Hand Me Down

HAND

ME

DOWN

A NOVEL

Melanie Thorne

DUTTON

For my mom and honorary mom

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

My mom and her husband
are doing it in her bedroom. I listen to her bedsprings squeak and their hushed, heavy breathing. I need to pee, but if I get up they’ll hear me, and that sudden, conscious silence would be worse than the sound of chimp squeals and hyperventilation muffled by our hollow bedroom doors and the three feet of hallway in between. At least she’s not screaming,
Oh, God
, like I’ve seen in movies. I chew the slippery skin on the inside of my mouth and wonder if it’s still a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain during sex, or if then, it is like a prayer.

It is Terrance’s first night out. For two years my mom has saved her nice voice for his collect calls, driven the hour and a half to Vacaville every Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning to see him, waited expectantly for his twenty-page letters full of shaded hearts pierced with arrows, poems wrought with adolescent angst, and fantasies I can never, ever, repeat out loud. His dark penciled writing is frilly with curled loops and a childlike slant. I only read the letters because Jaime made me. “Why would he want her to do that thing with the marshmallows?” she asked after she found the envelopes, dozens of them, in a pile under our mom’s nightstand. I told her I’d rather not think about it.

Water sloshing and soft moaning sounds radiate from Mom’s bathroom now, and I start to wonder how they can both fit in the tub but,
gross
. When Terrance arrived at the apartment today he said, “I know you don’t like when I hug you, but I’m going to anyway!” He scooped me up in his arms and spun me around like I was a toddler while I stayed straight as a corpse. Mom snapped a photo and giggled. He set me down but held me close to his chest, the pressure of his splayed hands across my lower back kept my hips against him. He breathed in my ear, “I missed you.”

“We’re so excited you’re home,” Mom said, taking another picture. “Aren’t we, Liz?”

“Not as excited as me,” Terrance said. His fingers grazed the sides of my breasts as he released me, and if he hadn’t done it before, I might have thought it was an accident. He wagged his thick black eyebrows at Mom and they haven’t left her room since.

If Jaime still lived here, I’d be lying along the outer edge of her bed, singing or cracking jokes, but alone, I stuff Kleenex in my ears and fold my body until my limbs are wrapped around me like a shell.

“Check it out, Liz,” Terrance
says in the morning, turning his back to me. He wears only boxer shorts, his thin legs dark with long black hairs. Above the waist he looks like a bodybuilder, his back and chest divided into chunks of muscle that twitch with each of his movements. I wonder if he will continue to lift weights now that he’s out of prison, and the Grape-Nuts in my mouth turn to sand.

“Very, um”—I cough, clear my throat—“muscle y,” I say, getting up.

He beams. “Thanks,” he says, “but, no, look at this.” He blocks my way and points at his left shoulder blade. “My tattoo.” It’s a six-inch King Arthur sword with detailed braiding on the gold-and-black hilt, an almost silver blade stuck through a red heart. The heart has a white ribbon running from top left to bottom right with my mom’s name in delicate cursive. He says, “Don’t you want to touch it?”

I have promised Mom that I will be nice. Last week she said, “This has to work, Elizabeth.” After she’d bought him two new pairs of Levi’s jeans and a Forty-Niners cap, after she’d gotten a second TV for her bedroom and ordered the cable package with extra sports channels, after she’d moved Noah’s crib out of her bedroom, she said in a whisper, her blue-green eyes dark and too wide, “It has to work this time.”

So I don’t ask Terrance if one of his prison buddies inked it, or what he had to do in return, or what happened to the tattoo of his first wife’s name. I don’t cringe or gag at the thought of touching his bare skin. An older tattoo of a cross covers his right shoulder, this one the veiny blue-black you’d expect from BIC ballpoints and safety pins.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Mom says, coming from the kitchen carrying a plate of pancakes. She widens her eyes at me and nods at Terrance.
Please
, she mouths, her features tight. She says to Terrance, “Sit, babe.” She rubs his back and pushes him into a chair, kisses his neck. “Eggs are coming.”

She busted out her big ho ensemble yesterday when she went to pick him up: low-cut V neck green tank top, black miniskirt, and black strappy heels. This morning she is wearing a new nightgown
with major cleavage and I think one of her giant boobs might pop out as she follows me into the tiny kitchen with her anxious twitchiness. Her eyes plead with me while she takes my bowl and says, “I’ll do that for you, honey.” She hasn’t called me honey since I was five. “Go, or you’ll be late for school.”

I walk past Terrance and roll my eyes at his back as he shovels undercooked pancakes into his mouth. Mom watches me, her face strained, frozen in that imploring smile behind his head, and I sigh. She relaxes her face, her lips quivering as they descend. She knows me too well.

“It’s a pretty cool tattoo,” I say, and she smiles.
Thank you
, she mouths. I grab my backpack and head out the door.

