FIVE
“separated”: june
Except they weren’t.
It was never like people thought.
The Pierson family was not breaking up.
Dad explained to Samantha and me. Taking our hands in his hands, and speaking matter-of-factly but gently: “Your mother is in her own zone, girls. More and more, that’s where you’ll find her.”
Mom was away for two days in a row. Then she returned, and next time she was away for three days. She took Rabbit with her in the station wagon. The house was strange and sad and lonely without them. Almost you could hear the echoes of voices, and of Rabbit’s little panting yips. In her own zone. More and more. Where you’ll find her.
It felt wrong, to return from school and Mom wasn’t there. You couldn’t help but think bad things.
Samantha said, “Franky, doesn’t Mom love us anymore?”
“Ask her. How would I know?”
“Sometimes I hate her!” Samantha’s small face crinkled with an impish defiance. “I don’t care if she ever comes home.”
Later, Samantha said, worriedly, “Franky? What if Mom doesn’t ever come home?”
“Don’t be silly. Mom is coming home day after tomorrow.”
“She is?”
“You know she is.” I pretended to be exasperated with my dazed little sister.
Samantha smiled, poking her thumb at her mouth. “Oh, well. I guess I did. But I forgot.”
We didn’t miss her! We went to school like always. We had our friends. We had our school activities that mean so much when you’re involved in them, though afterward you’ll hardly remember why. It felt good to be out of the house and at Forrester, where I was a lanky, red-haired, ponytailed sophomore who had a quick, just-slightly-scratchy-sounding laugh and never gave the impression of taking myself too seriously. “Franky, what’s up?” friends would call out to me, swinging along the corridors between classes. I was numb much of the time like I’d been injected with novocaine. In lavatory mirrors I’d catch myself smiling Mom’s cheery stapled-on smile.
People like you when you’re upbeat, a little rowdy, unpredictable. They don’t like you when you mope.
Dad began saying to Samantha and me, “You know, nobody likes girls who mope.”
You know, Franky’s going through this thing.
What thing?
Her mom and dad.
I wasn’t sure if I heard this, exactly. At Forrester. In the locker room, before our last swim meet of the season.
No, what? That’s why she’s been so spaced out?
At Forrester, I was on the yearbook committee, and I belonged to the Drama Club and the Girls’ Sports Club. Although I wasn’t one of the stars on the swim team, I had my isolated, unexpected moments when I swam like a suddenly crazed/demonic fish. Freaky Green Eyes racing for her life. I helped our team win a crucial meet, but I wasn’t big enough or strong enough or good enough to be consistent, which means reliable. Yet Meg Tyler, our swim coach, was sympathetic with me, and had a way of taking me aside as if I was someone special, or should have been. At the last meet, which Forrester won, if just barely, she said, “Franky, good work! Next year you’re going to come into your own, I predict.”
Next year, I hope I’ll be here.
I told Miss Tyler thanks. I told her she was a terrific coach. I was touched by her faith in me though I didn’t believe it for a nanosecond.
Faster and faster the days went. Everybody was looking forward to summer. I tried to feel that way, too. I stayed up late finishing papers for English and social studies that were overdue, telling myself Freaky can handle this. Like a tricky dive: take it slow. Studying for exams, cramming my head so it felt almost good. With Mom not home much, I could stay up half the night and nobody would know. (Dad was often out. He’d come back around two A.M. some nights.) I took my exams, walked out of school with my mind wiped blank like a blackboard.
I did okay. I didn’t fail any subject. Actually I raised my grade in honors English to A–, where I’d been dragging along with Bs and incompletes all semester. Samantha did okay, too. Finished fifth grade with all As and a single B (gym). I was proud of her, and I hoped that Mom and Dad were, too.
“When can we come with you, Mom?” Samantha kept asking. And Mom would say, “When your school is out.” But when school was out, and Samantha asked, Mom said evasively, with a nervous flutter of her eyelids, “When I’m finished painting the cabin. When your father thinks it’s appropriate.”
Samantha said, jabbing her thumb at her mouth, “Franky and I can help you paint, Mom. You let us last time. You said we painted your studio really well.”
