Broken Wings

I got my blouse back on and buttoned it clumsily. Then I sat up and pulled my sweater over myself as Ashley rushed out the door. Mrs. Fassbinder stepped back with her hands still up and shaking.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, looking in at me. “Oh my, my.”

  She looked so confused and flustered, I half-expected her to suffer heart failure. Her pallid face was beet red, her lips twisting. Then, finally gathering her wits, she told me to stay where I was and rushed off. I finished fixing my clothes and walked out of the room. Ashley was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Mrs. Fassbinder. After I splashed some water on my face, I wiped it with a towel and returned to the remedial reading room.

  “How are you?” Mr. Cody asked when I entered. “You look a little flustered yet.”

  “I’m all right,” I said, and then noticed no one else was in the room. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s your lunch hour, Phoebe.” He pointed to the clock. “Be back at one-ten. You know where the cafeteria is and all, right?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Well, you still have a long day ahead of you, Phoebe. You should get something in your stomach, unless the nurse has said otherwise, of course.”

  “That’s right. She said otherwise,” I told him.

  “Well, I’m just off to lunch myself. You can sit here or go outside as long as you don’t leave the school grounds, okay?”

  I nodded, and he left. The truth was I was still shaking, the trembles rattling my very bones. I flopped into my seat and lowered my head to my folded arms. I think I fell asleep for a few minutes because when the door was opened and I heard my name, it was almost one o’clock.

  A tall, dark-haired man wearing a tie and a shirt with no jacket stood in the doorway, holding the door open. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He had a firm mouth, a cleft chin, and two brown eyes under thick, dark brown eyebrows.

  “Phoebe Elder?” he said again.

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Dean Cassidy,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “To my office, young lady. Move it. I don’t intend to have a conversation with you in this doorway,” he said sternly.

  I rose and walked out.

  “Keep going,” he said, remaining a foot or so behind me. “Just past the guidance department,” he added, and I turned into an office doorway.

  The secretary turned from the filing cabinet and looked at us. She had short, auburn hair and was dumpy with a round face. Her eyes narrowed as she shook her head.

  “Send for Ashley Porter,” Dean Cassidy ordered, and she moved quickly to the phone on her desk.

  “In here,” he told me, holding a door open.

  I entered his office, which wasn’t much bigger than the outer office. On the paneled walls were all sorts of commendations, plaques, and awards from a variety of community organizations, congratulating Dean Cassidy for his work with the youth of the community, as well as his college degrees in gilded frames. I saw pictures of a pretty woman and two little girls on his desk.

  “Sit,” he commanded, pointing to a chair in front of his desk. He didn’t go to his chair. Instead, he went to the window and looked out. He stood there without speaking so long, I assumed he was waiting for someone else, but finally he turned and glared down at me.

  “I’ve been here for almost ten years now,” he began. “I’ve dealt with many things, insubordination in class, truancy, theft, fighting, smoking, vandalism, but this is the first incident of something as sordid and disgusting as this.

  “And then, on top of that, to have such a thing involve a student that hasn’t been in my school two full days!”

  I turned away from him and stared at the wall.

  “I don’t know whether to have you sent to a church, a mental institution, or a prison,” he hollered so loudly it made my ears ring and shook my insides, but I didn’t cry and I didn’t cower.

  Slowly, I turned my head back to him and looked up at him. He was frozen with his back bent, his face glaring, his arms out.

  “Well, when you decide,” I said softly, “let me know.”

  If a human being could explode and reform himself, he would have at that moment. His face got so red with blood, I thought the top of his head would blow off and stick to the ceiling. His throat undulated like the body of a snake, his Adam’s apple bulging, and then he stammered and pointed at me.

  “You… you show me some respect, young lady. Your life here is hanging on by a thread.”

  I turned away again, and there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in!” he screamed.

  The door opened, and his secretary told him Ashley was outside.

  “Send him in here,” he commanded.

  I heard Ashley enter, but I didn’t look back at him.

  “Not only is the coach very, very disappointed in you, Ashley, I am absolutely disgusted with your behavior. What was going on in your head?”

  I smiled to myself.

  It wasn’t exactly what was going on in his head that mattered, I thought.

  “Wipe that grin off your lips, young lady, or I’ll wipe it off for you,” Dean Cassidy threatened.

  “And how you going to do that?” I shot back up at him.

  His eyes widened in surprise. I looked at Ashley, who was just as astounded. He shook his head gently as a warning.

  Dean Cassidy got hold of himself and straightened up.

  “I wanted the two of you in here together so I wouldn’t get one story from one of you and another story from the other. You don’t know how serious this is, Ashley. You could be in a lot more hot water than I cook up,” Dean Cassidy told him, and nodded at me.

  What was he implying? That I would accuse Ashley of trying to rape me?

  Ashley looked sufficiently terrified now.

  “I’m not going into detail about what Mrs. Fassbinder reported. You know what she saw. Do either of you want to deny it?” the dean asked.

  “No, sir,” Ashley said quickly.

  “And you, young lady?”

  “My name’s Phoebe,” I said.

