When Secrets Die (24 page)

“How about Twyla? It would be fun to go bowling, all four of us. Or she and I could stay home, and you and Marcus could go out.”

“God,” Emma said.

“What? What's wrong with Twyla? Or do you feel like you need to pick my friends for me, like you control everything else in my life?”

“You know what, Blaine? You can have anybody
but
Twyla. Last time she was here she kept trying to start a fire in the fireplace.”

“Yeah, where else would you start one?”

“How about you
don't
start one, which is what I told her at least three times. It being hot outside, with the air-conditioning on. And not to mention the chimney being seventy years old with cracks in the mortar. She could have set the whole house on fire.”

“Yes, I know,
Mother
, you've brought it up a million times. I get it. You hate Twyla.”

“If a
guest
can't respect the
rules
, she isn't welcome to come back.” Emma glanced at her daughter. The sulky look, as usual. “You're just spoiled, Blaine, you know that? The first time something doesn't go your way, you throw a temper tantrum.”

Emma flicked the turn signal on and moved onto Melton Road. It was a pretty stretch of highway, on the back roads so the traffic was minimal, and it wound alongside a lake on the left, and woods on the right. She heard the road noise first, then looked and saw that Blaine had opened the passenger-side door on the Jeep and was poised over the side of the car.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Emma grabbed her daughter by the hair and yanked her back into the car, and Blaine screamed and hit her, hard, on the arm. The car veered to the right and into the oncoming lane, but there was no traffic, and Emma got the car back into its own lane before a car came toward them from around the bend.

“Pull over, Mom, right now, pull over, I want out, let me out, let me out of the car.”

Blaine's voice hit the upper registers of hysteria, and Emma drove with her left hand, keeping her right hand wound tight in her daughter's hair. Blaine hit her over and over and over, until she pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, the two of them screaming at each other.

It made Emma sick. Sick at heart. Sick to her stomach. Her arm hurt where Blaine had punched her.

Emma let her daughter go. Blaine jumped out of the Jeep, tripping on her way out, then scrambling to her feet, and running, then disappearing, into the woods. Emma sat in the car, chest heaving, tears running down her cheeks, watching the woods, wondering what in the hell had just happened. She waited a long time, door hanging open, cars whizzing by her on the left, but Blaine did not come back. And Emma did not know what to do.

BLAINE

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

Blaine's feet hurt, and she could feel blisters bubbling up on her left heel. She would pick today to wear the platforms and skirt. The sun was out, but it was cold and she wished she'd worn a jacket.

Blaine looked down the road. She had a long walk ahead of her, a long walk to nowhere. A rusty orange pickup truck went by, slowing, the driver honking. Blaine kept walking, and did not even give the guys in the truck a look, reaching inside for what Mom called the “inner bitch.” The truck kept slowing and Blaine felt her heart beat fast, but then another car came behind the truck, and the driver picked up speed and moved on.

It was really stupid, being on the side of the road like this. Her mother had put her in a terrible position. Blaine had stayed in the woods and waited awhile, and then she had looked out just in time to see her mother drive away. And part of her had crumpled. Her mother just leaving her like that. What kind of a mother leaves her daughter by the side of the road?

But it was a relief not to have to go to school. The girls all hated her. They'd all been good friends since kindergarten, and they didn't need any new people in the clique, especially not ones as pretty and smart as Blaine Marsden. The boys liked her too much. They followed her to class and honked at her in the parking lot, and girls she didn't even know came up and got in her face because some boy they liked was looking at Blaine. She couldn't go to the cafeteria—none of the girls would sit with her, and the boys wouldn't leave her alone.

She hated it here. She hated school, she hated the other kids, and she hated her math teacher, who could not speak English, made no sense at all, and ignored all of her questions. Blaine needed to keep her grade point average high to qualify for the kind of scholarships that would get her through college, and right now she was carrying a low D in Algebra I. She needed a tutor, but saw no point in asking Mom for a tutor when she had that worried look every time they went to Kroger. Her friend Brandon was good at math, and he'd promised to help her. Not that she'd ever see him again. She was on her own now, and never going home.

