In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  “If it’s what I’m thinking of, you’re going to be reliving it alone.”

  “Don’t be such a crybaby.”

  I stared at him long and hard. “You’re acting crazy, Trey.”

  “Just following orders.” He saw my confused glare. “Geronimo.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not him again.”

  “And I like Scott,” Trey said. My brother, Master of the Segue.

  “Come again?”

  “We need to do this.” He smiled pleasantly and installed himself under the sloping Huddle Hut roof, his bush of blond hair turned pink by the sun slanting through the rosy sheet.

  “What does this have to do with Scott?”

  He patted a pillow and waved me in.

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed and raised an eyebrow. It was his are-you-going-to-be-a-sissy? look, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  “No,” I said again.

  “Shell.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  “What—are you three? I’m not ‘making’ you anything. I’m inviting you.”

  I wrinkled my nose at his attempt at manipulation and struck a rebellious pose. “He’s dead. We’ve grown up. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  It had been a long time since Trey had looked at me that way—with equal parts compassion, strength, and resolve. He came out of the Huddle Hut and wrapped me in a hug that brought tears to my eyes. “He’s dead. We’ve grown up. And it matters more today than it ever has,” he whispered against my ear, so urgently that I shivered. “We need to do this,” he said, pulling back. “We need to remember who we are.”

  I closed my eyes, expelled a breath, and let the past wash over me.

  “You think maybe we’re mutants?”

  Trey stopped drumming his fingers against the Huddle Hut floor and turned his head to look at me. The motion dislodged the earphone I had so carefully arranged to fit against my ear. I reached between our heads to find my half of the earphones and press it back into place, resticking the masking tape that held it there.

  “Stop turning your head when I talk to you,” I said. “It unsticks the tape.”

  “This wasn’t your most brilliant idea, you know.”

  “I didn’t hear you coming up with anything better.”

  “Maybe we should get two Walkmans with two sets of earphones. Ever think of that?”

  “But then we couldn’t listen to the same tape at the same time.” It seemed obvious to me.

  “You’re right,” he sighed in halfhearted frustration. “It’s much better to lie here with a Walkman between our heads, listening to Toto with two disconnected halves of earphones masking-taped to our ears.” His sarcasm made my mind feel brighter. Toto did too. It was our courage music, and we’d be needing it soon.

  “So . . . about the mutant thing.”

  “We’re not mutants.”

  “This is what I’ve been thinking . . .” I had to pause because I didn’t really have my arguments all organized in my head yet.

  “You making outlines in your mind again?” We’d been doing persuasive speeches in Miss Reeser’s seventh-grade English class for a couple of weeks, and Trey didn’t like it. He got frustrated when I stopped midsentence to plot out the best way to say things, and he especially got antsy when I tried to convince him of the nutritional value of, say, butter, instead of just asking him to pass it. So I didn’t take too long organizing my thoughts before plowing ahead this time.

  “Mom’s a decent person,” I said. “I mean, she’s nice, right?”

  “Too nice.”

  “So let’s say she comes from Planet Nice.” Trey started humming the theme from Star Trek, and that kind of impressed me as he still had Toto playing in his left ear, but I wasn’t deterred. “And Dad is . . . well . . . not such a nice guy.”

  “So he comes from Planet Bast—”

  “You can’t swear if you’re trying to be persuasive, Trey.” I felt him smile. “Dad comes from Planet If-I-Knew-You-Were-Using-My-Masking-Tape-I’d-Blast-You-to-Jupiter.”

  “Betcha they have trouble fitting that on their license plates.”

  “And we’re kinda half and half, right?”

  “Nice to see you’ve been paying attention in biology class.”

  “So we’re mutants.”

  “More like hybrids.”

  I had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded right.

  “So as hybrids, how do we decide which planet we belong on?”

  Trey turned his head again, which unstuck the tape—again. “Huh?”

