Torn Away

by Jennifer Brown

  They’d acted like… family. Like they were offering a place to belong. I just had to take it.

  My grandfather started laying cards out on the table again. “As if I need to cheat,” he blustered, “against a girl with purple hair.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  As dire as the sky had looked the day before, it looked that much brighter the next morning, as if the sun were trying to make up for lost opportunity. For the first time since arriving at my grandparents’ house, I awoke without one of them waking me, a shaft of sunlight warm across my face, like a caress.

  The night before, after Grandpa Barry and I had played Spit and then three hands of rummy, I’d made brownies from a box I found in the back of the pantry. I’d placed the plate of brownies on the table between us and poured two glasses of milk. I taught him how to play Seven Bridge, and he won the first game, which included a lot of crowing and laughter on his part. I blamed the loss on distraction. How was I supposed to concentrate on the cards with the kitten in the center of the table?

  Grandpa Barry was good at keeping me from brooding. We chatted about places that had the best ice cream, whether or not soccer was a boring sport, books we’d read, and the Waverly theater company, which he thought had a summer program that I could get involved with if I wanted.

  Not one word about storms or tornadoes or my freakout or the way I’d been acting or the lifelong grudge my mother had held against them. Just brownies and milk and cards.

  And for a few minutes, none of that reminded me of Mom or Marin.

  When I realized that I had spent time not thinking about them, I instantly felt guilty. I tried to call up their faces in my mind. They were fuzzy, but they were still there. I imagined their voices as they spoke to me. I was pretty sure I could remember those. I told myself that eating brownies and playing cards wasn’t going to make them deader. It wasn’t like a bowl of macaroni and cheese with my grandfather meant I was forgetting they ever existed.

  I pulled myself out of bed, showered and dressed, then padded into the kitchen, where my grandmother sat over a newspaper, a pen in her hand. She looked surprised to see me but didn’t say a word as I passed by. I tried to act as if everything was totally normal between us, going to the fridge to grab a cup of yogurt I’d seen in there the night before.

  I sat across from her and ripped off the top of my yogurt. “Where’s Grandpa Barry?”

  “He went into town to pick up a few yard supplies. Got some fertilizing to do this weekend,” she said. She leaned over and wrote something into a crossword.

  “He going to be gone long?” I spooned yogurt into my mouth, my heart beating, knowing what I was about to ask.

  “Oh, a little while,” she said. “You never know with him. He runs into people and gets talking. How come?”

  I swallowed. “I thought maybe we could go to Elizabeth today. I’ve never seen my mom’s grave.” I let the words fall between us, my stomach sinking further the longer she took to respond.

  She lifted her chin, tapped her pen to it a few times, looked out the window. “Well, I don’t know if he’ll be back in time to go.”

  “Just the two of us,” I said. “Me and you.”

  Almost instantly, the end of my grandmother’s nose bloomed red. I only noticed it because that was something that always happened to my mom, too. The moment she even thought about crying, her nose would redden, starting with the tip.

  “I need to put on some decent clothes,” she said. “I can do that right now.” I could tell she was making an effort to not look as hopeful and eager as she felt.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Okay.”

  She pushed away from the table, leaving the crossword right where it was, then hurried out of the kitchen. From the living room, she called, “We can have lunch at Orrie’s. It was one of Chrissy’s favorites.”

  “Sure,” I said after a pause, and even though I still felt all kinds of uncertain, something about the day ahead felt right, too.

  She left a note on the kitchen table for Grandpa Barry, and we got in the car. I watched out the window as we pulled through town.

  “Is that the high school?” I asked, pointing to a brick building about half the size of my school.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, “but your grandfather and I have been talking. If you’d like to stay at your school for senior year, we’d certainly understand. We’ve got a little money put aside and are willing to use it to rent a place in Elizabeth for the school year. It won’t be home, and we probably will need to come back to Waverly on the weekends to tend to the house, but we want you to be happy.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. Chrissy wouldn’t have wanted you to be uprooted your senior year. They’re saying your school will be rebuilt by August, can you believe it?”

  I shook my head. I almost couldn’t believe anything at this point. The thought of getting to spend senior year with my friends, at our favorite places to hang out, in the lighting booth and on the stage, made me feel somehow whole again.

  “Thank you,” I breathed. “Thank you so much. We can come back every weekend, I won’t mind.”

  “Well, some weekends you might want to stay, if you have things to do with your friends in Elizabeth,” she said. “But we’ll work it all out.”

  It didn’t make sense. How could the grandparents Mom had told us were so horrible be the kind of people who’d be willing to move to another city so their grandchild wouldn’t have to go to a new school? How could oppressive and judgmental people never say anything less than a kind word to me, even when I hadn’t been kind to them? I’d never questioned Mom. Never. But it didn’t add up. The things she’d said about Barry and Patty were… well, they seemed wrong. And did it really matter anymore, anyway? Mom was gone; my grandparents were all I had.

  We drove a little while longer, until I couldn’t take it anymore. “What happened?” I blurted out as we turned onto the highway.

