As the year went on I had begun to measure the passage of time not by the signposts of my own development, but by Carrington’s. The first time she rolled over, the first time she sat on her own, ate applesauce mixed with powdered rice, the first haircut, the first tooth. I was the one she always raised her arms to first, giving me a wet gummy grin. It amused and disconcerted Mama at first, and then it became something everyone accepted matter-of-factly.
The bond between Carrington and me was closer than that of sisters; it was more like that of parent and child. Not as a result of intention or choice…it simply was. It seemed natural that I would go with Mama and the baby to her pediatrician’s visits. I was more intimately acquainted with the baby’s problems and patterns than anyone else. When it was time for vaccinations, Mama retreated to the corner of the room while I pinned the baby’s arms and legs down on the doctor’s table. “You do it, Liberty,” Mama said. “She won’t hold it against you like she would someone else.”
I stared into Carrington’s pooling eyes, flinching at her incredulous scream as the nurse injected the vaccines into her plump little thighs. I ducked my head beside hers. “I wish it could be me,” I whispered to her scarlet ear. “I would take it for you. I would take a hundred of them.” Afterward I comforted her, holding her tightly until her sobbing stopped. I made a ceremony of placing the I WAS A GOOD PATIENT sticker on the center of her T-shirt.
No one, including me, could say that Mama wasn’t a good parent to Carrington. She was affectionate and attentive to the baby. She made certain Carrington was well dressed and had everything she needed. But the puzzling distance remained. It troubled me that she didn’t seem to feel as intensely for the baby as I did.
I went to Miss Marva with my concerns, and her answer surprised me. “There’s nothing strange about that, Liberty.”
“There isn’t?”
She stirred a big pot of scented wax on the stove, getting it ready to pour into a row of glass apothecary jars. “It’s a lie when they say you love all your children equally,” she said placidly. “You don’t. There’s always a favorite. And you’re your mother’s favorite.”
“I want Carrington to be her favorite.”
“Your mama will take to her in time. It’s not always love at first sight.” She dipped a stainless steel ladle into the pot and brought it up brimming with light blue wax. “Sometimes you have to get to know each other.”
“It shouldn’t take this long,” I protested.
Miss Marva’s cheeks jiggled as she chuckled. “Liberty, it could take a lifetime.”
For once her laugh was not a happy sound. I knew without asking that she was thinking about her own daughter, a woman named Marisol who lived in Dallas and never came to visit. Miss Marva had once described Marisol, the product of a brief and long-ago marriage, as a troubled soul, given to addictions and obsessions and relationships with men of low character.
“What made her that way?” I had asked Miss Marva when she told me about Marisol, expecting her to lay out logical reasons as neatly as balls of cookie dough on a baking sheet.
“God did,” Miss Marva had replied, simply and without bitterness. From that and other conversations, I gathered that on questions of nature versus nurture, she was firmly on the side of the former. Me, I wasn’t so sure.
Whenever I took Carrington out people assumed she was mine, despite the fact that I was black haired and amber skinned, and she was as fair as a white-petaled daisy. “How young they have them,” I heard a woman say behind me, as I pushed Carrington’s stroller through the mall. And a masculine voice replied in patent disgust, “Mexicans. She’ll have a dozen by the time she’s twenty. And they’ll all be living off our tax money.”
“Shhh, not so loud,” the woman admonished.
I quickened my pace and turned into the next store I could reach, my face burning with shame and anger. That was the stereotype—Mexican girls were supposed to have sex early and often, breed like rabbits, have volcanic tempers, and love to cook. Every now and then a circular would appear on the racks near the supermarket entrance, containing pictures and descriptions of Mexican mail-order brides. “These lovely ladies enjoy being women,” the circular said. “They’re not interested in competing with men. A Mexican wife, with her traditional values, will put you and your career first. Unlike their American counterparts, Mexican women are satisfied with a modest lifestyle, as long as they are not mistreated.”
Living so close to the border, Tex-Mex women were often subject to the same expectations. I hoped no man would ever make the mistake of thinking I would be happy to put him and his career first.
