Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

penis and work him with my hand.

  What is this? Impossible! No! I crashed on through the thicket of accusation.

  Celia knew what Bobby did. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except smoking dope and having lovers. She even sent me to his house later when she didn’t have to. She could have protected me, but she didn’t care. She was jealous of me. She let him be inappropriate with me.

  My daughter molested? My girl abused? A helpless child wounded? No. Her youth betrayed? No. Her innocence corrupted?

  No. Bobby Jerome in Bethie’s bed, Bethie’s body? No! No! No! I crumpled the pages in my lap, in my fist and took several steep breaths as though going under, sinking into unimaginable depths far, far over my head, but I read on, blinded by 178

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  tears and nausea, tore through the other pages—more of the same, more vivid, till at last I somehow got to the end.

  I am sick of lies, sick of lying and pretending and keeping your secrets for my family and their lies. They are all so fattened with lies they cannot know the truth. The truth is hard and dry and brittle as old bread and I have eaten this hard, dry bread and my pain is unbearable.

  I have eaten dry bread while my family chews on meaty lies.

  I thought of Sass and Squatch chewing, gnawing their way through the rag ends of ham bones, the sound of it terrible, abominable. The blood and bone of it. I felt like it was the flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone. Disemboweled. Nuclear family? Wrong phrase. Isn’t that what I’d always blithely maintained? Family needs some Darwinian grisly food-chain imagery? I could all but hear the shred and sunder of my family. I began to cry into my hands, to sob and gasp, shoulders heaving.

  “Celia?” Dorothy startled me as she came through the French doors. “Has someone died?”

  This time it was Dorothy’s turn to catch me, to hold me, to embrace, to try to stand between me and the abyss that yawned. I clutched the pages and sobbed against Dorothy.

  “Read it,” I said finally, bitterly, handing her the letter. “Read it and weep.”

  She did read it and weep. So did Sunny when we went back home.

  Sunny read and wept and gasped, plummeting through these pages one by one, going finally to

  Bobby loved me better than he loved his own daughters. If I told anyone what he did, they would know he loved me better and 179

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  how it was good for me and didn’t hurt and didn’t hurt me even though I cried and Mommy didn’t listen and didn’t come to me. He would not let me cry out to Mommy. He told me he did it to me because he loved me best, and if I told, no one would love me ever. I would be alone. But I am alone. Mother lets him. Maybe the others are alone too, maybe he does it to them too and she lets him use his fingers to

  Sunny dropped the stapled pages and they fell to the floor and she sat paralyzed in her chair, head thrown back, hands clenched.

  “How can she say this? How can she lie like this? How can she think this!” Sunny’s voice spiraled up into a screech and she gulped the glass of Wild Turkey Dorothy offered her, a shot glass. The three of us sat at the table looking and not looking at the two duplicate letters in front of us. “Who else got one?” Sunny asked at last. “Do we know?”

  “Victoria, no doubt.”

  “Victoria and Eric are in Portland this weekend,” said Dorothy.

  “She won’t see it till they come home Sunday night.”

  “Bobby. Bobby will have one waiting at home.” I was sure of it.

  Sunny began to tremble and she covered her face with her hands.

  “Bethie was as much his daughter as I was. Every time Bobby came to get Victoria for visitation, Bethie always came too. We were all three sisters, all Bobby’s girls. You’re my girl, Bethie, that’s what he used to say.” Sunny mopped her face. “It’s all so sinister now. So ugly. My father never hurt anyone. No child. Ever. He could never hurt a little girl. Brio!” And Sunny clapped her hands over her mouth to stop herself from saying the worst thing there was to say, from thinking the worst there was to think. The most terrible.

  “It’s unthinkable,” Dorothy maintained, her voice cracking, “unthinkable.”

  I looked at the letters, forced myself to reread swiftly: Bobby skewered for perversion and me impaled for collusion and cow-ardice. As my fingers scraped down the pages, under my finger-180

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  nails there collected not paper and ink, but flesh and blood. Mine.

  Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone. Bloody, all of it.

