Girl, Hero

by Carrie Jones

  I remember my uncle on the boat. I remember how she didn’t believe me. I remember the cross. A turtle head peeks out from the far edge of the swamp, watching. Whack. Splash.

  My mother is a whore. My mother is …

  Mike O’Donnell puts his hand on my shoulder, pushing on me.

  “Lily, you are the product of our affair.”

  I drop the stick into the mud. The turtle dives below the surface. This man’s hand is heavy. He was right. My mother should have been here to tell me this; she should have been the one.

  Keep moving. Keep moving.

  He won’t stop talking, just comes right after me. “You are our love child, our child of love.”

  Child of love. I am nothing. I am a child of love. A product. I am a big gaping hole. I am a mucky swamp that turtles hide in. My stomach returns, a burning pit.

  I hop onto a stump. My balance fails. I fall. Mike O’Donnell’s hands try to catch me. He fails. The mud squishes all around me. I stand up quickly. Leaches live in here with the turtles. Leaches suck your blood. They suck and suck at you until there is nothing left.

  He reaches out a hand for me to grab, laughs. “You’re wet through.”

  I don’t take his hand to get out of the muck. But he’s a sucker, this man. He grabs me by the shoulders and hauls me up and I scream, “Don’t touch me!”

  He drops his hands like I’m fire.

  When I am up on the bank again, I check for leaches, try to calm down. This is not how heroes act. This is how victims react. Big breaths. Isn’t that supposed to calm you down? I try it and then I say in a voice much calmer than I feel, “I’ve got to go change.”

  He nods. “Your mother wants to keep this quiet.”

  “What quiet?” I spit out the words like they are swamp mud. I spit out the words like they’re evil things. They are. Words are. “Keep what quiet?”

  “That I’m your father.”

  It seems to me she’s been keeping this quiet for a decade and a half, but I don’t say that. Instead I just say, “Uh-huh.”

  “And …” He looks into my eyes and I can’t look away. It’s like there are magnets there, or that he’s Superman or a magician, someone with those kind of hypnotic eyes. “I don’t know if you should tell your mother about this.”

  It’s Uncle Mark again. It’s the line. The line the bad guys feed you to keep you quiet, keep you theirs: Don’t tell your mother.

  My voice is slow and quiet and shaking. “You don’t know if I should tell my mother.”

  “She wanted to tell you this herself. We don’t want your pa in the dog house already, do we?”

  “My pa?”

  “You don’t have to call me that. Keep calling me Mike, if you want.”

  He looks over at a blow-down on the right, and this time I grab his eyes when he looks back at me and I force him to keep staring. My voice is cold like a monster, like my skin wet from the swamp. “It doesn’t seem logical for me to call you Pa if it’s supposed to be a big secret, does it?”

  “True.”

  “Then I guess I’ll just have to keep calling you Mike.”

  And then I turn and start running back to the house, tripping over roots and rocks but managing not to fall again.

  How could she lie all these years, Mr. Wayne?

  How could she make me think my dad didn’t love me because he forgot to pay child support? That he was too stupid to remember to feed me? How could she make me love him? All those times, she said over and over again, “He’s your father, Liliana. You have to go.” “He’s your father, Liliana. Be patient with him.” All those lies!

  Up in the sky, the sun moves so slowly you can’t tell it’s gone anywhere unless you pay attention, until the dark at the end of the day grabs you by surprise.

  I am Irish.

  My name should be Liliana O’Donnell.

  I should be tall.

  Hannah Dustin is not my ancestor. There are no Moravian depression chromosomes in my DNA. My grammy isn’t my grammy.

  My real father doesn’t wear blue tights or ankle bracelets.

  How could she lie to me?

  Am I a bastard or is that just a name for boys who are in line for the throne? Can girls be bastards? Or are we just illegitimate? How does that work?

  Unless it’s not true. I’ve seen enough movies to know that people lie. I’ve watched enough awful uncle types to know that men lie. But why would he lie?

