Beyond Summer (33 page)

“Move back, Landon.” I elbowed him aside cautiously. “All three of you move back.” If something was really wrong with Barbie, I didn’t want any of them to get hurt. “Barbie, what’s happening? Do I need to call an ambulance? Are you sick?” Gripping her wrists, I tried to pull her hands from her face. My fingers slid in the clammy moisture on her skin. “Barbie, do you need a doctor? Did you take something? Did you get something from Fawn?” My mind raced through the possibilities—everything from Barbie trying to commit suicide with an intentional overdose, to street drugs having been slipped into her drink last night.

“I’mmm . . . saaa . . .” she moaned. “I . . . ummmm . . . sooo . . . saaa.”

“Barbie, talk to me. What’s wrong?” I pulled harder on her hands, loosened her fingers, dragged them from her face, dislodging tangles of hair. She seemed oblivious to the pain.

“I’m soh, I’m soh, I’m soh . . .” she breathed, then pulled in a gasp that whistled and shuddered in her throat. “I’m soh-ryyy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The words were breathless, almost unintelligible.

Holding her wrists, I shook her. “Sorry for what? Barbie? What did you do?”

“I’m just . . . I’m just like her. I’m just like her.”

I shook her again, and her head rattled like a ball on a tether. “Just like who? Barbie, stop this. You’re scaring the boys. Tell me what’s wrong.” Behind me, Landon started to sob. Mark grabbed Landon’s shirt and retreated backward over the pile of Duplos, taking Landon with him. Daniel tried once more to see his mother’s face, then scooted away and crouched under the table with the others. In the living room, Jewel whimpered softly.

“I’m sorry.” Barbie collapsed forward with the words, her head sliding slowly down my arms, as if she were pleading with me, begging for something.

I fumbled for a course of action. Yell for help? Call 911? Try to slap some sense into her?

Jerking upward, I bounced her head off my forearms like a volley-ball. “Stop this! If you took something, tell me. Otherwise, go back to bed. Go somewhere. Do something. You’re scaring the kids, and you’re scaring me.”

Her eyes met mine, and the fog slowly cleared. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for . . . I did . . . I did everything wrong. I didn’t ever want to be like her. I didn’t ever want to do what she did.”

I pushed her hair back, tucked it behind her shoulder. The gesture felt surprisingly intimate. For an instant, the woman on the floor wasn’t Barbara, the queen of high heels and plastic surgery. She was just a human being, broken in front of me. “What . . . Who did, Barbara?”

“My mother.” Barbara sniffled, wiping a hand across her nose, then pressing trembling fingers to her lips, the nails leaving reddened trails on her skin as she drew them downward, letting her eyes fall closed. “She let them take us away. She just . . . she just let them do it. She never even tried to get us back. She just . . . moved on.” Her eyelids squeezed tighter, pressing tears from beneath her lashes. “I never wanted to be like her.”

I felt the unexpected tug of compassion, a strange connection to Barbie that I’d never expected. My mother had moved on, too. She’d left me behind like I was a game she was tired of playing. “Barbie, I know you love your kids. They know you love them.”

Her brows, blond and childlike in the absence of makeup, squeezed again. “They don’t even want to come to me. Jewel likes that . . . that girl better than she likes me.” She rolled her head toward Shasta’s house. “Jewel wants
her
. Jewel wants you. The boys don’t even care about me. They don’t look for me. Everybody leaves.” She collapsed again, sobbing. “I just wanted someone to love me.”

I grabbed her shoulders again, holding her away from me, trying to force her to focus. “They’re just kids, Barbara. They’re just kids, and every time they turn around, something’s changing. First, it’s a different nanny every few months, and now there’s no nanny, but you’re here, except you’re not really here. You’re never the same twice. You’re either passed out or taking off with Fawn, and every once in a while, you grab them and hold them so tightly they can’t breathe. You’re their mom. They need you to be their mom. They need to know they can count on you to . . . to take care of them and make them feel safe. All the time—not just once in a while. You can’t just . . . check out whenever it gets to be too much.”

Biting her lip, she sagged against the wall, pressed her forehead to it. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault we’re here.”

