What I Had Before I Had You (10 page)

Around the age of ten, I realized that church was something from which most attending kids' mothers were not excused, and I started throwing weekly fits. “Mo-om,” I whined. “How come I have to go if you don't go?”

My mother enjoyed this weekly chance to show me the breadth and depth of her sacrifice. I could say it along with her: “I didn't move all the way out to Ocean Vista to raise a godless daughter. God doesn't want me in that church, but He sure as hell wants you.”

When I was very young, I thought that meant she was going to hell instead of heaven. I had a nightmare in which I searched for her through a town built of brimstone, full of snakes and ladies in red bikinis. I woke up crying and asked my mother if she was really going to hell. She sat on the edge of my bed and told me how it was possible to cast aside all your sins on your deathbed and go right up to heaven. She tapped my chin three times, our special kiss, and said she had a trick up her sleeve. I asked why I couldn't do that, too, why I didn't have a trick. “You could, but it's better not to have to. Sin hurts,” said my mother. I asked if it hurt like a bee sting. She said, “More.”

Today, James pulls up and I am hopelessly hungover. My mother is cutting coupons in the kitchen while she waits for a client. I can hear the zing of her scissors. I assume she has intuited my delinquency these last few weeks, but I am puzzled by her strategic pause. When will she pounce? At fifteen, I don't consider the possibility that my mother has other things on her mind than me.

“Hey, kiddo,” says James as I sink into the passenger seat. He squints at my outfit: ripped white jeans and one of Pam's screen-printed T-shirts, a giant ant drinking a Coke. Not church attire.

“Here's the deal,” I say once we're on the road, coasting inland. “I'm not doing church anymore. Maybe you'd like to go with your real family?”

He shakes his head. “Jewish. Busy.”

“Whatever. Drop me at the boardwalk?”

He gives me a long look as he makes his inevitable decision. Shrugs. As we U-turn, he asks me, “You been sleeping?”

“Yup.” I have been, though passing out more frequently than drifting off. It seems like an odd question until I recall that hot anxious sleepless time at the beginning of the summer. Amazing to think that it was only six weeks ago; my whole life has started up since then.

“Your mom been sleeping?”

“God, what is it with you and sleep? What's your damage?”

He chuckles and repeats my new phrase, “What's your damage,” in his soft, nasal voice, and it is so dorky that it makes me smile.

I shout out the window, “Sleep when you're dead!” and we ride along in companionable silence.

We pull up to the curb by the big pedestrian boardwalk ramp, where Stan the Deserter and a few other crazies are pestering a busload of summer-camp kids in matching purple T-shirts. Kandy is walking up the ramp toward our usual arcade hangout spot and doubles back when she sees me getting out of the car.

“Hey, sugar tits,” she yells. “This your dad?”

James rests his arm in the car window and smiles broadly, which makes him look different—less slumpy-sad—than usual. “Just a friend,” he says.

Kandy struts over to lean against the car. She is wearing, of all things, a denim one-piece jumpsuit with a halter neckline. She sees me looking at it and says, “It's vintage.”

“I remember that look,” says James before I can think of something snarky to say. “That was very hip. It suits you.” He turns off the engine.

Kandy's lip curls with pleasure. “Thanks, old man. You coming up?”

I am horrified. James? Coming up where? The arcade? The boardwalk? What is she talking about? I slam the passenger-side door and pound twice on the car. “Oh, no, he has knee replacement surgery this afternoon, he can't come.” They both stare at me, failing to pick up on my fine humor. “He has to have his dentures filed down. After his coffin fitting.”

James laughs, tucking his chin down turtlishly, back to the James I know. I look between them, waiting for Kandy to start walking or James to turn the car back on. Nothing happens, so I head up to the boardwalk alone, and when Kandy comes up twenty minutes later with a soda I bet she didn't buy, I ask, “What the fuck was that?”

“He's nice.”

“He's, like, fifty.”

“
Ew.
I just said he's nice. What are you, ageist?”

I shudder. I guess I am ageist.

Kandy leans against the boardwalk fence and throws her head back, takes a drag of her cigarette. “Jim thinks I could model,” she says.

“James.”