  She glanced at me, then changed lanes. “What do you mean?”

  “What happened between you guys and my mom? Why did she hate you so much? She told us you disowned her.”

  My grandmother’s hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, her eyes locked straight ahead. She hesitated, and for a moment I worried that nobody would ever tell me what had happened. I would never know the truth.

  “We did,” she finally said. “She got mixed up with Clay. His whole family was a mess. A bunch of criminals and drunks. We told her that we didn’t approve and that she couldn’t see him, but Chrissy was so strong-willed. Always had been, ever since she was a toddler.”

  I thought about my mom. I’d hated arguing with her, because there was no winning. When Mom got her mind set on something, it was going to happen, whether you liked it or not, no matter how much begging and pleading you did. It was good to be reminded that some of the things I knew about her were absolute truths.

  “Anyway,” my grandmother continued, “she started dating him, and next thing we knew she was getting in trouble, too. Ending up in jail. Once she got arrested for taking off her bikini top and throwing it up onstage at a concert. She was so drunk she didn’t even care that she was topless. We tried putting our foot down, but she pushed back harder. Found ways to be with him no matter what we did. He had a hold on her like we’d never seen before.”

  “So you disowned her because she wouldn’t listen to you?”

  “No,” she said. “She got pregnant, but she was still doing all the same old destructive things. We got worried. About you, Jersey. We were afraid she was going to hurt you. So we tried to get her some counseling, but she said if we insisted, she would run away and marry Clay. We told her if she did, she might as well never come back. And she ran away. And she never came back.”

  “But you told her she couldn’t.”

  My grandmother glanced at me. “If there was one thing we wished we’d never said, that would be it. We immediately began search
ing for her, but she’d moved out of Waverly and we had no idea where she’d gone. When we finally found her in Elizabeth, she’d already had you. We were so excited and ready to put everything behind us. But he still had such a hold over her. She wouldn’t come home, and she called the police. So we left. And we worried so much about you, but Chrissy wouldn’t budge. She loved him, and the way she saw it, we were the enemy.”

  These things didn’t sound like Mom, and I had a hard time imagining her turning her own parents away in favor of that disgusting man I’d met in Caster City.

  “But they split up, eventually,” I said. “Why didn’t she come back after he left?”

  “I don’t know,” my grandmother said. “I really don’t. We sent some… letters… some packages over the years, but we never heard anything back. We worry that we gave up too easily. Like I said, if only we could do it all over again.”

  “The kittens came from you.”

  She paused, then nodded. “Yes. You got them?”

  I opened Marin’s purse and pulled the black-and-white kitten out and held it up. She glanced at it several times, trying to keep her eye on traffic. “This is the only one that survived the tornado. I thought they came from Clay.”

  “They were from us. Chrissy had a set. She loved them, and they were the best way we could reach out to you and let her know that we still loved her, too. They were our way of saying we were thinking about you both the whole time,” she said. “And praying that you were okay.”

  All those years, Mom and I were alone. I’d grown up believing that our aloneness was something that had happened to us—something we had to prevail over—but really it was only something that had happened to me. Mom had wanted it, and she had not given me a choice in the matter.

  And all the time there was this family out there wondering about me. Caring about me. Wishing me safe and imagining what my life was like and giving me a place to belong in their hearts, even if I never showed up there.

  But now here I was, and it was up to me whether I wanted to claim my spot.

  “What was my mom like when she was my age?” I asked. “Before she met Clay, I mean?”

  My grandmother smiled wistfully. “She was a ball of fire. Independent, outgoing. She was a cheerleader in junior high, you know.”

  I blinked. Mom, a cheerleader? I tried to picture her hopping around in a short dress waving pom-poms. I couldn’t do it.

  “She always thought she was going to be a hairstylist,” my grandmother continued. “One time, in elementary school, she cut her own bangs. Chopped them so short the other kids teased her mercilessly. They called her T-square for months. But Chrissy didn’t care. She was the kind of person who was going to do what she wanted, the whole world be damned.”

  “She pretty much stayed that way,” I said. And then, thinking about Marin’s relentless begging for me to dance with her, added, “My sister was like that, too.”

  My grandmother glanced at me, her mouth turned down at the corners. “I wish I’d met her,” she said.

  And I couldn’t help thinking that Marin would have liked our grandparents. “Yeah,” I said softly. We drove along for a while longer. I held the kitten in my lap, stroking its side with my thumb. “Are there other relatives?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Like, cousins and stuff?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a sister and a brother. Barry has two brothers. But they’re all in St. Louis, where we both grew up. Maybe we’ll take a ride out there someday,” she said, then amended, almost shyly, “if you want.”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to do that or not. I was curious, but this felt like it was all happening so fast. I shrugged. “Someday,” I said. “If you grew up in St. Louis, why are you here?” To me, St. Louis seemed so much more exciting than Waverly.

  And as we drove along the highway toward Elizabeth, my grandmother told me stories about my family. She talked about how she met my grandfather and their move from St. Louis to Waverly and everything that led up to having my mom.

