What I Had Before I Had You (6 page)

The laughter of the kids around us is uproarious. Pam says I am fucking
nuts,
as if this is a fantastic thing. I'm surprised again by what impresses my new friends. The ratty boy slumps on the floor, holding the back of his hand to his nosebleed.

“Please try to remember,” I say, and he scowls up at me like he wants to bitch me out, but like he is afraid of me, too.

I walk home in the chalky dawn, drunk and pleased with myself and blissfully distracted. I am a teenager now. I am armed with new weapons. I fall into bed and sleep at last.

I SWIM UP
toward the surface of my dream and hear the song before I realize what it means:
Sweet William on his deathbed lay for the love of Bar'bry Allen. So slowly, slowly, she got up, and slowly she drew nigh him, and the only words to him did say, young man, I think you're dyin'.
My mother is home. I calculate quickly: It was nine days.

I'm still wearing the clothes of the night before: cutoffs and a white T-shirt brittle with beer stains. I stink. I leap up and dig my cotton flowered pajamas from a pile on the floor, hop on one foot as I whip shorts off and boxers on. I slip the dirty clothes between my dresser and the wall. My room is painted peach and furnished haphazardly—my bed is dark wood and my dresser is pink laminate, meant for a little girl; a brown oval shag rug swallows dropped earrings. I spray myself with drugstore papaya body spray and hope it's strong enough.

She's not in the kitchen, but something smells rich and salty and makes me hungry like I haven't been in weeks. An enormous lasagna is browning in the oven, cheese bubbling on Pyrex. My mother is out back, hosing gunk from the grooves of a tomato-paste can. The world rights itself. She stands with one bare foot up on the tilted porch, in a black sundress with gold buttons up the front, her red hair burning up in the sunlight. Her freckles and moles in all the familiar places, the old friendly jut of her shoulder blades as she bends over her task. Seeing her there is like a good breath of air after an underwater hour.

She spots me blinking in the doorway and drops the running hose.

“Olivia! My tiny bunny rabbit, I am home!” She comes at me full-force, grabbing my cheeks and kissing around her pinching fingers. I pretend to mind; this is an old game. I laugh and groan and wriggle free.

“I can see that,” I say, and sit down on the edge of the porch, dangling my feet in the grass, as she picks up the hose.

“So. You made some new friends.” She wants me to believe that this is a psychic intuition, but I know better: She looked in on me while I was sleeping, before my costume change. It doesn't matter; I have more important things to talk about. The pressure of the visions on the inside of my mind is too much to bear a moment longer.

“Mom. I started seeing my sisters. I saw them three times. Out on the beach. But they were older, like my age.”

My mother hoses fiercely at an already clean can. “That's impossible.”

“I'll show you.”

I dash inside and down to the basement to grab my photos. When I come back up, my mother is spooning baby food into cups at the kitchen counter. I slap the prints down in front of her. “Their names are Laura and Courtney,” I say.

She inhales sharply, and I think I've got her with the names. Are they the ones she chose? She's never called them by name
.
I watch her face for pride, but she is impassive.

“No,” she says. “I don't know them.”

She is using her absolute tone of voice, and I am baffled. Why is this moment so cold and so flat and so far from what I had envisioned? Could it be pure selfishness—that she wants to remain my sisters' only ambassador? She places a cup on each high chair tray, in the circular indentations, and turns away to the silverware drawer.

“I
know
they are my sisters. Like you know things.”

She places two tiny spoons in the cups. “You think you're coming into your gift.”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

She puts a hand to my forehead as if I am sick and draws my face up to hers, our same-green eyes very close. “I don't see it in you,” she says. “I would see it.”

“But I
know
them.”

“That's impossible. Your sisters are right here.” She gestures at the air beside us.

The narrowness of her logic oppresses me. It was easy to play along with her visions when I had none of my own. Now I feel a rising disgust. She is utterly convinced of her own point of view, like the explorers who staked their lives on the flatness of the earth, who stared at a globe and said,
Impossible.

“Impossible because
I
saw them, not you,” I say.

“You're mistaken. Let it go.” She pulls her hair off her face, and I see that her fingernails are clipped and bitten bare. “Shall we go swimming, you and I?”