  “If I had to choose, I’d want to live on Planet Nice. Not that Planet Nice would be a party. Actually, I think I might die of terminal boredom. But it still would beat the smell on Planet Masking Tape.”

  “Dad’s planet smells?”

  I nodded. “Like burned coffee and garlic breath.”

  Trey seemed to mull that one over for a minute. I let him do that because Miss Reeser had told us that it was important to give the audience enough time to figure out what we were talking about.

  “It’s no fun being a hybrid,” I said when the silence got a little too long. I was really hoping we’d be able to keep the topic going and avoid the horrendous exercise Trey had planned for our Huddle Hut session.

  “You ready?” he said.

  My diversion hadn’t worked. I gave his question some thought and decided I might as well bite the fungal bullet. I needed the milestone like Madonna needed a stylist. Trey must have read my mind, because he grunted up to a sitting position at the same time I did. We pulled the remaining masking tape off the sides of our faces, cringing as little hairs came off with it, and took simultaneous deep breaths.

  “You still sure about this?” I asked, kinda hoping he’d changed his mind.

  He nodded with absolute conviction. “Too many signs,” he said. It made me uncomfortable when Trey talked about signs. I was the one who was supposed to see invisible things, and he was the one who was supposed to fix real-life things. “Mom hasn’t made mushrooms or zucchini in months,” Trey continued, certainty lending weight to his words, “and today, right after I had that dream about going to boot camp for zucchini delinquents, both vegetables turn up in the fridge. On the same day as my dream, Shell. The same day. I’m telling you, this is Geronimo’s way of getting us to prepare for next time. We can’t ignore the signs.”

  Trey had started calling God Geronimo. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because the Big Guy felt more like a warrior that way, the type of God who would unleash a swarm of arrows on anyone who tried to hurt us.

  “You dream weird things,” I said.

  He wasn’t finished making his point. “And then Dad went to that seminar and Mom went to get her hair done, and we’re both alone in the house with the fridge. That’s a sign too.”

  I stifled the urge to tell him that me being alone with a fridge was nothing unusual. “What are we going to say when she asks us where the mushrooms and zucchini went? She’s not going to believe the ‘Geronimo’s boot camp’ thing.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, but I could tell he wasn’t really giving it much thought. He had the same look on his face he’d had earlier, when he’d stood by the stove stirring one pan of zucchini and one pan of mushrooms. He was hard-eyed and square-jawed, obviously taking this boot camp thing seriously.

  “Geronimo has no idea how much I hate mushrooms,” I said.

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I don’t think I can do it.”

  He reached for the bowl of fried mushrooms and handed it to me; then he took the bowl of fried zucchini wedges and held it up to his face.

  “What does it smell like?” I asked.

  “Zucchini. You?”

  I sniffed at the mushrooms without bringing them too close to my face, just in case my gag reflexes were smell-sensitive. “Mushrooms. Cold mushrooms. And a little bit like the boxes of bait we used to buy at the cabin. You think they’d taste any better if we warmed them up?”<
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  He shook his head and used his fingers to take two pieces of zucchini from his bowl. That Toto music had really made him brave. “You take some out too,” he instructed, his eyes riveted to the green triangles he held.

  I gagged when my fingers touched the slimy mushroom slices. “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “Trey . . .”

  “Come on, Shelby.” There was something desperate in his voice. Like my failure would make him look weak too.

  I picked up a couple pieces of mushroom and watched them flop against my fingers like slices of slug. “I can’t eat them, Trey. There’s no way.” It was all I could do to quell the impulse to fling them off my fingers into a far corner of the attic.

  “Just do one of your persuasive speeches on yourself,” Trey said with growing tenseness. I could hear him swallowing loudly from time to time. “Tell yourself it’s not going to kill you. . . .”

  “I might throw up.”

  “But you won’t die. And then next time Mom fixes them and Dad’s all Godzilla, you’ll be able to eat them.” He was trying so hard to be persuasive, but I could tell he hadn’t made an outline in his mind.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t, Trey!”

