“Can you get my bag?” she asks again as I stare too long at her face.
“He hit you,” I say, not going to the door, looking at her instead.
She nods, looks away, fiddles with the fleece throw on the back of the couch and then gives up and throws it over her head. She’s crying. “Don’t, Lily … ”
I walk to the chair, bend down and touch her knee, and she seems so small, my big sister. “We have to call someone. The police.”
“No.”
From beneath the fleece throw, I can see her head shaking.
“We have to. It’s illegal.”
“No.”
“Why not?” I ask, my voice rising, frustrated.
“It’ll be in the paper. I won’t have my name in the paper.”
“In the paper?” This makes no sense.
“Under the police report,” she says.
I have no idea, no idea what she’s talking about, but I just move on ahead because I can tell by the way she’s sitting, so still, that she is just beyond. She isn’t twitching like she normally is. She isn’t moving back and forth. Even her hands are still.
“Do you want me to call him? To yell at him?” I ask. I tap her knee to get her attention. She doesn’t answer so I ask again. “I’ll call him.”
“No, just go get my bag.”
I take my hand off her knee and stand up. “Should I call Mom? She’s at the movies.”
“She already knows.”
“She knows and she went to the movies!” I yell. I slam my fist into the end table. The lamp wobbles. I catch it. “She knows?”
My voice makes my sister cringe. Her own voice comes out low and solid, like a person who has seen their wagon go up in flames on the prairie, a person who has lost it all and still has to go on.
“I asked her to. I didn’t want to come in with Mike here. I don’t want to have to keep explaining, at least not tonight. I’m too tired. Please, just go get my bag, Lily. Please.”
I turn and leave through the kitchen door, turning to glance back at Jessica with the blanket over her head like it will hide her, like she’s a three-year-old who doesn’t know that people still know she’s there even though she’s not looking at them.
“Have you ever seen The Shootist?” I ask.
There’s no sound from under the blanket. My poor sister, my heart goes out to her in one big rush. She used to carry me around the house on her shoulders when I was little. Have I already mentioned that? She’s nice, usually; kind.
“In The Shootist, John Wayne plays John Bernard Books, right? And people are not being too cool to him,” I say. “So he goes, ‘I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.’ Everyone should expect that, Jessica.”
There’s silence, then a sigh. She curls her feet up to her chest and from beneath the blanket she says in a trembling voice, “Please Lily, just get my bag.”
I can’t believe it. Even one of the best lines in movie history does nothing for her, so I trot out into the night and look at the stars and pull her bag out of the passenger seat of her car. It’s light and easy to carry. The stars must like being so far away from all this earth stuff, all this suffering. I’m not talking just about my sister but about everyone, all those people in the Sudan, the people sold for sex slaves in Asia, the people in our own country getting abused, hurt.
What good am I if I can’t even help my sister, Mr. Wayne? What kind of cowpoke am I? I’m not worthy enough to haul on my boots.
Staring at the stars, I plan out what to say next to her. I will tell her it’s not her fault. I will tell her that no woman deserves to be hurt or scared. I will tell her that I love her. That’s what I can do.
When I come back in, the chair is empty. She hightailed it to the shower. She does that like I do, to be alone to think. I sit on the big couch in the living room and count cars on the highway. I count and count and count, but when she’s done with the shower she doesn’t come back out to the living room. She grabs the duffel bag where I’ve left it in the hall and then goes into the guest room and shuts the door. Mike will be officially sleeping with Mom tonight, I think. Have I said that before?
I’m sorry. This is not much of a letter, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that nobody is going to be fooled tonight. I get up and go into my room. I pull my bedspread up. It’s scratchy. I bet Alyssa Cutler has a puffy comforter. I bet she has pillows made with feathers.
I can’t have feather pillows because my mother is afraid of birds. Each year blackbirds come and stop on our front lawn when they migrate. There are hundreds of them. They fill the tree branches and make them black. They line the wires on the utility poles. They make everything black but full of life. I like to imagine that they all have names and know each other.
I like to imagine that if one of them goes missing they all notice, and that’s when the squawks start, a sort of alarm system.
Where’s Harry? Squawk. Where’s Harry?
Is Harry by Brad? By Brad?
Bad bird coming east. Bad bird coming.
Hide. Hide. Hide.
My bedroom is lonely and cold and as dark as the desert at night. Only there are no stars. I wish there were stars and then there would be something to count as I stare up at the ceiling, wondering how everything in the world could be so wrong.
Maybe I should get up and stare out the window, rest my head against the cold pane of the glass and count cars again, but it’s night and people are running out of places to go so there wouldn’t be that many to count anymore.
I can hear my sister crying through the wall. I touch the wallpaper where her head might be. I just feel the lump of old wallpaper underneath the new.
It isn’t like I’ve never heard about people hitting women. I know all about it. I’ve watched the talk shows and the news and seen the women cry and the husbands in their orange jail clothes saying that they are sorry, but this is my sister. My half sister, I remember, and wonder if it’s the same thing.
