In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  “Because you’re a girl.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I think maybe the bad-parent gene is a male one.”

  I pondered it for a moment. “Well, I’m not going to risk it. There are enough screwed-up Davises in this world without adding any more. Besides, I haven’t exactly seen any guys hovering around me.”

  “That’s ’cause you’ve been scaring them away.”

  “With my hair or my weight?”

  “Are we going to discuss this at every single huddle?”

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “You’re not fat and your hair is fine.”

  “So what’s scaring them away?”

  Trey looked at me as if he was trying to figure it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said, and I was pretty sure he really didn’t. “Maybe if you actually, you know, got girly around them.”

  “What are you saying? That I’m not girly enough?”

  “Not around guys. You get all competitive and stuff.”

  “I do not. What do I have to compete about?”

  “It’s not that kind of thing. It’s like they can’t get anywhere with you. You’re always shutting them down.”

  I raised my eyebrows and assumed a Southern accent. “Who, me? Why, surely you jest.”

  “I’m just saying,” he concluded.

  I saw the serious look in his eyes and the way his mouth was pulled kinda tight and I knew he was worrying about me. I didn’t like it, so I tossed another marshmallow at him. He caught it in midair, quick as a rattlesnake, and launched it back at me with a bellowed “Get out of my face, you pathetic kryphip!”

  7

  ANOTHER REHEARSAL, another stab at the chaos theory. I used the term like I knew what it meant, but it was way too mathematical for my brain. All I knew was that play rehearsals tended to feel like too many free radicals bouncing off too many parameters and never quite achieving homogeneity. That was a fairly random succession of science-type terms, all inaccurately used and with absolutely no scientific value, but it sure felt like a play practice to me.

  Though Seth and Kate were doing a great job learning their lines, they were—much to my surprise—being a tad less successful at re-creating the kind of intimate moment that had earned them the roles in the first place. Seth seemed afflicted with compulsive awkwardness, and Kate, with her take-no-prisoners approach to everything, did nothing to put him at ease. In the scene where Joy, who had bone cancer, was supposed to be lying in a hospital bed in unbearable pain and Lewis was supposed to be proposing to her, the best they could muster was a dynamic that made Seth look like a bumbling idiot and Kate come across as an ailing tyrant. And when I tried to add a tender gesture to the mix, merely asking Seth to run his fingers down Kate’s cheek, the lid came off the pressure cooker.

  “He’s not going to touch me,” Kate said before I’d even finished my instructions. “He doesn’t even look me in the eye when he’s proposing to me, so how on earth is he supposed to touch me?”

  Seth looked pleadingly my way. “I just . . . It’s hard to remember the lines and the motions at the same time. And the text is so . . .”

  “Mushy! Go ahead. Say it. Can we change it, Miss Davis? It’s really kinda gross.”

  I looked from one to the other and tried not to laugh out loud. You’d think a scripted romance would be easier to manage than a spontaneous one. All around us, the rest of the cast was trying to look absorbed in either homework or learning lines, but it was obvious that their ears were really trained on the quarreling not-quite-couple in front of me.

  “Okay, you two,” I said. “We’re going out to the cafeteria to work on this. And the rest of you—” I paused to make sure I had their attention—“are going to run the opening scene with Meagan standing in for Seth.” There were grumbles—which I understood. Bubbly Meagan had ended up being my right-hand man, which meant she was an errand runner, an actor fetcher, a snack cleaner-upper and a whatever-Miss-Davis-needs-er. She’d already proven invaluable to me, as much for her helpfulness as for her bright and cheerful spirit. But—and this was the reason for the cast’s groans—she was not an actress by any stretch of the imagination, and her voice and accent did nothing to convey the solemnity of 1950s Oxford. So whenever she stepped onto the stage to replace a missing actor, the scene invariably dissolved into something akin to auditory slapstick.

  “It’s only for a few minutes,” I told the cast. “And it’s more for the memorization than for the acting, so give Meagan a break.”

