“Stacy didn’t show, huh?”
“Obviously.”
“She always was kind of a flake.” He never knew when to shut up. “Hey, let’s have a little smoke while we’re at it.” He pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it while steering with his elbows. I shook my head when he held it out to me. “Oh yeah, you’re a good girl now. I forgot.”
Being in Tommy’s car with the pot smoke and the damp night air triggered a rush of memories, stuff I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Like our first “date,” about a week after that day in the bathroom. Tommy showed up at our house one night, a rainy Tuesday, and asked for Darren. Darren had worked Tuesday nights for almost a year and Tommy knew it.
“He’s not here,” I’d said. I remember watching him, knowing he was there for
me,
not Darren, that it was a game we were playing.
“Oh.” He gave me a little smile and his scar wrinkled up in a way that made my stomach jump, back then. He leaned in the doorway, in his black T-shirt and jeans jacket, like the house belonged to him and anything in it was his for the taking. “I just wanted to go for a drive, you know. I like driving in the rain.” He looked over my shoulder. “Are your parents home?”
My mom was at work and my dad had gone to bed early after pulling a long shift at a temp job. It was after he’d been laid off from National Paper, but before the auto store, and it seemed like all he did was hunt for jobs or temp or sleep.
Tommy said, really cheerful-like, “Hey, I have an idea. You want to go for a drive with me? We could stop and get some ice cream, you know. I’ve got a craving for mint chocolate-chip ice cream.”
“I don’t know,” I said, even though I did know. “I have homework.”
“Do it later.”
I grabbed my jacket and keys and walked out the door with him without even thinking about it, like part of me had been waiting for him to show up like that, with some lame excuse for going out, ever since that day in the bathroom.
We drove down the coast that night and parked in the lot at Montara Beach, where Tommy lit a joint. “You don’t want any of this,” he’d said. “You’re too young and sweet.”
“You have no idea what goes on in junior high, do you,” I said, taking the joint from him. Still playing the game.
“It’s been a while.” He watched me take a hit. My friend at the time, Melony Fletcher, was sort of a pot head and I’d smoked a little with her. It wasn’t my favorite thing in the world but I wanted to show Tommy I wasn’t a kid.
“You have to
promise
not to tell your brother about this,” Tommy said. “Promise?”
“It’s none of his business. I have my own life.”
We smoked and listened to the radio and then Tommy moved the bench seat back, put his long arm behind me, and said, “Come here.”
It was like I was watching myself slide over toward him, watching myself let him pull me onto his lap while I laughed and laughed, goofy from the pot. It didn’t seem so bad. I knew plenty of girls at school who had what they called boyfriends, but they didn’t go out on dates. Their boyfriends were just guys they made out with after school while their parents were at work. Some of them were having sex—including Melony, with Mitch Benedict.
Tommy said, “I just want to look at your pretty face. Up close.” His face was an inch from mine and I stopped laughing. “You’re so pretty. You’re prettier than any of the girls in high school. They all look so made up and used up and fake, not like you.”
Not like me. Those words rang in my head, bouncing around with the pot and the dizziness of being alone with Tommy, in his car, a boy — a
man
— telling me I had something other girls didn’t.
I touched his scar, something I’d wanted to do since I first saw him. It felt soft, like regular skin, not how I expected. He took my fingers and kissed them. “It’s not cool,” he said, “you know, kissing your friend’s little sister.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Like I said, it’s none of his business.”
“I agree.” But he still wouldn’t kiss me; he just stared at me and squeezed my hip and smiled until finally I kissed him. He liked to remind me about that all during the next months when I would say we should stop doing what we were doing. “Hey,” he’d say, “you started it, remember?”
So we made out that night and never did get ice cream, me trying to keep the game going because it was the only thing in my life that felt any good. After that, Tommy would pick me up from school sometimes and take me driving, or would show up on the nights Darren worked and it kept on like that for almost a year before anyone found out.
Later, after he told everyone about my dad finding us, Tommy didn’t seem so cool and tough and smooth, he just seemed like a sleazy loser and I could see why girls in high school weren’t interested in him. Even Melony, who had a key chain that said “99% Virgin,” dropped me after it got around about Tommy. It took me awhile to figure that out, why
Melony
cared about reputation, until I started hearing the way Tommy had described the story to everyone. He made it into a joke. He made
me
into a joke.
But Lee was right. Tommy had something. And even when he was all gross from the pizza place and stoned and driving me home from Safeway after Stacy didn’t show, there was a part of me that remembered how it felt when he chose
me:
that first time he told me I was pretty, that first time I kissed him. I remembered, too, how it felt when I finally realized it wasn’t a game and it wasn’t something I was watching on TV. It was something real happening between two real people. Me,
I
felt real; feeling real feelings, saying real words.
