“Always?” I say and my voice cracks.
“When your mom and I were kids,” Tammy says, settling onto the mattress, “our stepmother threw things at us constantly. She locked us out of the house, sent us to bed without dinner at six P.M., refused to buy us clothes or let us go anywhere.” Tammy closes her eyes and her shoulders tense. “Once Linda and I woke up with uneven bowl haircuts and a dead bolt on our bedroom door because I told our dad she wasn’t feeding us.”
I squeeze her hand and she flinches. “Is that when she started hitting you guys?”
Tammy nods. “She always went after Linda first.” Her nostrils flare. “I fought back so she started waiting until I wasn’t around.” She snorts. “Coward.”
I wait for Tammy to continue, to tell me how it got better, but she just sits there, wide-eyed and staring into space. “I had piano practice after school,” Tammy says, still not looking at me. “I quit so I could walk her home but Linda waited so long to tell me.” She drops her head and pulls her hands into her lap. “I should have noticed.”
“Did you feel guilty?” I say, thinking of Jaime’s scars, of Mom’s, the visible surface marks and the deeper damage we can’t see on their skin.
Tammy blinks and presses her lips together. “I still do,” she says quietly.
“Me, too,” I say. “About Jaime.”
“Oh, Liz,” she says. “Don’t.” Her shoulders relax a bit and she forces a smile. “Guilt is a useless, festering disease. Nothing that has happened to you or Jaime was your fault.”
“But you just said—”
“It’s harder after it becomes habit,” she says.
I chew on my fingernail. “I bet Mom doesn’t lose sleep feeling guilty,” I say.
“Your mom made great sacrifices for you girls,” Tammy says.
“Not lately.” The dammed flow of tears behind my eyes threatens to burst free. “She abandoned us.”
Tammy studies me and purses her lips together on the side of her mouth, considering. She says, “For a long time, I thought your mom was weak for staying with your dad. I encouraged her to get over her fear and escape, for you and Jaime. And she did, finally, but”—Tammy takes a deep breath—“now, I think it took tremendous courage for her to suffer all she did. She believed she was protecting you girls, putting your safety before hers, and she wasn’t scared for herself.”
I remember how secure I’d felt for the first half of my life with Mom in the next room, even if Dad was home. Without hesitation, she defended us from monsters in the closet and our rampaging father. Dad’s temper needed an easy target and Mom surrendered to keep him away from us. “He hit her a lot,” I say.
Tammy’s jaw clenches. “I know,” she says. “She’s a good liar, your mom. And I was so far away.”
“I used to think she was so brave,” I say. She muffled her cries when Dad hit her, endured black eyes, cantaloupe-sized bruises, and sprained wrists in near silence so that her daughters could dream in peace. Jaime slept through the beatings but I often watched, powerless and furious at my tiny fists that were incapable of fighting back. “Like a superhero.”
“She was brave,” Tammy says with pride. She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I think she still is. And she loves you girls so much.” Tammy scoots off my bed. “You are brave, too, you know.” She pats my knee and stands tall. “We are a family of warriors.”
I yawn and snuggle deeper under the blankets. “What do you think we could be if we didn’t have to be brave?”
Tammy’s face registers anguish before she laughs. She bends and kisses my forehead. “Good night, little girl,” she says and turns off my light. “Sweet dreams.” The lip balm she wears leaves a sweet smell and light residue on my face, and even though I worry about pimples, I close my eyes and don’t wipe the honey-scented wax from my skin.
It takes two more days of waiting for Mom to call before I finally break down and dial home while Tammy is at her aerobics class. Terrance answers the phone, “Home of the Whopper, what’s your beef?”
“Can I talk to my mom please?”
“Who is this?”
“I’ll give you two guesses, genius,” I say.
“Well, hello to you, too, Liz,” he says and snorts. “It’s good to hear your voice. Hold on.”
I hear a shuffle and a squeal, and then Mom breathes, “Hi, Elizabeth,” into the phone. My stomach churns and I don’t even want to talk to her anymore. “How are you?” she says. “How’s school?”
