The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  But I can’t make Raymond stop. I don’t think that’s how it works anymore. If he decides he’s my father, I think he’s my father.

  He decides other things, too. He decides everything. He decides I shouldn’t go to school, because boys my age have one thing on their minds and he doesn’t want me anywhere near that. I get tutored instead.

  He decides that Mom should dedicate herself to charity. It’s just another kind of grift, sweetheart, he tells her, and she laughs and pets his arm.

  He decides that when he’s not there, when he’s off on business, there are men in the house—for security, he says. We have guards, we have a driver, we have a housekeeper, we have people watching us every minute of the day.

  He eradicates any reason for us to leave, any option for us to leave, any help that could let us leave, and it’s shocking how fast he strips our freedom down in the name of family and care and protection, because his job is a dangerous one and boys my age only have one thing on their mind and charity’s just another kind of grift, sweetheart.

  And she just . . . lets it happen.

  You don’t grow up with my mother and not know all about power over men. How to get it. How to use it. How to keep it.

  And now she hasn’t even lost it, she’s given it to him on a silver platter because of love, and I’m reeling, because it’s such a con. Most of the time, we’re this shiny little Stepford family veneer to hide the criminal grime. But it’s like there’s a net around the house, and every day, he hauls it tighter.

  I tell myself, at first, that she doesn’t bend; she’ll find a way to break him.

  But then . . .

  She doesn’t bend. She doesn’t find a way to break him.

  She just keeps breaking.

  And then she does something that breaks me.

  It’s a normal day on the beach. Because that’s what I do now. Sit out on the beach with Mom in the mornings, before my tutoring sessions, and then in the afternoons I stay in my room and read. I try to stay quiet. I try not to draw attention as I give whatever bruises I’ve got time to heal. It’s not hard, most of the time, because they are obsessed with each other, in that gross, gooey, show-off way that Mom relishes after so many years of being unknown.

  But sometimes, his schedule is different, and that day, he comes with us down to the sand. When I trot past him, he frowns, and I catch it, but he doesn’t say anything, so I keep going. Maybe it’ll be okay.

  Mom settles under her umbrella and spears fruit from the glass container she brought, and I try not to roll my eyes when they feed each other. I lie out on my towel with my book, but it’s hot out already, so I peel off my shirt and toss it to the side.

  “You want some fruit, honey?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  My face is buried in my book, so I don’t see them at first, but I hear it, breaking through the hum of the beach and curl of the waves: a sharp whistle and lookitthat, three words smashed into a laughing, skin-pricking drawl as three teenage guys walk down the beach past us. I don’t even look up—this shit’s been happening since I was nine—I just flip to the next page.

  But Raymond’s head snaps up. “Did they just . . . ?”

  “Oh, love, don’t worry about it,” Mom says. “It’s part of being a woman.”

  I glance over my shoulder at the two of them before going back to my book.

  “Ashley,” he barks suddenly.

  “Yes?” I learned early he doesn’t like being asked what. He thinks young ladies should be positive. Yes is so much more affirmative and positive.

  “Cover up, honey,” he tells me.

  I don’t even hesitate. I just play dumb. “Don’t worry, I put sunscreen on before I left the house.”

  My mom’s eyes narrow. She knows exactly what I’m doing.

  “Ashley, put on your shirt,” he says, in the kind of tone that tells me bad things will happen if I don’t.

  I should obey. I should say yes. It’s what he likes.

  But it’s hot, and it’s not my fault the boys whistled at me.

  “No.”

  “Baby,” Mom says. “Do what your father says.”

  I turn back to my book, ignoring both of them.

  When he yanks me up off the sand, it’s from underneath my arm, right at the armpit, and I flinch under his hold.

  “We’re going to have a little talk,” he says, and Mom makes a noise of protest that dies under the look he gives her.

  He marches me up the beach and to the house, and right to my room.

  “Sit at your desk,” he directs, before swinging my closet doors open. “Christ,” he mutters, like the clothes Mom bought me are an affront to him.

  “What are you doing?” I ask as he starts pulling clothes out of the closet and throwing them on the bed.

  “Making your wardrobe appropriate.”

  “Mom picks out my clothes,” I say, almost numbly, because I don’t get this. He hits me, but he keeps talking and acting like some other guy whistling at me is bad. I don’t understand how he can’t see.

  He’s the one I’m afraid of. I’ve struggled through everyone and everything else. But I don’t know how to struggle through him. I can’t defeat him. She’d never forgive me. She still hasn’t forgiven me for last time.

  “Your mother knows how to dress for one thing and one thing only,” he says.

  “Hey!”

  “Do not talk back to me.” He shakes his finger at me. It makes my mouth snap, because once the finger is out, it’s almost impossible to keep him from hitting, and my hip is just healed from where he kicked me; there’s a scar now. I hate seeing it in the mirror.

  I watch as he gets rid of half of my clothes. All my tennis dresses and shorts, all my skinny jeans and leggings, every sundress in my closet.

