Girl, Hero

by Carrie Jones

  I don’t tell her that I worry her baby will die like Sasha Sandeman pretended her baby brother did, or that I’m afraid that Dad is gay. I don’t tell her I’m worried that the letters and emails I write to congressmen just get thrown away while people die and rot in their jail cells without even a tin cup to clang on the bars like in Rio Grande.

  I don’t tell her I’m worried that I’ll never be good enough for anything, or that her husband will beat her and then beat her baby.

  I don’t tell her anything. I don’t tell anyone. Just you.

  When my stepfather died, he did it when we were having lobsters and steamed clams at my Aunt Shirleen’s. She’s really rich, the kind of rich that wears big diamonds and has whirlpools instead of bathtubs. When my stepfather died my mother cried for a long time, and held me all night, sighing, “What am I going to do now? What will we do? Who will love us?”

  All that sort of stuff. All I remember about it are those sentences she kept repeating and being smashed against her chest as we slept in a twin bed downstairs at Aunt Shirleen’s. All I remember was being suffocated against my mother’s breasts as she cried and wondering how babies who are breast-fed can stand it, being that close, so close that every breath you take in through your nose smells completely of your mother, obliterating everything else.

  That’s how I feel now, suffocating, everything smelling of one thing: Mike O’Donnell’s arrival. My sister has gone off to see her stupid husband with the meaty hands, and I’ve eaten my leftover spaghetti. I’ve called Nicole and talked until her mother made her get off the phone. I would call Sasha, but she doesn’t like talking on the phone unless it’s necessary. She prefers to talk in person so she can see what the person does while they talk, see what movements they make, where their eyes go, whether they look blank or startled. She says people can lie on the phone too easily. I think she just likes studying people so that she can use it in her acting.

  When my stepfather died, it was the first time my mother was without a man there to tell her what to do, which bills to pay first; without a man to hold her and snore her to sleep each night. She started dating my stepfather before she divorced my father. She once bragged to me that she’s never been without a boyfriend for over a week. It’s been three hard years since my stepdad died, and that’s a long time to be single for a woman whose previous record was a week. She’s had dates, of course, and some men lasted a month, but it wasn’t the same thing. I think about this and how my mother must feel as lonely as I do right now, sitting in the living room, all my homework done, the encyclopedia open to the entry about Hannah Dustin. There’s nothing on television and it’s too late to call anyone because it’s a school night. I’ve already watched one of your movies tonight: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. My mom says I only get one movie a night on school nights.

  Mr. Wayne, please don’t ever show this letter to my mother because she’d kill me. Although, you’re dead, so of course you can’t show her the letter. What am I talking about? God, Nicole is right. I am a freak.

  My dad sent the child support check yesterday. My mom ripped it open with the edge of her nail, just sliding it through the paper, the same way she opens Christmas presents. She smiled and sighed and then her face turned all hard. “That man is so dumb, how could I have ever married him?”

  My lips tightened and my eyes narrowed, the way yours do when you see a cattle thief making his way into the saloon, and I said, “He’s not dumb.”

  “He switched around the numbers and he spelled ‘hundred’ wrong. Plus, how late is this check?” She arched her eyebrows at me, turned her back and put the check in her wallet. “What would you call it then?”

  “Forgetful,” I said.

  She turned back around and pulled me to her, wrapping me up in one of those big hugs of hers, and said, “That’s all fine and good, except when he forgets about my baby.”

  Since she couldn’t see me, I rolled my eyes.

  Did you ever not get a part? Were you always the star?

  It is ten o’clock and still my mother and Mike O’Donnell aren’t here. It’s so dark outside. My cat, Fandango, hops up on my lap and with my fingers I separate the colors of her fur; orange, black, white, gray. We sit on the mushy chair in the living room, looking out the picture window at the car headlights that drive down Jenkins Road, waiting for one of them to turn into the driveway, for my mother and this man she likes to come home, but none do and pretty soon I fall asleep just like Fandango. My head slumps forward, so that when I wake up my neck will ache and have a crick.

