Has she watched it? I try to wrap my brain around the idea of my mother seeing my father—the man she fell in love with and married and had two kids with—die in a video taken on some jackass’s smartphone. A smartphone.
When I finally look at her, I see my face in hers, in the curve of her chin and cheekbone, in her red-rimmed eyes. I made this whole thing worse for her by disappearing for a few hours. I wonder if she feels like people keep abandoning her: Dad, my brother Peter, her boyfriend Dirk, and now me.
When I touch her arm, she’s surprised, although whether she’s surprised that I touched her or that I’m still standing here, I’m not sure. “I’m sorry I left like that. I don’t know what happened.”
“Where did you go, Rose?”
This is the question I’m trying not to answer. I could lie, because lying comes easily to me these days, even when I’m trying to be sincere and genuine—definitely something to be proud of. But my guess is, she already knows the answer.
My mother made it clear that Jamie was off limits for a while after the parking lot incident. Part of me was fine with that—Jamie didn’t give me the chance to explain my role in that whole thing, so he didn’t deserve my explanation. I didn’t call him and he didn’t call me, which was basically a repeat of what happened last summer. Except last summer I knew I’d be seeing him when school started again. Not the case this time. So one day I caved and asked Angelo—Jamie’s best friend and my bandmate—how Jamie was doing. That’s how I found out he was working at Dizzy’s.
I’m not sure how my mother found out, but I think she keeps pretty close tabs on Jamie, as much for his sake as for my mine. He was my mom’s patient after his mom died, and she likes him. I’d go so far as to say that she has a soft spot for him. She knows he’s a heart-of-gold guy who has had a lot of rough things to deal with. But as far as she’s concerned, he now has too many strikes against him, not the least of which is that he’s a dropout with a “history of violence” who works in a bar.
It doesn’t matter that he’s only violent when he’s defending someone he cares about. It also doesn’t matter that I’ve had my own issues with violence—she prefers to overlook that. I can’t blame her. What mother wants to acknowledge that her daughter has an ugly streak?
When I don’t answer her question, my mother goes over to our rickety chrome and Formica table, which still has our dinner dishes on it, and drops into one of the vintage red vinyl chairs. She slides her glasses up onto her head and pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes. She always forgets what this does to her eye makeup, and I usually remind her not to do it, but not this time. “Just tell me where you went in my car without permission.”
I sit down across from her, the vinyl chair squeaking in protest—or warning—that I shouldn’t do what I’m about to do. I do it anyway. “I went to see Jamie.”
She pulls her hands from her eyes to look at me. “At his house?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“You went to Dizzy’s? And they let you in?”
“I told the guy at the door that I just had to talk to Jamie for a minute. It wasn’t like they were going to let me drink anything.” I am able to rationalize my decision to keep the part about my fake ID to myself because I no longer have it. Why worry her even more?
She shakes her head, dumbfounded. “You’re sixteen, Rose. There are no circumstances—none—under which you should be in a bar. No car for two weeks. And if I find out that you set foot in that place again, or that you’re seeing Jamie, you will be grounded until you’re done with high school.” I’m getting off easy, but I stare at the table and keep quiet because I don’t want her to know I know. “I thought we decided you were going to keep your distance from Jamie.”
I don’t remember much about the time that passed between when my mother told me about the video and when I was standing in line at Dizzy’s. But I do know that talking to Jamie was suddenly a matter of life or death. “I felt like he’d know what to do. About watching it.”
“And did he?”
“It turns out he wasn’t interested in talking to me.”
When she speaks again, her voice is hesitant. “So you haven’t seen it yet?”
“No. Have you?” The question slips out before I can think better of it.
She looks at her hands clasped on the table as if she doesn’t recognize them.
She watched it. My mother watched it. By herself.
Maybe if I ask her about it, I won’t be tempted to go online and undo all the progress I’ve made in the last two years managing the rage, the panic and my out-of-control imagination. But when her hands slowly rise from the table to cover her mouth as if she’s afraid that what’s happening inside her might come out, I know I’m not going to ask her a thing.
