“How was it?” my mom asks all bright and cheery.
I shrug and open the fridge. “Okay.”
“Did he give you my check?”
“No.” I grab an apple, slam the fridge door, and she groans and swears beneath her breath. I can’t take this. “I’m going for a quick bike ride.”
“Fine.” She’s already turned away, picking up the phone. “Be back in time for dinner.”
My rear brakes squeak whenever I press the grip. It sounds like cats scared behind a tavern somewhere. For a second while I’m pumping up the hill towards Bangor, I imagine you driving by in a big old truck. It’s red, an antique Ford, I think. You lean out and wave to me. I get inside. You pick up my bike and haul it into the back like it weighs nothing.
“How was your day?” you ask.
“Okay.”
You push a brown bag towards me. There’s a Veggie Delite from Subway inside it. “My favorite.”
You wink and just keep driving.
You drop me off at the track. Paolo Mattias is rushing around it, long legs smashing records like he did in eighth grade. Paolo sees you drive away.
“That your dad?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Wow.” His eyes light up and you can just tell that he’s thinking how amazing it would be to have a dad like you, like John Wayne, a hero kind of dad. “Cool.”
Mr. Wayne, just tell me something. Why does being alive have to hurt so much? You must know. I’ve seen that look in your face on the TV screen when they replay your movies. I’ve seen your face, Mr. Wayne, and I can tell that you know something about pain. You watch the sunset. You watch the movie men, the Italian Indians. I know you know something about it. So tell me, Mr. Wayne. Why does being alive have to hurt so much?
Since my father forgot to feed me after the engine show, I race to the kitchen as soon I’m back from biking. The apple didn’t do it. I’m hoping that my mom’s made beef stew for tonight. I love beef stew, especially the carrots and the potatoes all coated with gravy stuff. But there isn’t a Crock-Pot on the counter. I can’t smell anything cooking. A package of stew meat sits on the counter, unopened. Food poisoning waiting to happen.
“Mom!” I yell. “I’m home. What’s for dinner?”
There’s no answer. Maybe she’s been kidnapped, I think, but, c’mon, really. Who would kidnap my mother? Still, I throw myself down and shimmy across the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Inching forward, I listen for the bad guys … Saddle up.
“Mom?” I take a chance, call again.
“I’m in here.” Her voice comes from our living room.
“Are you alone?”
“What?”
I can tell by her tone she’s alone, so I stand up and head for her. She’s sitting in the tall yellow chair with the roses on it looking out the picture window. Her face is splotchy and three quiet tears are dropping down her cheeks. First, I think that someone, maybe my Nana, has died. But she isn’t sobbing. She would be sobbing if someone died. When my stepfather died, she sobbed and sobbed and clutched me and moaned that our world was over and we’d never survive without him.
All I wanted to do was run away, then. I know this is awful and I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. It’s true. My face mashed into her shirt, and it was too soft and close. Her hands clung to my back and she shook and shook. I kept wanting to push her away and run to this special place I have in the woods where all these ferns grow and the light streams down in big golden rays, slanting through the trees. I wanted that more than anything, the peace there.
I’m sure that’s how you’ve felt a few times, like when your second wife turned out to be a prostitute and a drunk and she waved that gun in your face when you came home. I bet you wanted to just go by the ocean somewhere or the desert, and have a drink or two, alone. But you didn’t, did you? You stood there like a man and you faced up to your troubles, that’s what you did.
That’s what I did too.
My mother isn’t sobbing now. There’s just those three tears. I hope that maybe it’s just that Mike O’Donnell isn’t coming. I cross my fingers. I think about the newspaper headlines. One Man Dead In Fight. Maybe he’s been arrested. I want to bounce around like a G-rated goofball and say, “Oh happy day! Oh happy day!”
I don’t. Instead, I switch back into the role of your daughter in that movie where you fight the oil fires. I’m strong and good and kind.
