Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  “But we need to be really clear here, all of us do. Even you, Bethie.”

  I took a deep breath. “You are giving us an ultimatum, right? You will consent to be in the family with us—to be in a relationship, as you put it—only if we believe that Bobby Jerome sexually accosted you, molested you.”

  “It’s the truth! He is a monster!”

  “And if we don’t believe that, if we believe Bobby Jerome is incapable of those acts, then you are finished with us forever.”

  “Until you believe me.”

  “Well then, Bethie, what if I say, I believe you believe these things happened, that you have been told they happened and you believe it.”

  “I’m not a liar!”

  “The worst thing is a liar,” Wade observed evenly, “whoever the truth might hurt—you, Celia, or Bobby, or any of you—whoever individually the truth might hurt, the lie hurts everyone. If you want to go on believing Bobby’s lies and denials, then that’s your choice.

  And your responsibility.”

  I studied the man on the couch, noting for the first time that his trimmed beard obscured a weak chin and the mustache obscured the defect of an overbite. For once his eyes were not brimming with beneficence and empathy, the suffering of a man who has gotten himself off crack and so knows firsthand the sorrows of the flesh.

  They were interested eyes, but not benign. Rather than be ingested by the spongy couch, he extricated himself, moved to the edge, alert.

  I clutched at the back of the chair. I started to salivate like you do before you’re going to heave. I have misunderstood everything. I see that now. I had taken it all personally. Boo hoo, Wade shattered my past. But I was only a casualty. Bobby was only a casualty. Sunny and Victoria too. Bethie was the target. The in-233

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  tended victim. The destruction of my past was incidental. It was Bethie’s past Wade wanted to destroy. That whole part of her life that did not involve Wade Shumley. That past will now be closed to her. She can never return to that old warm place—Isadora, Useless, Sophia’s Beach, girls in the orchard, Huggamug-wumps, Boomerquangers—all that is lost to her, suffused with pain, with bitterness and betrayal. She could never go back, only go forward. With Wade.

  And as for Gary Alsop, he was an unsuspecting dupe in this. Wade would use Gary as long as it suited him. Wade Shumley had kid-naped my daughter. Her face ought to be on a fucking milk carton.

  She was a prisoner in victimville. It was a dirty little war. Wade might have already won, but I would not go without a fight.

  I said to my daughter, “Wade has thought all this out, Bethie.

  Wade knows exactly what’s happening here. What Wade has done is unconscionable.” I drew myself up and addressed him directly.

  “I understand now. I understand what you’ve done, you sanctimo-nious, manipulative bastard—”

  “You promised,” Bethie shouted, “no name-calling, those were the rules!”

  “Listen to me, Bethie, you gave us an ultimatum. We leave and then? Then you will have no one but Wade. You will have no one at all who is your family, no one who really knows you, who knows not only who you are, but who you were. When we leave here, he will become the mirror of your whole identity. That’s why he changed your name from Bethie to Elizabeth. You didn’t do that.

  He did. At that awful engagement party, he could see we had claims on you, long-standing ties that he could not match or meet. And so he had to destroy us. But he’s stealing your past, Bethie. It’s Wade who’s making you sick. He’s feeding you off his own sickness. No one man can be a family.”

  “Wade’s given me everything! Work, love, support and a program for my recovery.”

  “That’s bullshit. That’s not your work. That’s his job.” I brought down the fucking kitchen chair and it spronged along the floor.

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  “Wade loves me! You never think of anyone but yourself!”

  “You better leave now, Celia.” Wade rose. “You’ve done more damage to Elizabeth than you can possibly guess at.”

  “But not more than you can guess at,” I snapped back. I turned to Bethie imploringly. “Without your own past, without your memories, you’re empty. You’re a vessel for him to fill up. You can never mention your past again because it’s so ugly now. Don’t let him do this, steal and destroy. You can lose everything else, you can give everything else all away. But your past can only be stolen from you, Bethie. Don’t let this sniveling, hypocritical, pump-sucking bastard steal—”

  “Get out! Go away! All of you! I hate you. You’ve ruined everything!”

