Tara didn’t talk about her dad much and it didn’t sound like he ever called her or sent letters or anything. Reggie had heard Tara’s mom lashing into her when Tara had asked for new shoes. “Jesus, Tara. Why don’t you call up your two-timing father and ask him to pay up all the freaking child support he owes? Maybe then we could afford your fancy new shoes. I’m sure that little baby he’s having already has a hundred pairs.”
Tara ended up shoplifting the shoes she wanted anyway. Her mom was always either working or sleeping, and didn’t seem to notice the many mysterious additions to Tara’s wardrobe. She could come back from the mall in an outfit with the price tags still attached, and her mother wouldn’t bat an eye, just rush out the door, stuffing her apron in her bag and uttering some vague warnings about not staying up too late. Sometimes it seemed like a game Tara played, like she was daring her mom to notice, like she actually wanted to get caught.
Charlie pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and began to smoke without inhaling. He’d take a little puff, then let it right out. His eyes got red and his nose started to run. He was wearing the Rolling Stones T-shirt his dad hated—the one with the Sticky Fingers album cover showing a close-up of a guy’s crotch. His dad said the shirt was obscene and made him look like a queer. He’d thrown it in the trash, but Charlie had fished it out and kept it hidden, always careful to layer another shirt on top of it when he left the house.
Charlie’s dad, Stu Berr, was a burly cop who showed his disappointment in Charlie by constantly trying to remold him into his vision of the ideal son. He bought him a weight bench, dragged him to football games, stopped paying for Charlie’s guitar lessons, and made him get a military-style buzz cut, which made the shape of Charlie’s head look strangely crooked.
Tara sat up, eyes glistening excitedly as she looked at Charlie. “The cigarette you’re smoking was poisoned with a deadly nerve agent. You have one minute to live.” She pulled out the small hourglass pendant, flipped it over, and watched the pink sand running through. “Only one thing will save you.”
“What?” Charlie asked nervously. Tara could go anywhere with this.
“You have to kiss Reggie. She’s got the antidote on her lips.”
Reggie shot Tara a panicked look—did Tara know how Reggie felt about Charlie?
Charlie looked at his cigarette, considering. He licked his lips, probably trying to imagine the taste of poison.
Reggie held her breath, wishing for the kiss, but also praying he wouldn’t do it. If he kissed her, then maybe he’d be able to tell how Reggie felt. Like all her secrets would travel by osmosis through her lips and into his. Did kisses work like that? Reggie didn’t know. She’d never kissed anyone but her mother and aunt.
“Time’s running out,” said Tara as the sand slipped through. “Do you live or die?”
Charlie gave a soft, defeated sigh, and leaned over and kissed Reggie. His lips were warm and tasted like smoke, but only stayed on hers for a second. It was the kind of kiss a big brother might give because his mother made him, but still, it made Reggie’s stomach do a flip. Her heart was pounding so hard she was sure the others could hear it. She felt her one true ear redden as the knowledge sunk in, deeper than it ever had before: she was in love with Charlie Berr, stupid haircut and all.
Tara smiled, letting go of the hourglass. Then she squinted up at the tarp ceiling. “So are we gonna get a real roof on this place or what?” she asked. “ ’Cause the blue light in here makes us all look like Smurfs. Très sexy.”
Reggie laughed a little too hard and loud, pleased to be moving away from the subject of the kiss. “The roof is next, definitely. Then I think we tackle the bridge.”
The tree house was a relic from Reggie’s childhood, built for her when she was seven by her uncle George. Turning it into a proper hangout had been Tara’s idea, and Reggie immediately went to work drawing up plans for a roof, walls with windows, and a door that opened to a suspension bridge that would cross the yard and lead right to the little balcony outside Reggie’s bedroom.
Reggie had scoured the library for books on design and building, taking notes on the distance between studs, the proper span of roof rafters, how to do a window header. She’d never thought about how buildings worked before, but she soon found herself hooked—here was something that took her love for drawing to a whole new level. She felt herself instinctively drawn to the neatness of plans and blueprints; the idea that you could put a design down on paper, then bring it to three-dimensional life with lumber and nails. It felt almost magical.
