Torn Away (10 page)

Immediately, Dani and Jane were forgotten, as were my fries. “Will be where?” I asked.

“Ma’am,” my grandfather reminded sternly.

“Will be where, ma’am?” I repeated.

She looked up at me, chewing, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “At the house. Like I was saying,” she said.

Of course, that made sense. Clay would be at their house every now and then. He was their son, after all.

He was also my father. The father I hadn’t seen in sixteen years.

“He’s…” I hesitated, so many questions racing through my mind.
He’s still alive? He’s not in jail? He’s the kind of guy who visits his mother?
“He’s in Caster City?” I finally landed on.

“Of course he’s in Caster City. That’s where the whole family is. His sister, Terry… his nephews… us.”

“He only ever lived up here because it’s where your mother wanted to live,” my grandfather remarked. My insides burned at the thought that I would, after sixteen years, finally see my father. “He was born in Waverly, about an hour thataway.” He pointed out the window with his fork. “But we left that town years ago, moved on down to Caster City. Clay refused to come with us. Said love went where it needed to go. When she ruined his life, he come down to his family. Shoulda never stayed up here, to be honest.”

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I peeked at the incoming text from Dani:
Mom said she needs to talk to Ronnie. Sorry. I’ll keep working on her.

I put the phone back in my pocket, my stomach twisting in knots. This was happening. I was going to Caster City with these people. I was going to see my father, after all this time. “So does he come over a lot?” My throat felt coated by French fry grease. I cleared it nervously. “Ma’am?”

“No,” she said, still giving me that look, as if she expected me to know about my father’s life, even though I’d never been a part of it. She set down her fork and took a sip of iced tea. “He lives there. With us. And his wife, Tonette, and their two daughters. You’ll meet them all tonight.”

Grandfather Harold was true to his word. After we left the diner, we didn’t stop again until we got to Caster City. Not that I asked him to. I sat in the backseat and thought about what they’d said. I was going to meet my father today. For the first time ever, really.

It was evening when we crunched up the gravel driveway, but the days had been getting longer, so dusk was just starting to fall. I peered nervously through the windshield at the tiny house we were approaching. It was white, with falling-down shutters and a front stoop covered on three sides with wooden lattice, which had holes punctured throughout. I wondered if that was going to be my bedroom. I didn’t see how I’d possibly live in such a place until winter.

Two boys who couldn’t have been any older than eight burst through the front door as we settled into park. Neither of them had shirts on, and their faces were filthy. Their voices drifted through the car’s open windows.

“Give it back!” one of them yelled, clobbering the other on the back of his head with a fist. “Ya turdface, ya smelly fartwad!” They fell into mutual headlocks and spewed cusswords while rolling around on the damp ground, punching and gouging at each other.

My eyes widened in surprise. I held my breath waiting to hear Grandfather Harold’s response. But if my grandparents had heard the boys, neither of them acknowledged it. At that moment, Marin seemed so very innocent to me. Like a little angel.

Grandmother Billie tugged at the hem of her shirt and the thighs of her pants, then leaned down and peered at me through her open door.

“This is it,” she said. She shut her door and ambled up the walk.

Welcome home, Jersey
, I thought.
This is it.

As I opened the door and unfolded myself from the backseat, a woman stepped out on the front porch, holding a diaper-clad toddler on her hip. The baby’s hair and face were as messy as those of the two boys on the ground.

“Nathan! Kyle! Cut that out!” she yelled. The baby pointed at the boys and babbled something loud and unintelligible. The woman shifted her attention to me. “You can come on up,” she called.

But my body didn’t want to move. My legs trembled and my arms shook under the weight of my backpack. I wasn’t sure I could keep from throwing up the burger and fries that still churned in my stomach.

This was not my life. Cussing children and dirty babies whose gender I couldn’t even identify and scowling grandfathers
and a sofa on the porch for a bedroom and no friends, no school, no Kolby standing outside watching storm clouds roll in. And somewhere in there… my father. The man who’d abandoned me. He’d ruined Mom’s relationship with her family, so that when he left, we were completely and totally alone. And without Mom, it was just me. Alone. In this place.

