by Bright, Sera
I took a step back and covered my reaction by putting my hands in my pockets. “Sorry, my hands are dirty. I need to go inside and wash them.”
She waved goodbye, and her heels clicked on the concrete as she walked back over to Ash’s empty house. The sound grated on my nerves, already stretched raw and thin. I walked across the lawn. Yellow dandelions blanketed the green grass, waving freely in the breeze that came off the lake.
Ash had asked around town about me, which meant he could conceivably be staying in town, too. He wouldn’t be spending the summer with his parents, so where was he? I eyed my house, and didn’t see any movement inside. He’d never given me his key to my house back, and I always told him my house was free for him to use when my father wasn’t home.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew of my arrival before the day ended. The tide of gossip was that fast at times, depending on how much the info was worth to someone. Pulling my keys out of my pocket, I unlocked the door. Dust glittered in the doorway from the sunshine, and a musty smell floated out the door. The absolute silence told me no one was waiting for me. I hesitated in my uncertainty, then went inside.
After I’d checked all the rooms in a freakish paranoia, tiredness took over. It had taken two days of driving to get home, stopping for short naps in fast-food parking lots. It wasn’t like I slept for more than a couple of hours at a time on a regular basis anyway.
In the living room, everything had become more worn and faded, especially my favorite quilt that hung over the back of the couch. It was the same home from my childhood, but it didn’t feel as familiar as it had when I was a child. Nothing here had changed, so the only factor that had changed was me. It was an uncomfortable feeling, knowing the one place where you used to belong no longer fit the person you’d become. Especially if you’re unsure whether you liked that person or not, in the first place.
I wrapped myself up in the quilt and lay on the couch, falling into a half-sleep where vivid dreams beckoned me to come closer, but I couldn’t quite let myself fully let go. In the back of my mind, I kept expecting a knock at the door.
A thudding noise on the front steps startled me awake. My stomach plummeted as I sat up, leaving me nauseated and disoriented. I tossed the quilt on the floor and went to the living room window. A guy carrying a bag of phone books cut across the lawn. I pressed my forehead on the grimy glass, willing my heart to slow down.
Coming back here was going to drive me insane. The idea of seeing Ash rattled me so much, I could barely breathe, let alone think straight. I couldn’t get past the shame of lying to him. I’d promised I would never hurt him, and that’s all I’d ended up doing.
The incessant ticking of the vintage black cat clocks my father collected drew my attention. Already noon, and I never gave Helen my new phone number or asked what time she wanted me to come in tonight. I’d been too busy running out the door like a lunatic. Besides, I needed something, anything to do to distract myself. I went into the kitchen, where my bag sat on the table. I rummaged through the mass of mail, trying to find my phone with no immediate success.
I dumped the whole thing out on the table. Papers scattered on the Formica surface, and loose coins rolled off the edge. I’d clean it up later, like everything else. A layer of dust covered the whole house. My father hadn’t cleaned anything on his infrequent stays, beyond washing a few dishes and taking out the trash. My cheap black phone lay in the middle of the mess. I flipped it open and dialed the café.
“Hey, it’s—”
Helen cut me off. She also didn’t have any manners. “I know who it is. The ungrateful ass who couldn’t be bothered to eat the food I lovingly and painstakingly prepared for her.”
I sat down at the kitchen table. The wooden chair squeaked as I tucked my feet under me. “I’m really sorry—”
“Oh, you will be. Mark my words.”
I smiled at her threat. When she was nice, that’s when you should be scared. “I’m calling to see what time you wanted me to come in.”
“Uh-uh, you’re not getting off that easy. Since I have your complete attention,” she said, “We all missed you this last Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
I picked up a piece of junk mail and aligned it with the corner of the table. “I’m sorry.”
