All the Things You Are (15 page)

He'd encourage her to dress up in the clothes he'd bought her, and then he'd take her out, to the movies, for ice cream, and the clothes were kind of grown-up, skirts and blouses like maybe a secretary might wear. She could see her mother looking on in dismay, but she never said anything, never
intervened
. Her dad took her to Brogan's, and that was the best, all the bar staff smiling and Daddy winking and everyone saying, ‘Look at you! All grown up! A real little lady!'

And that's how she felt, like everyone was watching her, every song was about her. She felt special. But she wasn't all grown up. She wasn't a real little lady. And it wasn't normal. And just as she was starting to figure this out for herself, her little brother stepped in and, well, it wouldn't be stretching it to say, saved her life. Not that she saw it that way then, or for a long time afterwards: her rage was so unfocused, so scattershot that Danny had to take his unfair share, same as anyone else who came her way.

It was a weird time for him back then as well. Something had happened with Danny a couple of years before, around the time of the Bradberry fire. He'd been getting bullied, she thinks by one of the Bradberrys, she was in another class and anyway they didn't hang out together, God forbid, but there was a time at home when Daddy would tell Danny he had to stand up and be a man, no Brogan was raised to be a crybaby, and Danny would tell Daddy he didn't know what he was talking about, and Daddy would roar, actually roar like a bull, and hit Danny, knock him down. That happened more than once, and Mom intervened
then
, she heard it a few times but only saw it once, the old man attempting to hit Danny and Mother getting in between them and shielding her son and crying, ‘No! No!' Pathetic and hilarious, it was like something from a silent movie. All Donna thought, really thought, was
She'll step in for him but not for me
.

Then the Bradberry fire happened and everything seemed to go numb for a while. It was like, after the deaths of the Bradberry children, all the kids in town had a sort of amnesty for six months or so, you could basically do what you liked and your folks would just shrug and let it go. Not that Donna had the confidence to do anything out of line except pout and sulk and feel sorry for herself. She looks at Barbara now, Donna and Irene on the shore, shivering into their towels, Barbara still in the water, her crawl a thing of beauty to behold, eleven and already a prey to adolescent mood swings, girls mature earlier these days, physically at any rate. Everything Donna suggests, Barbara's first reaction is ‘
No!
' She's a sweet kid at heart, and can always be talked around, but it sure feels like work. It's good, though, that she feels entitled to say it. A tribute to her mother, who Donna likes a lot more than she feels comfortably able to express, even if she is a precious princess pain in the ass. Who's done an amazing job with these two little girls.

So, what didn't actually happen was, after weeks of …
flirting
, Donna thinks it would be correct to call it, one night they are home alone together, Mother is out at the movies, Danny is over at a friend's house, Donna and Dad, just the two. She gets dressed up in a new dress he bought for her. She puts on make-up. He cooks her dinner, steak, salad, baked potato, the old Brogan's grillmeister magic, she hadn't seen
that
for a long time. He lights candles. He gives her a
beer
, her first. He talks to her about … well, she doesn't really remember what he talks to her about, only that he seems very sincere, and a little cross, and he keeps saying, ‘I hope you understand,' and how one of the finest arts in the world is the art of keeping a secret. What she remembers is how it makes her feel: excited, and special, and scared, because she knows it isn't quite right. When he gives her a second beer, she says no, because she hasn't finished the first one, and anyway it's made her head feel all swirly, and he laughs and says that's the whole point of beer, to make you feel swirly, don't lose that swirly feeling, and he kisses her on the lips, a Daddy kiss, except he lingers just a little too long for Daddy, and when he moves his face away, Danny is standing in the doorway, headphones around his neck. Turns out he wasn't over at a friend's, he was in his room listening to Pink Floyd. Danny looks at her, and she sees him take in the dress, the make-up, the beer. She wants to explain, but she doesn't know how. She wants to apologize, but Danny has turned his attention away from her. Daddy is still smiling, the gracious host at whose table everyone is welcome. He offers Danny a beer, invites him to sit and join them. But Donna knows that isn't going to happen. Donna knows this is all over now. Danny walks up to his father – he's an inch taller, and filling out to be broader of chest, though he's not there yet – and he jabs his right index finger in the old man's face.

