Straightened

by Alana Terry

  “So, do you really think Vivian’s guilty?” They were halfway back to Nick’s apartment when Kennedy finally found the courage to broach the subject.

  Nick shrugged. “I guess it’s possible. A mother’s love can be a pretty strong motivation in something like this.”

  She knew that sort of thing happened in books. But still, that didn’t mean regular people like Vivian Abernathy could up and kill their husbands, did it? Kennedy had experienced so many things in the past twelve months. Surviving a kidnapping. Running away from a vindictive criminal. Confronting police brutality head on.

  Still, everything in the past was a far cry from pre-meditated murder.

  There had to be some other explanation, a logical scenario that wouldn’t condemn Vivian or her son. “What about that Marcos guy?” Kennedy asked. “The counselor?”

  Nick scoffed. “You don’t even want to hear my opinion on the likes of him.”

  Kennedy hadn’t been prepared for such a vehement response. She stared at his radio dial. Maybe he’d opt for some folksy grunge worship music.

  “I wish he’d told me he’d been talking to that quack job.” Nope. He wasn’t reaching for the dial at all.

  Nick shook his head. “If you ask me, that’s when everything started to go wrong. When Noah thought he had to go so far as to change his orientation. I hate it when families do that to their kids.” He slammed his hand on the steering wheel.

  Kennedy tensed in her seat but didn’t respond.

  “I hate it,” he repeated, more softly this time.

  Kennedy glanced out the window. It was strange to see the midnight sky even though her body and brain were telling her it should be the middle of the day. She felt like Kate in Taming of the Shrew, riding in a cart with her new husband who forced her to admit the sun was really the moon. She couldn’t believe how long of a day it had been already.

  How long of a night, that is.

  Nick strummed the steering wheel, but the upbeat rhythm was gone, replaced by a heavy, dour pulse.

  He looked over at her. He couldn’t be out of his twenties yet, but there were long furrows etched across his brow she’d never noticed before.

  “I get pretty worked up about the whole ex-gay movement.” His fingers held still. “That’s because it was charlatans like this Marcos deadbeat who killed my sister.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “We grew up in Oregon.”

  Kennedy wasn’t sure that Nick was talking to her as much as he was releasing a story that he’d been trying too hard to hold in.

  “Our childhood was perfect, really. Our parents owned this Christian campground. Most beautiful, anointed spot of land on the continent, I swear. People would come there and meet God. I’m not just using church lingo, either. I mean they seriously and literally met God there. And really, it was impossible not to, what with the mountains and this gorgeous lake. We’re talking water so clear you can see the color of the individual grains of sand twenty feet deep. No pollution, no traffic. Just perfect.”

  He shook his head. “Man, I miss that place. They turned it into some ritzy resort once my parents sold it. Made the owner his millions by now, I’m sure, and he thinks it was good business practice, but really it was the land itself. That spot. If I didn’t know my geography better, I’d have to say that must have been where Moses talked to God in the burning bush or something, because there’s never been a piece of land that I could truly call hallowed ground like that place. Grace Harbor, we called it.”

  The night was still and calm. No traffic. No noise but the loud rumble of the youth group bus.

  “So my sister,” Nick continued, “her name was Lessa. Lessa Grace. We’re only eighteen months apart. My mom says I was a real fussy baby, stomachaches and cholic and just a pretty grumpy disposition, but she says all that changed the day Lessa was born. Even the midwife, she knew there was something between us, a special bond. She actually handed Lessa to me first before she gave her to my dad. I’m probably loony, but I actually think I remember that day. There’s this little yellow ducky blanket that I remember the midwife wrapped her up in. Even my mom forgot about it. It wasn’t in any of the baby photos or anything like that, but when Lessa... After everything that happened, I was helping Mom clean out her things, and I saw it. That same blanket. Had this cute ducky in rain boots holding an umbrella.”

  Nick scratched his temple. “I wonder if my mom still has it.”

