The Shore (12 page)

The first thing he asks is how the hell you're so certain. When you show him the test tube with its incriminating ring he wants to know where you got it, where you got the money to get it, who took you to get it, because he would have found out if you'd gotten it in town. His voice gets louder and louder, until you're cringing away from him, all but hiding under the opposite side of the table. This makes him angrier, he's not some monster that you have to hide from, and as you mumble an apology and straighten up he goes into the bedroom.

When he comes back he smacks a wad of bills down on the table, crumpled ones and fives with a few twenties and fifties
shuffled in, creased and layered together like a handful of last year's leaves.

“Was saving for a motorcycle,” he says, “but that can wait. Get rid of it.”

“Why?” you ask.

“Why?” he says.

“Why not keep it?” Start a family. Get married. Be what your mother expected you to be. Watch your own children during the day instead of other people's. Have a reason to end the arguments.

“I ain't gonna father a bastard. You can always have another one.”

“I want this one!”

His fist comes down on your upper arm, but you don't flinch away. You've pushed him too far, like you always do. He curses, grabs your wrist, and wrenches you across the room so that you bounce against the opposite wall, but you've become stone. You hear none of it.

Maybe one day you'll learn to read his moods better, learn to sense when he's running out of patience, learn to stop pushing him until the storm comes. There will be bruises, on your arms and other not so visible places, in the morning, and neither Stella nor Ellie nor any of the people you see throughout the day will say a word about them, the way you never say a word when Ellie's skin blooms purple-green. Even so, you know they'll see and wonder what you said, what you did, how you failed to keep it together this time.

As he calms, you find yourself nodding along with what he says. He leans in to kiss you, to embrace you, ashamed of his outburst. Then he draws you into the bedroom: you always
make love after a fight, to make up for the screaming. You let him touch you, slowly peel your blouse off, without saying anything. You want to think, to go someplace quiet. The last thing you want is the soft-shelled crab feeling of him on top of you, but it's so easy to touch him off again, and you're freshly scared, recently reminded of what those fists can do. It hurts in a sharp, shredding way when he enters you, but you roll your selfness up from your toes and tuck it into the very back of your head, leaving your body empty, and the pain goes dull. Your eyes flick across the ceiling and around the upper edge of the wall, settling nowhere in an attempt to escape from the sound that is more a sensation of his hot, wet breath on your neck, the grunts and chuckling moans as he pushes into you. His hands on your shoulders burn.

A movement catches your attention, and over Donnie's sweat-flecked shoulder you see the older of the boys, freckled face framed by the tiny trailer window. His eyes meet yours, their stillness making him seem infinitely sad, and you focus on them. The pain gets worse, and you want to say something to Donnie about it, except the last time you did, things didn't end so well. The boy steps through the wall, and even though you don't want anyone to see you like this you're glad that he does, that he knows, that someone knows without you having to put it into words. He puts his hand on the pillow next to your head. His eyes look like the quicksilver from the thermometer you dropped when you had mumps, still and moving at once, silver and glinting, and you focus on them, time your breaths to his, watch him so closely that for a moment you think you've become him.

It hasn't always been this way. Once you were a good girl, and went to church with your mama five days a week, ate the wafer and prayed to God that you'd escape eternal hellfire. She said that was what happened to girls who lied about washing their hands and cleaning their rooms and whether they'd eaten the last cookie weeks before and put the packet back empty in the cupboard. She'd not done right by your older sister, she'd been foolish then, but by God she was going to do everything she could to make sure you turned out holy.

You never meant to lie, but you could never remember what you'd done, or hadn't done, or had been meant to do but hadn't really been listening when you'd been told to do it. You knelt on the time-stained pine floorboards of the Catholic church in Parksley and prayed like nothing that you wouldn't burn up in hell, but your mama shook her head over you, said that you'd never be saved if you didn't get over your lying ways.

When you got older you started noticing boys, and boys started noticing you, and Mama started noticing you noticing each other. She scared them off for a few years, but when you started working at Stella's Donnie Hammond took the opportunity to follow you around, get you alone so he could stroke your hair and arm and tell you how damn pretty your cloud-gray eyes were. He told you that just one kiss, just one touch, wouldn't get you in trouble, and even though you didn't believe him you let him touch you, and kiss you, because you wanted to know what his hands and lips felt like. You had never guessed anything could feel that good.

