All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (32 page)

“I understand. Will Kellen see it?”

The prosecutor and the public defender swapped nervous looks.

“I want him to see it,” she said.

Definitely one of the more disturbing depositions I ever took, and I didn't for a minute think her testimony would convict him. All the defense needed to do was put that girl in front of a jury and let her do her little reenactment.

 

9

AMY

Fall 1983

When Mom finally came home from Powell, she brought Wavy and Donal.

The whole first month, they slept together in the other twin bed in my room. They didn't have anyone else, besides us, and I wasn't sure how they felt about us.

For a while, we lived in a circus with Mom as the ringleader. In the middle of the night, I often heard her on the phone with one of her friends, or fighting with Dad. Once I woke up to Mom yelling, “Restitution is important! Wavy deserves something for what happened.”

All of Val and Liam's property was tied up in the mess with the drug bust. Most of the property wasn't even in their names, and the government confiscated it all. Mom wanted to sue Kellen, but he was
indigent
, dead broke with a public defender.

All along Mom had said, “If he actually cared about her, he'd plead guilty, so she wouldn't have to testify.”

He pled guilty to one count of Criminal Sexual Penetration of a Minor under Sixteen and was sentenced to ten years. Mom still wasn't satisfied.

“The S-O-B who stole her innocence gets to walk free after ten years,” she told her book club. It wasn't much of a book club by then, more like Mom's personal support group.

On the day we got the news that Kellen had pled guilty, we found out what happened to his assets. There wouldn't be any restitution. No “making that bastard pay.” Kellen had already signed everything over to Wavy: his house, his business, his bank account, plus half-a-dozen vehicles, including a 1956 Harley-Davidson Panhead.

It stuck in my mother's craw for a long time. She wanted revenge, but no one had to force him to do it. I think that's why she went on trying to get revenge against Wavy. Mom insisted everything had to be sold and the money put in a trust for Wavy, which Mom would control. Kellen's business partner bought out his share, Mom found a buyer for the house and some of the vehicles. She wouldn't even let Wavy go to the house and retrieve anything of Kellen's. Wavy didn't argue.
Nothing belongs to you
, she always said.

When Mom found a buyer for the motorcycles, though, Wavy put her foot down. In the middle of our driveway, as Mom tried to leave for the lawyer's office to sign the paperwork.

“Mine!” Wavy screamed it until my mother gave in. How could she do anything else, with Wavy standing in front of our house, shrieking that one word at the top of her lungs over and over, until the neighbors came out and stared? Wavy got to keep the Panhead. A mechanic from the motorcycle shop in Garringer delivered it and wheeled it into a corner of the garage. Wavy and Kellen's helmets were in the saddlebag.

Watching her run her hand over the gas tank, the mechanic said, “Maybe she'll ride it someday,” but her feet didn't even touch the ground on either side of the bike. I knew she'd let it rust on rotten tires before she let someone besides Kellen ride it. Still, she kept the chrome polished and changed the oil. Every once in a while, we'd hear the sound of its engine, started and revved a few times in the empty garage before she turned it off. It took her whole body weight to kick start it, but she could do it. Once a year, a mechanic from the local bike shop came to give it a tune-up. Wavy wasn't allowed to pay for that out of her trust fund, so she got an after-school job doing typing.

That, though, that all came after the worst of the circus had ended. The real circus was the lawyers and reporters and total strangers invading our house. Like Wavy and Donal's paternal grandmother, who'd never met them, but wanted them to come live with her in South Carolina.

If it had been up to Dad, he would have let them go. He and Mom fought all the time. About the money spent, about Mom's obsession with the dead-end investigation into Aunt Val's murder, and the endless trips to Powell. About Wavy and her behavior. The sneaking out, the not eating, the not talking, and the strange surprises that made their way into our house, like a baby raccoon living in Wavy's laundry hamper for a month. All the things that had sent Wavy to live with Grandma in the first place, but Grandma wasn't an option anymore.

