Torn Away (15 page)

Someone had left a newspaper at one of the tables and I sat down to read it. Not that I was all that interested in the Caster City news, but it felt good to do something normal and mundane again.

I read every word of every story in the paper. I looked at all the photos, read the captions underneath them. I read the classifieds. Then, not ready to give up the feeling, I rambled through the aisles and ran my fingers along the book spines. Touching the titles, remembering good books I’d read, picking up new ones I hadn’t heard of and studying their covers.

I sat back in an armchair and read through most of a book.
I didn’t have the money to buy it, so I forced myself to stop reading, feeling a little like I was stealing, even though I knew I only meant to steal the moment of sanity. When I got up and placed the book back on the shelf, I noticed that the café had closed and it was dark outside. Someone had pulled a safety gate about a quarter of the way down in front of the doors, and a voice over the intercom was telling us the store was about to close.

Reluctantly, I left, making a promise to myself to come back and visit again soon. Maybe scrape together some money and buy the book I’d been reading. Something, anything to make me feel normal again.

I was walking along the sidewalk, taking in the neon lights of business signs and the stars above that, when my phone rang. It was Jane.

“Omigod, Janie!” I squealed. “You’re okay!”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “I finally got a new cell phone yesterday. My old one got lost in the tornado. I’ve been dying to talk to everyone.”

“Dani said you’re in Kansas City?”

“Yeah. Staying with my uncle. Our house got wiped out. Afterward, we were climbing around trying to find stuff, and this big bunch of bricks fell on me and broke my leg in three places. I’m on stupid crutches for the whole summer. Can you believe that?”

At this point, I could believe almost anything. People think a tornado drops down on a cow pasture or a trailer park and everything is fine. They never think about things like infected
cuts and broken legs and old ladies crushed by air conditioners in their bathtubs. They never think about orphans.

“Were you in the school when it happened?”

She chuckled. “Yeah. We didn’t even know anything was going on. We were practicing and never heard the sirens. We didn’t figure it out until the power went off, and then we heard all kinds of horrible noise, crashing and banging, like everything was falling down around us. But everyone was fine. Nobody got hurt or anything. And, thank God, my parents had gone to my brother’s soccer game over in Milton, so nobody was home. Our house is completely gone.”

“Mine, too. I have, like, nothing left.”

“I have my violin, and that’s pretty much it,” she said. “But the funny thing is, I don’t want to play it. At all. The only thing I’ve got left, and it’s still in my dad’s trunk.”

“It’ll come back.”

“I guess. Maybe. It just seems kind of pointless now, is all.”

So many things do
, I wanted to say. “So are you going back to Elizabeth?” I asked instead.

“Yeah. My dad’s been down there all week clearing off our lot. I guess right now everybody’s just trying to get the debris moved out of the way. There was a minivan on top of my bed.” She laughed, then sobered. “Oh, hey, I’m really sorry about your mom and sister.”

“Thanks. It’s been pretty hard.”

“Yeah.” She took a breath. “Dani told me you’re staying with your dad in Caster City? I didn’t even know you had a dad. You never talked about one.”

“I didn’t have one. He’s just a jerk who shares my DNA. And he would argue that we don’t even share that much. I’m trying to get Dani to let me stay with her in Elizabeth. I can’t live here.”

“When everyone gets settled, you should come up to KC for a visit,” Jane said, and at last my heart lightened. My friends were coming through. “My cousin Lindy is a trip. You’d like her. I’ll ask my aunt.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll call when I get out of here, and then I’ll come by.”

We talked for a few more minutes about things like where our friends had ended up, what would happen with graduation, given that we didn’t have a school and nobody really knew how many seniors were still in Elizabeth, and whether or not the movie theater was standing. It seemed like so long since I’d talked about anything other than the tornado, I hardly knew how to talk about other things. The conversation ended too quickly, as we both seemed to run out of things to say. When had that happened? When did I stop knowing how to talk to Jane?

I hung up the phone and continued walking but only got a few steps when a blast of a horn a few feet away made me jump.

“Where the hell you been?” Clay yelled, hanging out the car window. “Get in the damn car.”

At first I stood rooted in my spot. I had that “stranger danger” feeling that we were always warned about when we were kids. Don’t ever get into a car with a stranger, we’d been told. Trust your instincts. If your instincts tell you the situation is
bad, stay away from it. Never get in the car with a dangerous person; never let him take you to another location.

But nobody ever told you what to do if you got those gut feelings about the man who was supposedly your father.

“What you starin’ at? Get in the car, I said!”