So, this is what I do. Later, when she’s asleep, I sneak into her room with my camera. The flash goes off, but she’s out cold. I take a picture of her face. I take a picture of her arm. Then I sneak out of the house. I untether my bike and start pumping it down the highway, straight towards Bangor. Cars pass me and dirt kicks into my face. I pass acres and then a brick house. The lights of the Merrimack houses seem too bright, too happy.
I close my eyes when I get too close to a house. I don’t want to hear what’s happening inside the walls. I don’t want to know anything anymore, you know.
Houses look so good from the outside, at least the Merrimack houses do. They have nice lawns and pretty shrubs and the roof tiles are all neat in place against the wind. The trees by them reach towards the sky.
I ride right past them and I head for Bangor, riding in the darkness, not into a sunset, but into black.
I’m not sure why I’m riding in this direction, other than it seems right, somehow. It’s just the right way to go, I guess. I think of all the two-story apartments. I think of the sidewalks.
Bangor isn’t my city, not really. When I get to the line between Merrimack and Bangor, I stop at the sign. It says, Welcome to Bangor.
It’s meant for cars to see. I reach up and touch it. Then I turn my bike around and head home.
Welcome. Welcome.
There’s no sunset there either. Just dark.
At home, I crawl into my sister’s bed and lean into her back. I wrap my arms around her. She grabs my hands in hers. She cries and then she sleeps. I stay awake. I think of those newspaper headlines: One Man Dead.
I think of statistics about domestic violence.
I think of how Hannah Dustin did everything to get back to her c
hildren and how my mother’s right here, giggling across the hall, but she couldn’t be farther away.
In case you were wondering or worried by the last letter, let me tell you that I’m out of bed and ready for school before anyone else even wakes up. Even my mother is still in her room with Mike. The door is shut when I walk down the hall, but his snores come through wood and drywall, announcing he’s here.
I put a Pop-Tart into the toaster and wait for it to come up. I eat the corners off and not the middle, just nibble around the edges so that I can lose weight.
The phone rings. No one calls this early, at ten past six. Someone must be dead. Grammy?
I snatch the receiver off the wall. “Hello?”
“Lily?”
His voice comes out as a grunt. How fitting.
“Hello, Brian,” I mutter and my stomach threatens to do a toaster and violently expel the Pop-Tart. I keep it down.
“Let me talk to Jessica.”
“She’s not here.”
The hair on my back starts to stand up, not that I have hair on my back, just little fuzz that no one can see, but I can feel it, moving.
“Don’t give me that crap. Let me talk to her,” he says.
I don’t say anything. I just listen to him breathe into the phone. The kitchen looks so calm and normal like it always is, just counters and a yellow refrigerator and a stove. Dishtowels hang off the handles of the pine cabinets. My stepdad built those. My breath comes out like a hiss, my tongue in the center of my mouth. I put the receiver back on the hook.
My hands shake.
The phone rings again.
“Liliana,” he says, his voice much calmer, the fake calm after a blizzard. This is the calm that tries to lull you into forgetting how frigid the snow can be, and makes you think only of how pretty the white is. “Let me talk to my wife.”
Brian is a man with a body like an old stove, hefty. He always had a beer gut even in high school. He wears blue T-shirts with a pocket in front. He keeps his cigarettes there, and the top of the carton peeks out to show the red top and name of the brand he smokes: Marlboro. He is no Marlboro man, roping and riding in my desert with a bottom like a runner’s. He won’t be roping in my sister’s desert either. Not if I have anything to do with it. I think of what you said when you were Capt. Rockwell Torrey in In Harm’s Way: All battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be someplace else.
I imagine that Brian must be smoking right now, sitting in their kitchen by their table that never has a cloth over it. I imagine him flicking an ash into one of his glass ashtrays. I aim and shoot.
“I’ve got pictures, pictures of her bruises. So you listen to me—you call here, you come on this property and we’ll have the police here faster than you can spit. No one messes with my sister.”
Bang.
I hang up the phone again and switch the lever on the bottom, which controls the ringer. No one will hear the phone today. Imagining how angry Brian will get, when he dials and hears it ring five hundred million times, doesn’t make me happier. Actually, I feel a little scared, and when Olivia and Sasha come I don’t want to get in the car and leave my sleeping house. I stash my shaking hands in my pockets and listen to them discuss bipolar systems of sexuality, but I can’t stop worrying.
“It’s not gay or straight,” Sasha says. “It’s not one or the other on a straight line, it’s more like a circle, or like you can be different spots on the line, instead of just all one thing. Right? Like I’m not totally straight because I can think girls are cute, but I don’t want to kiss them or anything.”
“That’s still pretty straight,” Olivia says, shaking her head and turning off the highway.
Sasha pouts and then mocks herself. “No. No. I’m not a straight, boring person. I’m not!”
She rips on a trying-not-to-be-straight monologue for a while. Sometimes I think she’ll do stand-up comedy and just blast out of Maine and high school early, leaving us all behind. Maybe she could make my life into something funny. There was this girl who wanted to be John Wayne because she wanted to be a hero … Only she was like five feet tall and had these really great boobs …
“Lily? You want to help us with our Darfur campaign?” Olivia asks.
