In Broken Places (17 page)

“I’m not completely clear on the deprogramming yet.”

“Maybe I’m not either.”

“Maybe Shayla is part of the process.”

“As long as she doesn’t become a victim of it.”

“I know you, Shell. Is there anyone else who knows you better?”

I thought for a fraction of a second. “Nope.”

“I’ve seen you at your best and at your worst—and no, a bathing suit is not what I’m referring to—and I have never,
ever
seen a hint of Dad in you.”

“Even when I jumped on his back and clawed his eyeballs out?”

“You were protecting me. Just like you’d protect Shayla. And this fear you’ve got going, Shell? That’s exactly what it is. You protecting Shayla—against yourself.”

“Huh.”

“But there’s no need to. I know that like I know . . . like I know you used to Ace-bandage your chest in junior high.”

“I wasn’t happy about being a woman.”

“No kidding.”

“You knew about the Ace bandages?”

“Yup. The only thing I apparently don’t know anything about is Scott. So, hey, Shell . . .” He tried to sound casual. “Who’s Scott?”

“Are you coming for Christmas? Please come for Christmas! Shayla needs to spend time with her favorite uncle.”

“How can I be her uncle if you’re only her pseudo-mom?”

“Shut up.”

“You’re going to have to deal with this, you know.”

“When I’m sure I’ve deprogrammed my genes.”

“Who’s Scott?”

“He’s a coach.” I rolled my eyes.

“Stop rolling your eyes.”

“How’d you know?”

“And . . . ?”

“He keeps wanting to talk to me!” I said
talk
like it was a horrible thing—like playing bingo.

“And?”

“And I don’t want to talk to him. But he keeps backing me into a corner—”

“Figuratively or . . . ?”

“Figuratively, Trey.”

“Which makes you feel powerless, which makes you get angry, which makes you think you’re Dad, which makes you blow a gasket at Shayla’s AC/DC impersonation.”

“This call is getting expensive, Dr. Freud. Tell me about you.”

“
Me
wants to hear about Scott.”

“Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.”

There was a pause. “I miss you, Shelby.”

“I miss you, too.” I allowed my hopes to rise just a little. “Christmas?”

“We’ll see.”

“I think Marilyn Manson’s losing steam.”

“Give her a kiss for me.”

“I will.”

“To the muddlehood . . . ,” he said.

“. . . of huddlehood.”

“Thanks for calling.”

“Bye, Trey.”

Shayla was half-asleep when I stepped into her bedroom. She was lying on her side, a stuffed animal in the crook of each elbow, humming Barney’s song in a misty, cottony voice. I knelt on the braided throw rug next to her bed and slung an arm over her waist.

“You getting tired?”

She nodded.

“You had fun playing basketball with the boys, didn’t you.”

Another nod.

“Shayla . . .” I wasn’t sure how to broach this subject. It felt like shoving a porcupine into a wool sweater—not easy, at best. “There’s something I think I need.”

Tired eyes opened a fraction more. “You want a donut?”

I loved this child. “Actually,” I whispered, adjusting my seating so I could prop my head sideways on my arm and be nose-to-nose with her, “I think it would make me really happy if I could call you my daughter.” Shayla’s eyes were so close to mine that I could see the dark flecks in the blue and her pupils dilating and retracting. “When we meet new people,” I continued, trying to make it clear to her young mind, “I’d like to be able to say, ‘This is my daughter, Shayla.’ You know what I mean?”

A shy smile curved her lips and she tightened her hold on her animals.

“So, beautiful—” I could feel a tear escaping from the corner of my eye and running down into my hairline—“is it okay if I call you ‘my daughter, Shayla,’ from now on?”

She watched another tear follow the path the first had taken and looked into my eyes, worried.

“I’m not sad,” I assured her, and I knew my smile proved it.

