She looked at me, and it was like she had two faces on. The top one was puzzled and still kinda laughin… but underneath there was a careful, distrustin sort of look. What I saw in that underneath face was everythin Joe had told her that spring and summer, before she had begun to pull away from him, too. I don’t have no friends, is what that underneath face said to me. Certainly not you, nor him, either. And the longer we looked at each other, the more that face came to the top.
She stopped laughin and turned away from me to look out over the water. That made me feel bad, Andy, but I couldn’t let it stop me any more than I could let Vera get away with her bitchery later on, no matter how sad it all was at the bottom. The fact is, sometimes we do have to be cruel to be kind—like a doctor givin a shot to a child even though he knows the child will cry and not understand. I looked inside myself and saw I could be cruel like that if I had to. It scared me to know that then, and it still scares me a little. It’s scary to know you can be as hard as you need to be, and never hesitate before or look back afterward and question what you did.
“I don’t know what you mean, Mom,” she says, but she was lookin at me with a careful eye.
“You’ve changed,” I said. “Your looks, the way you dress, the way you act. All those things tell me you’re in some kind of trouble.”
“There’s nothing wrong,” she said, but all the time she was sayin it she was backin away from me. I grabbed her hands in mine before she could get too far away to reach.
“Yes there is,” I said, “and neither of us is steppin off this ferry until you tell me what it is.”
“Nothin!” she yelled. She tried to yank her hands free but I wouldn’t let loose. “Nothin’s wrong, now let go! Let me go!”
“Not yet,” I says. “Whatever trouble you’re in won’t change my love for you, Selena, but I can’t begin helpin you out of it until you tell me what it is. ”
She stopped strugglin then and only looked at me. And I seen a third face below the first two—a crafty, miserable face I didn’t like much. Except for her complexion, Selena usually takes after my side of the family, but right then she looked like Joe.
“Tell me somethin first,” she says.
“I will if I can,” I says back.
“Why’d you hit him?” she asks. “Why’d you hit him that time?”
I opened my mouth to ask “What time?”—mostly to get a few seconds to think—but all at once I knew somethin, Andy. Don’t ask me how—it might have been a hunch, or what they call woman’s intuition, or maybe I actually reached out somehow and read my daughter’s mind—but I did. I knew that if I hesitated, even for a second, I was gonna lose her. Maybe only for that day, but all too likely for good. It was a thing I just knew, and I didn’t hesitate a beat.
“Because he hit me in the back with a piece of stovewood earlier that evenin,” I said. “Just about crushed my kidneys. I guess I just decided I wasn’t going to be done that way anymore. Not ever again. ”
She blinked the way you do when somebody makes a quick move toward your face with their hand, and her mouth dropped open in a big surprised O.
“That ain’t what he told you it was about, was it?”
She shook her head.
“What’d he say? His drinkin?”
“That and his poker games,” she said in a voice almost too low to hear. “He said you didn’t want him or anybody else to have any fun. That was why you didn’t want him to play poker, and why you wouldn’t let me go to Tanya’s sleep-over last year. He said you want everyone to work eight days a week like you do. And when he stood up to you, you conked him with the creamer and then said you’d cut off his head if he tried to do anything about it. That you’d do it while he was sieepin.”
I woulda laughed, Andy, if it hadn’t been so awful.
“Did you believe him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Thinking about that hatchet made me so scared I didn’t know what to believe. ”
That went in my heart like a knife-blade, but I never showed it. “Selena,” I says, “what he told you was a lie.”
“Just leave me alone!” she said, pullin back from me. That cornered-rabbit look come on her face again, and I realized she wasn’t just hidin somethin because she was ashamed or worried—she was scared to death. “I’ll fix it myself! I don’t want your help, so just leave me alone!”
“You can’t fix it yourself, Selena,” I says. I was usin the low, soothin tone you’d use on a hoss or lamb that’s gotten caught in a barbwire fence. “If you could have, you already would have. Now listen to me—I’m sorry you had to see me with that hatchet in my hand; I’m sorry about everythin you saw n heard that night. If I’d known it was going to make you so scared and unhappy, I wouldn’t have took after him no matter how much he provoked me.”
“Can’t you just stop it?” she asks, and then she finally pulled her hands out of mine and put em over her ears. “I don’t want to hear any more. I won’t hear any more.”
“I can’t stop because that’s over and done with, beyond reach,” I says, “but this ain’t. So let me help, dear heart. Please.” I tried to put an arm around her and draw her to me.
“Don’t! Don’t you hit me! Don’t you even touch me, you bitch!” she screams, and shoved herself backward. She stumbled against the rail, and I was sure she was gonna go flip-flop right over it and into the drink. My heart stopped, but thank God my hands never did. I reached out, caught her by the front of the coat, and drug her back toward me. I slipped in some wet and almost fell. I caught my balance, though, and when I looked up, she hauled off and slapped me across the side of the face.
I never minded, just grabbed hold of her again and hugged her against me. You quit at a time like that with a child Selena’s age, I think a lot of what you had with that child is gonna be over for good. Besides, that slap didn’t hurt a bit. I was just scared of losin her—and not just from my heart, neither.
For that one second I was sure she was gonna go over the rail with her head down and her feet up. I was so sure I could see it. It’s a wonder all my hair didn’t go gray right then.
Then she was cryin and tellin me she was sorry, that she never meant to hit me, that she never ever meant to do that, and I told her I knew it. “Hush awhile,” I says, and what she said back almost froze me solid. “You should have let me go over, Mommy,” she said. “You should have let me go.”
I held her out from me at arms’ length—by then we was both cryin—and I says, “Nothin could make me do a thing like that, sweetheart.”
She was shakin her head back and forth. “I can’t stand it anymore, Mommy… I can’t. I feel so dirty and confused, and I can’t be happy no matter how hard I try. ”
“What is it?” I says, beginnin to be frightened all over again. “What is it, Selena?”
“If I tell you,” she says, “you’ll probably push me over the rail yourself.”
“You know better,” I says. “And I’ll tell you another thing, dear heart—you ain’t steppin foot back on dry land until you’ve come clean with me. If goin back n forth on this ferry for the rest of the year is what it takes, then that’s what we’ll do… although I think we’ll both be frozen solid before the end of November, if we ain’t died of ptomaine from what they serve in that shitty little snack-bar.”
I thought that might make her laugh, but it didn’t. Instead she bowed her head so she was lookin at the deck and said somethin, real low. With the sound of the wind and the engines, I couldn’t quite hear what it was.