At that moment, I would have given anything to have Marin back, to have Marin ask me to dance with her. I would have East Coast Swung until my legs gave out. I would have hummed right along with her.

I turned my eyes upward and blinked hard, wishing I would wake up from this nightmare.

But it didn’t happen.

“Come on, she don’t bite,” Grandfather Harold said, startling me back into reality. He tugged on one of the straps of my backpack, but I held it tight.

“I’ve got it,” I said, and then when I felt his shadow shrivel me, added, “sir.”

He paused, then grunted. “Suit yourself.”

I followed him up the walk, which was cement crumbled to almost as much gravel as the driveway, past the boys, whose breathless exertion had finally drained the cusswords out of them. Instead, they lay mostly static on the ground, groaning in various wrestling holds.

“Hey,” the woman said when I hit the porch, stepping back warily, as if Grandfather Harold were escorting a dangerous animal into the house. “You coulda come on up. Didn’t you hear me?”

I met her gaze but didn’t know what to say. Was this my father’s wife? Was this the woman who’d replaced my mother? This woman in a threadbare and faded maternity top and unbrushed hair, with a bevy of foulmouthed children?

I turned my eyes to the wooden porch boards and followed my grandfather into the house, hearing the woman yell after I’d passed, “You boys, I told you to cut that out and get your butts inside the house!” The baby echoed a garbled version of the latter end of her sentence. At once I felt sorry for the kid, while at the same time grateful that this was not how I’d grown up. Except now it was going to be part of how I grew up.

Grandmother Billie was standing in the living room when we came inside. A couple of teenage girls scowled at me from the couch. The shades were drawn and the TV was on, giving the room a dark, impenetrable aura.

“She meet Terry?” my grandmother asked, talking about me in third person.

“We passed her on the way up,” my grandfather answered, as if the terse, one-sided exchange could be considered an introduction.

I recalled the conversation from the diner. Grandmother Billie had mentioned my father’s sister, Terry. So that woman out there was my aunt, not my stepmother. I wasn’t sure whether this was good news or not. In a way, finding out that my stepmother was loud and foulmouthed would be better than continuing to wonder what she was like. There is relief in the known, even if the known is ugly.

“These here are Lexi and Meg,” my grandmother said,
gesturing to the two girls on the couch, who’d gone back to watching their show and didn’t even bother to look up at the mention of their names. Instantly, I was flooded with guilt. How many times had Marin felt like this, with me refusing to acknowledge her so I didn’t miss some lame crap that some lame reality star was saying? “I guess they’re your sisters.” I pushed Marin’s purse closer to my side with my elbow.

“Half,” one of the girls intoned, giving me the most cursory nasty flick of her eyes.

“Well, yes, half sisters, I suppose,” Grandmother Billie corrected. “Come on. I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

I followed her through a cluttered kitchen. Food-caked dishes clung to the sink, and the microwave door stood open. We walked out to an enclosed porch that looked over the backyard, letting a whoosh of fresh air into the stifling kitchen. Grandmother Billie held the screen door for me with one hip.

“We call this our family porch,” she said. “But for right now it’s yours. You can pull the shades on those screens for privacy, I suppose, but you can’t lock the door to the house because it locks on the inside.”

She tossed an armload of bedding onto a couch that looked a hundred years old, with big orange flowers on top of a backdrop that might once have been white but was so coated with the outdoors it appeared almost beige.

“You got any clothes?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I bought a few pairs of clean underwear at the pharmacy. I need to do some laundry.”

“Well, you’re a little thick to borrow from Lexi or Meg, but
maybe Terry’s got something you can squeeze into.” She eyed me up and down, making me feel bloated and uncomfortable. “It seems to me that beggars shouldn’t be choosers, anyway,” she said, and I had to restrain myself from asking her what the heck she was talking about, since I hadn’t said anything about not wanting to borrow Terry’s clothes. She sized me up a bit more, then added, “You can get settled, and then when you’re done, come on in and wash the dishes. Lexi’s gonna be real happy she ain’t got to double up on chores now you’re here.”

