Consequences
That first year, we were always driving. From our house to Dad’s, from both places to school, from school to the Lone Tree Gymnastics Academy, which took three thick freeways crisscrossing San Jose to get to. I was carsick a lot: all the curves and stops, Mom asking questions about Dad and Mariah, Truman explaining about his whole fucking day to make her feel she was still the only one he told things to.
“Why can’t Mariah pick us up?” I asked one day. Just to be an asshole.
Mariah had moved into Dad’s about a month ago. She called peanut butter and jelly sandwiches “PB and J’s,” pronounced Target “Tarjay,” and if she told you to clean the bathroom and you said you already did, she would say, “Well, that might be good enough at your mom’s, but I know you can do better.”
Mom found my face in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were gray like mine, but her blonde hair was nothing like my tangle of corkscrew brown curls that everyone lied and said they wanted. “She’s busy, Daisy.”
I rolled my head from side to side, the way Coach LeeAnn said to. “We could hang out at school. Wait for her.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
I could see tears in her eyes, and it was like our Seventh-Grade Science Day last month when the Rube Goldberg machine worked just the way it was supposed to, all the dominoes falling neatly against each other at the end.
I turned toward the window, not answering.
Truman said, “Her car smells like onions,” trying to make her feel better. I hated him.
Mom blinked hard. “We’ll just keep doing it like this, then.”
She turned onto Dad’s street, and I noticed the statue. It was about three feet tall and sat on the small porch of the first house on the block. The house was dirty-looking, with pots of twiggy, leafless plants under the front window and a pink sheet hanging across the glass pane in the front door.
“Is that some weird garden gnome?” I asked.
Mom turned around to see where I was pointing. “It’s a black lawn jockey,” she said, “and it’s disgusting.”
“Why?”
She started explaining about slavery until I was like, “Okay. I get it.”
“I mean, why would you want a thing like that on your porch?” She shook her head. “Why would you want people to know you’re that kind of person?”
I knew she wanted me to agree with her, because that would be like me saying we were the same kind of person and whoever lived in that gross house was some other kind of person and wasn’t it great that we were so much alike.
“Can I have some money?” I asked. “I need new leotards for the meet.”
“It’s not until Saturday. Can it wait ’til Friday?”
“I want to get them tomorrow,” I said. “Mariah said she’d take me.”
At Dad’s, I toasted and buttered slices of sourdough bread and brought them into the living room, where Truman was playing Wallace and Gromit on his laptop.
“Here,” I said, setting the plate on the table. It was one of my after-school jobs over there: taking care of him.
Without looking away from the screen, he said, “Thanks for not making a PB and J.”
Down the hall, Mariah called, “Daisy, help me, please.”
“Why does it have to be me?”
“I’m asking nicely,” Mariah cooed, wanting credit.
I trudged to the door of their bedroom. Mariah was standing in front of their closet. A bunch of Dad’s shirts were on the bed.
“I’m clearing out some of Dad’s things,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” I said.
Mariah reached into the closet and pulled out the Hawaiian shirt he wore on road trips. “I’m not liking your tone, Daisy.”
I thought, Fuck my tone, you bitch, you whore, you family-wrecker. “He likes that one,” I said. “Did you even ask him first?”
The yelling was still new—my parents weren’t yellers—but I was getting used to it. She didn’t do it in front of my dad, and the one time I tried to tell him, he held up his hand and said “I don’t want to get involved. You guys work it out yourselves,” like we were all his kids.
“Fuck off,” I finally said, because she was hurting my ears, and I wanted it to stop for just one fucking second.
That was when she held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
It was in my back pocket. “No! I didn’t do anything!”
She stepped in close, reaching around.
“Get off me!” I yelled.
I felt the phone yanked out of my pocket. “You bitch!” I yelled. I knocked the phone out of her hand. It hit the edge of the dresser. From where I stood, I could see the shattered screen.
She looked at me with a strange smile. “You’ll be lucky if you even see a phone for a year,” she said
.
