by Lynne Hugo
Tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s happening tomorrow. Last night, it felt like my Mom said you’ll get him, and then I thought maybe she means get even with him. Maybe I could get even with him for her and for Tina. And for Grandma. And me.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when I can’t come in Mom’s room. Now I can make it smell like her, and I can put on clothes of hers, and I can sort of talk to her. But I don’t know when she listens. Maybe sometimes not at all, because she’s off doing something else. Jill said she’d prayed to her a couple of times about passing Geometry. Maybe she was listening to Jill when her own daughter needed her. I asked Jill to quit, except then she said, “Well, I also sort of asked her to help my Mom get well because there might be more cancer,” and I couldn’t ask her not to do that anymore, even if Aunt Rebecca is a witch. I wish I knew how this works but there’s nobody to ask.
twenty-one
ALEX LIT ANOTHER CAMEL. Even though Greevy had assured him it was a no-brainer that he’d win, he wasn’t prepared to, and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to. It wasn’t something he could know, one way or the other, his last experience with a child having seared him like a red-glowing iron brand. What he’d really wanted was to, well, see her, and talk about Chris. Unthinkable, her being dead. He’d imagined enough about his own dying, but as much as he still thought about Chris, her death had never shadowed his mind.
Reardon Greevy had explained it was all or nothing. He’d have to sign to give up his rights, or he could claim them, in which case custody would go to him as a surviving natural parent who wasn’t in prison or an insane asylum.
“Her family wishes I was,” he’d told the lawyer.
“And would they be right?”
“No. Might be. No.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. It just helps to know what mud they’re going to throw up on our windshield. Since you haven’t been committed or convicted, it’s a no-brainer.”
“I don’t want to cause any…I sort of wanted to…talk to her, let her know I…”
Greevy cut him off. “Well, there’s a restraining order, you remember. All she wants from you is your John Hancock.”
“My…?”
“Signature.” Reardon Greevy had given a falsely apologetic smile, though the gesture that would have come naturally would have been to roll his eyes. “Sounds like you’d better think this over. Maybe you really don’t want to have your daughter.” Alex detected a thorn of contempt in what he’d said. He knew the man looked down on him. He was so tired of being looked down on, so sick and tired of it. Pictures of what must be the lawyer’s children were framed in thick sterling and pewter on the bookcase and his desk. He either had an awful lot of kids or just kept adding new pictures next to old ones as they grew up.
“It’s not that.” Alex coughed, and cleared his throat again.
“Well, what is it? It is, ah, your responsibility, after all.” Alex could feel the man’s impatience. Reardon shifted his long legs as if to signal his mounting contempt. “You have rights,” he added, “but maybe you’re not the sort to claim them. I take on clients who want to win.”
And then, of course, he had won. Wearing his buddy Dink’s suit, since Al was an even bigger guy than Dink, with a shirt and tie he’d bought at Value City, Alex had won.
HE HAD A TRAILER. It had been his mother’s, and when she’d died four and a half years ago, it had passed to him along with enough money to have it moved to a park closer to the factory where he installed locks on replacement windows. Then he’d been fired from that job for drinking, but had gotten another one, close enough, as a worker ant on the loading-dock side of another colony. He took his smoke breaks, threw his money in for burgers when one of the men made the lunch run, went home and watched television. He’d gotten used to hating it, waited until he got home to drink most nights, and it wasn’t so bad as actual dying. “No second chances,” his father used to say. “No second chances around here for little assholes,” after a ham-sized hand had stung his cheek, or his back, or wherever it had happened to fall. He was small for his age, always, taking after his mother’s side, though he had his father’s Black-Irish coloring. His father hated small men, and children, as best Alex could tell. He’d hooked up with a waitress whose second husband had been shot and ran around with her before he died. Alex always liked those nights best, the ones when the old man hadn’t come home.
“No second chances,” Alex said aloud as he looked around the bedroom and picked up two full ashtrays, dumping the contents into a paper bag and went on to collect the cans and food wrappers that had accumulated just since the social service investigator had been there to interview him. What had he done? He’d tried for some kind of a second chance when he had every reason to know better.
