by Luanne Rice
“I’m sorry, Josie,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”
Right now she hated Sean. She wanted to tell him, but she was afraid he’d make fun of her, too. From now on, no matter how nice he pretended to be, she would know how he really felt. She wanted to punch him in the nose.
She was walking fast toward her house when she saw her father’s truck turn into the driveway. Her mother stepped outside to meet him. Josie couldn’t hold her feet down; she ran as fast as she could.
Her parents stood there, saying hello to each other, not even seeing Josie. As she ran, she saw her mother turn slowly, see her, and say something to her father. Both her parents were smiling. They thought she was happy, excited to see them; Josie didn’t want them smiling. She wanted them to know how mean Sean, and the kids, had been to her; her feelings were a furious, wordless tangle. A sob tore out of her throat.
Now her parents frowned. They stepped forward together, but Josie was past seeing. She ran blindly, her arms held open. She flew straight at her parents and hit one of them with full force. She wasn’t sure which one caught her, and she didn’t care.
“If he weren’t my nephew …” Cass said.
“It’s not his fault,” Billy said. “He’s a teenager. He’s fat, and he wants to be popular. He’s a teenager.”
“He made fun of Josie just like those other creeps.”
“He said he was sorry. You could see how bad he felt about it.”
Cass didn’t reply. They were sitting outside, drinking iced tea, listening to the crickets. All three kids were supposedly in bed, but Billy heard different rock beats coming from both Belinda’s and T.J.’s windows.
“You going to hold it against Sean his entire life? Remember the time T.J. poured ketchup all over Emma at her birthday party?”
“I’ll get over it,” Cass said. “Anyway, Sean’s not the point.”
“Do you know what actually happened?” Billy asked. Sean at the scene was so flustered, so apologetic, they hadn’t been able to get much out of him.
“He told Bonnie some kids down the street were laughing at the sign and making fun of the way Josie talks.”
“Nice kids.”
“I’d love to know exactly who was there. Joyce Barnard was the only one I saw for sure. I feel like calling John and Rachel.”
“What good would that do? Kids are mean to each other. It’s one big, endless chain reaction. Joyce’ll get hers.”
“She has braces,” Cass said.
“So, call her ‘tinsel teeth’ next time you see her.”
Cass actually seemed to be mulling that over.
“You can’t shield Josie from every little thing,” Billy said. “You always let T.J. and Belinda handle their own scrapes.”
“It’s different with Josie.”
“I know it is. Kids are going to pick on her. That’s why she has to be tough.”
“You make it sound easy.”
Billy knew it wasn’t easy. Seeing Josie so upset today, crying so hard you couldn’t understand a word she said, had made him crazy. She kept trying to talk, her tears making the words broad and shapeless.
“What?” Billy had asked, making her try again. Then again. Cass, realizing Josie was past reasoning with, had signaled him to be quiet. Billy had pretended to understand Josie’s babbling while patting her head, kissing her damp cheeks, rocking her in his arms. Figuring out how to deal with this daughter of his bewildered him.
When he didn’t talk to Josie, Cass would give him hell. Now she was upset because he’d tried to make Josie talk at the wrong time. Billy knew he did a good job with the other two kids, but it seemed he did nothing right with Josie. Tomorrow he’d leave for a short summer fishing run, and he was actually looking forward to getting away. He glanced at Cass; she had a far-off look in her eyes.
“Whose?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Whose blood are you after? You look like you want revenge.”
She shook her head. “I don’t.”
He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She stared at the sky. She always used to watch for shooting stars. They could lie on their backs for hours at a time, counting meteors and making out. He moved closer to Cass; it almost surprised him when she rested her head on his shoulder.
“I’m scared,” she said in a low voice.
“Why?” he asked.
“That we can’t protect her enough.”
“We can’t protect any of them enough,” Billy said. He knew what Cass was going to say, and he waited.
“But Josie’s different.”
Billy couldn’t talk her out of that. He wished he could talk Cass herself out of being different from how she used to be. Out of losing herself along the way.
