Forbidden

by Abbie Williams

  She did, vaguely, but said, “No, not really.”

  “You were so little the last time I saw you, only three or four. You and Shelly drove up for Mom’s funeral.”

  A sudden, watery memory gripped her, a vision of people huddled under umbrellas, crying, but she said again, “I don’t really remember, I’m sorry.” She gave up and sank onto her chair at the table.

  “You were so little,” he said again, and sighed deeply. “Erica, that’s your aunt, played Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison for you on the record player that weekend. You thought that was great.” He sounded in danger of rambling, and to her amazement Bryce felt another flicker of memory: a big creaky house with big drafty rooms, a woman with gorgeous, long red hair–mermaid hair she’d wanted to comb with her fingers.

  “I still love that song,” she heard herself admit.

  “That’s how I picture you still, with two long braids and those huge brown eyes,” he said. “I’m sure you’re a little bigger now.”

  “Yeah,” she responded automatically, and a small spurt of anger flared in her belly, burning away the momentary connection. Suddenly he gave a shit after more than a decade and a half had passed? Where had he been when she was desperately wrapping towels around her mother’s arms?

  “Bryce, I’m calling to see if you can talk Shelly into coming up here for the funeral,” he was saying. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her, and you, and if you could make it that would mean so much to all of us. I would pay for plane tickets.”

  “Ah…when?” she asked, feeling out of depth and fighting the urge to simply hang up the phone.

  “Dad’s funeral is this Wednesday. You’d be welcome to stay longer than that, too.”

  Hell, no. But she said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, honey,” he told her like he meant to end the conversation, but he paused. Bryce imagined a hundred questions she could ask right then, but all she managed was, “Why?” Her voice sounded small, a little girl’s, though she hadn’t intended that.

  Over a thousand miles away, Wilder Sternhagen gripped the back of his neck and rocked on his heels. The heat from the fireplace in his living room, burning in a vain attempt to counter the grayness of his day, was nearly unbearable against the front of his jeans, but he didn’t move back. Instead he stared into the leaping, vivid orange flames, his favorite part of the fire, the wild and dangerous part of it.

  Jesus Christ, he thought, while his niece waited quietly. How could he possibly begin to answer that? How could he find a way to atone, to even explain? My own kids were little too, and the farm…I didn’t make time…it’s not my fault…

  For a moment he was furious at his father for dying before resolving things with Michelle. More than anything he wished Matthew was home, but he’d been unable to even make contact with his youngest brother today. Finally he said, “Bryce, I wish I could answer that, but I can’t right now. Just please come.” And then, his throat closing swiftly, he said, “Good-bye.”

  She hung up, stomped 12 feet, and slammed open her mother’s bedroom door.

  Michelle didn’t look at her, but immediately said, “No.”

  She was digging through the top drawer of her dresser. A large pile of bras and panties covered the floor. Bryce stared between this and her mother, who angled one shoulder slightly away from her. Michelle was tiny, and so slim she wore children’s sizes. Her frailness was somehow exaggerated by her snow-pale skin. Bent over, with strands of hair clinging to her damp cheeks, Michelle looked so ashen and vulnerable that Bryce swallowed the angry words in her throat and instead sank to the threadbare satin blanket on the double bed.

  “No, what?” she asked quietly. Michelle paused in her rummaging, then reached into her denim purse and extracted a smoke and her lighter. She sat down beside her daughter and lit up, then wrapped one arm about her updrawn knees and drew deeply on her long 100. It was clearly a defensive posture, and Bryce waited a moment before repeating the question.

  Instead of answering, Michelle suddenly stretched her right leg and poked at the mound of undergarments on the floor, then leaned and plucked something from the lacy depths.

  “There it is,” she said around the filter, and studied a small black and white snapshot for a second before handing it over to Bryce.

  “It’s you and…your mom?” Bryce hazarded a guess, bringing the snapshot closer to her eyes. Summertime somewhere, long ago, because Michelle couldn’t have been more than two or three. The kind of late-afternoon sunlight that made Bryce’s throat ache shimmered over the older woman’s pale hair. Tiny Michelle was reaching for that halo of light; neither of them were looking directly at the camera, but instead at one another, and the mother’s face bore such an expression of tender devotion that anguish further seared the back of Bryce’s throat, catching her off guard. But she swallowed the pain instantly.

