by A. M. Henry
“This is pretty good,” Dad says. “I liked the other one better, I think. Where do you find all of this music?”
“Internet. Spotify. Pandora.”
“I understood ‘internet’.”
“I’ll put Spotify on your computer when we get home,” I tell him. “You’d like it, I think.”
After the song ends, I switch to Holy’s Grove’s new album and realize I’m doing exactly what Dad does with the car radio.
“Oh, I like this,” Dad says. “Who is it?”
“Holy Grove. New album.”
“Reminds me of Black Sabbath.”
I feel stunned for a second—I had no idea my father listened to Black Sabbath. “You like Black Sabbath?”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “But you know how your mother is—she can’t tolerate anything but classical music. So I don’t listen to music much, except in the car.”
We listen in silence for another while, an endless sea of trees going by as we head south on Route 287. I can’t stop thinking about the shadows under Dad’s eyes and how it’s my fault. I stare up at the blue sky out the window as Holy Grove’s vocalist says, Point to the sky, and hope you’re not right.
“I’m sorry,” I say when I can’t hold it in anymore.
“Sorry?” Dad sounds confused. “For what?”
“For… You know… Everything.”
“Don’t be sorry, Angela,” Dad says. “I should be the one to say sorry.”
“For what? I pretty much destroyed the family.”
“We should have done something sooner. We knew you were in trouble, but…” He struggles to find the words. He sounds like he’s wanted to get this out for a while. “We shouldn’t have shut you out like that. The total house arrest, and everything else… We should have tried to help you. You needed to heal, and we just… Just left you to pick up the pieces by yourself.”
“I deserved it.”
Dad swerves and almost hits the car in the next lane and for a split second I see ice and snow and a car spinning out of control heading straight for us, and I have to close my eyes and take deep breaths. When I open my eyes again, Dad has pulled over to the shoulder and killed the engine. He stares at me, his expression dead serious.
“How could you think you deserved that?”
“I wrecked your life. I wrecked everyone’s life.”
Dad shakes his head slowly. Closes his eyes and rests his forehead on the steering wheel and for the first time in my life I see my father as a person, not just Dad. A person who makes mistakes. A person with limits. A person who has no idea what the answers are.
“You didn’t wreck everyone’s life,” he says. “Your parents should have been there for you. That’s our job. But we weren’t.”
“There’s no manual for perfect parenting, you know.”
“Maybe not. But we still screwed up.”
“So what you’re saying is that you guys ruined my life. Can I have that in writing?”
Dad shakes his head and laughs. “I think you might be the toughest person I know.”
“Then I guess you didn’t screw up as badly as you thought,” I say.
He gives my shoulder a quick squeeze, his expression almost like he’s afraid to get any closer. Then he starts the car and gets back on the highway.
“Put on that first band again,” he says. “Paladin or whatever. I liked them.”
37.
The doorbell rings at ten after twelve on Saturday. After a minute, it rings again and I remember Mom took Casey out Christmas shopping, and Dad took Rachel to Barnes and Noble, so I’m the only one home. I trudge downstairs in my sweatpants and open the front door and almost fall over.
Before the graveyard, I don’t remember the last time I saw Brady. I also forgot how much he looks like his younger brother—hair a little more light brown than dark blonde and eyes a little more grey than blue, but everything else looks almost identical to Jason and for a second I forget how to breathe.
“Hi, Angela.” He sounds like Jason, too.
I must look like I’ve seen a ghost, because he gives me this apologetic frown and a sheepish shrug of the shoulders and shuffling of feet. The movements are so not Jason that I can breathe again.
“Sorry to just show up like this,” Brady says. “It’s just… I saw you a while back, at the grave…”
I have no idea what to say. After a few seconds, I manage to respond, “That’s okay. Do you want to come in?” with kind of a lot of stuttering.
Brady looks over his shoulder like he thinks someone might have followed him, and then steps through the door. He stands awkwardly in the hallway, like he’s waiting for instructions. It takes me a while to realize I should invite him into the living room or something. I head for the kitchen instead and Brady follows while the silence of the house crashes around us like ocean waves.
“You want something to drink?” I ask.
Brady sits down at the table and I head for the fridge.
“Sure,” he replies.
“We have water and fizzy water.”
“Water’s fine.”
I get a glass of water for him and hope he doesn’t notice my hands shaking.
“So…,” Brady says. I get the feeling he doesn’t even know why he came here. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh… Um… Okay, I guess. How about you?”
He looks good, but then Brady always looked good. He still keeps his light brown hair long, uneven and almost to his chin, still pushed back behind his ears. He still has that innocent look on his face, almost like a little kid even though he must be twenty or twenty-one by now.
“I’m okay,” he says. “Almost done with college.”
“Already?” He was only two grades ahead of Rachel.
“Yeah.” He does that sheepish, almost embarrassed shrug again and it reminds me of when Rachel and I rode the same bus as him and Jason in grade school. “I took a lot of extra classes in winter and summer, so I’m graduating a year early.”
Brady was always the good one. The smart one.
“What are you studying?” I ask him. “And where do you go?”
