Whisper Me This(52)

About two weeks into his tenure, I quit and took a job with a temp agency, which has landed me stints doing everything from answering phones in a veterinary office to writing community articles for small newspapers. I love the variety, even though I know this is a phase I should probably have grown out of about twenty years ago. I keep waiting for some great life purpose to rise up in front of me and declare itself, but I don’t seem to be wired for greatness.

Elle is staring at me, tapping the pen on the table.

“What?”

“You were daydreaming. Are you really going to just let the church ladies plan Grandma’s funeral?”

“I am. What’s next?”

She grins. “Tony.”

“I don’t think I follow you.”

“We’ve got safety and basic needs and shelter taken care of. Love and belonging come next.”

“Could we skip that and get straight to self-actualization? Besides, I have you and Grandpa. All the love I could possibly need.”

Elle makes a scoffing noise. “Not the same. Tony’s cute. Don’t you think?”

Cute isn’t the word I would use for Tony. At all. Too masculine. Too much muscle. Too much shadow hidden beneath his grin and his gentleness. I’m not about to share any of these thoughts with my daughter.

“Can we get back to work?” I ask her. “I don’t have time for boys right now.”

This doesn’t get me off the hook.

“Oh, fine,” she says. “Aunt Marley, then. She definitely fits under love and belonging. Don’t you miss her? We can go to the concert, right?”

Marley.

I don’t remember her as anything more than an imaginary friend, and yet her name is at the center of everything—all this mystery. It is also the heart of the breach between my mother and me. My desire to find my sister is equally balanced by a desire to stay as far away from her as possible.

I take a breath, curl my toes, tap my fingers on my thighs. One of my counselors taught me this trick for staying grounded—one of the counselors who reinforced my mother’s continued statements that Marley was made up of my imagination, that I needed to make real friends and live in the real world.

Elle is waiting for an answer. I give her an evasion.

“So she’s Aunt Marley now? Just like that?”

“Well, she is my aunt, right? So what else would I call her?”

I drop my head into my hands and rub my temples. “Elle, this isn’t going to be some exuberant family reunion. She might not even want to know us. Maybe she’s a terrible person, and we don’t want to know her. If we go to that concert. If.”

“She’s family,” Elle says, as if that is the answer to everything. “It doesn’t matter what kind of person she is; she’s still family.”





Leah’s Journal

I married Boots when I was sixteen, a bona fide shotgun wedding. My father sobered up long enough to be outraged and make some empty threats. Boots didn’t need threatening. He was into me and loved the idea of himself as a father, that he was recreating in his own image. He wanted me by his side all the time, everywhere. I loved the way he wanted me all to himself.

“We don’t need anybody else,” he would say. I agreed. My few friendships fell away, one by one.

Mom was just too beaten down and tired to raise a fuss.

She tried. I’ll credit her with that.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said to me. “Being pregnant isn’t the end of everything. Have the baby. Give it up for adoption. You’re a smart girl. You should finish school.”

I thought this to be stupid advice. She hadn’t done that. Why should I?

Logic, with a sixteen-year-old girl, doesn’t always exist. I ought to have seen it then, where her own shotgun marriage landed her. With me and an alcoholic husband and no real life whatsoever. But I was madly in love.

At that point, I had no clue I was carrying twins. The idea of a baby (let alone two!) was sort of nebulous and unreal. My body hadn’t changed much. Apart from a little nausea in the mornings, I wasn’t even sick. Boots looked like an escape. Like salvation and a dream. He was going to be a rock star. And he’d chosen me—me! We were going to live in a mansion and have a castle in France. Travel all over the country, where he would perform before adoring fans.

And me? I would travel with him, of course. Me and a baby. One happy family.

It wasn’t a church wedding. The pastor of our church refused to perform the ceremony. I thought at the time he was judging us because I was pregnant. I wonder now if it was his attempt to save me, or at least his refusal to be part of the devil’s deal I was making.

So we were married at the courthouse, by a justice of the peace. I couldn’t afford a wedding dress, and God knows Boots couldn’t afford to buy one for me. He told me not to worry about it.

“We are not the dress-up sort of people, you and me,” he said. So I wore my usual blue jeans, with a long shirt to conceal the snap I could no longer close.

I didn’t have a friend to be my witness. For one, they were all too young to be legal. And I’d been so completely absorbed in Boots since that very first night that I really had no friends left who were interested.

My mother signed for me.

Boots brought two of his band members to bear witness. One was his buddy, Irv somebody. I never did know his last name. The other was a girl, Jolene Avery. Her name I knew too well. Boots talked about her a lot. What a fantastic singer she was. Her accommodating nature (this to highlight my own stubborn willfulness). How thin, how active, how sexy.