Like Family

by Paula McLain

  Maybe I would, I thought loudly, but said nothing. I stared out the window, holding the long chunk of hair in my fist, rubbing it a little, like a rabbit’s foot.

  SOPHOMORE YEAR I LOVED Ruben Estrada, Eric Hobart, Ed Chavoya, the boy who sometimes visited Noreen’s next-door neighbor, the boy from Roosevelt High whom I watched run a liquid 800 meters at a regional meet the spring before and Bill Mosher. Mostly Bill Mosher. He wore a red plaid shirt, and his teeth were so white and straight they were like a kind of math. He sat diagonal and left from me in Typing II, and I’d forget to hit return for staring at the tan bridge of his hands on the keyboard.

  Somehow, Teresa guessed I loved Bill and started teasing me when he’d run by at track practice. “There goes your to-ver!” she’d call loud enough for everyone to hear. All I could do was blush and swear she was wrong.

  She didn’t let up, though. In February, after a meet, a Truth or Dare game got started on the darkening bus home. I wasn’t anywhere near the action, but heard “Oh, no!” and laughing, and there was Bill Mosher being pushed toward my seat by Teresa and Curtis Cunningham and some others. I felt hot and terrified and thrilled.

  “Get her,” Curtis hollered, and I knew I was going to be kissed. In that moment, I didn’t care if Bill cringed over it, if he made dramatic spitting gestures after or had a good laugh with his friends about how awkward I was. I wanted the kiss and all the ways it would change me. But Teresa was the one who named the dare. It wasn’t a kiss at all; instead, he jabbed his index finger under my armpit, then smelled it.

  You’d think I’d have been too embarrassed after that to trail Bill from D building to lunch every day, but I wasn’t. I did it for the rest of the school year, close enough behind him so that my hand was the very next one to drag the banister, push the swinging door. I’d follow him to the snack bar and back to the lawn under the amphitheater, so close I could smell his burrito.

  Me, I didn’t eat lunch and hadn’t since seventh grade. We got lunch tickets from the Welfare Department, but I threw them away, every day into the same open can. They were stamped Free on the back, and everyone knew only poor families got free tickets — the same families that waited in line downtown for hunks of cheese and powdered milk and baby formula. I didn’t want anyone to think I was like those poor people. In fact, I didn’t want to be different in any way. If people found out I’d been given away not once, but over and over again, they would feel sorry for me. Easier to lie and say the Lindberghs were my parents and always had been. I could be anyone, really. I could be no one, sitting cross-legged behind the last stack in the library with my bag of corn nuts.

  AFTER LUNCH THERE WAS gym, where I stood in the outfield wearing my heinous blue bloomer jumpsuit, praying for bunts. After gym there was chorus, which I liked, even the mi mi mi scales, the five-minute arrangements of “Muskrat Love” and “Feelin’ Groovy.” One afternoon, as Mrs. Adams was going over solos with the small group of favored sopranos everyone else called the Screamers, I looked across the room at the alto section to find a heavyset blond girl looking back. Did I know her? Was she in my second-period government class? biology?

  When class wrapped up, the blonde pushed along the risers, right toward me. “Hi,” she said. “You’re Paula, aren’t you? I’m Stacey. Do you remember? My mom knows your mom.”

  “Hilde?”

  Her eyebrows came together. “No, Lynette. My mom’s Lynette. Your mom’s name is Jackie, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, all of my blood finding my face.

  “Do you remember when you lived with us? How are your sisters? Teresa must go here too. I haven’t seen her.”

  I managed to say yes, that she was a junior, though most of me was up in the filing system, shuffling through names and faces, trying to place her, this Stacey.

  “Well,” she said, smiling a little and turning away. “Good to see you. Say hi to your sisters for me.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

  I was all the way out by the portables before she clicked in. There was a Stacey, a blond slip of a thing, who had started kindergarten with Teresa. If Stacey was the daughter of Mom’s friend Lynette, wouldn’t that make Mom’s boyfriend Roger her uncle? Creepy. It was possible we had lived with Lynette during one of the times our dad was away, but I didn’t remember. I did have a clear image, though, of Stacey and Teresa holding hands as they turned down the sidewalk toward the elementary school. There was a Cyclone fence threaded with weeds. Mom raced ahead of them with a camera.