The whole thing upset Dad's schedule. When Mom was in Powell, he was supposedly making sure we had dinner and went to school. It turned out to be harder than it looked when Mom did it, and we mostly took care of ourselves.

“This is destroying our family,” Dad said about once a week.

Mom's response was always, “They are part of our family.”

“Look at what it's doing to your daughters and tell me that.”

I wasn't sure exactly what it was doing to us, but my grades the first quarter of my sophomore year were awful. Leslie even got a C in Geometry that quarter. Those first few months it was so stressful, sharing space with Donal, who was shell-shocked, and Wavy, who was actively hostile.

At school everyone wanted to know about my aunt and uncle. Were they really drug dealers? Were they murdered? I avoided those questions as much as I could. That was how I made friends with Angela, who had, it seemed like a thousand years ago, come to our house with her sister Jana and read
Forever
out loud. She wasn't in my circle, too pretty and popular, but in the locker room, changing for PE class, when the other girls quizzed me, Angela said, “Leave her alone. It's none of your business.” When she saw me alone in the cafeteria, she would gesture for me to sit with her friends.

Whatever it did to Leslie and me, the circus tore Mom and Dad apart. On our neat little suburban street, mine were the first parents I knew to get divorced.

The last thing Dad said to us as a family was, “I can't do this anymore.” He should have said, “I don't
want
to do this anymore,” because he could have kept doing it. Leslie and I did. It wasn't like he offered to take us with him when he moved out.

Ironically, he left just as the circus was winding down.

Two guys, one in a suit and one with a big black medical case, showed up with legal papers to get a blood sample from Donal. Leslie and I were teenaged and indignant, saying, “They can't do that, can they?”

It turned out they could, because Sean Quinn had filed for custody, claiming he—not Liam—was Donal's father. The evidence had been there the whole time. Aunt Val had always said that Donal's birthday was January 21, but his birth certificate said March 21. Liam couldn't have been his father, because he was in jail when Aunt Val got pregnant.

Some judge we never met decided Donal should be with Sean.

The last night of the circus that was our lives, a lawyer came to pick up Donal, because Sean Quinn was a coward. He wasn't brave enough to face Wavy and watch her hug Donal good-bye. She shook all over, while Donal cried and tried to comfort her.

“I'll come visit. You can send me letters. I'll come for the summer. Uncle Sean says so. That I can come for the summer.”

When I started to worry the lawyer would have to pry them apart, Wavy took her hands off Donal and stepped back with a horrible, empty look on her face. While the rest of us went to the door to see Donal off, she crawled into the closet under the stairs.

She stopped eating. Really stopped. She got thinner and paler, walking up and down in her nightgown. Mom threatened to take her to the doctor.

One day I got to the cafeteria at school and opened my lunch box to find half my sandwich gone. Sitting next to me, Angela looked at the half sandwich with one eyebrow up.

“Going on a diet?” she said.

“I think maybe Wavy's going to live,” I said.

Wavy did live. She kept eating, secretly, and she went to school. In her dismal white pin-tucked dresses, she looked like a consumptive child from the nineteenth century, transported to the raucous hallways of a public school. She caught up on the course work she'd missed and survived her freshman year of high school. Survived being stared at and whispered about.

Every week she wrote two letters: one to Donal and one to Kellen. Sometimes she got a short note or a postcard from Donal, but nothing from Kellen.

Eventually Mom sat Wavy down at the kitchen table and handed her a stack of letters. Every letter she'd sent to Kellen, all returned from the prison marked UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE.

“The judge says you're not allowed to write to him and he's not allowed to write to you. He'll get in trouble if he communicates with you.” Mom sounded almost sorry. Wavy gathered up the letters and carried them to her room. She never said a word, and I never saw her write to Kellen again. She usually wrote to Donal after she finished her homework in the evenings, and she always signed the letters, “See you soon. Love, Wavy.” See you soon. See you soon.

