Torn Away (8 page)

I paused, blinking rapidly. I opened my mouth, but my throat felt closed tight.
We didn’t. We didn’t make it through okay at all.

“What about Kolby?”

I took a deep breath, steadied myself. “He’s fine. He went to Milton. But, Dani… I have to tell you something.” I paused again, unsure of how to say it. I’d never had to give anyone bad
news before—not like this—and I wasn’t sure how you eased into it. Instead, I blurted it out, my mouth working faster than my brain. “My mom died. And so did Marin.”

There was such utter silence on the other end of the line, I could hear myself breathing into the speaker. When Dani spoke again, her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Are you serious?”

I nodded, unable to speak, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me nodding, and I felt stupid, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. The words wouldn’t come out.

“Oh my God, Jersey. I don’t know what to say.” There was a long, wrenching silence. “I’m so sorry.”

“So yeah, we’re in Prairie Valley right now,” I said, swallowing, trying to get control of myself and get as far away from the word “died” as possible. “I don’t know when we’ll be back home. Our house is pretty much gone.”

“I know. We drove around a little last night. My mom wanted to take pictures so she could send them to my grandma in Indiana. I guess all those houses have to be rebuilt. Is Ronnie going to rebuild yours?”

“I don’t know. He isn’t talking.”

Dani’s voice went soft. “Yeah, I guess he’s pretty messed up right now. I can’t believe they died. Do you know when the funerals will be?”

“No. Ronnie isn’t talking. About anything. He’s not even getting out of bed.” I considered telling her that I’d been stealing money out of his pants so I could eat, and that I was wearing the same underwear I’d been wearing when the tornado
hit, and that I was starting to get scared that he would never get out of bed and that I would starve to death or something stupid because I was too numb to think of how I could save myself. But I didn’t want to worry her any more than I already had, so I let the silence sit between us again.

“Listen,” she finally said. “I’d have to ask my mom, but if you need to come stay with us, at least until the funerals are over, I’m sure it would be okay with her. We don’t have any power and our roof is leaking in, like, ten places, but they’re going to fix it today and they’re saying we might get power back by the end of the week, maybe.”

Part of me wanted to jump at the chance. I wanted to tell Dani to come get me right now, wanted to hop into her car and let her mom soothe everything the way my mom would have done if she had just stayed home, if she had just skipped Marin’s dance class. I would borrow Dani’s clothes and be happy to wear something that smelled like fabric softener rather than sweat and rainwater, even though she was easily two sizes smaller than I was. I would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, thick on the peanut butter, and drink endless sodas, even if they were warm and I had to eat by candlelight.

But I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking about how much Mom loved Ronnie and how disappointed she would be in me if I left him, stinking up the bedsheets and mopping his unwashed face with the pillow, starving himself to death because he wouldn’t get up to eat. Even if I’d never had a deep connection with Ronnie, Mom had loved him like mad, and I couldn’t leave him, because Mom wouldn’t want me to.

“Okay, thanks, I’ll tell Ronnie.”

“Just call me.”

“I will. I should go. If you hear from Jane, let me know, okay?”

“Of course. I’m sure she’s fine. You shouldn’t worry.”

“Yeah,” I said, but how did we know? Not everyone came out of the tornado fine. I didn’t come out fine at all.

“And, Jers?”

“Huh?”

“Let me know when the funerals are? I want to come.”

I squeezed my eyes tighter; a tear slipped out and down one cheek. Burying my mother and my sister seemed like something I just couldn’t do. I wasn’t strong enough. I wanted my mom. I needed her. How depressingly ironic that the one person I needed to give me strength to face my mom’s death was the one who’d died.

“I will.” I hung up and sat with the phone in my lap for a few minutes, staring at the water that dripped off the bottom of the window air conditioner into a plastic tub on the floor.

“You okay?” the desk clerk asked, leaning over the counter to peer at me. She twisted her watch around on her wrist anxiously.

I nodded. “Fine.” A lie. I got up and started to walk toward the door.

“It’s real terrible what happened over there in Elizabeth,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m real sorry about it.”

“Thanks.” I hurried out of the office as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to hear anyone else tell me they were sorry. What did
I’m sorry
mean, exactly, when someone had died? Wouldn’t it be much more accurate to say
I’m grateful
when someone close to you was hit by tragedy?
I’m grateful
, as in,
I’m grateful that this didn’t happen to me
. At least that would be honest.

