Hand Me Down (26 page)

Deborah and Winston come home a little after eleven. I hear the door open, the alarm beep, and Winston going up the stairs. I get up because I know he’ll be back down soon. He never goes to sleep without checking that all the windows and doors are locked,
the alarm is set, and the dog is in the house, but none of his security measures make me feel any safer.

I sit up, yawning, and wave to Deborah as she sits in a pile of dog hair. “How did things go?” she says, her hand swooshing at the floating tufts of fur.

I try to calm the churning in my stomach, swallow acid. “Fine.”

She takes a deep breath. “Are you okay, Elizabeth?” Her brows crease in that same look of concern I imagine on her face when she leaves the house in the middle of the day and shows up at the houses of the hurt or suffering, the unwed mothers or pregnant teens, her neighbor whose son she thinks is gay, the old lady who wants to die alone.

“I’m fine,” I say and start to get up. Deborah stands up, too, and puts one hand on each of my upper arms.

“Let me help you,” she says. Her elbows bend and suddenly she’s hugging me. “You’re hurting. I can see it,” she says.

I inch my body back far enough that my calves hit the couch, my balance is thrown, and I fall into a cushion. “You can’t help,” I whisper. She has no idea what’s really wrong, and doesn’t want to know.

“Maybe not, but God can. He’s here for you, Liz.”

I’ve spent the last four Sundays at church in a pink dress Deborah bought me that is edged with white lace and sports a pink bow at the center of the collar, listening to sermons about forgiveness and the power of God’s love preached by a middle-aged man who checks out my legs when I sit in the front row beside Deborah. God isn’t even in the building.

“He’s not,” I say.

“It may not seem like it, but He’s chosen this path for you for a reason.”

“If that’s true, then I’ll be fine.”

Deborah says, “Jaime says sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and hears you crying.”

“I can’t sleep at night,” I say.

“Probably because you read such morbid books,” she says.

“Vampires aren’t morbid.”

“They’re dead.”

I say, “They’re immortal.”

“You hardly ever smile.”

“I’m a discriminating audience.”

“And you never eat,” Deborah says. “You’re turning into skin and bones.”

“Maybe then I won’t look like my mom,” I say.

“Elizabeth!” She throws up her hands and her blue eyes get wide, her cheeks puff out, and I think of my father’s face one time he hit me. He wasn’t supposed to see me standing over the stainless steel sink in Crystal’s trailer, pouring his forty-ounce bottles of Olde English 800 down the drain. He was supposed to drive us here, to Deborah’s, a two-hour drive through unlit, two-lane country roads, and lots of fast freeways. I’d already taken the cash from his wallet.

His eyes bulged, his jaw set, and it was like slow motion as he charged me in his bare feet and ripped jeans. He punched my stomach and when I bent to breathe, he shoved me down against the plywood cabinet under the sink, jammed his knee into my chest, and pressed the cupboard handle into my back so deep I had
a four-inch arch outlined in black and blue for weeks. I didn’t make a sound, just gritted my teeth and waited. I never showed anyone the bruises.

Deborah’s energy deflates and she plops down next to me in her linen dress. “The vibrant little girl who used to bounce around and ask questions about everything and who sang and played and laughed…” She sighs so deep dog hair swirls in the air around my head. Deborah shakes her head. “That light I used to see in you is gone, Liz,” she says. “It’s gone and that makes me sad.”

I don’t remember the girl she thinks I was.

“I scheduled an appointment for you to talk to a counselor,” she says. Her eyes are closed so I lean my head against the couch and close mine. In the silence I think of rivers running into oceans, tides ruled by moon rhythms, the security of instinct. Water doesn’t get sad and slow down; animals don’t get lost after a bad night, their emotions don’t impede their survival. No matter how many scout ants never return to the colony, the queen sends out more of her children without hesitation.

“Good night,” I tell her, getting up. She looks at me, those orange-brown eyebrows angled in, her translucent pink-rimmed glasses lifted slightly.

“You’ll talk to her?” she says.

“I’ll go,” I say.

