by Foxglove Lee
My heart clenched. I couldn’t breathe.
“This is the maximum sentence that can be handed down under Bill C-19, and here’s my question to you: fourteen years—too much or too little? Did the judge in this case use Robert Warren as a martyr to MADD women everywhere, trying to make a point that drinking and driving is no longer socially acceptable? Or does a third-strike drunk deserve a longer sentence? I’m taking your calls at—”
“I need to use the phone,” I shouted to Tiffany, scrambling behind the counter.
“What, you’re calling in to the show?” Tiffany brought the olive-coloured rotary dialler out from under the cash register. “What’s gotten into you?”
“My mom,” I said. My hands were shaking. “I need to talk to my mom.”
I started dialling, but forgot the area code and had to hang up and start all over again. The stupid dial wouldn’t turn fast enough and it made me want to scream.
“I tell you, Gord,” a woman was saying to the radio host. “They should toss that Robert Warren in the slammer and throw away the key. Let him rot. An eye for an eye. He killed that poor little Natalie, crippled the girl’s mother, and all because of the drink. I say if you set foot in a car drunk, it’s murder, plain and simple. A man like that shouldn’t see the light of day, not ever again.”
The phone was ringing against my ear, but it sounded far away, like I was calling another planet.
“Thanks for your call,” the radio host said. “Now to our next caller. You’re on the air with Gord. What do you make of today’s sentence in the Robert Warren case?”
I gazed at the radio expectantly, and when nobody said anything, I realized someone had picked up the phone cradled in my hands. “Mom?”
My voice on the radio asked, “Mom?” I sounded like a child, no more than Mikey’s age. Oh God! My fingers had dialled the radio station instead of my mother. My whole body went numb.
“Sounds like someone’s playing with the phone,” the host said. I heard him in my ear, and then on the radio seconds later. “Is your mommy or daddy home?”
“No,” I said. My voice sounded not at all like me, like I was talking from outside myself. “Robert Warren…” My throat constricted so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Robert Warren… he’s my father.”
I slammed the phone down, and my words echoed on the radio: “He’s my father... my father… my father…”
“Sounds like we’ve got a little prankster on our hands,” the radio host said, and went on to the next caller. “You’re on the radio with Gord…”
I turned slowly. My head felt like a fifty-pound weight, but it also felt like it was floating away. My body was not my own. I’d never felt so ashamed in all my life.
Tiffany was looking right at me, of course. Where else would she look? I thought about all the ways I could have found out my father was in jail. This was not my number one choice, not by a long shot. I didn’t want Tiffany to know. I don’t think I wanted to know, myself.
“That’s your dad?” Tiffany asked. “Your dad is Robert Warren? He killed a little girl. I saw it on the news.”
She knew more than I did. Oh God, everybody knew. Everyone but Mikey and me.
“You said your dad was a rock star.” Tiffany wasn’t scowling, but she wasn’t smiling either. I couldn’t read her expression. It seemed utterly lost. “You lied to me.”
“I never said he was a rock star. He’s a musician. That’s true. I didn’t lie. He’s away from home a lot, on tour. He travels with his band. I didn’t know…”
She probably didn’t understand a word I said. Everything came out in a blubbering whimper. I could barely understand myself. What’s worse, I didn’t know what I wanted. I felt locked in place, bolted to the floor, and horrendously claustrophobic.
A part of me still wanted to call my mother, to scream at her, to ask why she hadn’t told me about this huge thing that was going on in my family’s life. But I knew myself too well. The second I heard her voice I would crumble and cry. I’d want to be there for my mom and take care of her, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not just yet. I wanted to hold on to my anger a little while longer.
And what about Aunt Libby and Uncle Flip? Obviously they knew all along. Now I understood why they changed the radio station every time the news came on. Now I understood why my mother hadn’t let me and Mikey watch TV in ages. This was big news, this stuff with my father. He killed someone. A little girl. He was a murderer.
My father was a murderer.
“Rebecca?” Tiffany asked. “Bec, are you okay? You’re shaking.”
