Girl, Hero

by Carrie Jones

  “I’m sorry,” I say with a quiet rattle and before I walk away I watch a smile spread across his face, like a canyon breaking, forming on top of stone ruins, creasing.

  He thinks I’m a wild horse. He thinks he has broken me. But I can still buck and throw him off, I’m betting on it.

  “Some boy called,” he grunts. “I told him you were grounded.”

  I whirl around. “Who?”

  He shrugs. “You shouldn’t be getting calls from boys anyway. They just got one thing on their mind.”

  Shaking my head, I can’t even get one word out. Then finally I manage, “Maybe boys like you.”

  I fly out and away, rushing down the hall before he can even think to react. My mother’s voice echoes after me. “Liliana!”

  I slam my bedroom door, push the bureau against it, turn on my music, get my ear buds in and pretend no one else in the whole damn world exists.

  In the morning my mom acts like nothing happened. So do I. What else is there to do? To open my mouth is to make it all real. I don’t know why she and my sister were crying. I don’t know if Mike told her that he told me. Not knowing whether she knows is hard, but I’m not going to bring it up. It’s up to her. It’s her sin, or fault, or whatever. I mean, she’s the grown-up, right?

  Anyway, I’m just glad she isn’t going off about me running at night the way she normally would. She used to freak out about me riding my bike across the highway in the middle of the day. Was your mother like that? Maybe all mothers are like that.

  She has sweet lips, my mother. She used to put wet facecloths on my head when I was little and had a fever. I wish I had a fever and she’d do that now.

  “Do you remember when we went with Daddy to the desert?” I ask while Mike O’Donnell’s, aka Pa’s, sleep-snores echo down the hall. I ask while my mother rushes around with her turquoise robe over her work outfit because she’s cold and trying to save money by keeping the heat off until Mike gets up. Truth is, Mike cranks the heat up to eighty and since the days have been too cold for early fall we’re wasting a lot of money that way. She’s worried about making it through the winter.

  “Yes. What about it?” She pours skim milk into her coffee mug. She likes her coffee as white as her skin, she likes to say, and so she always pours a lot in, only this time she isn’t paying attention and spills it over the rim and it sloshes all over the counter.

  “Sugar diabetes,” she swears while going to the sink to get the green sponge to wipe up the mess.

  “Do you remember the West Mitten Butte? It looked like a hand reaching up towards the sky?”

  Her eyes shift left, the way they always do when she is thinking. “A big, big rock, right? In that Navajo place?”

  “Monument Valley,” I say. “Tsé Bii Ndzisgaii.”

  It is hard trying to remember how to pronounce it. But I try anyways. She won’t know if I say it wrong.

  “Uh-huh …” She wipes at the spilled milk so haphazardly that it drips off the counter and onto the floor.

  It is such a mom thing to do that I calm down for a minute. I take a big breath to ask her about Mike and my father. Paolo said the secret and skill of parkour is to plan out every move towards your escape, but my mom is a quick one and beats me to the punch, Mr. Wayne.

  “I am still disappointed with your behavior last night and if I didn’t have other things on my mind—”

  “Do you remember it? Do you remember how Daddy said it was a water basket and sacred? Do you remember how beautiful it was?” I gush out. Monument Valley is safe, I think. Safe. It was back when things were good and it was just my mom, my stepdad and me.

  She squats down to wipe up the milk drops on the floor and the long line where it’s dripped down the side of the counter. Standing up she says, “Sure I do. Of course.”

  But her eyes are looking left again, searching for something.

  “Sometimes I don’t think you remember anything,” I say and wait for her to make the next move, cock her pistol and aim. She doesn’t, just goes and gets a dish towel to mop up the wetness the sponge left when she wiped the milk.

  Leaving to go outside before Olivia and Sasha are even here, I don’t say goodbye and she doesn’t even notice, so busy she is with all these other things that are on her mind.

  While I wait for them to come, I sit on the stone wall, swinging my legs above the gravel driveway and trying to get that desert feeling back into my soul. Right now, I don’t know what’s what but I know that I was in that desert. I know its truth. I know the red and yellow coils of Raplee Ridge in Utah, where it was sand art in earth tones come to life, zigzags of subdued color coils. And I know the way at night the wind turned cold and whipped my hair into my face as I held my dad’s hand as we watched the sunset. And I remember my dad’s hand, calloused and hard against mine, holding me to him, tight. My dead dad. Stepdad.

  How many does that make? Three? Three dads. One dead. One in name. One biological. Maybe.

  Wagons forward, Mr. Wayne, wagons forward.

  You know, the desert is like the bones of the world jutting up to the sky, showing what it is that makes the land stay together, unmarred by the expectation of show-boaty foliage. It shows what really is strength. How can I be that strong?

  At bus room in the cafeteria, Paolo winks at me.

  Sasha goes all chirpy singsong, nudging me with her side. “I think he likes you.”

  “No? Really?” I say, and she laughs and laughs because I’m so cranky I barely talked in the car while she and Olivia railed about Sudan and the woman murdered there.

  She tweaks my nose. She smiles. “You don’t know how cute you are.”

