A Place For Us

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  In the silence that followed, Phoebe felt her limbs turn to pins and needles. Dread filled her with a kind of lethargy. This was too much for her. She couldn’t handle it. By the time both her parents entered her room, she’d almost willed herself back to sleep.

  “Phoebe?” her mom said. “We need to talk to you, honey.”

  Phoebe opened her eyes and stared at the low ceiling. The room was barely ten feet by twelve, a crummy little box. She hated the flimsiness of the house, with its chipped wood veneer cupboards in the kitchen and the spotted wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere. The air that was always slightly fetid with leftover cooking smells. Her mom worked her tail off, but there was never any money for extras. The cashmere sweater had been a birthday gift from Uncle Fred to her mom. It had seemed to Phoebe to be the one new, beautiful thing to enter the house in months. Now her father carried the soiled ruin under his right arm. Phoebe could feel his gaze on her. She flinched when he cracked his knuckles.

  “Look at me,” he said. Phoebe’s turtleneck snagged on the blanket as she turned to face her father, exposing the ugly bruises.

  “Oh, my God!” Wanda said. She sat down beside her daughter on the bed and peeled the turtleneck back farther. “Oh, Phoebe, honey, what happened?”

  “Who did that to you?” Troy demanded. “Where were you last night?”

  Phoebe shook her head. When it became clear that she was unwilling to speak, Wanda said, “I told you: she was babysitting. She was at the Bostocks’.”

  “What the hell went on there last night?” Troy said.

  Phoebe shook her head faster. The sweater’s sweet-sour smell filled her nostrils, and her stomach rebelled. She sat forward, weeping and retching at the same time, though there was nothing left to throw up. Her mom pulled her into her arms.

  “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay,” Wanda murmured, rocking her daughter back and forth.

  “I’m going to leave the room, Phoebe,” Troy announced. “And I want you to take that top off and let your mom see the rest of your body. Wanda, you need to ask your daughter some hard questions here. Do you understand me? I’m going to be standing right outside the door.”

  Phoebe fell back on the pillow as her dad turned to leave, then curled into a ball when the door slammed shut behind him.

  “It’s okay,” Wanda said, rubbing Phoebe’s back. “It’s okay. We just need to know what happened. Were you drinking last night, honey?”

  Troy had taken the sweater with him, but its stench still hung in the air. The lingering taste of scotch coated Phoebe’s tongue. Surely, her mom could smell it on her daughter; it seemed embedded in her very pores.

  “Yeah,” Phoebe said into the pillow.

  “Where did you get it from?”

  “Liam’s friend.”

  “So Liam was involved with what happened? Who else was there?”

  “Liam and his roommate and his roommate’s brother.”

  “So these boys offered you something to drink—and you just decided to take them up on it? I know this isn’t the right moment to lecture you, Phoebe, but I am surprised. I mean I really thought we understood each other on this subject. Remember that talk we had last summer?”

  A fresh wave of anguish swept through Phoebe as she thought back on the conversation her mom was referring to. It had been right after Liam first confided in Phoebe about his problems. Wanda, who periodically suggested that Phoebe “share anything that might be on your mind,” had gotten an earful from her daughter about the dangers of teenage drinking. Oh, Phoebe had just been on fire with her love for Liam—thrilled by how much he was beginning to rely on her. How much he needed her!

  “Liam asked me to stay,” she told Wanda, turning around to face her mother. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, her lips swollen.

  “Tilly was already in bed?” Wanda asked, brushing back Phoebe’s bangs. “So it was the three boys and you. Liam asked you to stay. And you all had something to drink. Is that right?”

  “Liam’s roommate didn’t, but his older brother did. I think maybe they all had been drinking on the way up from school. They seemed a little out of it when they got there.”

  “So when did Mr. and Mrs. Bostock come home? Did they see what was going on? Did they realize you’d been drinking?”

  “Mommy,” Phoebe said, fresh tears springing up. “They didn’t come home. They spent the night with friends somewhere. I knew that they were planning to—but I forgot to tell you.”

