Torn Away

CHAPTER TWELVE

As predicted, my grandparents arrived before Dani called back. She’d texted—Mom not picking up. Will keep trying—but it was too late to save me.

I refused to answer the knock on the door, forcing Ronnie to get up. He could send me away, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

We hadn’t spoken since I’d told him I hated him. I didn’t know if he was staying silent in an attempt to make me feel guilty, but if so, it wasn’t working. If I’d been the one who’d died with Mom in the tornado, he would never have turned Marin out. He would never have sent her to live with strangers in a strange city.

He opened the door and a white-haired woman with a face as wrinkled and tan as a tree trunk stepped inside.

“She ready?” she said, talking about me rather than to me, as if I weren’t sitting right there. Ronnie nodded and she turned toward me. “You got things?”

“Only a few,” Ronnie interjected. “We lost everything in the storm.”

“Yes, you told me on the phone,” she said, no softness, no tenderness in her voice. As much as I’d gotten tired of hearing everyone tell me how sorry they were, this was worse. It was like she didn’t care at all. Like she was here to pick up an unwanted couch. All business. “Harold’s in the car,” she said, raising her voice. “You eaten? He’d like to hit the diner on the way out.”

“I’m not hungry,” I muttered, forcing myself to stand up. I searched Ronnie with my eyes as I walked past him, hoping he would change his mind. I would forgive him if he let me stay. It would hurt, but I’d pretend he’d never called them. I’d try to understand. But he simply looked down at his feet and let me pass.

I followed Grandmother Billie, who didn’t so much walk with me as walk determinedly ahead of me, her step as steady as a warden’s. And I realized that was what this felt like—being led to a jail cell, my freedom stolen. Actually, this felt worse than prison. At least in prison, my friends could visit me. I’d already lost Mom and Marin—now I was losing Dani, Kolby, Jane, everyone I knew, everything that was familiar to me. What else could possibly be taken from me?

We approached an old, mostly rust and maroon car idling at the curb, Grandfather Harold sitting behind the wheel, squinting in the sun. He pushed a button on the dash with a fat finger, and the trunk popped open.

“You want to put your bags in?” Grandmother Billie asked, lifting the trunk lid all the way.

I shook my head, squeezing Marin’s purse closer to my side. The thought of lowering the pocketbook she loved into the motor oil–scented trunk on top of a tangled snake of jumper cables felt too much like ripping out my lungs and jumping up and down on them. I opened the back door and slid inside the car, which also smelled like oil, mixed with something more organic. Grass? Skin? I couldn’t tell.

Grandfather Harold lifted his chin once to acknowledge me, and my stomach clenched with fear as he put the car into drive, Grandmother Billie slamming the trunk and easing herself into the passenger seat in front of me. I didn’t want to go. Please, Ronnie, I begged inside my head, come out and get me. Make it like the movies, where at the last minute the girl is loved after all, and gets saved by the hero. Be the hero, Ronnie. But our motel room door had slowly swung shut, closing the space between me and the last familiar thing in my life. He didn’t even wave good-bye.

“She ain’t hungry,” my grandmother said, her blunt fingers working to find the seat belt as my grandfather pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

“Well, I don’t s’pose she has to eat,” he mumbled.

“She’s just gonna sit there?”

“If that’s what she wants to do. As long as she knows we ain’t stopping halfway down to Joplin for anything. She don’t eat, she don’t eat.”

“Well, we can’t let her starve to death.”

I chewed my lip and listened to them argue about me, as if I were invisible.

We navigated way too slowly toward the highway. If Grandfather Harold was going to insist on driving like this, we would never get to Caster City. Which would be fine with me.

I stared out the window and thought about the time Mom had taken Marin and me to Branson for an all-girls weekend. I’d watched the fields roll by, thinking that southern Missouri was so many worlds away from Elizabeth. As we passed Caster City and the landscape changed, the Ozark Mountains bursting around us, looking untouched and untamed, I had felt so far away from home.

I remembered that there had been a dead, flattened scorpion behind the curtains in our cabin and I’d freaked out, refusing to step down off the couch until Mom had checked the whole cabin over. But Marin had been fascinated by the bug.

“It’s got poison?” she kept asking, and when Mom would answer, “I don’t know, honey. Some scorpions are poisonous,” Marin would crouch low, her butt hanging inches from the floor, her bare toes pushed into the nap of the carpet, cords of her hair dangling down past her knees, and would stare at it. A few seconds later, she would look up. “Is it the poison kind?” And Mom, checking under a couch cushion or in the linen closet, would absently repeat, “I don’t know, honey.”