At school, I hardly said a word anymore. “What is your problem?” Callie Heidenreich asked. I knew she thought I was mad because she went around telling people that my saying I had two houses now was like bragging. I just shrugged, because I was mad about that, and also because what was the point of even talking: My words were dead and now it was just random letters ricocheting off my teeth. No one listened, anyway.
Dad asked, “What’s this I hear about you being rude to Mariah?” And when I tried to explain, all he said was, “You know better than that, Daisy. That’s not how we raised you,” like the two of them were my parents all by themselves. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and flipped him off. I thought, I was standing up for you! And then I hope that stupid palm-tree shirt is rotting in some landfill somewhere.
In the car on the way to Lone Tree, Mom said, “You’re awfully quiet, honey.”
Truman said, “Mariah took away her phone and it broke.”
The parts of her face I could see in the mirror were frowny with sadness. “Did you tell Dad?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That I should know better.”
“She yelled at Mariah,” Truman said.
“Shut up!” I said.
“Oh, honey.”
I hated how she was secretly glad I wasn’t getting along over there, how she wanted to swoop in and be on my side when everything was her fault in the first place. How she should have given him one more chance.
“You know he loves you, right? He loves you guys more than anything in the world,” Mom said, and it was like the rotting stump of my tongue was growing thick and fat and cutting off all the air.
“You know that, right?” she said, but I just looked away.
Late one night at Dad’s, I snuck out. I tiptoed down the hall and unlatched the front door. Teeth chattering, I ran down the street and then another two blocks, to where the bike path started. It wound through the neighborhood backyards and then followed the train tracks. I found a tree with bark like fish scales, silvery in the dark, and crouched down.
Then the weeds shook in the dry dirt, and the ground rose and dipped, and the air stopped and backed up, making way. I finally understood that thing about deer. I felt the screaming—all those letters, jammed up, shoving to get out—and when it was over and the last car was swallowed by the night, I leaned hard against the tree (like the one Coach LeeAnn said to visualize when we had to balance or strike a pose) and gulped in air and realized my tongue felt fine.
Now it was something I did almost every night I was over there.
At Mom’s, I stayed in my room if I wasn’t at school or practice. It was almost empty because of the stuff I took to Dad’s. Some books and a few trophies for beam on the shelves. On the walls, posters of pirates left over from when I was six: I had loved their gleaming swords pointed forward, their furious, white-toothed smiles. I, too, wanted to know where in the endless sea the treasure was buried. Now, I lay on the bed doing nothing. Sometimes I fell asleep and woke up with that weird-afternoon-light feeling: the sickening boredom of empty time, of waiting.
When I was in second grade, Mom would lie on the bed with me. We made up stories about me having a boyfriend named Reginald Garcia. “What’s he like?” she would ask, and I would never answer because I couldn’t imagine what kind of boyfriend I would want. Instead, I told her about the things we did together: dancing in Safeway to “Jingle Bell Rock” and not caring that everyone was looking, getting French fries and strawberry milkshakes for dinner because we didn’t like how on a hamburger the bread was touching the meat, collecting rocks, doing cartwheels. “I’m better than him at cartwheels,” I said once, and Mom said it was good he didn’t mind that.
“Why would he mind?”
“Sometimes boys like to be best,” she said, which was something that never occurred to me before.
“Does Dad like to be best?”
“We do different things,” she said, “so it doesn’t really come up.”
Now, if she knocked on the door, I said I was doing homework. Sometimes she left snacks on the floor outside: a plate of lemon bars, a little bag of trail mix. I ate them, raging, because she was trying to show me how nice she was compared to Mariah, who was always dieting and didn’t allow sweets in the house.
Sometimes in the car, Mom asked if I liked any boys. “No!” I said, which was a lie. But what I never said was that after I decided a boy was cute, I watched how he was when we talked or hung out at lunch, and if all the stories he told were about him winning something, I lost interest.
At the other place, I did whatever they told me. Dad tried to get me talking during dinner, and I said just enough so he wouldn’t think I was sulking, which he really hated. Mariah pulled the skin off all the chicken breasts and complained when no one wanted seconds. “They don’t taste like anything!” Truman always said, not noticing how Mariah’s eyes squinted into angry slits.