My junior year seemed to go quickly. Mama’s disposition had improved considerably, thanks to the antidepressants the doctor had prescribed. She regained her figure and her sense of humor, and the phone rang often. Mama seldom brought her dates to the trailer, and she hardly ever spent a full night away from Carrington and me. But there were still those odd disappearances when she would be gone for a day and come back without a word of explanation. After these episodes she was always calm and strangely peaceful, as if she’d gone through a period of prayer and fasting. I didn’t mind her leaving. It always seemed to do her good, and I had no problem taking care of Carrington by myself.
I tried to rely on Hardy as little as possible, because seeing each other seemed to bring us more frustration and unhappiness than pleasure. Hardy was determined to treat me as if I were a younger sister, and I tried to comply, but the pretense was awkward and ill-fitting.
Hardy was busy with land clearing and other brutal labor that toughened him in body and spirit. The mischievous twinkle of his eyes had cooled into a flat, rebellious stare. His lack of prospects, the fact that other boys his age were going to college while he seemed to be going nowhere, was eating away at him. Boys in Hardy’s position had few choices after high school other than to take a petrochem job with Sterling or Valero, or go into road construction.
When I graduated, my choices weren’t going to be any better. I had no special talents that would afford me a scholarship anywhere, and so far I hadn’t even taken any summer jobs that would have given me experience to put on a résumé. “You’re good with babies,” my friend Lucy had pointed out. “You could work at a day care, or maybe as a teacher’s assistant at the elementary school.”
“I’m only good with Carrington,” I said. “I don’t think I’d like to take care of other people’s children.”
Lucy had pondered my possible future careers, and had decided I should get a cosmetology degree. “You love doing makeup and hair,” she pointed out. That was true. But beauty school would be expensive, though. I wondered what Mama’s reaction would be if I asked her for thousands of dollars of tuition money. And then I wondered what other plans or ideas she might have for my future, if any. It was pretty likely she didn’t. Mama chose to live in the moment. So I stored the idea away, saving it for a time when I thought Mama would be open to it.
Winter came, and I began to go out with a boy named Luke Bishop, whose father owned a car dealership. Luke was on the football team—in fact, he had taken the fullback position after Hardy’s knee had gone out the previous year—but Luke wasn’t considering a sports career. His family’s financial status would allow him to go to any college he could get into. He was a good-looking boy with dark hair and blue eyes, and he bore enough of a physical resemblance to Hardy that I was drawn to him.
I met Luke at a Blue Santa party just before Christmas. It was the local law enforcement’s annual toy drive to collect presents for poor families with needy children. For most of December toys were donated, gathered and sorted, and on the twenty-first, the presents were wrapped at a party at the police station. Anyone could volunteer to help. The football coach had ordered all his players to participate in some capacity, whether it was to collect toys, attend the wrapping party, or deliver them the day before Christmas.
I went to the party with my friend Moody and her boyfriend Earl Jr., the butcher’s son. There must have been at least a hundred people at the party, and a mountain of toys stacked around and beside the long tables. Christmas music was playing in the background. A makeshift coffee station in the corner featured big stainless steel carafes, and boxes of cookies plastered with white icing. Standing in a row of present-wrappers, wearing a Santa Claus hat someone had put on my head, I felt like a Christmas elf.
With so many people cutting paper and curling ribbons, there was a shortage of scissors. As soon as a pair was set down, they were immediately snatched up by someone who had been waiting for his or her turn. Standing at the table with a pile of unwrapped toys, and a roll of red and white striped paper, I watched impatiently for my chance. A pair of scissors clattered on the table, and I reached for them. But someone else was too fast for me. My fingers inadvertently clamped over a male hand that had already grasped the scissors. I looked up into a pair of smiling blue eyes.
“Dibs,” the boy said. With his other hand, he flipped the tail of my Santa hat away from my eyes and over my shoulder.
We spent the rest of the night side by side, talking, laughing, and pointing out presents we thought the other would like. He chose a Cabbage Patch doll with curly brown hair for me, and I picked out a model kit of a Star Wars X-wing fighter for him. By the end of the evening, Luke had asked me out on a date.
There were many things to like about Luke. He was average in all the right ways, intelligent but not a geek, athletic but not muscle-bound. He had a nice smile, although it wasn’t Hardy’s smile. His deep blue eyes didn’t have the ice-and-fire brightness of Hardy’s, and his dark hair was crisp and wiry, instead of thick and soft like mink fur. Luke also didn’t have Hardy’s outsized presence or restless spirit. But in other ways they were similar, both tall and physically self-possessed, both uncompromisingly masculine.
