Crazy Horse's Girlfriend (9781940430447) (14 page)

We walked back through the woods, laughing the whole way. At our campsite, I pulled the grill open, and quickly threw hamburgers onto the hot metal.

“Unlike that kid, I'm not going to stare moodily at my meat,” Mike said, cracking two beers open and handing one to me.

“Now that is hot,” I said, and we clanked cans.

We finished grilling, ate, and made a fire as the light began to dim.

“This is amazing,” Mike said. It was getting cold, and was now almost completely dark. It had gotten dark fast. Mike was looking into the woods and I could hear the sound of crickets starting up.

“Soon we'll be able to see the stars,” I said, putting my hoodie on.

“That will make this perfect,” Mike said, sitting down in one of the chairs we'd brought.

“Except one of us needs to learn to play the guitar,” I said, spearing a marshmallow on a stick and handing the bag over to Mike. “And it's not going to be me. I'm too lazy.”

“How about we just turn the radio up?” Mike moved his chair closer to mine and put his arm around my shoulders. We sat like that, the sound of the fire comforting, the stars coming out, the marshmallows blackening on our sticks like something ripening on the vine. I felt so content, so beautiful parts of me felt like they were dying off, exploding.

“I don't think I've ever felt so good,” I whispered into Mike's ear, my lips brushing the delicate brown edge of it.

“Me too,” he whispered. He took my hand, led me into the tent. He took my clothes off slowly, his hand running down my hip, over my thunderbird tattoo. “I love this thing,” he said and kissed it. He looked back up at me, and everything slowed down. My stomach turned with too much feeling and urgency, his voice in my ear, our clothes all around us, the faint heat and light of the fire, Mike telling me he loved me.

Mike put the fire out as I was fading into sleep, the sound of the tent unzipping and zipping, the water hissing on the fire. Mike crawled back in and curled up next to me. I dreamt.

 

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6

 

I was staring at it. Like I had stared at the ten ones before it, the big, blue plus signs sitting in a ring around me. I was sitting on the toilet, staring at them, my head swimming. I knew this was my fault. Mike had told me that he hated condoms, that he was clean, that he had only slept with one girl before me, his girlfriend in California, and that they had never used a condom and never gotten pregnant.

“Shit!” I whispered to myself. I gathered all of the tests together and buried them beneath a pile of tissue paper in the trash. I pulled my pants up, drained the bathtub I had been sitting in after the eighth test and opened the bathroom door like everything was fanfuckingtastick. Like I wasn't sixteen and pregnant and a total fucking statistic. I walked out into the living room and sat down in front of the TV with the twins. I was watching them until Mom got home. She had some sort of lame-ass meeting that was going to keep her late. I sat in front of the afternoon cartoons and tried not to feel like I was drowning. I'd been due for my period about a week after Mike and me had been camping, and when I hadn't gotten it and had started getting sick in the mornings, I had known. I had just known. I watched TV, the colors swirling, the twins clapping, my stomach moving further and further into a deep, dark hole. I thought about what I had to do and went blank.

A few hours later, Mom came in. I was still sitting by the TV. She put her bags down, let the twins rush at her and looked over at me.

“I thought you were going to start dinner?” she said, looking exhausted, her button-down white blouse wilted like an old flower about to rot away and blow into the wind.

“What?” I asked.

“Dinner? I swear sometimes, Margaritte, that you're getting high down there.”

I laughed uneasily. “Dinner, yeah, I was distracted.”

“By homework I hope,” she said, walking into the kitchen. She came out a few minutes later and plopped down on the couch next to me, smiled, put her long, dark arm around me. “Forget it. Let's order pizza, OK?” She said. “Your call. Whatever you want. As long as you get a plain cheese pizza for the twins.”

Carrie broke eye contact with the TV. “Pizza?” She asked.

“Pizza!” Mary echoed and started jumping up and down.

Mom laughed. “Oh, to be a child again. To be that happy over pizza.”

“Huh, yeah.” I said, and picked the phone up. I ordered pizza and we waited, all of us watching TV together. There was a knock at the door. The pizza guy was a tall, skinny kid with bright pink acne in his junior year who had bought weed from me on multiple occasions. We had exchanged an awkward
hi
when I opened the door. I gave him money and he placed the pizza box into my hands, and we laughed at the ironic role reversal.