I held tightly to her hand. “No, it’s not, Barbara. My father left us here. My father did this.” As painful as it was to admit, it was true. Dad was the one who had run out, who’d left us to fend for ourselves. “I don’t think he meant for this to happen, but he had to have known it was coming. He must have known it for quite a while, and he didn’t tell anybody. He didn’t tell us. He kept it hidden because he was too proud to admit it. He lied to us about it, and then he left.”

“He loves us.” The words ended in a stifled sob. “I need him. I can’t do this without him.”

I felt myself cracking inside, breaking open. I couldn’t give in to it. I couldn’t crumble, too. “He’s not here. We have to take care of ourselves.”

She swallowed hard, her chin bobbing with the effort. “I can’t.” Her lashes parted, damp and clumped, and she focused beyond me, on the boys. “I can’t . . . I can’t give them back their . . . house . . . the pool . . . their toys . . . their . . . They shouldn’t be here . . . in this place. They shouldn’t have to live like . . . in this . . . this. I know how it feels. I know how it feels to be treated like everybody’s trash.”

I caught her gaze through the veil of tears. “Barbie, they don’t care. You’re the one who cares about that. Have you looked at them lately? Haven’t you noticed they’re not fighting all the time anymore? They’re fine here. They like it, even. They like it because we’re all together, because we’re all in the same space. They just need you to be in that space with the rest of us, that’s all. They want their mom to
be
their mom.” Barbie’s hands held tightly to mine. Our gazes tangled, and she nodded. Where there had been only contempt and hatred, now I felt a bond.

Jewel let out a mewing cry in her bouncer seat, and I stood up to go after her. When I came back, the boys were curled in Barbie’s lap. Her head was bowed over theirs, her hair falling around them like a shield. I took Jewel to the kitchen and left them there, clinging to one another.

The hours after Barbie’s breakdown felt like the first time we’d spent together in the house as a family. We sat on the back porch with Jewel while Aunt Lute took the boys on what she called an
expedition.
She’d helped them put on baseball caps with scarves draped down the back to protect them from the desert sun. As they stalked off across the yard with Aunt Lute’s colorful silk scarves fluttering on their shoulders, Barbie wiped her eyes again. She’d been crying off and on all day, as if our situation had suddenly come crashing down upon her in all its dismal reality. She’d cried off the last remnants of last night’s makeup, and hadn’t bothered to replace it today, and her hair now hung in a sloppy ponytail, not at all typical of her.

Pulling her knees to her chest, she hugged herself tightly, shivering under her T-shirt, even though the day was hot. In the muted afternoon light, without the free-flowing hair and makeup, she looked small and frightened. Vulnerable. Real.

She cupped a hand around her neck, as if she were feeling for the pulse there, or trying to steady it, then wrapped her arms over her knees again. “We’ll have to do something. We can’t stay here forever. Boone’s going to need this house. You have to go to school. . . .” Blinking, she checked the yard, studied the trees overhead. “What time is it? What day?”

“The first of August.”

“We’ve been here almost a month.” It wasn’t a statement or a question, more a thought left unfinished. Her eyes welled again. “The twins start at Bramler on August nineteenth. . . .” The sentence rose in the middle and fell at the end, as if she knew that Bramler Academy was now way out of reach. Her teeth clenched, drawing her cheeks tight. “It’s not fair.”

“I don’t know what’s fair anymore,” I whispered. Living here, seeing the people at the Summer Kitchen and in the reading class, I found it hard to deny that we were still much better off than many. People who had been living just like us were now eating at the Summer Kitchen and subsisting in low-income apartments because they’d lost their jobs, lost their homes, made investments that went sour. Barbie and I could be so much worse off, and if we didn’t do something soon, we would be. Our situation as it was couldn’t last.

“I’m not going back to school in the fall,” I said. “I’m going to start looking for a job.”

Barbie’s gaze flicked toward me. “You can’t. Paul would be so upset. He wanted you to have that golf scholarship.”

Her advocating for my father caused me to pull away. How could she defend him? If he cared so much, where was he? “I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t ever want to hear his name again.”

I felt Barbie’s touch on my hair. By instinct, I shifted away, and she withdrew her hand. “He loves you, you know. You should hear the way he talks about you, the way he talks about that scholarship. He’s so proud of you.”

“I didn’t even want the scholarship. He never asked me what I wanted. He never listened.”

The cat wandered across the porch, and Barbie scooped it up, held it in her lap, and stroked it. “I was always . . . jealous of the way he looked at you, like you were his little princess. He admired you so much. You were everything I could never be.”

