Beth experiences every pothole, every dip in the road, as if it were a personal insult. Her back hurts, her head hurts, her butt is numb, and she feels like there is water sloshing the length of her legs, just beneath the skin. It doesn’t help that the U-Haul trailer seems to be weighing her car down, pulling at the back end and forcing it to ride low on the tires. Doing permanent damage, she just knows it. Even less helpful is the fact that this move is not Beth’s choice. Her financial situation hasn’t been good since the divorce. Now, after being fired from the restaurant where she cooked for the past eleven years, after deciding to move and waiting all summer for her house in Charlotte to sell, she finds herself with very few options.
Her son, Dan, so attuned to other people’s moods these days, tries his best to occupy her mind, to get her to stop fixating on the negative. He really is such a sensitive boy, especially for a fifteen-year-old. Beth often wonders where he gets it from. His father isn’t like that. And Beth certainly isn’t, either. Dan DJs for her, favoring nineties artists he knows she likes: Mariah Carey, Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, Destiny’s Child. Not a very creative list of faves, but then he knows she grew up in rural Michigan—the same place they’re headed now. Probably, she didn’t have much exposure to anyone else.
In the backseat, his sister, Jeanette, gives their mother the silent treatment. Occasionally Dan’s cellphone will buzz, Jeanette asking him to ask their mom for a rest area or a hamburger. When they stop, Beth notes how urgently Jeanette runs for the bathroom, how ravenous she is when she digs into her food. Jeanette holds grudges silently, but thoroughly, like a true DeWitt.
“Rest area?” Beth asks, eyes on the rearview mirror where Jeanette pretends to be asleep. Dan hesitates, swiveling in his seat to check on his sister.
“Jeanette, I saw you looking at your phone,” Beth says. “Yes or no? Rest area?”
Jeanette’s eyes pop open. She doesn’t glare at her mother. She holds her face blank, nodding at Dan. When Beth pulls into the rest area, she no more than gets the car in park before Jeanette is out the door. Beth tries and fails to remember being twelve, tries to summon the extreme loathing, directed both inward to the self and outward to family, classmates, teachers, strangers at the mall, grocery clerks, the guy who takes tickets at the movie theater—it’s as if Jeanette hates other people for not being her, but she also hates herself. A Gen-Xer stuck in an iGeneration body.
Jeanette is mature for a twelve-year-old, with hips and breasts and piles of natural hair. Beth knows the pressure Jeanette already feels, simply because she’s at that age. And it’ll only get worse from living in River Bend, where the default is Dutch. She knows Jeanette will feel like she’s supposed to be tall and slender, with long legs and blond hair. Beth can also remember, all too vividly, the isolation of never seeing anything of yourself in your classmates. Never seeing other people of color, never seeing black hairstyles. Not having a store that carries good black hair care products. Never finding clothes at the local shops that flatter your figure. Why is she bringing her daughter to this town? Why couldn’t she just shut her mouth at work and carry on the way she had for years? None of this would be necessary if she could only remember how to be complacent.
A few days ago, Beth found on Jeanette’s computer a listicle of pencil tests you can do to find out how attractive you are. It included things like placing a pencil under your breast; if the pencil didn’t drop, it meant your breasts were too saggy. Or holding a pencil against your chin and nose; if the pencil touched your lips at all, it meant your lips were too big. That’s how they get you: It’s all the small ways they tell you you’re not good enough.
“You spend too much time online,” Beth told Jeanette that evening. “It’s getting in the way of your school.”
Jeanette stared at her blankly.
“You only get half an hour a day.”
“What about school projects?” Jeanette demanded.
“Half an hour of recreational use.”
Beth hadn’t even wanted Jeanette to have a computer, but her father bought it for her for Christmas. Beth considered devising her own tests, skewed in favor of black girls everywhere: Place a pencil in your unbound hair; if the pencil drops, your hair is too straight and stringy.
“How are you doing with all this?” Beth asks Dan. He shifts in his seat, seems to be choosing his words carefully.
“I’ll be fine,” he says. Not It is fine, or I am fine. The wording is not lost on Beth.
“It’ll be nice to see your granddad, right?”
Beth will never assuage the guilt that she drove away her children’s father. The kids will see him in the summers, but she doubts that’s enough. She watches Dan not know how to act on a daily basis, not know what to say, and she wonders how he would be different with a male role model. Someone to teach him some semblance of confidence. Dan is a fragile-looking boy, with pale brown skin and hair cut too short—he doesn’t like to fuss with it, although she has heard him say he wishes he had dreadlocks. She’s noticed that, when he talks to people, he refuses to meet their eyes, instead wielding a paperback novel like a shield. If only he were outdoorsy, he might have that gold-russet skin like his sister. And he might lose some weight. He’s not fat, exactly, but doughy. He prefers libraries to football fields, and it shows. Jeanette is on her way back from the bathroom now, and even with her face in her phone, she moves with more pep, more confidence than Beth can ever recall seeing in Dan.