So far they’d framed the walls of the tree house and sheathed them with plywood. The simple shed roof was framed, and there was plywood over half of it, the other half draped with a blue tarp. They’d brought some sleeping bags up as well as a deck of cards, and an old fruit crate they used as a table. There was a stack of board games in the corner—Monopoly, Clue, Life, and an old Ouija board that had belonged to Vera. Empty Coke cans were scattered around as well as a hammer, saw, and boxes of nails.
Charlie had stashed his beat-up old acoustic guitar up there. When they hung out at night, they used votive candles stuck in glass jars and Charlie would play soft, bluesy tunes that Reggie would get lost inside; the notes carried her to a far-off place in some imaginary future where Charlie was famous and onstage, telling a crowded theater, “This song is for Reggie.”
Reggie looked at the guitar now, purposely keeping her eyes off Charlie. She fiddled with her new ear.
Tara said, “Let me see,” reaching out for Reggie’s ear, keeping her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Does it come off?” Tara asked, tugging gently. When Reggie nodded, Tara pulled harder until the ear came off in her hand.
“Cool!” she exclaimed, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Just like Mr. Potato Head!”
A FEW MONTHS AFTER the dog attack (which in Reggie’s family was thereafter referred to only as The Unfortunate Incident) her aunt Lorraine had taken her to a doctor in New Haven, who, after studying Reggie’s remaining ear, fashioned her a prosthetic ear to match. Only it didn’t. Not quite. The color was off a bit and the glue that held it in place itched terribly, so the ear stayed in Reggie’s top drawer, hidden beneath her underwear. Her mother and aunt gave up after a while and only made her wear it on special occasions.
“Your ear!” they would cry as they were headed out the door, late for Christmas Mass or school picture day. And Reggie would run up, rummage through the drawer, and attach the ear only to remove it covertly in the car and place the lump of rubber in the pocket of her good coat, where she would feel for it from time to time, touching it the way another kid might stroke a rabbit’s foot.
Her mother had also been disabled by the dog, which, ever after, Vera referred to as Cerberus. The dog’s teeth had gone clean through the fleshy part of her mother’s right hand between thumb and forefinger, damaging a tendon and nerve that the doctors were not able to completely repair. The result of this, in addition to the thick, semicircular scarring ruining her once perfect hand, was that Vera would never be able to bend her pointer finger. She would go through life self-consciously hiding her damaged hand, holding it on her lap or down at her side, all the fingers curled but one, which left her perpetually pointing. When she was out in public, she took to wearing long white gloves—the leather supple, soft as butter, the pointer and index fingers of the left hand stained yellow from the Winstons she chain-smoked.
In Reggie’s mind, the dog truly became the three-headed beast with a serpent’s tail, who, her mother explained, was the guardian of the underworld.
When she went over the attack in the months and years to come, Reggie would picture her mother in her sparkling white underclothes twirling a gigantic black three-headed dog through the air, the word Bastard ringing in her one good ear.
It was years before Reggie learned the true meaning of the word bastard, and that the dog was not the only bastard on the deck that afternoon. Reggie was a kid without a father, the very
definition of bastard, which was pointed out to her rather cruelly back in the fourth grade by a gang of fifth-grade girls, led by Dusty Trono.
“Say it,” Dusty said as she held Reggie pinned underneath her in the sandbox while Dusty’s friends looked on, giggling. Dusty grabbed a hunk of Reggie’s hair and pulled and twisted.
“I’m a bastard,” Reggie had whimpered, tears streaming down her face, sand sticking to it.
“Now eat sand, bastard,” Dusty said, twisting Reggie’s head so that her face was pressed into the sand.
REGGIE’S AUNT AND MOTHER had convinced her to get the new ear before starting high school in the fall, saying it would be a fresh start. Her new improved ear was made of latex and snapped into two titanium screws the surgeon had implanted in her temporal bone. The ear was purely aesthetic: the dog bite had done a great deal of damage and the subsequent scarring left her almost totally deaf in her left ear. The surgeon had suggested that Reggie have an ear reconstructed from cartilage taken from her rib cage, covered with a flap and skin graft. He showed her a photo of a patient who’d had this procedure done, and the ear looked like an actual ear.