“Yes, honey. You certainly did. But . . .” Mom paused. For a moment she seemed confused, as if she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be saying. “. . . it’s another time now, honey.”
I wanted to ask her what painting her cabin had to do with Dad’s opinion. And how long was it taking to paint her cabin, which was the size of a single room? But resentment for this woman was like a big clump of hot dough in my throat.
Go away then. Stay away.
You don’t love us. You love the “zone” you’re in.
As soon as the station wagon pulled out of the driveway, know what I did? I made certain my cell phone was turned off.
For hours each day, except when Maria was here (Maria was the Filipino woman Mom had hired to oversee the household in her absence), I kept the family phone off the hook, too. Mom called home at least twice a day; she could leave a message in our voice mail.
So I wouldn’t be waiting for the phones to ring every minute I was home.
I stopped bringing my friends home. With Mom away, the house was deadly quiet like a museum nobody ever visits. Even Maria banging around vacuuming the big rooms overhead (that didn’t need vacuuming, but Maria had to do something to earn her salary) was a kind of dead absence of sound. Rabbit’s nervous high-pitched yipping, which Dad disliked, I kept imagining I heard, but at a distance, as if Rabbit was somewhere in the neighborhood, lost. Samantha and I kept thinking we saw him in the kitchen by his food and water dishes. We heard his toenails clicking on the tile floor, and his eager panting breath.
Samantha said, “It isn’t fair, Franky, is it? Rabbit is our dog, too.”
“I guess Mom isn’t thinking of us right now. ‘She’s in her own zone.’” I spoke lightly, not sarcastically.
Samantha asked, “What’s a ‘zone,’ Franky? Daddy didn’t say.”
“Her own space, like. In her own head. Doing what she wants to do, not what other people want her to do. I guess.”
In fact, I didn’t know. But I knew I hated that zone.
Pretty soon we figured out the schedule: Mom was gone two or three days a week, and most of this time Dad was home. (When he wasn’t traveling, he worked in downtown Seattle. He covered local sports events when they “impacted” on the national scene.) The day after Mom returned, Dad would leave. There was always some overlap. A family meal together, an evening. Samantha was nervous a lot, not knowing what was going on, exactly; I tried to be neutral. I guess I was stiff with Mom, feeling she was betraying us. With Dad, when all he wanted was his “good girls” laughing at his jokes, it wasn’t so hard.
I wondered: did Mom and Dad sleep together any longer? In the same bed?
It was weird—some nights at dinner they got along really well. Called each other “honey” and “darling” and were extra nice. Then, next day, Dad would be flying out to Miami, Chicago, Austin. And when he returned, it would be time for Mom to pack up her things, kiss us good-bye, call, “Rabbit! C’mon, boy,” and drive off in the station wagon to Skagit Harbor. Once Samantha stood in the driveway yelling after Mom, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t! Rabbit is our dog, too.”
Sometimes when Mom was gone, the house was suddenly noisy upstairs and out on the redwood deck. Dad was “having friends over for drinks.” They’d arrive around six P.M., and around nine P.M. they’d leave for dinner in one of the trendy Seatt
le restaurants Dad took Samantha and me to sometimes. On his way out of the house, Dad always came to see us downstairs to inform us he was “going out for a bite to eat” with his friends, and not to wait up for him.
Samantha would say primly, “Daddy, you already ate with us.”
Increasingly, a woman unknown to us would be hanging on to Dad’s arm and would want to say “hi!” and “good night” to Dad’s daughters. (Samantha camped out in my room until she went to bed next door in her own room. She wasn’t too much of a nuisance, except if I was talking with friends on the phone; I didn’t like her listening and butting in.) Samantha thought this woman was always the same person, but I knew there was more than one woman. It was easy to confuse them because they were all blond, glamorous, and years younger than Mom. They looked like TV news or weather girls. They looked like models. Dad never introduced them to us; maybe he didn’t remember their names. He’d knock on my door, push it open even as I called out, “Come in,” and he’d come inside just a few steps, and the blond woman would be beside him, but just slightly behind him, and he’d say proudly, “See? My good girls. Sam-Sam, the little one, and Franky, who’s a star swimmer at Forrester Academy. Terrific, aren’t they?” The blond woman would gaze earnestly at Samantha and me as if we were specimens of some rare unnamed species, and she’d squeeze Dad’s upper arm through his sports shirt and say breathily, “Oh Reid, gosh, yes. They take after their daddy.”
