What I Had Before I Had You (11 page)

Someone calls, “Wait!” from the window, and Jake swings out, graceful tonight, his long body compressing and releasing like a spring. Behind him, kids spill out one after another after another, some of them very close to falling. I move beneath them instinctively, my arms held out to catch. When the last one grounds, I hug him out of relief. The moon is gibbous and grave, and we can hear the boardwalk even from here, the distant lights garish: some other careless world.

“Let's go,” I say, and we run like hell until we are behind the dark pilings on the beach.

“Did they follow us?” somebody whispers.

“No, they don't care,” says Jake. He throws out his elbows to crack his back. “They don't care where we go.”

So we go swimming.

We leave our clothes wedged between sandy boulders and swim in our underwear. I am wearing a white cotton bra, no underwire, the only kind I own. The water feels like cold silk to my switched-on brain, as if I am rolling tangled in the long silk skirts of a crowd of giantesses. I try to convey this to Pam, and she asks Jake what he gave me. They murmur low and watch me swim. I am so angry with my mother that it feels like part of me rather than an emotion that might come and go. I thrash and dive. The salt water in my mouth is like food.

“Don't swallow.” Jake holds me by my shoulders, and his hands on my bare skin feel incredible. “Olivia. Don't swallow so much, okay?” I spit out the water in my mouth and let Jake carry me like a weightless baby through the waves. Someone yells, “Marco!” and the echo, “Polo,” rings back multiply.

I look up at Jake's face against the star-exploded sky. “You picked me,” I say. “Why me?”

He is more Jake than usual tonight. His skin is white and his mouth is dark and the water is the color of the sky. “I just like you,” he says. He is larger and larger, and then I realize larger is only nearer, and he is kissing me. The breeze is prickly cool and the heat of his lips so ecstatic I wish I could crawl inside of it.
Oh
, I think.
Oh.

I dive away, and when I come up, Pam looms over me darkly. “Do you realize what you're doing?” she whispers, pulling me back toward shallow water. Her face is very close, gleaming wet and desperate. “This is Jake. This is not just anyone.”

I giggle and dive, resurface. “How long has it been going on?” she asks, so I dive again. This time she grabs me under the armpits and hoists me back up.

“Fuck you,” I say—in a friendly way, like “thank you,” like we say it all the time—and she drops me and walks back to the shore, rising streaming from the waves. Her back is narrow and pale as the moon, and her underwear clings invisible. She is a goddess, I think. She is a Vermeer girl. She is a mermaid's first time on land. I turn around and swim to Jake, but by the time I reach him, we are all getting out, and when I call for Pam, she isn't there anymore.

 

7

W
HEN I EMERGE
from the Emerald, Carrie has already called the police. She is sitting on the steps, hugging the beach bag to her chest. “Are you mad?” she asks.

“No, you're right, it's the next thing to do.” We are both thinking, I suspect, that it was the first thing to do and that I am doing badly at this. I feel guilty as we drive to the station house. One count of aggravated carelessness. One count of poor mothering.

The station house is just as I remember it, a squat brick building full of blond benches and fluorescent lighting. Distance from the beach sharpens my panic, my sense of the real, and Carrie seems satisfied to see me properly fretful, drumming my fingers on the front desk. A policeman shows us to a small office, where we sit on black plastic chairs as I fill out the missing persons report. Height: four-three. Eyes: brown. I rest my head on my hand. Carrie is texting, and I don't say a word.

A man with a gelled wave of brown hair enters and introduces himself as Detective something. Something Polish. I am not really listening. I am seized by imagery: Daniel cowering in a peeling green rowboat, the salmon man reaching for him. Daniel clinging koala-like to a piling as the water rises around him. Daniel in a basement, in a dog crate, rocking back and forth to clank the metal on the ground. Terrible, unstoppable, these thoughts. I am suddenly afraid I will cry.

The detective puts down the missing persons sheet and leans across his desk, crinkling his eyes in a practiced show of sympathy. “I have no doubt that we'll find him. It's only been an hour. First thing I'm going to do is alert my guys.” He pulls a radio from his belt and gives a short description of Daniel: nine-year-old white male, lime-green swim trunks. Officers respond in crackly code. The only thing I catch is 10-4.

“What about the father?” the detective asks me.

“What do you mean?”

“Would your son's father have any reason to come looking for him?”

“Oh. No.”