I couldn’t wait until they were all asleep, the house slow-breathing around us. The outside darkness was like a formal aunt who nodded hello instead of talking your head off. I felt the busyness in my mouth: the letters dancing on my tongue-stub, getting ready. After the train passed, when the silence settled itself back down, I walked home feeling as though my back were being patted: a distant, kindly comfort.
Late, late on a Sunday night, I noticed the lawn jockey again.
Curious, I tiptoed up the path to the front steps to see it close. A statue of a man with thick thighs in white pants, an unnaturally black face, and red lips to match his vest. Eyes all sclera and iris, like we learned last year, except a real sclera has veins and an iris is hardly ever black. He was leaning forward and holding out one hand with a metal ring in it. His lips were open in a smile. I peered closer: no tongue, like it was cut out, the mouth gaping like a wound.
At Mom’s the next day, I knocked on Truman’s door.
“What?” he said when I entered.
“I need some help,” I said.
“I thought you weren’t talking.”
“Only if I have to.”
“Like a hunger strike, until they get you a new phone.”
“No.” I didn’t feel like explaining. “Listen, will you help me?”
“Do I get paid?”
“No.” I knew he’d do it anyway. He wanted everyone to be happy in a neat and tidy way.
“What do I have to do?” he asked, and when I told him, he said, “That’s against the law.”
“It’ll be fun,” I said. “I promise. I’ll make it fun.”
He didn’t believe me, but I think he was relieved I was talking so much and didn’t want to fuck that up by arguing.
The next Friday, late, I pushed his door open. He had fallen asleep even though I’d told him not to.
“Get up!” I hissed, pinching him just enough so he would open his eyes but not make too much noise.
“What time is it?” he whispered, pulling on a hoodie.
“Don’t talk. I’ll tell you later,” I said, afraid that if he knew, he’d back out.
Outside, the moon was a fingernail, not good for any light. No traffic on the main road, and all the houses were dark except one. Inside, a woman in a ratty bathrobe with a little boy on her lap rocked in a rocking chair.
Truman huffed and whispered, “I’m tired of running!”
“Shh!” I said. “Not much longer.”
Finally we got to the tree.
“Why did we have to run?” he whined.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “When it gets here, yell as loud as you can.”
“Why?” he asked, raising his voice already to be heard.
“Just do it,” I said.
I grabbed his hand and pulled him into a squat. I held on as I screamed, struck with the fear that he might dash onto the tracks, so pumped up with the thrill of it, thinking he could do anything. But he didn’t pull away from me or even try to make me let go. When I snuck a glance, he wasn’t yelling. Just staring at me, like maybe I was yelling in a particular way and he thought he should study me to see just how it was supposed to be done.
“What?” I said in the after-quiet, the last car rumbling out of sight.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
I didn’t know how to say. “Didn’t you want to?”
“Why would I want to?”
“Just to, you know. Let everything out.”
He pulled his hand out of mine and wiped it on his jeans: the skin-touching had made it sweaty.
“I like keeping everything in,” he said.
Walking home, I explained what we were going to do next.
“Are you scared?” he asked.
“No, because everyone knows it’s disgusting. Mom even said.”
“It would be funny if a black policeman saw us doing it.”
“Nobody’s going to see us doing anything,” I said.
Truman leaned down for the legs, and I pulled on the hunched-over shoulders until it tipped back into me. We held it as far off the ground as we could and felt with our feet for the first stair down and then the next. We were both panting. It was made of metal and weighed more than I thought: maybe forty pounds.
Once we got to the street, we trudged down the block, trying to match our strides. “Be careful!” I whispered, willing my sweaty fingers to find a place to grip on the smooth slope of its back. The head bobbled against me like a heavy, fragile egg. I started feeling like it was a real person and if we dropped it, everything would shatter into intestines and brains.
At Dad’s house, we ducked along the side with no windows and propped it against the fence. “Now what?” Truman whispered.
“Go in,” I said.
“You can’t just leave it here.”
“I know. It’s fine. I’ll take care of it.”
He looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. “Quiet!” I whispered as he headed back around to the front.