“House looks the same,” Tommy said, pulling up to our curb. “Your old man still crazy?”
“He’s not crazy.”
“Okay, depressed or repressed or whatever.” I got out of the car and slammed the door. He called through the window: “Aren’t you going to thank me for the ride?”
“Thanks for the ride. Now leave.”
“All right, all right. Jesus.”
He drove away and I went into the house. The basement light was on and it looked like Darren and Stacy were still up. When I got halfway down the stairs, Darren appeared at the bottom.
“Nice of you guys to finally show up,” he said in a loud whisper. “I was about to take Mom’s car to go out looking.”
“What are you talking about? I waited around for forty-five minutes and no one ever showed!”
Darren motioned for me to come all the way downstairs and we went into the little bathroom, closing the door so we wouldn’t wake April. “Stacy isn’t with you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, feeling something that scared me. “She’s not here?”
“Shit,” said Darren, running his hands through his short hair.
“The car is in the Safeway lot,” I said. “They said she left early, at nine thirty.”
“Well where is she, then?” Darren said. “Where is she?”
I pulled the comp book out from behind my bed and stared at a blank page for half an hour.
I didn’t want to write about the girl on the waves anymore.
I was scared to write about anything else.
Early the next morning, my mom drove Darren down to Safeway to pick up the Nova. Stacy had left a note in the car: “Don’t worry about me. I’m sorry.” Nothing about where she was or why she left or if she was coming back. Mom and Darren called in sick to work, but Dad said he couldn’t afford to miss a day just to go chasing after Stacy.
“She’ll be back,” he said. “She just wants the attention.”
Darren didn’t respond, but I saw his hand clench around April’s bottle.
“What kind of a mother leaves her baby?” Dad continued, looking around the kitchen for some kind of support.
“Don’t want to hear it, Dad,” Darren said.
For once, Dad actually shut up about Stacy and left Darren alone. He didn’t exactly offer to help or say anything to make it better, but at least he stopped talking and left for work.
Mom poured a cup of coffee for Darren, who sat at the table with April cradled in his arms. “Let’s just stay by the phone,” Mom said. “I bet we’ll hear from her any minute.” She rested her hand on Darren’s head for a second in a way I hadn’t seen her do for a long time. “Stacy probably just needed to get away for a little bit.”
As usual, Mom refused to see the reality of the situation, choosing instead to believe that everything would eventually work itself out by some sort of magic.
“Mom,” Darren said quietly, “if she needed to get away all she had to do was tell me. She knows that.”
“Well. You never know. Hormones can make a young mother crazy . . .”
Darren got up with April and left the kitchen. I followed him into my room. “What are you going to do?” I asked. He put April on my bed on her stomach and shoved his hands way down into his pockets, eyes on the floor.
“I don’t know.” His voice broke and his shoulders started shaking and then he just stood there in the middle of my room, crying but trying not to make too much noise, my big brother who could deal with anything. April stopped her own sounds and lifted her little head as best she could to look at Darren. Neither of us had ever seen him cry before. He covered his face with both his hands. “I’m sorry.”
If I were a different kind of sister, a better kind, I would have hugged him and told him everything would be okay. Maybe if we were out of my parents’ house, in our own place, we could be that kind of family. But here, we were the same old Lamberts we’d always been. And besides, for all I knew, nothing would ever be okay again.
Darren made some calls to Stacy’s family but no one had heard from her, and they didn’t seem to care, which was typical. They were almost as screwed up as we were. Stacy’s mom didn’t want to have anything to do with April because she thought April never should have been born.
Sometimes I wonder, you know, what’s wrong with some families. Like mine, and like Stacy’s. I look at people like Lee, with her mom and stepdad so nice, and I know that’s how a family should be, and I realize how fucked up it is to not be talking to each other and to be blaming each other and not wanting to know anything about your own grandkid. I’m sorry, but it’s just fucked up.
Used to be I’d think about that stuff and just go, okay, no big deal, it will be different with me and Stacy and Darren. We’ll
make
it different. But with Stacy leaving the way she did, I started to think the truth was that we didn’t know how. We didn’t know how any better than Mom and Dad did.
Darren didn’t want to call the police; he worried they might end up taking April away. So he left April with me and went driving around to some of his and Stacy’s favorite places in the city and around Pacifica.