“I understand it's uncomfortable to consider, ma'am, but it happens.”

“No,” I say again. “His father didn't come for him. That's one thing I'm sure of.” Carrie gives me a spiteful look.

“Any other family members you think might want to . . .” He draws circles in the air with his hand. Dot dot dot. “Grandparents, maybe? Aunts, uncles?”

“No.” I feel like he's fishing for something, like maybe he thinks I have kidnapped my children and there are sane, responsible people out there tracking us down. I have broken out of the asylum, stolen street clothes from a clothesline, something like that. I'm getting carried away. Why would he think that? I let an hour go by without calling the police, is that so unusual? I thought I could find him myself.

“It's a possibility we have to consider.”

“All of his grandparents are dead.”

“That rules them out, huh.” The detective chuckles and then looks at my face and stops. I have lied a little bit; Sam's mother is alive but poses no such threat, sucking oxygen from a tube in a retirement village in Arizona. It's hardly a village. Whenever we visited, she said they were making her play the tambourine, and couldn't we speak to someone about that? She would weep with frustration. Sam would read his father's letters out to her, old letters she kept in a Velcro giveaway binder from a car dealership, and she would fall asleep and never remember which ones he had read.

In my family, grandparents go faster. My great-grandparents dropped like flies before my mother turned ten, two in a car crash, one of cancer, and one simply vanished, crawled, perhaps, beneath a porch like a cat would, to avoid a fuss. I never met my grandparents. My mother told me how they died, he of adrenal failure, and she of love, ten days later. My mother only ever showed me two pictures of them. She was in one of them, a chubby kid in a white dress with a frilly smock, blowing out birthday candles. My grandmother, her dark hair bobbed and waved, leaned over the cake, too, with a close-lipped smile, ready to blow out the last candles if her daughter didn't have enough breath. My grandfather stood behind them in suspenders, with a dark beard, his expression unreadable due to photo glare on his glasses, like crazy neon bug eyes. The other picture was black and white, and in it my grandparents were younger. They were skating on a frozen lake. He was behind her, holding her around the waist, and she was clutching his arms for balance. They both wore earmuffs. Other people were skating behind them, a blur of motion against which my grandparents looked frozen.

I DON'T HAVE
a single picture of my mother as I remember her. I never took one. The only pictures I have are the ones in my head. She didn't have a camera, herself, so neither are there pictures of me as a baby. It pains me now that, while I snapped away at everything else in Ocean Vista, I didn't take a picture of her lounging on the sofa in a square of light or kneeling to garden, kerchief-headed, a drop of sweat eking along her jawline. She was always with me. I didn't think I needed any proof of her.

Later, I came into a stack of photos from her childhood, and these are what I've shown my kids. How strange for them to see a grandmother their own age, grinning toothless from the back of a horse. I told them that she died before they were born, and this satisfied them. She is gone and will not impose wet geriatric kisses or send preppy Christmas sweaters like Sam's mother used to. They know that she is the source of my moods and of Carrie's red hair, and that she and I fought, and that I left home young. Though I have been very clear that they may ask me anything about our family or about my past—that I had a withholding mother and they do not—they have asked me little. When a teacher directed Daniel to draw a family tree, in the branch that sprouted the Mom twig, he wrote:
Grandmother. Red hair. Missing tooth. Rode horses. Mean.

I am sorry that he will never know her as she really was: a burning star, a tigress, a prophet. The heartbeat that fills the house.

THE DETECTIVE DRIVES
us to the boardwalk in his squad car. We sit in the back, and I'm embarrassed. Carrie is enjoying it. She crosses her arms and sets her jaw, and I can tell she's playing out some bad-girl daydream in her head.

We stand on the boards amid the happy throng and show the detective just where we lost Daniel, beside the snack stand. “I thought he was watching the grill cook,” I tell him. “I thought he was right there.” I think I see his green trunks through the crowd, but it's a girl in a green sundress. Two cops mount the turnstile and turn onto the boards. On the street behind us, I see a cruiser stopped at a red light. I feel hunted, even though I know they are supposed to be helping me.

“Ms. Reed?” the detective is saying.

Carrie is glaring at me. “Mom!”

“I'm sorry.”

“That's okay. Where were you folks headed tonight?”

