Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby

“What now?” she asked me as we climbed into my car. “Bendo?”

“Nah,” I said. “Let’s just go to my house and watch movies or something.”

“Sounds good.”

As we turned into my driveway, the headlights curving across the lawn, the first thing I saw was my mother sitting on the front steps. She had her shoes off, her elbows on her knees, and when she saw me she stood up, waving her arms, as if she was in the middle of the ocean clinging to a life raft instead of twenty feet from me on solid ground.

I got out of the car, Lissa behind me. I hadn’t taken two steps when I heard someone off to my left say, “Finally!”

I turned around: it was Don, and he was holding a croquet mallet in one hand. His face was red, his shirt untucked, and he looked pissed.

“What’s going on?” I asked my mother, who was now coming across the grass to us, quickly, her hands fluttering.

“What’s going on,” Don said loudly, “is that we have been locked out of the house for the last hour and a half with no way of gaining entry. Do you realize how many messages we’ve left for you on your phone? Do you?”

He was yelling at me. This took a moment to compute, simply because it had never happened before. None of my previous stepfathers had taken much interest in the parenting role, even when Chris and I were young enough to actually have tolerated it. Honestly, I was speechless.

“Don’t just stand there. Answer me!” he bellowed, and Lissa stepped back, a nervous look on her face. She hated confrontations. No one in her family yelled, and all discussions and disagreements were held in controlled, sympathetic, indoor voices.

“Don, honey,” my mother said, coming up beside him. “There’s no need to be upset. She’s here now and she can let us in. Remy, give me your keys.”

I didn’t move, keeping my eyes on Don. “I was at dinner,” I said in an even voice. “I didn’t have my phone with me.”

“We have called you six times!” he said. “Do you have any idea how late it is? I have a sales meeting at seven A.M. tomorrow, and I don’t have time to be standing around out here trying to break into my own house!”

“Don, please,” my mother said, reaching out a hand to touch his arm. “Calm down.”

“How did you get home if you don’t have your keys?” I asked her.

“Well,” she said. “We-”

“We drove home one of the new year models,” Don snapped, “and that’s not the point. The point is that we have left messages for you and your brother which were not returned or acknowledged and we have been out here for over an hour, about to bust out a goddamn window-”

“But she’s here now,” my mother said cheerfully, “so let’s just get her key and we’ll get inside and everything will be-”

“Barbara, for Christ’s sake, do not interrupt me when I’m talking!” he snapped, whipping his head around to look at her. “Jesus!”

For a second, it was very quiet. I looked at my mother, feeling a pang of protectiveness that I hadn’t experienced in years, since it was usually me either yelling at her or, more often, just wishing I could. But regardless of the anger my mother could flare in me, there had always been a clear line, at least in my mind, de marking the short but always clear distance between the We that was my family and whatever man was in her life. Don couldn’t see it, but I could.

“Hey,” I said to Don, my voice low, “don’t talk to her like that.”

“Remy, honey, give me your keys,” my mother said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Okay?”

“You,” Don said, pointing right in my face. I stared at his fat finger, focusing only on it, while everything else-Lissa standing off to the side, my mother pleading, the smell of the summer night-fell away. “You need to learn some respect, missy.”

“Remy,” I heard Lissa say softly.

“And you,” I said to Don, “need to respect my mother. This is nobody’s fault but your own and you know it. You forgot your keys, you got locked out. End of story.”

He just stood there, breathing hard. I could see Lissa shrinking down the driveway, bit by bit, as if with just another couple of steps she might be able to disappear completely.

“Remy,” my mother said again. “The keys.”

I pulled them out of my pocket, my eyes still on Don, then handed them past him to her. She took them and started quickly up the lawn. Don was still staring at me, as if he thought I might back down. He was wrong.

The porch light snapped on suddenly, and my mother clapped her hands. “We’re in!” she called out. “All’s well that ends well!”

Don dropped the croquet mallet. It hit the driveway with a thunk. Then he turned his back to me and headed up the walk, taking long, angry strides. Once up the front steps, he pushed past my mother, ignoring her as she spoke to him, and disappeared down the hallway. A second later I heard a door slam.

“What a baby,” I said to Lissa, who was now down by the mailbox, pretending to be engrossed with reading the new letters STARR/DAVIS that had recently been affixed to it.

“He was really mad, Remy.” She came up the driveway carefully, as if expecting Don to throw himself back out the door, ready for round two. “Maybe you should have just said you were sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I said. “For not being psychic?”

“I don’t know. It just might have been easier.”

I looked up at the house, where my mother was standing in the doorway, hand on the knob, glancing down the hall to the darkened kitchen, the direction in which Don had stalked off. “Hey,” I called out. She turned her head. “What’s his problem, anyway?”

I thought I heard him saying something from inside, and she eased the door shut a bit, turning her body away from me. And suddenly I felt completely strange, like the distance between us was much much greater than what I could see from where I was standing. Like that line, always so clear to me, had somehow shifted, or never even been where I’d thought it was at all.

“Mom?” I called out. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Good night, Remy,” she said. And then she shut the door.

“I’m telling you,” I said to Jess. “It was totally messed up.”

Across from me, Lissa nodded. “Bad,” she said. “Like scary bad.”

Jess sipped on her Zip Coke, pulling her sweater tighter over her shoulders. We’d gone by and knocked on her window after leaving my mom’s, when I decided I wasn’t about to spend the evening under the same roof as Don and his temper. Plus there was something else: this weird feeling of betrayal, almost, as if for so long my mother and I had been on one team, and now suddenly she’d up and defected, pushing me aside for someone who would stick a finger in my face and demand respect he hadn’t even begun to earn.

“It’s really kind of normal behavior,” Jess told me. “This whole my-house-my-rules thing. Very male. Very Dad-esque.”

“He’s not my dad,” I told her.

“It’s a dominance thing,” Lissa chimed in. “Like dogs. He was making clear to you that he is the alpha dog.”

I looked at her.

“I mean, you’re the alpha dog,” she said quickly. “But he doesn’t know that yet. He’s testing you.”

“I don’t want to be the alpha dog,” I grumbled. “I don’t want to be a dog, period.”

“It’s weird that your mom would put up with that,” Jess said in her thinking voice. “She’s never been the type to take much crap, either. That’s where you get it from.”

“I think she’s scared,” I said, and they both looked at me, surprised. I was surprised myself; I didn’t realize I thought this until I said it aloud. “I mean, of being alone. This is her fifth marriage, you know? If it doesn’t work out-”