Freckled

by T W Neal

  I jump up in shock. This is my fault. I distracted Bonny so she didn’t listen. I brought his wrath on us by leaving the family and not making sure everything was okay. I run after them as Bonny’s dragged down the hall and all the way across the kitchen by her hair. “Pop! No! Please, stop. This is my fault!”

  I can’t hear anything or see anything but Bonny’s face, distorted by the pulling on her scalp. Her eyes looking back at me are stark and huge—blue-gray with yellow specks, not green at all. I noticed that a long time ago, but I forgot.

  He hauls her to the drainboard and shoves her head into the sink, still holding onto her hair.

  “I told you to wash the dishes,” he grinds out. He grabs his china mug of yeast water and dashes it in her face.

  “Pop, no! You’re hurting her!” I yell from the doorway, heading toward them. He’s still got her by the hair, holding her dripping face over the sink, but he swivels and his eyes are the exact shade as hers. His face is so red and twisted that I can’t even tell it’s him.

  He throws the mug with a heave of his arm. It hits me in the face with so much force I fly backward.

  Everything goes black.

  I hear a high-pitched sound like a teapot left on. As I slowly come back from somewhere else, it gets louder—it’s someone screaming.

  Pain accompanies surges of red that have replaced the black behind my eyelids.

  If only I could go back to wherever I was.

  I don’t want to be around for whatever’s coming next.

  I keep my eyes shut, and that’s a good thing because blood fills my eye sockets. I feel its heavy gooey wetness, smell its coppery heat on my twitching eyelids. Mom’s yelling at Pop, somewhere overhead. The hands touching me, putting something that feels like a towel on my head, are Bonny’s small light ones.

  She was the one screaming.

  Mom puts my head in her lap. She’s dabbing at my forehead with something wet, and she’s crying. Bonny’s crying. Anita’s crying. Even Pop is crying as he keeps saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”

  I feel queasy and sleepy. Eventually, they get me cleaned up. There’s a discussion about the hospital because my forehead is nastily cut. I chew the maximum amount of orange, sweet baby aspirin tablets allowed, but my head still really hurts. Somehow, I’m propped up in bed in clean clothes. My bloody shirt is floating in the toilet, where we usually soak Anita’s dirty diapers.

  “I told you I was sorry,” Pop says, sitting on the bed. My eyes are almost swollen shut so it’s hard to see him. “You don’t want me to go to jail, right? If you tell what happened they’ll put me in jail. So, you can’t tell or it’s the end of our family.”

  “Okay.” I don’t want anyone to know this happened. I don’t want Pop to go to jail when he’s obviously sorry. It was really my fault he lost his temper with Bonny, and as usual I brought shit down on myself with my loud, sassy mouth.

  We don’t go to the hospital. They put my forehead together with butterfly Band-Aids, and I stay at home until all the swelling goes down in my face, which takes a while. Bonny and I don’t talk about what happened, but at night she comes and sleeps with me. All of us lie to anyone who asks and say, “Toby fell off a horse and hit her head.”

  Mom’s been planning to take Anita to meet her mother, Stella, who we call Maga. She calls Maga after the Cup Incident, in spite of the long-distance charges. Mom drags the phone into our parents’ room, and I hear lots of whispered confabbing.

  A week or so after the Cup Incident, she announces, “I’m taking Anita on a trip with Maga to Guatemala for a month. I need to think about things.”

  Pop, who’s gone to an anger management counselor in Lihue at her insistence, folds his lips shut and doesn’t say a word. I’m shocked that he’s going along with this. He hates it when she goes anywhere without him, but he’s quiet now because he’s afraid she’s going to leave him.

  Yep, she’s going to leave us with him, and take off with Anita and start a new life. Bonny and I go for a walk with her, pushing Anita’s stroller, to get her alone.

  “Don’t leave us here with him!” Bonny begs, tearing up. “We’re scared!” Bonny hardly ever emotes like this. Mom blinks hard, and I can tell she’s feeling bad.

  “We don’t know what might happen when you’re gone.” I hang on her arm. “Please take us with you, too.”