It was nice without Dad home. Sometimes he was fine, sometimes he was silent, sometimes he laughed too much, but we were always waiting. When he finally came home, Mom and me had put the twins to bed and we were sitting on the couch, watching
Quincy
together.

“Hi girls,” he said, shutting the door.

“Leftover pizza,” Mom said.

“Great, thanks.”

He got himself several slices from the kitchen and then sat down next to us. He'd poured himself a large glass of scotch to go with it. During the break Mom told Dad that Jake was getting out of juvie tomorrow.

“His parents letting him come home?” Dad asked.

“Yes. Though they have all kinds of conditions.”

“I was going to suggest that we all go to the Spaghetti Factory for dinner Friday night. How about we take Jake along?”

“Really?” I said, looking over at Dad.

“Yes. We all need a break. Let's go out.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, and Mom took his hand.

We watched TV together that night, and although I was aching inside over what I was going to do about the thing inside me that was only going to be a bigger and bigger issue, literally, it was nice to feel like a family, instead of all of us sequestered in our usual spots, Dad in the office, Mom in the bedroom, me downstairs. I went to bed scared, happy, picking my pipe up, putting it down, picking it up, putting it down. Trying to read and failing.

The next day, pouring myself a cup of coffee, I looked out the window and saw Jake leaning against my car. I ran out the door.

“Jake!” I yelled, running over to him. He caught me in a big hug, and his smell: motorcycle oil, hair tonic, and some strange indefinable spice enfolded me along with his arms and I felt good. I pulled back after a minute and he smiled down at me.

“How was time in the joint?” I asked, and we piled into my car.

“Great!” he said. “I feel like I've grown. As a person.”

“In other words, you sold a lot of drugs,” I said, turning onto the main street.

“Exactly.”

“Jake,” I said, shaking my head. “You need to be more careful.”

“Oh, little cousin,” he said, turning and giving my head a pet and then a twist until I told him to cut it out. “I missed you. How are things with your new loveeeeeerrrrr,” Jake said mockingly. My stomach twisted. I had almost been able to forget about my problem for a second there.

“Great,” I said nervously.

Jake's eyes narrowed with concern. “Something tells me that it's not great. You sound funny.”

“No. Really. He and I are totally cash,” I said in what I hoped was a convincing tone. It wasn't.

“What did he do? He fuck around on you? I'll kick his little Colombian ass—”

“No! No. It's fine. He's fine. It's really good. It's fine.”

Jake was silent. He knew I wasn't telling him something and this was new for us. I told Jake everything. And I wanted to tell Jake, I really did. I knew that he would help me, no matter what I decided. And I knew what I had to do. I just, you know, didn't want to face it. And telling Jake was facing it. I didn't even want to tell Mike because it would change things. I wanted to just, I don't know, do what I had to do and then maybe it wouldn't. Or something like that. I was confused.

Jake and Mike and me spent that week hanging out, laughing, doing deals together and it felt like the most perfect thing in the world. But hanging with Mike was weird. We had fun but I felt the whole time like I was hiding something huge from him, because I was. I figured he would know something was wrong but for some reason, he didn't. And that was best because I needed badly to figure this out in my head, for me, before I let anyone, even Mike, in on it.

But I was really looking forward to Saturday. Dad was behaving that week, and Mom was looking less wilted and the twins were not annoying the living crap out of me. The only thing wrong was that I was fucking, fucking pregnant.

Saturday, all of us piled into Dad's giant, blue suburban. It had been sitting like a ancient submarine in our yard for years, half buried in the dirt but, for some reason, lately, he'd kicked it into high gear and had actually fixed it.

Dad was obviously drunk, but not too drunk to drive of course and the twins were cute as hell, buckled into their car seats, Barbies in grimy light brown fists. On the way there, Jake made funny faces at the twins and they laughed, and Mom and Dad talked up front. They didn't argue once. Dad didn't growl or yell, or tell everyone to
be quiet!
He seemed happy, laughing at Mom's jokes and reaching up to scratch at his light brown beard whenever she said something interesting.

