“But not for another week,” her 3V voice moped.
They would take away her 3V games. And her father would probably enjoy the thought that now she would spend her time studying as she should. And her imagination would die for a week, a slow, emaciating death of boredom and parental assault. Already she was looking forward to a week from now, when she would ride again with wind in her hair, Horse Companions at her side.
“Where the hell could she be?”
David Jackson was furious. He paced the living room with only a floor lamp and the constantly changing video feed of the muted Web Report lighting his path. “She knew damned well her monitor would call about her dismissal. That’s why she ran. So typical. Refusing to face the consequences. Refusing to take responsibility!”
Susan sat on the couch, focused on the arrangement of fake flowers on the coffee table. David had been ranting since she’d told him about the monitor’s call. At first she hadn’t said anything, hopeful that Elizabeth would appear and the two of them would discuss her absence from school without involving David. He’d turned on Web Report as usual to check the stocks but then, after night fell, Susan had gotten worried and told him everything. For all she knew, Elizabeth had been out all day. On the streets.
(what’s in your basket, Red Riding Hood)
Wandering around.
(something sweet . . . to eat)
With God-knows-who ready to take advantage of her.
“When that girl gets home I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” demanded Susan. Her mother’s protective impulse was welling up inside her. Aware of her sudden hostility, David stopped in his tracks, staring at her. Now that she had his attention, Susan went on. “You’ll spank her? Put her to bed without supper? Take away her games? What?”
His face took on a fierce look, offended by the question. By the questioning. Why was he always the bad guy, goddammit?
“I’ll make her understand what it is to leave this house without telling someone. She’ll know what accountability is all about. She’ll know what it means to—”
The back door opened to the kitchen, the hinges squeaking, tattling on Elizabeth. David looked at Susan, who stared hard back at him. Their eyes parried and dodged. David knew Susan was angry with their daughter too, angry at Elizabeth for leaving without letting her know, angry at herself for not noticing for hours, angry at him for daring to think of punishment when all Susan wanted to do was wrap her arms around Elizabeth and welcome her home, safe from the wolves in the forest. He listened to his daughter’s footsteps trying to be quiet on the tile of the kitchen floor. He suddenly experienced a profound sense of déjà vu. Doubt overcame him. Should he do what he thought was right here? Ambivalence always plagued him when it came to disciplining Elizabeth. He was keenly aware of his own baggage but unsure how to handle it.
David knew Elizabeth would be off and down the hall to her room quickly if he didn’t intercept her. And if he was going to confront her, he wanted to do it here, on his turf. And really, that was for her benefit. Unlike her space in the house, the living room was a place she could leave behind when she needed to. Doesn’t she realize I think of things like that?
“Elizabeth!”
His voice was short and loud. He thought of it as his drill-sergeant voice. Not something she could pretend she hadn’t heard.
Susan was still staring at him, daring him to be too hard on their daughter. Don’t dare me, he thought. That’s dangerous. And then he realized his anger was directed at Susan, not Elizabeth. He promised himself he wouldn’t let it affect what he said to the girl.
Elizabeth mounted the steps to the living room slowly. “Yes, Daddy?” Her voice was light, lifted at the end with the question, trying to soothe the savage beast with the music of her twelve-year-old voice.
“Come here, Elizabeth,” he said. David kept his voice as neutral as he could. He really didn’t want to scare his daughter. He maintained an image of the overbearing father-ogre in his mind’s eye to keep himself in check. When someone two-and-a-half times your size yells at you, it’s hard not to be scared. So he tried to control his voice. “Why don’t you sit on the couch there, beside your mother?” He killed two birds with one stone with that. David knew Elizabeth would feel safer next to Susan, and he knew the same would be true of his wife.
Then he realized that he’d had that thought.
God, safer? The idea made David’s skin crawl. Safer from me?
“Your monitor called today,” he said, putting aside his sudden feeling of self-loathing.
Elizabeth nodded, swallowing. “I know,” she said quietly.
“He said you were dismissed from class today because you hadn’t prepared properly.”
She closed her eyes once, then opened them again. “Yes, sir.”
He leaned forward in his chair and saw Elizabeth lean back on the couch. Five feet at least separated them. And she’d leaned back. Away from him. God, safer from me? he thought again.
He leaned back again. He put the footrest of his armchair up. He hoped it would put them at ease.
“Why were you not prepared?” David formed his words carefully. He wondered to himself, How would a how-to parenting book ask these questions? He thought that trying to apply an objective standard to his approach to the conversation might keep him from getting upset.
“I . . .” Elizabeth broke off. She had tried the lie on the monitor and it hadn’t worked. And Mr. Skinner had called her father, just like he’d promised. So her father would know all. Nothing to do now but tell the truth. Take the punishment. Get it over with.
“Next week,” her 3V voice said. “And we ride in Rheanna again.”
“I’m waiting.”