When she found out two years ago that I spent the holidays alone, she didn’t simply invite me to join her. Instead, she basically forced me on pain of death to come to her house for Thanksgiving. Then she threw snowballs at my window on Christmas Eve until I agreed to go caroling and stay the night at her house. In the morning, she and all her friends proudly showed off the presents wrapped under the tree for me. I treasured all those little trinkets more than any envelope of money my father had ever handed me.
“Don’t be sorry. You needed to get away from this place. I get it. But you’re coming to my house this year, or I’ll find you. Ann Arbor isn’t that big. I’m not kidding. Jackass Ralph was put out, and you know how he gets.”
Her family died years ago, so she decided to make her own, including a cranky ex-Marine with the unfortunate name of Jackass Ralph. You couldn’t call him Ralph, you had to say the whole thing or he wouldn’t answer.
“Tell him I missed him, too.”
She snorted. “I didn’t say he missed you. Just that he was put out.”
“How could you tell the difference?”
“I know, right?” she said. “And to answer your original question, get back here by seven.”
An impulse to tell her I’d changed my mind seized me, but I stuffed it down. I wasn’t going to bail on her after knowing how disappointed she was with me already. I stacked some of the mail into a neat tower on the corner, needing something to do with my hands.
“I’ll see you at seven then.” I snapped the phone closed.
The letter from the mortgage company rested on top of one of the piles of papers. I attempted to call the number listed. The automated system put me on hold, and then hung up on me. Four times. I gave up, it would have to wait until Monday. Then I called my father and left a message that I was home, an exercise in futility since it took days for him to check his voicemail. He claimed he couldn’t make personal calls when he was on the rig. I couldn’t tell the difference. It had always been impossible to reach him, even before he decided to work out in the middle of the ocean.
I sifted through the papers, sorting out the junk from the other official letters. I didn’t open them. They weren’t my problem. As I flipped over a piece of junk mail, Michelle Townsend’s face stared up at me from a slick postcard. An attractive woman in her early fifties with shining chestnut hair and sparkling green eyes, she seemed almost friendly and human. The bold font at the bottom announced just how gosh darn happy she was to be the future stateswoman for our district.
I’m sure she was happy—she’d have plenty of opportunities to ruin more lives with less work. I turned the card over. Her tagline read like the punchline of a sick joke: “Fighting for strong families, fighting for strong communities.” I crumpled the postcard up and threw it in the trash. Fuck her.
Chapter Four
When I was thirteen years old, I learned that your best intentions aren’t what matters, it’s the results of your actions…
Ash hadn’t been in school for the whole week. He didn’t answer the door yesterday, even though I had watched his parents leave for work in the morning, before knocking. He had to be okay. He just had to be. Terror kept me awake all night, and this morning I’d found the courage to call, but his mom answered the phone. She had sounded pleasant on the phone, but she lied. He wasn’t sick. He didn’t get sick. If he missed school, it was for other reasons. Reasons that made my gut wrench.
I’d skipped school, knowing that if they called home my dad would either sleep through the phone call or ignore it. At the end of our backyard there was a gap through the fences, and I slipped through it from my yard into his. The bushes planted alongside his fence formed a tunnel, and I crept up toward his h
ouse. His mom was still home—she never stayed home from her job at a public relations firm downtown. Something was seriously wrong. It was a huge risk for me to take, her catching me, but I was out of options. I had to make sure he was okay.
A woman’s voice carried out the kitchen window as dishes clattered. I dived under the hedge beneath the open window. The fresh mulch ground into my knees and the palms of my hands, and I gagged a little. It smelled like the manure from the farm we went to on last month’s class field trip.
“I care who called!” Ash’s mom said. “If people found out CPS came to my home, do you know how much damage control I would have to do? Do you even know how much work I have to do now to take care of this visit? Did you ever think about that?”
She paused. I didn’t hear anyone else talking. Was she on the phone with her husband? Ash’s dad worked long, irregular hours as a cop for the town.
“We’re not lucky they decided against opening an investigation. We haven’t done anything wrong! You agreed—” Another pause. Her voice rose higher in pitch. “No! Don’t you dare start arguing with me, Rick.”
