“But you stuck it out in spite of the challenges, right? That’s an accomplishment in itself.”
“I need to learn German,” I said emphatically. Bev opened her mouth like she was about to tell me when and where to go for lessons. “
After
my life settles down a bit!” I amended. The last thing I needed to add to my challenge-saturated life was language study.
“Well, when you think the time is right, I know a lady who’d be a great tutor for you.”
“Maybe in a month or two—give or take a decade.”
Bev laughed and plopped down at the kitchen table.
I sat opposite her. “How did you learn? Did you take lessons when you got here?”
She smiled like there was a good story there. “Gus would tell you I had to learn German because nobody was obeying my orders when I barked at them in English.”
“Your orders?”
“I was a bit of a battle-ax in a previous life.”
I had trouble believing it. “How ‘previous’?”
“Oh, you know . . . ongoing.”
“Really?”
She nodded and leaned back in her chair. “I was one of those women whose world isn’t so much their oyster as their kingdom. And that worked just fine in South Carolina. I could walk into Walmart and boss the customer service people around like nobody’s business. I’d give waitresses a run for their money demanding this and that and complaining about it when it came. There was a teller at my bank who refused to deal with me—she actually took a coffee break every time I walked in the door.”
I was dumbfounded. “Really?”
“Really. And that’s not even mentioning the way I treated my kids’ teachers or the elders at my church. . . .”
I gave her a disapproving look. “What did you do to your poor elders?”
“I was the church secretary for nearly ten years before we came over here. And I figured the position gave me the right to turn First Baptist Church into Bev’s Private Playground. If they didn’t do things the way I thought they should be done, I made enough noise about it that it became a bigger issue than it ever should have been. The pastor finally had to ask me to tone it down a little or a couple of his elders were going to resign. Now that, Shelby, is a battle-ax.”
I shook my head, looking across the table at this woman who seemed the epitome of the genteel Southerner. “Well, I haven’t seen anything battle-axish about you since I’ve been here.”
“Oh, I had most of it knocked out of me when I got to Germany. You don’t get very far in the grocery stores here by yelling, ‘I demand to speak with your manager!’ in English.”
“I can’t believe you were like that.”
“Well, I was. And Gus will tell you I can still be. But it took
moving here to cure me of the worst of it. Nothing like a little humility to drive a lesson home. But my need to be understood made me learn German, so I can now kindly tell the mailman that he should leave our packages under the balcony rather than in the pouring rain, and I can gently suggest to the waitress at our favorite restaurant that my pork steak is so rare it’s still oinking. A few years ago, I would have demanded a new dinner—and on the house, too!” She laughed at my astonishment and added, “Gives you a whole new appreciation for my husband, doesn’t it?”
“The guy’s a saint.” I laughed. “I just . . . I just can’t picture it.”
“Lucky for you.”
We sat there grinning at each other for a moment.
“I should get going,” I finally said, remembering Shayla and suddenly missing her.
“Can you hold off just a minute? I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something, and this seems like a good time to do it.”
“Is Shay still refusing to eat her vegetables?” Not that I could blame her. It showed she had good taste.
“Oh no, it’s not that. I’ve just been wondering if it wouldn’t be good for her to start going to kindergarten in the mornings. There’s a great one right here in Kandern. It might be healthy for her to have more contact with other children, don’t you think? She’d probably pick up the language in a matter of weeks, too.”
“Kindergarten?” I had visions of Shayla alone on a foreign-speaking playground.
“It’s just half days.”
“Is she . . . Is it too much for you to take care of her?” I’d worried that Bev’s child-care duties might have been too taxing, and this suggestion seemed to validate my fear.
“Oh, heavens, no, Shelby! Having her around is as easy as it gets. This has nothing to do with me. I just hate to see her cooped
up with an old lady all day long when she should be out playing with kids her age. And since you’re in Germany now, why not give her some contact with the language and the culture? If there’s a good age to learn it, believe me, it’s hers.”
I felt irrational fear tightening my throat. “Really? You really think it would be good for her? I mean, with all the changes she’s gone through already this year . . .”
“Well, it would be another change, for sure, but the payoff might outweigh the adjustments. She’d be able to play with other children again, for one—something she really hasn’t done much since you’ve gotten here. And it’s so important to have that kind of social contact at her age. It’ll stimulate her mind and broaden her world a little in the process.”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“Hey, there’s no hurry. Think it over and let me know if you’d like to try it. I know one of the ladies who runs the place, and we could go visit the school together. You can ask around, too—find out how other BFA faculty children have fared. She wouldn’t be the first to go there.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
And I did. I thought about it from that moment all the way until supper, fretting and weighing and pondering, until Shayla’s wide eyes, gazing across the table at me, made me just blurt it out.
