by Amber Smith
“I have to say,” she begins, the line of her mouth quirking up at the corner, “I predicted this. I predicted it would end this way. One of them would be here.”
Jackie quickly steps in and puts her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “It’s time for you to leave, Caroline. That’s really enough.”
She shrugs Jackie’s hand off. “She was like a dog all those years, you know,” she says to Jackie, her expression twisting her already-harsh features, like she’s catching the odor of something rotten. “So desperate for his love and attention and approval that she’d let herself be kicked and kicked. Always went crawling back, licking his hand.” She looks up at me and Aaron. “Everyone wanted to make me out to be the bad guy.”
“You need to leave,” Jackie repeats more firmly. “You’re causing a scene, and Allison would not want you here—no one wants you here. Please go.”
“Well, she finally bit back, didn’t she?” she says, shaking her head.
She pauses, letting her words sink onto my skin, finding their way inside of me, like a drug into my bloodstream. We’re not supposed to be talking about any of this, not here, not now, not out in the open, not ever. But she won’t stop.
“She was going to be trapped forever, and she knew it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” she asks, looking directly at me.
I open my mouth, but . . . no words. I shake my head, or at least I think I do.
“I think you should go,” Aaron says, taking a step toward her.
She holds her hands up in front of her, surrendering, then she reaches for my hand. As her fingers graze my palm, they feel cold and soft and bony. She turns, and leaves exactly the way she came.
I look down at the small, folded piece of paper she’s left in my hand. I open it slowly. In handwriting so impeccable it looks like a scrolling font, ten numbers are lined up in a perfect row, along with the words Caroline. Just in case. I close my fist around the paper, crunching it in my palm like it’s a secret.
I want to follow her, tell her not to leave. I want to know what she knows. But I can’t do any of those things. I can barely feel my hands and feet. The world seems to tilt on its axis just a little too much. I have to sit. Because my thoughts are racing in a million different directions and I’m sure my brain is short-circuiting one region at a time, neuron by neuron. I move to the hard couch along the wall, Aaron and Carmen and Jackie following me. And the paper in my hand: Caroline. Just in case.
DROWNING
MY BRAIN FIGHTS AGAINST my body, but I have to open my eyes. And as soon as I do, I’m forced to remember everything all over again, all at once. The way he looked lying in the casket, his face, his hands crossed over his chest like he’d been sculpted out of something other than flesh. When I think of him, this seems to be the only image on file in my head. Better not to think of him at all.
It’s been three weeks since Dad died.
My mind ticks off one more day. Another Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, come and gone. Check. No news. Check. Friday again. Check. Callie stays silent. Check.
July is now in full effect. Nearly every day this month has reached record highs. I kick the sheet off the bed and roll over. Jackie replaced the big bed that was originally in here with two twins, like Callie and I used to have back home when we shared a room. Her bed is empty, made up perfectly neat. I look at the clock; it’s already noon.
Just in case. I think of the scrap of paper tucked away in my change purse, sliding around the bottom of my backpack. And now the thought that, every morning, inevitably comes next: In case of what? What more can possibly go wrong?
I pull the pillow over my head and will myself to fall back asleep. I try to tell myself it’s only the heat zapping all my energy, evaporating the life force right out of me. It’s the kind of weather that makes me long for the slow, cold seasons, for wind and snow. Right as I’m at the edge of dreamland, something jolts me back: a knock on the door.
Three dull, soft taps, a sound you could almost ignore.
I pull the pillow away from my ears and listen.
“Is someone there?” I call, my voice scratchy as I utter my first words of the day. “Come in.”
The door pushes open. Callie stands there. A doughnut wrapped in a napkin in one hand, Jackie’s cordless phone in the other.
“Hey.” I clear my throat. “What’s up?” I ask, even though I don’t expect an answer.
She steps inside the room and sets the doughnut down on the nightstand. She holds the phone out at arm’s length. It’s become like this massive game of charades trying to communicate with her. I try to keep my patience, but it gets harder every day.
