“You need to go, Mom.”
“Yeah, I know that, but there’s no time. I worked sixty hours this week, double shifts. By the time I get home I’m dead on my feet.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. You must be exhausted.”
“Yeah, tell me. Anyway, what are you getting?”
“Tuna sandwich, how about you?”
“I need a burger. They any good here?”
“Sure, yeah, they’re great. Get a milkshake too. They’re the best.”
“Right. My pants are too tight as it is.” Linda ordered a coffee, a rare hamburger and a chocolate shake, reaching for the cigarettes in her purse.
“There’s no smoking here, Ma.”
Linda huffed, tossing her bag down onto the seat. “Shit. Thought I’d get away with it in Jersey.”
Jane smiled. “Sorry.”
“So, how’s my girl? Let me see that arm.”
Jane lifted her sling, pulling the fabric aside to show the cast. She shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”
“No? That’s good.” Linda studied the table, tapping her fingers against the saltshaker. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner. Like I said, the mall’s been awful.”
“I wish you didn’t have to work so much.”
“I need the money, sweetheart. I have bills, you know, and without your father around I can’t exactly afford to let anything slide.”
“I could help you out, Mom. Send a little money every month.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why?”
“I’m not taking money from my kid. No way.”
“I’d rather you do that than wait around for Dad to come home.”
“Well, it won’t be long now, will it?”
Jane watched her mother. Tendrils of hair sprung out from the band of her platinum blond ponytail. Her face, lined beneath a dusting of pale powder, nevertheless held fast to the beauty of her youth. Her eyes were soft and brown, her lipstick the wrong color for her skin. The beige sweater she wore clung too tightly around her middle, but overall she was slim still in her light blue jeans. She looked exactly as she had when Jane was a child. Maybe a bit more tired, if that were possible.
Jane rested her cheek in her hand, feeling the old familiar ache fill her throat. The love she felt for her mother was almost painful.
“Thank you for coming to see me, Mom. I know it was a long drive.”
“Ah.” Linda waved her hand, flicking the idea away. “I have to come see my baby when she’s hurt. That’s what mommas do, right?”
Jane’s smile was slow, pensive. “I’m really glad to see you.”
“Me too, Janie. So what’s been going on with you? How’s Ben doing?”
“Oh, he’s fine. Busy. Almost finished with the film, I think.”
“That’s nice. Work okay?”
“Well, aside from this…” Jane gestured to her arm.
“Yeah. Right.” Linda laughed. “Sorry. You’re off for the summer?”
“Yes, actually, I’m out on workers’ comp, so…”
“Oh, you’re lucky. Get some time off to relax.”
“Well—”
“Yeah, you know, teachers, you guys have a good deal going. All that time off…”
The waitress came by with Linda’s coffee. Nodding at the server, Linda reached across the table for the sweetener. “You’ll be off all this summer, right?” She kept her eyes on the coffee.
Jane watched her, careful. “Yeah.”
“So you’ll be free to come to Maryland, for the hearing.”
“Mom…”
“Now listen, I had to come here in person to tell you this. And I don’t want you interrupting me. Let me say my piece.”
Jane closed her eyes. So this is why she came.
“Your father did wrong, I know that. But he paid his debt. He’s been in that hellhole now for twelve years. Enough is enough.”
“What about the man he killed? Is it enough for him? Twelve years, then he’s out on the street to do it again?”
“Goddamn it, Jane.” Linda slammed her coffee spoon on the table. She covered it with her hand to stop its clattering, lowering her voice. “He’s not going to do it again. I told you. He’s changed. You’d know that yourself if you went to visit him once in a while.”
“Mom, I write to him, I call him, I go once every month.”
“Yeah, well, imagine him up there in that place all by himself, no one to talk to, no family with him.”
“He murdered someone, Mom.”
“It was not murder!” Linda hissed. “It was an accident. He was drunk. He didn’t mean to do it.”
“He had a knife with him at the bar. That means he had it on him. What if he had used it on you?”
“Damn it, don’t say that.” Linda wiped her eyes with the back of her knuckle, straining to keep her voice down. “I know he was out of control, Jane. I know it. But it was the drinking. It wasn’t him. You don’t know him like I do. The way he used to be. He’s had a hard life, a very hard life. No one should have to go through what he’s been through.”
“I know that. Trust me, I know. And I do know him like you do. Don’t you think I love him too? He’s my father.”
The waitress came again with their plates of food. “You girls okay?”
“Yes,” Jane said automatically. “Yes, we’re fine. Thank you. This looks great.”
The waitress smiled, giving Jane a long look. She grabbed a pile of napkins from a nearby cart and set them on the table. “In case you need these.” She eased away.
Linda reached for one and blew her nose, taking off her glasses. Dark circles ringed her swollen eyes.
Jane watched her mother take a deep sip of her milkshake and set it down. “Look at you. Sitting there crying into your shake.”
Linda snorted, gave her a grudging smile. “You’re one to talk. With your little tuna sandwich.”
Jane reached for her mother’s hand across the table. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you’ve had a hard time.”