Was I? I couldn’t feel my body.
My feet must have started moving, because before I knew it, the door was slamming behind me. I’d left the store and was flying down the hill, not knowing where my feet were taking me. Part of me wanted to run straight to my aunt and uncle’s cottage. Part of me wanted to scream at them for colluding with my mother to keep this life-altering secret from me. I heard it all in my head, every word I would say to them.
And then I pictured Mikey standing just inside his bedroom door, gazing out at me with tears welling in his big brown eyes. He had the same lush black lashes as my mother, the same face, just smaller. I could see him so clearly in my mind’s eye. Mikey obviously knew something was up just as much as I did, but I couldn’t be the one to tell him the truth. He was only a kid. I would be an adult in two years, and the news had nearly given me a mental breakdown.
I ran past the horseshoe pit where old men tossed languidly in the summer heat. They didn’t seem to see me, but they never did. I was nothing to them. There were young children playing at the beach, and the girl who’d thrown mud at me glanced up as I whipped by them. Her eyes went wide, and I saw everything in her expression: contempt and pity and fear and absolute disdain.
All at once, I knew how every human being on the planet was going to treat me for the rest of my life. I was the daughter of a killer. From now on, that’s all anyone would ever see.
When I got to the government pier, I slowed down and looked across the water. Nobody was out on the lake—too late in the day for fishers, and most of the people with motorboats and water-skis only came up on weekends. I sat on the concrete ledge and hung my arms over the heavy chain that served as a barrier.
The water was deep, just a drop-off, and when you looked down, depending on where the sun rested in the sky, the lake was either black or sublimely bright. Right now, it was black.
My ponytail hung over my shoulder as I stared at my reflection. I pulled Tiffany’s scrunchie from my hair, letting it hang loose across my face. I looked better this way, like Cousin It from The Addams Family, with my pimples all concealed behind the thick curtain. I tried to think, but my brain put a stop to that. My mind went blank.
I sat in perfect silence until the sun blazed so hot against my scalp I couldn’t bear it. Flipping my hair back, I tied it up with Tiffany’s scrunchie. When I stood, blood gushed between my legs. I needed a new pad, but I didn’t have one with me. I didn’t have anything but the clothes on my back. I could have returned to the Jones’s cottage, or to my family’s for that matter, but my feet wouldn’t let me. They guided me in exactly the opposite direction.
I could have walked forever. I really believe that. I could have walked until I reached the ocean, and I probably wouldn’t have stopped there. Probably, I would have walked out into it until the water consumed me, and that would be the end.
My feet weren’t tired when I got out to the rich people’s cottages. They were much farther apart than ours in the community. The first was built up on the hill, overlooking the lake but across the gravel road from it. The next was built so that half of it was on stilts over the water, but you could only see that one if you peeked through the treeline fence.
The third was my favourite, because it was huge. It was a mansion, really, bigger than any house you see in the city. There was a three-car garage, and the driveway was like a landing strip for a UFO. I don’t remember i
t being there when I was a kid, so it must have been built just in the last few years. It sort of popped up one day, and there it was. The people in our cottage community called it a monstrosity, but I found it majestic. Without really thinking, I walked up to it.
There were windows in all three of the garage ports, and I jumped up to peek through them. Two were empty, and the third had a car that was covered up in a huge silver blanket.
I heard the gritty rumble of a car tearing down the gravel road, and my heart locked. Luckily, my feet were thinking, and they led me behind the garage and into a gazebo, where I almost fell on the covered Jacuzzi. This really was a mansion.
The car that had frightened me drove right by the cottage, and my heart settled down. There was a nice garden behind the gazebo, but a lot of the flowers looked pretty dead, which must mean the owners weren’t around to water them. I looked in the huge back windows, and everything looked like a magazine. The kitchen was so clean and so perfect, not a dish in the sink or newspaper on the breakfast table. Nobody had been inside for a while.
If I hadn’t been so sure, I wouldn’t have broken in.
