Entering Normal (7 page)

Lately, in spite of her efforts, things are changing. Her balance is precarious, as if deep inside she is undergoing a tectonic plate shift, like the one she heard about on a
Nova
show Ned watched. When the narrator explained that imperceptible and subtle movements occur within the earth's crust and that these alterations precede earthquakes, she felt a jolt of recognition. Since the accident this feeling has been growing, and she has especially felt it this fall, as if her interior world were oscillating in minute and dangerous movements. Danger hangs invisible in the air. Threatening.

She turns out the kitchen light and heads up the hall stairs, guided by the faint glow of the night-light Ned has left on for her. The world outside is silent save for the distant barking of the McDonalds' collie.

She undresses in the dark, slides into bed, careful not to disturb Ned. He is a good man. Honest and hard working. She is lucky to have him. She repeats these words like a prayer.

He moans slightly in his sleep. She wonders if he is sick—those worrisome headaches—and she feels the unpleasant sting of guilt for turning him away earlier. What if he has a tumor? An aneurysm? Could she stand to lose him too? Could she stand to lose another member?

After Todd died, Reverend Wills gave them a book written for couples who experienced the loss of a child. “A lost member,” the author wrote. Like a leg lopped off, Rose thought as she read the words. Or an arm. The book said that the death of a child could bring a couple closer or drive them apart, that couples either turned to each other for comfort, tried to make sense out of the tragedy and discover spiritual support, or they divorced, the assault of a child's death too much for their marriage to withstand.

Neither has happened to her and Ned. They just float, suspended in time, waiting for a life raft to find them.

CHAPTER 7

OPAL

DURING HER FIRST TWO MONTHS IN NORMAL, OPAL had prepared herself for a call from Billy, but the weeks have passed without so much as a single word except for the messages he relays through her mama, messages Opal knows enough not to trust. Melva can carry on all she wants about Billy missing her and Zack, but if he misses them all so goddamned much, why doesn't he at least call? At first this lack of communication irritated Opal, but now she is reassured by it. It reinforces her belief that Billy is relieved to have them out of his life, that he won't make any fuss.

When he finally does call she is so totally unprepared that his voice sends a jolt straight to her stomach.

“HI, BILLY,” SHE MANAGES— COOL AS YOU PLEASE—AND thinks,
Shit.
She slides down to the floor, her back against the cupboard, and cradles the phone base in her lap, unconsciously taking the same pose she held every night the fall of her junior year when, night after night, she would slouch down on the living room carpet and hold the phone tight against her ear. For hours, they would talk in whispers, tones varyingly cottony or tender, silky or hushed, as they progressed through the stages: attraction to flirtation, first date to dating, steady dating to phone sex. Phone sex led to the real thing—sex on the bench seat of his black Ram or behind one of the gravestones at the back of the Baptist cemetery, anywhere they could be alone for five minutes. Who would believe that what began with hot whispers and the thrilling tenor of one boy's voice could lead to such trouble, that it would end in tears of disbelief and crisis—unimaginable crisis?

“Shit, I miss you, Opal.” He has lowered his voice. First time they've talked since she left New Zion, and he's acting like they spoke last week. He is
so
out of touch with reality. “How's Zack?” he is saying.

As if he anything like cares. “Well, he's just fine.” She lets her eyes roam around the kitchen and finally fix on the small yellow-and-blue spot stuck straight in the middle of a cupboard door.

The sticker—peeled from a banana—was there when she moved in, a remnant left by the Montgomerys. It was so startlingly out of place in the sterile, avocado kitchen that Opal had immediately taken it as a sign. Stuck like that in the middle of the cupboard, what else can it be? She has not yet figured out the meaning.
Chiquita
. Wasn't there a singer from South America with that name? Or is she confusing her with the character in the banana ads?

“Opal? You still there?”

She pulls her attention from the decal. “I'm here.”

“I miss you, Opal.”

She pauses, knowing the prescribed response, the answer Billy waits for:
I miss you, too.
The wire hums with her silence.

“How're you doing? You okay?” he asks, as if Melva hasn't been feeding him regular reports.

“I'm great,” she says in a baton twirler's chirp. “Just great.”

“Yeah, well that's wonderful,” he says in a voice suddenly gone flat.

“I've rented a house,” she says, “two stories, three bedrooms, a backyard. It's on a dead-end street which is good—safe for Zack—and there's a nice older couple next door.” She knows she is babbling but can't stop. “I've enrolled Zack in preschool and there's a toy store here that is interested in the dolls.”

