These Things Hidden (7 page)

G
us is fading quickly. “Where’s the baby?” he asks Charm when she comes home from the hospital.

“He’s safe,” she reassures him. “Remember, he’s with that nice family now? They are taking good care of him.”

Charm hears a rap at the front door. She lifts the pot of mashed potatoes from the stove top and goes to the door. Jane stands on the front steps, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, carrying her bag of tricks, as she calls it.

“Hey, how’re you doing?” she asks as she steps into the house. “Fall is in the air.” She shivers slightly and Charm takes her coat from her.

“I know, and it’s only the end of August. We’re doing
fine,” Charm responds. “Gus is in the other room watching television.”

“Ah, food for the mind.” She smiles.

Charm shrugs. “It helps pass the time.”

“How’s he doing?” Jane asks, her tone turning serious.

“He’s okay. Some days are better than others.”

“How about you? How’s school going? Are you juggling everything okay? It’s a lot of responsibility for a twenty-one-year-old to be going to school and taking care of an old man.”

“Hey, don’t call Gus old, it will hurt his feelings. We’re doing just fine,” Charm says, stiffening a little. She knows where Jane is heading with this. Jane brings up the subject of a hospital or skilled care facility nearly every time she comes to the house. “I call him three times a day and check up on him at lunch.”

“I know, I know.” She holds up a hand, trying to placate Charm. “You’re doing a great job. I’m just saying there are always options for you and resources. You let me know if you think Gus is taking a turn for the worse or if you need more help. Okay?” She looks her levelly in the eyes.

“Okay,” Charm answers, knowing that Gus would never stand for being moved from his home.

“I saw your mom the other day,” she says casually as she scans the kitchen. Charm is aware that, as a nurse,
it’s Jane’s job to make sure that Gus is getting the care he needs. She’s not worried—the house is always clean and she always makes sure to have food in the refrigerator.

“Oh?” Charm says as if she doesn’t care. But she listens, greedy for any snippet of news of her mother.

“Yeah, I saw her at Wal-Mart in Linden Falls. She looks good. Said she is working as a waitress at O’Rourke’s.”

Charm doesn’t respond. Her mother has had many jobs over the years and Charm doubts this one will last long.

“She’s still with that guy, Binks.”

“For now,” Charm says bitterly.

“She asked about you. I said you were doing great,” Jane says gently.

“She could ask
me
how I am on her own, she knows where I am. She lived here long enough for her to remember.”

“She wondered if you’ve heard from your brother,” Jane asks tentatively.

“No,” Charm says guardedly. “Not for years. Last I heard he was doing drugs and participating in other highly illegal activities.”

“You
are
doing great, you know,” she tells me again. “You hang in there. Soon you’ll be done with college and can begin your own life.” She hoists her bag over her shoulder and calls out to Gus. “The lady of your
dreams is here, Gus. Turn off that junk on the television!” Gus’s laughter rings out from the other room and then they hear the click of the television being shut off.

Charm sees how gentle and caring Jane is with Gus and knows she’s like that with all her patients. She gives him medication that relieves the pain and finds a way to make him smile through the pain the morphine can’t reach, treating Gus with the dignity and respect that is so important to him. Because in the end, that’s all he really has left. He knows he is going to die, but Jane is easing the way for him. She talks to him like he was the man he remembers himself to be—the firefighter, a respected member of the community, a good friend and neighbor.

She thinks about someone finding out what they did five years ago. If anyone learns of the law she had broken, her dream of becoming a nurse would disappear.

I want to do what Jane does for others,
Charm thinks.
I hope that I get the chance.

I
wake up shivering. The windows of my car are fogged over and it takes me a minute to figure out where I am. I wipe away the condensation with the heel of my hand. The sky is black and I see that I’m still parked in front of Missy’s apartment. No lights shine in the apartment and the street is quiet.

My neck is stiff from sleeping with my head against the steering wheel and my mouth feels dry, like it’s stuffed with cotton. I think back to the night before, about how I thought for a second that boy could possibly be interested in me. Just me. I had thought that by leaving Linden Falls I would be able to start over in a place where no one would know where I came from, who my sister was. But I was wrong.