A loud crash rang out, the sound of metal on metal. In my hiding spot, I winced at the noise. Her voice dropped, lower and more intense. I strained to make out her words although she stood practically above me in the window.
“You begged me to have a child, and I only did it to make you happy. All I asked in return was for you to let me make the decisions on how he’s raised. Now you’re bitching about it, and I won’t stand for it, do you understand me?”
I closed my eyes tight and took a deep breath, despite the full weight of her words pressing down on my chest. I was the one who had called Child Protective Services. If she or his dad had hurt him, it was my fault.
I’d been terrified since a month ago, when Ash showed up at my window after a bad beating from his dad. He’d stumbled into my room and passed out. I couldn’t wake him up. I couldn’t get a hold of my dad for help. I couldn’t even call 911 because Ash’s dad worked for the police department and they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. His parents would’ve just lied again about how it must’ve been a concussion from a soccer game. I’d felt so helpless, especially when the nightmares started. Right before dawn, Ash had finally woken up and I helped him back to his house, wishing we could just run away instead.
Later, I researched child abuse on the Internet, and called the number to report them anonymously. Oh, God. It didn’t seem like their visit was going to change anything. If anything, it was going to get worse. Nausea clenched in my stomach. And all because I broke my promise to Ash. He told me not to tell anyone, I should’ve listened.
“I let you have your way! He’s friends with that white-trash girl next door, isn’t he? I don’t say one word about how much time they spend together. And we both know why you won’t let that go. You’ll never let it go. It’s only a matter of time before she becomes a slut like her mother, and if anything happens between them, I will kill him myself…” Her voice faded off.
I hugged my knees to my chest, a sob constricting my throat. She thought my mother was a slut, and she thought I was going to become one, too? I wasn’t quite sure what made someone a slut, other than having sex.
But I got one thing clearly: she didn’t want Ash and me to be together like that or she would find a way to hurt him. Hot tears ran down my face. Then I had to find a way to make sure we weren’t any more than just friends—ever. She’d find out somehow, I didn’t doubt it.
I scrubbed a dirty hand across my face and pulled myself together. She was wrong about one thing. I was never going to be like my mother. I wouldn’t just walk away like she had.
My arms and legs felt like rubber bands as I crawled out from under the hedge. The worst part was, I didn’t have any more answers than I did before, except the knowledge that I’d made things worse. They kept Ash out of school when they wanted to hide his injuries. How badly was he hurt this time?
Awareness nudged at me. My heart pounded in my ears. Afraid I’d been caught, I looked over my shoulder. Ash leaned out his bedroom window on the second floor, wearing only a pair of athletic shorts. Dark bruises colored his skinny torso in the morning light.
I sniffled and put on a brave face for him. I could pretend I wasn’t a coward who broke promises.
He ran his hands through his hair and stared down at me with a solemn expression. He raised a hand out the window. I waved back at him with fake cheerfulness. A thread of relief unwound some of the pressure on my heart, and I breathed a little easier. He was okay. Mostly.
Then he whipped around as though spooked, slamming the window shut and pulling the curtains closed. Crap, his mom must’ve come into his room. She couldn’t catch me in the backyard—I couldn’t screw up things any more than I already had. I hunkered down and ran for the gap in the fence, squeezing through the narrow space.
In my own yard, the nausea finally followed through on its threat, and I gagged until I puked into the overgrown grass. Once my stomach stopped heaving, I leaned against the fence and covered my face with my hands. A weak cry escaped, then another and another. They wouldn’t stop as much as I tried to control myself. My fault. All my fault. I couldn’t help him no matter what I did. I stuffed a fist in my mouth, preventing a wail from coming out. I just wanted him to be safe.
Several minutes passed as I wept my soul out, thankful the tall fence hid me, in case Ash was back at the window. He didn’t need to see me crying like a baby. He never complained or whined about his life. If he could be strong, I should be strong, too.
