March 2010 Archives

Something is wrong.

Hazel is clingy and weepy and miserable, like a sick child. I think she's actually sick at first, and when I feel her forehead she pulls away without the panic she used to. She lets me touch her now, though she never initiates it. I don't know what to make of it, whether she's allowing this because she doesn't feel well - it crosses my mind that she might be afraid to reach out.
I pull her close from time to time because it seems like she needs it. I do, too.

My best guess is that she feels guilty about what happened between Mia and me. This doesn't occur to me until Wednesday afternoon when I'm discussing the entire thing with a friend at work. Kelly listens sympathetically. "Look," she says. "Here's what I think."

Hazel is a teenager. She's been through a terrible time, everything she's told me and God knows what else. Hazel is all kinds of fucked up. "Not that that makes her a bad person," Kelly says. "She's a kid. She needs moral direction. She needs to know that you don't hate her for breaking up your relationship, because she probably blames herself."

That's plausible. Actually, it seems perfectly reasonable. After dinner I pack her into the car and we go to the Baskin Robbins at the mall, and sit outside eating ice cream cones in the car. It's easier to talk like this because there's nowhere to go.

When Russell got home that night he told me he was disappointed in me and grounded me again. I desperately wanted to talk to him about why I'd stayed at home, but I might as well run away again - the end result would be the same. I had no illusions about what would happen if Russell found out I had lied to him.

I paint this picture of horrible, oppressive guilt, but at this point I had tortured myself enough that I felt it fading a little more every day. I was always, always sorry, but it was easy to feel a little bit justified when he spent the entire Sunday with me, running around the Mission looking for a bite to eat at an ethnic restaurant and wandering into all the little shops up and down Valencia. It was a treat meant for him, not for me, and we spent a lot of time looking at things like hats and shoes, but I knew who he'd have been spending time with if Mia was still around. Instead he was with me, and the two of us sat together eating and talking, and I felt like somebody's kid, and for a little while, everything was right with the world.

It was the last good day before everything went to shit.

I had thought that having Mia gone would make me happy, but I was wrong. I had traded my fear of displacement for a lingering, overpowering guilt that renewed itself whenever Russell sighed or went to bed early. For a couple of days he didn't even feel like cooking, and we ate pizza from the box, so much that I got sick of it. We had pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I would have had appreciably less of it had I gone to school on Thursday and Friday, but Russell left earlier in the morning than I did, and he got home later in the day. Out of all three of us, I had suffered the least, but I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed, instead balling up under the covers until ten or eleven in the morning, not sleeping but feeling sick with remorse over the violence I'd done to my friend's relationship. I thought about calling Mia but decided against it - I was too scared. I knew what would happen. It would be easier to run away.

On Friday morning, I decided that that's what I would do.

I got out of bed at ten-thirty, after lying for three hours weighing my choices. I had tainted my home - even if I could begin to feel better about things, I'd always be scared that Russell would find out. Maybe I talked in my sleep, I thought. Maybe I'd accidentally slip and say something one night. Maybe twenty years from now I'd admit to the whole thing and he'd get upset and leave me. All these scenarios were completely unreasonable but I worried about them nonetheless. It would be easier to just write him a note and set it on the coffee table and take off for somewhere new - Santa Cruz, maybe, or Portland. I had read about its culture of street kids and decided that I might fit in there. I had done it before. This time I would know how to do it better.

Russell avoided Mia for two days, and the wait was excruciating. Bonnie and I had discussed every possibility and I'd felt reasonably safe that I'd never be found out, but remained unconvinced. So much was on the line. For example - what if they weren't using the condoms in the first place? That had obviously not been the case, but there were so many little ways that things could go wrong that I spent the next forty-eight hours on the edge of a nervous breakdown, unable to concentrate in school, going through possible scenarios in my head.

I think on some level I expected the whole thing to fail. On another, I wanted it to. I had felt guilty from the start, and if Russell found out, maybe I'd have the chance to come clean about other things, too. If he forgave me, I could stop lying to him.

Mia began calling the house on Wednesday. I listened to the messages when I got home from school. Where are you, Russell? Why aren't you picking up your cell? Is something wrong? Hazel, are you there? Will you call me? Her bewildered plea - to me - inspired a level of empathy I was surprised to feel, and disappointment that in short order, she would know how awful a person I was.

Russell listened to the answering machine when he got home, but he didn't call her. We ate leftover pizza by the light of the television, and I tried to think how to unburden myself of what I'd done. There was no, Ha ha! Just kidding! at the long end of a lie like this.

I don't know how long this might have gone on if Mia had not knocked on the front door in the middle of Wednesday night's rainstorm.

The sun is warm on my back as it sinks over the houses to the immediate west, so late in the day that it feels like high summer. Hazel does her homework at the kitchen table and I make us dinner, a stir-fry I've put together with leftover vegetables in the fridge. She will still eat anything I set in front of her. It's a nice evening, domestic, idyllic, and if you'd looked in the window you'd have thought we were a family.