“How would you feel about going to kindergarten, Shay?”
She frowned a little. “Is that school?” She sounded suspicious.
“It’s school for kids your age.”
“Djoh-many kids?”
I nodded. “Bev said you could go a few mornings a week if you wanted to. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” I hoped with all my heart that she would shake her head and refuse to consider it. Maybe even throw a tantrum. Fling some macaroni.
Instead, she frowned a little less and said, “Only if my wabbit can come with me.”
Huh? Someone suggesting that I go to school in a foreign language, even at the ripe old age of thirty-five, would have encountered Hysterical Shelby, the one with the bugged-out eyes, shrill voice, and permanently shaking head. But Shayla? Four-year-old Shayla? She just frowned a little, like she wasn’t sure she liked the flavor of this particular conversation, then shrugged and decided her stuffed animal should come along. I wasn’t sure who was teaching whom in this relationship.
“You’re sure? I mean, you don’t want to think about it some more?” I told myself to shut up. This was about Shayla, not about me.
“Will there be Legos?” she asked.
“Um . . . probably. Or something like Legos.”
She pursed her lips. “Okay,” she finally said.
“Okay,” I repeated, a little reluctantly, peering at her closely to detect any minute sign of misgivings. But Shayla was back to concentrating on her macaroni, so I figured the conversation hadn’t exactly traumatized her. “Well,” I said lightly, “I’ll talk with Bev and maybe we can go visit the school this week.”
“Uh-huh.”
I had expected anxiety and tears and refusals from this child who had suffered such an overdose of change in recent weeks. Instead, her matter-of-fact agreement had put my own fears to shame. What felt like the beginning of a loss to me, to my pseudo-daughter was merely the start of something new.
THE DAY MY DAD
left had started pretty well. It would go down from there for a few hours, then up again for, oh, about a couple decades. Trey and I followed the smell of bacon frying to the kitchen and observed our usual rituals of breakfast in pj’s, doing dishes to the Beatles, and getting dressed to the smell of the lawn being cut. It was a day that felt cheerful—kelly-green around the edges—and that somehow brought out the sports fans in us. So Trey donned his lucky Bulls championship cap, and I donned my lucky McDonald’s Walk for Life T-shirt, which always felt disloyal to Wendy’s. But I was getting over that.
I think it’s the sports theme that dismantled our lives. That may explain the hate-hate relationship I’ve had with sports ever since then, though I’m pretty sure I was already of that mind-set in preschool, when I staged a sit-in every time my teacher told us to climb the monkey bars.
Monkey bars
was a deceptive term.
Monkey
sounded like
fun, in a goofy, screechy kinda way. And
bars
sounded yummy, in a Mars or Snickers kinda way. But
climbing
?
Climbing
sounded like something that required physical effort, and that’s where five-year-old Shelby drew the line.
Trey and I wandered outside in our sports gear, and Dad told us he was going to the hardware store to have his lawn-mower blade sharpened. He took Mom’s car since it was parked behind his and she wouldn’t be needing it as she had walked to the hair salon to have her ends trimmed. We stood in the driveway after Dad drove away and had our usual Saturday conversation.
“What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. We could go to the arcade.”
“Yeah.”
“Or we could watch MTV.”
I didn’t like MTV. It made me feel like I’d drunk too much Coke. “Or we could go to the grocery store and try their free samples.”
Trey and I weren’t very good at Saturdays. We could never decide what we were going to do—except when Dad had one of his fits. When that happened, life became predictable and manageable and we no longer had to plan our day or come to an agreement. We knew the drill. It took all the frustration out of Saturdays. But Dad had been in a pretty good mood so far, so we were left to our own devices.
Why Trey stayed home on weekends with little old me was a mystery. He had friends on the soccer team and at school, though he mostly just hung out with them between classes and during games and scrimmages. They never came over to the house, but I think that’s because it was too hard to explain my dad to them. And not just the neckties-on-Saturdays thing.
We were about to throw in the towel and head to the video arcade when the sport of basketball decided to turn our lives upside down.
See, Trey had his Bulls cap on, and when he was wearing that, he tended to suffer from Michael Jordan delusions. I saw him eyeing the basketball hoop that hung above our garage door and concluded I’d have to find my own entertainment for the next hour or so while my usually fairly rational brother bounced a ball in rhythmic monotony and yelled, “Three-pointer!” at the top of his lungs. I did, however, see an impediment to his plans.
“Don’t you think Dad’s car is too close to the hoop?” I asked.
“I’ll shoot around it.”
“Trey . . .” Dad loved his car. The first deadly sin in our household was messing with Dad’s car. The second deadly sin was everything else.