Shayla let go of the blue rabbit she’d been holding and reached out to hook her arm around my neck, pulling my face down to touch hers. We stayed like that until she was asleep, me kneeling next to her bed, cheek to cheek with my daughter, her breath warm against my neck, the smell of her sweet and heavy like warm honey in my lungs. And it struck me with so much force that I had to hold back sobs that this was the antithesis of a God-spitting-on-me moment. This was God pouring such a deluge of wondrousness and overwhelmingness and profound healingness on me that I could hardly stand it. As I knelt there by Shayla’s bed and tried to absorb the enormity of the moment, it was all I could do not to crawl up under the blankets and huddle there all night with Shayla—with my
daughter
—in my arms.

TREY AND I
had been huddling a lot in the week since Dad had gone all Godzilla on us, though it had taken a couple tries for me to figure out how to make it up the ladder to the attic without using my injured arm. We’d been off school all week, and I wanted to think that was because Mom was giving us time to get our heads sorted out. After all, last Saturday had been the kind of thing that muddles the brain a little. I wasn’t used to seeing my brother being strangled by my dad, and the image kept coming back to me, no matter what I did. Opening a carton of orange juice—Dad strangling Trey. Cleaning up my bedroom—Dad strangling Trey. Watching game shows on TV—Dad strangling Trey. It had been a Dad-strangling-Trey kind of week.

But I knew my mom hadn’t kept us home from school just because we needed to get over the shock to our brains. I figured it was also to allow time for Trey’s neck to heal. Explaining that her daughter had
sprained her wrist in a fall was one thing. But explaining how her son had gotten bruises all over his throat and a bad cut to the side of his mouth? That would take a little more creativity than my mom possessed. We hadn’t complained about the weeklong vacation, though. Instead, we’d spent it reading books, playing video games, eating tons of food (Mom always cooked when she was stressed), and turning the Huddle Hut into Ali Baba’s cavern. We brought up pillows and comfy blankets; we moved in lamps and extension cords; we even dangled Christmas tree lights over the wardrobe at one end of the attic so we could lie in our tent at night and imagine they were stars. I’m not sure what had prompted the Huddle Hut overhaul. There was just so much uncomfortable going on inside that we felt compelled to build something comfortable on the outside, I guess.

It was shortly after lunch, and Trey and I were lying on our backs shoveling trail mix into our mouths. Mom had discovered our attic hideaway. I knew that because we’d crawled up today to find a bowl of trail mix and two glasses of Kool-Aid sitting in the middle of the hut on a tray.

Trey dropped an M&M into his mouth. “One week ago this minute, I decided I wanted to shoot hoops.”

“I always told you sports were unhealthy.”

“Maybe it’s just basketball.”

“I think he’d have been mad if you’d wrecked his car for soccer, too.”

“Yeah, probably. We should make a movie.”

That was a new one. “Of what?”

“The things you see in your head when the life’s being choked out of you.”

He had my attention. “You saw things?”

“Yup.”

“Like what?”

“An Easter egg hunt.”

“Weird.”

“You were there too.”

“What was I doing?”

“I don’t know. Just kinda smiling and looking at me.”

“Trust me—I wasn’t smiling in real life.”

“And I saw something orange. Really orange. Like, burn-your-eyeball orange.”

“It wouldn’t make a very good movie,” I said.

“No, you’re right.”

“You think he’s coming back?”

“If he does, I’ll kill him.”

His words made my stomach do a little
thunk
. That was the weird thing about my dad. I knew he was evil and capable of hurting us—I wore the bandages that proved it—but hearing Trey talk about killing him still made me feel not right. He may have sprained my wrist, but he was still my dad.

“Do you think he ever liked us?” I asked my brother.

“Nope.”

“I used to give him things to make him like me more. Like leftover candy from Halloween and clay bowls from art class. I even made him a macaroni necklace once. I was supposed to give it to Mom, but I figured he needed the cheering up more.”

“He never loved us.”

“You sure?”

He pointed at his neck.

“Right.” I didn’t want to push it, but . . . “It’s just that sometimes he was really nice.”

“Like when?”