  A real father doesn’t lie. A real mother doesn’t lie. Do they, Mr. Wayne? Real parents are there for you and they believe you when you tell them about horrible things. A real father doesn’t tell you he’s yours and then tell you to keep it quiet.

  I pull off my boots at the back porch so I don’t track mud into the house. I shiver and pant. Mike’s still making his way back to my house. He struts along like he belongs here. He doesn’t. He doesn’t move like a turtle. He doesn’t hide in his shell to deal with things. He doesn’t think things over, does he? He just walks into lives and doesn’t care who he steps on, like some sort of thudding dinosaur. He just lives in their houses and drinks their Cokes and sucks away at their lives. I stare at him. I stare at his ugly jeans that are up just a bit too high like he’s some kind of cowboy. Who is he trying to fool?

  He isn’t my Uncle Mark, but he reminds me of him. They look. They take. They don’t care. They move too quick to think of consequences. They say don’t tell.

  But I am a turtle. I can hide if I want, or I can move forward. I can think and then act.

  I grab some clothes from my room and carry the bundle of them in my arms as I run to the bathroom. I want to get in there before Mike gets inside. I need time to think. I turn the shower on and strip, shove my clothes into the hamper. The shower water falls hot and heavy onto my shoulders and head. I check for leaches. I scrub my calves with Irish Spring soap. How appropriate it seems. How appropriate everything seems. My whole life is a lie.

  I don’t know what to think, and I’m not sure what to write either. I feel as if I’ve been in a saloon and some low-down dude has just klonked me over the head with a whiskey bottle and I’m out for the count.

  And you know, Mr. Wayne, it’s no good to be out for the count.

  So, I take a shower, thinking that will fix my head.

  The water from the shower steams as it flows down and turns my body red. It runs over me so hot that it takes all of my willpower to stay under it, to stay still beneath it for as long as I can, but I do. I have to.

  What did you say in Hondo?

  You said something when you knew it was all different, that nothing would be the way it was, something like: Yup. The end of a way of life. Too bad. It’s a good way. Wagons forward! Yo!

  I stand under the water until it washes every loose skin cell off of me and down the drain. After I prove to myself that I can take this scorching, I turn the faucet a centimeter towards cold and pick up the bar of Irish Spring soap. Their motto is, fresh and (whoo-whoo) clean as a whistle, which is what I want to be, clean as a whistle.

  I give it a try; I say it.

  “Wagons forward!”

  My voice resonates off the shower wall, sounds deeper, somehow.

  “Wagons forward!”

  I grab my mother’s loofah sponge, which I never use because it’s so ugly and scratchy until it gets wet. I scrub myself, in circles, little circles all over the place, my shoulders and belly and breasts. My breasts are too big, like my mother’s, only I don’t have the belly to go with them. They make me look ridiculous, like I’m going to topple over. I try to scrub them away, circles and circles and circles, until my skin starts to bleed.

  Then, when I see the blood, I do something completely shameful. I step out of the shower, drip all over the pink bath mat and wrap one of the peach towels around me.
My mother bought these towels when she knew for sure Mike O’Donnell was coming. She thought our old towels were embarrassing, which they were, thin and green and dark. These towels are fluffy and bigger. Not that I care. I just wrap it around me and let the shower run so that Mike thinks I’m still washing. I waste gallons and gallons of water, some environmentalist I am. Sasha and Olivia must never know.

  Steam fogs the mirror and I wipe a circle off with the edge of my palm so I don’t leave fingerprints I’ll have to clean off later. Through the streaks, I examine my face. A long face. Does it look Irish? What do Irish people look like? All I see is my mother’s lips, absolutely normal size. All I see is a nose that isn’t too big or too small, a little upturned. Mike O’Donnell’s nose is thin and straight. My father’s is large like an eagle’s beak. My mother’s is small, much smaller than mine, the kind of nose that is practically nonexistent, a pug nose that sits in her round face. My mother looks more Irish than I do, with her thinning reddish hair. My hair is thick, even when wet, and curly a bit. Where did my hair come from?