“You don’t know. You have no idea.”
Jane met her gaze, searching her eyes for something she could connect to, something she could reach. “I’m afraid of him.”
Linda’s eyes filled. She shook her head. “Don’t say that.”
“Mom, there won’t be anyone there to protect you.”
“I don’t need anyone to protect me.”
“Yes, you do. Of course you do. Otherwise, what was the point of me?”
“Honey.” She looked at Jane. For a moment it almost seemed as if she could see her. “There’s more point to you than there ever was to me.”
Jane held her mother’s gaze. She was still a young enough woman. She could make another life for herself, a new start. “It doesn’t have to be this way, Mom. You’re worth more than this.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me.”
“I’m not.” She leaned forward. “I just…I love you, Mom.”
Linda looked away for a moment, and then back.
“I love you too, Janie. Just do this for me. Please. I need you.”
Jane took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it, Mom, okay?”
“Okay.” She patted her daughter’s hand. “That’s all I ask.”
* * *
Jane lay in bed that night, staring through the darkness at the ceiling. She couldn’t sleep, but she didn’t need to. There was nowhere to be tomorrow morning. No demands on her time, no schedule to keep. Only the constant, steady pressure of her mother’s voice in her head.
She knew that Linda loved her, had not meant to hurt her or to let her be hurt. That she had barely survived those years herself. Called upon to save herself or her daughter, she had chosen neither. She’d chosen Dennis. She was still choosing him.
Many nights Jane had lain in her bed just like this, silent and still under the blankets, listening to her parents fight. There would be another woman, or the threat of one, or her mother would have put dinner on the table late, or cold, and her father would rail against he
r for hours over it while he drank, and drank, and drank. And she would listen, praying for their voices to soften as they sometimes did, for the sound of their bedroom door to click shut.
On those evenings when the screaming died away, when they slunk off together to their shabby bed, she allowed herself to cry. She could afford it then, knowing they were safe at least for the night. Although somehow that fade into silence was harder to accept, knowing what her mother was agreeing to, what she was forgiving.
One morning she’d gone downstairs to breakfast, eyes still red from the night before, to find Linda singing in the kitchen. She was wearing a faded nightgown and standing at the stove, making pancakes. She kissed Jane on the cheek as she stepped in, pulling her too close against her loose breasts.
“Morning, Mom.”
“Janie! Good morning. How’d you sleep, baby doll?” Her voice was unnaturally sweet, set with determined cheer.
“Fine, thanks. How about you?”
“Oh, real good. Real good. Listen, flip this batch for me while I run to the bathroom, okay?” She handed Jane the plastic spatula.
Her mother hurried out of the kitchen. On the table next to a full ashtray and a coffee cup lay the morning’s crossword puzzle. Jane eyed it while the pancake batter bubbled in the pan.
She supposed they had made up. There’d been no more sound from them since just before midnight, when she’d fallen into the imperfect sleep of someone waiting. She was groggy, thinking back on what she’d heard of their fight. It was something about the rent being due.
In her head she had calculated what was left in her small bank account, trying to figure out if she should come downstairs and offer to help. But she’d been afraid. Her father’s voice had sounded loud and slurred, and then abruptly there’d been silence, followed by the creak of their feet across the floor boards.
His car wasn’t in the driveway. She looked out the window at the empty spot and wondered where he’d gone. Maybe she could bring it up to Linda this morning, while they were alone. Her father wouldn’t need to know where the money had come from.
She turned the perfect, round pancakes over and set the spatula down on the stove. She walked over to take a closer look at the crossword. It was missing sixteen down, “Ayn Rand’s philosophy.”
“Objectivism,” she said aloud, and suddenly a piercing beep blasted through the kitchen.
A flare of smoke rose out from under the pancake grill, the spatula warped and melting against the hot rings of the burner. Jane plucked it out of the fire and tossed it into the sink as her mother barreled back into the room.
Linda took one look at the plastic liquefying on the burner and slapped Jane across the face. “I leave you here for five minutes and this is what you do? I just cleaned that goddamn stove!” She turned to inspect the damage. “Jesus, look at this!”
Jane leaned against the counter, holding her face in her hand. She felt herself go still inside, all sound and color fading out of the room. “I’m sorry.”
“Look at the fuckin’ burner! It’s ruined! I am telling you right now, little girl, you are cleaning that up. And if you can’t clean it up, you’re buying a new fuckin’ ring for the stove, because I am not paying for that. God, it stinks in here.”
She pushed past Jane to open the window over the sink. As she lifted her arms to hoist the sill, the baby powder scent of her deodorant drifted over the kitchen, mingling with stale sweat, cloying and sweet. The smell made Jane sick. She wanted to lift the hot griddle in her hand, to wind it back, to knock Linda down.
She took a step back, horrified.
She’d cleaned the stove. And used her babysitting money to replace the burner.
Linda had resumed cooking, muttering to herself, piling pancakes on a warming plate in the oven and frying bacon to go with it. When her dad pulled into the driveway, she made Jane sit down at the table as if nothing happened.
