This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  “How do you feel about all this?” Dr. Allen asks.

  I feel like she knows the answer already, but I answer anyway. I realize it has gotten easier to be honest and open with her. “I don’t know how to feel. I… It feels like I’m cheating on Jason.”

  “Perfectly understandable. It will take some time to sort through all of your emotions.”

  “But… I do like spending time with him. I like having another friend.”

  “Everyone needs friends,” says Dr. Allen. “And it doesn’t have to be anything else if you’re not ready. After everything you’ve been through, I think this is a huge step forward. You’re letting yourself live life, and enjoy it.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel less guilty.”

  24.

  I don’t register Lauren Hart’s foot suddenly jutting out into my path until after I trip over it. While she and her friends laugh, I go sprawling to the hallway floor, my backpack, books, and water bottle flying in three different directions. If I had a normal, fully-functioning left knee, I might have saved myself. But I don’t, and I land heavily on my right side, bashing my elbow onto the hard marble floor.

  “Oh my God, Angela, are you high or something?” Lauren laughs at her own joke. She and her friends step over my stuff and walk away, their laughs echoing off the lockers.

  Bitch.

  I take my time gathering my things off the floor and end up getting to math late, my elbow still throbbing.

  Lauren and I were BFF’s for a while in middle school. In eighth grade she stopped speaking to me, opting instead to establish a new clique consisting of the girls who had started shaving their legs and wearing makeup. She dated Ryan sophomore year, after I refused to go out with him. He dumped her a month later, the Friday before spring break.

  “You’re late, Ms. Lillegard.” Mr. Mallon points to the clock above the door.

  “Sorry.” I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “You can make up for it by solving the problem on the board.”

  Great. More public humiliation.

  I spend gym in the nurse’s office watching Criminal Minds reruns with Ms. Doyle, the school “nurse” (read: some kid’s Mom who has nothing better to do all day because all her kids are in school). I consider bailing on history, but then I get angry at myself. Why the hell am I moping? I’m not afraid of Lauren Hart or her friends. Since when do I care who laughs at me? So I put on my haughtiest expression and stroll into fifth period history a minute before the bell rings.

  Ryan, instead of sitting in his usual seat on the other side of the room, has relocated to the desk next to mine.

  “Where were you?” he asks the second I sit down. “I waited by the art room.”

  “I went to take a nap.”

  Lauren and her friends walk in. They make a point of pausing in the doorway to stare at me, and then whisper and giggle amongst themselves.

  “Trouble on the playground?” Ryan asks.

  I shrug. “Girls being girls.”

  When Lauren sits down, she glances at Ryan for half a second, but I don’t miss the look that crosses her face—sort of sad, sort of angry. And for half a second, she looks ten years younger.

  I actually feel sorry for her, which makes it hard to feel angry about the incident in the hallway earlier.

  25.

  “We’re going out to Wellsboro for Thanksgiving. Mairéad and the kids will be there, too.”

  Dad has all three of us gathered in the kitchen—Casey and I just home from school, and Rachel came home from college for a week. Two months of laundry sits on the kitchen floor in black garbage bags.

  “Are we staying over?” Casey asks.

  “Of course we’re staying over,” Rachel says, trying not to make a face. “It’s four hours away.”

  “Yes, we’re staying over,” Dad says. “Wednesday afternoon until Saturday.” He looks upset about this.

  Grandma lives in a little yellow house in northern Pennsylvania, right smack in the middle of nowhere. Literally. You can see pretty far across fields and woods from her yard, and you can’t see a single neighbor.

  *

  “So Dad says you’re sleeping with the enemy.” Rachel piles her dirty laundry into the washing machine.

  “I beg your pardon?” I sit on the dryer, un-balling her socks.

  “You’ve been going out with Ryan Reagan.”

  “We’re not ‘going out.’ Just… hanging out.”

  “You were spotted making out in his car. Twice.”

  Mom’s spies: everywhere.

  “How the hell did that even happen?” Rachel asks, trying not to laugh.

