June 1985
“Gabrielle?” Mum’s voice pierced the darkness, her footsteps weary on the stairs. The door opened. She felt about for the light, flicking it on. “Why aren’t you ready yet? Your father’s here.”
I didn’t reply, pulled the covers over my head.
Sighing, she drew the curtains, cranking open a window. “It’s so stuffy in here. No wonder you’re lethargic.” She pulled back the sheets, gasped. “You’re still in your pajamas? What are you playing at? He’ll say I did this deliberately!” She hurried to the wardrobe, scraping the hangers along the rail. “What do you want to wear? Your new T-shirt?”
I stared up at the ceiling, at the dentists’ poster. I used to love that poster so much when having my teeth checked that I asked if I could keep it when they were having the surgery refurbished. If anyone wondered why a fourteen-year-old kid wanted something to distract her from pain in her own home, no one said anything. It was just a tropical beach—turquoise sea, palm trees—but I liked it a lot. One day, when I had my own house, I’d plant palm trees everywhere.
“How about your cropped trousers? They look nice, hmm?”
Outside, there was an engine running and then it cut out. She went to the window, looking out. “Please, Gabrielle. Do this for me. Pull yourself together.”
The warble in her voice drew my attention away from the tropical beach. I looked at the lines on her forehead, the gray patch in the middle of her hair, the way her nails were bitten and bled, the way her shoulders were like knobbly walnuts underneath her blouse. And she wanted me to pull myself together?
“He could make things very difficult for us.” She exhaled, and her face looked so sharp, so thin, I could imagine her as a skull. “Financially.”
“Okay. Keep your panties on,” I said, sitting up.
She smiled, relieved. “Thank you.”
I stared at her stonily. “Well…?”
She looked blank and then jumped up. “Oh, you want me to leave? Just don’t be too long. I’ll tell him five minutes, all right?”
I shrugged, picking up the clothes she had laid out for me. The T-shirt said Staying Alive in ’85 across the front. Lately, I’d been wearing it ironically.
At the door, she smiled at me again and then left, barely needing to open the door more than a crack to fit through. She had lost a lot of weight, mostly because she was on her feet all day now as a waitress in one of the touristy cafés in town. Dad had sunk a lot of money into his new house and into expanding the business, she had said, and Sara was demanding. I didn’t know if any of that were true, didn’t think Mom would make it up, but then she wasn’t exactly unbiased either. No one liked Frizzy, least of all me.
I knew something else was off too. It felt like the radio was between stations the whole time—low strange noises from Mars. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I knew she was depressed—who wouldn’t be in her shoes—but there was something else. If I’d had the energy, I might have tried to work it out, but I didn’t. And then there was the lack of care. I didn’t care about very much anymore. Not even Mom.
Downstairs, Dad was leaning against the car, enjoying a cigar, head turned up to the sky as he blew out smoke rings. As though that was going to wash with me anymore. I scowled, flapping my hand as I got in the car. “That stinks.”
“Nice to see you too,” he said, getting in beside me, cigar clenched between his teeth.
“I hate that smell.” I wound down the window, sitting with my body turned away from him. On the seat, there was a long blond hair and another on the floor carpet. It smelled of her too. I hated everything about this car.
“You look nice,” Dad said. “Is that new?”
As if he would know. As if he knew anything about me now.
“Where are we going?” I asked, playing with my necklace. Mom had made me put on this white bead necklace at the last minute that all the girls wore at school, and she’d combed my hair over on one side as though I were Lady Di.
“Where would you like to go?”
“Home.”
He sighed, rubbed his beard. “You’re already home.”
I looked up at the front of our house as though surprised. “Oh, yeah!”
There was a silence. He turned off the engine. “Look, if you don’t want to go, then…”
Just say it, Dad. Pull the plug. Put us both out of our misery.
Whatever he was going to say, he decided not to. He sighed again, started the engine. “Let’s just see where we end up,” he said.
I didn’t speak the whole way. He didn’t put the radio on either like old times. I sat stiffly in that new car that smelled of dead flowers and hairspray, and watched the summer pass me by outside. I hadn’t gone farther than my room and school in ages, couldn’t remember what freshly cut grass smelled like, how hot the sand got at the beach in a heat wave.
