One of the reasons Cassie was not popular with other girls was the severe restrictions with which her father had shackled her. It was as if other girls thought that hanging around with her might infect them with the same chains and constrict their activities and ruin their young lives. Their parents might get similar ideas and employ keys and locks where they had never used them. Mia Stein said she thought Cassie might be just the one to get the rest of us in trouble because she was so envious of our freedom and fun. Jealousy, after all, came with the territory teenagers inhabited. Celebrating someone losing an advantage or a privilege was practically a team sport. I knew that was the main reason Ginny was upset that she had to invite Cassie to the party. Ginny feared that Cassie was just the sort who might get her grounded once she had witnessed what went on.
“Who is this?” Cassie’s father demanded. I could see him holding the phone the way a Neanderthal would hold a club, readying himself to pound my voice against the wall.
“Sage Healy, Mr. Marlowe. I wanted to talk to Cassie about our math homework, please.”
He grunted. “Just a moment.”
It took so long for her to come to the phone that I suspected he wasn’t going to tell her I was calling and let me wait until I gave up, but she finally said hello in a tiny voice. I could almost feel her trembling through the phone. Was he standing right beside her?
“I thought we had a good time last night,” I began. “I hope you enjoyed it.”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
“Maybe you and I can do something together next weekend. My father would drive us to the movies or—”
“I thought this was about math,” I heard her father say. He had been listening in on another phone. My heart sank.
“I was just about to talk about math, sir,” I said.
“You can talk about it in school,” he replied. “Hang up, Cassie. Now!”
I heard the phone click. He remained on the other phone listening for me to hang up. I could hear him breathing. I decided to wait him out, and finally, he hung up, too. I held the receiver for a few moments, my ear buzzing and the heat in my face making me feel sunburnt. After I hung up, I sat there fuming.
He was destroying her, destroying his own daughter. The man was sick and cruel. I had to do something about this. For the rest of the weekend, I mulled over possible things I could do. Uncle Wade had been right. Without any tangible evidence and Cassie coming forward herself, what could I really do? But I wouldn’t just give up. Twice my mother asked me why I was in such deep thought. Suspicions came out of her eyes, ears, and mouth like black bubbles.
And then she finally asked what I had expected she might.
“Did you tell us everything you should about that party?” she demanded. “Did you hold something back, something you did that we might find out? Are we going to find out from someone else? Well?”
“What else could I tell you? We danced, we ate, and we talked,” I replied. “I told you some were drinking alcohol, and some passed around one of those drugs to make you high and wild, but no one was building bombs. Can’t you stop making me feel like a terrorist every time I set foot out of this house?”
The words came out before I could stop them. I was trying to hide my deeper worry about Cassie with the tone of frustration and defiance in my voice. It set her back for a moment and sent her looking for my father. He returned with her, and they both simply stood looking at me as if they saw the early evidence of some Third World disease, a rash, spots, pimples on my face.
“What?” I finally had to ask.
“Your mother tells me you were snippy with her,” my father said.
“I’m sorry if I sounded that way, but I don’t know why she’s still asking me all these questions about the first real party I’ve ever gone to with others my age. How am I supposed to make any friends anywhere if I can’t go anyplace they go or do anything they do? And then I have to rat on them like a narcotics agent or something.”
“Rat on them?” my father said. I didn’t think what I had said was so terrible, but they both looked like I had admitted to a murder.
“I can’t help it that some of the kids do bad things, but I haven’t done anything to give either of you reason to think I’m some kind of juvenile delinquent,” I protested, the tears building under my lids.
They both continued to look at me as if I had bloodstains on my clothes and hands and was caught standing over a corpse. Neither spoke, so I continued.
“I don’t go anywhere you don’t want me to go. I don’t get into trouble in school. My grades are very good. I never cheat or steal. I’ve never been disrespectful to my teachers, and yet I’m so restricted compared with anyone else in my class,” I added, not mentioning Cassie, who was obviously chained down more.
“Satan was an angel before he fell,” my mother said.
“What’s that mean? You think I could be Satan or a fallen angel?”
“When you were little, you were always disrespectful, embarrassing us with those tall tales even though I forbade you to do it,” she reminded me. “We had to send you to a therapist, remember?”
“But I’m not doing that now.” I looked to my father for some relief, but he seemed unsure of what to say. He continued to study me. “I said I was sorry if I sounded snippy. I didn’t do anything bad last night, but it seems I still have to deny it. I’ll probably have to deny it for weeks.”
I couldn’t imagine any of my girlfriends being reprimanded for exhibiting just a little frustration and sarcasm in their voices when their parents spoke to them. In fact, the parents of most of my new friends probably would be grateful to know that was all the misbehavior they exhibited. Most, if not all, of those parents were unaware of how often their daughters smoked pot, took some Ecstasy or something similar, drank alcohol, were sexually active with boys, smoked in the girls’ room, and generally lied about most places they went and things they did. Maybe my mother was right. I was so angelic that I had to fall sometime.
