“Oh, never mind,” Miss Lydia sighed. “If the very idea sets you off, you’re likely past the age when you could have had a boy for a friend.” I was pretty sure what she meant, but made a mental note to roll that comment around some when I was alone.
Then she harrumphed. “Make me a promise, Billie Marie. I want you, when school starts up again, to take a real hard look in the classes up and down a year. See if you can’t find somebody you can be friendly to.”
“I can’t do that!” The very idea made me itch. I’d gotten pretty used to being invisible at school, too.
“I don’t see why not.” When she looked me in the eye like that it was impossible to look away. “Why, I’m . . . pretty near sixty-five years older than you and we’re friends, aren’t we?”
I hadn’t been so surprised since the day the town disappeared and Miss Lydia yelled out my name. But I sure liked her. If she thought we were friends, I guessed we were.
That night I crocheted her a potholder that was only a little bit crooked, and the next day she told me it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen.
Chapter Four
A lmost five weeks had gone by, all told, before the day it all happened. St. Swithin’s Day, straight-up middle of July, dawned sunny and bright and, even if I couldn’t plan on confiding it to Miss Lydia, I felt a wave of relief. Middle of the morning, I was out back trying to pick enough straggly green beans for that night’s supper when Curtis drove his pickup into the alley from the back way. He yelled to get my attention and then said, “Come on, get in and go to town with me.”
“No, thanks,” is all I said.
Then he held up some money and a piece of notebook paper. “Mom wants you to get her some groceries.” That oily-looking smile again. “Guess she don’t trust me with woman’s work.”
I could hardly believe Miss Lydia would make me go anywhere with Curtis. I stepped out into the alley so I could see past our garage and across the street. Just then Miss Lydia straightened up from her flowers and waved. She could see Curtis’s truck right there plain as day, so I thought she was saying to go on.
I still didn’t want to. But I figured that’s part of what friends are for, to do things for you they don’t want to do. Just because you’re their friend.
After I got in, Curtis backed out of the alley instead of pulling on through. It was an odd thing to do, but I was trying not to think too much about where I was. Much later I remembered being barefoot, which right there would have made a sashay into the IGA out of the question.
I tried to run when he pulled up to the back of the school and stopped. I swear I did. I’ve imagined it a million times the last five years and every single time I get away somehow at that instant and run for home.
Sometimes I bite his hand and he lets go. Sometimes I kick him where it hurts and make off while he’s bent double. Sometimes I just scream and it surprises him so, he lets go. Just for a second. Just long enough.
A second would have changed my life and everything in it since. But the truth is, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out the driver’s door and over to the building before I could even get my feet under me. He held on so tight while he broke a window next to the handle on the big double door I got burns on my wrist. Deep enough to scar just a little. I still wear a purple bracelet of skin when it turns bitter cold.
But I forgot about my wrist hurting when the back of my head hit the lunchroom floor. For a few seconds I thought I was going to pass out, but I guess adrenaline kept me awake.
I slapped and kicked and clawed best as I could until Curtis backhanded me across the face so hard I saw stars. I quit trying to hurt him then. But I couldn’t stop trying to get away.
The sun was shining straight at me through the bare windows and I squeezed my eyes shut against the glare. I tried to block out everything else, too, but couldn’t. Behind the blood red of my eyelids, I couldn’t stop feeling or tasting or hearing or smelling.
I knew it was Curtis’s tongue shoving into my mouth, but it felt like a snake trying to muscle its way past my teeth and it tasted like a dirty ashtray rinsed in coffee.
His whiskers scraped my cheeks like sandpaper, and the smell of Brylcreem in his hair mixed with stale sweat on his clothes and the smell of a million school lunches.
He started grunting while he pulled at my clothes. It sounded like a hog going after his mealtime slop. Sometimes now I imagine I threw up on him and it disgusted him so he let me go. But no matter how many times I gagged with his mouth mashed against mine, nothing came up. My stomach was empty. Sometimes I wonder if eating breakfast that day might have saved everything.
Finally, Curtis took his mouth off mine so he could threaten to kill me if I didn’t stop struggling. And then came a pain like I didn’t know existed. White-hot pain like a thousand fingernails scraping my insides out. So bad I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
But it could and it did, again and again, until the pain swallowed me up and that’s what I became. I couldn’t separate it from anything else in my being. Lightning bolts hit with the rhythm of waves on a beach, one following another. Each one tearing me open, ripping me apart.
And sometime during this Curtis grew strangely calm. He cooed at me, droning on like he was in a trance. Like he was trying to lullaby me to sleep. “That’s it. Idn’t that good? Idn’t that what you wanted?”
And somehow, from somewhere behind his voice in my ear and beyond the pain I had become, I heard the sound of someone crying.
It must have been me.
Chapter Five
C urtis had roared off in his truck and I had run all the way home before I realized the house key had fallen out of my pocket somewhere. I’d been sitting on our back step less than a minute before Miss Lydia was right there. She must have been watching for me.
