Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  She was cold and wanted to go home, but she couldn’t leave now, they’d think she was afraid. She was afraid. She didn’t like cemeteries, they gave her the creeps, and when she thought about death, its vacant intangibility, she felt a wild rush of helplessness. Sometimes she pictured herself in a coffin under the ground, her hands folded across her chest, the white satin enveloping her like snow. A girl from school had almost killed herself and Willa knew it was a stupid thing to do, even though sometimes she wondered what it would be like, just lying there, waiting to get pulled into heaven. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she tried to imagine her dead mother’s face and on some occasions could even believe that she saw her there, shining through like a ghost. It would freak her out and she’d have to look away. She didn’t know anything about her biological father or his whereabouts, but her father had told her when she turned thirteen that he’d do whatever he could to find him, if that’s what she wanted, and she’d been so touched by the gesture that she’d put the thought out of her mind after that. Somehow, knowing where he was didn’t matter as much to her—he hadn’t been the one to carry her for nine months and give birth to her—it was different for men. And men could be such assholes.

  It was how she felt about Teddy Squire—he was hard to know. Sometimes he seemed indifferent to her. She had to be careful. He wanted things from her. Sex. She could tell; she could feel it. She wasn’t sure; she didn’t know what to do about it. She wasn’t certain about anything, except maybe riding Boy, but it was impossible to explain how she felt to anyone—that was one thing she and her mother had in common: horses. There was nothing that compared to being on a horse. The wind rushing through your hair, the horse’s sweat mixing with your own, the smell in the air when you rode. And the sound that galloping made as you crossed a field. That sound alone was a kind of drug. But the feeling she got—of being totally free. Freedom was her drug, not stupid pot. Not pills. She felt connected to her horse. She knew he loved her and it was real love, not love because you got something for it. It was her own private feeling and they shared it when they were together, especially after she rode him, when she brushed him in the cold quiet of the stable. You couldn’t have that quiet love with a real boy, she thought. But with horses it was different.

  Monica started running and then everybody started running. Monica with her perfect boobs, her murderous black hair, eyes that glittered with secrets. Willa was flat-chested and didn’t have any secrets. Monica was smaller than her and curvy and slim-hipped and had her own account at Gatsby’s. She was a prep; she bought Lacoste T-shirts at seventy bucks a shot, and wore them a size too small so her belly showed, even though it was against school rules. She had a way of making you do things you didn’t want to, like drinking somebody’s bourbon. Monica had moved up from the city with her mother because her father had fallen in love with somebody else. They lived in an old cottage full of unpacked boxes. People thought she was cool because she was from the city, and she had this power over them. Even Teddy, who was no less susceptible to big boobs than the next boy, couldn’t resist her.

  They found the statue in the deepest part of the cemetery, among the crooked Pilgrim stones. The statue was taller than she expected, over six feet, draped in robes of cement. Her severed wrists, which ended in stumps, seemed to tilt up toward the heavens. Great wings were attached to her back. Her long hair twisted snakelike down to her hips. Her breasts were perfectly round. Willa wondered about the stonecutter who’d made her, if he’d fashioned her after the dead woman in the ground, or after his own fantasy of a woman. The grave read Beloved Wife and Mother, but this woman didn’t look like anyone’s mother.

  Teddy came up to her ear, his breath a warm hiss. “Want some more?” He held up the apple and she shook her head. He ran his fingers through her hair. His fingers had cuts from Shop and the Band-Aids were catching in her hair. He was making a box for his mother for Christmas, with an owl carved into the top. Mr. Jernigan, who taught the Shop class, had made a big fuss over it, saying that his mother was lucky to get such a fine gift. Teddy didn’t talk about his father much. She knew he lived someplace far away, out of the country perhaps. Teddy’s mother was beautiful and cool and she was an artist and Willa couldn’t understand why she’d left L.A. and come to live here, in the most boring place on Earth.

  “Who wants to go first?” Monica said in a diabolical, stoned voice. They stood there in front of the statue, looking up at it, everybody’s breath like smoke, everybody stuttering in the cold. “Okay, you cowards. ” Monica took out her pack of Marlboros and emptied all the cigarettes into her hand. Then she ripped one in half. She put them back into a pile so you couldn’t see which one was ripped, then held them out like a little bouquet of flowers. “We all pick. Whoever picks the short one has to touch her.”

  “I have to get her home,” Bette Lawson said, tugging her sister’s sleeve.

  “Fraidy cat,” Monica said.

  “This is so stupid,” Ada Heath announced.

  “It’s not stupid, Ada. It’s exciting. You never want to do anything, you’re so afraid Mommy and Daddy’ll find out.”

  “I am not,” Ada said sullenly.

  “Are too.” Monica thrust the cigarettes out to Bette. “Bette picks first. Then she can go.”

  Nobody said anything. It pissed Willa off how much power Monica had. Bette’s sister, Darcy, who had something wrong with her, nobody knew what exactly but you could see it in her eyes, a squint of confusion, began to cry. Loud, shuddering sobs. “Don’t do it, Bette, please don’t! ”

  Trembling, Bette reached out her hand and chose a long cigarette. “Not me,” she declared to the solemn group. Then everybody else picked, including Willa, who knew instantly that she had lost. Defiantly, she lit the cigarette, and everybody backed away from her, like she had a disease.

