Hand Me Down (17 page)

Lucero yells, “What’s a Simba?”

“It’s a lion, Grandma Lucero,” Terrance says as he picks Noah up and sets him on his shoulders. “You know, the movie.” Noah’s
legs hang over onto Terrance’s white sleeveless T shirt and Terrance howls something that sounds like the opening song from the Disney film, “Hiiiii, yahemaaa!! Yamheeseeshadoo.” Noah joins with some “ooohing” and Mom takes a picture. Terrance bows his head and says, “The Delacruz Family Band will be performing again in ten to fifteen years.” Chuckles go around the lawn chairs and picnic tables and Terrance says, “Let’s eat cake.”

After we sing “Happy Birthday,” and Noah blows out the candles, and Mom cuts the cake and serves all of our guests before she offers a plate to me or Jaime, I’m sitting on a swing in the playground, finishing my small slice from Raley’s bakery. Most of the younger kids and some of the relatives have gone home. Jaime ate her cake and said she needed a cigarette. “Those probably cost more than underwear,” I said.

“I didn’t say I didn’t get new underwear,” she said and slipped out a pack of Marlboros from inside the waistband of her jeans. “Dad doesn’t pay for these, either,” she said and left the sandy area for somewhere more secluded.

I didn’t see him approach but suddenly Gary sits in the swing next to me and rocks his Nikes in the sand. His face is thinner; he’s lost weight since I saw him last. It must be all the sex. “Hey, Liz,” he says. “Good to see ya.”

“You, too.” I set my paper Barney plate on the ground.

“Listen,” he says and I wish he wouldn’t. I don’t hold anything against him, I know it was Carol, but he says, “I gave your mom a few things you left at our house.”

I’m glad he can’t see my face. “Thanks.”

“And,” he says. “You know, I didn’t want you to, uh, I mean…”
He sighs and runs his hands through his hair. He does not share Terrance’s growing bald spot. “Carol is pregnant,” he says.

“Congratulations.”

“Carol wants a girl,” he says. “And if it is, I hope she’s like you.”

“If I ever move back, I’ll come and babysit,” I say and he looks up at me, his eyebrows raised. I smile at him, an almost real smile to show him I’m okay.

He nods. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Liz,” he says and stands up. “Rambo misses you.”

“I miss him, too.”

“He sat outside your door and wagged his stump for days after you left,” Gary says and sticks his stubby fingers in the pockets of his jeans. He says, “Well.”

“Thanks, Gary,” I say.

He nods again. “Yep,” he says. “Take care.” His head bobs up and down as he turns and walks back to Terrance, the party, his pregnant wife. I think of all the children running around in his family. The fertile Delacruz males—fed on bologna and Kraft Singles, Sunny Delight and cheap beer, the men who sag their sweatpants, who still think poop is funny, and who tell jokes that start, “What’s the worst part about bangin’ a nigger chick?”—they must squeeze out powerful juice.

Noah was born three years
ago on a Sunday afternoon in Mercy General Hospital. Mom was calm all the way up to the maternity ward at four
A.M
., walking fast but steady with her feet spread wide, carrying her purse with her left hand, her right hand
on her protruding belly. I carried her duffel bag and Jaime and I pushed elevator buttons and opened the doors that weren’t automatic while Terrance parked Mom’s Ford Taurus. When Terrance arrived, he pushed the two chairs in Mom’s room together, balanced his Forty-Niners cap over his face and fell asleep behind a privacy curtain. “Wake me up when it’s time,” he said.

A young nurse fed Mom green Jell O from a plastic cup. “It’s not his first child, is it?” the nurse said through her pink lipstick and tight smile.

I shrugged. “With our dad, Mom had to drive herself,” I said. “At least Terrance parked the car.”

Five hours later Noah emerged pale and wrinkled, with white flaky skin and red spots on his face like tiny zits. Jaime said, “What’s wrong with him?” Mom started crying and the nurse thought maybe we should leave her alone for a while.

Terrance had held Mom’s hand during the delivery and now he stroked her forehead and told her the baby was beautiful. “He came from us,” he said, tears in his eyes. “He’s our perfect baby boy.” He kissed her cheek. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You did great.” He squeezed her hand and kissed her on the lips, a gesture that for once seemed sweet rather than disgusting. “I love you,” he said. “So much,” he said and kissed her again.

