by Tawni O'Dell
I woke up to the sound of breathing again. This time I was sure it was Mom. She had fallen asleep with me in my race-car bed, her arms wrapped around me and her hands clamped together like a padlock.
Then I was sure it was Jody back in the red Jell-O days. She used to have nightmares and Amber and I took turns lying with her while she tossed and turned and mumbled and wrung Sparkle Three-Horn like a wet washcloth. When she finally calmed down and fell into a deep sleep, I always did too even though I knew she was going to pee the bed.
Then I relaxed into the certainty that it was Amber. She had crawled into my bed again, sleeping behind me with her body pressed against my back and her arms and legs wrapped around me. Most nights I hated it but some nights I gave in and let the warmth and weight and smell and softness of her overwhelm me. I belonged to someone.
I took her hand and pulled her tighter against me. Her breath tickled my neck.
“Harley,” she whispered.
We were alone beneath my covers. We were alone beneath our card table fort listening to gunshots.
“Harley. Are you okay?”
“Huh?”
“Harley. Wake up.”
I was still on my stomach. I hadn’t moved a muscle from when I fell into the pillows. My eyes flew open and I lay perfectly still as reality sank in. I wasn’t a kid anymore.
Amber squeezed my hand and leaned over to see if I was awake. Her hair brushed my face like a spray of perfume.
“It’s not such a big deal what happened with Ashlee,” she whispered in my ear. “You could have talked to me about it instead of getting shitfaced.”
I rolled away from her and sat up. The motion made my head spin.
“Were you afraid? Is that it?” she asked.
“Huh?” I said, groggily.
“I was afraid my first time,” she told me. “That’s why I picked out Ashlee for you. I wanted you to be with someone who loves you. So she could help you.”
My eyes began to make her out in the dark. She knelt next to me in a stretch lace chemise. Victoria’s Secret had done wonders for my female undergarment vocabulary.
“Help me how?” I asked in a croak.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but that’s what I always feel like I’m looking for when I fuck someone. Help.”
I couldn’t make out the expression on her face but I could make out the lace pattern against her skin and the absence of anything beneath it.
I started backing away from her in a crab crawl and bumped into a wall.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and started toward me.
“Don’t,” I suddenly shouted.
“Don’t what?”
“Stay there.”
I got to my feet and held out my hands, praying for the power of a crossing guard.
“Are you freaking out again?” she asked.
She started to stand, and I dropped my head and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Jody told me what happened when you saw Mom.”
Great. Just great. I laughed out loud. A dinosaur and a Happy Meal. Ten bucks. Ten wasted bucks. Twenty wasted bucks on Ashlee.
“Why don’t you ever tell me anything?” She kept at me. “You could’ve told me that. I wouldn’t have made fun of you.”
She was coming. Getting closer and closer. I could feel her even though I couldn’t see her.
“You were afraid of her. Weren’t you? You were afraid to touch her,” she said in a trembling voice. “You can touch me.”
She took one of my hands in both of hers and started to raise it. Then she stopped suddenly, blocked by her own intentions.
I opened my eyes. She stared back at me without seeing, her jaw lifted in defiance but her face tranquil.
I ripped my hand out of hers. I whirled around and stumbled over my feet trying to get away.
“What’s wrong?” she said, frantically. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t waste time trying to stand. I scrambled across the floor on my hands and knees.
“You prick,” I heard her say. “You bastard. You fucker. You son of a bitch,” she chanted like a teacher calling roll.
“You prick,” she said again, coming up behind me.
Anger had returned to her voice. Once she was completely hidden behind it, I could usually be fooled into facing her again.
“You’re supposed to take care of me too.”
An unseen force yanked me to my feet, but it pushed me too fast. It was dark. I ran into a wall but I kept my balance. Amber’s breath seared my neck.
“What about me?” she screamed.