“Barbara, what are you talking about?” As far as I could tell, my father was mesmerized by Barbie. Why else would he have given her everything she wanted, including four kids, none of whom were his idea?

She laughed softly, ruefully. “You were perfect. His perfect little girl. I always wanted to be somebody’s perfect anything. I wanted someone to love me that way.”

“My father loved you.” Even now, it was hard to admit. I’d always convinced myself that his attraction to Barbie was merely physical—the hormonal insanity of a man facing midlife. I’d told myself that the pretty young wife and the batch of in vitro kids were merely a form of denial—his way of pretending he was in his twenties instead of his fifties. I wondered if he’d ever considered that he’d be over seventy before Jewel graduated from high school.

Now she might never know him at all. Would she end up like Shasta someday—desperately trying to fill the gap created by a father who’d left her behind?

“He took care of me,” Barbie said quietly, her expression hard and sad as she tracked something in the brush by the creek. “He liked the way I look. That’s all there ever is.”

“You let it be that way. You let it be just about the surface.” Who was I to talk? Hadn’t my life been mostly window dressing? In the weeks since the Rosburten crash, not one person, not even my so-called best friend, had called to check on me. I could be marked off like any other engagement that no longer fit into the social calendar. The worst of it was that I felt the same way. Other than the convenience, the ease of it, I didn’t miss my old life, or the people who had filled it. Amazingly, this life, my life here, felt real, and raw, and important, close to the center. I’d dug down because I’d been forced to, excavated myself, and begun to discover someone I never knew existed.

Barbie’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, thin lines of bone appearing through the T-shirt, and then disappearing again. “There’s nothing else anyone would want to see. The inside’s not always so pretty.”

“The inside is what’s real.”

Her lips trembled, full, perfect, perfectly sad. “I’m not like you, Tam. I’m not strong.”

“You must be.” I felt the connection to Barbie again. Part of me wanted to reach out and take her hand, but I didn’t. “You must be, or you wouldn’t still be here.”

Looking at her hands, she picked a rhinestone off the fingernail polish Fawn’s spa had probably done for her, pro bono. “I always found someone to take care of me. You can always find someone who likes the way you look, if you’re pretty. . . .” Her cell phone vibrated on the decking beside her, and she twisted to look at the screen. “It’s Fawn,” she muttered to no one in particular, then hit the button and silenced it. For a half second, I expected her to get up and take the phone into the house, but then she just slid it farther away, as if it were a temptation she didn’t need right now.

Somewhere nearby, a car alarm started going off as we watched Aunt Lute and the boys patrol the edges of the yard and gaze over the fence into the creek. Aunt Lute plucked something from a bush and placed it carefully in the boys’ hands. Running with newfound treasures cupped in their fingers, they hurried back to the porch to show us. Landon opened his hands, and a tiny canoe rocked back and forth, teetering on his fleshy index finger. “Is a boat!” Rolling the boat over, he displayed the bottom, where the letters
B-o-A-t
had been clumsily scratched into the wood.

“It sure is,” I said. “Did Aunt Lute give that to you?”

“Her get it from a tree!” Landon’s face was filled with the magical glow of toy-bearing trees—like wild blackberry vines, only better. Even the blaring of the car alarm couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. All three of the boys were so caught up in Aunt Lute’s story, they seemed oblivious to the noise.

“The Lady of the Water has left them for us,” Aunt Lute yelled over the racket as she crossed the yard, a paisley scarf fluttering on her shoulders like multicolored hair. “Aren’t they lovely? We’ll run a sink of water and sail them. Then tonight, we’ll lay them by our beds so that in our dreams, we might sail off down the river like Hiawatha.”

“The canoes were a great idea, Aunt Lute,” I said. No telling where she had found the little boats—probably someplace in the boxes of junk she kept piled on the porch.

She laid a splay-fingered hand on her chest. “Oh, not mine—the Lady of the Water. The boats were hers. Perhaps her little fairies grew tired of rowing and left them there in the bushes.” Sometimes it almost seemed as if Aunt Lute really believed her own stories. Other times, I knew she was crazy like a fox, and making up invisible ponies and the Lady of the Water was just her way of dealing with the kids and escaping the weirdness of our lives.