Chapter 64
“What happened? How scary,” Hannah said, leaning in so close that Zooey could have leaned across and kissed her. Maybe she should, while she had a chance. The truth was about to come out. How would Hannah react?
“The haircut was self-inflicted, something she did one day when she caught herself admiring her reflection in the mirror in her bedroom. She said when she realized what she was doing - she had been preening a bit, combing her hair and thinking about washing it - she freaked out. Michael was dead and she was thinking about herself?”
Hannah made a sad sound and said, “But, of course she needed to take care of herself.”
Zo shook her head. “She didn’t see it that way. She took all the blame for Michael’s death, ravaged herself with her own words from the night he died. When she realized she was thinking about herself, something she’d promised herself she would never do again, she went and got some paper scissors and hacked all of her hair off. And it was a hatchet job, let me tell you. In some places, she had cut all the way down to the scalp, and it looked naked and sad, all bare like that.”
“Poor mom. But why did she leave? Where did she go? What happened to her bedroom door? Was it a friend?”
Zo took a deep breath and dived, bracing herself.
The whole terrible story came out the next morning. Amy and Pam arrived early that Saturday bearing fresh bagels and coffee and the four of them sat down at Zooey’s kitchen table to talk. Keeley was talkative for the first time in a long time, though she was a horror to look at, her body and face so emaciated she looked like an animated skeleton, worsened more by her crazy patchwork haircut. She wore a clean pair of pants and a blouse that Zooey had loaned to her, both of which swam on her. Her dirty clothes were in the washing machine, which chugged and sloshed away down the hall in the utility room.
After the haircut incident, Keeley had gone on hiding in her bedroom and waiting to die. She admitted that was what she wanted at the time. She hated a world where someone like Michael could die and someone like her could live. What changed her plans was the day her mother came knocking, and all hell broke loose.
Up until that day, they’d ignored each other. It was easy to do. Keeley remained locked in her room and didn’t ask for anything. Her mother continued her schedule of cleaning and cooking and errand running in the mornings and afternoons engaged in church-related activities, with the exception of Sundays, when she spent the whole day at church. Her father was only home late at night, when he’d rummage in the fridge for a late dinner before falling into bed in the guest bedroom where he’d been sleeping for the last few years.
Just before noon that Thursday, Keeley had been lying in bed as usual, when there was a knock at the door. It was her mother, saying she needed to clean Keeley’s room. Keeley sat up in bed and called back that she would clean it herself. Her mother knocked again, insisting she needed to do it. Keeley didn’t want to leave the room, and for the first time since the accident, didn’t just go along with the flow. She pleaded and promised she’d clean it well, that it would be up to her mother’s standards, just leave her alone. There was quiet on the other side of the door, so Keeley thought her mother had agreed. She lay back down.
That was when the pounding started, making Keeley leap out of the bed. She shouted through the door to stop, but her mother kept kicking at the door. Keeley could hear the wood giving in. When the frame started to shake and splinter, Keeley started to realize that if her mother got in, she might try to kill Keeley again. And that was Keeley’s turning point. There in her darkened bedroom, the fear coursing through her while watching her bedroom door buckle under her mother’s assault, she saw the light. She wanted to live.
She dressed as fast as she could, grabbing jeans and the first clean shirt on top of a pile that had been stacked neatly in her drawer in the spring when her mother still did her laundry and cleaned the empty room her daughter rarely inhabited at the time. Slipping on shoes and grabbing her wallet, she snatched up her overnight bag that still contained the dirty clothes and other items from her summer on Captain’s when the doorframe gave and the metal lock snapped. Her mother stumbled into the room, her hands out in claws and Keeley ducked behind her, feeling her mother’s intention like a thunderstorm, lightening ripping through the room. She heard her mother gasp, and knew she’d been spotted. She ran.
Clattering down the front stairs and opening the front door, she realized her mother wasn’t behind her, but she kept running. As she crossed the lawn, she felt something soft hit her calf, and looked down to see that it was her dirty nightgown which she had left on the floor in her haste. She looked up and saw that her mother was in her bedroom window. The window was wide open, and she was throwing things out of it at Keeley. She yelled, “Run! Good! Don’t come back! You’re not wanted in this house! Do you hear me?”
“It was like something broke inside of me, hearing that. Something that was already smashed to bits, but there was this one last piece intact, holding the whole thing together. When she said it, that piece broke,” Keeley said, leaning back in her chair and staring off into her memory.