“Okay.” I hear Terrance laugh. “I didn’t get to pick my elective so I ended up in technology,” I say.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she says.
“My teacher can’t spell and she has a mullet.”
Mom says, “I hear your new room is pretty big.”
“I can’t put anything on the walls, but I have my own bathroom.”
“Lucky you,” she says. “Most teenagers don’t get their own bathroom, you know.”
Terrance’s laughs become louder. “Babe,” he says. “Babe, you gotta come see this.”
Mom giggles. “Sorry, we were watching a movie.”
“I’ll let you go then. Don’t want your daughter to interfere with your life or anything.”
“Don’t be a snot,” she snaps. She clicks her tongue in a “tsk” sound and takes a breath like she’s going to say something but then doesn’t. We sit for a beat, the TV and Terrance’s sniggers in the background. “Why can’t we have a normal conversation anymore?” she says and now her voice is tired.
“You haven’t called,” I say.
“I’ve been busy,” she says.
“Don’t you miss me?”
“Of course I do, Liz,” she says. “But life goes on.” She sighs. “You know that.”
“I thought this was supposed to be temporary.”
“We still have to adjust and move forward.” She clears her throat. “All of us.” The subtext is like cold water flung in my face: that means you. She’s not thinking about me coming home at all. She’s settling into new routines, a daily life without me or Jaime.
“Hello?” Mom says.
The lump in my throat grows like a tsunami so I keep my mouth shut against the stinging grief that is quick to rise around Mom. In my memory or on the phone, all she does is remind me that I’m not as important as Terrance, that Jaime and I are not even second-string players kept on the bench. We’re being replaced.
“This silent treatment is not worth the long-distance rates, Elizabeth,” she says but I can’t speak. “If you’re not going to talk to me, why did you call?” Because somewhere inside of you is the mother who loves us. Mom says, “Fine, young lady, if you’re not going to talk to me, then—”
I hang up. My nostrils flare, searing tears fill my eyes, flames blister in my chest, and for the first time since I arrived in this whitewashed city, I’m too warm.
Outside, the street is covered in a clean white blanket, sparkling under the almost full moon and burning stars. Icy webs dim the streetlights and the grounded moonlight stretches forever along Tammy’s street. Trees are held captive by the weight of the water, animals have been caved in by layers of unique snowflakes, nothing moves. There is no sound.
Holding the silence against the ringing in my brain, I step out onto the snowy sidewalk, palaces of ice crystals cracking under my feet. I feel them break, faintly hear their crunching destruction, and suddenly I want them to crumble. I want them to explode, to shatter and burst into thousands of slivers under my devastating weight, to rupture and then vanish completely, leaving no trace of their existence. Poof, gone.
I smash my boots into snowdrifts, kick frozen grass, melt snowballs in my fists. I spin and stomp on the snow in Tammy’s yard until I realize I’m screaming with my mouth ripped open, my teeth and throat bared to the sky, and my chest constricting in the cold. I howl under the stars until my lungs are dry and I can’t breathe, but the snow swallows my voice. The frosty white carpet and thick air absorb every
resonance before it has a chance to ripple out into the night, and even as loud as I cry, no one can hear me.
5
Checking the mail has become the highlight of my weekdays. A black metal container is bolted to the red bricks of Tammy’s condo next to her front door, and every day I flip through the envelopes searching for something with my name on the front, a familiar return address. I’ve mailed two letters to Jaime, three to Rachel, and I sent Gary and Carol a thank you card featuring a picture of a brown boxer like Rambo, but each day not one in the stack of letters is for me.
Some of the envelopes are addressed to Sam, which doesn’t seem fair since in the month I’ve been here I haven’t seen him once in real life. He lives in framed photographs around Tammy’s house, mostly in her bedroom: Sam dressed in a navy-blue snowsuit doing a handstand on top of an icy mountain; Sam and Tammy in kayaks floating on a greenish brown river in South America; Sam riding a bike in the 1979 Olympic Trials.
