Three More Words

by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

The first picture was a dorm party in the common room taken just before Christmas. Two guys wore boxers and two girls were in scanty bikinis decorated with tinsel. I wore a tube top, and tights under a short skirt, with a fair amount of cleavage showing. I was pretending to guzzle a bottle of vodka. My expression was dopey—with half-closed eyes and my tongue to one side. “I had a couple of wine coolers, but I wasn’t as wasted as I look. We were kidding around.”

  “Yeah,” Gay said softly at first, “college kids party. No big deal. But do you want to know what is wrong with this picture?” She waited two long beats. “It’s on the friggin’ Internet!” she screeched. “What did I tell you? Don’t do anything that you don’t want to see printed on the front page of the newspaper the next day!”

  “I didn’t post it,” I croaked.

  “You posed for it.”

  “Where does this person get off sending your mother pictures like this—for Mother’s Day, for heaven’s sake!” Phil snarled.

  “I already wrote this Warner person and warned them,” Gay said.

  “What did you say?”

  “They had no right to duplicate and distribute your image, and that it was slanderous, libelous, whatever.”

  My parents’ reaction was completely different from what I had feared. They weren’t happy to see me looking slutty or drunk, but they were directing their wrath at the messenger.

  “Do you know what ‘schadenfreude’ means?” Gay asked. I shook my head. “It’s the sick satisfaction some people feel when they hear of someone else’s misfortune. People love to see those on a pedestal fall from grace—like a politician caught in a sex scandal or a movie star getting arrested. The tabloids bank on this unpleasant human trait.”

  “What Gay is trying to say is that the more well-known you are, the more pleasure someone will get from seeing you brought up short,” Phil said. “No matter what you were doing or not doing, these photos give the perception you were naughty.”

  “I’ll deal with it,” I promised.

  As it turned out, cleaning all my accounts and adding layers of privacy settings was more difficult than I had anticipated. We were the naive pioneers of social media. Nobody expected that parents, old boyfriends, stalkers, potential employers, school administrators, and law enforcement would scrutinize our web presence. When I was in foster care, any misbehavior was written into my permanent record, and childish mistakes as well as official inaccuracies haunted me for years to come. This was the adult version of the same curse.

  Early in my sophomore year, I was helping Sid serve refreshments in the theater lobby.

  “Hi, Sid,” a rail-thin professor said.

  “This is Professor Wydell,” Sid said. “I’m in his religious philosophy class.”

  “What are you doing for Winter Term?” he asked Sid.

  Eckerd closes the campus in January for Winter Term, which is an intensive study of one subject or community service, including college-sponsored courses worldwide.

  “My parents want me to do a project near our home in Germany.”

  “What about you?” The professor stared at me with electric-blue eyes. “I’m leading the one in South Africa.”

  “I’d love to go.”

  “We’d love to have you,” the professor said so warmly that I assumed my reputation wasn’t as bad as I thought.

  During the second semester of my freshman year, I had joined the women’s rugby team. I knew from the first scrum that I had found my sport! Running, tackling, and grabbing the ball were outlets for any pent-up frustrations or annoyances—even ancient angers that lingered in my bones. I gained respect for being both fast and tough, and was nicknamed “Chainsaw” for my fierce tackling.

  The Courters came to the first match of my sophomore year, and Phil filmed my game-winning try. Running toward the ball, I turned one direction and my knee went another. My leg buckled under me. I had to be carried off the pitch, and the searing pain did not subside despite icing. I had torn my ACL and needed replacement surgery.

  “But I’m going to South Africa in January!” I complained to the surgeon.

  The doctor consulted his calendar. “If I operate within the next two weeks, you can get your rehab done over the holidays and go on the trip—as long as you promise not to go out for one of the rugby teams over there.”

  After the surgery, Phil and Gay took turns nursing me. My leg was wrapped with a clumsy apparatus that pumped cool water around my knee to prevent swelling. It had to be refilled with ice every few hours.