  I shrug and hide my face in my Gryffindor scarf, beating one of her rolled up socks against the dryer until it unrolls.

  Rachel’s expression turns more serious. “You’re allowed to date, you know.”

  “I know. But it still feels wrong if I think about it for too long.”

  She hops up next to me on the dryer and wraps an arm around my shoulder. She smells like flowers and bubble gum and books.

  “I don’t know how to make you feel better about that,” she says. “But you seem happier than last time I was home, and that can’t be wrong. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  She gives me a squeeze and then drops back down to the floor and continues loading the washer, frowning at my hair. “What is up with the braids? I didn’t think you had enough hair to do it up in braids like that.”

  “Ryan digs the Viking look.”

  Rachel buries her face in her hands.

  “You should do yours to match,” I say. “We’ll need the strength of our ancestors to get through four days with Mom and Mairéad.”

  “Ugh. No kidding.”

  *

  Mom and Dad put all my old clothes in boxes in the attic, to save them from the damp in the basement. After a struggle up the stepladder, I sorted through them and brought most of them downstairs.

  “So is this Rebel Angela 2.0?” Rachel asks.

  She and Casey barged into my room to make sure something drastic hadn’t happened—I haven’t shut my door or blasted my music since before the accident.

  “Viking, not rebel,” I say.

  I abandoned most of the pants in the attic. All of them are super-tight skinny jeans in various colors—mostly black, red, and purple—and I can’t really maneuver my left leg into them without calling the fire department to get me back out again. I brought down all the shirts—also mostly black, red, and purple, all of them altered by me with scissors and safety pins and ribbon and shoelaces. The skirts were also altered by me, lots of flowy and lacey skirts leftover from my gypsy phase.

  I used to love taking fashion to extremes.

  “How do I look?”

  I put on one of the black skirts, the cotton torn into two panels, with an uneven skirt of black lace underneath; and a dark purple long-sleeved shirt under a black and purple brocade-patterned corset. The high-heeled boots defeated me, so I had to settle for the steel-toed cowboy boots.

  Casey smiles. “I like it.”

  “Are you going on a date?” Rachel asks with a sly smile.

  “Sort of.” I stare at my reflection in the mirror that I dragged out of Rachel’s room. It looks like someone I might want to be. “Tomorrow, we’re going to Eddie’s.”

  We have half days at school all week and no homework, so Ryan and I planned our first “real” date for Tuesday night. I don’t know why I feel so jittery about it. Maybe because this makes it real.

  “We should do a double date,” Rachel says. “I’m seeing Kevin tomorrow.”

  “Umm… No, that’s okay.” I’d rather keep the awkwardness to a minimum.

  *

  The “date” has turned into a somewhat ridiculous affair, because Ryan and I both discovered that neither of us has ever gone on a real date before. Real date as in the dates people have in romantic comedies. I decide it’s a horrible idea about fifteen minutes before he arrives to pick m
e up at six-thirty.

  “If you won’t let me touch your hair, at least let me do your makeup,” Rachel commands.

  We stand side by side in the bathroom, me second-guessing every decision I have made about my outfit, hair, shoes, accessories, choice in restaurant, choice in boyfriend (is he my boyfriend now??), and every other choice I have ever made from birth to the present.

  “Fine.”

  “Wow,” Rachel says, staring at me with her arms folded over her chest. “You really like him.”

  “What?! No I don’t.”

  “You wouldn’t look like a trapped wild animal if you didn’t. Sit down. I’ve only got ten minutes to get it right.”

  Ryan comes to the door while Rachel still has me pinned down in the bathroom. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that only Dad is home and not Mom. Rachel did some weird smudge thing with the mascara and put a dark red wine colored lipstick on me, so now I look like some super-Goth Viking shield maiden. She leaves me at the top of the stairs, and I go down to find Ryan and Dad standing a good ten feet away from each other in the kitchen. Ryan holds a bouquet of red roses.

  “Really?” I say to the roses.

  Ryan raises an eyebrow. “I could say the same about your outfit.”

