The Last to Let Go

by Amber Smith

  “Why do you sound like that?” she asks. “All sarcastic or something?”

  “Because. Come on, my neighborhood is not cool, I promise. You know, it’s not a bad thing to live in a nice neighborhood,” I tell her, but I hear it too—a tinge of something in my voice—not sarcasm exactly. Something more sour than sarcasm. I swallow it down. “Hey, stop worrying, this will be fine.” I rub her shoulder and smile sweetly, burying that bitterness somewhere deep in my gut.

  “Okay . . . this is me,” she says, pulling her car into the driveway of a house that looks like something out of a magazine. Tall, made of brick and siding, with a big, beautiful wraparound porch, complete with a swing and wind chimes and bird feeders, shutters flanking every window, a big tree in the front yard that’s lost all its leaves. And, sure enough, it really does look pretty much identical to the houses on either side. It reminds me of Jackie’s neighborhood, except everything is a lot newer, a lot bigger, fancier.

  When we walk through the door, everything is neat and clean and orderly, just as it was on the outside. And bright. Lots of windows with matching curtains. Smells like flowers—lavender, maybe—though I don’t see any. We take our shoes off in the entryway, and Dani hangs our heavy jackets on the coatrack next to the door.

  “Okay,” she whispers. “Brace yourself.”

  “Danielle?” I hear a woman’s voice call. “Danielle, is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” she yells as I follow her through her living room, decorated almost entirely in blue—all different shades of it. Blue couch with blue pillows, a blue abstract painting on the pale blue wall. “And Brooke is here too.”

  “Hold on!” I hear, the voice sounding like it’s getting closer. I hear a small crash in the next room and then a muffled “Ow, damn!” before a woman emerges from the doorway. She’s a full head shorter than both me and Dani. As she comes closer, I can see bits and pieces of her in Dani—the same smile, the same voice. She has amazing deep-brown eyes and shiny black hair pulled back into a french braid, her skin the same bronze tone as Dani’s, except deeper. She’s wearing a skirt suit with panty hose and no shoes, her jacket unbuttoned to reveal a white satin shirt underneath that it looks like she was in the process of untucking when she ran in here.

  “Brooke, finally!” she shouts, walking right up to me and throwing her birdlike arms around my neck, as if we’ve just been reunited after years of being apart. I feel a jolt, a spark in my chest, a small electric shock—trying to remember the last time someone hugged me like this. Even though this woman is essentially a stranger, I don’t want her to let go. I try to gather this up for my memory, save it, and store it somewhere cool and dry. There for me to pull out another day when I need it.

  When she releases me, she still holds on to my arms, as if she senses, somehow, how much I’ve been longing for a mother. “We are so happy to have you,” she tells me, her voice soft, like she’s talking to a little kid. “Danielle’s father isn’t home yet, but he’s looking forward to meeting you too. Danielle never brings friends home anymore. We keep asking her, ‘Where’s Brooke? Why don’t you invite your friend Brooke over?’ ”

  “Okay, Mom—let her breathe, please.” Dani steps in between us and gives her mom a hug. She’s so casual about it, but I guess she must get hugs every day. She mumbles “Sorry” to me under her breath. A petty monster of jealousy begins to creep up my spine, one vertebra at a time.

  “Oh, stop!” her mother tells her, swatting at her arm lightly. “I’m a mother—it’s my job to embarrass you. Right, Brooke?”

  “Right,” I agree. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  “There. See?” she says to Dani, waving her arm in my direction. “She said it’s nice to meet me.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Dani moans. “I heard. Mom, look, we’re going to go upstairs and study until dinner, okay?”

  “Fine, hide her from us—that’s fine. I just got home myself. I need to get out of these clothes!” she calls after us, already halfway out of the room.