  “And you, Phoebe?”

  I looked at Ashley.

  “I guess what she told you is what it was, but I don’t know what she told you, now do I?”

  “Well, I’m not going to get into detail about it,” Dean Cassidy said.

  He finally sat behind his desk.

  “Okay, Phoebe, you wait outside. I want to speak with Ashley first.”

  I got up and walked out, closing the door hard behind me. I knew what he was going to say in there. I could have written his dialogue for him. He was going to tell Ashley Porter I was a very bad girl with a bad record from my other school and he had gotten himself into trouble because of me. He was going to tell him how devastated his parents were going to be when they heard about it all. He was going to tell him how he was a boy with a good future that he was tossing into the ash can. And then finally, he was going to try to get him to put as much blame on me as he could. By the time he was finished, it would be as Ashley had pretended: I had seduced him.

  Ashley will probably do and say what the man wanted, I thought. What did I matter anyway? His parents lived here, and the dean would emphasize that he should be concerned about them.

  “She doesn’t care how her aunt Mae Louise and uncle Buster look in the community, or she wouldn’t have gotten herself into so much trouble here so quickly. You have no reason to be loyal to a girl like that,” he would say.

  Maybe Ashley didn’t need all that much convincing. The truth was, I hardly knew him. For all I knew, loyalty was a foreign word to him. He was certainly not very loyal to his teammates on the basketball squad, I thought.

  Why didn’t you think about all that before, stupid? I asked myself as I sat across from the secretary, who looked at me as though I were a serial killer. She avoided my eyes and worked on files.

&nb
sp; After what seemed like thirty minutes, but was probably only ten, the dean’s office door opened and Ashley, his head bowed, came out with the dean right behind him. He glanced at me and then quickly shifted his eyes guiltily away.

  “Write him a pass back to class,” the dean said with his hand on Ashley’s shoulder.

  “Phoebe,” the dean said, and nodded at his opened door.

  I stood up, looked at it, and shook my head.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I been there, done that.”

  “What?”

  Ashley spun around in surprise as I walked past him out of the office and started down the hallway.

  “If you know what’s good for you, young lady, you’ll march right back in here!” Dean Cassidy called after me from the office doorway.

  I know what’s good for me, I thought.

  That’s why I’m not marching right back.

  4

  Daddy’s Gone

  I didn’t know where I was going, of course. I just left the building and continued to walk down the street. I went about four blocks before a police car pulled up alongside me and sounded its siren. The policeman got out when I stopped and turned.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  “Anywhere but here,” I said.

  “You can’t do that, miss. The school is responsible for your well-being. Now get into the car,” he ordered.

  He wasn’t that tall, but he looked like he could rip a tree out by its roots. His shoulders were wide, and he had a neck so thick, I thought it would look perfect on a bull. He stepped toward me threateningly.

  I walked to the car and got in.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, and I gave him Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster’s address.

  “You’re taking me home, then?”

  “That’s where the school wants you brought. Your mother’s been called.”

  “She’s not my mother,” I said.

  “Who is she?”

  “My aunt.”

  “Whoever she is to you, she’s been called. What did you do wrong, anyway?” he asked.

  “Be born,” I said, and stared out the window.

  “Kids today,” he mumbled. We drove without speaking the remainder of the trip.

  I felt certain Aunt Mae Louise would get rid of me now. With all she was telling Daddy and me about how important she and Uncle Buster were in the school community, she would surely be too embarrassed to keep me around. In a way I felt relieved. Daddy would have to take me back, and we would have to find a way to make it work.

  When we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened and she stood there with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. The policeman got out and approached her with me trailing behind.

  “You her aunt?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she replied.

  He asked her to sign some paper on his clipboard, which made me feel like a package being delivered.

  “Good luck,” he sang as he returned to his car.

  “We’ll need it,” she called after him, and looked at me.

  “Not here two days and you do something like this?” she asked.

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Believe me, that’s what I want, too. Get in and stay in your room until Buster calls. He’s trying to locate your daddy right now.”

  “Good,” I said, marching past her.

  I went into my room and shut the door. All the while I hadn’t noticed how gray the sky had become. The room grew darker and darker until I heard raindrops tapping on the window with a sound that made me think of tapping witch’s fingers, long and bony with sharp, hard fingernails. It was something I heard and saw in recurrent nightmares all my life, only now the witch’s face I imagined was Aunt Mae Louise’s face.

  More often than not, when I was younger and I had a bad dream, there was no one there to comfort me. I would put on my lights and catch my breath, but I distrusted every shadow, no matter how small. Nightmares hid themselves in shadows. They waited and watched until they were confident I was asleep, and then they crossed through the light and came into my head through my ears or my nose or my open mouth. That was what I used to believe and, although I never told a soul, still believed. Even when I was little, I sensed that if I told Mama, she would either ignore me, yell at me for being stupid, or maybe even laugh and tell one of her friends what I had said and embarrass me. She had done something like that often enough.