  Kennedy listened quietly. There wasn’t anything to add. She could tell Nick was speaking more to himself than to her by now.

  “So anyway, Lessa and I were close. It sounds so trite to say we were best friends because it went deeper than that.”

  Kennedy’s thoughts drifted off toward Reuben, studying hard at Nairobi University and getting his health monitored at the hospital there.

  “We shared a room from the beginning,” Nick went on. “Mom says she wasn’t planning on it happening that way, but I threw such a big fit the night she was born, and Lessa had been fussing so much my mom thought if she put her crib in the room with me, I’d change my mind in a minute or two. But as soon as she put us in together, we both slept sound as rocks. That’s just how it was. We were so close in age we invented our own language. Mom’s got it on video still. My sister’s not even big enough to walk yet, and she and I are having these back-and-forth conversations just babbling, and I understand exactly what she’s saying because I can tell Mom what it is that Lessa wants.

  “My parents were great, loving folks. The kind to give a stranger the shirt off their backs and take him out to lunch if he needed it. But I think as Lessa and I got a little older, they started to wonder if it was wrong for the two of us to be together all the time. Not necessarily in a bad way, it’s just that Mom homeschooled us since the campground was pretty remote, and even though there were kids and families camping literally in our backyard all year, Lessa and I were perfectly content playing together, just the two of us. We didn’t ever seek out any other friends. I never played with little boys, she never played with little girls.”

  As she was listening, Kennedy thought back to her own childhood. She’d never had a sibling, could only imagine what it would have been like to have another kid to play with all day long.

  Nick’s dreadlocks swayed from side to side almost in time with his apostle bobble heads. “My parents were open-minded about a lot of things. At least that’s how they started out. Then Mom got more and more involved in her homeschool niche. It wasn’t like today where you have secular and agnostic and atheist homeschoolers all mixed up. In general, the homeschool community back in those days was very Christian and very conservative. They had this magazine my mom would get, tell her how to be a proper homemaker, junk like that. Made her feel bad because she didn’t walk around all day in a long denim skirt with a scarf tied around her hair. That’s the kind of conservative we’re talking about. And it really emphasized what they called the Biblical model of femininity, which to them meant headscarves and homemade bread and submitting to your husband even if he’s an abusive alcoholic. I’m not making this up. I remember I was about ten and I didn’t have anything better to read, so I took her magazine in the outhouse with me, and it was this nineteen-year-old girl married to this middle-aged drunk who’d already broken her arm, and she’s writing an article telling other women how freeing it was when she learned that God just wants her to pray for her husband and leave the changing up to him. I mean, come on. That’s the drivel my mom was filling her head with.

  “It was right around then that Mom started worrying about Lessa. I mean, my sister was the stereotypical tomboy. Climbing trees, hunting frogs, collecting bugs, dissecting them ... When she was littler, Mom was happy just to have the two of us outside so she could worry about maintaining the campground and scheduling retreats and running the business side of things without us constantly badgering her. But then as Lessa got older, and as Mom got more and more into her housewife theology as I call it, she started worrying
about Lessa. Worrying she wasn’t on track to grow up to be this model Proverbs 31 woman Mom read about in her magazines.

  “The irony is Mom wasn’t even that kind of wife. She was spirited. That’s what Dad loved about her. She could hold her own in an argument. And she did. I never grew up thinking my parents hated each other, but I knew they fought. It never bothered me. It was just a part of life. Mom had a master’s degree, but Dad only made it halfway through his bachelor’s. The funny thing is these women she was learning from in the magazines, they were out to make her feel bad for having an education, for running a company. And when I say running a company, that’s because Mom did all the behind-the-scenes stuff. The scheduling, planning, hiring summer staff, all that. Dad was the face of the camp. He did the welcome sessions and DJed the family dance nights and went around from table to table cracking jokes in the cafeteria, but Mom was the real CEO, CFO ... all that fell on her. And she did it well. But she read about these model little housewives who only cooked from scratch and dusted all day, and that made her feel guilty. Guilty for having a master’s degree, guilty for spending time away from us kids even though Lessa and I couldn’t have been happier. We had the whole campground as our backyard. Life was perfect as far as we were concerned.