“Whatever.”

THIS IS WHAT
we do at Emerald parties: We drink, we talk about ourselves, we make jokes, we catch each other's eye and think,
What if?
We do a power hour—a shot of beer every minute, the minutes marked by song changes, a boy wearing eyeliner and army boots manning the boom box. Kandy invites new boys, always: shy JV athletes, stoners, philosophizing honors boys with facial moles and legs hairless as girls', and they flutter around her while she postures for Jake. Inevitably, one of these boys passes out, and we put makeup and a bra on him, and I take pictures.

Tonight somebody brought an old childhood copy of Magic Telephone, a game where you figure out, from clues spoken by a giant pink plastic telephone, which one of twenty-five fictional boys has a crush on you. On laminated cards, they clutch surfboards and electric guitars; their skin gleams acne-free. We are playing
ironically.
We take shots of Jägermeister whenever we guess wrong. I am pulling for Will, the hot poet-athlete, because the other girls seem to like him most. I haven't seen my sisters since the Peter Pan encounter, and I am feeling successfully normal.

“Look at that,” says Pam, and points through the doorway to the bedroom, where Kandy and Jake are slow-dancing, Kandy with her head on Jake's shoulder and her eyes closed, looking like a doll; Jake smoking a cigarette. I snap a photo. Jake notices the flash and waves his pinkie at us. He makes a drinking sign with his cigarette hand, rolls his eyes, and points at Kandy's head. I laugh. Pam stares at me and gets up.

The music is good, and the air is salty and cool, and everywhere people are laughing; it is one of the good nights. After our game has broken up, Jake comes over to where I'm dancing with a knot of kids. He lifts my hand, spreads it open, and drops a round pink pill into my palm. His eyes so blue they seem clear to me, like lenses through which I am seeing an interior sky. “But Doctor,” I ask, “what will it do?”

“It will give you joy,” he tells me, and that is good enough.

WE DON'T HEAR
them come in. All of a sudden there are five giant cops flanking the door to the suite, yelling that we kids are in big trouble and this building is condemned and did we do this to the walls? I see it happen in slow motion, these men bellowing, pointing, striding into the heart of my new world, fluttering their fingers over the butts of black guns tucked into belt holsters. One of them pries a Barbie doll out of the gunked paint on the wall and shows it to another one. My eyes focus on a pink color behind the cops, such a familiar pink, moving, following them into the suite: That's a dress my mother has. No.

That's my mother.

There she stands, trembling, glassy-eyed. She followed me. It is one of the good nights, maybe the
best
night, and she is out to ruin everything. Her cheeks are flushed, and as she sees me take her in, her right hand rises to her hip and her jaw sets square. Rage blooms on her high cheekbones. Pam is suddenly beside me, her shoulder pressed to mine. Ready to defend. Everywhere, confusion. Some kids, too wasted to notice, keep on dancing, and some kids, too wasted to think straight, cry. The ratty boys make for the door, but a cop blocks them. They jostle my mother, who doesn't seem to notice, her eyes locked on me.

The cops are yelling something, but it is hard to pay attention. I feel aware of the patterns of blood moving inside all of our bodies: Möbius ribbons of fluid rush. This is how I realize the drug is working. The room seems larger and everything more committed to itself: blue more surely blue, red more surely red, sofas as sofa as they can be. And my mother, more herself than I can stand, more tender and embarrassing and terrible, storms raining hail from her look, rearing up to smash me down, scrape me up from the floor, and pack me into a box to keep on her windowsill. A witch.

She comes toward me, talking fast. One of the cops says something to her. She throws him a gorgeous lit-up smile and says something, and he nods and turns back.

“Don't you think I know what you've been up to?” she asks. “On this mission, do you think I am unguided? Do you think you are so smart?”

“Stop,” I hiss.

She pushes on without pause, into a dense field of anger. “These kids are trash, these kids will ruin you, you have to come home now, I can keep you safe but they cannot keep you safe, and if you don't come home, how can I keep you safe?”

The music dies; one of the cops has found the boom box. My mother's voice is everywhere, and everyone is watching us and realizing who she is and who I am and what it means.