“The benefit,” the surgeon explained, “is that we create an ear using cartilage and skin from your own body. It will look and feel like the real thing. It would require two surgeries, six months apart.”
Unnerved and a bit sickened even hearing about the procedure, Reggie felt content, for the time being, to stick with the removable latex ear. It was at least far superior to the older, off-color rubber ear of her early childhood. Now she’d look almost like a normal girl.
REGGIE WATCHED AS TARA turned the new ear over in her hand. “It’s kind of freaky how real it looks,” she said. “Shit, it even feels real.” She touched the ear to her cheek and closed her eyes. Reggie squirmed a little at the strangely intimate gesture.
Charlie stubbed out his half-finished cigarette. “They make sex toys out of latex, and some of them look pretty real,” he said.
Tara laughed. “And you’re an expert on sex toys?”
Charlie’s cheeks turned pink. “I’m just saying.” He reached for his guitar and strummed a few chords. His fingers were long and nimble, the nails cut short and square. He always looked more comfortable with a guitar in his hands. It was the only time he ever looked totally relaxed, his shoulders slumping a little, his body curving around the instrument, melting into it almost. Sometimes Reggie would come up to the tree house on her own and hold his guitar. She’d lay down with it on the sleeping bag, arms wrapped around the hollow body, fingers caressing the steel strings but never daring to strum them.
Tara handed the ear back to Reggie, who snapped it in place.
“So I think we’ve got supplies for the roof in the garage,” Reggie said. “There’s a couple sheets of plywood left and a box of shingles. We’ll need cable for the bridge and some really heavy-duty eyebolts. Some kind of clamps to make loops with the cable ends.”
Charlie leaned over his guitar, looked down at Reggie’s drawing of the tree house, and scowled. “I still don’t think it’ll work,” he said, pointing to the suspension bridge she’d drawn leading from the tree house to the little balcony outside her bedroom window.
“Sure it will,” Reggie said. “We just need eyebolts and some metal cable. We attach the wooden slats to the bottom two cables. The top two are our handrails.”
“There’s no way,” Charlie said, shaking his head, pushing the drawing away.
“People build suspension bridges all the time,” Reggie told him.
“Maybe so,” said Charlie. “But for us to do it, to build a bridge all that way, it’s impossible.”
“It’s only fifteen feet. And if we —”
“It’s impossible,” he said dismissively, turning back to watch his fingers dance up the fret board, bending strings, making the guitar sing.
“WHAT DO YOU DO if you like someone and they don’t like you back?” Reggie asked her mom. They were in the waiting area at Hair Express. Vera was flipping through the latest issue of Variety that she’d pulled from her bag. She carried a large leather purse that was more like a tote bag, and kept it crammed full. To get to her keys or lipstick, she had to pull out handfuls of receipts, notes scribbled on little memo pads, matchbooks, dried-out pens, eyelash curlers, silver bird-shaped scissors, coupons, foundation, empty packs of cigarettes, lost buttons, aspirin, and tea bags. (Vera wasn’t a tea drinker, but placed the moist bags over her eyes to help with wrinkles.)
“How do you know he doesn’t like you back?” Vera asked, holding the magazine in her white-gloved hands so that Reggie could only see her eyes. Her mom’s lashes were so heavy with mascara that Reggie wondered how she kept them open.
It was Sunday evening and Reggie was the last appointment of the day. The other stylists were sweeping hair into little piles, soaking combs in disinfectant, and counting out their tips. Dawn was finishing up with an old lady with peach-tinted hair.
Vera was wearing a scarlet dress and matching high heels. That was one of the things about her mom—she always dressed up like she was going to party. She put on full makeup to run down to the donut shop, because, as she always said, “You never know who you’ll meet. The world is about connections, Regina. Not just who you know, but who they know. It’s all one big web, everything interconnected, everyone tugging on each other’s strings.”