“What’s wrong?” I ask and touch her shoulder. It trembles.
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay. You don’t have to.”
I know what that’s like, not wanting to tell someone what’s wrong, because if you tell them it isn’t a relief. It just makes it more real, or maybe if you tell them they’ll pity you, and when you add someone’s pity onto your own sadness it’s like all the strings inside of you become untuned, stretched too tight, and you can feel them ready to snap apart if anyone says anything, or if you even move.
Even though I know that, I swallow. I swallow big and hard, and all the grit from those oil fires feels like it’s stuck there.
I’m not sure if that’s true, but it sounds good.
My mom hiccups. I notice that her eyes stare right ahead. I wonder why she hasn’t looked at me. Maybe she’s in a coma. Or shock. What do I do if she’s in shock? I try to remember what we learned in health class in eighth grade.
“Are you cold?” I ask. “Maybe you should lie down on the floor. I’ll get a pillow for under your head.”
I imagine new headlines. Quick-Thinking Girl Saves Mother From Shock.
Her hand lifts from the armrest and flutters at me like I’m a bug she’s brushing away, which is an absolutely evil thing to do no matter how upset she is. I turn.
“No, Liliana.” The fluttering hand grabs my forearm, and it’s surprisingly strong. “I’m not cold. I’m sorry. It’s just … your sister …”
“What about her?”
“She’s … oh. I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”
My mother stares into my eyes. It looks like little red snakes are stretching all around her eyeballs. She’s been crying more than three tears. She must have been crying hard before I came home. I never should have left. I should have stayed here and protected her.
“What happened?” I fix her with my gaze. It’s the same gaze you would use to get horses to listen to you. I call it the trainer gaze.
My mother always submits to it. “She came over and she had this bruise. A very large bruise. All on the left side of her chin.”
“A bruise?”
The clock chimes on the wall. I stare at it, trying to figure out what the damn numbers mean.
“Brian hit her?”
My mother lifts her hand like it weighs a hundred tons. “She says her jaw was locked and Brian had to hit it to unlock it. Her jaw does that.”
“What a lie.”
“We don’t know that.”
“He is such a freaking jerk.” I scoop up an unlit cigarette that’s been dropped on the floor. Outside, there are crows chasing a hawk above the big pine tree at the end of the yard.
“Liliana!” She holds out her hand for the cigarette. “Ladies don’t use that sort of language. I have never said that word in my entire life.”
“What’s your point, Mom? It makes you holy or something? Her husband is beating on her and you’re all pissed off about me using the f-word. Yeah, right on the scale of things, that’s the big crime, huh? Jesus. It wasn’t even the real f-word. I said ‘freaking.’”
I toss the cigarette at her and walk from my mother’s chair across the living room to the door of the family room that used to be a garage. It’s cozy, with big barn beams on the ceiling, bricks on the wall and a Franklin stove. I don’t go i
n there though. Instead, I just do stupid little manic laps around the yellow living room, the color of a bruise that’s almost healed.
“Jesus Christ,” I say.
My sister is fifteen years older than I am. She married Brian when I was three.
“She said her jaw was locked. She wouldn’t lie,” my mom says. She stands up and puts hands on my shoulders to make me stare into her face. I’m taller than she is. I grew two inches last year. She is so short. “She wouldn’t lie to me.”
“Mom. Everyone. Always. Lies.”
She drops her hands. Her face crumples, but I ignore it and start towards the family room to get the laptop. I have a report to do. I’ll have to go through the living room to get back to my bedroom. I don’t want to do this report stuff at the kitchen table. Not right now. My mother checks the top of the piano for dust, brushing her fingers really slowly along the dark wood and inspecting.
“Maybe you should call Dad if you’re so worried,” I say.
She looks at me like I’m crazy, which I probably am.
“Your father? Like he’d have any idea what to do.”
“Do you?” I ask.
“No.”