  “Don’t do it, Willa!” Darcy cried. “You’ll get cursed!”

  “You don’t really believe this shit, Willa,” Teddy said.

  Willa threw down the cigarette and looked up into the statue’s face, her indifferent gaze, and wondered how the legend had come about in the first place. Why were women always getting accused of being the evil ones? It wasn’t fair. It had occurred to her even when she was little, watching the movie version of Snow White. Even in the fairy tales, the female villains never relied on weapons to do their damage—they were far cleverer than that. They relied on deception. Games and trickery. Everything was just another game and you couldn’t trust a woman, you couldn’t believe a word she said. The statue didn’t look dangerous, she thought, but perhaps that was its greatest danger. Girls like Monica didn’t look dangerous either. It was hard to know when you could trust someone.

  It made her angry; it made her stomach ache.

  Someone pushed her from behind and she stumbled into the statue’s cold embrace. Everyone was laughing and when she turned around she saw that it had been Ada who had pushed her and that even Teddy was laughing.

  “Cursed,” Darcy whispered darkly.

  “It’s only a joke,” Teddy said.

  Willa swallowed hard to keep from crying. She hated Teddy for laughing and she hated Ada and she doubly hated Monica. She ran as fast as she could back through the graveyard toward the road and Teddy was running too and she slowed down a little so he could catch up. She wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her, that was the only thing she wanted, but he didn’t. He grabbed her roughly and said, “Would you fucking wait?”

  She looked at his face, his mouth.

  “I want to get cursed too.” He kissed her, his tongue sweet and bitter and dry and wet, but she didn’t want him kissing her now.

  “I can’t.”

  “Come on,” he said with an edge of impatience. “You know I love you.”

  But she didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She started running. She ran like a wild horse through the blue cold light of the cemetery. She could hear Teddy chasing her, breathing fiercely, calling her name and telling
her to wait, wait up, but then it was quiet, and there was nothing, only the wind, and she knew he’d given up, and she suspected that it was the very thing that would be Teddy’s downfall in life—that he gave up too easily. She stopped to listen. They were still up on the hill, she could hear them laughing and she knew that the laughter was about her, but she wouldn’t go back up there, she wouldn’t, she’d just keep going.

  It was almost eleven and the road was dark and her cell phone was out of charge. Teddy should have run after her, she thought. He should have cared more. She didn’t want to have sex with him anyway. For a long time she had thought she might, they almost had, but now that possibility was a dead thing that could not be watered. She ran along the road in the flashing light of the cars, tears coming down her face. Cursed, he had said as he kissed her. I’m cursed.

  It wasn’t safe on the road at night. Anyone could stop. Anyone could grab her. Her throat burned from all the cigarettes and she was still a little drunk. But the rest of her was strong. She’d been in track last year, before Monica had come to Pioneer. It was like a dare because Monica didn’t participate on school teams. She didn’t want Willa running track and Willa had been such a loser last year that she’d quit so Monica would think she was cool. It had been something she’d done for her friend, a symbol of loyalty, and now she knew it had been stupid because Monica didn’t do anything for her in return, Monica didn’t do things for people.

  Walking in the darkness her life suddenly became clear to her. You could hear everything in the darkness. You could hear the grass. You could hear the wind gulping at your neck like somebody trying desperately to tell you something, like someone coming out of the woods in tattered clothes and covered with dirt and a look of terror on his face. A fugitive—that was who the wind was tonight—and he desperately wanted to tell her something. What? What was he trying to tell her?

  Sometimes, in the wormy dark of her head, she hated herself. It was a deep thick muddy hate, way deep inside of her. She might stick her finger down into the throat of it just to see what came up. Down where it gets narrow and damp, but even that wasn’t deep enough. When she was a child and they went to the beach in Montauk her mother would tell her to dig all the way to China and she would try to do it and that’s what she meant now, digging so deep into her own misery. You can’t find the bottom of it. You can’t touch it. Nobody really understood what she was going through. She just felt down. Down, down, down. She had taken to wearing black and nobody seemed to care. There was this Goth store at Crossgates Mall and she had bought a black cape, but still hadn’t worn it. She imagined herself naked in the black cape and it made her body restless, it made her heart feel rubbery. Her parents had stayed up late the other night discussing their troubled daughter and her father had said in his ultimately casual tone that it was all normal teenaged angst, nothing to worry about, and she’d felt like screaming, There is nothing normal about me!