They arrive in River Bend around midnight. Beth had wanted to avoid driving at night, but they’d gotten a late start and made more stops than she anticipated. And now here she is, returning home to the town that, once upon a time, she couldn’t wait to leave.
The way back isn’t quite as she remembered—the new highway bypass throws her for a loop. It’s as if River Bend wants to be left behind, forgotten. Even in the dark, Beth can tell the town has changed only for the worse. Somewhere in the intervening years, the village installed lampposts that look like gaslights—someone’s kitschy idea of sprucing the place up. The new lights sort of resemble the Gaslight Village at the Muylder Museum in Kalamazoo, her favorite exhibit when she was a child, a life-sized diorama of how River Bend would have looked in 1850. The museum, however, had flickering lights that looked like real flames; the static bulbs in the lights along Main Street are stubbornly unchanging, like the village itself.
The potholes on Main Street are like trenches she has to rumble the car over, and most of the storefronts downtown are boarded up. River Bend was never a booming place, but now it’s just the skeleton of a town. As she pulls into the alley behind her father’s house, the trees and garages lean close, bearing down on her. Beth finds herself taking great gulps of air, and is glad her kids are both asleep, that she can have a moment to pull herself together after parking.
The house had blurred in her mind over the years. In the darkness, it seems to have grown larger. She knows it’s painted pale yellow, but for the life of her, she now has trouble making it out against the sky. There is no moon out tonight. The alley behind her is dark, the streetlamp burned out. She stares at her father’s house, trying to discern the pitch of the roof, the stairs leading up to the back door, anything.
She should be able to find a happy memory of it—this is the house where she spent her early childhood, the house where they lived when her family was still whole—and yet, even as she strains her mind, all she can come up with are memories of Gilmer Thurber here, in this house, his presence in every corner, filling the house like dark water.
The longer she stares, the harder it is to see, so that she finds herself turning away, giving the house the side-eye, trying to trick it into materializing. Next to her, Dan snores quietly. Jeanette shifts in her sleep and gives an unhappy whimper. Beth knows the house stands there, yet the lot seems to be full of stars and space, with distant planets dotting the wall facing her. The Milky Way is folded into the roof. Her eyes are sore and dry. She finds herself dozing, her head drooping onto her chest, and then her eyes blink open. She could close them, just for a second, if only her mind would quiet. Instead, she stares at the house until its eastern-facing wall grows pale, until the sky around blues and brightens. At first she thinks it a trick of the light, but as the dawn comes on stronger, the house looks blue, and stays blue. It’s been painted recently, she realizes. It’s only the third week in September and the mulberry tree in the backyard is a sunny yellow, its leaves dropping to the grass beneath. A light goes on inside the kitchen, and she can see her father, Ernest DeWitt, through the gauzy curtains, poking around in the fridge, the pantry, making coffee. At the sink, he pauses, tilts his head, then reaches out and pushes the curtains aside.
“Wake up,” Beth says quietly, and when Dan stirs next to her, she adds, “we’re here.” She has to tell herself, Get out of the car; go inside the house. She shakes her head. Dan wakes his sister, and Jeanette comes briefly to life in that moment when her body is awake, before her brain has booted up.
“It’s morning,” Jeanette says. “I slept in a car all night.” She seems proud of this fact, like it’s the kind of bohemian lifestyle she’s always longed for. Even as her kids open doors and stretch in the new sun, even as Beth’s father greets his grandchildren for the first time since they were little, Beth has to keep telling herself, Get out of the car.
Jeanette walks right up to Ernest DeWitt and hugs him, and something inside Beth stirs violently. She spills out of the driver’s seat and onto the driveway.
“Eliza,” her father says, and just hearing her childhood name makes her bowels turn to ice. He has his arms held open to her. She doesn’t want to forgive him so easily. She doesn’t want to hug him, doesn’t want to be here, yet here she is, standing dumb and tired in the driveway as the smile he wears grows strained around the eyes. His face sags at the jowls, his glasses are crooked on his nose, and she finds herself staring at him. She’d forgotten the details of his face, and she wonders briefly whether he really is her father. They look nothing alike, and not just because he’s white. The round, upturned nose, too small for his face, and the fleshy jaw. His arms, those strong, tan arms, go heavy, they droop, and Beth inserts herself into them to prop them up.
“It’s good to see you,” he says, and kisses her forehead. “When did you get in? I was waiting, but I fell asleep on the couch.”
“You painted the house” is all Beth can say.
“It was Linda’s idea,” he says, and turns as the back door claps shut. There, standing on the stoop, is a girl Beth recognizes immediately. Dirty blond hair, a little too much makeup smudged from sleep. Linda Williams. When she was in high school, Beth used to babysit the Williams girls. Linda would have been about ten, old enough to stay home alone really, except their mother seemed keen to foist the girls off on anyone else.