It was a time in my life when I was especially vulnerable to male attention. Everyone else in the small world of Welcome seemed to be paired up. My own mother had been dating more than I had. And here was a boy who resembled Hardy, without the complexity, and he was available.
As Luke and I began to see more of each other, we were accepted as a couple and other boys stopped asking me out. I liked the security of being half of a pair. I liked having someone to walk through the halls with, someone to eat lunch with, someone to take me out for pizza after the Friday-night game.
The first time Luke kissed me, I was disappointed to discover it wasn’t anything like Hardy’s kisses. He had just brought me back home from a date. Before getting out of the car, he leaned over and pressed his mouth to mine. I returned the pressure, trying to summon a response, but there was no heat or excitement, just the alien moisture of another person’s mouth, the slippery probing of a tongue. My brain remained uninvolved from what was happening to my body. Feeling guilty and embarrassed by my own coldness, I tried to make up for it by wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him harder.
As we continued to date, there were more kisses, embraces, tentative explorations. Gradually I learned to stop comparing Luke to Hardy. There was no mysterious magic, no invisible circuitry of sensation and thought between us. Luke was not the kind who thought deeply about things, and he had no interest in the secretive territory of my heart.
At first Mama hadn’t approved of my dating a senior, but when she met Luke, she’d been charmed by him. “He seems like a nice boy,” she told me afterward. “If you want to date him, I’ll allow it as long as you keep to an eleven-thirty curfew.”
“Thank you, Mama.” I was grateful that she had given her permission, but some inner devil prompted me to say, “He’s only one year younger than Hardy, you know.”
She understood my unspoken question. “It’s not the same.”
I knew why she’d said that.
At nineteen, Hardy had already become more of a man than some men ever were. In the absence of a father he’d learned to shoulder the responsibility of a family, providing for his mother and sisters. He’d worked hard to ensure their survival, and his own. Luke, by contrast, was sheltered and coddled, secure in the belief that things would always come easily to him.
If I hadn’t known Hardy, it was possible I would have come to care more about Luke. But it was too late for that. My emotions had bent around Hardy like wet-molded leather left to dry and harden in the sun, until any attempt to alter its shape would break it.
One night Luke brought me to a party held at someone’s house while their parents were away for the weekend. The place was filled with seniors, and I looked in vain for a familiar face.
The hard blues rock of Stevie Ray Vaughan blasted from outside patio speakers, while plastic cups of orange liquid were handed out to the crowd. Luke brought some to me, advising me with a laugh not to drink it too fast. It tasted like flavored rubbing alcohol. I took the tiniest sips possible, the caustic liquor stinging my lips. While Luke stood talking with his friends, I excused myself by asking where the restroom was.
Gripping the plastic cup, I went into the house and pretended not to notice the couples making out in shadows and corners. I found the guest bathroom, which was miraculously unoccupied, and I poured the drink into the commode.
When I emerged from the bathroom, I decided to take a different route outside. It would be easier, not to mention less embarrassing, to go out the front door and around the side of the house rather than return through the gauntlet of amorous couples. But as I passed the big staircase in the entranceway, I caught sight of a pair of entwined bodies in a shadow.
I felt as if I’d been stabbed through the heart as I recognized Hardy, his arms around a long-limbed blond girl. She was riding one of his thighs, her upper back and shoulders revealed by a black velvet bustier top. One of his fists was closed in her hair, holding it back as he dragged his mouth slowly along the side of her throat.
Pain, desire, jealousy…I hadn’t known it was possible to feel so many things so strongly, all at once. It took every ounce of will I possessed to ignore them and keep going. My steps faltered, but I didn’t stop. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hardy’s head lift. I wanted to die as I realized he’d seen me. My hand shook as I grasped the cold brass doorknob and let myself outside.
I knew he wouldn’t come after me, but my pace quickened until I was half running to the patio. The breath shot from my lungs in hard bursts. I longed to forget what I had just seen, but the image of Hardy with the blond girl was permanently seared in my memory. It shocked me, the fury I felt toward him, the white heat of betrayal. It didn’t matter that he’d promised nothing, owed nothing to me. He was mine. I felt it in every cell of my body.