I lowered myself to the ground next to it. Him. He still looked straight ahead, mouth dumbly open, hand forward, like he would do anything you said, help with any chore, not utter a single word if you called him names or kicked him. I thought about the people who’d put him on their steps. I didn’t know them—had never seen them—but I thought they must have wanted to convince people they were better than someone, even if their house was all broken-down, in shambles. Even if that someone was just a statue.
I was starting to like him; I wanted to name him. Joe. Joseph, which sounded more dignified. He should be dignified, after all the years of being a slave and never having a say. He should have a good name.
I sat with him until the sky started to whiten with cold winter sunlight. Then I stood up and stretched. I was chilled from all the sweating. I picked Joseph up and held him as close to my body as I could. Slowly, I made my way around to the front of the house and then down the driveway to the curb. I held one hand against the back of his head, feeling its breakable baby roundness. Knowing it was still too dark for anyone to see, I pressed my lips to his forehead. I whispered, “It’s okay, Joseph. You’re rescued. You’re free.”
I have no idea how I got the bashed-in Toyota’s trunk open.
After I shut it, words popped and sang in my mouth; my fingers twitched. The world flooded in. I went back to talking.
Nothing happened for a few days.
On Tuesday, when Mom dropped us off, Dad and Mariah were waiting for us at the open front door. Dad’s arms were crossed. Mariah had her hands on her hips, like we were taking too long to get up the walkway. They stood aside to let us in. Dad said, “Okay, let’s get this over with,” and I thought maybe there were police in the living room. If there were, I decided I wouldn’t run. I would tell them my father’s girlfriend beat me, just to see what would happen.
No police. Dad told us to sit down. Then he looked at Mariah, who shook her head and walked out of the room. I thought, He sends her away so she won’t start yelling at us, because then he’d have to stop her.
A surprise: He handed me a brand-new phone. “Be careful with it,” he said. “No throwing it around.”
“I didn’t throw it. She—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Daisy. And that’s not what we’re going to talk about.”
I felt the sweet rectangularity of the box in my hands, the familiar heft inside. He was buying me off, but I didn’t care.
Then it was just an hour of Dad asking what was wrong with us and did we know how embarrassing the whole thing was for Mariah, who’d opened her trunk at Safeway where everyone could see.
“Not us. Just me,” I said.
He started talking about consequences, and how he and Mariah were going to have to think long and hard about what would happen next.
“Where’d you put him?” I asked, not even listening, because it came to me then that people have their own reasons—buried like doubloons, so secret they can’t even be said in words—for why they do what they do, and you think you can get what you want out of them by saying the right thing, but you can’t, you really can’t.
I was thinking maybe I’d keep Joseph in my closet, but Dad said, “We drove it to a dumpster. There’s no place for that kind of thing in this neighborhood.”
Then he said this behavior would not be tolerated and made us go to our rooms.
A few minutes after I’d put my phone in the charger by my bed, Truman came in and closed the door behind him.
“Mom bought you that phone,” he said, his voice shaking with the release of an important secret long kept. “She was talking to Mariah and didn’t know I was listening. Mariah said no way were you getting a new one, but Mom said she’d pay for it and finally Mariah said, ‘Well, I can’t stop you.’”
He paused for a second. “She’s such a bitch,” he whispered.
For the first time in over a year, I felt tears welling up: knowing he knew. I was not going to live this strange, split-in-two life alone. I met his gaze and nodded, and he nodded back. We were going to be each other’s witness.
I never told Truman I watched our mother carefully for weeks, then months, waiting for her to say something about buying me that phone. She never did. If I’d mentioned it, he would have shrugged, because he was like her that way. He already knew that sometimes you had to speak up, and sometimes what you kept deep and private was what mattered: all the words held in, changing everything.
• • •
Gina Willner-Pardo’s short stories have been published in such magazines as Berkeley Fiction Review, Bluestem, Pleiades, Cog Magazine, Five on the Fifth, The South Carolina Review, and Whetstone, which awarded her story “Accident” the John Patrick McGrath Memorial Award. She has also written seventeen books for children, all published by Clarion or Albert Whitman. Gina’s book Figuring Out Frances won the Josette Frank Award, presented by the Bank Street College of Education, to honor a book of “outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally.”