Beth wonders what her father is doing with this child, but it occurs to her that, as creepy as it is, their relationship makes a kind of sense. There’s something of the child in Ernest’s gaze, something that feels like a game of hide-and-seek: When you look into his eyes, you might catch a glimpse of a shoe or a pigtail disappearing around a corner, but when you follow it, it’s gone. Speaking with Ernest, it’s easy to lose all track of the present, you’re so focused on seeking out the child, hiding.
This wouldn’t be noteworthy in a man of twentysomething; you could pass him off as a late bloomer, but Ernest is in his early sixties, and so the game of hide-and-seek will forever catch Beth off guard. Yet women love him, and men yearn to be near him in hopes that some of the child will flit into their gaze.
Beth has always hated this about her father; she has only ever wanted him to grow the fuck up. A bit of a hypocrisy, really, given that she, too, has a child inside her, that she had felt the child stirring, shifting in sleep, when her father called her Eliza. Her anger at her father is, in part, anger at her own inner child, whom Beth can’t seem to shake.
“So nice to see you again,” Linda says, sidling up next to Ernest, inserting herself between father and daughter. Beth remembers Linda as a horse girl who always smelled like hay and manure. Now her hair is unusually full and glossy, and her fingernails are too long for a farm girl’s. None of this is to be overlooked; even so, Linda stands with her hands on her belly, still flat like a twentysomething’s. Beth notes Linda’s rosy cheeks, her pudgy face.
Beth closes her eyes. Her father has put a child in this child.
After unloading boxes, Beth leaves to return the trailer, but her car is on empty. She stops at the only gas station in town. A truck pulls up to the pump in front of her, with a man, woman, and child all sitting on the bench seat. When the man gets out, it takes Beth a second before she recognizes him; he’s older, yes, his hair retreating from his forehead, his skin wilted with sun damage, but once she notes the round blue eyes, the thick lips, it’s not hard to find Steve Brody in this face, worn past its years.
More startling is realizing the woman in the truck is Deb. In the decades since Beth last saw her, all the color seems to have drained from her, so that she’s not only old, but old-fashioned, like she’s stepped out of a 1950s television program: She’s gray in a Technicolor world. Deb doesn’t look at Beth, and Beth decides not to linger. She’ll fill her car halfway and leave.
She slides her card into the reader, and when she withdraws it, the reader beeps loudly. A message flashes on the display: Her card has been declined. She tries running it again, and again it is declined. She knows there’s money in the account; the bank probably put a hold on it because she didn’t tell them she was moving. While she decides whether to try again or drive around the block until the truck leaves, a car pulls in behind her, waiting to use the pump.
“Pump three,” a voice calls over an intercom, “please see the cashier inside.”
Beth looks up to find she is pump three. Steve also looks up. Beth doesn’t like the expression on his face when he recognizes her.
The man in the car waiting behind her scoffs. He has his window open, his arm draped out, and when Beth looks at him, he honks for her to get out of his way. He’s scowling at her, not a look of annoyance, but of hatred. Beth knows this look. He assumes she’s a deadbeat, a stain on society.
Worse, now Deb has seen Beth. Beth can tell because Deb’s cheeks have colored, and she stares out the side window so as not to look at Beth again. And while Steve won’t look at Beth, either, he’s puffed his chest out, and he’s smiling.
She can’t deal with this. Not right now. As she walks inside to prepay cash, the driver waiting behind her throws his arms up in disgust and squeals his tires as he maneuvers his car to the other side of the pump. Once inside, Beth browses the aisles of canned goods, the off-brand frozen pizzas, while she waits for both Steve and the other driver to finish pumping and leave.
The bedrooms in Ernest’s house smell like they’ve been locked up since Beth was a kid. She strips bedding, ashy with dust, and replaces the linens with her own. It makes no sense to her that he kept this big old house all these years. He never remarried. What use had he for three bedrooms, other than to collect dust? He hasn’t even stored anything in them. The house is furnished, but spare, as if waiting for people to come and live in it again. Well, here we are, she thinks.
Despite how much space there is, it’s not enough. When Jeanette found out she would be sharing a room with her mother—Beth had withheld this information until the last possible moment—she went into Dan’s room and shut the door. She hasn’t been seen since. Dan brought her lunch in his room. As patient as he is, even he is beginning to show signs of strain; he’s no longer quite as accommodating with his mother, and instead of helping unpack, he has plopped himself down on the couch in the living room with a book and has budged only for meals and bathroom breaks.
Beth takes the same bedroom she had as a child. Inside, she’s flooded with memories. They weigh on her so that she’s exhausted, and she takes to bed within a week of moving home. In here, there isn’t much to occupy her mind. A worn wood floor, mostly covered by a beige Berber rug. And that gaping wound of a window, dressed in gauzy curtains. Today, she lies in bed, staring outside, looking down on the yard of the empty Thurber house. Without warning, she’s back inside those walls, where too many adults live. Her babysitter, the white-haired witch. She remembers the walls hung with crucifixes and the portrait of blond Jesus in white robes, both his hair and his clothes tainted by cigarette smoke. And her babysitter’s middle-aged son, Gilmer, walking around in various states of undress. Gilmer and his sister are in jail now, awaiting trial for the horrible things that went on in that house. A trial won’t be enough, though. Corporal punishment wouldn’t be enough. Castration would be closer, but still insufficient.
