I’m shocked and grateful, and while Terrance also looks surprised, his face hardens and his eyes narrow into slits. He jerks away from her so fast it’s almost like a slap, and no matter what she’s done to me, the second he hurts her I am free to claw out his eyes and scratch off his skin. “She ruins everything,” he says.
“I told her she could,” Mom says. “I promised.”
“You could sleep at Tabatha’s,” I say, shrugging.
“Go to bed, Elizabeth,” Mom says. “Now, before I change my mind.”
Terrance doesn’t leave, but I think I ruined their mojo. Terrance isn’t as magic as he thought, I guess. Their bedroom stays quiet all night and while I appreciate the silence, I still can’t sleep. I think of Dad’s plan to get Jaime and me to live with him, his self-serving obliviousness to what that one phone call would do to his daughters. More cash means more booze without more work, and I have no doubt that Dad would be like a frat kid with a fake ID if he succeeded. Of course, he was banking on Mom’s faulty parenting to back him up, and he won that bet. Jaime and I just keep losing.
I wanted to hate the baby. I’d planned on it all those months as Mom’s belly grew, tried to ignore the instinctual response to coo and cuddle the tiny crying bundle wrapped in soft white blankets, reminded myself he was half enemy blood, and as long as I wasn’t alone with the little guy, it worked.
At four months old, Noah was still crying all night but Mom never yelled at him. She screamed at Terrance for leaving the bathroom light on, for leaving his boots in the hallway for her to trip on, for not putting the toilet seat down. She yelled at us if our rooms were messy, yelled at me if dishes were piled in the sink or if the carpet looked dirty. The woman who normally waited until telemarketers finished talking to politely say, “No, thanks,” was now saying things like, “I don’t have time for this crap.” Her eyes were hardly open at dinner but she still got up for church each Sunday, she managed to drive safely, and she never yelled at Noah.
It was summer. Noah could hold his head up and grabbed at plastic toys, dolls, faces, and our hair. His little hands were surprisingly strong. In the mornings while Mom got ready for work, Jaime and I watched him along with Saved by the Bell and Sweet Valley High on TV. During commercials for games like Crossfire and Mouse Trap, we pushed the skin of Noah’s forehead into his eyes so he looked like a shar-pei puppy. We sang along with the Tootsie Roll and Mentos jingles during commercials, made Noah’s chubby legs dance, molded his baby hand into a fist, and then pulled up his middle finger.
“Look at his big ears,” Jaime said. Sometimes we called him Dumbo.
“He’ll probably get Terrance’s buck teeth,” I said.
“He doesn’t look like Mom,” she said and poked Noah in the belly. He made more sounds now than just screams. Giggles and nothing words poured out of his mouth. Jaime said, “What if he’s not really our brother?” He stared at us with the same wide brown eyes he absorbed everything with, darker coffee colored in the center and muddy brown at the edges, and always alert, examining. I pulled the skin from Noah’s cheeks and watched his lips stretch into a twisted clown smile.
“Half-brother,” I said. “And we saw him come out.” He bounced and waved his chubby arms, and I thought if someone replaced his eyes with blue and lightened his complexion, he looked a bit like Jaime. Same round face, pudgy cheeks, soft chin.
After Mom left for work with Noah to drop off at day care, Jaime and I were free until five P.M. We lazed in front of the TV for more than the allotted three hours and sometimes didn’t get dressed until four thirty. We did our hair and makeup like the Glamour Shots photos some of our friends had done at the mall, and pranced around the living room in our pajamas, making up dance moves and singing as loud as we could along with the blaring radio. We lounged at the pool in ninety-degree sun, listened to tapes I’d ordered from Columbia House for free: Ace of Base, Stone Temple Pilots, and Boyz II Men. We applied tanning oil and remembered to turn frequently. Sometimes we put lemon juice in our hair for highlights, or cucumber slices over our eyes to “banish bags,” practices I’d read about in the Cosmo magazines I bought with babysitting money and hid under my bed.
A few weeks before school started Jaime and I walked home from the pool with our towels wrapped around our waists, rubber flip-flops wet from our dripping bodies and squeaking with each step. We were arguing about whose turn it was to make lunch as I unlocked the door.
