24
Daddy Please Don't Cry
==========MARY===========
"I love you," he said.
The words still rang in my ears, and like a shockwave in my heart, when I finally sat down. Danny and his mom dropped the phrase so often that its declaration had lost meaning.
Before he had said I love you, he'd also said, "I need you."
I wasn't expecting to hear that either.
He had also said, "Don't worry 'bout it."
But my eye throbbed, reminding me that it was swollen and sensitive on my face when he mumbled that. And before he'd mumbled that, I had told him: "I'm here to get my things."
The wet and muddy pant legs swayed against my ankles as I walked from Danny's car to my house. Danny had just screamed out the car window, "I'll be waiting!" But I pretended not to hear.
The rain had only napped last night, and it re-awoke that morning as the sky started to lighten. The rain tacking against the tin of the drain pipe was what had awoken me. Danny slept on through though, and unlike throughout most of the night, breathed silently. Despite the cold air slipping in through the screen, I was warm beneath his shoulder huddled over mine and with his bare arms wrapping around my body.
But out on the street, walking to my house, the rain soaked in through the sweater of his I wore, seeming to seep right through my skin, drenching my bones.
As I walked down Bayview, on the street splodged with mud and dead leaves, I kept my head down, watching my steps to avoid the worms that stretched out along the pavement. My neighborhood smelled of mud and the scent of salt from the ocean, and the crash of the surf below the bay sounded stronger than ever. As I walked by the homes of all my neighbors, I forgot about being drenched and wondered about all of their lives on this anomaly of an August day, which seemed to forecast what the oncoming autumn would feel like.
Most of the homes in Danae's Bay were built for idyllic beach life. Adorned with tall windows that served as walls, providing each room with a perfect view, and also openly exposing their lives for me to observe.
My neighbors were all huddled in for the day, cozy in their living rooms with lamps turned on to cast out the gloom of the afternoon, sipping on tea, watching the rainfall from within. All of them eager to wear the layers that summer made obsolete, and grateful, feeling deserving, for their break from the heat.
My hair mopped the back of my neck as I looked over at my favorite house from which blue smoke arose out of the chimney, floating out above the roofs, seeming to thicken the gray haze in the sky. On the lawn, birds squeaked as they played from tree to tree, shaking the rain off the leaves as they shuddered their wings and flew away. And from inside my favorite house, I heard the chime of a piano melody. I had imagined that a little blonde girl was learning how to read music on a white piano.
You see, after all those years of walking those same streets, to and from school or work, I had gotten to know my neighbors in a way they'd never gotten to know me. From the outside, I always peered in through their windows, learning about their entire lives within.
A flock of blackbirds fluttered in the treetops, rattling the leaves hung with tears.
I pulled at the ankles of the sweatpants I'd borrowed from Danny, now completely caked in mud and rain, and walked up the porch steps to my house. The doormat erupted in a mini flood, further soaking my feet. As I walked towards my front door, I could feel the blisters brewing.
Just as I pulled open the screen door, I saw Jim come hobbling from around the living room corner. Balancing his steps with a cane I wasn't quite sure of when he started using, and dangling a joint from out of his mouth. The smell of marijuana shot straight up my nose.
Jim lunged forward, limping with the wooden cane that wobbled with the weight of his body.
"I'm here to get my things," I said.
"Don't worry 'bout it." He answered. But then as Jim crossed into the gray daylight from the dimness of the hallway, standing in the doorframe, he looked warily at me.
"Wh-What happened t'your eye?"
"Are you fuc—are you joking?"
"No, dear?" He took a careful step down onto the porch. "Your eye, sweetie. Tell me. What happened?"
"Nothing... I'm here to get my things."
"What? Why?" he said anxiously as he walked to his lawn chair. "Are you movin' out?"
"Seriously?"
Before Jim answered, he dropped the cane against the barbecue, scratching the steel as it slid off and thumped to the ground. And then while struggling to lower himself into the seat, asked, "Still seeing... ooh? What was his name? Daniel?"
I shook my head.
"Oh. That's too bad. He seemed like a very nice boy."
On the strike of the lighter, the end-tip of the joint caught a short flame and fizzled, cupping the harsh stank of raw weed. Jim took a hard hit, and as the smoke drooled out of his mouth, he admired how fat of a joint he rolled.
Jim then went on a rant about how Danny was a Leftist and how he's a part of a group of defective snowflakes that are trying to destroy the First Amendment. And that we can't trust our neighbors anymore, and that the Left are committing crimes like taking a knee for our National Anthem. I stopped listening somewhere in the midst of it.
"I'm just tryin' to protect ya, Mary," he said before he began another rant about taxes, or the government, or some other conspiracy theory. Just as I nodded and pulled open the door he said, "I just don't want what happened t'your mum, t'happen to you."
My attention averted from the cold handle.
"Ya know, your mum was young, she was your age, when she got pregnant with you, right?"
The indents of the screen door handle crushed into my palm. I didn't dare let go of my grip.
"It's just real scary t'think 'bout that happening t'ya too, Mary."
He lifted the joint to his mouth. I nodded, anticipating more.
But he only picked and chose what he wanted to reveal about my mom. We didn't say anything else. Jim vanished into a daze or a daydream, staring out towards the crevice between the close-knit properties on the east side of the street. The only view of the ocean we got.
The hinges of the screen door shrieked as I pulled it back, about to step inside.
"Mary."
I turned around. Jim's eyes were glossed over and red. Even then, I had faith they were red with tears.
"I need you," he said.
The smoke from his lips slipped into the air. The frame of the porch cringed with the rocking of the wind. Flakes of dirt wavered in the cobwebs.
"Yeah," I said. My eye throbbed.
"I couldn't handle losin' you, like how I lost your mother."
I nodded, opening the door wide enough to let myself in.
"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.