I told her I’d decided to toss my afternoon’s work out the door and come over and window-shop a little, but I couldn’t find anything I liked. “So I thought maybe you and I could ride back on the ferry together,” I said. “Do you mind, Selena?”
She finally smiled. I would have paid a thousand dollars for that smile, I can tell you... a smile that was just for me. “Oh no, Mommy,” she said. “It would be nice, having company.”
So we walked back down the hill to the ferry-landin together, and when I asked her about some of her classes, she told me more than she had in weeks. After that first look she gave me—tike a cornered rabbit lookin at a tomcat—she seemed more like her old self than she had in months, and I began to hope.
Well, Nancy here may not know how empty that four-forty-five to Little Tall and the Outer Islands is, but I guess you n Frank do, Andy. Most of the workin folk who live off the mainland go home on the five-thirty, and what comes on the four-forty-five is mostly parcel post, UPS, shop-goods, and groceries bound for the market. So even though it was a lovely autumn afternoon, nowhere near as cold and damp as I’d thought it was gonna be, we had the aft deck mostly to ourselves.
We stood there awhile, watchin the wake spread back toward the mainland. The sun was on the wester by then, beatin a track across the water, and the wake broke it up and made it look like pieces of gold. When I was a little girl, my Dad used to tell me it was gold, and that sometimes the mermaids came up and got it. He said they used those broken pieces of late-afternoon sunlight as shingles on their magic castles under the sea. When I saw that kind of broken golden track on the water, I always watched it for mermaids, and until I was almost Selena’s age I never doubted there were such things, because my Dad had told me there were.
The water that day was the deep shade of blue you only seem to see on calm days in October, and the sound of the diesels was soothin. Selena untied the kerchief she was wearin over her head and raised her arms and laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Mom?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “it is. And you used to be beautiful, too, Selena. Why ain’t you anymore?”
She looked at me, and it was like she had two faces on. The top one was puzzled and still kinda laughin ... but underneath there was a careful, distrustin sort of look. What I saw in that underneath face was everythin Joe had told her that spring and summer, before she had begun to pull away from him, too. I don’t have no friends, is what that underneath face said to me. Certainly not you, nor him, either. And the longer we looked at each other, the more that face came to the top.
She stopped laughin and turned away from me to look out over the water. That made me feel bad, Andy, but I couldn’t let it stop me any more than I could let Vera get away with her bitchery later on, no matter how sad it all was at the bottom. The fact is, sometimes we
do
have to be cruel to be kind—like a doctor givin a shot to a child even though he knows the child will cry and not understand. I looked inside myself and saw I could be cruel like that if I had to. It scared me to know that then, and it still scares me a little. It’s scary to know you can be as hard as you need to be, and never hesitate before or look back afterward and question what you did.
“I don’t know what you mean, Mom,” she says, but she was lookin at me with a careful eye.
“You’ve changed,” I said. “Your looks, the way you dress, the way you act. All those things tell me you’re in some kind of trouble.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” she said, but all the time she was sayin it she was backin away from me. I grabbed her hands in mine before she could get too far away to reach.
“Yes there is,” I said, “and neither of us is steppin off this ferry until you tell me what it is.”
“Nothin!”
she yelled. She tried to yank her hands free but I wouldn’t let loose. “Nothin’s wrong, now let go! Let me
go!”
“Not yet,” I says. “Whatever trouble you’re in won’t change my love for you, Selena, but I can’t begin helpin you out of it until you tell me what it
is.
”
She stopped strugglin then and only looked at me. And I seen a third face below the first two—a crafty, miserable face I didn’t like much. Except for her complexion, Selena usually takes after my side of the family, but right then she looked like Joe.
“Tell me somethin first,” she says.
“I will if I can,” I says back.
“Why’d you hit him?” she asks. “Why’d you hit him that time?”
