by Nancy N. Rue
“What was she–like two minutes old?”
“Less than that. I loved her because she was my child. There have been times since then when I didn’t like her very much, but I have always, always loved her.”
This was not helping me. At all. The lump in my own throat wasn’t going to block the tears for much longer if he kept on.
“Do you remember me telling you that it killed me not to have Weezie here with me all the time?”
I nodded.
“That I don’t get to wake her up every morning and make sure she’s eating right and tuck her in at night.”
It couldn’t have been more like torture if he’d pushed things under my fingernails.
“All of that, Jess–all of it–is how I feel about you.”
I shook my head and tried to get up, but he put his hands on the arms of my chair and I had to stay.
“I loved you from the first moment your mother told me you were even in the world–because you’re my child. And when I learned how to be a father to Weezie, it killed me every day that I couldn’t wake you up in the morning and make sure you were eating right and tuck you in at night. I spent an entire year trying to find you, and when I took one look at you in your mother’s kitchen, I fell in love with you–because you are my daughter.” He swallowed–hard. “Since then I have loved waking you up every morning even though you hate it–and making sure you eat right even though you go for ice cream every time you’re out of my sight–and seeing that you are tucked in at night even though you think I’m tormenting you. And when I started to think that I wasn’t going to get to do that every day until you’re grown, it killed me all over again, because–” He stopped and put his hand on his mouth, and his face looked like it was working hard. Then he moved his hand and said, “Because I love you, Jess. You are my firstborn child, and I love you.”
He looked like he didn’t know what to do then, but I did. I flung my sobbing, weeping, nose-running self into his arms, crying into his neck.
Crying until I stopped. Crying until I could say, “I love you too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
We didn’t make it to church that day, so I asked Lou if we could take Weezie with us to lunch. When he called her, she said she didn’t want to go, but he told me he thought he knew why and he went to get her anyway. I stayed home to wait for them, kind of wandering around the little house and wondering how it had ever seemed like a cage to me. It was the safest place I knew.
I stopped wandering at the prayer table and ran my hand across the top of it. Lou had done all the praying when we’d knelt there together that one day, but–could I actually pray by myself? Did I know how?
I looked around, and then felt stupid because who was I worried about seeing me? I got on my knees on the padded part and closed my eyes the way Lou did and couldn’t figure out what to do next. What was I supposed to say to God…Jesus…
Yeshua.
“I want to follow,” I whispered. “So would you please call the demons out of me so I can?”
“Hi, Jessie,” someone whispered.
I choked–until I realized it was Weezie behind me.
“Where’s Lou?” I said.
“He’s in the car. He said to come out when we’re done.”
“Done what?” I said.
So far she hadn’t looked at me. Her blue eyes went to the door, the floor–they practically went into her armpit–but they couldn’t seem to find their way to mine.
I patted the kneeler next to me. “Want to join me?”
She nodded and sat on it. Her eyes were now on her knees.
“Did you want to say something?” I said.
“Yes. But I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That you won’t.”
“Won’t what?” It was starting to feel like I was pulling out her nose hairs or something.
“That you won’t forgive me–because I’m really sorry that I told on you–but I only did it because I was scared you were really gonna run away, and I wouldn’t ever see you again, and that would be horrible because you’re my sister.” She looked up at me with her eyes all wet, ready to overflow. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
“As soon as you give me a chance,” I said.
She pressed her lips together over her braces.
“So–you say you’re sorry.”
She nodded.
“Do you mean it?”
“I never say I’m sorry if I don’t mean it.”
“Because your dad says so.”
“I do mean it!”
I put my face down close to hers. “I believe you. And I forgive you, okay?”
You would have thought I told her she was going to meet Hannah Montana. She wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I was sure she was going to cut off my circulation. I let her do it, though. It felt kind of good.
“You want to go to lunch with us?” I said. “They have coconut shrimp there.”
“Okay,” she said–all fuzzy-voiced.
“I have to go get my phone or your dad will give me the hairy eyeball,” I said.
“Okay.”
“That means you have to let go of me.”
She did, but she trailed me like a bloodhound into the bedroom. I found my phone and my flip-flops, and she sat on my bed and picked up RL.
“You like this book, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She ran her fingers across the letters. “Real Life,” she said.
“I don’t know if that’s what it means.”
“That’s what it means when me and my friends text message each other.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“Don’t you text?” she said.
“Your dad didn’t get me texting.”
Weezie rolled her eyes. “You know, Jessica, he’s your dad too.”
I didn’t tell her not to call me Jessica. I was afraid I’d cry again.
Even though we spent the whole day with Weezie, she still begged to be allowed to spend the night. Lou said no. We all had to get back to our routines. For the first time ever, I liked the way that sounded.