Magazines like Prevention and National Geographic and catalogues for Eddie Bauer and L. L. Bean round out Tammy’s mail, and I put it all on her wooden console table after I’m inside. I set my backpack against the stairwell, turn up the heater, and open the refrigerator. Thanks to me, a butterfly magnet full of grassy greens and bright yellows now breaks up the white of the fridge door, but Tammy’s kitchen is the one room where there is nothing on the walls yet.
I pour Kashi cereal and low-fat milk into a bowl and put it on a wooden breakfast tray. I do this almost without thinking, my afternoon snack now a daily habit like so many other things have become here. This house has a routine, a schedule, even on Saturdays. Tammy lets me sleep in until she gets home from the gym, but then it’s up and out of the warmth of the covers and into the gray cloudiness of winter in the Wasatch Mountains.
On weekday mornings Tammy wakes me up, “Rise and shine,” and flips on the lights. If I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to heat my insides with a scalding shower, she blasts hot water from the kitchen faucet and I get shot with cold. The first few times I couldn’t tell she did it on purpose. We listen to NPR in the car, and Tammy takes side streets all the way to school.
“Do you feel prepared for your biology exam?” she says. Or, “Did you finish that French assignment?” I always say yes.
Tammy and I haven’t painted the walls yet, but our weekends have not been wasted. Like my mom, Tammy believes in efficiency. Sunday mornings we go grocery shopping and to Costco, and since most people here are in church the stores are almost empty. Tammy buys things like smoked salmon and Brie cheese, whole-wheat bread and pasta, one percent milk instead of two, and real butter. She purchases fresh meats and vegetables and makes chile rellenos, crab cakes, and turkey burgers. She buys ingredients for pot roast, tacos, chili. She remembers that cheesecake is my favorite dessert, and she makes it with a lemon sour cream layer on top. “Natural is always better than processed,” she says. “Homemade beats restaurants for most things.” I’ve never seen a Rice A Roni or Hamburger Helper anywhere in her cart, not even a box of instant oatmeal.
“I make the best blueberry muffins from scratch,” she tells me one Sunday, and they are. Fresh nuggets of fruit in soft cake glazed with orange-rind-infused sugar syrup. Tammy slices one still warm from the oven, and I devour my half so fast it burns my mouth. It’s like baked heaven on my taste buds and nothing else matters while I chew and swallow.
Tammy picks off small pieces of her muffin with her fingers and drops them into her mouth. She says, “During grad school, I lived off these, mocha coffees, and pasta for weeks at a time.” Her eyes are far away. “I lived in a tiny studio in California with a tiny kitchen.”
“Alone?”
“Sam took a job in New Mexico before I was done with school.”
“You studied math, right?”
“Applied mathematics, yes,” she says. “I’d come home after class or work and cook dinner every night. No matter how bad the day was, I always ate something yummy.” She licks her fingers. “Has your mom told you what our evil stepmother made us eat?” I nodded—cold canned vegetables, overcooked and tough chicken innards, instant and still flakey potatoes. “As soon as your mom and I moved out, I started making things I’d never tried that were fresh and full of new flavors.”
“Where did you learn to cook?”
“Betty Crocker and Julia Child cookbooks I got at a library sale,” she says. “I only had one sauce pot big enough for spaghetti or fusilli or gnocchi and one skillet for sautéing veggies.”
“Did you make your crab and angel hair pasta dish back then?”
“No, I couldn’t afford crab,” she says. “I’d cook whatever was on sale: zucchini and tomatoes, almost expired sausage with peppers and mushrooms, or sometimes just garlic, olive oil, and basil,” she says. “I grew fresh basil on the tiny kitchen windowsill in an empty garbanzo bean can.” She laughs and takes another muffin from the cooling rack. “I reused everything I could.”
“And now you have all this,” I say, gesturing to the big, light-filled kitchen. “Lots more than two pots,” I say and she smiles. She hands me another fluffy blueberry treat and this half I eat in pieces, like Tammy, savoring each small crumble. We sit as trees sway outside the windows and shadows inch across the rosewood floor. The muffins cool and the bakery smell fades from the room. “I want a house like this someday,” I say.