  Michelle took the photo back into her own hand and blew smoke, but carefully, not letting any touch the old paper.

  “Yeah,” she sighed, and closed her eyes. “She was really beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  Bryce, always suspiscious of what seemed to be a heart-to-heart tone in her mother’s voice, only nodded.

  “I’m not going,” Michelle said after a protracted silence had passed.

  Bryce, who had been studying the wood paneling opposite her and wondering when was the last time she’d been in Michelle’s room for anything, bit down hard on her bottom lip.

  “Why?” It hadn’t worked with her uncle, but it was all she could manage just now. She didn’t take her eyes from the wall.

  Michelle’s knees drew up again. “I’m not ready. I tried going back once, when you were three. It was a fucking disaster.”

  They hadn’t exchanged this many words in months. Bryce dared a peep at her mother. “Your brother mentioned that…he said it was your mom’s funeral.”

  Michelle laughed suddenly and harshly, emitting a cloud of smoke. With a vicious twist, she ground out the cigarette in the blue ceramic ashtray on her nightstand, which couldn’t have been emptied in at least a half carton.

  “That bitch wasn’t my mother,” was all she said.

  Dangerous ground Bryce, she told herself, but asked, “Not the woman in the picture?”

  “No, not her.”

  “Then who…”

  “Lydia was my father’s second wife. We went to her funeral because I wanted to see her dead.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom!”

  Michelle turned to meet Bryce’s eyes. “I’m completely serious. The truth hurts sometimes.”

  Don’t I know, Bryce didn’t say, looking back into Michelle’s eyes, resisting the urge to turn her own away. Her mother must have been pretty once. Her irises were an utterly clear ice blue, inhabited by no flecks of other color, no slim spoke lines radiating out from her pupils. And her lashes, the only feature Bryce was certain she had inheirited from her mother, were long and thick and dark. Neglect and hard living had chiseled a path through the rest of her features; though only 39, she appeared far older. “But you’re going. I already told Wilder I would send you.”

  Bryce used both hands to heave herself up. Without replying to the statement she walked back to the kitchen and popped open a beer.

  “I’ll leave,” she said into the empty room, loud enough for Michelle to hear. “I will run away before I go to some funeral a millon miles away. I will move in with Wade and his mom and stepdad.”

  Michelle made no reply in the half-hour Bryce waited, drinking. She eventually slipped again onto her chair at the table to dent her beer cans and consider how pathetic this whole situation was: her mother would not manage to rouse even a tiny flicker of sympathy for her dead father, would not make an appearance at the funeral, but would instead choose to send her daughter into a group of complete strangers to do the honors for her. It was totally silent in her mother’s room, and Bryce at last walked back and peered in; for a second her heart pounded very hard against her ribs and bil
e rose up her throat…but Michelle was only sleeping, lying flat on her back with the ashtray balanced on her belly, snoring lightly.

  Bryce stepped in and silently removed the disgusting adornment from her mother’s sleeping form. Conversation closed. She was fairly certain Michelle wouldn’t remember the details of this exchange anyhow, and Bryce vowed there on the stained blue carpet she would never mention it again.

  4:30 p.m.

  Two hours later, errands complete, Trish pulled up beside the Fremont Motel. She and Bryce looked up at the second-floor room numbered 212, with its battered door thrown wide to the bright afternoon air. Garth Brooks sang from the radio, cranked to full blast, and they could see Amy jumping on the bed. She caught sight of them and yelled, “Come on, you guys, let’s hit the pool!”

  Trish giggled, moving to open the trunk. Together she and Bryce unloaded two cases of beer they’d brought as party favors and Bryce followed her best friend up the rickety cast-iron steps, her fingers curled around the heavy cardboard box. Halfway to the top Trish stopped abrubtly and someone on the landing said, “Hey, let me help you.”

