Writing Our Song (6 page)

One time Tommy had sprained his ankle in the school playground just after school had finished and I had helped him get home.  From then on, our respective families had been reasonably close, but had kind of drifted apart after I went to middle-school.

Being next door neighbors we had, of course, kept in touch.  Sometimes our two families would have each other over for dinner, real neighborly and all.  Even though I hadn’t been in their car since Tommy and I stopped going to the same school, I knew without a shred of doubt that it would still smell like wet dog in there.

To my left was a beat up old gray van that said ‘Shannon Contractors’ on the side, it belonged to our other neighbor, Toby Shannon.  I didn’t know him as well as the Jones family, but I’d lived next door to him long enough to know that he was a builder with what seemed like an entire workshop inside that van.

One time he had helped my dad fix the lawnmower and I remember my dad had been amazed that Toby just so happened to have the exact right part for the exact model of lawnmower we owned.  He was usually up early and back late, so it was unusual for him to be home at this time of day.  The fact that his van was parked out on the street rather than in his garage probably indicated that he was going to be heading out again, I supposed.

If I had to choose one word to describe the Jones-mobile, it would be ‘family’.  If I had to choose one for the Shannon-van, it would be ‘work’.  I’d never met a person that drove something like this Ferrari but I had a feeling I was about to.  The fact that it had two seats didn’t really scream ‘family’, so I could probably rule that one out straight away.

Keep calm, Beatrice
, I thought to myself.  I knew something like this would happen one day, hadn’t Eli spent an entire session trying to coach me through this very scenario?  I just hadn’t expected it this quickly.

I turned and walked towards the house, absolutely dreading what I would find in there.  Despite Eli’s advice, I didn’t feel ready for this, not in the slightest.  When he had spoken to me about my mom moving on, I had been able to reluctantly envision some time in the future when I wasn’t living at home anymore, where I wouldn’t have to actually
see
them together.

Not now though.  Not just one short year after my dad’s death.  I could still
feel
him in the house.  Given how far my relationship with my mother had deteriorated, that feeling was the only thing that still made this house a home.

I could still remember how the two of them looked at each other when they weren’t thinking about money or any of the million other things that irritates the average person.  Couldn’t she?

Standing under shelter near the front door, I shook off my umbrella and folded it down before stepping inside.  Immediately I could hear voices coming from the living room, my mom and a man.

Ordinarily my mom wasn’t home when I arrived after school, but if she had been then I would have just quietly walked up to my room trying to not be noticed.  Not this time though.  Something forced me to walk into the living room, to see the horrible truth for myself.

And there he was, standing in the living room like he owned the place, laughing with my mom like he belonged there.  On the coffee table was an open bottle of wine, maybe champagne, and they were each holding a glass as if there was something in the world worth celebrating.

The smile dropped from my mom’s mouth when she saw me and she glanced to the man, Eugene I supposed, as if to gauge his reaction.  When he spotted me I saw a flash of disdain cross his face before he replaced it with a resigned smile.

“Beatrice, I thought you were working today,” said my mom.

“Wednesday.  I don’t work Wednesdays,” I said.

“Oh, right.  Well… um… this is Eugene.  Eugene owns Mercercorp.  Eugene, this is Beatrice.  My daughter.”

I almost cringed at the way she said ‘my daughter’, as if the admission of my existence was as pleasant for her as confessing to some heinous crime.

“Ah, Beatrice,” Eugene said, “Kate mentioned she had a daughter.  Nice to meet you.”

“Hi.”

“Never had time to have any rug-rats of my own, always so much work to be done.”

“Eugene’s just negotiated a big deal for Mercercorp so he’s taking me out to celebrate,” said my mom.

“Oh.”

“Don’t be rude, Beatrice.  Eugene is a very important man.”

I scowled. “Good job, Eugene.”

“Call me old fashioned but I believe that children should show their elders respect.  You can call me Mr. Mercer.”

My anger, barely held in check since I saw that first bunch of roses, threatened to explode and send little pieces of me all over the room.  I felt my hands bunched up into fists at my sides and heat radiating from my face and at the same time realized my eyes were watering.

