Romeo is Homeless

by Julie Frayn

  She sighed and stared at her hands. “Because I wanted to stay with him. He needed me. I made him happy. He deserved a little of that, don’t you think?”

  “August, come on for Christ’s sake. You didn’t know that boy. He was a stranger to you.”

  Her head snapped up and she glared at her father, a sob caught in her throat. “He was not a stranger. I did know him. Better than anyone had ever known him.” She put a hand to her mouth to stop the verbal flood. On the verge of telling everything, she put her head on her arms and wept.

  “Don, that’s enough. No more tonight.” Her mother slipped an arm around her waist and helped her to her feet. “Come on, sweetheart. Bed time.” They walked up the stairs to her room, August leaning against her mother.

  Caraleen pulled some pajamas from a drawer and handed them to her, then sat next to her on the bed and brushed hair away from her face, tucking it behind one ear.

  “You got close to Reese pretty fast, huh?”

  “It was easy, Mom. He was so nice and sweet to me, a complete gentleman.” She looked at her lap and grinned, a blush warming her cheeks again. “And he was cute, too.”

  “Ah, I see. That never hurts, does it?” Her mother put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed, then kissed her head. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’m sure there’s more to tell tomorrow.”

  The next night, August sat in silence across the table from her parents while they sipped tea and ate the apple pie August baked that afternoon.

  She told them about the other kids. What she knew of their stories, their abusive families. She glanced at her father. She’d never seen his tanned face so pale. Then she turned to her mother. “Look, you’re not perfect parents. I’m not even sure what that is. But I had no good reason to leave you. What they all went through, how their parents treated them, it’s horrible. Unthinkable. I had no idea people could do any of that to anyone, let alone their own children. But if I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have known , and I’d probably still be just a brat who isn’t satisfied with anything.” She reached across the table and put a hand on each of theirs, looking at each of them in turn. “I’ve changed. Believe me, my life looks different now.”

  Her mother nodded and patted August’s hand. Her father just looked at her. He didn’t say a word. Then he shifted in his chair and leaned forward. “So if they live on the street, how do these kids eat?”

  “They’d usually find food in the garbage. Called it Dumpster diving.”

  Her mother pushed her half-eaten piece of pie away.

  “Sometimes they steal.”

  One of her father’s graying eyebrows shot up. “They’re thieves?”

  “Just little stuff, a piece of fruit or something.” She twisted the silver ring on her finger.

  “August, there aren’t varying degrees of theft. You either steal or you don’t. Bad is bad.”

  “I don’t think so.” What about the dirty magazines in the sock drawer? Just pictures, her father wasn’t touching girls in the flesh. But if bad is bad, no varying degrees, then you’re a hypocrite, Daddy. “You have to be there, to live like them to truly understand. And the alternative sucks.” She breathed a deep inhale and took her time letting all the air out.

  This particular revelation could wait while she cut a slice of pie and thought about her next words. She scooped a big bite onto her fork and brought it to her mouth. Reese would have loved her apple pie.

  “They sell themselves. Prostitute themselves. Usually to get just enough money for one day.” She shoved the pie in her mouth.

  Her mother closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh, hell no.”

  “Sometimes they get hurt.”

  “What do you mean?” her mother snapped.

  She told them of Amber’s rape, finding Ricki’s body in the next bed.

  Her mother gasped and put one hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  Another night, another round of unstoppable tears. “Daddy, he said he was a priest. He had a street ministry. A priest!”

  Her father ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “Not like any priest I’ve ever met. But sweetheart, there are bad people everywhere. Sometimes where you least expect them to be.”

  “I met him on the bus. He gave me the address to his ministry so I could go there if I needed anything. If I had, he probably would have raped and killed me. A priest! Everything I took for granted, thought was right, got so screwed up, so twisted.”

  “And did they arrest this man?”

  “Guy beat him up. I think he might have killed him.”

  “August what kind of people did you fall in with?” The sudden boom of her father’s shout shook her in her seat. He hadn’t raised his voice to her in years. “Drugs, self-abuse, prostitution. Murder! You could have gotten hurt. Or worse! What were you thinking?”

  “They’re the best people I’ve ever met!” she yelled. “Guy did that for Ricki and Tanya. To save Amber, to save other girls from being raped, beaten. Or worse. What kind of priest does that? He’s bad, not Guy, not any of them. What would you have done if it was me, Daddy? The same thing, I bet.” She breathed hard while her father leaned back in his chair, his palms over his eyes. She lowered her voice. “Guy’s a hero. They all are. They put up with so much abuse, so much degrading shit. Just to barely survive. And why? Because they had no family who loved them, they had no home. It’s not fair. Not fair at all. They’re just kids, like me. I don’t even know if Amber is okay. She’s out there all by herself now.” Her whole body started to tremble. “Ricki, Tanya and Reese are all dead, Guy is probably in jail.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach and leaned forward in her chair, rocking and weeping. “Oh my God, it’s all my fault! I came along and everything changed, I ruined their whole family!”

