by Amy Gentry
It stopped my heart back then. I was scared for her, scared of her. I held my breath and thought, This will be over soon enough. By the time she’s a teenager, she’ll wise up. Like I did.
She didn’t make it.
“How dare you.” Tom is angrier at me than I’ve ever seen him, leaning down to force eye contact but still looking every inch of the foot taller than me he is. “We do not do that, Anna. We don’t do that to our kids.”
“You were as scared as I was.”
“I don’t care how scared you were,” he says, his frame growing larger every second. “We agreed: Never in our house. I saw too much of it in mine.”
“And how are your sisters doing, Tom?” I say, raising my eyes to his suddenly.
“Scared shitless of their father!” he snaps back. “And probably their husbands too! Is that what you want?”
“And how many of them were kidnapped and sold to the highest bidder?” I yell. “And how many of them were raped every day for eight years?”
“Anna—”
“They were safe, Tom! They were kept safe!”
He puts his finger right up in my face and bites off every word with a growl. “If you think that’s how it felt growing up with my father, you don’t know the first goddamn thing about safe.”
But I’m beyond reason now. The screaming has unleashed something too big to make a sound. I think I am sobbing, but then I realize I am only gasping, again and again, struggling for air. I feel dizzy, and my vision clouds. The next minute I come to, still standing in the same place, crushed against Tom’s chest. It is as if he’s pushing the air back into my lungs, and the big black thing in me dissolves into ordinary tears.
“Why did she do it,” I say, sobbing against him. “Why?”
“You know Jane,” he says. “She lost track of time. And Julie, I think she was just feeling cooped up, trapped. You know what she’s been through.” He shudders and gives a deep sigh. “I was as worried as you—and as angry. But now that we know they’re okay, honestly, I think it was probably good for the girls to get some bonding time.”
“I meant—her hair.”
Tom releases me, takes a step backward, and stares. “You can’t be serious.”
I know he’s kept up with Jane all these years, fighting through the traps she set to keep us away, while I was too happy to believe she didn’t want my interference. But Julie—how has he kept up with her too? How does he still have that connection from before? How did he know to move straight to Julie and hold her close when I went straight to Jane and did what I did?
“They’re like strangers.”
He looks at me with disbelief. “Anna. That’s how all mothers of teenage girls feel.”
But Julie, as Carol Morse reminded me, is an adult. Tom doesn’t know about Carol Morse and the miscarriage, Alex Mercado and the envelope. He doesn’t look into those eyes and wonder if they’re the right shade of blue and then think to himself, Would I even know the difference?
I could tell Tom everything, but I’m the one who let the poison in, and we’re already being punished for it. What better proof of my sacrilege than this horrible feeling of not recognizing my own children, kicking them out of the nest for having the wrong scent, striking them when I want to hold them, all because they disappear at odd times of the day and night and I never know what they will look like when they return?
“You’re right,” I say. “I know you’re right.”
Tom and I can afford only one fight a night. We are too newly repaired for more. I allow myself to be taken to bed. When he is asleep, I slip into the bathroom with my phone, mute the volume, and search until I find a YouTube video called “Gretchen at Midnight @ Chapel Pub—10/2/14.” I push the triangle to play the clip and watch as Julie’s face, no bigger than a smudged white thumbprint on the screen, opens its mouth under stage lights and silently sings.
Violet
sang for the first time in Lina’s backyard.
Violet never thought of it as her backyard, although she’d lived there almost a year, long enough to dye her hair blue and then bleach it and clip it short and start growing it out all over again as a ripe strawberry blond. Short hair was nothing special in this company, of course, but she could tell Lina liked it better show-pony-long, no matter the color.
Lina had friends over, and they’d all been drinking. It had gotten dark and a little chilly, so they lit up the fire pit out back and dragged chairs from the kitchen around it. Lina never smoked pot, so Violet usually avoided it too. It should have been a sign to her that she was ready for a change when, this time, she took the joint that appeared on her left as if by magic, held in Susan’s hand. “Vee,” said Lina, but she turned and shrugged almost immediately as Violet took a long pull.
Violet relished the small opportunity to remind Lina she was not a knickknack picked up somewhere exotic for a song. Nobody except Lina operated on the assumption that getting Violet off the pole was the same as having bought and paid for her, but it lingered on the air like the smell of fireworks, the scent of a dangerous excitement that was over before anyone else could enjoy it. Expelling a lungful of pot smoke without a sound, Violet handed the joint back to Susan, who grinned handsomely and passed it on.
Once rid of the joint, Susan pulled a guitar from behind her seat.
“Troubadour time already?” said Susan’s girlfriend, Beck, from across the circle, where she was wrapped in a woven blanket.
But Susan didn’t sing a love song. She began by strumming the guitar with her bare knuckles, and then started up a picking pattern that reminded Violet of running water, dissolving the chords into individual notes. The joint was loosening the knots in Violet’s limbs one by one, and the tension of her status as a trophy girlfriend who should be seen and not heard began unfurling like cream in coffee. Susan’s fingers on the strings plucked at her arm hairs, her leg hairs, the hairs on the back of her neck.
