Tony is right behind me, which should be comforting, but the responsibility of his presence weighs heavy on me. As for Elle, once again she doesn’t listen, and she and Mia troop up behind us.
The door opens as Dad steps up onto the pallet that serves as a porch.
Marley stands there, looking even more like a younger version of Mom now that she’s not dressed for a performance. No makeup, her hair drawn back into a loose ponytail. She’s wearing faded jeans and a western shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
She steps out and closes the door behind her. A wave of stale tobacco accompanies her, along with the blare of the television.
“This really isn’t a good idea,” she says. “I’m sorry. Maybe—”
“I want to talk to him,” Dad says.
“He’s not fit to talk to. Usually he’s better at this time of the day. Tomorrow?”
“Now.” Dad again. I can’t think what’s gotten into him, but I’m grateful. Now that we’re so close, I can’t bear to walk away without meeting my birth father, without knowing the other side of where I came from.
“Please, Marley. We had a deal.”
She shrugs. “Fine, then. It’s on you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She opens the door and steps aside to let us troop in.
There are too many people for the space, that’s immediately clear, and we all stand in an awkward huddle, exchanging curious stares with an old man propped up in a recliner. He’s got a can of beer in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. Two empties sit on a cluttered end table beside him, next to an overflowing ashtray.
“Who is this, then?” he demands. “Did you let some church group in, Marley?” His voice competes with a laugh track on the TV.
She crosses to him, picks up the remote from the arm of the chair, and presses Mute.
“This is your daughter—the other one. Maisey. She wanted to meet you.”
He squints in our direction. “Well, I’ll be a rat’s ass. Never expected to see your face, that’s certain. Come over here and let me get a look at you.”
He botches his first attempt to adjust the recliner so he can sit up, obviously confused by the problem of his occupied hands. He finally sets down the beer, takes another drag of the cigarette, and pushes the lever that brings him to sit upright.
His arms are thin and bony, his belly bloated. He reminds me of a spider.
I approach him the way I might something dead and stinking that needs to be attended to. There’s a sharp, bitter taste in the back of my throat. Up close I can smell beer and smoke and an infrequently washed body. He looks old. Much older than Dad. He’s bald on top, what’s left of his hair uncombed and lying in greasy strands. His front teeth are missing. Gray beard stubble sprouts from his jaw.
“You don’t look like her,” he says. “Marley favors Leah. You look more like me.”
It’s revolting but true. I can see the shape of my features in his wrinkled face. And his eyes, reddened and sunken as they are, still are the color of my eyes and Marley’s.
“Cat got your tongue?” he asks. “Seems like you must have had a reason for coming here.”
“Have a chair,” Marley interjects. “Sit down. I’ll bring more from the kitchen.”
I don’t want to sit. I want to bounce right out the door. But I perch on the edge of a ratty old couch, picking up a newspaper to make room. Dad sinks down beside me. Tony stays standing, and I can tell he’s on high alert.
“I didn’t know about you,” I say. “I did some digging after Mom died.”
“She’s truly dead, then.” He stubs his cigarette into the ashtray, but it doesn’t go out. Smoke continues to curl up, blue and sinuous.
“I told you, Boots,” Marley says. “You never listen.”
“Thought maybe you were making it up,” he says, dismissively. “Females.” He directs this at Tony. “Anybody want a beer? A cigarette? What can I do you for?”
I can’t think of anything to say. My imagination, generally so quick to jump in, completely fails to put this man together with my mother, even if I picture him young and possibly handsome. He’s tawdry and cheap and mean.
“You beat her,” Dad says, in a conversational tone of voice. “Frequently.”
Boots laughs. “Is that what she told you? Had a good imagination, did Leah. Passed it on to Marley. What about you, Maisey? You got an imagination?”
“Actually, Leah never mentioned you,” Dad goes on. His flat tone makes my spine prickle. Old and frail or not, there’s something menacing in the way he’s talking. “Damn close to forty years of marriage. Never mentioned you. Not one word.”
The old spider—I can’t think of him as my father—levels a look at Dad that is pure venom. “I had the juice of her,” he says. “You got the leavings. How was she? Still to your taste, I’d say, if you stuck with her so long.”
I’m going to vomit. Right here, in the middle of this sordid room in front of this horrible man and the sister who hates me. I press a hand over my mouth to hold it back, but then I have to breathe through my nose, and that does nothing to ease my nausea.
Dad is made of tougher stuff. “We found the broken bones when she was dying,” he says. “Ribs. A collarbone. A cheekbone. Did you break them all at once? Or one at a time?”
Boots takes a long swig of beer. “I’m empty. Fetch me another, Marley.”
Marley doesn’t move. She stands across the room, hands on hips, looking at him as if he’s as much a stranger to her as he is to me. “You beat her?” she asks.
He slams the can down on the table and raises his voice. “I asked you for a beer!”
She doesn’t budge. “And I asked you a question.”
“Don’t you turn this on me,” he says. He levels a finger at Dad. “You. Coming here into my house, turning my daughter against me. Get out. The lot of you.”
None of us move.
I’ve got both hands cupped over my nose and mouth now, trying to use them like a mask.