Reggie knew that after the haircut, her mom would drop her at home, then go off to rehearsal. She was doing a play down in New Haven—something dark by a local playwright who was starting to build a name for himself. The play was directed by a man named Rabbit, her mom’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, who had the temperament of an artist and was, in Vera’s words, both a bastard and a genius. Reggie had never met him, but she’d heard countless stories about his temper tantrums during rehearsals and about how well connected he was. “He knows everyone,” Vera always said, a proud smile on her face. “He even has a cousin in Hollywood who’s worked for Martin Scorsese.” Vera spoke the names of famous people in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, like they were magic incantations that you didn’t dare say out loud.
Vera continued to study Reggie over the top of her magazine, waiting for an answer. Reggie bit her lip. “Because he likes someone else.”
Vera nodded knowingly. “And does this someone else like him?”
Reggie thought for a minute. “I don’t think so. Not like that anyway.”
Vera smiled. “Then let him know how you feel. That’s what I did to get Rabbit. He was seeing this little blond number until I swept him off his feet.” Vera smiled in a self-satisfied way.
“But I can’t do that!”
This was stupid. She didn’t have her mother’s looks or grace. Vera could sweep any man off her feet. Reggie was just a gangly, awkward girl with a chest as flat as a boy’s. Just last week, when she’d been at Ferraro’s market with her mom, the checkout boy had been unable to take his eyes off Vera. He’d said, “Can I help you out to the car with these? Or will your son get them?” Vera didn’t correct him, only said, “We can manage. Thanks.”
“There are other ways, Regina. But remember, you can’t change what’s inside a person. All you can do is help them open their eyes.”
The peach-haired woman walked by. Dawn called Reggie’s name and she jumped up and hurried to the chair. Vera went back to her magazine.
“And what are we having done today?” Dawn asked, moving close to put a plastic cape around her. She smelled like cigarettes and wintergreen gum.
Reggie looked at herself in the mirror, her hair long and wild, going every which way. “I’m ready for a change,” Reggie told her.
Dawn nodded. “I know just the cut for you.” She washed and combed Reggie’s hair, then went to work, the scissors singing, hair falling in great clumps onto the floor, mixing with the wispy tendrils of peach-colored hair.
Reggie had worn her hair long since the dog attack, when it had been pale blond and curly. Cherub hair, Lorra
ine called it. It was her mother’s color, the one trait they shared. As she grew, the tight curls turned to waves and the color darkened, as if the only evidence of her being Vera’s daughter was slipping away, year by year. By the time she sat in the hairdresser’s chair, it was chestnut brown. She looked over at her mother, who had switched to a People magazine and was scowling down at the movie stars and singers with a disgusted, Who-do-they-think-they-are look. Her platinum hair caught the light and glowed like a halo.
“Keep your head straight, hon,” Dawn said.
Reggie turned back to her reflection and had the strange sensation that it was some other girl she was seeing. Her face looked longer without the unkempt bangs covering her forehead. It was thin, freckled, with dark blue eyes and pointed, elven features that made her seem younger than thirteen. She watched how carefully the hairdresser worked the scissors around the false ear, never seeming to notice that it was any different from the other.
Chapter 5
October 16, 2010
Worcester, Massachusetts
FOLLOWING LORRAINE’S INSTRUCTIONS, THE first thing Reggie did when she got to the large, sprawling medical center was ask for the social worker—Carolyn Wheeler. The building was a confusing warren of waxed floors, elevators, beeping machines, and unimaginative art reproductions on the walls. The heels of her cowboy boots echoed in the halls. Doctors were paged. A code blue on B Wing was called. Elderly volunteers in green smocks manned information desks and wore cheerful buttons that said: how may i help you?
Reggie had won an award once for designing a community health center when she was getting her degree at Rhode Island School of Design. It was circular to represent unity and wholeness, and remind patients of their connection to the earth and nature. A curved wall was like outstretched arms ready to envelop and protect. It brought us back, on some deep level, to our original home: our mother’s womb. Reggie’s design included a living wall of plants and a large water feature in the center that could be heard and seen from every room. The hospital in Worcester was the antithesis of Reggie’s long-ago design. With the fluorescent lights, long corridors, sharp corners, and tiny windows that looked out onto the parking lot, she couldn’t imagine how anyone here could possibly get better. Reggie felt lost and off-kilter, and her forehead was damp with perspiration, even though the building was pumped full of cool air.
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