In Broken Places (25 page)

There was no arguing that point.

I allowed myself to think about my parents for a while—something I rarely did—but it seemed appropriate, as they were so entangled in the moment. “When do you think Dad turned into . . . well, Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, Mom wouldn’t have married him if he was as bad then as he was later, right?”

Trey thought about it for a moment. “Probably not,” he said. “I hope not.”

“So there’s a good chance that he was a nice guy at one point in his life—nice enough for Mom to fall in love with him.”

“I guess it’s possible.”

I sighed. “It’s more than possible. She told me herself—with pictures and letters to prove it.”

“When was this?”

“Right after her stroke.”

“And I’m just hearing about this now because . . . ?”

I shook my head in frustration. “Because I didn’t like it. The part about Dad being romantic and lovable. I tried to forget it, actually.”

“But she said he was.”

“Yup.”

“So . . .” I could hear his reluctance in the hesitation that preceded “We have to believe her.”

I sighed again, more wearily this time. “Yeah, I guess we do. But maybe he was just faking being nice to get the girl. Whatever it was, she believed him.”

“And you think Scott’s a nice guy too,” my brother said with intimate understanding.

“And more.”

“And your point is that you think he could turn into Dad, since Dad was probably all sweetness and light before we knew him.”

“Yup.”

“And the other half of the point,” he continued with unerring accuracy, “is that
you
could become Dad.”

“There are no guarantees, Trey. We were raised with him. We absorbed some of him in all those years. We had to.”

“Or maybe we had such good seats at the Jim Davis horror show that it scared us straight. Ever think of that? Maybe we’re not going to become him because we’ve seen him up close and personal—and because he was so revolting to us.”

Something cold trickled through the marrow of my spine. “I hate him.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You’ve never said that before,” Trey said quietly, with no reproach.

I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut. “I’ve never felt quite this derailed before.”

“It’s . . .” He paused. “I don’t think it’s a good thing for you to suddenly decide you hate him, Shell.”

“Maybe I’ve spent too much time making excuses for him. That’s what you used to tell me, remember?”

“But refusing to hate him is what kept you sane.”

“No, Trey, it’s what kept me
barely functional
. And there aren’t very many upsides to that. Not for me, anyway.”

He understood. I could hear it in his sigh. “Don’t hate him.”

I remembered Scott’s face when he’d left my apartment and couldn’t quell the heat of fury in my blood. “Dad did this to me,” I said.

“Yeah, but he’s not around to fix it. So hating him isn’t going to do anything except wear you down.”

I wasn’t sure I could withstand more wearing down. There were enough other factors in my life competing for the honor. Still, I hated him just then with a very childish passion.

“Hating people bleeds a person dry, Shell. It does. You’re better off using that energy to figure yourself out.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“I think you should try.”

The international connection hummed as we fell silent, me with my pain and Trey with his compassion. “Have I told you I love you, Trey?”

“Uh—that’s a bit of an abrupt topic change, there, Shelby.”

“There’s a line in the play where Joy finally gets to tell Lewis she loves him—right before she dies—and I’m worried I haven’t told you often enough.”

“You’re not dying, are you?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Good—then I’ll allow the comparison with Lewis and Joy, but only because you’re emotionally distraught. And I know you love me. There isn’t a moment in my life that I haven’t known that. So it’s okay that you haven’t said it as much as you wanted to. It got said other ways.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” We let a pause lengthen. “Think you can sleep now?” he asked.

“Probably not, but I can give it a shot.”

“How undoable is this Scott thing? Can you reverse the engines?”

“Not sure. I need to decide first if it’s worth the risk.”

“Well, take it from someone who’s lived through your worst PMS
and
gone jeans shopping with you. Any guy would be lucky to have you.”

“I’m damaged goods.”

There was a tense silence. “Okay, now you’ve made me mad. Don’t ever say that about yourself again, Shell!”

“Okay,” I said in a very small voice.

“Jim Davis might have been your father, but you’re worlds apart from him. Planets. Don’t give him the power to make you damaged goods—not even in your head.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now go to bed!” There was a smile in his voice again and it warmed my innards.