  “You’ve broken all the rules,” Wade declared. “Get out. Your relationship with Elizabeth is over.”

  “You’re full of shit, Wade! There are no ex-mothers! This is a family fight and not a teatime relationship. We are in a relationship, Bethie. I’m your mother, damnit! I pushed you out of my body! I loved you from before you were born! How much more related can you be?”

  Wade told us to get out, all of us, told us repeatedly, though he did not raise his voice and he did not look at Bethie, sobbing, curled up fetally in the fleshy couch, pulling at her hair and moaning. Sunny moved toward her.

  “Don’t go near her,” Wade ordered, his temper rising. “Just get out. I should never have let you come, especially you—” He spoke to Grant as we all moved toward the door. “She’s told me about you and your brother, about the cruel boys you were, torturing her cats, the brutality you inflicted on her and Victoria while you lived with them, the physical abuse.”

  “What? Physical abuse? Bethie? Bethie?” Grant reached out to her like a ballplayer, to catch what would otherwise be a home run for the opposing team.

  “You know you did it!” she burst out harshly. “You did it! You and Lee—you did it to me. You tortured my kitty. You tore the head off my doll. You cheated from my homework. You 235

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  poured my goldfish into the toilet, and left him there for me to pee on. You used up all my good soap, my lavender soap, and left it floating in the tub. You kept me in the closet and you made me—”

  Bethie broke into a fresh paroxysm of weeping.

  But it was Wade who clarified and expanded, graphically, how Elizabeth remembered that often, when Grant and Lee’s father had been upstairs in bed with me, the two boys had trapped Bethie in a closet and made her take down her pants before they’d let her out.

  And with a single expletive, and a single blow, Grant decked Wade with a furled fist. Wade doubled over, crumpled at Grant’s feet, hit his chin on the coffee table and bit his lower lip, which began to gush blood. And as Wade turned, he caught his temple on the edge of the table, opening another gash while Bethie screamed, scrambled and clung to him.

  Wade shook Bethie off and got slowly to his knees. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and regarded his own blood with some affection. “You see, Elizabeth, what did I tell you? You are well rid of them.”

  Once outside in the brightness, and after the sunless apartment, the four of us blinked at one another while our eyes tried to adjust to the light and our minds to adjust to what had just transpired. We could hear from inside the apartment, crying, weeping, a kind of keening wail that would have broken a heart of stone. Sunny started back toward the door, but Victoria stayed her. “It’s over,” she said.

  “You can’t do anything. No one can.”

  “It was a lie,” said Grant, the cords in his neck still visibly taut. “I shouldn’t have hit him, but it was a lie.”

  “It’s all been a lie,” I said as we walked slowly away. “But we can’t go home yet. We have to go to see Bobby. Now we know where the lie is coming from and why, and we have to-236

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  tell him or he’s going to stay sunk in this cesspool Wade created.

  We can’t help Bethie, but we can help him.”

  “I don’t want to see anyone,” said Victoria. “I’m exh
austed. I want to go home and cry, or take a Valium, or drink or something. I hate all this.”

  “Fine, Victoria. But I’m going and Sunny and Grant are going. We all came in the same car,” I reminded them. In truth, Sunny looked ashen and Grant was badly shaken, but this had to happen now.

  “Bobby is living in a hell he did not create and does not deserve.

  And I think we need to tell him so. All of us together.”

  “He won’t want to see Grant,” Victoria objected. “Bobby won’t much like it that Sunny and Grant are, well, sleeping together. It’s a pretty strange—”

  “I’m not asking permission.” Sunny stiffened.

  I rode to Bobby’s with Victoria, the terrible silence between us made somehow the more oppressive by the new-car smell in her BMW, by all that expensive quiet. Finally I couldn’t bear it, and I asked her what had gotten into her, or out of her, or whatever was eating at her.

  “Do you think you’re the only one who’s suffered? This has been hell for me too.”

