“I’m on the phone,” was all Girl said in reply.
When Jacob pulled up outside in his diarrhea-brown hatchback, Girl yelled, “I’m taking the dog out!” She left the napkin-note on the stove for her mother and ran out the door. She put the dog in the fenced-in backyard, confident that Mother would hear him bark and let him back in.
notes from the fourth wall
stepmother’s side of the story
“Do you know the one thing I am most ashamed of?” my stepmother asked me years later. “The fight when you ran away from home.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure it’s going into the book,” I said.
“You must write it,” she told me. “If the story is to be accurate, you must write it. But here’s how I remembered it: you and I went to the awards ceremony. You confided in me and we were having a nice conversation, and then you started screaming for no reason, so I slapped you because I thought you were hysterical. I had been told that when someone is hysterical you have to slap them across the face. All I could think was that the neighbors would hear you screaming and think I was abusing you and call the police. I was so afraid of losing you. We were lesbians, and if they thought I was abusing you the police could take you away and I’d never see you again. I’m so sorry for that. Really.”
I made some sort of there-there noises. “It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t, but there weren’t any words that would make it so. Throw a plate on the floor and look at the broken pieces. Tell the plate you are sorry. The plate is still broken.
“But you know, I always thought maybe you really left just to spite me. We had told you that once you turned eighteen you would be out of the house for good—either in college or working full-time. So I always thought you left first just to defy me.”
“That really had nothing to do with it,” I answered.
“Well, I just wanted you to know why I did what I did,” she said.
We hugged awkwardly. I always hugged her sternum to sternum, with my butt sticking out so she couldn’t pat it. I hated when she patted my bottom.
scraps of paper
After Girl left home—running away sounded more dramatic than she thought was justified—she stayed a week or two with one friend, then another week with a different one, always moving on before she wore out her welcome. A teacher let Girl stay in her guest bedroom for a month, until she needed the spare bed when her own mother came to town. Girl was at Sandy’s house when the ice storm hit.
“Wake up, girls,” Sandy’s mom said. “There’s been an ice storm. There’s no school, and we lost power. We’re going to your grandmother’s, Sandy. Girl, you are going to have to call someone for a ride. The radio said over 750,000 people lost power, and no one knows how long it will take to get it back on.”
Girl and Sandy looked out the frost-covered window, rubbing the pinky sides of their fists on the window to clear it. Outside was surreally beautiful. Icicles hung from every tree branch so heavily they bowed in curving arcs to the ground. Bushes were encased in ice, each twig wearing a thick coating. Whole trees had fallen over, their roots sticking out of the ground like large wheels. A black power line hung across the road. Everything was still, super quiet without traffic noises—there was a state of emergency, and roads were closed. Girl had never noticed how noisy houses were, with fans, furnaces—the electronic buzz of radios and televisions—until suddenly all the noises stopped.
Girl packed up her clothes into blue, plastic grocery bags, and Jacob came and got her. He had arranged for her to spend the day with his adult sister and her baby, because although she didn’t have power either, she had a gas stove. Girl knew the sister—every Friday Jacob’s older siblings and their children came to their father’s for dinner, and most of the time Girl was invited, too. They all crossed themselves and recited a prayer in unison that Girl didn’t know and wished she did, so she just bowed her head and looked at the red plush dining room carpeting. She was shy around them, but they were always nice, and when Jean’s daughter took her first steps, it was to Girl’s outstretched arms, not her mother’s or grandfather’s.
School was closed for a week, then two, and finally three whole weeks, but Girl wished it were in session—it would have made it easier for her to find a place to stay if people had power, and given her somewhere to go during the day at least. Jacob didn’t have power either, but his father let her stay in one of his empty bedrooms: he had five children, and only two were still at home. They had a gas stove and a gas heater in the family room. The bedrooms got down to fifty degrees, but with extra blankets it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Girl constantly looked through the “roommates wanted” section of the newspaper, calling every place that seemed likely. No one wanted to rent to a high school kid, even though she assured them that she had child support from her father and could make rent. Finally, Mother’s best friend Marty found a coworker that agreed to take her in, but not until after the ice storm.
“I’d let her stay here,” Jacob’s father had told him, and that was what Girl had been hoping for, “but I don’t want you to feel obligated to stay together. If she’s living here and you want to break up, you won’t be able to.” Sigh. While Girl understood the Catholic man’s position, it would have been so much simpler to be living with her boyfriend and