They were all mesmerized. Hearing her talk openly like this was so new, it made Zooey wonder who this imposter was. Was this their Keeley, the tireless gatekeeper of her inner workings?
Keeley continued, “When I finally got far enough away to feel safe, I was in a park. There were lots of kids running and playing, moms pushing kids on the swings. The children were laughing and screaming, happy kind of screams. It was unreal. This was what childhood was supposed to be like. Not that. I found a park bench and sat down and tried to figure out what to do.”
She decided she wanted a fresh start. She remembered a story she’d heard about the small wine vineyards sprouting up out on the North Fork of Long Island. She could go out there, offer herself up to work picking grapes or any other manual labor jobs they were willing offer her. She liked the idea of picking grapes in the sun, sleeping in a barn, living the simple life.
The biggest problem was that she didn’t have any money or a car. How would she get out to the northern tip of Long Island? She could have asked any of her friends, especially the Barefooters, who she knew would have helped her in a heartbeat, but she was tired of depending on other people. Her mother wanted her out of her life. Her father didn’t care. She wanted to have a life where she was important, where her absence would be a problem, not a solution. Plus, suffering felt right, after what happened to Michael.
She decided to hitchhike. She knew it was dangerous, that any strange scary person could pick her up, but she also knew she didn’t look particularly good. Anyone picking her up would probably be doing it out of pity more than anything. It would be the last time she took favors from anyone. She walked to Route 1 and stuck her thumb out, her little bag at her feet.
The first car to stop was a station wagon with a mother and a little boy strapped into a child car seat in the back with a pacifier in his mouth, his wide round eyes regarding her.
“Do you know how dangerous what you’re doing is, young lady?” the woman asked, pulling back onto the road.
The car smelled of baby powder and peanut butter. Keeley was comforted by the homey scent, wanted to curl up and sleep next to the nice concerned mom who quizzed her on where she was going and tried to give her money. Keeley wouldn’t take it. The woman drove out of her way to give Keeley as big of a head start as she could, dropping her off near the New York border with a look of sad regret.
The next ride wasn’t as good. An old Buick rattled to a stop in the breakdown lane after she’d been standing with her thumb out near the New York border for an hour. The man was wearing a ratty stained white t-shirt stretched over his balloon of an abdomen and grunted most of his words, barely intelligible. Keeley told him she was heading out to Long Island and however far he could take her would be great. Then he started driving in the opposite direction, getting onto the highway and driving upstate, passing Rye, then White Plains before pulling off onto back roads.
“Oh, no. What did you do?” Amy said, leaning across the table, her eyes huge.
Zooey nodded in agreement and looked at Keeley, feeling worse and worse as the story came out. It was her fault. All of this.
Keeley said she decided to keep quiet, make it seem like she didn’t know any better. She didn’t want him to know that she knew she was in trouble. As soon as they stopped at a light, she threw open the passenger door and leapt from the car holding her overnight bag. She could hear him yelling as she ran the opposite direction up the sidewalk and then into the yard of a house to hide, running around back and pressing herself against a wall. He didn’t come after her.
She hid behind the house, immobilized by fear, until the sun started to set. There was still no movement in the house. A small toolshed toward the back of the property looked promising, and after finding it unlocked and apparently used as a storage area with boxes filled with Christmas decorations and old clothes, she decided it was as safe a place as anywhere to sleep that night. She found some old blankets in one of the boxes and made a bed on the floor, whispering thanks to her unknowing benefactors before falling asleep.
The next morning, the owners of the house were clearly home, sounds of activity coming from all parts of the house, and Keeley had to wait to leave until she was sure they were gone, which wasn’t until the afternoon. Finally, she left. She got back on the road, turned off of it onto another road, and walked for over an hour before ending up in a small town.
The town was tiny, actually. There was only an old closed-down gas station, the pumps removed, a pharmacy, a post office, and a bar. The bar, called Pete O’Malley’s, was open. Keeley went inside and asked the bartender if she could work for some food. He said he couldn’t offer her any work, but he gave her a sandwich anyway, letting her sit at the bar to eat it even though she was underage. She thanked him profusely and promised herself again that she wouldn’t take any more favors once she had a job.