  “I’m not talking about all this, Victoria, about what Bethie’s un-leashed. You have not been yourself since Dorothy’s heart attack.

  Since the engagement party when you told me the truth about you and Eric. Why did you keep your marriage a secret anyway? I didn’t care. Really. But I’m hurt that you felt you had to lie to me about marrying Eric.”

  “Oh, God—please just can the hurt feelings, will you? I don’t want to hear another word about hurt feelings. Anyway, I didn’t lie. I waffled and qualified. There were tiny omissions. You knew I was living with Eric and that much was the truth.”

  “Eric is a wonderful man. Really, a fine husband.”

  “Please stop. Please. You sound just like Dorothy. She must be rubbing off on you.”

  “Your life is your own, Victoria.”

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  “It was.”

  Bobby and Janice lived in a split-level in North Seattle, a comfortable-looking house with a postage stamp of a yard and a chain-link fence in a neighborhood of small children, judging from the pink bicycles littering the sidewalks. Todd was mowing the front lawn.

  He looked pleased to see Victoria, looked less pleased to see me and downright alarmed when Sunny and Grant pulled up behind. We said we wanted to see Bobby and he glanced toward the window where his mother and the Wookie stood scowling at us.

  Our struggle with Janice was predictably full of recriminations and accusations and anger, but after what we’d just been through, this was a mere toxic picnic. Occasionally the Wookie punctuated Janice’s condemnation of all things Isadoran with aspersions on me in particular. Bobby finally straggled out of the bedroom, and he looked as though the noisy altercation had woken him from some dream. Like Bethie, he was a physical wreck and it was terrible to see accused and accuser suffering in such parallel ways. He was unshaven, and his gray hair untrimmed; he’d lost weight but not flesh and his skin seemed to flap unhappily about his jowls. He was wearing shorts that hung on him and a T-shirt from an old Grateful Dead concert. Shocking to see him, to see how the man of such buoyancy and spirit and charm uneroded by age could have drained out of the body of Bobby Jerome in so short a time. But to see Sunny and Victoria, his face lit, and after that, Janice could not deny us.

  Sunny especially fussed over him and I could imagine her as a girl fussing over him when they had lived together till Janice took him In Hand. Sunny had a special voice for Bobby, a voice unlike any other in its tenderness, a voice she used perhaps for Brio, but no other. He wanted to know all about Brio, why she hadn’t come and if she missed him. So Sunny told him all the news of Island Preschool and Baby Herman and how much Brio missed his music and their games. “She wants you to come back and do all the things you used to do. She wants you to live con brio, Dad.”

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  Bobby regarded Grant curiously, coldly, as though seeing him for the first time. He asked what Grant was doing here.

  Sunny interceded before Grant could answer. “I’m in love with Grant, Dad. We’re in love. Aren’t you happy for us?”

  “I am not my father,” said Grant. “I love Sunny and Brio and I’ll always do right by them.” And he stepped behind Sunny, as I’d noticed he often did, like a mast or ballast.

  Sunny reached for Grant’s hand, held it. “You see, Dad, it’s going to be OK.”

  “You never call me Dad unless it’s dire. Is it dire?” He looked at Janice, at Victoria, at me.

  Slowly, in a kind of chime and spiral, repetition, revelation we told him why we’d come and where we’d been and what we now understood. “Wade can only deal with weak people,” I said at last,

  “people who are hurting and in pain. He can’t bear strength, so he had to put Bethie in pain to make her weak. He told her a sort of story about you, about me, about us in the old days over and over.

  He told her that story till she believed it.”

  “Like the Huggamugwump stories,” Sunny volunteered, “one of those chilling stories kids love, where there’s peril and adventure and a safe harbor at the end. He told her those lies like stories.”

  “Of course these are lies!” Janice interrupted. “What else could they be? Vile lies. This is not news, and you are not helping Bobby.”