  “Anyway, Mom decided it was too late for her to become the model of a docile, submissive wife, but she was going to train up Lessa the ‘right’ way. By the time she was eight, Lessa was in charge of all the cleaning, all the laundry for the whole family. If she complained, she was copying Bible verses about cheerful attitudes or junk like that. In fourth grade, Mom made Lessa start cooking breakfast and lunch for the family. We always ate dinner in the cafeteria with the campers or I’m sure Mom would have had her doing that, too.”

  Kennedy thought back on herself at that age. Her mom made her do chores, and Kennedy complained about them. What kid didn’t? But it wasn’t as if Kenendy had been forced to do anything simply because she was a girl. It was more like she was the only kid around, so she had to pitch in to help. Even so, the amount of work she grumbled about probably totaled less than an hour a week, nothing like Nick’s sister having to run an entire household at such a young age.

  “It was in fourth grade that Mom made her start wearing dresses. Which is stupid if you ask me, because not even Mom wore them, not all the time at least. She got Lessa a sewing machine and said by the time she turned twelve, she’d have to make all her own clothes, so she may as well start learning. Had to ask a church lady to come by and teach her, because Mom didn’t even know how to sew herself.

  “It was around that time Mom finally put her foot down. She said Lessa and I were too old to share a room anymore. She’d tried to separate us a dozen times by then, but whenever she moved one of the beds into another room, we’d end up together on the same mattress before either of us could sleep. But Lessa was something of an early bloomer, and when she was ten Mom said absolutely no more sharing a room, and especially no more sharing a bed. I was still very much a kid. I had no idea what the big deal was, and my parents weren’t the type to talk about that sort of thing out in the open. I didn’t know about puberty or anything like that, and it hit Lessa first and I didn’t even realize what was going on. All I knew was Mom was treating us like we were nasty for still spending so much time together, for wanting to sleep in the same bed or go skinny dipping down at the lake on weekends when none of the campers were around to see us anyway.

  “It sounds like it shouldn’t have been quite that big of a deal, but when Mom finally kicked Lessa out of our room, things started to deteriorate fast. I mean, it was probably a whole lot of causes at once, but back then I remember thinking it was the room issue that started it all. Lessa stopped doing things with me. Stopped climbing trees or racing outside or swimming in the lake in the evenings. We went a couple years where she hardly talked to me at all. Just focused on her sewing and her cooking and her cleaning. She was thirteen when I came to this crazy realization. I realized, Hey, my sister’s a girl. Sounds pretty dumb when you put it like that, but up until then, she’d just been my sister. Someone to play with. Someone to force me to swim faster than I ever thought I could, racing from the far side of the lake to the other. It didn’t matter that she was a girl and I was a boy. At least not until Mom started making such a big deal about it. So Lessa was thirteen, and she was wearing this sundress that she’d made, and she was leaning down to pick some weeds in the garden, and I said to myself, Hey, my sister’s a girl. And that realization right there seemed to explain everything that’d been happening for the past couple years that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. All those extra chores. How Mom would ride her if she didn’t have what she called a ‘cheerful disposition’ about everything. Those hours of Bible verses Mom made her copy out if Lessa even hinted at talking back. Why we couldn’t share a room anymore or go swimming anymore unless someone else was out there watching us, and even then Lessa had to cover up her swimsuit with one of Dad’s extra-large T-shirts. I could go around the whole camp all day in just my swim trunks and no one would think twice about it, but even to walk from our cabin to the lake, Lessa had to have one towel wrapped around her waist to cover her legs and one more draped over her shoulders to hide everything else.