  I’ve barely got the Band-Aids off my forehead and the scar is still puffy, marking me for life. If the Cup Incident happened when Mom was out taking a walk, what could happen if she’s gone for a month?

  “He’s sorry and he means it,” Mom says stoutly. “Pop’s not drinking anymore, but he’s smoking pakalolo, so he’ll be mellow. He’s going to the anger management counselor. And he knows I’ll leave him if he does anything.”

  That doesn’t reassure us.

  During one of their confabs, I overheard him complaining about the stupidity of having to go to anger management. “This would all go away if I just had a different job. Like I told the counselor, I hate my job and that’s what’s making me angry.”

  “We’d have to move because your job is tied to this house,” Mom told him. “Anyway, I need to get away and think about everything. I’ll know what we should do when I get back.”

  I don’t think she’s coming back at all. This is Mom’s way of easing out the door without a big scene. She’s afraid of Pop, too. She’ll go to California, to Maga’s house with Anita, and we’ll get a have-a-nice-life letter.

  I can’t bring myself to say goodbye when she leaves. Bonny and I will have no one to protect us if Pop gets mad—though I do believe he’s scared, too—scared of being stuck with us, without her.

  I hug Anita goodbye, though, trying not to let her see me cry. She’s so sturdy and plump, with the same green eyes Bonny and Pop have and that shiny white hair, and the delicious marshmallow on the back of her neck that I love to kiss. The weight of her body and all the nights I’ve walked her and carried her have made a baby-shaped impression on my chest and arms.

  I tack up Huni, who the Wilcoxes let me ride because he doesn’t get enough exercise. I take him out into the pasture to avoid seeing Pop drive Mom and Anita to the airport. I run him around my homemade obstacle course until we’re both too tired to feel much of anything.

  Pop starts drinking again right after she leaves, but only two or three beers a night. Bonny and I don’t let down our guard, but like Mom said, Pop tries to be nice. He’s carefully polite, shutting the door when he pees and saying “Excuse me” when he farts. He goes to the store and buys a few special things like cheddar cheese and bread. He even cooks sometimes, though Bonny and I do the other household chores and our usual hours.

  One evening, while playing guitar, he calls us into the bedroom.

  “You girls need to learn to relax,” he says. “Especially you, Toby. Always so uptight.” We’re used to watching him roll his own joints or pack a bowl, but we glance at each other with wide eyes when he hands us each a joint. “This will help you relax.”

  “Mom wouldn’t like us smoking,” I say bravely.

  “She doesn’t have to know, does she?” Pop smiles, and the squint lines next to his eyes make them look friendly. I know better. His face is chiseled with lines now, the blond hair gone from the top of his head but for around his ears, a few lonely strands brushed across his scalp. He looks older than thirty-three.

  I remember how handsome he used to be, how I thought he looked like a Viking god when he chased the local guys away from our camp. I think of him teaching me to fish, and taking me on hikes, and about how much I wanted to be James Theodore the Third, the son he never had. I think of all of that in a flash, and I take the joint from the big square hand that is the original of mine.

  He lights my joint and shows me how to drag on it, then hold the smoke in my lungs—hot sweet thick darkness—before letting my breath out slowly to get the maximum effect.

  Then he does the same with Bonny, while I take anothe
r drag.

  We both cough at first, but like every new thing I take on, I’m determined to master this thing I’ve seen the grown-ups all around me spend so much money and time on. There must be a reason pakalolo is so special, and if so, I want in.

  I feel dizzy at first, then giggly—but not relaxed. I feel energized, and a bubble of what might be happy, a feeling like Christmas morning when there are presents. A feeling like galloping Keiki down the beach, or taking off on a wave, or leaping off the pier into that turquoise water below. A very good feeling.

  I go outside into the yard, where darkness is welling like a rising tide. I leap across the lawn, dancing ballet, which I haven’t done since lessons in La Jolla. I sing my current favorite song: “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry . . .”