Swallowing nervously, I pulled open the passenger door and slid into the front seat, the ripped vinyl making dull tearing noises on the backs of Terry’s jeans.

He had the car in drive and was squealing away from the curb before I even got the door all the way closed.

“Been looking everywhere for you. My sister must have lost her damn mind,” he muttered, looking more at my hair than at the road in front of him. His tires bumped a curb and he quickly corrected, then overcorrected, the car swerving into the other lane and back again. “Lettin’ you color your hair, paying for it with money she ain’t even got. The two of you look ridiculous. And now my girls are feelin’ left out and Tonette ain’t gonna have ’em goin’ around lookin’ like that, that’s for sure. You keep tellin’ me I’m your dad, but you don’t even ask before you go and color your hair somethin’ stupid.”

I gritted my teeth, willing my mouth not to open, willing my ears not to hear him.

“You just gonna sit there like a loaf a bread?” he pressed.

But I continued to stare straight ahead, ramrod stiff on the torn passenger seat, watching him sway and swerve and knock into things like a pinball, clenching my teeth and my fists and my heart, feeling my resolve to stay silent crumble. If I didn’t speak up for me, who would?

“If you’re gonna leave the house, you need to tell someone you’re goin’,” he ranted.

“Why?” I said, turning on him.

He pulled up to a stop sign, glanced at me. “What do you mean why?”

“I mean why do I need to tell someone?”

He looked at me, incredulous. “So people don’t go worryin’, that’s why.”

I coughed out a laugh. “Who is worried? Tonette? Billie? Harold, who never even speaks to me? You? Give me a break. Nobody here cares about me.”

“That don’t give you the right to disobey the rules.”

I hadn’t wanted to get into it with my father, but I’d opened my mouth, and now there would be no shutting it again. “Lexi and Meg told me you didn’t want me here. Why did you agree to let Ronnie send me?”

He turned hard into a parking lot and screeched into a space. For a second, I got scared that he was going to do something dangerous. “I ask myself that every day,” he said, his nostrils flared. “Maybe ’cause Tonette’s right and I’m some sorta sap. Guess I figured after all these years of your mom keepin’ you from me, I deserved somethin’ outta you.”

We were staring at each other now, each of us with hate in our eyes. “What are you talking about?” I said. “She never kept me from you. You walked out on us. You never came back.”

A slow grin spread across his face and he began nodding as if it all made sense to him now. “Is that what she told you? That I walked out?” He tipped his head back against the seat
and laughed, then turned to me again. “I got tossed out. Christine ‘wanted somethin’ better.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers when he said the last three words, then jammed a stubby thumb at his chest. “I told her I could be somethin’ better, I’d get a job and stop drinkin’ and would take care of you. But she said she deserved more and I’d see you again over her dead body and that was that. And look. She’s dead and now here you are.”

“You lie,” I said through my teeth, but a part of me could tell that he wasn’t lying. A part of me could see it in the slight tremor of his thumb, could see it etched into the lines around his eyes. “You never wanted anything to do with me.”

His eyes hardened and he paused, sizing me up, the muscles of his jaw working. “Damn shame that’s the story she gave you. ’Cause it ain’t the truth.”

“It’s not a story. It is the truth,” I said, but my voice was wavering, getting softer.

He put the car into reverse and began backing out of the parking spot. “When I threatened to get the law involved, she started sayin’ you weren’t even mine.” He put the car into drive and glanced at me one more time. “I believed her at the time. She was some kinda messed up and I wouldn’t a put nothin’ past her at that point. But anyone with eyes can see we got the same DNA.” He pulled out onto the road and started heading toward the house again. “And then she was gone. Moved. Wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared on someone. I gave up. Met Tonette, started over. Forgot I even had a daughter named Jersey. Didn’t seem like there was anything else I could do.”

We drove along for a few minutes in silence, the town giving way to squat cookie-cutter homes. I wanted to get back to the house, to retreat to my couch and pull the blanket over my head, try to disappear from the lies, try to ignore the sinking suspicion that the liar was Mom, not Clay. Just thinking it made me feel like a traitor.

If what he said was true, the story of my life was a lie. I’d spent so many hours wondering about him, imagining him, wishing he’d come to my birthday party or to Christmas mornings or would stop by or call to see how I was doing. He never did, and I’d spent so much time hating him for abandoning me.

But according to him, he hadn’t. She’d kept him away.

She let me think it was about me. She let me pine for him. She told me he was a monster, worthless, dangerous. She made me afraid of him. She encouraged me to hate him. I refused to believe it. I couldn’t.

