I inhaled the sweet scent of the smoke and smiled at him. He had blue eyes and dimples and made my heart race like it did right before a meet. I didn’t recognize him from my classes. “Not anymore.”
He offered me his hand to help me into the truck.
My mother tried to warn me. I was on my way out one evening, my pockets clinking full of mini booze bottles I’d stolen from my father’s collection, when she materialized before me in her white bathrobe, like a ghost. “Rachel, you have to stop. Your father won’t forgive you.” Her face was lined, worried. “Some . . . boy’s mother called. She said you got him drunk.”
I stopped, wondering which boy she was talking about. Because there had been more than one. At parties in strange houses, buzzed on watery beer, I’d hook up with almost any boy who’d wanted me. Which, since they were teenagers, was pretty much all of them. “Do you think I’m pretty?” I would say, standing naked before each one. I felt powerful, wanted. “Yeah,” each boy had said.
I stood in front of my mother and recalled all of this and felt nothing. Numb. Little pieces of my soul were getting chipped out and thrown away, and I didn’t care anymore. Being numb was better. “He wanted to,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”
My mother rubbed her temples and looked at the floor. We hadn’t known, but she was probably already experiencing the first stages of dementia. Sometimes she struggled to find words, used the wrong ones—I just thought it was because English was her second language. Looking back, I think that’s why she had so many unfinished quilting projects. But I was young then, and not searching my parents for signs of illness.
I waited for my mother to speak. I wanted her to forbid me to leave, to order me back to my room. To tell me I still had some worth, even if I couldn’t swim. I could not articulate any of this. Couldn’t even think it consciously. Instead, I pushed past her and she clutched onto the railing. My mother had no power. She knew nothing about my life. She was a figurehead, not a parent. “Just leave me alone.” I knew she’d do as I asked, because it was easier, and she did.
The following week, another kid reported he’d seen a bag of weed in my locker. My father stood in the principal’s office stone-faced as the principal asked if I had anything to say for myself before I was expelled.
I said nothing.
“It’s not hers,” my father said. “She told me her friend gave her a paper bag, said it was a sandwich. Asked Rachel to hold on to it until lunch. How was she supposed to know? Her friend probably saw the dog coming.”
The principal furrowed his gray-white brow. “And who is this friend?”
My father shrugged his big shoulders. “You want her to be a pariah on top of everything else? Tell you what.” He stood up. “You should decide what’ll be more expedient. You can expel Rachel and get a lawsuit that you’ll end up settling for a lot of money, maybe with your job—or you can give her a one-week suspension.”
I hadn’t told him any such thing. For a second I had the urge to tell the truth. Yes, it was my weed. Yes, I deserved anything thrown at me. But that would make it worse. My father would flip out. I held my tongue. My stomach churned and I began to cry.
The principal didn’t answer. I wondered what power my father had that my principal knew about.
Killian gestured to me. “Come on, Rachel.”
The principal looked right at me. I remembered him shaking my hand after I won a CIF championship. Saying hello to me in the hallways. All the wrinkles of his face seemed to drop to the center of the earth. “Is this true, Rachel?”
No, I whispered in my head. I nodded.
“Tell him, Rachel,” my father prompted.
They were waiting. I swallowed. “I guess somebody stuck it into my locker while I was getting my books out. I didn’t even see it.”
The principal sighed. “Well, you’re a good kid. I’m inclined to believe you.” He shook hands with my father. “Too bad about the swimming.”
“It is too bad.” My father smiled his easy Cheshire Cat grin, the one nobody seemed to see through but me. “She’ll find something else. She’s a great kid. The best.”
I followed him out to the car, tears streaming down my face. I was shaking and I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d narrowly escaped punishment, or because I hadn’t gotten it.
When we got in the car and shut the doors, he turned to me, his eyes burning with fury. “What do you have to cry about?” he said. “I just fixed it for you. You’re a damned idiot, Rachel. First the swimming. Now this.”