  Now I sat here, unable to stop the trembling inside myself, despite the angry brave front I had put on in front of the dean, the policeman, and Aunt Mae Louise. It was one thing to be alone in a world where there were other girls like myself who were as alone or almost as alone as I was, but to feel like I felt here was harder.

  This is all Mama’s fault, I thought. If she hadn’t been so selfish, she would have considered me and what would happen to me after she had run off. I hated Aunt Mae Louise, but she wasn’t all wrong when it came to my mama, I admitted to myself. And she wasn’t wrong about Daddy either, about him ignoring all the warnings and about him being too weak.

  But he was all I had and I was all he had now. Lucky people had lots of choices for themselves. I had none. Wherever I was in my life, I thought, there would always be bars on the windows. There would always be shadows waiting to pounce on me. Lie back and take it, Phoebe, I told myself. Stop trying to go against the wind.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the rain and fell asleep. The sounds that woke me were the sounds of Barbara Ann and Jake returning home. I heard Aunt Mae Louise chastise them for making too much noise, and I heard her warn them to stay away from me. The tone in her voice made me sound like I could contaminate them.

  The drizzle turned into a heavy downpour. It went on and off for what seemed like hours and hours. I left the room only to go to the bathroom, and when I walked through the hall, I was struck by how quiet it was in the house. Both Jake’s and Barbara Ann’s doors were shut tight, and Aunt Mae Louise wasn’t nearby. All I could do was wait. Finally, she came to my room.

  “Your uncle Buster has not been able to locate your daddy yet. His company is trying to contact him for us, but he hasn’t gotten to his scheduled stops, I guess. Anyway, you might as well come out and help me get the dinner ready. Uncle Buster is on his way home.”

  “Are you sure you want me touching things?” I asked sullenly.

  She paused and furled her brow.

  “No, I don’t want you touching things, but I don’t want you doing nothing either. Idle hands get into mischief.”

  I followed her out and set the table. The truth was, I was getting cabin fever in that tiny room anyway. Even her grouchy face and bitter comments brought some variety. When Barbara Ann came out of her room, she looked at me with different eyes, eyes not so full of herself as they were fearful of me. What did Aunt Mae Louise tell her, I wondered, or what had she heard from the other students on the bus?

  As if she could read my thoughts, Aunt Mae Louise decided to tell me immediately why Barbara Ann was looking at me askance.

  “The other kids made fun of her on the bus, I’ll have you know. Seems the news about you and that boy spread like a bad rash through the school. All of our friends are going to hear about it now. Fine thing to do to us.”

  I didn’t say anything. My tongue stayed glued to the roof of my mouth even though the words were scratching away at the base of my throat. I finished what I had to do and then, when Uncle Buster came in, I sat with my head down.

  “Your daddy’s going to be very disappointed to hear about this when I contact him,” he said. Surprisingly, that was all he said. Aunt Mae Louise said grace, and then we ate in relative silence. Every once in a while, I looked up and saw Jake staring at me wide-eyed.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer and I slapped my fork down on the table and stood up.

  “I didn’t kill anyone, you know,” I screamed, and marched out of the dining room.

  “Phoebe Eld
er!” Aunt Mae Louise called after me. “You don’t get up from the table until you are excused. Do you hear what I said?”

  “Let her go,” Uncle Buster said.

  I slammed the door behind me. What little I had eaten seemed to be caught in my throat. My stomach churned, and I went into the bathroom and threw up. They heard me, but no one came to see how I was. Now I was thinking that I wouldn’t wait for them to contact Daddy. I would pack my things and just leave. I could hitchhike a ride back into Atlanta proper, and I knew where we kept our key outside the apartment. There was no sense in staying here a moment longer.

  It was still raining very hard, however, so I thought I would at least wait for it to let up. In the meantime, I packed everything and then I sat on the bed with my arms folded, facing the door. To my surprise, it opened slowly and little Jake poked his head in.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “Are you really going to hell?” he replied.

  “Your mother tell you that?”

  He nodded.

  “No. I am not going to hell. I am in hell and so are you,” I snapped back at him.

  “No, I’m not. Only bad people go to hell,” he said. Even at his young age, he had Aunt Mae Louise’s scowl.

  “Not just bad people,” I said, “also unlucky people.”

  My answer put some confusion in his eyes. He shook his head and said, “No, they don’t.”

  “You better not come too close to me,” I warned, “or I’ll take you with me. I’ll wrap my arms around you so tightly you won’t be able to get loose and we’ll go down, down, down.”

  He started to shake his head and then I went, “Boo!” He backed out quickly and closed the door. I started to laugh, but stopped and suddenly felt more like I should cry.

  Maybe Aunt Mae Louise was right to tell her children that. Maybe I am going to hell, I thought. I’m my mother’s daughter, aren’t I? What chance do I have to avoid it? The only thing I’ve accomplished in my short life is get myself deeper and deeper into trouble. It was a dark, descending road I traveled, and perhaps hell was at the end after all. I had no idea how or what would stop my fall. It seemed hopeless and useless to think of a way. I guess Mama had the right idea after all, I thought. Have a good time and don’t worry about tomorrow.