I take the phone and bring it to my ear. Callie walks away.
“Hello?”
“Brooke, is that you?”
Something inside me releases like a pressure valve with the sound of her voice. “Mom!” I shout, suddenly completely awake.
“I don’t have long. Please, tell me. Tell me everything. What’s happening? How are you? What about your brother? And Callie? We have a lot to talk about, I know. How are things at Jackie’s? Tell me the truth. Please believe me, I think of nothing else but you kids. Brooke, hello?” she asks frantically, as if she thinks maybe she’s lost me, though she hasn’t given me a chance to respond to her series of rapid-fire questions.
“I’m here.” My own voice echoes back at me, a delay on the line that I once heard somewhere means your call is being recorded.
“I love you, do you know that?” she says.
“I love you, too. How are you? Do you have any news?”
Silence.
“Mom? Are you there?” I ask, feeling my blood begin to pump faster through my veins.
“Just tell me you’re okay,” she says, not answering my questions.
“I’m okay,” I lie. “We’re all okay. But no one’s telling us anything.”
“I know, I know and I’m sorry.” She stops, and I can feel this vibration in her voice, weaving its path through the air and space, through the telephone lines, coiling its way around the inside of my ear—she’s about to start crying.
“When can we see you?” I ask, feeling her desperation quickly becoming mine.
“I don’t want you to see me here,” she says quietly. “It will only make me feel worse.”
“But I miss you.” I wait, but she doesn’t say anything. “Mom, I . . .” I want to tell her just how hard all this has been on me. But I don’t. Because this isn’t how things work between us. Sometimes I wish it were, but I know now is not the time to try to make it about me.
“You have every right to hate me,” she gasps, and I hear the tears fully emerging now, distorting her voice, making it high, then low, then whispery, then loud, the words being pulled under by an ocean churning up from the deepest part of her. “It’s—it’s so hard to explain. I can barely get my head around it myself, I just . . .” Unable to catch her breath, she pauses midsentence.
I know what I need to do, what I need to say. “Mom, stop, it’s okay.” I take a breath and set my own murky ocean of needs and fears aside. “Look, everything is going to get straightened out and you’ll be home in no time.” Though I have no way of knowing whether or not that’s even possible, I try to reassure her, and myself. “Stop talking like that. Everyone knows it was an accident, okay?” I lie again.
“Brooke,” she whispers. “I don’t even know that.”
I feel this sharp piercing in my chest, like someone has just stuck me in the heart with a tiny hypodermic needle, and now a small but steady stream of blood is leaking out with every beat, every pulse.
“Mom,” I say firmly, trying to snap her out of it, “I think you just need to take a breath, okay? You’ll be back home with us soon enough. Hold out a little longer, and it will all be over.”
“No, no, no,” she whines over me, like she’s the child and I’m the parent. “No, you don’t—you don’t understand.”
“None of this is your fault,�
�� I tell her, but as those words pass across my lips, I have trouble believing them. And I hate her for making me doubt—doesn’t she know that my belief in her is all I have to hold on to?
I hear a click on the line, a pop. “Brooke, I have to go, okay?” She sniffles. “They’re telling me I have to go. I love you, okay? I love—”
I try to answer her—“I love you, too”—but the line is dead. I hold the phone in my lap and stare at it, waiting for my head to stop spinning, waiting for my thoughts to clear up. And when they do, I remember what’s important, what I have to do: I have to protect her, protect her from herself, even. She’s unraveling and she needs me to be strong enough for the both of us, for all of us.
I carry the phone in one hand and the stupid doughnut—which is the source of the five extra pounds I’ve put on since we arrived here—in the other as I make my way to the living room. Jackie sits on the couch with a basket of laundry next to her, folding clothes into neat piles that line the coffee table like towers in a skyline.
“Oh great, you got to talk to her,” she says, gesturing to the phone in my hand. “She sounded good, didn’t she?” Jackie says, smiling, nodding.