“We’re not treating you unfairly, Sage. You’re hardly old enough to be completely independent and free to do anything you please,” my father finally commented in a calm tone. “We’re responsible for you and your actions.”
Was that commitment more than it was for natural parents? I wanted to ask. Did adopting me come with more responsibility for some reason? To whom else but themselves did they make these promises—some state official, or maybe my birth mother, whom I now believed they knew after all?
More than once, I had heard someone say, “You can’t choose your relatives.” But my parents could, and now that I thought about it, I could, too. I could decide one day that I’d had enough of them. When I was old enough, perhaps I could walk out that front door more easily than a natural child could. A natural child would still carry the mystery and the power of blood ties. She wouldn’t be able to look at herself without being reminded of the parents left behind. Their hair, their eyes, the shapes of their faces, and even the sounds of their voices were indelibly written into her very soul.
But not me. I had no one I knew written on my soul in any way, shape, or form. I was like an offshoot of some meteor sailing independently through space, maybe blazing once and burning out on my descent to somewhere I never intended.
I didn’t say anything, even though I wanted to continue to defend myself, to show some defiance. Yes, they had a parental right and obligation to know where I was going, whom I was seeing, and what I was doing, but did they have a right to know what I was thinking, too? Was I completely naked and forever exposed? Didn’t every child, adopted or not, need some privacy?
“When your mother or I ask you questions, Sage, it’s only out of the deep concern and love we have for you,” my father said, filling the void of silence. “It’s a parent’s job, responsibility, and obligation to do that. It’s just something natural for a parent to do. Anyone who doesn’t place the welfare of his child ahead of his own is a dismal failure.”
I looked down. I wished
I were an angel, fallen or otherwise, and wings would sprout out of my back. I’d fly away instantly.
“I know there are parents who conveniently believe their children should sink or swim on their own, almost from the day they can walk and talk,” he continued in that same reasonable, calm tone of voice that always made it difficult to dislike him or even argue with him. “Maybe their own parents treated them that way, but more than likely, they are too self-centered. It should be natural for parents to protect and nourish their children in every way possible, no matter how old their children are.”
“Wild animals leave their offspring as soon as they can care for themselves,” I said. “Some consume their own young. It’s called filial cannibalism. Scientists believe they do it to ensure the production of healthier offspring.”
I wasn’t sure they understood what I was suggesting, but the moment I had learned about this in Mr. Malamud’s science class, I recalled my mother’s frequent threat to return me to the orphanage. She wasn’t threatening to eat me, to kill me, but she was threatening to put me back in a place where I could easily fade away and, in a real sense, die. The very fact that she could conceive of doing that filled me with fear that she could do something even worse to me.
“We’re not wild animals,” my father said.
I looked at my mother. She didn’t seem as willing to say that.
“If you’re especially tired or something serious is bothering you, we want to know about it,” my father added. He stepped forward to put his hand gently on my shoulder and then patted my hair and smiled. “We’re hoping you will always trust us enough to confide in us, Sage. Your trust is very, very important to us,” he stressed. “It’s actually our biggest worry. Can you appreciate that?”
“Yes,” I said, my same budding tears turning from cold to warm, now coming more from my heart than my rage.
“Well, then?” he asked.
I looked at my mother. How did she do it? How could she look at me and see so deeply inside me, no matter how I tried to disguise it? “I trust you,” I said, but I looked down instead of at him.
“No, you don’t,” my mother said. “You lied to me a while back. We both knew you had lied, and we waited to see if you would correct it, but you still haven’t.”
I looked up quickly. Uncle Wade had told them after all, I thought. That, more than anything, depressed me.
As if she could read my thoughts, however, my mother added, “No one had to tell us that, either. You’re not as good as you think you are when it comes to disguising deceit.”
Another girl my age would try to defend herself, perhaps pretend she knew nothing about it. She would twist and turn, looking this way and that, for an acceptable escape. She would feign innocence, act as if she had no idea why her parents would be so angry. Maybe she would turn the argument on her parents and accuse them of something, make them defensive. I’d overheard many girls talking about how they got away with things at home by doing just that. I didn’t know if I was capable of doing something similar.
I always wondered if their mothers and fathers did the same sort of thing when they were their children’s ages. Why wouldn’t they recognize the deceptions and rationalizations? They had walked the same paths, had played the same parts, and were characters in similar stories. Did every young person live with the same fantasy, that their parents were perfect people? Didn’t they ever hear their parents’ friends say, “I hope my children never do what I did” or “They’d better not ever do what I did”?
My guess was that most of their parents pretended to believe them or let themselves be distracted to avoid a crisis. Was it Uncle Wade who once told me that you couldn’t lie to a liar? Someone who’s had a history of being deliberately deceptive recognizes the symptoms in someone else. I knew now that my parents hadn’t told me the truth about myself or about themselves. That rule surely applied to them, if it applied to anyone, I thought. I might as well confess.