I couldn’t let them see me cry, I’d never show them how much they’d gotten to me.  I stormed out of the living room, up the stairs and closed my bedroom door behind me before the first sob escaped my lips.  I sank down to the ground with my back to the door.

Furiously, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hands, not letting the tears fall.  Several times I felt another whimper or sob welling up from deep in my chest, but I clamped my teeth together and forced it back down again.

I clenched so hard I thought my teeth were going to crack.  My lips pulled back in a fanatical grimace of effort and every muscle bunched up until each wave of grief and anger became smaller and less frequent and I was back under control again.  Downstairs the front door opened and closed.

I hated him, everything about him.  His expensive car, his expensive suit, his condescending attitude, how he thought he could replace my dad.  How could my mom go from dad to him?

Thinking back to all the times my parents had argued about money I wondered if my mom had basically been bought.  Not in the sense of being paid directly… just won over by the promise of all the money that Eugene had, and the lifestyle that came with it.  Damned if I’d ever call him Mr. Mercer.

Compared to the support, the love, my dad had been full of, money seemed like a shallow consolation prize.  Right there on the floor of my room, I made a promise to myself.  I would have cut the palm of my hand and sealed it in blood if I had a knife.

I’ll never let a rich man buy me like that.

Chapter 6

My exams at the end of the school year went much better this time around, gaining me mediocre grades that at least didn’t need creative interpretation to get me a pass.  I continued working at Eddie’s diner, though after I had another panic attack while working on the front counter one night, they kept me to cooking and cleaning duties.  That was fine by me.

After a lonely birthday and Christmas, I almost felt like I was a robot, just going through the motions of somebody who was actually alive.  When I did feel something, it was grief, or anger or confusion and I did my best to shove those emotions back down.

It was like my emotions were dangerous, like if I started crying I might not be able to stop, or if I let myself get too angry I might hurt myself or somebody else.  Everything was confusing, and I didn’t quite know how to bottle that one up.

Things had never been great between my mom and I, but every day since the accident felt like a new low.  That was a lot of days by now.

One morning I woke up with a burning question in my head and I tried to shake it, forget it.  It was stupid, I already knew the answer anyway.  For days I wrestled with this voice that wouldn’t shut up, until I conceded and went down to the kitchen where my mom was just about ready for work.

I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the kitchen table pushing the flakes around with my spoon, unsure how to even broach the subject. 
Why not just spit it out?
  That voice in my head asked.

That was a difficult question, but the imminence of my mother’s departure pushed my mind into overdrive and I soon had my answer.  It was because, even after everything, I still had a tiny kernel of hope.

There was still time for her to remember that I was her daughter, not something to be ashamed of.  She could remember the time I made her a mother’s day card with macaroni glued on in the shape of a love-heart.  And all the rest.

Before Dad’s accident she had been distant, not so cold like now.  I knew she had loved Dad and, as much as she had been able, she had loved me too.  That’s why I had to ask the question, I needed to know if she could ever be the person I needed her to be.  I needed to talk with the only other person still on the planet who had known my dad as well as, or better than, I did.

That’s also what made the question so scary.  I had to reveal a chink in my armor, take at least one brick out of the walls I had erected inside myself.  I had to risk being crushed again.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?”  she popped her phone into her new handbag and raised her eyebrows at me as she set off towards the front door, if I didn’t stop her she wouldn’t even hear my question.

“Mom!”

“What?”  She paused.

“Do you…”

My heart began pounding in my ears and I felt the familiar flush of heat across my neck and face, the shortness of breath and hopeless terror that had reduced me to a shaking wreck on more than one occasion.  I had to get it out quickly.

“Do you still… love me?”

The room was deathly quiet between each boom of my heartbeat, my shallow breaths barely audible even to myself as I awaited her response.  I couldn’t look at her, instead I stared at my breakfast through half-closed eyes.  Would she just come over and give me a hug?

I could almost feel it, the warmth, the sense that I could just close my eyes and be held for a few seconds without having to worry about the past, the future, guilt, grief, anything.  A few seconds of peace.