  Dani narrates for me as we move from space to space: “Dining room, where we never eat unless we have company.” Then she leads me from the formal dining room through a kitchen with shiny new appliances and a sliding glass door that leads outside to an enormous backyard. “Kitchen, obviously. Kitchen table, where we always eat. Outside, grass, garden, pool, blah, blah, blah.” She talks fast and walks even faster, as if this is all too humiliating for her to bear. Then down a hall she points to doors: “Basement, where there’s a game room nobody uses. Bathroom. My parents’ room. Their office—where they keep the good liquor,” she whispers behind a cupped hand. “Now. Upstairs. Almost there,” she says, lowering her voice, taking the stairs two at a time.

  “Okay, we’re in the sanctuary now,” she announces, slightly out of breath as she reaches the top step.

  “One minute forty-five seconds,” I say, looking at the place on my wrist where a watch would be. “You could probably shave off at least five seconds if you skip the kitchen portion of the tour next time.”

  She takes my face in her hands and looks at me straight in the eyes for a moment. Then she reaches for my hand and leads me into this loft area that the stairs spill out into, a closed door on either side. There’s a window seat straight ahead, and bookshelves and a big red couch with lots of pillows, a TV with some kind of complicated gaming system hooked up to it. There’s a huge dollhouse that sits on a table in the corner, looking suspiciously like a miniature version of this house. And next to the dollhouse, the guinea pig habitat.

  “So this is my pad. My sister and I have the whole upstairs. Of course”—she gestures to the closed door on the right, big foam letters spelling out V TORI ’S ROO—“she’s away at college now, so it’s just me. And Bonnie and Clyde,” she adds, pointing at the two balls of white-and-gray fur nested into a kingdom of cedarwood chips.

  “I like Bonnie and Clyde. Victoria, is it?” I ask her, trying to read through the missing letters.

  “Tori.”

  “Okay, Danielle,” I tease.

  “Dani,” she corrects. “No Danielle—not ever.”

  “Okay, Dani,” I relent, sensing she’s not joking about this one. “You miss her a lot, don’t you?” I ask, though I don’t tell her that I can relate to missing a sister.

  She nods, then turns toward the door on the left: DANI S R OM. “She’s my best friend. I know that’s totally dorky, but it’s true. It’s actually kind of ridiculous how much I miss her,” she tells me, trying to cover up her sadness with a laugh. “You may have noticed I don’t exactly have all that many friends.”

  The terrible thing is, I didn’t really notice. But now that she’s mentioned it, it’s not like I ever see her hanging out with anyone other than Tyler. “Why is that?” I ask as I follow her into her bedroom. “You’re a nice girl.”

  “Ha, ha,” she deadpans, pulling me in and closing the door behind us. I barely have time to look around before she’s kissing me, her hands finding my waist. I kiss her back, running my fingers through her hair, my favorite part the soft, downy fuzz that’s growing in from when she shaved it before school started.

  “Hey,” I say softly, pulling away. “Aren’t I supposed to be the one with all the evasive maneuvers? Not that I don’t like your maneuvering, but . . .” I step away from her to take a look around her room—posters line every inch of every wall, floor to ceiling, so that I can’t even tell the color of the wall underneath. Bands I’ve never heard of, movie posters for movies I’ve never seen, quotes, art, pages torn from books. “Now, your room definitely feels a lot more like Dani than the rest of your house.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says, coming up behind me and threading her arms around my waist, pressing her mouth against my neck.

  “You should.” I walk up to her vanity—formerly white wicker but now covered with bumper stickers that overlap one another so they can barely be read. A mirror is framed by snapshots. “Is that her? Tori?” I a
sk, looking at one that features a younger-looking Dani with black, shoulder-length hair standing next to another girl who looks almost identical to her, except maybe a little older and with their mom’s dark eyes. “And you . . . look at your hair—oh my God!”

  “Yeah, that’s us.”

  There are other pictures too. I recognize a few people from school. But not anyone I ever see talking to Dani. Yet here they all are, smiling, laughing, shouting together in these pictures. I decide not to ask what the deal is. If she wants me to know, she’ll tell me.

  “Your mom is adorable. You know that, right?”

  “I do,” she says with a sigh. “I know. She’s very sweet.”

  “You must get your eyes from your dad, though.”

  “My eyes?” she repeats, batting her lashes dramatically.