Donal didn't come for the summer that year. Or any other. Wavy's sophomore year, her last letter to him came back stamped: NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. NO FORWARDING ORDER.

 

10

DONAL

April 1984

I wasted too much time at the sandwich counter waiting for Sean to come out of the bathroom. The counter guy came by twice and said, “Where'd your dad get to?”

“The bathroom.” That's what I said both times.

“He's been gone a while, hasn't he?”

I shrugged, like Wavy, because what was I supposed to do? Sean always took a long time in the bathroom. Sometimes I had to go get him, and he'd be asleep on the toilet with his needle in his arm.

So the counter guy wouldn't ask me again, I got up and walked over to the gas station. That's when I saw the postcards. I ran out to the car and looked for money. We didn't have the Corvette anymore and the new car smelled bad under the seats, like gas and rotten stuff. The carpet was sticky from where somebody spilled a pop. Not me.

I found enough for the postcard, a pretty one of the Grand Canyon that Sean said we didn't have time to see, but I didn't have enough money for the card and a stamp. The lady at the cash register said, “That's okay. I can spot you four cents.” She was nice. I was glad I didn't steal the card.

Then I had to borrow a pen, because that was how life was with Sean. I liked it better when I lived with Sandy. I didn't always have to beg or steal things.

I wrote as fast as I could, but I didn't want it to be messy.

Dear Wavy, we had to move and I don't know where yet. I will write to you again when I know where. See you soon. Love, Donal.

“Who're you writing to, sweetie?” the cashier lady said.

“My sister.”

“That's nice.”

I wished she would be quiet, because it was hard to remember Aunt Brenda's address. Before I could write the zip code, Sean put his hand on my shoulder.

“Whatcha doing, Don?”

“He's such a cutie. He's writing his sister a postcard.”

“Come on, buddy. You can finish that in the car,” he said.

In the parking lot, he took the postcard and put it in the trash. He squeezed my shoulder hard and said, “Don, didn't we talk about how it's not safe for you to write to your sister?”

“I didn't tell her where we were,” I said.

“I don't want you sneaking around behind my back like that again. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Wavy was right. Sometimes you have to nod, even if you don't agree. She was right about a lot of things.

 

11

WAVY

1986

After Kellen was UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE, and Donal was NO FORWARDING ORDER, I felt dead. I woke up in the mornings surprised my heart was still beating. The food I snuck at night tasted like nothing. I stole a whole red velvet cake from Mrs. NiBlack that was for a charity auction. It tasted like dirt. That was what I imagined it was like being dead. Feeling empty with the taste of dirt in your mouth.

Whatever Val felt now that she was dead, I couldn't think of her as Mama anymore. I wanted to take her flowers like Kellen had done for his mother, but I couldn't stand to go see her now that she was lying next to Liam.

Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire. The only thing that made it hurt less was moving my hands. Like Kellen washing dishes, making his head empty. I sliced and knitted and ironed and sanded and hammered and typed, trying to make my heart empty. Home economics class. Typing class. Woodshop class. Homeroom, where I volunteered to make decorations for dances.

The questions never stopped, but in high school, I learned a new way to deal with them. No matter what the question was, I nodded.

Were your parents really murdered?
Yes.

Did your boyfriend kill your parents?
Yes.

Is it true you were gang-raped by some bikers?
Yes.

Aunt Brenda told the story to her book club and they told someone else, who told someone else, and on and on and on, getting less true every time it got told. Even less true than Aunt Brenda's version.

I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

I also liked watching people. The girl who was pregnant changed the way she moved to hide it. The boy who looked at people like they were bugs scribbled angry things in his notebook. The teachers kissing desperately in the storage room weren't married to each other. Amy stood too close to the Spanish teacher when she worked the football concession stand. Leaning over, she brushed her arm longingly against Mrs. Ramirez's arm.