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  Without a thought, I picked a dirty plate off the table to carry it to the sink. I stopped in the middle of the room, then turned and set the plate back down where it was. Maybe it was time to stop trying to clean up the family’s messes, like Marie said. I headed up the stairs, my boxes scraping against the stairwell walls.

  My room was just as I’d left it one hour before my graduation ceremony: the torn plastic bag from my robe and cap on the floor, my bed scattered with skirts and dresses I had tried on, then discarded, as I searched for something pale enough not to show through my flimsy white gown.

  I didn’t know how to start packing any more than I knew how to start a new life. I’d slept in this room since I was born, and everything I had ever owned was in it, from my stuffed toys and books to my stacks of journals.

  I packed in a rush, not bothering to sort the things I wanted to take once I had a place to bring them—my favorite pens, my clothes, a few books, candles, odds and ends. I left the journals behind, as if by doing so I could leave the memories behind, and I scooted the boxes alongside the wall. Then I packed my duffel bag with the things I’d need immediately—a couple of changes of clothes, my toiletries, the book I was partway through reading—and I carried the bag downstairs to leave at the back door. I went back for my word processor, still in its box.

  As I carried the heavy box down, I kept my shoulder propped against the wall to keep my balance, my side brushing against the darkened smears on the paint where my fingers had trailed each time I went up or down the stairs. Stains Ma tried to cover with fresh paint every couple of years, but they always bled through, just like Clay’s handprints that were smudged above the door frame where he leapt to see how high he could reach.

  I waited at the back door for Marie, the porch light on, watching the rain glint as it fell in dotted lines from the eaves. When the wind kicked up, the rain bobbed the fronds of the spindly fern Ma had set at the edge of the porch a few days before and blew the drops through the mesh of the screen to spatter on my face.

  I closed the door and there they were, the half inch horizontal lines Ma etched in pen, an A or a T next to each of them, along with the date. Lines Mom used to mark our height from the time we could stand up, no matter how much we protested once we’d grown past the age of caring about “getting big.” I reached out and touched the marks near the height of my shoulders. About there, I decided, was when I first moved out of this house; I just hadn’t packed yet.

  I stood looking at the closed door for a time—at the hinges, the worn rim around the doorknob, at anything “safe”—as if in doing so I could keep the ugly, random slidelike images that had been pelting my brain for two days from connecting, from speeding up, from turning into a horror movie that I didn’t want to see. But staring at the door didn’t help.

  It’s strange, the way you can enter a house and feel down to your bones that something is terribly wrong, even before you see anything amiss.

  The minute I stepped inside the house that morning after graduation—just two days before Mitzy brought me back to pack—I knew something was dangerously wrong. I felt it in my skin at the nape of my neck, which had gone as taut as my breath, and in the sudden buzzing in my ears.

  I pitched my cap and gown on the kitchen counter, my gaze fixed on the table, sitting at such an odd angle. There was an empty space where the chair that normally sits at the end should have been. My sudden fear made me call out Ma’s name, even though moments ago my intent was to make it to my room without being seen or heard, so I could pretend that I hadn’t stayed out all night at Settler’s Hill.

  That’s when I saw Ma sprawled on the floor on the other side of the table, her sleeveless nightgown twisted around her hips, one bruised leg draped over the other.

  “Ma!” I stepped over her and knelt down, rolling her onto her back.

  Her eyes were only partially open, one iris a sliver under its lid, the other swollen shut and purpled. There was a cut on her left cheek, just below the swollen eye, and clotted blood smeared to her ear. Purple-red fingerprints spotted her upper arm and rimmed the sides of her neck.

  I dropped to my knees and slipped my hand under her head to turn it toward me. There was a lump under the fingertips of my left hand, just above her ear. I leaned over, putting my face close to hers to feel for breath. What I felt coming from her alcohol-drenched mouth was so faint that I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it.

  I screamed for Clay, even though I knew he wasn’t there, and I yelled for Dad, even though when I got home seconds ago, I had sighed with relief when the empty driveway reaffirmed what my watch already told me: that Dad had left for work. I called for him, even though I knew it was he who had put her on the floor.

