In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  I was beginning to understand that Shayla, besides being my half-sister-daughter, was also going to be my only ticket into the good graces of Kandern’s population. Her unabashed smiles and clear-voiced tucks, which we now knew were actually Tag, drew outright friendliness from some of the people we encountered and curious stares from the more austere strangers we crossed. I just got the stares—and a less pleasant variety of them, at that. It seemed that no one had ever informed the German population that gawking was rude, and they had elevated the brazen impoliteness to a sort of national pastime.

  The first time I fully experienced the even-greater discomfort of a group stare was when Gus and Bev took us to a restaurant in the nearby village of Hammerstein. The restaurant was actually a train car dating back to 1882, which had been attached to a large building where the kitchen and bar were located. There were still small metallic signs on the paneled walls warning passengers not to lean out the windows. It was a small, cozy space, and the curve-backed wooden benches on either side of each table gave it an old-world charm. Shayla went a little crazy with excited questions when we arrived. Where were the tracks? Was there a conductor? Why weren’t we moving? Did we have to pay to ride it? And lastly, what was this “shishel and pomus” Bev was talking about?

  As it turned out, “shishel and pomus” was Schnitzel und Pommes, the most traditional of traditional German meals. Breaded pork cutlets and fries, to be exact. The dish lost some of its exoticism in translation. But not as much as Schwein Nippel Suppe, which I found out, to my horror, was pig-nipple soup. The Johnsons had wanted to be the first to introduce us to schnitzel, but they hadn’t bargained on Shayla’s reaction to the train, or on the effect her excitement would have on the evening.

  It started with me trying to get her to sit down. It had been an easier feat on the plane ride to Germany, because the seat had been equipped with a seat belt and the patrolling airline attendants had made sure we used it. But there were no seat belts on the restaurant benches, and Shayla was determined to spend the meal standing on her seat and staring out the window.

  “Shayla, you need to sit down.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not allowed to stand on the benches, honey. You might fall and hurt yourself.”

  “I won’t. Look! A cat!” she shrieked with glee, pointing out the window at a barnyard tabby crossing the road.

  “Sit down, Shayla.” I was painfully aware of the Johnsons’ eyes on me and even more painfully aware that I was new at the mom thing. An unfriendly waitress brought us our drinks and ordered Gus to tell “das Mädchen” to take her feet off the bench.

  “The nice lady wants you to sit down, Shayla,” he coaxed, and I wondered on what planet the waitress’s personality would be defined as nice.

  “No!”

  I took hold of Shayla’s arm with one hand and turned her face toward me with the other. “You will not speak to Gus that way, little girl.” I tried to sound motherly and firm.

  “I’m not little!” she yelled, trying to tear her arm from my grip and losing her balance in the process. One of her feet slipped off the edge of the bench, and her cheek connected with the hard wood of the backrest.

  “Shayla,” Bev said, jumping up to prevent any more of a fall, but Shayla was well beyond fear by that point.

  “I’m not sitting down! You can’t make me! I’m not! I’m not!”

  I’d learned early on in my pseudo-motherhood that Shayla was a generally well-behaved child with a naturally sunny disposition. Generally meant that the sunniness was not a permanent fixture and that the reverse side of well-behaved was raving maniac. But Gus and Bev had never made the acquaintance of the One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest version of Shayla, and her banshee-meets-hyena screams clearly took them by surprise.

  As I tried to lift her off the bench and away from the glassware on the table, she threw her upper body back and used her feet to kick at me. And she screamed. She screamed so much that patrons at the other tables started to protest. I redoubled my efforts to appease her, finally lifting her stiff body onto my lap in a flurry of thrashing arms and kicking legs, but I simply couldn’t quiet her. She was mad. Spitting mad. And I couldn’t figure out what I had done to set off such a ferocious response.