At one point, Marin was crouched so low her nose was between her knees and I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed off the couch and snuck up behind her.

“It moved! It moved!” I shrieked, bumping her in the back with my knees and making her pitch forward.

Marin had shrieked, catching herself just short of falling over, and had shot straight up and run out of the room, bawling her eyes out while I laughed.

“Really, Jersey, did you have to?” Mom said, exasperatedly chasing after my sister.

Marin had spent the whole rest of the weekend terrified, crying and running from every bug she saw.

Sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, heading toward the part of the state where I’d seen my first and only scorpion, I thought about how I’d done that to her. I’d taken away her fascination and replaced it with fear. She’d died scared of bugs, because that was how I’d shaped her.

Without thinking, I reached into her purse and pulled out another stick of gum, cramming it into my mouth with the first. I spread the foil out on my knee and drew a picture of a stick figure crouched over a little black blotch on the ground.

Marin loves scorpions, I wrote. I liked that truth better. I folded up the foil and dropped it in with the others, then leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the chain stores and strip malls fade away into the fields and farms that were to become my new reality.

Neither of my grandparents bothered to shake me awake. Instead, they relied on the slamming of their doors—whoomp! whoomp!—to alert me that we’d stopped. I lifted my head from the window, wiping my damp cheek on my shoulder, and blinked the parking lot into focus. My grandfather had come around the car and was standing next to my grandmother, both of them staring at the doors of a grungy-looking diner.

After a few seconds, my grandmother turned and bent to look in the car window. “You comin’ in?” she said, her voice muffled by the closed window.

I didn’t answer, didn’t move. Wasn’t sure how to do either one. So she simply nodded once and turned away. Together, they walked into the restaurant without me.

I shook my head and gave a disgusted little snort.

I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was too tied in knots to even think about eating—and I really didn’t want to have to try to make conversation over dinner with these two people. But it had been days since I’d had any sort of real meal, and I knew that now it was up to me to make sure I did things like eat and shower and sleep. Nobody else was going to care.

My grandparents were sitting at a table near the restrooms, side by side, their shoulders touching. Who does that? I thought. What couple doesn’t sit across from each other so they can talk? But then I decided that I was just as happy it wouldn’t be my shoulder grazing against one of theirs, and I slid into the chair across from my grandmother.

“We already ordered,” she said by way of greeting, but the waitress had appeared, carrying two glasses of iced tea, which she plunked down in front of my grandparents. “Didn’t think you were coming.”

“That’s okay, sweetie, I haven’t put the order in yet. Need a menu?” the waitress asked. Something about the softness in her eyes reminded me of Mom, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to hold myself back from crying out or flinging my arms around her waist. Maybe in my movie, the waitress could be the hero who loves the girl after all. Save me!

“No, that’s okay,” I managed. “I’ll have a burger and fries. Some water.”

“Sure,” she said, and took off.

“Now, I don’t know how your mom did things, but don’t you go expecting to eat a lot of fancy dinners out,” Grandfather Harold said, his voice deep and ragged, the kind of voice that would scare a little kid. Hell, the kind of voice that was already scaring me.

I didn’t know how to respond. If they thought my life with Mom had been fancy after their son abandoned us, they were crazy.

“And don’t be expecting any fancy dinners at home, either,” Grandmother Billie said, frowning at the saltshaker, which she turned in circles between her hands. Almost like she was nervous. What did she have to be nervous about? “And you’ll be cooking some of them yourself, so don’t be expecting to be waited on. We run a house, not a hotel. Everyone pitches in.”

“Okay,” I said, my voice a squeak.

“Yes, ma’am,” my grandfather corrected.

The waitress brought my water, and I picked it up and sipped it, grateful to have something to cool down my burning cheeks.

“Don’t drink too much,” Grandfather Harold said. Lecturing must have been his strength. “We don’t plan to stop again until we get home. You got an emergency, you’ll have to hold it.”

I put the glass down, uncomfortable silence pressing over our table like a thick covering of fog.

The waitress brought our food. Once I started eating, I was surprised at how hungry I was, at how good hot food tasted. My grandparents dug into their matching chicken-fried steaks, shoveling gravy-drippy forkfuls into their mouths. A dollop of white gravy clung to my grandfather’s bottom lip.

“We don’t got that much space at our house,” Grandmother Billie said after a few bites. “On account of everyone living there. We believe in taking care of family when they’re in need, and unfortunately you’re not the only one in need.”

“Goddamn flophouse,” my grandfather said, crumby spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. He licked one side clean and I had to turn my eyes toward my plate to keep from feeling nauseous at the sight of his food-covered pink tongue slithering out between his dry lips.

