Billie Standish Was Here (5 page)

I couldn't imagine why on earth I wouldn't want to get married. So I could stand behind the counter at Penney's the rest of my life? I wasn't going to college, so I couldn't teach school. And there wasn't much else for girls like me.

It's not like I didn't know there were extraordinary women out there who had done amazing things. But that was just it. As far as ordinary women went, the kind who were born in the middle of nowhere to dirt farmers—those women got married if they could and then had babies if they could. That was their dream. I had never heard it talked about as a choice.

My brain was getting more of a workout than it ever had at home or in school. I began to wonder if those places were mainly teaching me not to think.

Miss Lydia turned the album page without saying more and several pictures of two little girls had me wondering if she had had daughters who didn't get to grow up. But you don't blurt out that kind of question. Not when somebody's eyes look like hers did then.

It turned out the pictures weren't in order. These were of Miss Lydia herself and her friend Lucy. She and Lucy had been closer than most sisters, she told me. I had
always wished for a sister to talk to and it was news to me you could be even closer to a friend.

Miss Lydia said, “Pneumonia took her in 1901,” in such a matter-of-fact voice I wasn't sure if I had asked out loud. “Such a shame. Anymore, a couple of days' bed rest and a prescription and she and I would have been back out in the haymow playing.”

She needed so badly to clear her throat. I didn't know what I'd do if she broke down. But then she took a sip of tea and asked me to tell her about my friends.

I said, “Oh, I don't really have any.” But that sounded so pathetic coming out I added, “Not yet, anyway.”

“Don't have any friends!” Miss Lydia was astonished. “Why ever not?”

“Well, there's only two other girls in my grade at school and they've been best friends since before I met them.” It was a fact so old I didn't have to consider it. It's just how it was.

But Miss Lydia did. “You're tellin' me they neither one have room for two friends?”

The idea of Karen and Debbie being friendly toward me was laughable. Making fun of me was part of the glue that stuck those two together and kept them feeling superior in their one little foot of space on the planet. I covered my smile with one hand and said, “Nope.”

“Well, then, what about the girls younger or older?” she said.

“No.” I shook my head. “Nobody has friends outside their own grade. It's almost like a rule.”

“Why, I never heard the like!” she sputtered. “The very idea that a year or two is so sacred.” It did seem silly when you put it that way.

“Just the way it is.” I had never questioned it so I couldn't explain it.

“Well, what about the boys in your class? Any makin's of a friend there?”

That was so outlandish I started giggling.

“Oh, never mind,” Miss Lydia sighed. “If the very idea sets you off, you're likely past the age when you could have had a boy for a friend.” I was pretty sure what she meant, but made a mental note to roll that comment around some when I was alone.

Then she harrumphed. “Make me a promise, Billie Marie. I want you, when school starts up again, to take a real hard look in the classes up and down a year. See if you can't find somebody you can be friendly to.”

“I can't do that!” The very idea made me itch. I'd gotten pretty used to being invisible at school, too.

“I don't see why not.” When she looked me in the eye like that it was impossible to look away. “Why, I'm . . .
pretty near sixty-five years older than you and we're friends, aren't we?”

I hadn't been so surprised since the day the town disappeared and Miss Lydia yelled out my name. But I sure liked her. If she thought we were friends, I guessed we were.

That night I crocheted her a potholder that was only a little bit crooked, and the next day she told me it was the prettiest thing she'd ever seen.

A
  lmost five weeks had gone by, all told, before the day it all happened. St. Swithin's Day, straight-up middle of July, dawned sunny and bright and, even if I couldn't plan on confiding it to Miss Lydia, I felt a wave of relief. Middle of the morning, I was out back trying to pick enough straggly green beans for that night's supper when Curtis drove his pickup into the alley from the back way. He yelled to get my attention and then said, “Come on, get in and go to town with me.”

“No, thanks,” is all I said.

Then he held up some money and a piece of notebook paper. “Mom wants you to get her some groceries.” That oily-looking smile again. “Guess she don't trust me with woman's work.”

I could hardly believe Miss Lydia would make me go anywhere with Curtis. I stepped out into the alley so I could see past our garage and across the street. Just then
Miss Lydia straightened up from her flowers and waved. She could see Curtis's truck right there plain as day, so I thought she was saying to go on.

I still didn't want to. But I figured that's part of what friends are for, to do things for you they don't want to do. Just because you're their friend.

After I got in, Curtis backed out of the alley instead of pulling on through. It was an odd thing to do, but I was trying not to think too much about where I was. Much later I remembered being barefoot, which right there would have made a sashay into the IGA out of the question.

I tried to run when he pulled up to the back of the school and stopped. I swear I did. I've imagined it a million times the last five years and every single time I get away somehow at that instant and run for home.

Sometimes I bite his hand and he lets go. Sometimes I kick him where it hurts and make off while he's bent double. Sometimes I just scream and it surprises him so, he lets go. Just for a second. Just long enough.