“Like when we went to Disney World that one time. He let us go on all the rides we wanted and stay until the park closed. And when he took us out to movies ’cause we got good report cards,” I added,
recalling more and more instances when he’d seemed a little less horrible. “He even bought us popcorn that one time when you’d gotten good grades and scored three goals in your soccer game.”

“And then he came home and made me stand outside the front door for three hours because I dropped the pickle jar when I was getting it out of the fridge.”

“Yeah, but we got popcorn.”

“He didn’t love us, Shell. He still doesn’t.”

“Maybe he’ll realize he does—because he’s away from us—and come back and say he’s sorry.” There was something light and fluttery brightening in my lungs. “Maybe if I send him a card or something—”

“What?” Trey came up on his elbow and glared so hard it made me shiver.

“Or maybe if I went to see him, wherever he is, and told him that we don’t hate him bad. We hate him like we hate the dentist—not like mass murderers.”

Trey looked at me and I could tell I should be quiet. His nostrils were flared and his eyes were squinty. He got up off the floor and took a few steps away, his hands on his hips, breathing like he’d just run up the stairs. When he turned around, his lips were curled in and the skin of his face looked stretched too tight. “What’s wrong with you, Shell?” His voice was hard, as Trey-less as the sneer distorting his features. It scared me bad enough to make my face feel prickly. “He’s out of our lives,” he said, and there was cement behind his eyes. And then his voice got really hard, like cold metal, and he said, “He’s gone. You hear me? Leave him wherever he is!”

He stood there, glaring, for another minute or two, then stalked back to the Huddle Hut, threw himself down next to me, and crammed a fistful of trail mix into his mouth, chomping hard and squinting at the sheet above us. “Leave him wherever he is,” he said again, more softly this time. A little faded. I put an M&M in my mouth, but my
stomach didn’t seem to want me to swallow it. Maybe I was coming down with the flu. Or cancer. It wasn’t normal, anyway.

After a few minutes had passed, enough for me to sing “Eye of the Tiger” in my mind, I tried to reason with Trey one more time. Actually, I was probably trying to convince myself more than him. It just felt wrong not to have a father—guilty, somehow.

“We should have waited until he got home to move the car.”

“Shut up, Shelby!” He sat up and spit a little trail mix at me when he added, with gravel in his throat, “He’s not coming back! He’s dead!”

I knew my dad wasn’t really dead, but it made me cry anyway. Trey’s yelling made me cry and my not-dead dad made me cry. I thought of the drawing of John Wayne I’d made him when I was little and wished I’d just used the red eraser. If I hadn’t gone into his desk, maybe he’d still be here today. But I couldn’t say that to Trey. His anger had made his bruises look deeper red, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about Dad anymore. Not for a long time. So I closed my eyes and listened to the squirrels running back and forth on the roof. I hoped they were playing, maybe with their dad watching them through the leaves of a tree to make sure they were safe. I hoped it so hard it made me dizzy.

After an unseasonably warm fall, the weather had turned wintry. The leaves, it seemed, had browned and fallen overnight, and we’d gone from Kool-Aid weather to hot-chocolate weather just as fast. My walks to the Johnsons’ after school were now drives, and though I disliked the cold, I was grateful for the change. It made it less obvious that Scott had stopped performing his Boy Scout routine. We’d crossed in the hallways and on the street several times since the gym fiasco, and he’d always been friendly. I’d tried to keep the zingers down to a minimum—my form of
penance—but sometimes they just popped out. He’d become one of Shayla’s favorite people, and she tended to launch herself at him whenever she saw him, which made extricating myself from banal conversations a little complicated. But I did get one thing straight when I ran into him in the doorway of the Lacoste bakery one Saturday morning.

“Where’s Shayla?” he asked, surprised to find my usual sidekick nowhere in sight.

“My daughter is having a playdate with Lizzie Robinson,” I said, putting sufficient emphasis on
daughter
to make my subliminal message not quite so subliminal.

