“That she would be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Really?”
“Really. See? She’s nice.”
“No, she’s not,” I said. “She hates us and wants us dead, just like our parents.”
“Well, she can’t do it here, in front of God and the deputies and everybody.”
“So how are we gonna get home?”
“We’ll get her to drop us off at the fairgrounds. We’ll find Steve and Teddy.”
Amanda got to the jail exactly when she said she would and managed to take care of our paperwork and bail us out.
She looked a lot more casual than she had when we’d seen her on our front porch. She was wearing jeans and tennis shoes and a rust-colored sweater that would have looked great with my hair. She burst into tears again when she looked at us.
“You’re as tall as I am!” she exclaimed in a broken voice. “Oh, you’re so beautiful.”
Lizzie shot me a look that said I was way wrong about this woman.
She ushered us into her Park Avenue, gushing about how good we looked and how glad she was that we had called her.
“You can just drop us back at the fairgrounds,” I said. “We can find our ride.”
Amanda looked at me like I was too cute for words. “I can’t do that, Kara. It’s not safe for a thirteen-year-old girl to be at the fair alone on a Saturday night. I can’t believe your grandparents let you come here in a car with boys who drive.”
“They didn’t exactly let us,” Lizzie said. “They wouldn’t have cared, though.”
“Well, I care.” The thing is, she sounded convincing. I figured she must have practiced it all the way over. “I’ll drive you all the way home, and then I’ll talk to them and tell them what I think of the supervision they give you.”
“Hey, we’re thirteen, okay?” Who did she think she was, talking about us like we were little kids who needed a babysitter?
“They should take better care of you. You could have been killed in a car accident on the way there, riding with boys who are barely old enough to drive . . . staying out until all hours—”
“I wouldn’t say anything to Deke or Eloise if I were you,” Lizzie said. “Deke might get his gun.”
She was silent for a long time as we left the interstate for Highway 49. “How do they treat you? Do they hurt you?”
“They’re okay,” I said.
“But Deke . . . does he . . . do anything . . . inappropriate?”
Lizzie glanced at me, and I could see that she didn’t understand the question any more than I did. “What do you mean inappropriate?”
Amanda swallowed and looked real uncomfortable. But the question must have been important to her, because she kept pressing. “I mean . . . is everything all right there?”
“It’s fine,” Lizzie said.
“I could take you home to my house if you’re not safe there,” she said. “It would take some doing, since there’s supposed to be a restraining order to keep me from coming near you. But if we could prove that you were in danger there, or that your grandparents were abusing you in any way . . .”
I thought of the closets, but we hadn’t been shoved in there in a while. Deke sometimes looked at us in that lustful way men had and got all nice and stuff, talking in a sweet, gentle voice that he’d never used with us in his life. When he came into our rooms at night, stroking our legs and talking that way, it always turned my stomach. But I could handle him.
Besides, the last thing I wanted was to wind up a sitting duck for Amanda Holbrooke. I kept thinking about that money, and how we would be able to sue her when we turned eighteen, and that we would be rich then and she would be the one left penniless.
The house was dark when she got us home, and since we wouldn’t give her any information about abuse, she had to let us go in.
Lizzie held back at the car. “Thank you for helping us.”
“Anytime.” Amanda smiled at her. “Lizzie, I’m serious. Call me anytime you’re in trouble. I’ll always come for you. I mean it, now. Kara, do you hear me? Day or night.”
I wondered again how she knew us apart. I was already halfway up to the house, and that big black mutt I hated came bounding up, jumping up on me with his dirty paws. I fought him down and got to the front door.
I turned back before going in and saw Amanda hugging Lizzie and planting a kiss on her cheek.
I felt a momentary, irrational surge of jealousy, but I went in and tried to shake it out of my mind. Lizzie came in moments later.
“See? She isn’t like they said.”
“She’s just like they said!” I told her. “She just wants us to drop our guard.”
“If she wanted us dead, she could have killed us on the way here.”
“No, she couldn’t. Not when the police had just handed us over to her. If we wound up dead, they would know who did it. She’s just waiting for the right time.” I sat down on the bed, angry at the way the night had turned out. “I can’t wait to grow up and sue the stew out of her.”
But Lizzie was quiet as she got ready for bed.
TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t see Amanda again until we were fifteen, though I know now that she had someone watching us a lot of the time, taking pictures and following us.
Lizzie and I were pretty wrapped up in our own lives and didn’t notice. By then, we had both taken jobs at the SOS Truck Stop, where we made more tip money in one night than we could have stolen at the state fair. I was the first to drop out of school so I could work more hours, and shortly after that, Lizzie dropped out, too. The whole idea of sitting in class all day and listening to those Hitler-type teachers, whose husbands worked in the same chicken slop that Deke did, was just too much to take. I didn’t like people looking down on me when I got something wrong, and I didn’t like being told what to do.
Rules and me just didn’t get along. Lizzie wasn’t crazy about them, either.