So where was she going to go? She could call Great-Aunt Jodina, but what would she say? I beat up Mom, come and get me? She couldn't bear it if Aunt Jodina stopped loving her. Plus she lived all the way up in Harlan, and it would take a long time for her to get down here.

Franklin had given her his home and office numbers, in case she needed him. Blaine had been touched, but there was no way she'd call him. It was just too awkward.

And Blaine realized that she didn't have any money. She'd jumped out of the Jeep without her purse or her backpack.
Shit
. Her mother had driven her nuts that morning, asking over and over,
Do you have lunch money, Do you have lunch money
, and had finally shouted, “I'm putting ten dollars in your purse for lunches this week.”

That ten bucks was still in the Jeep.

Blaine sucked her bottom lip. At her old school, there would have been friends she could have called. At this dumb school they confiscated the cell phones, so nobody had theirs on. Twyla couldn't drive anyway.

At least Twyla had been nice to her. True, Twyla was a lot more out there than her mother knew. For one, she was pregnant again, and trying to decide what to do about it. Two, she was cutting school to hang out with Brian and Art, who were Mormon rednecks, looking for trouble and wives, which was a combination found only in weird places like her own high school. And Twyla was doubly attractive to both boys, being both trouble and open to marriage. She sure wasn't looking to go to college like Blaine was, although Blaine hadn't given up on the girl. She was smart enough, if she could just focus, although asking Twyla to focus on anything other than getting a fake ID so that she could sing country music at karaoke bars and get discovered was like trying to get Wally to stop barking when the doorbell rang. Impossible and noisy, both of them convinced you were interfering with their sacred role in life.

It was true that things happened when Twyla was over. The girl could not leave the fireplace alone, she had to light the kindling, like it was some kind of compulsion, and she was more likely than not to forget to open the flue, so the room would fill with smoke. But Twyla was no better at starting fires than she was at anything else, so at least they went out pretty fast.

The problem was, there was nobody else to hang out with. And whose fault was that? Who had moved her every two years, who had made her go to the stupid high school in Kentucky where she didn't have any friends except guys who wanted to
do
her? And then when she wanted to hang out with the one kid who was halfway interesting and acceptable as a friend, her mom says no, she can't come over, pick somebody else.
There wasn't anybody else
.

Anger or despair, which way did her mother want her to go? Her real dad did not care enough to even call her or send her a birthday card, he forgot her at Christmas, and Mom had kicked Clayton out the door. At least Clayton had tried. Her mother shouldn't have let him move in unless she was going to keep him.

Blaine felt light-years away from her peers. Their biggest worries were which college to select; hers was whether she could even go to community college. Grades and financial aid would make or break her.

And now it was over between her and Mom. She might never see her mother again.

And the dumb thing was that school was finally getting better. Brandon was helping her with math during lunch, and Twyla sat with them, begging off half of Blaine's lunch every day, and with the three of them there in the cafeteria, bent over the books and laughing at stupid stuff, Blaine had felt normal, finally, like she blended.

Back at her last school she had been popular, she'd had lots of friends and was on the actual short list for homecoming princess. And she'd traded this for a hick high school with no computer lab and a foreign language program that was a joke.

Since Ned got sick, everything was always awful. Blaine was just trying to break out of that, and it was clear her mother wasn't going to let her. She and her mom had been okay before Clayton came along. Blaine knew her mother needed adults in her life—she needed a boyfriend. And it wasn't like her mother ever let them spend the night, or be there all the time. Not unless Blaine liked them. Blaine had nixed more than one, but she was more careful about that now, and sometimes, though she would never say it out loud, she wished her mother wouldn't give her quite so much power. But it was mostly a comfort. She had too many friends whose lives were ruled by the parent's boyfriend or the girlfriend of the hour, who came in and changed everything and shoved the kids out of the way.