Marley crosses the floor, only a few steps, each one taken with precision, to stand directly in front of Boots. “Nobody ever told me that you beat her.”
“She left us,” he says. “Walked away from me and you when you were just a bit of a thing. Not a second thought for either of us. Don’t you let these people make you forget that.”
“I’m not likely to forget,” Marley says.
“What kind of mother leaves a child behind?” Boots smiles a gap-toothed smile at her.
Silence descends. Every one of us can see that there is no excuse for abandoning a child. Mom took me with her. Why not Marley?
In this moment I understand my sister’s anger. How would I feel if I’d been left behind? Not just left, but left with this old asshole of a man. I wonder how often Marley has been beaten. I can’t help picturing fists smacking against my mother’s flesh hard enough to break bones.
God.
My stomach erupts into heaving I can no longer control. I struggle up toward my feet, one hand over my mouth, the other pushing against the arm of the sagging couch for leverage. I can taste the acid. I’m not going to make it.
But then Tony is there, just in time, with a plastic grocery bag he grabbed up off the cluttered floor. When I take it from him, he holds back my hair. His hands are so gentle; his presence feels like a fortress of protection. When the spasm ends, he takes the bag, knots it, and sets it outside the door. Marley brings me a glass of water, silently, wordlessly, an act of grace.
Boots wheezes laughter. He taps a cigarette out of a half-empty pack and lights it.
“I remember that day like it was a painting on my wall,” he says, blowing a stream of smoke out in a cloud around his head. “It was about this time of year. Blue sky. The whole world turning green with promise, but what does she do? Can she enjoy it? Of course not. Nothing was ever good enough for her.
“‘I’m leaving,’ she told me. Just like that. No by-your-leave, no warning. ‘I’m leaving and I�
�m taking Maisey.’
“‘How am I supposed to raise a child?’ I asked her. ‘A man’s got to work and such.’
“‘You’ll figure it out,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your mother to help you. I can’t manage both of them on my own.’
“She didn’t even kiss Marley good-bye. I know this is a sore spot with my daughter, but let me tell you this. I raised her, and she turned out good and strong, so good riddance to Leah, I’ve always said.”
His words fill the room with finality.
I sit with the enormity of it. My mother did this thing. She was justified in leaving him. I can see that. He’s a heinous example of a human being. But leaving a baby. I try to imagine leaving Elle behind and can’t do it. I’ll go back to Kansas City with her, if I have to. I’ll put up with Greg for the rest of my life, if that’s what I need to do to keep her safe.
I wish she wasn’t here now, though. She’s too young for this. I’m too young for this.
And then Dad leans forward, puts both hands on his thighs, and says, “Enough with the lies. How about if you tell them what really happened?”
Leah’s Journal
And here we are, at last, at the moment I’ve been dreading and avoiding and talking circles around since I started writing this story. The moment that has cast its wide shadow over the rest of my life, and your life, Maisey’s, and Marley’s. And I suppose even over Boots.
If we were Catholic, maybe I’d go to confession, but I don’t think I could speak this aloud. I’ve always told myself I did the only thing I could. Truth? Or a comforting lie that helps me maintain my distance from the past?
I don’t know. I’ll never know. So here are the facts as I remember them.
It was a Sunday morning, just past dawn. Boots was out all night, partying.
I didn’t sleep that night. I spent it packing. Very carefully, knowing that I would have to carry everything with us in one battered old suitcase. I packed their favorite blankets and their blue bears, the one good thing Boots ever gave them. I took the little stash of money I’d been hoarding from what I coaxed out of him for groceries and rent.
We had moved into an apartment in Pasco, not far from the Greyhound station. I’d already bought the tickets. All I had to do was get us there. It wasn’t a long walk, not more than half a mile, but with the way my ribs were hurting, the weight of the suitcase, and trying to coax the girls to walk, it stretched out ahead of me like a marathon.
All the while, there was the fear that Boots would come home before we left the house or would drive down the wrong street at the wrong time and see us walking. I told myself over and over this wouldn’t happen. It was way too early for him to come home after a party. He’d be sleeping until noon; it was only 6:00 a.m.
I told the girls it was a game and that I would buy them ice cream when we finished our walk. They were only two, but bright enough to capture cause and effect. They didn’t get ice cream often, and they loved it. We started out, me with the suitcase in one hand, holding Maisey’s hand with the other. Marley held on to Maisey, and so we went, down the sidewalk, a small human train headed for freedom.
It didn’t work out that way. Boots had found a woman who sourced his fondness for cocaine. Instead of lying on a couch somewhere, sleeping off too much alcohol, he was wide awake and supercharged.
He found us before we’d made it more than a few hundred feet.
That moment, when his pickup truck nosed up to the curb on the wrong side of the street and he stepped out to stand on the sidewalk, blocking our path, has played out in nightmares over and over again. He had the mean look on his face. He stood like one of those western gunfighters, legs spread wide, hand on his hip.
I thought he was just posturing. My fear was solely around another beating. And then he pulled something out of his pocket, and I saw that he had a gun. When he got it, where he got it, I’ll never know, but I will never forget the instant I realized what he held in his hand. The terror of knowing what power he had in that moment to end me, to end all three of us.
