Invisible Girl (2 page)

She hits harder and harder. Her arms are long, with hard knots for biceps. I close my eyes and a trusty word shimmers like an oasis through sweltering heat in the middle of my brain. I drop to my knees and watch
antidisestablishmentarianism
rise into droplets of glittering diamonds. I’m barely aware of the noise of her slaps and the sharp clink of her bracelets hitting each other when she swings her fist.

When there’s a sharp kick in my back, I fall forward. Pain bursts along my side and my word melts away because my breath is coming out so hard and steamy, it couldn’t stand the heat.

I open my eyes. My mother’s eyes pour into mine, but they’re not angry anymore. They look more shocked, like she can’t believe that there’s a thin stream of blood dripping from the corner of my mouth. She drops to her knees and pulls my head against her chest. “Why do you make me do this?” she whispers. “Why? Why?”

I smell her perfume and know I’m not supposed to answer this question. She starts rocking me and calling me “poor baby.”

I feel the pressure in my head and I know I hate her, but I love her stroking my back right now and I’m too dizzy to know how to think about anything.

Sometimes, after she’s been at me, I think about killing her. But then, later, she comes into my room, washes my cuts and brushes my hair. She cries and tells me how much she loves me. Sometimes she sleeps in my bed with me, pressing me against her chest, and I sleep in a cloud of warm skin and safety.

I try to pretend I’m in that cloud now, but pain keeps jerking from my back and globs of hate rise like pus in my heart. Then she puts her lips to my ear and starts singing something in a normal mom’s voice. My hate globs burst into pure air. I feel an electric current of need running from her bursting breasts to my baby ones, like she knows all the woman secrets of periods and bras and that I won’t if she’s not with me.

I melt against her.

She puts a last kiss on my cheek and stands. I notice for the first time that there is a suitcase near the door. My face gets hot again but it’s a different kind of heat, one that starts in my stomach and feels like I ate old food that’s now burning up inside me.

I look at my dad. He looks away fast because he’s leaking all over. Invisible water pours out of him, and I wonder if I blew on him, would he just fall over. I know there’s nothing to get from him but I say, “Da-ad?”

He moves slowly out of the daze where he hides whenever I’m being beaten. His pale hand with the hairy knuckles reaches out for my mom’s arm, but she moves away roughly and the hand falls through the air down to his side empty.

My mother walks to the door and picks up the suitcase. She looks at me. Her eyes are less runny now, as if she can actually see stuff outside her body. I give her my freezing stare like I do on the days when she forgets to pick me up from school and I walk the three miles home rather than letting the nuns know that she isn’t coming again. Usually when I do this, if she’s not so drunk that she’s hitting me, she cries until her eyes are red and she has to use ice on them. Today she doesn’t even notice my stare.

I keep it up anyway. I want to stay tough and show her I’m really, really furious, but she isn’t even looking at me anymore. She’s walked back over to the closet and is flicking through the coats and sweaters. She grabs a couple and lays them over her arm. Then she turns toward the door again.

I notice a run in her black pantyhose right below the back of her knee. Her skin, normally dark, looks bright white where it presses between the black threads.

I plan on hating her forever, then “Don’t go” pours out of me from somewhere behind my stomach, somewhere I didn’t know about. Before I know it, tears burst. I lurch on my knees and grab her around the waist. The material of her dress is satiny, and I have to hold on hard. Her chain belt is sharp against my face.

“Mom, don’t go,” I say in a whisper. “I promise I won’t take your bottles anymore.” My voice sounds wet as if the rain outside has gotten into my throat.

I figure she’s had it with me for the bottles. When I’m really mad at her, I scour her hiding places and take the amber containers into the alley and throw them into the dumpster. I like to do this on Mondays after the dumpsters are emptied so they can shatter against the bottom.

My mother’s hands claw at mine, trying to pull me off of her. I grunt as I hold on. My hands are dark like hers, Italian hands, not Irish like my dad’s. Our fingers are shaped exactly the same except hers end in sharp red nails. Her bangles slam against each other. Then one nail digs into me so hard, I lose my grip.

“Ow,” I yelp. Blood rises quickly on the cut as if I had too much in my body in the first place and some was dying to get out.