  He contemplates the pile, like he’s deciding if he wants to set it on fire or something. I lick my lips, glancing toward the door. Is she still sitting on the beach? Did she really just let him drag me up here and not worry what he might do to me?

  “Can I—” God, my lips are dry. “Can I ask what’s wrong with them?”

  The approval in his eyes makes the nerves uncurl a little inside. Okay. This is the way to play this.

  “You’re not part of one of your mother’s little cons anymore,” he tells me, almost patiently. “You’re my daughter, and you should be dressed appropriately and doing appropriate activities. Lying out on a beach barely dressed or bouncing around a tennis court right when you start growing up is just going to do one thing: draw every boy toward you. I’ll buy you a horse and you can start riding instead.” He smiles at the thought. “That’s much better.” He praises himself. “I should’ve thought of this before. Stables are full of girls, and horse girls only have time for one thing: their horses. It’ll be a much healthier environment for a girl who’s been through what you have.”

  He’s planning my life out loud so casually, it takes me half a second after he’s finished talking to fully process everything he’s said. He’s still picking through my clothes on the bed and I’m staring at his hands, tripping into the horrible realization that are his words.

  “What?” I have no hope to get around it, but I still say it, even though he doesn’t like it, and oh God, wait, I was supposed to say yes instead. He likes yes better, but yes doesn’t make sense here, it doesn’t, because what is the only response. It’s the only thing I can say other than screaming because she told him, she told him about Seattle.

  “What are you two doing?” My mother’s voice breaks through the numb cloud spinning in my head.

  “Talking about some changes,” Raymond says. “Horseback riding instead of tennis, for instance. And no more clothes that’ll make people whistle at her.”

  Abby smiles, fondly and indulgently at him. “Honey, she’s a girl on a beach, she’s gonna get
catcalled, it’s just—”

  “Then she won’t go on the fucking beach!”

  Her eyes widen at the shift and rise in his voice.

  “Why don’t you go downstairs and make me a list of the appropriate clothes you’re thinking about so I can go shopping?” she suggests softly, going into mollify mode, just like I did. “I’ll get these ready to donate to charity and then come downstairs. Does that sound good?”

  “Fine,” he says. “But she’s not stepping foot back on that beach without an escort.”

  He leaves and Mom watches him, a smile creeping back on her face, and when she turns to see the mess on my bed, she tuts, like it’s cute that he dragged me up from the beach and tore my entire closet out onto the bed.

  “Will you get me some bags?” she asks. When I don’t move or speak, she looks over her shoulder at me, expectant. “Baby?”

  “You told him,” I say.

  “I—” She frowns for a second, her hands half full of sundresses I’m not allowed to wear anymore.

  “You told him.”

  She doesn’t even have the grace to blink or look ashamed now. “He’s my husband.”

  I just stare at her, unable to voice the betrayal, seconds from launching myself at her because I want to tear her fucking eyes out. I want her to hug me. I want some part of this to be okay.

  Did she tell him everything? Did she tell him what she did?

  “The past year has been difficult for me, too,” she says. “I sacrificed everything, baby. For you. So I need you to start behaving. Stop being so sullen. I did not raise you to show this level of disrespect to your father.”

  “You didn’t raise me to have a father.”

  Her lips press together so hard they nearly disappear. My heart thumps in my ears, but I keep going:

  “You keep acting like this was the endgame all along. It wasn’t. You raised me to be one thing.”

  “And now I’m telling you to be another! This is not hard! You are a smart girl. You are adaptable. Why can’t you just . . . adapt? Your sister was never like this when they . . .” Her mouth clicks shut, and my eyes widen.

  My entire world splinters apart in that moment, like I was in darkness and light ripped through it, seam by seam. Because my sister . . .

  My sister is the strongest person I’ve ever met, and my mother has made it clear that strong girls don’t get hurt like I did. That I should’ve been stronger. That I should’ve just dealt with it, like I did when I was Haley.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She holds her hand up, shaking her head, backing away from me, already heading toward the door. I scramble off my bed; I’ll chase her down the hall and those death-trap marble stairs if I have to.

  “I’m talking to you! Tell me what you meant!”

  “This conversation is over.”

  “Who’s they? What did they do to her?”

  Did you kill them, too?

  She lets out a frustrated breath. “Drop it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “My God,” she mutters, staring at the ground, gritting her teeth against me. “Fine,” she says, and when she turns on me, there’s a kind of cruelty in her eyes that I’ve only seen directed at marks. Never at me. “What happened to your sister when I was still honing the con is a lot worse than what happened to you. I tried to keep her safe. I thought I had it under control, that they’d never get close enough to . . .” She shakes her head, like she’s trying to shake it off. “If you want the details, I’ll give them. But all it’ll do is make you damn grateful I learned from my mistakes and adjusted the con before you came along so the marks were criminals.”

  “Instead of what?”

  She’s silent.

  “What were the marks before?”

  But I know. I know. I don’t want to, but of course I do. Her silence says it, and I feel like I might die, right there and then, like I can’t exist with this knowledge.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I tell her. It comes spilling, automatic, out of my mouth, so I guess it’s the truth and nothing but. It certainly feels like that.