“To the brotherhood, buddy.”

“And the Davishood, Sis. For better or for worse.”

We hung up.

In the quiet that followed, God spoke. I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t sense a presence. But a revelation blossomed in the space between my heart and mind, so elemental in its simplicity that it blanketed the ragged edges of my anger with gossamer appeasement.

God hadn’t been idle while my father’s words and actions had threatened my sanity and bruised my dreams. He hadn’t been passive when rage had battered me and fear had shackled me. He had given me Trey. He had given me a living, breathing, comforting warrior whose devotion had mirrored his own. It wasn’t he who had so wounded me—it was he who had rescued me. And though the consequences of my father’s depravity were still mine to bear, I knew at that moment, more clearly than I had ever known, that God had been faithful. And it was because he’d been there that the horror had been survivable.

The thought quelled my anger but not my grief as I walked slowly, heavily toward my bedroom.

NOTHING MUCH HAD CHANGED
in the house. It still smelled of fried onions and laundry soap, and it still seemed cluttered with the overflow of too many lives lived in too small a space. Mom sat in her La-Z-Boy, her feet propped up and a glass of water within reach. She hadn’t moved much from this position since her return. We’d made her as comfortable as we could, and I’d spent a couple of nights in the overwhelming perkiness of my old room just to make sure she was really all right. The doctors had called it a ministroke, which sounded a little too cheerful for something that had left Mom temporarily without a memory, weak, and confined to a hospital bed.

But she was feeling better now. Her eyes weren’t as scared and her skin looked a little less like Marcel Marceau’s. She’d called me earlier and asked me to come by, so I’d swung over after my day of student-teaching and found her sitting there, Oprah blaring from the TV set
and a book open on her lap. I had to agree—Oprah was a lot more bearable diluted with some reading. It crossed my mind that Mom had her own version of Oprah’s Book Club going on.

“Sit down, Shell,” she instructed, her voice as rice-paper thin as her skin. “And hand me that box, will you?”

I fetched a small, ornately decorated wooden box from the coffee table and laid it in her lap. Mom turned watery eyes on me and seemed to dig into her brain for a prepared speech she’d stored there. “My . . . episode . . .” She halted, reaching for her glass with unsteady fingers.

I wanted to say,
“Your episode was a stroke, Mom. ‘Episodes’ are what make incredibly obtuse shows like
Dynasty
into palatable televisual bites. ‘Strokes’ are what nearly kill people. Get it right.”
But she appeared to be gathering courage, so I didn’t interfere. A lifetime in the Davis household had taught me that courage was rare and precious. It got us through the tough stuff. Like Rolos and wit.

“My episode,” she resumed, “made me remember this box.”

Strange—it had made her forget everything else, at least for those first couple of hours.

I observed in silence as she lifted the lid off the box and rummaged around inside. It struck me that her hair had gotten grayer—much grayer—and I wondered when that had happened. She seemed older than her years, and for a very brief moment, I couldn’t remember what had caused her premature aging. A framed photograph on the mantel slammed me with the answer. Jim Davis. Absent husband. Abusive father. Immortalized in a pewter frame. But Mom was unaware of the bitter nostalgia in my mind. She pulled from the box a stack of envelopes tied with a red ribbon, their edges yellowed by time but still intact.

“I want you to have these,” she said.

“Mom . . .”

“Hush, Shelby.”

Mom wasn’t prone to giving orders, so I obeyed.

“While I was in the hospital . . .”

There was a strength to her voice, a purposefulness I’d seldom heard before. She was trying to be bold, for one of the few times in her life. I found it disconcerting.

“While I was in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think.”

What with the being catatonic and all.

“And I remembered this box. And . . .” She blinked hard to disarm her tears. “Shelby, I want you to have these. And the rest of the things in here.” She put down the letters and took from the box a dried rose, a blue garter, and a handful of dog-eared pictures. “I need you to promise me that you’ll keep them.”

“Mom, what are they?”

“Even if I die, you promise me you’ll keep them.”