“Physics and engineering, at Ramapo. Dad didn’t approve of me going to school to become a mechanic.”
“So you picked the hardest major you could think of? Makes sense.”
He smiles, just barely. “It was the closest thing to mechanics that I could think of. Turns out I really liked it.”
“I guess that explains how that station wagon is still running. Are you still living with your dad?” I ask.
The cause of their big fight—Brady moved out of their mother’s house to go live with their father. Brady was a junior in high school, Jason a freshman. Jason only talked about it once.
Brady frowns. “Mostly. I go back and forth a lot since… since the accident.”
Their father worked three jobs to support their mother’s drinking problem, at least until he couldn’t take it anymore and moved out, moved over an hour away because he knew she was afraid of driving and wouldn’t follow him that far. Brady tried for months to take care of her, make her get help, go to rehab, go to meetings. He gave up and left after she threw an empty bottle of cheap Scotch at his head. Then Jason hated Brady, too, as well as their father, for walking out on the mother who needed them.
“How’s your mom?” I ask, afraid of the answer.
We hardly ever saw her. She usually passed out around 4:00 AM, often carried from the living room floor and into bed by Jason. She’d get up twelve hours later and walk to Smitty’s Pub on Main Street before she returned home to drink whiskey in her bedroom. Jason would go through the house every morning to throw out liquor bottles and fast food wrappers and plates of half-eaten food scattered around the house. I helped him and never asked questions and Jason never talked about it.
“She’s doing… better,” Brady answers. “Jason… Well, that kind of sent her over the edge, but it let us get her admitted to an inpatient program. She goes to meetings
two or three times a week now. As far as I know, she’s sober.”
“That’s… really good to hear.” I feel a tightness in my chest and I can’t shake the horrible feeling that this is all my fault—his mother, Jason dying, his family falling to pieces—all of it my fault. If I’d never gotten involved with Jason, he’d still be alive and their family might not have turned into such a mess. It’s all my fault.
“It’s not your fault,” Brady says.
I guess I don’t have much of a poker face. “Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not,” he says it more forcefully this time. “It’s something awful that happened, but it’s not any one person’s fault.” He looks at his watch, stands up. “I’m really sorry I just dropped in on you like this.”
“It’s okay, really.” I stand to walk him to the door.
“I just wanted to see how you’re doing,” he says. “Make sure you’re okay.”
I’m getting choked up and I can’t answer. I just nod.
“Keep in touch,” he says on his way out the door. “My number’s still the same.”
“Okay.”
After he leaves, I sit in the living room and stare out the windows for nearly an hour, until Dad and Rachel come home. I don’t mention Brady.
38.
“You seem troubled today. You’re fidgeting.” Nothing gets past Dr. Allen.
“Brady came to my house over the weekend. Jason’s brother.” I switched this week’s shrinkage session from Thursday to Monday because I had to talk to someone and I can’t talk about this with anyone else. I wait for her to ask how this makes me feel.
Dr. Allen purses her lips. Frowns. I know she’s trying not to say it because she hates therapy clichés, but there’s no other way to phrase it.
“How does that make you feel?”
I try to keep a straight face, but can’t. She smiles, too, and I feel a little less tense.
“I don’t know why he’d want to see me.” I tell her.
“Were they close, Brady and Jason?”
“When they were younger…” I tell her what I know of their family, their mom and the divorce and Brady leaving and Jason’s anger. “They didn’t really speak much before… before Jason died.”
Dr. Allen listens, then thinks for a moment before she says, “He might feel like he missed the last months of his brother’s life. He could be looking for some kind of closure. You were the closest to Jason when he died, so it doesn’t surprise me that Brady would want to check up on you.”
“I’m scared that he blames me.” I know he said he doesn’t think it’s my fault, but people lie.
She frowns at me, sits back in her chair. “Why do you feel it’s your fault?”
For some reason, I think back to our first session and the game of Pretty Pretty Princess. And then I think back to that last Pretty Pretty Princess game with my sisters.
Casey screaming and sobbing and running to Mom. Mom pounding upstairs a minute later, a crying, sniffling Casey in tow.
“What the hell did you do to her?!” Directed at me only, not Rachel. “You’ve been taking her things? Threatening to fight her?!”
I froze. Mom’s unbridled rage will do that to you. Silence equals guilt. Rachel said nothing. Mom ransacked the room, Casey pointing her to all of her belongings. It didn’t matter that half of them were on Rachel’s side of the room or on Rachel’s bed or in Rachel’s toy box. I did it. All my fault.
After Casey had her things back, Mom grabbed me by the wrist and practically dragged me down the stairs. Then she dragged me towards the basement and that’s when I started to fight because that half-finished wine cellar she used for time outs scared me more than her rages. But Mom was a hell of a lot stronger than a ten-year-old. I tripped halfway down the basement stairs and something in my ankle cracked and the pain almost blinded me, which is when I started screaming and crying.
At the bottom of the stairs, Mom threw open the cellar door, hurled me inside, shut the door, and locked it from the outside.
My crying turned to silent tears and choked little coughs. I sat huddled by the door, the only source of light coming from beneath it. But then Mom reached the top of the stairs and flicked the light off, plunging me into total darkness.
