Safe from Harm (9781101619629)

by Evans, Stephanie Jaye

  I handed her the glass, sat down on Jo’s spare bed and said, “Start talking.”

  “Okay. Baby Bear, move over or get down.”

  “He’s not supposed to be up there.”

  “Dad . . .” She squeezed in next to him on her bed. “Okay. First you have to promise not to get mad.”

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m mad already.”

  Big sigh and a flip of her long, dark braid over a shoulder. Jo drank some more diluted apple juice.

  “So Phoebe comes up to me at school and says can we talk and I say yes even though I don’t want to and no matter what you and Mom say I’m not sorry for what I said that night at dinner because it was only the truth.” Jo took a drink and I nodded my head because, so far, I’m keeping up.

  “Phoebe lays down this whole ‘I didn’t know I was crowding you’ and ‘if you’d only said something.’ She still wanted to be friends but she would respect my space and everything and just to show how sorry she was, she’d spoken with Alex and we’d all go to the movies and then out to dinner and then back to Phoebe’s house to spend the night—no, Dad, don’t give me that look, not for Alex to spend the night, me and Phoebe.”

  Baby Bear lifted his heavy head and dropped it in Jo’s lap. Jo set her glass down on top of an issue of Pointe and picked up a grooming comb off her nightstand to work at a matted place on Baby Bear’s ear.

  “First off, that didn’t feel like she was respecting my space all that much, I mean, she makes all these plans with my boyfriend—”

  I winced at the word.

  “—without ever asking if it’s something I’d even want to do, but I texted Alex and it seemed like he wanted to . . . just whatever. I said okay and I called Mom.”

  “We’re talking about getting home at two thirty in the morning and crawling in the window, right?”

  She gave me an impatient chin jerk. “I’m telling you, Dad. Mom says okay and she brings me up an overnight bag because Phoebe wanted to go straight from school, she didn’t want me to come home first even though I didn’t see what the big hurry was.”

  Phoebe didn’t want Jo coming home and hearing what I had to say about Phoebe’s morning visit, that’s what the big deal was. I wouldn’t have told Jo. But I wouldn’t have let her go if I had been home for the call.

  “Phoebe drives me and Alex to the movies and somehow I’m in the backseat, Alex is in the front seat with Phoebe, and on the way over she starts with, ‘Alex, what are you going to do all summer with Jo up in New York? That’s going to be so hard.’” Jo put a wheedling edge in her voice while she was voicing Phoebe.

  I tap my wrist where a watch would be if I still wore one. My question is still out there, getting cold.

  Jo holds a finger up, telling me she’ll get to it. “She wouldn’t let up. The whole movie she’s texting us, I mean, we’re sitting right next to her, but she has to be texting the whoooole movie? Like, ‘You do love Alex, don’t you?’ and she sends Alex this message, ‘Has Jo SAID she loves you?’ Like it’s her business.”

  I wanted to know if Jo had told Alex she loved him, too, but I wasn’t asking. Kids throw that word around and they start using it and then they start acting on it and . . .

  “Then she wants to go get something to eat after the movie. That was the plan all along, but by the time we get out of the movie, it’s nine thirty, and you know, I told Mom I’d be back at Phoebe’s house at ten. She acted like having a curfew meant—”

  I said, “If you went to the movie straight out of school, why did you get out at nine thirty?” I felt like I was missing pieces of the story.

  Jo ducked her head and finished the last of her drink, excused herself and went to the bathroom. After a while she came back with her glass refilled with water and a wet washcloth to wipe her face.

  “Messing around,” she said. “Stuff.”

  Uh-huh. We’d get back to that.

  I said, “You are working up to telling me how you got home at two thirty in the morning and why you used your window instead of your door, aren’t you?”

  “Dad. Yes. If you could be patient.”

  I nodded that I would try.

  “Phoebe says we’ll go back to her house and have something to eat there, because she and Alex need to be understanding about curfews for younger people. You got that? Like I’m ten or something?”

  I pushed the pillow up against the headboard so I could lean back. If I wanted my answer, I was going to have to follow down the road of a story Jo was telling. We might get there in the end.