  “Yes, your beautiful eyes,” I tell her. “I’ve been a huge admirer of them since the first day of school, you know.”

  “Oh really?” she says with a wide grin, pulling me over to her bed. We lie down side by side. I feel her let out a long breath of air. She has glow-in-the-dark stars plastered all over the ceiling, arranged in haphazard clusters. “Yes, I have my dad’s eyes. He’s white, by the way—not sure if I ever mentioned that. Don’t want you to be surprised when you meet him. I mean, a lot of people don’t realize. My mom’s side of the family is from India. But she grew up here.”

  “You never really told me that,” I say. “But I guess I kind of figured.”

  “He’s nice too,” she adds. “You’ll see.”

  I prop myself up on my elbow so I can see her face. “All right, I have to ask. Why do you seem so damn sad about your parents being nice and sweet?”

  “They’re nice, they’re sweet, they love me, they take care of me, feed me, clothe me, all of that, and I’m grateful, I really, really am. But . . .” She stops, inhales through her nose. “I’ll always be Danielle to them.”

  “So they don’t know that you’re . . . that we’re . . . you know . . . together?”

  “Oh, they know!” She laughs, bitterly, in this way I’ve never heard from her before—it sounds so wrong coming from her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, everything is all on the surface with them.”

  I nod, encouraging her to tell me more.

  “I came out to them in eighth grade. I sat them down at the dining room table, Tori next to me for moral support, and I flat-out told them, no two ways about it, I’m a lesbian. They sat there, listened, then asked if I wanted ice cream. Never talked about it again. They’ve never acknowledged it, never asked any questions. It’s like they pretend it never happened. That’s just the way it is.”

  She hoists herself up from the bed and walks over to the mirror to look at the pictures again. “You know, I used to have tons of friends,” she tells me, her smile wavering, making it clear she’s trying not to cry. “When I was this person”—she holds up the photo of herself with shoulder-length hair—“but that person’s gone, and so are all of those so-called friends.”

  “They stopped being friends with you when you came out?”

  “Not exactly,” she says with a shrug. “They just sort of faded slowly, one by one. But I still had Tori, and later, Tyler, and somehow that was enough.”

  “Until this year,” I add. “Right?”

  She nods and bites her lip, trying not to cry. I stand and walk over to her. I put my arms around her, the way that I’ve needed these past several months. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t met you, seriously,” she whispers into my hair.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “I know.”

  “I guess,” she says, sniffling as she lets go of me, “the thing that bothers me most about my parents is they should be able to understand. You know, their families were not okay with the two of them getting married. My mom’s parents wanted her to marry an Indian guy. My dad’s parents thought they we were too different from each other—they didn’t get it, they worried about things like, what religion would their grandchildren be raised in, stuff like that, you know?”

  I nod.

  “But they loved each other and they did what was right for them. I’ve always really respected that—respected them for that. Except now they can’t see that I need to be different in the same way that they needed to be different from their parents. They can’t see me.” She lets herself sink down onto the small stool at her vanity mirror. “It’s so frustrating!” She pulls a tissue from the box that sits on the desk and wipes her eyes. “They’re such hypocrites, sometimes I can’t stand it.”

  I kneel down on the floor so we’re at eye level. “I see you,” I tell her.

  “I see you, too.”

  No she doesn’t, my brain argues. I do my best to ignore it.

  We eat in the dining room, the room Dani said they use only when guests are here. The food is great. Her parents are perfectly lovely and sweet and polite, and she does have her dad’s eyes. But she’s right; they don’t see her at all. They don’t want to see her. This is no dollhouse after all. I look at Dani across the table, feeling like maybe we’re more alike than I thought, like maybe someday I could let her see me, too, all of me.

  SEEKING WATER

  SINCE FOURTH GRADE I’VE missed two days of school, and that was only because I was contagious with strep throat. I’ve never even considered skipping school before. Until today.

  Dani has been texting all morning with updates about all the stupid stuff I’ve been missing—Robinson yelled at a student, student cried; someone dropped a lunch tray in the cafeteria; a kid was sent to the principal’s office for making sex noises in AP American History; Tyler’s wearing mascara and got really mad at Dani for pointing it out; and so on.

