Page 78 of Kill Your Darlings

Wendy was relieved, and not surprised, that it was just Rose, her mother, picking her up at Denver Airport. As Wendy pushed through the exit gate, her mother was right there, in the stance Wendy recognized as an anxious one, arms crossed just under her breasts, moving her weight from one leg to the other.

“You look really good,” her mother said as they crossed the hot tarmac to the parked car. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” Wendy said, realizing as she said it that this brief conversation might be the only words spoken about the actual reason she had been living with her aunt Andi in Mendocino the past four months.

In the car, as they drove toward Tabernash, her mother talked about Alan’s summer job taking tourists out horse-riding in Granby, and how he’d decided that he wanted to become a big-animal vet.

“That’s a lot of school, right?” Wendy said.

Her mom laughed. “That’s what I told him, but he’s a new Alan this summer. You’ll see.”

“How’s Dad?”

There was a long enough pause for Wendy to know that something bad was coming. “Unfortunately, he did lose his job last week. Well, no, I shouldn’t say that. The job itself fell through. It had nothing to do with your father.”

Wendy wasn’t surprised, but it did mean that her father was not currently working, and when he didn’t work, he drank. Pulling up in front of the small vinyl-sided rental house they currently lived in, Wendy saw that Frank, her dad, was sitting on the front stoop. He wore suit bottoms and a white undershirt as though he’d just come home from work for the evening and was out enjoying an end-of-day gin and tonic. But it wasn’t evening yet and he was unemployed.

“The ladies return,” he said, standing up to hug Wendy. “Jesus, look at you. Last time I saw you, you were a scrawny kid. What did your aunt feed you out there?”

Wendy was saved from answering by her mother shooting Frank a look, then saying, “Wendy’s tired. Let her go get settled again in her room.”

Her father wacked Wendy on the ass as she passed him, and said, “I’m not saying anything bad, just that it’s been so long since I’ve seen her. She’s a little woman now.” Wendy passed through the living room, the smell of gin still in her nostrils, and returned to her room, unchanged since she’d last been there—when was it?—probably the beginning of March. That was when she couldn’t hide the pregnancy anymore and her mother had come up with the plan to pull her out of school early and send her to visit her sister in California. Her father was working around the clock at that point, trying to sell some kind of automated rental system to ski areas, so he either hadn’t noticed Wendy’s state or he hadn’t questioned the plan. And neither had Alan, who was mostly high as a kite in those days. The cover story was that Aunt Andi had broken an arm and needed an assistant to help her in her art studio.

Wendy had traveled to Mendocino at five and a half months pregnant. She’d gotten in that particular state on her last day in New Hampshire, Thom Graves and her stealing away into the woods with a blanket to lie on but without a condom. He’d pulled out early, though, and Wendy thought that that was all it would take to ensure there was no chance of getting pregnant. She hadn’t even suspected that it had actually happened until December of that year, the family now living in a brand-new state, Thom and New Hampshire a far-off memory.

The first thing Wendy noticed in her bedroom was the mason jar filled with wildflowers on her bedside table, a homecoming present from her mother. Wendy lay down on her made-up single bed and stared up at a cluster of glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars on her ceiling that she’d forgotten about. She hadn’t put them there herself; it must have been some other kid who once upon a time lived in this tiny room with the black mold spots covering one whole wall. She swiveled her head from side to side, taking in her bedroom. Except for being pregnant, she hadn’t actually minded her time in California. Her aunt was insane, of course, everyone knew that, but she was funny and she lived in a cool bungalow type of house and spent most of her time making pots or dyeing fabrics with mushrooms and things like that. Aunt Andi was the one who contacted the Catholic people who arranged the adoption. All Wendy had to do while she was there was spend her days reading books—her aunt had everything from old Nancy Drew books to Danielle Steel, and a book she read twice calledEven Cowgirls Get the Blues—and eating weird vegetarian dishes. Her aunt was similar to her mother in one very important way: she could keep up a steady stream of conversation without ever really talking about anything of substance. She never once asked Wendy how she’d gotten pregnant or how she felt about giving the baby up.

It was also nice to be near the ocean, even though it was thePacific and not the Atlantic, where Thom lived. She did wonder what he would think if he knew that she was pregnant, but she wasn’t even sure she knew what she thought about it, except that she wanted it all to go away.

Aunt Andi had stayed with her in the hospital after she’d given birth. Wendy had held the baby briefly but didn’t feel much of anything except the desire to get out of the hospital and pretend that none of this had ever happened. Although after she’d held her daughter for the last time, when she was recovering in her bed, she remembered telling Aunt Andi—this was after some pretty trippy painkillers—that she thought Annabel would be a good name for the baby. Wendy had come up with the name because Andi had a book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe that she’d been reading and rereading. She remembered saying it only because when she did, her aunt had burst into tears and had to leave the room. It was the only time she’d seen her aunt, or her mother, for that matter, cry.