I stood outside and looked up at the sky. The day was sunny and warm again, and here, twenty miles away from home, it almost seemed like a normal day. Except on a normal day I would be in chem class right now, excited about theater club practice and the lighting cues I still had to learn. On a normal day I would be seeing Mom tonight, would be telling Marin that I was too busy, too busy, always too busy.

I gazed down the line of motel room doors. Behind one of those, Ronnie was drowning in his own grief. Behind one of them, he was alone and I was alone, only feet apart, unable to talk about the things we needed to say.

I couldn’t go in there. Not yet.

Instead, I turned and walked down the sidewalk, Ronnie’s credit card in my pocket.

I wandered past a strip mall, which was filled with real estate offices and computer repair shops and dry cleaners, and headed toward a big chain pharmacy a short distance away. My clothes and shoes felt coarse and gross against my skin. I gazed at all the perfect buildings, the perfect people. Why had they been spared?

I stopped at the pharmacy and filled a cart with packages
of ugly underwear and socks that I normally wouldn’t be caught dead in, T-shirts and flip-flops emblazoned with the logo and mascot of a high school I’d never attended, and packs of chips and cookies and cups of Easy Mac. I stood for a long time in front of the cold section, letting the refrigeration fall over me in waves, closing my eyes and soaking it up until my arms were goose bump-y and tight. After I’d bought as much as I could carry, I walked back to the motel, shopping bags looped over my arms, wondering how I was going to lure Ronnie out of bed.

What would Mom want me to do?

If Ronnie and I had been closer, maybe I would know. But Mom had always been the buffer between us, had always been the one trying to bridge a relationship where there really wasn’t one.

“You can call him Dad, you know,” she’d said one night not long after they got married. “He’s technically your dad now.”

“My dad lives in Caster City,” I’d said, my bulbous ten-year-old belly sticking out under the bottom of my shirt.

“That man,” my mom had said, her eyes fiery and narrow, “was never a dad. A dad doesn’t just abandon his child. Ronnie would never be that kind of dad.”

I knew she was right, of course. And it wasn’t like I had any deep connection with my so-called dad in Caster City. Even by the time I was ten, I couldn’t remember what my real father looked like. I didn’t have one single memory of the two of us together. But I always kept Ronnie at a distance anyway. Maybe being abandoned by my real dad was
why
I’d always
kept Ronnie at arm’s distance. How many dads was I going to give the chance to hurt me?

I stood outside the room for a few seconds, key card in hand, while I took a deep, readying breath.

But when I pushed open the door, Ronnie’s unmade bed was empty. The bathroom door was open, the light out—he wasn’t in there, either. Relieved, I shut the door and hustled to the bathroom myself, anxious to put on some clean underwear and then eat a quiet dinner by the TV.

It wasn’t until somewhere around 3
AM
, when I woke to find the TV still on and Ronnie’s bed still empty, that I began to wonder where he might have gone.

Ronnie didn’t return until late the next day. I squinted, sitting cross-legged on my bed playing cards, and held my hand up to shield my face from the strip of sunlight that flooded the room when he opened the door.

“Where were you?” I asked.

He let the door close behind him and turned to open the curtains. The heat of the afternoon sun blazed through the window onto my bed.

“You need to get your stuff together,” he said.

I gathered the cards and dropped them into their box. He paused for a second at the foot of my bed, as if he was going to say something, the lines deep in his face and shaded by the several days’ beard he had grown. There were bags under his eyes and he had a smell about him that I recognized as stale alcohol. But he only stared at the bedspread uncomfortably and then moved on toward the bathroom. I heard him unwrap a plastic cup and turn on the faucet.

“Why?” I said. “Where are we going?”

The water ran for a while longer and then he reappeared, the edges of his hair damp as if he’d splashed water on his face.

He let out a sigh. “Listen, Jersey, I don’t know how to say this,” he said, but then he didn’t say any more. He sank down on his bed, sitting with his back to me.

“Say what?” I finally prompted, turning and letting my legs dangle over the edge of the bed. “What’s going on? Is it the funerals? Are they today?”

