Chapter 10
I called my brother from the car to find out what happened with Maryam and what had gone wrong.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Ian, come on, did you have a fight? Did you…you know…”
Digger looked across the car at me. “You know…” he repeated softly. “Just say it, Cinderella.”
“I’m not talking to you about that,” Ian snapped at me at the same time.
“Do you need me to come home?” I asked him.
“I’m not a child. Stay there with Digger and live it up.” He hung up.
I looked at the screen. The picture was of Ian, when he was about Joaquim’s age. He was holding a lacrosse stick and beaming.
“He doesn’t want to talk about it,” I explained to Digger. “He’s mad at me, now.”
“Nah, he just doesn’t want to tell his sister why he didn’t get laid. Can you blame him?” Digger put his hand on my knot of hair and shook it gently. “He’s almost a grown man, Rebecca. You have to treat him that way.”
“He still needs me.”
“Yeah, he still needs you to love him. He may not need you to be his mother so much, not anymore.”
I looked out the window at a boarded-up building and blinked quickly so the sudden tears wouldn’t spill out of my eyes.
“We’ll go up there in the morning, figure out what went wrong,” he said. “After Ian has a night to sleep on it and she does too. You know how those things go, maybe she’ll be ready to forgive him by tomorrow.”
“Maybe.” I yawned, almost splitting my face in two. When we got up to the warm bedroom, we got back into our prior naked state. I lay with my cheek on Digger’s chest and his arms hugging me to him. I thought I could get used to this, feeling so cozy and protected. I thought that I would take a moment just to lay there, then I was going to kiss him again, and things would heat back up. He was humming a song as he ran his fingers lightly across my back and I let my eyes drift closed. Just for a minute. Before I knew it, I was waking up and light was streaming through the one un-covered window. I was still wrapped up in his strong arms.
“Morning.” Digger rubbed his sandpaper chin across my shoulder and kissed my neck.
I sat up and pulled the sheet high to cover my breasts. Digger looked even better when he first woke up, all scruffy and sleepy-eyed and languid. I, on the other hand, had a head of hair full of knots, and probably indentations on my cheek from the pillow, and dark circles under my eyes, and bad breath. Mornings were not beauty-time for me. I yanked at a tangle in my hair.
Digger sat up too, the muscles in his stomach rippling. Oh, so pretty. I reached my fingertips out to them but he was running his hands through my hair, teasing out the tangles. He expertly divided it into strands and braided it neatly back, securing the end with a twist-tie from next to the bed. He eyed me critically. “Not my best. I should have brushed it first. Not bad.”
I ran my hand down the braid. “You really know how to do this?”
“I told you I did. Ilsa had the best hair in the elementary school. She used to make me watch videos to learn new techniques.”
I started laughing, forgetting about my dark circles. “Really? You were a good brother.”
“Yeah, well. She doesn’t need me to braid her hair anymore except on special occasions.”
“But she still needs you.”
He tugged my braid. “She’s never going to be able to lose me, either.” He kissed my forehead, then my eyebrow, and his hand tugged down the sheet covering my breasts. It was a long time later when he said, “Let’s go see Ian.”
My brother was still asleep when we got to my house. I did a better job of getting cleaned up and dressed, sadly undoing the braid (but I saved the twist-tie as a memento).
Ian was looking bleary-eyed, sitting at the kitchen table when I came down. I started to make everyone breakfast. “Hi there.” He nodded once. “Where’s Digger?”
“Someone called about some car thing. He went outside to talk.”
I nodded back, opening the refrigerator. I didn’t know how Digger liked his eggs. I didn’t know a lot about him yet, but I got a funny, excited feeling: I thought we were going to spend a lot of time together finding out more.
“I don’t want to talk about Maryam,” my brother announced.
“Ok.” I cracked a few eggs into a bowl, looked at Ian and thought about Digger’s appetite too, and cracked a few more.
“I thought she wanted to come over here. I thought she really liked me.”