Rachel meets me for lunch
at our spot by the dried up fountain in the old courtyard near the parking lot. Blue tiles line the bottom of the pool, but it fills with brown and orange leaves as the gnarled oak trees go bare, and I brush some off the concrete edge before sitting.

“Are you going to homecoming?” Rachel asks. I just look at her. “What?” she says and pulls out her lunch. “It’s our first high school dance.”

“Homecoming?” I lift one eyebrow at her. “Really?” I frown at the peanut butter on bread I slapped together.

Rachel hands me a Fruit Roll Up and some Cheetos. “I thought you might want to get out of your house for one night,” she says and takes a bite of the roast beef sandwich her dad made her.

“My mom probably won’t let me,” I say.

“You could ask,” Rachel says.

“If I can get her attention,” I say. “Last night—”

“You can try,” she says and scoots closer to me. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

“Dances aren’t really my idea of fun,” I say. I doubt Mom will buy me a dress and I don’t want to find a date. “At last year’s ‘dance’ people just head banged to Nirvana all night,” I say.

“But this is high school,” Rachel says. “It’s different now.” I scrunch my nose in disbelief. She says, “For me?”

I sigh. “Okay, I’ll ask.”

She hugs me. “So what happened last night?” I open my mouth and she grabs my arm. “Oh! He got out last night! I’m so sorry, how was it?”

As I tell her, deep gray clouds roll across the sun and I pray it doesn’t rain. I have to walk home.

For two years Terrance called
our house almost every day after school. A mechanical voice said, “You have a collect call from an inmate at a California state prison,” and we pushed two to accept the call and patched Terrance through to Mom at work on three-way. I’m not sure what Mom told her coworkers at the abuse victims’ organization about her husband, but she writes grants to help women assaulted by men like Terrance so I doubt anyone at her office knew the truth.

Jaime discovered early on that if we held down the mute button after we clicked Terrance and Mom together, we could hear them talk and they had no idea. Jaime listened every day. “He always asks
what she’s wearing,” she’d tell me, or, “He gets jealous if she mentions another guy.” Jaime collected information and we used it to gauge Mom’s moods. If the prison went into lockdown on a Friday—which meant no visit Saturday—the dishes were done, the TV off, and dinner on the table when Mom got home.

One afternoon about a month ago, Jaime came into my room and put her head in my lap like she used to when we played house and I was the mom. “What’s wrong?” I asked, putting down my book and stroking her hair.

“Terrance is getting out next month,” she said and started crying. “Mom’s really excited.”

“Fuck,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

“I called Dad. He said we can come live with him and Crystal.”

I sighed. “He’s not sober.”

“So? At least he doesn’t lie.”

“Mom’s not going to lie us into a ditch on the way to school.” I touched Jaime’s hairline at her right temple, where a V shaped silvery-white scar is etched into her skin under the blond strands.

“It wasn’t a ditch,” she said, shaking her head and brushing off my hand. “It was an accident.”

I eyed the raised and shiny reminder of the cost of letting my guard down for even a second. I said, “They’re not accidents when he’s drinking.”

Jaime pulled her bangs over her scar the way she does when she catches me staring. She sat up. “Crystal told me this wasn’t Terrance’s first time in jail. That he didn’t deal drugs like Mom said.”

“Well, he did that, too,” I said and wondered how much of the police reports Crystal had shown Jaime. Some of that stuff was not
for kids. Living in Crystal’s filthy two-bedroom trailer was not for kids, either.

“I’m scared, Liz.”

“Scared enough to live with Dad?”

“He said he’d love to have us,” she said.

“He’d love to have us take care of Crystal’s daughter for him.”

“You’re not scared of Terrance the pervert?” She looked at me and I marveled again at how our eyes could be the exact same color blue, like seeing my eyes in her face. “Did Crystal tell you what he does?” she said. She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “It’s freaky and gross.”

Crystal had seated me at her always sticky kitchen table and read me dozens of pages of eyewitness accounts, police summaries, and victim statements that provided details of his crimes I didn’t need. I’d already noticed Terrance’s wandering eyes carried the same restless look as cheetahs and tigers pacing in their zoo cages, instinct contained but not eliminated. “Yes, I’m scared of Terrance,” I said. I’ve stopped wearing shorts to bed and I get dressed in the locked bathroom. “But I’m scared of Dad, too.”

“Dad would never hurt us,” she said and hugged me. “He loves us at least.”

He hurts us all the time
. “You know that doesn’t matter,” I said. “He loved Mom, too.”

Then last week, Jaime went to school one day and didn’t come home. She didn’t tell me beforehand, just called from Dad’s and said she wasn’t coming back. Mom didn’t want to talk to her. “If she’d rather be there, then fine,” Mom said, smiling wide enough to show the pearl-gray tooth behind her left incisor. “No need to
have a big argument about it.” Her glasses reflected the light so I couldn’t see her eyes, but she walked away with her hips swinging to the bass thumping from the new stereo she’d bought for Terrance.