Deke and Eloise didn’t care if we quit school, since we were going through one of our poverty periods when Deke had already lost all of the annual check in a crap game at the Isle of Capri Casino, way back in March. By September, when we wanted to quit school, they needed whatever money we could bring home to help with the rent and the light bill. We learned quick not to brag about our tips, because it was a sure bet that if we went to bed with money, we’d wake up with none. Deke would steal it and say he didn’t, or Eloise would take it right out in the open and claim that we owed her for all the years she’d cared for us.
So we took to stopping by the Secret Tree on the way home from work and stuffing at least half of our tip money in there to be used at some later date. It wasn’t like we were saving up for anything. It was mostly gone by the end of the month, as we used it to buy clothes or makeup or the occasional bottle of whiskey that our boyfriends couldn’t afford.
It was around this time that Deke became a real problem. In the mornings, when he and Eloise came in from a night at the Isle of Capri Casino, he would come in our room. His hand on my skin would startle me awake, and I would smell his rancid, liquor breath as his beady eyes looked me over.
I would move his hand away and tell him to leave me alone, but he was awfully strong for looking so scrawny, and alcohol only made him mean.
One morning, when I found him sitting on the edge of our bed like that, I got mean myself. “Get out of here, Deke!” I pulled the covers up over me.
Lizzie woke next to me, and her hand closed over my arm.
I caught Deke’s roving hand. “You touch me again and I’ll break something over your head.”
He grinned. “I don’t mean you no harm, now. You know that.”
Lizzie sat up in bed, her back against the wall. “Deke, if you don’t get out of here right this second, I’ll scream for Eloise.”
Neither of us had illusions that Eloise would defend us, but we knew she didn’t take it well when he looked at any other woman.
“Hush, now!” He stood up, his grin gone. “I t
old you I don’t mean you no harm.”
“You’ve always meant us harm,” I said. “We’ll remember this when we turn eighteen and get our money.”
That did it. Deke held his hands palm out. “I’m leaving. You got me all wrong. All I’ve ever done is took care of you.”
After that, we got Steve Crawley to put a locking doorknob on our door, and we locked it when we went to bed at night. It kept Deke away from us most of the time.
By this time, Steve Crawley was pretty much my regular boyfriend, though I stepped out now and then with one of the younger truckers who came through town. Steve had also dropped out of school and taken a job at the paper mill. He thought he was hot stuff because he didn’t get slime all over his feet, but he still smelled to high heaven whenever he got off work.
Our favorite thing to do was to go to the high school football games, boozing it up, just to face off against the authorities there, who had nothing over us since we weren’t students. And the homecoming game was a perfect opportunity to thumb our noses at authority. There everybody was, all set for the dance—the girls with their fu-fu dos and their gaudy corsages, and the guys all moussed and ready. We loved to go and make fun of the homecoming court in their fancy gowns, riding around the field in convertible cars, waving like Lizzie used to do when she pranced down the tracks.
I always wondered if Lizzie was sorry she’d never gotten the chance to do that for real, to go out on that field and wave and hear her name announced on the loudspeaker. She might have made it, too. We were both as pretty as any of those tramps at that school and we knew most everybody in town.
But if Lizzie felt that way, she denied it. She said she wouldn’t be caught dead doing that and she was glad that we didn’t have to get all frilled up and go to that dance afterward.
We had already put away a fifth of vodka—Lizzie and Steve and a guy named Mick . . . and me, of course—when we got to the game.We were having a good time, mocking the homecoming court and prancing with exaggerated zeal, waving at the crowd and laughing our heads off.
And then I saw her—Amanda Holbrooke—sitting up in the stands and watching us with this look on her face.
I grabbed Lizzie and told her to look without looking. She was wobbling a little from the vodka, but she looked up in the stands and saw the woman staring at us.
“What does she want?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. “But it’s creepy, her just watching us that way.”
“Let’s leave.” I worried that she was going to make her move and do us in. “Crawley and some of the guys got a hotel room near the dance. They’ve got a bunch of booze. We can party all night long.”
Lizzie glanced back up in the stands. “I guess . . .”
I hated it when Lizzie got distant and pensive and gave such hazy answers. Any other time, she would have been anxious to get to the room and another bottle. Even the guys wouldn’t have bothered her, because we had learned pretty much what it took to keep a man. We weren’t prudes or anything, and we’d been around the block, if you know what I mean.
Plenty of men had taken advantage of us, and sometimes we just decided to take advantage right back. It was all in the way you thought about things, we’d figured out.
So we headed out to the hotel near the dance and partied to the sounds of the bass guitar from the live band in the ballroom nearby. We provided a place—for a fee, of course—for those bona fide students who got thirsty and restless to come and have a drink.
By the time the dance was over, we had enough money to do something crazy, so Crawley took us down to Vicksburg to the Isle of Capri. We knew that Deke and Eloise would be there, but we didn’t much care. We weren’t old enough to get in, but Crawley had figured out a way to get us fake IDs.
We divvied up the money and went in to lay our bets, Lizzie and me at the blackjack table, Crawley and the others who’d come with us at the crap table. We won a little, then lost a little, and I finally saw the appeal it had for Deke and Eloise.
