Beautiful (16 page)

“If you need anything, we're right outside,” Mom says, stroking my hair, and I have the sudden impression that everything would be okay forever if she would just keep doing that. Nothing could ever be wrong or scary again as long as she keeps moving her hand across my head. But she stops just as I become convinced of this, and I feel myself deflate, become light as ash, and the bed is suddenly not soft at all.

Tracy is the last one out. “Don't puke on anything,” she says, and closes the door.

I lie there for a while, looking at the ceiling. I would do anything to sleep right now. I would do anything to be home in my own bed, five or six sleeping pills in my stomach. I would do anything to never have to wake up again.

There is a soft knock at the door. There is my name in Charlie's low voice. There is “I'm sorry.” There is “Can I come in?” There is me getting up and locking the door, turning off the lights. There is me crawling into the corner between the bed and the wall, making myself as small and still as I can be. I am closing my eyes as hard as they will close. I am wrapping my arms around my legs and holding them tight against my body. There is a voice in my head drowning out Charlie's:
If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.

I would not wake up if I didn't have to. I would not open my eyes and see the horizontal light that breaks through my blinds, would not see it bend and twist around the corners of my room like yellow cobwebs, like neon prison bars. I would not feel my head pounding, my throat dry, not taste my mouth with the acid fuzz of morning. I would not feel my stomach twisting in its chemical residue. I would not lie here looking at the white ceiling and wanting black again, wanting the heavy stillness of sleep, the flesh like lead, the solid absence of memory, the absence of sound and pictures and light and movement.

But there are instincts that I can't control, instincts that say “wake” and “live” without my permission. There is a robot
inside who obeys, whose bladder says get up and go to the bathroom, who blinks at the sunlight and takes in breath. There is nothing I can do to stop it. I cannot lie here forever. I am not that strong.

The alarm clock says it's afternoon. The sound of Christmas carols and the smell of burnt coffee tells me Mom is out there waiting by the tree and pretending it's morning. There is nothing I can do to make it not Christmas.

I get up. I put on my bathrobe. I go to the bathroom. I pee. I brush my teeth. I gag and spit up toothpaste. I walk into the living room and there is Mom sitting on the couch in front of the Christmas tree she decorated herself, still in her pajamas. She isn't doing anything, not watching TV, not playing video games, not reading one of her magazines that shows how rich people live. She is just sitting, just staring blankly at the Christmas tree, just waiting for me.

She looks at me. “I tried waking you,” she says. “Several times.” She does not sound angry, just tired.

“I must be really sick,” I say. “I didn't hear you.”

“That's a shame,” she says, looking back at the tree. “Being sick on Christmas.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I just stand there looking at the fake fire in the fireplace.

“I'll go get your dad,” she says, and stands up, holding her
back like an old person. Her slippers brush against the carpet as she walks, like she is merely sliding her feet, like she doesn't have the energy to pick them up off the ground.

I sit in the seat she emptied and it is still warm. I look at the tree and her careful decorating. I think about how bringing the tree home and making it beautiful was always something we did together, how she and my dad would carry it in and set it up while I foraged through the shoe boxes full of ornaments, choosing my favorites, the ones I would place. I remember how, after several adjustments, the tree would always still be a little bit crooked. It is perfectly straight this year. She paid extra to have the guys at the tree lot drive it over and set it up. We skipped the decorating ritual because Dad had to work late and I was doing something I don't remember. I came home in the middle of the night and there it was, lit up and straight and perfect, and I remember wishing I had not seen it.

There's the ornament I made in kindergarten, the beads on popsicle sticks in a pool of dried glue. This is always the one we'd put on last, right in the front, right in the middle, more important than the star on top.

“All right, let's open presents,” Dad says as he enters the room. He's trying to smile, but he can't hide the fact that he'd rather be back in his room with the door closed, doing
whatever it is that he does in there. Mom looks at him hopefully, but her face settles back into blank disappointment.