“He’ll just get mad. I don’t want any more trouble here today.”
Her father came in with a case of Heineken under his arm and a bouquet of roses wrapped in grocery paper.
“For you, Lin.” He kissed her mother on the lips.
“Thanks, baby. These are really pretty.”
Linda took them, arranging them in a vase and giving Jane a fierce look of warning. “Sit down, love. I made us a nice breakfast.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Dennis gestured toward Jane, who sat with her hands in her lap, looking down at her plate.
“Ah, don’t mind her,” Linda said. “She’s in a snit.”
* * *
She’d once told Ben about that morning with her mother. They were making breakfast in his narrow kitchen a few months before he’d gone to L.A. Scrambled eggs and toast, fresh fruit from the farmer’s market. He was brewing espresso beside her, whooshing steam from the stainless steel machine and fogging the window over the sink.
“She really screamed at me.” Jane laughed. “Dad was scary, but Mom could stop your heart when she was mad. The way she’d come at you! Terrifying.”
“Mm hmm.”
Jane’s smile faltered. “Looking back on it now, it’s kind of funny, don’t you think? Here I am so worried about my father, and getting ready to empty my bank account for her, and trying to help her with the crossword, and I make one mistake and it’s all over.”
“She hit you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s fucked up.”
Beside her, he fed a cup of milk into the steamer. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the whirring.
“Of course it’s fucked up. I know that. I was just…”
“I suppose she’s had her share of karmic justice for it, though, right?” He set the steamed milk down and turned to the opposite counter to begin slicing pineapple.
“What does that mean?”
“I mean the whole situation was a mess, obviously. It’s amazing you turned out as well as you did.”
“Is that a compliment?” She turned to face him, watching his back as he sliced.
“Of course it is.” His knife clicked repeatedly against the cutting board. “Look at you. Smart, educated, sophisticated. You’re everything they’re not.”
“Well…”
“That’s you. You did that on your own. Do you know how much I admire that?”
She softened. “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why you let them bother you so much.”
She turned back to the eggs. Her voice became quiet. “Bother me?”
“Yeah, I mean they were shitty parents, sure, but you made something of yourself. It’s your past. It doesn’t have to be your present and future too.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because it takes up a lot of space in your head. Between that and school you’re like the walking wounded.”
She stopped stirring the eggs and stood still, staring at the pan.
“Ouch.”
“Janie.” He took her arm and pulled her around to face him, placing his hands on her shoulders. “I just want you to be happy. You don’t need all this stress.” He stared straight into her eyes. “When we get married, I want you to know, we can do things differently.”
“Okay.”
“Hopefully I’ll be getting work out in L.A., and you don’t want to move there, so we’ll have to lead pretty independent lives. You’ll be able to do whatever you want here on the East Coast, and I’ll take care of myself whether I’m here or in California. So you won’t have to worry about our relationship at all. No stress.”
“It’s not—”
“It doesn’t have to be like it is with your parents.”
“I don’t know, Ben. It’s just…would we really live on different coasts?”
“Why not? We don’t need to follow some archaic standard of marriage, do we?”
She went back to stirring the eggs, grabbing the salt without needing to look, her fingers finding it in the cabinet after years of habit. “I guess not.”
“You’ve had more than your share of worries in your life. We have the chance to do something new. Doesn’t that sound good to you?”
Ben had seemed so sure of himself, it hardly felt possible to disagree. She hadn’t known why it made her feel so sick inside.
Against her will Jane saw an image of David. Leaning back against her couch, suit jacket lying over a chair. Standing beside her at Mrs. Johnson’s wake. Eating cookies with her on a bench in the middle of a snowstorm. Holding her face in the palm of his hand.
It wasn’t fair to compare him to Ben. He didn’t know her as well as Ben did. He didn’t know how demanding she could be. Of course he could be there for her, could even be attracted to her, as long as the rules of casual friendship limited the demands she could make on him. As long as he never knew the full scope of how she felt, of what she needed. As long as he never had to bear the brunt of all her intensity and all her pain.
She couldn’t indulge herself with fantasies of what might be. Ben was her fiancé. Linda was her mother. This was the life she had. And no amount of dreaming would change that.
She lay back down. In the darkness she listened to the wind calling outside her window and tried not to think of David.
Chapter Twenty-One
The scent of caramel popcorn crept across the crowd, sweet and salty in the early summer breeze. Barkers called out for customers, shouting to be heard over the beeping and clanging of the arcade. Overhead, strings of tiny lights glowed against deepening twilight. David walked beside her, whistling, leading her past a cluster of carnival rides toward the end of the pier.
“You sure you’re up for this?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
“I’m doing it.”
“All right.”
He pointed to a set of rickety stairs. “We’re here.”
At the top of the steps stood the steel skeleton of a roller coaster, utilitarian rails painted a stern blue and gray. A convoy of cars roared above their heads, shaking the ride’s metal girders from sky to foundation, vibrating the wooden planks under their feet.
I’ll Become the Sea Page 11