I opened my mouth to ask
“What
time?”—mostly to get a few seconds to think—but all at once I knew somethin, Andy. Don’t ask me how—it might have been a hunch, or what they call woman’s intuition, or maybe I actually reached out somehow and read my daughter’s mind—but I did. I knew that if I hesitated, even for a second, I was gonna lose her. Maybe only for that day, but all too likely for good. It was a thing I just
knew,
and I didn’t hesitate a beat.
“Because he hit me in the back with a piece of stovewood earlier that evenin,” I said. “Just about crushed my kidneys. I guess I just decided I wasn’t going to be done that way anymore. Not ever again. ”
She blinked the way you do when somebody makes a quick move toward your face with their hand, and her mouth dropped open in a big surprised O.
“That ain’t what he told you it was about, was it?”
She shook her head.
“What’d
he
say? His drinkin?”
“That and his poker games,” she said in a voice almost too low to hear. “He said you didn’t want him or anybody else to have any fun. That was why you didn’t want him to play poker, and why you wouldn’t let me go to Tanya’s sleep-over last year. He said you want everyone to work eight days a week like you do. And when he stood up to you, you conked him with the creamer and then said you’d cut off his head if he tried to do anything about it. That you’d do it while he was sieepin.”
I woulda laughed, Andy, if it hadn’t been so awful.
“Did you believe him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Thinking about that hatchet made me so scared I didn’t know what to believe. ”
That went in my heart like a knife-blade, but I never showed it. “Selena,” I says, “what he told you was a lie.”
“Just leave me alone!”
she said, pullin back from me. That cornered-rabbit look come on her face again, and I realized she wasn’t just hidin somethin because she was ashamed or worried—she was scared to death.
“I’ll fix it myself! I don’t want your help, so just leave me alone!”
“You can’t fix it yourself, Selena,” I says. I was usin the low, soothin tone you’d use on a hoss or lamb that’s gotten caught in a barbwire fence. “If you could have, you already would have. Now listen to me—I’m sorry you had to see me with that hatchet in my hand; I’m sorry about
everythin
you saw n heard that night. If I’d known it was going to make you so scared and unhappy, I wouldn’t have took after him no matter how much he provoked me.”
“Can’t you just stop it?” she asks, and then she finally pulled her hands out of mine and put em over her ears. “I don’t want to hear any more. I
won’t
hear any more.”
“I can’t stop because that’s over and done with, beyond reach,” I says, “but this ain’t. So let me help, dear heart. Please.” I tried to put an arm around her and draw her to me.
“Don’t! Don’t you hit me! Don’t you even
touch
me, you bitch!”
she screams, and shoved herself backward. She stumbled against the rail, and I was sure she was gonna go flip-flop right over it and into the drink. My heart stopped, but thank God my hands never did. I reached out, caught her by the front of the coat, and drug her back toward me. I slipped in some wet and almost fell. I caught my balance, though, and when I looked up, she hauled off and slapped me across the side of the face.
I never minded, just grabbed hold of her again and hugged her against me. You quit at a time like that with a child Selena’s age, I think a lot of what you had with that child is gonna be over for good. Besides, that slap didn’t hurt a bit. I was just scared of losin her—and not just from my heart, neither.
For that one second I was sure she was gonna go over the rail with her head down and her feet up. I was so sure I could see it. It’s a wonder all my hair didn’t go gray right then.
Then she was cryin and tellin me she was sorry, that she never meant to hit me, that she never ever meant to do that, and I told her I knew it. “Hush awhile,” I says, and what she said back almost froze me solid. “You should have let me go over, Mommy,” she said. “You should have let me go.”
I held her out from me at arms’ length—by then we was both cryin—and I says,
“Nothin
could make me do a thing like that, sweetheart.”
She was shakin her head back and forth. “I can’t stand it anymore, Mommy ... I can’t. I feel so dirty and confused, and I can’t be happy no matter how hard I try. ”
“What is it?” I says, beginnin to be frightened all over again. “What is it, Selena?”
“If I tell you,” she says, “you’ll probably push me over the rail yourself.”
