In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  Bev chuckled. “And you haven’t seen the last of it. The students at this school are—how shall I put it?—unique.”

  “I figured they would be, with missionary parents and international backgrounds.”

  “Actually, in most ways, they’re not that different from American teens. They get in the same kind of trouble, believe me. But they’ve dealt with a lot heavier stuff than, say, a fifteen-year-old kid from North Dakota. So they develop some pretty interesting coping mechanisms. That’s where the unique part comes in. Old souls and quirky minds make for a great combo. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that uniqueness reached entirely new heights when they’re involved in a creative project.”

  “Like acting in a play?”

  “Exactly. So you, my dear, are in for a treat.”

  “I’ve never directed a play before, Bev.”

  “Gus hadn’t ever been a custodian before either, but he caught on pretty fast. Though I’m sure directing plays is a whole ’nother ball of wax.”

  My worry was exacerbated by the fog of jet lag. “I don’t know, Bev. I’ve taught English for twelve years, so that part won’t be anything new, but . . . theater? I tried to tell them that I wasn’t qualified when they gave me my assignment, but no one seemed overly concerned about it.”

  “Shelby, honey, a person learns two lessons mighty fast at Black Forest Academy. One, there’s no business like God’s business. And two, what you used to do, think, and be is entirely irrelevant to your presence in this place.” She snapped her dishcloth at me and flashed a conspiratorial smile. “But don’t tell anyone I warned you.”

  3

  I’D JUST WANTED to make my dad a drawing. That’s all. But my old eraser made red marks on my paper and smeared my pencil lines, so I went hunting for another one. I knew Dad had one somewhere in his desk, a white one that used to be square but looked rounder now that all the corners had been rubbed off. It was a good eraser. And it smelled—I don’t know—helpful, somehow.

  So I went to his desk and looked in the drawers and behind the stacks of papers, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to get into his things. I figured just this once would be okay because it was for him. Dad always watched John Wayne Westerns on TV, so I was drawing him a cowboy on a big black horse, with hills in the background and some Indians’ feathers poking out from behind them in red and green and yellow. It was everything he liked right there on one piece of paper, and I was pretty sure it would make him happy—like Tootsie Rolls made my brain grow a smiley face. On days when Trey stayed after school for soccer, I really needed my dad to be less mad.

  I didn’t find the eraser, not even in the tin at the back of the top drawer where he kept old batteries and rubber bands and twisty ties and paper clips.

  I finished the drawing anyway and put it up on the fridge with a basket-of-fruit magnet. Then I waited for him to come home. I could always tell by the way he closed the back door if he was happy or mad. Today he’d slammed it so hard that the glasses in the cupboard rattled and I was glad I’d done something that would—maybe—make him just a bit less angry. Actually, it was more about making me less scared than making him less angry.

  Dad went straight to his office before I could tell him about John Wayne, and I could hear him fiddling around for a while. I was trying to get up the courage to interrupt him when he said, “Who’s been in my desk?” He kind of growled it more than just saying it.

  I could tell Mom was trying to be soothing when she said from the kitchen, “Just Shelby. She was looking for an eraser, I think. Where is that white one, by the way? We looked through every drawer in the house for it this afternoon!” Her voice sounded jittery.

  My father stepped out of his museum-clean office and saw me leaning against the arm of the couch. I’d bumped into it backing away from his door.

  “You’ve been going through my things?” he asked.

  His voice was quiet. But it was that thunder-behind-the-clouds kind of quiet that made me want to cover my ears and sing “La-la-la” as loud as I could. I figured if I made enough noise, I wouldn’t be able to hear it when the thunder really got close. The other option was running really fast and really far. But the rule was no screaming and no running in the house. So I had to just kind of stand there and be scared and hope he wouldn’t notice and call me a coward. There was usually another word right before coward, but it made me feel cringy to even think it in my mind.

  “Answer me,” Dad demanded. His voice sounded like barbed wire. The backs of my legs were up against the couch. I couldn’t have run even if I’d tried. “Have you been in my stuff?”