“Is this her?” a cop says to my mother, and my mother says yes it is. “Go on.” The cop points me toward my mother.

The faces all around me sour. I will be the one who ruined the summer, the one who infiltrated the club just to narc on everyone. I will be alone again.

I feel an impulse to go with my mother, just to get it over with. I am unmasked. There is that eking feeling of burning eye socket and toddler contrition, that instant shame response that makes me want to lie facedown in bed and cry until she comes in to rub my back and tell me that it's okay after all.

But then my mother claps a hand on my shoulder, puts her flushed face up to mine, and yells, “You have no idea what you're getting into, you think you know but you're a child, what makes you think you can sleep with dogs and not get fleas?”

Dogs. Pam has moved back slightly. The look of doubt on her face breaks my heart. Is that the drug or just my head, everything feeling so powerful? My mother's hand on my shoulder is like doom; I can feel her nails pressing crescent cuts into my skin through my T-shirt. I have a thought, and I do it without thinking.

“Who are you?” I ask my mother. She gapes at me like a drowning fish. I turn to the cop. “I don't know this lady.”

The cop groans. “Okay, kid.” He puts his hand behind my shoulder as if he is going to push me closer to my mother. He doesn't, though; I guess cops aren't supposed to push. His hand just floats there, and I look him in the eye and try to look confused, which is not hard because the drug makes his face seem more like his face, which is sagged and bristled like an old cartoon hound dog's.
Sleep with dogs,
she said.

“I really don't know her,” I say, and there is some credibility to the rise in my voice. He stands back and looks at my mother, who is stamping with frustration.

She yells, “I can't believe this bullshit! You're all bullshit!”

The officer cocks his cartoon head and says, “What?” just under the volume of my mother's continued indignation.

“She absolutely is my daughter, Olivia Reed, born November second, 1972. She is in danger, these kids are in danger, and why am I the only one who wants to stop this danger?” She bites her lip. The cop eyes her, considering. I can see the kind of rage she has cooking, a beloved-of-God, towering rage.

The cop can see it, too. “Okay, then, what's your name?”

I give the name Desiree Kandinsky and a fake address, and he writes it down. He turns to Pam. “Name?”

My mother surges forward. “She's lying! Can't you see she's lying?” She is crying in frustration, and she lets her fist come down on the officer's chest. Pounding on the chest of a police officer in grief is something I have seen women do in movies, but real police officers don't like it. He takes on a deeper voice to say, “Ma'am, I need you to step back.” Everyone stares at my mother to see what she'll do, or that's how it seems, though I know there are other cops taking down other kids' names, making kids sit in different chairs, calling their parents.

“I'll complain,” my mother starts, and I take the opportunity to retreat toward the next room in the suite, where the tall windows look out over the ocean-facing side of the Emerald. “You fucking pigs, I'll complain. How can you trust a liar and a child, I will give you her birth certificate, she is absolutely mine.” Then she dashes forward, toward me, and the cops move to block her, and that is the last thing I see: her hair snaking out as she whips her head around, trying to wriggle past the giant cartoon police dogs, her eyes huge with horror as I disappear around the corner.

Somewhere, I can hear somebody puking. I grab Pam's hand and pull her over to the window. We peer out. There is a drop to the slanting roof and dormer windows jutting from each of the floors below us. I can do it. “Kandy?”

Pam gestures toward the other room. Kandy is passed out on the bed, her golden hair spread out like a sun. Behind her, all of our small paint selves stand watch. “Don't worry, she gets arrested all the time.” Pam looks at me, flushed, one eyelid twitching. “Don't drop me.”

I swing down to the roof and slide the few feet to the top of the highest dormer window. From there, I talk Pam down to me:
Hang, straighten your body out long, now drop, get low, take my hand.
We do it four times, down to the ground, Pam shaking all over. When her feet hit the ground, she crumples like a dropped cloth and sits like that with her hands fisted. I feel elation when I hit the ground after a climb; she feels only a release from fear. I hold her head to my chest and tell her she is all right, and she seems so very slender and fragile, like a wounded bird, and I can feel her trust and her love all through my body, and I think
this
is the thing. We turn to go.