“What’s her name, Coach?” It was the team captain asking, and I recognized him as Kenny, a muscular player who also had a reputation for being a gentleman and an all-round good guy.
“Lady Shay! Treat her like one!”
Kenny picked her up by the waist and ran with her to the basket. She dunked the ball like a pro and beamed as a cheer went up from the players. It wasn’t long before they were all involved
in a quirky game of basketball, with Shayla riding high on their shoulders, up and down the court, answering to Lady Shay and living one of the highlights of her short life.
“She’s a natural,” Scott said.
“She was a
hungry
natural two minutes ago. I promise.”
“Guess she changed her mind.”
“They won’t drop her, will they?”
“They know the rules. ‘You break it, you pay for it.’”
“That’s comforting.” There was a silence. “Kenny seems nice.”
“He’s a class act.”
“He’s got a way with kids.”
“I think it goes both ways. Shayla has a way with strangers.”
“No kidding. You should see her and the landlady cozying up.”
I let out a startled yelp when I looked over to find Shayla hanging from the rim with her little hands, then letting go and dropping into the arms beneath her. “Shayla!” It was instinctive. As instinctive as the need I had to get out there and rescue her. But Scott’s hand on my arm halted me midstride.
“She’s fine,” he said.
And looking out onto the court, I could see he spoke the truth. Shayla was off down the court again, perched on Kenny’s shoulders, her ball resting on his head, a glowing smile on her face and her eyes riveted on the approaching basket. She giggled and squealed and dunked the ball again.
“And I’m supposed to get her to bed after this?”
“Have you ever been to Sausenburg?” he asked, changing the subject abruptly, which was his modus operandi.
I rolled my eyes—but that took them off Shayla for too long, so I decided to stop that for now.
“It’s the ruins of a castle,” he continued, unfazed. “Just above Sitzenkirch. Shayla would love it.”
Sitzenkirch was a tiny village about five minutes from Kandern, where the elementary school had found a home. I had been there once, just to see what it looked like, but I hadn’t seen any ruins.
I didn’t answer Scott. I’d learned that answers led to conversations, and conversations that didn’t have the Johnsons’ house as a punctuation mark gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Scott blew his whistle again. “Okay, guys! Outta here!”
Every head on the floor except Shayla’s snapped around to look at the clock.
“But, Coach, we still have ten—”
“Pack it up!”
The players clearly weren’t used to aborted practices. They looked at each other, mumbled, then shuffled off the court. Kenny deposited Shayla at my feet, a ball still in her hands, then went back out to gather the rest of the balls into giant nets.
“What’s the rush?” one of the guys asked as he was passing Scott.
“Lady Shay needs a ride home.”
I was outraged. “She does not!”
Scott raised an eyebrow. “You want me to tell them why I really cut our practice short?”
“You’re hurrying home to catch
The Young and the Restless
?”
“No—I’m hoping to have an actual conversation with you.”
“Oh.”
“Right. This two-minutes-and-forty-seconds thing is for the birds.”
“Well, Shayla and I need to get home to make a casserole, so . . .”
“I’d love some.”
“What I was going to say was that we need to run and you need to lock up, and we don’t really need a ride, so . . .” I was bending
over at the waist and trying to pry Shayla’s hands off the basketball she held like a lifeline.
“I’d like to talk.”
“Why?”
He looked exasperated and entertained. It was an interesting combination. He fished a quarter of orange out of a bowl and handed it to Shayla. She immediately let go of the ball and focused her attention on devouring the snack.
“I knew that would work,” I said a bit defensively.
“Of course you did. You’re her mom.”
I bit my tongue.
“And I’m a guy who’s either got a death wish or a challenge disorder, because I’d kinda like to get to know you.”
“I’m not good with people.”
“You’re a teacher.”
“I’m not good with grown-up people.”
“Gus and Bev adore you.”
“I’m not good with . . .”
Scott crouched down so he was eye-level with Shayla. “Shayla, is your mom crazy?” He said it with a mock-serious face as he wiped some orange dribble off her chin with his thumb.
Shayla had been helping herself to more of the leftover oranges, and she had her mouth so full that she had to swallow twice before she could say, “She’s not my mom.” The subtext was “dummy”—as in,
“She’s not my mom, dummy.”