Instantly she regrets mentioning her work. Although it is the first thing she was ever good at—really and surprisingly good at—Billy hates that she makes dolls, though what it is about them that makes him so mad is beyond her.

“Well, I'm glad to hear everything's so terrific with you, Opal, because—not that you asked—but me, I'm not doing so great.”

Crap.
Not five minutes have passed in the first conversation they've had since she left New Zion and already it's heading straight downhill. It was mentioning the dolls. She stares at the yellow sticker, and just like that the singer's name comes to her. Not Chiquita. Carmen. Carmen Miranda. But that doesn't help her figure out the meaning of the sticker.

“That story you fed me,” Billy says, “about going to visit a relative?”

Reluctantly she drags her attention back to the call. “Yes.”

“Well, damn it all, Opal. You lied.”

Whatever. “Lied?”

“About visiting a relative.”

Ancient history, Opal thinks.

“Your daddy told me you don't even have relatives in Ohio,” he says in an injured tone, as if this is the important part of her lie.

“I know,” she says. Sometimes he can be so
thick
she has to wonder if someone has to zip his fly for him.

“Well, shit, Opal. I believed you.”

“I'm sorry,” she says. A bone tossed from the safe distance of six states.

“Sorry doesn't count for much right now,” he says.

“Let's don't fight,” she says. “There's no point.”

“There is a point, and the point is I miss my boy, Opal.”

Well, just how did he grow him a paternal streak? Here she's been away for more than two months, and he's just now getting around to calling her. Is she supposed to think he gives an honest damn? And it isn't like he ever paid all that much attention to Zack. He was a bum daddy when they were in New Zion, and Opal can't see why two months' absence would improve matters. Billy barely held Zack when he was an infant, wanted no part of feeding him or—God knows— changing him. And as Zack grew older he whined, “I'm no good with little kids. I don't know what to do with them.” So now he's suddenly learned? Quick learner.

“Listen, Opal,” he says with a voice so serious that an unexpected thrill of fear courses through her, “I want you back here. I want us to get married, be a family. I mean it, honey.”

Fat to no chance of that, she thinks. Just because she made a mistake by getting pregnant, she isn't going to compound it by marrying him. Billy's last name should be He Always Wants What He Can't Have. The most popular kid in New Zion High and the only reason he chose Opal was because she kept him dangling for weeks. Gave him only a little at a time. Had ideas and interests beyond his pretty butt.

“I mean it, Opal. We could get married right away. Give Zack a proper home.”

She hears Melva's voice in the “proper home for Zack” comment.

“We've got to talk about this, Opal. We've got to work something out. You can't just stay away like this.”

“My being here has nothing to do with you, Billy.”

“But Zack has something to do with me. He's my son, too. My blood.”

“Like you really wanted him.”

His reply is muffled. She hears in the background a voice that is definitely female. A flash of jealousy turns quickly to anger. Calling and acting like he wants to marry her when all the time he's with some slut. Someone like Caryl Jackson who for sure wears her Junior ROTC uniform while she's making out. Caryl Jackson who is as flat as a board without her padded, push-up bra. Well, let him have a battalion of women. It's none of her business.

He cups the receiver with his hand, murmurs something on his end, then says into the phone, “When we're done, your mama wants to talk to you.”

“You're calling from my mama's?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing there?” This news floors her. Is he living there now or what?

“I just stopped by for dinner.”

Stopped by? It isn't like her parents' house is exactly on his way home.

“Opal, we got to talk. You can't shut me out like this.” There is another muffled exchange on his end, and then the phone is handed to Melva.

“This isn't easy for any of us,” her mama begins. “I'm ashamed to think a child of mine could behave in such an irresponsible way.”

“This isn't about you, Mama,” she cuts in—Lordy, hasn't she heard all this before—but Melva is off and running.

“If you can't think of my feelings, or your daddy's or Billy's, you could at least consider your son. He needs a daddy.”

Opal is not as indifferent to this as her mama might think and has spent many nights brooding over this very point. From day one, she has been concerned about how the separation would affect Zack, and several times it has occurred to her that she should mention Billy to Zack, ask straight out if he misses him. But then she thinks, why disturb sleeping dogs? Of course she would die before giving her mama this much ammunition.

“For the life of me,” Melva says, “I can't figure out what you're doing. Sometimes I think you deliberately set out to upset people's lives, to break people's hearts.”

