SELFLESS (10 page)

“What?”

“I couldn’t make this kind of thing up even if I wanted to,” I said. “This guy was so wasted that he didn’t even wake up when they tattooed a dick on his bald head.”

Cream was gasping with laughter. “Your family sounds like someone I’d never want to mess with.”

“They were my family and I didn’t want to mess with them,” I confessed.

“I gotta say, I kind of envy people who come from big families,” Cream said.

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “You’re not from one?”

She shook her head. “No. It was just my brother and me.”

I smiled. “I wished for a brother sometimes, if only to balance all the estrogen.”

“He was so protective,” Cream said with an incredulous laugh. “I could barely date. All of my boyfriends were terrified of him.”

“And what, not your dad?”

Cream smiled sadly. “Our parents didn’t raise us.”

“Oh,” I said. “So when you say it was just you and your brother …”

“It was really just us,” she said. “He raised me.”

We finished up the floor in the main area, which included the foyer, sitting room, and kitchen, then started working down the hall and into the bedrooms as Cream told me about her past.

Cream’s brother—Terry—was seven years older than her. Their parents had both died in a train wreck when Terry was about thirteen and Cream was eight. Even before that fateful day, Cream remembered, Terry was incredibly protective of her, walking with her to school rather than trust her to the school bus all alone.

“He called me his little princess,” Cream said, her lips twitching into a bitter smile as she mopped.

Cream had faint memories of her parents, but details like their faces and the sounds of their voices faded with each passing day. Terry told her about them all the time.

“Mom had dark brown hair, like yours,” he said. “She liked to sing. She sang all the time. Do you hear her?”

“Yes,” Cream had said, at first. She could hear the frame of the melody, barely grasp the shape of the words. Then, later, “yes” still, but it was more of a lie.

“I had to lie to him,” she said. “I felt like it would hurt him too much to realize that I’d forgotten things, like he would feel it was his fault for not keeping the memories in my head.”

“Dad had glasses,” Terry said. “You liked to pull them from his face and wear them. He had a tie that Mom would straighten every day before he left. Do you see him?”

“Yes,” Cream had insisted, “yes, yes,” each assertion becoming weaker and weaker with time.

“We had photos of them,” she said wistfully, pushing the mop at a particularly stubborn scuffmark, “but we moved around so much that they degraded. The last one I had, I left at Mama’s.”

I thought she would cry, her lips already trembling, but Cream simply plowed forward in her story.

She and Terry didn’t have any relatives, both their parents from small families. So when Terry realized that they would likely be split up, put into foster homes or adopted out to different families because of the difference in their ages, he woke Cream up from bed late one night and they slipped away.

“Vanished,” Cream said. “Terry had these incredible instincts. I don’t know where he got them from, but he always knew what to do—or pretended to. All I did was follow him.”

They bounced from shelter to shelter, Terry always lying about their ages. They both looked older than they were, so it was easier to escape suspicion. Both she and Terry mistrusted police officers and gave them wide berth. And whenever someone would start asking too many questions, they’d just slip out again. Terry tried to keep them both fed and would give up a meal if it meant putting food in her belly. But there were nights when they both went hungry—many nights.

Terry kept up with Cream’s education as best he could, quizzing her on state capitals and spellings and making her do sums by writing on asphalt as a makeshift chalkboard with little bits of gravel acting as their chalk.

“We had fun, in spite of everything,” Cream said, smiling as her eyes looked back at that time. “Terry made everything into a game for me because I was too young to understand what trouble we were in. He said we were hiding from CPS, but it always sounded like some evil witch—CeePee Ess. I imagined she was a witch and that we were a prince and princess on the run. He didn’t correct me.”

When Terry was sixteen, he got a job at a diner. Through some wrangling, he procured a small apartment for them both through his new boss, who was very kindly. They got Cream enrolled in school again. Picking up on classes and homework wasn’t too terribly difficult because Terry had stayed on Cream about learning the entire time.

The more time she spent at school, the more she blossomed. Cream thrived when she was around peers her own age. She liked the attention she got from members of the opposite sex, even in junior high. Cream was soon holding hands with her classmates and kissing them on their cheeks in little alcoves in the hallways of the school.

She found excuses to stay at school as long as she could—going early for breakfast or club meetings, staying late for extracurricular activities. She got involved so she could spend more time with her newfound friends and stay away from Terry’s protective presence.

“You’re better than everyone there,” he said when he caught her making out with a boy when she was fourteen. “None of them deserve you.”

“I want them to deserve me,” she’d cried. “I want them, Terry.”

She was so hungry for attention after flying under the radar for all those years. She craved it.

“You and I, we’re all we have left,” Terry said, unshed tears glittering in his eyes. “We’re it, princess. Do you still remember Mom and Dad? The way she smelled? The way he laughed? Do you?”