Through my tears, I was stunned. “I couldn’t help the swimming.” Then I realized. Oh my God. He was right. I’d worked out too hard.
It was all my fault.
He turned on the car. “If you’d listened to me about form, you wouldn’t have gotten injured. Very simple. You’ve never listened to me.” He started backing up. “Just do me a favor. Keep out of trouble until you’re out of school. I have business in this town, and I don’t need you fucking it up with your antics. Got it? No more, or you’re out on your ass.” He slammed his palm on the steering wheel, beeping the horn. “No more!” he screamed.
I nodded mutely and bit my tongue, concentrating on that pain so I’d stop crying. I swallowed down the hard lump in my throat. I didn’t worry about getting kicked out because I was going to be good from now on. “I won’t mess up again. I promise.”
• • •
We didn’t speak of it again. I stopped going out to the parking lot at lunchtime, knowing that the principal would be specifically watching for me, waiting for me to mess up. I ate lunch alone, in a far shady corner of the campus, behind the P.E. building, where couples went to make out. At nights I lay awake, imagining creatures out of the dark shapes in my bedroom, wondering what I was going to do with my life. Wondering what the point of it all was. My grades had dropped so much this semester I doubted any college, even the local state school, would take me. I wasn’t able to bring myself to care anymore. I’d have to live at home and go to the community college. And what would I do after that, marry somebody, end up like my mother?
I longed to talk to her, to cry into her shoulders, and several times I almost did. I went to her quilt room where she sat sewing, sewing, sewing, like she was in some kind of factory with an imaginary deadline. As I stood in the doorway, watching her head bent under the orange yellow desk lamp, I knew two things to be true. She had her own demons. And because of those, she’d be unable to be a mother in the way I needed a mother.
Mom looked up at me and if she’d invited me in, maybe things would have been different. She didn’t say anything, just waited, blinking blearily. The sewing machine hummed. She frowned as she searched my face. As if I was a door-to-door salesman bugging her.
I reached out and grabbed the doorknob and shut the door. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a bottomless canyon, looking down, and very much wishing I could jump.
I retreated into my room and locked the door. All I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. I longed to cry, but nothing would come. I felt like I was inhabiting some permanent dream world, where I’d never be the slightest bit happy again, or even sad.
I went to the window, imagining what would happen if I leaped out onto the concrete driveway. It was only two stories. With my luck, I’d probably just break my neck and need to live with my parents forever. I went to my closet, looked at the clothes bar, wondering if it’d support my weight. I pushed down on it experimentally. Maybe. I picked up a belt, made it into a loop. Would suffocation be quick?
Somebody pounded on my door. “Rach?” The sound of Drew’s still bell-sweet little girl voice jolted me back into reality. My heart restarted. I gasped, tears springing into my eyes. I threw the belt down. “Do you want to watch Jeopardy! with me?” We used to watch that together as we did our homework, each of us shouting out answers, usually a few seconds too late.
; • • •
This was not what I wanted. It would most likely be my sister who’d find me. I couldn’t do that to her. I sank to the floor, shaking uncontrollably. I took several breaths. I made my hands into fists until the nails cut my palms, the pain giving me something else to concentrate on.
“Rach?” Drew knocked again, rattled the doorknob.
“I’m busy,” I said, my voice sounding more brusque than I’d intended. “I have homework.” I couldn’t talk to Drew about any of this. She was still an innocent little kid. I needed to protect her.
I heard her shut the door to her room. The strains of Stravinsky’s “Elegy” floated through the walls. Drew bought the sheet music for it almost two years earlier, when she was just ten. It’d been too difficult for her at the time, but now here she was, performing it perfectly. Holy shit. When did my sister get so good? I wondered, listening to the low, sad melody.
Then Killian pounded on Drew’s door. “No playing after nine,” he shouted. I touched my shirt. It was soaking wet from the tears I hadn’t realized I was shedding.
