Prayers and Lies (28 page)
Authors: Sherri Wood Emmons
“Mr. Burke,” I breathed. “Oh, God!”
“And he grabbed my arm so hard I like to died. So I told him to get his goddamn hands off me, or I’d kill him.
“So he hauled me off to the principal’s office, and she came in and hollered for a while and then she called Aunt Helen, and she came in and cried, and then she brought me home and cried some more and gave me what-for.
“Poor Aunt Helen.” Reana shook her head. “I figure she got more than she bargained for with me. Maybe she won’t want me here no more.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “She’s just mad.”
“That’s just it, Bethany. She didn’t act mad at all. She just cried and told me she was sorry. What does she have to be sorry about? She didn’t tell them girls about me and Caleb.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of Mother’s reaction. If one of us had punched someone at school, I was dead certain Mother would have raised the roof before turning the culprit over to Daddy for a spanking.
“Well,” I said uncertainly. “Probably she’s sorry you had such a bad first day. But I’m sure tomorrow will be lots better,” I added hopefully.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Reana said. “If they make me go back to that school, I surely will kill someone.”
“But, Reana Mae, you have to go to school.”
“I don’t know why,” she said, her chin raised slightly. “Caleb didn’t finish school, and he done just fine workin’ at Granpa’s store.”
The stubborn chin began to tremble then.
“I wish I knew where he’s gone to,” she whispered. “Why don’t he come?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he can’t.”
“Yeah,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. “That’s probably right. He’s probably gettin’ hisself set up with a job and an apartment first, so we’ll have us a place to live.”
“Mother and Daddy will never let you go away with him, though.”
“They can’t stop me!” She said it loudly, defiantly. “I ain’t theirs to boss around. When Caleb comes, I’m goin’ with him, and there ain’t a damned thing they can do about it!”
Downstairs, we heard the front door slam. Then Mother’s voice calling Tracy to her room.
“She’s gonna get it now,” I said to Reana Mae.
“She ain’t gonna get nothin’ from Aunt Helen, compared to what I’m gonna give her.”
I stared at my cousin, watching her fist clench tightly.
“She’s gonna pay for what she done to me, Bethany. That’s for certain.”
Reana Mae did go back to school the next day. She and her tor-menters were called into Mrs. Watson’s office and made to apolo-gize—Jenny and her cohorts for tormenting Reana Mae, Reana for hitting Jenny and Amy. None of them meant a word they uttered, but they all went through the motions.
Reana Mae’s burst of furious temper had earned her a good bit of notoriety at school … and several admirers. She hadn’t, after all, been Jenny Spangler’s first or only victim. Lots of other sixth graders hated Jenny and her crew. Most were delighted to see them knocked down. Within a week, Reana Mae had a new set of friends—not the cheerleaders and prep girls, of course, but an assortment of loners, stoners, nerds, and other outcasts for whom she had become a kind of instant hero.
Tracy had earned herself a monthlong grounding for telling people about Reana’s background. This, coupled with Reana Mae’s newly elevated status, infuriated her as I’d never seen before. She sulked in her basement room, listening to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath on her stereo and talking on the phone to Lynette and her new boyfriend, a dark-haired basketball player named Mark. When she emerged for dinner or school, she stared balefully at Reana and me, snarled at Mother and Daddy, and muttered under her breath a lot.
One morning, just before she left the house for school, I saw her hiss something at Reana Mae as she walked past. After she had gone, I asked Reana what she’d said.
“Just the usual.” Reana grinned. “That I’m gonna pay for what I done to her. What
I
done to
her!
”
She shook her head, and her hair swung around her face. Mother had bobbed her hair, so that what had been a long, tangled mane was now a sleek, shiny curtain framing her face.
“I reckon she’s dead crazy, Bethany,” she continued. “She don’t even know how mean she is, she’s so crazy.”
I nodded.
“Anyways,” she continued, “I ain’t worried about what Tracy’s gonna do. She can’t hurt me none.”
I stared in admiration. I believed every word she said, that Tracy couldn’t hurt her anymore. I wasn’t sure how Reana Mae had come to a place where that was true, but I knew it was.