  “There were rules for everything. Rules about who she could or couldn’t be alone with, rules about who she could or couldn’t talk to without getting dad’s permission first. Rules about how long her skirts had to be, how much of her shoulders had to be covered even in the hottest summer days when no one else was around.”

  Nick was quiet for a while. Kennedy wondered if he had lost his train of thought or if he was absorbed in his own musings.

  “She ran away when she was sixteen. Left me a note — nothing for my parents, but a long letter to me. I still have it. She asked me not to show it to Mom and Dad, and I never did. All she wanted them to know what she was safe and she didn’t ever plan to come home. And she never did.”

  The apostle heads bobbled stupidly. Kennedy would have given up her entire Shakespeare collection for the chance to throw them out the bus window, them and their annoying grins.

  “I’m sure psychologists and theologians could have a field day dissecting my sister’s story, arguing about whether it was that rigid upbringing that made her feel so ashamed of who she was as a girl that turned her into a lesbian or if she would’ve headed down that route no matter what. She didn’t talk about it in that letter she left me. It’s not like she was even in the closet at that point. I just think she was so confused she didn’t know what to think about herself or her body or her sexuality or anything. Her whole life, from about the age of eight or nine on, it had all been a list of rules. Rules she had to follow because God had made her a girl. Rules that made her feel ashamed of her body, rules that focused so much on keeping men from lusting after her that she grew to hate everything about who she was. She was a binge eater by the time she left home. Still skinny as a rail — you’ve seen her picture — even if she packed away six or seven thousand calories a day, but I think either consciously or subconsciously she was trying to sabotage herself. Turn herself into the kind of person men would be less likely to notice so she wouldn’t feel so guilty for drawing the wrong kind of attention.”

  They were back in Nick’s neighborhood now. The van slowed down as its headlights lit up the apartment building ahead of them. “Anyway, sorry for blabbing your ear off. I don’t even remember how we got started on this topic.”

  Kennedy didn’t remember, either. All she knew was she was tired. Physically tired from her grueling day of travel yesterday, and emotionally tired from everything that had happened since she landed in the States. If this was any indication of what her sophomore year would be like, it was going to be a long nine months.

  Nick parked, and she dragged herself out of the bus. His apartment was on the third story. Thank God for elevators, she thought as she forced her legs to uphold her weight.

  Rest. That’s all she wanted
. Even if she couldn’t fall asleep. Just the chance to shut her eyes. Turn off her brain, which had been reeling ever since she learned about Wayne Abernathy’s death.

  Nick unlocked the main door to his apartment building as quietly as he could. It was almost five in the morning. Kennedy hoped everyone would still be asleep when they got upstairs. She wondered if Woong would remember anything of his night terrors when he woke up.

  She followed Nick into the elevator. Neither said anything. Kennedy could almost feel the gravity from his couch pulling her toward it as the elevator let them off on the third-floor hallway.

  A figure in a hooded sweatshirt sat huddled in front of Nick’s door. He glanced up, his eyes swollen and puffy and full of so much pain Kennedy was momentarily paralyzed.

  “Noah?”

  The boy sniffed loudly and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’m sorry I came here. I didn’t know where else to go. Please. You have to help me. I made a huge mistake.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Kennedy was glad Nick was there. Nick was the one Noah was looking at with those terrified, pleading eyes.

  “I need help.”

  She could tell Noah was trying to keep his voice calm, but it wasn’t working. A few hours earlier, Kennedy had been impressed with the way Nick could plant himself in the middle of stress, tragedy, and chaos and stay so quiet and serene. Now, she’d wish he’d hurry up and say something.

  Anything.

  What was he waiting for? Either he needed to call the cops and let them know he’d found Noah, or he needed to barrage Noah with questions so they could figure out exactly what had happened to his father.

  Instead, he stood there, assessing the scene with his head cocked to one side, frowning sympathetically while Noah sat curled up in a little ball.