  “Seriously, y’all,” Meagan added, her voice too high for her age but oh-so-cute.

  Seth, Kate, and I found a table in the cafeteria just outside the auditorium.

  “Okay,” I said. “Seth, read your line again and try to put some real affection into it. Then touching her face will come from a whole context of emotions and might not feel so forced. Go ahead. The actual proposal.”

  I’d discovered, in the short time I’d been a play director, that acting had as much to do with psychology as with stage technique and vocal production. This had come as a relief to me, as I had much more experience with being an armchair psychologist than with teaching amateur actors to become juvenile De Niros and Hepburns.

  Seth’s tall frame hunched a little as he first read the words silently, then attempted to speak them. “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man, who needs you more than he can bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?”

  “To which you reply, with feeling . . .” I prompted Kate.

  She dutifully said her line. “Okay. Just this once.”

  It was the Edsel of proposals, the Pacer of all things intimate. “All right, Seth,” I sighed, “what do you think was wrong with that?”

  He looked at me as if I’d asked him for the square root of an astronomical number.

  I tried another tack. “What’s missing that would make it sound like an adult man who is finally—at long last—asking the woman he loves to marry him?”

  “How’s he supposed to know?” Kate asked in frustration. “He’s not a man yet!”

  I was just about to lecture her on respecting her castmate when she caught sight of something over my shoulder and rose from the table, waving her arms.

  “Hey, Coach Taylor! Coach Taylor!”

  I froze. In fact, I think my lungs might have suffered some sudden-onset frostbite because for a moment there, they felt like they didn’t really want to work anymore.

  “What’s up?”

  I turned to find Scott sauntering up to the table in a tracksuit and a knit hat. I assumed my best nonchalant voice. “Kate, I’m sure Coach Taylor has other things to—”

  “If you were an adult man . . . ,” Kate interrupted, blushing when Scott tilted his head a little and gave her a look. “I mean, since you are an adult man, tell us how you would do it if you were proposing to a woman who was dying of cancer.”

  “Sounds cheerful.” Poor Scott. He did a great job of not, say, busting out laughing and leaving the cafeteria as fast as he could. He did, however, get that I’m-about-to-launch-into-a-yodel look I’d seen before, so I knew there was some laughter in there somewhere. I felt a little sorry for him, but I felt sorrier for myself. I just wasn’t very good at real-life awkward situations. I preferred them on a stage.

  “Please feel free to tell Kate to find another guinea pig,” I told him. What I really wanted to say was, “This was not my idea and I’d really rather not have to deal with you.” I turned on Kate. “This isn’t Coach Taylor’s problem, Kate; it’s yours and Seth’s. So how ’bout we concentrate on the two people who can actually do something about it?”

  “What are the lines?” Scott asked, pulling a chair up to the table and sitting on it backward.

  “Don’t you have a practice to run?” I asked as Seth handed him his script and Kate pointed to Lewis’s proposal.

  “They’re running the Wolfsschlucht,” he said, referring to the cross-country course in the woods behind the s
chool. “Besides, I haven’t been in a play since high school, so this might be fun.”

  “You used to act?” This from Seth—with a little more desperation than he’d probably intended.

  “Scott, really, if—”

  “Wow. Pretty serious stuff,” he said, ignoring my second attempt at allowing him to leave. He glanced at Seth. “So you’re telling her you want to marry her?”

  “He’s supposed to be,” Kate interjected.

  “And you’re supposed to love her—I mean really love her. Like a guy who finally gets the guts to propose. Right?”

  “Guts is the key word there, Seth. Guts.” Kate was on a roll.

  I, on the other hand, was not. My body was anchored to my chair and so, apparently, was my brain. I wasn’t sure what was most traumatic at that moment: Kate’s behavior, my inability to change the situation, Seth’s bordering-on-physical discomfort, or the fact that Scott—whom I really did not want to know—was about to utter intimate words in what I feared would be a powerful way. I didn’t want to be there to witness it. At all. But I did have an overwhelming craving for cheesecake.