Mama'd told you that boys would try and make you do dirty things, but she'd never told you exactly what they were, or that you'd want to do them, so when Donnie started pulling
you closer and moving his hands under your clothes you didn't know what to do. So you did nothing. And after you'd done nothing once you had to keep on doing nothing.

You'd sat near each other in mass for years, your mother and his mother were both in the Altar Guild, you'd been in the same class at school until he'd dropped out to learn how to fix cars; Mama thought he was a good Catholic boy. He told you it was just plain mean, letting him touch you special one day and then saying no the next. And it weren't no use, Mama would have said if she'd known, stopping after you'd started. You'd already proved you weren't a good girl; you weren't worth anything anymore. You decided that you might as well enjoy it.

Except once he'd gotten you to go all the way, he didn't take the time anymore to run his hands over your quivering skin, to kiss you long and slow, the way he had at the beginning. He got straight to the main attraction. You felt cheated that you didn't enjoy this as much as you had the touching, even though it was supposed to be the big thing, the biggest thing. But you didn't know how to tell him that, how to ask for something different, or what to ask for.

You were seventeen when you finally got caught. It was in your dad's toolshed, on a rainy day when there hadn't been anything to do. Donnie had come to find you, and by then you'd found the nerve to tell him that even if he was your secret boyfriend you didn't want to do it anymore. He'd told you not to be that way, that he'd try harder, make it nicer for you, almost cried, and you'd relented. When your dad came in you still had your shirt on, but there was no good excuse for the rest of it.

Mama scattered your clothes on the front lawn, smashed your porcelain ballerinas on the sidewalk, the rain mixing
with her tears and sticking her long gray hair to her face. You could feel the eyes behind the curtains on the prim little street in Parksley where you lived, hated them for enjoying the spectacle. You gathered up the muddy skirts and blouses without saying a word.

For a while you stayed with Donnie at his parents' house in Tasley, a few miles south of Parksley and still close enough for you to walk to work, but the priest and the women got after his mother until she decided that she couldn't help the two of you live in sin anymore, and had Donnie's daddy kick you both out. Donnie found the trailer quick after that, a dented sardine tin with a rotting kitchen floor and barely enough room to change your mind, and found a farmer that would let them park it cheap on his land. With what you made at Stella's and what he made fixing cars, you could just afford the rent. There wasn't anywhere around that cost less to live. There weren't any other options.

The first time you walked into the grocery store after your mother threw you out, the eyes felt like cigarettes being put out on your skin. You'd thought it would be the men who would stare, but instead it was the women. Even though you guessed half of them had done the same, been touched and kissed or more and liked it, none of them had been caught. You felt the weight of their judgment on your shoulders as you picked through the basket of dented, marked-down cans. You'd known them all your whole life, but not a soul spoke to you, until Ellie asked if you were planning on making a casserole with those beans. Her belly was round and firm with Chloe, the copper wire twisted around her wedding finger in place of a ring still shining, her guarded, acne-scarred face the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen.

Donnie falls asleep afterward, and you squirm out from under him and sit naked at the kitchen table, looking at the mound of bills. You have no idea how much is there. You have no idea how much an abortion costs. You'll have to get Ellie to give you a ride down to Norfolk, or up to Salisbury; you're not sure if either place has a doctor that does that sort of thing.

A shadow moves across the screen door, and you jump to cover yourself. You thought that it was Cabel, come like he does sometimes to ask for a drink or a snack or just some company because his mother's passed out and her boyfriend is elsewhere, but it's the boys again, one on either side of the doorway, watching you impassively as you contemplate the money on the table. For a moment you resent the thickness of the stack, the careless way the bills are crumpled and folded together, in light of your pilled-up thrift-store clothes, the dented, marked-down cans of beans and vegetables in the cupboard, the hole in the corner of the kitchen floor that you've covered with a piece of plywood to keep Cabel from climbing through it when he visits you. The way Donnie takes your pay, every cent of it, for the rent, and demands to know what you've spent money on if there's less than usual.