Thank You for All Things

by Sandra Kring

  When Howard came in, I shoved the picture in his hands before he even had time to set his books down. “Twins!” I announced. I pointed to the baby the doctor said was a boy and told him I was sure that the second baby I was pointing to was a girl, even though she was partially tucked behind the boy, making it impossible for the doctor to verify this. “Look, she’s waving,” I said. “See her perfect little hand? ‘Hi, Mommy, hi, Daddy.’ ” I used a babyish voice as I said this, then sighed, content. “God, Howard,” I said. “Just look at them. We created them. You and me.” I heard my excitement, my awe, and it surprised me. I’d never been one of those girls like Mitzy, whose arms ached when she saw a baby.

  Howard was standing before the cave wall—the original wall—which he’d painted over the week before, black, of course, without explanation, leaving the ranting demons on the other wall holding puppets with no shadows and crushed chalk smudged on the floor. He looked at me with vacant eyes. He smelled of weed, again. Even though I’d asked him not to buy any more because we needed every dime we could save for disposable diapers and other baby things. He took two stapled sheets of paper from his book and thrust them at me, as though I hadn’t just showed him our babies’ first photo.

  I asked him what the papers were.

  “Fry. That fucker,” he said. I looked down at the essay Howard had worked on feverishly for the last week. So feverishly that he couldn’t pull himself away long enough to work his few hours in the campus library. Professor Fry had scratched the words, Incomprehensible gibberish, and Doesn’t answer the questions, in red ink, under the F he’d given him.

  Even now I have to catch myself. I find myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I had set aside my hurt over his lack of interest in my pregnancy, my feelings of isolation and loneliness, and just listened to him, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so nuts. That’s old thinking, of course, and I have to stop myself all over again. Blaming myself, as Mom always blamed herself.

  That night I flew into a white-hot rage when he ignored the ultrasound to obsess about his grade. I called him selfish and said that I was sick and tired of handling everything myself as he went on his crazy tangents. I screamed that my studies were just as important as his and that our babies were even more important. I vowed that if I had to take care of them myself, I would, but that I’d not take care of some self-absorbed, weed-whacked boyfriend while I did it.

  He didn’t cringe and cry at my threat, as he had a few weeks earlier. Instead, his eyes showed that he had dived into the same pool of rage I was treading in, and he grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm around my back until my fingertips reached my hair. “Don’t you ever fucking threaten to leave me again. You hear?” he hissed, his breath hot against my ear. “And don’t ever call me crazy.” I screamed that he was hurting me and begged him to let go.

  His chest was rising and falling with strangled breaths—the same huffing pants I’d heard come from my father year after year, each time he hurt my mother. He shoved me, and I stumbled.

  I put my hand protectively over my stomach, not wanting my babies to hear his enraged breaths echoing through the water in my womb. He grabbed my hair in his fist then and twisted it until it threatened to come loose. “Don’t you ever fucking threaten to leave me. I told you that before.”

  I was petrified. I wrapped my arms around my belly all the tighter, not just to keep out the sound this time but to shield every inch of it in case he cranked his fist back.

  He walked me backward until I thumped up against a black wall. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I cried, hating myself for cowering. “Just don’t hurt them. Please, don’t hurt the babies.”

  He stopped. He grabbed me. He stroked my hair where my scalp was still stinging. “I’d never hurt you, Tess,” he said, as though I’d cried out for mercy for myself, not for my unborn children. “You’re all I’ve got, baby.”

  Like a fool, I melted with those words. He was all I had too.

  “I just want you to be a part of this pregnancy,” I told him later, as we lay together naked from the waist down, his leg resting over mine. He’d made love to me so violently, his thrusts pushing into me so hard, I had grunted with each of them. I tried to be discreet, pretending I had an itch as I slipped my hand over my belly and felt between my legs to make sure the wet was from him, and not from my womb, and then strained to see if my fingers were red. When I saw no dark patch, I took his hand and placed it on my stomach—a place he’d not touched since he’d learned I was pregnant—where the twins were bumping against my skin. I asked him to feel them. To acknowledge that they were real.

