Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Something was off. A mother always knows.

So Nikki’s mother waited until her daughter was at school and prowled through her room. She’d never done it before, never had the need, silently judged those parents who were forced to police their daughters, paw through their diaries for secret rendezvous, search underwear drawers for condom packets. Nikki’s mother didn’t need forensic evidence. A mother knows.

But: All those empty bottles in the closet. Cheap vodka, some gin, and a few tacky wine coolers. Left behind when they so easily could have been disposed of, almost as if Nikki wanted her to see. And the pictures, beneath her mattress, pages torn from magazines, of women doing ungodly things.

Nikki’s mother thought about all those hours Nikki had spent alone with that Dexter girl, imagining the girl pouring vile liquids down her daughter’s throat, imagining the girl stripping off her daughter’s clothing, climbing up her daughter’s body, trying to pervert her daughter into something she was never meant to be.

It was not acceptable, she thought.

“So what did you do?” Kevin asked, stroking his finger along Nikki’s mother’s bare leg, up and up and, almost unbearably, up.

She had called him in a moment of weakness. She only, always called him in a moment of weakness, and every time was supposed to be the last time, but then there she was again, bedded down in her husband’s gym buddy’s navy sheets, staring at the photo of him with his wife and children at Disney World, Mickey ears perched on all four heads, while he burrowed his face beneath the blanket and did things to her down there in the dark that she could never understand. He’d asked her, once, if she wanted him to put the photo away, and she lied, saying that wouldn’t be appropriate, and that she barely noticed it, when the truth was that the photo was another thing she didn’t understand, a necessary part of the process, that she needed his fingers and his lips, but also their faces, Cheri’s bovine eyes and the twins’ sorry cowlicks, that it was this photo she saw when she closed her eyes and let his tongue guide her over the edge.

“I put it all back,” she told him.

“Every girl needs her secrets,” he said, and smiled like they shared something together.

In therapy, which had been Steven’s condition for taking her back, she had told her husband that the affair meant nothing, the other man couldn’t compare to him, which was true. Kevin was smaller in every way. Poorer, uglier, meaner. She couldn’t tell him that Kevin was the tool that made Steven bearable, which was how she justified continuing it, even now, even after she’d sworn never again, this time I mean it .

“Maybe I should talk to her about it,” Nikki’s mother said.

“Maybe,” Kevin agreed. He was nothing if not agreeable. Sometimes Nikki’s mother felt like she was having sex with herself.

“But a mother shouldn’t know everything about her daughter,” she continued. “I certainly wouldn’t want her to know everything about me.”

“Certainly not,” Kevin agreed, and they stopped talking.

She was sore, driving home, but it was the good kind of sore, the kind that would sustain her through her dinner preparations and the inane small talk of family life, a secret and deeply pleasurable ache that would keep the smile fixed on her face. This was what convinced her: Nikki deserved her secrets, as did they all. Hadn’t she taught her daughter that who we are, what we do, is all less important than who we seem to be?

Dinner was meat loaf, and it was polite. Nikki’s father didn’t ask his wife what she’d done that day. Nikki’s mother didn’t ask her daughter why she smelled, as usual, of breath mints. Nikki didn’t ask her parents why her brother wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving. They discussed Halloween, whether to hand out toothbrushes again and risk getting egged, or capitulate to the inevitable and return to the mini Hershey bars of years past. Nikki’s father told a politely funny story about his colleague’s toupee. Nikki said she’d be home late the next day because she was giving a friend a ride to the doctor, which was just the kind of thing Nikki was prone to do. Nikki’s mother offered her daughter dessert and smiled when Nikki turned down the empty calories. She felt better already. Girls went through phases — everyone knew that. Nikki knew what was needed to survive and excel. She would be fine. That’s what Nikki’s mother told herself that night as she endured her husband’s ministrations and went to sleep, and that’s what she told herself the next day when evening darkened into night and the little ghosts and monsters stopped ringing the doorbell and still Nikki didn’t come home.

She would be fine.

A mother knows.

THERE HAD TO BE CONSEQUENCES. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them.

And it had been so easy.

Nikki had called to apologize. Again, when I refused to answer, and again, when I didn’t show up at school. Fuck my parents, fuck obligation and requirement and life; I stayed in bed, I kept the door closed, I waited to feel better or feel something or die.

She left me a note in an envelope on the front porch, and it said, I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Never again. This time I mean it.

Never again. At that, I did feel something, and it filled the void. It brought me back to life.

I couldn’t figure her agenda, why it was so important to make me forgive, but this time I didn’t need to understand it. I only had to use it.

I laughed; I called her. I let her apologize to me, blame it on grief, blame it on Craig, on Lacey; she’d wanted to teach me a lesson about who I was allowed to talk to and what I was allowed to ask for, that was the explanation for this party; and as for the last one, that was a mistake, ancient history, terrible but past and she was sorry, so that should be enough. She was trying to be a different person, she said, a better person, that’s what all this had been about. She’d been stupid, then. Later, she’d been angry. Now she was just sorry, and couldn’t I just believe it.

I told her she could apologize to me if she wanted, but only in person, in the place she could be trusted to tell the truth, and on the night her ghosts would howl the loudest. Even ground: We would both be haunted. I swallowed bile and told her to meet me in the woods, and when she showed up, I was waiting.

She laughed, at first, even when she saw the devil marks I’d painted on the walls of the boxcar, the pentagram I’d smeared on the floor in pig’s blood. She laughed even when I showed her the knife.

THE KNIFE.

I brought it, but I never intended to use it. It was generic Kmart crap, its blade the length of my forearm, its edge sharpened once a season, its hilt a cheap black plastic with a leathery feel. I’d used it to chop potatoes and raw chicken, enjoyed the satisfying thwack it made when swung recklessly through the air and into a soft breast or leg or straight into the meat of the cutting board. Before Lacey, the knife was the only recklessness I allowed myself. My mother hated it, but it always made my father laugh when I held the duller edge to my neck and pretended to slit my throat. The knife had always felt like a toy, and that night was no different.

I wasn’t the kind of person who would use a knife, only the kind who would need one. Without it, Nikki wouldn’t have listened. She wouldn’t have been afraid, and I needed her to be afraid. I needed her to do what I said, to be my puppet. Letting someone else have power over you, Nikki had said, that was the only truly intolerable thing. And so she’d told me exactly how to hurt her without drawing blood.