  Bev said something to me across the table, but I couldn’t hear her. As Gus made a comment to the diners at the table next to ours, she stepped close to me and whispered, “Do you want me to try?” in my ear. Coming from anyone else, I might have taken the suggestion as an insult, but Bev’s face was so full of compassion for my predicament that I numbly nodded my appreciation and mouthed my thanks. She gathered a squirming and still-wailing Shayla into her arms and stepped outside.

  Now why hadn’t I thought of that? It was October and the nights were getting colder, but a few goose bumps were a small price to pay for extricating myself and my daughter from a humiliating situation. Through the window, I watched Bev talking to Shayla, keenly feeling the stares of the other diners in the train car, all of whom had interrupted their conversations to observe the battle raging at our table. Gus stacked his forearms on the table and said, “You know, Christopher used to throw such bad fits that the neighbors called the cops on us once.”

  I tore my eyes away from Shayla long enough to give Gus an incredulous look.

  He nodded in confirmation and went on. “You’d be amazed at what set him off. Mostly it was not getting his way, but sometimes—and don’t quote me on this—sometimes I think he just did it for the fun of it. I think it felt good to the little guy to let it rip once in a while.”

  “But did he do it in public?” I was ashamed at the scene we’d caused.

  “If he really wanted to get his way, he did. There’s nothing like a little public embarrassment to make a parent give in!”

  After a very brief time outside, Bev reentered the restaurant with a sullen Shayla walking next to her.

  “What do you say?” she asked the little girl whose bottom lip stuck so far out it looked glued on. “Shayla?” Bev coaxed.

  “Sowwy,” Shayla said, and though her eyes were trained downward and her body turned away, I was pretty sure the words were intended for me.

  Bev deposited Shayla in her seat and placed her napkin in her lap, then circled the table to sit by Gus.

  “Have a nice talk out there?” he asked.

  “Shades of Christopher,” she answered.

  I glanced at Shayla while Gus and Bev perused their menus. She looked dwarfed by the bench, her little hands clasped in front of her and her chin against her chest. I saw her take a hiccuping breath as tears gathered in her eyes. There was “I miss my daddy” written all over her face, and it broke my heart. I scooped her into my arms and held her like that while I ordered our meals and waited for them to arrive. She never really cried outright, which was more heart-wrenching to me than overt tears would have been. She just sat there, occasionally answering the questions we asked her, but mostly staring at the door every time it opened. I think she was waiting for a conductor to come by.

  And after it was all over, every patron in the train car smiled at Shayla as she walked toward the exit, as if she were the best-behaved little girl in the whole wide world. Me? I got stares. But Bev had explained to me, after the earlier scene, that the stares only meant “You’re interesting” and not, as I had assumed, “We dislike you intensely.” So I squared my shoulders, pasted on a smile, and left the restaurant under the patrons’ stares with as much dignity as I could muster.

  Back home and ready for sleep, Shayla sat against me in her bed while I finished reading A Fly Went By. She smelled of toothpaste and baby shampoo and was so soft and snuggly that I had trouble associating this sweetness with the tantrum I’d witnessed earlier.

  I closed the book and scrunched down a little farther in the bed, turning sideways so her head could rest on the pillow. “Did you like the train restaurant?”

  Her head nodded against me.

  “What part did you like the
best?”

  She took her time answering. “The cat,” she said.

  Of course. We’d gone out to dinner in a train and eaten all new foods, and the memorable item of the evening had been a cat wandering past in the street. Children—how had I managed to inherit one?

  “Is that why you got so mad? Because you wanted to see the cat?”

  She shrugged and I sighed. “You need to obey me when I ask you to do things, Shayla. You might not understand why I’m asking you to do them, but you need to obey anyway.”

  “Or you’ll get mad at me?” she asked in a hesitant voice.

  “Did you think I was mad at you tonight?”

  She nodded.