“That's our business.” There is something droopy about his face, some irritating sitcom goodwill that can't be for real. I picture him with a three-day beard, and there he is, the cartoony hound dog, holding my mother back as she whips her hair from side to side and shrieks, reaching for me, as I back toward the great window of the honeymoon suite, toward the night sky and the promise of freedom. But of course he can't be the same cop. I stumble backward a few steps, and my calf hits the seat of a bench. As I fall, I try to make it look like I am purposefully sitting down, but I can see in Carrie's expression that I am acting weird. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away. She hates me. She is wishing for her father.

The detective sits down beside me and engineers a moment of respectful silence. I could strangle him. “Do you need a hotel for the night?” he asks. “We need to know where you're going to be in case we can't get you on the phone.”

“We'll be with you until you find him. Since you're so confident.”

He sighs. “Ma'am, did your son know where you were headed?”

You can almost see the lightbulb blink on above Carrie's head. “He could have read Kandy's address off the GPS!”

The detective nods gratefully. “Then that's where I need you to be, in case he's on his way there. All right? You ladies had some dinner?”

Carrie shakes her head. The detective stands and holds out a hand to help me up. “I'll escort you on over there. We'll find your son.”

I stand up without taking his hand. As we walk to the squad car, I reach for Carrie, and she skitters away from me. We duck into the backseat and roll quietly through Ocean Vista. We are going to the station house for the car, but it feels for all the world like I am being driven home, contrite, to be escorted along the crooked flagstone path to my mother's door, where I will hang my head and say,
I'm so sorry I lost Daniel, I don't know how it happened,
and she will walk back into the house and never speak a word.

 

8

F
OR THREE DAYS
after the Emerald bust, I don't go home. We can't go back to the Emerald, at least not so soon, and our world is splintered, centerless. Certain kids look at me with dislike. Pam watches me closely when Jake is around, but she hasn't breathed a word to Kandy. I spend nights writhing sleepless on Kandy's sandy sofa and days hanging out on the beach. I hear nothing from my mother. Every moment, I expect her to come barging into the arcade or into Kandy's living room, pushing aside all the lazy, smelly brothers to get to me. Her failure to do so wears me down, and soon I am yearning for my sun-and-moon bedsheets, a plate of good food. A fresh strawberry. Sleep.

I leave Kandy's sofa in the early morning and bike to my house, half-pretending that I'm sneaking in after an Emerald party and nothing has changed. There is a hose tap under my bedroom window that I use as a toehold so I don't make telling footprints in the garden soil. I pop the screen inward and swing myself up with unusual gusto to get out of the lukewarm prickling rain that has begun to fall. I am halfway through and wriggling my hips over the ledge before I see my mother. She is lying on my bed, wrapped in her pink silk bathrobe, sad-eyed, cheek to my greasy pillow. An empty wineglass on my bedside table and a thumbed copy of
Great Expectations
speak to her vigil. I tumble in and replace the screen behind me.

She looks at me, but I don't seem to register. I wait. Maybe she wants me to speak first. After a few minutes of standoff, she says with a chilling lack of affect, “I know you're not stupid, so I assume that you are
choosing
to throw your life away.” She swings herself to a seated position and finds her slippers with her feet. “Everything I've ever done is for you. My whole life.”

She stalks out of my bedroom and slams the door behind her. It makes a huge wooden
crack,
and then there is the turn of a key I didn't know existed in the antique iron lock below the doorknob.

This is not the first time she's caught me sneaking out at night; last year there was a fashion among the youth of Ocean Vista to visit the bakery at four in the morning, when the baker would sell hot pastries for a quarter—the broken ones, the ones with burned edges. I heard about it at school and decided to go myself, not in a giggling group, like other kids, but alone. I loved it: the otherworldly feel of the night bakery—the yellow light and the smell of bread, so rich you forgot there had ever been another smell. The baker told me knock-knock jokes and let me sit on the floured counter. He knew my mother but wouldn't say how.

When she caught me slipping through the screen door late one night and learned my destination, her eyes went soft, and she cried into her hands on the living room sofa. “Has he ever tried to touch you?” she asked me. Her tears left dull pink tracks from her eyes to the corners of her mouth.

“No! God, Mom,
no
.” This was a painfully embarrassing question. “Gross. He's, like,
sixty.
He's my friend.”

