CHAPTER ELEVEN
Then
“Wake up, girl. C’mon.”
Theresa fended off the tugging hands and grabbed at her comforter. She tried to burrow back into the pillows. It had to be a nightmare, but no, again the blankets were yanked away, and her father’s hands were shoving. Pulling.
“Get up—now. Pack your shit. We have to go.”
Theresa, bleary-eyed, sat and gathered the blankets to her chest. “What’s—”
“She’s kicking us out.” Her father was hollow-eyed, hair sticking up all over the place. He stank of nervous sweat, and his gaze darted around the room without settling too long on any one place. He paced, grabbing things and throwing them in a giant black plastic garbage bag.
If she didn’t get out of bed and stop him, he was going to ruin her stuff. He’d done it before. Lots of times. “Dad, stop, I’ll get it.”
He tossed the half-full bag onto the floor in front of her. “We have an hour.”
“Or what? What happens in an hour?” She was already bending to scoop up the bag and put it on the bed, then pulled her suitcase from beneath it. This was probably the reason why she’d never put it in the basement along with everyone else’s. Maybe she’d always known, somehow, that she’d need it like this. Suddenly, in the middle of the night.
“She said she’ll call the cops.” Her father ran both hands through his hair. “Let’s go.”
“Why is she going to call the cops?” Theresa put the empty suitcase next to the garbage bag but turned to face him. She wanted to ask him what would make his still-new wife threaten him with the police. What had he stolen from Galina that would make her toss them both out like this? Money? Or something to sell for money? Galina was not the sort of woman to allow it, not even once. “What did you do to her?”
It was the wrong question. He whirled to face her, fists clenching. “Just pack your shit, Theresa. Whatever isn’t packed in forty minutes, you leave behind.”
There was no way she’d be able to fit everything in this room inside the single suitcase, not even if she used the garbage bag, too. She’d lived here for a little more than six months, and in that time, Galina had been generous to her. She claimed it was because she’d always wanted a daughter to spoil. A pretty bedspread and curtains, a shaggy throw rug, posters for Theresa’s bedroom wall like the ones Alicia and Jenni had across the street. Thinking of Jenni now made Theresa frown, the older girl’s death still raw, and a nightmare all its own.
Were these things important enough to her to take along? Was she even allowed? Theresa thought, her brain no longer fuzzy with sleep. Or would Galina accuse her of stealing them? Theresa focused. Pinpointing what, exactly, she needed to take and what she would have to leave behind. Her father had left the room, thank God, because his pacing and hovering were distracting.
She folded clothes quickly, pulling out what she’d need most from the drawers of the dresser that had been in this room when she moved in. Underwear. Socks. If she had to wear the same jeans for weeks at a time before they could get to the Laundromat, clean panties and socks made it easier. She pulled out a dark-green, short-skirted dress. Galina had taken her shopping to buy Theresa “pretty things.” The things her father had never known she’d want or need.
She would not cry.
The dress went in the suitcase, even though it took up too much room. T-shirts, jeans. The sweaters and pajamas she shoved into the garbage bag, careful not to stuff it so full that it would tear.
It took her thirty minutes to pack up everything she could possibly fit. The suitcase. A backpack. Her gym bag. The plastic trash bag. Her entire life in these four bags.
The sun was still an hour or so from rising when she hauled her suitcase out to her dad’s car. When she went back into the house to get the rest, Babulya was sitting in the kitchen. Theresa had been heading for the back stairs but stopped at the sight of the old woman in her head scarf, her gnarled hands resting on the table in front of her. Babulya had packed up a paper plate of cookies wrapped in plastic.
She would not cry, Theresa thought.
“These are for you. And take the sandwiches from the refrigerator. You’ll be hungry. Maybe not now,” Babulya said in her thick Russian accent. “But later.”
Faintly from the living room came the sound of muffled shouting. A skid of furniture legs on the wooden floor. Babulya didn’t look in the direction. Her gaze was steady on Theresa’s face.
“I don’t know what happened,” Theresa whispered.
Babulya shook her head. “Is Galina. Is your father. Not you.”
“But I still have to go with him. She’s kicking us both out, not just him.”
“Theresa!” Her father shouted and was hushed at once by Galina’s lower, but no less angry, voice.
Babulya opened her arms, and Theresa went to her. In the old woman’s embrace, she closed her eyes and thought of how it felt to be, even for just a little while, safe. Part of a family.
“Is not you,” Babulya repeated, and kissed Theresa’s cheek. “Never worry that it was you.”
In the end, it made no difference. Whatever her father had done, Theresa also had to pay the price for it. They were out of the Stern’s house before sunrise, their belongings tossed into the back of her father’s beat-up Volvo, and in a rattrap motel in the next town by breakfast time. Whatever had gone down between him and Galina, he wouldn’t talk about it to Theresa.
He talked about it on the phone to his soon-to-be ex-wife, though. Muttered conversations while Theresa lingered in the bathroom so she didn’t have to come out and pretend she wasn’t overhearing. Her father had done some shady things in the past, but whatever he’d gotten into this time must have been worse than anything. This was something he wasn’t going to get out from under; that was evident as three weeks passed before they moved from the motel into an equally crappy apartment close to the hospital where he had not yet, miraculously, lost his job.
Theresa never asked him again what he did to Galina to make her throw them out.