“Elizabeth!” Winston doesn’t need to
yell. His voice carries deep and loud, his laugh like a truck horn blast. It’s so bad Ashley refuses to sit near him when we go to the movies. “Elizabeth!”
He never calls me Liz. I am wearing Rachel’s bikini—and, I have to say, filling it out more than when I’d left Rachel’s, so much that I’m starting to almost consider Dean’s photo request—and lying on the concrete on the edge of the pool. Six feet at the deepest end, it has a waterfall with dark porous rocks and tropical foliage and a black bottom for solar heating, but with Jaime all buddy-buddy with Ashley and “adult supervised swimming only,” this pool is not the perk it could be.

But I can still lie on my back beside the shimmering surface, listen to the babble of the waterfall, look at the sky, and pretend that my location isn’t this conservative nothing to do town, but simply, poolside, anywhere, USA. I am getting pretty tan.

Winston appears through my sunglasses. “Elizabeth,” he breathes, winded from the walk outside. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” I say.

“You’re too close to the pool,” he says. I scoot two inches. He says, “I’m going out.” Pause. “Deborah is shopping.” He looks uncomfortable, his belly tilting from side to side as he shifts his feet.

“Okay,” I say and close my eyes. Fat men try to talk to cute girls anywhere. I could still be anywhere.

“I need you to watch Matthew.”

I stand up, wrap my towel around me, and tuck the end under my armpit. The atmosphere is ruined anyway. Winston stops averting his eyes. I say, “Isn’t he just playing SEGA?”

“He needs to be supervised.”

“I think I’ll hear him if he starts crying from finger cramps,” I say and Winston doesn’t even smile.

Inside, Matt sits on his legless chair in front of the screen, closer than usual. “So, I heard you need to be watched,” I say.

He shakes his head, which looks even bigger without his glasses. “My dad worries too much,” he says. He’s playing a puzzle game that looks like Tetris. Colored blocks float down the screen like neon raindrops.

“No kidding.”

“He went to get my new glasses. He’s blind without his, so…” Matt shrugs.

“Where’s Jaime?”

“Mom took the girls to the mall.”

“‘The girls?’” I say. Not so long ago that term referred to different girls.

“Yeah, Jaime and Ashley wanted to go shopping.” He rolls his eyes.

“They didn’t even invite me.”

“I thought you hate shopping.”

“I guess they’ve really bonded.”

Matt says, “Like carbon and oxygen,” and I laugh out loud. I sit down next to him on the carpet. He squints at me. “What?” he says.

“Do kids make fun of you at school?” I say.

He looks at his bare feet and his light brown bowl cut flops forward. “Sometimes,” he says. His head pops up and he looks at me the way Jaime used to when I said I had good news or told her I’d let her have control of the remote. He says, “Do you know why?”

He can’t throw a ball, he’s afraid of birds, he has little spotted scars on his forehead from the years he pounded his head into
rough surfaces. He still goes to therapy. I shrug. “Kids are mean,” I say.

“My dad says small people pick on others to make themselves feel big.”

“That’s some of it,” I say. As if Winston’s guns aren’t proof enough that he was bullied. “I bet you’re also the smartest kid in your class, and that’s some of it, too.”

Matt looks up at me with raised eyebrows. “Can you teach me how to play a sport?”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “One with a ball?”

On the way to the
therapist’s office Deborah tells me I could be part of the family if I wanted to, if I stopped isolating myself. “Jaime is already one of the Cranley crew,” she says. As if I needed to be reminded. Deborah says, “We want to see you smile again.”

Every week it gets harder to dodge her requests for me to sing at worship practice. I picked up her guitar once when she wasn’t home and strummed the strings. I pushed the memory of Terrance’s offer to teach me how to play from my mind and felt the vibration of the wood, the humming between my ears and in my fingers, and if they weren’t songs to praise the god who was on my short list, I might have tried to learn.

Deborah says, “You have a home here, Liz, if you want it.” She looks at me so I nod. “But you have to put a little effort in.”

I know she wants me to eat more than cereal and smile at
church and pray like I mean it and curtail my sarcasm and sing with her praise group and pet the dog and get used to the guns and the rules and the roosters and even though I remember how to play along, I feel like I shouldn’t have to. “Okay,” I say.

Deborah smiles at me like something has changed. “Great,” she says. I wonder how long I’ll last.

“How are you feeling, Elizabeth?” The counselor is a short, round woman, almost as tall as I am and twice as wide. She has straight black hair cut in a bob that stops just below her ears.

