Break the Skin (23 page)

We drove down the Lloyd Expressway to Roberts Stadium to see
Cheap Trick. “Classic power rock,” Lester called their music. I knew who they were. In fact, it was why I’d wanted to come. Daddy had told the story over and over of how, when he was nineteen—this was back in 1975—he saw them play on a hay wagon on the Mt. Gilead courthouse square for the centennial celebration. “Cheap Trick,” he always said with a shake of his head that told me he was still amazed. “They were just these kids on a hay wagon. Right before they hit it big.” Now they were nothing. Just a band on the backward side of success. Just these men as old as Daddy would have been, playing shows in cowtowns like Evansville. The opening act was a band called Watershed and they were no one I’d ever heard of.

It was nice there at the concert, and at the end, when Cheap Trick sang a song about the fire that burns long after the love is gone, and couples were hugging and swaying together, Lester put his arm around my waist, and I let him.

Later, when we were at his house, he had trouble with the lock. “Here, let me,” I said, and without a protest, he stepped back so I could turn the key.

It was, I decided then and there as the door pushed open and I felt the heat inside the house, one of the best moments of my life. I’d said,
Here, let me
, and he hadn’t been flustered at all. I’d taken the key, and he hadn’t said a word—had acted glad, really, as if we’d loved each other for years and had come to rely on such favors.

When I think back on it now, it’s hard for me to say if I really loved him or whether I’d just gotten tired of not having anyone to love, and there he was, a sweet man, who loved me first.

THE MIGRAINES CAME
and went. One afternoon, I was at Lester’s house, watching a DVD, the Marx Brothers in
A Day at the Races
, and the edges of my vision blurred, and I felt the first stabs of pain in my temples. It was one of those winter days that break clear after a stretch of clouds
and snow, and the sunlight slanting through the window was too much for me. I was sitting on the couch with Lester, and before I could catch myself, I slumped over against him, and he asked me what was wrong.

“Headache,” I said. “Could you maybe close the blinds?”

The noise from the movie was too much for me. The Marx Brothers were involved in some sort of hide-and-seek game. Doors were slamming, and people were stomping through a room.

Lester closed the blinds. “Do you want some Tylenol?” He turned down the sound on the television. “Laney?”

I was trying to count. I was doing my best to take deep breaths. But the room was spinning, and I felt the nausea rise into my throat. I tried to make it to the bathroom, but I couldn’t, and I was sick all over the linoleum floor.

Lester said, “Oh, Laney,” his voice all sweet and tender. He helped me into the bathroom, and he wet a washcloth and he cleaned my face. He gave me another damp cloth, and then he said, “I’ll be right outside. Just call if you need me.”

I ran water from the faucet and caught a little in my mouth and swished it around and spit it out. I dried my face on one of Lester’s towels. The pain behind my eyes was still there, and I felt so tired.

He tapped on the door. “Laney, are you all right?” He sounded so worried, so I opened the door and stepped outside.

He’d cleaned the floor, and there was a smell of lilac air freshener, the only reminder that I’d been sick. He’d taken care of everything, and not a word of complaint.

“I’m so tired,” I said, and he put his arm around my waist and led me to the couch and helped me lie down.

“You can sleep if you want. I’ll turn off the TV.”

“Leave it on,” I said. “Just turned down low the way it is right now.”

In the movie, Harpo was playing. I closed my eyes and listened to that harp music. Lester covered me with a blanket, and he sat down on the floor by the couch, and he held my hand. I drifted off to sleep, but
before I did I heard Lester chuckling softly, and I thought it was the most wonderful sound, one I could get used to hearing the rest of my life.

“POOR LANEY.”
When I woke, it was dark, but Lester hadn’t turned on any lights. At some point while I’d slept, he’d switched off the television and come back to sit by me. I reached out and touched his arm. “Do you feel better?” he asked, and I said I thought I did.

“I want you to go with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“To see Rose. If she did this to you, then she can make it stop.”

I shook my head. “You don’t want to see Tweet.” I was afraid there might be an ugly scene between him and Lester over the fact that Tweet had told him to stay away from the band. “I know you’ve got your history with him.”