I wouldn’t admit what I was thinking about that night to anyone, ever, I promised myself. Drew had saved me, jarred me out of my lowest point, and she would never know. It was too shameful and too burdensome to confide. So I just kept managing my pain as badly as I knew how. At least I knew for certain I’d never leave my sister. Not like that.
• • •
A couple of months after the drug incident, on a summer night, my father caught me parked in a car, late, with another boy. The boy was dropping me off and I hadn’t wanted to be dropped off yet, so I’d whispered, Why don’t you park down the street? and there we were, steaming up the windows a few houses down, where the streetlight was out. I don’t remember the guy’s name or what he looked like, particularly. He was just another boy who paid attention to me, and that’s what I needed. Suddenly there was a violent rapping at the window. “Unlock this car right now.” My father pounded the glass with his palm. He was, though then sixty-six years old, still a big, burly man.
I screamed and fixed my clothes. “Don’t unlock it.”
But the boy, scared, unlocked the car, and my father opened the passenger door and yanked me out by my sleeve. A glass bong fell out of my pocket, shattering on the asphalt. He put his arm around me tight and ushered me back up the street, my arms pinned to my sides, and into the house, slamming the front door as hard as he could. He turned to me. “So it’s boys and drugs. What are you, a prostitute?”
I looked around for Mom. Nowhere. “No,” I whispered, edging toward the stairs. My heart thumped and I suddenly became drenched in sweat. I needed to get to my room, where I could lock my door and cry.
“I will not have you bringing shame into our family,” Dad said, his voice low. He leaned into my face, his breath smelling of old garlic and sulfurous red wine. Broken capillaries lined his red cheeks, a map with roads leading nowhere.
I gripped the banister and took one step up. “I’m sorry.” I wanted to hide my face, to crawl under my bed like a little kid, holding on to my stuffed Easter bunny for dear life. “I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll be good.”
“You already promised that!” Dad shouted. “How many chances do you think you get, Rachel? I’m not taking care of any baby. I’m not bailing you out of jail. I’m done.”
Drew appeared at the top of the stairs, her face white. “Rachel? Dad? What’s going on?”
“Go back to bed!” I shouted. I didn’t want her to see this.
“Now you’re a slut and a dope addict? Fantastic.” He straightened and took in a deep breath. I had the impression he was getting himself under control. He closed his eyes. “You need to get out of my house.”
“What?” I thought I must be dreaming; Dad was talking like a bit player in an after-school special. I flushed, heat spreading from my torso up to my face. Mom appeared behind him. “Mom?” I said, hoping she would stand up for me.
She didn’t. “I wish you’d listened to me.”
Dad folded his arms, his face turning a normal color. “There’s a Japanese saying.” He stared at me emotionlessly. “I’m surprised your mother hasn’t taught it to you. Ichi-go, ichi-e. One chance, no mistakes. You make a mistake, you have to live with it. Now. Get your stuff and get out.” Dad stepped aside. “Tonight.”
“I’m only sixteen.” A wail worked its way into my voice. Oh my God. Was he really kicking me out? Where would I go? Nobody in our neighborhood kicked their kids out unless they were serious drug addicts. Was I one?
My mother came out of her sewing room and moved to the middle of the living room, her gaze fixed on my father as though he was a wild tiger.
He glared at me. “I left home at sixteen. You need to get your head on straight.”
At last my mother spoke up. “Give her until morning.” Her voice was assertive.
My father’s eyes opened wide, genuinely surprised, as if he’d forgotten the existence of my mother altogether. Some of the bluster deflated out of him. “Be out by eleven a.m. I’ll be back from golfing then.”
All night, I ran through a mental list of people I could call and ask for help. I couldn’t stand the thought of their sympathetic, polite voices. My swim team knew what I was up to. I saw them whispering at school as I walked out to the parking lot at lunchtime. Sorry, my parents said no, I imagined them saying, while secretly thinking, You brought this on yourself. Deal with it.
