Torn Away

Ro

“Thank you for this,” he said to the old man, and the anger returned. I wanted to punch Ro

The old man nodded. “Not a problem. She got any bags?”

“Not really. Just a couple up here she can carry. We lost everything, as you saw.”

My jaw tensed. Ro

“You get any word from FEMA yet?” the old man asked, and as Ro

“Ready?” the old man said, and I realized he had been peering past Ro

“Huh?”

“You ready?” Ro

I glared at him. “No. But I guess I don’t have a choice,” I said.

“No,” he said, “you don’t. You’ve got to make it work this time.”

He went back to his picking on the steering wheel, and the old man slowly maneuvered his way around to my side of the truck. I clutched the top handle of my backpack and pushed Marin’s purse tightly up my shoulder. My grandfather opened my door and I slid out.

“Have a nice life,” I said to my stepdad.

I knew I would never see him again.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

My grandmother said my name in pretty much every sentence. “Jersey,” she kept repeating. “Jersey, would you like some coffee cake? Jersey, let’s put your things away. What time do you like to wake up in the morning, Jersey?” It was like she couldn’t get enough of it. It was driving me crazy already.

I followed behind her in my burr-covered socks, my shoes left by the front door next to theirs. She showed me to my room, a lavender-and-white monstrosity of ruffles and gingham and scented soaps and fabric flowers, so different from the porch at my other grandparents’ house it made my brain ache. A plate of cookies sat on the nightstand. I could smell them from the doorway. My stomach rumbled.

“This used to be Christine’s room,” she said, stepping aside to let me pass. I shuffled in, trying to imagine my mom in such a space. Trying to see her stretched out across the cloud of bedding, her feet kicked up in the air behind her as she talked on the phone. Trying to imagine her pushing out the window screen and shimmying through to meet Clay, kissing him on his boozy mouth.

It was getting harder and harder to call up mental images of Mom. Especially any version of Mom that might have lived here—this was so different from the Mom I’d known.

There was a framed photo on the dresser. A little girl on a man’s shoulders, his hair a mess, the little girl holding a baseball cap proudly in the air.

“That’s Christine and Barry,” the woman said, and when I continued to stare at her blankly, she added, “Barry’s your grandpa. I’m Patty. Did you know that already? I don’t know what Christine shared with you.”

I said nothing. She didn’t want to know what Mom had shared with us about them. And even if she did, I wasn’t in the mood to tell her. The eight-year-old inside me was afraid to breathe in this house, afraid of catching the oppression Mom had always talked about. Afraid of being judged. How did I know who this woman really was? How did I know she wouldn’t turn on me the way Dani’s mom had, or give up on me the way Clay had, or lie to me the way Mom had, or cast me out the way Ro

In that regard, Mom was the same as me, I realized. We were both motherless. The realization flooded my heart, made me feel closer to her somehow.

My grandmother interrupted my thoughts. “You can call me Grandma, though,” she said. “I’m so happy to finally meet you, Jersey. We both are.” I stared at her, unmoving, until she finally withered back from the doorway. “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom’s right across the hall here. Feel free to take a nap or explore or do whatever it is you want to do. We’ll have di

She shuffled out and closed the door.

The moment she left, I devoured the cookies, greedily, guiltily.

Once they were gone, I stood by the night table, not sure what I was feeling anymore. The room was nice. It smelled good and it was bright and cozy. My mom had a history here, so in a way it felt comforting. But she’d hated that history. I was torn. If I decided to be happy here, wouldn’t I be betraying Mom’s memory?

I finally shrugged my backpack down onto the floor and dug through it for some clean clothes. I pulled out a shirt and shorts from Terry. The shirt had a CCHS Captains logo on it, and for some reason, my old Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt popped into my mind.

I wasn’t ever the biggest on team spirit. My friends and I were hardly athletes. In fact, we theater geeks never understood why anyone would want to run around in a field or in circles on a track, and the athletes never understood why we performing-arts-center groupies wanted to sweat under a spotlight reciting Shakespeare so

But everyone owned spirit wear. We wore it on football Fridays, mostly. Even if we never exactly bothered to go to the game.

Marin was obsessed with my Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt. She loved its cartoon bulldog and bright orange lettering. She’d drag it off my bed or out of the clean laundry basket and would dance around the living room in it, on her tiptoes, total Marin-style, the sweatshirt hanging to her ankles, the sleeves flapping in the air.

I told her once that when I graduated she could have my sweatshirt. You’d have thought I’d bequeathed her a diamond mine, the way she whooped and hollered and jumped around the room. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that by the time she got into high school, the sweatshirt would be way out of style and ugly and old and she wouldn’t want it.

Sitting on my mother’s old bedroom floor, with Ro

I sank to the floor and picked up Marin’s purse. Most of the lipstick had wiped off, but it was still rubbed into the cracks, the stitching. I grabbed a tissue from a box that sat on the dresser and scrubbed at the face of the purse. The lipstick was mostly gone, but if I looked hard enough, I could still see traces of pink.

I pulled the lipstick out of the purse, then rubbed across the top of it with the tissue, too. The stick was no longer sharp, the way Marin liked it, but at least it didn’t have Meg’s and Lexi’s germs on it anymore.

I dropped it back inside the purse and found a piece of gum.

I drew a sweatshirt on the foil.

Marin is a Barking Bulldog.

I hid it with the others, noticing that the collection was getting pretty big now. Which meant that the gum supply was getting low. I didn’t want to chew the last pieces. To run out of Marin’s gum would seem like an end that I hadn’t fully realized yet, and didn’t want to.