  “Bobby Jerome”—Dorothy stroked Sunny’s short hair—“is a good man. A good man. Maybe not the most responsible of men, but not…” In the silence, shadows shifted uncomfortably around the kitchen, the wind outside stirring trees. “Never this unthinkable accusation.”

  “It’s been thought,” I said slowly. “So, it’s not unthinkable.”

  “How can you take any comfort in that logic?” Dorothy asked.

  “I don’t. There’s no comfort to be had. Now that Bethie has sent this—and God knows, these are copies, God knows who else received this same letter—once the indescribable has been described, then it has a life of its own. It has form. It has the possibility of truth. Once something has been thought and someone has said it”—I pushed the twenty stapled pages away—“then it can be true or false. But it is no longer unthinkable. It has been thought. Written. Said. Now we have to fight or deny. Or what-ever people do. What do people do?” I asked. No one knew.

  “We’re all made ugly, guilty,” Sunny said at last. “Bobby molested Bethie. You didn’t care. The rest of us were stupid and ignorant, victims ourselves, or uncaring.”

  “This is going to tarnish and shatter everyone it touches. Even you, Dorothy. No one living here will be spared.”

  “Really, Celia”—Dorothy drew herself up—“I am not the sort to scurry back to Bellevue at the least sign of trouble. I will not desert any of you when you need me. Besides, you do need me—it’s almost one. I’ll go on over to Henry’s. I’ll take care of everything. You stay with Sunny. You need to be here when Bobby comes back with Brio.

  I’ve never heard anything so vile and ugly in all my life,” Dorothy added, taking all our glasses to the sink.

  After she left us, Sunny and I sat in the silence, or as much silence as there ever is in my kitchen, marine radio, fax machine, all of that.

  Sunny got up and turned off the radio, unplugged the 181

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  fax from the wall, and we sat for hours asking ourselves questions we could not answer, anger congealing into defeat, a pool of pain.

  Later, hours later I guess, we heard Bobby’s Subaru come into the yard and stop and Sunny’s face, her whole body seemed to contort in anguish for her father, her sister, her daughter. We heard Brio’s voice.

  Brio waltzed in full of news about the fox they’d seen. A real fox.

  A pheasant too, a mother pheasant with her little ones. They saw all this on some back road or another when they’d got lost. “’Cept Bobby says you can’t get lost on an island. All the roads just go dead end at the sea, and you have to turn around and go back. The way you came.”

  To go back the way we came was so impossible that big tears rolled down my face. Brio didn’t notice. Bobby did.

  They’d gone to Massacre for lunch, Brio said, and met Grant at the Duncan Donuts. Grant said it was a good kite flying day, insisted they must have a kite. He finished his lunch and took Bobby and Brio back to the sailboat at the Massacre Marina. “He gave us one of his kites. Handmade kite. Grant said girls should always have the things that made them happy. But we broke it,” Brio confessed.

  “Oh, Brio—” Sunny cried, swooping her up in an embrace and weeping against her sweet neck.

  “Don’t cry, Mommy,” consoled Brio. “Don’t cry. Bobby says Launch can fix it and Grant will never know we broke it.”

  “Somebody die?” asked Bobby, looking at me.

  “
Grant told Bobby you were boo-ful, Mommy,” Brio volunteered.

  “He said I was pretty boo-ful too, but you were really boo-ful, didn’t he?”

  “Of course she’s beautiful,” Bobby scoffed. “Anyone can see that.

  He must have thought he was Einstein or something to notice Sunny is beautiful. He’s as bad as his father.”

  “Brio, sweetness”—Sunny pressed her close—“you go take the broken kite and find Launch. And he will fix it.”

  “I’m hungry.”

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  “You go over to Henry’s and ask Dorothy for something to eat.

  Dorothy’s there. She’ll feed you and help you find Launch.”

  “Why aren’t you at Henry’s, Celia?” asked Bobby. “What’s wrong?”

  I waited for Brio to leave, for the door to close, for Sass and Squatch to bound after her through the orchard path. Then I went to the cupboard and got another shot glass and I poured him some Wild Turkey. Sunny and I sat on either side of him and said he should drink it.

  “What’s this for? I thought you said no one croaked.” Bobby tossed off the Wild Turkey and laughed. “Kills the pain. Give me another, Doc. Give it to me straight, the whiskey and the word. A leg cut off?