  The second day I was home, Erick showed up unannounced. I was camped out on the living room sofa because I couldn’t make it upstairs to my room. I opened my eyes and tried to focus, but his features broke into fragments, then re-formed in the light glinting off the bay. I started to sweat. Erick brought me a wet washcloth and wiped my face. “Here, drink some ginger ale,” he said, guiding the cup to my lips.

  That night he slept on the other side of the U-shaped couch and got up to refill the ice compartment. The next day he said, “I’ll take care of Ashley in St. Pete.”

  “That’s a lot for you to take on,” Gay said. “She should stay here for a few more days.”

  “I have to get back to class,” I insisted. “He can stay in my dorm room.” One benefit to being an RA is that you get a private room, and mine had a comfy thrift-store couch.

  My residents brought me food from the caf, but Erick added fresh ice through the night and rearranged pillows when I moaned.

  Getting around on crutches was harder than I expected, but nobody minded when I stumbled into class a few minutes late. I was taking extra courses because I had decided to major in both theater and communications and had added two minors in psychology as well as political science and couldn’t afford to get behind. Immediately after New Year’s, my doctor cleared me for the trip to Africa.

  By the time we arrived in the hostel in the Observatory section of Cape Town, my knee was throbbing from being in the cramped airline seat for more than twenty-four hours. I had also slept through breakfast on the plane, and when I got to the hostel, I was starving and bought a hot dog from a street vendor. I woke in the middle of the night with stabbing stomach pains and started retching in the sink.

  Professor Wydell checked in on me when I missed the orientation meeting. “Take it easy on the booze. I know it is legal for you to drink here, but obviously you’re not used to it.”

  “I have food poisoning.”

  “That’s one way of describing it.”

  Perhaps some other students had already gotten drunk, but the strongest beverage I’d had so far had been a Coke. I dragged myself to the hostel’s common room for the next lecture, which was a short course on the history of South Africa.

  The next day we were to start the volunteer portion of the program, but the bus never arrived, so we were on our own. There wasn’t much to do where we were in the Observatory section of town except go to restaurants or bars. The closest place was an English-speaking bar patronized by students from all over the world. When I first hobbled in, the waiter sat me in a booth where I could rest my leg. “How’d ya manage that?” he asked when he saw the still-livid scar.

  “Rugby.”

  “Bring this one a springbok on the house!” he said.

  I took a sip. It was minty and tasty. Best of all, I wasn’t breaking a law by drinking.

  That afternoon I had several springboks. The first relaxed me, the second masked my knee pain, and by the third I was finally having a marvelous time. I stumbled back to the hostel, but I don’t remember much more than the ceiling spinning when I lay down and not waking up until morning.

  The next day we began our service projects, and the final week we toured Table Mountain, the Cape of Good Hope, Robben Island, and the seal and penguin colonies. The group even took a wine-tasting tour. Wherever we went I ordered a springbok—or two—to help ease the pain of walking. Except for my sickness, I enjoyed the trip and received full credit.

  A f
ew months later, I exited the campus post office and saw Professor Wydell and a student soliciting donations to send mosquito nets to malarial villages. He waved me over. “Want to contribute?”

  I paused a bit too long. The professor hissed, “Ashley, if you donated half as much as you spent on your bar tab, we could outfit a whole village.”

  I reeled. Since the trip, I hadn’t had a single alcoholic beverage. I was angry that he was so mean-spirited and worried that someone might have overheard the nasty remark. I made a quick donation, then turned and walked to the far side of the campus with my face burning in a combination of rage and embarrassment. Why did I have to keep learning some lessons over and over? Apparently, once you blow your reputation, it is almost impossible to restore it. Professor Wydell thought I had been wasted, even though I’d had food poisoning. When he later saw me drunk on the springboks, his suspicions were confirmed. He had moved his mental index card on me from “dependable” to “unreliable”—or maybe something worse.

  Someday I hoped to change his mind.

  3.

  family matters

  Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.