I glanced at him. He was frowning, his face scrunched up like he was a little boy again.
“I think she does,” I said.
“Yeah, then she wouldn’t have told her parents.”
I was desperate to know more but trying hard not to sound too eager so he would keep talking. I pushed the bread down in the toaster and sliced up bananas. “Hm? What did you say about her parents?” I asked casually.
“She told her mom that she was thinking about sleeping over here! Of course they freaked out and said no. Now they think I’m some kind of, I don’t know, horny high school boy, that all I want is to, you know.”
We were back to “knowing” things. “Why do you think she talked to her mom?”
He mumbled something.
“I didn’t catch what you said.” The butter bubbled in the frying pan and I poured in the eggs.
“I said that she was worried. She told me she wanted to talk to her mom for advice.”
I thought about that, about being able to turn to your mom for advice about big issues in your life, to get her guidance with your problems. It sounded pretty wonderful to me. “Ian, I think that’s normal. We don’t do that, but other people do.” I hesitated. “Did you tell her not to?”
“Yeah, because of course her mother would tell her to stay away from me! She did, so I was right.”
“Maryam told her mom and her mom told her dad, and her parents wouldn’t let her come over here,” I clarified.
“Yeah, I think so.”
I sighed. “Let’s have breakfast. I’m going to get Digger.”
He was standing on the back patio, surveying the snowy landscape. “This house is huge. I didn’t know it went back so far. It’s like a fucking park.”
I pulled his arm. “Come inside. I’m getting nowhere with Ian.”
Digger’s presence made Ian clam right up. The only thing he said for a while were requests to me to pass various food items. Digger appeared not to notice that my brother was glaring at him.
“Did you have fun last night?” Ian asked me as we finished up our quiet meal.
I looked into my coffee mug, steadily avoiding his eyes. “Mmhm. We went to a great restaurant.”
“Really?” Ian asked. “What was the name?”
“Oh, um…”
“Wreck, you’re such a terrible liar.” My brother looked furious.
“Don’t call her that.”
We both swiveled to look at Digger. “I’m tired of hearing that,” he said evenly. “Rebecca is a nice name. Everyone should use it.”
“I don’t mind when Ian calls me Wreck,” I told him. “He always has, since he was a baby. He doesn’t mean the same thing.”
Ian stared at me. “What are you talking about?”
I got up to clear plates. “You know, why everyone at school called me Wreck.”
Ian looked confused. “Because I did. I couldn’t say your name right when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, that’s why Tracey started calling me that in the beginning. But it became a joke, at school. Because I was such a train wreck. Everything I did was all messed up, all the time. Sucking at gym, sucking at all sports, failing my classes, sitting alone, tripping and dropping stuff. I was a wreck. The name fit.”
There was total silence in the kitchen. Digger put his plate in the sink and put his hand on my back.
“I didn’t know that.” Ian sounded stunned. “I thought—was it that bad for you, at school?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. Ian, seriously, don’t get upset.”
“That’s why Tracey has been calling you Wreck? That’s what she means when she says it to you?”
“She’s just thoughtless,” I said softly. “She doesn’t consider much beyond herself.”
Ian pushed back his chair, put his dishes in the counter next to me, and left the room.
“Great.” I sighed. “Now I made him feel worse.”
“I did that,” Digger told me. “Tracey explained to me at the basketball game why she called you that, why it was so funny. Someone needed to set him straight about that Wreck bullshit. Now he’ll be able to tell everyone else to stop it, too.” He hugged me from behind. I paused my dishwashing to lean back against him. “I have to go down to the shop. Me not being there yesterday left some kind of void that they filled by fucking up about twenty different things.”
I nodded, my head bobbing against him. I waited.
“I’ll come by here and get you when I’m done,” Digger continued. I felt a little smile grow on my lips as I nodded again and he bent his head to nuzzle my neck.
Ian stayed in his room for most of the morning, ignoring me when I knocked to ask if he had practice. He came out to eat while I was running on the treadmill.