He’d told Reardon Greevy that he’d go get Alexis at Cora’s, but the word had come back through the attorneys at a hundred an hour, which made three five-minute phone calls cost him twenty-five dollars. (He wanted to, but didn’t ask why hearing the word no from Cora’s lawyer had to take five minutes.) He’d have rather picked her up because he didn’t know whether he was supposed to invite Cora in. In fact, he didn’t want her even to see the trailer park. He’d as soon do the driving himself, about an hour each way.
His bedroom would have to be hers, now, he guessed. The social service investigator mentioned it would be best if her report mentioned that he did have a separate bedroom for Alexis. The woman had seemed so young, but she must have been three or four years older than he’d been when the twins were born. He still thought of them that way, the twins, inseparable in his mind. Maybe he’d flirted a little with Ms. Guard, who’d told him to call her Heather. Maybe he’d overstated wanting his daughter; maybe he’d lied just a little, but only about how he hadn’t had any idea where she was all those years, or about how he’d tried to find Christine when he’d come back, how Mrs. Laster wouldn’t tell him and waved a shotgun around. Maybe Heather had seen him as a little heroic, resisting the war that her generation had learned was all wrong, and a little tragic in the loss of his family.
What were teenage girls like anyway? he wondered. The last one he’d been around was Christine, and nothing he’d done with her seemed like useful experience. Nor did having been a fugitive in Toronto, always spooked, picking up day jobs and night girls, rootless as a stone and with as much feeling. There were gatherings and networks of Americans who’d fled like him, but he found they talked about Daniel Berrigan and Bill Coffin and books he’d never heard of. He tried to read one that was pressed on him, but found it full of long words and it didn’t seem to have a story to it at all.
The guys at work who talked about teenage daughters did it with exasperation and sometimes fury. “Jesus,” said Dink, the one whose daughter Jennie had five earrings in one ear and three in the other, something that kept Dink in constant fear that she was dabbling around the edge of a satanic cult. “Why else would anyone dye her hair orange and blue and punch holes where God never did?”
Alex ventured to tell Big Al, who was too sluggish to have a temper, that his daughter was coming to live with him, making it apparent but unspoken that he’d receive advice without offense. Big Al said, “Well, the first thing is that about half the time they’re in the monthly thing. The way you know is that they don’t talk to you, they’re pissed off, act like you’re dumb as cement, and cry and carry on if you say squat. If you was married, you’d recognize it.”
“Half the time?” That didn’t sound right to Alex.
“Yeah. And the other half is when they’re bad to be around.”
CORA WAS TO HAVE Lexie at Alex’s by five o’clock. At four minutes to five, a station wagon inched its way like a pained turtle over the speed bump and paused at each of the three trailers before his. The car pulled up at an angle—Alex’s parking space was filled with his pickup—and idled.
Nothing happened. Alex was sidelong to the bedroom window, angling himself so as not to be seen. There were blinds on
the window, ones his mother had put up, which were down but open. He made the double bed that took all but a couple of feet of floor space around it while watching for some movement. Finally, the passenger door opened and Alexis’s dark head appeared. The door slammed like a heart against the wall of his chest, and she stood there, staring at the trailer. The driver’s-side door opened then and Cora pulled herself out, her cane like a feeler on the asphalt first, even though the afternoon sun was scarcely down and Alex thought she must certainly be able to see perfectly well.
He stepped back, toward the door, waited for a knock. And waited some more, each second elongated like a late shadow.
Finally, he sidled to the window and looked again. Alexis was dressed entirely in black, long pants and a long-sleeved shirt in spite of the spring warmth. She’d pulled her hair straight back in a relentless bun of some sort, and her lipstick was blackish purple. She and Cora stood in front of the car, talking, perhaps arguing. Alexis gestured, looked agitated, shook her head no. Cora, her back to the window from which Alex watched, put her hand alongside Alexis’s cheek and caressed it, and then the girl, his daughter, the phantom featureless in his mind all these years, stepped forward and laid her head on her grandmother’s chest, and put her arms around that expanse of back, linking her hands. Alex studied his daughter’s face looking for Christine, but saw only a stranger.