  —Oprah Winfrey

  Once Lorraine knew I was in college, she started to text me on a regular basis. Seeing her name on my screen flooded me with conflicting emotions. Sometimes I gave quick responses; sometimes I ignored her. The Courters said I should “make peace with my past,” and “integrate all facets of my life,” and that “you cannot have too many people who love you.” Even so, I worried that there was an imaginary line with them, and I didn’t want to cross it. Also, I knew enough to worry that I could get ensnared in the spidery web of drama that spun around Lorraine.

  At the end of October of my freshman year, Lorraine called three times, leaving messages to phone her back. The fourth time she caught me rushing to class, and I answered without looking first at the name on the screen.

  “Hey, it’s me,” Lorraine said. “We’re having a Halloween carnival at church, and it would mean so much to Autumn if you could make it.”

  Scarlett was holding the door for me, but I waved her to go ahead. “I want you to meet Rex.” Lorraine paused, then added, “He’s the one who got me into this church—and sober.”

  “Okay,” I said, surprising myself. I was curious to see my sister again. Besides, maybe I needed to form a relationship with Autumn in case Lorraine crashed.

  I wasn’t comfortable going alone. I asked my roommate Iris.

  “I need the weekend to finish my paper on Japanese pottery,” she said. “Maybe Aiden will go.”

  Aiden was majoring in political science, and he made even the most boring topics sound interesting. He had a wonderful smile and hair a bit more strawberry than mine. “We gingers have to stick together” was his pickup line. You couldn’t call it dating, since there were few planned meet-ups. We just were . . . together . . . a lot. It felt wrong to even suggest the trip to him. Nikki would have been the best—she knew my life story—but she was working full-time and going to community college in Citrus County. Most weekends she stayed in St. Pete with Ian, and I didn’t want to drag her away from him. That left Erick. He didn’t seem surprised by my call and responded enthusiastically.

  “I just need to tell my dad I’ll help him with the roofing work on Sunday instead of Saturday.”

  When Iris heard that I’d called him, she snapped, “You rarely even take his calls, so how can you ask him to be your emotional air bag?”

  “We’re still friends. We help each other out,” I said, as much to convince myself as her.

  Iris looked at me challengingly. “Does he think of you the same way?”

  I shrugged. How could I explain our bond when I was so conflicted? I compared every guy I met to him and somehow expected that Erick would always be there if nothing else worked out. I knew this reflected poorly on me, so all I said was, “Either way, Erick has excellent intuition. He’ll help me figure out if she’s drinking and how her kid is doing.”

  People in stable families have no understanding of chaotic ones. The stronger members feel compelled to protect the weaker ones. Sometimes children parent their siblings or even take charge of their parents to keep them out of trouble and prevent the family from being split by authorities. Nobody from an upper-middle-class, intact family could imagine the terror of never knowing whether you will live under the same roof as the rest of your family the next day. I had done an abysmal job with my brother, Luke, who was never out of trouble. I wanted to protect Autumn—who had already lived with Lorraine two years more than I had—from the same fate, even though I hardly knew her.

  “So what’s the deal?” Erick asked as he drove my car toward the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

  It was one of those clear October days when Florida is the sapphire jewel on the earth’s ring. Behind us, St. Pete’s cluster of office towers and the dome from Tropicana Field baseball stadium formed a sculptural background as we headed higher and higher onto the causeway. The Gulf’s glassy surface was too bright to look at without sunglasses.

  “Just don’t leave me alone with Lorraine, okay?” I said, cracking the car window and taking some deep breaths of salty air. I have a tendency to get motion sick, and my anxiety caused a sour taste in the back of my throat.

  “What are you so worried about?”

  I swallowed hard to suck down the bile. “You don’t know how she can be.”

  I was relieved to see that we were turning into a nice neighborhood. Rex’s house was freshly painted a sunny yellow. The open garage door revealed several Harleys in various stages of repair.

  “Cool,” Erick said.

  Autumn was almost six and already in costume. She ran out the kitchen door that led into the garage. “Ashley’s here!” she shouted as Lorraine followed behind.