Then Susan started singing in a throaty alto, a folk song. She walks these hills in a long, black veil. She visits my grave when the night winds wail. The song was strangely familiar—or maybe she was just stoned—and Violet’s mind raced to grab the tail of each line, never quite catching up. Then the guitar’s rounded edge bumped against her bare knee, sending its shiver up her thigh to her cunt, and for the first time, she was attracted to a woman, really attracted. And it wasn’t Lina.
Beck was looking over at Susan with an expression in which patience and paranoia mingled—she was high too—but most of the others were still chatting and laughing and clinking beer bottles and wineglasses onto the ground or scraping sandaled feet across the concrete to grab another bottle from inside.
Then Violet started to sing.
At first she sang along with Susan, and then she started to split on the rhyming words—veil, wail, sees, me—soaring upward in response to Susan’s emphasis, following the bumps of her voice the way she used to follow John David’s. And then, finally, she peeled her voice off the back of Susan’s, as if she’d been riding along on the back of a bird, and, catching the feeling of flight, spread her own wings. After that it was like dancing. She and Susan breathed in together and spent their breath together, vibrating like two strings on the same instrument.
Outside the pocket of air where they were singing, wineglasses dangled and beer bottles hung in the air, suspended halfway to parted lips.
When the notes knit themselves back into chords, Violet knew it was done, and the high flew out of her just like that, leaving a sleepy vacancy.
The women in the circle clapped and exclaimed over Violet as if she were a precocious child or an animal that could talk. Someone said, “Lina, where have you been hiding this one?” As though she hadn’t been to all their poetry readings and dinner parties this summer, not to mention the Black Rose, where she’d watched them get lap dances from her former coworkers.
While Lina lapped up the praise, Susan put a hand on her arm and asked, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”<
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“Church,” she answered truthfully, and because she was still a little high, the word seemed to encompass everything she meant by it, which was John David and the darkness at the center of light and the things both ugly and sweet she would offer anyone if it meant survival. Susan nodded, and Violet thought for a moment she really understood. What could have happened to Susan that she did?
“If you ever want to join me for an open mic sometime,” Susan said and patted her arm twice with a wink.
Violet knew by the prickling in her skin, and by Lina’s eyes on her, that the circle had become charged with a dangerous energy. She imagined herself transforming into the sputtering, sparkling catherine wheel that would burn down Susan and Beck’s life together, forcing them to decide who would keep the condo in Northwest and the restaurant they co-owned and their four-year-old son. She weighed all that against the pot-fueled flickering in her cunt that she could exhaust in a single evening or at most a few weeks.
It was tempting.
She snuffed out the tiny flame. “I don’t think I could,” she said. Susan was too complicated.
Anyway, saying no to Susan had an upside. Lina was so grateful that when the next chance came around, as Violet had known it would, Lina said yes. And then Violet was singing folk music with trios in little cafés, filling out harmonies here and there with other kinds of bands too, and she felt the satisfaction of belatedly scrubbing away the last of Starr the stripper with the red waterfall of hair down her back, and flipping into her new identity, Violet the singer with the strawberry-blond bob that was growing out, little by little. She drifted from gig to gig, band to band, until she ran into a male drummer.
Will was single, so all she had to break up was a band.
7
When I wake up the next morning, Tom is outside cleaning the pool.
I watch him through the bedroom window as he stands at the pool’s pebbled ledge, sweeping the long pole of the vacuum slowly across the bottom like a gondolier. With each measured stroke, last night feels farther away. The tingle in my palm from slapping Jane, Tom’s yelling, and, most of all, the face on my cell-phone screen cradled in my palm as I crouched in the bathroom—it’s all gone now, washed clean by sleep and early-morning showers. A mistake. A misunderstanding. A blond girl in a blurry video. I grab a pair of fresh jeans out of the laundry basket and pull them on, then feel a lump in the back pocket and find Detective Overbey’s card, pulped in the washing machine and fuzzed from the dryer, unreadable. I throw it in the trash.
I take my coffee outside and settle into a deck chair to watch Tom’s rhythmic movements. It’s one of those rare, sparkling, rain-cooled mornings that occasionally graces Houston in June, a throwback to March, a day you could almost mistake for an ordinary summer day in a more hospitable climate. The shadows of the tall pine trees move on the deck; the breezes that languidly stir their tops back and forth barely reach me. A yellow worm of late-season oak pollen drops into my mug, and I fish it out. We may have our problems, but after all, we are a family again, husband and wife and two beautiful daughters, together at last.
The door opens and Jane comes out, rolling a suitcase behind her.
“Sweetie?” Tom calls as she wheels the suitcase to the car, ignoring us. I hear a car door open, then close again with a thump. As she passes by the deck without her suitcase, Tom says, “Jane?”
