Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  Harder this time.

  “Don’t you raise your voice at me, young lady.”

  The stench of alcohol rode on his breath and settled between them.

  “Please don’t grab me,” she said, more quietly, although part of her thought this would be a good time to raise the roof.

  But if she did, what would he do to her then?

  “You live in my house,” he rasped. “You do as I say.”

  Something told her this was not a time to argue back.

  “Can I please go?” she asked quietly, not meeting his eyes. “I have school tomorrow.”

  “Maybe we should have a little talk first.” Again, he slurred his words. How could his reflexes be so fast when he couldn’t even talk? “Come on into my den.”

  That would be like following a spider into its web.

  “I really need to sleep,” she said, swallowing hard because her throat felt like it was closing. Dread. Fear. “I have a test tomorrow.”

  “You have a test tonight.” He pulled her out of the kitchen and down the single step to his den, a room that had originally been a garage and, as such, felt far from the rest of the house. “I’m going to test your loyalty.”

  “To who?”

  He chuckled. “That’s a good one. You’re a smart kid.” He opened the door and pulled her in. “Say we start by testing your loyalty to your mother. You wouldn’t want to tell her about our little meeting tonight.”

  “What’s to tell?” Olivia’s entire body trembled. “I just want to go to my room.”

  “Then again, there should be a little loyalty to me, too, don’t you think?” He went on as if she hadn’t said a word. “Because I’ve given you a roof over your head and food and everything else you needed for six and a half years.”

  Olivia stood tall, hoping he couldn’t tell how she shook. “It wasn’t my choice.”

  “You were the beneficiary, though, weren’t you?” He released his grip on her arm and rubbed a knuckle over her breast, watching with obvious pleasure when her nipple rose at his touch.

  It was cold and fear and she knew it, but she knew just as well that he took that as a sign of her wanting him.

  She stepped back, pulling her nightgown tighter around her, wishing it was newer or warmer or made of steel. “I’d be glad to leave.”

  And she would leave. She would leave tomorrow. If Allie’s family would let her stay with them, that would be the best, but if not she’d find something else.

  She’d sleep in Cabin John Park if she had to.

  Anything but this.

  “Come on, now, Miss Livia, you don’t need to play games with me. I know you want this, too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She backed up, still hoping that somehow, by some miracle, she could get out of this by pretending it was some kind of big misunderstanding.

  That would require Donald to have some conscience running in the back of his mind, though, and at the moment he didn’t seem to have anything like that.

  “Sure you do.” He touched her breast again, and licked his lips. “You’ve been wanting this as much as I have.” He tugged her nightgown down, exposing her breast, then bent down, coming at her with his mouth open.

  She turned to run, but he turned her back.

  Still, she scrambled backward, feeling for the door behind her. She caught it, finally, in her hand, and was about to pull it open, when he slammed his fist right next to her head, banging the door shut.

  “This isn’t how this is supposed to go,” he said, and his foul breath made her feel like vomiting.

  “If you let me go up now, I won’t tell anyone,” she promised.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then”—she thought fast—“can I at least go brush my teeth?”

  He laughed outright at that.

  And why not? It was a stupid attempt to get away and even he knew it.

  “Where was I?” He pulled her nightgown down again and clasped his mouth onto her breast.

  His face was hard against her skin, the stubble of his beard rubbed her like sandpaper. She went to scream, but he clapped his hand over her mouth.

  “Shut up,” he rasped. “You owe me this.” He yanked her nightgown up and tore her underpants off, then pushed his hand roughly against her.

  “Stop it!”

  “You can make this easy or you can make this hard, but you can’t make it stop.” He jabbed his fingers into her. “So make your choice.”

  If she screamed, what was the best that could happen? Her mother would come? If he’d do this to Olivia, God only knew what he’d do to her mother to keep it quiet.

  No one could help.

  Later, she didn’t remember anything past that point. In her mind, it was a blur of pain and fear and anger, all taking place in the dark, surrounded by the semifamiliar shadows of her daytime life.

  She only remembered it as the night that changed the rest of her life. The night she learned that she was made of weak stuff and needed to live her life as safely as possible because she didn’t have the strength to go out and take on the world by herself.

  “What is wrong?” Allie followed Olivia out of gym and into the bathroom.

  Stupid Mr. Bredicca had yelled at her and told her that there was only one bathroom pass and she’d have to wait, but she ignored him. What was he going to do? Kick her out of gym? She wished!

  “Nothing.” Olivia was a mess, tears streaming out of her eyes and down her very pale face. “Leave me alone!”

  “No! Something is obviously really wrong and I’m not going to just go off and leave you here.” Allie followed her through the open door of the girls’ bathroom and stood barricading it. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Olivia whispered.

  A frisson of fear tripped through Allie. This was weird. Olivia always told her everything.

  Especially the bad stuff.

  “Liv, you can,” she said, walking toward Olivia. She reached a hand out to touch Olivia’s shoulder and Olivia flinched. “Oh, my God, what is going on?” Allie didn’t want to make this about her, but Olivia was acting so strange it was really scaring her.