  “You forgot? That’s a little hard to believe,” Wanda said, frowning as she took in her daughter’s blotchy cheeks and swollen eyes. “But let’s deal with that later. Sit up a sec. We’re going to take this turtleneck off. Lift your arms up. That’s a good girl.” Wanda had to tug hard to get the top over her daughter’s head. Phoebe had the pale, sensitive, lightly freckled skin of most redheads, which made the welts on her upper arms—the color and shape of fingerprints—appear that much darker and more vicious-looking.

  “Oh, my God!” Wanda said.

  “What?” Troy called from the other side of the door.

  “Mommy!” Phoebe cried, as she looked down at herself and began to understand the full extent of her brutalization. Troy banged on the door.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Cover up a little, honey,” Wanda said, rising from the bed. “I think we need to let your daddy see this.”

  • • •

  Troy appeared to be in complete control of his emotions. He didn’t curse or cry out when he gently examined his daughter’s neck and arms. He sounded perfectly reasonable when he asked Wanda to get her digital camera. And when he took the many photos, from many different angles, of Phoebe’s bruises, he was thorough and methodical. But it was this very composure that alarmed both Wanda and Phoebe. They knew his temper too well. Yes, he was calm—but they were both aware that it was a deadly calm.

  “Okay,” he said finally, turning off the camera and handing it back to Wanda, who’d pulled over the chair from Phoebe’s desk and was wedged in next to the bed. Troy crossed his arms on his big chest and looked down at his dear daughter’s tearstained face.

  “Did he rape you?”

  Phoebe shook her head.

  “Are you sure? Would you have even known it if he had?”

  “Yes,” Phoebe whispered. “I would know. Because he tried.”

  “He tried? But—what? He couldn’t do it? Or you wouldn’t let him? What happened?”

  “I—kicked him,” Phoebe said, the memory of Brandon’s tongue in her throat returning unbidden, along with that of Liam, passed out on the chair, openmouthed. “I kicked him where it hurts.”

  “Good for you, baby,” Troy said with a mirthless laugh. “And I believe you. But your mom’s going to run you up to the ER anyway and have you checked out.”

  “Oh, no, Daddy!” Phoebe said, pulling the covers around her. “I’m fine—really. I promise. I’m perfectly okay.”

  “Bullshit!” The word thundered around the little room. “You’ve been assaulted! You’re covered with bruises. That Bostock kid tried to rape you, Phoebe! And, believe me, I’m going after that bastard. He’s not going to get away with this.”

  “But, Daddy—,” Phoebe began. Now was the moment to tell him that it wasn’t Liam who had attacked her. He’d only sat passively by. But her father’s outrage finally released her own anger—anger that until now had been covered over with layers of guilt, self-loathing, and shame. Brandon’s stupid fat fucking cunt comment had been circling through her tortured thoughts all day, holding up a cruel mirror to her wounded psyche: Was this how Liam saw her, too? Dumb and overweight? She’s been putting out for me since seventh grade! Liam had told Brandon. That’s what he really thinks of me, Phoebe told herself. He’s just been using me. And then making fun of me to his rich friends. He’s been laughing at me all this time!

  “There’re no buts about this,” Troy told her. “You’ve been wronged. You’ve been harmed. Nobody has the right to do wha
t that boy did to you. I don’t care if he’s the Dalai Lama. We will not be humiliated. We will not be pushed aside. We will not stand for this. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Phoebe said at last.

  5

  Brook had overdone it again, Michael reflected as he trudged up the pathway to his studio. It was supposed to have been a simple family supper—an informal and relaxed preholiday get-together with Michael’s mom, his older sister Lynn, and her husband, Alan Simonetti—but Brook had put together a buffet worthy of one her R.S.V.P. events.

  “My goodness!” Michael’s mom, Ethel, had said when Brook showed everyone into the dining room. There, arranged along the sideboard, and interspersed with gold-dusted pinecones and delicate branches of white LED lights, was a tiered cake stand of tea sandwiches, platters of smoked salmon, steamed jumbo shrimp, and a spiral-cut glazed ham studded with cloves. Though never truly impoverished, Ethel had spent her married years pinching pennies and taking pride in making do with very little. “Who else is coming? The Queen of England?”

  Beyond, through the double French doors, a large, elaborately decorated Christmas tree brushed the top of the great room’s cathedral ceiling. Almost every mantelpiece, bookcase, and tabletop downstairs bore some evidence of the obvious pleasure Michael’s wife took in the holiday season.