  “Wow!” I said. “Which princess are you?”

  “She’s Aurora from Sleeping Beauty,” Lorraine answered for her.

  “This is my friend Erick,” I said formally. He stepped closer to shake Lorraine’s hand.

  “I’m a hugger.” She reached around him for a squeeze, but I backed away. “We need to head over to the church in about twenty minutes. Did you bring costumes?”

  “I did,” I said. Erick had leant me an Elvis costume he’d worn for a Halloween party the year before, which came with a black wig. I added gold chains and large sunglasses.

  Lorraine looked to Erick, who shrugged. He hadn’t brought anything.

  “How about one of Rex’s motorcycle outfits?” Lorraine showed him how to pull the studded motorcycle chaps up over his jeans. “Hottie!” she giggled, making me wonder if she was trying to flirt with him. “We can’t all fit in my truck. You want to follow me?”

  The fair was bigger than I expected, with many booths and crafts for sale, including Bible covers and Christmas items. There was a biblical petting zoo, pony rides, freshly squeezed lemonade, and tables filled with homemade baked goods.

  Lorraine bought a stack of tickets so Autumn could try the games. Erick helped her throw balls for prizes, while Lorraine and I lingered in the background.

  Out of the blue Lorraine said, “I would have gone to college if I hadn’t had you.” She squinted into the distance. “At least I finished high school, even though I was pregnant—a real diploma, not a GED.”

  Erick stepped forward. “Is it okay if Autumn has her face painted?”

  “Do you have enough tickets?” Lorraine asked.

  “Yep!”

  She waved to a friend. “Everyone was so excited to hear that my firstborn was coming. No one can believe I have a daughter old enough for college.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how she described her relationship with me. Was I the taken-away-by-the-cruel-state-who-refused-to-give-her-a-helping-hand daughter or the one she lost because of her illegal and irresponsible actions? Well, maybe some higher being forgave all if she was saved, but that didn’t mean I had to absolve her as well.

&nbs
p; She watched Erick lead Autumn by the hand. “I like your guy. He’s very handsome! Does Gay like Erick?”

  I bristled. “She doesn’t really know him.”

  “What did Gay say about you coming to spend the weekend with me?”

  “I don’t tell Gay everything I do.”

  “Did Sammie let you know that I’m divorcing Autumn’s father?” I shook my head. “He was a bad influence. Now I’m clean, and so is Rex. He’s been sober for ten years this Thanksgiving.” I nodded. “You’ve been happy with those people, right?” she probed. I recognized her jealous tone. Envy is one of my flaws too.

  In the car on the way back to the house, I said to Erick, “Let’s come up with an excuse to go back tonight.”

  “Okay,” Erick agreed, but we couldn’t come up with a plan, and Erick is a terrible liar. Then Rex offered to take him on one of his fanciest motorcycles. We were staying.

  After Erick’s ride, Lorraine said, “Hope you like lasagna.” I saw one defrosting on the counter. “I make mine with low-fat ricotta, and nobody can tell the difference.” I’m very particular about food—it was like I hadn’t yet grown out of that picky-food stage that toddlers go through. I still disliked combination foods, even if the individual parts like cheese, noodles, and tomato sauce were fine, but I didn’t say anything. Now it really would have been rude to leave, since she already had prepared dinner.

  I picked at the noodles while Autumn gobbled hers messily, then put her head down on the table.

  “You finished?” Lorraine asked in a sharp tone. Autumn startled. “Get ready for bed, and don’t slop up the bathroom.”

  “Want me to help?” I asked Autumn.

  As I waited for her to put on her nightgown and brush her teeth, I was imagining my counselor at The Children’s Home supervising my bedtime routine.

  “I fall asleep in Mommy’s bed, then she moves me.”

  The smell of the perfume in the master bedroom was cloying. Tomato sauce rose in my esophagus, burning my throat. I had no memory of my mother ever tucking me in. “Night,” I said, and backed away from the bed.