The front door was a dream door: an arm’s length away but impossible to reach. I gathered all my strength but it was more than I needed. The momentum threw me outside. I tripped down the porch steps and hit the ground face first. White light burst in front of my eyes and the salty-sweet taste of blood filled my mouth.
Amber came out on the porch crying harsh, bitter sobs.
I raised up on all fours. Beneath me was a round gray rock jutting from the grass like a wart. Tiny black splashes of blood hit it with a steady raindrop rhythm. A sticky warmth crawled down my chin.
“I don’t love any of them,” she screamed at me. “I hate all of them. I want you to know that. I want you to think about it all the time.”
I staggered to my feet and took off at a run. Behind me in the dark front window, I saw a sparkle. Mom’s sheers danced and it was gone.
I didn’t slow my pace until I came to Black Lick Road. I walked down the very middle knowing if someone came around a blind curve at this hour they would have no choice but to kill me.
My lungs burned. My face throbbed. I checked my mouth with two fingers to make sure I still had all my teeth and found a dent on my bottom lip where the skin had been parted. I wiped my fingers on my jeans and left a long dark smear.
There was no light to guide me or lead me. I looked up at the black sky patched with cast-iron storm clouds. The moon was distant and milky gray like an old man’s sightless eye.
I kept walking. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew what I was leaving and that was enough motivation. When a house materialized out of the gloom, my first thought was to pass it by but instinct pulled me toward it. Not to use as a form of refuge but to use as a target for my building rage.
I stopped and filled my hands with roadside gravel. Dogs started barking, ruining my plan for a sneak attack on the house, but I was already halfway down the driveway so I started whipping rocks at them instead.
An outdoor light went on. The dogs barked louder. I threw harder. A door opened and Callie Mercer peered out.
“What . . . ?” she started to say.
She stepped outside barefoot and bare-legged in a short white nightshirt that said WORLD’SGREATESTMOM.
“Harley, is that you? My God, what happened to your face?”
I looked down at the rocks still waiting in my hands and I wondered for a moment, Was it me? She started across the driveway, not feeling the sharp stones beneath her feet. I searched the horizon for an escape route, over the dark sloping yard, past the onyx glint of the pond, through the wall of hills, to a fierce black line with no end in sight.
I dropped the rocks and started running again, slipping on the dew-slick grass and swearing at the pain that flared from my lip each time my foot connected with the ground. When I got to the creek, I stopped. It was only five feet across but it stretched out before me as wide as any river.
My knees buckled and I collapsed on the muddy bank, beaten.
I was lying on my side staring at the rustling water when I heard her heavy breathing and the crack of a branch. She got down in front of me on her knees and put her arms around me. I thought about resisting out of pride but I couldn’t remember if I had any.
“I’m not going back there,” I said, and started to cry.
I circled her waist with my hands and buried my face in her lap.
“You don’t have to,” she said quietly, and he
ld my head against her. “I never understood how you could stand to stay there in the first place.”
She didn’t make me feel better. I felt worse. I sobbed harder. Hoarse, ugly sounds like my grandpa’s cough.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“It’s not okay. It’s not ever going to be okay.”
“Not so hard, Harley. Don’t hold me so hard.”
I moaned.
“Shh,” she murmured.
I clutched her tighter, rubbing my face all over her like a blind pup. My cheek brushed across her nipples, and she took in a sharp breath. They felt too hard to be part of the rest of her.
“You’re right,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “It’s not okay. I can’t make it okay. Do you understand that?”
I slipped my hands down over her hips, along her legs, up under her nightshirt. She was naked. The feel of her made me lose my mind. I couldn’t tell what parts I was touching and I didn’t care. They were all the same. They were her.
I pushed her down in the mud. I kissed her belly with my torn lips. I kissed her thighs. I kissed her everywhere. That’s all I wanted to do. Kiss her. I kissed her breasts. Her nipples weren’t hard at all. I felt like I could crush them with my lips. I tried and she cried out, and I jerked back, panting. She was smeared with my blood.