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Olivia dissolved into hard, staccato sobs.

  “I would.” Allie put her arms around Olivia and held the cold, shaking figure.

  “N-no, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. I don’t even understand.”

  Allie knelt in front of Olivia and met her eye to eye. “You are not going through this alone, whatever it is. I’m here and I’m going to stand right here next to you until you let me help you. I don’t care how many classes we miss or if we have to sleep in here.”

  Olivia gave a halfhearted smile but it wilted into tears immediately. “You’ll hate me.”

  “Oh, my God, no I won’t. Ever. I don’t care what you do. Just tell me why you’re so upset.”

  So Olivia did. She told Allie everything she could bear to say.

  That afternoon, Allie went with Olivia to her house and stood outside waiting while Olivia told her mother what had happened.

  By the next afternoon, it was all over the school that Olivia Pelham was having sex with her stepfather.

  Twenty-one

  We’re all washed up.

  —ad for Fostex Soap

  The clock seemed to be ticking awfully slowly today.

  “Olivia.” Tim poked his head in her office. “I’m afraid you’re needed at the studio for a photo shoot.”

  Despite the fact that she’d been sitting there thinking about absolutely nothing in particular, Olivia had to fight to bring her attention to him. “What?”

  “The studio.” Tim gestured. “We have a model who’s not feeling well.” He pantomimed drinking. “And we don’t have time to get a new one.”

  Olivia sighed. What the hell was she supposed to do? Go there with tomato juice, egg whites, Tabasco, and a blender to concoct some sort of hangover remedy?

  Where in her j
ob description did it say she had to fix people who couldn’t manage to be professional enough to do their own jobs?

  But she knew where. It was between the lines.

  There was a lot of stuff between the lines of her job description. And she’d been working between those lines long enough not to be surprised by them.

  “Go to Starbucks and get a coffee traveler. Bold.” It usually came with multiple cups. She’d pour the entire damn thing down the model’s throat if she had to.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Got it.” Tim popped a finger gun at her. “The usual routine.”

  “The usual.” She sighed, then added to herself, “It’s always the usual.”

  That was the first catastrophe of the day. By nine-thirty A.M. they’d sobered the model up enough for her “before” pictures. By ten-thirty, Tim reported, she’d rallied for the “after.” And they’d only lost forty-five minutes.

  Which translated to several thousand dollars.

  Which came up a couple of hours later, when Olivia was in a meeting with the editor in chief, Gil Marshall.

  “We’re getting our asses handed to us by Allure and In Style,” he barked. “Circulation is down across the board, costs are up, and the biggest celebrity we had this month was Tara Reid. I mean, shit.” He threw his hands in the air. “Is this the best we can do?”

  “I had Katherine Heigl lined up but you didn’t want to rush production to coincide with her Donate Life America campaign,” Olivia pointed out. She was ready to back it up with more of Gil’s willfully missed opportunities but he cut her off.

  “We can’t move our entire schedule around, change the focus of dozens of employees, just to accommodate one charity!”

  “We have to if we want sales,” Olivia said. “We had to use a completely anonymous cover model that month, and that issue sold particularly badly, whereas a People magazine that came out at the same time had huge sales. It was a mistake, Gil. A stingy mistake.”

  It didn’t matter what he said. Later, she couldn’t remember it at all. What mattered was that, despite how right she was, Gil Marshall had bulldozed over her point and acted as if it had no relevance at all.

  And the fact that she knew it was completely on point didn’t matter one whit.

  What mattered was that Gil Marshall had a scapegoat for every decision he made that went wrong. That was what had mattered above all else for all the years Olivia had worked there.

  The rest of the meeting went on in a similar way. Just like tens of other meetings had gone in the past. Once, Olivia had risen to the challenge, trying to make right all the things Gil said were wrong.

  But lately she’d gotten tired of the futile exercise. Lately she’d looked out the window during these meetings and contemplated the clouds drifting past, forming and unforming familiar shapes.

  Sometimes it felt as if someone were giving her a sign way up high.

  But when the sign looked like a smiley face with no other explanation, what was she supposed to do with that?

  “Olivia, we have a problem and it’s already gone to press.”

  Olivia put her call on hold and asked Tim, “Is this urgent?”

  “Sort of. Yes.”

  She finished her call, hung up the receiver, and asked her waiting assistant, “What is it?”

  “So . . . you know how we had that article on feminism and how women are portrayed in the media and how powerful words can be?”

  Olivia thought for a moment. “Yes. It was called ‘Bad Words,’ right?”

  Tim colored and cleared his throat. “That’s right. And you said you loved the word legend because of all the dignity and accomplishment it implied without being sexist.”

  “Right.” Yes, she’d meant that. It was a good, strong word. She stood by that.

  “And then you said you hate the word pussy because of how demeaning it is to women’s sexuality.”

  “Yes.” She hated the word entirely. There was never a flattering or even benign use for it. If one wasn’t referring to a cat—and for decades one really hadn’t used the word in reference to a cat—there was no positive or flattering use for it. “Was that too racy?”