She was sitting at the bar after finishing her sandwich when the bar started to fill up, working-class guys mostly, getting a beer before going home. One man, a friendly older gentleman wearing a navy blue uniform that she couldn’t place, offered her a ride as far as Mamaroneck when she told him where she was going. She accepted gratefully. That’s when he started insisting on buying her a drink. At first, she explained that she was underage, but he just waved his hand at her protests.
After a few more apologies, she gave in. She was surprised when the bartender readily poured her the drink and grateful when the vodka hit her stomach, warming it. The man plied her with drinks, cheap vodka and cranberry juice, saying, ‘just one more, for the road’, until she was very drunk. She had never been that drunk before, felt that completely out of control. She knew part of it was how thin she was. It didn’t take much.
Next thing she knew, she was in his car, dozing as the car rolled down dark streets, seeing streetlights flashing by overhead when she cracked open her eyes. Then she was out again and when she woke, she was still in the car and the man was on top of her, trying to pull her jeans down and swearing softly. When he realized she was awake, he held her down. She fought him, scratching and trying to poke at his eyes, but he wouldn’t let her get near them, grabbing her hands with one of his and holding them above her head.
“That’s when I kneed him in the nuts,” Keeley said.
“Ooo,” Pam said, groaning.
“I know, but what was I going to do? Anyway, he let go and I jumped out and ran like crazy. The car was parked in this big parking lot that went on for what felt like miles, and I ran toward all the lights on one side. Then I stopped when I came to the turnstiles, saw the Victorian curly-cue buildings. I looked up, and there it was, the Dragon Coaster.”
“Playland! So, he had been driving the right direction!” Zooey said.
“I turned around just in time to see his car pull out of the parking lot, taking my overnight bag with him. The park was closed and there wasn’t anyone around. Someone had left the gates open, maybe that’s why he chose that lot. But I saw it as a sign. Two times in two days, looking like this. I knew someone somewhere was trying to tell me something. Even if there wasn’t, my luck was bound to run out and why chance it? I knew I could make it here, that it was maybe an hour’s walk. I swear, at the end, I really felt like giving up and just sleeping in someone’s yard, but I couldn’t stand any more trouble.”
Zooey couldn’t stand any more trouble, either. She reached her hands across the table toward Keeley. Keeley hesitantly took them. Zooey said, “You’re safe now and you’re not going anywhere.”
Keeley shook her head, “What about Wellesley? No, I should get a job like I planned.”
Pam interrupted. “’What about Wellesley?’ What about SUNY? You could still go back to school. Forget about the vineyards.”
“Hey, don’t knock having a job ‘til you have one,” Amy said. “And I have one. I’m hereby knocking it. It sucks. Go to school, Keeley. Trust me.”
Zooey said, “Keeley will go to school when she’s ready. I’ll put Wellesley on ice for now. It’s not going anywhere. We’ll just chill out here. It’ll be good.”
And it was good. They slept in every day, lying around the house wearing nightgowns and robes most of the time, only getting dressed and leaving to go grocery shopping or to get other supplies. They bought lots of frozen dinners and other easy meals and Zooey watched as her friend’s hair started to grow out and she slowly put on weight, looking more and more like the old Keeley. They got videos at the video store and spent whole days watching movies. They started taking walks at the beach, pulling their shoes off to put their bare feet in the sand even as it grew colder in October. It was relaxing and strangely healing, the two of them hitting the “pause” button on life together.
Zooey’s mother was happy Keeley was there keeping her daughter company. She was less thrilled that Zooey had put off school, but let it go. She had never been the one to push Zooey, it was her father that had done that, expected only the best of his daughter. Plus, her mother was still ensconced in at the family’s lake house in Michigan, surrounded by family and old friends. If her daughter wasn’t going to go to school and she wasn’t going to join her mother in Michigan, at least she was with a friend.
It was in November that Zooey noticed that Keeley wasn’t the only one gaining weight. She felt heavy and bloated, and she became frequently nauseated. Her emotions started swinging wildly and she frequently thought that Keeley was mad at her when she wasn’t. Then she realized that the last time she’d had her period was in the beginning of August.
While Keeley was taking a bath one afternoon, Zooey ran out to the corner drugstore and raced home with a pregnancy test, tucking it in her bedside table’s drawer to use in the morning. The morning came and so did the answer to the question pinging away in the back of her mind, two blue stripes confirming. She was pregnant. With Michael’s child. The only possibility.
