Girls on Fire(20)

When I was ten, my mother told me she pulled my name from some shitty romance novel. “Lucky you weren’t a boy,” she said, “or it could have been Fabio.”

It was her hobby, telling lies about the past. Making up stories to help her feel better and me feel worse.

Your father left because he didn’t love us.

Your father was a useless f*ckup and we’re better off without him.

Unless she was in one of her other moods: It ruined everything, a f*cking baby, how could it not. No more f*cking on the kitchen floor, suddenly it’s all diapers and bills and how can I blame him for f*cking off. I would’ve done it myself if I’d thought of it first.

Before you, he drank, but he was no drunk.

Before you, everything was good.

Back in Jersey, when she was in an especially good mood, she would tell me how they met, both drunk off their asses at a Van Halen show. He worked security, she was a groupie, and she’d f*ck anyone if it meant getting backstage.

She didn’t talk about it as much with the Bastard around, because he didn’t like the reminder that he wasn’t her first. But sometimes, when he was out bowling for the Lord or whatever, she’d get drunk and misty and want to play another round of This Is Your Life. Your daddy gave me a coat hanger for Valentine’s Day. I should have used it.

I know what I know.

Lacey, he said, when he put his hand on my unformed head, only that thin layer of lace and womb between us, and he said it because even then he thought I was beautiful.

I’d stay if I could, he whispered, that last night. I’ll come back for you.

He did come back for me, four times that year, twice the next one, always when she was at work or asleep, and I never told her, not once. Sometimes he showed up at night and threw pebbles at my window, like we were f*cking Romeo and Juliet, and he would climb up the trellis and crawl into my bedroom with a stuffed animal in his mouth, some limp bunny or three-legged cat that he’d found and saved just for me, because he knew I liked them wounded. He’d put his finger to his lips, and I’d zip mine shut, and we would play in the moonlight, quiet as mice, pretending that maybe this one time, the sun would never rise.

When he stopped coming, I knew he had a good reason. I liked to imagine him on a ship somewhere, the merchant marines or maybe cabin boy on some private yacht, my father swinging through the riggings, shouting Ahoy there! and Land ho!, making his fortune so he could come back for real and take me away.

Except how would he know to find me in Battle Creek? We were doing fine in Jersey, just the two of us, me doing whatever I wanted and my mother letting me. I gave her the same courtesy, pretending to buy her flexible definition of “waitressing” and ignoring the parade of sad, lonely men, the local car dealers and the drunk tourists. Then along came the Bastard, something wicked this way in a velour suit. The Bastard James Troy, and how ironic is it that your real daddy and my fake one have the same name, like how a double-wide trailer and Buckingham Palace are both called a home.

My James acted like he was still in the military, even though he’d never actually been in the military, unless you counted getting dishonorably discharged from the reserves after less than six months. Who needed a Purple Heart when you could be a soldier in the army of God, fighting the good fight by phone-banking for the Christian Coalition? The man’s most valuable possession was a framed, signed photo of George Bush. Reagan, even Nixon, maybe I could have respected—but what kind of middle management weenie has a hard-on for George H. W. Bush?

My James, she called him from the beginning: My James knows how it is, unlike that bitch sponsor always up her ass about the Xanax, as if she didn’t need something to take the edge off without the beer. My James will drive; my James will make dinner; my James says abortion’s a sin—and anyway he’s always wanted to be a daddy and you’ve always wanted to be a big sister and look at the pretty ring.

People will assume it’s mine, I told her. That you’re mothering your own grandson for propriety’s sake, and she said people knew her better than to believe she did anything for propriety’s sake.

She thought she was better with him than without him, and maybe it was true, but just because dog food tastes better than dog shit doesn’t mean you want it for dinner. When dog food gets a transfer to corporate headquarters, conveniently located twenty miles past bumblef*ck, it doesn’t mean you hitch up the U-Haul and speed into the sunset, listening to Barry Manilow and stopping to pee every twenty minutes because little-bro-to-be is kneeing your bladder.

No one should move to Battle Creek in the summer. I mean, obviously, no one should move to Battle Creek at all, but some of us had no choice in the matter, and should at least have been excused from arriving in summer, piling out of the shit-paneled van to get a good look at the shit-paneled house and almost spontaneously combusting before we made it halfway up the driveway.

In the summer, Battle Creek smelled like fried dog shit. No one who lived there seemed to notice, maybe because it’s all you’d ever known. Like the so-called lake covered in so much algae you wouldn’t know there was water under there unless you stepped in it, which not even one of the native morons would do, because God knew what was living in the toxic sludge underneath. Or the public pool with its sick green water, the color of chlorine mixed with pee. But it was between the pool, or the lake, or the 7-Eleven that reeked of those disgusting meat pockets roasting in the heater case—because in the summer, in Battle Creek, there was literally nothing else to do. Unless I wanted to lock myself in the house for two months, and when it came to a house containing the Bastard and his not-technically-a-bastard fetus, agoraphobia was not an option.