T.J. prowled his parents’ bedroom when no one was home. He opened their drawers and stared at what was in them. He pawed through his father’s sock drawer, his mother’s underwear drawer. He looked through the desk where they kept the bills. He checked under the mattress on his mother’s side of the bed, then his father’s.
He walked along the upstairs hall, looking at all the pictures. Nearly every inch of wall space upstairs was covered with framed photographs of the family. His great-grandparents in old-fashioned outfits on Easton’s Beach; Gram in her wedding dress; his mother in her wedding dress; his father (with a mustache back then) holding two gigantic lobsters toward the camera; Aunt Bonnie in her wedding dress; everyone’s first communion, school, and baby pictures; Belinda holding Josie right after Josie was born and not looking very happy about it; T.J. sledding down the golf-course hill, his mouth wide open in a shout. He stared at that picture for a long time, trying to read his own lips or remember what he was yelling.
They didn’t have an attic. They stored their winter coats and special-occasion tablecloths in trunks and big cardboard boxes printed to look like wood grain; his mother would shove them into the crawl space over Belinda’s and Josie’s bedrooms. T.J. hoisted himself up. Wasps swarmed in and out of a small louver at the north end. The roof slanted just above his head. Beads of amber sap glittered along the two-by-fours that formed the eaves. Sweat dripped down T.J.’s back as he went through the boxes.
Next he took a shower. He turned the water on as hot as he could stand it. He scrubbed himself clean and washed his hair, then leaned against the tile until the water went from scalding to warm to lukewarm to freezing cold. He felt sad; he didn’t know exactly why. He didn’t understand why he was snooping through his own house.
He went down to the basement. His father had put a Ping-Pong table and dartboard down there, and his parents were always encouraging Belinda and him to have their friends over. Nothing depressed T.J. more than the idea of his parents fixing up the basement so he and Belinda could have parties there. Maybe his parents thought it would keep them off the street, out of parking lots, away from fast cars. The only kids who had parties in their parents’ basements were stone-cold drags.
On the other hand, a Ping-Pong party right here with chips and soda and ice-cream sundaes and spin-the-bottle while his parents were out of the room would be just the thing for Belinda. Perfecto. T.J. would have to suggest it to her. She’d be the hit of study hall.
He heard the back door close and his mother’s and Josie’s footsteps in the kitchen.
“T.J., are you home?” his mother’s voice called.
“Down here,” he yelled.
“Dinner in half an hour. What are you doing in the basement?”
“Playing darts,” he called, just to see if she’d come to investigate. He leaned against the Ping-Pong table, waiting. When she didn’t appear on the basement stairs, he went back to snooping. He’d always thought his mom was pretty cool, definitely smart, but she was losing it. Playing darts? If she’d fall for that, she’d fall for any wimp excuse. The next time he felt like taking off for Fall River with Chris and Sean, he’d tell his mom he and the boys were washing cars for charity.
Six unvarnished pin
e cupboards stretched the length of the room. Their fake Colonial wrought-iron hinges and door handles were black, arrow-shaped. He remembered being scared of them when he was little. They had the same evil shape as Satan’s spear-point tail, the one pictured in his prayer book.
He could still see that picture of Satan: pointy red face, sharp beard, glittery black eyes, hooves instead of feet, a loincloth that had reminded T.J. of a diaper, that long red whip of a tail with a barbed arrow at the end. In the picture, the tail seemed to be snaking out of the diaper, and T.J. had thought Satan had a monster cock, red and dangerous, ready to jab any innocent girl who walked by.
The devil’s-tail door hinges had kept T.J. out of these cupboards; right now, about to explore something totally unfamiliar in his own house, T.J. felt strange and wild. He stared at the hinges. Satan, guardian of the basement cupboards. T.J. opened the first one: a stash of booze.
His parents hardly ever drank, except at Christmas. Not like at his grandparents’ house, where the bottles were in plain sight, full today, empty tomorrow. Of course, his grandparents never seemed affected by liquor. They were always the same: kind of grumpy in a nice way, always trying to joke, laid-back old people. They were more likely to have a shelf full of liquor than his parents. T.J., who had already drunk from a keg and bought beer on his own, felt a little shocked.