  He pulled his hand away quickly, moving it to my sore, engorged breasts. He tugged my shirt up and scraped the cups of my bra above them, and he sucked on my nipples as though the milk they were readying themselves to make was his only sustenance.

  I should have known from watching my own dad that Howard’s promise to never again touch me cruelly would be followed by more slaps and shoves and, eventually, punches used like exclamation marks to make their point. I should have known.

  And then one night it happened. He hit me. In the stomach. And afterward, he screamed how he hated that I loved my babies more than I loved him. “There! Are you happy you had to know how I feel about them now? Are you?”

  I called Lou for the first time in months, the second Howard left for class, and he showed up with Lacy twenty minutes later. And even though I still had a month left before finals, we pooled what money we had and Lou borrowed some more from his brother, and they put me on a plane and sent me home.

  I cried all the way back to Wisconsin. I cried because I feared that the cramping in my stomach meant something was seriously wrong and that refusing to go to the campus doctor before I left was a horrible mistake. Every twinge I felt seemed to reinforce my fear that the tiny hand waving in the ultrasound picture I had in my purse was a premonition. And I cried too because I missed Howard so badly that my chest hurt.

  I told myself, all the way back to Timber Falls, that I wouldn’t be there long. That when Howard saw that my things were gone, he’d be sorry about what he’d done and realize that he wanted his children as much as he wanted me. Then he’d find me and make things right.

  I don’t know if I should pity or despise the desperate girl I was on that plane ride home, or the idiot I was eleven days later when I lit up inside because Howard pulled into the drive. Ready to take me with him at any cost.

  I close the lid of my laptop, swab my wet cheeks, and roll onto my side. I just had to go snooping again, and now I’m sorry. Real sorry.

  I squeeze my eyes tight and I try to see Scotty and me skating. I try to see Peter stuffed with leaves like a scarecrow. I try to see an orphaned sperm squiggling in a petri dish. But all I can see is a madman shoving my mom—and shoving me—as I tried to wave to him.

  Downstairs, I can hear Marie struggling to be heard above Chico’s barking. “No, it will be a while yet, I think.”

  I take my pillow and clamp it over my head, pressing it tight against my exposed ear. I lie like that for a time, and then, when I can’t stand it anymore, I go downstairs, not even caring that my eyes still have to be the color of beets and Mitzy’s sitting right there. I grab Mom’s cell phone off the counter.

  “What are you doing with that?” Mom asks. She sees my face then, and stops. “Lucy? You okay?”

  I go out onto the porch. Outside, where every pretty leaf has been ripped from the trees and is lying damp and rotting on the ground, I find Peter’s number in Mom’s contact list and hit send.

  “I don’t know, but she’s crying,” I hear Mom say from behind the screen door.

  Peter’s answering machine picks up, and when the beep comes, I shout into it, “Peter! I need you. Please come. Now!”

  Mom gasps and bursts onto the porch, the screen door making a loud crack behind her. “Give me that thing,” she says. I push her away, and even though I don’t have a jacket on and there are snow flumes falling, I race
for my bike and get on it, pedaling as hard as I can. Why did she put those things on her laptop? She knows me. She knows I’d dig!

  I don’t realize that I shoved Mom’s cell in the pocket of my jeans until it rings. My bike wobbles as I tug it out with cold, stiff fingers. I look at the window on the front, and it says Peter.

  I almost topple over when my front tire hits the gravel at the side of the road. I right myself, though, and I flip open the phone with one hand. “Peter!” I shout. “I know! I know my dad punched my mom’s belly. I know she ran back here to get away from him because he hit us. He was crazy, Peter. My dad was crazy.” I am sobbing so hard, my breath heaving from the exertion of pedaling with all my might, that I can only hope Peter can understand me.

  “Lucy? Honey? Where’s your mom?”

  “At the house.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Riding my bike. I don’t know. Just riding.” My sobs sound tight now, because my lips are stiff from the cold, or maybe from fear.

  “Honey, stop the bike for a minute. Okay?”