“I made sandwiches yesterday,” I said.
Jaime shrugged. “You’re older.” She smiled and pushed me and then we both saw Mom’s purse on the kitchen table. At two thirty, it should not have been there.
We knocked on her closed bedroom door. “Mom?” She didn’t answer but I heard sniffs so I turned the knob.
Mom sat on the mattress with her back to the door. “Mom?” An overturned plastic hamper spilled clothes onto the floor, pants and collared shirts were on the bed, something like a dark T shirt hung from the lamp, cutting the light in half.
She said, “I’m okay.” Her fingers twisted a white cloth in her lap but she didn’t lift her head. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Please shut the door.”
I made tuna sandwiches and fruit punch Kool-Aid and by the time we were fed and in dry shorts and T shirts Mom said she needed to talk to us. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, but her face was dry.
She took a deep breath. “Terrance was arrested this morning.”
“For what?” I said.
“He’s in jail again?” Jaime said.
“He didn’t mean any harm,” Mom said.
I said, “What did he do?”
“He was just flirting,” Mom said. “What do women expect when their butt cheeks hang out of their shorts?” She pressed her fingertips to her eyebrows and covered her face.
“When’s he getting out?” I said.
She released a huge sigh. “I don’t know,” she said and started crying in big heaving sobs. Jaime looked at me with wide eyes, but I didn’t know what to say. Mom said, “They don’t believe him. He wouldn’t do what she said he did, but with his record.” She wiped at her eyes. “He could do time.”
Mom looked down at her blouse, at the daisy-size wet spots mushrooming out from her breasts. “Damn, I’m leaking.” She went into her bathroom, dripping all over, tears adding moisture to her shirt.
“Time for what?” Jaime said.
“Prison time,” I said.
“So Terrance is gone?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I hope so.”
Mom yelled, “Can one of you bring me a bottle?”
When I handed her one of the dozen bottles I’d hand washed in hot soapy water that morning, I saw that the white garment she’d been clutching earlier was in her bathroom trash. Her bed was made and carpet cleared, most of the clothes were back in the hamper. Mom sat on the toilet with her breast-feeding bra unhooked and hanging open under her left breast, the yellow suction cup of the pump attached to her nipple. “I don’t know what we’ll do, Liz,” she said. “He didn’t make much, but it helped and with the car payments and Noah’s day care…” She finished pumping and capped the bottle top. She rehooked her bra, pulled a clean shirt from her closet, and slipped her arms through the sleeves.
“He’s never coming back?”
“It’ll be okay,” she said.
She came out of her bathroom and hugged me. Jaime appeared in the bedroom doorway and Mom pulled her close, too, and squeezed us both hard. “We’ll be fine,” she said, but she wasn’t blinking.
When she left to pick up Noah, I dug out the clothing she’d thrown away: a pair of the white basketball shorts Terrance wore loose and baggy. They were made of slippery synthetic jersey material and these were ripped near the crotch so no wonder she trashed them. I felt stupid for trying to play Nancy Drew. But later, when Crystal read me the police reports, I understood why Mom had destroyed her room that day. A waitress at a Denny’s in Lodi claimed that Terrance had made “suggestive comments�
� and “obscene gestures” at her. The waitress then claimed that Terrance had followed her into the bathroom, unzipped his work jumpsuit, and popped his penis out of a hole in his baggy white shorts.
8
Sam barges into my room without knocking. He used to share this office space with Tammy before it became my room, and he acts like I’m a squatter he can’t get rid of. He walks to the ceiling-high bookcases against the wall and clears his throat. I turn up the volume on my CD player. Sam clears his throat again and hefts a huge textbook off one of the lower shelves. I hum and open my math book. Sam walks to my desk and stands with his free hand on his hip. He bends over so his mouth is level with my ear and says with his bran muffin breath, “I meant for you to turn your music down, Elizabeth.”
I don’t look up from solving for x. I say, “That’s what words are for.”