And what of Mrs. Thurber? Dead probably. And oh so many children there, all of them affected. She wonders where they are now. Who were their parents, even? There were the Hudson boys, grandchildren of Mrs. Thurber. Jerry and Mikey. Are they still in town? She seems to remember her father saying Mikey was a cop now. She isn’t sure, though, because she hasn’t gone out much, and when she has, she’s wandered about town in a protective fog. Even now, her instinct is to freeze, to close her eyes, in order to shut out the memories. But that won’t do. To keep from looking, she pulls the curtains.
It takes a week for Jeanette to finally come out from her confinement in Dan’s room. She spends a day exploring the house. Such as it is. She would have much preferred moving in with her father, but her stepmother, Mara, said that children needed their real mother. Translation: Mara had no desire to raise another woman’s kids. Jeanette’s father had a chance at a do-over, and Jeanette knows she shouldn’t begrudge him that. Still, she does.
So this is to be her exile. A frigid, rambling house. A living room where the ceiling sags. Dingy shag carpet, tangled and matted, the color of muddied toffee. A bathtub that takes so long to drain that you stand in someone else’s dirty water if you shower in the morning—which is why Jeanette showers at night, or, worst case, takes a bath in the basin tub upstairs in the morning.
Her granddad’s house has a mustiness, a clamminess, that Jeanette can’t stand. She longs for the small, tidy house they left in Charlotte, the bright, sunny windows, the smooth tiled floors. Their house had been painted in pastels, a buttercream kitchen, a lavender bathroom. Her granddad’s house is white on white, the walls repainted so many times over the years that the surfaces look thick and wavy. The washer and dryer are old and clunky and take forever to finish a load. There is no dishwasher. The television is a monstrous box, like the house itself, with wires sprouting off the top, and nobs to pull and turn for power, volume, and channel selection. The bark-brown couch smells of pets, but there are no pets. When she asked her granddad how old the couch was, he said, “Someone left it on the curb on trash day,” with a note of bragging in his voice. “That must have been ten, fifteen years ago?”
The only nice thing about the house is Linda’s coffeepot: brushed metal, with a mesh filter basket. Jeanette coaxes a cup of coffee out of it one day when Linda isn’t there, but she does something wrong. The coffee comes out gray and translucent. But oh! The dark, smoky taste of the coffee Linda makes, the exhilarating jolt when it hits her blood! Jeanette tries it black, like her mother takes hers, but it’s too much. She’s been drinking it with milk and sugar for maybe a week now—not in secret, exactly, but she isn’t going to advertise it to her mother.
Dan dares Jeanette to go into the basement one Saturday morning. He comes up from there with a handful of Indian-head pennies, dark and worn and metallic-smelling, like blood. Tempting, but when Jeanette opens the door of the basement and sees the light from the hallway quickly dissolve into blackness, and the cool breeze lifts the odor of dirt and mushrooms up to her face, she reconsiders.
“Who cares about a bunch of old pennies?” she tells her brother.
She can’t shake the cold after that. It settles into her body to stay. She takes to rising early in the morning and standing over the floor vent in the kitchen, letting the hot air fill her flannel nightgown and blow life back into her frigid limbs. She shares a bedroom with her mother, whose sleep is fitful and irregular. Her mother thinks Jeanette doesn’t hear her crying at night, her breathing willfully even, the subtle splash of tears dropping onto her pillow. Worse yet is when her mother does sleep, and talks incoherently. Her mother looks sicker and more tired by the day.
Jeanette has always heard that Midwestern winters were brutal, but nobody ever warned her about Midwestern fall, the feeling that the world outside is shutting down, the ache in her spine that tells her to sleep, too, sleep for months. It’s already bad, and it’s only the end of September. She’s put on five pounds, has to check herself from snacking all day. She’s hungry and lethargic. This morning, on her way downstairs to stand over the floor vent, she contemplates whether she’ll make herself eggs or Cream of Wheat for breakfast, fantasizes about having both. She can imagine what her new friends at school would say. The smart girls in town don’t want to be friends with her, and she doesn’t have much patience for the Beckies on the cheerleading squad, who are unbearably bubbly, so she’s befriended a couple of horse girls, the first kids who would talk to her, girls who battle constantly to keep their slight frames slight. Allison, she knows, doesn’t eat meals. And yesterday, Jeanette went into the bathroom after lunch and heard someone throwing up. Caitlyn came out of the stall, smiled at Jeanette, and started talking about fifth period as if everything were fine. And now it makes sense: Caitlyn has sick breath, every morning and every afternoon. When Jeanette eats lunch at school, Caitlyn makes comments like, “I wish I could eat like that, without facing the consequences.” Jeanette isn’t sure whether Caitlyn thinks Jeanette’s eating doesn’t have consequences, or Jeanette doesn’t face them. She wishes she hadn’t quit band. All of her friends at her old school had been band kids, like her brother.