I called Jason. I thought maybe if I had a reason to talk to him, with big news like Stacy disappearing, he’d kind of have to keep listening even if Lee had already told him about our fight.
“There you are,” he said when he answered the phone. “I thought you died or something.”
I smiled, relieved. He didn’t hate me; not yet, anyway. “It’s only been a couple of days.”
“Well I’ve been bored. Let’s do something.”
It’s funny how just a couple of words from him could make me feel a million times better. I almost didn’t want to spoil the good feeling by talking about Stacy, but I needed someone outside of our house to know so that it wouldn’t be something I had to carry around on my own.
“Holy shit,” he said after I told him, “she seems like such a good mom.”
“She is.”
“She’ll come back,” he said. “I bet she’ll be back tonight.” We were quiet on the phone for a minute. I pictured him: breathing, his dark hair hanging over his eyes; probably slumped into the old armchair he’d moved into his room in eighth grade. Maybe scratching his stomach. “Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Let’s go out to Serramonte or something. Tomorrow?”
We made our plans, me feeling like I’d been given a little gift — at least another week before Jason heard Lee’s side of the story. When I got off the phone, April started fussing. I picked her up and walked around the house with her over my shoulder, but that only made her cry more and I couldn’t get her to stop. Her crying sounded more scared than tired or hungry. It was like she’d figured out Stacy was gone, and not just to work. I went into the kitchen to make a bottle anyway, not sure what else to do.
Dad was sitting at the kitchen table; I sucked in a lungful of air in surprise, loud, which made April cry even harder. Dad seemed startled, too. When I caught my breath, I said, “I thought you went to work.”
He kept his eyes on his National Paper coffee cup. “I did. When I got there I told them I had a family emergency and came home.”
“Oh.” I shifted April around and tried to work on her bottle with one hand, holding her close to me with the other. The top of the bottle fell to the floor when I tried to screw it on, and when I picked up the top, I dropped the bottom part and formula spilled all over the floor. “Shit.”
Whatever good feeling I’d gotten from talking to Jason was already gone, and now I felt myself start to lose it. What if Stacy never came back? I couldn’t picture me and Darren doing all this stuff for April for a couple of days, never mind the rest of our lives.
Dad picked the bottle up off the floor and set it on the counter. I figured he’d lecture me about my mouth and how I shouldn’t swear in front of April, or about how this was the way it would be now that Stacy had deserted us so I’d better get used to it. Instead, he reached out his arms. “Here. Let me take her while you fix the bottle.”
April, still crying, turned her head at the sound of his voice. He’d only held her once as far as I knew, right when she got back from the hospital. Usually he left the room when she cried. “That’s okay,” I said. “I can do it.”
“I’m sure you can. But I do know how to hold a baby. I had two of my own.” April’s crying had reached that red-faced, squinty-eyed scary stage and now I had to sterilize the bottle and start all over. So I handed her over to Dad.
When he took her, he had to stand closer to me than he had for a long time. I could feel the warmth of him and the aftershave he’d used since I was a kid, just this cheap stuff you can get at Safeway. I got this strong feeling of missing him, like he was someone who I loved who had died and gone away, someone who was mostly a memory. I wanted to grab him and say okay, I was sorry about Tommy, it was just a stupid mistake and I knew I’d hurt him and I wished I hadn’t. Because I did love him. I did.
But then I remembered that night, and the way he looked at me like he didn’t know me, and I’d cried in the car all the way home and I
did
say that I was sorry, over and over again. Then I said it about fifty more times in the days after that, and he never did more than shake his head or leave the room.
And I said I was sorry again after he got the job at the auto parts store and overheard his twenty-year-old manager telling a sixteen-year-old employee one of the versions of me, a variation of the nympho version:
Yeah, that’s Deanna Lambert’s dad, you know, the one who got in a fight with Tommy Webber because he found them, right? Him and Deanna, that skanky eighth grader, going at it and she was loving it, you know, and then her dad shows up, and that’s him, working in the parts department.
He, my father, repeated the whole thing to me and Mom, his voice loud there in the kitchen and I said I was sorry,
again,
and wanted to tell him that’s not how it happened, not what I was like at all. But why should I have to defend myself, convince my own father, my dad who knew me forever, that I wasn’t like that? And wouldn’t any father,
any
father, have gone up to those guys at the auto shop, those guys who were half his age, and made a declaration for me:
Hey, that’s my daughter you’re talking about. My daughter
. And come home and not said anything about it, not humiliated me all over again.