  I slapped Ma’s unbruised cheek with quick taps and called her name, begging her to wake up: a scene straight out of one of the soap operas Ma occupied herself with in the afternoons while she medicated herself with vodka.

  Not knowing what to do for Ma, I called Marie—the same as Ma called Marie every time there was a crisis—my hands so clumsy that I could hardly dial. “Tess, is that you? Honey, take a breath. Slow down. Auntie Marie can’t understand you,” she said.

  Marie reached the house quickly. “She’s breathing, honey,” she said, after she laid her head over Ma’s chest, then pressed her fingertips to the side of Ma’s neck. “She’s going to be all right.”

  But I wasn’t convinced.

  Marie leaned back on her feet and tenderly picked up one limb and then the other, her fingers gently stroking Ma’s bruised skin. Silent tears ran down her cheeks and she didn’t bother to brush them away.

  Marie wrapped her arm around my waist firmly as two white-coated EMT workers slid Ma onto the gurney. And when a police officer told me he’d have to ask me a few questions, she stepped in quickly, telling him that I was too upset and could answer his questions later.

  “One question, then,” the officer said. “Miss? Do you have any idea who did this to your mother?”

  A new assault of fear slammed my body as I answered, “My father.”

  My legs started shaking, and Marie pulled out a chair so I could sit down. She gently pushed until the base of my neck was resting below my knees, and she told me to breathe deeply.

  And I did. At least until the sirens began their screaming descent toward town.

  Marie took me to her house after we left the hospital, saying I could pick up my things in a day or two and stay with her until I left for California in August. “I’m so glad you’re getting out of here, honey,” she told me. “You get yourself an education and a better life than your mother’s.”

  Dad cried when the police plucked him from his station and escorted him through the mill. That’s what people were bold enough to tell me later, anyway, their retarded eyes filled with pity—for him.

  When Mom was released, Marie brought her home too and wasted no time giving her opinion of things. Ma insisted that Dad wouldn’t have done it had she not had “a little too much” to drink.

  Marie jumped all over Ma then, reminding her that Dad had been slamming her around for years and that the only difference this time was that he’d gotten caught. “You are a battered woman, Lillian, and that’s all there is to it,” Marie said, her voice as sharp and hard as an arrowhead. She stopped for a breath, then quickly added, “No, I take that back. That isn’t all there is to it. You aren’t only a battered woman. You’re also a drunk.”

  Ma looked like she’d been punched all over again. I glanced at the door, thinking of bolting. Marie must have sensed this, because she pinned me to the couch with one glance before turning her attention back to Ma.

  “You know what you and Sam need … well, besides a divorce?” she said. “You need to start taking responsibility for your actions. It’s time you both stop blaming the other and start owning up to the truth about what you’ve allowed yourself to become. I don’t give a shit how many times you do something that irritates that man, he has no right to physically
and emotionally beat you as he does. And I don’t care how many times he knocks you to the floor, that’s no excuse for hiding yourself in a bottle.”

  Marie pointed her finger at me then and told Ma that I had suffered for years, living in that house with the two of them, and that Clay had lost his home for the same reason. She told Ma that even if she and Dad didn’t have any concern about what they were doing to each other and themselves, they should at least be suffering some distress about what they’re doing to us.

  Ma was sobbing, and I made a move to grab her a Kleenex from the box on the end table, but Marie put her hand up to stop me. “You aren’t going to take care of your ma in this house,” she said, and I was forced to sit there and watch Ma sob and dab her runny nose with the back of her hand.

  For a time the room was silent but for Ma’s crying. I watched Marie from the corner of my eye. Long strands of her hair had come loose from a rubber band and were hanging over a face that was more serious than I’d ever seen it, the softness normally there replaced by something as solid and immovable as a boulder.