Cream was so upset at Terry keeping her from her precious attention that she said the most hurtful thing that she could think of.

“No.”

Terry had recoiled as if she’d hit him, and she never, never forgave herself.

“I started being more discreet with my little boyfriends,” Cream said as we cleaned our own room. “And Terry threw himself into his work at the diner. He got a raise, which encouraged him. We were still close, but it was never the same after that terrible fight.”

Cream was just about to turn seventeen when Terry found the best way to protect his sister.

“Stop crying,” he pleaded after he told her. “This is the best for both of us. I’ll be earning money and sending every cent back to you. You’re brave. You can do this.”

“But the Army, Terry?” Cream had wept. “The Army? What happens if you—if you —”

“If I die,” Terry said calmly, “You’ll get help from them. Support, both monetary and emotional. This is the best thing for us. I’ll go and earn money, and you’ll stay here and grow.”

Cream wondered whether this was because she’d snuck a boy from school into the apartment and made love to him in her bedroom. Terry had to have known from the hurt expression on his face the next morning, but he never said anything.

“Please don’t leave me,” she’d begged. “Please don’t. We’re all we have left.”

“That’s not true,” Terry said. “You’re doing a wonderful job of making new friends.”

That was like a knife through her ribs. Of course Terry had known about her having sex with that boy. He knew everything. He watched out for her and was only trying to protect her—more often than not, anymore, from herself.

She didn’t have anything else she thought she could say to him to keep him there. Cream watched him silently as he shaved his head with a razor in their tiny bathroom. She watched him as he packed a bag, leaning against the doorframe to his room. And she watched him as he walked out the apartment door to go to basic training.

“Don’t worry about the rent,” he said. “I have an arrangement with my boss.”

He bent down to kiss her on the forehead.

“Be good,” he said simply, and left.

Cream never found out whether the arrangement with Terry’s boss had included sex, but that started happening. She didn’t want to deny the man anything since he was letting her stay there. Plus, she liked sex. It felt good.

“Ever since the beginning,” Cream said, shrugging as we scrubbed the bathrooms. “I mean, I don’t want to brag, but I come every single time. It’s kind of freakish. I don’t know.”

“That’s not freakish,” I said, polishing the toilet until I could practically see my reflection in the porcelain. “That’s awesome.”

And without Terry in the apartment, Cream started bringing more and more boys home to her bed.

“Let’s be honest,” she said as we made our bed. “I’m lucky I never got knocked up—or a disease. I wasn’t safe. I was just lucky.”

Terry came home for a little bit after basic training, then was sent overseas. He wrote letters to her, telling her about the new things he was seeing and experiencing. Then, the letters stopped.

Cream wondered and worried about him, wishing there was some way to contact him. She slept with more and more boys, trying to fill some ever-widening void, not understanding what was happening to her.

Could Terry be hurt? Captured? Dead? Or worse—did he leave her like she’d been leaving him all these years? She loved her brother, as much as she pushed back against his protectiveness, but the last option was the most painful. He had been right, though Cream hadn’t wanted to admit it. They were blood, and all each other had left. She shouldn’t have spat on that. You only got one chance at family.

After she graduated high school, she grew tired of Terry’s boss’ insistence at dominating the prime spot of realty between her legs. A friend of a friend told her about a place where she could live and work, away from the man who implied that she’d be on the streets if she ever denied him access to her sex.

So Cream packed up and went to Mama’s nightclub, fresh from getting her high school diploma and with the uncanny ability to come with every partner.

“I don’t know,” Cream said as we took a break for lunch, eating sandwiches in the kitchen, our robes and nakedness long since forgotten. “I always felt like sex was the only thing I was good at. I liked working at Mama’s—a lot. Probably too much.”

“Everyone’s different,” I said, shrugging and munching on the sandwich. Andrew’s kitchen was remarkably well stocked. Somehow, though, I couldn’t picture him stopping by the market on his way home.

“I’ve never heard from Terry, though,” she said, tears filling her luminous eyes. “I still don’t know what happened to him.”

“You should contact somebody.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone in the Army. There has to be someone who knows what happened.”

“You know the worst thing, though?” she said, picking at the crust on her bread. “I kind of don’t want to contact him.”

I stayed silent at that. There was nothing I could really say. I waited, taking another bite of my sandwich, sure that she’d tell me why when she was ready.

Cream took a long sip of her water. “I think he’d be ashamed of me,” she said finally, gripping the edge of the table.”

“I don’t think he would be,” I said. “From what you’ve told me, you’re both survivors. You both did what you had to in order to make it through.”

Cream frowned. “I can’t shake the feeling that he’d be disappointed in me,” she said. “He’d tell me I was too good for all of this.”

“Maybe he’d be right,” I suggested. “What did you always want to do when you were in school?”

“Have sex with boys?” she said, her brow knitted in confusion.