Of course she sounded good to Jackie—she saved up the real stuff for me. “Yeah,” I lie. “Jackie, I know she says she doesn’t want us to visit her, but I need to see her.”
“I hear you,” she tells me. “We’ll figure something out, all right?”
I nod. Then I look at Callie, folded into the cushions of the couch, absently picking at a pastry from Jackie’s shop. Jackie’s eyes meet mine, her lips pressed together into a hard line, her head shaking slightly back and forth. We share a silent moment of communication that somehow conveys how I’ve been feeling too: hopeless, frustrated. Callie’s been going to see this therapist once a week—Dr. Greenberg, a highly recommended child psychologist, according to the doctors at the hospital—except I don’t see any improvement, and if anything, I think she may be getting worse.
That night Jackie invites Aaron and Carmen over for dinner. I think it’s going to be another announcement, but dinner goes as usual. Unplugged, we all take turns talking about our day, except Callie. Aaron and Carmen brought dessert: a cake that Carmen’s mom baked. Jackie makes a huge deal about how she wants her mother’s recipe and maybe she will add it as a seasonal special at the shop.
We’re all sitting in the living room afterward when Jackie suddenly stands up and says, “Oh! Hold on,” and rushes out of the room. Ray shrugs. I hear her opening and closing the closet door in the hall, then she comes back, toting a stack of board games in her arms. “Game night!” She sets them down on the coffee table like an exclamation point. “Kids, this is what us old folks used to do for fun before video games and all that computer stuff came along.”
“Back in the Stone Age,” Ray adds as he leans forward in his chair to take the tattered lid off the Scrabble box.
“We’ve played Scrabble before,” Carmen says, nudging Aaron. “Right, babe?”
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“So have we,” I add, gesturing to myself and Callie.
“This kind of Scrabble?” Jackie asks, holding a wooden L tile between her fingers. “Or the one they have on the computer?”
We all look at one another; she has us there. We have video games, of course, but I’ve never been any good at them. That’s Aaron and Callie’s thing more than mine. I don’t mind; I’ve never had much use for games anyway.
We choose our tiles and arrange our letters. Ray insists that Jackie is making words up. “ ‘Appliqué,’ ” she argues. “It’s a design, like in sewing. It’s a word—look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“I will!” he counters in that good-natured teasing way of his.
I wish I could call my mom back right now and tell her that being here with Jackie and Ray, with their clean sheets and perfect marriage and balanced meals and game night, only makes me feel worse. I know I don’t belong here and I never will. It’s like being underwater and not knowing which way is up, like drowning slowly, even though you’re trying so hard to find your way back to the surface.
I get stuck on my turn; there are no words to be made. “Pass,” I say.
“If you have an S, you can just add it to the end of one of the other words,” Jackie offers.
“Come on, just take your turn,” Aaron says.
“You could add on to this word right here,” Jackie says, leaning over to peek at my tiles like I’m some kindergartner who doesn’t know how to play the game.
“Pass,” I repeat.
“You can’t pass,” Aaron says, losing his patience with me.
“Do you have an S?” Jackie repeats. “If you do, then you can just—”
“I know,” I interrupt. “I don’t have one,” I tell her, pulling my row of tiles closer to me.
“Here, let me see,” she says, reaching for my little wooden tile tray.
“I don’t have a damn S, okay?” I don’t mean to yell, I don’t mean to knock over my tiles and mess up the whole board. I don’t mean to stand up and storm out of the room. But I do.
“Brooke, what the hell?” Aaron calls after me.
As I’m shutting the guest room door, I hear Jackie tell him, “No, leave it. It’s fine, really.”
KEEPING SCORE
ANOTHER WEEK, COME AND GONE. Jackie, Ray, and Aaron are all in the kitchen talking in hushed tones. No one ever said anything to me about the Scrabble incident, which only makes me feel worse. Because now I’m positive they’re keeping score against me, they’re just doing it silently. They enter the living room in single file, each taking turns flashing me and Callie fake, uncomfortable smiles, looking back and forth between one another.