  Marie pulled a corner of an envelope from the pocket of her sweater and fingered it. She told Ma that she knew a woman who was a recovering alchoholic and she’d given her a call. The woman would be glad to take Ma to tonight’s AA meeting, but she’d have to call the woman herself if she wanted to go. Marie said she’d leave the woman’s number on the end table. She reached over and set it there.

  I glanced at Ma, who sat on the other end of the couch, her elbow crutched on the armrest, her face propped on a fist clutching the crumpled tissues she’d taken from the box herself. She looked up at Marie then, her eyes singed with fear. “I …” and sobs claimed the rest of her words.

  Marie’s face softened, and she went to Ma, settling her large frame down beside her. She wrapped her arm around Ma and tipped Ma’s head to her shoulder. She told Ma that she loved her. That she’d kept her mouth shut in the past for the most part but that things had just gone too far and needed to stop. She stroked Ma’s hair, a gesture that always made my insides go soft.

  “You can’t do a damn thing to make Sam straighten up and fly right, Lillian,” Marie said. “But you can choose to straighten up and fly right yourself. Now. Before he kills you, or you kill yourself.” She revealed that Ma’s wounds from Dad’s beating this time were superficial and that it was her blood alcohol level that had her knocked out cold—the first I’d heard this. “One more drink,” she said, “and I could have been bitching at you in your casket, Lillian. And that scares the hell out of me.” Marie’s voice broke and she rocked Ma as she repeated, “Just scares the hell out of me.”

  I went to stay with Mitzy that night Marie insisted, saying I needed to just go and be the teenage girl I was and talk about boys, and movies, and whatever else it was that eighteen-year-old girls talk about. I didn’t want to go, because I knew I’d be keeping Mitzy from Brian and because I didn’t want to leave Ma, but Marie gave me no choice.

  Marie called after Mitzy and I finished a pizza to tell me that Ma left with her friend for the AA meeting. She told me that we shouldn’t bank on anything, but that we should pray.

  I didn’t pray, though. I’d talked to this so-called God the night Dad put Ma’s head through the wall years before, pleading with Him to not allow Dad to ever lay a hand on her again. I prayed the way I’d seen the child pray in that painting that hung in the basement of the Lutheran church where Ma dragged me on Sundays when I was little: with my knees on the floor, my elbows propped on the bed, the palms of my hands pressed together. Had there been a God, He would have stopped the beatings, I reasoned, because anyone with the goodness of a God would not have let someone like Ma be beaten.

  It was a good thing that Marie and I didn’t bank on anything, because Ma went back home the following week. Marie’s face blotched with anger when Ma told her she was going, but she didn’t try to talk her out of it. Instead, she told her flatly that if she wanted to subject herself to that hellhole some more, she could go right ahead but that I wasn’t going back with her.

  I could see from the way Marie stood—legs parted and stiff, fists on hips, chin lifted high—that she meant business. Ma knew it too, because she didn’t tell me to pack as she gathered her things.

  While she folded her nightgown—the same one that had twisted around her as they hoisted her onto the gurney—I begged her not to go home. “He’ll do it all over again. You know he will,” I said.

  Ma pointed toward the flowers and card on the nightstand and told me how when Dad brought them by earlier he promised that he was going to do better. She reminded me of Dad’s hard life and the hot head he’d inherited from his dad, then followed up with his lame promise that he’d keep it in check from now on. I looked at the roses sitting on the night-stand, still wrapped in plastic, the green plant food cartridges still fastened to their stems, and I wanted to shred them into a thousand pieces. “Did the bastard promise to stop screwing his whore too?” I snapped.

  Ma spun around to face me head-on and reminded me that I was talking about my father. She rattled the clasp on her tattered suitcase and gave up in tearful defeat, blaming her shakiness on my upsetting her.

  I probably shouldn’t have said it, but I was so upset that I couldn’t help but ask her if that was it or if it was the fact that she needed another drink that had her packing for home.

  Marie must have heard our raised voices, because she came into the room and took me by the elbow to steer me out.

  I pleaded with her to stop Ma, saying that we couldn’t let her go back there. Marie’s hold on my elbow tightened and she tipped her head so that it was resting on mine. “Honey, people will do what they’re going to do. You can’t save anyone from themselves.”