Chapter 15
I’d never considered breaking into a house before. It wasn’t something I planned. The screen just lifted out so easily, and the kitchen window opened right up. That mansion cottage was built to be burgled.
The kitchen… Wow! I’d never seen anything like it. The fridge had an icemaker and two doors that opened up in the middle. But it didn’t have any food inside, except fancy condiments and jams. There was nothing in the freezer but ice and gourmet coffee beans.
Their dishes were beautiful, with little flowers painted around the sides and gold all along the edges. Not much in the cupboards except some crackers and olives, odds and ends like that, but I took the lack of food as a sign that nobody was likely to come barrelling through the front door any time soon.
This probably sounds really juvenile, but I guess I was playing house, pretending the cottage was mine. I owned it and everything inside—all the modern chrome furniture, the glass-top table, the white leather sofa. Everything.
In the foyer, there was a circular staircase that led to a multitude of bedrooms and studies. They were all so fancy, each room grander than the last, more stuffy and formal than the modern rooms downstairs. The only exception was the master bedroom, which was gigantic. It kind of combined old and new. The bed had a headboard made from chrome and a white sort of Plexiglas, but the trunk at the foot of the bed looked as old as the hills.
There was no door to the en suite bathroom. It was separated from the master bedroom only by a wall of glass blocks. When I walked inside, I felt like I was entering some kind of mythic ice palace.
The bathroom was almost as big as the bedroom, and almost everything was made of frosted glass. Well, not the toilet, and not the tub. The shower stall was completely separate from the bath, which was an in fact an indoor Jacuzzi. I turned on the faucet and it sputtered a few times, choking out copper-coloured liquid. After a little while, the water ran clear, and I flipped the switch to plug it.
When I stripped out of my sweat-soaked clothes, I realized my period had been even heavier than I’d thought. Blood had soaked through the edges of my aunt’s giant underwear and into the lime green spandex Tiffany had loaned me. My head buzzed. I was so embarrassed that I tossed them in the frosted glass sink and filled it with hot water. I could only hope a woman visited this cottage and left some pads.
Falling to my knees, I yanked open the cupboard doors beneath the sink. Heaven! Yes, there were pads, and they were name brands—the “super-absorbent” thin ones with wings. They were so much more expensive than the lumpy kind my mom bought. I never thought I wanted to be rich, but imagine being able to buy the best of everything? It was unfathomable.
When the huge tub was nearly full, I slipped into the warm water and turned on the jets. If I thought a cupboard full of name brand maxi pads was heaven, this was heaven times a thousand! In the few days I’d stayed with Tiffany, I’d taken quick showers in the Jones’s grungy bathroom, but there was black mould creeping up the walls, so I only stayed in long enough to wash my hair and shave.
This was relaxation: alone in a mansion, floating on a cloud of warm water, Jacuzzi jets pummelling my muscles. What could be better?
Tiffany.
Strange, but I missed her already. I wanted to talk to her so badly, and ask what she thought of all this stuff with my dad. She seemed really judgemental after the radio show, but I hadn’t really given her a chance to explain. On the other hand, when I told her about Yvette, she’d acted just like my uncle, treating me like I belonged in a straightjacket. I had a feeling I knew what she’d think if she knew more about my family: that I was losing my grip on reality. My life was so full of domestic trauma that I was manufacturing friends, manufacturing memories.
Not that I had to worry about Yvette anymore. She was gone for good, drowned in sewer sludge. Now, I had nothing to worry about… except how I was supposed to live out the rest of my life as the daughter of Robert Warren.
It was weird. I suddenly felt like a different person. I’d just broken into someone’s house! I would never have done that before. Now I felt like it didn’t matter. Everybody knew my father was a criminal. They’d known before I had. So what difference did it make if I did bad things?
And at the same time, there was a part of me—a big part of me, and a part I’d prefer to keep under wraps—that was happy. Fourteen years without my father. Any good child would be distraught. But me? I felt relieved. For fourteen years, he couldn’t hurt my mom. He couldn’t yell at Mikey. He couldn’t call me names or treat me like some kind of underage servant. After all this time, we were free.
