Whatever It Takes, page 19
I think of Dad and want to cry and scream and reach out to him all at the same time. I have as many questions about him now as I do about her. Did you know she was seventeen when you met her? Did you feel like a hypocrite every time you told me to save myself for marriage and always tell the truth? Yet it’s his shoulder I can see myself crying on. And when I take him out of that image, because I can’t turn to him the way I have in every other hardship I’ve ever faced, there is no one to take his place. No one has loved me the way Dad loves me. No one has betrayed me the way he has, either.
I brace the palm of my left hand on the counter in front of the sink and drop my chin to my chest. I’m flushed with heat, like I have the flu or something, and I’m holding my right arm tight in that broken wing position, trying to get some relief from the relentless pain. I must have forgotten to take ibuprofen this morning, and I didn’t bring any in my purse this morning, because I hadn’t expected I would be gone this long.
I take a breath and pull myself out of the mire that has been sucking at me for hours. I can’t trust my thoughts, because I am at my physical and emotional limit. I need to focus on some short-term goals: I need food, a pain pill, and some sleep. Then I’m going to the house where Mae was living when she disappeared—David Vandersteen’s house at the time. I need to see something tangible. Stand where she stood. Maybe the home owners will let me walk through it. If Mae lived there, I lived there too, right? What if I remember something about the house? The thought gives me goose bumps and makes me want to skip the nap, but I know that’s not possible. I already feel as if I’m moving a few steps behind my body.
I eat a few chips left in the bag I bought at the front desk when I checked in yesterday. It would take only a few minutes to go back downstairs and buy something else from the little shelves of snack items—a protein bar would be a good choice—but it feels like a lot of work to leave this room and go down a flight of stairs and make a decision and go to the counter . . . not doing it. I open my pill bottle and tap one white pill into my hand, then stare at it for several seconds. Maebelle Gérard went to jail three times between her eighteenth birthday and being found in the Grand River a few months before she would turn twenty-one, twice for possession and once for . . . prostitution. She was nineteen when she was arrested for solicitation—I would have been thirteen months old—and she said she had done it to get money for drugs. A crack whore. My mother.
Had she left me with David when she went out that night? I’d seen his mug shots too—big, broad, hard, and with a huge eagle tattooed on his neck as though it was coming out of his skin, talons first. I wonder if the wings touch at the back of his head or if there’s a space there. I wonder if he’s still alive and if I have the guts to try to find him if he is. He knew my mother. He knew me. I think back to the imagining I’ve always had of meeting someone who knew her and hearing them say, “You look so much like your mother.” That possibility is so different now. I’m scared of finding him—he doesn’t seem like the kind of man I’d want anything to do with—but his is the only name connected to Maebelle’s that I’ve found so far.
Or maybe I was with Dad the night my mom tried to sell herself for drugs. The article about her death said she and Dad were estranged. Would Dad have been in his apartment making dinner for me while my mother was looking to trade sex for money? Did he hate her? That thought frightens me as much as David Vandersteen and his eagle tattoo. I have always believed that my parents shared a tragic romance and that he still loved her after all these years—I’ve believed that’s why he never married again, because he couldn’t make room in a heart still so full of Mable. Remembering the lies I made up because of the lies I was told makes Dad feel like a stranger. A person I’ve never met before. The kind of man who shacks up with a seventeen-year-old girl and gets her pregnant. The kind who makes up a totally different woman to put on a pedestal for me. Was it embarrassment that made him do it? Shame? Fear?
I fill a glass with water from the bathroom sink and take the pill, then text Beck that all the travel has caught up with me and I’m going to take a nap. I should call and give her a fuller update but I’m too . . . embarrassed? Is that the right word? And what, exactly, am I embarrassed about? That Mom was an addict? A prostitute? That Dad made up a different mother for me to know? That I fell for it? Yes, I determine—all those reasons. My mother was not who I believed she was, so where does that leave me? I’m not genetically predisposed to law-abidingness or domesticity or all the other virtues I was led to believe my mother prized. What am I genetically predisposed to? Who was I supposed to be before I was told to live up to a very different expectation?
I climb between the starchy hotel sheets and pull the coverlet up under my chin, praying that I will wake up with a clearer head. The information I’m uncovering—the truth—is like one of those Russian nesting dolls; story hidden inside story hidden inside story hidden, except that each layer gets uglier, the images get darker, the faces drawn into more and more disturbing expressions that make me want to stop opening the next doll. But I won’t stop. I deserve to know those layers even if they aren’t pretty. I deserve to know all the dolls hiding inside me.
32
Mark
October 1996
“Mae,” Mark said with his hands balled into fists at his sides and a lump in his throat. “It’s my weekend.”
She narrowed her eyes still smeared with yesterday’s makeup and tucked her straight black hair behind her ears. Her hair was unwashed, as was the tank top she was wearing without a bra. Bright blue sweats hung on her boney hips. He barely recognized her as the woman he’d once thought he’d grow old with. “It’s only your weekend because I said it was your bloody weekend and I’ve changed my mind, so it isn’t your weekend anymore. You play nice, I play nice.” She slammed the door. A few seconds later she slammed another door inside the house. The sound of her laughter came from the window to Mark’s left, likely as she recounted what she’d just said to Mark—how she’d put him in his place. A man’s voice laughed with her, and the tips of Marks ears burned.