“I’d been on the Web.” Her eyes began to well up.
“Good, that always helps,” her 3V voice said. But these weren’t crocodile tears. They were for the words she knew were coming.
“Mmmm,” her father said. “Mr. Skinner called. He said you lied to him about why you weren’t prepared.”
“Goddamn that fucking prick!” her 3V voice said. Elizabeth was horrified at the words in her head, clenching her teeth to keep the obscenities in her mouth. But they were her words. And despite their nastiness
(Michael would be proud)
she couldn’t say they weren’t.
“He’s always out to get us!”
Nothing for it now but the truth.
“Yes, sir.”
David lowered the footrest of his chair, and she tensed immediately. Susan put an arm around her, stroking her shoulder, ready to step between them if need be.
“That’s unacceptable, Elizabeth,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” She was crying now, her face crumpled in on itself and flushed red, the wrinkles of her emotion hinting at her face as an old woman.
“We paid for today’s class, and we’ll pay for the makeup session before the end of the year,” he said. “You don’t take school seriously enough. As a result, we’ll pay twice as much for the same amount of teaching.”
Elizabeth felt the mucous running thickly from her nose. She reached a hand up to wipe it off. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, but her mouth was contorted with her crying, and it came out as a long, baleful moan.
“Sorry’s not good enough,” he said, his voice rising.
Susan’s eyes began to speak through her mouth. “David—”
“When I need your input, I’ll ask for it,” he said, flitting his attention briefly to her. Her eyes flattened, and he immediately regretted having said it. Not because he was afraid of his wife, but because it would only fan the flames of the situation higher.
His own fire was burning now, his fuse shortened by the thought of Elizabeth failing in her education, failing herself in the long run, something he never could get her to understand. It was so frustrating! Couldn’t she see what was best for her? Couldn’t she understand that what she did now would mandate the rest of her life?
“You must do b
etter in school,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. He tried to give his voice a helpful quality, like the adults in those children’s educational shows he watched growing up. This is the number three. Threeeeeeee. “Elizabeth, it’s not so much the money that bothers me”—and he’d hoped to leave it at that but couldn’t help adding—“although that’s something that your mother and I have to consider. But if you don’t turn your performance around, the webschool will drop you. Don’t you understand, without a good education early on, college is questionable, and then everything changes?”
Elizabeth formed the next line in her head a second before her father spoke it. You know, Elizabeth,
“if you don’t apply yourself, you’ll never”
amount to anything
“and you’ll end up”
serving drinks somewhere
“in some cyberbar.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, crying less as she reached the most familiar point in the conversation. She knew the ending now. Not happy. But not worse either.
Her father sighed. “No Web privileges for a week. Use it for school research only. And I’ll have the home computer print me daily reports of your online activity to make sure that’s the case. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, beginning to cry again as a week without Rheanna solidified into reality.
“I’ll keep you occupied,” her 3V voice promised. Teased, really.
“Go to your room,” he said. “I want you in bed by . . .” He looked at the clock, and it showed 8:30. “I want you in bed, lights out, by 9:30, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re dismissed.”
Getting up from the couch, her mother’s hand slipping slowly down her back as she pulled away, Elizabeth was relieved and despondent at the same time. But at least it was over. She made her way down the stairs from the living room.
“Not too quickly,” her 3V voice said, “or he’ll get you for that too.”
When she got to her room she closed the door and got into bed, pulling the pillow over her head. Without her 3V world, the pillow and closed door were the only things that muffled the yelling.
“Well, that should take care of it for today,” David said, unmuting Web Report. “Tomorrow on the other hand, I’m not so—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Susan. Her voice rose quickly, thunder in front of an approaching storm. David stared at her, dumbstruck. “Don’t you know why she left today, David? Don’t you understand that you can’t talk to your own daughter?”
He muted Web Report again and stood up, putting his hands on his hips. “Enlighten me, since you seem to know everything.”
“You push her too hard.” Susan’s hands were out, her fingers working, as if she could somehow help him grasp what she was saying. “You’re always threatening her with failure. Do you know what it’s like at her age to be warned against being a failure day after day by the man you look up to more than any other in the world?”
“Do you really have to ask that question?”
Susan stood up too then, her hands now clenched fists at her side. “No, I suppose not. But that’s why you of all people should understand her!”
“Then what do you want me to do?” He was shouting now. “Let her get away with disobeying me? Enable her failure in school? Set her up to fail for the rest of her life?”
Susan’s head drooped. “There it is again! You measure everything in her so many different ways that none of it means a goddamned thing! So all you do is confuse her. You hold your love out to her on a stick, a reward for applying herself. Some parents spoil their kids with stuff. You promise you’ll love her if she measures up to your definition of success!”
“That’s not true!”
“Of course it is! Everything you do shows it, whether you know it or not! Jesus, David, you were more upset when I told you about the monitor’s call than you were when I told you she was out after dark.” Susan was close to tears now herself. She heard the words she was saying, and hearing them out loud showed her just how bad things had gotten.