  Jo sighed. “I tried to come home then. After the movie. I said I had a headache but she’s all ‘Oh, Jo—I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings—she’s very sensitive, isn’t she, Alex?’ And I said she hadn’t hurt my feelings and Alex said no, I wasn’t very sensitive, so of course then Phoebe’s saying, ‘Is she insensitive, Alex? Is that why she’s able to leave you all summer?’”

  I was getting mad, the way my child had been manipulated.

  “So first she stops at Kroger’s to get the ingredients to her ‘Grandpop DeWitt’s Power Punch.’ It’s like her favorite beverage and this is what it is, Dad, you’re not going to believe this. It’s lime sherbet, three packets of grape Kool-Aid, and ginger ale. You put everything in a blender. We get to her house and she makes this famous ‘power punch’—it’s supposed to have vodka, too, but no we didn’t, you should see your face, Dad—and it is disgusting and I don’t see how vodka would make it any better—not that I’d know, Dad, so relax.”

  I had swung my legs off the bed. “Are you telling me Phoebe drinks?” I know teenagers drink. But the girl had my daughter in the car.

  “I’m telling you that according to Phoebe, when Grandpop DeWitt makes his power punch, he puts vodka in it. That’s what Phoebe says. So maybe that’s true and maybe it’s a lie, how am I going to know?

  “Then Phoebe’s stepmom comes into the kitchen and sees the glasses of power punch, and she sees the sherbet container and the empty Kool-Aid packets on the cabinet, and she slaps her chest and staggers back like she’s having a heart attack and she says, ‘You have broken a hard-and-fast.’ You would have thought she’d found us cooking meth in her kitchen. She goes running out screaming for Phoebe’s dad and I grabbed a paper towel and I swept the whole mess into the garbage can. Phoebe said to leave it—her stepmom was always on about something, but Alex helped me and we had the countertops scrubbed and the blender rinsed and draining before her stepmom got back dragging her dad to see what we’d done, not that we’d done anything. Alex and I couldn’t even drink the stuff, ours went in the sink, but Phoebe sucked it down like it was a Vanilla Frappuccino after a day in the desert. My mouth was practically black from the one swallow I took.” Jo gave a shiver of distaste. I knew the shiver was for the drink but I got up and draped her quilt over her shoulders. She was still damp with sweat and the air conditioner was on.

  “Her dad gets her stepmom calmed down, he says, ‘We’ve got an audience here, Liz,’ meaning me and Alex, because, yeah, embarrassing. Turns out Liz is way diabetic so she doesn’t keep sweets in the house. That’s what the Kool-Aid and sherbet fit was over, which, okay, I get that but then she also adds that she doesn’t want obese children. She said that right out. I don’t want obese children either, but I don’t go around saying, ‘I don’t want obese children!’”

  That last was done in a dead-on mimicry of Lizabeth, complete with hands on hips and head cocked.

  “And then. Then Phoebe takes us up to her room, and gives Alex the whole ‘Story of Phoebe’s Tragic Life,’ which I’ve heard before, twice, and she was all serious and crying and we were holding her hands because even though I hate Phoebe Pickersley, I wish she were dead—”

  I was off of that bed in a flash, “Jo!”

  “You know what, Dad? Mrs. Thompson says I have a right to my feelings.”

  “N
ot those feelings, you don’t. Not ever. Don’t you ever let me hear that kind of hatefulness coming from one of my girls. You’re working for the wrong side when you talk that way. I mean it.” Jo had shocked me. There are lines we can’t cross when we choose our road—Jo had crossed one.

  Jo hid her face behind her hair and her hands. Baby Bear had roused himself when I raised my voice. He tried to push his nose between her fingers and when he couldn’t, he snaked his tongue through and licked whatever he could reach.

  “Dad,” she said through her fingers.

  “I mean it.” My heart was thumping.

  “I know. But I didn’t. I only said it. It came out, is all.” Her breath caught.