  Now I was late for class. Mrs. Weller grimaced as I came to the door, and everyone looked up, even Ruben Estrada, who (oh, cruel, cruel world) sat directly in front of me for the first time since fifth grade. It would be last period too, when my hair had gone through all of its contortions and there was a film on my face from the dirty heat and from where I put my hands to my forehead all the way through geometry.

  I slid in, opening my notebook and my Penguin copy of Julius Caesar. Mrs. Weller started up with the voices and the hand gestures and the forsooths, but I couldn’t follow her. “My mom knows your mom,” Stacey had said. Not knew, knows. Did they write letters back and forth? Or was she here, in Fresno? The text in front of me blurred sickeningly. My desk felt clammy. I looked up, and there was Ruben’s neck — brown, solid and the same, the three small moles under his right ear. Everything spun except Ruben, his collar, his moles, his left ear. His hair was so black and shiny it was nearly blue. It looked slick, oiled. Like if I walked on it, I’d surely fall down and never get up.

  FRESNO WINTERS SETTLE IN like a wet shawl. The damp is a shock after so many months of drought, as is the cold. You might walk through a shorn field, soggy socks rubbing inside your shoes, the hem of your jeans growing heavier, and not believe any of it, though your fingers tinge pink, then lavender. Not believe the air can be so like water. It was this kind of day in early December when my sisters and I walked off the bus toward home and bad news. Fog had come down, soaking everything. Penny kicked at the wet grass as she walked, streaking one pant leg to the knee. All along the barbed-wire fencing, bubbles of water rested on the sharp tips, looking like transparent ladybugs, spared somehow, and still.

  Though it wasn’t yet four o’clock, Bub’s car sat in the drive with a cold hood. That’s when we knew something was up. We found him in his chair in the living room, the TV off, stroking our dog Barry’s big square head — though a dog let on the carpet was as rare as a lunar eclipse. Bub stayed quiet like this until dinner and then told us that Floyd had been killed. Not just killed but murdered, and when he said that, his face twisted, as if the word were too hard to hold in his mouth.

  Goldie and Floyd had had a fight, apparently, loud and long, about Christmas, how Floyd wanted to come down to Fresno and spend the holiday with Dot and Carlynne and the boys and their wives. His family. Goldie must have thought that Floyd was going to leave her and go back to them because she went out and bought a little gun. She slit a hole for it in her mattress and kept it there, way down in a nest of batting. One night, after they had made love, she waited until Floyd was asleep, dug out the little gun, held it to his temple and fired. Then she snuggled up right next to him and shot herself the same way. Two weeks passed before they were found. It took that long for a neighbor to figure out he hadn’t seen Floyd in a while. The dogs looked hungry too and were whining. When he walked up to the house to see what was going on, he didn’t have to knock but once; he could smell the wrongness of the whole thing from the porch. They were both naked, and the sheet had been pushed down to the end of the bed. Nothing was covered up. He saw every terrible thing.

  LYING IN BED LATER that night, the house dark and too quiet around me, I wished that Bub had kept most of the story to himself. Over and over, I swallowed hard, as if the images were floating up at the back of my throat instead of deep in my overactive brain. I saw Floyd in his chair, like that night at his house, except this time he wasn’t asleep, he was dead, and instead of the sombrero in his lap he held
Goldie, or parts of her: her hands, her sad lunatic face.

  In the police investigation it came out that Goldie had a long history of manic depression and had even been institutionalized years back. Had Floyd known this? Had Goldie known what she was and what she might do, or was her illness like a shadow or seed that had grown inside her until it was large enough and dark enough to take everything over?