“I’m going back. I bought my ticket last night. I’m staying with April tonight, and she’s taking me to the airport tomorrow morning.”
Tom turns off the vacuum and leans the handle against a tree. “Sweetie—we talked about this. Maybe you need some time to—”
“I want to go back. Now.” Tom doesn’t ask why. Neither of us do. “Will you take me to April’s house?”
“Sure, sure,” he says. She disappears back inside. He turns to me.
It’s my cue. “I’ll apologize,” I say. And then, when he looks down at his sandaled feet: “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t look up as I walk past, but his anger is palpable.
I go upstairs and knock on Jane’s door and, when there is no reply, open it an inch at a time, softly saying, “Hey.”
Jane is rummaging through her closet. She looks at me over her shoulder and then returns immediately to what she is doing, which is stuffing an open duffle bag full of things she is apparently choosing more or less at random.
Behind me, the shower starts running, and I think of Julie’s new hair. I wonder how much of the excess dye will wash down the drain, whether the red will stain the tub. Then I snap back to Jane standing in front of me, back turned.
“I’m so sorry, Jane. There was no excuse for that. We were just—I was so worried.”
Jane yanks a sweater off a hanger and throws it into the bag. “Be worried,” she says. “You can do it without me around.”
I take a step inside the door and close it behind me. She whirls.
“Did I say you could come in?”
“Jane, please.”
“Please what? Please stay out of the way so you can be with your other daughter, your real daughter, the one you care about? Please be fine, so you don’t have to give me any of your precious time or listen to what I say?”
“Please stay.” She looks at me with such longing, her jaw set and quivering, like she used to when she was a child. “Your father needs you.”
Her eyes drop to the floor, and when they come up her chin isn’t shaking anymore. “I’ll go out for breakfast with him on the way to April’s. Would that make him happy?”
“I think he would like that, yes.”
“I’ll miss him. I’ll miss both of you—all of you.” She wipes her eyes with her flannel shirtsleeve. “I just—can’t be here right now. It’s making me crazy. She’s my sister too, you know. I missed her too. I was frightened too all these years.” She looks around at the room, at her closet. “I hate this room. Sleeping here still gives me nightmares.”
“We couldn’t move,” I say. “We—”
“I know, I know, you wanted her to be able to find you. And she did. So that’s all that matters. I get it.” She goes back to stuffing more things into the bag. “I don’t even mind that you’ve barely asked me about my school situation at all—”
“Jane—”
“Don’t. I’ll figure it out on my own. I always do.” She finishes her job and grabs the bag off the floor, throws it on her bed. “Just don’t take it out on me because she found you, not the other way around.”
There’s a gentle knock at the door, and Jane pushes past me to open it.
Julie is standing in the doorway holding a pair of black high-top tennis shoes in her hands. With her short hair plastered wetly to her skull, she looks older and smaller, almost birdlike.
“You’ll need these,” she says, holding out the shoes.
“You can keep them,” Jane says, her voice roughening around the edges. “I need a new pair anyway.”
“Are you sure?” says Julie.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “I want you to have them.”
“Thanks,” says Julie.
“You have my e-mail address, right?” Jane asks. I feel like I should be leaving the girls alone to say goodbye, but they are directly blocking the door, so I just stand, hands in jean pockets, waiting.
“Yeah,” Julie says. “Thanks for hanging out. I had a nice time.”
“Me too,” says Jane. She lunges forward and gives Julie a quick hug. “I love you. I’m glad you’re home.”
Then she turns to zip up the bag on the bed. She grabs a stack of notebooks from her desk and loops her book bag over one shoulder. By the time she turns back to the door, Julie is gone, the door to her room shut.
I reach out my hand for a bag, but Jane shakes her head, grabs the duffle, and moves out the door. She makes it all the way down the stairs at a brisk march, thump-thump-thump, the heavy, purposeful Jane step, as if she’s shipping out; I follow in her footsteps more softly and slowly. Tom gets up from the kitchen table when he see
s her and steps toward her, reaching out for the bags. She surrenders everything to him, even the notebooks, and he silently carries them out to the car. I keep shadowing her until we reach the back door, where Julie must have hovered long ago, a knife at her back, before taking her last step over the threshold of childhood and into whatever was waiting for her on the other side.
My hands still in my pockets, I want to reach out for Jane’s shoulder. I don’t, but maybe some invisible part of me does, like a phantom limb, because she turns around anyway.
“Mom,” she says, and she buries her head in my shoulder for a second, her arms pinning mine down, almost hurting me.
When she pulls away, I’ve got tears in my eyes, but I let them stand and subside and pull my hands out of my pockets at last, rest one on her elbow. “I love you,” I say.
Her face is serious and a little sad. “Mom,” she says. “I think you should know something. Julie has a cell phone. She told me she borrowed one to call me yesterday, but then I saw it in her purse.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a slip of paper. “I wrote the number down.” She gently takes my hand away from her elbow, and the last bit of Jane I feel is her fingers pressing the paper into my palm.