I take my place on the floor because it is always my job to be Santa. I hand them each a present that they bought each other, wanting to get this over with. I take one with
Cassie
written on it in my mom's messy handwriting, the kind of writing you'd expect from an artist or a doctor, not a housewife with a husband who hates her, not a mother with a daughter like me.

I open mine and it is a sweater I will never wear. “Thank you,” I say to no one in particular.

“I saw it and knew the green would look great with your eyes,” Mom says.

I take my bathrobe off and put the sweater on. It is itchy and too big. Dad gets a wallet identical to the one he gets every year. Mom gets slippers identical to the ones she's wearing now.

More presents and more crap no one wants. I get a cheap bracelet with hanging charms of roller skates, lips, a heart, and the word
sassy
in cursive. Mom gets a bathrobe and scented candles. Dad gets a tie and a set of white handkerchiefs. I get white cotton underwear and white cotton socks.

“That's it,” Mom says, and glances under the tree. They both look at me.

“I didn't have time to make anything,” I blurt out. “I've been so busy with school and everything, and I didn't really realize it was Christmas and—”

“It's okay,” Dad says.

“It's enough that we can all be together,” Mom says, another talk show sound bite.

I look out the window and the sky is gray. All the trees look wet and weighed down.

“Are we going to have pancakes?” I say. Mom always makes pancakes on Christmas morning.

“We already ate, Cassie,” my dad says. “It's almost two.”

“I can make some,” Mom says. “We can have pancakes for lunch.”

My stomach hurts and everyone is quiet.

“Well, I'm off,” Dad finally says. “I have work to do.”

“On Christmas, Bill?” Mom says.

He gives her one of his looks that says
I can't believe I married you.

“Fine,” Mom says, looking at her lap.

He stands up and kisses her on the top of her head, kisses me on the top of my head. I smell the smell from his coat the night he picked me up in Juanita, warm and spicy, and then it's gone. Then he's walking away and closing the door to their bedroom and the smell and my father are gone.

“Hungry?” Mom says, and I nod my head.

She walks to the kitchen and I stay sitting on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper. The Christmas carol CD is over and the only sound is Mom opening cupboards and paper crunching as I collect it all into a pile.

“How many do you want?” she calls from the kitchen.

“A million,” I say, even though now the pancakes just seem sad.

“Okay,” she says, and I walk to the kitchen to get a trash bag.

“We should start recycling,” I tell her, just to say something.

“You're right,” she says as she measures Bisquick into a bowl. I go back into the living room and put all the garbage into the trash bag. I put the bag by the front door. It will not be recycled. It will be put in the dumpster with everyone else's Christmas trash.

I sit on the couch and smell pancakes cooking. My feet are freezing so I slip them into Mom's old slippers. She's wearing her new ones now.

“Can I have your old slippers?” I say.

“Sure,” she says.

They are warm and soft on my feet. I can feel where her toes spent a year carving into the fabric. They fit perfectly.

I sit there for a while looking at the tree. Something about it is not right. It is too perfect, too organized. The ornaments are all equally spaced, as if Mom used a ruler to decide where to hang them. I kneel by the tree and take off my Popsicle stick/bead/glue monstrosity. I find my favorite ornament in the back of the tree, on the bottom, the porcelain Mr. and Mrs. Santa in their red-and-white outfits, eyes closed, lips pursed, leaning toward each other for a kiss. I place my ornament next to them, destroying the symmetry Mom spent a lonely night creating. But in secret, in the back, on the bottom.

Mom brings in a plate of pancakes and a bottle of syrup. She has made a drink for herself even though it is still afternoon.

“Do you want to watch
It's a Wonderful Life
?” she says, her ice cubes clinking.

“Yes,” I say. There is nothing I want to do more than eat pancakes and watch the movie we always watch at Christmas.