Somehow I managed to find Luke in the crowd on the patio, and he looked at me with a questioning smile. He could hardly fail to notice the burning color of my cheeks. “What’s the matter, baby doll?”
“I dropped my drink,” I said thickly.
He laughed and laid a heavy arm around my shoulders. “I’ll get you another one.”
“No, I…” I stood on my toes to whisper in his ear. “Would you mind if we left now?”
“Now? We just got here.”
“I want to be alone with you,” I whispered desperately. “Please, Luke. Take me somewhere. Anywhere.”
His expression changed. I knew he was wondering if my sudden desire to be alone with him could mean what he thought it meant.
And the answer was yes. I wanted to kiss him, hold him, do everything Hardy was doing at that exact moment with another girl. Not out of desire, but furious grief. There was no one I could go to. My mother would dismiss my feelings as childish. Maybe they were, but I didn’t care. I had never felt this kind of consuming anger before. My only anchor was the weight of Luke’s arm.
Luke took me to the public park, which contained a man-made lake and several wooded copses. At the side of the lake there was a ramshackle open-sided gazebo lined with splintery wood benches. Families went there to picnic in the daytime. Now the gazebo was empty and dark. The air rustled with night sounds, an orchestra of frogs croaking among the cattails, a mockingbird’s song, the flap of herons’ wings.
Just before we had left the party, I had chugged the rest of Luke’s tequila sunrise. My head was spinning, and I reeled between waves of giddiness and nausea. Luke laid his jacket on the gazebo bench and pulled me onto his lap. He kissed me, his mouth wet and searching. I tasted the purpose in his kiss, the message that tonight he would go as far as I would let him.
His smooth-skinned hand slipped beneath my shirt, over my back, plucking at the clasp of my bra. The underwire garment loosened across my chest. Immediately he reached around to my front, finding the tender curve of a breast, capturing it in a rough squeeze. I winced, and he loosened his grip a little, saying with a shaky laugh, “Sorry, baby doll. It just…you’re so beautiful, you make me crazy…” His thumb rubbed over the hardening tip of my breast. He pinched and chafed my nipples insistently, while our mouths moved together in long unbroken kisses. Soon my breasts were raw and sore. I gave up any hope of feeling pleasure and tried instead to simulate it. If something was wrong, it was my fault, because Luke was experienced.
It must have been the tequila that gave me the sense of being an outside observer as Luke pushed me off his lap and onto the jacket-covered bench. The impact of the wood against my shoulders struck a flare of panic in my midsection, but I ignored it and lay back.
Luke tugged at the fastenings of my jeans and pushed them down over my hips and off one leg. I saw a section of sky from beneath the gazebo roof. It was a misty night with no stars or moon. The only light came from the distant blue glow of a street lamp, flickering from a moth storm.
Like any average teenage boy, Luke understood next to nothing about the more subtle erogenous areas on a woman’s body. I knew even less than he, and being too timid to volunteer what I did or didn’t like, I passively let him do what he would. I had no idea where to put my hands. I felt him reach beneath my panties, where the hair was warm and flattened. More rubbing, a few times roughly grazing the sensitive place that made me jump. He gave an excited half-laugh, mistaking my discomfort for enjoyment.
Luke’s body was broad and heavy as he lowered himself until my legs stiffly bracketed his. He groped between us, unzipping his jeans, using both hands to accomplish some hurried task. I heard the sound of crackling plastic, and felt him pulling at something, arranging it, and then there was the unfamiliar taut, bobbing length of him against my inner thigh.
He pushed my shirt and bra up higher, bunching them beneath my chin. His mouth was at my breast, pulling tightly. I thought we had probably gone too far to stop, that I had no right to say no at this point. I wished it was over, that he would finish soon. Even as that thought crossed my mind, the pressure between my legs became bruising. I tensed and gritted my teeth, and looked up at Luke’s face. He didn’t look back at me. He was focused on the act itself, not on me. I had become nothing more than the instrument by which he would gain relief. He shoved harder, harder into my resistant flesh, and a pained sound broke from my lips.
It only took a few searing thrusts, the condom turning slick from blood, and then he was shuddering against me, groaning in his throat.
“Oh, baby, that was so good.”