I gently wrap my fingers around her wrists and hold on. “Breathe, Mom,” I whisper.
Her blue eyes meet mine, and I can see that she feels terrible that I’m comforting her and not the other way around. But she’s the one who saw the jackass’s video, not me, and unfortunately for her, there are no rules for this situation, there is no self-help book. My brain inappropriately churns out a title—What to Do When Someone Films Your Husband’s Death With a Smartphone: A Handbook—before it settles.
I think this is what our shrink, Caron, meant when she said grief isn’t linear—it just keeps looping back around. Caron also said that sometimes all you can do is breathe and exist, and that’s enough. So that’s what my mom and I do. We sit there, inhaling and exhaling.
When the front door opens, my mom looks up at the clock. We listen together as Holly drops her keys in the tray, steps out of her noisy clogs and makes her way toward the kitchen, her silver bangles clinking against each other on her arms. It’s a sound we’ve both gotten used to in the last few months, and it’s a comfort.
Last year, the alarmingly lovely Holly Taylor and her dad, Dirk, moved to Union from Los Angeles so he could teach for a year in the drama school at Yale. Holly is that rare breed of girl who is as nice as she is beautiful. She and I became friends and then Dirk and my mother started dating. I was not a Dirk fan. Despite—or because of—his being a famous movie actor, he was a total cheeseball. Plus, there was the small matter of him not being my father. But he made my mom happy. I hadn’t seen her happy in a long time, so I got over myself and tried to be supportive. When his year at Yale ended, he went back to LA to do a TV show, but Holly didn’t want to leave Union. Mom told Dirk she could live with us, and while he didn’t love the idea, he said yes.
Holly goes through life believing that good things lie just around the corner for everybody. While I don’t believe that, I like being in proximity to someone who does. Kind of like my not believing in God but taking comfort in knowing that Vicky is praying for me weekly down there in Texas. Well, she says she does it weekly, but I think she does it daily—she just doesn’t want to freak me out by telling me.
I love having Holly here, especially since Tracy spent so much of the summer in the city and my brother Peter went back to Tufts early. My mother likes having her here too, although it’s complicated for her. Holly is dating a college guy, which my mother sure as hell would never let me do. I don’t think Dirk would have let Holly do it either, except that Cal was in one of Dirk’s classes last year and Dirk liked him. I don’t know anything about being a parent but I’m guessing Dirk realizes the futility of keeping guys away from his beautiful daughter. So if she wants to go out with a guy he knows and trusts, it’s probably in his best interests to let her.
Holly stops in the doorway and leans against the frame. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, her gaze shifting nervously between my mom and me.
“How was the play?” My mom’s voice rises a little—she’s trying to sound normal. She pulls a chair out for Holly, patting the seat.
“Dad would have been happy with their performances but not ecstatic.” Holly makes her way to the table and tucks a leg under her as she sits, her bangles jingling. “Are you both…?” She
stops short of asking us if we’re okay. “How are you?”
In the silence, the clock over the stove ticks. And ticks.
“I think we’re in shock,” my mother finally answers. “Like it just happened again. Which is impossible.” She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself, her voice cracking. She clears her throat, picks up the plates that I neglected to clear after dinner in my burning desire to get the hell out of the house and carries them to the sink. “Girls, I’m sure you’re curious, but once you see it, you can never unsee it.”
“I’ll load, Mom. It’s my turn.”
She doesn’t seem to hear me. “I can’t keep you from watching it,” she continues as she opens the dishwasher and puts the plates in without rinsing them, which I’ve never seen her do in my whole life. “All I can do is tell you that I wish you wouldn’t.” She closes the dishwasher and turns out the lights, forgetting about the glasses and serving bowls still on the table, forgetting that Holly and I are still sitting there. “Rose, I left Peter a message—I just said I needed to speak with him. If you hear from him, let me know. Don’t stay up much longer—school tomorrow.” As she leaves us sitting in near darkness, she adds, “No car privileges for a week, Rose.”