Once, Freaky Green Eyes intruded. Saying, “Actually, we take after our mom, too. Have you met Mom?”
The look Dad flashed me, even as he smiled, and laughed!
Saying his usual, “Okay, girls. Don’t wait up for your old dad.”
Samantha was okay, I guess. Learning to adjust to the New Schedule. I felt sorry for her. I could see she was crying in secret, because she knew that crying annoyed Dad; and sometimes, I have to admit, I got impatient with her, too. (Seeing Samantha cry made me want to cry. No thanks!)
Samantha had friends from her school, but they didn’t live close by us, so when Mom wasn’t here to drive her, she was sort of stuck at home. She was lonely, and emotional. Just to get attention, sometimes, five or six times a day she’d ask if Mom had called, if I’d checked our voice mail. Actually coming into my room in the middle of the night—when I’d finally fallen asleep—pleading, “Franky? Did you double-check the messages for tonight?”
Of course, we could call Mom. But Mom rarely answered her phone, and she didn’t have voice mail. I asked her why, and she said evasively, “Phones make me nervous. You never know who might be calling.”
Mom wasn’t an e-mail person, either. She said computers made her nervous, so she didn’t take her laptop to Skagit Harbor.
And Dad, too. Often he was out of reach. Sometimes an assistant would call. “Francesca Pierson? Hold for Reid Pierson.” After a long wait, and a series of clicks, Dad’s voice would come on the phone, loud in my ear and sounding harassed. “Hi there, sweetie. What’s up?” Somehow, wherever Dad was in the country, he had the idea I’d called him.
“But Dad, you called me.”
“I did?” Dad sounded vague, bemused. He’d laugh, as if a third party had played a joke on us both, and Reid Pierson was too good a sport to take offense. “Well. Just saying hello, honey. Is your mother anywhere near?”
If I said yes, Dad would say quickly, “No-no, Franky. I don’t need to speak with her. Just checking, see?”
After Dad broke the connection, I’d stand holding the receiver to my ear like a hypnotized person, waiting for a voice to return.
Then in June, my mother’s older sister, Aunt Vicky, who was my favorite of all the Connor/Pierson relatives, began e-mailing me. Aunt Vicky had called me four or five times and I guess I’d never called her back, for some reason.
(Maybe I didn’t want Aunt Vicky to hear something weak and frightened in my voice. She was sharp and picked up on things that even Mom didn’t.)
Hi there Franky:
Just checking in. I miss you. Let’s plan a winter trip. I’m thinking of Costa Rica.
Right now, I’m wondering how you and Samantha are. Give me a call tomorrow, will you? Thanks.
Love & kisses,
Aunt Vicky
Well, I didn’t. I resented Aunt Vicky butting in.
Wondering what Mom had told her. Wondering if there was some secret about my mother and father that Aunt Vicky knew and I didn’t.
Dear Franky,
I’m a little concerned, you don’t answer your telephone calls & you don’t answer e-mail. Shall I drive up? This weekend?
Love & kisses,
You-Know-Who
Quickly I typed out:
Dear Aunt Vicky,
Samantha & I are fine. Things are fine here. We’re out of school till Sept.
I stared at the computer screen for five, ten minutes. . . . Finally I added:
Please just leave us alone, Aunt Vicky.
Love,
Franky
(Why was I so angry with Aunt Vicky? Actually, I loved Aunt Vicky. We got along really well together, liked the same kind of jokes, liked swimming and the outdoors. Aunt Vicky had taken me lots of places including, when I was twelve, on an unforgettable trip to the mountains of northern Mexico to observe the monarch butterfly migration. She was crazy about Samantha, too.)
I never clicked Send, though. After a while deliberating, I clicked Delete.
There was this puppet-girl Franky Pierson. I hoped that people were marveling how extra normal and totally sane she was.