“Fine,” I say.

“Can we try for more specifics?” A thick, dark wooden cross hangs on the wall above her desk. Under it is her psychologist’s certificate, as if God had some say in her credentials.

“I’d rather not be here, but I’d rather not be anywhere, so here is good enough I guess.” I shrug.

She writes something down on her little pad. Her feet cross at the ankles. She says, “Do you mean you’d rather be dead?”

I play with a rip in the fabric of the couch. Not leather. “Not dead,” I say. “Just, nowhere.”

She scribbles something else. “Do you have suicidal thoughts, Elizabeth?”

“Don’t we all?”

“Are you depressed?”

“Only when I’m thinking,” I say and she sighs. She leans forward in her cushy leather desk chair. Neat piles of paper sit on top of the cherrywood cabinets behind her. Perhaps they’re other patients’ files, notes from sessions with people who are having
affairs, or fantasizing about someone of the same sex. People who are damaged and in need of repair. After I leave, she’ll add me to that pile.

“Elizabeth,” she says and adjusts her notepad on her lap so she can clasp her hands together. “I can’t help you if you won’t open up to me.”

“Who says I need help?”

“Your aunt is worried about you.”

“She worries about everyone.”

“Do you worry about yourself?”

Sometimes
. I stare at the carpet. Brown, a little darker and less faded at the edges of the office. How many other people have sat in this seat and been asked the same questions? She doesn’t really care about me. And she can’t help, either. The one person who could is literally sleeping with the enemy.

Ms. Counselor stretches into the high black back of her chair. “Everyone worries about something,” she says. “It’s perfectly natural.”

Cicadas chirp in my head and I understand why they never shut up. After years of living underground, they surface, bursting, winged, free but doomed, and they spend two weeks singing—or maybe they’re screaming—in the trees before they die. I feel like I’m doomed, too, and I’m scared I’ll never even get to be free.

She says, “Why don’t you tell me what worries you.”

When I was little, I worried that my parents would never get back together, that we wouldn’t have a family again, that Jaime and I would be separated. The years we eluded my father I worried he would find us, I worried when he yelled and hit Mom, worried
Jaime would wake up, worried we’d have to go to the hospital or the police station again. I worried that Dad was too drunk to drive, worried that Jaime wouldn’t notice, worried that she’d be thrown headfirst out the window and Dad would be unharmed.

I worry that Tammy will choose Sam and move to Australia, that she won’t want me back, that I won’t be able to leave Jaime, that she won’t care if I do, that I won’t be given a choice. I worry Mom will never change her mind, that Terrance will get tired of almost assaulting me, or fed up with my begrudging compliance and turn his creepy eyes and poisonous words on Jaime. I worry about this jittery inertia, this contained fear and anger, circling like whirlpools in my chest, weighing down my lungs all the time, but I know without it I might not make it on my own and that worries me even more.

“Elizabeth?” Counselor lady is handing me a blurry tissue. I take it from her but it just sits in my hand. I clear my throat and she becomes clean, in focus, and I am so fucking tired of the angled eyebrows of temporary concern that are completely useless. No one can make a difference but me. “I’m done worrying,” I whisper.

She lifts her head from whatever she was writing on her yellow notepad and says, “What was that?”

Enough cowering
. I force the swelling in my throat to subside, brace my ribs against the panicked vibrations in my lungs, and slide my armored exoskeleton back over my chest. The heaviness is familiar, comforting, but no longer strong enough. It needs thicker panels, arm extensions, a higher collar. I tighten the straps on my shields and imagine the improvements and increased
protection. I take a deep breath and exhale in one long steady stream of air.
It’s time to fight.

“Elizabeth?”

I swallow and clear my throat, square my shoulders against the couch. “I’m fine,” I say and almost smile.

After more than a month
of not talking to my mother, Deborah insists it’s time. I swore I was done with her, but I suppose that wasn’t very practical. She is my mom.

Deborah hands me the phone when she and Mom finish their weekly Liz’s attitude and behavior update. I say, “Have you heard from Tammy?”

“Hi to you, too,” Mom says. She sighs. “It’s good to hear your voice, Liz. I’ve missed you.”

“Apparently so has your husband.”