There was something in her eyes that frightened me. Where they had been a bit befuddled moments before, they were now laser clear—focused and demanding and damning.

I pulled my chair closer to hers and took the stack of letters from her lap. The ribbon gave easily, like it had been undone before, and I glanced through the envelopes. They were addressed alternately to Jim Davis and Gail Sanders. As I fanned through them, the scent of White Shoulders, like wisps of memory, drifted up to me. It was the aroma of young love and middle-aged heartbreak, of tentative hope and obliterated dreams.

“You and Dad?”

“Five months of correspondence while he was still in the Navy.”

“And the pictures?”

“The two of us when we were young. Dancing at the prom, waterskiing, our engagement party . . .”

She held the stack of pictures out to me, but I shook my head and moved back in my chair. “Mom, I’m not sure I’m the right—”

“He was your father, Shelby. And the man I loved. And if you don’t keep these, no one will know him after I’m dead.”

There was a stubborn set to her chin and, again, that obstinacy in her gaze. This meant enough to her that she was willing to fight for it—and I’d never really seen my mother fight for anything before. It made me angry.

“Why do you want to keep these, Mom? What difference does it make if everyone forgets him?”

“He was my husband.”

“He was a jerk.”

“He—was—my—husband.”

I was stunned. “Yes, Mom, your abusive husband. Your screaming, offensive, and brutal husband. I should know—he was my father too.”

“But he was a good man once,” she said, pleading. She shoved the sheaf of letters toward me. “Read these, Shelby. Read them and tell me that he wasn’t once kind and romantic and—”

“I don’t want to read them, Mom.”

“Then look at the pictures. They’re—”

“Mom, no.”

“He was another person once. He was good enough for me to love him, Shelby. He was funny and engaging and . . .”

The lights seemed to dim as the walls around me regurgitated their embedded memories. My dad’s voice crashed across the stillness, his words slashing at my fragility with sadistic precision. His savagery overwhelmed my defenses and annihilated the child in me once more, reducing her to an empty shell, swollen with bravado but translucent in her pain and helplessness. I felt the room tilt a little as my mind fell deeper into the remembered vortex of a merciless destruction, a calculated obliteration of all that was strong and soft and yearning in me.

When my mom pushed up to the edge of her chair and covered my hand with her own, it was all I could do not to fling it away along
with the letters I still held and the nauseating powerlessness crushing the resolve from my courage.

I rose and moved to the window across the room, the letters falling like dead leaves from my hand to the blue carpet. I stared at the tree where Trey and I had swung as children, and I tried to remember the happy moments but found them all marred by my father’s contempt. I breathed—and in breathing found solace. I was still alive, despite his murderous rages. He hadn’t destroyed me.

“It wasn’t entirely his fault—the way he was,” my mom said quietly, her voice a little raspy. “His father was a drunk who abandoned the family when he was nine. How was he supposed to know how to be a good parent to you?”

I shrugged. There were no valid excuses.

“He grew up poor. Had to work hard—too hard for a boy his age. But he made it to college, got a good job, started his own business. . . . He made sure you and Trey would never be as poor as he was.”

“Hurray for Dad.”

“He tried, Shelby. It . . . it just wasn’t in him to be sensitive.”

“His problems went well beyond insensitivity, Mom.”

“Yes,” she conceded. “They did. But—”

“And whether he was raised by a drunk or by a pack of wolves, it was still him shoving me into the wall of that kitchen,” I said, pointing at the kitchen door, “his hands around Trey’s neck, and his voice reducing you to . . . to this!”

She lowered her gaze as I motioned toward her with my arm, presenting the human incarnation of my father’s degradation. She was a fragile woman, broken by age and devastated by her marriage to a tyrant, yet as toxic as the memories were, she wouldn’t allow them to alter her devotion to the man who had destroyed her. Her willingness to look past my father’s sins was revolting to me. I’d tried that too, even long after he left, but I was beyond it now. He deserved no mercy or extenuation from me.

I turned to the window and tried to wrestle my mind back into the present, away from the images and sensations suffusing the air of this house that still smelled of my father’s maleficence.