Noah cried at night; all night most nights in the beginning. Terrance and Jaime slept through his screams but I lay awake and listened to his high-pitched wails and wondered what could possibly be so distressing at his age. Mom sang lullabies and church songs in her soft soprano, rocked him in the yellow recliner, put him in his crank up swing. Sometimes he stopped screaming long
enough to eat, which he did with his eyes closed, his mouth around Mom’s nipple, his little cheek muscles working like a pulse. Mom’s strong arms held him close, her free hand smoothed the downy wisps of black on his head, traced the side of his jaw with her pinky finger, tapped his round, dime-sized nose. Once, I watched him open his mud-brown eyes and gaze up at Mom as if she were the only thing he could see and she was, literally, his whole world. She grew him inside of her from nothing and I thought,
I came from that place, too
.

Noah’s pale skin darkened each day, and the red spots faded, and after a few weeks he looked less like a big creased worm with arms and more like a baby. Jaime and I did extra chores and whatever Mom asked without arguing. We washed piles of spit up towels, baby onesies, and Terrance’s new work jumpsuits. We washed Mom’s pajamas and sweatpants and our own laundry. We took poopy diapers to the dump; cleaned bottles, hospital-green nose plungers, and tiny thermometers. We walked to the liquor store four blocks away to buy milk, eggs, toilet paper. I cooked spaghetti and fish sticks and frozen pizzas for dinner. Mom said thank you for almost everything we did, but her voice was robotic, and she didn’t say much else except her quiet cooing to Noah.

After a while, Mom went back to work. Noah started smiling, but he still cried at night. I listened to Mom tell him about her day, her coworkers, her grant-writing projects advocating assistance for abused women. She talked to him as if he were a normal person while he screamed like it hurt his throat. One night I got up to pee and saw Mom standing at the kitchen window with all the lights off, silhouetted in the moonlight, swaying her hips and shoulders
with Noah in her arms, her heels planted two feet apart. She stared out the window at the starless sky and rocked.

“Mom?”

She turned and whispered, “I think he’s asleep,” without interrupting her swaying. Black rings made caves around her eyes and dried tears glinted on her droopy grayish skin. “But I have to keep moving.”

I whispered, “Want me to wake Terrance up?”

“He has to work tomorrow.”

“So do you.”

She turned back to the window. “I did this for you, too, you know,” she said, her eyes wide open in their caverns. “Rocked you, took you for drives. You cried all the time except in the car. Worse than this, worse than Jaime, but it was night when your dad couldn’t stand it so I’d wrap you in a blanket, put you in the car seat, and drive around the neighborhood playing Joni Mitchell until you fell asleep.” She rocked her hips and swung her arms, stared through the glass at the night.

“At least Terrance doesn’t do that,” she said. “He doesn’t yell like your dad if I couldn’t get you to be quiet. I hear him still, in my head sometimes. He’d yell with his voice scratchy and he’d throw things and I’d say, ‘Shh, baby,’ over and over, but you wouldn’t stop and he hadn’t hit you, I never saw him hit you, but you could fall if he hit me and I was always tired, too tired to drive, so sometimes I’d just sit in the car in the apartment parking lot and let you scream.”

Goose bumps moved up my arms and mostly bare legs, covered to midthigh by one of Mom’s old T shirts. I took a step toward her.
She was crying. “I’m sorry I let you scream,” she said, staring straight out the window. A few distant stars looked like tiny blemishes in dark paint. “You were never afraid of him, and I was so scared,” she said, still moving to her own rhythm. “I’m so scared,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around her soft waist, under where she held Noah, and she kept rocking so we swayed there together until the sky was spotted with twinkling white defects.

Jaime and I are sleeping
on the couches tonight and since Jaime is still shorter, even if only a little, she gets the love seat. These slate-blue sofas have been around longer than Terrance and with him gone we try to pretend he never existed. Jaime says, “The house smells funny now.”

“Yeah,” I say. It smells like musty sweat and hot metal. I say, “It smells like Terrance.” We are eating microwave popcorn and watching
Twister
.

Mom comes in from the hallway. “Noah is finally asleep,” she says. “All that sugar.” She laughs. “Did you see him hit the piñata?”

“He had fun,” I say.

Jaime says, “It was good cake.” We all sigh and watch the screen: cows floating in front of Bill Paxton’s brand-new red truck, mud spraying the windshield, Helen Hunt’s hair still flawless despite tornado wind speeds.

