Torn Away

by Jennifer Brown

  “We used to be the Bulldogs,” I said, as if that mattered. Barking Bulldogs, I heard Marin’s voice sing out in my head. Barking Bulldogs, Barking Bulldogs.

  “Yes, I heard you had quite the football team. Did you know any of the kids on the team?”

  Of course I did. I knew them all. We’d grown up together. I wondered how many of them would be playing next season. How many of them wouldn’t be playing at all? “I was in theater,” I said.

  “Oh! Fun! What plays were you in, Jersey?”

  I couldn’t blame her for asking. I actually got asked that a lot. People never assumed someone who loved the theater would love being behind the lights the most. But still, her asking irritated me. It wasn’t the fact that she didn’t know, it was the fact that… she was my grandmother and she didn’t know. I gritted my teeth against the irritation, but it was useless. This was all too much. Too fast, and too much. I pushed my chair away from the table, and it made a loud squeak that echoed through the food court and made people turn and look.

  “I need a new cell phone,” I said, abruptly changing the subject. “Mine got cut off.”

  “Oh.” She thought it over. “Okay. But we can just pay the bill on your old one, get it transferred over to our names. That way your number won’t change.”

  “That’s fine. Then I’m ready to go home,” I said, suddenly too pissed at all the changes in my life to feel the relief I wanted to feel over not having to get rid of my old phone and the precious photos on it.

  My grandmother didn’t say anything. She followed as I huffed it to the parking lot, my legs fueled by the weird anger that had begun following me around like a ghost.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Two weeks had passed since my grandmother’s church invitation, and I’d been hoping she’d forgotten. But on the third Sunday after our trip to the mall, she stood in my doorway, having swapped her trademark khakis and pastel sweater-and-tunic combo for a dress and stockings, the lined toes peeking out through a pair of rattan sandals. Her knees were knobby and her calves were covered in varicose veins that the hose did nothing to hide.

  I sat cross-legged on my bed, playing cards, and pretended I didn’t notice my grandmother standing there. They seemed to have introduced me to everyone and taken me everywhere and were finally, blissfully, leaving me alone. I’d become an expert at being invisible; now if I could just become an expert at making them invisible.

  She knocked lightly on my doorframe. “Jersey?” I squinched my eyes shut to keep from yelling at her for once again saying my name in a question. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to church?”

  I didn’t look up. “Nope.”

  But instead of getting her to go away, my short answer only seemed to move her to try again. She stepped into the room and sat gingerly on the edge of my bed, making the cards slide. I scooted back and scooped them up into a deck again.

  “It could help,” she said, and if I hadn’t hated her so much, I might have been touched by the soothing tone of her voice. She acted as if she really cared. The same as when she left plates of home-baked cookies on my dresser or bought me a new set of headbands or a shirt or a little trinket to help me build my life back up again.

  I felt sorry for her in those moments, because she didn’t know that Mom had raised us to see her as the enemy, that it would be a betrayal for me to love her. She didn’t know how broken I was on the inside, that I couldn’t have let her in even if I’d wanted to, because the part of me that had once loved was now gone. She didn’t know that while I found her house a somewhat acceptable place to hang for the time being, I was only waiting for the time to come when I could leave it. And that when I left her house, I would also leave her forever.

  “I don’t need help,” I mumbled. I shuffled the cards, bridging them expertly.

  “Jersey, eventually you’re going to need help. You know that, don’t you? You’ve lost a lot, Jersey, and this could be your first step.”

  Two cards slipped out and I pounded my fist—the one holding the deck—against my leg. “Please,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to sound civil but knowing I was skating on the edge of not sounding civil at all. “Please stop saying my name so much. It’s driving me up the wall. It sounds stupid.”

  She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something but seemed to think better of it and closed it with a curt nod. She got up and left my room, not another word about church, and not another utterance of my name. Thank God.

  I stayed right where I was until I heard the front door close and saw through the curtains my grandmother’s car backing down the driveway.

  I got up and headed for the living room, hoping to get some TV in before they came back.

  But my grandfather hadn’t gone with her. Instead, he sat, baseball cap and plaid shirt in place, at the kitchen table, with a deck of cards.

  I walked past like I didn’t see him and got a soda out of the refrigerator, planning to drink it out in the living room while I watched something mindless.

  But when I headed for the living room, I couldn’t help noticing he was once again neglecting to move the ace.

  “You do know you can move that to the top, right?” I asked, pointing to the ace.

  He looked up, like he hadn’t noticed me, and I had a moment of wondering which one of us was the better actor. Probably neither of us. “Huh?”

  I moved around to his side and picked up the ace, making a new row above his cards. “You can move this up and start building that pile. Same suit, the ace is a one. That way you can flip here.” I flipped over the card that the ace had been on. It was a ten of spades that he could play.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “I’ve been playing it wrong my whole life?”

  “If you’ve been playing it this way, then yeah, it looks like it,” I said. I popped the lid on my soda.

  He moved around a few more cards, then got stuck again. I helped him by placing a queen on a king, but then we were both stuck and he had to sweep the cards back into a pile. He glanced up at me.

