She narrowed her eyes, willed herself to stop her tears, and rose from her seat. It could be that she wouldn’t live with either one of them. Screw you both, I’ll live somewhere else entirely. Kids did it all the time. They took off, ran away, lived with people who gave more of a shit than their real parents ever did.
That, or they figured out how to make it on their own.
Like the Halcomb kids. Just like them, as a matter of fact.
29
Saturday, April 3, 1982
Eleven Months, Eleven Days Before the Sacrament
AVIS WAS DIGGING in the vegetable garden with Sunnie and Robin—Shadow romping about the yard—when the topic came up.
Sunnie stabbed her fingers into a bed of peat moss and black soil, then let her head loll to the side like a rag doll’s and contemplated aloud: “I wonder when we’re gonna move on.”
That simple pondering nearly stopped Avis’s heart. There had been times when she, too, had wondered whether Jeffrey and the family would pack up what little belongings they owned and say it was time to go. But that was before the garden and the lovemaking and the various little improvements the boys had done to the house. Deacon and Noah had painted the window shutters. Kenzie had cleaned the dead leaves from the gutters and had been paying close attention to the landscaping. Surprisingly, the strangely frenetic boy had a soft spot for roses and spent his free time tending to a couple of old bushes close to the front of the house. Even Clover and Gypsy had pulled up the rugs and beaten them with brooms.
Those weren’t the actions of people who were intending on packing up and leaving anytime soon, and so Avis had stopped worrying about it. At least up until the moment Sunnie suggested the idea wasn’t as impossible as Avis thought it to be.
To wonder meant to want, if only in some small way. Avis knew those types of yearnings were contagious. They would spread from person to person until, at last, everyone would be ready to bid Pier Pointe a fond adieu.
Sometimes she tried to imagine waking up to an empty house, no pills to dull the pain of loneliness—at least not until her next refill. If they wanted to kill her, an unannounced departure would leave her dead of a broken heart. All Jeff had to do to end her was disappear.
“Move on,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Where would we go?” We, because she couldn’t let them go without her.
Sunnie shrugged a little, then gave Robin a look as if searching for help. Robin frowned, unhappy with having to explain. “The pantry’s pretty sparse.”
It hadn’t taken long for Avis to burn through almost all her savings feeding ten people instead of one. That, and Shadow still had to eat. She was trying to stretch the money as far as it would go, hoping that the vegetable patch would help. But ten people plus a dog was a big number, one big happy family with an emphasis on big.
Her mind jumped to her dad in his fancy suit and shiny shoes. She’d tell him she was in trouble. Something about the car not working. Or a broken appliance. Or an unexpected vet visit. Something that would have him pulling out his wallet with a sigh, but nothing severe enough to garner too much attention. She didn’t like asking him for favors, but if it was a matter of either swallowing her pride or losing everyone, she’d choke it down and ask for seconds. Another sacrifice, another way for her to secure her place within the clan.
“My dad has money,” she said. “Just give me a few days.”
Sunnie and Robin looked at each other. Avis half expected them to re-explain the fact that they weren’t supposed to talk to their old families anymore; that, really, Avis didn’t have a dad. Audra did. But this was a special case. This was for the good of all.
An hour later, Avis stood in front of the open pantry chewing her nails, trying to get up the nerve to call her father the way she had promised. Jeffrey sidled up to her and brushed his mouth against her ear.
“Don’t you dare,” he whispered. “You ask him and you compromise everything you’ve fixed about yourself.”
“But it’s for the good of everyone,” she argued. “A sacrifice . . .”
Jeff shook his head. “Relying on someone like that for help is as good as chaining yourself to their ankle.”
Except, wasn’t the house a form of reliance? It was costing her father money he could otherwise be collecting from a paying tenant. Unless, the way Jeff looked at it, after everything she had tolerated, her father allowing her to live there rent free was the least he could do. But she refused to give up on the idea so easily.
“He’s rich,” she explained. “I just need to make something up, something believable that won’t make him suspicious.”
Jeff turned Avis to face him and looked her square in the eyes. He was ready to protest, to tell her no, absolutely not.
“I can’t lose you,” she said, her bottom lip catching a quiver. “I’ll leave everything behind and go with you, but what’s the point in that? What’s the point in living in tents and eating out of trash cans if we can have a house, a kitchen, a safe place for everyone to live? Are you going to make them go through that hardship? For what?”
“For you.”
His reply lit the ends of her nerves on fire. They hissed like Fourth of July sparklers, spit gold and silver flakes of flame across her fluttering heart. He’d sacrifice it all, put the ones he loved out on the street for her.
Because she was important.
Because he didn’t want to use her.
For once in her life, she truly mattered; perhaps—dare she even think it?—more than he had ever thought she would.
Jeff pulled her into a tight embrace, the kind of hug you give someone to say thanks but no thanks.
“I won’t allow it,” he insisted. “We would rather never see you again than thrust you back into the life you’ve just escaped.”
Over the past few weeks, she had told him everything. The neglect as a child. The way her parents bought her off every Christmas and birthday. How her mother had screamed at her while still on the phone with the emergency dispatcher. The way her father had looked at her with muted disgust as she lay in the hospital, both of her wrists bandaged up like giant Q-tips. But she had also told Jeff that she wasn’t sure whether it had been her imagination or whether her parents truly did hold some sort of contempt for her. She wanted to believe it was just her illness manifesting those delusions of hatred and ill will. But as soon as she suggested that maybe her parents weren’t as bad as she had made them out to be, Jeffrey struck the idea down.
It’s not you, it’s them.
He used words like manipulation and mind control and false love. He told her that they had brainwashed her into believing they were good despite her obvious knowledge that they were anything but. He brought up Stockholm syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, codependency. All his points were valid. Everything he said made sense.
“I forbid it,” he said. “The moment you start asking for money, they’re going to wonder what’s going on.”
Avis knew her father was impulsive. At times his anger seemed to have no bounds. He was the type to act first and consider the consequences later. There was no doubt in her mind that, if he did discover Jeff and the others living in the house he owned, it would end in a screaming match. She would storm off into the unknown and her father would bid her good riddance. And while Avis wasn’t fond of her dad, it wasn’t the way she wanted it to play out. She wanted him to fade into the shadows of her past rather than see him again for one more heaving, ugly fight.
“Then we’ll have a family meeting,” she said, determined. “We’ll explain the situation and we’ll all go into Pier Pointe and start picking up job applications. There are ten of us, so if only five of us score work, we’ll be fine, right? Even part-time work will pay for groceries.”