“Emotional abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. Worse! You can heal broken bones; you can’t heal a broken mind. Not easily.” But Rosalee wouldn’t hear it. “She’s not going to answer.”
“I remember how Järvinens are,” said Rosalee, disturbingly patient. “None of y’all ever pick up within the first minute. ‘People who hang up quickly—’”
“‘Never want anything important,’” I finished. She knew us!
I made a baby with her. She couldn’t help but pick up a few things.
“You’ll wanna talk to her, I guess,” said Rosalee, waiting and waiting for my dead aunt to answer the phone.
“I have nothing to say to her.”
“Well, she’ll have plenty to say to you, that’s for sure.”
I shrugged and drank, smugness pouring into me along with the ice-cold milk as the wind manhandled the sweet gum on the lawn and sent its branches scraping along the house. The wind wasn’t manhandling me. My brief day of homelessness had ended with me sheltered and well fed, not by Child Protective Services or a pimp, but by my own mother. How many other runaways could make that claim?
“Ulla?” Rosalee stopped pacing and leaned against the counter. “This is Rosalee Price. Yeah, me.”
I almost choked on my milk, my smugness evaporating into sour gas. “She’s alive?”
Rosalee put her hand over the phone. “Sounds like it.”
I slammed the glass to the table.
Rosalee slanted a dark look at me but spoke into the phone, “I know that. She just turned up on my doorstep.”
I heard Aunt Ulla’s heated voice all the way from my chair. Rosalee had to hold the phone away from her ear.
When the screaming died down, Rosalee said, “How many stitches? Oh. Too bad. Well, what do you want me to do? Burst into flames? I said it was bad.”
Louder, angrier yelling.
“Don’t yell at me. Yell at your niece when you pick her up. Well, you have to see her again. She’s your family. Don’t put that daughter shit on me! I never even seen her before today!” Pause. “What? Diagnosed as what?”
Panic sent me scurrying out of the kitchen, my pack slung over my shoulder. What was I doing sitting around like the battle was won? She knew about me now. Aunt Ulla was giving her a play-by-play of all my antics over the past year, including the incident from this morning. Rosalee would be more desperate than ever to send me away. I had to move quick and stake out a bit of earth for myself before Rosalee got off the phone.
I found a switch on the wall that lit the living room: one chair and one footstool, but no futon or foldout couch. No couches, period. Down a hallway to my left was a bathroom, a linen closet, an office the size of a closet, and finally Rosalee’s bedroom, which housed a twin-size bed.
I went back to the living room, worried. One chair in the kitchen, one chair in the living room, a twin bed in the bedroom. It wasn’t that Rosalee didn’t have room in her life for me; Rosalee didn’t have room for anybody.
Opposite the front door was a staircase. I went up expecting more of the same antisocial layout, but on opening the single door at the top of the stairs, I discovered a large, empty attic space shaped like the top half of a stop sign. The walls were white and the same blond wood from downstairs covered the floor. A large window with brass-handled casements overlooked the dark, dreaming street.
Such good bones this room had. Such potential. It even had its own bathroom with a shower, sink, and toilet so white I doubted they’d ever been used.
A guest room. Empty because Rosalee clearly didn’t want any guests. Luckily, I wasn’t a guest.
I was family.
I set my bag on the floor and unpacked: seven purple dresses, purple underclothes, my purple purse, the big wooden swan Poppa had carved for me, and my cell phone. Since the room had no closet, I placed everything on the built-in shelves along the wall opposite the door, including my pills, which took up almost all the top shelf. I put the few toiletries I’d packed into the medicine cabinet. And that was it.
I was home.
We’re both home. Poppa agreed, satisfied. He had been waiting to reunite with Rosalee even longer than I had.
I went downstairs and paused for a bit outside the kitchen door. When I heard nothing but Rosalee’s sporadic murmurings, I continued down the hall to the linen closet and commandeered several thick blankets and one purple bath towel.
The purple I took as an omen—a good one.
