When My Heart Was Wicked Read online

  When I moved in with my dad and Anna three years ago, I was a different girl. Hard and scared, with chopped-off hair and black eyeliner. I wore a bomber jacket even in the summer. I’d stolen it from a park bench while its owner played on the grass with his little kid, and with it on, I felt like I was invisible.

  My dad and Anna planted me a moon garden of angel’s trumpets, white roses, and larkspur and cosmos. The flowers climbed a series of posts like a teepee, and I’d sit beneath the garden at night. Once my eyes had adjusted to the dark, the flowers would seem to glow and float like pale lightning bugs in the sky. The world finally felt like it was beginning to slow down. I remembered how to breathe.

  The wind picks up throughout the afternoon and into the evening. I go outside to sprinkle dried angelica around the four corners of our property for additional protection, but the herbs scatter in the wind and blow away almost immediately. It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t feel safe from my mother if we lived behind castle walls woven through with protection herbs and spells, behind a moat filled with deadly alligators. She’d find her way in. She always does.

  I sit at my desk and attempt to do word problems. At least I know that soon Anna will take me out for dinner, and then I’ll be able to breathe without hyperventilating, even if only for an hour or so. Here at home I can feel my mother’s energy rolling like a toxic fog through the rooms. The smell of her perfume has infiltrated the cracks in the walls. I feel her everywhere. I can’t seem to catch my breath.

  I’m still on word problem number one when Anna taps with her fingertips on my open door.

  “Are you about ready?” she asks.

  “Let’s go,” I say. I don’t even bother to close my book. I leap up and grab a sweatshirt, and then we’re downstairs and out the door.

  We walk downtown past some of my favorite places. The Senator Theater is a venue for concerts now, but in the old days it was a vaudeville house, with jugglers and animals and acrobats. At Ital Imports and Melody Records, you can buy actual records along with jewelry from Thailand, and incense and clothing from India and Guatemala. Jack’s is open twenty-four hours and the waitresses call you hon. When my dad would let me, I used to go late with my friends and we’d listen to the drunk college kids, who talked about nothing but how totally wasted they were.

  At the Bear, we order our food, then sit at our favorite table next to the Harry Potter pinball machine. “The Bear” is short for Madison Bear Garden, but no one calls it that. It’s like a big junkyard of wonderful things — the walls and ceilings are covered with old pictures and license plates and mechanical gadgetry like wheels and cogs and even full-size carriages from the olden days. Surfboards, torpedoes, a kayak. Anna says the door to the girls’ bathroom used to say MEN and the boys’ bathroom said WOMEN, only they each had a hand pointing to the other bathroom, and people would get confused and walk into the wrong room. But the signs aren’t like that anymore.

  To keep our minds off my mother, we are reading the funny fake ads on the menu. RAISE MOOSE IN YOUR BASEMENT says one ad, and Anna says, “We could hang our garden tools from the antlers.” Another ad for some kind of spyglasses says SEE YOUR NEIGHBOR NAKED CLOSE UP. We just eye each other. Bald and weird-eyed Mrs. Jouve? No, thanks. We’re sitting side by side, even though ordinarily we’d sit opposite each other. I know it’s silly, but I want to feel safely ensconced in my booth, where no one can snatch me up and take me away. Anna on one side of me, and on the other, a wall of protection: old yearbook rugby pictures of boys with strong arms and ghostly faces. A man’s voice booms from the loudspeaker, “Anna, come and get it. Your order’s ready, Anna!”

  “Do you want to come get it with me?” Anna asks, and even though I do, I shake my head. I’m not a child.

  Still, when she comes back with our food — cheese fries and a Caesar salad for her, a Bear burger with curly fries for me — I am relieved to have her weight beside me. I feel light and insubstantial, like the kids in the old Shel Silverstein poem who get snatched up by gypsies and carried off in pillowcases. I inhale everything on my plate. While I eat, I imagine myself growing heavier, like a great tree with giant roots. I cannot be moved. I cannot be carried away. I suck at my Coke until the liquid is all gone and I’m sucking on air. Anna watches me, holding a cheese fry dripping with cheese.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You were hungry,” she says.