“So why, then?” I croaked. “If what you say is true, if you tried so hard to stay connected with me, why don’t you want me here now?”

“Because I don’t need no paternity test to tell me whether or not you belong to me. At this point, I already know you don’t. You were Christine’s from day one. You ain’t my kid. You’re a stranger. And you’re messin’ with my real family.”

“I never had a chance to be your real family,” I said.

He shrugged. “That ain’t my fault.”

He pulled into the driveway roughly, and I leapt out. I swung the door shut and tromped around the back of the house while he laid on the horn. I heard the front door open
and Tonette’s nasal voice squawking, “I’m coming! I’m coming! Jesus, keep your wad in your pants, Clayton!”

I was so busy thinking about my mom as I flung open the door to my porch, I didn’t even notice Lexi and Meg until I was practically on top of them.

My half sisters were sitting on my couch, laughing.

“You look like an old lady,” I heard one of them say, but my mind was unable to make sense out of what exactly I was seeing.

They had Marin’s purse. It was open on Lexi’s lap, the contents bared to the world. Marin’s things. My things.

“What…?” I started, but then I noticed that both of them were chewing gum, the foils wadded up and tossed onto the couch, and they both had pink, lipstick-smeared mouths. Lexi was clutching Mom’s lipstick in her hand, rolled all the way to the top, the pretty slanted point ruined. Across the front of the purse they had written “COW” in Mom’s lipstick.

“You got some seriously messed-up taste in lipstick, Granny,” Lexi said, but she looked nervous as she said it, as if she knew they had crossed the line this time.

I reached out and snatched the lipstick out of her hand.
“That was my mother’s,” I said, feeling a rage swelling so big inside me, I wasn’t sure how to contain it. I’d unclenched my teeth, and everything I’d been feeling in that car ride home—hell, everything I’d been feeling since the tornado—strained to get out of me. I felt bare and taut, an exposed nerve, a caged animal, a spring.

I’d lost everything at this point. I had nothing left but my memories—the ones that came from me, the ones I could trust—and they were trying to steal those, too. They couldn’t. I wouldn’t let them. If I let go of my memories, I might never recognize me again.

“Well, your mom has gross taste, then,” Meg said.

I reached down and picked up the purse, grabbed the foils they’d discarded on the couch, dropped everything inside, then hurriedly zipped the purse shut and hugged it to my shoulder, the lipstick they’d drawn on the outside smearing up against my skin.

“Hey,” Meg said, standing up, her nose a couple inches away from my chin. Lexi followed half a beat later but took a small step to the side, hanging back a little. Meg grabbed for the purse, but I clamped my elbow down on it. “Nobody said you could have that back.”

“It’s not yours to take,” I said.

“Anything in my house is mine to take,” she said. “And if I want to take your ugly-ass lipstick and your little gum stash, I will. And that goes for anything else you might have, Jersey Cow. Because you don’t get to say what goes on in this house. You don’t belong here and everyone knows it.”

“Meg,” Lexi said. I glanced over. Lexi was looking worriedly between her sister and me. “Come on, let’s go to Jeff’s party now.”

“What?” Meg said defensively. “It’s the truth. The only reason she’s here is nobody wants her.”

She had turned toward her sister, but my eyes were firmly planted on Meg. On her delicate little ear with the earrings snaking up the side. On her sharp, freckled cheekbone. On the corner of her hateful little mouth, where lipstick collected in a pink pool.

My mother’s face swam before my eyes, coming out of the bedroom, the pink lipstick making her skin look creamy and smooth. Marin’s voice echoed in my ears:
It’s for special. I like it sharp.

And now the tip was blunt and ragged, ugly. It had been stretched across the lips of two horrid girls who had only worn it to be cruel, had been dragged across the face of Marin’s purse, no longer special, no longer new. That lipstick had probably been Marin’s most prized possession, and these two bitches had no right.

Before I knew what was happening, my hand reached out and grabbed Meg’s face, slapping up against her mouth as I dug my fingers in and clawed, trying to wipe the lipstick from her lips. She didn’t deserve it; she wasn’t special enough. These were
my
memories.
Mine
. And I would die before I would let anyone take them from me.

Meg gave a surprised little yelp, stumbling backward. Her heels caught the edge of the couch and she sprawled back onto
the floor, her head knocking against the boards loudly. I followed her down, clawing and scratching at her face, mashing her lips against her teeth with my palms, dragging my hands across her mouth over and over again.