Scott looked at me, his eyebrow raised in question.
“She’s not technically my daughter,” I confirmed.
If Scott was taken aback, he hid it well. “See why we need to talk? I don’t even know the basics.”
I looked away.
“You can have your Mace within arm’s reach at all times.”
I bit my lip.
“I’ll help you with the dishes.”
He was getting warmer.
“I read a killer bedtime story.”
“Sounds a bit morbid for a four-year-old.”
“I mean I’m a good bedtime-story reader.”
“Had a lot of practice?”
“My niece and nephews think I’m pretty cool.”
“I’m sure that’s comforting.”
“After conversations like these? You bet it is.”
“I’ve got a rock,” Shayla said. Scott’s conversational skills were clearly rubbing off on her.
“Really?” He was down on her level again.
“A blue one on the inside.”
He looked up at me. “Quartz?”
“She found it at the flea market.”
“Maybe you can show it to me someday.”
“But not tonight. We’ve had a big day and Shayla needs to get to bed early.” It sounded hollow even to my ears.
Scott straightened and ruffled Shayla’s hair. “Some other day, then. And maybe I can show you a castle, too. Would you like that?”
“A weal castle?”
“What’s left of it. You can even climb the tower.”
Something rasped over my nerve endings. In one overwhelming moment, the walls and ceiling around me shrank and closed in until they became the pale-green walls of my mother’s kitchen. The sensation was so vivid and stark that I could hear the angry impotence of the air conditioner propped on the windowsill above the sink and feel the grip of something dark pressing in around my mind. I knew, in a remote and rational part of my thinking,
that I was still standing in a high school gym, but something about Scott and his castle plans had suffused my senses with the smells, sounds, and crippledness of my youth. There was nothing truly menacing in the moment, yet I felt trapped by Scott’s exchange with Shayla, backed into a corner, barred from an escape route, and robbed of both choice and independence. I felt manipulated, bulldozed, and helpless.
Scott must have read the anger on my face. He frowned and looked like his mind was on rewind, trying to figure out what he’d said wrong.
“Don’t back me into a corner,” I said. The tremor in my voice shamed me. “And don’t use Shayla to do it.” I could feel the flush of anger on my cheeks and was as shocked by it as Scott.
“I wasn’t . . .”
I picked Shayla up and headed toward the door. “Thanks for the oranges.”
We left.
I’d like to say Shayla and I walked home in silence. It’s what my brain needed. But Shayla’s mind had been so stimulated by her first pick-up game that she couldn’t seem to stop talking. She talked about her rock, she talked about oranges, she talked about hanging from the rim, she talked about a cat that crossed the street in front of us and about the bright-green shoelaces on her sneakers. She talked, in other words.
As much as I craved silence, I found solace in her chattering. In the days following her enrollment in kindergarten, Shayla had become subdued and pensive, but the last week had marked a change. After Bev and I had talked with her teacher and encouraged her to acknowledge Shayla’s English questions and respond to them in German rather than ignoring them altogether, an awkward, bilingual dialogue had begun between them. Some of the
girls in the class had started to include Shayla in their playground antics, and the newness of German kindergarten rituals had become less startling to her. She no longer cried herself to sleep, and though she wasn’t always excited about going to school in the morning, it didn’t terrify her anymore. Which was good for both of us—she had fewer meltdowns and I had fewer guilt-ridden, sleepless nights. So we were both a little happier.
But as Shayla talked all the way home from the gym that evening, my mind wasn’t really on her brighter spirits or on the meal I still had to make. It was on the abrupt and frightening end of my conversation with Scott. I couldn’t understand what had led from A to B, from bearable present to intolerable past, from relatively sane Shelby to raving-lunatic Shelby. I didn’t have any answers. Scott’s bullheadedness had made me put up my defenses; that much I knew and understood. But losing it that fast over a harmless invitation to a castle? That was perplexing—and, given my gene pool, terrifying, too. I remembered the heat of anger that had suffused my face and how it had made my voice shaky and my hand too firm around Shayla’s, and a familiar fear gripped me. The apple and the tree.
