“We’ve got to have the funerals sometime, though,” I said. “We can’t just let them… rot… in the morgue.”
“I know what needs to be done,” he said. “But it isn’t that easy. I’ve lost everything important to me.”
I slipped my big toe along the bumpy inside of my flip-flop. Almost, I amended for him. I’ve lost almost everything important to me. But I knew he’d said what he meant. He’d lost Mom and Marin—the important things. He was as stuck with me as I was with him.
“I did, too,” I said instead.
He finally turned to face me. “I got hold of your grandparents. Billie and Harold Cameron.”
I frowned in confusion.
“The ones down in Caster City,” he added.
“I know,” I said. “I know who they are.” They were my father’s parents, the only grandparents I had, and Ronnie knew that all too well.
Mom’s parents had disowned her. In all my life, I’d never heard her talk about them unless one of us asked a specific question. But she’d talked about Billie and Harold Cameron. I don’t remember ever seeing them, and I never once got a birthday card or a Christmas gift from them, but I knew who they were in a vague sort of way. I knew that Mom disliked them. She thought they were cold as reptiles, and they’d probably gotten that way by being screwed over by their own kids so many times. I knew that she’d blamed them, in part, for my father leaving us, but that she’d kind of felt sorry for them, too, because all they ever did was clean up their kids’ messes and they never had any enjoyment of their own. She said they seemed depressed and jaded. Like life, and everyone in it, was out to get them.
“You told them about Mom? Why?”
He finally raised his tired, bloodshot eyes to meet mine, which made my shoulders shrink and my stomach slip. “Jersey, I’m sorry,” he said, and that was pretty much all he needed to say. I got it from just those three words.
“But why?”
He spread his hands apart, and I got some satisfaction from seeing them shake, from seeing his chin quiver and the string of saliva that connected his top tooth to his bottom lip. “I can’t do it. I can’t raise you alone. I never meant to…”
Call me your daughter, my mind supplied, and that right there was the reason I could never embrace Ronnie as my dad. It had nothing to do with being abandoned by my drunk father down in Caster City. It was a barrier that neither of us could acknowledge but that we both knew was there. Ronnie never intended to call me his daughter. I was simply part of the package deal he got when he married my mom.
“So they’re coming up here to help you? Is that it?”
He shook his head miserably. “They’re gonna take you down there.”
“What? I don’t want to go down there. I want to stay here. I was planning to help you rebuild. I don’t need some vacation from the storm.”
“It’s not a visit. They’re taking you to Caster City to live with them.”
“Uh, no they’re not,” I said, standing suddenly. “No way.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“But why? I can help you. We can help each other. You’re overwhelmed right now. We both are. But it’ll get better. Besides, my friends are all up here. I can’t just leave them. I need them.”
“You need a mother, and I can’t give you that,” he said.
“Billie Cameron isn’t my mother! Mom was my mother! She’s gone and I’ll never have another mother, and sending me off to live with strangers isn’t going to change that.”
“It’s the only option you’ve got,” he said.
I moved toward him, reaching for him. “No, it’s not. It’s not an option at all. I want to stay here. I want to stay with you. Please, Ronnie, don’t make me go live with them. I don’t even know them.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned onto his side, his face smushed against the ugly bedspread. He said something else, but it was too muffled for me to make out.
I turned and looked around frantically—for what, I didn’t know. I felt like I needed to do something that would show him what a bad idea this was. Something that would make him change his mind.
“Please, Ronnie, no. I don’t want to go. Please,” I begged, kneeling by the side of his bed, but he stayed with his face buried, spewing unintelligible noises into the polyfiber. “I’m not going!” I cried, trying to sound defiant but knowing that I had no real threat to make. I had no money, no stuff, no other family to turn to. “You can’t make me do this.”
Finally, Ronnie sat up and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, calmer now. “I don’t want this. But I don’t want to take care of you right now. I know that sounds horrible and makes me a bad person, but I can’t help it. It’s how I feel. I don’t know what to do with you. Except this.”
“Mom would hate it.” My jaw ached from being clenched so hard. “She would hate you for doing it.”
“Your mother would understand.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She would never understand why you would send me to live with them.”
“I’m sending you to someone who can take better care of you than I can. She would want that.”
I stood. “She wouldn’t.”
“They’ll be here in a few minutes, so you should get your things together,” he answered.
Anxiety washed over me. A few minutes? There was no way I’d convince him this was a horrible idea in just a few minutes. Of course, he probably knew that, which was why he had waited to tell me. My mind raced, trying to think of an offer, a deal, anything I could do to change this. But I came up with nothing.
“Fine,” I said, bending to gather what few items I had and stomping across the room to stuff them into my backpack. “Wait.” I froze. “They’re coming now? What about the funerals?”
He looked down at the floor, smashing his lips together. “I’m sorry, Jersey” was all he said. Again.
Fury engulfed me. He was sorry? I was going to miss the funerals because he was too selfish and cowardly to let me stay with him, and he was sorry? “You can’t be serious. You can’t actually be thinking it’s okay to send me away before I get to say good-bye to my mother and my sister.” At this, my voice cracked, and tears started anew. “How could you do that?”