“So we’ll find a place for you, but it probably isn’t gonna be the same kind of bedroom you had in your old house.”

“ ’Course that bedroom’s halfway to Marceline by now anyhow,” my grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a joke or if he was just insensitive. He seemed to specialize in the latter.

“We could put her on the porch sofa for the time being,” my grandmother said, turning to Grandfather Harold, her forkful of meat suspended and dripping over her lap. He didn’t answer, but she didn’t seem to be looking for an answer. “It gets cooler out there at night than in the house, anyways. And it’s all covered,” she added, “so you wouldn’t need to worry about that. We’ll figure out something else for you in the winter. Maybe set up a room in the basement.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, thinking that the last place I wanted to be “set up” in was a basement. The very thought of setting foot in a basement made my palms sweat.

“It’s a shame what happened to your mom,” Grandmother Billie said between bites. “But there’s nothing to be done about it. Terrible things happen every day. To everybody, not just you.”

Again I was reminded of Mom’s theory that Billie and Harold were unhappy people because of the pain life had dealt them. I wondered what terrible things had happened in their lives, and if Mom was right, and they’d simply shut down to shut out the hurt. I wondered if I would end up cold as a reptile, unhappy, jaded, someday telling someone fresh in their grief that “terrible things happen every day.”

We ate in silence for a while, each of us staring at our plates. I was full before I’d even gotten halfway through my burger, but still nibbled on my fries.

They tasted like the school’s fries, which were the best thing in the cafeteria. Almost every day Dani and Jane and I would get a chocolate milk shake and a large order of fries to split. We’d sit the shake and the fries in the middle of the table and take turns dunking the fries into the ice cream.

People who saw us do it for the first time would always act all grossed out about it, but then they’d give it a try and next thing you knew they’d be eating fries with chocolate shakes at their tables, too. It was the sweet and salty, hot and cold together that made it perfect.

Sort of what made Dani, Jane, and me perfect together. We were all different. We complemented one another.

I missed them so much my ribs ached as I breathed. Jane didn’t even know I’d left. That is, if she’d made it through the tornado okay. Would I ever find out? If Dani’s mom didn’t pick up her phone soon, I would be well on my way to my new life in Caster City. I tried not to think about what this meant: If I was living in Caster City, three hours away, I wouldn’t be sharing fries and shakes with my two best friends anymore. I wouldn’t be sitting cross-legged next to them on the edge of the stage during theater club meetings, and I wouldn’t be spotlighting Dani’s face as she belted out the lead lines anymore or listening to Jane practice a new piece on her violin. I wouldn’t graduate with them.

I maybe wouldn’t ever see them again.

It was so unfair.

“Of course, Clay will be there,” Grandmother Billie said, adding to the conversation after such a long pause it took me a minute to understand what she was talking about.

Immediately, Dani and Jane were forgotten, as were my fries. “Will be where?” I asked.

“Ma’am,” my grandfather reminded sternly.

“Will be where, ma’am?” I repeated.

She looked up at me, chewing, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “At the house. Like I was saying,” she said.

Of course, that made sense. Clay would be at their house every now and then. He was their son, after all.

He was also my father. The father I hadn’t seen in sixteen years.

“He’s…” I hesitated, so many questions racing through my mind. He’s still alive? He’s not in jail? He’s the kind of guy who visits his mother? “He’s in Caster City?” I finally landed on.

“Of course he’s in Caster City. That’s where the whole family is. His sister, Terry… his nephews… us.”

“He only ever lived up here because it’s where your mother wanted to live,” my grandfather remarked. My insides burned at the thought that I would, after sixteen years, finally see my father. “He was born in Waverly, about an hour thataway.” He pointed out the window with his fork. “But we left that town years ago, moved on down to Caster City. Clay refused to come with us. Said love went where it needed to go. When she ruined his life, he come down to his family. Shoulda never stayed up here, to be honest.”

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I peeked at the incoming text from Dani: Mom said she needs to talk to Ronnie. Sorry. I’ll keep working on her.

I put the phone back in my pocket, my stomach twisting in knots. This was happening. I was going to Caster City with these people. I was going to see my father, after all this time. “So does he come over a lot?” My throat felt coated by French fry grease. I cleared it nervously. “Ma’am?”

“No,” she said, still giving me that look, as if she expected me to know about my father’s life, even though I’d never been a part of it. She set down her fork and took a sip of iced tea. “He lives there. With us. And his wife, Tonette, and their two daughters. You’ll meet them all tonight.”