Authors: Amy Gentry
My eyes follow the pointing finger, and for the first time, I notice Julie’s hair, which is wet and plastered to her head like Jane’s but starting to dry. I see the short, feathery red cap, fluffed upward at the hairline by a cowlick, and for a moment, I can’t even speak.
“I told you she would freak out,” Jane says, but nobody pays attention now.
“I’m sorry,” Julie whispers.
“Why—” I take a step toward Julie, reach out a hand, and tentatively touch the place over her ears where her long, silvery-pale hair used to be. I ruffle the side hair, pull it forward, check that it’s real.
Then I start crying. I can’t help it.
“I can’t believe this,” says Jane. “She’s the one who left the house today without telling anyone where she was going. She’s the one who disappeared. Not me. Not me!” There’s a bandage on Jane’s left ring finger that has come loose and is flapping around. When she sees that no one will try to stop her, she doesn’t bother stomping, just rushes upstairs and slams the door to her room.
Julie follows, but slowly, one foot in front of the other, wading through my grief like it’s a current in a flood, like she might lose her footing and be swept away. She looks as if she has lost more children than I can possibly imagine.
My mother slapped me once.
The summer after fifth grade, Angie Pugh invited me to spend part of my summer vacation with her family in Northeast Harbor. My mother, who had strong ideas about raising girls, reluctantly agreed, but I had outgrown my swimsuit, and shopping for a new one was torture. She stood behind me in the corner of the dressing room, watching with a frown as I tugged each suit over my newly widened hips. The suit we finally picked out had polka dots and a full, ruffled skirt that hung halfway to my knees—I had maxed out my growth spurt the year before and would never be an inch over five feet.
The first day of my vacation with Angie, she made a face at the polka-dotted suit and said, “Here, take one of mine.” She opened up a drawer full of bikinis from the juniors’ department, bathing suits my mom would never even let me take off the rack. I tried a crocheted bikini with a halter top and beaded hip ties that clicked when I walked. Angie looked at me appraisingly and said, “Now I get what it’s
supposed
to look like.” She sounded jealous, but only a little; after all, she was the one with the vacation home in Northeast Harbor, and I was the one with the Catholic mother.
For ten days we played tetherball and Ping-Pong, walked to the old-fashioned soda fountain for Coke floats, told each other ghost stories under the covers with a flashlight. At the end of the vacation I gave Angie her suit back, but I hadn’t thought about the tan lines. My mother, who did not believe in knocking, came in while I was changing.
As I cried from the sting, she yelled, “Do you know what the men who saw you were thinking? Do you?”
I didn’t believe her. To me, it was just a body. But when summer ended I found out that to the boys in my school, the men in the streets, to anyone who looked, it was more than that; it was an open book full of horrible secrets, a dirty magazine anyone could paw through. My mother never hit me again, but I hated her for being right.
My mother died before Julie’s hips ever filled out a skirt. She never saw me get my first heart-stop—that moment when you look at your girl in a certain light and see that she’ll eventually become a woman, and it reminds you of every boy who put a pencil up your skirt when you walked ahead of him on the stairs, every man who stared at you at the bus stop, every honk on the street, every leering comment. You remember being alone, gloriously alone, reading a book in a sundress, feeling the grass prickling your thighs and the sun on your forearms, and then realizing that you weren’t alone at all as a man you were ashamed to feel afraid of walked up and asked if he could put sunscreen on your back. You look at your daughter and it all comes back, every microsecond when you felt that twin surge of shame and fear, but this time it’s outside of you, happening to a body that feels like yours but doesn’t belong to you, so there’s no way to protect it.
It stopped my heart back then. I was scared for her, scared
of
her. I held my breath and thought,
This will be over soon enough. By the time she’s a teenager, she’ll wise up. Like I did.
She didn’t make it.
“How dare you.” Tom is angrier at me than I’ve ever seen him, leaning down to force eye contact but still looking every inch of the foot taller than me he is. “We do not do that, Anna. We don’t do that to our kids.”
“You were as scared as I was.”