“I left lunch for you in the fridge,” I said, panting. I had all kinds of weird yet pleasant muscle aches from the night before. I thought about some of the positions that Digger had made with my body and quickly held the towel over my face to hide my expression.
“I’m sorry,” Ian told me. “I really didn’t know about the nickname.”
I slowed the treadmill. “I know! It’s really ok. It doesn’t even upset me when people from Lamb’s or college call me that.”
“College?”
I shrugged. “They got it from Tracey. We were there together, too.”
Ian looked furious. “I hate that girl. She came over here, last night.”
Now I stopped the treadmill. “She did?”
“Yeah, ripping down the driveway, gunning the engine. I think she was drunk. She wanted to know where you were.”
I had a terrible memory of her tattling on me before to my father. “Did you tell her?”
“I said you were at a movie with Mom.”
She must have been drunk if she believed that. “Thanks.”
“Are we ever going to be able to stop lying? You know, when I met Maryam’s parents, I made up some story about how Mom is sick, and that was why she never came to my games or any school stuff.”
I stepped off the treadmill. “I’ll meet them, if you want me to. I’ll try to act normal so they’re fooled into thinking we have a nice family.” I elbowed him, trying to make him smile.
He didn’t. “They asked me if I had any other brothers and sisters besides you, and I lied about Margot. I said I didn’t.”
“Well, that’s hard to explain.”
“Yeah, hard to explain that our sister took off instead of going to college, hides from us, and hasn’t bothered to say hello in how many years? It does make us sound pretty fucking awful.”
I sat on the edge of the deck of the treadmill and tugged on his pants until he sat down too. “Do you know why Margot left? Do you understand?”
“She hated Dad.”
“Yes, but there was more than that, right? She was scared of him, Ian. That’s why she left. She was so angry at me and Mom for not standing up for her.”
“What did Margot think you could do when she was too afraid to tell him the truth herself?”
I shrugged. “I wish I had stood up for her. I knew she was seeing Kelli. But it wasn’t fun and games for me when Dad realized that I had been helping Margot to hide things from him.” It had been, hands down, the worst day of my life when Margot took off. I had lost my sister and she had punished me for not being the person I should have been with that letter she had left for our father, telling him the truth about herself, telling him how I was complicit in her secrets. I shifted around, the memories making me anxious.
“When I get older, I’m never getting married. I’m never going to do this to someone else.”
I put my arm around him. “I think you’d be a great husband and father, if you want that someday. You don’t have to act like Dad. You make the choice, Ian.”
“He called here a few times already.”
“Did he want to talk to me?” I asked.
“No. I told him you were sitting right next to me, knitting.”
I stared at him. “I don’t know how.”
“Yeah,” Ian said, sighing. “That’s how well he knows you. That’s how well I lie.” He stood, freeing himself from my hug. “I have to go study math.”
“How did that last test go?”
“I got a C. I asked my teacher not to put it in the online gradebook yet so Dad won’t find out. She’s going to let me retake it because I’m the stupidest one in the class.”
“Ian, come on. Don’t say stuff like that.” I thought about Ilsa. “I still know someone who could maybe tutor you. Want me to give her a call?”
“This is someone through Digger,” he stated, and I nodded. “No.” He walked out of the room.
Great.
I called Tracey to check on her. I had been keeping my distance since Ian’s basketball game, only responding with one or two word answers to her numerous messages. We talked for a while, and she wanted me to come over to see some new clothes she had just bought. I felt like I owed her. We had been pretty much inseparable for years and I couldn’t just drop her, even if she had made me angry at the game. Even if I was rethinking how she had always treated me.
“Wreck!” Tracey hopped down her porch barefoot and launched herself at me. “Are you mad at me again? I did what you wanted and I went to the basketball game, so why are you mad?”
“Hi,” I said, patting her back. It was like talking to a kid. “No, I’m not mad at you. I’ve been busy with things.”