Next cupboard: a pile of records. He read some titles: Super Session, Concert for Bangladesh, Sweet Baby James, Bridge over Troubled Waters, Tapestry, Imagine. Nothing too unfamiliar; his parents had pretty much the same goofy shit on CDs now. He stared at Carole King’s album cover. Ugly hair, pretty tits.
Looking through these cupboards made T.J. feel like a detective. What if his parents secretly smoked pot, kept their goods down here? His parents weren’t that old; they had told him they’d tried it once in high school.
Maybe the hinges were no accident, maybe his parents were Satanists, like his cousin Sean. Sean said Satan gave you whatever you wanted, but you had to give something to him first. Sean had sacrificed his sister’s baby pictures and an entire side of beef his parents had bought at the food co-op. Steaks, roasts, ribs, chopped beef: half a cow. He’d hauled the packages out of the freezer in the middle of the night, borrowed his father’s truck to cart them to the harbor, and fed them to the black water. He had taken Emma’s baby pictures to Minturn Ledge Light and set them afire. In return, Satan was going to get Sean his own Harley and get him laid.
“Yeah, right,” T.J. said out loud. T.J. had never gone for the Satan shit; he thought it was totally bogus. Sean was a fat kid, and Satan worship was the only way he could feel tough. In real life he was a spineless dweeb: he had made fun of the Deaf Child sign right in front of Josie, just so T.J.’s asshole neighbors would stop laughing at him.
But here, opening the basement cupboards, T.J. felt totally, one-hundred-percent convinced his parents were Satan worshippers.
It would explain everything: that distant look in his mother’s eyes, the way she never seemed to be all there anymore—nothing ever made her really happy, the way she used to get. Now his father always itched to go fishing, just to get away from home, and T.J. couldn’t entirely blame him, considering how miserable everyone was all the time. Maybe Satan had the family in his clutches, was dragging them all down to hell.
Ready to open the third cupboard, T.J. would not have been surprised to find dead babies, boiled kittens in jars, chopped-off fingers and toes. He yanked open the door.
“Holy shit,” T.J. said. Boxes of bullets. Sunny yellow boxes stacked one on top of another filled with hundreds and hundreds of bullets. T.J. opened one box, and then another. He put a bullet in his pocket. He knew his father had a rifle and a handgun. He had seen the rifle onboard the Norboca in April, and his father had told him it was there in case of emergency.
What the hell kind of emergency could a rifle solve one hundred miles at sea? Maybe his father was expecting a deranged whale. Or maybe he was afraid the men would mutiny, seize the helm, hijack the boat to the Bahamas.
His father had given him a man-versus-nature lecture, about sharks and hurricanes and the Bermuda Triangle, then he’d eased into a man-versus-man lecture, about drug smugglers and gunrunners and modern-day pirates. T.J. had listened without saying one word, because he’d figured the real reason his father had a rifle onboard was that if the day arrived when he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d have the means to blow himself away. None of the other reasons made any sense. Fucking pirates.
Then, arranging the bullet boxes the way he’d found them, T.J. saw the snake. He jumped about a mile. “Hey!”
He was going to call his mother, but then he changed his mind. His mom had enough to handle. T.J. would scope out the snake himself. Coiled up, it was hiding at the back of the cupboard, in the shadows. T.J. grabbed a Ping-Pong paddle, pushed some boxes aside.
“Jesus,” he said. It was his father’s handgun, not a snake. “You big asshole,” he said to himself, reaching for the gun.
He wondered whether it was loaded. He didn’t know how to tell. He held it in his right hand, pointed it at the floor. Then, he couldn’t in a million years have explained why, except maybe from some macho instinct he’d picked up from cop shows or Nintendo, he pulled the trigger. Click.
“Idiot!” he said out loud, but inside he felt charged up, thrilled, because he had known—really known for sure—that the thing wasn’t loaded. He’d just known.
“What doing, T.J.?”
He spun around.
“Hey, Josie,” he said, hiding the gun behind him.