For instance: I helped Jenn Carpenter’s mother organize a surprise sixteenth birthday party for Jenn on June 20, which was the eve of her birthday. For weeks we made plans by telephone and e-mail. (During which time, when Mrs. Carpenter asked about my mother, I told her always cheerfully that Mom was “fine”—Mom was “working at her art.”) Twyla and I were entrusted to pretend to be dropping by the Carpenters’ to pick Jenn up for a movie, but when Jenn walked into the Carpenters’ family room, where we were waiting, there were twenty-three of Jenn’s friends plus relatives and even Jenn’s father, who’d flown home early from a business conference in Rio. When we started singing “Happy Birthday,” Jenn gaped at us wide-eyed. Her jaw literally dropped. So funny! Mrs. Carpenter was videotaping. There were balloons, there were mounds of presents. Someone put a glittery hat on Jenn’s head. We laughed and laughed. I wiped at my eyes seeing how totally surprised and happy Jenn was, how people loved her and she loved them.
The thought came to me I wish I was that young.
“Francesca? It’s me.”
After a while it got to be that, when Mom came home, sometimes I wasn’t home. And if I was, sometimes I didn’t come out of my room to meet her. Stayed at my computer cruising the Web. Clicking onto sites that took me to distant places. (I was getting interested in paleontology. Paleontology digs in Montana, Wyoming. Digging up bones from one hundred million years ago. In some clear, dry climate where you could see for miles, where it wasn’t always misty or raining.) I’d hear the station wagon in the driveway, and Samantha running, and Rabbit barking, and I knew that Mom would be wondering where I was, waiting for me to come out and hug her. I thought, Let her wait. Let her wonder.
Soon, then, Dad would depart. And when Dad returned, Mom would leave again for Skagit Harbor. Lots of people in this part of the state commute, by ferry as well as car, so I tried to think of Mom and Dad as perpetual commuters. What was strange was that Skagit Harbor was so close to Yarrow Heights, actually; an hour’s drive along Route 5 north skirting the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Samantha kept saying to Mom, “Why can’t we go with you? You promised!” And Mom turned the silver ring around her finger nervously, and said, “Honey, I did promise. I haven’t forgotten. But this isn’t the right time.” Samantha said loudly, “When, then?” and Mom said, “When your father says so.”
Another time, Samantha said slyly, “Mom? Daddy is away until Friday. We could go with you to the cabin, and you c
ould bring us back before Daddy came home. He wouldn’t know!” I saw Mom glance at me, her worried, frightened eyes, and I knew she was hoping I wouldn’t think that this was a great idea, too. I hated seeing her so scared seeming and weak. I guess my face hardened, and my eyes. Mom said, “Samantha, no. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all. Your father would be furious with us. All of us.”
But when Samantha asked Dad when we could visit Mom, Dad said with an air of surprise, “Sweetie, it isn’t up to me. It’s up to her.”
(Lately, Dad spoke of Mom as “her” or “she.” He never said “your mother” or “Krista” any longer.)
Samantha protested, “But Daddy, Mommy says it’s up to you. Mommy says to ask you.”
“No. She’s just pretending that. It isn’t so.”
Confused by this, Samantha stood blinking. She had the look of a child abandoned on the median of an expressway, as traffic sped past in both directions.
“Daddy! Can we all drive up to Mommy’s cabin, just for a little while? I want to see Mommy’s cabin!” Samantha’s voice was shrill, and I knew it was a mistake but there was no way to stop her. She kept on like this, whining, childish, pulling at Dad’s arm until he lost patience and took hold of her wrist and twisted it, and Samantha whimpered like an injured puppy, and dropped to one knee, and Dad released her, breathing hard, saying in a level, calm voice, “I told you, Samantha. I’m not going to tell you again. Both of you had better get this straight. It’s up to her. Not me.”
Samantha bit her lower lip to keep from crying. She knew she’d better not.
By the time we went to bed that night, Samantha’s wrist was circled in red welts from where Dad’s fingers had twisted. Next morning, it looked as if Samantha was wearing a bracelet of plum-colored bruises.
I felt sorry for Samantha but, well—she’d provoked Dad. She would have to learn not to do that.
As I’d learned, at about her age.
It wasn’t until two days later that Mom noticed Samantha’s wrist. It wasn’t until two days later that Mom was home, to notice anything.
Freaky Green Eyes Page 5