  I fought the tears. I fought them and fought them. I tried to sing happy songs in my mind, but the stupid tears came anyway and I knew they’d make Dad go from angry bull to exploding bomb—like in the Road Runner cartoons. “I . . . I was making you a present. . . .”

  And that’s as far as I got. His fingers closed around my arm so hard that my legs gave out. I tried to pry his hand away, but he just held on tighter. I could see Mom peeking around the doorway, but she didn’t say anything. She never did. “You will not touch my things again,” my dad hissed at me. I could feel his spit hitting my face and smell old coffee on his breath. “If you touch them again, I’ll give you a real reason to cry.” His fingers tightened some more around my arm as his eyes squinted and slashed.

  “Jim?” My mom had found her voice. A squeaky voice, but a voice.

  Dad let me go so suddenly that I fell into the arm of the couch and slid to the floor in a humiliated tangle of limbs and loss and misery. It was my fault. I had made him mad with my dumb picture. I knew that he worked really hard and needed everything to be tidy and quiet when he got home. I was stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Keep her out of my office, Gail,” my father barked. He turned like a soldier in a parade and marched out of the living room.

  It was well before dawn when I heard the door of my bedroom open.

  “Shelby?” The clear, high voice close to my ear sounded like it meant business. “Shelby, you awake?”

  I tried not to groan and pried an eyelid up just long enough to ascertain three facts: I was in a German apartment, it was just after four, and Shayla was looking way too wide-awake for this ungodly hour. By my calculations, she’d gotten just seven hours of sleep, which was roughly ten hours less than I’d hoped for. Her long afternoon nap the day before was coming back to bite us both in the you-know-what. Jet lag was nasty business.

  “You wanna crawl into bed with me?” I asked hopefully.

  “I’m hungwy.”

  “Well, sure, but how ’bout we snuggle for a little while before we eat?”

  “I’m hungwy.” There was a telltale threadiness to her voice this time around. I’d heard it before, usually right about the time this child I’d thought was perfect had launched into an unprovoked crying jag. I pushed back Bev’s lavender-scented sheets and swung my feet onto the chilly tile floor.

  “You want a piece of bread?” I asked as Shayla and I padded down the hallway from my bedroom to the kitchen.

  “Toast,” she said.

  The apartment looked no better after a night of sleep than it had the day before. There wasn’t anything overtly wrong with it. It was just that the walls were all painted chalky white and everything was square and sterile. The off-white tile floors were cold and the furniture was hard and angular. I knew it would begin to feel familiar eventually, but for now, to my sleep-deprived mind, it felt more like a furnished science lab than a home.

  I looked through the cupboards without finding a toaster. “There’s no toaster, sweetie,” I told the expectant child who stood no taller than my hip. “Can we just have bread this morning and we’ll buy a toaster later?”

  Her mouth twisted a little and her chin began to wobble. “But I like toast,” she said.

  “Shayla, there’s no toaster. And I can’t make you toast without a toaster.”

  “But . . .” A house without a toaster was an aberr
ation to her mind. “But I want toast.”

  Toast was a big deal to my jet-lagged four-year-old. The wobble became a wail that started soft and crescendoed from there. Stream to torrent. Spark to blaze. Zero to sixty before I’d had time to quell it. I tried to reason with her.

  “Shay, this isn’t our old place. . . . We don’t have everything we need here yet.”

  The crescendo grew to new proportions. So I got defensive.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it, Shayla. It’s practically the middle of the night and . . .”

  The wail rose to greater heights. So I decided to get firm.

  “Stop that right now, Shayla!”

  And off we went into a stratosphere of weeping I’d only visited on a couple of previous occasions. How Shayla managed to stay upright with her head thrown back and her body gone limp was beyond my understanding, but there she stood, tears sliding down her cheeks and neck and under the collar of her Cinderella pj’s. While I pondered my options and feared another failure, Shayla gasped and sputtered and gathered another breath, then tore into the second chapter of her wail.