When he couldn’t bear it any longer, he went through the small living room flicking on the television as he passed it, hoping to make the situation appear casual. He’d rehearsed what to say, but it had fled his mind, which had dried up. His stomach lurched and flopped like a landed fish as he opened the metal door and stepped out onto the stoop.
“Hi,” he finally managed to get out.
Alexis stared at him with the open, unyielding eye of a creature newly dead. He involuntarily took a step backward, bumped his heel on the step and looked down.
“Hello, Alex,” Cora said, carefully polite. She straightened her green-and-blue print blouse over the top of her slacks to give herself something to do with her hand, seeing that Alex was considering sticking his out to shake. “This is Alexis, but she likes to be called…”
“I go by Detta,” Lexie said. Cora looked at her.
“Detta?” Alex said.
“That’s what they call me.”
“Okay. Detta. You wanna come in?”
“No.”
“Um…” Alex stalled.
“Her things are in the car,” Cora said, peeling her eyes off the granddaughter on whom they’d been stuck since she’d said her name was Detta.
“I’ll get ’em,” Alex said, and they let him struggle back and forth from the car to the door three times.
“Do you…uh, want to come in?” Alex said to Cora.
“Yes, she does,” Detta said.
“Just for a minute,” Cora said.
The two followed him through the trailer door into the dim living room where the furniture was a worn brown tweed. “Your room’s back there, through that door, uh, Detta,” Alex said. Detta looked around the living room and rolled her eyes. “The bathroom’s there.” Pointing. “I made space for you. And I got you some towels.”
“I brought my own,” she said coldly. “Are there locks on the doors?” she said, and somehow her voice managed to make it a challenge rather than a question.
“I…guess.”
“Fine. I’ll be using them.”
“Would you want to sit?” Alex said to Cora.
“She’s coming back there with me,” Detta said, dragging a duffel bag toward the door Alex had pointed out. Quarters were tight with three people standing in the living room—the trailer was only a single-wide—and Alex had to step back for her to get past him. Although she drew herself in tightly, as if in revulsion at his nearness, it was the closest Alex had been to her in over fifteen years, and he saw that her skin was pale and clear, eyes as light blue as Christine’s but bordered with black lashes. He couldn’t see if her teeth were good; her mouth was like a straight line drawn above her chin in heavy crayon,
“Maybe she’ll be more comfortable if I do,” Cora said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Okay. Yeah, sure,” he said, feeling like a monster. He sat on the edge of the stuffed chair while they went in the bedroom, considered getting himself a beer and thought better of it.
A few minutes later Cora emerged alone. “She’s making the bed,” she said.
“It’s already made,” he protested, knowing he’d just done it, an afterthought that hadn’t involved changing the sheets.
“She wanted to bring her own sheets. Have you made arrangements with the high school?”
“Uh, no.”
“What?” Cora’s eyebrows shot up when she became flustered. “Where’s she going to school? There’s a copy of her birth certificate and her transcript in here.” She drew a white envelope out of the large tan purse hanging from the wrist that leaned on her cane.
“I, um, I’ll find out.”
“Look, Alex. This isn’t a game. This isn’t Mr. Alexander the Great just getting what he wants. You did this. It’s the worst thing you could have done to this girl. Did you even think about her? It wasn’t enough just to ruin my daughter’s life. It’s done now, you won, and God help you. She has to go to school, be registered. She’s got to have some help adjusting. Did you even think about her changing schools the last month? Did you ever think about anyone but your sorry self?” Cora was shaking. She wasn’t one to lose control of herself and now she had, however quietly. “Is this about the money? You can have the money, damn you, just let me have her,” she hissed, the watery sheen on her eyes obscured by her glasses.
Alex blinked and coughed. “What money?” he said.
“Damn you,” she said, making it evident that she thought he was playing dumb.