“Don’t worry about it, Shell.” He was already bouncing the ball and lining up his first shot. “I’ve got all the precision of my man Jordan.”
He had neither the skin color nor the height, so I doubted he had the precision. The first shot went wide and bounced off the backboard directly onto the shiny hood of Dad’s Chevy. I cringed and covered my eyes like it would undo the hollow thunk that I knew must have left its mark on the finish.
“It’s okay,” Trey said a few seconds later, and I uncovered my eyes to find him polishing a blemish off the hood with his shirt. “It’s coming right off.”
“Maybe it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re a Bull while the car’s in the driveway,” I suggested. He got a look on his face that made me want to tie him to a tree with duct tape. It was a look that spelled
mischief
—only it spelled it
d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u
-
s
. “What are you thinking, Trey?” I really didn’t like the glint in his eyes.
He looked into the car and his smile broadened. “You know how I’ve been taking driver’s ed at school?”
“Trey . . .”
“I’m going to be sixteen in two and a half months.”
“Only if Dad doesn’t kill you before then.”
Trey leaned down and eyed the garage doorway like a golfer lines up his shot. “All I’ve got to do is put it in gear and let it coast into the garage.”
“Uh, Trey . . .” I was trying to figure out how to express my true feelings without resorting to nasty words.
Trey opened the driver’s-side door and got into the front seat. I was rooted to the spot with a combination of terror and reluctant admiration. My brother, the idiot, was truly a courageous guy.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I yelled as the engine came to life and he put it in gear. The car inched forward and I could see how it was perfectly lined up with the garage. I think Trey and I were both so focused on that, neither of us realized he had left the car door open. I saw it just as it was about to make contact with the garage’s doorframe and yelled, “Trey! The door!” so loudly that I startled myself.
I apparently startled Trey, too, because he panicked. He didn’t know what I’d yelled, but he knew it had sounded urgent, and in his frantic attempt to bring the car to a halt, he hit the wrong pedal, just for a second, and jolted the Chevy into the workbench on the back wall of the garage.
I’ve heard it said that time stands still at critical moments in life, like when someone says they love you or you win the lottery or your brother plows your dad’s prize possession into the garage wall. But time didn’t actually stand still in the aftermath of what we would come to refer to as the Big Bang. Time actually took on a life of its own and started to rock and swirl around me, and I think the whole earth kinda bucked along in rhythm. It was a cataclysm of unimaginable consequences, and time was thrashing around in a desperate effort to reverse itself. It didn’t succeed. When the earth settled a little under my feet, I heard a lone wrench fall off its wall hook and land on the hood of the shiny black Chevy.
This was not good—a very bad, very scary, very irremediable version of not good.
When Dad returned, he found us sitting on the stoop at the front of the house. We’d passed the minutes trying to make light of the situation, but I could see from the sweat on Trey’s forehead and the wideness of his eyes—like the top lids were stuck on something—that we hadn’t succeeded. That was a little disappointing, because we’d tried so hard.
“So do you still feel like Michael Jordan?” I’d asked.
“This is the end of my life.”
“Maybe we should run away to Mexico and build a Huddle Hut on the beach.”
“He’s going to kill me, Shell.”
“We could make up a story. We could say some homeless guy jumped in the car and rammed it into the garage. Or maybe a druggie.”
“Or maybe the pope.”
“Yeah—the pope’s a good one too.”
“The damage isn’t too bad, right?”
I hesitated. I didn’t know much about cars. “Well, the door is . . . It just has a few scratches, but . . .”
“He’s going to kill me.”
“Maybe if you tell him how sorry you are, he’ll understand. Or maybe he’s one of those people who get all upset about stupid little things but don’t really worry about the big things.”
He gave me a my-sister-the-moron look. We were in deep doo-doo and both of us knew it.
“I hear Mexico’s really nice this time of year.”
That’s when my mom’s car, with my dad in it, pulled into the driveway. It took a while for him to open the door, and that was scarier than anything that came after.
Trey stood and waited. I could see he had dark spots on his back and under his arms where the sweat had soaked into his shirt. When
Dad got out of the car, Trey took a step back. I stood and touched his arm, and then he stepped off the stoop and went to stand in front of the man whose lips had disappeared and whose neck was popping with veins and sinews and fury.
Dad didn’t take his eyes off the car and the mess of tools and paint cans on the floor around it.
“Dad, I—”
He backhanded Trey so quickly, like a lightning strike, that it was over before I’d seen it coming. Trey fell against Mom’s car so hard that his back curved over the hood. My dad kept him plastered there with his hand on his throat, pushing down on his neck like he wanted to crush it.
I felt like I was watching the scene through a wall of buzzing bees, so thick and seething was the air.