Sam isn’t wearing his Crocodile Dundee hat today, the weather has warmed up enough, I guess, though I still wear sweatshirts in the house most of the time. “Well then let these words clarify my meaning for you,” he says, creating a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pointing at his lips. “Turn. Your. Music. Off.” I reach up and turn the volume way down so only the faintest hints of drums and guitars float out of the palm-sized speakers. “I said, ‘off,’” he says.
“With my door closed you won’t hear a thing,” I say.
He slams his heavy book onto my desk. “Tammy asked me to help you with your homework,” he says. “But with that attitude, you’d be insufferable.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“I agree,” he says. “I think your best is just mediocre.” My eyes narrow and my lips fold around my teeth. “Tammy worries your grades are not high enough for acceptance at a quality university,” he says. “I told her, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’” He scoffs. “She should be overjoyed if you are able to enroll in a state school.”
“I am not like my mother,” I say. “The last few weeks it’s been your fault I’m too cold to do homework.”
“You can’t blame others for your shortcomings, Elizabeth.”
“At least I admit I have shortcomings,” I say, dropping my pencil and standing up. “A successful life doesn’t just mean money, you know.”
“What would you know about success?” He laughs. “The uneducated rarely achieve it—and with your background, well.” He picks up his book and starts to walk away. “Tammy’s blindness with regard to you is apparent.” You, too, buddy. He says, “It’s no surprise to me that your aspirations are rather low.”
I frown at the bald spot on the back of his head and wonder what Tammy sees in him. I think of her nervous hands at dinners since he showed up, her jumping up at his slightest mention of a drink or a snack, how they always watch, eat, and do what he wants. I think of their weekly phone calls while he’s in Australia, his presence felt in stored possessions and displayed photos for most of the year. When they returned from Hawaii they were tanner, but didn’t seem any closer. I say to his back, “I would want my partner to be happy.”
He shakes his head. “Happiness isn’t giggles and rainbows, child,” he says. He stands taller in the doorway and adjusts his shoulders. “We’re both satisfied.”
I say with the voice Mom calls snotty, “I thought you were supposed to be a genius or something.” I raise my eyebrows.
He sighs. “You’d better get back to work,” he says. “With how long it will take you to riddle out those equations, only two pork chop plates may be necessary.”
My face heats up. “I hate your pork chops,” I say as he goes down the stairs. I slam the door, turn the volume on my Counting Crows CD back up, and dive into my math homework. Unlike my issues with Sam, my math problems have a right answer I can double-check in the back of the book. I’ll show you, jerk. Without frostbitten fingers, I finish the equations in record time with every answer correct on the first try.
At school, Dean’s luscious red lips stick out and fold into a dramatic pout when I tell him I’m moving home at the end of the year. “How will I survive without you?” he says.
Dean and I have been eating lunch together on the grass behind the art building when the weather is nice like today, with the mid-May sun melting the chill from the air, the mountains on all sides sparkling like polished teeth. We sit cross-legged, leaning on hands propped behind us, the knees of our jeans touching.
I smile and poke his ribs with my index finger. “Are you saying you need a girl to protect you from the big bad LDS gangs?”
“The Mormon regime is afraid of independent women,” he says. “You’re like their Kryptonite.” He tilts his head back and gazes at one puffy white cloud as it drifts across the baby-blue sky. I close my eyes and let my skin soak up the warmth.
Dean says, “Are you sure you want to move back?” I’ve told him enough about my situation for him to ask.
“It’s home,” I say.
“Won’t it be a new house?”
“It’s still home in the bigger sense,” I say and shove his shoulder. He smiles. I say, “You can write me letters.”
“I’ll write you a book.”
“We can do math over the phone,” I say. I’m determined to show Sam that I will rise above my parents’ examples, without his help, so I recruited Dean as an after-school homework partner. Both of our grades have improved.
Dean nudges my knee with his and says, “We can do other things over the phone.” He grins at me, revealing the gap between his teeth, and lifts an eyebrow.
“Um.” I think I might be blushing.