  “You play cards?” he asked.

  I shrugged, taking a sip of my soda. He might have thought he was being all TV-shrink-clever, but I wasn’t about to let him trick me into opening up for some Tell-Me-About-Yourself-Jersey boo-hoo-fest. “Your mother played cards,” he continued, as if he hadn’t even noticed that I had ignored him. “She was smart as a whip with a game of Go Fish. Did you know that?”

  I stared at him over my soda. My mom hardly ever played cards, even when we begged. She said she hated it. Something else I didn’t know about her.

  “Of course, she got the gene from me.” He shuffled, bridged, smirked. “I’m unbeatable.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I made a tch noise and rolled my eyes.

  “You don’t believe me? It’s true. You couldn’t beat me if you tried.”

  “Doubtful,” I murmured, and he tilted his head, cupping one hand around his ear.

  “Huh? Gotta speak up. I’m an old man.”

  I lowered my soda. “I said it’s doubtful that you could beat me.”

  Slowly his mouth turned up into a smile. “Think so, eh?”

  “I know so. It’s sort of my thing,” I said. “I learned at camp. I can play pretty much anything.”

  He shuffled the deck. “Oh, really? Have you ever played Humbug?”

  “I told you. Cards are my thing. Deal.”

  He dealt all of the cards, flipping the last one face-up, and we started playing, my TV plans on hold for the moment. I’d forgotten how good it felt to play cards with an opponent.

  The best thing about playing cards is that you can play them with anyone. Friends, enemies, even perfect strangers. In some ways, I liked playing with strangers the best, because there were fewer distractions, less posturing.

  “Learned at camp, huh?” my grandfather asked.

  “My counselor had a book full of them. I always won.” I took the trick as if to prove the point.

&n
bsp; He made an approving noise. “My mother—she was your great-grandma Elora; you never met her—was something else with a deck of cards,” he said. We laid down our cards and he took the trick, surprising me. “She always had a deck in her purse.” I thought about the deck I had stashed in Marin’s purse. “She taught me a lot of games, but I learned this one in the service.”

  We played along silently for a few minutes. I won the game and gathered up the cards to start a new one.

  “Rummy?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows in you’re-making-a-mistake style and nodded. I shuffled and dealt.

  “Patty’s a hell of a gal,” he said at last, pulling his cards together and fanning them out. “She tries too hard sometimes, but she doesn’t mean any harm by it.”

  “I’m not going to church,” I mumbled, knowing where this was heading. I slapped my discard down pointedly, and he drew without missing a beat.

  “No, no, me either,” he said. “It’s her church, not mine.”

  I glanced up, but he wasn’t looking at me. “I didn’t know my mom ever went,” I said.

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah. It was a big deal to her for a while there. Your grandma and I are pretty surprised she never took you. That’s why your grandma thinks it’ll help you to go. Might make you feel closer to your mom somehow. Might help you to pray for her a little. Or, hell, pray for yourself. Lord knows I’ve done my fair share of that in my lifetime. You don’t have to go to church to pray.”

  “I don’t know how to pray,” I said, and once I’d admitted it, I realized that this was what had been keeping me from going all along. Not that I’d never gone to church or that I hated my grandmother or any other excuse. I’d been so freaked out when they died, and then I’d missed the funerals, and had gotten immersed in my problems in Caster City. I’d learned about the lies, about how I didn’t really know Mom at all, and I’d gotten angry. And I don’t know if the real problem was any of those things or all of them, but the truth was I didn’t know how to talk to my mom now that she was gone. I didn’t know what to say. And I felt so guilty about not saying anything. My mom and sister had died more than a month ago and I had never talked to them since. Had never told them how much I missed them or how I was feeling about everything or that I was fine and that I wasn’t mad that they weren’t home when the tornado hit or that I didn’t hate Ronnie. I had never even tried.

  I laid my cards facedown, suddenly too tired to concentrate. My grandfather still held his, rooted through them with his forefinger, choosing one and laying it on the discard pile.

  “Well, I’m nobody’s man of the cloth, but I believe you just pray by saying what’s in your heart,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any special formula for it. But your grandma’d know a lot more about that than I do. You should ask her.”

  But that was the problem. I had so much going on in my heart, and it didn’t often go together or make sense or even stay the same from moment to moment. How did I speak from a heart that didn’t understand itself? What did I say?

  When the garage door rattled open, I was surprised that an hour had gone by so quickly.

  My grandmother came in and for a moment just stood and watched our game, her light-brown old-lady purse dangling from her wrist, a pair of giant sunglasses on her face.

  “Lunch?” she finally asked, peeling the glasses from her face and setting the purse on the counter.

  “You betcha!” my grandfather cried, laying down his cards to win the game. I slapped down my remaining cards in frustration. “My belly button’s rubbing my backbone.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I need some fresh air.”

  I could see it, the bewilderment, as it crossed her face. Surely she had come in and seen me playing with him and thought I’d turned some big corner. Maybe she even thought this was the mark of a great beginning for us. A breakthrough.