“It’s all right,” she said.
She reached beneath my shirt. Her fingers stroked my stomach and chest, then slid into the waistband of my jeans.
I made some kind of noise, a cross between a war whoop and a death rattle. She didn’t seem to understand that in about thirty seconds, I was either going to come or throw up.
“I can’t—” I groaned.
“What?”
“Wait,” I finished. “I can’t wait.”
She pulled her hand out and rushed to undo the button on my jeans and unzip my fly. I just watched. I was way past handling small manipulative skills.
I wasn’t afraid at first. I wasn’t afraid when I pushed inside her and felt my mind, body, and soul twist themselves into one raw nerve. I wasn’t afraid when she gasped and called out to God and I realized there were two people having sex here, not just me. I wasn’t even afraid when I realized I wasn’t going to last long enough to bring her anything but frustration.
The fear came when I realized my dad had been wrong. It was worth a lifetime of driving a cement truck.
It was worth a lifetime.
The end neared and my hands started trembling so hard I couldn’t hold onto her anymore. All my efforts to bring her to me were like grappling for a handhold in crumbling earth. I gave up and let go and let her hold onto me. I came with my fists clenched above her.
chapter ( 9 )
When I opened my eyes again, I felt like I had been asleep for a hundred years. I was so sure of it, I was afraid to look around. I thought I might find an alien world without trees and grass, where the houses were built in the sky and shiny silver people flew around with jet packs on their backs.
I didn’t want to look at my body either. I didn’t want to see a gray sunken chest and a withered old pecker. I didn’t want to see Bud’s brown-spotted hands or Betty’s white thighs with inky veins like windshield cracks.
I remembered my grandpa on his deathbed hooked up to a respirator cursing environmentalists. His skin had lost all its color by then, paling until I could see every pearl-blue vein beneath its surface. All I could think of was worms and how he looked like he was already being eaten by them from the inside out.
The last time we visited him in the hospital before he died, Dad told him he was looking better. I remembered glancing over at the two of them, wondering if they were seeing something I couldn’t see. Grandpa had nodded and his bony hand, sprouting with tubes, had jerked up like he meant to touch Dad but before he could, it fell crumpled onto the sheet like a bird shot from the sky. Dad explained later it had been a muscle spasm.
They didn’t talk after that. Dad sat in the chair next to him unable or unwilling to look anywhere but out the window.
I started getting mad at him. This was his big chance to pour out his soul without being afraid or embarrassed because Grandpa was dying and couldn’t hold anything over him anymore. I knew they had a lot to talk about because they never did. They communicated solely through pace and posture.
I knew Grandpa still hit Dad and that had to bother him. If a kid outgrew his dad’s piggyback rides, it seemed only fair he should outgrow his punches too. But I had witnessed it. I saw Grandpa cuff him once out in his backyard. He caught him in the side of the head and Dad took a few faltering steps backward before finding his balance and shaking off the blow like an athlete shaking out a cramp in his leg.
I had been shocked more by Grandpa’s nerve than what he did. Dad was bigger than him in height and weight, and in my mind they were equals since they were both adults. But Grandpa had a skinny fierceness about him and chipped eyes as black and blunt as the coal he missed mining.
While Dad had traded attitude for endurance. Except for when he was beating his kids, his personality was insignificant.
Back in the hospital room, remembering that day, I began wondering if the way Grandpa treated Dad explained a lot about the way he treated me. Maybe if Grandpa had never hit him, he would have never hit me. Maybe it was that simple. But it might not have been Grandpa’s fault either. Maybe his dad had hit him.
Then I started thinking about Mom and how different her life would have been if that trucker hadn’t dozed off on his way from Sheboygan to Chicago with a trailer full of bratwurst and wiped out her family. She would have never moved here. She would have never been looking for someone to save her from an old aunt and uncle who didn’t want her around. She would have never screwed my dad and got pregnant.