A second would have changed my life and everything in it since. But the truth is, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out the driver's door and over to the building before I could even get my feet under me. He held on so tight while he broke a window next to the handle on the big double door I got burns on my wrist. Deep
enough to scar just a little. I still wear a purple bracelet of skin when it turns bitter cold.

But I forgot about my wrist hurting when the back of my head hit the lunchroom floor. For a few seconds I thought I was going to pass out, but I guess adrenaline kept me awake.

I slapped and kicked and clawed best as I could until Curtis backhanded me across the face so hard I saw stars. I quit trying to hurt him then. But I couldn't stop trying to get away.

The sun was shining straight at me through the bare windows and I squeezed my eyes shut against the glare. I tried to block out everything else, too, but couldn't. Behind the blood red of my eyelids, I couldn't stop feeling or tasting or hearing or smelling.

I knew it was Curtis's tongue shoving into my mouth, but it felt like a snake trying to muscle its way past my teeth and it tasted like a dirty ashtray rinsed in coffee.

His whiskers scraped my cheeks like sandpaper, and the smell of Brylcreem in his hair mixed with stale sweat on his clothes and the smell of a million school lunches.

He started grunting while he pulled at my clothes. It sounded like a hog going after his mealtime slop. Sometimes now I imagine I threw up on him and it disgusted him so he let me go. But no matter how many times I gagged with his mouth mashed against mine,
nothing came up. My stomach was empty. Sometimes I wonder if eating breakfast that day might have saved everything.

Finally, Curtis took his mouth off mine so he could threaten to kill me if I didn't stop struggling. And then came a pain like I didn't know existed. White-hot pain like a thousand fingernails scraping my insides out. So bad I thought it couldn't get any worse.

But it could and it did, again and again, until the pain swallowed me up and that's what I became. I couldn't separate it from anything else in my being. Lightning bolts hit with the rhythm of waves on a beach, one following another. Each one tearing me open, ripping me apart.

And sometime during this Curtis grew strangely calm. He cooed at me, droning on like he was in a trance. Like he was trying to lullaby me to sleep. “That's it. Idn't that good? Idn't that what you wanted?”

And somehow, from somewhere behind his voice in my ear and beyond the pain I had become, I heard the sound of someone crying.

It must have been me.

C
  urtis had roared off in his truck and I had run all the way home before I realized the house key had fallen out of my pocket somewhere. I'd been sitting on our back step less than a minute before Miss Lydia was right there. She must have been watching for me.

She sat down trying to comfort me and at the same time ask questions I just couldn't answer. I kept shaking my head and wincing away from being touched. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to untangle the words in my head and string them together in a way that made sense.

But then she saw the blood running down my legs and she started crying too. That made me feel even worse. I'd never, ever be able to pretend it hadn't happened now, because it didn't belong to just me anymore. She knew and there was no way she could ever not know again.

She stood up and tried to get me to go with her. She wanted to take me home. To her house. That house.
Where he lived too. I tried to tell her no but couldn't get anything out beyond, “What if he . . . what if he . . .”

Miss Lydia stopped crying just enough to say, “Oh, he knows enough not to show his face.” Then she led me across the street by the hand like nobody had done since I was four years old.

She took me upstairs and started to run water in the bathtub, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I thought about taking off my clothes. I couldn't and I told her so.

She left and came back with two big old terrycloth bathrobes and told me if I'd take a bath, she'd put one on too.

I didn't want anyone to see me naked and told her so, and she said to put my clothes outside the door. She'd wait. I heard her crying even with the door closed. It was a terrible sound.

I'd only heard an old person cry once before. My guess is, heartbreak just comes as less and less a surprise as your life goes on. But I'd heard my grandma cry after they found my Uncle Junior under his tractor, and it was just the way Miss Lydia was carrying on now.

When I lowered myself into the tub, the hot water scalded the raw place between my legs, but it also told me my muscles had been tied in knots for so long they were starting to ache. I scrunched down until my chin was
touching the water's surface. Tried to let my arms and legs float.

The water was soon pink with the sticky blood soaking off me and I grabbed for the soap and washcloth. I scrubbed every inch I could reach, but rinsing off with that pink water—washing myself in my own blood—made me feel like I'd never be clean again.

Later, Miss Lydia and I sat together on her couch downstairs in those ratty old robes while my clothes went through the washer and dryer. She petted my hair when I laid my head in her lap.

It was easier to talk, not looking at her. So I told her about the day Curtis came to our house and how I had been scared of him then. “I guess I should've told you,” I said. “I just had no idea . . .” I felt so stupid.

She started trembling and her voice came out shaky. “Oh, honey. Oh, honey, I didn't know. I just didn't know or I would've done anything in the world to stop him.” Then she said she was sorry, that she never should have had a son in the first place. I knew that wasn't right and tried to tell her so.

That made her cry more, but after three false starts she told me. “I wasn't much older than you,” she said, “when my own daddy . . . oh, child. My own daddy hurt me like that. He did. He did.”