  I eventually wind down and go back inside. Pop is plunking his guitar, picking out “American Pie.” He smiles at me. “Pakalolo made you hyper,” he says. “Never heard of that before.” Bonny is curled against his side, fast asleep.

  “Yeah, but I’m happy,” I say, and we both smile. It’s the closest we’ve been in years. But, he won’t let me have any more joints after that because me being hyper is the last thing he wants.

  We fall into a nice routine. Bonny and I help with the yard work, take care of the animals, do our school stuff. I fix dinner, usually simple soups and biscuits, sometimes tacos. We both clean the house.

  In the evenings, Pop drinks his beer, smokes his bowl, and plays guitar. We listen, reading books on the big bed beside him. I lie next to him on one side, Bonny on the other, as he picks out a new slack-key song he’s been working on. His hands handle the guitar gently but firmly, coaxing the music out. The afternoon light shines in and lights the blond hairs on his legs, and his skin is the golden-brown of Keiki’s palomino coat. Bonny looks more like him, and it makes me a little jealous. I have his hands and feet, though.

  During these mellow afternoons he tells us about himself. “I couldn’t be what my dad wanted. I couldn’t handle the pressure. Grandpa Jim wanted a son who could follow in his footsteps, and I just wasn’t up to it.” He tells us he was drafted for the Vietnam War, but at the exam he was disqualified. “Four-F. So many guys were trying for that, and I just answered everything honestly and got out of the draft because my anxiety was so bad.” I can tell Four-F means something’s wrong with you mentally or physically. He goes on. “I used to get so nervous before Mom and Dad’s cocktail parties that Mom would give me Valium. I started drinking when I was about you kids’ age. I could handle dealing with people when I’d had a few beers.”

  I didn’t know that about Pop. In all the Wilson family pictures, he’s tall and handsome and looks the part they wanted him to play—but really, he couldn’t handle much more than surfing and being a fix-it man.

  Sometimes after work he takes us surfing by the pier, which he hasn’t done in ages, and when we go into town, he takes us to breakfast at the Kountry Kafe, and even to a matinee at the big, creaky old firetrap theatre in Kapa`a. Eating badforyou movie popcorn, sitting on the hard-wooden chairs watching the flickering screen, I decide we might be okay if Mom doesn’t come back.

  But Mom finally does get back. After a month in Mexico and Guatemala, she’s lost weight and looks beautiful and tan from hiking and exploring the villages. Anita is all silver hair and gold skin. Both of them look prettier than I’ve ever seen them, and this makes me scared.

  Mom has always had something about her, a mysterious something that’s more than just looks. Even as her thighs have gone triangular and her breasts flat from nursing Anita, she’s still as sexy as one of those ancient fertility goddesses. Men love her. They like to talk to her, flirt with her, hang out with her, and she with them. I wonder if she met someone in Guatemala and feel guilty for thinking it.

  Mom is like a kerosene lamp—pungent and bright, warm and inviting, and always has the potential for explosion. In the times when she’s happy and loving, I draw close and want nothing more than to reflect her light. But there’s always been an unevenness to how she burns, a flaring so that black soot streaks the glass, and that’s her inner crazy.

  She finishes a bowl of the welcome-home soup and biscuits I made, and looks across the table at Pop. His eyes are bloodshot from getting loaded this afternoon, like he does every day. Fear makes his hand tremble as he crumbles a biscuit into his bowl.

  There’s a clear, determined look on Mom’s face: her chin is up, her jaw is tight, and those forest-stream eyes are wide and focused. A reckoning is at hand. She is not under the influence of anything, and it makes me realize how often, in the past, she was. Anita chews her biscuit in her high chair, looking on.

  Mom takes a breath, blows it out, and sits up straighter. “I took the trip in spite of the Cup Incident because it was already planned, and I needed to think things through. I’m leaving you,” she says to Pop. “You need to get sober and get your head and your anger under control. Girls, we’re going to visit Maga in Santa Barbara for a while. I already have the tickets.”

  Mom already has reservations for us to leave? Reservations to the Mainland mean money has been spent. The journey might as well be carved in stone. Bon and I are shocked into open-mouthed silence.