“You can't be friends with men.” She said this softly, as if she knew it would have no impact—that I was already too far gone. She took my hand and traced my lifeline with her finger. “Your life is long, Olivia. Don't walk by the highway at night. Promise me that you will never, ever do anything so stupid again.” My mother clasped her hands around the back of my neck and leaned her forehead against mine, our same-green eyes very close.

“I promise,” I said. Then, half an hour after she clicked off her reading light, I tiptoed out of the house and sprinted along the parkway, cutting into the wind so fast I couldn't smell the salt. My rebellion had started so quietly that it surprised me, at moments like this, to find myself sprinting in the dark away from a warm house.

I DREAM WILDLY:
I am on a bus sliding backward down hills, I am in a dark house with a door that bangs open and shut in a high wind, I am setting off a long line of Roman candles with Jake, one after the next after the next in an interminable row stretching to the horizon. They make a rhythmic firing sound: thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk . . .

An X shadows the midmorning sun patch on the floor of my bedroom, and I rise to see two plywood bars across the outside of the window frame. My mother is outside, pounding nails into the clapboard, sweaty in the old Yankees jersey she saves for dirty jobs.

“Are you kidding me?” I shout at her, and she clenches her jaw victoriously. I try my bedroom door and find it unlocked, and a hot plate of eggs and bacon waiting on the kitchen table. The front and back doors are locked from the outside. The windows will not budge. She has unplugged and hidden the telephone. I sit and eat furiously, too much, until I feel ill. With the windows closed, it is hot and stale, and the smell of the nursery pervades the house: close, faintly antiseptic, a kind of sweet that is neither flowers nor food.

I am spitting mad at my mother. I am sorry I came back. I will not be contained, I will not be included. I do not belong to her. A picture develops in my mind of a future Olivia holding out a match in the middle of the nursery, lighting the spirit world on fire, burning away all the babies and the just-dead fathers, the cards and the runes and the old photographs, while the real and certain furniture of the world remains—clean, inviolate.

I AM LOCKED
in for thirty-six hours. If I were still the obedient daughter of yesteryear, I might have been locked in forever. I spend the first morning ignoring my mother, who is, judging by the sustained banging of pans and hissing of burners, cooking a banquet for thirty. I watch the daytime talk shows (topics: “Runaway Homecomings,” “He Cheated with My Sister,” “Exes with AIDS”) until she comes to me, as I knew she would.

“Okay,” she says, settling beside me on the sofa. “Tell me all about it.”

“It?”

“What you've been up to.” She blinks too quickly. I don't believe her when she says she isn't angry, only
concerned.
“This boy.”

So she has figured me out. There is nothing to say. In my mother's mind, the danger that Jake poses would far exceed the more legitimate dangers of a sudden adolescence: the alcohol, the group mind, the availability of mysterious pills. Worse, she would understand the pang I feel when I smell Jake's dark boy-smell as he leans in to kiss me, and this new desire to feel his particular hands on the curves of my neck and the pooling places behind my collarbones. She would know just what I mean when I say that this feeling struck me fast and hard, the stroke of a hammer on a nail. She would understand me perfectly and tell me I am making a mistake. I imagine my sisters sitting opposite us in the brown corduroy armchairs, shaking their heads in solidarity with me.
Don't tell her anything,
they say.
She won't understand.

My mother lets go a train-whistle sigh and pads over to the dining room hutch to fetch a tarot deck. She lays out my signifier, the Page of Wands, and hands me the cards. We take our places on the carpet. Imaginary Courtney crosses her arms over her chest and raises her eyebrows at me to say,
Really?

“I want the queen.” I hand the cards back.

My mother shuffles through the deck, switches out the Page for the Queen of Wands. I can tell she doesn't like this by the soundless tightening of her throat. I will be her Page of Wands forever. “Fine. Shuffle it in,” she says, meaning that I should shuffle in my question. I shuffle automatically, trying to think of nothing at all, to keep her out of my head. She lays out the spread.

Most of her reading is predictable (I am lost and confused, I should turn to my loved ones for guidance), but I zero in on the Knight of Swords, the charismatic lover, in the position that indicates the uncertain future. Reversed, the Knight of Swords brings instability, heartbreak. My mother and I sit across from each other over the cards so that what she sees straight on is reversed for me and vice versa. I am convinced that I am in the best position to see the truth of my future.

“Can I go now?” I ask when she is finished.