That’s what I figured out that day while he yelled at me. That as much as I’d let him down, he’d let me down, too, and he was the one who should know better. He was the dad. He was
my
dad. That’s when I had to make myself stop loving him. I had to stop remembering the way he used to be, the way we used to be, because if I kept thinking about the old dad every time I looked at him, it would never stop hurting.
And that’s why I couldn’t touch him now and try I’m sorry one more time. I didn’t have it in me to be turned away again.
Dad had April, patting her on the back, gently bouncing her up and down. He headed for the kitchen door and I blurted, “Where are you going?”
“Just down the hall,” he said. “If that’s all right.”
I turned to run the hot water for sterilizing the bottle. Dad talked to April in the hall, not like baby talk, but in his normal voice. “Deanna’s fixing you up a bottle now, okay? She’s fixing it right up.” I tilted my head toward the sound of my name, the way April had turned to his voice earlier. He hadn’t said my name in forever. At least, not that I’d heard. I’d been “you” and “she” for a long time. He kept talking about other stuff, how Darren would be home soon and Mom’s car needed a new windshield. After a minute, April’s crying turned into little sobs and whimpers, and by the time I was done with her bottle she wasn’t crying at all.
Dad stood in the doorway. “I used to do that with you,” he said. “I’d walk up and down the hall and tell you about my day and anything else I could think to talk about.”
I thought then,
right
then, that something still could have happened. The last three years could be a bad memory. I could say,
Dad, let’s just try,
and he could look at April in his arms and nod quietly, and everything could be different, couldn’t it?
The moment went by, and Darren walked in and asked, “What’s going on?” He looked at April, resting her head on Dad’s shoulder, holding his shirt collar in her little hand.
“I’m just about to give her a bottle,” I said, concentrating on folding and refolding the dish towel. “She wouldn’t stop crying after you left.”
“I think she’s ready for a nap,” Dad said. He handed April over to Darren and left the room, his back straight and stiff. We watched him go without saying anything, then I threw the dish towel on the counter and put the bottle in the fridge. How come he could be like that with April all of a sudden? So nice, so . . .
fatherly
. Maybe it meant he could be like that with me if he tried, if he wanted to. Only I guess he didn’t want to.
“What was that all about?” Darren asked.
I shrugged. “He picked her up, she stopped crying.”
He leaned against the counter, holding April to his chest. He looked tired; big circles under his eyes, lips tight. “Remember last summer? When all we did was drive around looking for parties?”
Used to be he would get home from work and then me and him would pick up Stacy and sometimes Jason, then get something cheap to eat. If we had any money we’d go to a movie. Otherwise we’d drive around the valley or into the city and try to find a party or at least somewhere to walk around for a couple of hours. That was after Tommy, when Darren liked to keep me with him so that he knew where I was, and before Stacy found out she was pregnant, before I met Lee. To be honest, I couldn’t really remember any of the parties or anything specific we did that I’d call a good time.
“Yeah,” I said, “but mostly we were just trying to get out of the house. I mean, did we actually have any fun?”
“I don’t know.” Darren rubbed the fuzz on April’s head and yawned. “But I’d like the chance to do it again right about now.”
We were quiet, both staring at the kitchen floor, the ugly yellow linoleum that had been there since Mom and Dad bought the house, in hideous contrast to the pink walls. “Where do you think she is?” I asked. “Where could she have gone without the car?”
“She could be anywhere. She could be at someone’s house in Pacifica. Maybe she hitched, maybe she met a guy, I don’t know.” He sounded angry now, not scared anymore.
“Met a
guy
?” I asked. “Like, when? In between changing diapers and doing laundry and working?”
“I know, I know. She probably didn’t meet a guy.”
I thought hard about what I said next. I didn’t want to blame Darren or make him feel bad or anything like that, but if he was as clueless as he seemed I thought maybe it would help. “She wanted you to notice, Darren. To notice how amazing and different and mysterious she looked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Her hair, you know, how she dyed her hair.”
He stared. “She’s mad about her
hair
?”
“No, jackass.” I should have kept my mouth shut if I couldn’t explain it. “It’s just . . . you kind of acted like it was cute, like it was nothing.”
Darren got louder. “Again I ask: She’s mad about her
hair
?”
“Forget it, never mind. She’s not mad about her hair.”
“No, explain it to me. You obviously have some great insight into this whole situation.”
April started to cry again. “It’s like what she said when she looked in the mirror,” I said. “She could have been anyone, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
I sighed and got the bottle back out of the fridge, warmed it in the microwave for a few seconds, and handed it to Darren. He tested it and gave it to April. “Like, what if she hadn’t had April? She might be in college or backpacking across Europe or something. She looked like that kind of girl.”