Finn (5 page)

Bobby finally got the door open. Mom came in, cursing him for making her drop one of the bags. She was ready to really lay into him, but then she saw me. She smiled one of those smiles of hers which might have been pretty if you didn’t know for sure that there was something bad behind it. “Well, I’ll be,” she said. “If it isn’t my Chloworm.” “Chlo-worm” was her pet name for me. It came from a rubber worm she gave me that glowed in the dark.

She looked surprised to see me. As if she hadn’t sent her pig-faced boyfriend to kidnap me.

I didn’t rush up to give her a hug, which seemed to bother her. You wouldn’t think a person as shrewd as my Mom was capable of fooling herself about anything—for instance, the idea that after everything she’d done to me, I’d still run over and give her a big sloppy hug. It just goes to show that even very clever people can deceive themselves.

“I take it you’ve met Bobby,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I just showed her the cuts on my arms, which looked a lot worse than they felt. I hadn’t bothered to clean them up, since I figured the messy scabs would come in handy. Bobby cringed and started to explain, but Mom cut him off, without looking at him, without saying a word, just by snapping her sharp little fingers and pointing at his throat. “I’ll deal with that later,” she said, in a way that almost made me feel sorry for Bobby, even though he was a grown man. Then she came up to me and tucked my hair behind my ears. She smelled like cigarettes, but not the usual. A new brand.

“You look good,” she said. “Your grandparents have been fattening you up.”

“Not too much,” I said.

“Well, that’s all over,” Mom said. “You’re with us now.”

By even talking to me, she was breaking the law, but I knew better than to point that out. A restraining order isn’t much help when you’re in immediate danger. Instead, I tried to be all innocent. “Is this where we’re going to live?” I said.

“What, is there something wrong with it? What’d they do, spoil you? Send you off to finishing school?”

As if she hadn’t told Bobby where to find me. “I go to Field School now,” I said.

“Field? That’s private. Very expensive. A waste of money.”

“It’s a good school,” I said.

“I’ll bet it is. Full of fancy teachers and spoiled brats.”

“Are we going to live in the city?”

“Listen to you, with your little questions. What ever happened to ‘Hey, Mom, long time no see?’”

I didn’t say anything, because I knew how bad it was to lie to her.

“That’s just what I thought,” she said. She turned to Bobby. “You see this? Was I exaggerating?”

Bobby didn’t speak, but at least he looked sorry for me, which was potentially useful. Mom had him take me upstairs. “Make sure she’s not going anywhere,” Mom said. Her bossy tone made Bobby pout.

“I told you already,” he said. “I put a padlock on the window.”

“Well then, check it,” Mom said. “She’s been known to jump ship.”

Bobby muttered to himself, but only after we were out of earshot. “Here’s your new home,” he said, shoving me into a stifling little room with a bare mattress on the floor. The room was full of eerie dark green light from the garbage bags taped over the window. “Neat effect, huh?” Bobby said. “Like Halloween, almost.” I had never seen a window with an iron gate on the
inside,
but that’s what there was. Bobby went over to it and tugged at the padlock. He didn’t seem to care that he was grinding his grimy boots into the mattress. He punched the padlock a few times, as if his bicycle gloves were boxing gloves. “I told her the lock was fine,” he said.

“You’re a thorough person,” I said.

Bobby brightened. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “A little trust in my judgment.”

I decided to push it a little further. “Sorry about back there in the van. You surprised me, that’s all. I get that way when I’m upset. Plus I was just waking up.”

“Well, that’s okay,” Bobby said. He was practically beaming. “I knew you couldn’t be all the things Claire said. No one could.” Then he wagged a finger at me, which made the glove straps flap a little. “Now you make sure to behave, young lady.” Our relationship had clearly entered a new phase.

“I’m not looking for trouble,” I said, which was actually true. The less attention they paid me, the better.

“You just rest now,” said Bobby. “You’re going to be out late tonight. Your Mom needs a little help with something.”

But I wasn’t out late that night. Or the next day, or the one after that.

T
hey kept me locked up in that coffin of a room for three days and three nights. At first, I thought I was just being punished. That would have been Mom’s style. The fact that I saw only Bobby during that time was like her, too. She knew how to use your imagination against you.

Bobby brought me a pack of HoHos in the morning and maybe some chips at lunch and McDonalds or something for dinner. He told me we were “laying low.” Meaning, I think, that the police were looking for me.

Lying there on the bare mattress those three days—Mom hadn’t bothered with sheets, she thought they just made for a lot of extra work—I had plenty of time to think about my predicament. I’m not big on wallowing, but I felt that my life had taken a giant step backward. My grandparents were jerks to Silvia, and they had lots of annoying rules, but at least they tried to be nice. Mom, on the other hand, lived without rules, which was both good and bad, but mostly bad. The lack of rules occasionally worked to my advantage. For instance, the lobster night. We were living in Maine then, in a cabin. Mom and her boyfriend had gone out in a rowboat in the middle of the night and stolen a bunch of lobsters from lobstermen’s pots. They waited until the lobsters were cooked before waking me up, so when they carried me to the picnic table, there was a big plate of steaming lobsters and some melted butter, and my Mom put a bib on me, which made me feel taken care of. I still remember her breath on my cheek, and the little kiss she gave me, which smelled like white wine and perfume.