  Okay. I needed to calm down. I can overreact sometimes. I sat on the edge of her bed and heard it groan under the combined weight of Jo, Baby Bear and me. I gave Baby Bear a shove and he dropped reluctantly to the floor. He thought he should be the one up there comforting Jo. He thought he would do the better job. He probably would have. I put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a squeeze.

  “I don’t care what Phoebe’s done. I don’t care what she has said. How we treat other people, that’s about who we are, what we are, not who they are. You are called to be better than those words.”

  “I know, Dad. It was a figure of speech, okay? I didn’t mean it.”

  “Words have power.”

  “I said I didn’t mean it.”

  “Phoebe’s had a hard time since moving here.”

  “Dad. I was about to say that Phoebe isn’t totally awful because her life does stink, and if she’s telling the truth, it’s all her stepmom’s fault because she got pregnant with Toby and Tanner when Phoebe’s dad was still married to Phoebe’s mom—”

  “Now, now, Jo—”

  “All over again, I’m feeling sorry for her—but who knows if she’s telling the truth? Because, Dad, I don’t want her dead, but that girl is a bald-faced liar!”

  Ahh, gee. You know, in this case, I really hoped Phoebe was a liar. I did. Divorce is wrenching and complicated no matter the factors, but to have your dad start a new family before he had stepped out of the first, that’s harsh.

  “When did Phoebe lie to you?”

  “She has, that’s all! So then she starts on how classical ballet is a dead art, with nothing new to say and no new way to say it, and I was selling myself body and soul to an arcane system. What does ‘arcane’ mean, anyway? And why would anyone give up a boy like Alex to go practice toe points . . .”

  Jo got up, quilt about her shoulders, and did a spastic parody of en pointe. “She did it like that. I said I wasn’t giving up Alex and she smiles like a nutria with a can of drippings and says if I go away for the summer, maybe I am! And Alex smiled! But I’m going, Dad, I’m going! This has been my dream forever.” And there were tears.

  I held my arms out. “Come here, baby girl.” I wrapped my arms about my daughter, picked her up, quilt and all, and settled in the rocking chair in her room. I’d rocked her in this very chair when she was first born. Rocked Merrie in it, too. Baby Bear roused himself to stand next to his mistress, pushing at her with his wet nose and rumbling his concern.

  I said, “Jo, Phoebe is a hungry, hungry girl. I think she’s been hungry a long time, hungry for the things you have and she doesn’t. I don’t blame her for that. She’s lost her mom—”

  “I don’t think Phoebe’s mom was a good mom.”

  “Jo, most any mom is better than no mom.” I gave her a little shake. “You are going to New York. You are going to take the opportunity that you have worked so hard for and God made possible for you and that your mom and I are paying out the nose for.” That got me a muffled giggle. “I think Alex has better sense than to choose Phoebe over you just because she’s available and you’re away. But if he doesn’t, then that boy doesn’t deserve you, you hear me? If Alex is that dirt stupid, I don’t want to know him.”

  Still muffled, “He’s not stupid, Dad.”

  “I know it, baby.”

  “He’s really, really smart. He might make valedictorian.”

  “I think he’s a smart boy, Jo.”

  We rocked in silence for a while. Jo pulled the blanket over her head to shield her face from me.

  “She said something else. After Alex got picked up. I should have begged a ride home but Phoebe made such a big deal.”

  “What did Phoebe say?”

  Silence.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  Long silence, then, “No.”

  I pondered on that.

  “Did she tell you she came by to see me today?” I asked.

  Jo lifted her head. “She said you saw her.”

  “Is this the ‘lie’ you’ve been talking about? When you say Phoebe is a liar? Let me tell you about the visit.” A long pause, and I could hear the chimp, chimp sound that meant Jo was biting off slivers of fingernails, then I felt her head nod against my chest.

  I didn’t go into detail, but I told her the gist of it, and I made sure my daughter knew that Phoebe Pickersley had not been alone with me for one second when Rebecca couldn’t see us both clearly.

  Jo sat up. Her precious face was tearstained. “I knew it, Dad. When she said you came on to her . . .”