  “No, August. That’s not true.” Her mother came around the table and kneeled beside her. “Look at me, sweetheart. That priest was doing those awful things before you met them. Those girls that died were drug addicts and prostitutes for years. They were in peril before you met them. What you did do was give Reese something to be happy about, even if just for a few weeks. It is not your fault, do you hear me?”

  She stared into her mother’s eyes. She heard the words, understood why her mother said them. But didn’t believe any of it.

  “Mom, I miss them so much. I love them.” She looked at her father. “I love all of them.”

  Her mind raced through the night. She replayed her mother’s words over and over, trying to reconcile those reassurances with the horrors she had seen. The longer she agonized, the more exhausted she became. And the more she was convinced she was to blame for every bad thing that had happened. By the time she collapsed into fitful sleep, she was drowning in self-loathing and guilt.

  She spent the next day avoiding her parents. That night she would have one last story to tell. The tale of Reese’s suicide. She had to get her head straight and her emotions in check.

  She dragged out all of her chores, took forever in the pigpen and idled in the hen house. She visited all the animals and even took the truck out into the field by herself to practice driving. More hypocrisy. No license, no licensed driver beside her, but her father allowed her to break that law all the time. Varying degrees of bad.

  “I was in love with him.” She couldn’t think of a better way to start. She refused to be ashamed of her feelings for Reese. Why should she? They were the purest feelings she’d ever known.

  Her parents sat side by side, speaking their silent hand code. They shared a glance, but neither spoke a word.

  “I wanted to be with him. Forever.” It was times like these she wished she could have a drink. “I asked him to come home with me, but he didn’t think there was any way you’d accept him.” She kept her gaze locked on her parents. Would they have let him in? Would they have loved him? She couldn’t see any indication of what they thought. And it just didn’t matter now.

  She shifted in her chair and poured herself a cup
of tea. There was no need to rush tonight. She had abandoned the shame and guilt and replaced it with an almost cool detachment. What was done was done. No going back to change it.

  “He had such a hard time saying how he felt. Even figuring it out at all. I don’t think he understood love, or could deal with people who truly cared about him. The awful stuff he saw, the evil in people, that didn’t faze him. But love? Love messed him up. That last day, in the subway station, he told me I’d saved him. That he loved me, too. I think maybe I’m the only person he ever said that to.” She took a sip of tea and set her cup down. “Then he jumped in front of a train and died.”

  “Just like that?” Her father’s voice cracked.

  “Yeah. Just like that. I bet he decided to right then, right on the spot. That’s how he lived, moment to moment. Second to second. That second, he decided to die. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried.”

  Her mother’s eyes filled with tears.

  Her father cleared his throat. “If he hadn’t done that.” He stared at his cup. “August, would you have stayed with him?”

  She sat in silence for a moment. She knew the answer, why was she hesitating to say it out loud? “Yes. Yes, I would have stayed.”

  A small cry stuck in her mother’s throat. She looked like she would bawl at the slightest provocation

  A spasm of pain gripped August and she bent forward. She rested her arms on the table and her head on her arms and sobbed.

  Her parents were on either side of her, touching her head, rubbing her back, engulfing her in an awkward hug, overlapping each other’s embrace.

  “I killed him. My love killed him.” She wept in her parents’ arms. How could she have saved him? Undone a lifetime of hurt in a few short weeks? In her head she knew he’d made that choice on his own. He’d told her he didn’t want her to fuck up her life for him. So he made sure she didn’t.

  The next morning, August sat at her bedroom window. She’d told them everything she could bring herself to say out loud, and some things she hadn’t meant to. She felt lighter. Perhaps confession was good for the soul after all. But it niggled at her that there were still some secrets. Still parts of her experience – pieces of her – she just wasn’t able to share with them.

  “August?” Her mother called through the closed door.

  “It’s open.” She sat at the window and stared out into the yard.

  Her mother poked her head inside the room. “Can we talk?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Caraleen took a long time crossing the floor, her arms crossed in front of her chest. She sat on the bed and looked directly at August, eyes pinched and serious. She sighed and put her hands on her thighs. “August, did you have sex with that boy? With Reese?”

  Her heart flipped. She shouldn’t be surprised her mother had figured it out. She did everything but say “I fucked him, you know.” Had her father seen it too? Heat rose in her cheeks and she looked away, staring back out the window. She nodded once.

  Caraleen took one of August’s hands and shook it until she looked her mother in the eye. “August. Sweetheart. Were you careful?”

  She couldn’t speak, just shook her head. Then erupted into tears.

  Caraleen moved next to her and pulled her into a hug. “I’ll make an appointment with the doctor.”

  Chapter 42

  August rested her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window and stared out at nothing. She was three hundred miles away, every thought centered on her other, brief life. She had replayed those weeks in the city so many times in her head it became part of everything she did, everything she said, every moment of every day. She’d made some pretty stupid choices, but they were hers to make. She chose to run away. She chose to stay there when she could have made one phone call and gone home. She fell in love with Reese – no choice there. That was way beyond any control she knew how to muster. But she chose to show that love, to prove it to him, through sex. Unconditional. Unprotected. Yes, she made that decision all on her own. Pretty stupid choice.