I kept my arms around him. A ripple of revulsion ran through me as I felt him kiss my neck, his breath like steam on my skin. It was enough—he’d had enough of me—I needed to belong to myself again. I was relieved beyond measure when he lifted away, my flesh raw and hurting.
We dressed ourselves silently. I had held all my muscles so tightly that when I finally relaxed, they began to tremble from the strain. I trembled all over until even my teeth chattered.
Luke drew me against him, patting my back. “Are you sorry?” he asked, his voice low.
He didn’t expect me to say yes, and I wouldn’t. It seemed bad manners somehow, and it wouldn’t change anything. What was done was done. But I wanted to go home. I wanted to be alone. Only then could I start to catalog the changes that had occurred in me.
“No,” I mumbled against his shoulder.
He patted my back some more. “It’ll be better for you the next time. I promise. My last girlfriend was a virgin, and it took a few times before she started to like it.”
I stiffened a little. No girl wanted to hear about a previous girlfriend at such a time. And although I wasn’t surprised that Luke had had sex with a virgin before, it rankled. It seemed to lessen the value of what I’d given him. As if being someone’s first lover was a commonplace occurrence for him, Luke, the kind of boy virgins threw themselves at.
“Please,” I said, “take me home. I’m so tired…”
“Of course, baby.”
On the way back to Bluebonnet Ranch, Luke drove with one hand and held mine with the other, often giving it a small squeeze. I wasn’t sure whether he was offering reassurance or asking for it, but I squeezed back every time. He asked if I wanted to go out to eat tomorrow night, and I automatically said yes.
We made some conversation. I was too dazed to know what I was saying. Random thoughts went through my mind in the darting, irregular patterns of mourning doves. I was worried about how bad I was going to feel when the numbness wore off, and trying silently to convince myself there was no reason to feel bad. Other girls my age slept with their boyfriends…Lucy had, and Moody was seriously considering it. So what if I had? I was still me. I kept repeating that to myself. Still me.
Now that we had done it once, was it going to happen all the time? Would Luke expect every date to end with sex? I literally cringed at the thought. I felt stings and twitches in unexpected places, and the pinch of strained muscles in my thighs. It would have been no different with Hardy, I told myself. The pain, the smells, the physical functions would have been the same.
We pulled up to the trailer, and Luke walked me to the front steps. He seemed inclined to linger. Desperate to get rid of him, I put on a show of affection, hugging him hard, kissing his lips and chin and cheek. The display seemed to restore his confidence. He grinned and let me go inside.
“Bye, baby doll.”
“Bye, Luke.”
A lamp in the main room had been left on, but Mama and the baby were asleep. Thankfully I went to get my pajamas, carried them to the bathroom, and ran the hottest shower I could tolerate. Standing in the near-scalding water, I scrubbed hard at the rusty smears on my legs. The heat eased the clustering aches, water pouring over me until my skin no longer seemed imprinted with the feel of Luke. By the time I stepped from the shower, I was parboiled.
I dressed in my pajamas and went to my room, where Carrington was beginning to wriggle in her crib. Wincing at the soreness between my legs, I hurried to get a bottle ready. She was awake by the time I came back to her, but for once she wasn’t screaming. She was waiting patiently, as if she knew I needed some forbearance. She reached for me with chubby arms and clung to my neck as I brought her to the rocker.
Carrington smelled like baby shampoo and diaper cream. She smelled like innocence. Her small body conformed to mine exactly, and she patted my hand as I held the bottle for her. Her blue-green eyes stared into mine. I rocked in the languid motion she liked best. With each soft forward pitch, the tightness in my chest and throat and head disintegrated until tears began to leak from the outward corners of my eyes. No one on earth, not Mama, not even Hardy, could have consoled me as Carrington did. Grateful for the relief of tears, I continued to cry silently as I fed and burped the baby.
Instead of putting Carrington back in her crib, I took her in bed with me, putting her on the side against the wall. It was something Miss Marva had advised me never to do. She had said the baby would never willingly go back in her crib alone again.
As usual, Miss Marva was right. From that night on Carrington insisted on sleeping with me, erupting in coyote howls if I ever tried to ignore her upraised arms. And the truth was, I loved sleeping with her, the two of us snuggled together beneath the rose-patterned duvet. I figured if I needed her, and she needed me, it was our right as sisters to comfort each other.