“No,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
“And you should hear it,” she said. “It all happened before you were born, but it’s affected your life, right? It’s still affecting your life.”
I nodded. “And my brother’s.”
“Right,” Beth said. “I know. And I’m sorry.” She licked her lips. “Well, I was kind of a wild kid. Typical in many ways, but maybe even more wild than most.”
She then told me the things that Gordon had told me about her wild days in high school. I would have expected Gordon’s version to be worse, exaggerated for the sake of proving his own point, but as things went, it seemed that Gordon had been pretty accurate in his description of his daughter. She’d been a troublemaker. She’d become difficult for her parents to discipline and control. She’d run with an older and wilder crowd. She mentioned the drinking and the drugs.
“Your dad said they found heroin in your room,” I said.
“They found heroin paraphernalia in my room,” she said. “And it really wasn’t mine. I know that’s the oldest lie in the book, the one every teenager gives when they’re caught with something illegal, but it was true in my case. I was holding it for another girl. I’ve never shot up. I’ve done a lot of things, but not that. I know it looked bad to them. To Mom and Gordon. Dad, I should say.”
“You don’t call him Dad?”
“It’s hard to think of him as Dad,” she said. “You’ll see.”
She didn’t go on right away. She seemed lost in thought. My phone vibrated in my hand. I thought it would be Neal, but I saw Dan’s name on the display. Just checking in, I assumed. I wished I’d given his number to Neal so he could stay updated.
“So you were a wild teenager,” I said. “And you ran with some wild kids. Wasn’t this the seventies? Wasn’t everybody wild?”
“Not everybody,” Beth said. “I don’t think one time is really that different from another. Kids get wild. Parents worry. People didn’t always send their kids off to rehab back then. They took a harder line, I guess. Gordon—Dad—threatened me with a lot of stuff. He grounded me. He wouldn’t let me use the phone.” She shrugged. “Big deal, you know? Kids can find ways around that stuff.”
“And Mom?”
Beth paused. She stared at the floor, her eyes fixed on something, some moment in the past I would never see. “Mom did her best. I understand that now. She was hard, you know? She didn’t take much crap from me. She even slapped me once when I mouthed off to her.”
“Really?”
“Did she ever hit you or Ronnie?”
“Never.”
“Different times,” Beth said. “I don’t blame her. I would have slapped me too. She tried to talk to me as well. She treated me like a human being. I didn’t see it all then—I really didn’t. But she tried in her own way. I think she was just… confused by me. That’s all. She was just… baffled by my spirit. My strong will. My stubbornness.”
“She shouldn’t have been,” I said. “She had all those things.”
“True,” Beth said. “I have a daughter, and I see those same things. But it’s tough to step back from being the parent. Mom tried. I know she did. I couldn’t see that she was doing that, so I couldn’t meet her halfway. I just resisted. That was all I knew how to do back then.” She sighed. “Sometimes it seems that’s all I’ve ever done with people who wanted to help me. Resist them.”
Chapter Forty-seven
“How did you end up… leaving or whatever?” I asked.
Beth didn’t hesitate. She plunged right into the story. It seemed as though she wanted to get it all out, and I wondered whether she had told anyone else the things she was about to tell me. I guessed she must have told one person. She had likely told Mom the whole story sometime in the past couple of months.
“I snuck out of the house one night when I was fifteen,” Beth said. Her voice didn’t change much as she spoke, but I saw something in her eyes as she related the story. They looked a little glassy, a little distant. I could see the regret in them.
“I know I was grounded for something at the time, but that never stopped me. I used to go out the window in my room. It was easy. Gordon wasn’t home a lot, and sometimes I wore Mom out so much she couldn’t keep up with everything I did. She probably felt a great deal of relief every morning when I was still in the house and alive.
“That night I went out alone. Some girls I barely knew had told me there was a party across town. I don’t know how they had heard of it, or if they had any idea what was going on there. I doubt they knew what was really happening.”
“What was happening?”
“I’m getting there,” she said. “I couldn’t get any of my usual running mates to go with me because it was a school night and the party was so far away, so I just decided to go out alone. I did that sometimes, and I wasn’t afraid to do it. I could handle myself. I had the address. The party was supposed to be thrown by these older guys. I don’t think they were in college. This was in Haxton. We didn’t have a college there. But there were older guys in their twenties. Guys who worked in the factories and didn’t mind chasing after a high school girl every now and then. That was all I needed to hear. A party with older guys? I wouldn’t miss it.”
“How did you get there if it was across town?”
“I hitched,” she said. “Don’t look so surprised. People did it a lot more back then. I know it wasn’t that safe, but I think it was safer back then. We did it all the time. So I got dropped off on the street where the party was supposed to be, but as I walked up to the house, I could tell there wasn’t a party. Parties give off that energy, that vibe that something is happening there. The house was dark. Closed down. I checked the number on a scrap of paper in my pocket. I was in the right place on the right street. Since my ride was gone, I figured I’d walk up to the house and take a closer look. Maybe it was a small party. Maybe it had been busted, and everyone was laying low inside.” Beth shrugged. “Shit, I didn’t have anything else to do. You know? I didn’t want to go home and be locked in my room.”
“Sure,” I said, although I didn’t really agree. I would have rather been home than wandering around town in the middle of the night when I was fifteen.
“I walked around the back of the house. It had a detached garage. The house was dark but I could see that lights were on in the garage. It looked like someone had taped paper or something over the garage windows, but some light came through. I figured the party was back there. Who wouldn’t? It might have been safer and less messy to have people trashing your garage than your house. I heard some music playing, so I went up.”
She stopped talking, and I wondered whether she was going to go on. She seemed lost deep in her memory of this night, and I knew whatever had happened back then was playing out in her mind’s eye. Again.
“To this day, I don’t know why they were so stupid as to leave the door to the garage unlocked. Maybe they forgot. Maybe someone had just come in or left. I don’t know. I don’t know why they didn’t have anyone guarding the place. I just walked up. Anyone else could have. Maybe they felt really confident and comfortable.”
I swallowed. I wanted to tell her to hurry up, but I couldn’t. She had to get the story out in her own time.
“I pulled the door open,” she said. “It took me a minute to realize what was going on in there. At first, I thought it was the party. There were a lot of bright lights and the music. It smelled like pot. And there were people standing around. Mostly young people. I don’t think they noticed that I had opened the door right away. I tried to see what they were doing, and then it took them a few minutes to see me. About the time they saw me was when I figured out what they were doing in that garage.”