In Broken Places (9 page)

There were stars behind my eyes when he released me, so I didn’t actually see him shove Trey’s chair back so hard that it toppled over. My brother looked like one of those beetles that can’t figure out how to get up off their backs. So I guess my dad decided to help him by flipping him over onto his stomach with his shoe. He flipped him hard and Mom yelped and I jumped off my chair and went to grab Dad’s arm
because I knew what he was thinking and Trey kinda crawled away as fast as he could, but his knees kept slipping in the mess of his pancakes.

I grabbed my dad’s arm harder and said, “I didn’t mean it, Dad! I was just being funny! Trey’s ankle is fine! Really, it’s fine! He hasn’t been on his skateboard in forever!” But he wasn’t hearing anything right then except Trey’s cowering. He flung me off his arm so hard that I hit the fridge. Then he leaned down to pick my brother up by the front of his shirt. My mom had retreated to the sink by then and I wished she would throw herself on her husband’s back and ride him and pummel him until he stopped, but she twisted the towel in her hands instead and kept saying, “Jim. Jim, stop. Please, Jim.” Which I thought was a very ineffective approach.

My dad had Trey shoved into the corner of the wall and cupboards, and Trey had gone from looking scared to looking mean. He hadn’t been able to do that until the last couple of years or so. But somehow he’d managed to figure out how to stop being frightened and start being mad. It hadn’t really changed the outcome of my dad’s happy days, but I think it left Trey feeling somehow less destroyed.

“I’m not injured, okay?” he croaked bravely, trying to pry my dad’s fingers from the front of his shirt. “Let go of me, Dad!”

I tried to squeeze between my mother and the sink, thinking maybe her towel would protect me from what I knew was coming.

“Let go of you?” My dad was going rigid. “Let go of you?” he repeated, as if Trey’s request were colossally insulting. And he did let go then. He released Trey’s shirt and used that hand to slap him across the mouth—hard.

“Dad!” I yelled. “Dad, I was just joking. There’s nothing wrong with his—”

When my dad turned on me, I realized I’d crossed the kitchen and grabbed his arm again. I felt something wet on my face, but it couldn’t be tears. I wouldn’t let it be tears.

“His ankle is fine,” I said, trying to look like Trey, but I could feel my chin wobbling, so I clamped my jaw to stop it. “I was just being funny, Dad! I was just—”

The look he gave me dried up my words. He stood in front of me smelling like sweat and coffee and injustice. He was shaking—I could see it. And there was a vein popping out near his hairline. But it’s his eyes I remember most clearly. He looked at me like I was at once invisible and intolerable. He didn’t really see me. I was sure of it. He saw a weak, whiny, repulsive, and unwanted distraction. He made a kind of snorting sound that would have been funny under any other circumstances. Then he gave my mom the same kind of look he’d given to me, turned on his heel, and slammed the door on his way out of the house.

Mom rushed to Trey, who’d slid halfway down the wall and was bracing with his legs to keep from slipping farther. She helped him to a chair and got a wet rag to put on his lip. It was split a little. But he didn’t look mad anymore, which was good. It scared me when he looked that way. I picked up his plate and put it on the table in front of him, then I sat down on the chair next to his and kinda waited. We never knew quite how to bridge the gap between terrified and normal.

“I was just trying to be funny,” I finally said.

He turned his eyes to me and I could see he didn’t hate me. I couldn’t ever figure out how he did that.

He smiled a bit, but I could tell it hurt him, so he settled for smiling with his eyes instead, which always made me feel like warm bread.

“You gotta stop being funny, Shell,” he said. But I knew he didn’t mean it.

I nodded and put a pancake on his plate.

THERE WERE RITUALS
in Kandern that seemed so well orchestrated that I wondered if I’d missed a memo somewhere along the way.