  “Honey, wake up, Mike’s here.”

  Someone touches my shoulder, and my head jerks up and my eyes open, but everything is blurry like my eyes are still asleep and can’t remember how to focus even though my brain is alert and ready for action. I can make out the shape of my mother’s head in front of me and I smell her breath, boozy. I don’t know what kind of alcohol it is, but it stinks like when Sam Quinn brought that bottle of vermouth to Blackwoods Campground at Acadia National Park on our eighth grade trip. I don’t think it’s vermouth. The only things I’ve ever seen my mother drink are Black Russians, and only then on Christmas and New Year’s.

  There’s this tall, tall man beside her and I say, “Mr. Wayne?”

  She laughs, and all her smelly booze breath smashes into my face and makes me cough.

  Back when I was in third grade, my stepdad converted my sister’s old bedroom, which was a garage before that, into a family room. He put big barn beams on the ceiling and painted the shingles on one wall red, and then he put in a Franklin stove and a bar that runs across the south wall. The bar has all kinds of bottles behind it. Thirty or so. Maybe thirty, and my mom never touches them. She’s just not much of a drinker, so I especially can’t imagine her guzzling vermouth.

  “Say hello to Mike,” she says, pulling her head away from mine. I gulp to get fresh air. “Mike, this is Liliana.”

  “Pleased to meet you, little lady,” he says and sticks out his hand for me to shake. I grab it and it is cold and dry, like holding Italian bread that’s been cooked too long, flaky.

  “Hi,” I say and roll my head away.

  I can’t believe I thought he was you when he came in. I had just been dreaming that we were out roping steers on the range and there were these convicts who were about to shoot you dead, right through the heart, but I flung myself off my stallion and grabbed your waist, pulling you down just in time. Then I had my rifle, aimed and cocked, ready, and you pulled me behind a rock and said, “Thank you, little lady.”

  Then they came home. I wish I could go back to my dream. I like dreams.

  “A real beauty just like her mother,” this Mike O’Donnell man says, eyeing me. I curl my lip.

  “She’s still half asleep,” my mom whispers, and smiles like I’m a cute little dog.

  “She should get to bed,” he says, “not sleep here on a chair.”

  “I was waiting for you,” I say and look at Mike O’Donnell’s face, now that my eyes are focusing. I have to look up high.

  This man she brings home is tall, Mr. Wayne, way more than a foot taller than my mom, which means he’s about six three, almost as tall as you.

  I rub my neck, which aches from sleeping wrong, and continue. “I’m glad you got in safe.”

  “We stopped at the Back Room. That’s why we’re a little late and we saw lots of people there, which held us up of course and they didn’t have the fastest service tonight,” my mom says, kissing me on the head as I get out of the chair. She explains too much. She always does if she’s had anything to drink. Her talk gets all yappy and chatty like one of those little dogs, the kind that wear rhinestone collars and tiny sweaters and love to bite. I’m glad she doesn’t drink much. I guess she can be the diminutive doggy now.

  I shrug. “I need to go to bed.”

  “Good idea,” Mik
e O’Donnell says, his voice all mosey. “Get your beauty sleep so one day you can be as pretty as your mom here.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say while my mom blushes.

  She actually says, “Oh, Mike.”

  She puts her hand on his arm, all flirty, just like Nicole does when she likes someone. Nicole says body language can tell you a lot, like if you sit next to a guy and your legs touch and it feels hot where your legs touch, that means he’s attracted to you. I try not to think about my mother’s leg touching Mike O’Donnell’s.

  Mike O’Donnell actually bends down to kiss me too, touches his lips to my hair. I turn my head down to look at the floor so he doesn’t get my cheek. His booze breath reeks, but it has this gum smell over it, like he’s trying to pretend it doesn’t smell, like his breath is cinnaminty clean and he’s not totally roostered. His eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen, bluer than my father’s, and they have a yellow tint to them like the booze has got him full as a tick and the gin is trying to find a way to leak out. His eyes look like my mother’s eyes when she cries. He wears a suit. Why would he wear a suit? He wore a suit on a plane, like some businessman. Or is it for the date he had with my mother? No one wears a suit to the Back Room.

