Page 11 of Broken Bayou
I don’t wait for the coffee to finish dripping before I pour some into a cup, then sit at the table with my phone. I’d silenced my notifications before bed, and I see a text from Amy sent an hour ago. I check the time. What the hell was so important that she sent a text at six in the morning? I open it.
Stay off Twitter until I can call you.
Seriously? I thought she knew me better than that. I open Twitter. I scan for any mention of me and find it immediately. Christopher’s first wife retweeted my old classmate’s tweet from yesterday as well as the clip fromFort Worth Live. Under it she wrote,This is what a homewrecker looks like.There are hundreds of comments.
HOT!
I’d let her heal me anytime!
What a fucking idiot
She needs a boob job
NUTCASE!
Sad emoji, laughing emoji, flame emoji. The things people have the courage to say when they’re hiding behind a screen.
I developed a thick skin growing up with Krystal Lynn as my mother and after grinding my way through nine years of higher education without any support at home, but these comments find a way to pierce my armor. And in a way it feels good. Pain, I understand. The wordhomewrecker, however, I do not understand.
I keep scrolling, and that’s when I see her second tweet, stating Christopher and I engaged in an illicit affair while he was still married to her.
“Bullshit!” I yell to the empty kitchen. And that’s when I see her final tweet. It gets my hands shaking so much I almost drop my phone.This is not the role model we want for our children. She’s only an expert in cheating. How did you do so well on those clinicals? Time to be honest Dr. Willa!
Acid churns in my stomach. My breathing shallows. I scroll to Amy’s number and press it. It goes straight to voicemail. I send her a text instead:Call me!
I finish my coffee, talk myself out of responding to that insane tweet, tell myself that platform will only bring attention to something I want to disappear. Still, though, I’ll need to address it at some point. I can’t preach to people about how to handle bullies and not handle my own.
And there’s something else I have to handle. Of all the things I don’t have control over, finding that tape is something I still do. I need it in my possession. After that, I’ll hang tight for a couple of days, make sure the social media fallout dies down. Make sure the vultures don’t get anything else to feed on. Then I can go home, confront the allegations from Christopher’s ex, coddle whomever necessary atGMAto get my spot back, and reboot my career.
The shrill cry of a crow startles me and I jump. It sounds as if the bird has gotten inside, but the kitchen is empty. I’m too keyed up. Maybe I don’t need coffee after all. Then I notice something’s off. Something creaks near the door that leads outside, and I raise my coffee cup, ready to hurl it if anything tries to come through the door. Nothing comes in but a breeze. I lower the mug and study the door. It’s cracked open. I ease up to it and try to push it closed, but a hot wind pops it back open. I push it again. And again. Each time it opens on its own; the wind enough to jostle it free. The wood near the latch is warped and rotten. And it takes several more tries before I finally get itto stick. Even shut, the wind whistles through it. If only the attic door was this rotten. Then my gaze stops on something on the other side of the door’s window. My pulse kicks back up.
Clusters of rusted wire-fence pens fill the backyard. Once they were filled with goats and a henhouse and even peacocks. I loved yelling “Pretty, pretty” at them and watching them fan open their bright feathers. There are no bright colors back there now. Just browns and dull greens. And a rusted, leaning shed sitting off to one side. The Aunts kept their gardening tools in there. Like the attic, Mabry and I were forbidden from playing in it. Too many sharp objects. I wonder if those sharp objects still exist, especially one that might open a locked door.
I stand in front of the attic door with a hammer in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. My trip to the old shed proved quite fruitful. I tap gently at first. I don’t want to damage the lock too much. But the longer I stand there, tapping and getting nowhere, the antsier I get. Maybe I could hit it a little harder. I wedge the screwdriver into a crack by the knob and bring the hammer down hard on top of it. A ripping sound erupts from the wood frame. A piece splinters away, and the doorknob jostles. The damage sounded worse than it looks, but I’ll still need to leave some cash behind to fix it.
The smells of mothballs and mildew smack my face when I open the door. Sunshine floods in through two dormer windows facing the front of the house. The room isn’t an attic anymore. It’s a bedroom. An odd, sloped-roof bedroom, but a bedroom nonetheless. The Aunts once had a plan to make this place a bed-and-breakfast. Maybe they succeeded. My heart aches with the knowledge strangers could have enjoyed this space, made memories here while I was forbidden from doing the same. Another thing to add to the long list of things to forgive. But forgiveness is like a house of mirrors in the Watters family. Justwhen I think I’ve found a way to it, a memory will surface or, in this case, a room, and I’ll discover I’m even more lost than when I started.
My eyes stop on a stack of moving boxes against one wall. My fingers tingle. My mouth goes dry. Three boxes are separated from the others, in the back corner. I move toward them on shaky legs. On the side of each, in Petunia’s or Pearl’s loopy cursive, is a name:Krystal Lynn. My stomach drops as I drag one of the boxes to the middle of the room and stare at it. I test its weight. Then I test the others. I can get them all down the stairs and into my car without a problem. But do I really want to haul them back with me? Then what? Now that I’m looking at them, I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Dragging my past around doesn’t need to become a habit. What I need to do is throw them out. Be done with them for good. I could take them and toss them in a small-town dumpster on my way home. But first, I want to make sure what I’m looking for is here.