  “Okay. Okay,” I say.

  “Lucy, take a couple deep breaths. It will help you feel better. Come on, breathe with me.”

  But I don’t want to breathe. I only want him to come. But he insists, so I make my breaths match his.

  “What happened, Lucy?” he asks, when my breaths stop being so jagged. “Did your mom tell you the story and you ran out? Is that what happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just come, Peter. Okay? Is the wedding done, so you can come now?”

  “Yes. It was yesterday. I’ll come, Lucy. I’ll leave this very minute. But first I want you to go back to the house, okay?”

  I hear a car in the distance, and even though it’s hidden behind the hill at my back, I just know it’s Roger’s red Mustang. I expect it to come toward me, but instead the rumble fades as the vehicle heads toward town.

  “Come now, Peter, okay? How long will it take you?”

  “About three and a half hours,” he says. “Just go home by your mom and Oma, okay? I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  I tuck the phone back into my pocket and look behind me. I’ve ridden so far that I can’t see Grandpa Sam’s house anymore. Up ahead, though, I can see Nordine Bickett’s mailbox, even though it’s almost dusk, and a billow of white smoke rising up from between the trees. I pedal toward it, thinking of nothing but getting inside her house so that my teeth will stop chattering. Then I’ll call home and tell them where I am so they can come get me.

  I pedal with shivering legs, ordering them to go faster, and wobble up the Bicketts’ driveway. I don’t even care that another car is in her drive, where Henry’s truck normally sits. I only care about getting warm.

  Nordine doesn’t answer the door. Maude Tuttle does. She’s wearing her big wig and holding a rat-tail comb. “Well, if it isn’t Lucy McGowan,” she says. Her smile fades when she sees that I’m shivering. “Where in the hell’s your coat?” she asks as she tugs me inside.

  The kitchen is warm, and the scent and warmth from wood burning in a stove wraps itself around me. Nordine is sitting at the table before an opened blue case, where old-fashioned rollers with bristles on wire spines are piled. On the top of Nordine’s head is a row of curlers, the rest of her hair wet and clamped to the sides of her empty face.

  “You’re shaking like a leaf,” Maude says. She pulls me to the table and sits me down opposite Nordine, then goes into a bedroom and comes back with a quilt to tuck around me. “What in the hell are you doing out without a coat on a day like today?” she asks.

  “I know,” I tell her. “I read Mom’s diary, and I know that Mom fell in love with someone just like her dad. He beat her up too, and he was crazy. And he punched me even before I was born.”

  Maude Tuttle takes a chair beside me. She looks on the table and then the counter, like she’s looking for something, then she says, “Oh, hell,” and grabs the towel slung around Nordine’s narrow shoulders and gives it a jerk. She wads a corner of it, then dabs my face, clutching my nose with fingers wrapped in terry cloth, and says, “Blow. You’ve got snot running.”

  Maude wads the towel and sets it down on the table. She folds her arms over the top of it. “Reality can be harsh,” she says. “Sorry about that, kid, but it’s a fact of life.”

  “He was mean,” I said.

  “I know. I told you that.”

  “My dad was smart. Real smart. But it drove him crazy. No wonder Mom watches Milo like a hawk for any sign that says he’s not staying happy. And no wonder she gets squirrelly when I think too much. She probably heard that apples don’t fall too far from the tree too.”

  “You do think too much, Lucy McGowan,” Maude says. “How about some hot cocoa? It’ll warm you up. Nordine always has some Nestlé’s around here.” She looks over at Nordine, who is staring at us with a smile on her face, though I don’t think she knows why she’s smiling. “You have cocoa, Nordine?”

  Nordine nods and gets up, but by the time she gets to the counter, she’s obviously forgotten what she went for. Maude rolls her eyes and stands. “She doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground anymore. Sit down, Nordine,” Maude says, then roots around in the cupboards until she finds the cocoa can.

  “She’s probably better off that way,” Maude says. She gets milk from the fridge and pours some in a saucepan, and I grab the towel and dab my eyes with the clean end.