  And my eyes. They are blue. So are Mike’s. So are my mother’s. So are my father’s. Blue eyes all around.

  This tells me nothing.

  The steam from the shower clouds up the mirror and I open the shower door back up, reach my hand in and turn the water all the way to cold. Back at the mirror, my hand wipes away another circle that I can stare at, wondering who the person is that looks back at me, wondering about lies and truth and stories.

  Then I give up. I hate to admit it, Mr. Wayne, but I do.

  I lean my forehead against the cold mirror and start to whisper, “Wagons forward. Wagons forward.”

  But somehow, that gets mixed up with these stupid crying noises, and one word, “Daddy.”

  I whisper-cry it again, “Daddy.”

  And I don’t know if I mean my father or my stepfather, who I used to call daddy, and I’m not even sure if I mean you. There’s too many men I’ve lost, Mr. Wayne, too many men.

  I do know one thing. Daddy isn’t Mike O’Donnell. That’s for damn sure.

  You never doubted who you were, did you, Mr. Wayne? Even when your name was Marion, you knew who you were. You were the Duke. You were John Wayne. You were you.

  And then there’s me.

  Thomas Dustin married Hannah Emerson. Their daughter, Hannah, married Daniel Cheney. They had a child who gave birth to Anna. Anna married a Kilton who married a Faltin. That’s the connection.

  I am nothing like Hannah Emerson Dustin. I cannot imagine having so many children, killing so many people.

  I am a weak, cowardly person.

  That’s all.

  All those Faltins who married and gave birth until it came to me, did not in fact make me. They are not my DNA. I have no warrior woman in my chromosomes.

  But I thought it was true. I thought, but it might not be. I thought, but I may just be a lie. I thought, and so now I have to talk to my mother.

  Why do I write you these letters, Mr. Wayne?

  I get out of the shower officially and turn off the water, but it drips. I put on my clothes even though I’m not completely dry and step out into the house. My mother is there, but so is my sister. They both sit on the couch, huddled together and crying. Mike O’Donnell is nowhere that I can see.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, arms around my chest to keep out the cold. Maybe my mother has told my sister the truth about who I am. Then I think: What if Sasha has called somebody? Told about Brian?

  “Nothing,” my mother says, looking up at me and half smiling. She smooths her skirt across her lap. I hate that skirt with its big gaudy flowers in hot pink on top of a black background.

  “Everything’s okay,” my sister says but she doesn’t smile, just wipes some water from her face and looks away as if I’m not even there.

  My mother looks away, too.

  I glare at them. “Why is it that no one tells me anything?”

  The storm door slams as I leave and I can barely make myself yell, “I’m riding my bike to Sasha’s.”

  I yell this so they won’t worry, but I really don’t go to Sasha’s. I don’t even ride my bike. Instead I run, the thing I hate. I run really hard up and down the hills of Jenkins Road, passing all the trees that are almost barren. My running shoes bounce into the potholes the town never got around to fixing last spring. Running until it gets dark, I forget everything except the wind that whizzes past my ears as I speed down a decline, the wind that erases the entire day with its whisper: Forget it. Forget it.

  But how can I forget when I’m not even sure I want to? Who do I want my father to be? How can I forget when it has everything to do with who I am, or who I’m not?

  I walk down the length of the road when I know that it’s time to go home. The time for forgetting is over. Mary Bilodeau and her parents drive by and honk their happy horn at me, three quick toots, and pull up ahead. Mary sticks her head out of the station wagon and asks, “Do you want a ride home?”

  Thinking of Mary and her moony eyes, thinking I’m all perfect when she’s the one who knows who her father is, even if she is such a weenie she spills her lunch every day, I shake my head. “No. Thanks anyways.”