I turn the car ignition and flip the heat as high as it will go, so that warm air blasts against my face. The display on the dash says it’s three-thirty. I hope my grandmother isn’t waiting up and worrying about me. I try to gauge whether or not I’m sober enough to drive back to my grandmother’s house or if I should knock on Missy’s door and crash there for the rest of the night. I can’t bear the thought of facing her, though, of explaining why I left in such a hurry. I’m sure word has already made the rounds. Soon I’ll be right back where I was when I lived in Linden Falls. That girl. Brynn Glenn. That girl whose sister went to prison for drowning her newborn.

I decide that it’s safe for me to drive home. The world isn’t spinning like it was last night, even though my head is pounding and my stomach churns. I flip on my headlights and carefully pull out into the street toward home. I don’t know what I’m going to say to my grandmother. The truth, I guess. She’s just about the only person in the world I can be honest with, at least to some degree. She knows that I felt like an outsider in my own house. My grandmother understood. She told me that she felt the same way living with my grandfather and my father. They were both perfectionists, both incredibly smart, both interested in finance and astronomy. She said that try as she might, she always felt like she was on the outside looking in, wanting to be a part of their circle but never finding the space to squeeze in.

When I was fourteen I took a sketching class at the community center. One of our first assignments was to do a self-portrait. I sat in front of my mirror for hours with my sketch pad and pencil, just staring at myself. The nib of my pencil didn’t touch the paper, my hand floating above it like a butterfly trying to find a place to land. Eventually, Allison wandered past my room and poked her head in.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Just an assignment for my art class. I have to draw a self-portrait.”

“Can I see?” she asked, stepping into my room. I remember thinking,
My sister is so beautiful. She should be the one I sketch a picture of,
but I didn’t have the nerve to ask her. I tilted my blank sketch pad toward her and she looked at me, a troubled frown on her face. “I think that must be the hardest thing for you to do, for an artist to do. To draw yourself. For the whole world to see what you think you look like.” She shook her head at the thought, as if impressed. “Maybe start with your eyes,” she suggested. “And go from there.” Then she was gone, on to the next activity, the next school project, the next workout.

I sat there for a long time, all alone in my room, smiling. Not just because Allison graced me with her presence—which rarely happened—but because she
called me an artist. For once I wasn’t the little sister, the nobody. I was Brynn Glenn, the artist.

I still have that portrait I ended up drawing of myself. It shows me sitting in front of a mirror, looking at myself, paper and pencil in my hand. And if you look closely at the pad of paper that I’m holding, you’ll see another girl looking in a mirror holding a pencil and paper, and on and on until the girl in the mirror is so small you can barely see her. I thought it was pretty good and my art teacher did, too. I got an A. I showed my mom and dad and they told me I did a nice job. I asked if I could get a frame and put the sketch inside it and hang it in the living room or somewhere, but my mother said no. The picture didn’t really go with the decor of the house.

I never showed the picture to Allison. I was afraid of what she might say. For that one moment, Allison considered me an artist. I wanted her to keep that thought, remember me that way.

As I pull my car into my grandmother’s driveway, I see that she has left a light on for me. As quietly as possible, I unlock the back door and step into the kitchen. The light above the stove is on and there’s a note on the table.
Hope you had fun with your friends. There’s cake on the counter.
I smile. This is another reason I love my grandmother. There’s always cake. My stomach still feels queasy so instead I get a glass of water and make my way to my bedroom. Milo is curled up on my bed, fast
asleep. I nudge him to the side and crawl under my covers but sleep doesn’t come. I get up again, swallow my medication, adding an extra two pills to make up for the doses I missed the past few days and pull out my sketch pad. Climbing back into bed, I begin drawing, my hand moving as if on its own. Dark clouds, a river, my sister, a baby … and me. Watching it all.

