around and examining aloud with our parents what a great idea we thought it was, daring them to finally follow through with it and bring the relief of an explosion. All the while, the house hunting continued. In time, Chris and I viewed the drives around town as just that: drives. And when we were old enough to stay home alone, we declined to get in the Suburban at all.
“Okay, kids, I’ll be back soon. I’ve seen some great options over in Mantua. You’ll see!” Mom enthused, though we didn’t really listen.
MY OLDEST SISTER, STACY, always said her life began the day Marcia took her and her siblings away from Walt. They didn’t have much money, and Walt’s child support payments were sometimes inconsistent; with the distance Marcia had gained for herself and her children, Walt could no longer control them, and money was the one weapon he had left against his ex-wife. Marcia contacted authorities three separate times to collect back pay from Walt.
In addition to income from Marcia’s jobs, they relied on church friends and family to help them get by. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt, and the quote inspired Marcia through the most difficult years. Walt’s parents sent birthday and Christmas presents and back-to-school clothes. Walt and his siblings had come from a volatile home, but with Walt’s musical and academic talents he was regarded as flawless, especially by his mother, Margaret, who reportedly doted on him. But as loyal as she remained to Walt, even she could see that her son had not done right by his first wife.
Marcia’s parents were immensely reliable with their support, helping their daughter and grandchildren both monetarily and beyond. They watched the kids when they weren’t in school while Marcia worked, and they helped care for them when they were sick. It wasn’t an especially easy life, but it was peaceful and loving.
It was sometimes a little uncomfortable when Marcia’s kids would visit us in Virginia, because Chris and I had a lot more material things than they did. We had new skis, new bikes, the latest styles in clothes and shoes, newer models of everything electronic that Marcia’s kids didn’t even have older versions of. We were the ones Dad always provided for. Yet they never complained when it was time to go back home.
Our siblings came in different groups, usually, for several weeks at a time, but then Shelly came to live with us for her last two years of high school. I was ten and Chris was thirteen.
Soon after arriving, Shelly realized she’d underestimated how bad things were. For much of her life she’d witnessed Dad beating her mom, but now she was witness to Dad and Billie violently assaulting each other—sometimes physically, always verbally. Mom often ignored Shelly, and Dad traveled so much he was barely around. When Mom did acknowledge Shelly’s existence, it was usually to bark an order at her or chastise her for some wrongdoing. But Shelly was committed to staying in Virginia. Hardened from past experience, she proved to be even tougher than Chris was. We learned from her what it looked like to stand up for yourself.
When Dad next traveled to Europe, he took all three of us kids with him, as well as Mom. When Chris ducked into nudie magazine stores in Amsterdam, Shelly told Mom he was checking out tennis shoes a block over. Though she had his back, Shelly and Chris bickered like crazy on that trip, once even to the point that Chris screamed that Shelly was going to kill him after he’d teased her too much. When we were all in the car one afternoon, Dad reached his limit with them. “I’m going to pull this car over and spank both of you!” he said. Shelly laughed at him. She was seventeen, much too old to be spanked, plus she had our father’s number: he’d never laid a hand on her before.
Perhaps because they were so similar, Dad had a soft spot for Shelly. When he’d spent time with Marcia’s kids in California, he’d made them all line up outside his office door, to come in and be smacked one by one for whatever the baseless infraction of the day was, his sturdy frat-house paddle firmly in hand. When it was Shelly’s turn, though, he told her he wasn’t going to hit her. She should scream out loud anyway, he explained, so the others wouldn’t know. She felt the special treatment was because she saw him for what he was, and he knew it.
One night while Shelly was living with us, I was taking care of my daily chores in the basement—organizing some office files; Windexing the glass-fronted cabinets and tabletops; ensuring that Dad had one pen in each color of blue, black, red, and green, in soldier formation, awaiting him on his desk alongside one yellow and one white lined pad of paper stacked beneath one green steno notepad. Upstairs, Mom was making dinner. I could smell the ground beef and cumin as they sizzled together on the stovetop—taco night. Dad was working on his own creation on the piano, concocting a rendition of a Bill Evans song. Evans was just one of the many jazz greats Dad taught Chris and me to appreciate; Miles, Ella, and Duke were also favorites. The soft thump of the piano pedals began to form a repetitive pattern on the wood floor above me as he delicately worked a decrescendo into a specific chord progression again and again.
“Jesus Christ, Walt!” I heard Mom implore from the kitchen. “Do you have to keep playing that same line over and over like that?”
“Yes, Billie!” he yelled back to her. “And if you knew anything about music, you would understand why!”
I had already finished all my less-than-challenging sixth-grade homework and knew Chris was doing his in his bedroom. I trotted up the steps from the basement and saw Shelly lying back on an array of pillows on the family room couch, studying for a world history test. Her long red curls fell softly around the headphones that covered her ears. She had her bare feet and polished toes up on the coffee table, textbook on her knees. Her Walkman was turned up so loudly I could hear every word of Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home.”
She turned off the music when she saw me.
“Now, Carine,” she mimicked, “you’d better make sure that I have one blue pen, one black, one red, and one green all lined up next to my notepads. And they better be set up parallel to the lines of the wood grain on the desk. Do you understand me?”
“It’s impossible to line up a straight edge with walnut wood grains,” I mused. “The grain isn’t straight.”
“Oh, whatever, little Miss Smarty Pants!” she teased back.
“What are you reading about?” I asked.
“Wars,” she answered flatly. “As if I don’t know enough about that already.”
“Totally,” I answered, trying to sound like a high schooler. It didn’t work; Shelly gave me a small smile and reached for the buttons on her Walkman. Desperate not to lose her attention, I thought quickly of another subject. “So,” I began.
“So?”
“So . . . we’re doing a sex ed unit in school.”
“Okaaayyyy.” Shelly looked at me quizzically. She probably thought I wanted her to explain the birds and the bees or something, which I didn’t. Not really. Mainly I wanted to ask her—had wanted to ask her for a while, actually—to explain what the deal was with Quinn. When Quinn and Shannon had last visited, I’d heard them whispering with Chris about something, and I had a pretty good idea what it was. But the boys shut down as soon as they saw me. Maybe my big sister would answer, girl to girl.
“So . . . how is it that Quinn’s older than me and younger than Chris?” I ventured. “I mean, how is that even possible?” The pieces of my parents’ history were starting to become clearer, but the edges were still blurred and I had yet to grasp how they all fit together.
“You’re just figuring that out now?” Shelly’s eyes widened as she paused and waited for me to solve the puzzle. After a minute,