  I sighed and lowered myself to the floor, pulling Shayla into my lap and holding her sideways against me. She resisted at first, leaning her body weight outward and down, her hands pushing weakly at mine. But I lifted her closer and kissed her hot, damp temple and shushed quietly against her ear and began to rock, side to side, like a metronome measuring her forlornness. She hiccuped once, twice, swallowed hard, let out another mini-wail, then ran completely out of steam. She burrowed a little deeper and rubbed her cheek against my chest, her lungs spasming in the wake of so much strain.

  “Things feel really different this morning, don’t they, Shayla.” She took a tremulous breath, nodded, and wrapped an arm loosely around my waist. “Do you miss home?”

  A tiny bubble of air sighed out of her. “I miss my daddy,” she said, and I felt a familiar sinking in my gut. I knew this wasn’t completely about her dad. I knew, on a rational level, that this was about a new place and new people and a new bed and a window that hadn’t been where it was supposed to be when she’d opened her eyes this morning, but on the level of my own inner six-year-old, her words punched the confidence out of my courage. She missed her dad. She missed her dad. There was nothing I could do for that other than hold her a little closer and stifle my denials of her dad’s wonderfulness. It was good that she loved him. A little girl needed that. It just made my own loss feel more empty.

  We sat on the tile for a few minutes more, which gave me time to assess my response to this latest crisis and give myself a failing grade. I sang Barney’s theme song for her, and then she joined in a faltering rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” which never failed to bring back memories of the bright-yellow sun she’d drawn during our very first encounter. “What do you want on your bread?” I asked when we’d sung ourselves dry.

  “Stwawberry jam.”

  Of course. “Have you used the bathroom yet?” She padded off toward the insanely small bathroom while I opened the fridge and prayed for strawberry jam. Bless Bev’s saintly heart, there was one jar of jam in the fridge and it had strawberries on the label.

  There were three more teary episodes in the hour that followed, which may have set a new record. The first was when she discovered that German bread was harder than the Wonder Bread she was used to; the second was when I suggested she go back to bed and lie quietly for a few minutes as the rest of the world wasn’t awake yet; and the third was when we discovered that shower hoses apparently didn’t hang from the wall in German bathrooms but had to be held by hand. I knew this would be a bit of a sticking point for me, too. If there was one thing I loved in life, it was a long, hot shower. But I was trying to look on the bright side that morning, so I remembered what I’d been told about the exorbitant price of water in Germany and tried to be grateful that my contortionist showers would probably save me money.

  “I want to go home,” Shayla wailed as I aimed the water at her hair and rinsed off the shampoo suds she had been shaping into horns and halos minutes before. They coursed down her back between her chicken-wing shoulder blades.

  “This all feels pretty weird, doesn’t it.”

  “Wee-ohd,” she repeated with passion, tears in her voice.

  “We’ll take a walk around town later, okay? Get to know it a little better. It looked really pretty when we drove in yesterday, don’t you think?”

  “It’s wee-ohd.”

  “You’re right. It is. But you do like Bev, right? She’s not weird at all.”

  “Gus, too.”

  “They’re good people,” I agreed as I wrapped her in a thin blue towel Bev had left for us. “And Bev’s going to be taking care of you while I’m at work, so you’ll get to spend lots of time with her.”

  “She makes good cookies.”

  I laughed and wondered if all women were plagued, from such a young age, by an obsession with food. “We’ll get you cookies today too,” I said, and the news seemed to comfort Shayla immensely. So at five o’clock in the morning of my first full day in Germany, I sat on the edge of the tub with a sopping-wet child wrapped in my arms and had a long conversation about cookies and cake.

  The air felt taut. It was streaked with Daddy’s spittle and tinted gray-green by his wrath. “You will finish your meal!” he screamed into Trey’s stricken face, his bullhorn words a blistering burn, a stab, a hammer strike. “And you will finish it now. So pick up your fork and get shoveling, boy!” He punctuated his tirade with a string of expletives that made my brother shrivel and slump.