  I groaned. “Did she say that, Jo? Those words?” Those words could end a man’s career if he’s in the ministry.

  Jo thought. “She said it without saying it.”

  “Implied,” I said

  “I slapped her face, and grabbed my bag and left.”

  I groaned again. I should have gotten pencil and paper and started making a list of all the apologies and explanations I was going to have to make tomorrow.

  “You slapped her? Josephine Amelia—”

  “The Bible says there is a time to throw stones. I only slapped her.”

  “That’s ‘cast away stones,’ Jo. And that doesn’t mean bounce them off someone’s head. If I hear about you hauling off and whacking someone again, we’re going to have to—”

  “I’m not going to tell you stuff if I get in trouble every time I do.”

  Okay. That was fair. It was why, for eighteen years, I never told my mother a thing. I’m still careful what I say around my mom.

  I said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “But you will try to keep your temper, Jo?”

  “I was trying when I slapped her.”

  “Explain the coming in through the window part.”

  “I didn’t have my key—”

  This had to be the fifth house key Jo had lost. “Jo, why didn’t you have your key?” I got an eloquent shrug in reply.

  “—and I didn’t want to wake you and Mom up, and I can get in through my window perfectly well . . .”

  “Okay. Get up now, you’re getting too big for this old man. Here’s what we’re going to do. You take a quick shower and get in bed. You’ll never sleep if you go to bed with dried sweat all over you. I’m going to go have a bowl of cereal and I’ll come back up when I hear the water turn off. I’ll tuck you in. Okay?”

  Baby Bear accompanied me downstairs and we each had a bowl of Cheerios. I gave Jo five minutes after I heard the shower stop, and then we went upstairs. We found Jo smelling like peaches and peppermint and tucked under her covers. I knelt next to her bed and put my hand on her wet head.

  “Okay. How could you have handled the situation differently? In a way that wouldn’t get you grounded?”

  “Am I going to be grounded?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow you’re grounded to the house. Do you know why?”

  A sigh. “Because I slapped Phoebe.”

  “No. I’m not happy about that, but I won’t ground you for it since you told me about it yourself. Try again.”

  A bigger sigh. “Because I walked home by myself.�
��

  “Bingo. At two in the morning. You know better, Jo.”

  “Dad, I had to get out of that house.”

  “You could have called me on your cell and waited at the door. It would have been hard. I know it. Instead, you made what Nana would call a ‘grand gesture.’ But, Jo, it’s not more than six or seven years since a girl only a few years older than you got murdered out here.”

  “Dad—”

  “Bad things happen.”

  I got a bleak “Okay, Dad.”

  “You have to stay in the house or in the yard all day unless you’re with me or Mom.” I then relented. “But I don’t mind if you have a couple of friends over.”

  We hugged and I said her prayers with her. We haven’t done that in a hundred years, had bedtime prayers together. I hoped she still said them when I wasn’t there to make sure. Baby Bear circled the rug and lay down with a “whumpf.” I went downstairs to bed. I knew I would have to go see Liz and Mark tomorrow.

  From: Walker Wells

  To: Merrie Wells

  I don’t remember you losing your house key all the time. Jo has lost her house key again. Do you have a suggestion?

  From: Merrie Wells

  To: Walker Wells

  Go to Lowe’s or Home Depot. Make a dozen keys. Give Jo a new one and mail one to me, too. I lost mine at the meet last week.

  Four

  The next morning I filled Annie Laurie in on the night’s activities—those that had gone down while she was sleeping the sleep of the just.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said after hearing that I thought I should go see the Pickersley-Smythes.

  I told her she didn’t need to. Mark and Liz were reasonable people and I wasn’t expecting a problem.

  Annie banged her mug down on the counter and had to wipe up the coffee that sloshed out. “You should be. If Phoebe is going around telling people you made advances to her, no one’s going to be feeling very reasonable about that, Bear. If I come it will keep things calmer. I guess I’d like to think Phoebe wouldn’t make any wild allegations in front of me, so there’s that, too. Give them a call and see if they can see us in about an hour. I want to talk to Jo and get my own take on things and then I want a shower.”