Some Place Better Than Here

Chapter 24: Daddy Please Don't Cry

"I need you," he repeated. Behind the coarseness of his leathered voice, there was a sweetness when he spoke. I looked at him through the mesh screen. I nudged my head in a nod against the steel folds of the door. My wrist began to cramp.

"I love you."

I tried to think of the angle the straight lines of the door made.

"Don't you love me too?" he asked. "I've never heard you say it before, Mary."

"Yeah, Dad..." I couldn't think of the angle name. "I love you, too."

The same gust of wind that rang the chimes across the street swept drizzle onto my arm. The thin hairs stood in the sudden cold shock. I let go of the handle. The screen door slammed.

"Come over here," he said, finishing the joint. Compliantly I walked over. He softly repeated, "Come here." I inched closer to him. Jim gestured with his hands that I lean in even closer. "Here. Here."

And then, as I lowered my head towards Jim's hovering hands that moved past my ears, his fingers combing my hair, blood rushed to my eye. He lightly pulled the back of my head closer, and eased my face towards his lips. Kissing my cheek.

Our eyes met as I slowly stood back up.

I walked back to the door, thinking there was no more, but as I pressed my thumb into the handle, he abruptly hollered, "Mare!"

I turned around.

"I need t'make a trip to the clinic," he said. "Think ya could lend me a couple hundred bucks?"

"Sure."

"Thanks."

The walls of my room spun counter-clockwise when I lifted my forehead from my knees and looked at the girl staring back at me from the mirror that rested on my dresser. What I saw was an ugly girl with an ugly black eye. An ugly girl whose lips trembled as she struggled to hold back tears she didn't want to cry. For her whole life, she told that girl she needed to be hard inside to survive, and she was just so sick of crying.

Mt. Pile of Neglect stood tall on the corner of my bed atop the halfheartedly draped sheet, pouring its remains onto the floor. A mom might have tidied that for me. A mom might have brushed out my hair until I stopped crying. A mom might have stood in the way of Jim's hand and my eye. No matter what the cost.

I reached over to my night table, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a photo before leaning back against my bed. I stared at the polaroid. It was an old picture of a girl named Wendy. In the fragile old photo, she was leaning against the trunk of the black Trans Am I remember Jim driving when I was a kid. Over the years, I had studied the photo well. I got my hands on it by sheer mistake.

Years ago, Jim had pulled everything off every shelf and out of every drawer one day in the late spring, adamant that he was going to sell our house and make his fortune.

At the bottom of a wooden fruit-crate that had been a part of a collection of boxes that housed his memories, were some old birthday cards, a tourist pamphlet for New Jersey Summer Excursions, and a loose photograph slotted between the yellowed pages of The Catcher in the Rye.

The brittle pages skimmed under my thumb until a clump of them flopped open to the page the photo had been tucked into. The back of the white square read:

To are many more Endless Summers.

With LOVE—Jimbo (yur Bimbo!)

It was the first time I knew Jim could be human.

I remember delicately clipping the corner of the photo with just the edge of my fingers to flip it over. Intuitively knowing its importance. At first, I thought maybe it was from a magazine or something because the girl in the photograph was too gorgeous to be real. But there was the note on the back, and Jim's football jersey rolled up over the girl's narrow belly just above her high-waisted jeans.

The thought started off small, but in a matter of seconds, in a surging wave it amassed over my head and crashed down on me. I knew that she had to be my mom. The girl just had to be. The similarities terrified me. Although it took years of withstanding the shouting to hear the stories that only spilled out with the encouragement of alcohol passing his lips, I never found out much about her. Other than that, in Jim's words, she was a "whore." There were too many times I had stood there, taking the abuse, hoping to hear something more.

Eventually, the clutter that had scattered throughout the house went back in unkempt piles in drawers. The memories went back, locked away in the basement, never to be acknowledged as important until the moment of disposal came about those boxes again. But I kept my photo.

I kept it hidden. The polaroid with its crusted trim felt older than it had when I first found it. So did the hairstyle, maybe the makeup too, I don't know.

Mom's face had lost all its detail, either through the subpar quality of the film, or being taken on a dinky Polaroid camera, but I could imagine what she looked like. Maybe what she sounded like. The things she liked: Jim's jerseys, hoop earrings, grunge rock, maybe pop. She danced, definitely. Mom dreamed of getting out of Jersey and going to New York City. Being a Rockette, a backup on Broadway; howling the blues as a lounge-singer, wearing a red dress that matched her long red nails. Jim showed her off to the guys at the dingy local boardwalk dives where she spent countless nights dancing up a storm. She was so vibrant, so natural, so untouchable. Even the band played off time because Mom made her own rhythm. She danced to her own beat. Guys would try, oh boy would they try! She heard every pickup line imaginable—twice—in one night. But every night she only went home with one man. Her hero. This macho Bad Boy who stood broad by the bar, only because he was secretly intimidated by the dance floor his girlfriend owned. When not with her, he would tear his Trans Am through the circuit, putting other racers to shame. To the kids who weren't old enough for the bars and dickered around outside The Alley, he was something of an idol. He was the Leader Of The Pack, a residential Rebel Without A Cause; taking the heat from the cops who dared stop a race (though it almost always ended in a brawl). Street cred meant everything.

Mom would occasionally join in on these diesel-fueled runs under the midnight sun, cheering him on from the passenger seat, shoving his arm and calling him "Jimbo the Bimbo!" A convoy of chrome, driven at dangerously illegal speeds, soared through the night. She would eventually fall asleep on his arm to the hum of the highway.

But then again, maybe not?

Maybe she was just another stupid bitch. Stupid enough to fall in love with someone who would eventually hit and hospitalize her daughter. And she was damn cruel enough to leave me alone with him.

There was so much I wanted to, but would never, like ever, find out. What color were her eyes? What did her voice sound like; was it high or low? Was it raspy like mine? How tall was she? At what age did she have to start buying tampons? Did she lose her virginity to Jim? Could she even fucking dance?

I collapsed my head into my hands. A sharp striking pain rippled through my face.

Would she have stepped in between my eye and Jim's hand? Would she have been strong and run away with me, despite the odds, so we would have been safe?

Teardrops fell, one and then another, onto the photograph.

"Why did you leave me?"

But as always, my question went unheard by the long-forgotten photograph. I heaved, bursting out a sob. But then quickly rolled my lips in and clasped my hand over my mouth so Jim wouldn't hear. My chest palpitated as if I were disciplining a laugh. But the longer I kept it all bottled up, the more the core of my chest rotted to black.

There I was, as I'd been my entire life. Waiting for someone who only existed in photographs. Wishing that somehow, some impossible way how, mom would push open that bedroom door and come sit next to me on my bed and cry with me. And that somehow, she would find a way to be strong. Mom's voice would sound fragile, on the verge of cracking, yet she would remind me that everything would be okay as she brushed back my hair. Even if she didn't believe that—she would have told me anyway.

I cried for a while into my hands. Not daring to look up. Partly believing that if I were just sad enough—she would be standing there. Waiting at my bedroom door for me. To avoid being crushed, I remained facedown in my hands. Eventually, after the tears retired and I could breathe again, I steeled myself for the disappointment. But no matter how stupid and childish I knew that hope was, no matter how hard I tried to stay unbroken, a part of my heart still died when I looked up and saw that the bedroom door was still closed.