by Barbara Hall
Because it was 1957, and premature babies mostly didn’t pull through back then, they just left her in the hospital and waited for her to die. They tried to get back to their lives. Every evening when he came home from work, my father would ask, “Shouldn’t we go visit the baby?” And my mother would say, “I can’t do that, I can’t get attached, it’s too painful.” This went on for months, and finally my mother took a cab to the hospital, walked into the baby ward, and said, “I’m here to take my daughter home.”
They had no idea who she was.
So she took my sister home and named her Sandra and started feeding her with an eyedropper. Sandra lived. But my parents never got over the fact that she lived. It wasn’t their first choice. The fact that she lived forced them to confront the guilt they had about wanting her to die. My father confessed to me later that he was worried she wouldn’t “look right.” She looked just fine, but they could never see it. In their minds, she was always sickly and pale and flawed and just plain wrong. They also probably couldn’t get over the fact that she was a girl. Imagine my mother, knowing that she had a perfectly healthy son somewhere in the world, yet here she was, stuck with raising this sickly girl. Imagine my father, knowing that he had made this deal with the devil, not being able to tell.
Imagine him blaming himself for this terrible circumstance.
Imagine my sister Sandra entering the world as a terrible circumstance, shouldering that burden.
About three years later, my father convinced my mother to have another baby. She had to; she was obligated to. This girl, Sandra, was so weak and sickly (in his mind) that he couldn’t be sure she would live. So they had to have another and this one would be a boy. It must have been the boy argument that convinced my mother. She got pregnant with me and they got busy picking boy names. She carried me full term and I was born healthy and happy and squealing. But I was a girl. My father told me later that he was in shock to learn that he had had another girl. He knew it was their last because it had been so hard to convince my mother to have me. He didn’t have the boy he wanted, but right then and there, in the waiting room after hearing the news, he decided that there was no reason he couldn’t raise me as a boy.
They named me Catherine, but they kept my hair short as I was growing up and they dressed me in boy clothes and called me Cat because it was more boylike. That was how I ended up following my father around and hearing his stories and learning his games.
By the time I was five, my mother had come to accept that she wasn’t getting her son back (he was almost grown, anyway) and her life was going to be about raising these two girls and living with a man who had completely and thoroughly lost her respect. She didn’t know the whole story, but let’s face it, on some level she did. But because it was too painful to really know, she shut down and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of iced tea.
In the meantime, something had happened. My father had been lured away from his job at the bank and had been given a job in the carpet factory that was just opening up in town. A managerial position. He was offered more money and an opportunity to move up in the world. There was nothing that tempted my father more than moving up in the world. My grandfather Will probably instructed him to take the job, and he did. But it was a lousy job, where he was forced to work long hours and answer to men he didn’t respect. It offered him a certain kind of social status, but it didn’t fulfill his lifelong dream, which was to be completely accepted as an important member of society in Union Grade. He was allowed to join clubs and be the deacon in the church and all that, but my parents were still shut out of the best parties, the best cliques, the inner sanctum of Union Grade. By now he could see that his deal with the devil had not entirely paid off. Yet he was still in league with the devil because he had this secret. And he had an angry wife and two daughters. It was not how he saw his life playing out.
My sister and I paid the price for being daughters. My mother never really knew what to do with us. We weren’t an adequate substitute for her son. And we hadn’t solidified any agreement with her husband, or sealed any contract she had with her own fairy-tale vision of her life.
My sister Sandra became the focus of my mother’s attention, and meanwhile, I belonged to my father. I was his last chance, his “idea,” and I had certain obligations to fulfill. Because I belonged so completely to him in his mind, and because I was the closest he was ever going to get to having a son, he confided in me. He took me everywhere with him. My mother didn’t mind. She was basically done with having children. She had no protective instinct toward me, so she just gave me to him. For a long time I didn’t mind. I was the apple of my father’s eye, his idea, his creation, his invention.
My mother was tired of it all. Tired of him, tired of missing her son, tired of raising my sister. She had no energy left for me so she let him take over. And that is why he took me with him wherever he went. And that is why I saw things I shouldn’t have seen. And it’s why when he decided to become a criminal, I became one, too.
All families have things they do together, like board games or silly rituals or picnics in the country. My family is no exception. From the earliest time that I can remember, whenever the town’s fire alarm went off, my father woke the whole family up and said, “Let’s go find it.” We’d grab coats and blankets and follow him into the car. After that, we followed the trail of water that the fire truck left behind. The fire trucks in this town are really old and they leak like crazy, so that’s our trail. Sometimes. And sometimes he just seemed to know how to get there.
I don’t know if my mother enjoyed the adventure. I know Sandra did. It was one of the few times she actually felt like my father’s daughter. She was always angling for us to act like more of a family and this did the trick for her.