When she gets to the kitchen this morning, Linda is already slouched in a chair next to the floor vent, wearing a bathrobe and sweatpants, fuzzy socks on her feet. She clutches a mug of coffee in both hands, and alternately presses it to one cheek, then the other. Jeanette hesitates in the doorway, feeling despair bubbling inside her. Her feet are so cold she wants to cry.
“Want some coffee?” Linda says, and Jeanette blanks her face. “Right. Cocoa?”
“I’ll try some coffee.”
Linda smirks. Does she know Jeanette’s been drinking her coffee? And will she tell Jeanette’s mother? But no, Linda goes and pours Jeanette a cup, and Jeanette steals her place over the vent. The rush of warmth is bliss, her nightgown ballooning with heat.
“Smart,” Linda says when she returns with a steaming mug. She’s added milk and sugar; she knows how Jeanette takes it. “I need to get a nightgown.”
“How old are you?” Jeanette blurts out, then quickly checks herself. She takes a sip of the coffee and mutters, “Thanks.”
“Thirty-two,” Linda says. Her tone of voice suggests she is not offended, but rather amused.
“Younger than my mom,” Jeanette says.
“Yeah. It’s a problem.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Jeanette says, even though it does weird her out a little when she sees Linda and her granddad kissing. Warm now, she joins Linda at the table.
Linda runs a thumb along the rim of her mug. “How are you settling in at school?”
Jeanette can’t help but roll her eyes. Her mother hates it when she does this; she tells Jeanette not to sass. Linda only laughs.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to be excited.”
Jeanette pulls her feet up onto her chair. When she sees Linda looking at them, she tucks them underneath her, inside her nightgown. Her skin has gone ashy since moving here; River Bend doesn’t have the humidity she’s used to. She checks the weather app on her phone, hoping for rain, and is relieved to see that it’s supposed to warm up next week.
“Let me get you a pair of fuzzy socks,” Linda says, “and then I’ll make us breakfast.” And she goes upstairs to her dresser.
When Linda is gone, Jeanette counts the months. She heard her mom say something to her granddad about Linda being ten weeks pregnant. Next spring, there will be a baby in this house.
Jeanette doesn’t want to think about it.
Beth needs a job. She’s been looking for months, since before the move, but nowhere in this godforsaken town is hiring. She gets desperate, to the point that she even applies to be a line cook at a rinky-dink country club up in Kalamazoo, a forty-five-minute drive away. She used to be a sous chef. She used to run a kitchen with twenty people working beneath her, a kitchen that cranked out 280 covers on a Saturday night. A nice place, too, the kind that would loan a man a jacket if he showed up in his shirtsleeves.
As September winds down, she finally manages to find a job cooking down at the Hudson House, where they do a lot of meatloaf-mashed-potatoes-canned-peas dinners. The only seasoning they believe in is salt, and that they use sparingly. Their pies come in frozen from Gordon Food Service. Their whipped cream squirts out of a can. And, too, Beth feels a tightness in her chest when she learns that she was hired to replace Gilmer Thurber. She can almost smell him in the kitchen. She tells herself this is temporary, that she’ll keep looking, but she quickly settles into complacency. She doesn’t have the energy to job search when she gets home in the evenings.
When she arrives home tonight, though, Jeanette has the table set, a salmon in the oven. She’s mixing black currants into couscous. She’s somehow managed to procure asparagus in the fall. Beth has taken to leaving her money for groceries. She’d love to go with her daughter, she’d love to see where she gets her ingredients, but she knows Linda must be taking Jeanette up to Meijer in the next town north. The family sits to eat, Beth and the kids, Linda and Ernest all crowded at the kitchen table, five people squashed in at a table meant for four. Meals are always tense for Beth: Dinner table conversations leave so much unsaid.
After they finish eating, Jeanette produces a German chocolate cake she’d stored in the microwave. It’s on a plate, frosted sloppily, but it’s the most tender, moist cake Beth has ever eaten. Beth’s recipe is good, but not as good as this.
“You made this?” Beth says.
Jeanette shrugs.
“Where’d you learn to bake like this?”
“Food Network.” She’s licking the last of the icing off her plate.
“Since when do you have a sweet tooth?”
Jeanette shrugs again. “I’m on the rag,” she says.
Beth hadn’t known her twelve-year-old daughter had gotten her period. Her stomach hurts when she realizes she’s just as distant, just as self-absorbed, as her own mother had been.
Ask Beth about her mother on any given day, and you might get a variety of answers: She died three years ago, so suddenly nobody knew what to do. Or she lives in another state, far enough away to still count as an absence; she and Beth haven’t spoken in years. Or she still lives in-state, holed up in a house cluttered by hoarder tendencies; Beth can’t visit her mother, can’t even get a foot in the door. All of these have the ring of truth, the feel of it, but here’s the reality: Gretchen’s physicality is far less potent than the thought of her, the ways in which she and Beth have hurt each other over the years. As such, Gretchen is there, always there, a hunched bundle of nerves lurking in the corners of Beth’s mind.