She pulled my hand. “Come inside! Look at what I got.” We passed by her mother, working hard in her office, and her dad, lounging and watching sports. I waved at them both and they acknowledged me.
“They’re so pissed at me!” Tracey whispered when we got to her room.
“Why?” I stared at the mountain of new clothes on her bed. “For crying out loud, did you empty out Neiman Marcus?”
“I needed some new stuff! I was tired of what I had been wearing. Oh! Here.” She held up a sky-blue sweater. “I got this for you. It’s the same color as your eyes. You’ll look pretty in this.”
I took it from her. “Thanks, Tracey.” She wasn’t selfish, she was thinking of me as well. I smiled at her. “Tell me why your parents are upset. Because you bankrupted them?”
“No, because of the car. They’re like, if you can’t be trusted with a car, how are you going to move out and take care of yourself? And they really want me to move out.”
“What about the car? What happened?”
Tracey moved around some clothes, holding up a really beautiful dress in front of herself and looking in the mirror. “Oh, I got in an accident. A wreck!” She laughed.
“Are you ok?” I went to the window to look for her car in the driveway. “Is your car? It was practically brand new! Where is it?”
“It’s totaled.” She picked up a shirt, wadded it up, and tossed it back. “I don’t like that one anymore.”
“Tracey! Oh, my God! Were you hurt?”
“Jesus, it’s not a big deal! I’m fine. It’s just,” she made a face. “Like, the police are involved, because they said I was impaired.”
“You crashed your car while you were drunk?”
“I was only a little impaired.”
I sat down on her bed. “Oh, wow…”
She turned on me, furious. “It’s not a big deal! I don’t want to talk about it. My parents have already said enough. What did you do last night? Sat home?”
“No, I saw Digger.” A lot of Digger. I smiled a little.
“Oh, fuck. Wreck! Did you sleep with him?”
I didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
“Fucking finally!” Tracey squealed. “Welcome to womanhood! It took you long enough.” She sat down next to me. “How was it? Was he good? Is he huge? I bet he is. Did you bleed? Oh my God, my first time, do you remember?” She talked about it for a while, how she and Howie something had done it like four times in his parents’ bed while they were out of town skiing when we were freshmen at Lamb’s. When she paused for air, she eyed me briefly. “You know it doesn’t mean anything, right?”
“Yes, it does.”
“I can’t get a guy to stay with me for more than a night. You think you’ll be able to?” she demanded.
“If you’re looking for long term, I think you’re going about it the wrong way,” I told her.
She got red in the face. “It only meant something for you because you’re such an emotional fuck-up,” she said angrily. “It doesn’t mean anything to him. A man like him, a guy that gorgeous doesn’t stick with one woman. Don’t expect anything to come of it.”
I stood up. “I have to go.”
“Come on, Wreck! I’m just telling you the truth! Do you really think someone like that is going to stay with someone like you?”
I stared at Tracey and my throat got thick. “Bye,” I choked out. I dropped the blue sweater on the mound of new clothes and ran downstairs, not speaking to her parents as I hurried out of the house.
I did what I usually did when I was upset: I baked. The house was full of the aromas of triple-chocolate cookies and apple strudel when the doorbell rang and then someone pounded on the door with a big fist. I ran to open it and pulled Digger inside, putting my arms around his neck and hugging him.
“Well, hello to you too,” he said, lifting me in the air to hold me closer. “You get lonely?”
I nodded. I had been thinking about what Tracey had said all afternoon.
“Sorry it took me so long, baby girl. I met up with an animal guy at the house after I left the garage. He’s going at the raccoon problem. Said it’s the worst infestation he’s ever seen.” Digger sounded a little proud. “What smells so damn good in here?”
“I made dinner,” I explained. “And a lot of dessert.”