She's seemed troubled all weekend, but I attribute this to Mia staying overnight on the Friday. I've been trying to give Hazel some space in the hopes that it will make her feel more comfortable - when she came home late on Friday I didn't say a thing to her.  She's proven herself trustworthy anyway.

When I turn she's put her pencil down and is staring out the window into the side yard.

"You okay?" I say.

"Yes. I don't know." She looks up at me with just her eyes; her face is still tilted down toward the table. It reminds me of the night she showed up at my door, and I realize with dismay that she's still somewhat afraid of me.

"What?" I say, because she looks like she needs to say something.

Hazel looks away, screws up her courage and turns back to me. "You know when you left to get stuff for breakfast on Saturday morning? And Mia and I were alone in the house?"

When I talked to Oliver on Thursday morning he said it was fine, but something had changed. He was more nervous, more concise. Even Bonnie noticed. I tried not to be hurt but it was just the latest thing - the relationships in my life were crumbling around me, and worse, I felt that I was the cause.

On Friday he took me aside.

"Look," he said. School had just gotten out, and we stood at the entrance to the parking lot. "I think maybe... I mean, it's not about that."

"You're breaking up with me," I said.

He just looked down at me, clearly uncomfortable.

"I'm the same person I was on... whatever. Tuesday. You just know a little more about me." I heard the pitch of my voice change. It wasn't so much about Oliver. I could have taken him or left him, honestly, but the insult of being left again was too much. I looked past him, toward the parking lot. "You know what, never mind. I thought I was doing a good thing by trusting you with that but maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it." I left him standing there, protesting that it wasn't about Wednesday, it wasn't anything to do with Wednesday, but we both knew that it was a lie.

Russell had counseled bravery, but Oliver didn't understand. It was warm for once, and we sat on the hill outside the high school looking down onto Eastmoor Avenue.

"Huh," Oliver said.

I had been hoping for appreciably more feedback than that. I had given the entire speech to my knees, and now I hugged them and glanced over at Oliver. "It's not you. My dad can't even...." And I trailed off. "This is kind of a way too personal conversation to be having at this point, huh."

"Just a little," he said. He reached up to scratch the back of his head. "So I can't even like... hug you."

"Just pretend I'm like Rogue. From X-Men."

"Oh."

An excruciating thirty seconds passed. I watched the cars drive by, knowing that in a few minutes, one of them would be Oliver's. "That'll probably change."

"Yeah," he said. He sounded like he was trying to be okay with it, but I could tell he wasn't.  He got up. "Look, I gotta go."

"...Okay." I wanted to stop him. He seemed like he didn't know how to process what I had told him. I hadn't meant it to be a big deal, but despite Russell's disappointment, it hadn't yet occurred to me that what had happened to me would ever affect anyone else.

I took my time walking home.

I told Bonnie about the conversation I had overheard, but it took me until lunch the following day because I knew exactly what she'd say. While she had tried to convince me a few days before that Russell wasn't about to kick me to the curb, I was afraid she'd change her mind and confirm my worst fears: That my days in the house on Southgate were numbered.

"Your days in the house on Southgate are numbered," Bonnie said.

She didn't really say that, but the expression on her face after I'd related the story told me all I needed to know. "...And Bonnie, he said 'We'll see,' that means he's thinking about it." I let my chin fall to the top of the cafeteria table and folded my arms over my head in despair. "I don't know what to do. He's going to get rid of me. I don't know how to make him not get rid of me."

My bedroom abutted the lush, tangled backyard, which had had grass once but had been overtaken by errant ice plant and other, native coastal scrub and weeds. A cypress stood untrimmed in the corner of the yard and ivy crawled up the side of a dead oak that stood tall and stately and truncated just at the level where the first branches might have begun. The grass was tall and impassible, and the overall state of the yard made me uncomfortable. It was a mess to be put into order, like the living room and the bathroom and the hall, but yard work presented a challenge that cleaning the house did not.

I asked Russell one day why he didn't do anything with the backyard. He shrugged and said it was a rental house. "And anyway," he said, "look out the window sometime, and tell me if you think what you see would feel quite as comfortable in a yard with a manicured lawn and trimmed oleander."

I didn't think much about what he meant until an evening two or three days into March when I heard a scratching sound outside my window and sat up in bed to see a spotted skunk digging for slugs by the waning moon. The backyard wildlife had been an idle preoccupation that I didn't think much about unless it was bedtime, and I could spend an hour on my knees on the bed, leaning on the windowsill and waiting for a barn owl or a raccoon to visit in the night.