I hadn’t packed any nightgowns, so after I undressed and washed up, I wrapped myself in the towel and combed out my hair, which was always a chore. Island-girl hair did not like to be combed.
“What’re you doing?”
Rosalee stood in the doorway of the attic room, staring at my belongings on the shelf and at her blankets on the floor.
Staring in horror.
I untangled the comb from my hair and knelt next to the pile of blankets. “I’m nesting.”
“Like hell you are! You can’t stay here!”
Aunt Ulla had poisoned her mind against me.
“Yes, I can.” I unfolded the blankets and piled them atop one another. “What you mean to say is, you don’t want me here.”
“That’s right! I don’t!”
I sang, “You can’t always get what you want.”
Rosalee stared at me as though she’d never seen anything like me before. “Are you even gone ask how your aunt’s doing? Least you could do after what you did to her.”
“You said she’s alive.” I tested the softness of the pallet and found it lacking. I added two more blankets. “What else do I need to know?”
“It took eleven stitches to put her head back together. She only just got home from the hospital. You’re lucky she didn’t call the cops. You’re lucky she didn’t die.”
When I didn’t say anything, Rosalee knelt across from me, keeping the pallet between us. A shiny red bracelet encircled her left wrist, a bracelet with an old-fashioned silver key as long as my pinky dangling from it. I wondered what she’d do if I touched her hand, touched her anywhere, to see what it felt like.
“Why’d you hit her?” Rosalee asked.
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“You tell me.”
I stopped fiddling with the blankets. “She wanted to send me back to the psych ward so they could lock me away forever, and I told her I didn’t want to be locked away forever, but she wouldn’t listen. So I had to show her.”
I illustrated just how I’d shown Aunt Ulla by miming a heavy blow to Rosalee’s head. Then, unable to resist, I brushed my fingertips across the soft silk of Rosalee’s cheek. She felt feverish. Familiar. My fingers knew her. “But I wouldn’t do to you what I did to her. Forget about what she told you. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
Rosalee smacked my hand away as though it were a fly, the key attached to her bracelet jingling angrily. “Even if you were Hannibal Lecter himself,” she said, rising to her feet with careless grace, “around here you’re nothing special. You’re the one who should be afraid.” She began to pace. “You know your aunt’s packing up your stuff as we speak? Says she’s either gone ship it all here or to the state hospital.”
“Tell her to ship it here.”
“Only thing’s getting shipped is you.” Her footsteps echoed in the empty room, exaggerating the distance between us. “You think I aim to be responsible for what would happen to you if you stay in this town?”
“You haven’t been responsible for me for sixteen years,” I said. “Why should it bother you now? It doesn’t bother me.”
“I’ll drive you to Dallas myself if I have to,” she muttered to herself, ignoring me.
“And then what? You come back here and live your life of solitary splendor? To hell with that. I don’t care if you don’t want me—I need a mother more than you need solitude.”
Rosalee stopped pacing and looked down at me, tight-lipped. “What I need is to not have to chase after a bipolar-disordered kid.”
>
If she thought that name-calling would put me in my place, she was sadly mistaken. “I prefer manic-depressive,” I told her, “if it’s all the same to you. It’s much more explicit, don’t you think? More honest? But really, you can call me whatever you like as long as I get to stay.”
“I don’t know anything about normal kids, let alone …” Rosalee waved her hand at me and all my disordered glory.
“There’s nothing to know,” I told her. “All I have to do is take some pills and everything is jolly.”
“Your definition of ‘jolly’ includes assault and battery? You put your aunt in the hospital!”
“I haven’t taken my pills in a while,” I conceded.
Rosalee stomped to the shelf and snatched up a random handful of pill bottles. “So take ’em now.”
She took up her Easter Island stance, so I got up and got the right bottles from the shelf—lithium and Seroquel.
“What’re all these other ones for?” Rosalee asked, examining the bottles she’d picked up.