Years ago, Beth’s family disintegrated. Her mother is always mad at her auntie (who lives down in Indiana, where people haven’t yet realized she ain’t Miss Thang), and her auntie won’t talk to Beth, who’s guilty by association. Beth’s grandmother spends most of her time abroad, since she has the good sense to keep some distance between herself and the rest of them. Beth hasn’t seen her whole family together in nearly two decades.
When Beth told her mother about losing her job, about potentially losing her house, Gretchen’s reaction was much the same as when Beth told her mother she was getting divorced: “I could have told you this was going to happen.”
Her mother had never approved of the marriage in the first place. She never visited her grandkids, didn’t even talk to them on the rare occasion she called Beth. She skipped Beth’s wedding, although she did send a gift, a leaded crystal vase, in lieu of her presence. The vase was already broken when it arrived, a chunk from the rim rattling around in the bottom, and Beth hadn’t bothered filing an insurance claim with the carrier, or even notifying her mother. Instead, she used the vase broken, filled it with cheap bouquets bought at the grocery store and left too long to wilt, and then rot, Beth never bothering to change the water. When Dan was seven, he broke the vase for good while throwing a football in the house, and while neither Beth nor Greg were angry, Dan felt terrible. Come to think of it, maybe that explained his aversion to sports.
Beth is surprised by how few memories she has of her mother in this house. She tries to imagine her in the kitchen, making dinner, or hanging laundry in the backyard. Did she garden? After Beth’s parents divorced when Beth was four, Beth moved with her mother into the Section 8 housing in town, but within a year, Gretchen was remarried. Beth’s first stepfather was rich, or at least appeared to be rich. Turned out, all of his trappings of wealth belonged to his company—his car, his house. All of it went under with the company a few years later. No doubt Gretchen had hoped to strike it rich with this divorce—her own mother had set herself up quite comfortably by divorcing a rich man—but Gretchen took very little. There wasn’t much left to take. She’d had to move Beth back to the Section 8 housing.
“Serves you right,” Beth had told her mother.
Ever since the move, Dan’s father has called daily to check in on him. At first, Dan wondered whether this was his father’s real reason for buying him and Jeanette cellphones, except his father doesn’t call Jeanette every day. According to Dan’s father, Dan’s problem is that he doesn’t form relationships like his sister does. And it’s true; Dan doesn’t get attached to people in the way he thinks he should, and it sort of worries him. Actually, he never noticed it before, never thought to worry about it, but one night just before the move, he heard his parents fighting. His father had come to pick them up for the weekend. He heard his mom tell his father that yes, they really were moving, and no, there was no reconsidering, and then his dad asked if his mom really thought it was a good idea, and his mom said it was a little late to start this again. And then his dad said it: “He’s not like other kids. He’s not going to be able to just start over like that.”
Well, (a) Dan’s not a kid—he took driver’s ed this summer; and (b) Dan is kind of on his mom’s side: His dad was always trudging up old, already-settled conversations. Dan had been through months of counseling, at his father’s behest, had learned strategies to get out of his own head, to be present in the moment. Of course he could start over. He was even looking forward to it.
The truth is, Dan has a girlfriend now, or pert near, and even though part of him knows to keep it to himself—he can’t imagine his mother would invite Kelli Brody and her family over for dinner or anything like that—another, more primal part of him wants to climb onto the roof of his granddad’s house and shout to passersby. Not about Kelli per se, but about the general natures of attachment and physical magnetism. But he hasn’t climbed, hasn’t shouted, has he? See there? Impulse control. He’s successfully navigated a social setting with a fair amount of decorum, and emerged on the other side with a great feeling of accomplishment. This is surely a mile marker: Dan is now an adult. Ergo, his dad needs to lay off him.
And anyway, it’s not like Jeanette isn’t also affected by the move. At her new school, Jeanette is so far ahead of her classmates that soon she’s falling behind. She doesn’t want to do her work—it’s boring—and so she doesn’t.
“You only have to give the idiots what they want,” Dan says when she brings him a letter from her history teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, detailing Jeanette’s failure to live up to her teacher’s expectations. Jeanette asks him to add their mother’s signature. In the month since they moved here, their mother rarely comes out of the bedroom, except for work. On her days off, she doesn’t emerge at all, not to shower, not to eat. A sour bodily smell permeates the air, so that Jeanette often sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor of Dan’s room, or on the couch. She does her homework in the dining room—when she does it at all.
“It’s just so boring,” Jeanette says, rolling her eyes. For emphasis, she places both of her hands on her cheeks, pulling down her lower eyelids until the red inner parts show.
“Well, no wonder. Look at your classes. Reading development? You already read at a high school level. Have Granddad go in and make them switch you.”
“Why would I do that? They’ll just give me more boring work.”
But Dan talks to Granddad, who has Jeanette switched wherever possible. There isn’t another history class, though. When Beth learns this, she acts like she’s the one who’s been wronged. “You can always come to me,” she tells Dan, and Dan wonders whether she misunderstood, whether she thinks he was the one who had her classes switched.
