Girl, Hero

  “Yes!” Paolo yells in the car, punching his fist into the roof as Stuart peels out.

  “I can’t believe you knocked, Sasha,” Stuart says. “You are psycho. Psycho!”

  “She’s an insane woman,” Paolo says from the front seat.

  Sasha giggles. I don’t know whether to kill her or hug her, but I settle for a hug.

  “Mad?” she asks me.

  “Tell everyone what I wrote on the note.”

  Sasha takes a real dramatic breath and says, “It said, Real men don’t hit women.”

  “Tell her the whole thing, Sasha,” Stuart says as he turns onto the highway. He sounds like her father.

  She looks at me. I look at her. I put on my seat belt.

  “You added something?”

  She nods and tries to do her Sasha Innocent look on me.

  “Just tell me.”

  “Swear you won’t get mad?”

  “Fine.”

  “Swear.”

  “I swear I won’t get mad.”

  “It said, ‘Real men don’t hit women, potty face.’”

  Paolo whoops and smacks his hand on the ceiling.

  Stuart swerves and gets back in the right lane. He only got his license last week. He stayed back in first grade, which is why he can drive. He probably should have stayed back in drivers’ ed, too.

  “‘Potty face?’” I ask.

  “I wasn’t feeling very creative.” She shrugs.

  Something inside me trembles in a really happy way like I’ve just jumped from one high building to another.

  In the car, Sasha and I cuddle up in the back seat.

  “Did I really just do that?” I whisper.

  She nudges me with her elbow. “You went all hero on us, girl.”

  I shake my head. Doubt makes my stomach spasm. “It won’t make a difference.”

  “Of course it will.”

  We drive fast. Stuart shrieks around a corner. I grab her hand. Our fingers wrap together. “You really think so?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

  Next step? I write my mother a note and we drop it off. The house is all dark except for where her bedroom is.

  Stuart and Paolo and Sasha and I park on the road. We run up the driveway; the gravel crunches beneath our sneakers, and I’m so scared we’ll get caught or that Mike O’Donnell will come running out in his tightie-whities swinging a baseball bat around and Paolo or Sasha will get hurt. If he does, I will kill him. I will take him down, tackle him and kick him until he can’t get up. I’d punch him, Mr. Wayne, but I don’t have big fists. You have to remember I’m a girl and no firefighters ever trained me to fight, like they did for you when you were still little and called Marion.

  I steel myself and think of how I will kick his legs out first, and then smash my palm into his nose.

  This doesn’t happen.

  We run up all stealthy and I leave the note on the front door.

  Then we run back down and squeal off in Stuart’s little Mazda and go to Dairy Queen. We all deserve ice creams, we say.

  The note said,

  Mom, I’m not coming home

  until he is gone.

  We’re slurping down our soft-serve when Sasha says, “Oh my God. What if he finds it first?”

  We didn’t think of that, which just goes to show we’re kids and this is my life, not a movie. If it were a movie, I’d be cuter, my breasts would be smaller and our lines would be better.

  I think.

  Either way, though, I’m here with my hombres, partners in justice. All my secrets an open book.

  Something inside my gut loosens up a little bit, like a lasso letting loose, tension easing. It feels good.

  My mother doesn’t want me. She calls my dad’s house and says, “You can’t make me live my life the way you want.”

  She says, “I am the mother and you are the child.”

  She says, “I will get a court order to get you back. I have sole custody. Sole custody. Do you know what that means?”

  I say, “Who is my father?”

  There is a pause and then she whispers, “I don’t know.”

  I say, “What do you know about this guy? He drinks. He’s violent. He’s a total ass, Mom. A super-big ass and what about the newspaper clippings? What about those?”

  “Lay off, Lily,” she says, voice colder than a cowboy in the Colorado mountains in the middle of January. “You think you know what it’s like to be lonely? You think you know? You think you know how hard it is to be a woman alone? Well you don’t, okay. You don’t.”

  She hangs up the phone on me. She just hangs up.

  This is what I do, the second part of the plan. I take matters into my own hands. I do what a hero would do, a girl hero in Maine, not a man hero in an old Western.

  I call the police.

  I call the Merrimack police from the only pay phone I can find, which is outside of Hannaford’s. Stuart and Sasha wait in the car for me. Paolo stands next to me and keeps his hand in mine.

  I tell them, “There’s a man at my mother’s.”

  I tell them, “There’s a man who has a photo album full of newspaper clippings about a bar fight and a man being killed.”

  I tell them, “He drinks. He drinks and he is not a good man.”

  I tell them, “His name is Mike O’Donnell from Oregon. Can you run a check on him?”

  I tell them, “No, he’s not my father. I’m not related to him at all.”

  Then, I put the pictures of my sister’s bruises in a manila envelope. I write down important facts, put on the stamp and mail it to the sheriff’s office.

  It may not be the right thing to do, but it’s the only thing I can think of.

  Today, Paolo, Sasha, Stuart and I take a bunch of the letters I’ve written to you and put them on my stepfather’s grave. My hands tremble when I set them down and I want to grab them back, clutch them to my chest and run. The wind will take them. Maybe they’ll get stuck in the barren branches of the trees. Maybe it will rain on them. I don’t know. There’s a large gulp in my throat, seeing them there by Daddy’s grave. I’m dangerously close to losing it.