The exposed pipes in the ceiling and walls hissed and rattled. I thought I heard things rustling in the insulation and imagined giant, hairy wolf spiders and those gross little millipedes all creeping towards me across the gritty cement floor. I fought the nausea growing in my gut.
I don’t know how long I stayed in there. You could never tell. The light under the door reappeared and Mom’s feet thumped down the stairs. I scrambled away from the door. Mom unlocked it, opened it a crack, and then went back upstairs without a word.
Dad came home later, and none of us mentioned the cellar. Mom told him about Casey and the toys and they agreed to no TV and no play dates and me doing Casey’s chores. I tried to hide my injured ankle, because that was my fault, too. But Dad noticed.
“Hey, what happened?” he asked at dinner when I failed not to limp to the table.
“I fell on the stairs,” I said. Not a total lie.
“Let me see.”
Mom watched with her jaw clenched, staring me down, her eyes commanding silence. Dad looked at my ankle—by then black and purple and swollen. He touched the bruises and I winced, trying not to cry out.
“Honey, I’m pretty sure your ankle’s broken.” He turned to Mom. “You guys eat, make us some plates. I’m taking Angela to the hospital.”
Not a terrible fracture, it turned out, but definitely a broken ankle. I got a cast and a day off of school.
“Didn’t that hurt?” Dad asked me on the way home.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“I can’t believe you weren’t screaming your head off,” Dad said. “I would’ve been, at your age.”
I shrugged again, looked out the window so he couldn’t see my face. I don’t think I had learned to make it blank yet.
“You didn’t tell me any of that at our first session,” Dr. Allen says.
“I didn’t really remember until just now. I don’t know what made me think of it.”
“Were there a lot of incidents like this?” She looks concerned. Like ready-to-call-DYFS concerned.
“I don’t think so.”
There were, if I try really hard to remember. But I’ve already said too much.
“I mean, Mom used the cellar and that boiler room for time outs a lot.” For me. I think maybe Rachel went into the cellar once. Casey never had a time out in there, I think it’s because she looks too much like Mom. “But she didn’t like beat us or anything.”
Dr. Allen uncrosses her legs, re-crosses them. “You don’t have to beat a child to abuse them. Are you certain she wouldn’t consider seeing someone for counseling?”
I laugh. I can’t help it.
“I guess that’s a ‘no’,” says Dr. Allen.
“You try and tell her she needs it. See how that works out for you.”
39.
“So he just showed up? He couldn’t have, I dunno, called first?” Ryan gets a funny look on his face whenever the subject of Jason (or in this case, Jason’s brother) comes up—a weird frown like he really wants to say something but doesn’t.
I shrug. “I guess not.”
Ryan and I must be the only lunatics willing to sit outside in this weather. Everyone else hurries to wherever they’re going, bundled up in hats and gloves and scarves and puffy jackets. Snowflakes flutter down from a white sky, but not enough to stick to the ground. All the shop owners in the Warwick village center have put up Christmas lights and garlands and ribbons and everything else, so the town looks like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Ryan and I sit at one of the tables outside Café a la Mode, sipping gingerbread chai. Every time someone opens the café door, I hear the Christmas songs on the radio. I feel more content than I have in… years?
Across the street, a fam
iliar figure walks down the sidewalk and my little bubble of contentment pops. Derek St. Martin crosses Main Street and approaches our table.
“Hey, guy” I say to Derek
I wait for the hostilities to begin. Derek frowns at me, then at Ryan, and then laughs.
“You know when Casey told me you two were a thing, I didn’t believe her.” He settles down into one of the empty chairs across from us. “Funny how things work out.”
“Hilarious,” says Ryan.
I don’t know if they’ve put the past behind them. Two months is a long time. The Greenaway Academy is having its worst football season in five years. Ryan doesn’t want to go away to college anymore because he has no idea what he wants to study.
“So what brings you here this fine winter’s day?” Ryan asks.
He’s not mad anymore. I gulp my gingerbread chai to hide the sigh of relief.
“Antique shopping,” Derek replies. “I know, screaming queen. You guys want to take a walk with me?”
We stroll around the corner to the old warehouse-turned-antique shop. Inside, we weave our way through seas of old furniture and vintage clothing, odd knick-knacks and dinnerware and lamps and vases stacked on top of every available surface, in no particular order.
“I’ve been trying to find something for my mother for Christmas,” Derek says. “She has a thing for hideous lamps.”
“Must be a mom thing,” Ryan says. “Ugly lamps and scented candles.”
“Yep. Mom loves her some Yankee Candle,” says Derek.
“I wish my mother liked lamps and scented candles,” I say. “Christmas and birthdays would be so much easier.”
“Your mother doesn’t like anything,” Ryan says.
“Exactly.”
I wander off towards the back where they keep most of the clothes and try on all the old hats. Ryan models an enormous fur coat that looks and smells like it might actually still be alive.
“Hey guys, check this out.” Derek hurries over with the ugliest Tiffany lamp I’ve ever seen. “How perfect is this?”
“It looks like someone threw up all over perfectly nice stained glass flowers,” I tell him.