  I am too tired to think about it. In my room, I shut the door and put my nightgown on.

  Tonight I will not brush my teeth. I flop into bed and reach over to set my alarm. It is 2:19 a.m. My mother’s never been home this late. What time did she say they’d get here? Nine? Ten? I am too exhausted to remember.

  I stare at the ceiling for a long time. I close my eyes. I hear them giggling in the living room. I hear his voice forget to be quiet once in a while and boom out sentences or phrases while my mother says sweetly, “Hush. Mike, please. Liliana’s sleeping.”

  But I’m not sleeping. I’m closing my eyes and listening to my mother giggle, waiting for them to go to sleep. He will be sleeping right next to my room. I hear footsteps, hushed guffaws, a few all-out donkey-snort laughs, the kind you make when you laugh while you’re eating and snarf out all your food, and then I hear one door close. I wait for the other. Nothing. Figures.

  Snuggling onto my side, I push my head into my pillow, a fluffy pillow. I hate flat pillows, can’t stand sleeping on them at Nicole’s house. Has Mike O’Donnell brought his own pillow? Does he have a preference?

  I’m about to sleep. I feel that wasteland quality come over me, like I’m being shrouded or walking in a heavy fog or have taken cold medicine, but I jerk awake. I hear something. Not a giggle. Not a sentence or a phrase. A moan.

  A moan.

  A ghost?

  No, it’s a human moan. His moan. Deep and low. Not my mother’s. And in my mother’s room, behind my closet, her bed squeaks. One squeak. Another. Another. A moan. My mother’s moan now. Oh my God.

  You know, it isn’t like I think my mother is a virgin or anything. I’m not that stupid. Not like Katie Henderson who thought that her mother got pregnant by sitting on the toilet after her father went pee. She believed that until eighth grade when we finally had health class and a unit on reproduction. I, however, know my mother has had sex. I am here, right? And she had sex with my stepfather too. Of course she did. But, this guy? I don’t like this guy. I don’t even know him, just his name and his height and his breath.

  She did this once before. Right after my stepfather died. His brother had come up from California for the reunion that was at his sister Shirleen’s house. His brother stayed in our brown guest bedroom, too. He actually slept in there. But, a week after my dad died, after the funeral and everything, we went up to Lake Winnipesaukee to spend one last weekend on the boat before we sold it.

  My mom said we had to sell it after my stepfather died. She couldn’t drive it. I could. I could even get it into the slip without bumping anything, smooth like a car moves into a parking space. She didn’t care. She didn’t trust me to do things, Mr. Wayne. Didn’t think I had the constitution to handle anything like a boat or a bad man or a death. Thought I was just a goddamn little kid, that’s all. Just a kid.

  The night of Uncle Mark, I went to bed like at nine or so, in the back berth. My mom was supposed to sleep in the bow and Uncle Mark in the middle where the table converted into a bed, but they didn’t do that. They had all this tequila and talked about my dad and came back in drunker than a Labrador retriever who’s found a keg of beer instead of his water bowl. They were loud, too. They woke me up because they were so loud. My mother is never loud. She is a quiet woman, a woman of soft sounds.

  I moved my face from the pillow and saw them kissing, really kissing, the long romantic kind I’d only seen before on The Hills reruns, laying in the bow bed, tumbling around and rolling over kind of kissing, and neither of them had a shirt on.

  I was a little kid then, Mr. Wayne, eleven or something, and I didn’t think much before I did things, kind of like a baby shoves dirt in its mouth and doesn’t think of the consequences, all the grit that will stick between his teeth and scrape across his gums, kind of like that. So like an absolute imbecile, when I saw them searching for each others’ tonsils I stood up and yelled at my mother, “How could you? How could you? I hate you!”

  My mother sat up. My mother’s mouth gaped open. Uncle Mark smiled real slow like he thought everything was a damn good joke. She struggled to put her bra back on.

  “I hate you!”