Soft white tops of dandelions waved around in the grass of the backyard. They shouldn’t have looked so happy. I kicked my foot at them. The seeds flew away on the wind. At least they weren’t stuck here. They got to leave all this behind. They completely disappeared into the air, out of my sight. I stood up and walked through my backyard to the front door.
It was too late to go to school. They would notice if I showed up mid-morning without a note. I was too tired after my stupid crying fit and didn’t feel like forging one. Next to the door, letters stuck out of the black metal mailbox. I pulled them all out and checked through them, looking for any shut-off notices. There was one—the electric bill.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. In the winter, I’d gone a weekend without electricity when my dad forgot to pay the bill, and he’d already disappeared without telling me where he was going. This year he’d starting taking off on the weekends, with no warning or a way to contact him. And no matter how much I begged, he wouldn’t answer any of my questions afterward. Or stop doing it.
I opened the front door and went inside. In the living room, my dad was sprawled on the couch, playing a video game in his boxer shorts. I didn’t think he’d be up by now. He usually woke up when I started dinner before he went to work. His light brown hair the same color as mine stuck out all over his head from massive bedhead.
My dad was young, probably the youngest parent in our small town. Ash’s dad was the closest to his age. They used to be good friends when I was younger. With the curtains drawn shut, explosions from the game illuminated the dim living room. The weird cat clocks he kept buying at flea markets looked even weirder, their tails swinging shadows on the walls. A smoldering joint on the coffee table clouded the air with the pungent smell of pot. The queasiness returned, and I swallowed to keep the bitter taste of bile down.
“Hey, short stuff.” He took a drink from a pop can on the end table. “No school today?”
I took a risk. “No, I skipped school.”
He blinked, and for a moment, I thought he was going to say something. Comment on my dirty face and swollen eyes. Ask why I didn’t want to go to school. Tell me it was wrong to skip school. If he did, maybe I could tell him about what was going on with Ash next door and he’d know what to do. His forehead puckered as he stopped his game and put down the controller. I held my breath.
Instead, he raised his hand up for a high-five. “R
ock on, my little hell-raiser!”
My throat closed with another fresh onslaught of tears. I was an idiot for wanting him to notice. I handed him the shut-off letter.
“The electric bill is past due,” I mumbled.
He held it up to his face, like staring at it would make it go away. Or magically make it become paid in full. His grin faltered. “Fuck, I thought I paid this.”
“Guess not,” I snapped, but cringed on the inside. It was a bitchy thing to say, even to my dad.
“You don’t just look like her.” He smiled sadly. “Now you sound exactly like your mother. She would get so mad at me when I forgot the important shit.”
I poked my thumb through the hole in my t-shirt as I wound the fabric around in my hands. I didn’t try to sound like her. And I definitely didn’t try to look like her. He’d told me she loved nice clothes and make-up. Very pretty and girlie. I wore stuff I found at the thrift store over the clothes he bought me, but he still kept telling me how much I looked like her.
They had been high-school sweethearts from some microscopic coal-mining town in West Virginia. They came up here right before I was born when my dad landed a good union job at a factory in Cleveland. Sometimes he would tell me stories about her. His blue-gray eyes just like mine would light up and his whole face would change. He acted like a different person then. Real. Honest. Until he got to the part where she left late one night, right before my third birthday, and then his face would fall. She left a note explaining how she couldn’t handle raising a child, he’d remind me. He never let me forget that I was the reason she was gone.
He reached over to the drawer in the end table and pulled out his wallet. “My card’s in there. Can you pay this over the phone?” He tossed the black leather wallet at me. “For me, sweetheart?”
I caught it, and snatched the bill out of his hand. He turned his game back on and switched to the home screen, clicking through the settings. I opened the wallet and tugged out a credit card from behind his driver’s license. I chewed on the bloody sore spot on the inside of my cheek. The name on it wasn’t James Flynn.