Mom says, “I need to talk to you girls about something.”

I pause the movie and we both look at her and then at each other. We know how these talks go. She sits in one of the beige-
and-pink-cushioned chairs at the table and faces us, now wearing cotton pajama pants and a big yellow T shirt. Her hair is in a ponytail for the first time I’ve seen since Terrance was released. She has a hickey on her neck. “We are buying a house.”

Jaime says, “A real house?”

“I thought you couldn’t afford a plane ticket,” I say.

Mom says, “We got evicted.”

“What’s that?” Jaime says.

“Because of Terrance?” I say.

“Someone called the landlord and told them about Terrance’s record,” Mom says and shakes her head. “Like people can’t change.”

I say, “Who called the landlord?” but I have a guess after today’s talk with Jaime.

“Terrance wants to raise Noah in a house.”

Jaime says, “I want to live in a house.”

“We’d like you to come live with us,” Mom says and Jaime and I both freeze. We look at each other with eyebrows cocked and heads tilted. Mom says, “This second appeal is going well, and we should know by the time the house is ready, but I think God has answered our prayers.”

“What if the appeal is denied?”

“It’s in God’s hands.”

I say, “But will you make Terrance leave?”

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. She stands up. “You girls are my blood. Nothing is more important than that.” She kisses each of our foreheads and stands in her bedroom doorway. “You can come home in June, I promise.” She smiles and I think she believes it. She says, “Good night,” and closes her hollow door.

Jaime and I lean toward each other across the coffee table. Jaime whispers, “I don’t want to live with Terrance.”

“The appeal will get denied,” I say. “She’ll never make him leave.”

“If we live with Dad, we can do whatever we want.”

“Except relax.”

“He’s not that bad,” she says. “He doesn’t drink in the car anymore.”

“Without Crystal, he can do whatever he wants, too,” I say.

“At least he’s trying,” she says. She frowns and pulls away from whispering distance. “We can’t all be perfect like you,” she says, and it stings more than I would have guessed for a line both my parents have said to me before.

I turn off the TV, my throat tightening. I know Jaime’s memories don’t include the beatings I remember. I know she never hears Mom’s pleading in her head—
Please, David, think of the girls
—or the thuds of hard knuckles against soft flesh. It wasn’t Jaime who cleaned tobacco spit out of Mom’s hair, or knelt on the bathroom floor to remove glass shards from the soles of her feet with tweezers, hands slipping down metal slick with blood until my fingertips were bleeding, too. Jaime doesn’t remember the look on Dad’s face as he punched his wife, eyes wide and unseeing, his jaw fixed, teeth grinding millimeters to the left and right as he swung. She’s never had to watch her father come at her with that face or his fists, see that he doesn’t care who she is in that moment, and know that she can’t defend herself.

Jaime doesn’t remember because Mom and I worked hard to shelter her. Until today I was proud to have done such a good job. Now, I have to make her see that Dad is dangerous without
deepening the divide that’s grown between us. If I lose her, it was all for nothing.

We spend Sunday packing our
stuff. “Or I’ll do it for you,” Mom says as she’s putting on nylons and a dress without cleavage for church. When she leaves to pick up Terrance at Gary’s, Jaime and I make pancakes and eggs in our pajamas, and watch the rest of
Twister
together on the floor.

Later, in the nine by nine-foot room that used to be mine, Terrance’s leather weight bench and his dumbbells have forced my bookcase and dresser to the corners. My bed, part of a bunk that Jaime and I shared when we shared a room, is back on top in Noah’s room. Dust coats the few books and knickknacks I left behind, and I put everything in one box. My journals and favorite books and clock radio are already at Tammy’s.

In my room at Tammy’s, Alanis Morissette and The Beatles look down at me from either side of the fold-out bed. She rigged a string system so I could hang posters without putting holes in the wall, and I also have an Escher sketch and a Picasso print Tammy bought for me at a gallery in Park City. And even after I heard Sam tell her it would decrease their property value, Tammy let me stick plastic glow in the-dark stars to my ceiling.

In this room where I used to sleep, Terrance has redecorated the walls with Metallica and Black Sabbath posters, a dartboard, and pictures of shiny hairless men showing off chests as big as tractors, arms carved and tight, oiled up and flexed. His guitar stands in front of my dresser, the light wood backlit by the dark green
paint on the drawers. His fingerless leather weight gloves sit on top where my makeup used to live.