“I want to help you, Laney. That’s all that matters.”

So that’s how I came to be back at Rose and Tweet’s. I told the police officers this without confessing everything there was to reveal. I still hoped I wouldn’t have to say it all.

Rose let us in the house and then just turned and walked over to the couch, where she eased herself down, her hand bracing her lower back. My heart twisted. I’d never seen her look so tired, her face slack, dark circles under her eyes. And there was Tweet, monkeying around with his clarinet, his eyes closed, so far inside the tune he was playing—“Moonglow,” Lester would tell me later—that there might as well not have been anyone else inside that house. Tweet didn’t even seem to mind that Lester was there, as if he’d forgotten all about accusing him of stealing from the band and telling him to stay away.

“Rose,” I said, and I didn’t even try to hide how much it stunned me to see her looking the way she did. She settled a cushion behind her back and then rested her hands on her stomach, which was swollen now. “Rose MacAdow,” I said.

“Well, at least you remember my name.” She glared at me. “Long time, no see. You’ve been a ghost, Laney.”

“Work,” I said. “You know. Busy.”

“Sure, I know.” Rose lifted an arm and flicked her hand at Lester. “What’s shaking with you two these days?”

“Laney’s been having migraines,” Lester said. “Horrible headaches, Rose. You know?”

I knew he was fishing, hoping Rose would give herself away, some little sign that said, yes, she stuck those pins into that doll, yes, she was the one causing my headaches.

“Rose, did you put a hex on me?” I blurted it out. I stood there with my hands balled up into fists, and I said what was on my mind. “You made a poppet doll for me, didn’t you? You stuck pins in it and said a spell and gave me those migraines.”

Tweet stopped playing his clarinet, and it was suddenly so quiet I could hear Rose breathing through her mouth.

“Why, Laney,” she said, “do you really think I’d do that?”

“I do think that. In fact, I know it.”

“Maybe you’re just imagining things. Maybe you’re—”

She started to go on, but I stopped her. “Poke saw you. He told me everything.” I let it sink in, the fact that she couldn’t escape the truth. I saw her grimace. I took no pleasure from her discomfort. In fact, it made me sad. I said, “Why’d you do it, Rose? I thought we were friends.”

“You went back to being friends with Delilah,” she said.

“She was in trouble with Bobby May. I told you that.”

“You tossed me away like an old shoe.”

“Was that any call to try to hurt me?”

She was reaching her hand out to me, like she was trying to push herself up from the couch but couldn’t. “Do you really think I can cast spells?” Somehow I knew that if I took her hand I’d be answering the question. Only I didn’t know whether I’d be answering yes or no, or what
the right answer should be. Her fingers were trembling, and I listened to her breathing. “Do you, Laney?”

I couldn’t bring myself to leave her hand hanging there in the air between us. I took it, and I let her pull me down onto the couch beside her. “Are you all right, Rose?”

“Laney, Laney.” She held my face in her hands, and then she kissed me on each temple. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Later, I’d wonder whether she only meant she was sorry that circumstances were such that she had to give me those headaches. At the time, though, I heard what I wanted to, that Rose loved me, that she’d stop causing me misery, that the two of us would be friends again.

And just like that, the migraines stopped. “What do you think about that?” I asked Delilah a few days later.

“Think?” said Delilah. “What do I think?” She tilted her head back and stuck out her chin. “You’ll see, Laney. That woman’s trouble.”

“I think everything’s going to be all right,” I said. “Really, I do.”

More than anything, at least for a time, I wanted us all to have peaceful, easy lives. When we were at our best, I could see the people we could be—people like my mother and Poke and Lester, who all knew what it was to love someone. I’ll have the rest of my life to think how close we were to being those kind of people forever—how near we were to being good and faithful and kind.

SO I WAS FRIENDS
with Rose again. I drove her to her doctor appointments, and sometimes we’d go through the thrift stores, shopping for baby clothes. For a few weeks, this was my life: hanging out at Rose and Tweet’s, being with Lester; going to work at Walmart, where Delilah always asked me if I was all right.