  I wish those words had sunk in.

  chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  I DELETE THAT journal entry, as if by erasing it on my computer I can delete it from my mind. I can’t, though. I see every little happening even after the words are gone, plus the extras that my mind fills in. I see the lint from Oma’s Kleenex as she cries, hovering like a cloud in front of her face. I hear the groan of the box spring as Oma pushes her suitcase closed, the click of the lock. I smell the roses, sickening sweet, and see the tiny air bubbles through the clear green plastic of the tubes at the bottom of each stem. I see these things, and my mind can’t stop screaming, Don’t go back there, Oma. Please, don’t! as if it is all happening now, not over fifteen years ago.

  I lie down on my pillow and feel the bulk of the puppet against the side of my face. I yank him out by the arm, and I’m about to throw him, but I know that he’d only make a loud clunk that would bring Oma running. And although I want her to come—so I can see with my own eyes that she didn’t stay back in this house this whole time, that she did move out and get sober and happy—I stuff him under the pillow next to the one I use and push down, smothering him.

  I don’t know how long I doze, but when I wake up, I hear women talking in the kitchen: Mom, Oma, Mitzy, and Marie, and I can smell cake baking in the oven.

  “Well, look who woke up,” Oma says when I get downstairs. She opens her arms for a hug. As I’m hugging her as hard as Marie hugs, Mom slips her hand between Oma’s big breasts and my forehead and asks me if I’m okay. “You never nap unless you’re sick,” she says.

  “Oh, I hope she’s not coming down with my bug,” Mitzy says.

  “I’m not sick,” I say, as I stand in Oma’s hug, not wanting to let go.

  “It must be all the fresh air,” Oma says.

  The timer on the oven goes off, and I scoot aside so Oma can take the cake out. It’s golden brown on top and has juice bubbling up from the edges. Pineapple upside-down cake. One of Oma’s specialties.

  The women start yakking, and Oma watches the clock so she can tip the cake onto the cookie sheet waiting alongside the pan at just the right moment. If she tips it over too soon, it will break. But if she waits too long, it won’t come out at al
l.

  “God, that smells good,” Marie says. “But I’m not sure I should have any. I’m getting so damn fat.” Of course, this prompts them all to talk about their weight and exchange dieting tips.

  “Speaking of fat,” Marie says, after they agree that watching carbs is the key to losing weight, “this morning I walked in the bedroom and found Al standing in front of my full-length mirror, his Fruit of the Looms wrapped around his thighs, his hands down here.” Marie stands up and grabs her belly near her groin. “Good God, I didn’t know what bulge he was grabbing there, and it sort of threw me, you know?” The women snicker. “Turns out he was trying to get a good look at that hernia of his, and Lord knows he couldn’t do it by staring straight down.” The women snicker all over again.

  “He looked like he’d just been caught cross-dressing, when I walked in.” Marie contorts her face to mock his fear. She lifts her hands, rolls her eyes, and sits back down. “He told me he thinks it’s a tumor,” she says. “ ‘Cancer of what?’ I asked him. ‘Cancer of the fat part?’ ”

  Mitzy laughs so hard that she snorts.

  Marie looks at Oma. “You remember what a hypochondriac his mother was? She’d stay up three days in a row to sew a damn quilt, practically around the clock, then think she had cancer because she was exhausted on the fourth day. Every damn ache or pain she had was cancer. Well, turns out my Al is a closet hypochondriac too. I should have known; that man has been making jokes about dying since I met him.

  “He finally let me make him an appointment for Thursday. Good thing, or he’d be going there for more than a hernia, I’ll tell you. What is it about men when they’re sick or hurt? Damn big babies! I should have married Robert De Niro like I’d planned to.” The women giggle.

  “If only Ray were like that,” Mitzy says. “I always want to pamper him when he’s sick, but he never lets me. His mom wasn’t the warmest of mothers, so he thinks that when you’re not feeling well, you should just wander off by yourself like a sick dog.”