  Her parents were having problems. She had seen them apparently avoiding each other all around the house. Her mother would pause, often, at the windows, gazing out at the horses. Her mother was like an old beautiful harp you pulled out of a closet only to discover that the strings had popped. It was her mother who filled the house with strangers. The cook, the cleaners, the errand runners. Her mother had insisted on building the stables and buying the horses and hiring Rudy and the trainer Carlos and her mother spent so much money it wasn’t even funny. One day it would run out, Willa thought, and there would be nothing left. And her father wouldn’t survive without money. He relied on certain comforts—his weekly massages and manicures, his personal trainer—whereas her mother could survive anywhere, her mother was like some kind of slippery animal, she could adapt. Her mother had been in a foster home. She’d been a sad little girl and she was a sad woman too. Willa felt sorry for her and she loved her desperately. She wanted her to be happy. The only time her mother looked happy was when they rode together. They’d take the horses out on the trails and they’d ride for hours without even talking. They didn’t need to talk. Silence was their language; it was something they could share.

  But being her father’s wife wasn’t easy, even Willa knew that. He could be demanding. He could be distant. Her mother had figured out how to be a rich woman. She walked around in the most expensive clothes she could find with her shirt open too low so all the men on the farm could look into the deep crevice of her cleavage and see the lace trim on her bra—but it wasn’t for all of them. She dressed like that for her husband, but he never seemed to notice.

  Willa could remember reading the story of Thumbelina as a child, confused that such a delicate girl could marry an ugly mole, and it reminded her of her parents—her father, like the mole, was dark and hairy with large, brooding features, and he could be rude and unpleasant, especially on the telephone when he spoke to his people in California then complained afterward of their stupidity. Like the mole he had a preference for dark rooms, closing himself up in his paneled study, removed from fresh air and sunlight, smoking cigars incessantly, a proven method of keeping everyone out. It was all about money where her parents were concerned, and her father had tons of it. She didn’t know where he’d gotten it all, but it was there— it was everywhere. And like poor Thumbelina, her mother had crawled into a hole, far away from everything she knew. Even Willa knew that you couldn’t wash that kind of dirt off your feet once you’d trampled through it.

  Down the road, a car was coming toward her. It was an old-fashioned car, a vintage convertible with the top down. The car was turquoise, with whitewalled tires. It looked familiar, and she thought it might be one of the cars in her dad’s car club. She kept walking, the bright lights in her face. The car came up beside her and for a moment she thought it was her father, swiftly machinating an explanation for her whereabouts, but it wasn’t. It was somebody else she recognized, Mr. Heath. “Hello, Willa.”

  “Hello, sir.”

  “What in God’s name are you doing out here?”

  “I’m walking home.”

  “At this hour?”

  She shrugged, unwilling to elaborate.

  “Get in. I’ll give you a ride.”

  She hesitated for a moment, hoping that by now Teddy would appear, hurrying to catch up and apologize, but he didn’t, and she couldn’t help wondering if her Headmaster’s fluke appearance was a cunning harbinger of the Angel’s curse. Still, she was cold and scared and it was better than walking home. She got in and put on the seat belt, stretching the old-fashioned strap across her lap.

  “Cool car.”

  “It’s not mine. I’m in a club—with your dad, in fact.”

  “What is it?”

  “A Thunderbird.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “I’m kind of a car fanatic. It’s always been an interest of mine. Believe it or not, I’m a pretty good mechanic.”

  It occurred to her that Mr. Heath wasn’t his usual tucked-in self. The tail of his Brooks Brothers’ shirt was hanging out and there was a pack of cigarettes in the front pocket—she wasn’t aware that he was a smoker and smoking was forbidden at Pioneer. A seedy corduroy blazer was jumbled up on the seat between them. His genial boyish charm seemed compromised tonight by the stubble on his cheeks, a sheepish glaze over his eyes. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved them,” he went on. “Cars, I mean. I was always good with things like that. Mechanical things.”

  “Where did you grow up?” she asked him.

  “Everywhere.” He looked over at her. “I’m an army brat.”

  “That must have been hard,” she said, even though she would move the first chance she got. She would travel; she would live in Paris.

  He grunted and shook his head. “As my father would say: Not hard enough.”

  He smiled, but she saw that it was a sad smile, and it made her sorry for him.

  “Let’s see what this baby can do.” He shifted and stepped on the gas and they drove the dark empty roads. Willa was glad he was driving fast bec
ause with all the wind blowing around it was too loud to talk. She stared ahead at the road, her hair blowing wildly about her face. What Mr. Heath was doing driving around at this time of night eluded her. It seemed doubly strange that he hadn’t asked her about Ada, who, at the moment, was stoned out of her mind in the Union Cemetery and by now was probably puking her guts out, which was not particularly unusual when it came to Ada, who threw up regularly for sport. The radio was tuned to the local jazz station, a raspy whisper through the speakers. It was Miles Davis, she realized. His tune “So What?”

  Heath turned onto Hawthorne Road and sped up even more. He glanced at her and smiled and she couldn’t help laughing, it was fun, it was terrific—and they passed all the landmarks she knew so well— the red cottage where Nathaniel Hawthorne had lived and the boys’ summer camp on the lake, the little dark cabins along the shore, and the furry evergreens under the cotton-candy moon. They went over the bridge, where a lone man was fishing, then up Prospect Hill with its deep, narrow curves. Heath was driving well over the posted speed limit, looking more like a savvy race car driver than the headmaster of a school, and less than a mile from her house a cop pulled up behind them with his siren wailing.