“Sure,” I surprise myself by answering. “Sure, I’ll help.”
“Cool.” Sasha bounces in the front seat. “You okay?”
“Yep.”
Sasha and Olivia give each other looks.
“She’s lying,” Sasha announces.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Olivia says and we all laugh. Sasha turns the radio up because she knows I’m not in a talking mood. Instead, she and Olivia make up fake rap lyrics to the song that’s on.
“I oppress my woman, I oppress her good, ’cause if I didn’t, I’d never get wood,” Sasha sings. Olivia laughs.
I imagine Brian barging into the house.
Mike is there, I tell myself. He’s a man. He could beat Brian up probably, if he doesn’t fall over drunk first. It’s awful to think this way, but I can’t help it. I’m only a pacifist when it comes to myself, not my sister.
“Uh, can I tell you guys something?” I ask.
Click. The moment they’ve been waiting for, my sweet, goody-goody activist friends. The radio goes silent.
Telling Olivia and Sasha what happened is easy, but listening to them talk about protection orders and women’s rights and survivor syndrome is hard, almost annoying, and when I get to school it’s a relief to sit in study hall and have Paolo Mattias smile at me. He doesn’t know anything about me and I’m so glad.
He kicks a note at me and it says,
Are we still on for tonight?
I stare at the note for a minute. The Bic pen in my hand leaks a bit on my finger.
sure
Meet me after study hall.
I don’t write back. I nod instead and smile, little butterflies trapped in my throat, and wait for study hall to be over, amazed that I’m going on a real date with Paolo Mattias.
There are all these other people around me, sitting at their desks with the chairs attached, looking into their Calculus books or trying to read Othello for English class. I don’t think any of them know anything about what is happening, about how my life is so bad and so good at the same time and the crazy Ferris wheel of it makes me feel like my head is spinning in endless circles, high and low and high again.
I want to tell somebody, and then I realize that the person I want to tell is my dad, the Faltin one, the one with blue tights and silliness.
He would definitely think Paolo was cute.
Paolo’s all smiling-happy when we get out of study hall.
“I’ll walk you to class,” he says, leaning in, trying to carry my books.
I back away. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to carry your books.”
“That’s so old school.”
“What? What’s wrong with old school? I like old school.”
I shake my head. “I’m a big girl. I can carry my own books.”
He scowls at me, but the scowl doesn’t reach his eyes. Still, I feel bad, so I say, “If zombies were chasing you and you had to run away, parkour style, what would you do?”
A Britney girl jostles by me. Tyler yells to us. We wave.
Paolo thinks for a second, still walking. “Are you with me?”
“Why?”
“Because then I’d have to take care of you, too.”
“No. You don’t have to worry about me, just rescuing yourself.”
His lips relax a little bit. “Are they hyperactive zombies, or just regular slow-moving zombies?”
“Hyperactive, definitely,” I say and my heart feels a little bit lighter.
He steers me around a group of senior girls st
anding in the middle of the hall, messaging frantically. He nods towards the corner of the hallway and says, “I’d run full force, scale the wall, break through those Styrofoam ceiling tiles and scurry through the top really fast, drop down at the fire stairs, rush up to the roof, and jump.”
“Jump? It’s like three stories.”
“Not down. I’d jump from this building to the garage. That’s one story down.”
“You couldn’t do that.”
He smiles, all handsome confident guy. “I’ve done it before.”
“That’s insane!” I yell, and his lips relax. The tiniest flash of white teeth appear between them. I stop walking. “Could you teach me to do that?”
“Not right away.”
“But eventually?”
His free hand swipes a piece of dark hair off his forehead, pushing it back. It flops down again. “Yeah. I could teach you.”
“So, in case of a hyperactive-zombie invasion someday?” I ask, moving closer to the warmth of him, away from the bumping people hustling to class.
“You’ll be able to save yourself.”
I smile up at him. How can I not smile? “You are too cool.”
He laughs. “Right.”
At home, I put on lip gloss. It’s my mother’s. In front of the mirror I stand, lips puckered, one finger full of the globby stuff even after I’ve swabbed it on my lips. My finger needs to be wiped off. Nicole told me once that if you put lip gloss above your eyes it makes your eyes look bigger. I can’t remember if you’re supposed to put the lip gloss on your actual eyelid or above it. If you put it on the eyelid it might get sticky, so I decide to put it right above. My movements are slower than a turtle’s, but inside I am so excited, too excited, and my heart beats hard against my ribs.
Bathroom mirrors are not good places to inspect yourself. Everything is too bright. My lips shine and so does the skin above my eyes. I try out a smile, my lips stretching up, but feel fake. Fake and phony and stupid. I don’t even know if I like Paolo. I don’t even know if I should be going out. My sad sister sulks in the guest bedroom. Mike pretends to read the classifieds, but is really drinking spiked Pepsi. My mother is running around cleaning and acting like everything is normal, which it isn’t. My sister’s bruises shine out against her skin. A strange man has made our house his personal bar.