“I don’t know when the funerals are going to be. I can’t even make myself go to the hospital or talk to the funeral home. I don’t know where I’ll get the money. We’ll have a memorial… later. After I get things figured out.”
“The right thing to do would be to let me help you figure out those things, not send me away. I didn’t get to say good-bye, Ronnie. I didn’t get to tell them…” I pressed my lips together, unable to go on.
There was so much I hadn’t gotten to tell them. So much I wanted to. So much I should have been able to.
But who was I kidding? Saying any of those things at their funerals wasn’t the same as saying them to my mother and sister. They were already gone. I’d already missed my chance.
“I’m sure Billie and Harold will bring you up for it,” he said.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I hate you,” I said, and I meant it with every fiber of my body.
Ronnie slunk off to the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Desperate, I reached for my cell phone and dialed Dani.
“Hey,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Glad someone is,” I said. “I need your help.”
“What’s going on?”
“He’s sending me away,” I cried.
“Who is? Sending you away where?”
I pressed my forehead against the wallpaper—pineapples, how weird—feeling like I couldn’t breathe. “Ronnie. He’s sending me to live with my grandparents in Caster City.”
“No way. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Forever, I think,” I said. “He says he can’t take care of me. Help me, Dani.”
“He can’t send you away forever,” she said. “Can he? Is that, like, legal?”
“I don’t think he cares. I mean, they’re technically my family, so it probably is. But I don’t want to go. You’ve got to help me. Let me stay with you. Ask your mom.”
“She’s not home. You want me to call her?”
“Yes,” I said, but deep down I knew by the time she got ahold of her mom and called me back with an answer, it would be too late. They would have already come and taken me. I would be on my way to Caster City with people who were, according to my mom, cold as reptiles.
I hung up and continued to stuff things into my bag. I pulled out my Western Civ book and my math binder and threw them in the trash, keeping only Bless the Beasts & Children (hint, hint, ladies and gentlemen!) and a few pencils and pens. I rolled up the few clothes I had and crammed them inside the bag, cradling the porcelain kitten I’d brought from home. I pulled out Marin’s purse, running my fingers lightly over the fake leather.
I sat with it on my lap and waited, bitterly watching the TV rerun more footage of the tornado destruction. What the news crews couldn’t show was the real damage Elizabeth’s monster tornado had left behind. How do you record the wreckage left in someone’s heart? I pulled out a piece of gum and popped it into my mouth, then smoothed out the foil. I found a pen on the nightstand and drew a picture of a big stick figure holding a little stick figure.
Marin has a dad, I wrote beneath the picture, and then folded the foil into a tiny square and added it to the stash.
Marin has a dad.
Even in her death, she has a dad.
But I don’t.
I never did.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
As predicted, my grandparents arrived before Dani called back. She’d texted—Mom not picking up. Will keep trying—but it was too late to save me.
I refused to answer the knock on the door, forcing Ronnie to get up. He could send me away, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
We hadn’t spoken since I’d told him I hated him. I didn’t know if he was staying silent in an attempt to make me feel guilty, but if so, it wasn’t working. If I’d been the one who’d died with Mom in the tornado, he would never have turned Marin out. He would never have sent her to live with strangers in a strange city.
He opened the door and a white-haired woman with a face as wrinkled and tan as a tree trunk stepped inside.
“She ready?” she said, talking about me rather than to me, as if I weren’t sitting right there. Ronnie nodded and she turned toward me. “You got things?”
“Only a few,” Ronnie interjected. “We lost everything in the storm.”
“Yes, you told me on the phone,” she said, no softness, no tenderness in her voice. As much as I’d gotten tired of hearing everyone tell me how sorry they were, this was worse. It was like she didn’t care at all. Like she was here to pick up an unwanted couch. All business. “Harold’s in the car,” she said, raising her voice. “You eaten? He’d like to hit the diner on the way out.”
“I’m not hungry,” I muttered, forcing myself to stand up. I searched Ronnie with my eyes as I walked past him, hoping he would change his mind. I would forgive him if he let me stay. It would hurt, but I’d pretend he’d never called them. I’d try to understand. But he simply looked down at his feet and let me pass.
I followed Grandmother Billie, who didn’t so much walk with me as walk determinedly ahead of me, her step as steady as a warden’s. And I realized that was what this felt like—being led to a jail cell, my freedom stolen. Actually, this felt worse than prison. At least in prison, my friends could visit me. I’d already lost Mom and Marin—now I was losing Dani, Kolby, Jane, everyone I knew, everything that was familiar to me. What else could possibly be taken from me?
We approached an old, mostly rust and maroon car idling at the curb, Grandfather Harold sitting behind the wheel, squinting in the sun. He pushed a button on the dash with a fat finger, and the trunk popped open.
“You want to put your bags in?” Grandmother Billie asked, lifting the trunk lid all the way.