“What doing?” She had the cutest little smile on her face; she ran toward him, trying to look behind his back, like she thought he was playing a game. T.J. pivoted, rooted to that one spot, while she grabbed at his arm. They circled around in a crazy dance. “What have? What have?”
He held the gun in his left hand and gave her a push with his right. She stopped still, like he’d slapped her. Her mouth dropped open. T.J. hadn’t pushed her hard, but he knew he’d hurt her feelings really bad. She looked more surprised than anything. She’d expect Belinda to treat her like dirt, but she trusted T.J.
“Shit,” T.J. said. He used his body to shield Josie from seeing him slide the gun back into the cupboard. He slammed the door, then turned back to Josie. Her mouth was just starting to quiver, betrayal written all over her wide eyes.
“I’m sorry, Josie,” he said. “C’mere.”
She just stood there, looking at the floor.
He sat on the floor, patted his knee. “C’mere.”
She wouldn’t budge. He knew she wouldn’t start to howl, the way she did when Belinda was mean or when she couldn’t make people understand her. Everyone thought Josie was a little weakling, a spoiled-brat crybaby, but T.J. knew that wasn’t true.
Her bad screams were how she communicated at certain times. With T.J., she didn’t need them. T.J. could always get through to her. Right now, though, her feelings were hurt, and he knew he couldn’t rush her. She’d come through when she damn well felt like it.
“Danger,” T.J. said, pointing at the third cupboard. He reached out to touch the handle and slapped his own hand hard.
“Ouch!” Josie said.
“Yes, ouch if you go near that door. You got that, Josie? Danger.”
“Danger in there,” Josie said. Suddenly she looked psyched, like she’d forgotten T.J.’s rebuke, and because she could sense he was asking her to keep a secret.
“Dinner, you guys!” their mom called from upstairs.
“Come on,” T.J. said. Josie clasped her arms around his neck, and he carried her up to the kitchen. He put one finger to his lips. “Ssssh,” he reminded Josie.
She nodded her head.
“Any bull’s-eyes?” his mom asked as soon as he walked through the door.
“Huh?”
“I thought you were playing darts.”
“Oh. Yeah, a couple.”
“A couple is pretty good. Be carefu
l playing darts with your sister around.”
Was she kidding? God, he didn’t want to believe his mother really thought he’d been playing darts. It was every teenage boy’s dream to put things over on his mom, but this was radical. It only made it worse, her telling him to be extra careful around Josie.
His mom dished out helpings of baked sole for him, Josie, Belinda, and herself. She had a frown in her eyes, as if she were thinking of something nasty. Belinda was babbling about some great song she heard on the radio today.
“Ever thought of having a Ping-Pong party?” T.J. asked her. “Downstairs would be perfect.”
“Why haven’t you ever had one?” Belinda asked suspiciously.
“I’m planning a dart party. If it’s okay with Mom.”
“A dart party?” his mother asked, raising her eyebrows. “Is that what you said? A dart party?” She was beginning to get it.
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t mind a Ping-Pong party,” Belinda said carefully, warming to the idea. God, you could put anything over on her.
“They’re really fun,” T.J. said. “You could make it even a little more special by telling everyone to wear polka dots. Kind of a Ping-Pong theme.”
“And for your dart party,” his mom said, “you could have everyone wear pointy little hats and pointy shoes, and you could tell everyone they needed a password to get by the front door, like ‘What’s the point?’ They’d have to say it to me or I wouldn’t let them in.”
“Awesome,” T.J. said. His mother had this wise-guy smile on her face, like she wasn’t quite having fun, but for the moment, at least, she wasn’t miserable.
“I don’t even know how to play Ping-Pong,” Belinda said.
“Hey, I’ll teach you,” T.J. said. “If you’ll let me come to your party.”
“Are you faking me out? Mom, is he?” Belinda asked.
“Yes,” Mom said.
T.J. and his friends always joked about “Fantasy Moms,” the kind of moms who still looked young, dressed in jeans and T-shirts instead of teacher-style stuff, wore their hair loose instead of done up, were cool. You never thought of your own mom as a Fantasy Mom, but you didn’t mind if your friends did. And T.J. knew that a lot of his friends thought of his mom that way.