After Harvey, I lost some of my bravado. I’d been “knocked down a peg or two,” as my mother liked to say. I stopped hanging out with the kids at Friendly’s Market and looking for rides to the canal on hot days. I once again buckled down at school.
I was now wiser, smarter, less gullible, and far less innocent. In fact, any innocence I had managed to salvage from my experience with Steve was completely gone. And boys and men were completely off limits. Except for Elvis, of course. I still loved Elvis.
chapter 23
After the rape, I regressed into a childlike state for a while. I stopped flirting with boys altogether and I started hanging out with Patricia Embrey again. Linda was long gone and her mother welcomed my newfound attention to Patricia. I wasn’t officially babysitting her anymore, now we were just friends. I felt safe with her.
I also became closer to Pat, the girl next door. Pat and her parents were among those who lived behind a chain-linked fence. They had a large piece of property on which they raised vegetables and chickens. Pat’s parents, like Charlene’s mother, were very strict with her. Even though she was older than me, she wasn’t allowed to leave the yard. She had a younger brother and was supposed to babysit him, along with keeping the house clean and tending to the vegetables and chickens while her parents were at work.
I also found a new friend named Sue, who was about four years older than me. Sue was a pretty girl with long blond hair and blue eyes. “Wholesome” was the word my mother used to describe her. Sue was already in high school and was more mature and intelligent than the other friends I’d met on Janice Drive. She wanted to make something of her life and studied hard in school. She had a boyfriend named Glenn who she was madly in love with, so I didn’t see her often, but we became friends just the same.
Sue’s mother was what in those days they called a “floozy,” which meant she slept around. She spent most of her time in bars or off with some man, so, like me, Sue had pretty much raised herself.
One day, I was over at her house when there was a loud knock on the door. When Sue opened the door, two very serious-looking policemen stood there staring at us.
“Pardon us, ma’am, are you Sue Campbell?”
I could hear the nervousness in Sue’s voice. “Yes, yes I am.”
“May we come in? We need to talk to you.”
Sue opened the screen door to let them in. Her face was frozen in fear.
The uniforms the men wore made them seem very official but their demeanor did as well. Their intense energy took up all the space in Sue’s small living room.
“Ma’am, I think you should sit down,” the shorter officer said to Sue with a great deal of authority.
Sue nearly collapsed onto the couch next to me. “What is it?” she pleaded.
“Well, ma’am, we have some bad news for you. Your mother. Well, your mother is dead.”
The color drained out of Sue’s face. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was going to pass out. Sue sat in silence for several minutes. The policemen stood towering over us like giant monuments, almost motionless. All our eyes were fixed on Sue.
“Ma’am, I know this is a terrible shock,” the taller policeman said.
“Young lady, can you get her a glass of water?” the shorter one asked.
When I realized he was talking to me, I jumped up and went into the kitchen, relieved to have something to do. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and as I filled it with water from the tap I looked out the kitchen window. How would I feel if my mother died? I wondered. Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought of her lying in a coffin, lifeless and cold. But there was another feeling mixed in with the pain. A feeling of relief rose up from deep inside my chest. The feeling that I could finally breathe.
I heard a sound from the other room and it brought me back to the present. I took the glass of water back into the living room, where Sue still sat motionless on the couch.
I tried to hand it to her but she didn’t seem to notice. I put my hand on her shoulder and she looked up at me with the strangest look in her eyes—like I imagined someone would look if they were in a trance. Moving in slow motion, she took the glass from me and put it on the end table next to her without taking a drink.
“Ma’am,” the taller policeman said. “We need to tell you what happened to your mother.”
There was complete silence from Sue and no indication that she’d heard the policeman. They were both being very kind and very patient, which gave me the feeling that something horrible had happened.
The shorter policeman looked at me and asked, “Are you going to be able to stay with her?”
I said in my most confident voice, “Yes, sir. I’ll stay with her. We’re good friends.”
“We haven’t been able to find any other relatives. Do you know if she has any?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it is . . . was just Sue and her mother. She does have a boyfriend. I can call him.”
“Yes, that would be good,” the shorter policeman said.
This seemed to rouse Sue out of her trance. “Yes, Beverly, will you call Glenn? Please?”
“Sure, what’s his number?” I asked, grabbing my purse for a pen. As she recited it, I wrote it down on a magazine that was sitting on the coffee table and went over to the phone to make the call.
I could hear the