Every Sunday around 7 p.m., identical shiny black garbage cans appeared on the curbs, their contents devoid of plastic, glass, and paper. Consequently, every Saturday, before and after lunch, a parade of cars headed toward the recycling center behind the school and disgorged trunkfuls of reusable goods. Upon their return home, Kandern’s dutiful residents grabbed brooms and dustpans and headed out to the street to sweep the sidewalks and gutters. If sidewalks could shine, German sidewalks would be blinding.

On Sunday mornings, another smaller parade took off on foot and headed to the bakery, which stayed open only long enough to provide fresh rolls and thick-crusted loaves to Kandern’s bread
connoisseurs. And every Sunday afternoon around two, a procession of the young and elderly headed to the hills for their traditional, slow-gaited hike.

There were other less pleasant traditions, I discovered. It was apparently an unwritten law that Germans were required to tell their American neighbors how to park their cars, where to park their trash cans, and when to park their butts. I discovered the hard way that there was a window of time, between one and three every day, when silence and rest were not only a preference but an obligation. The same was true all day long on holidays. No work. No noise. Nothing. I was quite firmly informed of this fact when Shayla and I went out to the street to wash our car on a day off, and a neighbor I’d never seen before came stomping out of his house to tell me . . . something. My German hadn’t improved very much in our first four weeks in the country, what with spending all my time in an English-speaking school with my English-speaking colleagues or with my English-speaking pseudo-daughter. So though he wagged a finger at me and was sufficiently forceful to communicate that he was giving me an order, all I knew to do was freeze and instruct Shayla to freeze too—which actually managed to make the unhappy man smile a bit as she froze in midgiggle with suds on her nose.

The smile seemed to deflate his frustration. He said a couple more words to me, which could have been “Get a haircut” for all I knew, then grinned a little stiffly at Shayla and returned to his home. Shayla thought she saw him wink before he turned, but she had this wonderful habit of expecting people to love her. I, on the other hand, spent the rest of the day feeling stupid and nursing a humiliated ego.

I was beginning to understand that Shayla, besides being my half-sister-daughter, was also going to be my only ticket into the
good graces of Kandern’s population. Her unabashed smiles and clear-voiced
tuck
s, which we now knew were actually
Tag
, drew outright friendliness from some of the people we encountered and curious stares from the more austere strangers we crossed. I just got the stares—and a less pleasant variety of them, at that. It seemed that no one had ever informed the German population that gawking was rude, and they had elevated the brazen impoliteness to a sort of national pastime.

The first time I fully experienced the even-greater discomfort of a group stare was when Gus and Bev took us to a restaurant in the nearby village of Hammerstein. The restaurant was actually a train car dating back to 1882, which had been attached to a large building where the kitchen and bar were located. There were still small metallic signs on the paneled walls warning passengers not to lean out the windows. It was a small, cozy space, and the curve-backed wooden benches on either side of each table gave it an old-world charm. Shayla went a little crazy with excited questions when we arrived. Where were the tracks? Was there a conductor? Why weren’t we moving? Did we have to pay to ride it? And lastly, what was this “shishel and pomus” Bev was talking about?

As it turned out, “shishel and pomus” was
Schnitzel und Pommes
, the most traditional of traditional German meals. Breaded pork cutlets and fries, to be exact. The dish lost some of its exoticism in translation. But not as much as
Schwein Nippel Suppe
, which I found out, to my horror, was pig-nipple soup. The Johnsons had wanted to be the first to introduce us to schnitzel, but they hadn’t bargained on Shayla’s reaction to the train, or on the effect her excitement would have on the evening.

It started with me trying to get her to sit down. It had been an easier feat on the plane ride to Germany, because the seat had been equipped with a seat belt and the patrolling airline attendants had
made sure we used it. But there were no seat belts on the restaurant benches, and Shayla was determined to spend the meal standing on her seat and staring out the window.

“Shayla, you need to sit down.”

“Why?”

“You’re not allowed to stand on the benches, honey. You might fall and hurt yourself.”

