“I’m sorry, Lacey,” he said, and sounded it. “Dex is a big girl now. She picks her own friends.”
It was him calling you Dex that did it, like even if he couldn’t come right out and admit it, he was rooting for us, and the part of you that belonged to me.
Men are predictable. He hugged me. It was a dad hug, and don’t think I don’t know what that feels like. To feel so small, so safe, to feel a warm body and steady breathing and accept it as an end in itself, not an offer or a promise or a debt. I got snot on his shirt, and neither of us cared, and nothing twitched below his waist. It was a caesura, like the silence before a hidden track, a dark to hide in. The good kind of dark.
“Let’s watch a movie,” he said when we let go.
“Don’t you have to work?”
He shrugged. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
We slipped into the theater midway through Sneakers and watched Robert Redford save the day, then ventured out to the alley and shared a cigarette, and it would have been that easy, just the way I’d wanted it, except I didn’t want it anymore, didn’t want him for the purpose of hurting you, didn’t want him at all.
Wanted you.
Missed you.
Took what I could get.
THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR me in the house anymore. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and while I was gone James Jr. filled up the empty space. Little baby, big lungs. Lots of blue plastic crap, bright with stars and monkeys and terrifying clowns. Unwashed bottles, filthy diapers, the smell of lotion and shit, dried trickles of drool and puke, and, of course, the baby himself, the fucking baby, bright-eyed and apple-cheeked and looking at me like he remembered the time I baptized him into the church of Satan and was just waiting till he was old enough to tattle.
Home sweet home: The house was the Bastard incarnated in brick and vinyl. Fake siding outside and fake wood floors inside, grimy kitchen that never got clean. Wallpaper that looked like little James had puked it up, paisley blotches of half-digested peas and corn. I hated that most of all, because I knew my mother hated it even more but was too lazy and cheap to do anything about it. That wallpaper, Dex, that’s everything my life is not going to be.
The Bastard wasn’t around as much as he used to be, but when he was home, his mood was foul enough to make up for it. While I was gone he’d apparently discovered the limits of paper pushing. It turned out getting to play Mussolini to an office of stoned telemarketers wasn’t as much fun as he’d expected, and his election campaign for an open slot on the school board had—praise be to whatever saint watches over public school education—stalled out at the signature-collection stage. Maybe even the dim bulbs of Battle Creek could sense he was a repellent toad; more likely, my reputation preceded him. Let him rant all he wanted about Satanism being a phantom of an overheated imagination, about the devil wearing subtler costumes; he wore his costume and I wore mine, and too bad for him if mine was more effective, because when he called Horizons they told him I was saved and refused to take me back.
Meanwhile, Mother of the Year had started drinking again for real. I kept her secret. I had plenty of practice picking up her slack, though this was the first time the slack was the kind that habitually shit itself. I’m not going to say we bonded, me and baby brother, but helpless things are genetically designed to be cute. Big heads, big eyes, some kind of protect me pheromone; there was even the occasional moment when I would bounce him on my shoulder and whisper in his ear and not be tempted to drown him in the tub while Mommy Dearest slept it off.
“You’d be better off,” I told him, and then, because no one was watching, kissed that soft little baby head and let him wrap his warm little baby fingers around my thumb. “You don’t know what you’re in for.”
It was James Jr. that did it, in the end. Or maybe it was just me, fucked by habit, the lie slipping out before I had a chance to think. My mother had gotten drunk, left the baby alone, and that’s how the Bastard found him, squealing in a soggy diaper in an empty house, and “What kind of mother?” and “I should call the police” and “If you think I’m letting you anywhere near my son again” and “How many times do I need to teach you the same fucking lesson” and the Bastard thought cursing was spitting in the face of Jesus—that’s how mad he was—what was I supposed to do but say it was my fault?
“I promised I would babysit,” I told him. “I thought I could just sneak out for a few minutes and no one would know.”
She let me lie for her, and I let his hand crack hard across my cheek, and I guess we both thought it would end there, but when it didn’t, when he made her choose, her daughter or his son, she let the lie sit, and so I did as I was told, packed up my shit and left.