  Dad clears his throat.

  “We’ll be home by eight,” I tell Dad. I take the roses from Ryan—nice ones, I have to admit—and hand them over to Dad. “Put these in water? Please?”

  Dad frowns at me, then frowns at Ryan, then turns back to me with slightly less frownage. “Make it nine, if you want.”

  “Is my outfit really that bad?” I ask on the way to the car.

  “Actually, no.” Ryan opens the door for me. “You look amazing.”

  Our “date” ends up being exactly like what we always do when we hang out--eating junk food and complaining. Only it’s an official date, which means Ryan and I are official. I think.

  26.

  Squashed in the backseat between Rachel and Casey, I feel like a little kid again. Dad drives west on 84, eyes darting between the road and the mirrors. He hates driving on long trips because he has absolutely no sense of direction and hates admitting it. But Mom never feels like driving—which I don’t understand, because I’m pretty sure she has a microchip in her head linked directly to Google Maps—so she makes Dad drive.

  Awkward silence settled in before we even pulled out of the driveway. Only four hours to go.

  Casey falls asleep the second we get onto the highway. Rachel—never fond of traveling—feels sick two hours into the trip. The whole drive ends up taking over five hours because we have to keep stopping so Rachel can get out of the car and take deep breaths and dry heave on the side of the road.

  I text Ryan just before we enter the Wellsboro town center, before we lose cell service: HELP.

  As Dad drives through Wellsboro, its streets lined with old-fashioned gas lamps, I try to remember the last time we came here. Almost three years ago, for Easter. I had just turned fifteen, Rachel was sixteen. Casey, eleven, had just begun experiencing the joys of both middle school girl-clique warfare, and the onset of puberty. I was the star of the Harrowmill girls’ varsity soccer team—a big deal, since I was only a freshman. Rachel had reached new heights in nerd-dom her sophomore year—perfect grades, National Honor Society, debate team, president of her class, and already offered two summer internships with some investment banking firms in the city.

  A normal family, on the surface at least—three good kids with bright futures ahead of them.

  I realize that we are still that family. Nothing has changed, not really. Now though, our darkest shadows lay exposed. The clean, shiny skin ripped apart, rotten insides pulled out for everyone to see in the form of the delinquent daughter.

  Ryan texts back just as we reach the other side of the town center: LOL sucks to be you.

  *

  Two cars stand parked outside Grandma’s house: Mairéad’s monstrous black Chevy Suburban, and Grandma’s ancient station wagon with the faded, cracked wood paneling. Mom’s jaw clenches when we pull up the gravel drive, eyes fixed on Mairéad’s car.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Rachel says, opening her door before Dad comes to a complete stop. “Plenty of places to hide a body around here.”

  Mom almost smiles.

  The front door of the little yellow house opens as we get out of the car and unload our things from the trunk. Grandma appears in the doorway, and now the whole scene looks like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life: little house set in the middle of a greying field, sun setting behind it, property surrounded on all sides by woods and mountains in brilliant autumn colors, and Grandma in the doorway in her flowery pastel dress and pale pink apron, a smudge of flour on one rosy cheek. She still wears her hair in what Rachel calls “big old lady curls.” I don’t think she looks like an old lady, though. Maybe because she keeps her hair dyed a pale golden-blonde.

  My aunt, Mairéad shatters the Norman Rockwell painting a moment later when she follows Grandma out of the house, designer spike heels sinking into the ground with each step, and all-black designer wardrobe advertising the fact that she hasn’t eaten anything since the 1980’s. She looks like an angrier, emaciated, auburn-haired version of Mom.

  Casey sprints over to Grandma for a hug and a flour-covered kiss on the cheek. Grandma takes her glasses out of an apron pocket to get a better look at her.

  “So tall!” Grandma says, smacking Casey’s cheek. “Must get that from your father.”

  She walks towards the car, her black and brown hiking boots clashing fabulously with her outfit. Mom and Dad get quick, official hugs and cheek kisses. Rachel gets a better hug. Mom and Mairéad both make disgusted faces when they air-kiss each other’s cheeks.