Shayla and I retired Martha Stewart for the evening and had cereal for supper. This made Shayla happy, in part because she could eat immediately and in part because of the sugar high cereal gave her. Go figure. Consequently, our bedtime ritual became a little more drawn out and a lot more competitive. Shayla wanted to color instead of brushing her teeth. She wanted to sit on the floor and pout instead of picking up her toys. She wanted to point out the window at nothing instead of getting into bed. When she decided she’d rather belt out the Barney song at the top of her lungs, singing over my admonitions and squirming out of my grip instead of saying her prayers, I again felt that flush of anger, that
quickening in the chest and stomach that made me want to slap myself . . . or her.
I left the room with Shayla still blasting “I love you, you love me. We’re a happy family” in a way that might have scared Barney back into prehistory and, closing both her bedroom door and mine, reached for the phone.
It was midafternoon in Illinois, and Trey was at his post at L’Envie.
He picked up the phone and did his business-owner greeting.
“I’m turning into Dad.”
“Sounds like a personal problem.”
“Trey . . .”
“Hey, Shell. How are you doing? Things going well over there?”
“Guess that was a bit abrupt.”
“Just a tad.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Are you busy?”
“I’ll let you know when the Japanese tour bus gets here to buy me out of house and bakery.”
“So it’s a slow day is what you’re saying.”
“Slow
time
of day. It’ll pick up later.”
“I went to the gym tonight . . .”
“I’m sorry, let me replace the batteries in my hearing aid.”
“Trey . . .”
“Sorry.”
“I went to the gym to get something for Shayla to eat after school tonight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I lost it.”
“You lost Shayla?”
“I lost my temper. Over nothing.”
“Okay . . .”
“And now Shayla is in her bedroom shrieking a heavy-metal version of the Barney song and I can’t get her to stop, and when I grabbed her arm to make her lie down for the hundredth time . . . Trey, I wanted to . . . I mean, I almost . . . I wanted to just plaster her to the mattress and hold her there—hard.” I felt the emotion tightening my muscles again.
“She’s singing ‘I love you, you love me’ like Marilyn Manson?”
“Trey . . .”
“Hold out the phone. I want to hear.”
“Trey!”
“You’re not turning into Dad, Shell.”
I let out a shaky breath. “I need a Huddle Hut. And maybe a Valium.”
“Did you yell at her?”
“I thought about it.”
“Did you tell her she was worthless and repulsive and stupid?”
My stomach churned as I pictured Shayla on the receiving end of such a maiming diatribe. “No.”
His voice got softer, more serious. “Did you slap her or physically hurt her in any way?”
“No, Trey.”
“You’re not turning into Dad.”
“But I wanted to. I mean . . . I felt angry, Trey. You know—the face-getting-hot, might-have-to-scream variety of angry. I just wanted to, you know, shake some sense into her and make her stop
yelling
and tell Scott to go take a flying leap off a high place. . . .”
“Scott?”
“Never mind.”
“So how’s the weather . . . ?”
“It’s—”
“Who’s Scott, Shell?” I swore I could hear a twinkle in his voice, if such a thing were possible.
“This is about me, Trey. My anger. My personal failures as a pseudo-mom.”
“So egocentric.”
“I’m serious.”
“Number one, lose the ‘pseudo-mom’ thing. It’s insulting to you and to Shayla. Number two, getting mad isn’t a crime. Picturing how mad you could really get if you let yourself is not a crime. Having instinctive urges to hit something or hurt someone or throw a tantrum are not, in themselves, criminal, Shelby. Should we all be figuring out how to deal with things before those urges rear their ugly heads? Absolutely. But the fact that you didn’t scream, that you didn’t shove her into the mattress, that you didn’t start throwing dishes or heavy furniture . . . Shell—that’s proof that you’re not turning into Dad.”
I sighed. Loud and long. The singing in the other room had lowered a few notches.
“And number three,” Trey continued, “who’s Scott?”
“Don’t you ever worry? That you’ve got too many Davis genes, I mean.”
“Sure. But I also try to figure out where Dad went wrong. I’m of the school of thought that genes can be deprogrammed.”
“If that’s the case, why are you still single?”