I only wished I knew how to get to that place myself.
Reana Mae was finding her way into our Indiana world. But every night at bedtime, she knelt on the rag rug beside her bed and prayed so hard her lips moved. And I could see what she was praying for—she prayed every single night that Caleb would come tomorrow and take her away.
“H
ey.” Reena Mae looked up from the letter she was reading. “Harley Boy’s got hisself a car!”
“He’s not old enough for a car.” I grabbed the page from her hand.
“Look.” She pointed. “Right there, it says he got a 1968 Plymouth Duster, blue.”
“He’s only fifteen,” I sputtered. “He can’t even drive yet.”
“He can back home.” She smiled. “Hell, I bet he’s been driving his granddad’s car for years.”
“So, maybe now he can take Ruthann out on dates.” I laughed.
“Get real, Bethany.” She rolled her eyes. “Harley Boy ain’t no more taken with poor Ruthann than he was back when we were kids. I reckon he won’t never be in love with her like she is with him.”
It was true. Ruthann was still in love with Harley. She wrote to me every few months, always telling me everything Harley Boy had been up to … how well he was doing at school, how tall he was getting. She never asked about Reana Mae. But I guess that was probably natural.
Harley wrote to Reana Mae every month, and she always wrote back. They both knew he still loved her. They both knew she didn’t love him. But still they wrote. I think Reana always hoped Harley would have some news about Caleb, but he never did. Caleb hadn’t come back to the river since Jolene chased him off with Bobby Lee’s gun.
But we did hear about other folks, from Harley Boy and from Ruthann and sometimes from eavesdropping when Aunt Belle called.
Jolene had finally come back home, several weeks after she’d beat Reana Mae so bad. No one knew where she’d gone to or what she’d done while she was gone. One day, she was just back in her house. She was fatter and she’d stopped dying her hair red, so now the gray showed through. But she didn’t drink all the time anymore … at least, not so folks could tell.
She’d taken to doing jigsaw puzzles. She had one going of the Last Supper, one with twenty thousand pieces. Said by the time she finished it, she’d probably be ready to see the Lord Himself. And she went to church every Sunday and sat right up front by Aunt Belle. She’d taken to reading the Bible with a vengeance, and she quoted verses at anyone who’d stop to listen, especially the verses about hell and damnation. Belle said her eyes fairly lit up when she talked about the hellfire waiting for earthly sinners.
Of course, Jolene counted her husband and child among those sinners. She told folks that’s why she’d sent them away, Bobby Lee and Reana Mae. They were sinners, and they had kept her from finding the Lord. They had to go away, she said, so she could find her way home.
Reana Mae read every letter that Harley Boy or Ruthann sent as soon as it came. She scanned them quickly first, looking for Caleb’s name. Then she read them slowly, searching for any hint of his presence. Once I even heard her ask Aunt Belle on the phone if she knew where Caleb had gone to. But Belle said she didn’t know.
Of course, Reana assumed Belle was lying, but what could she do?
At fourteen, Reana Mae was finally what Mother always knew she’d be—beautiful. Her skin was creamy pale, with a light sprinkle of freckles. Her brilliant green eyes were fringed with dark lashes, her dark blond hair smooth and soft. She was taller than me and much curvier, her breasts and hips rounded softly under her tight T-shirts and Levi’s jeans.
I was still waiting for my own transformation. I was fifteen, after all, a sophomore in high school … and still flat as a board and skinny as a rail. Daddy called me beanpole, which I hated. And while Reana Mae said I was lucky because I didn’t have to wear a bra and no one would even notice, I envied her curves, as well as her clear complexion, blond hair, and green eyes. My own dark curls and darker eyes seemed plain by comparison.
In three years, Reana Mae had settled herself into our lives completely. After her disastrous first day of middle school, she hadn’t gotten into any more fights—although Mother did have to make several more trips to Mrs. Watson’s office to hear about Reana’s smart mouth. Mother bore this shame quietly, pleading in vain with Reana Mae to watch her temper and her mouth, but never meting out the punishment such behavior would have earned the rest of us.