I
’m on for cleaning bathrooms today at Gertrude House and then later I’m going to meet with Olene about a possible interview for a job at a local bookstore. I’m very excited about the job prospect and nervous, too. Olene is active in several community groups and many of her
girls,
as she calls us, get jobs at local businesses near Gertrude House. I set my bucket of cleaning supplies on the floor, grab the toilet wand and lift the lid of a toilet. Inside, I find a particularly realistic doll with wide, staring eyes looking up at me from the toilet bowl. I can’t breathe when I see it. It has the same smooth pink scalp of the baby I gave birth to and its arms are reaching out for me as if begging me to pick her up. I don’t stomp out of the bathroom wielding the toilet brush, ready to fight; I don’t yell or scream obscenities,
or promise revenge. I sink to the floor of the bathroom and lay my forehead against the blue tiled wall and cry and cry.

Finally, Olene comes into the bathroom—there are no locks on any of the doors in the house—and sits on the floor with me, holding me as I cry as I haven’t done in years. No one has ever seen me cry this way. Not my mother, or father, or even Brynn. I hold on to Olene’s thin frame, her knobby shoulders digging into my cheek, and cry.

“Shhh now, Allison, shhh,” she whispers into my ear, her stale cigarette breath a welcome breeze against my cheek. “It’s going to get better,” she promises. “Do you hear me, Allison?” I snuffle and nod into her neck. “Then let’s get you up and wash your face.” She places her rough, leathery hands on my shoulders. “It’s not going to be easy,” she says, looking up at me. “It’s probably going to get a lot harder before it gets easier. No one can change what you did or what has happened in the past.” I lower my head and start to cry again. “But—” she says so sharply that I have to look at her again. “But you do have control over who you are now and how you carry yourself. Do you understand?” I can’t answer her. “Do you understand?” she says again, and I bob my chin up and down.

“Meet the world with hope in your heart, Allison,” Olene says gently, tears gathering in her own eyes.

“Meet the world with hope and it will reward you. I promise,” Olene says in a way that I know she’s said the exact same thing to dozens, maybe hundreds, of girls over the years.

I nod my head and rub my eyes.

“Are you going to be okay?” Olene asks.

“I’m fine,” I tell her stupidly, nodding my head up and down and sniffling. It is so obvious I am anything but fine. “I just need a few minutes.”

“Okay.” She pushes herself up from the floor and stands over me for a moment as if trying to decide if she should say more. “I’ll see you later at the group meeting.” She glances down at the baby still floating in the toilet. “You want me to take care of that?”

“No, I’ve got it,” I say, and I hear the door click softly shut when she leaves. I look into the mirror at my swollen eyes and blotchy face. I can’t let the other women see me this way, I tell myself, and bend over the sink to splash cold water on my face. For a brief moment I think about how shockingly cold the river water would have felt on my baby’s face and a strangled gagging sound comes from my throat. I force myself to look in the mirror one more time and smooth my hair. It’s still long and shiny, a sunny yellow. I hate it. I grab a fistful of it, take a deep breath and look through the medicine cabinet for a pair of scissors but find none.

I pull an old towel from the linen closet, reach in and
lift the dripping doll from the toilet by its arm and wrap it up tightly. This is my test, I suppose, my initiation into the halfway house sorority, Phi Beta Felon. Well, I’m a kick-ass test taker. I open the bathroom door as the other residents sidle up to doorways to watch as I walk past them, my head raised, my back straight. I move purposely through the hallway down the steps, ignoring the snickers and comments as they follow behind me. I stomp through the kitchen and out the back door to where the large black garbage cans are stored. I wrench off the plastic lid and nonchalantly toss the bundle in. It lands noiselessly among the scraps of stinking food, the soiled paper towels, the garbage discarded by women who did bad things.

Hope. Olene had said to meet the world with hope. I want to do this. I need to do this, but I don’t know how.

As I move through the hallways of Gertrude House I hear the whispers of
“killer”
and see the angry, disgusted faces of the other residents. I will never be free of my past as long as I stay in Linden Falls. I have to get this job at the bookstore and I have to do my time at Gertrude House and then I’m going to move away. But first I have to see my sister face-to-face and make her talk to me.