“I won’t. Look! A cat!” she shrieked with glee, pointing out the window at a barnyard tabby crossing the road.

“Sit down, Shayla.” I was painfully aware of the Johnsons’ eyes on me and even more painfully aware that I was new at the mom thing. An unfriendly waitress brought us our drinks and ordered Gus to tell
“das Mädchen”
to take her feet off the bench.

“The nice lady wants you to sit down, Shayla,” he coaxed, and I wondered on what planet the waitress’s personality would be defined as nice.

“No!”

I took hold of Shayla’s arm with one hand and turned her face toward me with the other. “You will not speak to Gus that way, little girl.” I tried to sound motherly and firm.

“I’m not little!” she yelled, trying to tear her arm from my grip and losing her balance in the process. One of her feet slipped off the edge of the bench, and her cheek connected with the hard wood of the backrest.

“Shayla,” Bev said, jumping up to prevent any more of a fall, but Shayla was well beyond fear by that point.

“I’m not sitting down! You can’t make me! I’m not! I’m not!”

I’d learned early on in my pseudo-motherhood that Shayla was a generally well-behaved child with a naturally sunny disposition.
Generally
meant that the sunniness was not a permanent fixture and that the reverse side of
well-behaved
was
raving maniac
. But
Gus and Bev had never made the acquaintance of the
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
version of Shayla, and her banshee-meets-hyena screams clearly took them by surprise.

As I tried to lift her off the bench and away from the glassware on the table, she threw her upper body back and used her feet to kick at me. And she screamed. She screamed so much that patrons at the other tables started to protest. I redoubled my efforts to appease her, finally lifting her stiff body onto my lap in a flurry of thrashing arms and kicking legs, but I simply couldn’t quiet her. She was mad. Spitting mad. And I couldn’t figure out what I had done to set off such a ferocious response.

Bev said something to me across the table, but I couldn’t hear her. As Gus made a comment to the diners at the table next to ours, she stepped close to me and whispered, “Do you want me to try?” in my ear. Coming from anyone else, I might have taken the suggestion as an insult, but Bev’s face was so full of compassion for my predicament that I numbly nodded my appreciation and mouthed my thanks. She gathered a squirming and still-wailing Shayla into her arms and stepped outside.

Now why hadn’t I thought of that? It was October and the nights were getting colder, but a few goose bumps were a small price to pay for extricating myself and my daughter from a humiliating situation. Through the window, I watched Bev talking to Shayla, keenly feeling the stares of the other diners in the train car, all of whom had interrupted their conversations to observe the battle raging at our table. Gus stacked his forearms on the table and said, “You know, Christopher used to throw such bad fits that the neighbors called the cops on us once.”

I tore my eyes away from Shayla long enough to give Gus an incredulous look.

He nodded in confirmation and went on. “You’d be amazed
at what set him off. Mostly it was not getting his way, but sometimes—and don’t quote me on this—sometimes I think he just did it for the fun of it. I think it felt good to the little guy to let it rip once in a while.”

“But did he do it in public?” I was ashamed at the scene we’d caused.

“If he really wanted to get his way, he did. There’s nothing like a little public embarrassment to make a parent give in!”

After a very brief time outside, Bev reentered the restaurant with a sullen Shayla walking next to her.

“What do you say?” she asked the little girl whose bottom lip stuck so far out it looked glued on. “Shayla?” Bev coaxed.

“Sowwy,” Shayla said, and though her eyes were trained downward and her body turned away, I was pretty sure the words were intended for me.

Bev deposited Shayla in her seat and placed her napkin in her lap, then circled the table to sit by Gus.

“Have a nice talk out there?” he asked.

“Shades of Christopher,” she answered.