  It was all I knew to yell. All I could think. That and “Daddy,” which is what I called my stepfather. He didn’t mind that I called him that. He just was a Daddy, not a Stepfather or James.

  “Daddy!” I yelled it like a stupid fool. I yelled it even though I knew he was dead. I saw him dead. I yelled it because I needed someone to help me. I yelled it because I didn’t know what else to do.

  But guess what? He wasn’t there in the dark boat. He was in the ground in a coffin with the teddy bear I gave him and a video of Stagecoach, one of your movies that he loved.

  I just kept screaming like movie Indians running into battle on mustangs, hoofs pounding, eyes pained, throats quivering with rage and pain and blood.

  My mother’s breast wasn’t adjusted right in her bra and all her white skin just glowed there in the darkness. White like dead skin, it was. White like a man in a coffin.

  “How could you?” I yelled. Everything inside of me was cold, just a big black coldness, so sharp it hurt. “I hate you!”

  She shoved her shirt on and tried to hold me, but I wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t let her near, just flung my arms all around in these crazy motions, pushing and windmilling and flailing.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried, trying to get to me. “I’m sorry.”

  I scurried away.

  Uncle Mark, the mean ol’ rip, he didn’t even put a shirt on, or say anything, just went out of the boat and took a walk like an extra that’s not needed any more.

  His footsteps sounded heavy on the wooden dock.

  “Keep walking,” I thought. “Keep walking.

  I wanted him to never come back. I wanted him to walk away forever, but not into a sunset, nothing that romantic. He had made taco salad that night and kept smiling so that even my mother ate it. She never ate spicy food. She said it gave her indigestion. She’d pop a hundred Rolaids after she ate stuffing, and that’s not even spicy.

  I stopped flailing after she stopped hugging me, stopped shouting too.

  She stood there, leaning on the bathroom door, whimpering like a baby, “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I let her cry and apologize, but when she tried again to hug me, to get her arms around me and pull me close, I pushed her away. I was done with being suffocated, done with being hugged.

  “Leave me alone,” I said and lay back down on the plushy berth in the back of the boat.

  It’s hard to get over a thing like that, I guess. She lay down be
side me, so I scooted to the very bottom of the bed beneath the captain’s seat where you can’t sit up because it’s so low. Before my stepdad died, I pretended it was a coffin and I was a vampire waiting to be freed and explore the night. After my stepfather died, I didn’t like imagining coffins any more. So I imagined it was a stagecoach like in those movies we watched. It was a stagecoach rocking with the horses’ strides heading far away to gold-rush land or something.

  I just stayed there below her feet, staring at the fiberglass ceiling six inches away from my face. I listened to her cry the whole night. I didn’t let her hold me like when my stepdad died, didn’t come up from the small safe place below her feet. This was different.

  Inside me there was just this big aching canyon where my heart should be and her sorrys fell in there, into the darkness. Just fell and fell.

  In the morning we pretended like nothing happened. She made pancakes on the little stove in the boat. I ate them. Uncle Mark, my stepfather’s brother, ate them. They were good.

  How’s that saying go, Mr. Wayne? Another day, another dollar?

  Only Americans would say that. It’s never … another day, another hug? Or, I don’t know … another day, another adventure? Nope. Another day, another dollar.

  My alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. and Fandango looks at me. We both yawn. Her pointy teeth frame her tiny tongue.

  As I put my feet on the carpet I remember that the cast list for South Pacific will be up on the auditorium doors as soon as the first bell sounds.

  I don’t want to look on the door. I am terrified of looking on that door because I know if I get a lame part or no part, then Sasha and the rest of the world will know that I’m really a loser. Worse, I’ll know that I’m really a loser. And it will be doubly awful because Sasha will get a wonderful part and I’ll have to have my happiness for her be fuller than my sadness for me. And to make it triply worse I’ll have to find out at the beginning of the day and live with knowing all day at school, and I probably won’t be able to pay attention at all in any of my classes and forget to take notes, or else take notes so badly that I’ll have to ask someone for their notes like you do when you’re absent.