I shook my head, squeezing Marin’s purse closer to my side. The thought of lowering the pocketbook she loved into the motor oil–scented trunk on top of a tangled snake of jumper cables felt too much like ripping out my lungs and jumping up and down on them. I opened the back door and slid inside the car, which also smelled like oil, mixed with something more organic. Grass? Skin? I couldn’t tell.
Grandfather Harold lifted his chin once to acknowledge me, and my stomach clenched with fear as he put the car into drive, Grandmother Billie slamming the trunk and easing herself into the passenger seat in front of me. I didn’t want to go. Please, Ronnie, I begged inside my head, come out and get me. Make it like the movies, where at the last minute the girl is loved after all, and gets saved by the hero. Be the hero, Ronnie. But our motel room door had slowly swung shut, closing the space between me and the last familiar thing in my life. He didn’t even wave good-bye.
“She ain’t hungry,” my grandmother said, her blunt fingers working to find the seat belt as my grandfather pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
“Well, I don’t s’pose she has to eat,” he mumbled.
“She’s just gonna sit there?”
“If that’s what she wants to do. As long as she knows we ain’t stopping halfway down to Joplin for anything. She don’t eat, she don’t eat.”
“Well, we can’t let her starve to death.”
I chewed my lip and listened to them argue about me, as if I were invisible.
We navigated way too slowly toward the highway. If Grandfather Harold was going to insist on driving like this, we would never get to Caster City. Which would be fine with me.
I stared out the window and thought about the time Mom had taken Marin and me to Branson for an all-girls weekend. I’d watched the fields roll by, thinking that southern Missouri was so many worlds away from Elizabeth. As we passed Caster City and the landscape changed, the Ozark Mountains bursting around us, looking untouched and untamed, I had felt so far away from home.
I remembered that there had been a dead, flattened scorpion behind the curtains in our cabin and I’d freaked out, refusing to step down off the couch until Mom had checked the whole cabin over. But Marin had been fascinated by the bug.
“It’s got poison?” she kept asking, and when Mom would answer, “I don’t know, honey. Some scorpions are poisonous,” Marin would crouch low, her butt hanging inches from the floor, her bare toes pushed into the nap of the carpet, cords of her hair dangling down past her knees, and would stare at it. A few seconds later, she would look up. “Is it the poison kind?” And Mom, checking under a couch cushion or in the linen closet, would absently repeat, “I don’t know, honey.”
At one point, Marin was crouched so low her nose was between her knees and I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed off the couch and snuck up behind her.
“It moved! It moved!” I shrieked, bumping her in the back with my knees and making her pitch forward.
Marin had shrieked, catching herself just short of falling over, and had shot straight up and run out of the room, bawling her eyes out while I laughed.
“Really, Jersey, did you have to?” Mom said, exasperatedly chasing after my sister.
Marin had spent the whole rest of the weekend terrified, crying and running from every bug she saw.
Sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, heading toward the part of the state where I’d seen my first and only scorpion, I thought about how I’d done that to her. I’d taken away her fascination and replaced it with fear. She’d died scared of bugs, because that was how I’d shaped her.
Without thinking, I reached into her purse and pulled out another stick of gum, cramming it into my mouth with the first. I spread the foil out on my knee and drew a picture of a stick figure crouched over a little black blotch on the ground.
Marin loves scorpions, I wrote. I liked that truth better. I folded up the foil and dropped it in with the others, then leaned my
head against the window and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the chain stores and strip malls fade away into the fields and farms that were to become my new reality.
Neither of my grandparents bothered to shake me awake. Instead, they relied on the slamming of their doors—whoomp! whoomp!—to alert me that we’d stopped. I lifted my head from the window, wiping my damp cheek on my shoulder, and blinked the parking lot into focus. My grandfather had come around the car and was standing next to my grandmother, both of them staring at the doors of a grungy-looking diner.
After a few seconds, my grandmother turned and bent to look in the car window. “You comin’ in?” she said, her voice muffled by the closed window.
I didn’t answer, didn’t move. Wasn’t sure how to do either one. So she simply nodded once and turned away. Together, they walked into the restaurant without me.
I shook my head and gave a disgusted little snort.
I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was too tied in knots to even think about eating—and I really didn’t want to have to try to make conversation over dinner with these two people. But it had been days since I’d had any sort of real meal, and I knew that now it was up to me to make sure I did things like eat and shower and sleep. Nobody else was going to care.
My grandparents were sitting at a table near the restrooms, side by side, their shoulders touching. Who does that? I thought. What couple doesn’t sit across from each other so they can talk? But then I decided that I was just as happy it wouldn’t be my shoulder grazing against one of theirs, and I slid into the chair across from my grandmother.
“We already ordered,” she said by way of greeting, but the waitress had appeared, carrying two glasses of iced tea, which she plunked down in front of my grandparents. “Didn’t think you were coming.”
“That’s okay, sweetie, I haven’t put the order in yet. Need a menu?” the waitress asked. Something about the softness in her eyes reminded me of Mom, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to hold myself back from crying out or flinging my arms around her waist. Maybe in my movie, the waitress could be the hero who loves the girl after all. Save me!