I didn’t tell him about smelling the alcohol on my mother’s breath. I don’t know why. Maybe because he would have looked at me, bewildered, and asked why I’d waited so long to mention it, or why I would be cruel enough to say that about my mother when it wouldn’t bring either of them back.
He was a stable, good-hearted, hardworking man from a good, stable family and he’d never lived with a full-blown alcoholic or an addict, never saw the depths to which they’d stoop to get what they needed, and had no clue as to how bad it really got. He’d thought the motor court was a hellhole dump when in reality it had been one of the better places we’d stayed and I could never have made him understand that. Could never have told him the way it really was.
Or maybe I knew that if he knew she’d been drinking, he would ask her about it, and once he did that, it would all be over.
Maybe I didn’t tell because I loved him, and I could see how much he needed my mother, how much he needed to know that he wasn’t alone, that somehow she would end her silence, and open her eyes and her arms and comfort him.
Or maybe my omission was automatic, and as simple as blood winning out.
I didn’t know, but I never said a word.
Days passed, and it was all I could do to get out of bed in the morning, feed the cats, and find food. I didn’t want to go back to school yet, and since Beale had to work and didn’t want to leave my mother alone all day, he didn’t make me.
I brought her toast in the morning and Campbell’s soup for lunch. She never finished anything but her pain medication. She never answered anything I said, and after a while, I just stopped talking. Life became a dull, gray, block of ice and I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
The world was falling down around us.
And then, two and a half weeks after Ellie was buried, when Beale had gone into town one afternoon to the lawyer’s to talk about Aunt Loretta’s will, I heard my mother get out of bed, but not stagger directly into the bathroom.
I ran upstairs and stood in the bedroom doorway, watching as she got dressed, moving stiffly and with no emotion on her face at all. She didn’t look at me, only said, “I’m leaving. Candy will be here in fifteen minutes. Go get me some garbage bags from the kitchen. If you’re coming, pack your stuff and be ready when she gets here.”
I gazed at her, thinking dully that I should be more surprised, that I should be horrified and angry and trying to talk some sense into her, or cry and plead that this was our home now and Beale loved us, and we couldn’t just walk out and leave him . . .
But I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t cry, only made a small, helpless sound and sat down on the edge of the bed, dizzy. I’d been afraid this would happen, that it would end, that somehow she would wreck it because it was just too good, and I’d been right, I’d been right, and God, a furious flash of hate shot through me, drove me up and out of that room, down the hall to Ellie’s nursery where I stopped, sagging against the closed door, my hand on the knob but unable to turn it. Her soft, sweet baby scent lingered here, her powder and her lotion, and my knees gave way and I sank to the floor in despair.
Ellie hadn’t hated our mother. She’d loved her, she was of her, and so was I.
Oh God, my heart.
When Candy came I only stood back and watched, numb again, as she invaded the house and hauled half a dozen bulging garbage bags into the car, as she carefully helped my mother down the stairs, the bag of pills in her hand rattling with every step.
I took only one picture of me and Ellie off the fridge, and tucked it into my garbage bag. Made myself take one last look around, one last look at the best home I’d ever had, at Aunt Loretta’s room, at our First Family Christmas needlepoint piece hanging on the living room wall, at the terrible, one-line note I had penned—I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were leaving. Love,—and then I’d paused, wanting to write Miss Sayre Bellavia but it seemed like a pet name from a different time and using it now was a violation, so instead I just wrote Sayre and left it on the kitchen table with my mother’s house keys, right where Beale would find them when he got home.
I looked at everything except myself, and then I picked up my bag, stepped out onto the front porch, and closed the door behind me.
Seven Years Bad Luck
THE GARBAGE BAGS MY MOTHER HAD taken from Beale’s held more than just her things.
They held some of Beale’s and Aunt Loretta’s things, too.
“You stole from him,” I said tonelessly, sitting on the couch in Candy’s cabin and watching as she and my mother emptied the bags all over the living room floor, examining their loot.
“No, Loretta said I could have her jewelry—”
“Not all of it,” I said, holding her gaze. “She said you could have the amethyst promise ring if you gave it back after you got a real engagement ring, and her pearl earrings.”
“Well, I never got that engagement ring, did I, and I didn’t take everything,” my mother snapped back. “I left her wedding bands and her watch and most of the stuff she wore while we were there. And besides,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear and giving me a warning look, “I don’t exactly remember you trying to stop me, so you’d better just sit there and shut up, or get the hell out of here so we can concentrate.”
So I sat quiet and watched, sick at how she twisted things, and when she pulled the ruby velvet blazer out, Candy looked at the embroidered lapels, snorted, and said, “Wow, where’d you wear that? To a quilting bee?”
My mother laughed and said, “Yeah, right?” and tossed it over onto the pawn pile.
Stone-cold fury ripped through me and I vowed right then to steal that blazer back from the thieves, to ease it out of that pile before it could leave this dump, because Aunt Loretta had spent days embroidering those flowers, and they stood for love and sanctuary, and it was our first family heirloom that was supposed to be passed down to me, and so I would make damn sure that it was.
And I did.