  Scott cleared his throat and took a moment to focus. While he did that, I took a moment to look for the nearest emergency exit, but as my brains were anchored to the chair, running for my life would have been a dangerous proposition. So I sat there and tried to assume a casual expression.

  Scott began. “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man . . .”

  I snorted. It was very unladylike and very insulting and very, oh so very, unintentional. Scott shot a be-quiet look my way and continued in the most horrendous faux-British accent I’d ever heard, his voice crackling so badly in a semblance of age that an audience would have thought he was the one dying of cancer. “. . . an old man who needs you more than he can bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?”

  Kate was speechless, which, after the last hour of rehearsal, was a bit of a relief. Seth was dumbfounded and hugely disappointed. And I was desperately trying to regain the composure that seemed to have slipped out the door along with Scott’s real accent. At first, I’d feared that Scott had been serious in his interpretation, and if that had been the case, my snorting and carrying on would have probably irreparably damaged his self-esteem. But one good look at his grin had convinced me that his self-esteem was intact, as intact as the sense of humor that had apparently motivated the world’s worst Shadowlands performance.

  Scott slapped Seth on the back and flashed Kate a smile. “Sorry about that, guys,” he said jovially. “Guess I’d better stick to sports!”

  “Coach Taylor,” Kate said suspiciously, “what play were you ever in in high school?”

  “Play 99—full-court press, man on man,” he answered. “We won the game 89 to 33. It was fabulous.” He turned to me. “You walking home tonight?”

  The headlights were coming my way, and I was a deer. “Uh . . .”

  “Maybe I’ll see you then.” He smiled and trotted away.

  “All right, Seth,” I said, firmly forcing ridiculous panic to the back of my mind, “let’s talk romance.”

  I was halfway to the Johnsons’ an hour later when I heard someone jogging up behind me.

  “Don’t be startled. It’s Scott!” he called to me.

  “Who?” I kept walking.

  “The world’s greatest actor.”

  “Oh, him. You come near me, I’ll douse you with Mace.”

  He slowed down beside me and matched his pace with mine. “That bad, huh?”

  “By Academy Award standards, you were on par with, say, Dorothy’s dog.”

  “Toto? That’s a compliment. I would have ranked myself more along the lines of what he’d leave behind.”

  “Speaking of . . .” I sidestepped to avoid a little pile of doggie doo. “You really don’t have to walk me to Gus and Bev’s, you know,” I said when the silence had outstayed its welcome, which was about one and a half seconds after it had started. I wasn’t good with silence. Actually, I was, just not when it involved other people.

  “I was a Boy Scout. I have to protect the weak and beat up on the bad guys.”

  “And I’m . . . ?”

  “Going to hit me if I call you weak, so I guess that leaves the bad guys.”

  “I doubt I’ll be mugged in the streets of Kandern. It makes Mayberry look like a crime capital.”

  “Which means it’s boring as all get-out, but kind of nice for raising a daughter, huh.”

  “Beats Chicago any day.”

  “So does the weather.”

  “Except for the rain.”

  “I’m from Seattle—the rain just feels like home. So how’s your daughter doing?”

  “Shayla?”

  “No, your other daughter.” There was a little bit of Trey in him, but I tried not to register that fact.

  “Shay’s doing okay. Bev’s wonderful with her.”

  “Can I ask you something . . . personal?”

  “Too late,” I said. “We’re here.” And sure enough, we’d reached the Johnsons’ front door.

  “Wow. Time flies when you only have thirty seconds to talk.”

  I smirked. He hesitated.

  “So . . . do you want me to wait and walk you back to your place?”

  Absolutely not. “Actually, that’s kind of my time to catch up with Shayla. She tells me something else about her day with every streetlight we pass. You know.”

