Having a place you can call home. Did I have that? Maybe, just barely, back in Boston. But I was terrified I’d blown it. I was terrified I’d already hurt Crank so much that he wouldn’t want anything to do with me. I was terrified he would. I felt paralyzed.
“I’ve never really felt at home anywhere,” I said.
“No wonder, living like a bunch of vagabonds,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what I think. Home’s where the people you love are. It’s about finding the things that matter to you, and holding on to them and taking care of them. You make your own home, wherever that is. Kid … you’re family as far as I’m concerned. Keep your chin up. You’ll find what you need.”
I fought to smile. I wished I could be so confident. I wished I had any clue as to what I needed. “When you get back home, I want to come see you.”
“Deal,” he said. “I’m trying to picture you all grown up. You gotta email pictures, all right?”
“I will. You do the same.”
“Ok, my time’s up.”
I sniffled again and wiped my eyes. I didn’t want to let go. “Barry? Before you go … thank you. You don’t know … you gave me more than you realize, letting me tag along with you all that time in Belgium. I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me nothing. You’re my little sister, okay? We take care of family.”
“Okay,” I said, starting to cry. “Be careful over there, all right? I’m going to be really worried.”
He grunted skeptically. “I’m Recon, kid. In civilian, that means invincible. Gotta go. I’ll email you tomorrow. Merry Christmas, kid!”
I closed the phone and leaned against the wall and let the tears come. I’d lost so much time. So much life. Wrapped up inside myself, protected so tight inside my own cocoon where nothing could hurt me, nothing could touch me. All these emotions felt … raw, dangerous, out of control.
But those emotions … they also made me feel alive. And I was starting to want that. I was starting to want to live, to really live, to let myself be who I really was. Not wrapped up in protecting myself, not wrapped up in hating myself.
“You okay?”
I looked up. It was Carrie. She stood, leaning against the wall, with her arms crossed and a concerned expression on her face.
I thought about it for a second. And then I said, “Yeah, I am. Maybe better than I’ve ever been.”
“Who was that?”
“Do you remember Corporal Lewis? From the embassy in Brussels?”
She shook her head.
“I guess you were too young. He was … my big brother.”
She gave me an odd, questioning look.
“I’m okay, Carrie. Really.”
She leaned close and kissed my forehead. “You know you can always talk with me, right?”
I reached out and took her hand and squeezed it. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
I stood. “How pissed is Mother?”
“Her knuckles are white, and her face is all pinched up like she ate something sour.”
I said, “Well, I guess it’s time to go brave the dragon. This should be fun.”
“Coming with,” she said. So holding hands, we walked back into the family room.
Alexandra was sitting, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Mother sat across from her, shuffling the deck of cards in her hands and speaking. “The Brewers will be here for dinner this evening, and I expect you be on your best behavior, young lady.”
“Yes, Mother,” Alexandra said.
We took our seats as she continued talking.
“You should strike up a friendship with young Randy. He’s a nice boy.”
“He’s mean to the kids at school,” she said. “He’s a bully.”
“Don’t you argue with me, young lady.”
Alexandra shut up. I looked back and forth between the two of them, and I wanted to scream. Alexandra was sitting, staring at the table, face down. Alone. Sad.
It was Christmas Eve, damn it. She shouldn’t look like that. She should be laughing and having fun. I studied my mother.
What happened to make her so hateful? What happened to make acid drip from her tongue, to make her speak to all of us, and me most of all, as if we were something she hated? I didn’t understand it, and even though I’d always hated it, I didn’t really know any different, until I spent those weekends in Jack’s house.
I couldn’t help but wonder what Christmas was like there, if Jack hadn’t been deployed with the National Guard. Somehow I imagined him puttering around in the kitchen, making a huge meal, joking with Tony, and laughing with Sean and Crank. Here, my father was locked away in his study, as always, and my mother was … cold. Angry.
Alexandra was a wonderful, sweet little girl. And she didn’t deserve that treatment. She reminded me so much of the little girl I had been in Belgium. When the only family I could find was my security guard, who gave me space in his life and in his heart, and just a few minutes ago had called me from halfway around the world to tell me he still thought of me as his sister.
Seeing Alexandra like that—sad, in her formal dress, hands in her lap, face down, fidgeting as she stared at the table—something inside me broke.
“Mother. We need to talk. Right now.”
She looked at me, her face imperious, dismissive. “About what, dear?”
“Alexandra,” I said. “You might not want to be here for this.”
Mother raised her eyebrows. “I don’t recall you becoming the parent. I’m sure whatever it is you have to say, it won’t do your sister any harm.”
Carrie muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Oh, shit,” and sat back in her seat, as if she was trying to get as far away as possible from our mother.
“Fine, then,” I said. “But I need you to know … I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of you treating us all like we’re your personal punching bags. I’ve had enough of you talking to us like there’s something wrong with us.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Who do you think you are? You don’t speak to me that way, young lady. Now go away until you can be civilized.”