Coming into Denver was always cool, the city appearing like parts of a cloud drifting into view until the whole city was around you, the buildings glittering upwards. I stared up and then closed my eyes. I thought about what it would be like to be older, to have a job in a city like this, to do something important, or meaningful. I couldn't really imagine it. Sometimes though, when I would buy a magazine, usually some women's fashion magazine, and I looked through all of the glossy pages at the women dressed in clothing that cost more than what my parents' monthly mortgage was, I did picture myself as one of them. I'd even go to my closet occasionally and try to put something together like the women in the magazine, but I pretty much failed every time. My collection of Walmart tank tops and jeans and tennis shoes just couldn't add up to anything resembling what those women's lives looked like. Julia bought those magazines too. She was cool and knew things about music that I didn't and also bought magazines like
Rolling Stone
and
Spin.
And even though she was poorer than me, knew how to find things in the thrift stores that fit her lovely, thin body and made her look like an alternative version of the women that I so envied.

Jake was making both of the Barbies dance to La Cucaracha for the twins and it was hilarious. Even Mom and Dad were watching here and there and cracking up. It was good to hear my dad laugh. He did it so rarely. Sometimes my sadness for him overwhelmed my resentment and that was even worse. I worried that he would die horribly, either walking around drunk one day, freezing to death, or in a car wreck, or he'd just die in his bed when the alcohol finally took him. He was focused on the road ahead, still smiling slightly. I sighed deeply and with a slight rumble in my chest from the smokes.

Dad had to circle about a trillion fucking times before he found a parking spot. He'd offered to drop us all off at the front door, but for some reason, Mom kept telling him no. The twins were starting to get restless in their car seats, and nothing Jake did to entertain them was working anymore.

“I gotta pee!” Carrie said, looking over at me urgently. Mary nodded.

I looked over at Mary nodding and said, “Mary, do you have to pee too?” She just kept nodding. She always did what Carrie did, wanted what Carrie wanted, said what Carrie said. I had no idea if she really needed to pee, or if it was, as usual, a situation where she was just echoing Carrie's sentiments.

“Margaritte, do the twins need to pee?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, no. Doug—”

“Everyone just calm down.”

“Doug, you calm down.”

“Shut up Christine! Let me focus.”

Mom folded her arms in front of her chest and I began to feel sick. It had been going so well. About fifteen minutes later, after more and more circling, further and further away from the restaurant, Dad found a spot and parked. We filed out of the car. Carrie had been crying for ten minutes. Dad kept telling her to stop and Mom kept telling him to quit telling Carrie to stop, and then Mary had started crying, too. I felt like joining.

As we walked and the twins cried, Dad walked ahead, nearly losing us. Jake tried to keep an even distance between all of us, while Mom yelled, “Doug! Slow down!”

“If all of you would just move it!”

“Dad,” I said.

“Margaritte, if you would just hurry up, this wouldn't be an issue.”

“Dad, your legs are longer than mine and we're—”

“Let's go!”

I sighed deeply and thought about all the walks we'd taken up in the mountains when I was kid, before his body became too fucked up to handle long periods of exercise. He would make me walk in front of him, and when I would lag, he would swat me on the ass. I would cry and keep trying.

Finally, we all made it to the restaurant, as I had picked up one scratching, angry twin and Jake the other. Jake was silent. I could tell that he was furious. Though Dad had been in an unusually good mood, in the week since he got back from juvie, Jake spent as much time as he could with me, but he'd disappeared a few times, as he always had, and I knew he wasn't at his parents' place. When he showed back up, he'd sit in my basement listening to his heavy metal Christian rock on my old boom box, the one Dad had taped up with duct tape to ensure its survival.

Dad was already at the front, and we walked up behind him and waited until someone came to lead us to our table. We settled the twins into their booster seats and made our drink orders. I thought things might be over but I was wrong. As soon as Dad had his second scotch in hand, he set into Mom.

“You need to learn to control them, Christine. They need discipline. And if you'd only plan ahead—”

“Don't start in with me. I take care of them, you don't.”

“I work.”

“I work too!”

“Guys!” I yelled. Jake looked at us and went to the bathroom. I knew he was going to get high. That's how he dealt with his life at home. His parents never fought, but his father quietly controlled everything. Being in their house was like being in cold, windy tunnel. Sometimes though they would joke and laugh and it was fun being there, like in the days they used to powwow.

Dad ordered yet another scotch and I vibrated with expectation. Mom and I watched him drink scotch after scotch, as the twins chattered and laughed. Once Jake had gotten back from the bathroom, I went and got high myself. I knew that that was wrong, considering my situation, but I figured that since it wasn't going to be my situation for long, who the fuck cared. Though I felt funny doing it. Real funny. I only took one hit.