  No, only a foot? Amputation? No, Doc, no! Save my foot, Doc! Save my foot!” He swilled a second with more hokey dialog from Westerns, expecting some response, some laughter, but we just listened.

  “Well, give it to me straight, ladies. I’m a man. I don’t need liquor in my system to have a good time, or to get through a crisis. Give it to me straight. Is it cancer?”

  “Dad…”

  “Dad! Whoo! This must be really bad! She never calls me Dad, Celia. The whole world calls me Bobby. Even my grand-daughter calls me Bobby. OK, not cancer. Gangrene. Right?”

  “Dad, we have something you have to read.”

  “What’s the matter with you two? If you’re not going to laugh—”

  Bobby fell suddenly sulky and said, whatever it was, just get it over with.

  Sunny pushed one of the envelopes to him. “It’s from Bethie.”

  “I don’t get to be father of the bride?”

  Sunny started to cry again.

  Bobby frowned deeply. “This letter is addressed to you, Celia. I never read other people’s mail. I haven’t read your mail since Andrew Hayes started billing you for his services. Remember? When you were offering bed and breakfast before there ever was a Henry’s House? No offense,” he added slyly.

  “You have to read it, Dad. I know you don’t want to.”

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  “Have you read it? Did you need Wild Turkey?”

  “It is a kind of amputation, Bobby,” I said slowly, carefully, when Sunny was silent. “In its way, it is an amputation.”

  Bobby Jerome pulled the twenty pages from their envelope and placed them on the table. He began to read, but slowly, and unlike me or Dorothy or Sunny, who had flung ourselves head-long through the swamp, the muck, the mire and misery, Bobby read slowly. After the first paragraph, he took his reading glasses from his pocket and put them on. He read even more slowly with the glasses.

  “What does she mean?” he asked at page two. He seemed to dis-integrate like newsprint left in the rain, going gray, volitionless.

  “What does she mean? What is she saying?” he said over and over and over, long before he reached the end. “What does she mean?

  What is she talking about?”

  They weren’t the same question, I wanted to tell Bobby. What Bethie meant and what she was talking about, they weren’t the same question at all. Besides, there were lots of other questions, tugged, plucked from this cesspool, like pulling skeletal forms from the tar pits, dinosaur bones long submerged in the sticky medium of the past, caught there after some terrible calamity. That’s what it felt like to me. Like someone had died. But Sunny and I, every time we had to enlist help that afternoon, that evening, we kept saying No one has died, but…To Dr. Aagard, to Launch, to Grant, to Janice— No one has died, but…It came to have a kind of Biblical rhythm, a kind of reliable punctuation. No one has died, but…

  Bobby collapsed as though he’d had a heart attack, fell forward, slumped finally and slid to the floor, the letter beside him. Sunny and I, imploring, comforting, talking nonstop, Impossible, impossible, no one will believe this, could not get him to move, nor 184

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  could we move him and that was how Brio found us: Bobby between us, all three on the floor, when she stumbled back into the house and stood in the doorway. Over her face there was pasted excruciating confusion, but before she could even open her little mouth, Sunny whisked Brio up in her arms and carried her back to Henry’s House where Dorothy promised that the staff would keep her busy till Sunny returned—whenever that might be.

  While Sunny was gone, Bobby’s condition worsened, and he seemed to me to have gone into acute physical shock, not just a condition of the body, but of the heart and mind. I knew we had to get him upstairs, to get him into bed and keep him warm, but he remained inert, immovable. When Sunny returned, I asked her to go find Launch, to say to him, No one has died, but…I stayed, kneeling on the floor, Bobby cradled in my arms, me crying and trying to soothe, protest, protect, and then Grant walked in, kite glue in his hand. He flung it down and came to my side. No one has died, I said, not believing it, not at all.

  Sonofabitch, Grant said over and over, sonofabitch, reading Bethie’s letter. It had taken the four of us, Sunny and me, Grant and Launch to get Bobby up to my old room, the old bed which Bobby and I had once shared. Sunny sat beside him, his hand in hers, while I closed the curtains against the dappling afternoon light. He shook with chills and shock and I told Sunny to keep him warm and I went downstairs to call the doctor where I found Grant reading Bethie’s letter. Launch, in his mercifully incurious way, had gone back over to Henry’s.