She left, and I sank down onto the couch, not sure what to do to “get settled.” I didn’t have anything to put away. I was afraid to leave everything I owned unattended, especially in this place. And the last thing I wanted to do was go back inside that kitchen and do dishes that I hadn’t dirtied.

I gazed at the screen door leading out to the backyard, wondering what would happen if I walked through it and never stopped. Just headed out, walking, walking, walking. Be my own hero. Save myself.

To where, though? That was the problem. I could walk all I wanted. What I didn’t have was a destination. I didn’t have a home. This was it. This couch tucked away on a “family porch,” whatever that was, out in the middle of nowhere, where little boys cussed like sailors and half sisters sneered at you.

Nothing like my old home, where Marin played on the swings outside and Mom sat on a lawn chair and painted her fingernails Easter colors while humming that old Spandau Ballet song she loved so much.

“Jersey, watch this!” Marin would call if I so much as came close to the back door when she was out there. She’d do something that she thought made her a daredevil—like tilt her head way back while swinging or stand up at the top of the slide or hang upside down from her knees on the trapeze bar.

“Monkey Marin,” Mom would call out cheerfully, then turn to me. “Come on out, Jers. I’ve got robin’s-egg blue.” She’d hold up the bottle of fingernail polish and shake it.

“No, thanks,” I’d say. “I’ve got homework.”

But I didn’t. Hardly ever was it really homework that was keeping me away. It was always something completely stupid.

I never once sat outside and watched Marin and listened to Mom hum and let her paint my nails. Not one time.

“This much is true,” I whispered to myself, sitting on my grandparents’ “family porch,” remembering the lyrics at the end of the song. I wiped a trickle of tears off my cheek, then reached into Marin’s purse.

I popped a piece of gum, unfolded the paper, and drew a picture of my sister hanging upside down from a bar, a thought bubble saying, “Watch, Jersey!”
Marin is a monkey,
I wrote. And then added:
Mom is robin’s-egg blue.

I heard a door slam inside the house, followed by muffled shouting—sounded like those two boys and my aunt Terry again—and hurriedly zipped Marin’s purse shut. I wedged it between the back of the couch and the wall and then did the same with my backpack. I guessed that meant I was settled in.

I made my way to the kitchen sink and began washing the dishes, jumping each time someone made a sharp noise behind me—which happened every few minutes. I could hear the family convene in the living room. The volume on the television ratcheted up, my grandmother and Aunt Terry talking, occasionally barking a laugh or groaning or making loud “ooooh” sounds. These were the sounds of a home, but they weren’t the sounds of my home. Nobody was asking how my day went, whether or not I had homework to do, how the spring musical was coming along, or whether I was ready for finals. There was no humming, no chirping cartoon voices in the background, no hiss of Ronnie
popping open a beer. The sounds in this house didn’t belong to me—they belonged to another family, one I wasn’t a part of. In some ways it seemed like a lifetime ago that I’d last heard the sounds of my home. It seemed like I’d belonged to another family in a different life, a dream life, one that wasn’t even real.

Nathan and Kyle ran in and out of the kitchen randomly with what seemed like endless energy.

“You’ve got pimples,” one of them—I wasn’t sure which was which—said to me, and they both burst into giggles. I ignored them, tried to feel sorry for them, which didn’t work. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.

By the time I was finished drying the dishes and opening and closing cabinets until I figured out where they all were supposed to go, I was exhausted. Instead of following the voices into the living room, I went back to my porch, looking forward to being alone and going to sleep.

So much of my life was about being alone now.

I pushed through the screen door, only to find the two girls, Lexi and Meg, sitting on the couch. I froze.

“You got any money?” the older one, the one Grandmother Billie had called Lexi, asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t have anything at all,” I said.

The other one, Meg, squinted her eyes at me. “You came in here with a purse and a backpack. We saw.” She unwound her legs from the couch and stood up.

She was about nose-height to me, and skinny as a rail. She looked like she was maybe fourteen or so, a couple years younger than me.

“There isn’t any money in those,” I said, forcing my voice to come out steady, strong.