  I felt him gathering himself next to me. When he spoke again, it was in a quiet, certain voice I’d seldom heard from him before. He sounded deeper somehow. And farther away too. “If you can eat those mushrooms, he won’t be able to scare you with them anymore. He won’t be able to make you cry . . . or feel like dirt . . . or less than dirt . . . or . . . or anything. Not with the mushrooms. Not anymore.”

  “There’ll still be all the rest.”

  “Yeah, but there won’t be this. It’s one less thing, and we’re deciding he can’t have it.”

  I watched him drop the zucchini into his mouth and chew methodically, a red flush growing out of the collar of his Bulls T-shirt and moving up toward his jaw. He swallowed hard, froze for a moment, then swallowed again. “See?” he said, looking at me. There was sweat on his upper lip.

  I closed my eyes and brought the mushrooms to my mouth. I gagged when they touched my tongue, then again when I tried to chew. I felt tears eking out between my eyelids as I gagged over and over, finally forcing the mushrooms to the back of my mouth to swallow them.

  Trey was handing me a glass of water when I opened my eyes. He had more zucchini in his other hand. “You need to chew them this time,” he said.

  “You’re eating more?” I asked incredulously, awed and humbled by my brother’s outrageous courage.

  “Geronimo wants us to practice,” he said.

  And emboldened by my brother’s fierce conviction that Geronimo had orchestrated the challenge to defeat my father’s next assault, I took another deep breath and reached for more mushrooms.

  “The second time’s easier,” I heard Trey say. And all I could do was gag and believe him.

  22

  OUR SECOND PERFORMANCE wasn’t quite as clean as our first. With the excitement from the first night still pumping scattered energy through their minds, the actors made a few small mistakes, none of which the audience probably noticed. I walked around in the dark, mobile cocoon of backstage shadows and spoke in soothing whispers to the actors as they entered and exited the stage. There was something magical about the convergence of effort, inspiration, and accomplishment, a magic amplified by the presence of spectators who laughed, gasped, and cried on cue. I felt the performance like a constant hum in my marrow, a low-key intensity of purpose and emotion that was at once galvanizing and calming. I stood in the wings and absorbed it all until I felt swollen with the warmth of achievement and the overflow of gratitude. But my thankfulness was for more than the play. It was for the plenitude of God’s love for me, displayed in human form under the spotlights and in the audience beyond the stage.

  When Seth ended his final monologue as transparently and movingly as he had the night before, I felt a sunset-warm fullness I’d seldom experienced before. But the serenity of the moment was short-lived. After their second curtain call, Seth and Kate stepped into the wings, each taking one of my arms, and dragged me into the spotlight with them. I didn’t want to be there. Backstage was my comfort zone. But there was little I could do to quell the surge of their post-performance elation. Seth stepped to the front of the stage and, in the warm-chocolate voice I’d come to love, simply said, “This is Shelby. She believed in us and inspired us, and we want to thank her.”

  Kate gave me a bouquet and a long, hard hug, and I did a little half bow, extending my arm toward a cast that had, in many ways, altered my life. They smiled at me with emotions I knew I didn’t deserve, and I hoped my love for them was evident on my face.

  Nearly an hour later, when the audience had filtered out of the room and the actors had started to realize that their journey together was truly over, I heard a commotion by the auditorium door and saw Trey, my wonderful, pseudo-French brother, rolling a pièce montée into the room on a metal cart, sparklers pointing out of it like glowing porcupine quills. As much as I loved cheesecake, I loved this French tradition more. Nothing said celebration like a pièce montée.

  “Trey . . .” There was such happiness in my throat that I didn’t know how to continue. The actors scattered around the room approached the tall tower made of stacked cream puffs and drizzled with hardened caramel, their appetites suddenly outweighing their melancholy.