“Don’t be late for school,” she said, and walked out.

For a few moments I sat in silence, gripping the edge of the kitchen table until my knuckles turned white.  I wasn’t sure if the panic would bubble over until I screamed or not.  In the end, it didn’t.  All the terror seemed to melt away and I repaired my armor, replaced that one brick in the wall.

Behind the wall I felt like that struggling little spark of pure-Bea was finally extinguished.  In my mind it was replaced with a vial of some inky black poison with a little ‘break in case of emergency’ sticker on it.  Like a cold-war-era spy with a fake tooth full of cyanide, I had to carry it inside of me and if I knocked it too hard, if I let anybody past the wall, it would break and that would be the end.

“I won’t be,” I whispered to my long gone mom.

*****

Several weeks later I was glad I had asked that question to my mom and received that response.  A girl with a kernel of hope wouldn’t have made it through what happened next.  I came home from school to an empty house, not that that was anything new, but something was different.

When I was a little kid I’d had a similar feeling one day as I sat on the couch watching a cartoon after school.  Something was
different
and it distracted me during the entire show so afterwards I could never really remember if the princess had been rescued by the prince.

It turned out that the old reclining chair that used to sit in the corner was gone.  It had been there my whole life, so constant that it was just part of the background scenery.  Apparently a new chair was being delivered and the old one had become something called landfill.

No biggie, it was just a chair, but the feeling of something missing was there again and I wandered the house trying to figure out what it was.  Then I spotted it, the shoe rack next to the front door was nearly empty.

Shoes had always been a weakness of my mom’s, she loved buying shoes that only went with one outfit, or any shoes that caught her eye really.  She’d really held back while my dad was around but since those roses started turning up on our mantelpiece the shoe population of the house had certainly grown.

Now the shoe rack looked sort of like a ghost town, with just a pair of my boots sitting there beside the shoes I had kicked off without really looking only a few minutes previous.  All my mom’s shoes were gone.

With eyebrow raised I looked around the house some more, spotting several more of my mom’s belongings mysteriously missing.  Upstairs in my parents’ room the difference was impossible to miss, the room was almost barren.

In their closet, most of my mom’s things were gone, the only items left had been my dad’s.  This was where she had shoved all his things.  Behind boxes of clothes and various other things I could see his guitar case and sighed when I remembered how I hadn’t listened to his song before quickly closing the door.

Back downstairs in the kitchen I saw a plain white envelope on the table with my name written in black pen across the front.  I sat down and steeled myself to open it.

Even considering the events of the past year and a half combined with the clues I’d seen in the last few minutes, I never would have guessed what I read in that letter.  That’s why I was so thankful I’d been able to emotionally lock myself down after I’d asked my mom that stupid question.

Thanks to that harsh, but bitterly-true, fact, I didn’t break down as my eyes scanned over the hastily-written page.  It wasn’t flowery prose by any far stretch of the imagination but, out of everything, there were a few phrases that required special consideration.

‘Gone’ ‘not coming back’ ‘rent paid until the end of the month’ and ‘don’t try to find me’ were the words I kept on rereading over and over again.  Finally I put the paper down and stared out of the window for a while.

I allowed myself to just sit there and hate them for a moment.  That was a ‘safe’ emotion, that wouldn’t bring down my walls, that wouldn’t make me vulnerable again.  I thought back to something my mom had said a lifetime ago, they can only hurt you if you let them.  It was so true.

I hated how superficial she had become, I hated how he thought he could just throw his money around and do whatever he wanted.  I bet my mom would have come around eventually if it wasn’t for him.

Rich people had taken away my whole family and everything I loved.  It was because of them I was like this.  When my dad had said you don’t get to be that rich without crushing the dreams of a lot of people on the way up, I had thought he was just talking about the regular old cutthroat world of business.

Now though, I wondered if he knew what they were really like.  The wealthy today were just as ruthless as the wealthy people throughout history, throwing the poor to the lions for their own entertainment.

