac that he had lovingly restored.
“In what way?” I asked, vamping a little. I had a big crush on Jimmy. Maybe he was seeing me in a new light?
“You look really pretty,” he said. “Not that you weren’t always pretty, I mean.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You look great, too.” I wondered if we would end up kissing in the back hall of the funeral parlor. First cousins—that could be problematic—but then again his mom was only a half-sister to Dad. Does that make us half-cousins? Is that legal in Illinois? You can see how my mind works.
I thought about the stain. What was the nature of Sofia’s stain? A secret so dark that she had buried it deep inside for fear that if someone else found out they would hate her and abandon her. Did my uncle hold it over her when they quarreled? Did he threaten her with exposure? How much did you have to hate yourself to off yourself like that? And now the stain had been passed onto her kids.
Doesn’t that mean that my dad also carries the same stain? And then I realized that he did. The stain had poisoned our family too. The stain was shame. The crucible of violence in which Dad was raised had cast him as a leaden lump of passivity. He spent so much energy bottling up the aggression that he believed was inherent in his nature that he had long ago become unable to express any emotion at all. He had never once in his life hugged me or told me that he loved me; he never raised his voice or hand to me either. Whatever feelings he had for me he channeled into hurtful ridicule that he tried to laugh off as playful teasing.
Shame—I am intimately familiar with that feeling. I have felt shame for as long as I can remember—ugly, unlovable, a monster. So this is my legacy.
I started to think about Sofia differently. She had felt shame all of her life and when her husband came along and loved her and legitimized her, she felt validated and at the same time, she felt unworthy. Just like I had felt validated by the high school boys who were so eager to get inside my panties. And now the stain was in me.
I found a spot to perch on the railing to check my Facebook. On a whim, I searched on teen moms and found a page called Nine Months. There was a video posted by a chick named Jasmine.
Jasmine: “Can I Live” is based on a true story from Nick Cannon. Check out his music video . . .
I don’t know what I was thinking but I posted a comment: Making a big life change is scary. But you know what’s even scarier? Regret.
Candy: I’m 17 and I got accepted to Princeton. My parents don’t know that I’m pregnant.
Aleecia: Where is the baby-daddy?
Candy: He’s back in Italy with his family. He doesn’t know.
Shawna: You gotta tell him, girl! He should step up.
Candy: I doubt it. He’s already moved on. We haven’t really talked since spring break.
Isabella: Tell your parents. Today. Let me know what happens.
I sent friend requests to all of the girls who had posted on the page so they would follow me. Then I posted a link to my video shot in the toilet of the Walgreens: “Hi, it’s me. I just found out that I’m pregnant.”
That video got two million views.
EIGHT
FUNERALS ARE WEIRD—PEOPLE MILLING AROUND AND speaking in low voices. My Aunt Marie came up to me and told me not to cry. Why shouldn’t I cry? Isn’t that what you do at funerals?
I wanted to ask questions. Why had she done it? Had there been warning signs? Had my aunts and uncles talked about their parents’ deaths over the years? Did Sofia’s kids know about the murder?
My crazy Aunt Irene was there. She had never married, had spent some time as a nun, and then became a nurse.
“How old are you now, Luciana?” Aunt Irene asked.
“Fourteen,” I said.
“And do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
“No,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I had been with lots of boys but none of them thought of me as their girlfriend. Of that, I was sure.
“Don’t wait too long,” Aunt Irene warned. “Look at me. I had a suitor once, when I was your age. My father drove him off with a shotgun and little did I know that would be my last chance in life. You need to get married.”
It was such a surreal conversation. I was fourteen and pregnant, for Christ’s sake!
After the funeral, Dad drove me out to the lake to visit my Aunt Flo, his oldest half-sister.
“You can stay at Flo’s tonight,” he said. “I am going to stay with Uncle John. He shouldn’t be alone right now.”
Flo was perched on her usual bar stool inside the dimly lit and musty pool hall. I climbed up onto a stool next to her. I loved hanging out with Aunt Flo. She smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes. She was so cool, letting me sit in the bar with her and drink Shirley Temples.
“How come you weren’t at the funeral?” I asked as I sipped through my straw. “Do you mind if I make a video?” I trained my camera on Aunt Flo.
“He killed her, you know,” she said, slurring her words. She had obviously been in the bar all afternoon.
“Are you talking about my grandfather?” I asked.
“John,” she replied.
“What do you mean—Uncle John killed her?” I asked.
“He never loved her,” she said. “She felt worthless.”
“She always seemed so happy, to me,” I said.
Flo took a long drag on her cigarette. “He was sleeping with his secretary.”
“Are you allowed to smoke in here?” I asked.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” I said.
“Is that right?” she said. “When I was fourteen, I ran away from home. Did your dad ever tell you that?”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I had to get away from that monster,” she said. She didn’t seem to be listening to me.
“Are you talking about your father? Dad told me he was a mean bastard,” I said.