That time was nice. There was also a time when she would wake me up almost every night—she didn’t have a boyfriend then—and take me for long drives. I would be cranky for a while on account of being woken up, but pretty soon I’d roll down my window—it always seemed to be summertime when I was with her—and let the night air blow my hair around. Mom would find some bad country music on the radio and we would just drive and drive
wherever,
no destination, always winding up somewhere interesting, though, like a truck stop full of men who missed their kids and were extra nice to me. Or the ocean, where she’d drive us right down one of those private little streets, the ones beyond the boardwalk, where only rich people are allowed. Mom would pull the car right up to the end of the street, which would be covered in sand. We’d open the doors and listen to the ocean. I always wanted to go in the water, but Mom was afraid of it. She said that the ocean at night was the most frightening place she could imagine. Hearing her say that only made me want to go in more. I wasn’t the least bit afraid. To me, the night ocean was amazing. Even back then, the idea of a place where Mom couldn’t go appealed to me.

Mornings after those long drives I’d be too tired to go to school, not that I really wanted to. Mom would let me sleep in. Sometimes, if she was feeling especially guilty about taking me driving, she’d make me breakfast, complete with a big dessert. She didn’t believe in nutrition, which she said was invented by greedy vegetable farmers.

Those were nice times, but Mom could also be wild in a bad way, especially when she was in one of her funks. Her funks could last a long time. The worst one I remember lasted almost two months. She barely got out of bed at all. I almost called the police, because the things she was saying scared me. She was crying a lot and she always seemed to be saying goodbye. She came out of it, though, like always. She’d wake up one day and suddenly everything was okay. That’s when she’d go get a new boyfriend, or put up curtains, or have the rugs cleaned. She was very keen on fresh starts.

The way she would suddenly be in a funk, and then just as suddenly be out of one, took a toll on me. I never knew what to expect, and I guess I got into a funk of my own, because for a long time I wouldn’t eat, or, if Mom made me, I’d eat the absolute minimum, and even that was hard to keep down. Mom thought I was doing it on purpose. She said I was just trying to get attention, but I wasn’t. Food just stopped appealing to me. I had a metallic taste in my mouth all the time. I finally got her to stop trying to force feed me. She said she guessed I’d eat when I was good and ready, and hoped that would happen before I starved to death. Honestly, at the time, I think I would have been happy to starve. I remember not caring at all, about anything.

I must have looked pretty bad—I’d been avoiding mirrors for a while—because one day when Mom was out, my grandparents stopped by to see me, and my grandmother burst into tears when I opened the door. Mom’s place was filthy, as usual. My grandmother kept telling me everything was going to be okay. My grandfather was clenching his jaw, the way he does when he’s super angry. He said, “Let’s get the girl out of this hellhole.” Later, he told me they’d been watching the apartment building for almost two days, waiting until it looked as though my mother’d be gone for a while.

That’s when I started living with my grandparents. They brought me in front of a judge, who agreed that they should take care of me. He was a friendly judge, not intimidating at all, the way you’d expect someone to be who decides people’s fates every day. He asked me if I wanted to live with my grandparents.

“I suppose,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble.” That made the judge laugh, and he granted them custody of me, and then he issued something called a “restraining order,” which was supposed to keep my Mom away from me. Obviously, restraining orders don’t always work.

I thought about all of this, and then I thought about my Dad, which I almost never do when I’m angry because it makes me cry and then I get angry at him, too, or at least the memory of him, for making me cry. In a way, I was glad that my Mom didn’t keep any mementos of him around, because I don’t think I could have gotten through those three days if there had been.

W
hat Mom “needed help with,” it turns out, was robbing my grandparents. “Those two are loaded,” she said. “They’re worse than Jews. They’ve probably got money sewn into every mattress in the house.” There was no point in telling Mom she was being idiotic. She wouldn’t have listened. Besides, it was nice just to let her go on being wrong.

My grandparents are paranoid about cash. They’re always running out and getting twenty or thirty dollars from the bank. There’s never much more than that in the house, except when they go out of town. When they do go on a trip, they like to leave a hundred dollars on the table in the front hallway as they’re locking up, along with a note to any thief—Dear Intruder!—saying to please take the money and not make a mess ransacking the house. Personally, if I were a thief, I’d take the money and then I’d ransack the house for more, but I guess that means I think like a thief, whereas they think like grandparents.

On the third night, Mom, Bobby, and I took the van over to my grandparents’ house to “scope things out.” I had been cooped up for so long that I didn’t even mind what we were doing. It was enough just to be outside, breathing outside air, and to see the sky, even if it was the dishwatery city sky, with its pale orange haze. On the way across town, Mom asked me a lot of questions about my grandparents, mainly having to do with their habits. It was a Thursday—at least that’s what Mom told me. It’s amazing how quickly you can forget the day of the week—and even though it wasn’t true, I said that my grandparents always stayed in on Thursdays and watched their boring antiques show. Mom said that it didn’t matter because we weren’t going “inside” tonight anyway. She said that I better not be lying about the antiques show, because if we got there and there was no sign of the TV being on, she’d cut my hair.

This was more of a punishment than it sounds. She had done it once before when she was angry. She used pinking shears, those huge fabric scissors with triangle teeth. The scissors were dull and rusty, and she wound up tearing out almost as much hair as she cut. The hair that was left looked like it had been chewed off by a dog. The next day, when she saw what she had done and how much it embarrassed me, she was very apologetic, but I guess she didn’t really mean her apology, because here she was, threatening to do it all over again.