Reana Mae was stubborn and willful, but schoolwork came easily for her—too easily, my father said. Teachers either loved her or hated her, but they couldn’t fault her work—that is, when she did it. She coasted along with Cs and sometimes Ds for class work. She never studied and rarely did her homework. But she always got As on her tests.
The only class she seemed to care about was English. She devoured every assigned book, making trips to the library to check out other books by authors she particularly liked.
Lots of nights, we sat up late in our attic room, arguing the merits of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, debating the justice of Becky Sharp’s fate, bemoaning poor Tess’s sad outcome. By then, Melinda had followed Nancy down to Bloomington for college. Reana Mae could have moved into Melinda’s old room, but we were content sharing the attic.
When she started high school, I’d hoped she would join the school newspaper with me. But she seemed uninterested in news writing. She wanted to write just what she wanted to write, assignments be damned.
She changed her mind when she found out that as a staff photographer she could use the newspaper’s Nikon camera and darkroom. After that, she could be found almost every afternoon in the
Weekly Post
darkroom, learning to develop photos from Mr. Koontz, the journalism teacher.
She was not as reliable a photographer as we could have hoped for. Sometimes she showed up late for assignments, sometimes not at all. But her photos were gorgeous, and Mr. Koontz said she was the best student photographer he’d ever had—which didn’t say as much as you might think, since he’d only been teaching for two years. Still, everyone agreed, Reana Mae was good with a camera. She had a knack for getting unusual shots—catching Jenny Span-gler just as she fell off the balance beam, for example, or Brent Macy’s face just as he got his knees cut out from under him by a linebacker.
Brent Macy had been after Reana almost from her first day in the sixth grade. He was a year older than her—a jock who played on the football and baseball teams. All the girls eyed him appreciatively. But Reana Mae was unimpressed, as she was by all the boys who called our house or bought her valentines or sent her notes.
“They’re just boys,” she sniffed derisively. “What do I want with a boy, when I already got a man?”
She only said this to me, of course. Outside of our room, she never mentioned Caleb to anyone, especially not around Mother and Daddy, who seemed to believe she had finally gotten over her disastrous relationship with her uncle. I knew better. I watched her night after night, scribbling away in her journal. I didn’t have to read it to know she was pouring out her love for Caleb.
Someday, she still believed, he would come.
Reana Mae was just biding her time.
In late October, the entire high school became consumed with the homecoming football game. Howe High School was playing its archrival, Tech. Both teams had played well all season, and both were ranked in the state’s top twenty.
And then there was the homecoming dance. Tracy had long since picked out her dress at the mall. She’d worked overtime at the grocery store to earn the money for it, and it was beautiful—pale, sea-foam green with spaghetti straps and a short matching jacket. She looked like a beauty queen in it, and she’d already told Mark exactly what kind of flowers to buy for her corsage. Tracy was an old hand at dances; she’d been to every one since her freshman year.
On the Tuesday before the game, Brian Hutson stood beside me in the news office, watching critically as I aligned and cropped photos. He was a junior, the associate editor of the paper, and he made me very nervous. He was so handsome.
“Damn!”
I had scored the photo a full pica too narrow. It was ruined.
“Here, let me.”
Brian reached across me, turned the photo, and cropped the top slightly.
“There, we’ll just enlarge it a pica, and it’ll be fine.”
“Thanks.” I smiled at him. “Sorry I messed it up.”
He looked down at me for a long minute, then pushed his glasses up on his narrow nose and blurted out, “Do you want to go to the dance with me?”
I stared at him stupidly, blushing deeply, and finally said, “Okay.”
God
, I thought.
How stupid can I sound?
“Good.” He smiled, looking relieved. “I’ll pick you up at seven, and we’ll have dinner first.”
“Okay.”
“And let me know what color you’re wearing,” he said, still smiling. “For the flowers, you know.”
“Okay.”
God! He must think I’m a total jerk. He’s probably sorry he even asked me now.
I felt like I might keel over in embarrassment. Why couldn’t I ever think of anything funny or smart to say? I’d seen my sisters do this … even Melinda was good at it. But all I could croak was “Okay.”
Then, without warning, Brian leaned toward me, lifted my chin with his hand, and kissed me lightly on the mouth.
“See you later,” he said.