  Just like that, out of nowhere, his voice. It made something shift in the inner space between her belly and breasts, a feeling that caught Bryce so suddenly she struggled to draw a normal breath.

  Trish whispered, “Oh my God,” in a tone Bryce understood, and so when a man came down the steps toward them, she already knew what he would look like.

  Dark eyes, dark hair. Amazing lips. Scruff on his jaw. Black shirt, faded jeans. He towered over them, reaching one arm to take the beer from Trish as though it weighed no more than a baby.

  “Thanks!” she said and smiled brightly, then slipped around him and up the rest of the steps, leaving Bryce silent in her wake.

  “You, too,” he said, nodding at her armload, but she hesitated for a second, a moment that seemed to stretch out much further than just this hot June afternoon, a moment that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to her; on a subterreanean level, somewhere deep in her belly, she felt a distinctive shift. For a long, slow moment their gazes met and held, and the smile on his lips faltered at the same second his eyes crinkled a little, as though he too felt the air between them tighten.

  “Honey, come on!” Amy yelled at Bryce, bouncing off the bed to stick her head out the doorway. “Hey buddy, you want a beer? It’s my birthday,” she declared with drunken magnanimity, grinning at the stranger.

  “Thanks, maybe later,” he said, glancing back at Amy, and Bryce blinked once and pulled herself together. She surrendered the beer into his grasp, coming close enough to breathe him in. The skin along her inner arms and thighs prickled.

  “Thanks,” she tried to say, but it came out in a whisper, and he grinned, seeming at ease again.

  “No problem,” he told her. The second his back was turned her hands were in her hair, smoothing, pulling the sunglasses from from her forehead, shaking out its length. He carried the beer cases under each arm. His muscles were the kind built from hard work, she would bet her life. Long, hard, hot hours of manual labor.

  Jesus Christ, Bryce, she hissed to herself, tearing her eyes from the incredibly appealing view of the back of his shoulders, the slope of them, the chiseled shape of his torso. He deposited the beer on the plastic table parked midway between Amy’s room and the door to 214, which was open about a foot.

  “Guess we’re neighbors,” he observed, and Bryce made a show of hanging her sunglasses on the edge of her tight white tank top, recovering enough to offer him a smile.

  “Guess so,” she said, turning away before she melted into a puddle on the concrete, escaping into the music-pulsing depths of 212.

  “Okay, holy crap, that guy.” This from Trish as the girls crowded as surreptitiously as possible behind the sheer white curtains in the front window minutes later and watched him make his way across the parking lot to a waiting taxi. Amy, who’d been drinking steadily for the past three hours, waved gaily as he glanced up at their room before climbing into the backseat. Bryce, Trish and Stacy jumped away from the glass as though a gun had been fired.

  “Do you think he’ll come over later?” Amy asked, turning back to them with a flushed face and lopsided grin.

  “Dude, what are you talking about?” Stacy teased her, grabbing a pillow and tossing it at her head.

  “Hey, it’s my birthday,” she giggled, dodging the fluffy missile. “By the way, where’s my present?” she asked and darted for the tiny baggie of white pills that Trish produced with a flourish.

  6 p.m.

  Nothing was shitty about the cheap motel pool on X. Bryce floated in a haze of pure bliss, the threadbare blue beach towel over gritty concrete a downy cloud beneath her. Her slender body in last summer’s faded green bikini was transformed luscious and perfect and designer-clad. The sun was radiant as it shimmered in topaz fire over the surface of the speckled, chlorinated water. She loved her life, and her friends were angels whose laughter from their own nearby towels sparkled through the still air in a jewel-shower of sound.

  “Pass that bottle back, will you?” she thought she asked Trish, and she must have really spoken the words because her best friend’s face appeared suddenly in the space above her own, grinning hugely.

  “Here,” Trish said, pouring a little of the rum on her belly. Bryce curled over with laughter, each second more hilarious than the next. They were the only ones at the pool, and probably would be until later, when more of their friends would head over from Middleton on I-35 to join them at the motel.

  “Clean it up,” Bryce demanded, her ribs aching from laughter, and then shrieked when Amy leaned into the pool and splashed her.