“We know you were a little rich girl,” Lexi said, standing next to her sister. “Our dad told us about your mom’s job and all.”

I laughed. “My mom had a job, but we were far from rich. She didn’t get any child sup…” I trailed off, tucking my lips in against each other. My life without Clay wasn’t any of their business.

I studied their faces, looking for a resemblance. We shared blood, so in theory we should have looked alike in some way. My mom had always said I got my dad’s facial structure, which was why I didn’t look anything like Marin. Marin’s features were a perfect combination of Mom and Ronnie. I always felt like when it came to me, they should be singing that old
Sesame Street
song:
“One of these things is not like the others.”

But I couldn’t see myself in these girls, either. Their jaws were sharp where mine was soft. Their eyes were wide and blue, as opposed to my brown, narrow ones. They were skinny enough to squeeze through prison bars, where I was round and curvy. They each had a smattering of freckles across their upturned noses, which somehow made them cuter than they already were, where my face was lined around the edges with what my mom called sweat pimples.
Don’t worry about them, sweetie
, she’d say whenever I’d get frustrated and call myself ugly.
Everybody gets sweat pimples. They’ll go away.

Meg tilted her head to the side. “Just so you know, we don’t want you here,” she said.

“And our mom and dad don’t want you here, either,” Lexi added. “You’re only here because Granny says you’ve got to help family, even if they’ve never acted like family before. But we don’t really think it’s fair to have to be all sisterly just because that’s what Granny believes.”

I ground my teeth, concentrating on trying to look steely. “Well, I don’t exactly want to be here, either,” I said. “But I didn’t really have a choice in the matter.”

“Granny says you’re a sad case because you’re an orphan,” Meg added, the last word sucker-punching me.

I’m not an orphan, genius
, I wanted to say.
You’re only an orphan if both of your parents are dead, and my dad is still alive.
But I wasn’t so sure if that was true. Could someone be an emotional orphan? If so, I was an orphan all the way.

“Our dad told us about your crazy mom,” Lexi said, but Meg bumped her ribs.

“We’re not supposed to talk about her mom,” she hissed.

My breathing went steady and deep, my fists clenching at my sides. I had my moments of being mad at Mom, sure, but something about hearing these two talk about her enraged me.
You don’t know my mom
, I wanted to say.
You never will know my mom. She had more class than all of you combined.
“Well, my mom’s gone now,” I said. “She has nothing to do with anything anymore.” Inwardly, I cursed at how shaky my voice sounded. There were so many other things I wanted to say at that moment. I wanted to remind them that Clay was still my father, as much as I didn’t want him to be, and that made them my family, whether they liked it or not. Whether any of us liked it or not.

We stared each other down for what felt like forever. Inside the house, the TV blared, the children ran and cussed and knocked into things. Inside the house, the dishes were done. Inside the house, nobody cared how Lexi and Meg welcomed me.

Finally, Lexi said, “Come on, Meggie. We’ll get money out of her later.”

The two of them burst through the porch door and into the backyard, all the while stage-whispering names over their shoulders—a weak attempt to keep me from hearing them.
Whale. Moron. Orphan.

I sagged onto the couch, my hands shaking so hard I had to sit on my fingers to calm them.

Not that I’d been expecting to be best friends with my half sisters, but there was no way I could live with them. If I called Ronnie and told him they’d called Mom names and said horrible things about her, he would care, right? I mean, he might not have cared about me anymore, but he loved my mom. Surely he would take me back to defend Mom.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I had another text from Dani.
Still no news. Also still no Jane. Worried!
I typed a message back:
I hope she’s ok. Call me as soon as you hear from her!
I sent the message, then typed a second one:
This place is awful. Half sisters from hell. Save me!
I hit Send again, then scoped out an outlet where I could charge my phone later. It was my only lifeline home. I didn’t want to think of how abandoned and cut off I would feel if it died.

Quickly, I dialed Ronnie’s number, rehearsing in my head what I would say to him.
I know you think you can’t care for
me right now, Ronnie, but I can help care for you. I can help you keep Marin and Mom alive in memory. I can cook and clean for you. I won’t even complain if you want to remarry.