  “I’m scared,” I admit, and she sighs.

  “I know.”

  From somewhere in the restaurant, a child starts to scream. The sound is so shrill the windows might break. The glass might come raining down on the Harry Potter pinball machine and pierce our skin. I flinch and brush my ear with my hand, as if that might push the sound away.

  “Tell me what she said,” I say.

  Anna takes a sip of her iced tea. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “It’s my life. I want to know.” I don’t mean to be rude to Anna, but sometimes I can’t help it. She thinks she can protect me from everything, but we learned when my dad died that isn’t true. She couldn’t protect me from that. She couldn’t protect me from the nightmares that followed, from the loneliness and regret for all the times I was a bad daughter to him. And she can’t protect me now. We both know it.

  “She says she’s been talking with her attorney. She’s on parole. And she swears she’s turned her life around. She heard about your dad.” Anna looks up and I bite the side of my lip. These are the things we do to keep from crying: I bite my lip, she looks up. “And now she wants you to go live with her. She has a new place.” I try to swallow, but my throat is dry. My heart might burst from my chest and fly away.

  “Where?”

  “Sacramento.”

  The stones in my stomach rumble and rise to my throat. Sacramento is where I’ve always lived with my mother. It’s where we lived before she left. I close my eyes, and when I do, I envision them strung out before me: apartment after apartment and the occasional hotel room, each one as dumpy and dingy as the one before it. I see the ugly sprawling city in which I was always lost. I remember empty streets, crumpled paper blowing past the feet of junkies and homeless people. Once when I was little, a homeless man picked me up and tried to put me in his shopping cart, but I screamed and kicked him in the stomach and he let me go. Where was my mother? The apartment building we stayed the longest in was always hot and it had a sweet smell like orange juice, which sounds nice but it was horrible and rancid. My mother wouldn’t give me a key to the apartment, so after school I’d have to stay at the park until dark, or sit under the stairs and trade bottle caps from my collection with the little boy in the building who was always trying to hide from his father.

  “But I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and live with you.”

  “I want that too, honey, I really do. But legally I have no recourse. She’s your mother. I’m just …” She’s just the stepmom, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she holds her palms open before her in the air. They are empty. She is nothing.

  “What about what I want? Doesn’t the law care about that?”

  Anna doesn’t answer. We have both been through enough by now to know that it does not.

  Across the room, a child’s good mother calmly quiets its cries. Her soothing voice only makes me cry harder.

  The trees are dark outside my bedroom window, but the moon lights the sky like a backdrop, and the trees teeter and seem to toast each other like people from a movie cocktail party. Anna’s wind chimes bang against one another hard, and the sound is low and empty. Maybe it’s drama to say they have an ominous tone, but my mood is already black and swirly like a night sky behind a castle in some other movie, one in which someone’s about to go mad. Maybe the house will fly away and I’ll land in a parallel universe, a time and place where my mother is happy and normal.

  In real life, she’s probably out there, out in this cold dark night. Spying on us once again. Watching through our windows. Waiting. Counting down. It is warm in
side my room, but I shiver uncontrollably, huddled beneath my blankets. Mr. Murm purrs softly.

  I don’t want to leave Anna. She’s the only person alive who loves me. She’s been married to my dad since I was seven, but they started dating when I was four. Up until three years ago, my primary residence was with my mom, but I’d come to Chico every other weekend and half of the summer. Anna is the one who held me on nights when I was in second grade and my mother didn’t come to pick me up from school, didn’t show up at all until eventually the school called my dad, who came to get me. He took me to his house and drove me back to school seventy miles each morning for a week until she suddenly reappeared. Anna is the one who helped me with my nightmares, teaching me to imagine myself a conqueror, to imagine the bad guys in goofy underwear and big clown shoes. After my dad died, she let me sleep in her bed with her for six nights until I told her I was ready to sleep alone. In spite of her own grief, she made me soup and hot chocolate, she knitted me a blanket and let me stay home from school for as long as I needed. She has become my home.

