He turned, let go of the door, face puzzled and assessing her blankly.
“It’s Stacey Moore,” she said. “Class of oh-four.”
His eyes bugged in surprise, and finally the broad, familiar grin broke out. “Stacey Moore,” he cried, hurrying over, taking her in a semi-awkward, hunched-at-the-waist embrace. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Are you going in?” she asked.
He looked almost embarrassed by his need for a drink. “Felt like a night to get out of the house.”
“Mind if I join you for one?”
Lisa got off easily and loudly. The night of Jonah’s vodka aside, they rarely fooled around in Lisa’s house unless they were sure Bethany, Bob, and Alex were out because all three rooms were clustered together at the end of the hall. There was an odd, musty smell to the place that had nothing to do with the tacky floral-print wallpaper, yet seemed related. It was a low, dark house with sticky surfaces and ugly shag carpet in the bedrooms. Stacey had never liked being there and knew Lisa felt the same.
When Bethany heard the cries coming from Lisa’s room, surely she’d pictured a boy. Not Stacey Moore with her head between her daughter’s legs, Lisa practically yanking fistfuls of hair out by the roots of her blond. They never so much as heard the floor creak. It was one of those button locks that you can pop open by sticking a penny or a paper clip in and turning.
When Bethany snatched Lisa’s arm it made a sound like a single clap echoing in an auditorium. As Stacey scrambled to pull on her clothes, the panic was blinding. Bethany yanked Lisa out into the living room with an indifference to her physical well-being that seemed alien for a mother. Bethany threw her onto the couch, screaming, and not just with fury but with a panic of her own, like she was calling for help, trapped inside a flooding prison with the water bubbling up, and it amplified Stacey’s fear. She followed them, and Bethany barked her into a nearby chair. Lisa was still naked, and she pulled an afghan around her torso. Face red, spit foaming at the corners of her mouth, Bethany could have acted in a B movie about a demon-possessed woman. It would have been funny except Stacey had never been more frightened in her life. What do you think you’re doing?! was Bethany’s refrain, but she wasn’t employing it as a question. She wailed it into Lisa’s face, clenching and unclenching her hands until the blood turned them purple.
Stacey tried to look at Lisa like, Let’s just leave. Let’s go to my house, but Lisa only stared at the floor, catatonic. In all the time she’d known Lisa, she’d never seen her like that. No quick retort, no rebellion, no fire at all. She just stared at the floor and accepted her mother’s screams.
Bethany took Lisa by her ear and tried to yank their gazes together. “Look at me!” she shrieked, and Stacey felt the fear that precedes true violence. The breath in the moment before the knife pops the muscle and slides through.
Stacey blurted out, “We’re sorry.” Two frightened little words.
Bethany’s head swiveled to Stacey, as if remembering she was there. She stalked across the living room, and Stacey hated how she shrank into the chair.
“Don’t you talk to me. Don’t you ever talk to me. Who are you? What are you doing here?” An adult had never laid a hand on her before. Her parents never spanked her brothers, let alone their daughter. She just had no frame of reference for it. So when Bethany snatched her hair in one hand and snapped her head back, she couldn’t understand it. She remained limp, and felt her throat exposed, so much that she feared the woman’s teeth.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
Then she clamped a thumb and index finger around Stacey’s nipple, the right one, and pinched so viciously, she cried out.
“Stay away from her. Stay away. Stay away. Stay away.” She barked that over and over, squeezing Stacey’s nipple harder until the pain was a bright heat in her entire breast. And she just sat there letting her do it. She’d think about that for years. She was taller and stronger than Bethany. She could have smacked her, thrown that bitch across the room if she’d wanted. But adult Stacey would think of that later. Right then, she only knew she’d done something awful and irrevocable. This punishment was simply the beginning.
“If you ever come near my daughter again,” Bethany hissed. “You will be so, so sorry.”
Lisa had started crying silently, but still she didn’t move. This was not even Lisa, Stacey would later decide. This vacant, idle-eyed girl was some reversion to a younger self, and the way Lisa sat, melted and melded into the couch, still haunted her.
Bethany’s knuckles bore down harder. Like she was trying to rip her breast off. She leaned into Stacey’s ear and whispered beneath the sound of her daughter sniffing back tears and the refrigerator gurgling loudly in the kitchen. “Go near her again, I’ll set you on fire, you little whore.”
Then she pulled Stacey from the chair by her hair and that savage grip on her breast and threw her to the floor.
On the drive home—after Bethany threatened to tell her parents if Stacey said a word about this to anyone—she had to pull over. She was shaking so badly. She couldn’t complete a breath—a full-fledged panic attack. What it’s like to understand your own death the moment before the darkness. She stopped on 229, just west of the retirement home, opened the door, and vomited onto the side of the road. Her vision glittered, and she tried to listen to the crickets and not pass out. To this day, she had dreams of lying immobile as that woman poured gasoline on her.
Bethany took away her daughter’s cell phone, and Stacey couldn’t even talk to Lisa at school. A handful of teachers knew Mrs. Kline or went to their church. The next week she and Lisa met in the library during lunch, away from the study tables, back in a quiet row of books. They sat on the floor hugging their knees together, like they were in elementary school. Lisa played at the fraying threads on her wrist, running her finger under them, plucking them like guitar strings.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Stacey didn’t reply. Her breast still had a dark blue bruise on it surrounding the nipple like a halo. “We need to be careful for a while.”
“How long is a while? Because after this summer…”
Stacey would be in Springfield and Lisa in Virginia. Not the farthest distance two people had ever spanned, but at eighteen it felt like a continent.
Lisa looked at her, for the first and only time Stacey could ever remember, with anger. “She’s sending me to a counselor.”
“What kind of counselor?”
“What kind do you think.”
Stacey didn’t know what to feel. Part of her wanted to blame Lisa for just sitting there, for her cowardice, but who was she to talk. The relief that Bethany hadn’t told her parents was total. The panic attack had subsided but not the image of her mom taking Bethany’s call and bursting into horrified tears.
“You know I don’t even know if she’s my biological mother,” Lisa said. “Her story’s that my dad went back to Vietnam, but she doesn’t even have a picture of him. For all I know I could be adopted. ‘Han’ might be some bullshit she made up. Shit, I’ve never seen the blood work.” She picked at a scab on her hand, scratched away the gunky red crust like a lotto ticket. “All I know is I’ve hated her for so long. I figure you can’t feel that for your real mother.”
“This is crazy,” Stacey whispered.
“Maybe it was.” Then Lisa got to her feet and walked away. It was the last conversation they ever had in person.
Lisa left just before graduation. Stacey had to hear about what she’d done from Kaylyn. When she wrote to tell Lisa how furious she was that she hadn’t said good-bye or told her this insane plan, Lisa wrote back, It was too complicated. I knew it would be too hard unless I just left. I’m sorry.