We ended up somewhere I hadn’t thought of in a long while: No. 23, Ocean View Road. He stopped the car in the street, not pulling up in the driveway like we used to. I was thrown for a moment and then realized there were people living there now.
He reached for my hand as we walked toward the gates, then quickly withdrew it again. I knew he was acting out of memory, on autopilot, recalling a time when this would have been the most natural thing in the world to do.
At the gates, something happened. Everything began to shift within me like snow turning to sludge and I became liquid, my eyes filling. I gazed through the railings at the two cars in the driveway, side by side, the little bike standing by the garage door, the glimpse of a paddling pool in the back garden. And then I turned to Dad, buried my face in him as I cried.
* * *
At home, instead of just tooting the horn and driving off, he did something unusual and came inside with me. Seen through his eyes, the house seemed bare, cold. A lot of the decorative things here were his and when he had moved in with Frizzy, he’d taken most of it with him. He had offered to replace everything, but Mom hadn’t been interested in ornaments and whatnots—hadn’t seemed to notice they were gone.
“Why don’t you go upstairs for a bit?” she asked, her face all pointy again the moment she saw Dad.
One minute they were telling me off for spending all my time in my room, and the next they were sending me up there. It suited me fine, most of the time, except today.
I pretended to stomp upstairs, slamming my door, and then crept back down, stopping halfway, ear between the bannisters.
“…It’s not working,” Dad was saying. They were in the kitchen. Mom was making him a cup of tea, but I knew from experience that he wouldn’t be staying long enough to drink it. “She doesn’t…” The kettle was too loud for me to hear.
I waited for it to click off.
“Well, what do you expect, Robin? Look what she’s been through.”
“But it shouldn’t affect our relationship. I mean, I’m always nice to her.”
“Nice?” Mom said, her voice shrill. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
There was the clink of plates as she got biscuits, cake. He wouldn’t be eating any of it.
“I think we should stop it,” he said.
Stop our trips?
I picked at the paintwork, a flake chipping off, sticking painfully into my fingernail.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I had to force her to go again. It’s not fair on her.”
I tried to pull the flake out of my nail, but it was wedged there.
There was more noise as Mom assembled cutlery he wouldn’t be using. “Obviously it’s not going to get any easier on her,” she said, “once the baby comes.”
My head jerked so fast away from the bannisters that I nearly toppled headfirst down the stairs. Grabbing at the wood, my heart started hurting. What baby?
“That’s not going to be any day soon, at least,” Dad said. “Sara’s having trouble in that department.”
What department?
“Well, poor her…” I could tell even from here that Mom didn’t mean that.
“I have to get going.” He rattled his car keys.
Knew it.
“Oh, don’t you want fruit cake?”
“No, not today, Alice.”
“But I made you a cup of tea.”
“Another time, eh?”
I was so distracted by their conversation I forgot I wasn’t supposed to be listening to it. There wasn’t time for me to move or hide. Dad came into view, standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up at me in dismay.
I stared down at my fluffy socks. “How long have you been sitting there, young lady?” he said, his face all red, the way it used to be when he told a workman off for being slack, unsafe. “Were you listening in?”
“Oh, Gabrielle,” Mom said. “How much did you hear?”
My shame turned into anger, inflaming my ears. “Go away, both of you!” I shouted. “I hate you!” And I ran upstairs, this time slamming my bedroom door for real.
I paced the floor, feeling all corkscrewed and knotted. I wanted to punch someone—Dad, Mom, Frizzy. I wanted to knock them all down like skittles. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall of this stupid empty house.
Mom would be standing at the front door, watching him leave. She watched him come, watched him go. I knew this had something to do with what that signal from Mars was trying to tell me—the thing I couldn’t understand yet because I was only fourteen. But someday I would, and I would listen to every word until I knew it by heart.
Pulling the curtains, I got back into bed, staring up at the tropical beach, remembering how nice it was to be at the dentists’, where everyone looked right at you, shined a light on you, told you exactly what they were going to do and when and for how long and how it was going to feel.
Outside, Dad’s car was rumbling. I fought the urge to go to the window. I didn’t want him to see me there if he looked up. I didn’t want him to not see me there either and make him sad. I didn’t want to look out and him not look up at me though. By the time I’d decided to go and see, it was too late and he was gone.