My skin felt dirty, even underwater, and I scratched my fingers down my neck, peeling away layers of dead skin, dirt and oil, dust from the gravel road. When I looked under my short fingernails, the dirt that came off me was black. I couldn’t believe how gross I was. I did it again, scraping more black gunk from my neck, and then extending the search across my chest and my arms. When I looked down, my skin was a mess of red lines. The tub bubbled with black bits.
I had to get clean. I’d never felt so disgusting, and all the worse for not realizing it. How long had I been covered in grime? Had Tiffany noticed? The thought made my stomach quake. I scratched my flesh so hard it hurt. The jets turned off, but I kept going. This was about more than just being presentable. I needed to get clean.
By the time the tub ran cold, my fingers and toes were like prunes. I released the catch without moving, and when the tepid water drained out of the tub, it felt weird—like cling film tightening all over my skin. The air was warm, but not stuffy. I could have stayed there forever.
The towels were white, and I worried about getting blood on them. Today everything in this cottage was mine, and I didn’t want to ruin my luxurious linens. I kneeled before the cupboard under the sink and stared at a box of tampons.
I’d never used one before. When I was just a kid, before Mikey was born, I overheard my mother telling my aunt she was sure tampons were the reason it took her so long to conceive a second time. That always lingered at the back of my mind, but thinking about it with my teenaged brain, I realized my mother was probably wrong.
It was a brand new box, but I opened it and read the instructions. We’d been over this in health class, but I wanted to be extra-sure. I pulled off the wrapper and held the cardboard applicator in position, just like in the diagram. When I pushed, it hurt. It hurt a lot, actually. I’d never really tried to shove anything in there. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could stand to have sex. It would kill!
Took me forever to get it in, and I kept thinking ‘this isn’t worth the pain,’ but once I’d inserted the tampon I couldn’t feel it anymore. I towelled off. Tiffany’s green spandex floated in the sink, and I scrubbed it with a bar of white soap until the stain came out. Same thing with my aunt’s underwear. I hung them both over the towel
rack, and then explored the bedroom for something to wear.
Even though I was mad at Tiffany, I imagined this was our home. I opened the top drawer of a shiny black dresser and, sure enough, it was packed with underwear. Everything was satin and lace—panties and nighties and bras, all sorts of things. Black, white, red. Fishnet stockings. Sexy stuff. I picked out a black satin set and put it on over my aching red skin. It felt nice. It looked like the sort of thing you’d see on the covers of those pulp fiction books. Tiffany would have liked it.
There was a TV in the bedroom—the height of decadence—and when I turned it on a severe groan resonated from outside. It sounded like an angry troll, and my heart nearly stopped before I realized it was just the satellite dish kicking into gear.
A satellite dish!
I raided the cupboards as the dish warmed up, and then settled into the giant master bed. It had been ages since I’d watched TV. I binged on daytime talk shows about teenaged crack addicts and men who impregnated their wives’ sisters. Everything was sordid and delicious. I snacked on mixed nuts and fancy black olives, all the decadent foods I could get my hands on. I even tried to make coffee, but it turned out way too dark and full of grounds.
When the news came on, I half expected my aunt to change the channel. It clicked in that I was alone. There was no one to defend my innocence anymore. And when my father’s image flashed on screen, I froze. He looked… I don’t know… He looked bad, but no worse than usual. His hair was longer, and greasy, and his cheeks seemed sallow. They showed footage in slow-motion of him leaving the court, my dad with two lawyers in long black robes. There were lots of reporters in the background, but I was looking for my mom. I couldn’t see her anywhere.
There was a phone beside the bed and I picked it up. This time when I dialled, I didn’t call a radio station. I called my house. It beeped at me. Beep-beep-beep. The line was busy, but I didn’t hang up. I just listened to the beep-beep-beep-beep so I wouldn’t have to hear the TV reporters talking about my dad.