Dean removes his hands from the damp grass and leans sideways toward me. I flash back to Mom and Terrance, the steps from making out on a camping trip to marriage and a baby, and then Mom’s teary complicity in his latest crime, and while my body may want to respond, my brain isn’t ready for Dean to kiss me just yet. I prepare to back away as his cute face comes closer, but he reaches past me and snags a cracker off my wrinkled paper lunch bag. I exhale as his body moves past mine again to settle back into his grassy seat. I shake my head.
He grins again. “What?” He pops the cracker into his mouth. My cheeks are definitely pink. He tugs on my ponytail and opens his mouth to say something just as the bell rings. He groans and I wonder what he almost said. “Better get back to the cages.”
Dean walks me to class like a gentleman, and while I’m relieved there’s no pressure from him, my cheeks stay flushed for hours.
I spend the bus ride up to Tammy’s imagining what life would be like if I stayed in Utah. I’d go out on dates with Dean, to movies and parties and maybe even prom. We’d hold hands in the hallways and homework sessions might include “other things.” Tammy and I would hike in the canyons and play games and stay up late talking over bowls of ice cream. Sam’s not around for very long at a time, and at least I never feel his probing eyes on the spots where my skin meets my clothes. Also unlike Terrance, Sam seems to like his personal space as much as I relish mine. Part of me thinks I could be okay here.
At the condo there’s an envelope from Rachel waiting in the mailbox along with Tammy’s catalogues and the neighborhood newsletter. The Sacramento return address makes my eyes burn. Rachel writes, Spring Break was awesome. My mom taught me how to banish negative energies and do a soul cleansing. Plus, she gave me a bunch of R rated movies. I miss you! I can’t wait for you to come back. No one else will let me do their hair.
I miss Rachel, and I miss Jaime—who still hasn’t written me a single letter—even more. It was so hard to say good-bye to Jaime after our Spring Break talks, and it’s been hard to track her whereabouts since. For days at a time while I wait to hear from her I do homework with the phone by my books, put the phone on the bathroom counter when I shower, beg Tammy to get call-waiting since Sam is regularly on business calls. Not that he would answer. I call Crystal’s every twenty-four hours, but they’re only sometimes at her house. Jaime and Dad often stay at Steve’s and sometimes Jaime spends a night at Mom’s in exchange for
babysitting. “They come home drunk,” she tells me. “It’s almost like being at Dad’s.”
She calls when she can. Dad thinks I’m a bad influence. “After she talks to you she starts asking to go to school and stuff,” he said once when he answered Steve’s phone. “We’re not like you,” he said. “Leave us alone.” I know he bad-mouths me the way he did our mom when we were little and I have to trust that Jaime sees what he’s doing. She keeps telling me she’s not stupid.
Then Jaime calls one night and says, “Guess where I am.”
“Did you find an apartment?”
“Better,” she says. She’s not whispering or speaking in one-word sentences, and I can’t think of why she might be so excited. “It’s foggy here. It makes me think of turkey,” she says with a levity in her voice that’s been missing for months. “Or maybe, drama over a Snickers bar?”
“Aunt Deborah’s?”
“Yep,” she says and I sense she’s smiling.
Jaime tells me that Deborah, not having heard from any of us for a while, tracked Dad to Steve’s house. Jaime answered the phone and told Deborah she didn’t know where Dad was. Yes, he’s still drinking, still not working, still in denial. Deborah didn’t think that was a “suitable environment for a child.”
“She was all like, ‘I’m coming to get you. I’ll be right there,’ and hung up like Batman or something,” Jaime says. She laughs, which is a sound I haven’t heard recently, and it makes me smile. “Dad didn’t come back before Deborah showed up so I left him a note.”
“What about school?”
“She’s going to homeschool me for the rest of this year,” Jaime says.
“What did Mom say?”
“Dad’s pissed,” she says. “He said I betrayed him.”
“He deserves it.”
“He yelled at me until Deborah hung up on him,” she says, sighing. “Mom thinks it’s better for me here.”
“We agree about that,” I say. “How do you feel about everything?”
“Time for dinner,” she says. “Gotta go. Aunt Deborah made meatloaf. Everyone says hi.” She pauses. “I’m good, Liz.” Then she’s gone, again, but at least now I know she’ll be safe.
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