“What’s going on?” I finally ask as they form a semicircle around us.
Jackie reaches for the TV remote and mutes it. That gets Callie’s attention, finally causing her to look at them. I brace myself as Jackie takes a seat on the couch between us—this can’t be good. Aaron sits on the arm of the recliner and it tips forward with a squeal. “Your mother’s hearing was today—” she begins.
“I wanted to be there,” I interrupt.
“Mom didn’t want you there,” Aaron says, quick to jump in.
“That’s true,” Jackie agrees, bowing her head. “And, well. It didn’t exactly go in our favor.” She takes hold of Callie’s hand. I move mine before she can touch me. I hold my breath. “This hearing was to decide if there was enough evidence to proceed with a trial, or if your mom could come home, and they decided that the case will go to trial.”
“What?” I try to shout, except my voice barely works.
“I know, honey,” Jackie says. “But this isn’t the end. It simply means this is all going to take longer than we wanted, that’s all.”
“How much longer?” I ask.
“I don’t know, Brooke. It depends. And actually,” Jackie adds, “that’s one of the things we wanted to talk with you about.”
“Okay,” I mutter, the inside of me feeling like a slow-sinking ship, my heart a steel anchor that’s been thrown overboard.
“They offered a plea bargain, but—do you know what that is?” she asks, interrupting herself. I nod, even though I’m not exactly sure, because I need her to finish. Aaron sits up straighter and doesn’t seem to want to make eye contact with me. “It means they would drop the more serious charges if your mother pleaded guilty to one of the lesser ones—that way there wouldn’t be a trial.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” I ask, looking back and forth between Jackie and Aaron, who’s starting to get all twitchy and irritated, raking his hands through his hair.
“No, it’s not a good thing, Brooke,” Aaron says, looking up at me like I’m completely dense. “Because then she has to say that she’s guilty, which means she’ll have to serve time, no matter what.” He pauses and takes a breath. “At least if there’s a trial, she has a chance.”
“Oh. Right,” I agree, my brain p
rocessing this information too slowly.
Jackie continues, probably sensing the mounting tension between me and Aaron. “Well, her lawyer is working on building a case. He thinks we should go to trial instead. He thinks we can win,” she tells us, her mouth halfway between a smile and a frown.
“Okay, but how long will that take?” I try to ask again.
Jackie shakes her head. “A while. Months. He says it could be a year, even, depending on all the different factors. He’s not sure how long.”
I feel my mouth drop open, my jaw suddenly unable to bear its own weight. I try to speak, but my tongue feels like a dull, flat rock in my mouth. My voice has to claw its way out of my throat. “And what?” I say, turning to Aaron. “We’re just supposed to live at Jackie’s house for a year?”
Aaron looks up at me from under his eyebrows, scrunching his forehead like I’m saying everything wrong. “Brooke, come on.”
“No, you come on!” I check my volume, try to make my voice softer, but I can’t. “You always do that. You act like I’m the one embarrassing everyone, but I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking!” I stop to take a breath. I look at Callie, wishing she could agree with me.
“You’re wrong,” he says, lowering his voice. “That’s not what I’m thinking at all.” He taught me that when we were kids: When you’re being yelled at, you should get quieter rather than louder because then the other person—usually Dad—has to get quieter too, just to be able to hear you. It worked only sometimes. “I’m thinking you have it pretty good here and you should be grateful.”
“That’s easy for you to say! You can leave and go back to your normal life.” My voice only gets louder, despite its shaking. “We’re stuck here.”
Jackie releases a short breath of air, and when I meet her eyes, they are cold. I’ve never seen her look like that before. She raises her eyebrows and inhales a deep, long breath of air, like she’s preparing to deliver a huge monologue, but she only whispers, more to herself, “Okay.”