She'd always admired her mother for staying independent. It meant money troubles, but she'd never handed the power over to some guy in exchange for a wallet.

But then her mother was pregnant and throwing up with really bad morning sickness. And she and Blaine had sat together and had a really adult talk about abortion. Blaine had been on the fence about it, as had her mother, but they'd decided to have the child because Mom did not get pregnant easily, and because she loved Clayton and he really, really wanted a baby. Her mom had told Blaine before she told Clayton, and they'd made the decision to have the baby without his help or input. And her mother had warned her, always be prepared to take complete responsibility for any child you have, Blaine, because you'll be the one responsible no matter what any man says. Some are good fathers, some aren't, so be ready to take it all on yourself.

But the dance studio had been making good money, and Mom could teach pregnant for a long time, and so they'd gotten kind of excited about it and bought a lot of baby stuff. Clayton had moved in, and for a while they'd been the kind of two-parent family Blaine occasionally envied. She, who did not have a father who cared for her, was not one to underestimate their value.

Then Ned had gotten sick. He'd cried and screamed and turned red in the face, and thrown up so much it was scary. But Mom had been calm the whole time, calling doctors and taking him to the hospital. Sometimes he got better, then he'd get sick again, but Blaine never thought … she never thought he could die. Not these days, with all the advances in medical science. It had happened so fast too. Sick, screaming, off to the hospital. And then Mom coming home in the middle of the night, opening the door to Blaine's room, and in the light from the hallway Blaine could see her mother's eyes, dead eyes, with deep pockets of black beneath, and she knew that something awful had happened. It never made much sense, the details about liver enzymes, and his system shutting down and organ failure. She just couldn't believe it. This kind of stuff didn't happen in other families. It happened only in hers.

Everything was a mess, and nothing would get better, it couldn't. And there was no point in saying hang on till you get out of high school and go to college, because she had two more years of high school, and what college would give her scholarship money if she couldn't even pass Algebra I?

And then, all she did was ask if Twyla could spend the night. A small little request, for God's sake. She didn't want to go home to that
sadness
, those quiet dreary weekends where her mother walked around like a robot and other kids hung out with their friends, and the only thing Mom said to her was
Clean up your room, Have you done your homework?
and
What do you want for dinner?

Blaine felt her eye swelling. It was going to be a shiner. Her own mother had given her a black eye. So now she had an abusive mother. Maybe it had something to do with the drinking.

Blaine had been worried about her mom for months now. Hearing her get up in the night, hearing her throwing up so violently, seeing her face go white like it did, and watching her hold her side. It was Amaryllis Burton who had told her what was going on. She had been over to the house with one of those baskets from the clinic, and her mom had been sick the night before and was sound asleep, and Blaine had refused to wake her mother up. But she had been very polite to Amaryllis, although she didn't much like her. She was Mom's friend and clearly disappointed that her mother wasn't available, and kind of hinting that Blaine should wake her up anyway. But Blaine had stuck to her guns, though she had invited the woman to sit down in the living room and offered to make coffee or hot tea or get her a soda. Amaryllis had given her that sickly sweet smile and made some remark about how grown-up Blaine could be, the kind of remark that sounded polite to other adults, but that Blaine knew was meant to put her down and make fun of her.

Amaryllis had said that perhaps they should have a talk. That Blaine should know that her mother was drinking, and not to think too badly of her, because her mother had been through hell, though it was a shame she could not put Blaine before this weakness.

Blaine hadn't believed her. She didn't like Amaryllis, and the way she was so obviously jealous of her mom. Mom was pretty, she wasn't fat, she was
built
, and she was funny and smart and a great dancer, and she would never embarrass Blaine in front of her friends by showing off her double-jointed arm like her grandmother used to do to her. Blaine was kind of proud of her, too. Mom, at least, had lots of friends—girlfriends as well as men friends, and boyfriends, because her mother at least was fun.