  I told her it’s a flu-like thing. Which is believable, probably brought on by the sudden cold snap. The second week of December and we’re in the single digits, which seems wrong when there isn’t even any snow on the ground yet.

  I had to wait until the seats filled in, so I could sneak in the back of the courtroom without being seen—Mom was very clear, she didn’t want me here. She told Aaron, Jackie, and her lawyer to keep me away. But I couldn’t force myself to go to school and sit there through all my classes and pretend like this was an ordinary day.

  Aaron sits at the very front, Jackie and Ray next to him. There’s a table with Mr. Clarence, Mom’s lawyer. He turns around and says something to Aaron. I see Aaron shake his head, and then he nods—what they’re saying, I can’t tell. I notice that Carmen isn’t here.

  People start talking all around me, chattering, and that’s when I realize it: They’re bringing my mom out. She’s thinner, lighter, like she might just float away, if not for the two officers flanking her. They each hold on to an arm, as if she’s dangerous, in need of being kept under control. She’s wearing a blue dress, one with a tiny flower print, the one she used to wear to work all the time. I watch them escort her to the table, where Mr. Clarence pulls her chair out for her. She sits and then turns around to look at Aaron, but she doesn’t say anything. Then, as if she can sense I’m here, her eyes flick up in my direction, almost at me. I duck my head quickly, watching her scan the faces around me once more before turning back around.

  Behind me I hear a raspy whisper: “I’m hiding too.”

  As I turn around, the voice and its words sink in slowly. Caroline. My grandmother. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I turn back around, trying to remind myself how to breathe. I have trouble paying attention knowing she’s right behind me, the keeper of family secrets, the cause of so much pain, according to Jackie and my mom.

  A whole group of cops in uniform are in the seats on the opposite side of the room. A few rows ahead of me I see Tony, sitting in between two people. He is the only police officer on my mom’s side. I know those can’t be good odds. I see Mrs. Allister from downstairs, her signature permed puff of old-lady hair on the top of her head. Both Mr. Clarence and the other lawyer make their statements.
Various people are called up to the stand—it seems like everyone is an expert on something.

  It all feels very tame, anticlimactic, until Mr. Clarence calls a woman up, Dr. Montgomery. He approaches the witness stand, addresses the doctor with a casual tone. “You know, one of the first things many of us think whenever we hear about a woman being abused by her husband is, why did she stay? Why didn’t she tell someone? Why couldn’t she simply ask for help? Can you explain it—for those of us who have a hard time understanding—what is the thought process here?”

  “You’re absolutely right, it can be extremely hard to understand, especially for anyone who’s never experienced it firsthand. It’s not just about the physical abuse,” she tells Mr. Clarence. “Before Mr. Winters ever struck Mrs. Winters for the first time, he had already beaten her down emotionally, mentally—destroyed her confidence, made her feel worthless, like everything that was happening was her fault. . . .”

  I try so hard to listen, but her voice goes in and out. Something’s happening to me—each word is like a punch in the stomach, a slap in the face, a kick in the teeth. They echo over and over, pounding like a stake being driven into the side of my head. I’m suddenly plagued by an overwhelming rush of nausea through my whole body—not only my stomach, but in my throat and arms and legs—every part of me feels sick somehow. I notice my body tilting; I lean forward in my seat, my head feeling so heavy I think I might fall all the way over. But there’s a hand, strong on my shoulder, squeezing lightly, pulling me back from the edge of wherever I went just now. When I’m sitting upright, Caroline lets go and rests her hand on my back for a moment.

  When the other lawyer gets up to ask Dr. Montgomery questions, there’s this tone in his voice; it’s hard to say what it is, but it sounds so familiar. It feels like he’s bullying her—the same way Dad would bully Mom, making every word out of her mouth sound stupid, sound like a lie, twisting and bending every point she tries to make. Why didn’t Mr. Clarence get a male doctor to testify? That was stupid of him. They’re not taking her seriously. She’s too young, too pretty, too honest. She steps down from the witness stand looking defeated.