She sat down trying to comfort me and at the same time ask questions I just couldn’t answer. I kept shaking my head and wincing away from being touched. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to untangle the words in my head and string them together in a way that made sense.
But then she saw the blood running down my legs and she started crying too. That made me feel even worse. I’d never, ever be able to pretend it hadn’t happened now, because it didn’t belong to just me anymore. She knew and there was no way she could ever not know again.
She stood up and tried to get me to go with her. She wanted to take me home. To her house. That house. Where he lived too. I tried to tell her no but couldn’t get anything out beyond, “What if he . . . what if he . . .”
Miss Lydia stopped crying just enough to say, “Oh, he knows enough not to show his face.” Then she led me across the street by the hand like nobody had done since I was four years old.
She took me upstairs and started to run water in the bathtub, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I thought about taking off my clothes. I couldn’t and I told her so.
She left and came back with two big old terrycloth bathrobes and told me if I’d take a bath, she’d put one on too.
I didn’t want anyone to see me naked and told her so, and she said to put my clothes outside the door. She’d wait. I heard her crying even with the door closed. It was a terrible sound.
I’d only heard an old person cry once before. My guess is, heartbreak just comes as less and less a surprise as your life goes on. But I’d heard my grandma cry after they found my Uncle Junior under his tractor, and it was just the way Miss Lydia was carrying on now.
When I lowered myself into the tub, the hot water scalded the raw place between my legs, but it also told me my muscles had been tied in knots for so long they were starting to ache. I scrunched down until my chin was touching the water’s surface. Tried to let my arms and legs float.
The water was soon pink with the sticky blood soaking off me and I grabbed for the soap and washcloth. I scrubbed every inch I could reach, but rinsing off with that pink water—washing myself in my own blood—made me feel like I’d never be cle
an again.
Later, Miss Lydia and I sat together on her couch downstairs in those ratty old robes while my clothes went through the washer and dryer. She petted my hair when I laid my head in her lap.
It was easier to talk, not looking at her. So I told her about the day Curtis came to our house and how I had been scared of him then. “I guess I should’ve told you,” I said. “I just had no idea . . .” I felt so stupid.
She started trembling and her voice came out shaky. “Oh, honey. Oh, honey, I didn’t know. I just didn’t know or I would’ve done anything in the world to stop him.” Then she said she was sorry, that she never should have had a son in the first place. I knew that wasn’t right and tried to tell her so.
That made her cry more, but after three false starts she told me. “I wasn’t much older than you,” she said, “when my own daddy . . . oh, child. My own daddy hurt me like that. He did. He did.”
A jolt shot through me like a zap of electricity and I whipped my head around to stare at her. It was her turn to look away. I watched her chin wobble as she stared at the curtained window and forced more words to come out.
“My daddy . . . the one man who was supposed to look after me . . . and he hurt me. Whenever he could get me off somewhere.” Her shoulders started shaking, her head dropped to her chest, and tears started dripping down onto my face.
“Oh, Miss Lydia. Oh.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
“Oh, child, I would do anything to take this away from you. Anything,” she said. “I . . . should never have had a child. I never meant to. Because of what he did. What he was. And when I found out I was expecting . . .” She scrunched her eyes tight and spent a minute pulling herself back together. “. . . I prayed to God every night that I was carrying a girl. That there’d be no way to pass it on. And then . . . I had a boy. A boy, a boy, and I felt worse than Typhoid Mary for bringing him into the world.”
I felt so bad. Like it was my fault she’d had to remember all that. Like I should have hidden what happened for her sake, not mine.
But the way her face twisted up told me something different: that this was the kind of thing you never forgot, reminded or not. That even if I still owned it, all to myself, there could be no pretending it hadn’t happened.
I started wishing I could trade places with Miss Lydia and have all those years between my age and hers over and done with.
And then, all at once, I was tired enough to feel like I could sleep for a few of those years. I was way too tired to think any more.
So Miss Lydia started thinking for me. After my clothes were done and we both got dressed, she said we needed a plan. She said I should stay with her until my folks came home and she’d stick up for me if they said anything about losing my key.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t tell them?” I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet, but something faint started to claw at my stomach.
Miss Lydia shook her head. “I think it’d be best. Won’t undo what’s done and you got to remember, I’ve known your folks longer than you have. Known folks in general longer than that.”
I guess she could tell I didn’t understand. “My own mama blamed me when she found out . . . well, you know,” she said. “And I got a pretty good idea your mama’s no smarter than mine was. Your daddy . . . well, your daddy would feel like he had to do somethin’ about it. And whatever he did, everybody in the countryside would know why sooner or later. And that’s just more to talk.”
She hung her head and shook it, while tears dripped onto the hands clasped together in her lap. “And . . . honey, the plain, honest truth is that people, most of ’em anyway, are no damned good.” She shuddered like she was trying to shake something off. “And there’s nobody gonna blame you, child, long as I draw a breath.”
It sounded like nobody was going to blame Curtis either. The twist in my gut started to feel like fear. I didn’t know how I could stand living right across the street. I said, “But . . .” and found I couldn’t say his name. I shivered and Miss Lydia pulled an afghan off the back of the sofa onto my shoulders. I shook it off. Tried again. “But he . . .”