  THE FUNERAL TOOK PLACE in Delano, in a small hillside cemetery. The grown-ups were so quiet they seemed stunned, and the funeral went on for such a long time that we started to wander off, one kid at a time, and they let us. We stayed inside the cemetery gate for a while, my sisters and me, Tina, Krista and Uncle Hog’s two kids, Randy and Brenda. As we threaded the rows, I felt more than a little creeped out by how old it all was, how long they’d been gone, these people who weren’t even people now, just names. Rupert Rawson. Etta-May Aires. Mother.

  “Watch where you’re walking,” Tina said. “You’re not supposed to walk on their heads.”

  But what about the baby graves? How could you tell where the heads were when the markers were the size of a shoe, no room for anything but a first name? Lydia, Thomas, Jean-Ruth. One had an etching of a lamb held in a pair of robed and disembodied arms.

  It was all too much. A low gate hung open between two hedges, and we went through it, heading away from the parking lot and over a small hill until we couldn’t see cars anymore or parents and the only noise was us, wheezing with the climb. It had rained that morning but the wet had burned off, and it was growing hotter by the minute, too hot for December. When we stopped to rest, all the girls shucked their stockings.

  “I can see your business,” Cousin Randy said, pointing at his sister’s loosely crossed legs.

  “Oh, hush,” Brenda said, and pushed her skirt higher. Her panties were pale green, and along one edge I spied a fringe of dark-blond hair.

  I turned away then and pretended to busy myself in the purse I’d worn for the special occasion. It was navy blue with a long strap and snap close. Inside, there wasn’t much more than a plastic comb and some Certs and my lip gloss, which I took out and fussed with because I wanted Brenda to see that I owned makeup. It was bubble-gum flavored and brand-new, purchased the week before with nearly all of my measly allowance.

  “Hey,” said Brenda, “can I have some of that?” She slathered on a thick layer, held the lip gloss for a minute, turning it over in her hand like money, then said, “You know, I’d think about trading with you for it. If you really want.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Jewelry. Real turquoise.” She reached into the neck of her blouse and pulled out an owl necklace. Its head was a round stone, blue-green and flecked, and there were two little stones for its feet. I’d never had a necklace before and so traded without thinking. Brenda pocketed the lip gloss and unhooked the chain, handing it to me. The owl rested in my hand in the little pool of its chain. I didn’t even want to put it on yet; I just wanted to look at it, my owl, my jewelry. Its ears were tiny silver triangles and there were silver arcs for the wings, which lay back, resting. Its body was a silver oval, empty.

  Empty.

  I could see right through the belly hole to my hand. When the humiliation came, it came slowly, in a flush that built one realization at a time.

  Broken.

  Brenda had given me a broken necklace, knowing I was too stupid to notice. Maybe the worst thing about being a sucker was that the believing part didn’t last. Now that I’d seen it was no good, I couldn’t unsee it, not for a minute, not even long enough to wear the necklace once. The whole world could see it was missing the main part.

  A HANDFUL OF MIRACLES in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-one: (1) I started my period; (2) a boy actually kissed me. (It was Patrick Allison at the drive-in, and he tried to stick his hands down my pants first. He was gross for that, and I vowed never to speak to him again, but the kiss counted.)

  That was the summer before my junior year. Teresa was away, working at a mountain lodge Aunt Gloria had recently purchased on Huntington Lake (that real estate license really was paying off), trying to save money for a car. It wasn’t a great job — she cleaned rooms for minimum wage and waited tables at the small supper club — but she got to be gone. Before she left, she made it clear she would be way too busy to call or write. Way. She would see us in August.

  Somehow August came. On Labor Day weekend, we drove up to the lake to pick Teresa up and bring her home. She shared a small cabin with a girl named Sascha, who was there when we arrived at the resort in the late afternoon. Bub invited Sascha to have dinner with us at the supper club, and she showed us the edge of her Ace-bandage wrapper, telling us the story of how, the week before, she’d driven her car over a cliff and only cracked two ribs on the shifter. It was late at night on mountain roads, and she swerved to avoid a deer. “A baby deer,” she clarified. In truth, she was probably drunk but wasn’t telling. The car was still drivable, believe it or not. It hit no trees and landed absolutely flat, like some kind of UFO. Sascha said it all happened so slowly she felt as if she was flying more than falling. She wasn’t even afraid.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Bub said to Teresa while we picked through salads, waiting for the main course. “I found you a car.”