  8 p.m.

  “He’s back,” Trish whispered in her ear.

  Bryce, who had been drinking water for the last hour in order to pace herself, felt her nipples tighten against her still-damp bikini top and gripped Trish’s arm with one hand to hoist herself to an upright position. “Crap. Is the shower free yet?”

  “Yeah, Stacy’s out.” The girls had piled back into the room to clean up from swimming before other guests started to arrive, and Bryce was riding out the last of her buzz on one of the two queen beds, staring at the water-stained ceiling and contemplating how to ask Wade if she could move in, and what he might potentially make of that inquiry, until the funeral thing passed over.

  “Okay, my turn then,” she said. No way was the hottest guy she’d seen in a long time, possibly ever, going to see her looking anything less than her best.

  Yeah, keep telling yourself that’s the only reason, Bryce, she reprimanded herself as she shucked her clothes in the cramped motel bathroom. She showered in steaming water for as long as she could take it, then switched to cold to smooth out her hair. Naked before the wide mirror a few minutes later, she studied her reflection critically, cupping both hands around her breasts, holding them close together to affect some cleavage, wishing for the thousandth time since turning 12 that they were bigger. Whoever her father was, he’d been dark. Her own hair was coffee-brown, and never glistened with blond highlights like all her friends’ did in the summer. Her eyes were passably attractive, she thought, with very long lashes, as dark as her hair beneath thick eyebrows she painstakingly kept plucked. She didn’t think she looked much like Michelle, except for her small stature, but that suited her just fine. Michelle had never been the mother-daughter banquet type, the kind of place where similarities like that were noticed and complimented; Bryce smiled a little at her reflection as she imagined Michelle attending anything like that, as crazy as the notion of her mother leading a Girl Scout Troop or baking a birthday cake.

  A knock from the outside door shattered her thoughts and she rolled her eyes at herself, unzipping her make-up bag. Bronzer, golden-brown eyeshadow…she caught sight of her birth control pills in their white plastic compact and popped the one she’d forgotten this morning. She smoothed on lip gloss and decided to let her hair air-dry so it would have a little wave. She was just touching
a fingertip of expensive perfume (shoplifted for her from the department store display counter, courtesy of Trish’s little sister) to the hollow of her throat when she heard him.

  “Any chance I could take you up on that beer?” he asked, and she actually felt the pulse in her neck begin thumping beneath her fingers. People had been arriving for the last 20 minutes and she could hear laughter from the room and the landing outside, music and cans being cracked, but somehow his voice stood out.

  “Of course, neighbor,” Amy practically cooed. “Come on in.”

  Bryce’s heart was pounding so hard she could again hardly draw a breath, and she stared at herself in amazement in the mirror. It had to be the last of the X that had her so riled up; she drew a determined lungful and held it…no good, no good…her heart was still thumping madly. She released a shaky breath and then pulled on white jean shorts and the clean shirt she’d brought with her, an emerald green one with a v-neck that dipped low.

  Was it her imagination or had he been waiting for her, too? When she emerged from around the corner, into the pulse of activity, his dark eyes sought her out immediately. Within a few seconds they were less than two feet apart, though Bryce didn’t recall moving.

  “Hey there,” he said easily, beer in hand. “Hope you don’t mind me crashing your party.”

  This close to him, she had to tilt her chin way up to meet his eyes. He had shaved away the scruff on his strong jaw, changed into a different t-shirt (white this time) which emphasized his incredibly wide shoulders to an almost unfair degree. His hair was so dark it was nearly black, finger-length and gently wavy; his eyes the rich brown of pecans; twin dimples in his cheeks as he grinned blindingly at her. Oh, she thought inanely. Oh, oh, wow. She realized she was staring at him and immediately flashed her gaze away, out the door. Jesus, Bryce! Get a grip. Her kneecaps were trembling.

  “The sunset is gorgeous,” he added, still studying her face.

  She realized she hadn’t yet spoken and blurted, “Let me grab a beer.” Hands shaking, as though she were about 14 with her first crush, she fished one from the cooler on Amy’s bed and restrained herself from holding it to her overheated face.