“I don’t care how scared you were,” he says, his frame growing larger every second. “We agreed: Never in our house. I saw too much of it in mine.”
“And how are your sisters doing, Tom?” I say, raising my eyes to his suddenly.
“Scared shitless of their father!” he snaps back. “And probably their husbands too! Is that what you want?”
“
And how many of them were kidnapped and sold to the highest bidder?
” I yell. “
And how many of them were raped every day for eight years?
”
“Anna—”
“They were
safe,
Tom! They were
kept
safe!”
He puts his finger right up in my face and bites off every word with a growl. “If you think that’s how it felt growing up with my father, you don’t know the first goddamn
thing
about safe.”
But I’m beyond reason now. The screaming has unleashed something too big to make a sound. I think I am sobbing, but then I realize I am only gasping, again and again, struggling for air. I feel dizzy, and my vision clouds. The next minute I come to, still standing in the same place, crushed against Tom’s chest. It is as if he’s pushing the air back into my lungs, and the big black thing in me dissolves into ordinary tears.
“Why did she do it,” I say, sobbing against him. “Why?”
“You know Jane,” he says. “She lost track of time. And Julie, I think she was just feeling cooped up, trapped. You know what she’s been through.” He shudders and gives a deep sigh. “I was as worried as you—and as angry. But now that we know they’re okay, honestly, I think it was probably good for the girls to get some bonding time.”
“I meant—her hair.”
Tom releases me, takes a step backward, and stares. “You can’t be serious.”
I know he’s kept up with Jane all these years, fighting through the traps she set to keep us away, while I was too happy to believe she didn’t want my interference. But Julie—how has he kept up with her too? How does he still have that connection from before? How did he know to move straight to Julie and hold her close when I went straight to Jane and did what I did?
“They’re like strangers.”
He looks at me with disbelief. “Anna. That’s how all mothers of teenage girls feel.”
But Julie, as Carol Morse reminded me, is an adult. Tom doesn’t know about Carol Morse and the miscarriage, Alex Mercado and the envelope. He doesn’t look into those eyes and wonder if they’re the right shade of blue and then think to himself,
Would I even know the difference?
I could tell Tom everything, but I’m the one who let the poison in, and we’re already being punished for it. What better proof of my sacrilege than this horrible feeling of not recognizing my own children, kicking them out of the nest for having the wrong scent, striking them when I want to hold them, all because they disappear at odd times of the day and night and I never know what they will look like when they return?
“You’re right,” I say. “I know you’re right.”
Tom and I can afford only one fight a night. We are too newly repaired for more. I allow myself to be taken to bed. When he is asleep, I slip into the bathroom with my phone, mute the volume, and search until I find a YouTube video called “Gretchen at Midnight @ Chapel Pub—10/2/14.” I push the triangle to play the clip and watch as Julie’s face, no bigger than a smudged white thumbprint on the screen, opens its mouth under stage lights and silently sings.
sang for the first time in Lina’s backyard.
Violet never thought of it as
her
backyard, although she’d lived there almost a year, long enough to dye her hair blue and then bleach it and clip it short and start growing it out all over again as a ripe strawberry blond. Short hair was nothing special in this company, of course, but she could tell Lina liked it better show-pony-long, no matter the color.
Lina had friends over, and they’d all been drinking. It had gotten dark and a little chilly, so they lit up the fire pit out back and dragged chairs from the kitchen around it. Lina never smoked pot, so Violet usually avoided it too. It should have been a sign to her that she was ready for a change when, this time, she took the joint that appeared on her left as if by magic, held in Susan’s hand. “Vee,” said Lina, but she turned and shrugged almost immediately as Violet took a long pull.
Violet relished the small opportunity to remind Lina she was not a knickknack picked up somewhere exotic for a song. Nobody except Lina operated on the assumption that getting Violet off the pole was the same as having bought and paid for her, but it lingered on the air like the smell of fireworks, the scent of a dangerous excitement that was over before anyone else could enjoy it. Expelling a lungful of pot smoke without a sound, Violet handed the joint back to Susan, who grinned handsomely and passed it on.