But he never picked up his phone, and instead I left him a voice mail. “Hi, Ronnie. I just wanted to let you know that I made it down here.” I paused. “I want to come home, though. Please let me come back up. We can get through this together. Please? Call me?” I hung up, then dialed Kolby’s number.

“Hey,” he said, his voice sympathetic and soft, causing homesickness to rip through me. It felt like I had left years ago, not a few hours ago. It seemed impossible that it had only been a week since Kolby and I had walked home from the bus stop together. I’d borrowed his skateboard and pushed myself lazily along as we talked about how glad we were that school was almost over and the stuff we each planned to do over summer break. Neither of us would have ever dreamed we’d be doing
this
. “Everything okay? You still at the motel?”

“No,” I said. “Ronnie sent me to Caster City.”

“What the heck is in Caster City?” he asked. I could hear the clicking of computer keys in the background, and I could imagine him sitting back in that aloof way of his, a laptop in his lap, Googling Caster City.

I took a miserable, deep breath and let it out. “My biological father.”

There was a pause. Even the keyboard clicking stopped. “I didn’t know you had a biological father,” he said.

“Me either. Well, I knew I had one, but I was a baby when he left.”

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him yet. But if his daughters are any hint, he’s not so whippy.”

“Whoa, wait, you have sisters?”

“Half sisters, yeah. Meg and Lexi, the personality twins,” I mumbled.

“So I take it you don’t like them.”

“I don’t like any of this,” I said, feeling my voice rise, feeling my chest tighten. Why didn’t Ronnie answer my call? Didn’t he understand what he was doing to my life, what this stupid tornado had done to my life?

“How is Milton?” I asked, switching topics before I burst.

“Fine. Dull. But, hey, at least it’s a house, right?”

I closed my eyes and nodded. He had no idea.

“My mom is happy to be with her sisters, and Tracy is happy because we’ve got, like, a billion girl cousins. But I’m kinda sitting around with nothing to do but play games online. And my arm hurts like hell.”

“Why?”

“Remember? I cut it on some glass? Back, you know, the day after.”

“Still? It’s not healed yet?”

“No, it’s gross, you should see it.”

“No, thanks,” I said, but on the inside I was thinking I would totally want to see it if only it meant I could see him, if only it meant that I could see somebody familiar and friendly. If only I could see something I recognized, something that reminded me I had a place to belong. My chest squeezed again
and I feared this time I wouldn’t be able to stave off the tears. “Listen, I gotta go,” I said. “But call me later, okay?”

“No problem,” he said. “And, Jersey?”

“Yeah?”

“Hopefully they’ll come around,” he said. “Your half sisters, I mean. This could be good, right? Sisters?”

I doubt it
, I thought. “Yeah, definitely,” I mumbled, then hung up, turned the phone off, and stuffed it back into my pocket. I pulled the blanket over my head and bawled into the dirty couch, the sobs reaching so far down into me, they came out dry.

I lay there crying until the sun set and the sky darkened and the noises coming from inside the house slowly dimmed, dimmed, dimmed until they were shut off. Soon all I could hear was the chirping of crickets and the buzzy noise of frogs out in the distance and the occasional shuffle of what I imagined to be wild animals. I wanted to get up and lock the screen door, sure I was going to be murdered on my couch by some madman or a coyote or both, but there was no lock on that door. I might as well have been sleeping right out in the backyard.

But soon I began to tune out the noises and cuddle up in my blankets so much that I felt somewhat cocooned by them. Eventually, exhaustion took over and I started to drift off.

Before I could get into a deep sleep, though, I was awakened by the crunching of gravel under car tires. I didn’t even fully realize that was what I was hearing until the slams of two car doors split the air.

I sat up on the couch, hearing footsteps coming around the house, hushed voices floating over the sudden silence.

The screen door slammed open, knocking my heart practically out of my chest, and then there was a scent of alcohol, and a booming voice. “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” it said.

I blinked and peered through the darkness, into narrow, brown eyes that matched mine.

Standing in the doorway, swaying crookedly, balanced on a pair of beat-up cowboy boots, was my father, Clay Cameron.