I look up. She’s staring over my head toward the door. I sob and hiccup at the same time. “Mommy, don’t leave me” flies out. I haven’t called her “Mommy” since I was five.

She kneels down in front of me and pushes her forehead against mine. For a second, she’s the queen who comes in my bedroom and brushes my hair that’s just like hers. She looks like she’s about to tell me something really important when a car beeps outside.

She puts her hands on the floor and makes a small grunt as she starts to get up. I stare hard to direct her eyes back into mine so she can tell me the something important, but she’s already standing up with her eyes trained over my head.

The car outside beeps again and she kisses my cheek with a vague swipe of lips like she’s already out the door and her lips are running behind her. I can feel the red smudge on my skin. I can smell the whiskey mixed with her perfume. She turns and walks to the door. Her steps are wobbly. My father reaches out and this time grabs her arm. She swings her fist at him. “Don’t touch me,
Senator.”

My father sags back like a bag of flour someone punched.

The car beeps again and she hurries down the front porch steps, almost tripping on the broken one at the bottom. She holds her hand over her head as if it could protect her from the pounding drops. I crawl to the door because it doesn’t occur to me to stand up and walk. A big man gets out of the driver’s seat and opens her door for her, then tosses her suitcase into the backseat.

My dad watches with me. I want to smack some courage in him to go get her, but I’m afraid if I turn my head to look at him, she’ll be gone. Stupidly, I try to think of the right Warrior Word, as if there were one that could freeze her in her tracks so we could carry her back in, but nothing pops into my head.

She trips on something and her foot turns in the little cage of its high-heel shoe. She stumbles and falls into the passenger seat and slams the door. She doesn’t look back at me as the car speeds away, red lights winking through a wall of rain.

I don’t even realize that I’ve stood up in our doorway with no pants or underpants on until some kids whip down the streets on their bikes and yell, “Beeeaver,” then laugh as their tires send up white sprays of water, sparkling under the streetlights.

CHAPTER TWO

Everyone is over. Deep voices rumble. Kitchen chairs scrape battered tile. I’m upstairs with my chin resting on the clothing chute. Thank God all of my dad’s brothers are loud. Especially when they’re drinking. Otherwise it’d be impossible to pick out the words from the big male thunder.

I close my eyes to hear better. My dad’s voice sounds higher than his brothers’, as if he really wasn’t one of them but a stranger, weaned from his mother too early and deprived of vital nutrients. He’s saying, “Not even a phone call.” Then he tells them about what time she left last night and what the guy in the car looked like.

I know he won’t tell them that she squeezed her eyes half shut like an eel and called him “Senator.” He couldn’t possibly explain that to his broad-shouldered, thick-necked brothers, whose wives bring them beers during football games.

I could go down and tell them though. I know all about it. On queen nights when she brushed my hair she’d tell me that we were all going to end up in the White House. Since my dad’s Irish, he’d be like John F. Kennedy, who was the president way back in the 1960s. My dad’s going to finish law school, get into local politics, then win all the national races until finally, he runs for president. She’s going to be the first lady and have magazines write about what she wears. She says that the only difference between her and Jackie O., who was John F. Kennedy’s fancy wife, is that she’s Italian rather than French.

I’ve read all her Kennedy books. When I was younger, we used to pretend we were Kennedys and have conversations with them. My mom knew all their nicknames. When she was tired drunk instead of mean drunk, she talked about redoing rooms in the White House and what type of china she would pick out.

My dad says one more thing but it’s blurred, like the words got smudged by his tonsils on the way out. No one says anything for a minute, and then my uncle Pat clears his throat. He’s used to making decisions and speaking at meetings. He’s a union rep. There are seven boys in my dad’s family, all of them still in Boston and all of them, except my dad, working in construction.

My uncle Pat starts talking in low but urgent tones like he’s one of the nuns trying to get a nervous kid to stand up and go out on stage for a spelling bee. I hear “family,” “time,” and “Michael’s for a while.” I don’t know who Michael is.

My uncle Pat has five kids. All my uncles have at least four. My dad is the youngest and he and my mom just have me. My uncle Pat speaks louder and tells my dad to finish law school and get on with his life, that she’ll come back.