I took it and kept it in my locker at school, along with the picture of me and Ellie, because that was the only place my mother couldn’t rifle through, looking for stuff to steal and sell for her pills. Her addictions were alive again and hungry, and since technically she’d been on leave from the factory when she fell down the steps, she was now on disability. The money wasn’t enough, though, so she and Candy had started shoplifting and stealing, writing bad checks, and indulging in the occasional credit card fraud.
I’d gone back to school right after we’d moved in with Candy and then lingered at the library afterward, mostly because it was better than being stuck in that cabin with them, but the three-week absence had been long enough for me to fall behind in my schoolwork, and for Jillian to make a new best friend. She still talked to me every so often but it was only to try and find out all the juicy details of what had happened between my mother and Beale, and when I wouldn’t give her that, her conversations got fewer and fewer until they dried up completely.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about much of anything, except for losing my family. Beale, Aunt Loretta, and Ellie filled my mind, they were all I could think about, and most of the memories were good, the kind that left me sitting in homeroom alone after the final bell rang, my head lowered, my hair falling in front of my face and silent tears dripping off my nose.
But there were bad ones, too, images of Beale walking into that empty house after we’d run out on him, standing bewildered and disbelieving in the silence, sitting at the kitchen table in the dusk, my note in his hand and an untouched sandwich on his plate, the old, happy pictures of Ellie and Aunt Loretta, of me and my mother, still on the fridge.
And then there were the daydreams that started out good because I thought Beale was coming for me, and I couldn’t wait to see him, but when I let him into Candy’s he saw all his stolen stuff piled high on the table and then he looked at me, his face filled with sadness, be
trayal, and disgust, and I covered my ears but I still heard him say You knew she was a liar and a thief. You knew, and you never even warned me.
And it was awful because it was true, I hadn’t warned him, but if I had he and my mother never would have fallen in love, we never would have lived up at the farm, never would have had Ellie, and trying to stop any of that had been unthinkable. When my mother got out of rehab, I’d wanted to believe she would stay sober. I’d wanted to believe that when she said Beale knew about her past, she’d meant he knew everything, not just some things, but that had been stupid, a wishful, childish, eyes-shut acceptance of her lie because I’d so wanted to believe. I should have realized she would never have told him the truth, should have guessed from the way she’d whitewashed all those Candy stories at supper, making her sound like some high-spirited girl who just always happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time instead of what she really was.
The only consolation I had, and it was an unsettled one, flip-flopping between shame, relief, and miserable longing, was that as time passed and Beale never came for me, I began to understand that he never would. He would have come for Ellie because she was his blood, his birth daughter, and he had a right to her, but I wasn’t, I was only my mother’s and he’d only been her boyfriend, and boyfriends came and went around here, and they never left with their ex-girlfriend’s kids.
Holding on to that hope, even just one illogical, smoldering ember of it had been bad, but when that last little bit of it died, it was worse.
My grades plummeted, and I didn’t care. I squeaked by with Cs and Ds that marking period and when I showed them to my mother, she gave a derisive sniff and said, “Yeah, you’re a real genius, all right,” but that was the only time she ever referred to Beale.
She never mentioned Ellie at all.
Ever.
I whispered her name to myself for a while, walking to and from school where no one could hear me, and sometimes I would pretend she could see what I saw, like the snow and a cardinal and icicles, all things she’d never seen before, but that was harder because the grief would rise, making my arms and legs and heart heavy, making me feel slow and stupid and dangerously near tears.
I took my first drink—a screwdriver—that New Year’s Eve in the company of my mother, Candy, and a bunch of their friends. I was eleven, the youngest one there, and most of them thought it was a real hoot to see me knocking ’em back.
Until the drinks hit me, that is, and then I lost it. My shoes annoyed me, so I pried them off and threw them in the bathtub. Took somebody’s cigarette and put it out on the rug. Drank vodka straight from the bottle and almost choked. Crawled over and told Candy she was white and gross like lard, and when she told me to go fuck myself, I laughed and laughed, but it wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny; it was terrible and tilted and wrong so I laid down on my stomach and scrabbled around under the couch, pulling out the dusty picture of Ellie and me. I’d brought it home from school for winter break so we could be together on Christmas, and had hidden it there because I knew no one would ever find it, but when I looked at it, instead of making me feel better I started to cry and couldn’t stop. The world spun out, filling my mind with flashes of Ellie and Stormy, Beale and Aunt Loretta and even Grandma Lucy, Miss Mo and Mareene, all the people I’d loved and lost, and it made me hysterical, made me stagger up and push and shove and try to run out of the cabin.
Furious, my mother grabbed my arm, ripped the picture from my grasp, and shook me, slapped my face and yelled, “Stop it! Stop it! Don’t you ever bring them up again! EVER!” and then she whipped open the door and pushed me out onto the porch in the snow, and said, “Now stay out there till you sober up,” and slammed the door.
“I’m sorry,” I blubbered, sinking to my knees and then down to all fours, snow swirling around me, freezing my tears, my skin, making me shiver and moan. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
I blacked out after that, and woke up the next afternoon in my bed on the couch, sick, feverish, miserable, humiliated, and done with drinking.