On the way back from dropping her off at the mini-mansion, my cell phone rang.
I looked at the screen and got an instant attack of vampire bats.
“It’s my grandfather,” I said. “Do I have to answer it?”
“Not if you don’t want to. But I think you can handle him.”
That was the only reason I said hello.
“Jessica,” he said, “this is Grandpa.”
“I know,” I said, although I wouldn’t have recognized his voice. He sounded old and tired.
“Have you heard from your mother?” he said.
“Last night,” I said.
“Not today?”
Something unfamiliar was gathering in me. I sat up straight in the seat.
“No,” I said. “And I don’t want to do what she told me to do. I want to stay here.”
“When exactly did you talk to her?” It was as if he hadn’t even heard me, which was exactly like the grandfather I remembered. And exactly like his daughter.
“I told you, last night,” I said between my teeth.
“Then you’re the last person that’s heard from her.”
“Didn’t you call the hospital?” I said.
“I was at the hospital, Jessica.” He gave an impatient sigh. “I’m at your house now. It looks like she left here in a hurry.”
“I don’t get it.” I looked at Lou with what must have been wild eyes because he slowed down. “The doctors let her out?”
“Incompetent bunch of–all right, look, if you hear from her, you call me, do you hear?”
“I hear.”
“This is a mess.”
“Well,” I said, my voice stiff, “I’m sure you’ll clean it up.”
He was only silent for about a breath. “You still have a smart mouth,” he said. “You’re just like–”
“Do
n’t say I’m just like my mother.”
“I was going to say you’re just like your father. You call me immediately if you hear from her.”
I didn’t have to answer because he hung up. We were in the driveway by then.
“Did you get all that?” I said to Lou.
“I got enough.”
His face was serious.
“You okay?” I said.
He hung his thumbs on the steering wheel. “Listen, Jess, I want to say something to you about your mother.”
“Do we have to talk about her?”
“Yeah. We do. Your grandfather’s right about one thing: she’s in a mess and I don’t think it’s over. But I just think you ought to know that the way she’s treated you isn’t because of anything you’ve done–”
“I know,” I said.
He looked at me.
“She’s got ‘demons.’ Bad ones.” I pulled my feet up onto the seat and hugged my knees. “I prayed today.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked Jesus–Yeshua–they’re the same person, right?”
“They are. Yeshua is the Aramaic word for Jesus. How is it that you know him by that name?”
“It’s a long story.”
His lips twitched. “Then we’ll save that for another time. Back to your prayer.”
“I prayed that Jesus would call out my demon. I think it’s going to happen.”
“You’re talking about your ADHD.”
“Yes.”
He gazed through the windshield for a minute like he was seeing an answer out there. I started to squirm.
“What?” I said.
“I think Jesus is already working on that. You’ve improved a whole lot in the short time you’ve been here.”
“But that’s because of the medicine and you making me have a routine and all that. I’m talking about being cured.”
He scratched the back of his head. “There isn’t a cure for ADHD, Jess.”
“Then what about Jesus pulling the demons out of Mob and putting them into the pigs? What about the guy that was foaming at the mouth in church and Jesus cured him? Is all that stuff just fiction?”
He was staring at me, mouth halfway open. “I think I want to hear that ‘long story.’”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said.
“No, it isn’t fiction. Jesus did call out the demons–which could have been the hold those people’s mental illnesses had on their lives. They weren’t slaves to their insanity anymore– just like I’m no longer a slave to alcohol and you’re no longer a slave to that merry-go-round I bet you have in your head.”
“It’s a hamster wheel.”
“Jesus is already taking away the power ADHD has over you, but you still have to work with him. I go to AA meetings. I don’t go to places where they serve alcohol. I’m constantly praying–and reading the stories about Yeshua driving out the demons.”
“Where?” I said.
“In the Bible,” he said. “Isn’t that where you read them?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
His eyebrows went up.
“It’s part of the long story,” I said.
He nodded and opened the truck door. “Let’s go have some popcorn, and you can tell it to me. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
The vampire bats in my stomach were having babies the next morning when we pulled up to the shop on Levi. Rocky was standing there waiting for us.
I must have squeezed my dad hard around the waist because he said to me through his visor, “I think you can be a little late for work. You better take care of this first.”
“Does he know you’re not mad at him?” I said.
“He and I are cool.”
Of course they were. Lou could probably bloody Rocky’s nose and he’d still forgive him. But me–that might be another story.
I swung my leg out to get off the bike and caught it on the sissy bar and dumped myself onto the ground. When I looked up, a boy-creature with an adorable space between his teeth was grinning down at me.
“That’s one way to do it,” he said.
