Geek Girl

  Pat didn’t even blink when I asked him to take me even though it’s a two-hour drive—each way. He thinks it’s a good idea, didn’t even ask why suddenly I want to see her. I think he knows. He even takes the day off work, a gesture that means more to me than it probably even does to him.

  Deciding what to wear takes me two full days.

  I want to dress soft, with easy makeup and calm hair to show her that I’m a good girl, that I’ve turned out well, that she has had no negative impact on me.

  I want to dress as harshly as I can, with the hardest, most severe makeup I can manage, the shortest, tightest skirt, black lips, poofed hair, so that she can see just what her neglect has cost.

  I finally decide to go just as I look these days—something of a compromise between the two extremes.

  We go on a Wednesday. I have my iPod plugged into my ears, music blaring. It’s rude, I know, something I wouldn’t have cared about before Trevor the Polite got hold of me. I am a bundle of shaking nerves with tremors shimmering across my skin, and I don’t have it in me to make small talk.

  I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep just in case Pat tries to talk to me anyway, wishing I really could sleep. Thankfully, Pat leaves me alone, not even glancing my way, ignoring me as completely as I am him.

  The two-hour drive seems to take forever, and yet all too soon we are pulling through the security gate at the penitentiary. My tremors step it up double time, my stomach clenching.

  In order to be let in to the inner sanctum, you have to play a kind of game with the guards at different posts. Lots of suspicious looks at us, a walk through a metal detector, and a thorough frisking—me by a female guard who could probably kick my butt with her little finger, and Pat by a big, burly guy who I wouldn’t want to tangle with. I suspect we’re getting off fairly easy when Pat flashes his DEA badge.

  Finally—too soon—there’s only one iron door left between us and her. I feel dizzy, wondering if I might throw up on the clean white floor. Pat sidles over and gives me a one-armed squeeze.

  “I’ll be right out here,” he says meaningfully. “Take as long as you need. I have plenty of reading material to choose from.”

  He gives me a lopsided smile as he indicates the three outdated magazines on the small table next to an uncomfortable-looking orange vinyl sofa. I try to smile back but fail miserably. He ruffles my hair and kisses me on the top of my head.

  “You’ll be okay,” he murmurs. “She can’t hurt you now. You’re safe.”

  I nod tightly, then turn back toward the guard, who watches sympathetically. I’m probably not the first semi-orphan to grace this waiting room coming to see her wayward mother.

  “Ready?” he asks, then without waiting for an answer—or maybe just not giving me a chance to chicken out—he twists a key from his overloaded key chain and the door swings open. He steps in and waits for me to follow, which I do quickly because chickening out is sounding really appealing right about now.

  There are about a dozen tables scattered throughout the room. I’m surprised; I had been expecting glass partitions with a phone handset. This feels too intimate.

  Three tables are occupied. At one table sits a large woman and a man with two small children, probably her family. I wonder briefly what took her away from them and whether she regrets the distance. Another table has an old woman who looks like a sweet grandma, though she’s wearing the prison-issue white jumpsuit. She’s being visited by another woman who could be either a daughter or a granddaughter.

  The third table is taken by a skinny woman with long brown, lanky hair. She half stands as I enter but shifts her eyes behind me toward the guard and quickly resumes her seat. I also glance back toward the guard, and he nods me forward toward this stranger. I take a tentative step forward, then stop again.

  “Sheila, you have a visitor,” the guard calls harshly, retreating through the door and slamming it with a reverberating clang.

  “Jennifer?” the skinny woman, who doesn’t look familiar at all, asks.

  Fear chokes me—not a fear that she might harm me physically, but a psychological fear that I can’t even put a name to. I’m frozen, staring at this small person. My mother hadn’t been small, had she? I remembered her as someone much bigger than me, much tougher. How can this woman, who is thin and shriveled and no taller than me, be the same woman?