“And what exactly is this?” he asked. His voice was too calm. It didn’t match the crazed look in his eyes. There was a little too much white around them. His hair was uncombed. He needed a shave. He looked like he belonged on a street corner.
I set down the suitcase, knelt on the sidewalk, right there, and gathered both girls into my arms. There was no point making up a lie. It would only make things worse.
“I’m leaving,” I told him. “I’m taking the girls.”
“Is that right,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He turned that gun in his hands, pointed it at Marley first, and then at Maisey, before aiming it at me. “I thought it was you and me forever, Leah. Things changed after the girls came along. Maybe it could go back to how it was if they were gone.”
Showing him fear would have been the worst thing I could do. I knew that, but what do you do when a madman has the lives of your children in his hands? I didn’t care about my own at that point. I knew I was going to have to go back. Going to spend the rest of my life in his prison, because I wouldn’t have the nerve to try again.
So it was the girls I was thinking of, their safety. Their lives. If it was just me, I would rather he shot me and got it over with. But for the little ones I was willing to grovel.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I was being stupid. Don’t hurt the girls. I’ll go right back home. I’ll never do it again.”
“What makes you think I still want you?” He spat on the sidewalk, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. “You’re ruined, in case you hadn’t noticed. Stretch marks and fat and useless in bed. No fun anymore. I’ve got a new woman who’s actually worth fucking. So don’t bother ever trying to come home.”
He stepped off the sidewalk, down the curb, and into the street.
I stared at him. At the gun. At the open sidewalk. I got to my feet. Picked up the suitcase. Took Maisey by the hand. Both of the girls were whimpering, but they already knew better than to cry outright when he got like this.
He still stood there, the gun at his side.
I took a step.
“Course, there’s always a price for freedom,” he said. “I’m not about to let you treat me this way and walk off without me having something to show for it.”
“What do you want?” My mangled hope died a sudden, misbegotten death right then. I knew that what he wanted wasn’t going to be simple like money or my suitcase or a final purchased kiss.
But I never could have imagined the sort of devil’s bargain he was about to offer me.
Chapter Thirty
“You calling me a liar?” Boots shouts. “In my own house. In front of my daughters. You can get out. All of you. Just get out!”
“Sure,” Dad says, very quietly. “We can go outside. It’s easier to breathe out there, anyway. Did you want to come, Marley? And I’ll finish telling you what your father did.”
He makes a move to get up, but Boots isn’t having any of it.
“If you’re going to tell lies about me, I want to hear them. You stay right where you are.”
Dad shrugs. “Have it your way, then.” His eyes seek out Marley, and he talks as if she’s the only person in the room who matters. “She meant to take you both. First thing you need to know, she was hurt. He’d battered at her sense of self for years already. First time he hit her, she was pregnant with the two of you. And only sixteen. No parents effective enough to intervene.
“So on that day—the day she left you behind, Marley, there are things you have to know about her. She raised both of you pretty much by herself, sleep-deprived and hurt half the time, while your father went out partying.
“On the day she managed to get away, she had broken ribs—he’d kicked her after he knocked her down. There were two of you, and she couldn’t carry you both.”
“Now, Marley,” Boots protests. “Don’t you listen to this pack of lies. Not a word of it is true. If Leah had broken bones, then he’s the one who gave t
hem to her.”
“The journal,” I say, the lights coming on all at once. “You read the journal. I thought you burned it.”
“God help me, I had to read it first,” Dad says. “I know she trusted me to destroy it, but I wondered, too. How could the strong woman I knew have left a baby behind? I couldn’t reconcile it in my head. And so I read everything she wrote.”
“Do you still have it?” I lean forward, hoping. I want to read it for myself. Maybe it would help Marley in some way.
Dad shakes his head. “I burned it. After the shredder jammed, I threw it on the fire.”
For the first time since I’ve met her, Marley’s control cracks. “So she chose Maisey.” Tears flow down her cheeks, and she scrubs them away, roughly. “I can see why she left. But you’re not helping. How could a mother leave her child with a . . . a . . . monster?”
“She didn’t have a choice,” Dad says, and his voice has gone so cold, a shiver skates up my spine and settles at the base of my skull.
Leah’s Journal
“You can go,” Boots said, “but you have to leave one of the girls.”
Horror crawled all over me. Like ants, it felt. Ants in my belly and my heart and crawling in and out of my lungs.
“You’re crazy. What would you do with a child?”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?” he said. “You were leaving. Anything that happens here is of no concern to you.”
“I can’t—how could I do that?”
“Should have thought about that a little sooner. Pick one.”
“No. Please.” I actually clasped my hands to him. I let go of the girls and crawled to him on my knees. “Don’t do this, Boots. I’ll do anything you want. Just let me come back.”
He loved that. Made him feel powerful and godlike. I could see it on his face. But he was not a benevolent god.
A kick to the side of my head knocked me over onto the sidewalk. I lay there, the world spinning, pain blazing, and I couldn’t think. His words kept hammering at me.
Whisper Me This Page 29
