Jennifer Brown: Torn Away

When I realized that I had spent time not thinking about them, I instantly felt guilty. I tried to call up their faces in my mind. They were fuzzy, but they were still there. I imagined their voices as they spoke to me. I was pretty sure I could remember those. I told myself that eating brownies and playing cards wasn’t going to make them deader. It wasn’t like a bowl of macaroni and cheese with my grandfather meant I was forgetting they ever existed.

I pulled myself out of bed, showered and dressed, then padded into the kitchen, where my grandmother sat over a newspaper, a pen in her hand. She looked surprised to see me but didn’t say a word as I passed by. I tried to act as if everything was totally normal between us, going to the fridge to grab a cup of yogurt I’d seen in there the night before.

I sat across from her and ripped off the top of my yogurt. “Where’s Grandpa Barry?”

“He went into town to pick up a few yard supplies. Got some fertilizing to do this weekend,” she said. She leaned over and wrote something into a crossword.

“He going to be gone long?” I spooned yogurt into my mouth, my heart beating, knowing what I was about to ask.

“Oh, a little while,” she said. “You never know with him. He runs into people and gets talking. How come?”

I swallowed. “I thought maybe we could go to Elizabeth today. I’ve never seen my mom’s grave.” I let the words fall between us, my stomach sinking further the longer she took to respond.

She lifted her chin, tapped her pen to it a few times, looked out the window. “Well, I don’t know if he’ll be back in time to go.”

“Just the two of us,” I said. “Me and you.”

Almost instantly, the end of my grandmother’s nose bloomed red. I only noticed it because that was something that always happened to my mom, too. The moment she even thought about crying, her nose would redden, starting with the tip.

“I need to put on some decent clothes,” she said. “I can do that right now.” I could tell she was making an effort to not look as hopeful and eager as she felt.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Okay.”

She pushed away from the table, leaving the crossword right where it was, then hurried out of the kitchen. From the living room, she called, “We can have lunch at Orrie’s. It was one of Chrissy’s favorites.”

“Sure,” I said after a pause, and even though I still felt all kinds of uncertain, something about the day ahead felt right, too.

She left a note on the kitchen table for Grandpa Barry, and we got in the car. I watched out the window as we pulled through town.

“Is that the high school?” I asked, pointing to a brick building about half the size of my school.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, “but your grandfather and I have been talking. If you’d like to stay at your school for senior year, we’d certainly understand. We’ve got a little money put aside and are willing to use it to rent a place in Elizabeth for the school year. It won’t be home, and we probably will need to come back to Waverly on the weekends to tend to the house, but we want you to be happy.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Chrissy wouldn’t have wanted you to be uprooted your senior year. They’re saying your school will be rebuilt by August, can you believe it?”

I shook my head. I almost couldn’t believe anything at this point. The thought of getting to spend senior year with my friends, at our favorite places to hang out, in the lighting booth and on the stage, made me feel somehow whole again.

“Thank you,” I breathed. “Thank you so much. We can come back every weekend, I won’t mind.”

“Well, some weekends you might want to stay, if you have things to do with your friends in Elizabeth,” she said. “But we’ll work it all out.”

It didn’t make sense. How could the grandparents Mom had told us were so horrible be the kind of people who’d be willing to move to another city so their grandchild wouldn’t have to go to a new school? How could oppressive and judgmental people never say anything less than a kind word to me, even when I hadn’t been kind to them? I’d never questioned Mom. Never. But it didn’t add up. The things she’d said about Barry and Patty were… well, they seemed wrong. And did it really matter anymore, anyway? Mom was gone; my grandparents were all I had.

We drove a little while longer, until I couldn’t take it anymore. “What happened?” I blurted out as we turned onto the highway.

She glanced at me, then changed lanes. “What do you mean?”

“What happened between you guys and my mom? Why did she hate you so much? She told us you disowned her.”

My grandmother’s hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, her eyes locked straight ahead. She hesitated, and for a moment I worried that nobody would ever tell me what had happened. I would never know the truth.

“We did,” she finally said. “She got mixed up with Clay. His whole family was a mess. A bunch of criminals and drunks. We told her that we didn’t approve and that she couldn’t see him, but Chrissy was so strong-willed. Always had been, ever since she was a toddler.”

I thought about my mom. I’d hated arguing with her, because there was no winning. When Mom got her mind set on something, it was going to happen, whether you liked it or not, no matter how much begging and pleading you did. It was good to be reminded that some of the things I knew about her were absolute truths.

“Anyway,” my grandmother continued, “she started dating him, and next thing we knew she was getting in trouble, too. Ending up in jail. Once she got arrested for taking off her bikini top and throwing it up onstage at a concert. She was so drunk she didn’t even care that she was topless. We tried putting our foot down, but she pushed back harder. Found ways to be with him no matter what we did. He had a hold on her like we’d never seen before.”

“So you disowned her because she wouldn’t listen to you?”

“No,” she said. “She got pregnant, but she was still doing all the same old destructive things. We got worried. About you, Jersey. We were afraid she was going to hurt you. So we tried to get her some counseling, but she said if we insisted, she would run away and marry Clay. We told her if she did, she might as well never come back. And she ran away. And she never came back.”

“But you told her she couldn’t.”

My grandmother glanced at me. “If there was one thing we wished we’d never said, that would be it. We immediately began searching for her, but she’d moved out of Waverly and we had no idea where she’d gone. When we finally found her in Elizabeth, she’d already had you. We were so excited and ready to put everything behind us. But he still had such a hold over her. She wouldn’t come home, and she called the police. So we left. And we worried so much about you, but Chrissy wouldn’t budge. She loved him, and the way she saw it, we were the enemy.”

These things didn’t sound like Mom, and I had a hard time imagining her turning her own parents away in favor of that disgusting man I’d met in Caster City.

“But they split up, eventually,” I said. “Why didn’t she come back after he left?”

“I don’t know,” my grandmother said. “I really don’t. We sent some… letters… some packages over the years, but we never heard anything back. We worry that we gave up too easily. Like I said, if only we could do it all over again.”

“The kittens came from you.”

She paused, then nodded. “Yes. You got them?”

I opened Marin’s purse and pulled the black-and-white kitten out and held it up. She glanced at it several times, trying to keep her eye on traffic. “This is the only one that survived the tornado. I thought they came from Clay.”