  Then Grandma stands in front of me, gives my hair and outfit an appraising frown, and drags me into a suffocating hug. At some point during that exchange Mairéad swooped in like a vulture, because when Grandma lets go of me, she has materialized beside us.

  I get a not-quite-kiss on the cheek and then Mairéad turns to my mother and says, “I thought you told Mommy she turned normal?”

  Let the festivities begin.

  Grandma lets out a barking laugh and says, “That one’ll never be normal. She’s my mother all over.” She puts a strong arm around my shoulders and kisses my cheek. “And that is not a bad thing.”

  *

  Grandma keeps me by her side while the rest of the family brings our bags in. I catch glimpses of my two cousins while Grandma enlists my help in the kitchen.

  “So glad to see you well.” She pinches my cheek. “And back to your old self. I was horrified when your mother said you’d abandoned your style.”

  I never knew Grandma knew any details about me after the accident. I didn’t think Mom even told Grandma about the accident or the drugs.

  It has gotten dark out by the time everyone gets settled in, and Grandma serves us sandwiches in the dining room. I keep catching Mairéad’s daughters staring at me and I wonder what their mother told them. Carlee, in her third year of college, looks like a miniature version of Mom and Mairéad—same curly golden brown hair and big blue eyes, same cold expression on her face. Sarah, my age, looks like her father—pin-straight coppery brown hair, blue eyes, and a face covered in freckles.

  The family attempts small talk: how’s college, how’s school, how’s work. Mom and Mairéad throw in occasional insults disguised as conversation while Grandma’s eyes follow them back and forth like she’s watching a tennis match.

  “John, you’re still looking for work? The job market is so rough these days.” (Translation: So I see you’re still a lazy deadbeat.)

  “Oh Mark’s on another business trip? Shame he couldn’t be with the family for the holiday.” (Everyone knows he’s been cheating on you for years.)

  “Princeton is such a good school. Carlee applied there, but of course Harvard offered her that big scholarship.” (My kid is smarter than yours.)

  “Another
new boyfriend? You must be thrilled Carlee’s so popular. Takes after her dad.” (Your daughter is a slut.)

  “Don’t know how you can keep up with a career and owning your own business. I can’t imagine not staying home to take care of my girls.” (I married a rich man, so I’ll never have to work again.)

  Rachel and I both jump out of our chairs, grab our empty plates, and sprint for the kitchen. We drop our plates in the sink, me staring out the window into the black void beyond. I feel Rachel’s eyes on me. Part of me feels like I should want to defend my mother. But I don’t. I can’t stand Mairéad, but I have no desire to save my mother any discomfort. I’m not on anyone’s side.

  Or maybe I am. Dad looked like he desperately needed more alcohol.

  Two new wine bottles stand at attention on the counter, one red and one white. I open both of them.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel hisses.

  I take several mouthfuls of white wine straight from the bottle and offer it to my sister. She stares at me wide-eyed, but then relaxes. She grabs the bottle of red from my hand and takes a small swig, shuddering as she swallows it.

  “You’re a bad influence,” she says.

  I bring both bottles into the living room and empty the white into Mom’s and Mairéad’s glasses. I refill Dad’s glass with red and then turn to bring the bottle back to the kitchen, but then I think the better of it. I turn back and leave the bottle on the table next to Dad’s glass.

  *

  I like it here at night. Beyond the lights of the house, the darkness looks like a solid black wall. More stars than anyone could count litter the black sky. No sounds disturb the night, so I jump when the kitchen door opens behind me.

  “Smoking!” Grandma says, sitting down next to me on the steps. “Filthy habit. Give your granny one.”

  I take the pack of Camels out of my pocket and hand her a cigarette and the lighter. I stare at her while she lights up, wondering if I’m hallucinating. You don’t ever expect to see your Grandma smoking.

  “What’s this you’ve done with your hair then?” She touches one of the braids that hangs loose over my shoulder.