“You know better,” I says. “And I’ll tell you another thing, dear heart—you ain’t steppin foot back on dry land until you’ve come clean with me. If goin back n forth on this ferry for the rest of the year is what it takes, then that’s what we’ll do ... although I think we’ll both be frozen solid before the end of November, if we ain’t died of ptomaine from what they serve in that shitty little snack-bar.”
I thought that might make her laugh, but it didn’t. Instead she bowed her head so she was lookin at the deck and said somethin, real low. With the sound of the wind and the engines, I couldn’t quite hear what it was.
“What did you say, sweetheart?”
She said it again, and I heard it that second time, even though she didn’t speak much louder. All at once I understood everythin, and Joe St. George’s days were numbered from that moment on.
“I never wanted to do anything. He made me.” That’s what she said.
For a minute I could only stand there, and when I finally did reach for her, she flinched away. Her face was as white as a sheet. Then the ferry—the old
Island Princess,
that was—took a lurch. The world had already gone slippery on me, and I guess I would have gone on my skinny old ass if Selena hadn’t grabbed me around the middle. The next second it was me holdin her again, and she cryin against my neck.
“Come on,” I says. “Come on over here and sit down with me. We’ve had enough rammin from one side of this boat to the other to last us awhile, haven’t we?”
We went over to the bench by the aft companionway with our arms around each other, shufflin like a pair of invalids. I don’t know if Selena felt like an invalid or not, but I sure did. I was only leakin from the eyes a little, but Selena was cryin s’hard it sounded like she’d pull her guts loose from their moorins if she didn’t quit pretty soon. I was glad to hear her cry that way, though. It wasn’t until I heard her sobbin and seen the tears rollin down her cheeks that I realized how much of her
feelins
had gone away, too, like the light in her eyes and the shape inside her clothes. I would have liked hearin her laugh one frig of a lot better’n I liked hearin her cry, but I was willin to take what I could get.
We sat down on the bench and I let her cry awhile longer. When it finally started to ease off a little, I gave her the hanky from my purse. She didn’t even use it at first. She just looked at me, her cheeks all wet and deep brown hollows under her eyes, and she says, “You don’t hate me, Mommy? You really don’t?”
“No,” I says. “Not now, not never. I promise on my heart. But I want to get this straight. I want you to tell me the whole thing, all the way through. I see on your face that you don’t think you can do that, but I know you can. And remember this—you’ll never have to tell it again, not even to your own husband, if you don’t want to. It will be like drawin a splinter. I promise
that
on my heart, too. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mommy, but he said if I ever told... sometimes you get so mad, he said ... like the night you hit him with the cream-pot ... he said if I ever felt like telling I’d better remember the hatchet... and ...”
“No, that’s not the way,” I says. “You need to start at the beginning and go right through her. But I want to be sure I got one thing straight from the word go. Your Dad’s been at you, hasn’t he?”
She just hung her head and didn’t say nothing. It was all the answer I needed, but I think
she
needed to hear herself sayin it right out loud.
I put my finger under her chin and lifted her head until we were lookin each other right in the eye. “Hasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said, and broke out sobbin again. This time it didn’t last so long nor go so deep, though. I let her go on awhile just the same because it took me awhile to see how
I
should go on. I couldn’t ask “What’s he done to you?” because I thought the chances were pretty good she wouldn’t know for sure. For a little while the only thing I could think of was “Has he fucked you?” but I thought she might not know for sure even if I put it just that way, that crude. And the sound of it was so damned ugly in my head.
At last I said, “Has he had his penis into you, Selena? Has he had it in your pussy?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t let him.” She swallowed back a sob. “Not yet, anyway.”
Well, we were both able to relax a little after that—with each other, anyway. What I felt inside was pure rage. It was like I had an eye inside, one I never knew about before that day, and all I could see with it was Joe’s long, horsey face, with his lips always cracked and his dentures always kind of yellow and his cheeks always chapped and red high up on the cheekbones. I saw his face pretty near all the time after that, that eye wouldn’t close even when my other two did and I was asleep, and I began to know it
wouldn’t
close until he was dead. It was like bein in love, only inside out.