I almost point out that earlier she’d said two weeks, but I don’t have the heart. Or maybe I’m just being opportunistic. Holly and I listen as she goes upstairs to her room and closes her bedroom door.
“She called and told me what happened—I think she thought you were coming to find me,” Holly whispers, as if my mother can still hear us. “Did you get my text?” I nod. “So where’d you go?”
“Dizzy’s.”
“Rose! What happened to your plan to stay away? Wait, how did you get in?”
“I used the ID Tracy gave me.”
Holly gasps delightedly. “And it worked?”
“Ish. It got me in, but the guy knew it was fake and he took it when I left.”
“Ooh. Tracy’s not going to like that,” she says, spinning the bracelets on her arm.
“Well, obviously it wasn’t a very good fake ID.”
“Obviously. So, what happened to staying away from Jamie?”
I sigh, wishing I’d handled everything so differently tonight. “I didn’t go down there to get him back. I just needed to tell him. I wanted him to say he’d watch it with me, but none of that matters because he was too busy bartending.”
“How is that possible?” she asks.
“I guess his fake ID is way better than mine,” I say, knowing that Jamie doesn’t need a fake ID for anything, ever. “He’s making a lot in tips and he’s very popular.” I think of Ms. Cargo Pants, with her chestnut hair and green eyes, and her special smile just for Jamie. I snatch a serving bowl off the table, sending a big spoon clattering to the floor. “There was a girl. A Yalie,” I add scornfully, before remembering that Holly is dating a Yalie. “Sorry.”
She waves away my words, scooping up the spoon and taking the bowl from my hands. “Is he with her?” she asks as she rinses and loads it.
“I don’t know. They were definitely flirting. Whatever—I don’t care.”
“Oh stop it, Rose, of course you do.” She takes out the plates my mother loaded and rinses those, too.
“I don’t. He is not boyfriend material, and boyfriends are just a distraction anyway—”
Holly has heard my Killing Cinderella diatribe about the Romance Industrial Complex before. She cuts me off. “None of that stuff changes the fact that you love Jamie.”
I close the dishwasher a little too hard, making the glasses clank against each other inside, and change the subject.
“I love that you went to a play tonight and I used a fake ID to get into a dive bar. ‘Which one of these girls is more likely to have a meaningful future?’”
“The bar was more exciting than the play, trust me.” Holly loops her arm through mine and leads me out of the kitchen. We turn off the rest of the lights on the first floor and double-check the front door. When the only light left is the glow of the streetlamps through the window, Holly says, “I’ll watch it with you if you want.”
I love Holly for offering, but I shake my head. “Mom is right. You’ll never be able to unsee it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Whatever it is, you don’t need it in your head.”
“If you’re going to watch it, you have to watch it with someone, whether it’s me or Jamie or your mother or Peter. Promise me?” Holly asks.
Can I imagine watching the video with my mother or my brother? It’ll be brutal enough dealing with my own feelings—I’m not sure I can handle theirs, too. Which is probably why I went to see Jamie. But Jamie has his hands full with the Yalies. In fact, he might literally have his hands full of Yalie at this very moment.
As if she can read my mind, Holly says, “He’ll come around. He always does when it comes to you.”
“It’s Not You,” Halestorm, Halestorm
_______________________
Chapter 3
Upstairs, I dig around in the tangled pile of clothes and sheets that is my bed. Soon my fingers graze the cool metal of my laptop. I slide it out and open it, the screen springing to life with an old photo of my parents before my brother and I were born. Peter has been scanning family photos from old albums so we have digital versions, and I’ve changed my settings so that every time I open my laptop, a different photo comes up. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, but I’m not changing it.
I look over at Angelo’s old guitar sitting in the corner of my room, untouched for the last few days. I was planning on practicing tonight so Angelo doesn’t destroy me at rehearsal tomorrow—Angelo is on my ass about getting better at guitar so he can play bass—but it’s pretty clear that’s no longer going to happen.