I glanced at Shayla while Gus and Bev perused their menus. She looked dwarfed by the bench, her little hands clasped in front of her and her chin against her chest. I saw her take a hiccuping breath as tears gathered in her eyes. There was “I miss my daddy” written all over her face, and it broke my heart. I scooped her into my arms and held her like that while I ordered our meals and waited for them to arrive. She never really cried outright, which was more heart-wrenching to me than overt tears would have been. She just sat there, occasionally answering the questions we asked her, but mostly staring at the door every time it opened. I think she was waiting for a conductor to come by.

And after it was all over, every patron in the train car smiled
at Shayla as she walked toward the exit, as if she were the best-behaved little girl in the whole wide world. Me? I got stares. But Bev had explained to me, after the earlier scene, that the stares only meant “You’re interesting” and not, as I had assumed, “We dislike you intensely.” So I squared my shoulders, pasted on a smile, and left the restaurant under the patrons’ stares with as much dignity as I could muster.

Back home and ready for sleep, Shayla sat against me in her bed while I finished reading
A Fly Went By
. She smelled of toothpaste and baby shampoo and was so soft and snuggly that I had trouble associating this sweetness with the tantrum I’d witnessed earlier.

I closed the book and scrunched down a little farther in the bed, turning sideways so her head could rest on the pillow. “Did you like the train restaurant?”

Her head nodded against me.

“What part did you like the best?”

She took her time answering. “The cat,” she said.

Of course. We’d gone out to dinner in a train and eaten all new foods, and the memorable item of the evening had been a cat wandering past in the street. Children—how had I managed to inherit one?

“Is that why you got so mad? Because you wanted to see the cat?”

She shrugged and I sighed. “You need to obey me when I ask you to do things, Shayla. You might not understand why I’m asking you to do them, but you need to obey anyway.”

“Or you’ll get mad at me?” she asked in a hesitant voice.

“Did you think I was mad at you tonight?”

She nodded.

I knew the taste and texture of a parent’s wrath. It was acrid and coarse—noxious. It had no place in Shayla’s world. “I wasn’t really mad,” I said, stroking the hair back from her forehead. “I just
wanted you to sit down because that’s what you’re supposed to do in restaurants. I was annoyed and frustrated, but I wasn’t really mad.”

She shrugged again.

“What did Bev tell you when you went outside with her? Do you remember?”

“She said scweaming’s not helping.”

“That’s all?” Trust Bev to make it simple.

“And she said my mom loves me.”

I felt my heart turn a cartwheel and softly asked, “Do you believe her?”

Another nod.

“Well, good, because it’s true.” I kissed the top of her head. “Shayla, do you mind when people call me your mom? I mean, I know I haven’t been taking care of you for very long, but . . . people are going to just figure I’m your mom since we live together.”

“It’s okay.” Her voice sounded younger than usual, or maybe just more hesitant.

“And is it okay if they call you my daughter too?”

“Uh-huh.” There was less hesitation that time.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, turning myself around in the bed so I could face her. She snuggled down against her pillows and looked at me with large, tired eyes. “Let’s just let people call us what they want, okay? And you can call me whatever you want, too. You can keep calling me Shelby for the rest of your life if you’d like, and I’ll . . .”

She reached out and grabbed my hand. Just like that. I was in the middle of my we-don’t-really-have-to-be-mother-and-daughter speech, and this little girl whose little life had impossibly stretched my selfish little heart wrapped her soft, warm hand around my fingers and smiled in a way that made me want to . . . It made me want to call her
daughter
, to be honest. It made me wish I was her mother. It warmed me and enveloped me. It also scared me senseless.

So on that night when the only words roiling around in my brain were
I want to be your mother,
the words that came out of my mouth were “It’s past your bedtime. We can talk about this again later, okay?”

I avoided her gaze as I kissed her satin cheek and tucked the blankets under her chin. She said her prayers and I said mine. Then I let myself out of her room and went to sit on the secondhand couch in the living room. There was something about secondhand that I found disquieting, especially on that night. I didn’t like it much. Not in furniture. Not in scars.

And not in daughters.