She crumpled to the floor next to the sink holding the test strip and squatted on the tufted navy blue bathmat. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “What am I going to do?”
But she knew the answer. The next day she sat down with Keeley in the sunny reading nook that was in the large guest bedroom where Keeley had been staying and told her the whole story. Keeley’s expression became walled-off and she ordered Zooey out of the room, telling her she couldn’t handle looking at her. She curled up in a ball on the window seat and stayed there as Zooey left the room and quietly closed the door behind her.
Zooey expected anger, she expected to be hated and possibly rejected forever. It terrified her, the thought of being truly alone without her friends to lean on. But she also knew she was going to have Michael’s baby, no matter what. It was the only thing she could live with, giving his son or daughter a chance, a chance taken from Michael by adolescent stupidity, liquor, and a dark night on the causeway. And it was her chance, an opportunity to make things right with God.
She was curled up on the couch in the den an hour later, reading, when Keeley appeared. Zooey braced herself. Keeley stepped into the room delicately, almost deferentially. Zooey put down the book and straightened up.
Keeley walked over and sat down next to Zooey, who stared at her in surprise. This wasn’t anger. She didn’t know what it was.
“Hi,” Keeley said. “I’ve been thinking-”
“I know what I did was wrong,” Zooey blurted. “I’m so sorry.”
Keeley put her hand up. “It’s over. Michael’s gone. My life will never be the same as it would have been. Michael and I were supposed to be together. Amy was right: you only get one true love. I can feel it. I won’t have another.”
“I ruined everything. I wish I-“
“You don’t think what I said did something to him? I told him I never loved him. I lied. I was so mad that I needed him so much. I didn’t want to need anyone. So I lashed out at him in the worst possible way. Hitting him was nothing. It was what I said, and I think he believed me. Or was afraid I was telling the truth. Maybe what happened at your house had something to do with him running like that, being so stupid, but I know what I said was worse. The worst.”
Keeley swallowed visibly and continued. “I was upstairs thinking and suddenly it was all so clear. Here’s his baby. I was supposed to have his babies, and now, well, at least I can be an aunt, or something? A godmother?”
Zooey gasped, feeling like a bucket of icy water had been dumped on her. Of course. This was it. The final piece. “No, you’re going to be more. You’re going to be this baby’s mother.”
Zo found herself gazing at the floor, afraid to look up. But she had to. She raised her eyes and looked into Hannah’s, eyes so dark, mysterious. Her daughter’s face, usually rosy, was drained of color and her eyes were very wide.
“Do you understand?”
Hannah blinked. Then she said in a choked voice, “I’m yours? You’re my mother?”
Zo nodded, reached over and took Hannah’s hands. They were long and tapered, like hers, like Michael’s. Nothing like Keeley’s little hands and feet.
“But…, who knew? Did Aunt Pam and Aunt Amy know?” Then she shook her head violently. “No, this is too weird. It can’t be true. Mom is my mom. And…” She stared off, away from Zo.
“It’s okay. I know it will be hard for you to come to terms with. We kept it from you all this time. And we shouldn’t have waited so long.”
Hannah’s head snapped back, her thick dark brows lowering over her eyes. “Why? Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t understand.”
Zooey snatched at Hannah’s hands but she pulled them away. “Don’t be angry. It was the right thing, at least when you were little. You got to be the daughter of Keeley and Michael, beloved favorites of the island, a couple everyone knew, even if they were too young to be parents. If I’d claimed you, you would have been a hidden child with all the shame of that terrible night piled on you. The truth would have gotten out and the other children would have been different with you, maybe even the adults. Instead, you were the most loved baby ever.”
“But what about you? Didn’t you miss me? Didn’t you want me for yourself?” Tears glistened in Hannah’s eyes.
“I got to have the most beautiful baby who I adored. I saw you all the time, helped raise you. Keeley never denied me a thing.”
“But how could she? It wasn’t her baby and…” Hannah trailed off, looked down, struggling.
“Don’t you understand? This was the only way to make things right. I stole Michael from her that night, stole him in his drunkenness. With you, I could return life to its natural order. You were supposed to be Keeley’s baby, not mine.”
Hannah jumped to her feet, her chair making a loud rattling noise on the linoleum floor. “I’m sorry, Aunt Zo, I mean – oh! I need to get out of here.” She fled.