  She reaches up with one of her hands that had been resting on her lap beneath the table, and the chain connected to the cuff linked about her wrist drags loudly up the table. As if the action and sound is a switch, I feel myself unfreeze and my fear drains away. I nod and move to sit in the chair across from her.

  She smiles hesitantly, turning her palm up in a helpless gesture.

  “Hi—” I begin but stop short of calling her “mom.”

  She sighs as her shoulders droop a little.

  “Jennifer, you’ve grown up so much.”

  “Well, that happens to the best of us,” I say, using my sarcasm as a defense.

  She shakes her head, eyes darting everywhere—my eyes, cheeks, lips, hair, neck, arms that are resting on the table—as if she’s trying to take a thousand tiny photographs to store away.

  “I—” She breaks off, then sighs again. “This is a little awkward, huh?” she asks with a humorless laugh.

  “I don’t know you,” I blurt. She jerks a little in response to my words. “I mean, I know who you are, of course, but you’re a . . .”

  “Stranger?” she asks when I fail to finish my sentence.

  “Yeah.” I nod, looking down at the scarred tabletop and tracing a carving with my finger. Apparently, JS hearts HM, if the table is to be believed.

  She sighs and leans back in her chair. I relax fractionally when she’s no longer leaning so intently toward me.

  “Did I ever tell you how I met your dad?” she asks unexpectedly. For a brief moment, I’m confused—she knows Pat? With a wash of guilt and something deeper, I realize she isn’t talking about Pat at all; she’s talking about the man who tried to kill me when I was six.

  “No, I don’t think that particular story ever came up in one of our mother-daughter heart-to-hearts,” I say, and she winces slightly at the cynicism. She doesn’t comment, letting it go, leaning forward again and bringing both shackled wrists loudly up to rest on the table.

  “It’s a cautionary tale, to be sure. I was sixteen. I was a good girl, though you may find that hard to believe.” She laughs sardonically, as if doubting it herself. “I had good parents, a good life. I didn’t want for anything. But I was restless, you know?” She doesn’t pause, not expecting an answer, but I could have answered yes. I know that feeling all too well. “Whatever I had, it was never enough. I always wanted something more, though I never knew quite what it was I wanted.

  “I started hanging out with some kids who weren’t the best influence, you know?” Again, no answer needed, but this tale is beginning to sound familiar. “It was exciting. We were always doing things to get the adrenaline pumping. And always at night, after I had gone to bed and snuck out my window. That added a higher element of exhilaration to whatever we did.

  “We found someone who could get us some fake IDs.” Here she glances at me for the first time, her eyes flickering up to gauge my reaction. How can I judge when I used to have one myself? When I don’t seem overly shocked, she looks beyond me, lost in her memories again.

  “We were always going to the bars. Back then they didn’t worry as much about serving minors. They barely glanced at the IDs.

  “Anyway, one night I met a man who was extremely handsome.” She smiles in remembrance. “He was flirting heavily with me, dancing with me, buying me drinks. He made me feel very grown up, very desirable.

  “I began meeting him regularly. Sometimes we would stay at the bar dancing, but mostly we would go back to his place to—” She breaks off, her cheeks turning pink, and I shift uncomfortably, not because she’s letting me know they’d been having sex—that’s no surprise
—but at the way her embarrassment makes her look younger, a little more like the woman I remember.

  “Well, anyway.” She flutters her hands around, skipping what she thinks my ears are too innocent to hear. “I found out I was pregnant about a month later. My parents had no choice but to allow me to marry him even though he was quite a bit older than me. Also, looking back, I suspect they could see things about him that I couldn’t. They never did like him.” She shrugs, dismissing her parents’ concern. “And I believe they were glad to be rid of me since I’d been so much trouble for so long.

  “We moved away two weeks later when Kerry got a call from his friend Tom, who said he had a job here for him. I never talked to my family again, even when things got . . . bad. I didn’t want them to know, didn’t want them to see that they had been right.