  “Not exactly.” Tim looked down. “At least, not until now.”

  Her nerves tightened. “What do you mean, ‘Not until now’?”

  “Well, there was a typo.” Tim referred to the copy he had in his hand. “Where you said, ‘I hate pussy,’ they accidentally left off the h.”

  Olivia had to think for a moment. There was only one h in the sentence Tim had said, and its elimination changed the sentence entirely.

  “So we’re going to press with me saying ‘I ate pussy.’ ”

  Tim grimaced. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “That changes the meaning of what I said.”

  “Um . . . completely.”

  “In fact, without a correction, it changes the entire slant of the article.”

  Tim sucked air in through his teeth and nodded. “It kind of does. Yes. Although it was about feminism. Maybe that will just give it a ‘sisters are doing it for themselves’ vibe.”

  Olivia considered the ramifications. She wasn’t really all that concerned about how the change reflected on her, but there was the potential for—no, the likelihood of—a huge reaction and potential backlash from the public. Either Olivia could stand by her statement and face the misunderstanding of thousands of people, or she could run a correction and risk alienating a huge percentage of readers who might have been delighted at her “coming out.”

  And most of the readers would probably realize it was a typo.

  “It’s okay,” she said to Tim, although there was nothing he or anyone else could do now that the issue had gone to press. “If anything, this will make me seem more interesting than I am.”

  Which was true.

  But all Olivia could think was that she just couldn’t get worked up about this kind of mistake anymore.

  She just didn’t care.

  “David Weiner is on line two,” Tim told Olivia shortly before five o’clock.

  David Weiner! She looked at her calendar. Did they have an appointment?

  They did.

  She pressed the button and lifted the receiver, trying to come up with an excuse to get out of it. “David! I was just thinking about you!”

  “I’m flattered. I hope I don’t blow your nice thoughts with what I have to say.”

  “What?”

  “I need to cancel our date tonight.”

  Thank goodness. Olivia slumped in relief, then turned the page of her diary. “Would you like to reschedule? I have a couple of hours on Tuesday night.”

  “Actually, Liv, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get together for a while. Maybe not ever.”

  Her heart lurched. Did he have a communicable disease? Had he passed it on to her before finding out? When was the last time she’d seen him? Four weeks, maybe. He’d canceled last time, too. “Why not?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  AIDS? Would he introduce HIV-positive results this way? “Try me,” she said, her voice tight.

  “I’ve met someone.”

  It took a moment for Olivia to register what he’d said. “You’ve met someone? A woman, you mean?”

  “I hope I haven’t made you doubt my sexual preferences that much!”

  “No, no.” She let out a relieved breath.

  “It’s okay, I know it’s a shock. It’s a shock for me, too. Everyone always says when you meet the One you know it, and I wasn’t even interested in meeting a One, so imagine my surprise when Brenda turned up.”

  “Brenda.” Did Olivia know a Brenda? She didn’t think so. “That’s great, David.” Then, because she didn’t think she sounded convincing, she added, more firmly, “Really. I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thanks, kid. I hope I didn’t disappoint you tonight.”

  “Not at all. I actually need
ed to cancel anyway.”

  “Then it’s worked out fine.” He sounded like he didn’t believe her. “Look, I’ll give you a call sometime, see how you’re doing.”

  They both knew he wouldn’t.

  “Great! I hope you will.”

  They both knew she didn’t.

  They said their good-byes and she replaced the receiver slowly.

  What now?

  Even her fuck buddy—a term she hated, regardless of how apt it was—had found someone he was willing to change his ways for. David Weiner had, like Olivia herself, been one of the last holdouts, a single professional who didn’t want to muddy the waters with a relationship. David had, until now, been singly focused on his career, which had made him the perfect convenience for Olivia.

  She almost couldn’t believe he’d changed. Not that she wasn’t happy for him—she was. She sincerely hoped things worked out the way he wanted them to. Oddly, she felt not an iota of jealousy or regret.

  What she felt was lonely.

  Now virtually everyone she knew seemed to have someone or something that made their lives more meaningful and Olivia felt more lost than ever.

  By the time Olivia had to leave—there was no choice, the office had emptied of even the stragglers who’d stayed to do the last-minute rush to get the issue out—she was completely exhausted.

  No, maybe exhausted was the wrong word. Maybe it was simply that she was worn out from trying to make straw into gold all day, every day. Gil made things nearly impossible, with his constant picking at words and intentions, and his insane desire to make the magazine turn magically into a bestseller without any effort or sacrifice on his part.

  She left the office with the intention of walking the fourteen blocks to her apartment. It wasn’t something she’d have suggested anyone else do at this hour, but Olivia was indomitable.

  Unfortunately, once she got to the street and into a driving rain she wasn’t expecting, she tried to hail a cab, only to find out she was also apparently invisible. It seemed like forever that she stood there with her arm out, but all the cabs that passed were occupied.