Wendy was glad to be back in Colorado, only because she wanted a return to normalcy. She knew she couldn’t spend her whole life drinking herbal tea and reading dirty books at her aunt’s house, but it didn’t make it any easier watching her father get progressively drunker and drunker throughout the night. It wasn’t an entirely terrible evening. Her mom had made shepherd’s pie, making Wendy realize how much she’d missed meat the past four months, and Alan, as her mom had said, was somewhat changed by his new job. He wasn’t stoned, for one, and seemed actually happy. And for most of the night her father was an amiable drunk, talking about some new idea he had for storing sailboats or something, and actually asking Alan questions about the stables he worked at, but Wendy just waited for him to cross the martini line. That was her and Alan’s phrase for the moment that the gin turned her father from corny-joke-telling suburban dad to the blank-eyed evilness that he could become. Theycalled it the martini line because it often came right after their father would switch from gin and tonics or Tom Collinses and decide to have a “good old-fashioned” martini. Then his eyes would somehow empty out and he would go after someone in the family with what felt like true spite. That night he descended on Rose. As always it was like a switch; one moment he was toasting the Eastman family (“the four of us against the world”) and the next he was telling his wife he wouldn’t have married her if he’d known she would one day look like a fat Midwestern housewife. Alan turned to Wendy and whispered to her, “Go to your room. I’ll stick around and keep an eye on him.”

“What’s that, son?” Frank said, his head swiveling on his neck like it was hard for him to hold it up.

“Nothing, Dad. Wendy’s tired, so she’s going to sleep.”

As Wendy left the room, she heard her father say, “My daughter looks like a whore from California now.”

Alone in her room, Wendy listened to the mixtape she’d made by taping songs off the radio at her aunt’s house. She fast-forwarded to “King of Pain” by the Police, which was a song that Thom had liked. She decided to write him a letter, one she wouldn’t send. She’d written many letters to him, so many that they were more like a diary she was keeping. On their last day together in New Hampshire, the day they’d had sex in the piney woods behind his house, Thom had said that they shouldn’t write, that they should just have the memories of their time together. He also said they could think of each other every year on their shared birthday. So she hadn’t sent him any of the letters she’d written, even though she knew his address. If he had changed his mind about getting in touch, she wouldn’t know about it, because there was no way he’d know where they were now living. But he was probably right. Some things were best forgotten.

She finished the letter by writing “From Wendy, With Love and Squalor,” as she always did, and then cracked open the Edgar AllanPoe book that her aunt had let her keep. Even with her Walkman turned up she could hear her father’s booming voice coming through the house’s cheap walls, although, thankfully, she couldn’t hear the words.

ii

Thom had forgotten the bug spray and the mosquitoes were eating him alive, but it was August13, his half birthday, which meant it was Wendy’s half birthday as well, and he wanted to be in their special place in the woods. He’d brought the same blanket with him that they’d had sex on nearly a year ago, and he was lying half on it and half under it now, trying to shield himself from the bugs, trying to just focus on his memories of Wendy, of what it had been like to actually be in this spot with her, to be able to touch her and hear her voice. He found he could still picture her, for the most part, but he was worried that her voice was becoming lost to him. He knew it was a beautiful voice—everything about her was beautiful—but found he couldn’t really remember the specifics of it.

He wondered if she were thinking of him today as well. He knew that half birthdays weren’t really a thing, except that they had talked about it together exactly one year ago. Where had they been when they’d had that conversation? Or had it been on the phone? A wave of sadness rolled over Thom, a feeling that life was speeding up and moving too quickly and all his happiness was now in the past. He clenched his jaw, thinking that he might cry, but nothing happened. Maybe his life’s tragedy was going to be that he’d met his soul mate when he was fourteen, and now he was doomed to a lifetime of never finding her again. Why hadn’t she written him? He knew that he’d told her that she shouldn’t, but she knew his address. She even knew his phone number. Maybe she’d forgottenhim. Maybe she was with some other boy now, a thought he tried very hard to keep out of his head.

The nubby blanket was making him sweat, so he stood up, swiped away the orange pine needles that clung to both him and the blanket, and walked back through the woods to his house, occasionally breaking into a run because of the cloud of mosquitoes that was amassing behind him. Back in the kitchen his mom glanced at the blanket in his arms and asked him if he’d been reading in the woods. “Just thinking,” he said, and she knew enough not to ask him what he was thinking about.

Instead, his mother said, “Did you remember that Mrs.Burke asked you to go swimming at their pool this afternoon?”

He had remembered. The Burkes were two houses down; they had four kids, a senior girl named Kathleen, two middle boys named Kevin and Carter, and a girl that was Thom’s age named Kristen. The two girls were okay, but Thom kind of hated the boys, who were always dunking each other in the pool or talking about bra sizes or how you could know the color of a girl’s pubes by looking at her eyebrows. But the pool was pretty nice, and Thom had been harboring a strange fantasy for a while, one in which he confessed to Kristen, the girl his age, all about how he was in love with Wendy Eastman, who’d left town and broken his heart. He created conversations between the two of them in his head. She would ask him questions about their romance, and he’d tell her all about it. Sometimes, in these fantasies, he would show her the place in the woods where he had sex with Wendy, and Kristen would kiss him, tell him she wanted to have sex as well but understood he could never truly love her.

“Thom, did you remember?” his mother asked again. He thought he’d answered her but supposed he hadn’t.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” he said.

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