The force of my fury surprises me. I always imagined that the day I inherited her gift would be a great day, a threshold between an ordinary childhood and an extraordinary future. And now she has ruined it. I am not mistaken; I felt that blood thrum of recognition, I knew those girls in a way I trust like my body's will to breathe. If my mother is right and I am wrong, it means that I am not simply
mistaken
but that I can trust nothing I see or feel, that my intuition itself is broken. She must know this, yet there she stands, sweetly smiling.

I grab the toaster from the counter and throw it on the floor. It does not break, and we both regard it for a moment before I flee the house. As I mount my bike, I can see her through the screen door, kneeling to take the lasagna out of the oven. I think of the plastic-wrapped portion I'll find in the fridge later, and I resolve not to eat a bite.

THE EMERALD CROWD
absorbs me completely. I slip out my bedroom window after my mother's curfew and back in at dawn, and I am gone again after breakfast. With these kids, there is none of the noodling around about who calls whom first, who sits next to whom. We are like hive insects, congregating, swarming, dispersing. Kandy is the queen; if she says you're in, you're in. We generate so much noise, in every sense of the word, that I can barely hear the anxious whine of my own mind. We sprawl on the beach, we party in the honeymoon suite, we see who can pocket the most candy at Rite Aid. I wait for my sisters to join us again.

Pam wears Doc Martens spattered with paint and suspenders over rumpled T-shirts that she screen-prints herself: ducks with radio antennae, vases of flowers with baby-head centers, a diver poised on a water tower. Being at Pam's house is like being inside a sitcom: Something wacky is bound to happen, but everyone will band together to put things right, and the episode will end with a good one-liner and everything back to normal. Pam's parents, Lynnette and Doug, do crosswords in the mornings and kiss in front of their kids. The first time I go over there, I watch Lynnette chase Doug across the house with a flyswatter, laughing, and she won't tell us why. She is a pharmacist. Pam writes herself prescriptions for Dexedrine or Percocet on her mom's Rx pad. To fill them, we drive to other towns in Pam's hand-me-down Honda wagon. Pam's brother, Drake, is taking a year off before college to
find himself.
There are photos of family kayaking trips on the mantel.

Kandy's has the feel of a flophouse, but all the stubbly guys draped over the couches playing Action Fighter on their SEGA, studying the contents of the fridge, and yelling at one another for clogging the toilet or drinking the last soda—these are her brothers. Her mom is born-again, and her dad just sleeps.

I AM HANGING
at one of our spots (
our
spots, now) on the benches in front of our favorite boardwalk arcade. Kandy is watching Jake play Asteroids in the dimness, leaning her forearms on the lip of the game control board, sticking her ass out. Out on the bright boardwalk, the boys are kicking around a Hacky Sack, and the girls are talking. It seems that we are seeing who can talk the loudest. Pam and I are draped over the boardwalk fence, our legs laced between the rails. Pam throws her head back to watch a flock of gulls wing overhead. “You're going to get pooped on in the eye,” I tell her, and she wails with laughter. Over on the beach, jocks pile up, diving after a volleyball. And then I catch a glimpse of tangled auburn. My body snaps alert.

But receding down the boardwalk are two strangers, with hair not so thick nor so red as my sisters'. One of them scowls back at me. Pam looks at me curiously. “Who's that?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “Nobody.” Panic, in these moments. I feel myself rising and falling like an old helium balloon, and I think that if I don't ground myself now, I will float up to join my mother, high above reason, trailing a snipped string. But I don't know how, and so, because I am trying so hard not to think of them, my sisters are always there, hovering at the edges of my vision.

JAMES IS NOT
my mother's only boyfriend. There is Riley, an electrician with enormous forearms who brings me Charleston Chews and, even in the summer, asks me that most inane of questions, “How's school?” There is Terry, who says he works in the import-export business, whatever that means. He brings me books of photographs—Ansel Adams or Man Ray or E. J. Bellocq—and nervously adjusts his long black ponytail. Right now there is another, a French guy who wants us to call him Rocko. He doesn't have to bring me anything, I assume because he is so good-looking. The boyfriends don't bother me; I know my mother will never open our door to a man, not really. They are good for presents and trips but not forever.