They stood there, faces taut, each daring the other’s eyes to give ground. David looked away and turned around to find his chair. He fell into it. Susan stayed standing, her eyes never leaving him, pinning him to the mat of his recliner.
“That’s not true either,” he said. His voice was level. “I’m just as worried about her as you are.”
Susan took a deep breath. “But that’s not what I hear from you, David. That’s not what you say. That’s not what she sees.”
“I don’t give a good goddamned what you . . .” He grimaced. The hounds of his anger were dragging him forward into rage. He could feel their leashes breaking. But he held on. “You should know me well enough by now to know that I worry as much as you,” David said coolly. “For godsakes, we’ve been married long enough.”
Susan sat back down on the couch. He’s relaxing, now you relax, her mind advised her. “I used to think I knew you. Before we moved back here.”
He flashed her a look. It warned her not to start that argument. Let’s at least finish the one we’re having first, deal?
After fifteen years of marriage, she knew what the look meant. “David, for once I’m not digging at you for coming back here. But it’s this town. It’s cursed or something. I can’t imagine why—”
“Jesus, please—”
Susan threw up her hands to ward him off. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
“It’s a safer community, Sue!” David heard his own raised voice and flinched away from it. He lowered his tone. Down, boy. “We talked about this. It’s simpler living here.”
“We talked about it,” murmured Susan, “then you made the decision to move back here.”
“Here we go—”
“But I’m telling you, David,” she said, cutting the other debate short, “it’s this town. She has no real friends here. And kids need more than . . .” She motioned at the muted Web Report with its horizontally scrolling numbers and interactive stock-buying options. “She needs more than the Web.” And so do I, she thought but didn’t say.
“She’s making friends. It takes time to get adjusted. I realize that.”
Susan grabbed onto that. “Then tell her that. Don’t come down on her so hard. Help her. Don’t berate her.”
David stared at the scrolling numbers on the screen. He forced himself not to focus on the MerChrysler numbers. “I’ll talk to her again tomorrow, after school.”
“Better yet, talk with her. David, she’s a wonderful girl.”
“I know that,” he said defensively. Don’t you think I know my own daughter?
“Almost a teenager.”
He rolled his eyes. He remembered what he and Theron had looked for in teenaged girls. At that moment he recalled the ridiculous memory that he and Theron had pooled their money to buy X-ray glasses from the back of a comic book so they could see through girls’ clothing. The X-ray specs hadn’t worked, dammit. Jesus, what am I thinking?
“She’s growing up,” Susan pressed. “We have to help her with that.”
“Don’t remind me,” was all he said, running his hand through his hair. He unmuted Web Report.
Susan, sensing maybe she had made some progress, let the conversation end there. She walked into the kitchen to putter around. Nothing really needed to be done. She’d spent her day worrying over Elizabeth’s whereabouts and cleaning the house so much it almost shined.
David sat in the living room, hearing Web Report but not really listening to it, unable to think of anything else but the body language of the two people he loved most in the world as they’d sat on that couch.
They pulled away from me.
He played the scene over in his mind. He had leaned forward; they had leaned back.
They felt safer sitting away from me.
He rewound it again, replayed it. And again.
They felt the need to feel safer.
The thought broke his hear
t.
Chapter 17
Elizabeth pulled the pillow down tighter over her head. The Parent-Free Zone sign on her door implied they couldn’t enter without her say-so, though sometimes, like now, she couldn’t keep even their voices out. Still, it remained her sacred space, unspoiled by unwelcome visitors if nowhere else but in her mind.
She lay face down on her bed, tempted to cry but ashamed for wanting to. Instead, she settled for clamping the pillow over her head. She thought about her fantasy world, imagining the landscape of Rheanna around her. The smell of the horses and the blooming sweetness of the green grass. The power of the horse beneath her and the feel of his muscles as she rode across the plain. Her Companions riding at her side to meet the evil Mallus on the field of battle.
But it just wasn’t the same. She couldn’t really smell the grass below her. Caomos didn’t jostle and jolt her in the saddle. No Companions pledged fealty to her, come what may. There was only the dull roar of her own blood pounding, amplified by her stopped-up ears. And it was already getting hot under the pillow.
She took it off her head and sat up, brushing her tangled hair from her eyes. Elizabeth could hear another dull roar now, the low, occasionally not-so-low argument between her parents. Her mother once called it a “disagreement” when Elizabeth had asked her about it a long time ago. As if using that word to describe the yelling and cursing could somehow make it better, maybe even soften the loud voices in her memory’s ear.
But children always know.
And so she called it an argument in her head and never asked her mother again what it really was because Elizabeth already knew, and all the calling-it-something-else in the world couldn’t convince her it was anything other than what it was.
“Let’s get in the tank,” her 3V voice said.
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