  “You were born not long after that.” She clenches her fingers together and looks at me, shrugging again as if that story should answer all of my questions. Instead, there are a thousand new ones zooming around in my head.

  “Touching,” is the first acerbic word out of my mouth. She bristles, and her mouth tightens disapprovingly. “Doesn’t really explain how you came to the decision to leave me with an abusive, homicidal maniac to be raised, does it?”

  Her fingers whiten as she tightens her grip. Her shoulders jerk back. Anger flashes through her eyes.

  “You have no idea what it was like, Jennifer.” Her words are clipped.

  “You’re right, I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  “If I hadn’t left him, he would have eventually killed me.”

  “Well, better your innocent, defenseless daughter than you, huh?”

  “I had no way to take care of a baby, let alone myself. I had nowhere to live, no job, and no family. What was I supposed to do?”

  “How about come and get me as soon as you did have those things. Or better yet, take me with you and figure it out like any normal mother. How long did you live with your next husband—Stan, was it?—before you had no choice but to take me in when my father was arrested for attempting to murder me? You know, after he’d spent all the rest of the time beating me to a bloody pulp almost daily.” I clench my jaw, refusing to let the tears come.

  Her jaw also tightens in response. Her eyes—disconcertingly like mine—brew with a storm. I can see a thousand words trying to make their way out, but she holds them back. In a sudden movement, her hands come up to cover her face, the movement startling me as the heavy chains drag noisily up the side of the table. Her shoulders relax to their former beaten position. When she drops her hands, I see tears and regret pooling in her eyes.

  “I can’t ever explain it to you because until you’ve lived it, you can’t know. You’re right, though. I had a responsibility to you. I shouldn’t have left you there. No one knew as well as I did what he was capable of.” She shrugs, but this time it’s full of self-recrimination rather than nonchalance. “I began to hate you before you’d even been born because you were the thing that bound me to him, to the monster he turned out to be.

  “I wanted out. That’s what my life was about for too long—wanting out. And then you were born, and you cried and he beat me for that. You wanted to eat, and he beat me for that. You needed diapers and clothes, and he beat me for that. And every time I looked at you, all I could see was the beating that was going to come, and I blamed you, my beautiful, innocent baby girl. And I hated you for it more every day.”

  Her eyes hold mine, refusing to let me go while she spills the ugly truth. I can feel the tears on my cheeks, but I don’t wipe them away. To do so would be to acknowledge them, and I can’t do that.

  “So I left. And then he died . . . was killed . . . and you were brought to me. At first, I didn’t want you. But Stan made me keep you because we were able to get more welfare money for you.” I look away, sick at heart. She wanted me because of money? How much could it possibly have been—fifty, maybe a hundred bucks a month?

  She reaches forward as if to grab my hand, and I jerk backward. She looks over my head to where the guards watch through a window, then sighs and leans back, pulling her own hands back beneath the table.

  “Of course you must hate me, even more now that you know the truth. But I swear to you, Jennifer, I came to love you, every bit as much as a mother should love her daughter. Even though things were bad with Stan, I was working hard and putting money away so that someday we could escape, you and me, and go far away to where no men could touch us. And then Stan . . . when he . . . when I walked in and saw . . .” She stumbles over the words, her eyes locked firmly on the tabletop.

  “I remember clearly what you saw. I was there, remember?” I mean for my words to come out harsh, but they are whispered, tortured. She meets my gaze with her own anguish mirrored there.

  “I had to kill him, Jennifer. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have stopped. He would have come at you again, and I wasn’t always there, couldn’t always be with you to guard you.” Her eyes are pleading. I try to resist the look, but I can’t because her words are the truth; I can feel it.

  “So, here we are,” I say, my voice resigned as I indicate the visitors’ room.

  “Here we are,” she agrees sadly. “But I’m okay with that, Jennifer. I have to be. Because it got you away from him, put you in a safe place, and that’s the important thing.”