In her new classes, Jeanette is behind for the semester, having come in a month into the school year. She doesn’t know anyone, and these kids aren’t too eager to talk to her. They look at her askance and whisper among themselves, giggling but falling silent when they see her watching. After school, she doesn’t have time to catch up with her horse-girl friends from her old classes; she has too much homework now.
Dan comes home from band practice to find her sprawled out on his bedroom floor with textbooks everywhere. She’s wrestled her hair up into a tight bun on top of her head, the only way she wears it anymore. She looks like a librarian.
“Thanks a lot, ass face,” she says, indicating all her homework.
“My pleasure,” Dan says, feeling very grown up indeed at having ruined his sister’s life.
Beth is washing dishes one day, staring out the window into the backyard, when Dan comes into the kitchen and nudges her aside.
“You should go chill,” he says, taking the sponge from her.
He’s a good kid, and she’s grateful for him. She’s not really sure where he learned to be so sweet. Not from his father, surely. As much as she wants to take his suggestion, her mind is restless. She decides to get caught up on the laundry instead. She goes around the house, gathering clothes—there’s a half basketful of Linda’s tunic shirts and yoga pants in Ernest’s bedroom, and for Christ’s sake, can’t the girl do her own laundry?
The laundry room is tiny, with barely enough space to close the door behind her. The washer and dryer, the rack for detergent and fabric softeners, they take up almost the entire room. There’s a window above the washer, and when the afternoon sun shines in, the room grows as hot as the inside of a mouth. Today, the sky is overcast, a dreary day to usher in the second week of October, and the room is cold. The door behind Beth stands open, yet the room still feels too small. Beth can’t wait to burst back out of it.
There was a time—how old had she been?—when Gilmer Thurber was here, in this house, this room, with Beth. She can’t remember how or why, but she seems to think it was at her father’s invitation. He was here, in this house, and where was her father? In the house, but not in the room. And Gilmer grabbed Beth, pulled her into the laundry room. He had her up on the dryer, her clothes on the floor beside them. She could hear the shower running. Gilmer smelled like sweat and engine oil. He’d been teaching her father something about cars—she’d forgotten that, willfully: He and her father had been close, a mentor/mentee relationship, and he had been here, in this garage, and then this house, frequently. Beth’s parents divorced when she was four, and she moved in with her mother. She must have been no more than four when Gilmer had her up on the dryer.
Of course, her father didn’t know. Under threat of violence, she never spoke about it, instead accepting it as just a part of life: Sometimes her father would be unavailable, and then Gilmer could put her on the dryer.
Beth leaves the laundry unfinished, backs out of the room, and shuts the door. She’d thought moving back to River Bend would be okay now, with Gilmer gone, but she has her work cut out for her, damming these memories up again. It takes her the rest of the day, in her bed. Over the next few weeks, she finds more memories resurfacing, in the ill-lit recesses, on all the flat surfaces, the tables, the counters, in every room but the bedrooms, never the bedrooms, so that these rooms—especially her bedroom—become the only safe spaces. If she finds herself in one of the other rooms, she has to back away, pull herself up the stairs and to her bed, where she breathes deeply, concentrates on this room, its sunny wallpaper, the way the smooth wood floor creaks as she crosses it, the smell of the pine tree outside floating in through the open window. She finds her fingers in her mouth, scraping the undersides of her fingernails clean on her lower incisors, and this becomes a part of her ritual, the cleaning of her nails. She takes comfort in the fact that her hands often retain the taste of garlic and onions, or the flowery soaps Linda placed by all the sinks, or even the taste of dirt. Even this helps to calm her.
Downstairs, Linda makes coffee every morning. Ernest will have three cups, Linda half a cup, her pregnancy cheat. If Beth isn’t around, Jeanette will also pour herself a cup. She drinks only half, leaving a half-full mug in the sink. Linda doesn’t mind. She herself drank coffee at Jeanette’s age; she needed it when she would wake in the dark of winter and head downstairs, the kitchen cold before Grandma made breakfast. Linda would drink coffee as she pulled on her snow boots, her coat, and shuffled outside wearing a headlamp, huffing her way through the snow to the barn, her breath puffing in the glow of her lamp. She kept a mug of coffee with her as she fed the horses and cows before school.
Linda is a little annoyed, though, by the amount of sugar Jeanette heaps into her coffee. Linda buys coffee online—the local shops don’t carry her brand—and it doesn’t need anything but a splash of milk. But Linda reminds herself that Jeanette is twelve, a new coffee drinker.
Sometimes Beth, too, comes down for coffee, standing in front of the window over the sink and sipping it while watching the squirrels in the yard. At the first sip, Beth’s face will lift into something akin to a smile. She doesn’t talk to Linda, who is usually sitting at the kitchen table, her feet on the heater grate, but she’ll do the almost-smile, and sip half a cup at the sink before refilling and heading back to bed or to the bathroom to get ready for work. Linda had always thought black people were so loud and lively; she doesn’t know what to make of Beth’s silence.