  “No, it’s only us,” Brook told her mother-in-law. “But there’s no reason we can’t make it a special occasion, is there? Liam just got back from school. I feel like celebrating a little!”

  “And the good china, too,” Lynn said, picking up one of the gold-rimmed plates and turning it upside down. Michael glanced over at Brook, who met his gaze: Don’t correct her! he telegraphed. She doesn’t need to know this isn’t your best. Michael himself couldn’t keep track of how many different sets of plates they actually owned. Brook kept a “party room” down in the finished basement where she stored the extra cutlery, glasses, and china she kept accumulating. Though some of it was used for local R.S.V.P. events, Michael had resigned himself to the fact that his wife collected pretty tableware the way some women acquired expensive shoes.

  Brook seemed to understand what his look was saying. Her smile faded a little. She didn’t respond to Lynn’s comment. She’d obviously picked up on his discomfort about once again having to mediate between her overly generous tendencies and his grudging family.

  “Leave plenty of room for dessert!” Tilly instructed everyone as she piled shrimp onto her plate. “Mom’s been baking for like the last two months!”

  “Yes, but this is the kind of thing I do for a living,” Brook said. It saddened Michael to think that he was responsible for making his wife apologize for her largesse. And he knew how proud Brook was of the success she had made of R.S.V.P. But she still didn’t seem to understand that her in-laws considered her “business” something Brook did as a lark. Everyone knew she didn’t actually need to work, Michael could just about hear his sister Lynn thinking, Putting on big, la-di-da parties? Well, who wouldn’t want to do that if you had the free time?

  “So how’s the new school working out for you?” Michael’s brother-in-law Alan asked Liam as people began to take their seats around the table.

  “Okay,” Liam replied, picking up and then putting down his fork. Michael tried not to stare too openly at his son. Ever since Michael had tried to hug him that morning when he and Brook got back from Rhinebeck and Liam had just stood there—stiff as a statue in his arms—Michael had been trying to figure out what was going on. Did Liam seem even more withdrawn than before? Sullen and withholding? Oh, he was just being a teenager, for chrissakes, Michael would tell himself one moment; then the next he’d know for certain that something was wrong. Liam’s spark, that wicked sense of humor, was gone. Things were getting worse, not better. Sending Liam to Moorehouse had been, just as Michael had feared, a mistake.

  “Maybe you could enumerate on that ‘okay’ a little,” Michael suggested.

  “Enumerate?” Liam asked.

  “Yes. You know—fill in a few details for us.”

  “Oh,” Liam said, looking down. “You mean elaborate.”

  “Right,” Michael said, reaching for his water glass. Don’t react, he told himself. Don’t show you’re angry. Don’t even let him know you noticed the put-down. But, honestly, it felt like a slap in the face. And Liam’s little jibe had landed squarely on one of Michael’s sore spots—his tendency to fumble words when he was nervous or upset. Had Liam intended to hurt him in that way? No, Michael didn’t think so. He couldn’t allow himself to think so. For years, he’d thought of his son as his best friend, the one person he really wanted to hang out with. It was just that damned school, Michael told himself. Liam was surrounded now by rich, entitled kids who’d never been taught the importance of manners, let alone respect.

  Brook had told him—with a resigned laugh—that the third-floor guest room where Liam’s friends had slept the night before looked like a tsunami had come through. His dad would have slapped him halfway to kingdom come if he’d left a room that way, Michael knew.

  It was probably just the time of year, all those sentimental Christmas carols and the forced cheer, but he found himself thinking a lot about his father these days. Old Jack Bostock. “Jack of All Trades,” he used to call himself, “Master of None.” His dad thought most careers were a joke. No, Jackie B. was smarter than that. He preferred the odd job, the short-term project, anything that freed him up to develop his gadgets and novelty items. The erasable magnetic memo pad. The reusable kitchen garbage bag. The never-fail squirrel-proof bird feeder. Surefire breakthrough inventions that were going to make them all millionaires. Michael thought about the endless hours the old man spent down in the basement, soldering scrap metal and filling out patent forms. Only to be one step behind, or a few inches too close to, someone else’s design.

