"I'll leave," Carolee said. "You bet I will."
"You leave, you are never coming back, missy."
"Who'd the fuck want to?" Carolee said.
She slammed into our room, opening drawers, pulling stuff onto the bed, cramming what would fit into a flowered suitcase. "Bye, Astrid. It's been real."
Davey and the little boys were waiting in the hall, scared, blinking from sleep. "Don't go," Davey said.
"I can't stay. Not in this nuthouse." Carolee gave him a quick one-armed hug and went out, banging her suitcase against her knee. She walked right past Ray and Starr, never turning her head, strode out of the yard on her high heels and walked down the road, smaller and smaller.
I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay.
WHEN CAROLEE LEFT, Starr lost something essential, something she needed, like a gyroscope that kept the plane from flipping over or a depth gauge that told you whether you were going deeper or coming up. She might suddenly want to go out dancing, or stay home and drink and complain, or get all sweet and sloppy and want to be a family and play games and cook brownies that burned, and you never knew which it would be. Peter didn't eat her casserole one night and she took his plate and turned it over on his head. And I knew it was my defiance, my sin. I took it all, never said a word.
If only I hadn't started with Ray. I made her go off her program. I was the snake in the garden.
But knowing it wasn't enough to make me stop. I had the virus. Ray and I made love in the new houses, we made love in his woodshop behind the garage, sometimes even in the wash among the boulders. We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.
THEN ONE DAY Starr was yelling at the boys for their mess in the living room, some plastic lizards and Legos and an exhibit Davey was working on. It was a painstakingly accurate model of Vasquez Rocks and the fossils he'd found there on a field trip with his class, turritella shells and trilobites from the Cambrian era. Starr threw toys and puzzles and then marched over to Davey, lifted her foot and crushed his project in two fast stomps. "I told you to clean this crap up!"
The other boys ran out the screen door, but Davey knelt by his ruined exhibit, touching the crushed shells. He looked up, and I didn't have to see his eyes behind his glasses to know he was crying. "I hate you!" Davey yelled. "You ruin everything! You can't even comprehend!"
Starr grabbed him, started hitting him, holding him by one arm so he couldn't get away, screaming, "Who do you think I am? Don't you call me stupid! I'm your mother! I'm a person! I can't do all this by myself! Have some respect!"
It started as a spanking, but it turned into just a beating. The little boys had run away, but I couldn't. This was because of me.
"Starr," I said, trying to pull her off. "Don't."
"You shut up!" she screeched, and threw me off. Her hair was in her face, her eyes white all the way around the pupil. "You have nothing to say, you hear me?"
Finally she stumbled away, crying into her hands. Davey just sat by the devastation of his project, and I could see the tears rolling down his face. I crouched next to him, seeing if there was anything that could be salvaged.
Starr opened the Jim Beam she'd started keeping in the cabinet with the breakfast cereal, poured herself a glass, threw in a few ice cubes. She was drinking right in front of us now. "You just can't talk to people like that," she said, wiping her eyes, her mouth. "Little shit."
Davey's arm hung at a funny angle. "Does your arm hurt?" I asked softly.
He nodded, but he wouldn't look at me. Did he know, could he guess?
Starr sat on a molded kitchen chair, slumped with exhaustion after the beating. Sullen, drinking her booze. She took a cigarette from the gold package and lit it.
"I think it's dislocated," Davey said.
"Whine, whine, whine. Why don't you go somewhere and whine."
I filled a bag with ice, put it against Davey's shoulder. It looked bad. His mouth was all puckery. He never whined.
"He needs to go to the hospital," I said, afraid, trying not to sound accusing.
"Well I can't drive him. You drive him." She fumbled in her purse for the keys and threw them at me. She had forgotten I was only fourteen.
"Call Uncle Ray."
"No."
"Mom?" Davey was sobbing now. "Help me."
She looked at him, and now she saw the angle of his arm, the way he held it out by the elbow in front of him. "Oh Lord." She ran over to Davey, knocking her shin into the coffee table, crouched by her son where he sat on the couch, holding his arm. "Oh, mister, I'm sorry. Mommy's sorry, baby." The more she thought about it, the more upset she got, running at the nose, trying to comb his hair back with her awkward hands, making jerky, meaningless gestures. He turned his head away.
She crossed her arms across her chest, but low, more toward the belly, and huddled next to the couch on the floor, rocking herself, hitting her forehead with her fist. "What do I do, Lord, what do I do?"
"I'm calling Uncle Ray," I said.
Davey knew the number, recited it while I called him at the new houses. Half an hour later, he was home, his mouth set in a thin line.
"I didn't mean it," Starr said, her hands in front of her like an opera singer. "It was an accident. You've got to believe me."
Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything.
EASTER. A pure crystalline morning where you could see every bush and boulder on the mountain. The air was so clean it hurt. Starr was in the kitchen fixing a ham, pushing little points of cloves into the squares she'd scored into the top. She'd been sober for two weeks, taking a meeting a day. We were all making an effort. Davey's sling was a constant reminder of how bad it could get.
Starr put the ham in the oven, and we all went to church, even Uncle Ray, though he stayed behind in the car for a minute to get stoned before he came in, I could smell it as he passed by me to take the seat between Owen and Starr. Her eyes begged Reverend Thomas for a dose of the Blood. I tried to pray, to feel once again that there was something bigger than just me, someone who cared what I did, but it was gone, I could no longer detect the presence of God in that cinder-block church or in what was left of my soul. Starr yearned toward the sagging Jesus on the pearwood cross, while Uncle Ray cleaned his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife and I waited for the singing to start.