Linda doesn’t mind, though. She’s accepted that she and Beth will not be friends, that Beth cannot bless Linda’s relationship with Ernest. If Linda had a say, she wouldn’t even be here. She’d never have chosen to fall in love with a man so much older. And yet, here she is, the acting stepmother to a woman seven years older than she, a woman who can barely stand to be in the same room with her, a woman Linda has no idea how to read, how to coax out of the soft womb of depression she’s curled inside. But Linda can take care of Beth in this one small way: She can make her a cup and a half of coffee in the morning.
From her bedroom, Beth smells something burning. It’s a faint smell, scarcely detectable. Probably someone burning leaves, she thinks. She lies there, trying to ignore it. She tries concentrating on this space, but the smell intrudes. There’s no choice but to get out of bed.
On her way down the stairs, the smell grows stronger, and it occurs to Beth that it may be inside the house. She finds Linda cross-legged on the couch, with Jeanette sitting on the floor in front of her. Linda wields a curling iron and is using it to press Jeanette’s hair, which is so long, it piles into Linda’s lap. She’s pressing it dry, too, no leave-in, no oil. Nothing. Jeanette’s head pulls back each time Linda drags the iron through her hair. Jeanette doesn’t look bothered by it, but watching this scene, something inside Beth breaks. She makes a grab for the iron, and it touches Jeanette on the side of her neck, right along her jawline. Jeanette yelps, jumps away from her mother. Beth jumps, too, and ends up with the iron against the crook of her arm.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Beth says.
Linda says nothing. Just pulls herself up from the couch and leaves the room.
“Did she hurt you?” Beth asks once Linda is gone.
“Did she hurt me?” Jeanette says.
Beth inspects the burn on Jeanette’s neck. It’s purple-brown. She goes to the medicine cabinet, rubs Jeanette with aloe. She thinks the skin will flake, but it probably won’t blister. Her arm is another story. There’s already a great gray blister forming on the inside of her elbow.
“You can style your own hair,” Beth says when she finishes rubbing Jeanette with aloe. She inspects Jeanette’s hair, the ends now dry, singed, the white tips ready to fray.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jeanette demands. Beth has gotten to her daughter; for once, Jeanette’s voice is on the verge of real emotion.
Beth goes and gets a pair of scissors. Jeanette doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, as Beth cuts her hair.
“It has to be done,” Beth says, as if Jeanette had asked her a question. “She’s burnt it.”
Clumps of hair fall on the couch, cling to the front of her. They stick to the blistering burn on Beth’s arm. Jeanette freezes. Closes her eyes. Beth cuts it to Jeanette’s shoulders, but it’s uneven, so she cuts it chin-length. It’s still uneven. She gets the clippers she normally uses on Dan’s hair, puts the longest guard on it. When she’s done, Jeanette’s hair is less than an inch long. It curls into little corkscrews. Her scalp is pure white, visible where the curls pull away from it.
Jeanette still doesn’t move, doesn’t open her eyes, a reaction Beth can’t understand. Beth’s worked her whole life to protect her daughter. Even during the divorce, Beth and her husband were careful never to raise their voices, to always treat each other with respect. But this immobility. Somewhere along the line, Beth has failed.
Your hair,” Ernest says from the doorway, and Jeanette opens her eyes. She looks so much like Beth at that age, it’s alarming. Those wide, dark eyes, so distant, focused on something beyond here. When Beth was twelve, she was acting out in school, and Gretchen would call Ernest, would ask him what he was going to do about it. But what could he do? He didn’t know how to reach Beth, hadn’t known for years, not since he and Gretchen were called into the school when Beth was in second grade. The questions that school counselor asked, and the way she’d eyed Ernest. He and Gretchen both realized the school suspected some kind of abuse, and Ernest felt they were accusing him personally.
“Can I talk to you?” Ernest says to Beth, and Jeanette wastes no time. She’s up and headed for the doorway, her back unnaturally straight, brushing hair from her shoulders and chest as she turns the corner.
Ernest sits down on the couch next to Beth. He’s not accustomed to living with other people, to maintaining familial bonds: He’s been a bachelor for over thirty years. What he wants to say is How can I help? What do you need from me? It hurts him to see his daughter so visibly broken, and to be at such a loss for how to fix things. He blames her mother, for how Gretchen raised Beth after the divorce, because blaming Gretchen is easier than thinking too hard about things he doesn’t want to think about. Gilmer Thurber. The trial. He’d been contacted by a lawyer. The questions had caught him so off guard, but since then, his mind has been working on it. He should call the lawyer back; he should testify, tell what he knows. But, God, the thought of that man, the thought of his own little girl. Ernest isn’t sure he can do it; he’s not sure he’s strong enough.
He wants to make things right, wants to make up for lost time, but he doesn’t even know where to begin, and so what comes out of his mouth is “Why can’t you just be nice?”