Shit.
Doesn't her mama know she'd never deliberately set out to hurt people or break their hearts? How can she make Melva understand she is just trying the only way she knows to keep from drowning in the sea of other people's hopes and plans and expectations, from letting herself be talked into a marriage she knows in the deepest part of her heart would be a mistake?

“Are you listening to me, Raylee?”

“Mama,” she says. “I can't do this with you.”

“Do what?” Melva gets her hard tone on.

“This conversation. We've been over this all before.”

“For all the good it did.” Melva says. “Now you listen to me—”

Listen to her? Hasn't she been listening to her all her life? Lecturing at Opal is the sum and total of her mama's concept of mother-daughter relating.

“You can't expect people to accept this sort of thing lying down. You can't turn people's lives upside down and expect them to sit by and do nothing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Melva is working on her last nerve here. In spite of her best intentions, Opal is shouting.

“There's no need to raise your voice to me,” her mama says. “I just want you to realize that your actions have consequences.”

Actions have consequences.
Hasn't she heard this original piece of philosophy from Melva about three trillion times in her life? “You gave me that lecture when I was a kid, Mama. I'm not fifteen.”

Fifteen.
Standing in the living room unable to meet her daddy's eyes. Melva ranting on about shame and disappointment and how she won't be able to hold her head up around town and how she, Raylee, had her whole life still ahead of her, then getting down to the business at hand.
We know a doctor . . . this early on . . . a safe procedure.
Her mama couldn't bring herself to say “abortion,” yet the word hung in the air like a sour smell. Her own reaction, a swift plunge into lethargy—just let her mama take command—was followed by rationalization. She wouldn't be the first in her class; she could go on as if nothing had happened, an easy way out. She was as surprised as her mama and daddy when she heard herself say no.

That
was fifteen.

“Well, stop acting as if you were,” Melva continues. “You're so gosh darn wrapped up in yourself you can't see we're heartbroken here. Absolutely heartbroken with missing our darling boy.”

Opal can't traverse this territory one more time. “I have to go, Mama. I just got Zack to bed, and I think I hear him crying.”

“Of course he's crying. He misses his daddy. He misses all of us. What you are doing to him is beyond irresponsible. It's criminal. Actions have consequences,” she repeats. “Don't you be coming back to me down the road and saying I didn't warn you.”

After Opal hangs up, Melva's words echo.
Don't you be coming back
to me and saying I didn't warn you.
She closes her eyes and concentrates on rubbing away this message. She won't let poisonous thoughts spark her own fears. This is just another of her mama's idle threats, more manipulation to gain control and talk her into returning to New Zion.

She stares at the Chiquita sticker as if it could provide her with the answer. She sure could use a sign about now.

The first time she had a date with Billy, she saw a sign. He pulled up in front of her house in the Dodge Ram pickup he was so proud of, a truck with a cab so high off the ground she knew she'd need his help to climb aboard. Immediately she caught sight of the windsurfer sticking up out of the truck bed, and even from a distance she could read the purple letters scrawled across the board's broad fiberglass body:
No
Fear.
Much later she wondered how she could have misinterpreted a message that, on the surface of it, seemed so obvious.

Reading signs is like hearing music. They're always there; you've just got to tune into the right frequency. She stares at the sticker. She hasn't got the dial nailed on this one.

The phone call reverberates in her head. She's wounded to think her mama believes she goes through life setting out to shatter people's hearts. Is Billy's heart broken? She has no idea. But she won't marry Billy just so Zack has a daddy, just so it looks good for her mama, just so her mama can hold her head up. She doesn't love Billy enough, even if—she has to admit now—his voice still has power over her. Even if that night up in the old burial ground behind New Zion Baptist she had done things with Billy that even now could make her blush.

The power of sex. And where does that get you?

Jesus, he'd turned her on with his touch in ways she wouldn't have imagined possible. It got so if he just drew his fingernail down the inside of her arm, she would get wet. Now, remembering, she feels heat spread through her belly. Well, shit. It's this appetite for sex that got her into this fix in the first place.

She's heard about that big-league ballplayer who had a sexual addiction and thinks this is what she had with Billy. Out of bed, the honest truth is, he bored her. But give him five minutes alone with her in a bed and her brain disappeared, her body like a country invaded by a foreign power. One of the hardest things about splitting from Billy is missing sex. Well, forget sex. She has no intention of getting caught in that trap again.