I never saw the picture again.
We had a late snowstorm that spring and I got bronchitis. The cough was so deep and uncontrollable that I would hack until I threw up, and when the school nurse found out that my mother hadn’t taken me to the doctor, she told me to have a seat, pulled up my records, picked up the phone, and squinting at the computer screen, said, “Is this the right number?” She read it aloud, and I got light-headed because that was Beale’s number at the farm and for one blinding moment I wanted to say yes, and let her call it, wanted to sit right there and listen to her tell him that I was sick and needed care, to hear if he was worried and what he would say . . .
Unless he told the nurse that I wasn’t his problem anymore, and then exactly why.
I started to cry, and that made me cough and I threw up again. Once I could speak, I choked out my mother’s cell phone number and the nurse called and got her, and told her I’d been sick for a week, and that she really needed to get me to a doctor by this afternoon. My mother must have said something rude because the nurse stiffened, visibly startled, then straightened up and with ice in her voice said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ms. Huff, but this child is ill, and the fact remains that she will not be allowed back in school until she has proof of a doctor’s visit with her. Come to the office when you pick Sayre up, and they’ll page her. Thank you. Good-bye.”
An hour later my mother showed up in a car driven by a guy I didn’t know, and signed me out of school. She didn’t look at me, only pointed toward the backseat and told me to get in. “And for Chrissake if you have to puke, hang your head out the window or he’s really gonna be pissed.”
But I didn’t throw up, only sat huddled amid the trash and a smelly, hairy old dog blanket, breathing as shallowly as I could so as not to cough, listening to the snow crunching beneath the tires and gazing out the window at the heavy, gray sky until we got to the clinic, where he dropped us off and went down the street to wait in the Colonial Pub.
The waiting room was loud, hot, and full of sneezing, stuffy-nosed people and whiny little kids. By the time we got called to see a doctor it was already getting dark, and my mother was rabid to leave but the doctor listened to my heart and lungs, took my temperature, made me cough up some gross phlegm and confirmed bronchitis. She told my mother to feed me chicken soup and plenty of fluids, use a cool-mist vaporizer and cough suppressant at night if the cough was keeping me awake, and not to let anyone smoke around me, which was a joke because I slept on the couch in Candy’s living room, and everyone there, including whatever friends dropped in, smoked.
My mother got me a doctor’s note and then I followed her down the street to the Colonial Pub, where she told me to go sit in the car while she ran in and got him.
Ninety minutes later, when she still hadn’t returned and I was freezing, coughing so hard my chest ached and desperate to pee, I got out of the car and sidled into the pub. The hot, noisy, boozy air hit me in a rush, blurring my vision, sending my nose into an immediate thaw, and making me frantic to find a bathroom. I stood on tiptoe, searching the crowd, and spotted my mother sitting at a table in a corner of the room with a bunch of other people, a pitcher of beer nearby, her coat slung across the back of her chair.
I was heading her way when I saw the ladies’ room sign, and my mother was busy laughing and slapping the table and didn’t even notice me, so I went on by and into the bathroom.
I lingered awhile, thawing, and when I was finally finished, went back out into the pub and over to the table.
Three people were still there, but my mother and her coat were gone. So was the guy driving.
I hurried back through the crowd to the door and burst out onto the street in time to hear the car vroom to life, to see it start to pull away from the snowy curb. Panicking, I ran across the sidewalk, slipping on the ice, pitching forward and landing hard on the
passenger-side door.
My mother’s head snapped around, startled, then she said something to the driver. He stopped the car and, fumbling with the handle, I opened the door and fell into the backseat.
“What the hell were you doing? I thought you were back there sleeping or something,” my mother said irritably, tucking her hair behind her ears and turning to give me a look. “You’re lucky we didn’t leave without you.”
I was coughing so hard I couldn’t answer. Coughed the whole way home, rolling down my window twice as we drove to throw up, but nothing but bile came out because my stomach was empty.
The bronchitis lasted almost a month, thanks to the smoke and the cold air. I stayed home for about three days, using the shower as a vaporizer before I went to sleep, but my mother and Candy’s constant cigarette smoke was killing me and we had no chicken soup, so I went back to school and had two bowls for lunch every single day. I tried really hard not to cough on anyone and visited the nurse’s office when I had a headache or was feverish. She called my mother again and got permission to give me children’s Tylenol, and let me lie down on her couch until I felt better and could go back to class.
My birthday passed the way it always had before Beale, without notice, and then Ellie’s birthday passed the same way. She would have been one year old, and I wanted to spend the day with her, so on her birthday I took all the change I’d been collecting from the bottom of the washing machine, money I figured I’d earned by volunteering to do Candy and my mother’s laundry, especially their jeans because they always left change in the pockets, and setting out early, walked all the way into town.
I was starving when I got there, so I went to Dunkin’ Donuts first and got a banana-nut muffin and a strawberry Coolatta, carried them down to the little park by the river, and ate them sitting at a picnic table in the shade, trying to imagine Ellie was there with me. I couldn’t actually see her face in my mind anymore, but I always felt warm and happy whenever I thought about the beginning and the middle of her life, never the end.