  And Chico is my home now too. I don’t want to leave Chico. It is the only town I’ve loved. I love the underwater caverns and tunnels at Bear Hole and the creek-fed swimming hole at Lower Bidwell Park. I love the oak trees and the stray cats who lie around in the sun, and outdoor Shakespeare in the summer, and the old Maidu Indian cave with the acorn-grinding pits carved into the rocks. It is springtime here, and the Thursday Night Farmers Market just started a couple of weeks ago. Anna and I have plans to get hennaed there; we have plans to go every Thursday. It was there last year that I found tiny little Mr. Murm sitting in a cardboard box and murming his sweet little song: “Please take me home.”

  In her room, Anna is watching a movie on her computer. I can hear occasional swells of heartbreaking music. I long to go in there, to curl up beside her on her bed, snuggle beneath the sheets, let her tell me the old stories of princesses and dragons, ones where evil lurks and strikes out, and good always wins in the end. But I don’t want my mother to see me choose Anna over her on this dark night. She’ll be angry.

  She is still out there. I know it.

  At school I am a wreck. Even chemistry fails to comfort me. I can’t concentrate, and when Mr. Ramsey asks me a question, I can’t answer because I don’t know the answer and I didn’t hear the question. I avoid Zach. I drop my books in the hallway and spill chocolate milk on my shirt.

  “Are you okay?” Mechelle asks after second period. I’m a mess. I know I’m a mess.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to tutor Zach,” I say, as though that is the only thing that matters. “If I’m not at school tomorrow, tell him to ask Shell to help him. Okay? Can you tell him that?”

  “Dude, you’re being cryptic. What’s going on?”

  “My mom came to my house yesterday. She wants me to move back to Sacramento with her.”

  “Oh no.” Mechelle moves closer and puts her arm around me. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand people being nice to me right now. I spin away and wait in the bathroom until the halls are clear. I’ll get a late mark from Madame Sussman, but I don’t care.

  If Cheyenne lets me stay with Anna, I will happily do whatever busywork Mr. Garcia wants me to do. I will solve three hundred algebraic equations every night. I will wash his dry-erase boards with my tongue. I will be a perfect stepdaughter and never make Anna wish she hadn’t ended up with me. I’ll do anything. Just let me stay with Anna. Just please, please don’t make me go live with my mother.

  After school, she is waiting for me by the drinking fountain under the line of Chinese pistache trees. She’s dressed like some kind of Indian princess rock star — jean shorts, fringy black vest, suede boots, and a few hunks of turquoise dangling from leather straps in her hair. Everyone always says how alike the two of us look, but it isn’t totally true. Her eyes are so dark they look purple, while mine are plain and brown. Her hair, black as ink, is naturally sleek and shiny; mine is dark brown with some ugly natural highlights, and it tangles very easily. The features we do have in common aren’t beautiful. Our eyebrows are too full, our noses too sharp. While I try to smile at everyone I pass, my mother scowls. Everyone always says how beautiful she is, but looking at her now, I think she just looks tired and mean.

  A lot of the boys are staring at her, and a couple of the dumb ones whistle. But she doesn’t even react. Once her eyes have found me, they don’t waver.

  “Cheyenne,” I say, walking straight up to her. Her eyes narrow, and I feel a small victory. The last time we were together, I still called her Mom.

  She puts her hands to my cheeks. A current runs between us; it always has. “Look at you. I hardly recognize you without the weird makeup and black hair. You’re beautiful, so grown up. Lacy, I’m so sorry about your dad.” Lie number one.

  “Are you?”

  “Of course.” Her eyes widen like I’ve hurt her, but I know it’s an act. Nothing hurts her. I could pierce her flesh with jagged glass and she would only throw her head back in laughter. “I thought your father was a wonderful man.” Lie number two.

  What’s it to you? I want to say. You broke his heart again and again. But I say nothing. I let her insincerity hover in the air between us.