  I knew the taste and texture of a parent’s wrath. It was acrid and coarse—noxious. It had no place in Shayla’s world. “I wasn’t really mad,” I said, stroking the hair back from her forehead. “I just wanted you to sit down because that’s what you’re supposed to do in restaurants. I was annoyed and frustrated, but I wasn’t really mad.”

  She shrugged again.

  “What did Bev tell you when you went outside with her? Do you remember?”

  “She said scweaming’s not helping.”

  “That’s all?” Trust Bev to make it simple.

  “And she said my mom loves me.”

  I felt my heart turn a cartwheel and softly asked, “Do you believe her?”

  Another nod.

  “Well, good, because it’s true.” I kissed the top of her head. “Shayla, do you mind when people call me your mom? I mean, I know I haven’t been taking care of you for very long, but . . . people are going to just figure I’m your mom since we live together.”

  “It’s okay.” Her voice sounded younger than usual, or maybe just more hesitant.

  “And is it okay if they call you my daughter too?”

  “Uh-huh.” There was less hesitation that time.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said, turning myself around in the bed so I could face her. She snuggled down against her pillows and looked at me with large, tired eyes. “Let’s just let people call us what they want, okay? And you can call me whatever you want, too. You can keep calling me Shelby for the rest of your life if you’d like, and I’ll . . .”

  She reached out and grabbed my hand. Just like that. I was in the middle of my we-don’t-really-have-to-be-mother-and-daughter speech, and this little girl whose little life had impossibly stretched my selfish little heart wrapped her soft, warm hand around my fingers and smiled in a way that made me want to . . . It made me want to call her daughter, to be honest. It made me wish I was her mother. It warmed me and enveloped me. It also scared me senseless.

  So on that night when the only words roiling around in my brain were I want to be your mother, the words that came out of my mouth were “It’s past your bedtime. We can talk about this again later, okay?”

  I avoided her gaze as I kissed her satin cheek and tucked the blankets under her chin. She said her prayers and I said mine. Then I let myself out of her room and went to sit on the secondhand couch in the living room. There was something about secondhand that I found disquieting, especially on that night. I didn’t like it much. Not in furniture. Not in scars.

  And not in daughters.

  Trey and I sat in the attic under a sheet draped across the backs of four rickety chairs and secured with clothespins. We called it our Huddle Hut, but for all intents and purposes, it was our bunker—a place where we could talk about the ickiness outside without fear of its nastiness actually bruising our souls.

  It was a tradition we had started when we were much younger, on a day when my mom had screamed a bad word at my dad. We’d been so shocked to hear both the word and the volume coming out of her mouth that we’d scattered to our bedrooms. But that had left us all alone with our thoughts and our fear that Mom had lost it and joined the ranks of compulsively cursing grown-ups, so we’d catapulted back out into the hallway, where we’d very nearly smacked into each other.

  We needed to debrief. Quickly. Before our minds came to any conclusions about Mom and lost the very last vestige of security we still had.

  But going outside required passing through the kitchen, where Mom and Dad were still locked in combat, and talking in one of our bedrooms carried the risk of being overheard, so we’d headed to the attic instead. Feeling too exposed under the dusty beams and a little grossed out by the moth-eaten piles of junk, we’d erected the first of our Huddle Huts and crawled into it, all conspiratorial and confused.

  We concluded that day that our mother wasn’t really losing her mind. Nor was she ever going to be as mean as our dad. She’d just caught a bug, probably—the kind that gives you fevers and broadens your vocabulary. It would pass, we decided—like those migraines she got.

  We were a little older now and well past the age for building forts and playing hide-and-seek, but still the Huddle Hut tradition endured. We didn’t wait for something terrible like cursing to send us to the attic anymore. We just decided, when things got too murky, to run away for a bit. Our tradition had gotten a little more elaborate with time, and we now sat on a rug rescued from a trash heap with an assortment of candies and soda cans in front of us. Trey never told me where he got the snacks, but I had the feeling he might have stolen them from Mr. Karzakian’s 7-Eleven on the corner of Elm and Main. That was just a guess, though.