‘You cut this shit out now, you hear me?'

And Daddy looks to her, his face a study in
amusement
, as if Donna and he are Park Avenue sophisticates who've been surprised by an uncouth emissary from the League of Decency. And Danny, whose eyes are glittering with anger, without moving the right hand, hits Daddy with a swinging left that nearly knocks him sideways, then hard in the belly with his right, and rounds it off with an uppercut to the face that lands him on his back. Danny follows through and stands over him and Daddy cringes and cowers, curled up in a ball, and Danny is going to say something but doesn't. He turns and looks at Donna, his face contorted with adrenaline.

‘You should clean that make-up off your face,' he says. ‘You look like a clown.'

Of course, instead of being grateful (because it ended right there) she was furious (because it ended right there). It took her a long while to unravel it all. She knew at some level her father had crossed the line, but he had never paid her such attention before – nobody had – and she felt bereft without it. And she blamed Danny. Truth be told, some part of her, some reptile self unsusceptible to reason or society, or sanity, still does.

Barbara is out now, and they're all toweled dry and huddled beneath the hackberry trees, leaves turned a rusty red but still clinging on, and they're drinking the steaming hot chocolate Donna brought in a flask and chattering happily about the TV show
Glee
, which Barbara adores as a harbinger of the unimaginably exotic teenage excitements the future will bring, and which Irene disdains on the grounds that the singers are all copy cats. At least, the girls are chattering and Donna is listening and wondering if that's why she adores being in their company quite so much, if it's a simple equation: her unhappy childhood for their happy ones. Maybe she should have had her own kids. Only there's no way, if she had, that they would have turned out as untroubled as this pair.

‘What's that?' Irene says, the more observant of the two, looking up towards the house.

‘What's what?' Barbara says, her mouth stained with choco- late.

‘A rustling up near the house. Maybe it's a pussy cat.'

‘I tawt I taw a putty cat. Maybe it's a
snake
.'

There's silence then.

‘Maybe it was nothing,' Irene says quietly, uneasy at the notion there might be snakes anywhere nearby.

But Donna has heard it, or thinks she has, a rustle of leaves, or of wings, her nerves and senses doing double duty since Danny left, since the doorbell rang an hour later. It was Claire, of course, calling first and then driving over here, out of her mind with worry. Donna had wanted to let her in, but she felt she had to protect Danny, at least within an hour or so of his leaving. After that she was up five times, sleep broken by creaking floorboards or animal cries or wind through the trees, padding barefoot around the house, turning lights on and off, nothing to protect her but her trusty Glock 17, one of her souvenirs of eighteen months with the ‘president' of the Milwaukee Outlaws Motorcycle Club (along with the tattoos, the gang rape, the 147 stitches and the nervous breakdown she told Danny she never had and the suicide attempts he doesn't even know about). She didn't need Danny to alert her to the potential dangers of living alone and in some isolation, even in a twinky little burgh like Cambridge, but Danny's crisis, whatever the hell it is, has ramped up the anxiety level more than somewhat.

‘It's likely a racoon or an opossum,' Donna says, gathering the flask and the towels into her canvas tote and reaching for her glossy red clutch, where she keeps her essentials: make-up, house keys and gun.

‘Come on, let's hit the shower, girls.'

Irene usually runs ahead, and Barbara lags behind, but this morning, Irene is in no hurry to run into a snake, so Donna is free to take the lead back up through the sycamore and blue beech, bright October sun coaxing wisps of steam from the soft forest scrub. Which is as she wants it. Just the same, she doesn't want to press so far in front that she loses them, or that they could be surprised from behind, so she stops every now and again and waits for them to catch up. As Donna waits for the second or third time, nothing stirring up at the house as far as she can tell, she clocks the red clutch in her hand, and flashes on how bizarre she must look, in the woods, in a wetsuit, with a glossy evening purse: all she needs is a pair of Laboutins and it could be some demented fashion shoot in a glossy magazine.