I screwed the letter up and threw it towards the trash, hitting the wall beside my target and scowling at it as it settled on the floor.  This news would require a lot of thinking, but not right now.  Tomorrow I would need to make plans for myself.

*****

When I used the computers in the library at school the next day I found that what my mom had done amounted to child abandonment according to Washington state law and I toyed with the idea of reporting her.  After looking further into the process it didn’t seem like such a great idea though.

Sure, the vague concept of it provided some small measure of satisfaction but what would it accomplish in the end?  A fine that her boyfriend could pay with no problems, and then what?  I’d be put into some kind of foster care.

With my eighteenth birthday coming up later on in the year it would just be pointless.  No, I would just look after myself.  But I would have to be careful how I did it.

After the last bell rang I went to the office and asked if there was any paperwork I would need to take home because I was going to be leaving school.  Turned out there was.

At home I searched high and low until I found something my mom had signed and spent a couple of hours trying to replicate her signature.  When I thought I had it down I did my best to sign and initial in all the right places and then hoped for the best.

I handed the stack of papers back at the office the next morning and felt my heart jump to my throat when I was called to the counsellor’s office just before lunch.  Waiting outside, there was almost no doubt in my mind they had found some discrepancy in the signatures and my plans to go it alone were going up in smoke as surely as I was sitting there in his waiting room.

“Beatrice?  Come on in.”

For what I hoped was the last time and feared was not, I sat in my usual seat next to my usual box of tissues, surrounded by the usual clocks.

“So talk,” Eli said.

“About what?”

“You know what.  I heard you’re leaving us.  What’s all that about?”

“Oh.  Yeah.  We’re moving,” I said.

“Not too far away, I hope?  I’d think it would be quite disruptive changing schools.  Even if it’s a bit more inconvenient, I’d recommend a bit of a commute to keep coming here.”

“No, we’re going to New York.”

“New York?  Why?”

“My mom’s boyfriend is… uh… relocating his company’s head office there.”

“You never mentioned your mom was seeing somebody else.”

“Sorry.  Didn’t know how to bring it up.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Fine, just fine,” I said.

“What’s he like?”

“My mom’s boyfriend?”

Eli nodded.

“He’s… a real peach.”

“It’s natural to feel some, a lot, of resentment under the circumstances, Beatrice, but we knew this would probably happen sooner or later.  Not the moving part, that’s a bit unexpected.”

“Yeah, I remember we went over it.”

“Mmmm.  I think the three of you, your mom, her boyfriend and yourself, should sit down and have a very quick talk about how you’re feeling about the whole situation.  Everybody needs to be clear that he isn’t replacing your dad and he shouldn’t try.  You can all hopefully move forward with mutual respect.”

Mutual respect.  I thought back to my only interaction with Eugene that had come close to a conversation and just managed to suppress a smirk.  Not one single time had I ever called him Mr. Mercer, and I never would even if I had the chance.

“We’ll do that,” I said.

“And Friday is your last day?  Why did you leave it so late to tell us?”

“Just completely forgot, really.  Mind on other things.  You know how it is.”

Eli pulled his sleeve up and looked at his watch, though a glance at any of the other timepieces in the room would have sufficed, and then back to me.

“Well, when you get to your new school, I would recommend seeing another counsellor.  Maybe see somebody outside of the school.”

“OK.”

“I don’t want to infringe on your lunchtime, Beatrice, so I’ll let you get going.  It was nice to meet you, I wish it had been under happier circumstances.  Things will get better though, you understand?”

“Sure.  Thanks,” I said and shook his extended hand.

When his office door closed behind me I took a deep breath and felt my cheeks puff out as I released the air.  It was like getting through the Spanish inquisition with a surprise pardon.

After that I really phoned it in for the rest of the day.  There didn’t seem to be much point in putting any effort in.  I told my teachers and most of them didn’t set any homework for me.  I ignored those who did.  I would have said today was my last day but thought a weekend move was more plausible.

When I went to work that night I asked about increasing my hours to full time, which was a hard sell since they didn’t trust me on the front counter and my usefulness was hence somewhat limited.  Thankfully another part-timer had just handed in their notice and my manager let me take over their hours.