one?” She waited again as I tried to comprehend how the multiple explanations I had heard could still make any sense. “Never mind,” she finally sighed. “Tell you what. We’ll talk about it when you’re older.”
Feeling thwarted by my youth, I sniped at her, “Don’t you think you might do better in school if you didn’t study with that music blaring in your ears?” I’d gone for a sore point, and I’d hit it. Shelly was undoubtedly smart, but she struggled to meet expectations, while I easily brought home the mandatory straight As.
Shelly’s striking green eyes flared, then narrowed. Then her freckles melded as her nose crinkled up and her lips curled. “Shut up, you little shit!” I successfully dodged the large white pillow she threw toward my head. But as I walked up to my room, I was only mad at myself. I really wished I’d pressed harder instead of teasing her. I still wanted to know the truth.
SHELLY WAS A GOOD STUDENT but not a great one. As long as she brought home Bs and Cs, my parents would not allow her to join any extra-curricular activities or student-organized outings. When the senior ski trip plans began and again they told her she couldn’t go, she decided she’d had enough and went on the trip anyway. But she had an accident on the mountain and had to return to our house with injured pride and a blown-out knee, wearing a full cast up to her hip. Dad was doing extended work in Germany and Mom grudgingly helped her recover.
On the night Dad got back, a vicious fight started up between Mom and Dad. Shelly immediately took Chris and me out to dinner to keep us all out of the way. By the time we returned, the house was silent. When Shelly got home from school the next day, Mom greeted her. “You need to leave tonight,” she said. “And you are not welcome back in this house.” Mom then left for the evening.
Though Dad might have favored Shelly, he did not stand up for her against the woman he’d begun an affair with before Shelly had even been born. When he got home that evening, he helped Shelly pack.
Shelly moved in with her friend Kathy’s family for a short while before finding an apartment to share with some college kids, where she slept on the floor of their walk-in closet. She worked nights as a cocktail waitress to get by until she would graduate. I didn’t see Shelly again until she was invited by Mom and Dad to stop by to say hello and take pictures on her way to prom. When I asked Shelly why she had come back for such a farce, she replied, “I guess I was just wanting to feel some sense of normalcy.” She’d see Chris in the hallways at Woodson High, and he’d tell her that Mom sometimes checked with the high school to make sure Shelly was there and not cutting. He let her know he had her back.
Although my father did nothing to stop Mom from kicking Shelly out, late on that evening Shelly left I heard him cry for the first and only time. I was upstairs and heard a howl like an animal caught in a trap. I followed the wailing down to the basement and was shocked to see my father sitting at his desk, his face completely covered by his hands, his fingers stretched from ear to ear. It looked like he was trying to disappear.
CHRIS AND I, INSPIRED BY SHELLY’S DEFIANCE, took on the role of detectives when it came to the reasons for our mom and dad’s arguments. We stayed aware, listened carefully, gathered evidence, and met to discuss whatever was the case at hand. Our investigative skills improved with age and experience.
In school, we were both learning about the negative effects of drugs and alcohol and the signs of substance abuse. Our parents reinforced the lessons with their own threats of what would happen to us if we were ever caught using. We were conscious of the Jekyll and Hyde effect we witnessed on a regular basis within our own parents, relative to the daily intake of his gin or her wine. Then one day we found a questionable plastic bag in one of Dad’s coat pockets. We took it down to the basement office in search of a confession.
“What is this?” Chris inquired with eyebrows raised, his right hand holding the evidence in the air, the other resting confidently on his belt, feet at the ready.
“What?” Dad looked up, annoyed with the interruption. The surprise in his eyes turned into a scowl. “That’s tobacco.”
“Doesn’t look like tobacco” was Chris’s retort.
“It just looks different. Give it to me!”
“Why does it look different?” Chris didn’t back down as Dad snatched the proof out of his hand.
“I bought it on my last business trip to Europe, and it’s none of your goddamned business! Why are you two going through my things anyway!” he yelled. “Tell them it’s tobacco, Billie!”
“It’s tobacco,” she obeyed, but the daggers she shot at him with her eyes said something else. A titanic fight ensued, up through every level of the house until we were all in their master bedroom.
“Fine! It’s marijuana!” Dad finally admitted after pushing us away and throwing Mom around the room a few more times. “It’s for my glaucoma!”
“I’m calling the police!” Mom screamed and moved toward the phone.
Dad rushed through the room again; we all flinched, but he passed by us and ran into his closet, screaming the usual threats. “Go ahead, Billie! You’ll see where that gets you and the kids!”
I gasped at the size of the marijuana bag he resurfaced with. He held it high in the air and announced, “I’ve done nothing wrong! My doctor gave me this for my eyes! It’s perfectly legal!” He continued his rant as he stomped into the bathroom, red-faced and furious, and began to flush the contents of the bag down the toilet. “Fuck all of you!” he shouted between flushes. “I’ll just go blind and you will all be left out on the street to starve to death!”
“If it was really from your doctor then you wouldn’t care if Mom called the cops!” Chris insisted as he looked back at Mom. She wasn’t dialing the police, or anyone else for that matter. She never did. Chris walked out of the room and I followed, satisfied we had made our point. The fight died down after that.
When we told Shelly about it a while later, she laughed hysterically at the ridiculousness of the entire incident. For my part, I focused on my mortification that my dad was a drug abuser, destined for prison one day, I was sure. Chris’s reaction was different. He was incensed by our parents’ hypocrisy, and that never went away.
CHAPTER 3
AT THE END OF MY FRESHMAN YEAR of high school, I sat on the driveway brushing out Buck’s thick coat—a task Mom had deemed critical to save our vacuum from an early demise.
“Hey, Carine!” our next-door neighbor Laura called out, walking across the yard.
Laura was in the same class as Chris, another cool senior. She was a bit heavyset, eternally tan, and very pretty. Her thick blue eyeliner was always perfect, and she’d recently cut her long blond feathered locks into a shorter style. Though most girls were trying to duplicate Farrah Fawcett’s look, Laura was not one to conform to the masses at Woodson. I respected her.
“So”—she sat down next to me and welcomed Buck’s request for attention—“I drove your brother to school today. His car wouldn’t start.”
“Oh! I was wondering what the Datsun was still doing here. How’s he getting home from track practice?” I asked, as if she were his secretary.
“How