  Color drains from Pop’s ruddy face. He reaches toward her, pleading. “No. Let’s talk this over.”

  “How long are we going to be gone? What about the animals?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady as I think of the horses I ride, and my goat, Sarah.

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be gone.” Mom won’t look at me. “It’s up to your dad when he gets himself together. But it could be a while.”

  Bonny and I glance at each other, connected by invisible ESP. She’s feeling just like I do—sad, scared, a little bit happy that we’re leaving him, and guilty too. We liked our special times with Pop in the evenings, but we’re also breathless with relief that Mom didn’t abandon us after all. The scar on my forehead hasn’t gone away, even with nightly applications of popped Vitamin E capsules, and it reminds me every day how bad things could get.

  After dinner, I carry Anita into my room with me to pack. Anita’s sweet and calm like she always is, and I set her on my bed. She is wearing a white Mexican baby dress with bright, elaborate embroidery on the yoke and her green eyes are round as a doll’s in her tan face. She pops a finger in her mouth and lies down, snuggling into my pillow and watching as I pull my old suitcase out from under my bed.

  The suitcase’s got dust on it. It never used to be stashed in one place long enough to gather dust, but we’ve been here for three years, the longest we’ve been at any house.

  I hear Mom and Pop’s voices clearly through the single wall that separates my room from theirs. Mom’s voice is high and loud, making declarative sentences. Pop’s is a low, sorrowful rumble.

  I feel so sorry for him, but I’m mad at him too. I wish I could hate him, but I can’t. The mass of confused feelings I have is like a ball of yarn stuck in my throat.

  It would have been easier if she’d left him right after the Cup Incident, that innocuous description marking a detonation in our family. If she’d left him then, we wouldn’t have had time for this half-healing that’s given him hope.

  There’s silence in the other room for a long moment, and I wonder if they’re kissing. They’ve always had a lot of sex. Sex was what he was hoping for when he showered, shaved, and put on the clean shirt I had washed and dried in the sun for him.

  In our years of tents and close quarters, and even this old single-walled house, I’ve come to know all the different sounds they make. There’s the squeaking of springs, of course. The slow moan that sounds like the opening snarls of a catfight. The sharp cry like a seabird. The muffled words. The deep sound of satisfaction my dad sometimes makes, like when you take a bite of a really good meal.

  I’d fold my pillow around my head and hum for the duration, thinking determinedly of other things: horses, usually, or the plot of
the latest Andre Norton novel I was reading. Though frequent, Mom and Pop usually didn’t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and some part of me, while wishing I didn’t have to hear, was content knowing that the primary engines of our little train were firmly coupled.

  We were safe another day, as long as they were making love.

  “No,” Mom says clearly through the wall. “I can’t stay. I love you, but I’m leaving. Things can’t go on like this. You need to get help, and the kids and I need to be somewhere else while you do it.”

  I sort my clothing and the possessions I’ve begun to accumulate in three years, as Anita watches, sucking her finger. Packing the suitcase, I’m reminded of my old tidal wave escape kit. The same things, except the water jug, go into my suitcase that were in that old pillowcase under my bed.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Bumpy Road to Recovery

  Age: 12, Santa Barbara, California, 1977

  Maga meets us at the L.A. Airport in the giant blue Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon she’s driven since 1968, immaculate inside and out, the upholstery protected with bubbled plastic seat covers. Egidio is fanatical about clean upholstery.

  After a short, rough period of getting rid of stuff, finding new homes for the pets, and saying quick goodbyes, we’re here, if a little raggedy and tearful.

  “Well. That wasn’t fun, was it?” Maga greets Mom brusquely, but pulls her in for a long, strong hug—after all, the two of them were together in Guatemala for a month just recently and probably planned the whole departure. Mom must have got the strength she needed to break away from Kauai, and Pop, from those strong arms holding her.

  I’m still trying to forget Pop’s devastated expression as we left him at the airport.

  “Hey, girls.” Maga hugs each of us against her wide, deep bosom, and I inhale her sandalwood scent and lean into it.