“You lied to me. You might never leave the house again.” I have no way of knowing how serious she is, but she has done a remarkably good job of escape-proofing the house, and I am truly locked in. Tonight everyone is going up to Asbury Park to see a punk show. I'm supposed to ride with Pam. Jake knows the bassist from the opening band, and he's promised to get us backstage.

At three my mother has a shift at the store, and she leaves me locked in with Blanche. I go from room to room, doing damage. The kitchen surfaces are covered with her morning's work: quiches, coq au vin. Cake. I put it all on the floor for Blanche, who goes into a feeding frenzy, but then, when she whines and paws my knee, I realize I can't let her out. She dances at my feet. Her whining escalates to a howl. I put newspaper on the bathroom floor, but she doesn't understand. She is in pain.

This is worse than anything that has happened. I lie facedown on my bed and shout into my pillow. Blanche cries and cries. Eventually, the house smells like shit. Blanche jumps up on my bed and curls up against the back of my knees, and I rub her silky ears. She doesn't even know she should be mad at me.

None of my friends come by to break me out. They don't know I need breaking out. So eight o'clock rolls by, then nine and ten. My mother comes home, and I hear her stop short in the kitchen, taking it in. I fall back asleep. I must have tapped in to some emergency hibernation instinct, for I don't wake up until the next afternoon, when I can hear my mother explaining the boarded-up windows to a client as she walks him into her study. “It's a vermin problem,” she says. “Possums.” I am possums!

When I do emerge from my room to scavenge for food, in the middle of the night, the nursery door is closed and framed all around with light. The kitchen mess is untouched, chicken bones and frosting all over the floor. I pick my way through and put my eye to the keyhole. My mother is kneeling, and I can see only the back half of her: a cotton peasant skirt draping over her calves, her feet protruding behind her, dirty and bare like my own. She is lit by a warm, flickering light. For a moment I think she has beaten me to it and set the nursery on fire. I open the door.

What at first glance appears to be a heap of random objects in front of my mother has been, I see, arranged carefully. Candles stand on makeshift pedestals: stacks of books, Kleenex boxes set on end. Certain objects I recognize from elsewhere in the house: the three ballet-slipper ornaments, the dried baby's breath flowers from the living room side table. But there is more. A red plastic steering wheel, a crocheted blanket, tiny dolls made of thread and cigarettes. There is a plain wooden cross in the center, wrapped in Christmas-tree lights.

My mother is moving her lips in quick silent speech. She has lipstick and mascara on. She doesn't respond to my presence at all. I stand there until I feel stupid, and then I ask her what she's doing.

She holds up a hand to shush me, cocks her head sideways, and squints, her forehead trembling with strain. “I can't hear him when you talk,” she says without looking at me.

“Hear who?” I ask, though I already know. I want to hear her say the things that damn her most.

“God.”

I leave her to it.

I wonder now what God said to my mother at these times. It was easy then, and it is easy in memory, to dismiss her religious fervors, bound up as they were in her dramas of mood. But she said that God spoke to her, and so it must have seemed. And so it was, for what else do we have but the seeming world?

BY THE SECOND
evening, Imaginary Laura and Imaginary Courtney are seething.
What a fucking bitch!
they say.
I can't believe she would do this to you. Maybe she did this to us, too, maybe she smothered us to death.
They laugh and give each other a high five. The house still smells awful, though my mother has shoveled the worst of the mess into the kitchen and is going about business as usual, showing clients in and out.

My claustrophobia peaks. I kick a hole through the drywall of my room. I have begun to hate the house, its very walls, and it feels good, the white dust clouding and settling on the hairs on my arms like a fine snow. Your walls cannot hold me! I think, and bare my biceps in the mirror. It is a lucky kick: right between two wall studs. I snip the chicken-wire drywall backing, kick through the clapboard, duck under a snaking bundle of wires, and I am through. Mice will nest in the walls now, but I don't care. Let them have a warm, dry place. Let them invade.

I CONTINUE SLEEPING
at home to prove that my mother can't stop me from coming and going as I like. I tack a dry cleaner's plastic garment bag over the hole to keep the rain out, and my mother, defeated, lets it be. Jake comes by to pick me up or drop me off, and my mother stands in the doorway as I jump into the passenger seat or as Jake gets out of the car to open the trunk so I can grab my backpack. They stare at each other, Jake with a daring curiosity and my mother with a lively hate, her eyes bright and her hands planted on her hips, the only motion in the waves of her hair rising and falling on the breeze.