  She told me more things about my mom—that she hated being an only child and asked Santa for a baby sister every year, that she could swim like a fish and do splits in both directions and that, before she started smoking, she could outrun every girl in her class, and most of the boys, too.

  And then she talked about Clay’s family, how they were notorious throughout Waverly as being a nuisance. How they always had so many babies around you wondered where they all came from, but there was never any mistaking a Cameron baby because they all looked alike. We all looked alike.

  Before I knew it, we were driving up the exit into Elizabeth, all at once the surroundings looking familiar and unfamiliar to me, as if I’d been gone forever. This part of town had been untouched by the tornado, and other than a few downed trees, you would never have guessed that anything unusual had happened here. We stopped at a grocery store and bought flowers to put on the graves. I picked out pink carnations for Marin’s, because the florist had sprinkled glitter across them. I knew how much Marin had loved pink and sparkles. My grandmother bought red roses, because those represented love.

  We shared memories, and picked out the perfect flowers, and by the time we reached the cemetery, my mom and sister were in some ways more alive to me than they’d ever been.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  We both stopped talking as we drove through the cemetery. There was a very somber feeling about being there, so somber I almost felt a buzzing in my ears. Someone was being buried near the entrance; the mourners’ dresses fluttered in the breeze as they stood with their heads bowed.

  Everywhere I looked, it seemed, there were mounds of new dirt. New graves. My grandmother had told me that the final death count from the tornado was one hundred twenty-nine. One hundred twenty-nine lives stolen, only two of them from me. It seemed so weird to think of so many families grappling with the same sadness I’d been wrestling. This was the only cemetery in Elizabeth, so most of them were likely buried here.

  “Let me see…” my grandmother said as she turned right down one of the little side roads that snaked deeper into the cemetery. “I think it’s over by that fence back there.”

  I gazed out the window, trying to find two fresh mounds near the fence, swallowing against the lump in my throat. This was where they were—my mom and my sister. This was where they would be forever. The finality of their deaths hit me on a whole different level. This wasn’t temporary. They were really gone. They were never coming back. At the end of this nightmare there would be no happy reunion.

  Finally, my grandmother put the car in park and turned it off. She let her hands rest in her lap, gazing down at them for a few minutes. The only sound in the car was the crinkle of the plastic around the flowers as I squeezed them tighter.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  I turned back toward the window. The two graves were obvious now that we were near them. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

  We got out and traipsed toward the fence line. I read some of the names on the headstones, not recognizing a single one, and idly wishing that there were at least one person nearby that Mom would have known. Someone to keep her company. But I guessed she had Marin for that. I clutched the flowers so tight my fingers ached. Marin’s purse bumped along my side.

  “They don’t have headstones yet,” my grandmother said as we got closer, but it was as if she wasn’t really talking to me so much as she was talking to herself. “I hope he bought her one, at least.”

  I couldn’t imagine Ronnie not buying them headstones. But who knew what Ronnie would do and not do these days? After all, I’d never have guessed he’d abandon me. Boy, did he ever surprise me with that one.

  We stopped walking, and even though I suddenly didn’t want to, was suddenly terrified to, I had no choice but to look at their final resting place.

  I turned my eyes forward, expecting to be hit by an onslaught of sadness. Maybe even weakness, grief pulling me to my knees.

/>   But it was just dirt.

  Two splotches of dirt in an otherwise grassy field. One splotch of dirt much longer than the other. My mom and Marin were under there somewhere, but these splotches of dirt weren’t them. Now that I was here, I wasn’t even sure why I expected them to be.

  My grandmother sniffed lightly, and I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, which might have been her wiping her eyes, but I was too riveted to the dirt mounds to pay her much attention.

  “They’re gone,” I said. The obvious. “Ronnie sent me away before the funerals. I didn’t get to say good-bye, and now it’s too late because they’re gone.”

  “I didn’t get to, either.” She paused for a really long time. Then finally, “But I like to think they knew I loved them, even if Marin didn’t know me.”

  “But I never got to say it. I never told them.”

  She sniffed again, and then said, her voice louder with resolve, “You can tell them now.”

  I turned to her. “But I can’t. I don’t know how.”

  My grandmother looked like she was slowly melting. She tried to keep it in, but her face jiggled and wobbled and soon crumpled in completely. She nodded, letting out a sob. “I know,” she said. “And I don’t know how to help you. I feel like the only thing I can offer my daughter after all these years is to help you let her go, and I can’t do it. How can I, when I’m not ready to let her go myself?”

  I stood awkwardly in front of her. I hated that she was crying, but this whole grandmother-and-granddaughter thing was so new to me, and I was such a volcano of conflicting feelings myself, always feeling so near eruption I barely wanted to move.

  I bent my knees and dropped the flowers on the ground, then stood up again. Slowly, I opened Marin’s purse, then unzipped the small compartment inside. The foils shone at me, as if they were lit from within rather than reflecting sunlight. I scooped them out and held them in my palm, offering them to my grandmother.