“Lex…Detta! Detta, honey, I need to go on now,” she called. “I’ll be here to get you on Wednesday, and we’ll go out to eat, okay, honey?” Cora called to the bedroom. Before Lexie came out, Cora turned back to Alex. “You get her in school. Tomorrow.”
“I gotta go to…”
“You don’t go anywhere until that child is in school. Hear me?”
Alex put his head down. He hadn’t the slightest advantage, especially with conviction’s blaze on her side and him already asking himself what the hell he was doing and how could he ever fix anything. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
twenty-two
I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M stuck here with this freak who smokes like a bad engine and stares at me. Grandma left yesterday and I don’t even see her again until Wednesday night. I didn’t speak to him last night. He kept knocking on the door to my room, if you can call it that, it’s really a closet, but I didn’t answer him. This morning he knocked again and said, “It’s time to get up, we got to find about school for you,” which I figure he should have thought of a while back, but I was actually relieved that I’ll get to go to school. God only knows what he does all day. Probably goes around looking for women to ruin their lives. I wonder why it was Tina and not me.
I was already up when he knocked, because I’m used to getting up so early and I wanted to sneak into the bathroom. I had to use it so bad since last night, but I didn’t want to. It’s real small, and he’s got a roll-on deodorant, which is disgusting because it gets all over the hair under a guy’s arms. He’s got a brand of toothpaste I never heard of and I was glad Grandma said I could bring my Pepsodent, which is what Mom always bought, the one with fluoride, which I had to remind Grandma about. Then I had to get in Alex’s truck, which reeks and has garbage on the seat and floors, like crumpled-up cigarette packages and McDonald’s wrappers. He picked a bunch up and threw it behind his seat. I was going to ask him where there was a McDonald’s, but I didn’t want to talk to him. But then I didn’t have to, which was cool, because he drove into one and asked me what I wanted to eat. I was starving, but I just stared at him and looked away. He asked me again, but I still did
n’t answer, so he went in the drive-through and got coffee. I was hoping it was close enough that I could walk to it because I got the money Grandma gave me. So he drinks his coffee, and I’m just looking out my window and not saying a word. I hate it here. It’s ugly. The houses look all beat up, real old and jammed together. In the town, it looks like people are mostly black, but at the trailer park, I saw white people so I don’t really know.
The school is a dump. It’s got some kind of wire on the windows and it’s three stories high. Alex walked in with me and we went to the office. It was kind of funny because the lady asked him a whole bunch of questions about me and he didn’t know the answers, except he told her that my name was Alexis Michelle O’Gara, but I went by Detta. That’s right, Alex. That’s Detta as in Vendetta. Vendetta Christina, you jerk. Not that you’d know, but I’m a whole new person here. Lexie’s at Grandma’s and Detta moved here. At first I wasn’t going to tell her any of the other answers, but then she said I couldn’t go to school there if they didn’t know any information.
I want my old life, I want to be Lexie and have my mother back. I want to at least go to Grandma’s, but she said I couldn’t unless Alex wanted me to, because it wasn’t her weekend. I decided I’d make him want me to go. How long would it take to make him want me never ever to come back? Only Alex knows, but Vendetta Christina will figure it out. She’s the one who will take care of Lexie. I can see no one else is going to.
twenty-three
ALEX SHOOK HIS HEAD. Big Al and Dink, both hiding shit-eating grins like polyester shirts underneath their sturdy wool concern, had asked how it was going. Machinery noise, the breath of the factory, expanded like heat around them. Alex held up his hand. “Quit,” he said. “I’m in no mood.”
“Oh, Daddy’s in no mood…” Dink, out of punching range, mocked him, but his languid, Southern-edged baritone held out an invitation that only an initiate would have recognized. “What’d she say?”
“Nothin’.” Alex was way late, his arrival coinciding with the first smoke break of the day. Big Al and Dink were drinking coffee out of paper cups, flicking ashes on the cement floor of the loading dock, where they held their shape until disturbed, like small long-dead flowers. They sat on brown metal folding chairs that Dink’s wife had pronounced too ugly to keep. Instead of dropping them off at the Goodwill as she’d told him to, he’d brought them to the dock and told her he’d lost the receipt.