  I roll my eyes.

  She cocks her head. “Really.”

  In study hall Paolo risks it and passes me a note:

  Are you okay?

  I turn around really quick and give him a thumbs-up sign that’s totally fake. He frowns. And another note comes over.

  Liar.

  After study hall, he pulls me into a little dip in the hallway so people don’t ram into us while we talk. He bends his back so our faces are closer than they normally are. Little eyebrow hairs, dark and interesting, weave together to make the straightness of his eyebrow. I’ve never noticed all those little hairs before, all working together to make these two beautiful eyebrows.

  “Lily?” His hand sashays up to the side of my face, gently presses into my skin. His skin touches my skin. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  My mouth forms the word “no,” but no sound comes out.

  “I’m right here, you know. You can tell me anything.” His voice is strong and gruff but steady, so steady I’m almost jealous of it, of how he knows who he is, what he is.

  My voice? It breaks. “If I told you, you might not—”

  Like me. Agh. Was I really going to say that? I am so pathetic.

  His thumb moves, gently touching my skin. “That’s not going to happen.”

  His eyes brown their way into me somehow. I reach up and wrap my fingers around his wrist. They don’t quite make it all the way around. I move his hand away, but keep hold. “We’re going to be late.”

  He flips his hand in a way that makes his fingers twine into my fingers. Fingers meet fingers as we walk to our classes. So I feel a little better, but it doesn’t last. Nicole glares at me in the hall. Some druggie boy stole Stuart’s homework and was holding it for ten dollars ransom. Stuart didn’t even have five dollars. I let him copy my homework.

  Nicole avoids me in the cafeteria, waits until I’ve already gone through the lunch line before she gets up from where she sits with Christopher and Travis Poppins. She ducks her face behind her hair and avoids my eyes when I walk by. So I sit with Alyssa Cutler, who actually calls me over and asks if I want to sit with her. She raises her hand t
he way people do when they’re greeting someone at the airport and sings out my name like she’s one of those old jazz singers, Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday, someone who can sing deep and low. I’m glad I don’t see Nicole’s face when I sit at what she calls the popular table, because I think it would have ruined my joy. The day is over before I have a chance to ask anybody about anything or to even think much about anything myself. German tests and math quizzes. A thrilling badminton lecture in PE.

  At rehearsal after school, I’m so down that I can’t be peppy even when I sing about being corny and happy like Kansas in August and in love despite the fact that it’s World War II. Tra-la-la.

  “Lily, pretend to be happy! Remember the joy of Kansas in August and how happy you were there! Remember how proud you are to be corny and fun!” Ms. Gallagher yells. I try again, shuffling through the words, and she throws her hands up in the air. “Jesus!”

  I have a new respect for you as an actor, Mr. Wayne.

  I close my eyes, remember Paolo’s fingers around mine, his thumb caressing my face, and I do a little better.

  And when Olivia drops me off in my driveway, my father’s car waits there and I have to jump right in, and off he takes me to Hancock.

  In his beige ranch house I hang out with Grammy, sitting in her upholstered, almost tapestry-like chair that has tiny wheels attached to the bottom of it. Her fingers pick the dry skin of her foot, peeling layers off until her foot bleeds and the look of it reminds me of the desert where layer after layer of the earth is revealed.

  “If I do this,” she says, dropping a slice of skin into the trash, “I have a better chance of getting an infection and dying quick.”

  I nod. She stops for a moment and leans back into the tapestry. “Our family is known for depression. We’re Moravian, all those dark valleys where the mountains block the sun. You mustn’t look at me that way.”

  “Sorry,” I say and try not to look at her feet. She notices and puts her knee-high nylon back on. The dry skin catches on the weave of the nylon and makes a horrible sound, a sound that grates the soul. I stop myself before I hiss.

  She smiles and says, “You are young and beautiful and your skin is wrinkle free, but one day you’ll be old like your grandmother here and if you are the sort, which I doubt you are because none of us are that sort, but if you are the praying sort, you will pray to die.”

  “You’re still beautiful, Grammy,” I say, looking at her eyes as sharp as a cat’s.

  She blushes and waves a wrinkled hand at me. “Bless you for a liar, child.”

  Grammy is beautiful in an elegant way. She still wears silks and her hair shines a beautiful shade of white and her eyes sparkle when she talks about dying, like she’s a child who has just smooshed playdough into the rug on purpose. She used to be a painter, and her grandfather was the son of a duke who escaped Europe when Napoleon went on his walks across the continent hunting down noblemen to kill.

  “Do you know how old I am?” she asks.

  “Ninety-four.”

  She nods, puts her orthopedic shoe over her stocking and says, “I hope you never get to be this old.”

  And then she starts to cry. I look around for my dad but he’s in the kitchen turning over another pot roast and talking on the phone to his brother, Uncle Kilton, who lives in another town.

  The smell of meat makes me think of cattle and Westerns and you.

  “I hate these ugly shoes. They’re hideous,” Grammy says, pulling me back in.

