“So it’s okay to be small and hide?”
Patricia nods fiercely. “Oh yes. Whatever gets you to the other side is what you need to do. Because one day you’ll be big, and then you can go away from the monster forever and do what you want instead of what the monster wants.”
Brooklyn sighs and collapses against her chest. Patricia puts her chin atop the child’s head, feels Brooklyn’s tiny fingers running up and down her arm.
“I can be like a bunny,” she finally says.
“I can see that.”
“Did Mommy go away because she got big enough and didn’t want to be near monsters anymore?”
Ah, that’s a different question altogether.
Patricia knows David is the real monster, but Chelsea didn’t leave because of him. She left because of Patricia. The question makes her wonder how much Chelsea has told the girls about her relationship with her own mother. Does Chelsea think her a monster? Is Chelsea’s meekness, her weakness, her own version of playing the bunny so Patricia will finally stop attacking? Regret peals in Patricia’s heart, a muted chime hindered by years of rust. She held Chelsea away, tried to make her daughter strong, but she’s accidentally engineered a relationship in which she is the perpetual goddamn monster.
Everyone wants to be the hero—yet there always has to be a monster to fight, doesn’t there?
She’s the one who locked Chelsea out, who forced her to leave. When she was a young woman, she leapt into David’s arms just to get away from Patricia, and now she’s left because Patricia closed the gate.
And now Chelsea is fighting on television, taking on a crazed, feral countenance for fame.
It’s definitely not what Patricia thought would happen when she told Homer to strike out all those names from the clipboard at the gate. She thought Chelsea would go home, stew a bit, and then call to apologize, like a rational person.
She was very, very wrong.
“I think Mommy went on a grand quest,” she finally tells her granddaughter. “An adventure. I think that she, like so many heroes long ago, went out to win her fortune and one day return bearing gold and gifts.”
When Brooklyn speaks again, her voice is a tiny breath in the darkness. “Then why didn’t she take me with her?”
“Because she wanted you to be safe, and adventures are rarely safe.”
Tiny fingers play up and down her arm, a soporific, thoughtful rhythm.
“What about Ella?”
Patricia flinches.
Yes, that one is her fault, too, and there’s no way she’s going to tell this tiny, frightened, abused blessing of a child the truth.
“I think Ella is on her own adventure. She’s a big, grown-up girl. All big, grown-up girls have to go out and seek their destiny.”
“Will I do that one day?”
Patricia resists the urge to hug the child so tightly that it would make her yelp. When her own daughter was this age and older, she dreamed of the kid finally being out of the house, of having enough space to be her own person again, of enjoying a simple meal without a single request or complaint or taking a shower without finding a wet towel and the last of the shampoo gone. Patty counted down the days until Chelsea was no longer her responsibility, and even if she disliked David from the very start, she was relieved when her daughter chose her own exit strategy.
Yes, she told Chelsea she didn’t approve of David, but she never told her why. Never told her how she’d seen a million men like him, Mama’s man-friends and her own diner customers, men who sized up women as if looking at a car they might buy and run into the ground, a thing to be entered and exited at a whim, allowed or denied proper maintenance depending on the time and resources required, trotted out or hidden, crashed to smithereens and called an accident or an act of God and left behind to rust. Patricia never told her daughter that David made a pass at her once, when she was younger, telling her she and Chelsea could be sisters and he could barely tell them apart, a knowing gleam in his eye and his thumb playing over her bare shoulder.
Worst of all, a sin she’s done her best to bury and forget, she remembers that time a newly married Chelsea came to her, tentative and hunched over, and danced delicately around the topic of…how did she put it?
“Did you ever know someone who was like a different person when they were drunk? And they say horrible things, and the next morning, they don’t remember it?”
That’s what Chelsea asked her, arms wrapped around her waist as she stared unseeingly out the window at the bird feeder.
And Patricia was preparing for her first wedding, and she was nose-deep in the guest list, and she could feel the enormous can of beans that question threatened to open, and instead of facing her daughter and looking her in the eye and telling her the truth, instead she tapped her pen on the list and said, “Everyone does stupid things when they’re drinking, you included, I’m certain.”
Chelsea never brought it up again. There was more conversation, but it veered away from tense topics, and then Patricia was free to return to her guest list. She didn’t regret it then.
She does now.
But what was Brooklyn’s current question?
Ah, yes.
“Well, do you want to go have an adventure one day?”
She likes that Brooklyn stops to consider such questions before speaking.
“I want to go away,” the child says slowly, but as she speaks, her words pile on. “I want to go to Hawaii. I want to be a dancer. I want to be a puppy doctor. I want to live at Disney World. I want to meet Elsa. I miss Olaf. Mommy said he ran away, but I think he might come back. Do you think he’ll come back?”
Even on the mind-muddling meds, Patricia can put two and two together there. One desperate mother with the Violence plus a missing dog suggests that Olaf will not be coming back.
“Maybe he’s having an adventure of his own,” she says.
Brooklyn’s hand lands on her nose, then moves to her cheek, patting gently. “Nana, you talk a lot about having an adventure. Did you ever have an adventure?”
Patricia feels tears prick her eyes. What she’d like to say is, No, precious child, I didn’t. I was date-raped by the preacher’s son, and then I found out I was pregnant, so my mother kicked me out, and my entire family shunned me, so I used men and jobs like Tarzan uses vines until I landed in a place that felt a little like safety, and then I dreamed of what being free might feel like, and then I had everything I ever wanted except love, and then I lost it all, and here I am.
She does not say that. Doesn’t say anything like it.
What she does say surprises her, too.
“Not yet, but I’d like to.” She stares off into the easy darkness, grateful for it, for all the sins it can hide. “Shall we take off on our valiant steed to find your mommy?”
49.