“Oh. So it’s up to me.” I take a step down into the family room, imagine going over to my sister’s house and putting a knife to Brian’s throat. I say out loud, “Looked to me like somebody was getting a dirty deal. Just thought I’d cut in.”
My mom snuffs in with her nose. “Is that a John Wayne quote?”
I shrug. “It’s from Haunted Gold.”
Her voice rises. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“He’d know what to do,” I say, sitting on the edge of the sofa, because it’s true you would know what to do. The laptop is heavy on my lap. I stare at it.
“There are no heroes,” she says, sitting up straight and pointing at me with the white pen she does her crossword puzzles with. “Got that? No men are heroes. Get my lighter for me?”
“John Wayne is a hero.” I grab the lighter off the kitchen counter and hand it to her. She looks so old all of a sudden. There are lines by her lips and her lipstick is smudged.
“John Wayne was a movie star. That’s all.” She lights up a cigarette and rolls her eyes. “The world has gone on fine without him. Why don’t you go do your homework?”
The phone rings and she brightens up; literally leaps up from the chair she was too tired to move from before. “Maybe it’s Mike.”
She grabs it and I can tell by the way her voice softens that it is. No heroes, huh?
In the kitchen, I grab a bread knife and tuck it inside my pants pocket. I grab a steak knife too, and put it under my pillow, just in case.
The man in my report, Hannah Dustin’s husband, saved his children. Fleeing from a party of scalping Native Americans, he ushered seven of his children in front of him. He stood rear, shooting at the Native Americans who were intelligently hiding behind the trees and bushes. They shot back, but he had better aim. He did this shooting and running, shooting and running, for over a mile, pushing most of his hysterical family to safety, hurrying them on, giving them strength. He brought them to a house and guarded it. The Indians that were following him eventually left.
I can’t find the name of the nation anywhere. I’ll have to go the library to look in the encyclopedias there. I’ve already tried the Internet and came up with nothing.
Lord, were they angry though, running through the town, ready to kill anyone. I can understand that. It’s what happens when you get pushed too far, and I expect those Native Americans got pushed a lot. I can’t believe Hannah Dustin is supposed to be a hero. Her husband is another story. That’s a father.
If they made it into a movie, that would be your role. I can see you standing there, standing tall, shooting, aiming, protecting your children. You would know what to do.
When my mother’s gone to sleep, I creep into the kitchen. I grab the Tupperware cheese container out of the fridge and cut off a piece with a bread knife. It’s not too easy to cut all the way through, and it comes off jagged. Next, I go over to the breadbox my father made before I was born. It was a birthday present for my mother one year. She thinks that’s funny. He made her a breadbox for her birthday. I split the cheese up into little pieces and smoosh it between the bread. The way the yellow cheese breaks up the smooth brownness of the bread makes me think of my sister, Jessica. I don’t know why. I don’t know the why about anything. Sometimes you just have to let the gaps in your thinking come and not explore the connections, like why cheese in bread reminds you of your bruised sister.
Sitting on the stool by the phone, I eat all the bread and then I dial Jessica’s number. Her husband answers.
“Hello? Hello?
His voice is low and thick with beer. I like how people’s voices tell you what their soul is like. It makes life a little easier, I guess, but we get distracted by how they look and what they do, so we forget the clues of the voice.
I muffle my voice, try to make it like low and twangy, a John Wayne tough-guy voice. “Touch her again, you die.”
I don’t hang up the receiver. Instead, I disconnect the line. I reconnect it, call my father’s number, and hope that my grandmother doesn’t answer.
He picks up the phone and his voice is groggy from sleep. He goes to bed every night at nine.
“Hello?” he says. “Hello? Who is it?”
I hang up on him, too, just disconnect the line and then I feel so guilty it’s all I can do not to call back. Instead, I go back to bed and try to think of ways to save the day, save my sister, but I fall asleep before I can even think of one. Some hero.