  “I can see that you’re upset with me, Lacy. I’m sorry I had to leave you. But everything’s different now. I want to prove it to you.”

  “If you want to prove anything, then let me stay in Chico,” I say before I can stop myself. My eyes pool with tears of stupid desperation. “I want to stay here.”

  “Absolutely not.” Her eyes flash. She’s angry. I was too obvious. I wish I could take it back. “I’m your mother; you belong with me. Don’t tell me you’ve gotten attached to that woman.” She scoffs. “Listen, I know you like it here, but Sacramento is only an hour away. You’ll be able to come back here to visit your friends, and that woman too if you like. You remember Sacramento, don’t you?” She traces my jawbone with her fingernail. “You liked it. I have a new home there. It has a swimming pool and a little garden for you. I know you like planting things.”

  I don’t wonder how she knows that — she’s probably been watching us for days. But she doesn’t know the half of it. She taught me those weird spells when I was little, but now I can harvest plants to cure nausea, to make sleep come, to pull pain and poison from the skin. But I can’t stop time. I can’t make her stop wanting me back.

  “Please let me at least finish out this week of school.” I practically beg.

  “Negative. You’re coming tonight.”

  The first time Cheyenne ever took me butterfly catching, we sprayed our hands with sugar water so they’d land right on our skin. It was spring then too. We were on the way back home from my dad’s house in Chico, and we drove up to the very top of Table Mountain where the wildflowers were blooming. Everywhere you looked was color — the ground was yellow and purple and green; the sky was blue, and the air was filled with butterflies, big ones with orange-and-white wings. My mom handed me a yellow net — a small one made for a child. We ran through the fields, catching them in our nets and freeing them into glass mason jars. Afterward, we drank iced tea from a thermos as we drove back down the mountain to home. I held the jars in my lap, studying the slow flap of the butterflies’ wings, the way they flitted against each other, and I longed to hold them again on the tips of my fingers. I thought maybe she’d let me set them free in the bedroom we shared. They would give us such beautiful dreams.

  When we got home, she started melting beeswax in the double boiler. The kitchen smelled lovely, like springtime and candles. But then she opened a jar and lifted a butterfly out by its wing with tweezers, and she dipped it, still fluttering, into the melted wax. I screamed. I knew how it felt to be burned.

  Anna sits on my bed, rubbing Mr. Murm’s belly as he purrs, and staring at the ceiling while I pack dried herbs and essential oils into my patchwork overnight bag. The cloth handles are starting to fray, but it’s too late for me to ask
Anna to fix them. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not like I’m going to have any sleepovers at friends’ houses anytime soon.

  “I called your dad’s lawyer,” Anna says. “I have an appointment with her for Wednesday. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do, but I will try.”

  “I know, Anna,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “It’s just not fair,” she says, and for a moment she looks like a little girl about to throw a tantrum to get her way. Please, I silently beg, be strong, be the adult.

  “Well. Everything happens for a reason, right?” I say, pulling the quote out of the air. It’s something my dad always used to say. But is it true? If so, what was the reason for my dad dying? I shake my head. It can’t be true. It’s just that bad things happen. Bad mothers come back from the underworld, their sticky fingers snatching at their daughters. Little girls lose themselves, become bad. “Anna?” I sit beside her on my bed. Maybe Cheyenne is out there in the garden, maybe she’s looking through the window right now, but I don’t think so. I don’t feel her out there. Besides, she had said she’d be at the school for at least another hour, talking to my teachers and getting my paperwork in order. “I’m scared.”

  “Oh, honey.” Anna puts her arm around me, brushes my hair out of my eyes, and rests her chin on the top of my head. “If she hurts you, you call the police. And then you call me.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s that, when she’s far away, I feel like I can be the person I want to be.” Long ago, I decided Anna was a good role model for me, a person to hold up to the light. Anna who donates our garden’s surplus of organic veggies to the food bank, who teaches free knitting workshops at the women’s shelter. “As long as I’m with you, I can be good and do good things. But when I’m around her, I don’t like the person I become. I don’t want to be like her.”