  Trey wheeled the cart up to me and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “I figured your finale warranted something special.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said, my thoughts flashing back to the mushrooms he’d prepared for me earlier that day. I reached around a sparkler to pull off the top cream puff, the brittle caramel around it snapping loudly, and sank my teeth into the decadent treat. I heard someone clear his throat behind me but paid no attention to it. There was a tower of culinary fascination in front of me that had the full focus of my calorie-addicted brain. It was possibly because of my absorption in the pièce montée that I didn’t immediately sense what was going on around me or register the animated silence that fell the second time that same someone cleared his throat.

  Someone, as it turned out, was Scott, but it wasn’t until I heard Shayla’s earnest “Are you going to eat it all, Mom?” that I turned and found him standing there, my daughter in his arms.

  I didn’t know whether to be delighted or outraged. “Scott, what are . . . ?” Shayla was wearing her Cinderella pajamas and a mile-wide grin. I felt my heart do a cartwheel. Then my mom reflexes kicked in. “What is Shayla doing here?” I said to Scott. “She’s five and it’s going on midnight. Do you see anything wrong with this scenario?”

  Trey stepped in to take Shayla from Scott, saying, “She kinda had to be here for this.” He winked at me and moved to stand by Gus and Bev, both of whom had somehow materialized out of nowhere. Kenny was there too. And Simon, my clumsy props guy. Thomas, the epitome of British decorum even at the age of fifteen. And Meagan with her dancing eyes. Seth—solemn, peaceful Seth—standing just a tad too close to his feisty, untamable Kate. All my actors were present, lined up and waiting, exchanging the kinds of knowing glances that convinced me that I was the only one in the dark about what was going on here.

  “Scott,” I whispered, though in the hushed room, my words reached to the balcony. “What are you doing?”

  “Giving you certainty, I hope.” He paused, arresting my thoughts with the temerity of his gaze. “And storming the barricades. I’m multitasking.” He cast my actors a conspiratorial half smile.

  I glanced at my daughter, up way past her bedtime, and all I could think of was that she’d be a monster tomorrow. But when I looked from Shayla to my brother, I saw a family there that took my breath away. Trey, the defender to whom I owed my life in so many ways, and Shayla, the daughter of the bitter, violent man who had devastated my childhood but gifted me with the miracle of motherhood.

 
; Scott’s hand on my arm brought my attention back to him. He stood in front of me with so much earnestness and determination on his face that I felt a giggle bubbling to the surface. “What—are you going to make a speech or something?” I asked, distracted from my gratitude by a sense of impending significance. He nodded, and I felt the air constrict a little around us. “Really?”

  When he spoke, his voice was soft and uncharacteristically unsteady. “I’m not sure if this is the right way to do this, Shelby,” he said. “I mean, I know you’re a pretty private person, but the private approach hasn’t been working, so I thought . . . I thought maybe I’d . . . storm the barricades with a little public humiliation.”

  “For you or for me?”

  “Probably for me.” He smiled a little crookedly and added, “I’m the guy with a killer case of stage fright who’s trying to come up with the right words and pretty sure he’ll fail. And all you have to do is stand there and watch me suffer.”

  “Sounds equitable to me,” I said. Something weird was going on with my lungs.

  He cleared his throat—again—and looked down, gathering his thoughts. “Here’s the deal,” he finally said, his eyes rising to connect with mine, capturing my mind with their bold and gentle intensity. “I am convinced that nothing in our lives happens by chance and that the best things in life require taking a risk. So this . . . this is me taking that risk.”

  I glanced at Trey, my Huddle Hut chef, and began to suspect a conspiracy.

  But Scott wasn’t done yet. He took my hands in his and pulled me closer, linking his gaze with mine. There was a muscle working in his jaw and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. My skin felt electrified with apprehension. I tried to think happy thoughts of cows coming in from pastures and dolphins frolicking in the waves to calm my nerves and still my fear. But the cows ended up herding themselves over a cliff and the dolphins, in their enthusiasm, beached themselves on a rugged shore, so neither was exactly helping.