“I don’t know about the funerals. Stop asking me about the goddamn funerals.” He smacked the bed, a muffled
whump
. He took another breath, wiped his face. “I can’t… I can’t even think about it,” he said more softly. “I can’t think about anything. The funerals. The house. You. Every day I wake up and there’s all these things to do, and I can’t even get my head around them.”

I wanted to get up and go to him, sit next to him, wrap my arms around him and tell him how much I missed them, too. I knew it was what my mom would want, for me to comfort him and for him to comfort me, for us to be there for each other. But I stayed put, staring at his back, at his hunched shoulders and blackened elbows and the ragged hole in his T-shirt, that same invisible barrier keeping me at a distance.

“We’ve got to have the funerals sometime, though,” I said. “We can’t just let them… rot… in the morgue.”

“I know what needs to be done,” he said. “But it isn’t that easy. I’ve lost everything important to me.”

I slipped my big toe along the bumpy inside of my flip-flop.
Almost
, I amended for him.
I’ve lost
almost
everything important to me.
But I knew he’d said what he meant. He’d lost Mom and Marin—the important things. He was as stuck with me as I was with him.

“I did, too,” I said instead.

He finally turned to face me. “I got hold of your grandparents. Billie and Harold Cameron.”

I frowned in confusion.

“The ones down in Caster City,” he added.

“I know,” I said. “I know who they are.” They were my father’s parents, the only grandparents I had, and Ronnie knew that all too well.

Mom’s parents had disowned her. In all my life, I’d never heard her talk about them unless one of us asked a specific question. But she’d talked about Billie and Harold Cameron. I don’t remember ever seeing them, and I never once got a birthday card or a Christmas gift from them, but I knew who they were in a vague sort of way. I knew that Mom disliked them. She thought they were cold as reptiles, and they’d probably gotten that way by being screwed over by their own kids so many times. I knew that she’d blamed them, in part, for my father leaving us, but that she’d kind of felt sorry for them, too, because all they ever did was clean up their kids’ messes and they never had any enjoyment of their own. She said they seemed depressed and jaded. Like life, and everyone in it, was out to get them.

“You told them about Mom? Why?”

He finally raised his tired, bloodshot eyes to meet mine, which made my shoulders shrink and my stomach slip. “Jersey,
I’m sorry,” he said, and that was pretty much all he needed to say. I got it from just those three words.

“But why?”

He spread his hands apart, and I got some satisfaction from seeing them shake, from seeing his chin quiver and the string of saliva that connected his top tooth to his bottom lip. “I can’t do it. I can’t raise you alone. I never meant to…”

Call me your daughter
, my mind supplied, and that right there was the reason I could never embrace Ronnie as my dad. It had nothing to do with being abandoned by my drunk father down in Caster City. It was a barrier that neither of us could acknowledge but that we both knew was there. Ronnie never intended to call me his daughter. I was simply part of the package deal he got when he married my mom.

“So they’re coming up here to help you? Is that it?”

He shook his head miserably. “They’re gonna take you down there.”

“What? I don’t want to go down there. I want to stay here. I was planning to help you rebuild. I don’t need some vacation from the storm.”

“It’s not a visit. They’re taking you to Caster City to live with them.”

“Uh, no they’re not,” I said, standing suddenly. “No way.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“But why? I can help you. We can help each other. You’re overwhelmed right now. We both are. But it’ll get better. Besides, my friends are all up here. I can’t just leave them. I need them.”

“You need a mother, and I can’t give you that,” he said.

“Billie Cameron isn’t my mother! Mom was my mother! She’s gone and I’ll never have another mother, and sending me off to live with strangers isn’t going to change that.”

“It’s the only option you’ve got,” he said.

I moved toward him, reaching for him. “No, it’s not. It’s not an option at all. I want to stay here. I want to stay with you. Please, Ronnie, don’t make me go live with them. I don’t even know them.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned onto his side, his face smushed against the ugly bedspread. He said something else, but it was too muffled for me to make out.

I turned and looked around frantically—for what, I didn’t know. I felt like I needed to do something that would show him what a bad idea this was. Something that would make him change his mind.

“Please, Ronnie, no. I don’t want to go. Please,” I begged, kneeling by the side of his bed, but he stayed with his face buried, spewing unintelligible noises into the polyfiber. “I’m not going!” I cried, trying to sound defiant but knowing that I had no real threat to make. I had no money, no stuff, no other family to turn to. “You can’t make me do this.”