“I’m going to look out for you, ’Lil Sis. I messed up once, but I’m not going to again. You mean the world to me.”

“You don’t have to worry,” I told her. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Really.”

I thought it was—thought I was on the road to being where my mother had always dreamed I’d be. I made a call to the community college and signed up for GED classes, classes I’d never attend. I had every intention. I wish I could convince my mother of that now. She said later I shouldn’t have let what happened stop me.
You have to take care of yourself, Laney
.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I was still learning how to stand on my own. Before I could go to my first class, Lester disappeared, and without him, I was lost.

MISS BABY

I
kept checking my rearview mirror all the way from Deep Ellum back to Denton, convinced that sooner or later, I’d see Slam’s black Suburban bearing down on me.

“He won’t come after us, will he?” Donnie asked.

I said I was afraid he might. He was a dangerous man, and there was no telling what he’d do. My heart was pounding in my chest. I took a few deep breaths and curled my fingers more tightly around the steering wheel. It took everything I had to keep my eyes on the highway stretching out ahead of me.

Donnie said, “I won’t let him hurt you. I promise you that.”

“Oh, Lord.” I felt the tears coming to my eyes. “What’s going to happen to Pablo now?”

It was after midnight by the time I pulled into my driveway. A light was still on in Emma’s house, a little glow that showed through the diamond pane of glass in the front door and told me she and Pablo were in there waiting. When I tapped on the door—such a mousy noise, so afraid I was to deliver my news—the light inside the house went out. I knew Emma was looking out the peephole, making sure it was all right to answer the door.

“Emma,” I said. “It’s Baby.”

The dead bolt shot back, and the door opened, and Emma said, “Miss Baby, Lord-a-mercy. Get in here.”

So Donnie and I stepped inside—what else could we do?—and I waited for Pablo to come to us and ask for the money.

The house was quiet, no one but Emma to be seen. She switched on a tea lamp on a table by the picture window. The only sign of Pablo was the rounded toe of a loafer sticking out from the hem of the drapes. One of his shoes had gotten pushed back beneath those drapes and made it look now as if he might be hiding behind them. Mami used to chew him out good for leaving clothes strewn around the house. He’d come home from school and just start a trail from the front door to his bedroom—jacket dropped on the couch, sweater wadded up on the coffee table, shoes kicked off in the hallway. “Careless,” Mami said to him one day. “You’re a careless boy.” He gave her a smirk. “Aren’t you one to talk?” he said. She asked him exactly what he meant by that. “Where were you last night?” he asked her. “Who were you with?” Then he said the worst thing he could say:
“Puta.”
He called Mami a whore, said it in a low, even voice, and once it was said, there was no way in the world to take it back. Such was the history of our family, a story of hurt hearts, of wounds so deep nothing could heal them. The Watershed song from Club Dada was still in my head. It would be for a long, long time.
Mi familia
. We were experts at breaking the skin, at knowing just where to stick the needle to cause the most pain. In a way, it became the only way we knew we still mattered to one another at all.

“Where is he?” I asked Emma. “Where’s Pablo?”

She put a finger to her lips, signaling me to be quiet. Then her bony fingers wrapped themselves around my wrist, and she said, “Miss Baby, he’s gone to sleep. He’s back there in the bedroom sleeping.”

It sliced me open, the thought of Pablo sleeping in the still night, trusting that eventually I’d be there and I’d have just what he needed. I remembered nights when I was still a
niña
and Mami was gone, he’d come to my bed and he’d lie down beside me and tell me not to cry. He’d say he was
mi hermano
, and he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me.
No matter what might happen with Mami or our
abuelita
, he’d be there. The two of us. Forever.

Now he was dreaming whatever dreams a man like him had. Here he was at the worst point of his life—time, for all he knew, running down to
nada
—and he gave himself over to sleep. He trusted himself to the Otherworld, where fairies come out to push our lives along to wherever they want them to go. I longed for that power, the magic to wake Pablo and tell him everything was fine, to give him a new life, one where he and Carolyn would come back together and live long and happy. He wouldn’t have to be afraid. He wouldn’t have to pay for the bad he’d done. I’d just wipe it away. I’d give him that.