I stared at her and said, “Do you remember my senior year in high school, Mother? In Bethesda?”
“Of course I do,” she said viciously. “The year you shamed your father and nearly wrecked his career by letting that picture get out?”
With my left hand, I started slowly sliding off the bangles and bands I always wore around my wrist. In a conversational tone, I asked, “Mother, why did you never ask me when and how that picture was taken?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Why would I want to know? Why would I ask when my oldest daughter had become a drunken slut?”
Carrie gasped, and Alexandra sat up her in her seat, eyes wide and shocked.
You’d think, when she threw out words like that, I would want to cry. That I’d want to hole up in my shell, wrap myself back up in that safe cocoon that protected me ever since my senior year.
I was done hiding. My wrist clear of obstruction, I ran my fingers up and down the scars on the inside of my right wrist. Her eyes widened when she saw the scars. I said, “Do you remember when I came to you on New Year’s Eve of 2000? You and Dad were getting ready to go out, and I came in crying? Because I needed a mother for a change? You said, and I’m quoting, ‘Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad at school if you hadn’t behaved like a slut.’ Do you remember that?”
She winced. Good.
“I remember it, Mother. Because I needed you. And not long after all of you left, I went into the bathroom and slit my wrists. These are the scars.”
She gasped then ordered, “Alexandra, Carrie, go upstairs, right now.”
Alexandra didn’t wait around. She was gone in a flash. But Carrie said, “I’m staying here with my sister.” Then she reached across the table and took my right hand in her left.
My mother turned on me then. “I don’t know why you’re bringing this up now. I don’t even know who you are.”
“Of course yo
u don’t. You never bothered to ask. You never asked me what was wrong. Mom, that stupid picture? I was fourteen when it was taken, and the boy was eighteen. I needed help from you. I needed you. But you were too busy that year, weren’t you? With George Lansing? Am I right?”
She clenched her fists. “Whatever you thought you saw that night, you were mistaken.”
Carrie’s eyes were wide. I’d never told her about Mother’s little secret.
“Is that why you shut me out that year in China, Mom? Because of Mr. Lansing? Because you were too busy having your tawdry little affair to notice that your daughter was in an abusive relationship with someone years older?”
My mother stood up, her lips compressed into a tight line. “I don’t have to listen to this.”
“Yes, you do! You’ve treated me like dirt for the last eight years!” I shouted. “When I came home from that hideous abortion clinic in Beijing, you never even asked me what was wrong or where I’d been! Didn’t you notice all the blood on the sheets, Mom? Didn’t you notice how sick I got? I needed a mother and all I had was …” I shook my head. “Nothing. Not once were you there when I needed you. When Lana sent that picture out, you didn’t offer to help. You didn’t hug me, and tell me it was going to get better. Someone in Bethesda Chevy Chase made copies and stuffed them in people’s lockers at school. They tortured me, Mother. To the point where I couldn’t see any way out but suicide. And what I’ve never understood, to this day, was why? Why wouldn’t you help me? Why weren’t you there when I needed you?”
My mother’s face twisted, and she started to cry. “I …” she whispered. “I didn’t know it was so bad for you. You’re my daughter. I just wanted … I wanted you to be better.”
“You wanted to protect yourself.”
She shook her head. “No … that’s not it at all. Your father and I…we went through a really rough time in Belgium and in China. We thought … we’d fallen out of love. And he had an affair in Belgium. And … yes. I did in China.”
I wanted to vomit. “So you were just too preoccupied.”
She looked at me, her face unreadable, and she said, “Julia … what happened in China?”
So I told her. The whole stupid story of me falling in love with a boy too old for me, of him using me, and treating me like dirt and making me feel like it was my fault. By the time I got to the abortion, and being lost and wandering Beijing in the snow afterward, she was crying.
After I finished the story, I said, “For the longest time I thought you hated me. That there really was something wrong with me. That it was my fault Harry did that to me. That’s what he told me. That it was my fault.” I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t, Mother. I didn’t make all the right choices, but I was a kid. And no one was helping me. No one was there to talk to about it, to guide me. The only family I thought I had then was a twenty-year-old Marine who I thought I’d never speak to again.”
Carrie murmured, “You’ve got family now. You’ve got me.”
I looked at my sister and blinked my eyes to hold back tears.
My mom looked at us, her face a portrait of loss and shock. She shook her head then ran out of the room without another word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Part of my armor (Crank)
Look, I know I cook for a living. On a three foot grill, with set procedures. But it was Christmas morning, and I wasn’t going to let a Christmas morning go by without a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes. Because if Dad had been home, that’s what he would have done. What I didn’t realize was, cooking in Dad’s kitchen? It was completely different.
Mom finally stepped in after I set the frying pan on fire, flooding the kitchen with smoke and setting off the fire alarm.
We finally got it sorted out, though opening the windows and doors when there was a foot of snow on the ground outside was bracing, to say the least. But Mom laughed it off, and Sean put on his winter coat, and we spent the morning laughing and being a family.