My mother was just glad to get out of the house and glad that my father was in a good mood. It was unsettling how happy it made him, going to watch the fires.
For me, it was a little bit of everything. It was a completely different experience from where I was sitting.
Sometimes when we’d visit the fire, it would be a place I’d never seen before. I felt strangely happy when that was the case. My father would get out of the car and go chat with the cops or the firemen, all of whom he knew—they went to our church or belonged to the same clubs—and then he’d come back and say, “Lightning,” or “Electrical system,” or “Cigarette in the couch.”
But many times, at least half the time, it was a place I had seen before, earlier in the day. A place he had taken me to and told me to wait in the car while he walked around it. And then it was night and the whole family was in the car and we were watching it burn. Once when I was very little, I actually said out loud, “Daddy, you took me here!” The look he gave me shut me up and made me realize I couldn’t ever talk about such a thing again. The things we did together were for us to know. That’s what made it a secret life.
You’re probably thinking, Oh, now I get it, her father was an arsonist. That’s her confession. I really wish that were the whole story. It would be terrible to have a father who was an arsonist, but it wouldn’t make me feel like the criminal that I am. After all, many of the fires he started weren’t important. Just old, worn-out buildings that probably needed burning down anyway. It was a way for him to demonstrate this power he had, the power he had been sitting on for all those years, the skills he had learned in the army that he could never reveal. It was a strange kind of shout to the people who wouldn’t let him in.
I don’t know how it made him feel better to do that. I can just barely understand it. But I know he needs it and he’s going to keep doing it, just to show that he can.
There were other things, too, other parts of our secret life. I knew about the hidden family. He occasionally went to visit the woman who had his baby. She had been paid off but she had had the kid anyway, and sometimes he took me to visit them. She lived in a trailer and I would wait in the car while he went in to see her. Once she came out. She was bl
ond and fat and looked nothing like my mother. She leaned into the window and said, “Oh, Clyde, she looks just like you.” Then a girl a little older than Sandra came out and looked at me with this blank expression and told me her name was Amy. I didn’t know who she was but I knew.
“This is between us,” my father told me later. “We have a different connection, you and me. We’re not the same as the others.”
I knew he meant my mother and sister. He didn’t get specific then. When I was older, he told me more.
“Your mother is crazy,” he said. “Doctors have told me that I should have her put away. I think it was Sandra who did it to her. That whole experience broke her. I thought maybe having another baby…”
He got sentimental and sad when he talked about it. His eyes welled up. And I was young and I loved him and I wanted to make it better, but it also somehow gave me a stomachache.
“But after you she was just as crazy, and I was afraid of raising two girls by myself. So I’m just trying to make her comfortable, help her get along.”
I waited for more. He wiped a tear. I didn’t know what to do.
“And Sandra will never be right, I’m afraid,” he said.
I didn’t know what to do with any of this.
Then he turned to me with a big smile and said, “But you and me, we’re the same. We’re going to be okay.”
We’re the same, he said. He just made up his mind. I never had a choice.
I kept the secret of the fires. No one was really getting hurt. Then I let myself not think about it. Then it was exactly like it wasn’t true.
But Jaqueline was different. That was a thing that never left me and never will.
I’m tired now, but tomorrow I will tell you about Jaqueline.
I put the manuscript down and sat on my bed, taking yoga breaths through my nose. It was a lot to absorb, for sure, but I had finally gotten to a point in the manuscript that made my blood stand still in my veins.
I walked down the hall to my father’s room. It was dark in there. He had turned off the light and gone to sleep. But I switched it on and he sat up, looking around, all confused.
“What’s happening?” he said.
“You tell me.”
“Lynnie?”
“Who’s Jaqueline?”
He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on me.
“Oh,” he said. “You got to that part.”
“Yes, I got to that part.”
He patted the bed and said, “Sit down.”
“No. Just tell me.”
He sighed and said, “It’s in the letter. Who Jaqueline is.”
“You know what I mean.”
He said nothing.
“That’s my name.”
My real name was Jaqueline Julia Russo. Lynne was the nickname they agreed to call me. Jaqueline was so far in the past I didn’t even put it down on forms anymore. But I knew it in the back of my mind.
“There was another Jaqueline before me?”
He nodded.
“Am I named after her?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.
“Why?”
“It’s in the letter.”
“Stop with the letter. Just tell me.”
“Please sit down,” he said.
I sat on the edge of the bed, but just barely, as if the bed had the power to burn me or suck me into hell.
He thought for a moment, rubbing his eyes.
Finally he said, “Jaqueline was a girl who was very important to your mother.”
“So I’m about to understand, if I keep reading.”
“You should keep reading.”
“I will, but I want to know.”
“She loved Jaqueline very much,” my father said. “She wanted to validate her memory.”
“So I have another girl’s name.”