  Trey looked across the table at me and I tried to wing some courage to him with my eyes, but I knew he couldn’t really see me. It was a weird side effect of my dad’s temper tantrums, as if the loudness of his voice took so much out of us that there was nothing left for seeing or smelling. I’d felt it often enough that I recognized it in my brother—my gentle, tough brother whose eyes looked stubborn and scared.

  “Eat!” my dad yelled again, and when Trey, frozen by fear, didn’t budge, he grabbed a fistful of zucchini and mashed it against his son’s mouth. I saw tears spring out and balance on Trey’s lower eyelids as he clamped his jaw shut and furrowed his eyebrows in a superhuman effort to keep emotions at bay. He had never liked zucchini, had always gagged on it like I gagged on mushrooms, and I knew he’d rather have eaten worms at that moment than chewed on the green triangles he’d so meticulously separated from the rest of his stir-fry. I looked at his plate where the vegetables had been stacked in neat little piles until moments ago. We’d both learned early on that tall stacks made quantities look smaller, and I’d often felt a little jealous that Trey’s most detested food was so much more stackable than my despised fried mushrooms.

  But the ploy hadn’t fooled our dad today. He’d come home from work with so much tension ricocheting around inside him that I thought he should have sounded like a beehive. Instead, he sounded like one of those bad guys on TV that hold up banks with masks on their faces—and as a result, my brother looked like one of those dogs that live at rest stops on the highway. I wouldn’t forgive my dad for reducing him to that. Not ever. Trey seemed to have shrunk—so much so that I thought I might be taller than him at last. But I knew that was only a for-now kind of thing. He’d grow back to his normal size once my dad slammed out of the house and took off, tires squealing, in his fancy black car.

  Right now, though, there was only razor-sharp anger and ugly bullet-words that seemed to be striking my brother from the inside out. I wanted to run around the table and hit my dad’s chest until he turned his wrath on me. It was okay for me to cry—I could take it—but I was afraid of what would happen to Trey if those shimmering tears ever fell from their perch onto his flushed cheeks. They would hurt him much more than any of my father’s words.

  We’d been well trained by now, though. We knew to sit still as statues while my dad ranted and raved. Still as the green soldier on the pedestal in the park. Still as the a
ir when my dad’s anger ran out and all we could hear was pieces of our souls drifting to the gouged linoleum like shards of shattered shell.

  “You did this,” my dad screamed, turning his bile on my mother, who stood clutching the back of a chair on the other side of Trey. His voice sneered as he continued. “You sissified him with your cooing and fawning and now we’re stuck with a mama’s boy that doesn’t have the guts to eat his ve-ge-ta-bles. . . .” He yelled the last word right into Trey’s ear and I saw my brother flinch, bits of zucchini still stuck to his face. I looked to my mom, but there was no salvation there. Only a grown-up reflection of my brother’s gut-sick fear.

  So I did what I always did when my dad went all Wicked Witch of the West on us. I locked eyes with Trey, whether he could see me or not, and designed stuffed animals in my mind. I was on animal number three when I heard the door slam and my dad’s car peel away. I wondered if the stuffed animal in Trey’s mind was blood-red too.

  Shayla was excited that she’d had two mornings today—the first one with the bright-red sunrise, the shower, and the strawberry jam, and the second one without the sunrise and shower, but with more strawberry jam. Strawberry jam was a big item in Shayla’s little life. I was only grateful that she’d fallen back to sleep for a couple hours between her two breakfasts. Toward the middle of our “second morning,” we ventured out of our new home and into the streets of Kandern. A short walk brought us to the Hauptstrasse, a street lined with small stores and restaurants that ran the length of the town. I’d read on the Internet that Kandern was actually classified as a city, the smallest city in Germany by some accounts, but the narrowness of the streets and the smallness of the buildings gave it that barely-larger-than-a-village feel I found quaint and endearing.