My mother doesn't know who my father is. When she was younger, she worked for a madam in New York City and opened her legs to countless men. She doesn't have to tell me not to mention this period of her life to other people, though I am not shocked—I am impressed, even, a little. She never hid it from me, though I understood better as I grew. At some point, she told me, God decided it was time for her to be a mother, and He willed a pinprick hole into her diaphragm. Who knows how long it was before she noticed, how many sperm—of every kind and color—swam through that little tear into the world of my uncertain parentage? I don't envy my friends their fathers. At Pam's house, the bathroom sink is full of disgusting beard shavings; when she wants to go on an overnight, she has to get permission twice.

My mother taught me about sex before I can remember, about the circular journey of the egg and the way the sperm muscle in to fight for position. She said sex is only a tiny flea in the fur of love, which is a magnificent tiger, but that love, like a tiger, will kill you fast. When I asked her if she'd ever been in love, she said no and that she was glad. I didn't particularly believe her, but when she spoke with such finality, there was no way to needle her into saying more. Her past, as always, a locked vault.

Tonight she is out to dinner with Rocko, which tends to occupy her for three or four hours, so when Kandy and Pam show up at my back door with a joint, a bag of fun-size candy bars, and
Back to the Future
on rental, I let them in. “Are you alone?” asks Kandy, craning to see past me into the kitchen. They clatter inside, and I see the house along with them, as if for the first time: the white high chairs and the empty Gerber jars on the table, spilled apple juice sticky on one of the trays. I notice that I have been derelict in my duties—a perilous tower of dirty dishes in the sink, paper water-ice lids everywhere with their lemony crust, heels of bread wadded in countless Pepperidge Farm bags. Pam takes in the tacked-up pictures of horses from last year's
Mustangs of the Sierra
calendar. The kitchen's blue paint is cracked at all the ceiling corners, and beside the refrigerator sit boxes upon boxes of my mother's favorite five-dollar cabernet.

“Score,” says Pam, pulling out a bottle. “Opener?”

Kandy traces the back of a high chair with her finger as she studies the room. I feel a nauseous, nervy thrill: My new friends have stumbled into the secret center of my life, and they have no idea what they're looking at. “You have siblings?” Kandy asks.

I scrabble through the drawer of loose utensils for a corkscrew, planning to pretend I forgot that the wine bottles are screw-top, buying myself a moment to think. The impulse to lie is very strong. Yes, I had toddler brothers, but they died yesterday. I'm doing fine, thanks. No, the chairs are for my little cousins who visit sometimes from Trenton. Actually, our house has been rented for a movie set. But why should I lie? As far as my friends know, I am the kind of crazy where I punch boys in the face and climb roller coasters. Fun crazy, not sad crazy. I can tell them about my mother's phantom baby rituals without implicating myself at all. I can tell them I am whoever I want to be, and then
be
that way.

“Oh, wow,” says Pam, and I turn to see that she is standing in the open doorway of the nursery. In contrast to the kitchen, I kept the nursery immaculate during my mother's absence. I can't pretend I did this only for her. The bars of the cribs gleam with Lysol lemon. I even ground my fists into the pillows to make the appearance of recent sleepers.

Pam looks at me critically. “Are they out? With your mom?”

“No,” I say. “I'm an only child. I told you, she's crazy.” It's easier to say it this time. I feel how much further I can go in this direction, and it is exciting. I am not her tiny bunny rabbit. “She had stillborn twins before I was born. She says she can see their ghosts.”

“And she believes it?” prompts Pam, opening the diaper closet. “She really sees them?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That's so fucked up,” says Kandy, and sighs happily. “So you want to watch the movie?”

Kandy and Pam look a little let down at the ordinariness of the rest of the house: wooden coffee table, cream chenille couch, some pictures on the walls, ceramic swan candleholders, scattered issues of
National Geographic
(my mother subscribes for me, for the pictures). Our curtains are made from old pink and gold saris, and Pam reaches behind the couch to touch them. Kandy says everything is
nice
. “Nice spider plant! Oh, nice place mats.”