Hand Me Down (24 page)

I kiss Jaime’s forehead and feel my way through the dark hallway to the bathroom, my nighttime refuge. I paint my toenails with some cranberry-colored polish I find in a back cabinet and sing to myself. I envy Jaime’s ability to ignore the “reminders” Tammy talked about, the constant weight of past wrongs. Tammy said I should try to make peace with the hurts, but if they keep repeating, how can I move on? In the mirror I notice a string of red bumps running down my left cheek. In my head I hear Jaime call me pimple face, which she did when she wanted to be mean. My shoulders slump in my reflection. We don’t even spend enough time together to fight anymore.

Out in the family room I step gently on my newly painted toes, the tan carpet spongy like short-clipped grass under my feet. The quarter moon shines through the locked windows and lights up the space enough for me to see the furniture in the family room: the gray sectional couch, the recliner by the fireplace. This fireplace burns real wood, though, since Winston says it’s a “fire hazard,” it never gets used. The dark timber mantel displays a ship in a bottle, and a gold-framed painting in pastels of three women
wearing bonnets and laughing in a grassy meadow that is definitely not an original.

The light from the windows increases as I survey things that don’t belong to me: Ashley’s
Tiger Beat
and
Teen Vogue
magazines on the floor, Matt’s handheld video console, a pair of his little socks bunched up by the TV, Jaime’s pink plastic Hello Kitty makeup case and scrunchie on the couch. Outside, the sky is gray-blue and hazy. Lingering fog filters the rising sun and it figures that even during summer I can’t get away from the gray.

I pick up one of Ashley’s girly magazines just as Matt comes down wearing
Bananas in Pajamas
pajamas. I smile. “My brother loves that show,” I say and picture Noah singing along with the talking bananas, clapping his small hands. “He has those same pajamas,” I say. “A few sizes smaller.”

“I didn’t choose them,” Matt says and plops down next to me. “Mom buys all my clothes.” He yawns, and with his eyes half-closed shoves a cartridge into his SEGA console. “Want to play?”

I shrug and take the controller he hands me. The game is Primal Rage, dinosaur combat. I control a red, fire-breathing T. rex named Diablo and as soon as I learn the maneuvers, I pretend Matt’s bluish-purple velociraptor is Terrance and attack it with a vengeance. I think of his damp lips on my ear and deliver a spray of fire. I think of his heavy-lidded stare and stomp on the velociraptor’s head.

“Do your parents let you play this violent death match stuff?”

Matt leans toward me. “I convinced Dad it was a prehistoric learning game.” My eyebrows jump and he grins. “It does teach survival skills,” he says. “So it wasn’t really a lie.”

I laugh as his aggressive dinosaur leaps at me with teeth bared. “What if you get caught?”

“They trust me,” Matt says. “It’s you guys they think will lie.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Mom says it’s not your fault. That you and Jaime were in bad situations,” Matt says, his fingers clicking away on his controller as his dinosaur completes flying kicks and underbelly attacks on my much slower T. rex. “She said you had bad influences.”

I sigh. “What does your dad think of us?”

Matt hesitates, and that’s enough confirmation for me. Deborah can be as charming and convincing as my dad, and I bet Winston doesn’t have much of a chance to say no when she puts her mind to something.

I say, “Do you ever read?”

“Sure,” Matt says, “I read science books about flying and space engineering and entomology and—”

“Are you into guns?”

“My dad has guns,” he says. I know. I also know he keeps them loaded in a safe in his office, a safe taller than me.

“Does he let you use them?”

“Not here.” Matt’s birdlike dinosaur pecks at Diablo’s neck and rips off a strip of red flesh. Blood sprays everywhere but fades before hitting the pixilated background grass. “But sometimes he takes us to the shooting range. He says it’s important for our safety.” My neon-green life box at the top of the screen runs out, and I die. Too bad Terrance doesn’t have a life meter that’s running low. “You’re better than Ashley,” Matt says.

“Thanks,” I tell him and pat his head, which has yet to outgrow
that baby phase of being twice the size of his body. He looks like a giant doll no one would ever buy. When Matt was little, he pounded his head repeatedly against walls, floors, doorknobs, and once, the concrete driveway. These days, I understand the impulse and I wonder if he remembers what was so horrible he wouldn’t stop until he was tied down or passed out.