I stayed there, looking out, until the chaos in my mind receded, saying nothing until I was sure I could speak without harm to the woman whose life had been as scarred as mine, but whose heart didn’t appear to have been as hardened.

“Sit down, Shelby. Please.”

I turned reluctantly and went back to my mother. She held the letters I had discarded, her knuckles white with strain, her eyes overflowing with tears.

“I know how much he hurt you,” she said, grasping my hand with her birdlike fingers and leaning close to look into my face. “And I know he nearly killed your brother. . . .”

“Then why remember him, Mom? For a stack of letters that only prove that he used to be able to fake being human? For a bunch of pictures that only prove that you used to be beautiful and feminine and . . . and strong before he broke you?” I reached into the box and pulled out the dried rose, dusty and brown and impossibly weightless. “For this, Mom? For a dead flower? Why should I want to remember the man whose imprint on my life has been nothing but shame—and pain—and brokenness?”

I wasn’t sure when I’d crushed the rose. I hadn’t meant to. One minute it was in my hand, held up for my mom to see, and the next . . . the next it was reduced to splinters on my palm. Disintegrated. Dust.

My mom took my hand and brushed the remains into hers, holding them like fragile flakes of all of us. “This flower,” she said, “this rose—your father gave it to me the day Trey was born.” She took a feeble, uneven breath and said, “Your father gave me you, Shelby. He gave me you and Trey. And to erase him—” she looked at the letters and pictures and garter—“to erase him would be to erase you.”

I nodded. She leaned forward to brush a tear from my cheek.

“So I have to remember him, Shelby. I have to remember that the person who created you was not all bad—not all cruel. He was a troubled man. I know that. But he was part of you. I can’t deny his legacy without denying you.” She replaced the letters and pictures in the box, then sprinkled the rose’s ashes over them. “Will you remember him, Shelby, please? Please remember him—for me.”

Shayla and I spent our first Christmas morning together opening the presents we’d wrapped and set under our hideously decorated tree. The tree had become something of a bone of contention, as Shayla was of a more contemporary-slash-chaotic decorating school and I had graduated summa cum laude from the International School of Anal-Retentive Christmas Tree Design. I liked things symmetrical and matching. Shayla liked things random and clashing. I liked things classy and she liked them homemade with a pair of kitchen scissors and a bunch of out-of-ink markers. We were polar opposites when it came to trimming trees, and the end result proved it.

Every night when Shayla went to bed, I’d sneak around the tree and rearrange things just so, and every morning when she got out of bed, Shayla would boldly march up to the tree and put things back exactly as they’d been. Which led me to conclude that there had to be some kind of rhyme and reason to her artistic deviance.

When we opened the presents—my gift from Shayla was a clothespin hot pad she had made at kindergarten—I gathered up my courage and talked with Shay about her dad. It wasn’t the first conversation we’d had about him, but he had died just before
Christmas last year, and it felt important to acknowledge him that day.

“Do you remember what you used to do for Christmas with your dad?”

She squinted a little, trying to remember. “We had a twee,” she said.

“Did he give you presents?”

Vigorous nod. “My blue wabbit.”

“That’s right! That came from him, didn’t it.”

“It used to be pwettier, but it’s still soft.”

“It’s really soft, Shayla. Because you’ve loved it so much, probably.” Her eyes veiled with melancholy, and I drew her in, planting a kiss on her temple and holding her close. “What else do you remember about your dad?”

“He was funny,” she said.

Funny.
The man I had known had been anything but funny. But I was thankful all the way down to the bottom of my emotional scars that Shayla had been loved by this father I couldn’t imagine, this man who had given her bunnies and made her laugh.

“Do you still miss him a lot?” I asked a little reluctantly.

“I miss his Wondoh Bwead,” she said, and I could tell by the unsteady breath she took that she missed more than that.

“It feels sad to not have your daddy anymore, doesn’t it?” I tried to picture another man when I said
daddy
so the images of Jim Davis in my mind wouldn’t interfere with my compassion.