  “Grammy, you are beautiful,” I say and she looks up. I gasp because she is so beautiful, this lady who may not be my grandmother.

  “Beauty is a flower or smooth skin. It’s in the new bloom of life. I’m a painter, I know this. Beauty is youth,” she says.

  I sigh and shift on the couch. Reaching over, I pat her on the shoulder and then feel stupid patting her like that. What I’d like to do is rub her with my head, to smooth her wrinkles down with my own skin, to give her the type of beauty she desires. The beauty of flatness. My back hurts from sitting up straight. Grammy gets so angry if people don’t sit up straight. I think of things that are straight and rough.

  “What about trees?” I ask.

  Grammy takes a lace handkerchief out of her pocket, wipes her eyes and says, “I’m sorry, Liliana. What about trees?”

  “As they get older they get more beautiful.”

  I watch Grammy imagine with her artist’s eye the blooming strength of an old tree.

  “Then they become diseased and lose their leaves. Their limbs twist and their wood rots.” She shakes her head at me. I suppose she’s disappointed that I’ve almost gotten her to believe.

  “What about the desert!” I lean forward on the couch. “The desert is as old as you can get. The bones of the country, and it’s so beautiful, with the canyons and peaks, the raptors circling above, the cascade of colors.”

  Grammy smiles, folds her handkerchief, tucks it away. “You’re determined to prove me wrong, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s your prerogative.”

  She leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.

  “Are you imagining the desert?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “You’re like that desert, Grammy.”

  She opens her eyes and looks at me like I might actually know something. “I am?”

  “Yes,” I say, “if you’d just stop picking at your feet.”

  She laughs and starts pushing her chair into the kitchen where she can oversee the final stages of dinner and force my father off the telephone. “Just imagine I’m the Utah Speculation Company, mining for minerals in the canyon.”

  At home, after I give my mother the run-through about what we ate and what was said, with all the death stuff edited a bit of course, I finish my homework and then I head into the bathroom.

  “Gonna take a shower!” I yell.

  From the living room my mother hollers back, “We’re going out to see a nine o’clock movie.”

  I step away from the bathroom door and go to the end of the hall where I poke my head out the hallway door. My mother and Mike sit close together on the couch. His arm hangs around her shoulders. Some sitcom fills the room with forced laughter, like you aren’t intelligent enough yourself to know when to laugh. Movies aren’t like that. When my mom sees my head stick out the doorway she pulls away from Mike a bit, slightly. So slight he doesn’t even notice, but I notice because I know my mom.

  “Have fun,” I say, about as authentic as a sitcom actor, totally as fake.

  “We will,” Mike says. “Too bad it’s a school night. You could come along.”

  The phone rings.

  “That better not be a boy,” he grumbles, sitting up straighter.

  “So what if it is?” I say as it rings again.

  “Oh, Lily,” my mom sighs. “Could you answer it? If it’s Nana tell her we’ve already left.”

  I groan and walk to pick up the phone. “Hello.”

  “Lily?” my sister asks. “Is Mom there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, can I talk to her?”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I don’t want to wake up Brian.”

  “He’s asleep?”

  “Yeah. Could you get Mom?”

  I twirl the phone cord. “Isn’t it a little early for him to be asleep?” I know he must have gotten drunk and passed out.

  “Just get Mom.”

  “Does she know you’re pregnant yet?”

  Her voice is the angriest whisper I’ve ever heard. “Just get her.”

  “Mom!” I yell into the phone. “It’s for you!”

  When my mother gets up off the couch and slumps into the kitchen, she hisses, “It isn’t Nana, is it?”
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  “No. It’s the other daughter. The one you like.”

  My mom looks at the clock, bites her lip. “He never lets her call this late.”

  She snatches the phone from me and says, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She shoos me away with her hand. I take the hint and head to the shower once more.

  From the living room Mike yells, “You’ve been taking a lot of showers lately. People are gonna start to wonder.”

  I don’t say anything or turn around. I put my hand in front of me as I step into the bathroom and flip up my middle finger. Part of me wishes he could see it, wishes I were brave enough to show him what I really think.

  I cannot believe he’s my father.

  In the bathroom, I make my hand into a gun and face off with myself in the mirror.

  “Pow,” I say. “Pow. Pow.”

  My sister shows up after they’ve left. A new bruise colors the side of her face. She’s tried to put foundation on to conceal it, but the makeup isn’t thick enough and a round purple circle colors her face beneath the orange.

  “Don’t ask,” she says, walking past me and into the living room. She flops into a chair.

  “My bag is in the car,” she says. “Can you get it for me?”

  “Your bag?”

  “I’m sleeping over.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  She shrugs off her jacket. On her forearms, four dots the size of fingertips make themselves at home. My breath scissors my lungs in half. She hears me and shoves her jacket back on, hiding.

  “Jessica …”

  She waves my words away before they even make it out of my mouth.

  “But—”

  She shakes her head at me and says, “Please. Don’t, Lily.”

  I cringe and wonder where she’ll sleep. I guess in the room Mike pretends to sleep in. I guess since my sister is here, most of our pretending is over. Except for when it comes to who I am.