The girls catch up and she presses on, simultaneously thinking she's being ridiculous and yet all too acquainted with, and therefore prepared for, the worst. She doesn't know what kind of trouble Danny has got himself into. She's so used to assuming he walked the straight path, she the crooked, that she couldn't conceive of any trouble he
could
be in. He was right: she lacked imagination. Like the more partisan of her gay friends, she filed Danny and Claire under ‘breeders' and neglected to give them rounded characters. And now they appear to have gone off the deep end, or at least Danny has. God knows what he was talking about, gambling debts, or maybe drugs, if that slacker Jeff Torrance had anything to do it. And implying that their house was under threat, Jesus. Blackmail from somebody in his past? No, Donna hasn't a clue. She can barely remember those halfwits he used to hang out with, Gene something, and Dave, and … Ralph … Jesus, was one of them actually called
Ralph
? What a bunch of whitebreads, jocks and demi-jocks, Donna thinks she might have had sex with one of them in the back of a car out by the lake, but she can't be sure which one, or what kind of sex, or whether it
was
with one of Danny's friends; she knows she had plenty of sex in cars out by the lake, too much, in fact, and most of it pretty disappointing in almost every way, thanks all the same. But Danny really didn't register for her once she put the whole thing with her dad behind her, or thought she had. Sure, she was pretty much out of it a lot of the time from the age of fifteen, grass and ludes and wine, but mostly she just wasn't interested in him. Oh, she loved him and so on, but she didn't really see him as anything more than her straight, boring little brother. And now, after all this, he reveals a wild side?

There's another rustle, and branches sway in the backyard, just above. Briskly now, to put some space between her and the girls, Donna climbs the last few yards, hot in her wetsuit, trying to keep her breathing hushed, and as she reaches the stacked railway sleepers that do fence duty, two things happen at once, sound and vision in a mixed-media spasm: her cell phone sings out its shrill refrain, and she sees that the source of the rustling is
a
wolf
, a gray wolf prowling by the rear window of the house, then turning and staring in the direction of the ringtone. Donna goes rigid, meeting the animal's silver gaze, its breath furling its great head in white steam.
It's
afraid of
you
, she thinks, because she saw it in some documentary, along with
what the fuck is a wolf doing this far south?

The girls are approaching now, Barbara suddenly taking the lead and ticking Irene off for dawdling, and Irene giving it look-who's-talking right back to her sister, and the wolf's ears prick up at the sound and it does a kind of shuffle, like it's stretching out its limbs before attacking, perhaps. Donna fiddles with the catch on her clutch, recalling that there has been at least one wolf sighting annually in Dane County for some years now, not that she really needs to reassure herself that this isn't a fucking optical illusion as her hand closes around the Glock. No safety, she'll shoot through the bag if she has to, and she'll hit it, she's kept her eye in, target shooting at the Oakland Conservation Club once a month.

Irene shouts, ‘Aunt Donna, Aunt Donna!'

And the wolf skitters around on the frosty ground like a young colt unsure of its hooves, and throws back its beautiful head and appears to howl, soundlessly, a white plume of sputum sprayed above it like a mane, and then careens unsteadily around the side of the house and darts out in the direction of the highway.

‘Aunt Donna!' Irene says. ‘Tell Babs to stop being such a poo.'

‘
Babs
,' Barbara says. ‘
Puh-lease.
Do
not
call me Babs. Anyway, she's the poo. What are you looking for in your bag, Aunt Donna?'

‘My cell phone,' Donna says, truthfully, giggling a little in astonishment and nervous relief at the wolf, at its appearance and its departure.

‘I'm getting a cell phone when I'm twelve. I could have had one last birthday, but Mom said either that or a laptop and I chose a laptop,' Barbara says.

‘You're a lucky girl.'

‘Mmmm,' says Barbara doubtfully. ‘Megan and Susie have both. And Megan has an iPad also.'

‘Megan is a snoot,' Irene says. ‘But her brother Dougie is funny.'

‘Dougie
is
funny. Why do you think Megan is a snoot?'

‘She has a la-di-da accent.'