  I think about telling her about just how “safe” my life has been, but I’m exhausted. There doesn’t seem to be any point in hurting her.

  “You sent all of my letters back, unopened,” I accuse softly, thinking that had she opened them, she would have known that her sacrifice had been in vain.

  “I wanted you to forget about me, to move forward with your new life.” I want to ask her how she thinks I could have possibly forgotten the mother who had turned my life into such torment, but it’s another unnecessary question that would only be hurtful.

  “You live with a nice family?” she asks, sounding as if she really wants to know while also not wanting to know.

  I shrug, looking into her eyes and holding them with my gaze as she had held mine.

  “They want to adopt me,” I say. Pain flashes across her face, but she covers it and smiles thinly.

  “Do they? But aren’t you almost eighteen? Why would they wait until now?” Then she gets an “ah-ha” look. “I guess the state funding runs out soon, huh?”

  “It’s not about money with them,” I defend. Shame fills her eyes. “They want me.”

  “The father? He treats you well?”

  I want to tell her that it’s none of her business, but I want to be in her good graces because now more than at any moment before I want to become their daughter in truth, and I can’t have that without her permission.

  “He’s great. He took the day off work to bring me here today.”

  “And the . . . mother?” she hesitates, reluctant for another to be named such.

  “She’s really nice.” I pause, then decide to move on. I can’t see the need to hurt her with details about the woman who wants to become what she should have been. “They have a son who’s married and a daughter not much older than me. I would have a brother and a sister. But they can’t adopt me unless you sign a paper. Once I turn eighteen, I can make the decision myself. I really want it to happen before I turn eighteen. I want to belong to a real family.” Even as I say the words, I feel myself getting lighter because it’s the truth.

  She looks away, her eyes filling with tears. I remain silent, waiting for her.

  “It’s probably for the best,” she says, so quietly I almost don’t hear. “It’s the least I can give you.” She looks back at me, and I can see the pain. “Send me the papers. I’ll sign them.” She pushes back and stands up. Immediately a guard appears in the room.

  “One more thing,” I say as she turns away, making a sudden decision, one I hope I won’t learn to regret. She pauses as the guard places a hand around her upper arm.

  “I’d like you to rea
d the letters I send you and not return them unopened.”

  At my words, she turns back, amazement written on her features.

  “Send me? You’ll write to me?” Wonder lilts her voice.

  “If that’s okay,” I say.

  A brilliant smile breaks out, and she’s transformed from the beaten, vaguely familiar stranger into the mother I had known for such a short period, and I remember that she did love me.

  “That’s definitely okay,” she says as she’s led from the room.

  Another guard leads me out to where Pat waits. He pretends that he hasn’t been waiting anxiously, but when he puts the magazine down, the edges stay crumpled from his tight grip. He doesn’t say anything, but as I step forward, he opens his arms, and I collapse into them, letting the tears flow.

  19. If All the Raindrops Were Lemon Drops and Gum Drops . . .

  Todd has gotten a job at Talbot’s wiping down the tables after customers are finished eating their burgers, and since it isn’t too far from his house, Trevor and I volunteer to walk him there on the three days each week that he works. It’s less than a mile each way, and any time I spend with Trevor alone is a good thing.

  I know that his dorkiness has rubbed off on me when walking with him and holding his hand becomes something intensely pleasurable, something to look forward to.

  Today we came back to Trevor’s house because his parents are both gone for the day, so that means even more alone time. We’re sitting on the trampoline (another geek activity that is becoming one of my favorite things to do), and Trevor keeps giving me that look, the one that says he wants to ask me something or tell me something that he thinks I won’t like to hear—which means asking him what it is could be a big mistake.

  “All right, out with it,” I finally command when he keeps sighing.

  “Out with what?” he asks too innocently, leaning back on one elbow.

  “You know I can’t stand the suspense. Just say whatever it is that you think I’m going to be mad about and get it over with.”