I heard a story about when you were a kid in the California desert. You and your dog, Duke, had a paper route and there was this awful boy who called you girlie because your name was Marion. He beat you up. Those must have been some dire circumstances there. I have to tell you, I was shocked, Mr. Wayne, because I thought that you were always popular, a hero kind of man, not a get-smacked-around-and-called-girlie kind of man.
That didn’t last long, though, did it?
Firefighters taught you how to use your fists, but you still avoided that bully for as long as you could. I respect you for that. I respect you for using your fists as a last resort. There aren’t many men like that nowadays, but I think there are a lot of women, a lot of women who wouldn’t know how to make a fist if their life depended on it.
It’s also good to think that there’s hope, you know, for us people on the fringes. If a boy named Marion can grow up to be the Duke, well, anything’s possible isn’t it?
I would tell Nicole that story to make her feel better, but she’s not a big fan, Mr. Wayne. She prefers those boy-band singers. The ones with the skinny hips and shoulders to match. The ones with those high voices. I don’t think they should even count as men. No offense.
The reason I should tell her this story of yours is that Nicole thinks we have to be popular, and right now. This girl’s got her finger on the trigger and it’s twitching ’cause she’s ready to shoot.
Nicole is determined that our popularity is not going to be a lost cause, like in The Cowboys when you had to take five hundred head of steer through bad country and all you had for cowhands were little boys. That was a good movie and a lost cause.
You die in that one. That should never have happened. You refused to back down to the bad guy, refused to turn around, and he shot you in the back, again and again, while all those little boys watched.
I hated that.
I think Nicole’s popularity quest is probably a lost cause for me if Paolo Mattias has told everyone that he thinks my father is gay. It’s hard to be popular when your dad wears ladies’ panty hose, you know what I mean? I don’t know if he’s gay or not. I’ve never seen him with a boyfriend or anything, and he doesn’t talk ab
out guys being hot. I mean, he’s a truck driver, right? Truck drivers can’t be gay. Hairdressers are gay. Art directors are gay. Right? Plus, maybe he’s a straight cross-dresser not a gay cross-dresser, or something. Those exist.
Oh, God. Why does it matter?
If Paolo Mattias has gone blabbing like a weak-kneed hostage facing twenty-four banditos with guns, well, I just don’t have a hope of being cool. Being cool is not the point when you’re short like me, and your mom’s got a man coming to see her and your sister’s got a man hitting her and you’ve got no man at all.
I’ve still joined Students for Social Justice, Amnesty International, and the Modern Foreign Language Club, not because I want to be popular, but because I want to. I tell Nicole this at lunch. Students for Social Justice meets after school on Mondays, so I won’t be able to talk to her on the phone today.
“What?” Nicole says. She spreads the cream cheese on her bagels in circles. It has to be perfect or else she won’t eat. It all must be even, no lumps, no bumps, no thin spots. The spreading takes her forever, and I’ve usually finished my bagel by the time she starts hers. Still, it’s nice to look at, like a bagel from a commercial, with little ridges in the cream cheese from the plastic knife the cafeteria worker gives her when she goes through the line.
“What?” Nicole says again, because I haven’t answered. “You’re not serious.”
“Why not?” I say, sniffing the air. It smells like a pool in here, like bleach. They must have disinfected the whole cafeteria over the weekend. I sniff my bagel. It smells like plastic.
“Those are not popular-people clubs.”
“And what are?” I ask. I pick up the metallic wrapper the cream cheese came in and put it on my paper plate. I yawn and stretch. I did not get enough sleep.
“Track. Or cheerleading,” Nicole says. “You yawn like a cat. It’s weird.”
“I’m not doing any of those, except maybe theater,” I say, pulling my legs out from behind the bench that’s connected to the cafeteria table. I want to throw out my lunch stuff in the metal garbage can at the end of the table, just a few feet away. I keep talking while I’m walking. “I could never be a cheerleader. I’m not perky enough.”