  “Wouldn’t want to stand in the way of a mother-daughter streetlight routine,” he said, and I wondered if there was a simple way of just slipping “She’s really my half sister left for me by my dead abusive father along with a condo and a ’64 Impala” into the conversation. But I figured what he didn’t know couldn’t harm me.

  “Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Shelby,” he said lightly. “Thanks for not Macing me, or we’d have had even less time to chat.”

  “No problem. Guess you’ll just have to talk faster next time.”

  He smiled and raked his fingers through his wavy hair. “Next time, huh?” I decided his dimple was dangerous. “Say hi to Shayla from me.”

  “I will. Thanks for the escort, Cub Scout. This damsel’s safe and sound.”

  He raised a hand in a half wave, pivoted, and took off jogging down the road at a leisurely pace.

  Me? I told myself not to be flattered and that I didn’t have time for the likes of Scott Taylor. Then I opened the door to greet the sunshine of my life.

  SIX MONTHS EARLIER

  Dana held the car door open while I got Shayla out of the backseat. She smelled of soap and sun and felt impossibly small in her oversize jacket and matching pink boots. I felt like Peter Pan introducing Wendy to his world—an emotionally weary Peter Pan with a serious is-this-for-real? buzz going on. Things had moved fast since I’d made my decision. One minute I’d been sitting in Dana’s office trying to pick the right words to change the course of my life, and the next I’d been signing papers in Steve’s office, rushing off to Dream Acres, and then driving extremely carefully back to Trey’s bakery. I wasn’t used to having a pseudo-daughter strapped into the backseat. As it turns out, the words I had used to change my life were “I’ll take her,” which, as life-altering statements go, wasn’t exactly poetic, but it beat “I’m terrified but I can’t help myself” for clarity of purpose.

  Everything had gone so fast that Trey didn’t know he was an uncle yet. A pseudo-uncle-half-brother, I supposed. So Dana and I had decided that I should make L’Envie the first stop on my way home. And Dana had come along, I suspected just to get another look at my brother, but her presence in the car had been comforting, especially when Shayla had asked, “Are you taking me to Daddy?” from the backseat. I knew she knew that her daddy was gone, but I guess we all need to ask the tough questions again every so often. Just in case.

  Given the difficulty I was still having realizing that this pint-size human being now belonged to me, I didn’t know quite how to introduce her to Tr
ey. Belonged, of course, was an overstatement. Depended was more accurate. This agreement between my dead father and me was a nebulous thing, a tenuous connection I both wanted and despised. The wanted part was Shayla, who had crayoned her way into my future on our very first encounter, all sunshine-yellow and cloud-blue. The despised part was her father, who was mine, too, but only by birth. This man who had punctuated my childhood with emotional whiplash and affective dissension, the sound of which could still be heard in the squeaky hinges of my relational impairments, was now intimately linked to me—and in a permanent, irreversible way. I had tried to distance myself from him all my life, and in recent years successfully. Yet Shayla had brought him back inside my fortified walls with such intimate finality that a part of me—the fragile, damaged part—instinctively braced itself for rejection, aspersion, and pain.

  I gazed into Shayla’s eyes after I pulled her from her car seat, and she gazed right back, unwavering and just a little numb. If this new beginning was overflowing my adult capacity for comprehension, I couldn’t imagine the havoc it was wreaking in her uncomplicated world where, until recently, home had simply been Daddy. I asked Dana to watch her while I went inside and prepared Trey for the news.

  Trey was handing change back to a classy-looking lady when I entered the bakery. He sent me a wait-a-minute look and finished his business with her, turning his attention to me only as she exited in a fog of Chanel No. 5.

  “Shell! What are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t you be teaching?”

  “I’m playing hooky.”

  “Nice. Add to that ripping off a 7-Eleven and spending your allowance in the arcade, and we’ll have to start calling you Trey.”

  “Um . . . I have some news.” I sat down at one of his pretty French tables and, as there were no other customers in the shop, he joined me.

  “News?”

  “Kinda big news.”

  He had a suspicious look about him all of a sudden. “And the big news is . . . ?”