He looked pleased—happy, actually—and said, “Well, say hello to your daughter from me.” There were three cement blocks and a Humvee stacked on the word
daughter
when he said it, so I knew my message had gotten across.

I thought that would be the extent of our conversation and slung my bag higher on my shoulder, prepared to leave the bakery, but Scott didn’t move. I was standing inside the door, waiting to go down two steps to the street, and he was standing on the sidewalk, blocking my exit while his mind was engaged in what appeared to be some pretty intense internal dialogue. The baker’s wife finally bellowed that we were keeping the sliding door from shutting, and that spurred him into motion. German women yelling had a tendency to do that. He stepped into the bakery and moved me aside to allow other customers to exit.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked, jutting his chin toward the small dining room just beyond a glass wall.

“Um . . .”

“Please. We don’t have to stay long, but . . . I’ve been unfair to you and I’d like to make up for it.”

“Unfair?”

He pointed to the dining room. “Coffee? Or tea? I’d like to explain myself, but not standing here.”

This was not the usual fearless Scott standing in front of me, the conversational warrior who had submitted me to a hailstorm of questions so many times with zeal and confidence. This was a more guarded man who seemed more deliberate than spontaneous, more considerate than impulsive.

It must have been pity that made me say, “Just a few minutes,” as I pushed through the glass door into the smoky dining room beyond, wondering as I went what had possessed me to accept his invitation. “I’m not really comfortable with this,” I added to make sure he knew I wasn’t used to this kind of thing. He nodded and motioned toward a table. We sat in an alcove at the back of the room and ordered two cappuccinos. As soon as the waitress left, Scott leaned his forearms on the table and assumed a contrite expression.

“I’ve been selfish.”

“You said
unfair
before, but I’ll accept
selfish
, too.”

He nodded and allowed a lopsided grin. “I’ve got to admit that I’m . . . confused,” he said after a hesitation, “about what happened at the gym and . . . and a bunch of other stuff, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to you. The fact is, I’ve done my share of interrogating you—”

“Ya think?” Sarcasm crackled.

“And I’ve given you absolutely no time to get even—to counterinterrogate. Which leaves me knowing some stuff about you, but you knowing nearly nothing about me. And I can’t expect you to trust me if you don’t have any information to base it on, right?”

I frowned. “Who says I want to trust you?”

My question didn’t keep him from making his point. He’d apparently put some time into thinking it through and was intent
on saying it all. “So I’ve got no right to ask you any more questions until you’ve had the chance to even things up.”

“Even things up.”

“Reverse the conversational blitzes.”

“I get to ask questions?”

He took a deep breath. “As many as you want.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

He clearly hadn’t anticipated that option. “Then I guess—”

“What’s the time limit?” I asked abruptly. It was a strange proposition, but I could see some potential there. Maybe I’d decide he really wasn’t very likable after all once I’d had my chance to question him.

He pondered it for a moment. “As long as you want.”

“Actually, I’m supposed to pick Shayla up at the Robinsons’ in a half hour, so . . .”

“So I guess you need to start firing.”

The waitress appeared with our cappuccinos and gave us odd looks, perhaps perceiving the hum of tension between us. We were being cordial, but our guards were up. Our conversation in the gym, as unfinished as it was, had left us both in a kind of limbo that made this tête-à-tête feel a little surreal. Yet there was something reassuring in the emotional distance. It made me feel less vulnerable. So I launched into my questioning, subdued but purposeful.

“Middle name.”

He raised an eyebrow as if saying,
That’s the best you’ve got?

“I’m working up to the good stuff,” I said.

“Adam.”

“Place of birth.”

“Seattle.”

“Siblings.”

“One older sister. Two nephews, one niece.”

“So forthcoming.” I smiled sweetly.

“Keep going.” He had the focused look of an athlete before a game.

“Do you get along with her?”

“We do now.”

“You didn’t before?”

“I wasn’t always as lovable as I am now.” He grinned. “She’d tell you I was the worst brother who ever lived.”