Girls on Fire(67)

“She’s desperate for attention,” Nikki said that night on the phone. “Your attention, probably. Don’t fall for it.”

Nikki didn’t ask me what I thought Lacey was up to, but she was the only one. People who hadn’t spoken to me since junior high accosted me in the halls, wanting to know whether Lacey really thought she could call Satan’s wrath down upon her enemies, whether I thought she could. I liked it.

My mother asked me, occasionally, why Lacey never came around—it didn’t seem like she was disappointed, more like she thought I was hiding something she needed to know—but I usually mumbled something about being busy and hoped she wouldn’t bring it up again. My father pushed harder, told me that whatever Lacey’d done I could forgive, and I wondered what made him think that she was the one at fault. Or why he couldn’t decide whether we were better off with or without her. I didn’t ask. This was how we conversed, now, my father talking at me while I played a wall. I couldn’t remember why I was so angry with him. Because he’d kept things from me; because he hadn’t fixed things for me; because in some indefinable way he’d taken Lacey from me, which seemed an even greater sin now that she was back. Because he didn’t like the Hannah I’d become, and he couldn’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t you miss her, he said, and of course I did, and he was also saying without saying, don’t you miss me, and of course I did that, too. But it was safer like this, to be a wall. To be Hannah. My father, Lacey—neither of them understood why that mattered, staying safe. They didn’t know what it was to wake up on damp ground with a stranger’s boot toeing your flesh, to find words on your skin that named your secret self. They didn’t still, sometimes in the shower, rub themselves raw, imagining ink seeping into their skin, invisible brands leaving permanent marks. They didn’t know what it was not to remember.

It was all mine, the power to tell my story, build myself up again from whatever fairy tale I liked. I liked ordinary. Unexceptional. Safe. A story without dragons, without riddles, without a dark witch in the heart of the woods. A boring story about a girl who turned down the quest, stayed home to watch TV.

Now that I was Hannah again, I stayed in the kitchen after dinners, to help my mother with the dishes. You’re such a comfort to me, she would say, and I would smile my fake smile. We rinsed and rubbed, and I feigned interest in her latest self-improvement strategies, the Post-it note plan for the fridge, the poem-a-day calendar, the challenge of how to persuade herself to spend yet another evening sweating and stretching in time with Jane Fonda. She filled me in on her dull office politics and asked my advice on how to handle the * at reception who was always stealing her lunch. Sometimes she complained about my father, though she tried to pretend it wasn’t complaining, just idle speculation: “I wonder if your father likes this job enough to stick with it for a while” or “I wonder if your father will ever get around to cleaning out the gutters like he promised.” She was right about him, and I couldn’t understand why I still had to bite back the only answers that wanted to come: Maybe if you didn’t nag him all the time he wouldn’t hate you so much. Maybe he drinks to drown out the sound of your voice. Maybe you’ve told him he’s a failure so many times that he believes it.

He was drinking less but smoking more. He was happier. He’d stopped complaining about the movie theater, even taken on some extra shifts, mostly at night. I overheard my mother on the phone joking that he was probably having an affair.

That week, over a chicken potpie he’d uncharacteristically cooked from scratch, he said he was thinking about starting up his band again.

My mother laughed. “Oh, come on, Jimmy,” she said when he pulled a sulk. “I’m sorry, but if you’re going to have a midlife crisis, does it have to be such a cliché?”

“How about you, kid?” he asked me, as if he’d forgotten we weren’t like that anymore; I couldn’t be counted on for backup. “I could always use a drummer.”

It was pathetic, the idea of him jamming in a garage in some torn-up T-shirt with a tie for a bandana, a sad after-hours Springsteen. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, though, and he must have known what it meant.

The charm offensive swung back toward my mother. “You know you’ve always wanted to be my backup singer, Jules.”

“Not exactly my heart’s fondest desire,” she said, but without enough bite for my taste.

“That’s not what you said on our third date.”

Now she was fighting back a smile. “Jimmy, we agreed we would never—”

“Hot Lips here insisted we let her up on stage.” He reached for her hand, and she reminded him not to call her that, and said that he’d pushed her on stage, but when he pulled her out of her chair now, she pantomimed some unconvincing resistance, then let him swing her around and laughed when he started singing in falsetto. “I’m a good singer, I swear, really, let me at the mic,” he said, in his version of my mother’s voice, and she leaned her head against his shoulder and they swayed to music I couldn’t hear.

“To be fair, I’d had quite a bit to drink.” She was, ridiculously, giggling.

“They threw rotten fruit at the stage,” my father said.

She smacked him. “They certainly did not.”