All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Mom’s response was always, “They are part of our family.”

“Look at what it’s doing to your daughters and tell me that.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing to us, but my grades the first quarter of my sophomore year were awful. Leslie even got a C in Geometry that quarter. Those first few months it was so stressful, sharing space with Donal, who was shell-shocked, and Wavy, who was actively hostile.

At school everyone wanted to know about my aunt and uncle. Were they really drug dealers? Were they murdered? I avoided those questions as much as I could. That was how I made friends with Angela, who had, it seemed like a thousand years ago, come to our house with her sister Jana and read Forever out loud. She wasn’t in my circle, too pretty and popular, but in the locker room, changing for PE class, when the other girls quizzed me, Angela said, “Leave her alone. It’s none of your business.” When she saw me alone in the cafeteria, she would gesture for me to sit with her friends.

Whatever it did to Leslie and me, the circus tore Mom and Dad apart. On our neat little suburban street, mine were the first parents I knew to get divorced.

The last thing Dad said to us as a family was, “I can’t do this anymore.” He should have said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” because he could have kept doing it. Leslie and I did. It wasn’t like he offered to take us with him when he moved out.

Ironically, he left just as the circus was winding down.

Two guys, one in a suit and one with a big black medical case, showed up with legal papers to get a blood sample from Donal. Leslie and I were teenaged and indignant, saying, “They can’t do that, can they?”

It turned out they could, because Sean Quinn had filed for custody, claiming he—not Liam—was Donal’s father. The evidence had been there the whole time. Aunt Val had always said that Donal’s birthday was January 21, but his birth certificate said March 21. Liam couldn’t have been his father, because he was in jail when Aunt Val got pregnant.

Some judge we never met decided Donal should be with Sean.

The last night of the circus that was our lives, a lawyer came to pick up Donal, because Sean Quinn was a coward. He wasn’t brave enough to face Wavy and watch her hug Donal good-bye. She shook all over, while Donal cried and tried to comfort her.

“I’ll come visit. You can send me letters. I’ll come for the summer. Uncle Sean says so. That I can come for the summer.”

When I started to worry the lawyer would have to pry them apart, Wavy took her hands off Donal and stepped back with a horrible, empty look on her face. While the rest of us went to the door to see Donal off, she crawled into the closet under the stairs.

She stopped eating. Really stopped. She got thinner and paler, walking up and down in her nightgown. Mom threatened to take her to the doctor.

One day I got to the cafeteria at school and opened my lunch box to find half my sandwich gone. Sitting next to me, Angela looked at the half sandwich with one eyebrow up.

“Going on a diet?” she said.

“I think maybe Wavy’s going to live,” I said.

Wavy did live. She kept eating, secretly, and she went to school. In her dismal white pin-tucked dresses, she looked like a consumptive child from the nineteenth century, transported to the raucous hallways of a public school. She caught up on the course work she’d missed and survived her freshman year of high school. Survived being stared at and whispered about.

Every week she wrote two letters: one to Donal and one to Kellen. Sometimes she got a short note or a postcard from Donal, but nothing from Kellen.

Eventually Mom sat Wavy down at the kitchen table and handed her a stack of letters. Every letter she’d sent to Kellen, all returned from the prison marked UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE.

“The judge says you’re not allowed to write to him and he’s not allowed to write to you. He’ll get in trouble if he communicates with you.” Mom sounded almost sorry. Wavy gathered up the letters and carried them to her room. She never said a word, and I never saw her write to Kellen again. She usually wrote to Donal after she finished her homework in the evenings, and she always signed the letters, “See you soon. Love, Wavy.” See you soon. See you soon.

Donal didn’t come for the summer that year. Or any other. Wavy’s sophomore year, her last letter to him came back stamped: NOT AT THIS ADDRESS. NO FORWARDING ORDER.

10

DONAL

April 1984

I wasted too much time at the sandwich counter waiting for Sean to come out of the bathroom. The counter guy came by twice and said, “Where’d your dad get to?”

“The bathroom.” That’s what I said both times.

“He’s been gone a while, hasn’t he?”

I shrugged, like Wavy, because what was I supposed to do? Sean always took a long time in the bathroom. Sometimes I had to go get him, and he’d be asleep on the toilet with his needle in his arm.

So the counter guy wouldn’t ask me again, I got up and walked over to the gas station. That’s when I saw the postcards. I ran out to the car and looked for money. We didn’t have the Corvette anymore and the new car smelled bad under the seats, like gas and rotten stuff. The carpet was sticky from where somebody spilled a pop. Not me.

I found enough for the postcard, a pretty one of the Grand Canyon that Sean said we didn’t have time to see, but I didn’t have enough money for the card and a stamp. The lady at the cash register said, “That’s okay. I can spot you four cents.” She was nice. I was glad I didn’t steal the card.