  Trey made a production of opening a Coke can and handing it to me. Then he got one for himself and clinked it with mine as if they were crystal goblets and we were at a cocktail party.

  “To the brotherhood . . .”

  “. . . of Davishood.”

  “And to the muddlehood . . .”

  “. . . of huddlehood,” I finished. It was pretty lame, as toasts went, but we’d invented it when we were little and it sorta had sentimental value.

  Trey leaned back against a garbage bag full of old curtains, and I lay on my stomach with my face above the stack of candy. Again, it was traditional, and who was I to mess with history?

  “Sylvia’s knocked up,” he said.

  “But not by you, right?”

  “Nope. Bobby Stevens.”

  “To Bobby Stevens,” I said, raising a Rolo in salute.

  “And to his kid. May he live long and forever be happy he doesn’t have Jim Davis for a father.” Trey smirked and slurped at his Coke can.

  “He called Mom the B word again. Do you think he knows he’s repeating himself?”

  “He’s going to have to make up new words. He’s overused all the old ones.”

  “How ’bout . . .” I thought hard, the Rolo pinging at my brain. “How ’bout kryphip?” I suggested and spelled it for him because I thought the letters looked cool.

  He pondered it for a moment, then gathered a big lungful of air and bellowed, “Get out of my face, you pathetic kryphip!” It was a dead-on impression of Dad. “Yeah, I think that’ll work,” he said. “You’ll have to suggest it to him.”

  “I’d rather eat dirt.”

  “I’d rather eat worms.”

  “I’d rather eat monkey brains.”

  “I’d rather eat rabbit turds.”

  “Okay, you win,” I said. “I don’t want to get gross.”

  “Too late.”

  I knew he was trying to make me mad by implying I was gross, but I also knew he’d feel horrible if I did get mad, so I threw a marshmallow at him instead. If anyone had witnessed our exchange, they would have pegged us as being maybe seven or eight. We were nearly twice that, but it still didn’t bother us that our huddles were embarrassing. Nobody was there to see them but us, and it felt kind of freeing to talk about eating bugs and poop and stuff.

  People like Bobby Stevens made it hard to stay on the funner topics, though. He was a couple of years ahead of us in school, but he still reminded us of how old we really were and made us wonder when we’d be the ones God spit on.

  The concept of God spitting on us was also one of our Huddle Hut inventions. But we didn’t mean any dis
respect. We knew God was out there because Mom prayed to him a lot—and I did too, when I remembered. And we knew he was out there because when we said something like “God’s been spitting on us again,” we felt guilty, like we’d hurt his feelings. And you can’t hurt the feelings of someone who doesn’t exist.

  “Is she going to keep the baby?” I asked.

  “Sylvia?”

  “No, Joan of Arc.”

  “Yeah, I think so. Her parents don’t know yet, though.”

  “Dad would kill me if I ever got pregnant.” The thought alone made us both shudder. “He’d probably send me away to one of those knocked-up farms where girls go to have their babies without anybody knowing.”

  “Would you want to keep it?”

  I pondered his question awhile and turned it over and over in my head. “No,” I finally said, and I was sure of my answer.

  “Why not?”

  “Because what if I end up like Dad? That wouldn’t be good. Even if I ended up with someone like Bobby who kinda deserves to have Dad for a wife.”

  “You have a crush on Bobby?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Glad we got that straight.”

  “So you’re not having kids,” Trey said, and I knew he was getting at something.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you ever getting married?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither.”

  I wasn’t liking this huddle. It was more fun to talk about what other people would never be than about what we would never be. Big difference there.

  “I think you should,” Trey said.

  “Get married or have kids?”

  “Both. I think you could do it and not turn into Dad.”

  “I’d rather have another Rolo,” I said and popped one in my mouth.

  “Seriously, Shell.”

  I sighed. “Why should I if you don’t?”