SHELLY HAS A SECRET that isn’t much of a secret at all. When she was ten, a neighbor kidnapped her and kept her in his basement for ten days. He was fat, with a belly like a pregnant woman’s, and he had a wandering eye. Holly remembers when it happened, because it was the first time she was aware of something bad happening to another kid her age. Sure, there had been divorced parents (like hers), skinned knees and broken arms, and Holly even knew a girl whose dog had died after getting hit by the FedEx truck. But no one she knew had got kidnapped and—she was guessing, everyone was guessing, but no one knew for sure except for the police and Shelly’s parents—raped by some psycho nutjob who got away with it for as long as he did because he was a regular churchgoer, and no one ever suspects a man who is one with God.
That’s what Holly’s mother said when they finally busted him. She slapped down the newspaper on the kitchen table, three cups of coffee into the morning, and yelled, “Anyone could see the man was crazy! Look at that eye! You wear one little crucifix around your neck and your shit don’t stink.”
Holly’s mother is a godless heathen. She says this proudly to her two friends in town, who are also divorced and also mothers. They spend a lot of time in the next town over.
She has thin black hair and is tiny and focused, like a firecracker right before it explodes. She is always suing Holly’s father for more child support. Every time he writes another book, she asks for more money. Holly has a younger sister, Maggie, who has lots of medical bills. Neurologists. Therapists. Pharmacists. “Plus they are two teenage girls, Bill,” her mother would say into the phone. “They eat, they shop, they breathe.” The expenses, her mother hisses.
Holly’s mother exhausts her.
Shelly moved away a few months after the trial. She went to live on the other side of the state with her dad, who blamed her mom for what happened. Her mother also blamed herself for what happened, because she was at work, and not at home waiting for her child. And she blamed herself for marrying her husband in the first place. She married him because he was the first one who asked. What if no one else asked? What if? Her life was just one big mistake leading up to her child being kidnapped and molested. So Shelly left and her mother began to drink, and she did this for a few years, she was very good at it, until her boss at the salon told her to cut it out, quit coming to work smelling like you’ve been making out with Bartles & Jaymes all night long or you’re fired. She got herself in a program, went to a lot of meetings, made a lot of apologies, and tried to get her daughter back. A mother should be with her daughter, don’t you think?
Shelly always complains when her mom is “twelve-stepping” her again.
Take her, said Shelly’s dad. It’s my turn for some fun. Shelly’s dad throws acid parties now. She sometimes visits him on the weekends and smokes pot with his girlfriend who is only ten years older than her and used to live in Korea and knows how to swear in ten different languages. He’s acting like it’s the sixties again, that’s what Shelly says when she comes back after a visit. He’s trying to turn back the hands of time. El tiempo.
They are taking turns, this family, with being fucked up. That’s what Holly thinks.
Shelly’s been back in town for a year, and everyone knows exactly who she is; no one has forgotten a thing. People don’t forget things like kidnap and rape and molestation and violation and major jail time in a town so small no one can breathe. No one will touch Shelly. No one wants to go near her, except for the other burnout girls. They recognize her as the kind of girl who has a particular understanding of extreme sorrows inflicted by a different kind of fate than applied to the rest of the world.