“Different things: depression, insomnia, anxiety, hyperactivity, blah, blah, blah.” I held up the lithium. “This one evens me out. And this one”—I held up the Seroquel—“makes the hallucinations go away.”
“You hallucinate?”
Having her undivided attention was making me giddy. “That’s why my latest shrink decided I was manic-depressive. He said it was either that or schizophrenia, and I’m way too charming and rational to be a schizophrene. His words, not mine.”
I washed down the pills with water, which I drank straight from the tap in the bathroom. When I came out, I said, “Is that better? Are you happy? Can I stay now?”
“No!”
So much for giddiness. “No it’s not better, no you’re not happy, or no I can’t stay?”
“All of the above.”
I picked up Swan from the shelf and cuddled her. She was cold and heavy and made of wood, but a girl like me had to take comfort wherever she could get it.
“Why do you want me to leave?” I said. “I’ll be eighteen in two years. All the hard work of raising me has been done. I’m old enough to see to my own needs. You don’t have to do anything. What’s the big deal?”
Rosalee had hidden her arms behind her back so I wouldn’t get the idea that I could cuddle with her, too. “You wouldn’t fit in here.” She sounded desperate. “I keep telling you. A girl like you could never learn to adapt. And why would you want to? You think you’re crazy now? There’s things in this town that’d drive anybody—What the hell’s so funny?”
I could barely hear her, I was laughing so hard. “Let me get this straight: You want me to leave because you don’t think I can adapt?”
“I know you can’t.”
Was she serious?
I was biracial and bicultural—a walking billboard for adaptation. And what did she expect me to adapt to? Fishing in the crick? Baking pies from scratch? Small-town life was sure to be slow and boring, but maybe that was what I needed—Dallas sure hadn’t done me any good.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let me stay for one month. If I can fit in, make friends, all that, then I get to stay. But if I fail, then I’ll leave, and you’ll never have to see me again.”
Rosalee was quiet a long time. “One week.”
“Two weeks.”
More quiet. “And you’ll go back to your aunt?”
I stroked Swan’s long, straight neck. “I didn’t say that.”
“Then say it now or no deal.”
She seemed to be blanking on the fact that Aunt Ulla didn’t want me anymore—never had, actually—but if Rosalee wanted to listen to me lie, I didn’t mind indulging her. “If I can’t fit in, I’ll go back to Aunt Ulla.”
Rosalee sighed, a step-off-the-cliff, no-hope-for-it-now kind of sigh. “Please yourself, then. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I couldn’t believe it. Even knowing what she knew about me, she’d agreed to let me stay. “Yippee!” I waltzed Swan around the room.
Rosalee watched me dance—again as though she’d never seen anything like me—and went to the door, shaking her head.
“Good night, Momma.” The name immediately felt weird in my mouth, in my ears.
It must have sounded weird to Rosalee as well. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “I don’t even know you.”
I hadn’t thought black eyes could look icy, but Rosalee’s did. I stopped dancing and squeezed Swan against my chest. “If that’s the way you want it.”
“It is.” She left, and everything felt empty: the room, me.
She hates you. Poppa said. I told you she would. I told you she was unfeeling.
I set Swan on the shelf and curtsied to her, thanking her for the dance. “She can feel plenty. She just doesn’t want to. I’ll make her feel. I’ll make her want to keep me.”
In a week?
“Two weeks.” I switched off the overhead light. “That’s plenty of time. I’m a likable person, aren’t I? And she is my mother. Her instincts will kick in.”
After sixteen years? I think her instincts died a long time ago.
“Don’t be so gloomy, Poppa.” I scooched the pallet closer to the shelves so that Swan could better watch over me. I ditched the towel and lay naked on the pallet, pulling the chilly top blanket to my chin. “I can win her over. I know it.”
What if you can’t?
I yawned. “If I can’t, then I’ll paint the walls of her house with my blood.” A roll of thunder crashed outside and echoed beneath me along the floorboards.
“No matter what happens, one way or another, I’m here to stay.”