Mark stared at the door and forced his hands to relax. Be calm, he told himself. She wants to make you mad. Don’t you dare give her what she wants. There had been too much of her getting what she wanted already. It was killing him.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
He hadn’t seen Sienna in a month because Mae had refused his previous weekend too. Why hadn’t Sienna run to the door as she had the last time? He wasn’t leaving without at least seeing his daughter. He knocked on the door again, softly this time as a way to test that they couldn’t hear him. No one answered. He waited another minute. Then two. A gust of wind came around the side of the square little house where this guy used to live with his wife and kids. David wasn’t even divorced and Mae was shacking up with him.
He waited several seconds, then knocked one more time. He could go to an ATM and get forty dollars as a peace offering—though she wanted one hundred—but he’d be broke until payday next week. He shouldn’t have to pay more than the three hundred dollars they’d already agreed to when everything fell apart. But there was no court order that laid out the terms, and she was the mom and the citizen. Mark had tried to go about it the legal way, but she ducked and weaved and threatened until he put up his hands and took what he could get. The things the police officer had told him well over a year ago terrified him, so he clung to the idea that one of these days Mae would be arrested again, and this time Mark would be ready. He had Sienna’s birth certificate, long and short version, his own residency papers, and pay stubs and rent receipts to prove he was upstanding. He’d gotten the job at the meat-packing plant, and though he hated it beyond what he’d thought possible, it wouldn’t be forever. Just until. The police knew he was Sienna’s dad, and if Mae went to jail, custody would revert to him. Then he’d leave Canada if he could. If he couldn’t, he’d work toward citizenship and leave Hamilton, at least. There was a daycare center down the street that already took Sienna on the workdays when he had her. Sometimes Mae would drop her off for a week—thirteen days once—and each time he hoped that she wouldn’t come back. But she always did. Sienna was two and half now, old enough that she was becoming accustomed to this chaos. He’d hoped he’d have custody before she started making memories. With each new understanding of the world and awareness of her place in it, the chance to give her the safe and happy life she deserved moved farther away. He looked ahead at her starting school with Mae as her primary parent, of being ten years old in this mess. A teenager surrounded by Mae’s disgusting life. He was a fool to think his steady presence would protect her from anything if she stayed in Mae’s care.
With the second knock unanswered, Mark took a breath and tried the knob. It turned, and he pushed the door open slowly, revealing, one inch at a time, the life Mae had chosen over the one he had begged her to live with him. The house was a wreck, mismatched furniture in the living room, green shag carpet, strewn clothes, kitschy crap, and a few toys mixed in—like an indoor yard sale. It smelled like smoke; cigarette and pot and something else he didn’t know.
His daughter lived here.
He closed the door silently behind him, then stopped in the entryway in order to identify the sounds coming from down the hall. At first he thought the grunting and breathing was the TV, then wished it were when he realized what was happening on the other side of that door. He continued farther into the house, trying to ignore the breaking of his heart. Had Mae been different when they’d met, or had he just been too blinded by love and lust and freedom to see her for what she was? Even after all this time—she’d left him almost a year and a half ago—he did not know the answer.
Not my business . . . anymore.
Focus.
Where is Sienna?
He was determined to remain a part of Sienna’s life no matter what it took out of him to deal with Mae. His dad hadn’t given him the same consideration, but Mark was different. Sienna wouldn’t wonder what it was about her that made her not worth sticking around for. She would know, every day, that she mattered. That he loved her. That she was worth any sacrifice.
“CC?” he whispered, scanning the living room to his left as he moved slowly toward the back of the house, the sex noises making him sick and the fear of being discovered inside David’s house making his heart pound like hooves in a stampede. “Sienna?”
His heart rate picked up even more when she didn’t answer. What if she wasn’t here? Was Mae demanding money she knew Mark didn’t have to disguise the fact that Sienna wasn’t here for him to pick up? Where else would she be? With David’s wife and kids?
Focus.
Look around.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
With tentative steps, he moved past the living room and kitchen—an absolute disaster with dishes piled on the countertops and in the sink. Sienna wasn’t in there. His mouth was so dry he felt as though he could spit sand. Why wasn’t she answering his call? Could his daughter have been left with some druggy friends of Mae’s?
There was a door across the hall from the noisy room; it had to be another bedroom. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. No crib. Just a twin-sized bed and a pink dresser with clothes overflowing the drawers. Sienna was asleep amid the pile of blankets on the mattress, and the vise in his chest released. A little. That she could sleep through Mae’s yelling and slamming the front door in Mark’s face and the noise coming from across the hall was proof of how ordinary this was to her.