“There’s no reason you can’t have what you want if you work hard,” she says, getting up from the table and opening a Ziploc bag she’d rinsed out and let air-dry on the dish rack.
“Is this what you wanted?” I say.
Tammy drops blue-speckled mushroom shapes into the Ziploc bag one by one until all the muffins are encased in plastic and ready to be frozen. She nods as she seals the zipper. “Some days it is, little girl.” She nods again and smiles at me, showing all her teeth. Eyes crinkling at the corners, lips upturned as far as they will reach, this is Tammy’s genuine grin. “Some days, like today,” she says, “it’s exactly what I hoped for.”
Tammy thrives on taking care of the things on her to do list. We pick up dry-cleaning, visit antique stores, drop Tammy’s car off to get an oil change while we go to yoga classes. We pick up fresh bagels from Einstein’s and go to REI to buy bike parts in preparation for spring. It snows occasionally as we drive around the numbered streets of Salt Lake City’s grid running errands, and I relax into the furry gray seat cover in the warm car and watch tiny spots of bright white swirl in the air. I think about home a lot, with its wide grassy fields and long freeways, lazy green rivers and level structures. There are no mountains at home, the flatness stretches for miles so the valley tempers the climate and we don’t get this kind of cold. But there is more to see here.
“When it gets warmer,” Tammy says one day, “we can go to the farmers’ market. They have delicious fresh fruit. Do you like kiwis?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never had one.”
“And we can go hiking Sunday mornings,” she says. “When the snow melts, the streams run full and we can watch the sunrise from that mountaintop right there. I promise it’s better than any Sunday service you’ve been to.”
I say, “You really hiked all the way up that mountain?” Outside the car window, snow-tipped rocky peaks surround us and it doesn’t matter which one she’s talking about, they are all huge.
“It’s not that far,” she says. “You could do it if you wanted.”
Sometimes we walk down a block to the Eighth Avenue corner market to get milk or an onion, past snow stacked on the edge of the sidewalks, trees iced with layers of crystal lace. She tells me about winters in Connecticut with snowdrifts taller than me, when electricity is out for weeks, roads closed off, schools shut down. Now when I can’t sleep, I wish for a storm that immense. A blizzard so big and extensive, all of outside just fades into a gentle white void. I picture it in my mind: a whole world of blank and clean, like starting over, like this chance I’ve been given here with Tammy.
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I balance my cereal bowl and carry the breakfast tray from the wood floor out over the carpet. I’m allowed to eat in the living room if I am careful and so far, so good. I dropped an egg on Tammy’s kitchen rug last week, and when the yolk splattered against the blue weave on the twelve-foot floor runner I wondered what she’d be like angry, if she would simmer for days like Mom and then boil over. But I cleaned it up before she got home, and I don’t think she knew.
I turn on the TV and punch in the cable buttons I’ve memorized. Animaniacs starts at three thirty, and I think of me and Jaime at home before Mom on weekdays after school, watching TV too loud and eating popcorn or Pringles on the couch, singing cartoon theme songs together and imitating voices during the commercials.
“What are you doing?” I look up and see Sam standing on the stairs, wearing blue jeans and a big gray sweater under a vest that looks like a life jacket. His tan is darker than Tammy’s, his face has more wrinkles than in the photos, and large glasses rest on his crooked nose. We met once when I was eight, but I recognize him more from the pictures in Tammy’s bedroom.
“Eating,” I say through a mouthful of seven whole grains. “What are you doing?”
He cocks his hip and puts his hand over his faded brown leather belt, his elbow making a sharp V angle against his body. He smiles at me like I’m amusing. “I live here,” he says.
Sam has spent most of the last six years in Sydney, designing a secure computer system for Australia’s national health care programs. He works for their government, and makes a lot of money. He’s not married to Tammy but they’ve been together since high school. Sam was eighteen and the manager of a diner in L.A., Tammy was sixteen and a waitress, and twentysomething years later they’ve lived on a ranch in New Mexico, spent two years in a flat in London, owned a house together in Connecticut, and now own a condo in Salt Lake.
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