The DVD is already sitting on the coffee table, as if she put it there, waiting for us to watch it. She gets up and puts it in the DVD player. The intro credits roll and I scarf down my food. I have never tasted anything so good in my entire life. Mom lights the candles my father bought her and they smell like Christmas. I consider going into my room to smoke some pot and a cigarette. But my room seems so far away, miles,
states, countries, continents. I am exhausted. I lie down and rest my head on my mother's lap. I feel her tense and slowly relax. I try to remember the last time I did this. My mind is blank. All I can see is Jimmy Stewart in black and white. All I can feel is my mother's breath and warm skin through her bathrobe.

My stomach is full and I am warm and I am crying. Rivers are flowing out of my eyes and no one knows but me. Tears drop and absorb into Mom's bathrobe, making tiny black pools that will soon dry, leaving no trace that they were ever there.

Alex called and said get ready because we're leaving for Portland soon. She won't tell me when, just “soon.” She's paranoid like that. She doesn't trust me with anything. She probably thinks I'll tell Sarah. She probably thinks Sarah will follow us. She doesn't want her to follow us. She wants it to be just me and her. Nobody else. Just me and her and her brother in Portland.

My backpack's in the closet with more than a hundred dollars that I've stolen, a few dollars a day over the last three months. There are five pairs of clean underwear and socks, one toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap, a sweater, a pair of jeans and two shirts. That is all that will fit. I don't know what you're supposed to wear when you're thirteen and
running away to Portland and counting on a teenage drug dealer in a gang against fat people to take care of you. I don't even know what it means to be in gang against fat people, if they have a uniform, a gang name, a special handshake.

I keep thinking about shows I've seen, the movies with the girl on the streets, all dressed up like a hooker, all hard and tough. Then you always find out she's actually really nice if you get to know her and she's got some awful secret she's running away from, something so bad that living on the streets makes more sense than staying at home. Her tragedy seems so glamorous, and she's so sexy with her mixture of tough and sweet. She's always smoking and drinking whiskey, snorting things up her nose or shooting things in her arm. But then someone gets to know her, a nice guy or a nice girl who doesn't want anything from her. Someone gets her to cry, to tell her secrets, and you find out she likes pie and kittens, or she has an old baby doll she hides in her backpack and sleeps with at night.

I keep trying to think of something like that to put in my backpack, something special, something that would get a close-up in the movie about me and show everyone how sweet I really am. But I don't have anything that's mine, not really mine, no pictures of people I love, no stuffed animals I've had since I was a kid. All that stuff is gone, or it never existed in the first place.

Alex said she's counting on me. She said it in the voice that says I have no choice. I said okay and hung up the phone. It is sitting there on the pillow next to me, between my head and the white, cracked wall. I talked to her in the dark, the weak blue-gray of cloudy dusk casting soft shadows on my body. The light is almost gone now. I am almost black, invisible. There is only a warm sliver of orange creeping under my door, but it does not reach across the room to me.

It is the day after Christmas and school does not start for another week. I could stay in my room until then. I could fake mono and have my mother bring me food. I could flush the Ritalin and weed down the toilet. I could read and sleep and fatten up. I could return to school after Christmas break a different person. No one would recognize me. The kids in my class would say “Who's that?” and I would be someone new, someone good, someone to be nice to.

But changing is not that easy. Not after people know you as one thing and want to keep knowing you that way. Even if I showed up to school in pigtails and sweatpants, I would still be Ethan's girlfriend. I would still be Alex's best friend. I would still be that kind of girl. People don't just let you change identities, not unless there's something in it for them.

What I'm supposed to do now is smoke pot and eat sleeping pills and sleep tonight without dreams. I am supposed to
wake up, do the rest of the Ritalin, then panic in a few hours when it starts to wear off. I will call Justin even though I already know he's gone for the holidays because no one's picked up the phone at his house in days. I will call Alex because she can get anything and I don't know the people she knows and I'm afraid to go to the arcade by myself. We will get fucked up and she will be my best friend and if I'm devoted enough she might let Sarah hang out with us as long as we don't pay too much attention to each other. Sarah will be quiet and spacey and her eyes will have nothing in them.