“Shut up,” I said.
He put a hand down to me, and this time I took it. And when I was on my feet, he took my helmet off me and tucked it under his arm.
“Did you tell your dad you thought you were Step Nine?” he said.
I looked around, but my father was gone.
“No,” I said between my teeth, “and if you ever do–”
“You’ve already forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“That I said you could trust me.”
Rocky wasn’t smiling now. He was looking all serious, and he shifted the helmet to the other arm.
“I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Mean it?”
“I don’t say I’m sorry unless I mean it.”
His green eyes began to gleam. “So that’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“What else do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. You just usually go on for, like, ten hours–”
“You are just begging for a question, aren’t you?”
“Aw, man.”
“Lucky for you I only have one left.”
“I doubt that–but go for it.”
I took my helmet and hugged it to my chest, just in case I didn’t get the answer I wanted and I needed something to keep me from bursting into tears.
“Do you still not think I’m a basket case after I went off the other night? You can tell me if that changed your mind and I’ll understand–”
He didn’t stop my lips with his hand this time. He stopped them with his.
I still went down to my place by the sand dunes before sunset that night. I just didn’t go there for the same reason I did before. I actually wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing because I didn’t know that much about praying yet, but it seemed like a good place to try. I did know it involved closed eyes, and I was getting comfortable with that when someone said my name.
It was my mother.
Although, as I sat there, frozen in the sand, staring up at the bony form above me, I wasn’t sure it really was her. I’d seen her at her worst, going without showering or changing clothes for days, eyes with carry-on bags underneath them. I’d also seen her at the top of her form, polished to a gleam and snapping her French manicure at the world. But this woman was neither one of those. She wore a hot pink jacket over a T-shirt, and both of them hung on her like they were on a hanger. So did the jeans. My mother never went out looking like that.
It was her eyes, though, that really seemed to belong to someone else. They were cloudy and bloodshot, and they couldn’t seem to be still even as she tried to stare me down.
“He said you’d be down here,” she said.
The voice was the same. Sort of brittle, maybe, but still so sharp it brought me to my feet and yet made me want to start compiling excuses to get through this. I suddenly felt like I was on an old escalator.
“Hi,” I said.
She brushed that off the same way I was brushing the sand off the back of my shorts.
“Are you packed?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Did I not tell you on the phone to get packed? I knew you weren’t listening to a thing I was saying.” She gave me the first look that indicated she was even seeing me. “What are you waiting for, Jessie? Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I said. I was hating myself for even asking, but the familiar escalator was almost to the bottom, and I couldn’t see how to climb back up.
My mother tossed back the hair the wind was blowing in her face–what little there was of it. It looked like half of it had fallen out. “Where else would we be going?” she said. “Home.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to even say the word home.
She didn’t seem that surprised. “It isn’t about what you want. It’s about what’s going to happen.”<
br />
“What–”
“Honestly, Jessie, you still have the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old. Let me spell it out for you.” She spit some sand from her mouth and looked up at the wind like her annoyance alone was going to stop it. “I’m out of the hospital. I’m taking you away from Control Freak, who I should never have left you with in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking–”
I felt myself stiffen. “He’s not a control freak,” I said.
“–and we are going back to our life. That clear enough for you?”
She gave me the look I hated. The look that said I was a ditz-queen-airhead-moron. The look that wasn’t true anymore.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t clear.”
“Jessie, for Pete’s sake–you are still a–”
“Don’t tell me who I am.”
She stopped, mouth open. That unfamiliar thing gathered up in me again, the way it had with my grandfather. Only now I knew what it was.
“You don’t know who I am,” I said. “And that’s why I’m not going back with you. I’m staying here.”
She crossed her arms over her chest like a pair of sticks. “Am I hearing this right? You’re telling me what you are and are not going to do?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no, ma’am.”
She reached out to grab me, but I pulled away.
“He might let you get away with that kind of attitude, but I–”
“He?” I said. “You mean my dad? No, I don’t have to pull attitude with him. He doesn’t put me down every single chance he gets. He doesn’t treat me like a moron. He doesn’t ignore me for weeks and then get up and try to run my life. That’s why I don’t pull attitude with him. And that’s why this is my home now.”
She shook her head for so long I thought she really was possessed by demons. When she stopped, she batted her hair out of her face again and lowered her voice to someplace dark and menacing. Someplace meant to scare me.
“You don’t have the maturity to make this kind of decision,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
“You have a mental disorder!”
“So do you.”
“And you have a smart mouth that I’m about to smack.”
I backed up, but only to get out of her reach. Inside, I wasn’t backing up an inch. “I know I have a smart mouth,” I said. “Just like I have a smart mind. Because I’m just like my father.”