We were just about to lay down the last of our money when I saw Amanda again across the room. She stood in the doorway, wearing a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses, watching us in that creepy way she had. I knew she didn’t want us to see her—either that, or she didn’t want to chance having Deke or Eloise see her.
The light glistened off of her face, and I was pretty sure it was wet. Had she been crying?
Over us? Did she cry because we were still around, destined to steal her fortune when we reached the ripe old age of eighteen?
I turned my back to her again and tried to forget she was there. I went on with what I was doing and wound up losing the last of my money.
When I looked back over my shoulder, she was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
It wasn’t long after that I turned up pregnant. Now, I’m not stupid, and I know about taking precautions and all that, but it wasn’t something I exactly planned. It happened one night when I was a little high and I wasn’t all that concerned with keeping things safe. Next thing I knew, I was puking my guts out in the mornings and tired all the time.
Lizzie had had a few close calls herself, and one time even thought she was, so when it was my turn she knew just what to do. She had already located an abortion clinic down in Jackson and she told me she’d go with me if we could find somebody to take us.
Don’t get me wrong now. It’s not like I don’t like little babies. I do. And I really did have the secret dream of someday having one or two of my own. But I wanted to wait until I at least reached eighteen and sued Amanda Holbrooke, until I got the millions or billions due me. Then I figured I could marry a real high-caliber guy and shower my babies with everything I didn’t have growing up. I had visions of moving to a place that smelled clean and fresh, maybe in the mountains somewhere.
I’m not one of those people in denial about abortion killing babies. I’m clear thinking enough to know that people have babies, not blobs of tissue, that whatever that suction hose took out of my womb was the beginning of a real live person.
So it wasn’t an easy decision for me. I had known women who had done it before, women who had found out they were pregnant one day, bopped down to Jackson the next, and had it behind them in time to go out dancing that night. But I wasn’t like that.
We got Crawley to drive us there, and Lizzie sat next to him in the middle of the seat, holding my hand. She felt bad for me, because she could tell it was a hard thing. I’d carried around Missy, my doll, until I got too old for her, but I still slept with her every night. You don’t practice taking care of a baby your whole life and then not grieve over killing the first one you have the chance to have.
I leaned my head against the window for the hour’s drive, wondering what kind of mother I would have been, how I would have supported her. I don’t know why I thought it was a girl, but it just seemed like it was. It was probably because my dolls had always been girls, and I had practiced dressing them up and fixing little bows in their hair. I couldn’t really picture myself having a boy.
Anyway, I was wondering what kind of mother I would be, an orphan who’d never really known a mother’s love—at least not that I could remember. Would I mother like Eloise? Yelling at my child to stop squalling, then throwing her in the closet until she got quiet? Or would my instincts kick in, giving me that maternal grace that made me nurture my child and hold her when she cried.
It’s okay, sweetie.
It wasn’t fair that I hadn’t grown up with a mother, and now I wasn’t going to get to be one, either, at least not to this baby.
I was ashamed when tears started rolling down my face. I felt like there was already a person that I could see and feel and smell growing inside me, and because of some mixed-up set of circumstances, I was going to have her ripped away from me.
Crawley must have heard me sniff, because he said, “For crying out loud, you’re not over there blubbering, are you? It’s not gonna hurt, Kara!”
“How do
you know it’s not gonna hurt?” Lizzie shot back. “You ever done this?”
“Of course not, but I do know—”
“Then shut up, why don’t you?” She wasn’t usually so grumpy, but she was really worried about me. “And leave her alone. You’ve already done enough damage.”
“Hey, I’m driving her there, ain’t I?”
“It’s the least you could do,” Lizzie said.
“Oh, because you think I’m the father. Tell her, Kara. You don’t really know who the kid’s father is, do you?”
“Shut up, Crawley.” My voice was weak, distant. “Just drive.”
It made me sick that he was right. I figured it was probably him, but there was one other guy I stepped out with around that time, and Crawley knew about him, so I couldn’t say for sure. It didn’t really matter though. In a few hours it would all be over.
I wondered if the baby would hurt when they did whatever they did. I wondered if she would kick and cry. And I wondered what they would do with her when they got her out of me. Was there some little graveyard for these babies? Or did they just wrap them up in a garbage bag and throw them in the dump?
I knew these weren’t the thoughts I should have been thinking. They weren’t helping matters.
When we got to the parking lot of the clinic, I saw a group of people standing behind a fence across from the building. They waved signs with pictures of aborted babies.
I had to look away.
We got out of the car, and I guess Lizzie could see what this was costing me. She put her arm around me. “Come on,Kara. It’s gonna be all right.”
Crawley got out and looked at me over the roof of the car. “Uh . . . I think I’ll just drive around town or something. How long you think this will take?”
Lizzie shot him a condemning look. “Coward.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“You should face this like a man and come in and wait for her, you jerk! She doesn’t need to come out of this and have to wait for you to drive back up.”