  “Sonofabitch! This is impossible.” Grant spoke not so much to me (I was on the phone trying to get through to Dr. Aagard, leaving messages for him), but as a generalized curse. Other words failed him as he read on, finishing the twenty pages at last and sliding them back in their envelope. “Bethie always loved Bobby. If she wanted to destroy someone, if she wanted to strike out, strike back at someone, it should have been my dad. She always hated him. My dad moved in here and broke up the whole happy family.”

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  I declined to comment. It would have been disrespectful of Bobby’s suffering to remark that it wasn’t such a happy family by then, that Bobby and I had long since ceased to fulfill each other’s hopes and expectations by the time I met Andrew. What had once struck me as youthful and unfettered about Bobby came to be childish and vapid. He wanted to dream. I wanted to work. What did the girls want?

  “Bethie was always taunting me and Lee, telling us how wonderful Bobby Jerome was, what a great father he was, all the things he did for kids, and how pathetic my dad was, I mean, as a father, how she hated him, and hated us. Lee and I didn’t even stand up for him when she’d say how awful he was. Lots of times we hated him too.

  Our mom hated him. Even when she lived with him, she hated him.”

  “He has that effect on women, your father,” I replied neutrally.

  Before Andrew Hayes came into my life, I had not understood how sex could be a weapon, or that your physical need for a man, a certain man—Andrew—could propel you through the ruins of a relationship and keep you in those ruins, reduce you to a ruin yourself.

  “My dad and women—” Grant shook his head. “But he’s indifferent to kids. We envied those girls, Bethie and Victoria, because Bobby was so involved with his girls, so interested in what they were doing.

  Just like he is now with Brio.”

  Dryly, I explained as best I could that because Bobby loved the girls—volubly, demonstrably, effusively—that’s exactly what made this terrible accusation thinkable.
Imaginable. I saw, in my mind’s eye, again, Bobby on the edge of the bed with Bethie, or Victoria or Sunny for that matter, in his arms, Bobby playing hooky with one or the other, lavishing himself on each girl so she felt special and enhanced, sharing sunsets with the girls in a way that, certainly toward the end, he could not do with an adult woman. Women get harnessed to necessity. Eve herself had no time for sunsets after Eden. But a child, oh, Bobby and children…I started to cry and Grant rose, put his hand on my shoulder and said no one would believe anything so vile of Bobby

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  Jerome. He said this knowing, as I did, that some would. Some would believe Bobby had it coming. Word inevitably would percolate all over this island and some would believe.

  But on an island, because we are broken off from the whole, physically adrift in the Sound and difficult to negotiate in emergencies, some things yet remained possible, like Dr. Aagard coming to your house if you had an emergency that didn’t require hospitaliza-tion. He came to my house. He gave Bobby a shot, gave instructions, wrote out two prescriptions, and then he asked, if no one had died, what had done this to Bobby Jerome? I gave him Bethie’s letter to read. When he finished he said it was a sorry fact, but that this was the avenue some kids took, that it was a way for them to grow up, fast and finally: to smite down the parents in one terrible blow. “It’s like the old myths and tales, Celia. Some kids, this is their path to adulthood and they feel they must maim or destroy the parents, the authority figures, or they don’t believe they can ever be adults themselves. I’m sorry to say it, Celia, but this is not as uncommon as you’d think.”

  “Are you telling me I should take comfort from Oedipus?”

  “I think you should take comfort wherever you can,” he replied gravely. “Does Bobby’s wife know?”

  Not yet. But that night—that long, loitering June evening, the earth unwilling to relinquish the sun—Janice called. Sunny and I, sitting at the kitchen table, our hands wrapped around mugs of cold tea, we never went near the phone. We let the voice mail pick up. First Angie called. She had gotten a letter like ours. Then Nona. Both were stunned, but we still didn’t pick up. Across from me Sunny remarked that Bethie should just have posted it publicly. “That’s what she has done,” I said.