Once rid of the joint, Susan pulled a guitar from behind her seat.
“Troubadour time already?” said Susan’s girlfriend, Beck, from across the circle, where she was wrapped in a woven blanket.
But Susan didn’t sing a love song. She began by strumming the guitar with her bare knuckles, and then started up a picking pattern that reminded Violet of running water, dissolving the chords into individual notes. The joint was loosening the knots in Violet’s limbs one by one, and the tension of her status as a trophy girlfriend who should be seen and not heard began unfurling like cream in coffee. Susan’s fingers on the strings plucked at her arm hairs, her leg hairs, the hairs on the back of her neck.
Then Susan started singing in a throaty alto, a folk song.
She walks these hills in a long, black veil. She visits my grave when the night winds wail.
The song was strangely familiar—or maybe she was just stoned—and Violet’s mind raced to grab the tail of each line, never quite catching up. Then the guitar’s rounded edge bumped against her bare knee, sending its shiver up her thigh to her cunt, and for the first time, she was attracted to a woman, really attracted. And it wasn’t Lina.
Beck was looking over at Susan with an expression in which patience and paranoia mingled—she was high too—but most of the others were still chatting and laughing and clinking beer bottles and wineglasses onto the ground or scraping sandaled feet across the concrete to grab another bottle from inside.
Then Violet started to sing.
At first she sang along with Susan, and then she started to split on the rhyming words—
veil, wail, sees, me
—soaring upward in response to Susan’s emphasis, following the bumps of her voice the way she used to follow John David’s. And then, finally, she peeled her voice off the back of Susan’s, as if she’d been riding along on the back of a bird, and, catching the feeling of flight, spread her own wings. After that it was like dancing. She and Susan breathed in together and spent their breath together, vibrating like two strings on the same instrument.
Outside the pocket of air where they were singing, wineglasses dangled and beer bottles hung in the air, suspended halfway to parted lips.
When the notes knit themselves back into chords, Violet knew it was done, and the high flew out of her just like that, leaving a sleepy vacancy.
The women in the circle clapped and exclaimed over Violet as if she were a precocious child or an animal that could talk. Someone said, “Lina, where have you been hiding this one?” As though she hadn’t been to all their poetry readings and dinner parties this summer, not to mention the Black Rose, where she’d watched them get lap dances from her former coworkers.
While Lina lapped up the praise, Susan put a hand on her arm and asked, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”
“Church,” she answered truthfully, and because she was still a little high, the word seemed to encompass everything she meant by it, which was John David and the darkness at the center of light and the things both ugly and sweet she would offer anyone if it meant survival. Susan nodded, and Violet thought for a moment she really understood. What could have happened to Susan that she did?
“If you ever want to join me for an open mic sometime,” Susan said and patted her arm twice with a wink.
Violet knew by the prickling in her skin, and by Lina’s eyes on her, that the circle had become charged with a dangerous energy. She imagined herself transforming into the sputtering, sparkling catherine wheel that would burn down Susan and Beck’s life together, forcing them to decide who would keep the condo in Northwest and the restaurant they co-owned and their four-year-old son. She weighed all that against the pot-fueled flickering in her cunt that she could exhaust in a single evening or at most a few weeks.
It was tempting.
She snuffed out the tiny flame. “I don’t think I could,” she said. Susan was too complicated.
Anyway, saying no to Susan had an upside. Lina was so grateful that when the next chance came around, as Violet had known it would, Lina said yes. And then Violet was singing folk music with trios in little cafés, filling out harmonies here and there with other kinds of bands too, and she felt the satisfaction of belatedly scrubbing away the last of Starr the stripper with the red waterfall of hair down her back, and flipping into her new identity, Violet the singer with the strawberry-blond bob that was growing out, little by little. She drifted from gig to gig, band to band, until she ran into a male drummer.
Will was single, so all she had to break up was a band.
When I wake up the next morning, Tom is outside cleaning the pool.