Part 40 (1/2)

”Of course I do,” she said viciously. ”The year you shamed your father and nearly wrecked his career by letting that picture get out?”

With my left hand, I started slowly sliding off the bangles and bands I always wore around my wrist. In a conversational tone, I asked, ”Mother, why did you never ask me when and how that picture was taken?”

She wrinkled her nose. ”Why would I want to know? Why would I ask when my oldest daughter had become a drunken s.l.u.t?”

Carrie gasped, and Alexandra sat up her in her seat, eyes wide and shocked.

You'd think, when she threw out words like that, I would want to cry. That I'd want to hole up in my sh.e.l.l, wrap myself back up in that safe coc.o.o.n that protected me ever since my senior year.

I was done hiding. My wrist clear of obstruction, I ran my fingers up and down the scars on the inside of my right wrist. Her eyes widened when she saw the scars. I said, ”Do you remember when I came to you on New Year's Eve of 2000? You and Dad were getting ready to go out, and I came in crying? Because I needed a mother for a change? You said, and I'm quoting, 'Maybe things wouldn't be so bad at school if you hadn't behaved like a s.l.u.t.' Do you remember that?”

She winced. Good.

”I remember it, Mother. Because I needed you. And not long after all of you left, I went into the bathroom and slit my wrists. These are the scars.”

She gasped then ordered, ”Alexandra, Carrie, go upstairs, right now.”

Alexandra didn't wait around. She was gone in a flash. But Carrie said, ”I'm staying here with my sister.” Then she reached across the table and took my right hand in her left.

My mother turned on me then. ”I don't know why you're bringing this up now. I don't even know who you are.”

”Of course you don't. You never bothered to ask. You never asked me what was wrong. Mom, that stupid picture? I was fourteen when it was taken, and the boy was eighteen. I needed help from you. I needed you. But you were too busy that year, weren't you? With George Lansing? Am I right?”

She clenched her fists. ”Whatever you thought you saw that night, you were mistaken.”

Carrie's eyes were wide. I'd never told her about Mother's little secret.

”Is that why you shut me out that year in China, Mom? Because of Mr. Lansing? Because you were too busy having your tawdry little affair to notice that your daughter was in an abusive relations.h.i.+p with someone years older?”

My mother stood up, her lips compressed into a tight line. ”I don't have to listen to this.”

”Yes, you do! You've treated me like dirt for the last eight years!” I shouted. ”When I came home from that hideous abortion clinic in Beijing, you never even asked me what was wrong or where I'd been! Didn't you notice all the blood on the sheets, Mom? Didn't you notice how sick I got? I needed a mother and all I had was ...” I shook my head. ”Nothing. Not once were you there when I needed you. When Lana sent that picture out, you didn't offer to help. You didn't hug me, and tell me it was going to get better. Someone in Bethesda Chevy Chase made copies and stuffed them in people's lockers at school. They tortured me, Mother. To the point where I couldn't see any way out but suicide. And what I've never understood, to this day, was why? Why wouldn't you help me? Why weren't you there when I needed you?”

My mother's face twisted, and she started to cry. ”I ...” she whispered. ”I didn't know it was so bad for you. You're my daughter. I just wanted ... I wanted you to be better.”

”You wanted to protect yourself.”

She shook her head. ”No ... that's not it at all. Your father and I...we went through a really rough time in Belgium and in China. We thought ... we'd fallen out of love. And he had an affair in Belgium. And ... yes. I did in China.”

I wanted to vomit. ”So you were just too preoccupied.”

She looked at me, her face unreadable, and she said, ”Julia ... what happened in China?”

So I told her. The whole stupid story of me falling in love with a boy too old for me, of him using me, and treating me like dirt and making me feel like it was my fault. By the time I got to the abortion, and being lost and wandering Beijing in the snow afterward, she was crying.

After I finished the story, I said, ”For the longest time I thought you hated me. That there really was something wrong with me. That it was my fault Harry did that to me. That's what he told me. That it was my fault.” I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. ”It wasn't, Mother. I didn't make all the right choices, but I was a kid. And no one was helping me. No one was there to talk to about it, to guide me. The only family I thought I had then was a twenty-year-old Marine who I thought I'd never speak to again.”

Carrie murmured, ”You've got family now. You've got me.”

I looked at my sister and blinked my eyes to hold back tears.

My mom looked at us, her face a portrait of loss and shock. She shook her head then ran out of the room without another word.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

Part of my armor (Crank) Look, I know I cook for a living. On a three foot grill, with set procedures. But it was Christmas morning, and I wasn't going to let a Christmas morning go by without a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes. Because if Dad had been home, that's what he would have done. What I didn't realize was, cooking in Dad's kitchen? It was completely different.

Mom finally stepped in after I set the frying pan on fire, flooding the kitchen with smoke and setting off the fire alarm.

We finally got it sorted out, though opening the windows and doors when there was a foot of snow on the ground outside was bracing, to say the least. But Mom laughed it off, and Sean put on his winter coat, and we spent the morning laughing and being a family.

None of us said anything about the fact that Dad hadn't called. Maybe he'd get to a phone today. I don't know what the phone situation was over there. He mentioned something like big call centers they get bussed to when he called a couple weeks ago. He's writing almost every day.

Mom had gone out and bought a small blue star flag and mounted it in the window. She explained the tradition from World War II: families would put a blue star in the window representing each member of the family serving overseas in wartime. A gold star meant they'd lost a family member.

I wasn't much for prayer, but I'd found myself praying for Dad and for this thing to not actually come to war.

After breakfast, I cleaned up, then offered to start cooking Christmas dinner. My mother shooed me out of the kitchen in a hurry. ”Go entertain your brother,” she said.

I think she was enjoying this.

I could do that. We hooked up the new Xbox I'd bought him, now that I was actually earning money from the band, and goofed off playing games.

We hadn't opened everything. When I woke up this morning, there were two gifts under the tree from Julia. One for Sean, one for me. I'd looked at my mom and she said, ”She gave them to me before she left town and asked me to make sure you got them.”

She'd purchased Sean an updated 2002 edition of the 20-year-old medical textbook he'd been reading for the last several months.

I hadn't opened mine yet. I wanted to talk to her when I did, and I was watching the clock, waiting for noon here, nine A.M. in California. She'd be up by then, I was sure.

It was one minute after noon when I called.

The phone rang ... two, three times. I was afraid she wasn't going to answer, but on the fourth ring she picked up.

”h.e.l.lo?” she said. ”Crank?”

”Hey, Julia.”

”Is everything okay?”

I smiled, bitterly. Of course. She wouldn't expect a colleague, a member of the band, to call her on Christmas morning. That was something close friends did. It was something for family. Or lovers.

We were none of those things.

I took a deep breath. ”I called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”