Matt sniffs and says, “Mmm. Saturday morning bread.” It does smell good, and it reminds me of waking up in Connecticut the first time we visited Tammy. Each morning she toasted cinnamon-raisin bagels and scraped real butter across the top. The fog rolled away from the surface of the pond behind her house, revealing jungle-green plants and trees growing at the water’s edges near cattails and lily fields, their lush, thick canopies stretching out over the moss-coated surface. We sat on bar stools at Tammy’s kitchen counter and watched the humid stillness, sometimes broken by a lethargic dragonfly or a leaf too heavy with sweat dropping its puddle. She asked us questions like, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?” and promised to take us there when we were older. “When you graduate from college,” she told us, “I’ll take you anywhere you want.”

The cinnamon smell draws me from the dinosaur battles on screen to stare through the clear plastic square on the bread machine designed for viewing, but all I see is gray. “How do you tell when the bread is done?” I ask Matt, who is on level twelve with his velociraptor.

Deborah answers from the stairway. “It beeps. It’s supposed to be done at eight, but then it needs to sit for a minute.”

It’s too early to listen to Deborah’s list of things she thinks she
can do to cheer me up. She won’t talk about what happened, she’ll only say things like, “Try to look on the bright side,” or, “Positive attitudes put problems in their place,” as if I’m depressed because my favorite TV show got canceled. She says things like, “Oh, come on, Liz, it’s not so bad. If you come to the mall I’ll buy you a new outfit.” As if presents and cinnamon bread can protect me from the real dangers she doesn’t want to address.

The bread machine beeps while I am looking through the window in the top and I jump. Deborah presses her hand against my back for a second and I jump again. She says, “So, what do you want to do today?” I shrug. “I thought maybe we’d go shopping,” she says.

“You don’t need to buy me anything.”

“Do you have a dress for church?”

My nostrils flare out, but I bite my tongue, literally, and taste blood. “I’m sure I can find something.”

“I want you and Jaime to sing with me on the worship team,” she says and my eyes go wide. “Oh, don’t worry, not tomorrow of course, but soon. Jaime already agreed. You two have such heavenly voices; I can’t wait to hear you in practice.”

“Um.” My face feels stiff, my tongue is swollen, and I can’t make my mouth form words.

“So you’ll need something pretty to wear, and we might as well start looking today.” My brain is overloading with things I can’t say, filling like a balloon and ramming my skull from the inside. “The early bird gets the worm,” she says.

“I feel ill,” I say.

“You just need to eat,” she says. “You hardly touched my famous
meatloaf last night.” She slices me a big piece of squared cinnamon goodness and slathers it in butter. I have to admit it is delicious. She cuts and butters slices for Matt and herself and we stand in the kitchen eating fresh bread and staring out the window at the azalea bushes near the driveway.

After my second piece Deborah says, “So, should we get going?”

“Going where?” Ashley says as she staggers into the kitchen like she’s drunk.

“I don’t know if I’m up for the mall,” I say.

Deborah huffs her lips together and sounds like an unhappy horse. She lifts her hands and says, “What teenager turns down new clothes?” Those of us who have sex offender stepdads who don’t need any encouragement.

Ashley says, “You said you’d buy me a new swimsuit.”

Deborah says to me, “Do you need a swimsuit?” and Ashley gives me the evil eye behind her mother’s red hair. She makes an
L
with her thumb and index finger and raises it to her forehead.

“I have one,” I tell Deborah, and wonder what Rachel is doing today without me. “Thanks, though.” What I wouldn’t give to be lying out by the river, coconut tanning oil on my skin, drugs blurring my thoughts, talking with Rachel and laughing at her jokes.

“You must need something,” Deborah says and it’s true, but she can’t provide the things I need.

I say, “Sleeping pills?”

Deborah frowns. “That’s not funny, Liz.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Did my mom tell you how long she plans to leave me here?” I ask and my voice strains just a little.

Deborah reaches over to hug me and I let her. She smells like
laundry detergent and artificial fruitiness. “Let’s talk about that later,” she says. Deborah puts a bread crumb in her mouth and then licks her fingers. “Okay, troop,” she says and claps her hands together. “Time to start the day.”