The sky lowered and added its weight to my dad’s. The trees in the yard bent forward, forcing more air out of my brother’s lungs.
“What have you done?” Dad raged, disgorging a crush of poison words. “What have you done to my car?” I could see the spit flying out of his mouth, even at a distance, and the veins around his eyes were starting to stand out. He was red. Mottled. Rabid. His body taut and straining. His teeth bared in a snarl that belonged on a sick, caged animal—not on my dad. This was not my father. This was my worst nightmare in human form, my greatest, most horrendous fear choking the life out of my brother in Technicolor and surround sound. My legs wanted to buckle and my mind wanted to flee into insentience, but the only good part of me was being broken, that part that walked and talked and breathed as Trey, and I couldn’t let it happen. There was a bright-blue flash at the back of my mind and I launched off the porch, pushing through thick air toward my brother. My friend. My protector.
“I’ll kill you for this! I’ll kill you!” my dad was shrieking, his voice like broken glass. Then he ran out of words and just screamed and
howled and thundered while I tried to pry his vicious hands from my brother’s neck. I pulled at his arm, pitting my full weight against his grip, but I was a moth throwing myself against a fortress, feeble and frantic and impotent.
In a desperate last effort fueled by the churning lava in my chest, I jumped onto Dad’s back and braced my feet against Mom’s car and tried to pull him away from the hood, away from Trey, away from the hell of seeing my brother, shattered and helpless, dying before me. And still, my efforts were in vain. I reached around to my dad’s face and started to claw. I clawed at his eyes, I clawed at his cheeks, I clawed at his mouth and ears and nose. I felt wet against my fingers, and I didn’t care whether it was spit or blood or tears. All I cared about was that he was staggering back and releasing his hold on my choking, convulsing brother.
And then he turned, his hands tearing mine from his face, and slammed backward into the car with me on his back, knocking the terror from my lungs, before throwing me over his shoulder like a wrestler onto the ground. I felt my wrist bend too far, but it was only the mechanics of the injury that registered, not the pain. I heard shrieking in the background that sounded like my mom. Then my face hit the pavement in a streak of fire-yellow and blood-pounding red and I passed out.
My first thought when I woke up on the living room couch was,
Shoot, I didn’t kill him.
I’d really hoped my clawing would have severed an artery somewhere in his face and made him bleed to death. But there he was, sitting off in the corner of the room in the chair that was so pretty that none of us ever used it. My eyes were seeing things a little blurry, so I couldn’t tell if it was blood or just scrapes crisscrossing his face. I hoped it was blood.
“Trey . . .” I croaked, turning my head to find Mom’s face above mine. She was holding my wrist like you hold a dead bird.
“It’s just a sprain,” she said, and I squinted a little to make sure it was really my mom. She didn’t sound like her.
“Trey,” I tried again. “Where’s Trey?” This time my voice sounded less like a bullfrog and more like a cricket. But Mom was so busy staring at my dad, all slumped over in the pretty flowered chair, that I don’t think she heard me. Her face looked stony, like those gargoyles we’d studied in art class. Except she was prettier—but not by much. Hate had turned her ugly just then. It suddenly dawned on my mushy brain that maybe she was ignoring my question because the answer was too horrible to say. I felt like the couch folded up beneath me and I fell through, butt first, and went spiraling into an endless, dark, suffocating hole where the absence of Trey would shred me.
There were weird pictures flashing through my head, like pages of a notebook being flipped so fast that they all blurred together. I saw bits and pieces of Rolos and basketballs and zucchini and Coke cans and the Huddle Hut and the arcade and all these fragile pieces of Trey I wanted to gather up and press into a ball and swallow so he would be a part of me—inside me—even if he wasn’t in the world anymore. The darkness of the hole was blackening my vision and snuffing out my thoughts.
Life without Trey. Life without Trey. Life without Trey.
My heart tried to beat through my ribs so it could run away screaming into the attic and curl up in the Huddle Hut and just shriek.
“Is she okay?” The voice was raspy like the smell of burned toast, but it was Trey’s and it was alive and it came from somewhere down around my feet. So I pulled my head off the couch’s armrest and looked down my body through the spinning, rocking world . . . and there he was. He was sitting in Mom’s armchair, holding a bag of frozen peas against his throat. I could see there would be bruises there tomorrow. Tomorrow. Trey would be alive tomorrow. I laid my head back down on the armrest and heard a sob and thought,
How embarrassin
g
for
whoever was making such a pathetic noise. And then Trey was beside me, his frozen-peas hands cold against my arm. He knelt by the couch and shushed me like a baby, stroking my arm, while Mom stood there and stared at the corner with the pretty chair.