I cross my fingers. I have secret fantasies I’d never admit to anyone. They started when I was ten and I’m too old for them now, but I keep them anyway, like a nightgown that’s become way too short but it’s so soft, you wear it. I desperately want my dad to finish law school so he won’t be blank anymore and he’ll be like Nancy Drew’s father, Carson Drew, the distinguished lawyer who solves cases with Nancy’s help. Then, I’d get to come into his office, look over important papers and say with a smile and a small shake of my head, “Looks like we’ve got another one, Dad.”

Being like Nancy Drew seems more perfect now than ever. Nancy’s mother died when she was three. My mother has left us. It will just be me working with my dad, up against evil-looking thugs with tattoos or normal-looking businessmen who secretly run high school slavery rings. I’ll have a housekeeper like Nancy’s housekeeper, Hanna Gruen, who will worry about me when I’m not home on time and cluck over my missed meals and going without my raincoat.

Then, if my mom comes back and my dad wants to be president after we’ve solved around a hundred cases, that will be okay too. I know for a fact that Jackie O. wasn’t a drinker, because how could you be passed out or hitting people with all those reporters hanging around the White House?

The image is ruined when I hear something like a choking sound. I lean my head a little farther down. Now it’s a gasping. I open my mouth in concentration and my gum slips out and plummets down the chute into the laundry room. I wish I had a sister I could laugh with about the gum.

I strain my ears. Bottles clack. A throat clears. My uncle Kevin says, “Jesus Christ, Liam, buck up.” There’s another gasp and something cold grows under my skin. My father is crying.

I jerk my head up and bang it on the top of the chute. How can he be crying when he has to get his butt in gear and finish law school?

My mother’s face pops into my head, and hate and guilt twist over each other like snakes fighting. Maybe I shouldn’t have wished for a Hanna Gruen housekeeper. Maybe my mom thinks I don’t want her anymore. Maybe I really don’t.

Of course I do. I just want her fixed, so she doesn’t hit me anymore. Once, she didn’t drink for three whole months, and we made cookies together and did our nails and she brushed my hair and made lots of plans for the White House, where I could talk on the news about what kind of dog we were going to get.

Why isn’t my dad going out and getting her? What’s wrong with him?

Furious, I run down the stairs and into the kitchen. My father has his head on his crossed arms on the table. My uncle Sean, the oldest brother, has his hand on my dad’s shoulder. The other uncles are either still sitting at the table or leaning against the counter. A couple of them hold cigarettes, and the air is familiar with beer and smoke.

I open my mouth to demand that my father go out and get my mother and fix everything. The word
Dad
comes out, but the rest dries up in my mouth when he looks up at me with eyes that sink into his head. I see the stray cat with the torn ear that just kept slinking down when I tried to pet him.

I stumble back.

My dad smiles weakly. “Hey, kiddo, it looks like you’re going to get to go to Los Angeles for a while. Remember Michael Sullivan?”

I stand frozen with my heart beating a zillion times a minute.

Uncle Sean puffs on his cigarette, then says, “She’d be too young. He hasn’t been out here since she was almost three.”

My father puts on a fake-excited smile. “He’s your uncle Sean’s best friend.”

“Went to St. Pat’s together,” Uncle Sean breaks in, with the same fake smile. “He’s got a girl about your age—”

I keep backing up until I feel the refrigerator handle dig in between my shoulder blades. Outrage shakes me. I’m too shocked to even cry. My stomach has no bottom, just a huge fire-breathing dragon flying up from its depths. “You’re giving me away?” comes out of my mouth in someone else’s voice.

“No, sweetheart, no,” my dad says, looking pale and sickly like he does when I’m being hit and he can’t see me even though I’m right in front of him. “Just for part of the school year. I need some time to fix things up around here.”

Part of the school year? Does he know what he’s talking about? I can’t go to a new school with new people! I’m starting ninth grade in one week in a place where I’ve already figured out how to hide. At St. Henry’s, there are two buildings, the K-8 building, which has the elementary and middle school, and then the high school right next to it. Last year, at the end of the day, I slipped into the high school when all the kids were gone and I walked by the tired custodians sweeping the floors to scope out the building. I know where the lockers are and the bathrooms. I’ve been in the library with the scarred wooden tables and the stained-glass windows that make it feel like a church.