  “This is harder than I thought,” I tell Paolo. I look at the letters. It hurts to burn them, like putting your finger in a candle flame on purpose. But turtles have to move forward. They have to break apart their shells.

  He nods. “I remember you writing that letter in the Alamo Theater. Nicole made fun of you.”

  “You thought it was weird,” I say. A crow lands in a tree in front of us and announces its presence.

  “It is weird.”

  “Not as weird as you pretending to be all into John Wayne just to get me to like you.”

  He throws his hands up in the air. “I like John Wayne.”

  “But you don’t love him. You don’t adore him. You don’t recognize him as the greatest hero portrayer of all time.”

  Sasha groans and flicks the lighter. It has a smiley face peace sign on it. “If either of you had ever gone to therapy, you’d understand that Lily was merely trying to come to terms with her feelings of loss caused by her stepfather’s death. She transferred those feelings onto John Wayne, the typical father figure.”

  I shove my hand over her mouth to shut her up. She licks it.

  “Yuck.” I wipe it on Paolo’s sleeve. He laughs.

  “This is not the appropriate tone here,” Sasha says the moment her mouth is free again. She makes dramatic eyes. “I shall change the mood.”

  She sings some sort of mourning song. Paolo groans. Then Stuart sings too. It doesn’t sound that awful really. It just sounds sad.

  “This is really corny,” I announce.

  “Give in to the corny-ness,” S
tuart yells. He grabs some leaves and throws them in the air. “Give in!”

  Paolo puts his arm around my shoulder and Sasha holds my hand, but I don’t need them to. I’m okay all by myself. Still, it’s nice to have friends, buddies to ride off into the sunset with, who know you’re a little off but like you anyways, even if you’re a theater geek and your dad wears tights.

  I get ready to burn the letters, grab the lighter from Sasha. But before I do, the wind takes one letter, skittering it across the cemetery. My shell cracks. A piece of it falls. Sasha squeezes my hand a little tighter. A bigger gust of wind blows most of the papers away. I look into the sky, a sky that looks more like my dad’s eyes than Mike O’Donnell’s, and I smile.

  Saddle up.

  I nudge Paolo with my elbow. “Think there are any hyperactive zombies hanging out around here?”

  “Don’t worry,” he says as a couple of crows skitter-land on an oak branch above our heads. “We can take them.”

  For two weeks, I live with my dad and we get in a routine. He likes to hear about Students for Social Justice. He likes to hear me tell him all about the musical, about how Stuart Silsby and Sasha got in trouble because they were “practicing kissing” in the greenroom. I tell him how I cheated at poker during one of the downtimes between scenes and none of the guys caught me.

  “You have the innocent face,” he says. “You got that from me.”

  “Sasha says that poker is her favorite game because the kings are like cowboys and the queens are the bitches and they get to control everything.”

  “Lily!”

  “Sasha said it.”

  He laughs and laughs. He hits his thigh with his fist and bends over. I smile at making him laugh like that.

  My mom calls on the phone, crying. It seems the police came. There was an Oregon arrest warrant out for Mike O’Donnell. My mom says she doesn’t know the charge. Yeah, right. One Man Dead.

  “Come home, honey,” she says sniffing.

  I stare at the phone.

  “Come home, honey. I’m lonely.”

  But I can’t go. I can’t say anything. My voice vanishes. My sister takes the phone. My sister takes charge. She helps my mother pack Mike’s things, but there’s no place to send them. The police took the photo albums, but they left the rest of it. My mom and Jessica haul it all out to the garage, just the two of them, with Jessica all pregnant. I feel guilty.

  “No wonder he didn’t stay at his sister’s,” Jessica says when she comes and eats dinner at Dad’s. “The police had already checked for him there.”

  She shakes her head. She stabs a tomato slice with her fork. “I’m going to live with Mom for awhile.”

  She looks at me and I look away. I wonder if she knows about the photos. I wonder if she knows about me. I swallow. I cannot go back. The wagons are moving forward, Daddy. The wagons are going straight to new frontiers. I hope you aren’t disappointed, but I just don’t think I can go back yet.

  My dad and I go to Friendly’s, just the two of us, and it isn’t horrible boring like I’d thought it would be. He’s put a pink triangle sticker on his immaculate little car. The sticker represents gay pride, but I don’t tell him I know that. He doesn’t say anything either, and I realize that this isn’t like the Mike O’Donnell secret. This is something that is solely his and if he wants to officially tell me someday, then he will. It’s about him, not me.

  Don’t you think so, Daddy? Do you think that’s the right thing to do?

  In the parking lot, I turn and say, “Dad, I have something to tell you.”

  He switches off the car and holds the keys in his hand. “What, honey?”

  “When I was younger, right after Daddy died, his brother touched me.”

  “Touched you?” He swallows but keeps staring at me, head on. His blue blue eyes don’t look away from mine. Dead on.