Chapter Three
Thunder awakened me.
The heavy rain drilling against the window made dark wriggling shadows against the oblique ceiling. The rain echoed in the shadowy attic space and made me feel small and fragile, like a lace glove left behind on moving day—mateless and abandoned.
I shivered on the pile of blankets, waiting for Poppa to whisper to me so I’d know I wasn’t alone, but I’d silenced him when I’d taken my pills. Insanity or sanity. Poppa or loneliness. Wretched decisions I had to make every day.
Fucking manic depression.
I shuffled into the bathroom, and by the time I’d showered the hitchhiking grit from yesterday down the drain, I’d made my choice for the day.
Sanity.
I took my pills and pulled on the lavender eyelet dress I’d made right before Poppa had died, well before I’d gone into my all-purple phase. Like every dress I made, it had princess seams that highlighted my curves, a high bodice, and a knee-length skirt. And because frustrating boys was one of my great passions, this particular dress had a row of tiny, jeweled buttons down the front that had stymied many ham-handed Romeos.
I stood at my window, watching the rain try to drown the world. Rosalee and I could still get to know each other, but we would have to spend the day inside. Surely I could convince her not to go to work today; why would she even want to? She could tell her boss to give her retroactive maternity leave or something.
Surely she wouldn’t leave me alone and spend the whole day wondering whether I was destroying her house.
I went downstairs to the kitchen, my rumbling stomach as loud as an engine in the silent house … and saw Rosalee. She was hunched over the dining table, scribbling onto a yellow sheet of paper. She raised her head when I came in.
Even in the dull rainlight, even in her tattered red sleep shirt, she was still too beautiful to look at, and so close I could smell the lingering scent of Dove on her skin. Weird knowing such an intimate thing as what soap she used after years of cluelessness.
A glass bowl of mixed fruit, mostly apples and bananas, sat on the counter separating the cooking and dining areas. A whiff of cleanser, something lemony, hung in the air.
As I grabbed a banana, she said, “Go get your pack.”
“Why?”
She went back to her scribbling. “Just do it.” r />
I got my empty pack, reluctantly, and went back to the kitchen.
The key on Rosalee’s bracelet jingled as she held out the sheet of notebook paper to me. “Take this.”
I took it.
Rosalee had written directions to a school called Portero High; she’d even drawn a map. I looked at her in disbelief. “You want me to go to school ?”
“You only got two weeks to fit in. School’s the easiest place to start. Gimme that pack.”
I gave it to her as a mild case of first-day-of-school jitters struck me, an absurd sensation this late in September. The rain had seemed so cozy a moment before, but now that I had to go out in it …
I eyed the map dubiously, then watched the perilous sweep of water—framed so beautifully in the picture window—rush along the street, and I couldn’t help but imagine myself being swept along with it … into a drainage ditch.
“You don’t expect me to walk, do you? In this storm? I could catch pneumonia.”
“I don’t mean for you to walk. There’s a bike in the garage.”
“A bike?”
I went to the back door and peered through the glass panel. Torrents of white water streamed down the driveway from the garage to the street. Waiting to capsize me and Rosalee’s alleged bike.
This had to be a test. God tested his followers, didn’t he? Cruel tests of faith and devotion? Rosalee wanted to see how far she could push me, see if she could make me snap before I won the bet.
“Here.”
Rosalee stood behind me, holding out a shiny black raincoat and a pair of galoshes.
“I don’t wear black.”
“You’re the one don’t wanna catch pneumonia.” She shoved the rain gear at me. “Take ’em.”
I took ’em.
“You need lunch money too.” She tucked a five-dollar bill into my dress strap—like I was a stripper!—and shoved notebooks, pencils, and pens into my pack. When she was done, she zipped up the pack and turned to me. “Put on the raincoat!”
I did, feeling drunk on the attention.
“Galoshes too.”
Even when a mother’s child bashed someone on the head, that mother still wanted her child to be protected against the rain. This was what I’d been missing all my life, this motherly concern.