  I went to Bobby. I took his hand. “There is a kind of chronic pain,”

  I said, “that we will all have to endure. We have lost our daughter to Wade and Wade’s lies. But you have to get well because we can’t let Wade destroy you too. We have to protect the past, Bobby, our past, even though it was not perfect, not all golden, but it’s worth protecting. Think of us, Bobby, remember back, all of us, remember us on Sophia’s Beach. No matter what’s happened to you and me, or that the girls have grown up, something of us remains on that beach. Just like those old Indians who died there, anonymous, long dead, you know? But no one’s ever been able to change the name of what happened to them at

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  Massacre. Some memories are so powerful they cling to a place.

  Time itself clings there. You go to that place and you meet that time.

  An island in time. We can’t let Wade corrupt that. We can’t lose each other. All of us, Janice. I mean that.” I glanced at her and she had started to cry. I looked at Todd whose great mustache sat so awkwardly in his young face, and I told Bobby he still had children to think about, Victoria and Sunny and Todd and Brio. “We have to keep ourselves together, Bobby, and protect that island in time. We can’t let Wade steal across Moonless Bay and slaughter us all in silence.”

  I insisted Janice bring him over the following weekend for a picnic on Sophia’s Beach, and to my surprise, she did. The Wookie stayed in Seattle, sulking, but Janice made the effort. Give her that. And Bobby was better, visibly so, not entirely his old self, but the sight of Brio seemed a tonic to him. And because Bobby was better, Janice was better and Todd relaxed, bounded along Sophia’s Beach barking at the seals, crashing into the cold water where Eric joined him.

  Briefly. Everyone took a turn on the swing and when it was my turn, I went high into the air and over the water and looked up and down the beach at my family, not just Sunny and Brio, Bobby, Todd and Janice, but Grant too, Victoria, Eric, Dorothy and old begrudging Ned. I laughed out loud. For the first time since all this anguish had struck, I laughed. Maybe for the first time since Bethie’s wretched engagement party and dreadful Diane Wirth. I laughed now to think how strangely we were all related. Nuclear didn’t describe families.

  How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the twenty-first century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the
shared gene pool. Families like ours created from the rag ends of other families, molecularly connected to make something entirely different, combined to create a new whole.

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  Island Fever

  Does suffering, unjustly inflicted and patiently endured, make you a martyr? St. Sebastian came to Victoria’s mind. Joan of Arc, perhaps.

  But what about the less literary? What about those masses of victims, suffering hordes, like the Slaughter of the Innocents in the Bible? Or the hollow-eyed proletariat crying out for bread and revolution.

  Were they martyrs? Or does suffering, unjustly inflicted and patiently endured, simply make you a stupid shit?

  Victoria Robbins struggled all summer with these questions, feeling like a stupid shit, though slowly she came to believe that the answers hinged on accountability. I ought to have resisted Bethie, she thought on a more or less daily basis, nibbling around the edge of her French manicure as though it were a baby slug in the middle of an otherwise adequate salad. I ought to have said: Bethie, do what you want with your own life. Have the Great White Wedding. Flower girls, ushers, blue garters snapped and flung to 241

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  groomsmen, flowers tossed to the bridesmaids, and shove the whole thing down Celia’s throat and make her pay for it. Do what you want, but leave me be. I know best how to balance my marriage and deal with my mother.

  I will tell Celia in my own good time. Or not tell her, as I see fit. I do not need to make an Issue of my marriage. I will come to your engagement party. I will be your bridesmaid. But it is not your place to tell me when or what to confess to Celia. Victoria practiced this speech over and over till she had finally got it right. It took her all summer. An exercise pointless beyond belief.

  Pointless, yes, but it offered some comfort, because though her sufferings remained unjustly inflicted, at least she could actually blame someone else. Hold Bethie accountable for everything. Bethie had insisted on inviting the whole Robbins tribe to the engagement party. Bethie had assured Victoria inviting all of them was the only way to get Celia to accept her marriage, to get Celia (famously stubborn) to see that Victoria Robbins was truly a married woman with in-laws.