  Not that Jack ever gave up. There was always another brilliant idea. The next big dream. In the meantime, he learned how to play the unemployment system like an accordion—squeezing it here, easing off a bit there, always with a grin and a ready one-liner. Because Jack was a kidder. He was a real card. Except when he drank—which he made a stab at keeping to just weekends and holidays. When he really let loose. Christmas was one long, nonstop, riotous binge. Riotous to Jack, anyway. Not to his only son.

  “You’re looking so much like your dad these days,” Michael’s mom told him as he helped her carry Brook’s presents and carefully packaged leftovers out to Ethel’s car after supper. “I always miss him this time of the year. Oh, how that man loved a good time!”

  Since Jack’s early death from a heart attack—when Michael was just twenty-two—Ethel had devoted a good part of her energies to turning her late husband into a plaster saint. “The girls”—Michael’s three much older sisters, who’d married and moved on before Jack’s drinking turned mean—seemed perfectly happy to enable their mother in her mythmaking. But then, they’d never been exposed to the father that Michael had come to know all too well. Jack was the life of the party, all right, unless you were the one who had to scrape him off the floor when it was over. Oh, sure, everyone laughed at his jokes—except if you happened to be the butt of so many of them. Michael grew up acting as his father’s punch line and punching bag rolled into one.

  “Take Mikey, here,” Jack would say, as the bar started to empty and Michael quietly urged his father to call it a night. “Big strapping guy, right? Thinks he’s better than his dad. So I say, Mike—come on, take a shot at me. Why not? Show the old man what you’ve got.”

  Michael could hear the taunting words even now—and feel his stomach clench at the memory—as he pushed open the door to his studio. He flicked on the overhead lights and breathed in the scent of woodsmoke and tung oil that permeated the still air. He hadn’t been completely honest with Brook when, after his family left, he told her that he needed to get some work done on his new commission. In fact, the enormous bird’s-eye maple conference room table, which he was constru
cting from three separate lengths of wood, was well under way. No, what he needed was some time alone. To think about Liam. To get a grip on his feelings. Jesus, it was like he was still a boy himself. Stung by Liam’s stupid, thoughtless comment. As though he didn’t know what “elaborate” meant!

  He started the fire in the woodstove. He donned his work gloves and goggles and began to sand. Moving with the grain. Feeling the satisfying give of grit under the heel of his palm. The sweet aroma of wood dust tickling his nostrils. The trouble was, unlike his own dad, who saw Michael as competition, he loved Liam, unconditionally, with all his heart. He had never raised a hand against his son, unlike his own dad, who’d whipped Michael with his leather belt on pretty much a regular basis. He had thought about that kind of thing a lot when he was a kid. How different he was going to be from his own father. How he was never going to repeat any of Jack’s mistakes.

  Michael’s thoughts drifted back across the decades, as they so often did when he was working. It was one of the great things about the solitary, hands-on nature of his business that his mind was usually free to roam. Except when, instead of slipping gently over the surface of things, he found his thoughts swirling around and around in narrowing circles of worry and regret.

  “How would you know?” Liam had demanded last June when everything blew up in their faces. “You’ve never done anything wrong. You’re fucking perfect!”

  And instead of responding to his son’s cry of pain, instead of being honest and telling Liam the truth about his own terrible early mistakes, Michael had stupidly jumped all over Liam’s swearing.

  “Where did you learn to talk like that?” Michael had replied. “Not from me!”

  “Exactly,” Liam told him. “You’re too fucking good to use bad language.”

  Michael knew what his son was going through, far more than Liam would ever be able to understand. He knew how much Liam wanted Michael to rise to the bait. He wanted him to strike out—strike back—help Liam redistribute the blame. Michael’s father had been the same way: always coming out of his corner swinging, challenging any and all comers, but especially his only son. Which was exactly why Michael taught himself to hold his tongue and not fight back. He wasn’t about to let Jack know how much his taunts got to him. He trained himself to be strong, determined not to give his old man the satisfaction of knowing he was actually bleeding inside. Though sometimes he felt like the Spartan boy he learned about in school who hid a stolen fox inside his cloak and allowed it to gnaw him to death.