Finally, Ronnie sat up and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, calmer now. “I don’t want this. But I don’t want to take care of you right now. I know that sounds horrible and makes me a bad person, but I can’t help it. It’s how I feel. I don’t know what to do with you. Except this.”

“Mom would hate it.” My jaw ached from being clenched so hard. “She would hate you for doing it.”

“Your mother would understand.”

“No, she wouldn’t. She would never understand why you would send me to live with them.”

“I’m sending you to someone who can take better care of you than I can. She would want that.”

I stood. “She wouldn’t.”

“They’ll be here in a few minutes, so you should get your things together,” he answered.

Anxiety washed over me. A few minutes? There was no way I’d convince him this was a horrible idea in just a few minutes. Of course, he probably knew that, which was why he had waited to tell me. My mind raced, trying to think of an offer, a deal, anything I could do to change this. But I came up with nothing.

“Fine,” I said, bending to gather what few items I had and stomping across the room to stuff them into my backpack. “Wait.” I froze. “They’re coming now? What about the funerals?”

He looked down at the floor, smashing his lips together. “I’m sorry, Jersey” was all he said. Again.

Fury engulfed me. He was
sorry
? I was going to miss the funerals because he was too selfish and cowardly to let me stay with him, and he was
sorry
? “You can’t be serious. You can’t actually be thinking it’s okay to send me away before I get to say good-bye to my mother and my sister.” At this, my voice cracked, and tears started anew. “How could you do that?”

“I don’t know when the funerals are going to be. I can’t even make myself go to the hospital or talk to the funeral home. I don’t know where I’ll get the money. We’ll have a memorial… later. After I get things figured out.”

“The right thing to do would be to let me help you figure
out those things, not send me away. I didn’t get to say good-bye, Ronnie. I didn’t get to tell them…” I pressed my lips together, unable to go on.

There was so much I hadn’t gotten to tell them. So much I wanted to. So much I should have been able to.

But who was I kidding? Saying any of those things at their funerals wasn’t the same as saying them to my mother and sister. They were already gone. I’d already missed my chance.

“I’m sure Billie and Harold will bring you up for it,” he said.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I hate you,” I said, and I meant it with every fiber of my body.

Ronnie slunk off to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Desperate, I reached for my cell phone and dialed Dani.

“Hey,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Glad someone is,” I said. “I need your help.”

“What’s going on?”

“He’s sending me away,” I cried.

“Who is? Sending you away where?”

I pressed my forehead against the wallpaper—pineapples, how weird—feeling like I couldn’t breathe. “Ronnie. He’s sending me to live with my grandparents in Caster City.”

“No way. For how long?”

“I don’t know. Forever, I think,” I said. “He says he can’t take care of me. Help me, Dani.”

“He can’t send you away forever,” she said. “Can he? Is that, like, legal?”

“I don’t think he cares. I mean, they’re technically my family, so it probably is. But I don’t want to go. You’ve got to help me. Let me stay with you. Ask your mom.”

“She’s not home. You want me to call her?”

“Yes,” I said, but deep down I knew by the time she got ahold of her mom and called me back with an answer, it would be too late. They would have already come and taken me. I would be on my way to Caster City with people who were, according to my mom, cold as reptiles.

I hung up and continued to stuff things into my bag. I pulled out my Western Civ book and my math binder and threw them in the trash, keeping only
Bless the Beasts & Children
(
hint, hint, ladies and gentlemen!
) and a few pencils and pens. I rolled up the few clothes I had and crammed them inside the bag, cradling the porcelain kitten I’d brought from home. I pulled out Marin’s purse, running my fingers lightly over the fake leather.

I sat with it on my lap and waited, bitterly watching the TV rerun more footage of the tornado destruction. What the news crews couldn’t show was the real damage Elizabeth’s monster tornado had left behind. How do you record the wreckage left in someone’s heart? I pulled out a piece of gum and popped it into my mouth, then smoothed out the foil. I found a pen on the nightstand and drew a picture of a big stick figure holding a little stick figure.

Marin has a dad,
I wrote beneath the picture, and then folded the foil into a tiny square and added it to the stash.

Marin has a dad.

Even in her death, she has a dad.

But I don’t.

I never did.