  “Inappropriately,” I say in a flat, calm voice, because it was a long time ago. “It wasn’t too bad, not like talk-show bad.”

  “I’m sorry that happened,” he says and he grabs my hand in his. The keys get all jumbled up with our fingers.

  “For a while,” I say, my voice not so flat anymore, “I was really mad at you. I don’t know. I thought you should have been there to protect me. You or Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry we weren’t. I’m sorry we weren’t there for you,” he says, kissing the top of my head the way you used to.

  I sniff in and pull away, wipe my nose on the back of my hand. “I’m sorry too.”

  He wipes at his eyes with a handkerchief. Yes, he still carries a handkerchief. I’m sure I’m the only kid in town with a possibly gay, handkerchief-using, truck-driving father who only watches public television.

  “Mike O’Donnell is obviously a manipulative narcissist,” I say. “I think he may have killed somebody once. I think that’s what the arrest was all about.”

  My dad doesn’t even blink. “Well, after dinner maybe we should look into that. Find out what that warrant was exactly for. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He opens his door, and before he gets out of the car he says, “Does your mother know?”

  I’m not sure if he means about Mike O’Donnell or my uncle or what, but either way the answer is the same.

  “Yep.”

  He sighs and shakes his head. We walk up the sidewalk to Friendly’s. There’s a metal bike rack by the front door.

  “Check this out,” I tell my dad.

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, I cat-leap up to the top of the rack, walk across it, totally showing off. It wobbles a little bit and my dad rushes over. “Lily!”

  He grabs my hands. I hop down with my fingers wrapped around his. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Amazing. Is that the parkour thing?”

  I nod.

  “Think you could teach this old dog?” he asks, opening the door to Friendly’s. He holds it for me.

  “Maybe,” I say and give him a really fat wink. He laughs.

  The waitress gives us a booth. Once we’re all settled on the dark green vinyl I tell him my Hannah Dustin theories. I tell him that I think she liked it with the Indians, but got scared about going to Canada. She didn’t know what would happen and Canada just seemed impossibly far away.

  “I think she regretted killing them,” I say. “Even though they killed her baby.”

  “I can’t imagine killing anyone,” my father says. “I’m pro-gun control, you know.”

  “And pro-choice,” I say because I know his political litany by heart, having heard it every election year just like we always do. It sounds a lot like Sasha’s. “Pro-environment. Pro-the middle class. Pro-equal rights. Pro-blue socks. Pro-union. Pro-ankle bracelets.”

  He holds up his hands, laughing. “You’ve got me. You’ve got me.”

  “You know, in my Hannah Dustin report?” I eat a French fry, smoosh it around in the ketchup. “The father, Hannah Dustin’s husband, he left her in the house.”

  “Wasn’t he protecting the children?”

  “That’s what they say, but how do we know it’s the truth? That he wasn’t just running away?” I ask.

  “That’s always hard to know.” He gulps his iced tea. I watch his Adam’s apple slide like Jessica’s does.

  All of a sudden, halfway through the food, I push aside my French fries, just inhale real deep. And since it’s the day for saying things, just laying it all out there like John Wayne does, like the way you always used to, I say, “What if you aren’t my real father?”

  “What if I’m not what?” he says and then gestures with his fork for me to pass the salt.

  “My real father.”

  He holds the plastic saltshaker in his hand in mid-air above his plate. He doesn’t even tip it. “Where did you get
that idea from?”

  Slowly, he comes back to life and starts shaking the salt over his New England Country Thanksgiving Dinner, which is sliced turkey and Stove Top stuffing, I think.

  “Mike O’Donnell.”

  “That man’s a drunk, Lily. Plain and simple. We’ve seen that man’s a lying drunk.”

  He looks at me and I try to keep my face all blank and innocent like I don’t know anything in the world.

  “I wouldn’t trust a thing he says.” He’s not angry and I don’t want to be, but I have to know. I just have to, and I’m afraid he’ll turn mean like men sometimes do and kick me out of his house because I’m not his real daughter, and I’ll have nowhere to go.

  But I need to know, because it’s just like Mr. John Wayne used to say: When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it.

  So, slowly, I say, “Are you sure?”

  He gazes up at me and I just stare at him because maybe this is the last time I’ll ever see him in my whole life.

  “How could you not be mine?”

  All the breath I’ve been holding inside of me rushes out and flows across the table. It whirls around the restaurant and out the door, free.

  He eats the rest of his meal, even the cranberry sauce, but we don’t order sundaes, which are the best part of Friendly’s. I don’t know if you remember this about him, Daddy, but my dad will come here just for the sundaes. He’s such an ice-cream-aholic. The way you were addicted to cashews.

  In his eyes is the glimmer of doubt, and I think of how this wasn’t really my secret to tell, was it? When secrets are so strange and full of deepness we forget who they belong to.

  We go out to the parking lot and get in his tiny beige car, and he says, “For years I’ve thought you were mine. That means you are. There was never any question.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say and everything inside me breaks, because I miss you, Daddy, and I miss my father being my father and everything being simple. So I do a very un–John Wayne thing and start crying. I’m so ashamed, I put my face in my hands.