“CC,” he said as loud as he dared when he crossed the room and slid his arms underneath her. She stirred but didn’t wake as he cradled her in his arms. He brushed the tangled dark hair from her face, covered in freckles like Mae’s but sweet and bright where Mae’s was growing more gray and gaunt each time he saw her. Sienna snuggled into him, and he adjusted her so that her head rested on his shoulder. He didn’t even think about what he should do as he turned and left the room and then the house. He’d pawn his TV and get the hundred dollars Mae wanted if she freaked out over this, but maybe she’d get so shitfaced she wouldn’t remember telling him that he couldn’t take Sienna. It was his weekend after all—outlined on the schedule he’d typed up at the library months ago and made her sign—a copy for each of them. He kept vigilant records of his visits, when he paid his support, and the times Mae refused him his visits in case he ever needed to offer proof. He had to find a way to get the courts involved . . . only would they see things his way?
He pulled the front door closed softly, then all but ran for the car, afraid at any minute that David and his eagle neck tattoo would come charging after him. What would Mark do if that happened? The fear of it made him dizzy.
No one came, however, and within a minute Sienna was buckled into her car seat and he was on his way home.
That just happened, he told himself as he came to a halt at the first stop sign on his way out of the neighborhood. He’d walked right into that guy’s house and taken her, just like that. There was something invigorating about the success, and he thought about driving back to Wyoming right now. What would Mae do? Could he do it? What if he couldn’t cross the border without some kind of permission from Mae? What if he got arrested and they took Sienna away and it made this mess even messier?
He focused on taking deep breaths and being attentive to the cars around him so that the rush of adrenaline wouldn’t overtake his other senses. If Mark were arrested or deported, he could lose Sienna forever, and yet he was risking exactly that by taking her this way.
He went through three lights, turned right at the Texaco onto Marlboro Street, then right onto Hutchins.
It wasn’t until he parked in front of his apartment building and was taking Sienna out of the car seat that he wondered how she could still be asleep. It had worked in his favor that she hadn’t been crying or babbling, but it was six o’clock. Even if she hadn’t taken a nap today, a two-year-old shouldn’t be so tired at this time of day.
He held her against him as they entered the apartment and flipped on the light. He locked the door behind him, and his heart spasmed to imagine what would happen if Mae called the cops on him. They’d be able to tell she was high, though, right? So that ought to protect him. But what if it didn’t?
Focus.
“CC,” he said in a soft voice once he was sitting on the couch. He laid her across his lap, supporting her head with his left arm while he finger-brushed her hair off her face, hoping to wake her up. “CC, sweetie.”
She made a soft mewing sound and licked her lips as she snuggled closer into his chest. He could see her eyes moving behind her pale eyelids.
She smelled terrible, like Mae’s place, but when he leaned in for a closer sniff, he recognized the tang of vomit and a medicinal smell he couldn’t identify until he sniffed it a second, and then third time. Vodka?
Holy crap.
The spiral he’d been in got tighter, cinching around his chest as he blinked back tears. She’d given Sienna booze. So she’d sleep? So she wouldn’t run for the door and cry when Mae wouldn’t let her go with Mark?
Mark forced himself to remain calm and ran a bath so that he could wash his semiconscious daughter. The warm water roused her, and she woke up whimpering and a little panicked. He comforted her as best he could, crooning to her about black birds singing in the dead of night while he washed and rinsed her hair twice with the baby shampoo that smelled like strawberries. When the bath was finished and she smelled like his little girl again, he wrapped her in a towel, sat on the couch, and held her close as the sun went down on the other side of his window, turning the room to copper, while tears rolled down his cheeks. Please, he prayed, though he knew he didn’t deserve much help from God. Sienna did, though. He could pray on her behalf, couldn’t he? Please help me save her from this.
Sienna’s whimpers turned to cries as she became more alert around nine o’clock. He made her eat some Cheerios, which she then threw up all over both of them. He bathed her again, dressed her in one of his T-shirts, wrapped her in a clean blanket, and got her to drink some grape juice that she didn’t throw up. He gave her some children’s Tylenol because she likely had a hangover headache. She was two. After she’d kept down a graham cracker, he bundled her up, put her in the stroller he’d gotten at Goodwill, and took her for a walk in the cold dark he hoped would clear both their heads. The crisp night seemed to wake her up even more, and it did his heart good when she started babbling. He began the game of “Do you see a tree? Do you see a house?” that they often played on walks, praising her when she pointed out what he’d told her to look for. When they got home, he gave her more grape juice and fixed her a peanut butter and honey sandwich. He wished he’d thought to get her some Gatorade when they passed the gas station at the corner. The few times he’d been drunk, he’d found the electrolytes helped him recover.
They watched the Barney episodes he’d recorded on the VCR, and finally Sienna was tired enough to go to sleep. He tucked her into his bed, sang “You Are My Sunshine” until she was snuggled up beneath the covers, then tiptoed out of the room.
He sat on the couch for what seemed like a really long time, with only the sound of other doors in the apartment complex and cars passing on the street breaking the silence. I have to do something, he told himself after going over everything a dozen times.