When I presented my first discovery, he told me about ecosystems, and the next time we went to the beach, he went on about it some more. The whales and dolphins and sea lions out there in the ocean fed on the fish, check out the pelicans, Hazel, and I learned more about mercury and sand and seaweed than I thought there was to know. He pulled a drawer out of his desk and showed me a sheet of kelp forest stamps. It was a self-contained ecosystem, and while his backyard was only a tiny patch of Daly City, it was the home or on the route of several different kinds of native species. "If you want to do anything to it," he said, "pull up that ice plant. It's invasive. It was planted here a hundred and fifty years ago to keep the cliffs from falling into the sea, and it's taken over everything." Like cottontails and starlings and house cats and angry-looking house sparrows. I was not so much interested in the diversity of the animal life, but the idea that those animals could make a living on slugs and forage was fascinating. I wondered what it would be like to pry mussels from a rock with a screwdriver for your lunch or dive for seaweed and abalone in the cold Pacific ocean.

"You have to stop lying to him," Bonnie said.

We sat under cover of the hall outside the gym with our lunches, watching the rain pour over the parking lot outside. I was feeling somewhat attacked. Over the weekend I had begun to justify my lies, at least to myself, and reasoned that it wouldn't matter. Russell wouldn't find out anyway - it's not like my mother was going to come and get me. "If I could, I would. You know, I told him that first lie before he was anything to me."

"Why?"

"I don't know." Somehow it had been more appealing - certainly, telling Russell my mother had died was less painful than the reality: She didn't want me. But I'm not sure I knew all that at the time, and I was certainly aware of my limited ability to explain it to Russell in a way he'd understand. "It doesn't matter. He's not going to find out anyway."

"What if you forget part of your story and he remembers it?"

"I never talk about it anyway."

"What if you get hurt and something happens and they identify you? And Russell finds out that your real name isn't even Hazel?"

"God," I said. "I don't want to think about it."

"Are you going to marry Mia?"

The morning was cold and cloudy, and I wasn't ready to be awake, but missing an outing with Russell wasn't worth a few hours of extra sleep. Seven o'clock had reared its ugly head and I dragged myself out from under the covers, pulled some clothes on and climbed into the car with him. We drove up 280 until it regurgitated us on a city street, and as we drove, the street turned into my former home. It was the first time I had been back to Ferry Park.

"What kind of question is that?" Russell said.

"I dunno. You seem to spend a lot of time with her." It came out sounding like a guilt trip, but it wasn't. I just wanted him to know that I liked spending time with him, too. "I thought you were maybe, like... getting serious or something."

He glanced down at me in an expression that world-wise adults so often seemed to reserve for children; had his lips been moving he might have commented on the charm of my naivete. What did I know about getting serious? As it turned out, not much: "I've known her for three months, Hazel. That's not long enough to get serious about anyone." He paused. "Or, I should say, that's not enough time for me to get serious about anyone."

"Three months is a long time," I said.

Russell's love life was progressing with fewer upsets than my own. I didn't see much of Mia, and I don't know if he took special care to keep her away or if things just turned out that way. He grew calmer and more content, and the little things I did didn't bother him so much when he'd spent an evening with her. I was violently jealous of Mia's effect on him, and uncomfortably aware of it. I wished a terrible car accident or a new lover on her with an emulsion of vindictiveness and guilt - guilt not for wanting Mia dead but for wanting to take her away from him. I began to worry that her presence was making me redundant. It played out too easily in my head, them getting serious, finding a house to move into together, and Russell sitting me down at the kitchen table to tell me firmly that there was no room for me in his life anymore, that he had made arrangements with the appropriate authorities to have me sent to a foster home. I ran through that scenario over and over until it was not just conjecture but inevitability, and tortured myself at night with it, before falling asleep in a pillow damp from scared tears.

I had to do something about it. I tried to be good and for the most part I succeeded. I kept the living room clean and did the dishes and tried to make the house nice enough and clean enough that all he'd have to do when he got home was make dinner, which he enjoyed doing anyway. I asked him for homework help and we had long conversations about his days in school and what good this or that had done him in real life. I tried to get good grades to show him just how much good he was doing me by letting me stay here. I paid attention in English and brought home insight on some of his favorite books. I think he liked that.

His birthday was on March 4th, and that afforded me the perfect opportunity to do something to make him feel special. I had little enough money, but a few hungry lunches at school and I had enough to buy him a cake (I wouldn't dare try to make one on my own); the real problem was what to do about a gift. I consulted Bonnie.

What happened with Oliver and me on Saturday evening was not as I had represented it to Russell, but that was hardly my fault. In the heat of the moment, suffering from mental convulsions that rocked me back and forth between New Year's Eve and the present, where the picture on the big screen wasn't much better, I had risen from my seat, stumbled into the aisle in the flickering dimness of the theater and descended the stairs toward the exit, while Oliver spared me barely a glance, believing me to be under the influence of either a troubling stomach problem or an overwhelming need for confections.

I found out about this on Monday morning, when we met by our lockers and I tried to ignore him. I didn't know whether to feel angry or humiliated, and I settled for a combination of the two, shooting him a look that I fancied could have caused paint to coil in fear, and then looking away with disappointment. Oliver failed to catch the various meanings I was trying to communicate.

"Where the fuck did you go on Saturday?" he said. It was like having Russell yell at me, only with less teeth. He sounded more wounded than angry. "You just left."