  But it was too much. All of it was too much. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I knew I needed some time alone, some space to think about everything.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The day had turned sort of cloudy but was still warm. Someone nearby was mowing a lawn and I breathed in deep as the scent of lawn mower, gasoline, and cut grass reached me. The smell made me nearly double over with memories.

  Marin, outside with her plastic lawn mower, following Kolby around as he worked the real lawn mower in lines across his front yard. Her feet were bare in my memory, her toes painted pale pink and glittery. She was wearing a leotard—the one with the ladybug appliquéd to the front from a spring preschool recital—and was singing, though her song was drowned out by the noise.

  Mom was kneeling in the flower bed, her hands in a pair of blue-and-gray-striped gardening gloves too big for her fingers. She gripped weeds in her left hand, using a trowel with her right to dig up stubborn roots, while at the same time asking me questions about school.

  “How is Jane doing?”

  “Fine. She got some award at the Model UN thing last weekend.”

  “Oh, wonderful! Tell her congratulations from me. What about you? What do you have coming up?”

  “Not much. Drama club is doing monologues. Dani’s performing a scene from Alice in Wonderland. You should hear it. It’s really good. She made Mrs. Robb cry.”

  “What play is yours from?”

  “I’m just doing the lighting. I don’t have to do a monologue if I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, but why don’t you?”

  I was drinking lemonade Mom had made that day because she’d gotten off work early. She’d even bought fresh raspberries—something we couldn’t often afford—to sink in the bottom of the glass. The front door was open, the house dark behind the screen. Everyone was outside, playing or working, soaking up the cool early-evening air.

  It was the best. It was a random day and could have been swapped with so many other days that were similar to it, yet it was the best.

  And now I was walking through a strange neighborhood, alone, knowing I would never be outside with Mom, Marin, and Kolby again. I passed several neighbors, who all seemed to be eyeing me funny, and wondered how many of them knew my story. In a small town like Waverly, probably most of them did. Stories tended to be the favorite pastime in places like this. Stories about scandal or death or destruction even more so. And my story had all of the above.

  Is that Patty and Barry’s granddaughter?

  Oh, yes, I’m sure it is. That ungrateful Christine’s daughter, I suppose.

  So-and-so told me she lost everything in that awful tornado up in Elizabeth. Can you imagine?

  Poor thing. If her mama had stayed here…

  I felt icky under their stares, but I also wasn’t sure if I was imagining them, so I pointed my face down and kept walking.

  I’d gone a good ways, and had a good ways to get back to my grandparents’ house. Not that I was eager to get there, but I’d noticed that the sky had continued to darken, and now the faint rumbling of thunder sounded off in the distance, hastening my heartbeat. A storm was coming. How could I have not noticed when I left?

  The wind began to pick up, the hair of the little girls playing ball whipping around their faces. They yelled louder to be heard over the wind as they played.

  I checked the sky. The clouds seemed to be tumbling and roiling, blocking out the sun and making me feel cold inside. There hadn’t been a storm since the rain stopped two days after the tornado. I had never been afraid of storms before, but I found my pace quickening, my breathing getting deeper as I lunged down the sidewalk, hoping to get back to the house before the storm really rolled through.

  This wasn’t me. I kept thinking that as I felt my limbs shaking, my brain filling up with panicky thoughts. I didn’t even know who I was anymore, and it hurt to feel myself changing. I wanted my life back. I wanted so much that I couldn’t ever have, and everything felt so horrifically unfair and frightening and sad, it took all I had to keep control. I felt like I was slipping away.


  The thunder got louder and more frequent. I could see them. I could see my sister and mother, backing away from the windows at Janice’s studio. I could hear the little girls crying, could feel the phone buzzing in my mother’s pocket as I called her. I could see my mom, holding the phone to her ear, shouting, telling everyone to get back, unable to hear me on the other end of the line.

  I could see them, hand in hand, sprinting across the street to the grocery store, ushering the little girls along in their sparkly leotards and their tightly bound updos. I could hear the girls’ frightened voices, could smell the electricity in the air, could feel the sirens bleating through their bodies.

  I could see them, eyes going wide as the tornado became visible, and then squinching down tight as debris and cars and streetlights and entire roofs looked like dots of litter in the sky, before crashing down onto the streets.

  I could feel them, fear sinking in—fear and the instinct for self-preservation—as they thrust themselves down the aisles at the grocery store, hoping to get far enough.…

  I reached the end of the street and turned the corner to get back to Flora Lane, picking up to a jog, and then a run as raindrops—pregnant and insistent—began to beat down on me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ball the kids had been throwing earlier, bouncing in the wind down the center of the street.

  It had gotten so dark. So very dark.

  I pushed myself harder. My stomach hurt from exertion and panic. My grandparents’ house still seemed so far away.

  And then I skidded to a stop, gasping and pressing my palms hard over my ears as the tornado alarm started sounding.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  My grandmother was standing on the front porch, one hand holding the top of her head as if she were afraid her hair was going to fly off. Her face was deeply lined with worry as she glanced at the sky and then moved her eyes up and down the street. She called my name twice before she saw me, half-jogging, half-staggering along the sidewalk, hands over ears, ragged breath tearing dry tears out of me.