“I was afraid to tell you,” I said.
My father stepped back. He looked at my mother, who nodded confidently like someone who wanted to remind someone else she had been right all along.
“Tell us what?” my father asked.
“One afternoon, Mother asked me if I had gone into your office to snoop. When you two were out of the house, I saw you had left a file drawer open, so I went in to look in the drawer. I was going to tell you soon.”
“Soon?” my mother said skeptically.
“Yes. I told Uncle Wade about it. He thought I should have told you and that I should tell you soon.”
My father’s eyes narrowed, not with suspicion as much as with pain. I knew immediately that he was wondering why I trusted Uncle Wade to talk to more than I trusted him. I did feel very bad about it, but what was I going to tell him? The truth? That I didn’t go to him because I was afraid he would tell my mother? If I couldn’t keep secrets from them, they couldn’t keep them from each other.
“Go on,” my mother said. “You might as well tell us everything about it now.”
I thought about the things that bothered me the most and decided to start with that. “I found the picture I once drew of my birth mother, a picture I gave you and you hid. There was a photograph with it, and the woman looked similar. I don’t know how I drew it to look so similar, but is that a photograph of my birth mother?”
“Yes,” my father said, before my mother could deny it.
“Then you did know her?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t just find me in an orphanage at eight months old?”
“No. We told you that to make it less painful for you when you were old enough to understand. Even a little girl would be upset about it, and you’ve always been mentally beyond your years. We didn’t mean it to be a hurtful lie. We were going to tell you all about it soon.”
“Soon?” I fired back, sounding just like my mother.
“Your snooping made it sooner than we intended,” my mother said, the corners of her mouth dipping.
“What else did you find?” my father asked, waving his right hand to shove aside that issue.
“There were pictures of two other children. Who were they?”
“Children who needed to be adopted. They had too many serious mental and emotional problems baked into them,” my father said. Those were almost Uncle Wade’s exact words. “We didn’t think we could handle them. That’s when we thought that if we were going to adopt a child, it would be better if it was an infant.”
“I found my birth certificate. You told me you had lost it.”
“We don’t have your original birth certificate. We were going to reveal the one you found when we had explained it all to you,” he said. “You probably saw diplomas and old photographs.”
“Yes.”
My mother looked at him sharply, her eyes suddenly two swirling orbs of cold fear.
He smiled. “Just things we did when we were younger, posing, going on movie sets.”
“Why are they hidden in a drawer?”
He shrugged. “We have lots of old pictures in closets and boxes. Your mother doesn’t like cluttering our house with them.”
“I also found a small box full of strange things, bones.”
“It was something your uncle brought back from one of his trips. He knows that we’re both a little superstitious. It’s the way we were brought up. It’s not something we like people to know about us,” he said. “That’s why your mother gave you that amber necklace.”
“And that rock with a hole when I was younger, the one she hung on my bed?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“That garland of garlic, the knife I saw you put under one of the front steps, all of that?”
“Our superstitions. So you see, we can be foolish, too.”
“Is that why you always hated my stories and dreams?” I asked my mother.
“Yes,” she said, looking like she hated admitting it.
“And why you worry about me so muc
h?”
“That’s it,” my father said. “Now, is there anything more you want to tell us?”
I wondered if I should mention anything about how I had closed the file drawer, but since I wasn’t sure of that myself, I thought I had told them enough. They looked satisfied anyway. I shook my head.
“I hope this is the first and last time you keep something secret from us, Sage,” my father said. “No matter what you do, what you hear or see, we’ll be there for you first. Okay?”
I nodded. When I looked up, I saw that my mother was not as confident of it as he was. I couldn’t blame her. After all, she had reason not to be. I wasn’t telling them everything, and right now, I had no intention to. I was afraid that, like Uncle Wade, they would not only advise me not to think about it anymore but also forbid me to do anything.
And I had a plan I was now determined to follow.
What I had to do was push it as far back in my mind as I could, so that I wouldn’t look like a plotter and my mother wouldn’t realize there was something more. I avoided them both for the rest of the day by pleading too much homework. I found myself behaving just like any of the other girls by keeping my parents distracted.
“It’s like all our teachers knew we were going to a party this weekend,” I moaned at dinner.
“I’m sure none of them expected you to leave it to the last moment,” my mother said. “You should have done most of it the day of the party.”
“Probably,” I said.
They both seemed to buy my act this time. But I couldn’t help wondering. Were they just playing along to see how far I would go? Even though they told me things they had hidden from me, I still felt there was more, lots more.
I went up to my room after dinner, ostensibly to do this neglected schoolwork, but I had really done just about all of it. I had started to read ahead in my history text when I had a phone call. It was Ginny. I was both surprised and grateful that she was calling me after I had disappointed her.
“You missed a great time after the party,” she said. “Half the time, I found myself defending you, but I think most of the girls bought your excuse for not coming with us.”
Gypsy Eyes Page 12