  There’s a plunk on the stovetop and then the hiss of the flame. Maude sits down beside me again. “Now, folks like you and me, we don’t have the luxury of being in a retarded fog. And as if it’s not bad enough, knowing what we already know, we have to pick at old scabs too. The truth may hurt like a son of a bitch, but yet we gotta keep picking and picking until we draw blood.”

  I like the way Maude doesn’t talk to me like I’m a kid, telling me everything’s okay when it’s not or that things will be okay when maybe they won’t.

  I sniffle the last of my tears back up my nose. “I wanted to find a dad who was smiley like Scotty, and who maybe ice skated. I wanted to find someone nice, who hugs, like Peter,” I say, not bothering to explain who either Scotty or Peter is, even though I’ve always hated it when other people do that. I can’t help it, though. I’m too upset to want to explain. But it’s okay. I know Maude won’t look down on me for sounding like an idiot by not identifying them, her being an ex-hooker who can’t look down on anybody and all.

  “Course you did,” Maude said. “Who in the hell wouldn’t want a nice, smiley, huggy daddy who skates? But we get what we get, kiddo. That doesn’t mean that’s all we deserved, though.”

  I rub my hands together to get more feeling back into them. “Maude? Did my dad come to Timber Falls because he loved us and wanted us back?”

  Maude looks at me, one eyebrow rising. “You just have to keep pickin’, don’t you?”

  “I just need to know the truth.”

  She hesitates awhile, then she puts her hand over mine. The silver band from her gaudy, bigger-than-the-Hope-diamond ring is cool against my skin and gives me a quick chill.

  “What happened when my dad came to Timber Falls to get my mom?” I ask, even though minutes ago I’d shut my laptop because I didn’t want to know that very thing. “Did he come to hurt her?”

  “Who’s to say? But the important part is that, one way or another, Sam didn’t let it come to that.”

  “You mean my grandpa Sam prevented him from taking Mom and us back to California, so he couldn’t hurt us anymore?” I ask, feeling a sudden wave of love for Grandpa and a sudden wave of guilt for leaving him.

  “You could say that.” We hear soft sizzling sounds, and Maude gets up to pour milk into three cups with powdered chocolate at the bottom. She gives me a cup and a spoon, then starts stirring the two in front of her, alternating a few twirls in each cup. I don’t stir, though. I wrap my hands around the mug to warm them.

  “Your dad told your
mom that he couldn’t live without her—which those types always say, and probably believe—and that he loved her, which is also what they say, even though they don’t know one shittin’ thing about love, except how to suck from it. But he wasn’t in his right mind, Lucy.”

  “So Grandpa Sam kicked him out, didn’t he? And probably threatened to hurt him if he ever even thought about coming around Mom again. My grandpa was big and strong then, so my dad was probably too scared to ever come around again.”

  “You could say that. Now, drink your hot cocoa before it gets cold,” Maude says. “You too, Nordine.”

  “But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You said so yourself. What if my brother goes crazy like our dad? Or I do?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “How do you know? You turned out to be a—well, like your mom, didn’t you? Even though you didn’t know her either?”

  “For different reasons, not because it was stamped in my blood. You’re going to be okay, kid. You just are. And so is your brother. You aren’t living your dad’s life, whatever that was. Your mom’s seeing to it that you don’t.”

  I look at Maude hopefully, then take my spoon and stir the powder that is clinging to the edges of my cup. “I still don’t understand why my mom hates my grandpa, if all he did was chase Howard away because he was crazy.”

  “Well, young women are pretty dreamy, kiddo. All that love-conquers-all bullshit. You’ll see what I mean when you’re a little older and fall hard. It happens to the brightest of us. I suppose she believed that in time he’d have gotten his head out of his ass and come around so they could live happily ever after.”

  I stare down at the white milky swirls in my cup. “But my grandma did leave Grandpa Sam, so I guess that means she eventually stopped being dreamy.”

  “Well, I’d guess, more than that, she looked at her daughter and realized she was living the same life she’d been taught to live by example.”