None of us said anything about the fact that Dad hadn’t called. Maybe he’d get to a phone today. I don’t know what the phone situation was over there. He mentioned something like big call centers they get bussed to when he called a couple weeks ago. He’s writing almost every day.
Mom had gone out and bought a small blue star flag and mounted it in the window. She explained the tradition from World War II: families would put a blue star in the window representing each member of the family serving overseas in wartime. A gold star meant they’d lost a family member.
I wasn’t much for prayer, but I’d found myself praying for Dad and for this thing to not actually come to war.
After breakfast, I cleaned up, then offered to start cooking Christmas dinner. My mother shooed me out of the kitchen in a hurry. “Go entertain your brother,” she said.
I think she was enjoying this.
I could do that. We hooked up the new Xbox I’d bought him, now that I was actually earning money from the band, and goofed off playing games.
We hadn’t opened everything. When I woke up this morning, there were two gifts under the tree from Julia. One for Sean, one for me. I’d looked at my mom and she said, “She gave them to me before she left town and asked me to make sure you got them.”
She’d purchased Sean an updated 2002 edition of the 20-year-old medical textbook he’d been reading for the last several months.
I hadn’t opened mine yet. I wanted to talk to her when I did, and I was watching the clock, waiting for noon here, nine A.M. in California. She’d be up by then, I was sure.
It was one minute after noon when I called.
The phone rang … two, three times. I was afraid she wasn’t going to answer, but on the fourth ring she picked up.
“Hello?” she said. “Crank?”
“Hey, Julia.”
“Is everything okay?”
I smiled, bitterly. Of course. She wouldn’t expect a colleague, a member of the band, to call her on Christmas morning. That was something close friends did. It was something for family. Or lovers.
We were none of those things.
I took a deep breath. “I called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
She was silent, and then said in a small voice, “I miss you.”
My heart started pounding. Did she just say that? Was she screwing with me? Is that all it took to get me into an uproar? I grimaced. “I miss you, babe.”
“Call me babe and I’ll punch you right through the phone line, Crank.”
“That sounds more like you,” I said. “How are you? How is … everything?”
She said, “It’s tense here. I’m sort of in a minefield with my family at the moment.”
“Families are always minefields,” I said.
“Have you heard from Jack?”
“No … not in about a week.”
“If you do, please tell him—” She cut herself off, then said, “Tell him I love him, and I’m thinking about him, okay?”
“I will.”
“Did you open your present?” she asked.
“Not yet. I kinda wanted to talk with you first.”
“Well, open it, bonehead.”
I grinned. It was weird. It seemed like it had been weeks since we’d had a casual conversation that wasn’t weighted with tension and emotion. “All right,” I said. I walked over to the tree and picked up the tiny box, which didn’t weigh more than an ounce.
“Is it empty?” I asked.
“Yes, I decided to give you two cubic inches of oxygen.”
I rolled my eyes and tore open the wrapper. Then I noticed my mom looking in from the kitchen. Nosy. I turned my back, keeping the phone tucked between my ear and shoulder, as I opened the tiny box inside the wrapper.
Inside the box was a tiny friendship bracelet … woven, with pink and white threads. It was worn … really worn. I wrinkled my eyebrows. It was the one I’d seen on her wrist a thousand times. I didn’t think she ever took it off.
; She’d been wearing it the day we met. And every day since. This … I was afraid to even ask what it meant.
“Your friendship bracelet,” I said.
She was breathing heavily at the opposite end of the phone line. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay—you have to promise you won’t think I’m weird.”
“It’s a little late for that,” I replied.
“Shut up,” she said. Then she went on. “Well … I used to make those when I was in middle school. Corporal Lewis brought me the kit back from the States when he’d gone home on leave. He was just considerate that way.”
I grinned. She’d talked a lot about her Marine Corps bodyguard from those days.
“Anyway, I made that one. But I didn’t really wear them, until after … after I hurt myself. And then … well, you’ve seen. I wear a thousand bracelets, to … to hide it. To hide me. And that one, I’ve worn every day since it happened. Until this week. It was part of my—part of my armor. But I don’t need it any more.”
Jesus H. Christ. My eyes burned a little, and voice rough, I said, “Holy cow, Julia. That’s … that’s some gift.”
“You don’t think I’m weird?”
“Of course I think you’re weird,” I said. And then I went on, knowing that I shouldn’t, knowing that it was a mistake, but I did it anyway, because it was just true, and she had to know it. “That’s one of the reasons I love you.”
She was silent, breathing at the other end of the phone line.
“Oh, Christ, Julia. Don’t hang up on me. I’m sorry if I upset you by saying that.”
She was still silent, and I’d have sworn she’d hung up on me if I couldn’t hear her breathing. Finally, she whispered, “Promise you won’t give up on me, Crank? At least not until I get home after the holidays? Please?”
I sucked in a breath. Then I said, “I’ll never give up on you. Do you hear me? Never.”
“Merry Christmas, Crank.”
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