The packing tape has come loose on the box in front of me, peeling up on both sides, and that’s all the invitation I need. In a matter of a second, I’m kneeling beside the box and ripping the tape off. I pull back the top flaps and sit back on my knees. Inside are old clothes and books and odd pieces of jewelry. I exhale. My shoulders relax. This isn’t the box. I extract an old children’s book and my heart flutters. P. D. Eastman’sAre You My Mother?Mabry’s favorite. I fish out a dry-rotted and faded yellow dress from the box, which pulls me back to when Mama got it in her head that Mabry could winStar Search, and the first step would be entering Mabry in kiddie beauty pageants so she could get used to being on stage. Mabry was terrified. I was appalled. But Mama went down to the Goodwill and bought what could have been the ugliest, yellowest thing I ever saw, then went to town on her sewing machine. She said by the time she was done, every little girl in northwest Louisiana would be jealous. Mama was on a peak. There was no touching her.
Mabry, looking like Big Bird fromSesame Street, entered the Little Miss Cornbread beauty contest and came in dead last. Every girl, eventhe one with the lazy eye, won something. Not Mabry. She stood on the stage in that hideous dress, her giant ears, her little freckles standing out against her pink cheeks, and her brown doe eyes watering. Mama came unglued. How dare those judges judge her daughter. Who did they think they were? She proceeded to cause such a scene that she was escorted from the convention center and told no child of hers would be entered into another pageant in the state of Louisiana, ever. At home, Mama grabbed the sewing machine and, with incredible strength, hurled it through the front window, where it crashed onto a row of shrubs. She then snatched a bottle of vodka from the freezer, climbed into bed, and stayed there for days. On the fourth day, she called Mabry to her side and hauled her into the bed next to her, clutching my little sister even harder than the bottle of vodka. On the fifth day, I decided Mabry needed a safe word.
I dig past the dress until I see something that really gets my heart pumping. Mabry’s sketchbook. I wedge it from the box and open its worn cover. Mabry’s sketches look even more spectacular than I remember. She may have been grades behind in school and misspelled everything she wrote and wrote everything she misspelled backward, but the girl could draw. Her attention to detail was eerie. The first few portraits are of me. One of Travis and me, sitting by the bayou. One of the bridge. Then one of Mama and a man I don’t recognize, in what looks like a restaurant booth. I wonder if this is a real moment or one Mabry made up. Then I see one of old Mr. Billy Taylor and his wife, Ermine. Again, it looks like a moment Mabry watched. They are sitting, staring at one another at a table. Maybe Mabry watched them too. Although she was rarely anywhere without me. And I don’t remember seeing her at Taylor’s with her sketchbook when I worked there. But Mabry had a sneaky side. A few times, I remember the Aunts calling Taylor’s to tell me Mabry had snuck away, and could I go find her. Usually she was hiding on their property under a bed, behind the oaks, hiding from Mama. But maybe sometimes she snuck away, and we didn’t know, taking her sketchbook and capturing moments. From the looks of it, momentswith a woman and a man. My heart clenches. Mabry knew even less of our father than I did. At least I can remember what he looked like.
I flip to the next page and see a sketch of another couple. A little girl I don’t recognize, holding the hand of a boy I don’t recognize. The girl has a single finger over her lips. Something about the girl looks familiar, a tickle of a memory I can’t quite place. The next drawing is a parakeet. Ralph, one of Mabry’s pretend pets. Some kids had pretend friends. Mabry had pretend pets. I liked Ralph. Mabry always had her finger out, cooing at him.
I wrestle the next box to the middle of the room and open it, bracing for what could be inside and, again, releasing a long breath when its contents are still a mix of clothes and jewelry. Nothing looks special to me. I dig through the pile of outdated clothes: crop tops, cutoffs, plastic bangles. Krystal Lynn’s summer uniform. A black cowboy hat is crammed in with the other items and stands out against the faded neon colors. I put it on my head, and it falls almost to my eyes. Mama did have a cowgirl phase, but I always remember her hat being red. I drop the hat back into the clothes and focus on the third box. That’s the one. I feel lightheaded and touch my fingers to the carpet to ground myself.
Open it.
I yank the tape from the box and peel back the cardboard flaps. My breath catches in my throat. This is what I came for. A messy pile of black VHS tapes sits inside. Old dinosaurs. Most recordings of Mama’s soap operas. Bile rises in my throat. Most.
I hear Mama’s voice from when I visited her two evenings ago to tell her I’d changed my mind; I would be going to Broken Bayou after all. She looked at me suspiciously from the firm sofa in the overly warm TV room of the Texas Rose Rehabilitation Center, a place filled with functional handrails, lovely gold-framed landscapes, and plenty of guilt.
“I want you to have your things,” I said.
“Sure you do.” Her wrinkled lips formed a smile around the clear tubes leading from her nostrils to a small oxygen tank resting on the sofa in a cloth bag. An empty wheelchair sitting on her opposite side. Anoversize white robe meant for someone twice my mother’s size covered her frail body, and a bird’s nest of gray hair covered her head. Krystal Lynn Watters was always reckless and unpredictable and constantly in need of a hairbrush. That certainly hadn’t changed in that place. If anything, it was amplified ... even with all the meds. She looked as fragile and empty as the cicada shells my sister and I collected off pine trees when we were kids. She shifted and tapped a rhythm on the side of her leg. Mama’s press-on nails provided the soundtrack for my youth. She was always tapping them on something: the steering wheel, her teeth, a can of Fresca. I learned the timing in those clicks like a master thief learns how to tumble a lock. Her long acrylics were replaced by paper-thin ghosts of what they used to be, but their telling rhythm remained. And two days ago, it told me to be on guard.