Ashley groans, but my days and nights and naps blend into each other without clear stops or starts and I wasn’t kidding about the sleeping pills. I can feel myself slipping deeper into a pit of quicksand, being swallowed bit by bit. Every day it’s harder to move my feet so I stop struggling and don’t bother to scream, even when I’m trapped up to my waist and can’t move my hands, even as my mouth fills with thick, grainy mud. No one has noticed yet that I’m sinking.

At dinner, Deborah spoons more
mashed potatoes onto my plate even though I haven’t eaten any from the pile already there. Fried chicken and peas also sit untouched in front of me while Winston is on his second serving. After prayer, this family dives into their food, shoveling like stable boys until their plates reflect their faces.

“Matt,” Deborah says. “Tell us your Bible verse for tomorrow.”

He clears his throat and swallows his chicken. “‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.’”

“Very nice,” Deborah says and Winston nods, still chewing. She says, “Girls?”

Jaime and Ashley look at each other, take a breath, and say simultaneously, “‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.’” They take deep breaths and giggle.

“Good job, girls,” Deborah says.

Ashley says, “What about Liz?”

“That’s okay,” I say, pressing drifts of potato through the tines of my fork.

“If you learn, you won’t feel left out in Sunday school,” Matt says. I smile at him, but this is something I do want to be left out of.

“I don’t think I’ll go to Sunday school,” I say and the table goes silent. Winston stops chewing. Jaime cringes. Ashley smirks. “We all go to Sunday school,” Winston says.

I’d gotten spoiled living with Tammy. Sunday mornings we hiked on wildflower-coated foothill trails humming with singing birds while the sun rose, biked up City Creek Canyon and sketched pine trees or the brook skipping over water-smoothed rocks, took naps under the swishing sound of waving birch and oak branches and broken rays of sunshine. Nature is Tammy’s church, and if I had a choice, it’d be mine, too.

“Your mom would like you to attend church,” Deborah says.

“This family goes to church,” Winston says.

Even Jaime, “It’s a pretty cool church, Liz.” She nods at me like
shut up
, and just like that, I know she’d choose to stay here even if Mom said we could come home.

Ashley says, “So, Liz, you want to learn our verse now?” and smiles wide in challenge, her braces full of green and white flecks.

“Actually,” I say, “I remember that one.”

“Prove it,” Ashley says, so I do. I repeat the Bible verse I’ve said
a thousand times before and it means no more to me now than it did when my Sunday school teacher gave out candy to the kids who could memorize a few lines after a half-hour of repetition.

“‘For God so loved the world…’” I say, but wish I could say that it doesn’t matter how cool a church is if you don’t believe in God, that worshipping something without proof is insane, that I think Christians are hypocrites. Ashley pouts and crosses her arms over her chest when I finish, but Jaime smiles and Matt applauds.

“Wonderful,” Deborah says and Winston nods. “Just wonderful.” She claps her hands together. “Liz, have you ever thought of playing guitar?”

I shake my head, fill my mouth with five peas and a piece of chicken, and chew.

The clothes Mom brought
in my never-unpacked duffel bags still smell like lavender and rain, or at least that clean smell after rain has rinsed the air, and also something else that’s just the smell of Tammy’s house. I miss her every time I take out a clean shirt and they are almost gone. I sent her letters from Rachel’s house, but her six-week safari has thirteen days left.

I am looking for something “appropriate” to wear to church tomorrow. One of the skirts Tammy bought me or the thin white linen pants might work. I’m holding up a brown cotton A line skirt when Deborah comes in. “Oh, honey, don’t you have anything less somber?” She glances at the neutrals and dark colors in my bag. “Something pastel?” she says. “Maybe a light pink?”

I don’t move but my eyes won’t stop blinking. She puts a hand
on my shoulder, gives it a quick squeeze. “Don’t fret,” she says. She takes the skirt from my hand, squints at it. “As long as you don’t wear a black top, it’ll do for tomorrow,” she says and hands me the clothing. “But we are definitely going shopping, missy.”

Jaime comes in as Deborah is leaving. Deborah says, “Jaime, show Liz your church dresses.”

Jaime waits until Deborah is outside around the corner and says, “You’re not going to like them.”

I cross my arms over my chest and frown. “I’m not going.”

“I’m sleeping in Ashley’s room tonight,” Jaime says. “We only get to do it on Saturdays. She has a TV in her room, we rented
Clueless
. You could come, too,” she says, but I know her too well.