“—will never hurt you again as long as he lives,” she finished. Then she said, “Trust me.”
Well. My mama had told me never to believe anybody who had to tell you to trust them. But I’d had enough doubt planted about Mama’s thinking to confuse that issue.
And anyway, I knew she was right about Daddy. And about other people finding out. I’d be better off dead than living in Cumberland if everybody knew.
But I had to trust somebody. This felt a whole lot bigger than me.
We cooked supper for my folks out of her pantry and she helped me carry it over when we heard them drive in. They tried to yell at me about losing my key, but Miss Lydia interrupted and offered to call Mr. Ripley of “Believe It or Not” on their behalf. She half smiled as she explained that it was the first time she’d met anyone who had never lost anything. The look she leveled at them rendered them both pretty sheepish by the time she was finished. She kissed my cheek before she went home.
I was alone with my parents then, terrified to look them in the eye. Surely they would see I was a completely different person than I had been that morning. They’d want to know why.
But they didn’t give me more than the usual glance. Something ominous as a thunderhead was hanging in the air of that little kitchen and they didn’t notice.
After my heart slowed down and my hands quit shaking, I asked Mama for permission to take some aspirin. She wanted to know if I had a headache.
I did, from my head hitting the hard wood of the lunchroom floor. But I said, “No, I think I might be coming down with something.”
I sniffled a little for effect and a small shock went through me head to toe as I realized this was it. I had decided not to tell.
I had to run to make it to the bathroom before I threw up. After that I went straight to bed, but a long time passed before I was able to close my eyes, let alone go to sleep.
The sirens woke us up at 3:30. We all jumped out of bed and tried to run out the door at the same time, but Mama made me stay behind. So I stood at our front window and watched the lights on the police cars go around and around, splashing red across my face and onto the walls around me.
Mama came walking home by herself after a while and acted mad that I wasn’t in bed. I asked what had happened and she said, “That old fool woman shot Curtis for a prowler when he came draggin’ in, like he hadn’t done it a million times before. I guess she’s gone senile. Now go back to bed.”
And I did. But I never did get back to sleep.
Chapter Six
I t turned out the river had crested that day. Two days after Curtis’s funeral everybody started moving back to town.
Curtis Jenkins’s funeral was the strangest I’d ever seen—and I had been hauled to the funeral home more times in my eleven years than I could remember. Around here when anybody dies, everybody goes. I’ve never figured out whether it’s out of respect for the family or out of fear that otherwise, when their own time comes, theirs will be the only body in the room. Probably a little of both.
But this one was different, all right. How do you write a eulogy for a man nobody liked? What do you say to a woman who killed her own son, even when you think it was an accident? The Lutheran preacher just gave kind of a regular sermon. Maybe a little heavy on the “be prepared” theme. In this case it came out sounding a lot more like condemnation than praise for the departed.
The time before and after the service turned into a reunion for all the Cumberland folks who hadn’t seen each other since they’d packed and run for the hills. It didn’t seem right, all that laughing.
But I don’t think Miss Lydia heard a noise anyone made. She just sat in the front pew in her navy-blue dress and black old lady shoes with her hands twisted around a lace-trimmed linen hanky. And she stared straight ahead at nothing. Or at everything, I don’t know.
Th
e only time she moved was when I was within reach. I don’t know if she could hear me or smell me or what. Without turning her head or blinking she’d reach out, pull me in close, and squeeze until I could barely breathe. I might have wondered if she really had gone around the bend if I hadn’t seen just about every kind of behavior imaginable from folks sitting in the front pew of that room that always smelled like carnations.
I remember after Grandma Wharton’s visitation Daddy had little red dashes on his white shirtsleeve from Mama’s fingernails digging in and drawing blood. Old Man Sullivan stood in front of his wife’s casket like a guard dog at her funeral, fairly snarling at anybody who came close. And you never knew whose relatives would get into a shouting match right there over their dead body.
Grief seems to come down to individual style about as much as dancing does.
As for me that day, I had every emotion going on at once. My brain worked so hard it felt like it might seize up. I was horrified and sad and relieved and guilty and still in shock over everything that had happened in just three days’ time. The one thought that I kept coming back to was, “Please don’t die, old woman. Please live as long as you can, even if you don’t want to right now.”
It had come to me that if I lost Miss Lydia, I’d be the only person in the whole world who knew what had really happened and why Curtis was in that coffin at the front of the room. And I wasn’t sure I could hold all that knowledge inside me without breaking into pieces.
When the trucks rolled into Cumberland and everybody started lugging in the same crap they had lugged out less than a month before, Daddy did feel pretty smart. That presented him a problem. He thought pride was just about the biggest sin you could commit, so now he couldn’t say “I told you so” to anybody.
But he must have granted himself special dispensation after the door slammed behind him at home. He’d come in about ready to bust and strut around crowing to Mama about who said this and that and what had he tried to tell all of them a month ago?
Billie Standish Was Here Page 4