  They all wave and drive off, tooting again. Dusk comes and goes and by the time I come close to home it’s dark. This is the time my stepdad—my dad—always came home.

  The summer before my dad died we went to the Four Corners, flew into Sante Fe and rented a car. My dad just wanted to go to the corners where four states meet, but my mom insisted we see the Grand Canyon too, and Monument Valley since it was on Route 160, but it was the Four Corners that stuck in my memory because we stopped there first, stopped there first and took a big pause.

  It’s a slab of concrete with the seals of four states on it, and you can walk around from one state to another to another. My dad told me that Ernie Pyle, a reporter, once said about the Four Corners that seeing and hearing and knowing are what people solve their problems by. Seeing and hearing and knowing, and we are full of that. But really, once you’re in the desert you realize that everything you see and hear and know and worry about is just a crock of shit, not important at all, and it’s in the desert that you realize this.

  And that is what I wish, as I walk back up my driveway. I wish that inside of me was the desert surrounding the Four Corners, mesas and plateaus, layers of sedimentation and beauty, hawks circling within me to admire it all. I wish that the wind-pushed sand was forming crevices and canyons inside of my soul so that I could look at it and be reminded that seeing and knowing and worrying and hearing are nothing, nothing, compared to the beauty of the desert.

  The first time I every saw one of your movies, Mr. Wayne, was before that trip. My stepdad bought a whole bunch of them and we had a marathon. We ate nachos and popcorn. We ate ice cream and did nothing for the whole weekend, except watch you.

  He loved your movies.

  He would let me sit next to him, snuggle in beneath his arm and we’d watch you.

  “That’s a hero,” he said when you saved everyone in Sands of Iwo Jima.

  “That’s a real man,” he said when you swaggered in The Horse Soldiers while William Holden played the goody-goody.

  My poor neglected bike hangs out in the garage. I pull a rope around its neck like it’s a horse. I stare at it and wish it wasn’t a bike, but something I could hug.

  If my stepdad were here, he’d know what to do, I think. Do you?

  My mother waits for me. Her foot taps against the floor. I shut the door and breathe out slow to try to calm down my itchy trigger finger. I’m not ready to spill out what I know. I’m keeping it close to the hip.

  She’s not.

  “Where have you been? I was worried sick.” She pulls her turquoise bathrobe tighter around her waist. The robe is cheap and meant t
o look like terry cloth but when you touch it you realize that it is imitation terry cloth, of all things, and as thin as paper.

  “Running.”

  “Not at Sasha’s?”

  “No.”

  “I called her, you know.”

  I nod and start unlacing my sneakers. I can’t look at her. I just can’t. I might lose it.

  “I felt like a fool.”

  “Sorry.”

  I pick a dead leaf off my arm. It crumbles between my fingers, disintegrates even though a second before it was fine.

  My mother bangs her fist on the counter. “What did you say?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Say it like you mean it. If you’re going to say sorry, young lady, say it like you damn well mean it.”

  “Sorry.”

  Both my feet wriggle free and I walk past her towards the hall.

  She grabs my arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To do my homework,” I say. In her eyes fear mixes with anger. I shake her hand away, wonder if she’ll crumble beneath that cheap robe. She stands straighter as I keep walking.

  Mike O’Donnell sits on the couch as I stomp by. A beer nestles in his hand. He must have gone out to buy it. We never have beer.

  “You worried your mother,” he says.

  I nod and keep walking.

  “I said you worried your mother!” His voice is like a boxer’s fist, banging away at me.

  He stands up and rushes behind me, right at the entrance of the hallway. I whirl around, arms ready to push him away. “I told her I was sorry.”

  “What about me?” he asks.

  My hands sink to my sides, balled into fists, and I look at this man who says he’s my father, who says my blood, my genes, are all partially determined by him. This is the man who has gone missing all my life, letting me live some big fat lie and now he suddenly appears and expects me to apologize to him. Spitting in his face would be preferable, but that is not how I was raised and I still have homework to do.