  Teresa’s mouth dropped open to show a wet bit of crouton. If she could have spoken, the word would have been What or maybe What the hell? It was her money, and she wanted to pick the car herself. Even I knew that. If Bub’s “surprise” find had been a slick little Fiat, she might have been consolable, but it wasn’t. It was a white Opel Cadet, a chunky, graceless grandmother’s car that looked a lot like a dumpling.

  I tried to meet Teresa’s eyes across the table to give her a That bites look, but she was shut down, boarded up for the season. Her eyes were mica. I thought Teresa might throw her fork at Bub, but she could never do that and live. She settled for slamming her water glass onto the table and storming out, the screen door clattering behind. I wanted to follow her, but Sascha moved first. She didn’t excuse herself, but then again she didn’t have to. Bub and Hilde weren’t her parents, and besides, she’d proven she could take a bigger fall than most of us have occasion to.

  We finished our dinner, baked potatoes and leathery filets, while Bub lectured us about ungrateful kids and how he didn’t even have a bicycle at her age, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah. In between rants, he stuffed his face with forkfuls of potato quivering with sour cream. Like Hilde, he’d been growing larger over the years, but for him, the weight was contained solely in his belly. It butted up against the table now, and as he took a particularly ambitious bite, a glob of sour cream fell bull’s-eye. No one pointed it out, not even Hilde, who was slurping up au jus.

  After dinner, Bub sent me over to Teresa’s cabin to see if she was packed and ready to go. “Knock knock,” I said, through the screen door. I could see Sascha on one of the twin beds, smoking, her legs crossed Indian style, her shoes kicked to the floor. I stuck my head into the room. Teresa was on the other bed, lying with one arm behind her head and the other tossed casually in the lap of Gloria’s stepson, Kenny, who sat beside her. Kenny? I didn’t even know he was up at the lake. Furthermore, Teresa hated his guts — didn’t she?

  “What do you want?” Teresa said, lifting her head slightly. Her hand didn’t move from Kenny’s lap. Her fingers rested on his mangy leg as if she was his girlfriend or something. As if they owned each other.

  “It’s time to go home. Dad said to get you.”

  “Okay, yeah,” she said, but her head fell back on the pillow. Sascha blew a curl of smoke. Kenny reached over and put his hand on Teresa’s stomach where her halter top had pulled up to show the skin, flat and tanner than I’d ever seen it.

  “Okay,” she said again, and I waited for her to turn back into someone I knew.

  NOW WE HAD DONE it. A ten-dollar bill was missing from Hilde’s purse, and one of us took it. It was the only explanation. Ten
dollars doesn’t just walk off on its own, now does it? First there was a family discussion at the dinner table. Bub stated the case matter-of-factly. Hilde’s purse was behind the couch, where she always kept it. It was there with the ten dollars when we went to bed on Friday night; it was there with everything but the ten dollars when she checked it in the middle of the day on Saturday. He went around the table, looking closely at us, looking into each of our faces so intently I thought he was trying to see behind the skin.

  “Do any of you girls know what happened? This is the place to confess,” he said, “right now. You’ll be punished, of course, but not as badly as if you lie about it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and waited. Hilde sat beside him, her arms crossed in that way that said she’d double or triple cross them if she could; she’d latch them like a gate.

  I scanned my sisters’ faces, watching to see if one of them was about to cough it up, but they were looking at me the same way. Penny: “It wasn’t me.”

  Tina: “Not me.”

  Paula: “Hmm-mm.”

  Teresa: “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of this one way or another,” said Bub, looking at us and then into his helping of peas as if the little green heads belonged to members of a jury.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday, and we drove to church listening to Johnny Cash. Bub sang the words to “Folsom Prison Blues” pointedly, his glances into the rearview like poison darts. On the way home, there was no music whatsoever, to make as much room as possible for the soul spilling that would surely follow the morning’s sermon. Nothing.

  At home, we were gathered for another talk, this time in the living room.