The Girls I've Been(63)
She flips the pin. Another minute down. I look toward the door. No movement, still.
“So what do you want to do for the next eight minutes?” she asks.
I don’t know how to answer that. Any minute, Red Cap could be coming in here too early and we’ll be dead for sure. The longer Duane stays unconscious, the riskier things get.
Iris’s plan is risky. Destructive. Dangerous. Maybe deadly.
That’s where we are, and it makes my heart thump. Is this it? With Wes all alone and these last minutes with her?
“Truth for Truth?” I suggest, and the tightness in her mouth eases.
“Truth for Truth,” she agrees, her thumb rubbing over the heart pin’s point.
“I’m scared,” I say softly.
Her free hand squeezes my thigh. “Me too.”
“I don’t know if we can get out of this,” she tells me.
“We can. I’ve gotten out of worse.”
She’s quiet. The hourglass is almost empty.
“I’ve read about him. And about you,” she says.
“You’ve read about Ashley.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
That’s the question, isn’t it?
“What do you want to know?” I ask.
I expect her to ask prying questions. Searching, digging, uncomfortable ones. Maybe she’ll even ask the same thing Duane did: Did you really do the things they say you did?
But Iris does the thing she always does: She surprises me.
“Are you okay? After everything you had to . . . are you all right?”
Such a simple question—and it has a simple answer. It breaks me open all the same, that she asks that first. Like I come first.
She flips the heart pin. Seven minutes.
“No,” I say, because she deserves the truth. “I’m not.”
Maybe someday I will be.
— 48 —
Ashley: How I Choose
She marries Raymond, and I can’t stop her. He moves us to his big house in the Keys, and I’ve got no choice but to go where they tell me.
I’ve gone from a partner in my mother’s schemes to a bit player in her romance. I’ve got nothing to do. Nowhere to go. I’m not supposed to know the details of Raymond’s operation—that it’s a lot bigger than running a con or laundering money through the gyms and it’s a lot more complicated and wide-reaching—I’m suddenly supposed to just be. Be a daughter. Be a normal girl. Be okay.
I’m not any of those things. Not in the way they want me to be.
He’s your father now. She tears up when she tells me this, after the wedding. Like it’s beautiful. It tells me how bad it is, that she thinks that’ll be something comforting, instead of terrifying.
I know about being a mixed-up handful of traits designed to lure a man in. My job is to learn how each mark works: what makes him smile, which tells me about his happiness; what makes him frown, which tells me about his fears; and what he approves of, which tells me about how much control he wants.
That’s what fatherhood’s about, as far as I can see: control. Not just of my mind, but of my body. That’s what Elijah wanted when I was Haley, with his endless cooing about keeping sweet. That’s what Joseph took when I was Katie, before I made him stop.
But I can’t make Raymond stop. I don’t think that’s how it works anymore. If he decides he’s my father, I think he’s my father.
He decides other things, too. He decides everything. He decides I shouldn’t go to school, because boys my age have one thing on their minds and he doesn’t want me anywhere near that. I get tutored instead.
He decides that Mom should dedicate herself to charity. It’s just another kind of grift, sweetheart, he tells her, and she laughs and pets his arm.
He decides that when he’s not there, when he’s off on business, there are men in the house—for security, he says. We have guards, we have a driver, we have a housekeeper, we have people watching us every minute of the day.
He eradicates any reason for us to leave, any option for us to leave, any help that could let us leave, and it’s shocking how fast he strips our freedom down in the name of family and care and protection, because his job is a dangerous one and boys my age only have one thing on their mind and charity’s just another kind of grift, sweetheart.
And she just . . . lets it happen.
You don’t grow up with my mother and not know all about power over men. How to get it. How to use it. How to keep it.
And now she hasn’t even lost it, she’s given it to him on a silver platter because of love, and I’m reeling, because it’s such a con. Most of the time, we’re this shiny little Stepford family veneer to hide the criminal grime. But it’s like there’s a net around the house, and every day, he hauls it tighter.
I tell myself, at first, that she doesn’t bend; she’ll find a way to break him.
But then . . .
She doesn’t bend. She doesn’t find a way to break him.
She just keeps breaking.
And then she does something that breaks me.
It’s a normal day on the beach. Because that’s what I do now. Sit out on the beach with Mom in the mornings, before my tutoring sessions, and then in the afternoons I stay in my room and read. I try to stay quiet. I try not to draw attention as I give whatever bruises I’ve got time to heal. It’s not hard, most of the time, because they are obsessed with each other, in that gross, gooey, show-off way that Mom relishes after so many years of being unknown.