  She laughs. She actually laughs at me. “Baby, you are such a drama queen. You don’t have to worry about your sister. She’s a grown-up and she’s fine. I made my mistakes with her and I paid for them, didn’t I? She’s not here with me like a daughter should be.”

  No, she’s not, is she? She got away. I know why now. She’s free now. The thought sparks something in me.

  “I learned from my mistakes with your sister,” she says. “That’s why you’ve had the life you do. You got to be a little girl for as long as I could give it to you. And I worked hard to give that to you. But bad things creep through in the long run, baby. That’s life. You need to learn that and get over this so it won’t destroy you, because you’re better than that,” she says, and her voice softens, but I don’t. “And you need to listen to your father. He’s trying to protect you. That’s what fathers do.”

  She leaves me alone in my room, all those clothes still spread out on the bed, and I slide against my closed door to the ground because my bed feels tainted now.

  I press both hands against my mouth as the tears trickle down my cheeks. I’m not holding in sobs, I’m not holding in anything; I’m just holding myself, and my mouth has always been a lot more reliable than my heart.

  I think about the bloody dish gloves and her wild eyes. Did she learn from her mistakes? Or did she just learn how to bury them better?

  (She killed for me.)

  (She wouldn’t have had to, if she hadn’t chosen him.)

  I think about her. My sister. About how strong she is and how she keeps coming back to see us, and what both those things mean now, with this new knowledge.

  I think about that phone number, memorized long ago.

  I think about what I want for the first time in a very long time. Maybe forever.

  I take a deep breath. And another. And then maybe about fifteen hundred more before I’m ready.

  But I do. Get ready. Slowly and surely, I start to make some decisions of my own, without anyone else’s input.

  I decide to lift the old butcher knife from the kitchen a few nights after Mom buys Raymond a new set for his birthday. He’ll never miss it now that he has his shiny new toys.

  I decide to steal the gun that I find tucked in the corner of one of the linen cabinets, a forgotten backup that he really should have locked in the safe. Just think of what could happen.

  I decide to dig up the just-in-case box I buried under the dock the first week they brought me here.

  I decide to pull out the burner cell I have stored there.

  I decide to call my sister.

  I decide to run. Just like her. Because now I know:

  I want to be strong. I want to be free.

  I want to be just like her.

  — 49 —

  12:10 p.m. (178 minutes captive)

  1 lighter, 3 bottles 1 bottle of vodka, 1 pair of scissors, 2 safe-deposit keys, 1 hunting knife, 1 chemical bomb, 1 giant fire starter, the contents of Iris’s purse

  Plan #1: Scrapped

  Plan #2: On hold

  Plan #3: Stab

  Plan #4: Get gun. Get Iris and Wes. Get out.

  Plan #5: Iris’s plan: Boom!

  “I’m sorry,” Iris tells me.

  I shrug, because it’s hard to accept some things, especially apologies for things the people who love me had nothing to do with.

  “Sometimes I’m not okay, either,” she says softly, her eyes on the hourglass instead of on me.

  I’m quiet, waiting.

  “I’m the reason my mom left my dad.”

  “No,” I say immediately, because the idea of it is so strange. Her mom loves her. She’d never . . .

  Oh. My mind catches up with my he
art, because she looks so tentative when she finally glances up.

  She flips the heart pin. Six minutes.

  “I got strep throat last year before we moved,” she tells me.

  “What?”

  “They put me on antibiotics. I thought I had timed it okay with my birth control. But Rick, my ex, he always complained about wearing condoms because hello, selfish jerk, and I just . . . I thought I would be okay. It was stupid. I should not have been sleeping with a boy who complained about wearing a condom in the first place, but there I was.”

  “There you were,” I repeat, and I think I know where she’s going—no, I know where she’s going, and something’s rising in me.

  “I got pregnant,” she says, and her eyes are on me, and they’re burning with the kind of fear that makes my entire body throb, not with the pain, but with the desire to touch her, to reassure her: It’s okay. “And I am a what-if person, Nora. You know I am. I like plans and details and I have been making decisions about my body and especially my uterus since I was twelve and started puking from pain with every period. So I called the clinic.”

  I don’t speak, I just wait, her truth wrapping around me like a silk slip.

  “I needed money for the abortion,” she continues. “So I put some of my vintage stuff online to sell, but I forgot to block my mom from seeing the posts. And when she asked me why I was selling the Lilli Ann coat that my grandma gave me, I didn’t have a lie ready. She saw through me, and I broke down.” She bites her lower lip. “She did everything I needed. She drove me to the clinic and she paid for it, and she held my hair back when I puked afterward, and oh God, I’m gonna leave her alone now.” She presses her hand against her chest like she’s trying to keep her own heart from tearing out. “She’ll be alone because now I’m here and we’re gonna die.”

  “We are not going to die.”

  Her lip trembles. She has to take in two big, shuddery breaths to hold back the tears. I know how she feels: If she thinks about her mom, she’ll break down from the potential loss. I understand, because I can’t think about Lee. It’ll make me weak. Clumsy.