I was so intent on getting my sister’s lipstick back, I was only vaguely aware of the racket we were making. I was grunting, crying, repeating that she didn’t deserve to use my sister’s lipstick, that she wasn’t special enough, to give it back. Meg was screaming as much as she could through my fingers, her eyes wide and frightened, her hands flailing at my hair, my face, my chest. And in the background, I heard Lexi’s voice as she cried for help.

There was blood. I could see there was blood. Meg’s pink mouth had been replaced by a much larger red one. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything anymore. What did it matter? What did anything matter now? I was alone. I had no home, no family, nowhere that I belonged. In that moment, I finally and truly understood what it meant to have nothing to lose.

I kept after her until I was yanked to my feet roughly by two hands under my armpits. As soon as I was pulled off her, Meg curled up on one side, her arms flung over her mouth, her cries more like muffled shrieks.

I turned wildly, half ready to fight whoever had pulled me from her, but was surprised to see that it was Grandfather Harold. His fingers dug into my shoulders, his face a deep, wrinkled scowl. Lexi gaped at me over his shoulder, trembling, tears running down her cheeks.

“Let me go!” I shrieked, twisting violently out of his grasp.

“What the hell is going on?” Grandmother Billie said, bursting through the screen door, her nightgown swishing and swinging above her hairy ankles. She looked from Meg to Lexi to my grandfather to me, her head whipping around almost comically.

“She attacked Meg,” Lexi said. “She scratched her up bad.”

I turned my hands over and gazed at the blood on my fingers. I was still out of breath, so angry I could hear my pulse in my ears, but in a way what had just happened seemed impossible, like it had happened to someone else. Had my hands not been all bloody, I might even have tried to deny it.

Grandmother Billie hurried over to Meg and knelt next to her, trying to pry her arms away from her mouth so she could see the damage.

“They…” I said, then paused. How could I continue?
They stole my sister’s lipstick. They stole my memories.

Grandfather Harold took a heavy step toward me. “These girls ain’t never been in a lick of trouble until you got here. Now I understand why Ronnie wanted to be rid of you.”

“I’ve never been in trouble, either!” I cried out. “You don’t have any idea what I’m like.”

“I shouldn’t have agreed to this, family or not,” Grandmother Billie said.

By this time, Terry had joined the crowd, staring out through the screen door, Jimmy perched on one hip, rubbing his eyes. She pushed Jimmy’s head against her shoulder with one palm and shushed him but didn’t say anything.

I gazed at her, feeling ashamed.

Grandfather Harold motioned to Lexi. “Help your grandmother clean up your sister. We’ll deal with you tomorrow,” he said to me. “I s’pose we should call Tonette and get her home.”

They all shuffled back into the house, Meg’s cries turning to wet snuffles, Lexi glaring at me over her shoulder through slitted eyes. Aunt Terry watched me for a second longer; then I heard the sound of the screen door lock clicking into place.

At first I stayed rooted to my spot near the couch, the covered barbecue grill behind me, a stack of broken plastic lawn chairs close by. I blinked in the darkness, wondering how I had gotten here. How I’d gone from reading in a cozy armchair in a real bookstore to scrabbling open the skin of my half sister’s mouth in the space of half an hour. Or how I’d gone from cooking dinner for my family to sleeping alone on a porch in little more than a month. It all seemed so surreal. My life no longer felt like mine.

We’ll deal with you tomorrow
, Grandfather Harold had said, and though I didn’t know exactly what he’d meant by that, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. Worse, he’d planned to call Tonette, interrupt her night of barhopping to let her know that I’d beat up her precious little girl. I would be in huge trouble, because as angry as my grandparents had been, it wouldn’t be anything compared to how angry Clay and Tonette would be when they found out.

“Well, I’m not going to give you the chance,” I said aloud. I needed to get out of this place where truth and lies swirled and bled together and stole all that I had left of me. I dropped to my
knees and felt around until my hands landed on my backpack, which had been stuffed far behind the sofa, probably when Lexi and Meg were looking for something to steal. I pulled it out. It had been unzipped, but it didn’t look like anything was gone. I quickly grabbed the blanket that lay folded up at the end of the couch, stuffed it inside, zipped it, and pounded through the screen door into the night.

I wasn’t sure where to go. I hadn’t wandered around enough to have more than a vague idea of what was beyond the cookie-cutter houses and the strip malls. I could see pastures behind the house, and a thicket of trees on one side. I could maybe find an old barn to sleep in, or a clearing under a tree. But what if a storm came? I hated that I now got panicky over something so silly, but I couldn’t help it. Every day that the tornado sank deeper into my soul, I became more and more afraid of it.

In the end I decided to go with what was familiar, and headed into town.