I had to pick someone, though, or else I’d be sleeping on a park bench. Who would be most likely to help? Who had the kindest mom? I chose Jenn. We didn’t talk much anymore, only cursory hellos in classes, but she’d been on swim team with me since grade school. Her family lived in University City, another suburb on the other side of the mountain from La Jolla, a few miles more inland. I used to go over to her house to play, after swim practice sometimes. She was an only child—her mother wanted more, but couldn’t have them—and her house was the kind of Kool-Aid-and-cookie place a kid longs for. More often than not, I’d whisper-ask Jenn if I could eat dinner with her, and she’d ask her mom.
Jenn came to my house only a handful of times, where we’d play Barbies for a couple of hours after swim practice, until her mother came to pick her up. “Can I eat dinner here?” Jenn asked once in third grade.
It seemed only fair, though I was afraid of how my father would act. “I don’t think you’ll like what we’re having,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. My mother says you say yes to the company, not the food.” She grinned her cheerful gap-toothed grin. “I can pretend to like almost anything. Except anchovies. You’re not having those, are you?”
I admitted we were not, and went to ask. My mother, after hesitating a moment, agreed. We needn’t have worried, for my father smiled cheerfully at my friend and complimented her swimming skills. “One of the best, for sure! Keep it up, you’re going places,” he’d said, and passed her a buttered roll. But we’d gone to different junior high schools, and in high school we’d been friendly, but never hung out at each other’s houses again.
I called Jenn at the mostly decent hour of eight-thirty in the morning. Her mother answered. “Rachel! Oh my goodness. I’ve been wondering how you are.” Barbara was one of those comforting moms who wore sweatshirts with pictures of kittens on them and had a pleasant, huggable layer of natural padding.
Though I hadn’t meant to, at the sound of her kind voice, I burst into tears again and blubbered out the whole story.
I thought she’d be surprised at how I’d acted, how my father had acted, but she passed no judgment. “You’ll stay here,” she said firmly.
“It’s just for a few days.” I thought my father would cool off, change his mind, that at the very least my mother would contact me.
Instead, I was erased.
I saw my mother a week later when Jenn and her mother drove me to pick up
my things from the house. “I can go in there, if you like,” Barbara said. “You can wait in the car.”
Mom stood in the garage, glancing nervously down the driveway as if she was afraid Dad had enlisted the neighbors to spy on her. I knew my father had told her not to contact me. As far as he was concerned, they had no daughter. “No,” I said.
All three of us got out of the car, Jenn at my side, her blond hair in a ponytail, arms crossed and feet planted into the ground like she was my bodyguard. Barbara squeezed my arm. I felt braver with them. I addressed Mom. “Where’s Drew?” I hadn’t even had a chance to say good-bye to her. “I want to see her.”
“At music lessons. I’ll tell her you’re at Jenn’s.” Mom’s voice sounded normal. Not cheerful, not sad.
I hesitated, then nodded, taking this to mean I’d still get to talk to my sister occasionally. This, at least, lifted some of the burden from my chest. “Tell her to call me. When Dad’s not around.”
“I will.” Mom kept her hands behind her back, as if that absolved her of any complicity. It made me angry to see her standing there so emotionlessly. As if she didn’t care. I won’t care, either, I told myself. Not a bit.
We started loading boxes from the garage to the car. After a few minutes, she turned abruptly and went inside.
“Not even a good-bye.” Jenn shifted, shook her head. “Shit. That’s cold.”
“Jenn, language!” Barbara took in a deep breath. “Rachel. Your mother loves you. This has to be hard for her. She doesn’t have many choices, so she has to do what your father says.”
“Nobody has to do what a man says. It’s America!” Jenn flung out her arms.
Barbara folded a box top closed. “This is why I’m raising you to be independent, Jenn. Why it’s important to have a college degree. Even if you end up getting married to a great man, he could get injured or die. You always need a backup plan.” Barbara hefted up a box that was too heavy for her and heaved it into the trunk. If Barbara had any faults, it was her tendency to lecture. Maybe Jenn had heard it all before, but I soaked it up.
Sisters of Heart and Snow Page 7