He thought some more and finally said, “She considered it a great honor, to pass that name on to you.”
“Well, what if I don’t want some other girl’s name?”
He shrugged and said, “It’s why we decided to call you Lynne. You’re not the same. It’s a memory. It’s an homage.”
“Did the other Jaqueline contribute to my mother becoming a criminal?”
“You should keep reading,” he said.
“Tell me this: Am I named after someone good or someone bad?”
“Someone very, very good,” he said. “Who never had the opportunities that you have.”
“So she never had a car.”
He smiled at me. “She never even had a chance.”
I decided to let it be. I went back to my room and went directly to sleep and didn’t dream.
SIXTEEN
and Technically Three Days
• 1 •
I woke up around one a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was staring at the ceiling as if it were a movie screen, watching all these characters I didn’t know move around and play their parts. The strange girl with my name. My mother, who didn’t really look like me (I had gotten my father’s coloring; some people said I had her smile but I didn’t see it), suddenly looked exactly like me in the movie. I was the one who was living in this crazy house with the distant smoking mother and the strange, fire-setting father. And now I had a new friend to think about. I couldn’t wait until morning to find out about her. I turned on the bedside light and started to read again.
September 29
The girl’s name was Jaqueline. She was a teenager. She was the oldest girl of a man who was a machinist in my father’s carpet factory. He was divorced and had remarried a younger woman. They had children together, two girls, Dana and Sheryl, who were both roughly my age. They lived in the bad part of my neighborhood—the poor housing. We were allowed to play together, though my parents made it clear that they were beneath us in terms of social status. Jaqueline wasn’t on anyone’s social scale. She was just a wild teenager.
She tried to be good. She worked hard in school and made good grades. But when her parents weren’t looking, which was most of the time, she was wild. She had a much older boyfriend who rode a motorcycle. She wore hot pants and smoked on the streets. When her long hair got in the way, she pulled it back and put on a bandanna. She smiled and laughed a lot. She had a good attitude.
Once when my father was driving home from work, he saw her standing outside a local gas station, in her short shorts, smoking a cigarette, and he said, “If I ever see my girls doing that, I will beat them until they can’t sit down.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Around this time, my mother had finally reached her limit in terms of living with my father and complying with his rules. My father was an important businessman in town; my mother should have help. My sister and I weren’t much trouble, but we were children and she needed to be free to participate in the garden club and church functions. In order for her to do that, they needed help. They had gone through a couple of black women. My father had so much trouble accepting black help that he just canceled the whole thing. My mother was fed up. “I just need someone to look after the girls a few hours in the afternoon. A local girl to help out.” Jaqueline was looking for work and her father was an employee. My father finally consented.
They hired Jaqueline to babysit occasionally and to clean up after us. My father decided to abandon his prejudice and to see it as helping out the lower class. Jaqueline, or Jackie as she was known to us, was the perfect solution. She enjoyed playing with me and my sister. She’d cook on the days my mother felt overwhelmed by the heat. She never complained. They paid her by the hour. It was all good.
Sandra and I loved being babysat by Jackie. She told us great stories about ghosts and aliens from other planets. She played card games with us and scared us silly with her worldview (“the world behind your eyes,” she called it), to the point that we could barely sleep when she looked after us. But we loved her and our parents knew it. Her wild boyfriend with the motorcycle kept his distance, usually. Every
now and then he’d stop by, but his involvement consisted of glasses of iced tea on the front porch. Though he often offered to take us for rides on his motorcycle, he never actually did it. His name was Lance and he had a shaved head and tattoos. Jackie stared at him with a quizzical expression, as if she were witnessing physics defined.
He had given her a bracelet that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was silver with birds on it. She used to let me play with it, even though she never took it off her wrist. She held it up and the birds encircled her wrist and I would inspect each one and give them names.
She’d say, “This is to remind me that no matter where you are, you can always fly away.”
That was her plan with Lance. To fly away somewhere better. That was my plan, too, and maybe it still is. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe in that idea.
I looked at the bracelet and I felt a chill pass through me. Now I had the girl’s jewelry as well as her name. Where was this going to end?
Only one way to find out.
Jackie was like a cool older sister we had somehow inherited. Sandra liked to impress her and pretended they were peers. But I just looked up to her and listened and imitated her every move. I imagined myself having a boyfriend like Lance and riding on the back of his motorcycle. I imagined the bird bracelet on my arm and Jackie said she would give it to me when she finally decided to leave town.
“What if you forget?” I’d ask her.
“I won’t forget.”
“What if you leave in the middle of the night?”
“I’ll know in advance. Getting out takes planning. Lance and I are working on it, but we’re not going to just up and disappear.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, little Cat.”
Then she’d laugh and say, “But does that make sense? Giving my birds to a Cat? You’re not going to eat them, are you?”