Was that how life worked? Was that nameless, faceless trucker from my mom’s past responsible for me getting smacked every night? Or was it the fault of a great-grandfather I never knew staring at me from a black and white family photo with eyes like my own? Or did I need to go back further, hundreds of years, tracing dozens of generations, back to the first guy who hit his kid, back to the first random act of God that made a child an orphan?
It got too complicated for an eight-year-old. All I knew for sure was Dad blew his chance to work things out with Grandpa.
It wasn’t fair he got the chance and I didn’t. I wouldn’t have wasted it. If I had known Mom was going to kill Dad that night as I went off to Skip’s house to drink contraband beers and bullshit about horny college chicks, I would’ve stopped first and cleared some things up. I would’ve asked him why he didn’t like me. I would’ve apologized for being a disappointment to him. And I would’ve told him I loved him—because I did—in some joyless, unsatisfying way that hurt instead of healed, but I knew it was still love.
It wasn’t enough love to keep his memory alive, though. Or maybe it was the wrong kind. It hadn’t even been two years yet, but I already had a hard time picturing Dad’s face. I found it easier to conjure up the cast ofThe A-Team .
Still, sometimes I could see him and sometimes I could hear his voice. I could replay certain events like the day in the hospital with Grandpa. I could recite facts about him the way I could about certain historical figures: he supported his family, he gave excellent piggyback rides; he remembered his anniversary, kept his yard mowed, and hunted and drank with his buddies. He wasn’t too smart, but he didn’t need to be. He wasn’t enlightened, but he didn’t want to be.
But I couldn’t remember his presence in my life.
A stick started digging into my back. I reached under my shoulder blade to pull it out. My arm moved slowly, heavy with sleep or old age. I started thinking about the shiny silver people again and then an episode ofThe Flintstones popped into my head, the one where Fred takes a nap at the company picnic and when he wakes up he has a white beard down to his knees and Pebbles is off marrying Arnold the paper boy. The same panic he felt suddenly rushed over me along with the certa
inty that I had slept through my sisters’ lives.
Twenty years later and they were all still living at the top of the hill with the roof sliding off the house and the porch sagging badly to one side. The grass was three feet high, all four doghouse doors choked with goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, the rusted frame of my old truck home to a family of possum. The couch was missing and I knew Misty had dragged it back inside, and I also knew she sat on it at night and thought about Dad.
She was the only one who had a job. I didn’t know what it was but it didn’t matter. She hated it the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn’t much point in trying to do better. A lousy life for a lousy person; the punishment fit the crime.
Amber was pushing forty in stretch pants and too much makeup, bitter and scared, realizing too late that most of her life would be lived after thirty, but she never was good at math. At least she didn’t have a bunch of illegitimate kids running around. She had a scraped-out uterus instead, and her dreams were plagued by dead babies who always had names.
But Jody was the worst. She had returned to the red Jell-O days. I could see her, but I wasn’t with her. She sat at the kitchen table, mute and useless, the little-girl gold gone from her hair, the bottoms of her feet in bloody tatters from that piece of Dad’s satellite dish I never got around to ripping out of the ground.
I tried calling out to her, and I found myself in Bedrock with Fred running from one stone chapel to the next, chasing after Pebbles’s doomed giggle.
I came awake with a jolt. The storm clouds had scrubbed the night clean, leaving behind a fresh black sky pinpricked with stars. Night bugs chirped, and the creek made a sound like a snake gliding through grass. The air was chilly, but my skin itched and tingled. If flesh could simmer, this was how it would feel.
My body wasn’t old after all. My arms and legs weren’t feeble. I felt stronger than I ever had in my life yet nothing about me seemed solid anymore. I thought of pictures I had seen as a kid of swirling galaxies and how I used to wonder what held them together; refusing to believe in gravity, wanting to believe the planets all stuck around because they knew it was where they belonged.