Once I’m online, my fingers hesitate over the keys. I know that if I watch this, I might get answers to questions I’ve had for the last two years, like, what was Dad doing right before he died? Was he with nice, good people when it happened? Was it fast, and painless?
Was he in one piece when it was over?
I obsess over this one even though the answer is obvious. He was blown up by a bomb—one piece isn’t an option in that scenario.
I grab my phone and hit speed dial.
As it rings, I hold it to my ear with my shoulder and twist my overgrown bangs around my finger. I lean over to my nightstand and grab my pinking sheers, which I keep nearby for this very purpose.
Sometimes, the only thing you can control in life is your hair.
I don’t want to lose the blue ends of my bangs—Tracy helped me do them a few weeks ago and they look really cool—but they’re just too damn long. I should have cut them before we dyed the ends. But things don’t always happen in the order you want them to.
Vicky answers by saying, “Sugar, if you watch that video, I swear to god…”
Although I’ve never met Vicky in person, I’ve seen enough photos that I can picture her sitting at her kitchen table, fanning herself as she talks on her landline with the 30-year-old curly cord that’s probably sticky with kitchen grease. I imagine her sweating in the Texas heat, blotting her face with her “kerchief,” as she calls it.
“Did you just take the lord’s name in vain?” I tease.
“I’m a Texas Christian, honey—we get to take the lord’s name in vain in certain situations. And this is for sure a ‘certain’ situation.”
I lean forward over the edge of my bed so my hair hangs in front of my face like a curtain. “Are you okay, Vic?”
“No, sweetie. And you’re not either, I can tell.”
“If we watch it,” I say, “at least we’ll know what it was like for them.”
Vicky is quiet for so long, I check my phone to see if we still have a connection. Finally she says, “We can’t ever know what it was like for them, hon. And that’s how they’d want it. Don’t watch it, sweetheart.”
I slide the scissors under my hair curtain to reach my bangs. Sn
ip. A chunk of blue falls to the floor.
“That video never should have seen the light of day,” Vicky continues. “If I knew where Gabe was, I would tan his hide somethin’ fierce, I tell you what.”
I freeze, scissors poised to do more damage. “Who’s Gabe?” I ask.
There’s a long pause before Vicky says, “Your mamma didn’t get that far, huh?”
It’s hard to listen as she explains that the soldier who posted the video was Travis’ best friend, Gabriel Ortiz. He’d been using his camera phone in Iraq, even though soldiers aren’t supposed to do that. He and Travis were part of the convoy that was escorting my dad and a bunch of other engineers to a site. Gabriel got injured in the explosion, but he recovered, finished his tour, and signed up for another one before the army realized—or had to acknowledge—that he had PTSD and was unstable.
“So they sent him home. And now, for reasons only the good lord knows, he’s posting all the dang videos he took while he was over there. I tell you what, Rosalita, if Travis were here, he would kick that fool’s ass. Gabe always did need help stayin’ in line.” I hear a catch in her voice, and then she changes the subject so fast I get whiplash. “How’s junior year so far?” she asks with a whole bunch of fake cheer.
Junior year. Sometimes I feel like I was a freshman two seconds ago. Today it feels like 20 years.
“You still there, Rose?”
“Yeah—sorry.”
I can’t shift topics that quickly—I’m still trying to deal with the fact that Vicky actually knows the guy I’ve been referring to as “the jackass with a smartphone.”
I flip over onto my back and hold my bangs up between two fingers. Snip. A chunk spills on my face, tickling my nose, sticking to my lips.
“Did I just hear those scissors?” Vicky asks sternly. “You know you’re not supposed to cut your own hair. We talked about this!”
Vicky is a hairdresser, and she does not approve of my taking matters into my own hands. “I’m just trimming my bangs,” I say.
“There are professionals who would be happy to do that for you.” She sighs. “Don’t you go too short or your forehead will look as big as a football field on a Friday night, only nobody will be cheerin’.”
No More Confessions Page 2