  A pat on her thigh broke her concentration. She gave her mother a weak smile and a prolonged hand squeeze, then released it so Caraleen could have two hands on the wheel. The drive back from town, after a tense and frustrating appointment with Dr. Robertson, was interminable.

  “It will take some time to get results on some of the tests,” he had said. “But visually, everything looks okay.”

  August cocked her head to one side. “You can tell by looking whether or not I may have AIDs?”

  His cheeks were pinker than normal, his eye contact with her non-existent. He flipped through her chart and glanced at her mother once in a while, clearly mortified and disappointed to be discussing sex and disease with her. “No. No, you can’t. Not early on.” He had delivered her at birth, cared for her childhood illnesses, healed her broken arm, was always a kind and gentle man. And she had let him down. “We’ll just have to wait.”

  Caraleen guided the truck around the last bend in the highway before the mile-long straightaway to their drive. About fifty yards into the field, her father stood beside the rusty tractor sucking on a cigarette, blue smoke wafting up into the calm summer air.

  “Mom, can we stop now? I need to get this over with.”

  Caraleen eased onto the shoulder and clunked the transmission into park. She brushed her fingers against August’s cheek. “Let’s go.”

  “I think I want to tell him by myself.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right here.”

  August climbed from the truck and cut across the field, pushing corn stalks aside. Half way, she paused and looked back. Her mother was leaning against the front wheel well, watching with arms crossed. August took a deep breath, braced herself for the conversation to come and strode toward her father, her heart in her throat.

  He beamed at her as she approached. “Hi, sweetheart!” he yelled above the rumble of the old tractor engine. He climbed up into the cab and turned it off, the sudden silence ringing in her ears. “Corn’s almost ready, couple more weeks. Early, hey?” He butted his cigarette out on the sole of his steel-toed work boot and pocketed the extinguished end. He never littered in his cornfield. “Where’ve you guys been?”

  “Mom took me into town to see Dr. R.” She looked down at her feet, shifting from side to side, her hands tucked into her front jean pockets. Unable to fight it any longer, she started to cry.

  Her father gathered her in his arms, hugged her and kissed the side of her head. “Now, now. What’s going on? Why are you crying?”

  She pulled back without leaving his embrace and looked into his gentle eyes.

  “Daddy,” her voice cracked. “I’m pregnant.”

  He didn’t say a word, just stared at her. He wasn’t angry, didn’t look sad. He didn’t seem like he felt anything at all, just gazed at her for at least a full minute. Then he nodded a couple of times and pulled her into him. “Well. All right, then.”

  *****

  The rest of summer break played out like a never-ending video loop of typical farm life. Awake to the daily argument between Jack and the rooster, slop the pigs, gather the eggs, milk the cows, muck the stalls. Over and over again, same thing day in and day out. August loved it. She had a comfortable bed to sleep in and never had to worry where her next meal would come from. Only one thing was missing. A beautiful boy who had never set foot on a farm.

  The week before school started, she finished gathering the eggs and strolled across the yard to the house. Mr. Tugman’s truck rumbled up the drive, kicking up dust in its wake, Sara in the passenger seat. It was now or never - time to mend a fence. She stopped at the doorstep and waited as they exited the truck.

  Mr. Tugman strode toward her in his familiar confident and heavy-footed gait. Sara lagged behind, looking at her feet.

  “Good morning, August.”

  The reverberating bass of his huge voice had always unnerved her, especially knowing that he knocked his wife and daughter around once in a
while. But not much unnerved her these days.

  “Hi, Mr. Tugman.” She looked past him to Sara. “Hey, Sara.”

  Sara came out from behind her father. She looked at the ground then peered at August and offered a weak smile. “Hi. Can we talk?”

  She and Sara made meaningless small talk on their way up to her bedroom. Nice day. Beautiful weather. School next week. As soon as August closed the door, Sara started sobbing.

  “August, I’m so sorry. I know I broke our pinky swear, but you didn’t call! I was worried sick.”

  “I know. I understand. I would have done the same, I think.”

  “Is it true? You had a boyfriend there that died? Are you all right?”

  Neither of them made any moves toward each other. No comforting hugs were offered. There was no desire to lean their heads together to keep their conversation special or private.

  August walked toward the dresser and analyzed her reflection. It looked nothing like it used to. She went through so much, saw so much. It had transformed her. But Sara was still just Sara. How could she find common ground with her former best friend?

  She wasn’t angry with her friend for tattling. She would have done the same if Sara had run away. It was the broken promise she couldn’t get past. The trust was gone. She didn’t know if she would ever get it back.

  August fingered the hairbrush on her dresser and then wandered to the window, staring out at the pigpen. She missed Amber’s easy friendship, the connection they had, the ability to talk openly about anything, no matter how hard, without judgment. Desperate to have that again she turned to face Sara – and spilled her guts. She started to tell the girl all the things she couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents. She needed to say those facts out loud, offload some of the pain, share the unbearable weight.

  She skipped the boring details and went right to what mattered. She told Sara about Reese, about falling in love. About sex.

  “So, he was your first?”

  “No.” August swallowed and glanced at her feet. “Not him.”

  “What, Randy? You said you wouldn’t!”