Ian came out of his room to eat with us, very sullen and obviously still angry. I wasn’t sure who the anger was directed at anymore, but one target was definitely Digger. Ian made a few snide comments about higher education and the people who didn’t have it, sounding very snobby and rude. Digger ignored him at first, but when Ian announced that he found it funny that Digger would show up at our house now after he had been hiding from my parents all this time, that was the limit.
“What the fuck is your problem, Ian? Is it me, or would you get your panties in a knot over any man seeing your sister?” Digger asked, leaning forward over the table, his voice level.
Ian flushed. “I don’t like you, in particular. I don’t like how you let my sister get hurt.”
My eyes went to Digger. “Ian—”
“What are you talking about?” Digger asked him. “How did I let Rebecca get hurt?”
“Remember when she wasn’t calling you for a week? Did you think she went on a cruise or something? She wasn’t allowed to leave the fucking house! And then she keeps sneaking around to see you, and do you know what would happen if my dad found out? You don’t care what he would do to her!”
“Ian!” I didn’t know how much he knew, because we had never talked about my dad being physical with any of us. So many lies and secrets.
“She got in so much shit for going to see you. My dad tore her down every time he opened his mouth. The crap he says…” I thought Ian was going to cry. “I don’t know how you can take it. I don’t know how you can sit there and take it,” he told me. Now he did take a breath that sounded like a sob.
“I don’t even hear it anymore. Ian, you know it doesn’t bother me.”
“It bothers me! It bothers me when he says you’re ugly, stupid, worthless, useless, a waste of his time and money. He compares us, saying that I’m so smart, his athlete, his talented son.” He turned on Digger. “You should have seen her, trapped in here because of you! She looked like a ghost. You say you don’t care,” he told me, “but you don’t know the look you get on your face when he tears into you. Like your heart is breaking. He loves to make you look that way.” Ian wiped his eyes viciously with his sleeve. “It’s your fucking fault,” he seethed to Digger.
“Hey!” I jumped up. “No, it’s not Digger’s fault. Don’t say that.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Ian asked me. “Why do you stay here? For me, right? Then it’s my fault.”
“No! No.” I walked over to my brother and put my arms around him. “No.” He leaned his face into my stomach and I could feel him crying. I hugged him like I had done when he was little, playing with his crazy hair. “You’re blaming the wrong person, the wrong people. Ian, I love you so much. I love you.” I looked up and caught Digger’s eyes. I couldn’t tell from his expression what he was thinking. He pushed slowly back from the table and left us alone.
Ian went up to his room after a while, jerking away from me and almost running out. I went to find Digger, feeling like I had been put through a wringer. My head was pounding.
Digger was reclining on my bed. “This is the least comfortable house I’ve ever been inside,” he commented. “I had to go find your bedroom. At least you can tell that an actual person lives in here. Come here, Cinderella. Right now.”
I crawled next to him and let him hold me, hiding my face in his shirt. “I think I messed everything up,” I said, my voice muffled.
“How’d you do that?”
“I thought I was doing the right thing for Ian, staying here with him. Maybe I made it worse.”
“Remember what you were just saying to your brother?” Digger asked. “You didn’t make things worse. This whole fucking situation isn’t your fault any more than it is his.”
“I could have fixed it.”
“Yeah? Could you have, with how afraid you are? I can feel you start to shake every time someone mentions your father.” He took a deep breath. “Is he only using ugly words with you, or is there more, Rebecca? Is he using his hands, too?”
Tracey knew, because she had seen the marks. My mother knew, because my father did the same things to her and my sister for the same reason. No one else. I had never told anyone. I didn’t move, and I didn’t speak.
Digger’s arms tensed. “You’re leaving here with me. Tonight. Then we’re calling the police.”
I tried to yank myself free. “I can’t! My brother—”
“Ian doesn’t want to see you get hurt. I won’t let you get hurt, not anymore. We’ll take care of your brother, too. But I’m going to take care of you, right now.”
I put my head back down.
“Not anymore,” Digger said softly. “No one touches you, not anymore. That’s done now.”
I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop for a long, long time.