Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates

       2

      REPROACH LIKE AN ARROW leaping from the bow, aimed at my heart. Reproach in a voice of the lightest chiding, almost you’d mistake—if this were a TV comedy, if you were an unseasoned viewer—for playfulness, mischief.

      “You were with him, Krista. Weren’t you.”

      My mother did not emphasize him. In the light-chiding TV-Mom voice “him” was flat as concrete.

      Nor was her query a question. It was a statement: an accusation.

      “You could have called, at least. If you weren’t going to take the bus. If you’d given a thought to anyone except yourself—and him. You’d have known that—”

       That I was worried. Or if not worried, offended.

       A mother’s pride is easily hurt, don’t mistake a mother’s love as unconditional.

      Breathless from my dash through the rain and indignant, straggly-haired I kicked off my boots, fumbling to spike my jacket on a hook by the door half-hoping it would tear. A spiffy purple faux-silk jacket with cream-colored trim I’d quite liked when it was new not so very long ago but now had come to think looked cheap and too hopeful. I was avoiding confronting my mother for I did not want to have to respond to the accusing look in her eyes, a commingling of relief—for truly she’d been worried about me, not having known where I might be—and mounting anger. In the square-cut window above the kitchen counter, that my father had constructed, as he’d rebuilt much of the kitchen, our reflections appeared close together by a trick of perspective; yet you could not have identified either of us, even which was mother, which daughter. In a voice of deceptive calm my mother said, “Krista, at least look at me. Were you—you were, weren’t you?—with him?”

      And now it was him. Now, unmistakably.

      A strap of my backpack had become tangled in my feet. I kicked it aside, my face was smarting. Near-inaudibly I murmured Yes for I could not lie to my mother who so knew my mutinous heart, and, when she asked what I’d said, guiltily I repeated, defiantly: “Yes. I was with—Daddy.”

      Daddy was a little-girl word. Ben had not uttered Daddy in years.

      “And where were you, with ‘Daddy’?”

      “Just driving. Nowhere.”

      “‘Nowhere.’”

      “Along the river. Nowhere special.”

       But yes it was special. Because it was just Daddy and me.

      Betrayal is the hurtful thing. Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

      My mother’s name was Lucille. No one called her “Lucy.” An acute consciousness of her authority—now, the vulnerability of her authority—seemed to grip her, to bedevil her, at such times, increasingly as I grew older; to the most casual of exchanges she brought a mysterious demand that seemed never to be fully satisfied. Since Lucille’s husband—now her former husband—who was my father—had left us for the final time, or—this had never been clear to me, or to Ben—had been made to leave us, this demand had grown ever more insatiable.

      “‘Nowhere’ would have to include a stop for drinks, yes? You must be forgetting that part.”

      “Well—” I’d disentangled the strap from my feet, I had no reason not to look at my mother standing close beside me. “That country place on route thirty-one, by the Rapids bridge…”

      “The County Line. He took you there?”

      My mother’s eyes shone like copper coins. For she had me now, she would not readily surrender me.

      “Why didn’t you call me, Krista? If you were in a place with a phone? You must have known I’d be waiting for you.”

      “I did call, Mom. I tried…”

      “No. I was here, I’ve been home since four-fifteen. I would have heard the phone ringing.”

      “Mom, when I called the line was busy. Two or three times I tried, the line was busy…”

      This was true: I’d tried to call my mother from the County Line. But I’d only tried twice. Both times the busy signal had rung. Then I’d given up, and I’d forgotten.

      Now my mother was saying, conceding: maybe she had been on the phone, for just a few minutes. Maybe yes she’d missed my call. “I called Nancy’s number”—Nancy was a classmate of mine who lived in Sparta, at whose house I sometimes stayed overnight—“to see if you were there, or if Nancy knew where you might be. She didn’t.”

      “Mom, for Christ’s sake! Why’d you call Nancy.”

      “Krista, don’t use profanity in my presence. That’s crude, and that’s vulgar. Your father might say ‘For Christ’s sake’—and a lot worse—but I don’t want to hear such words in my daughter’s mouth.”

       Fuck, Mom. Such words are all I have.

      My heart beat in resentment that in my mother’s eyes I was still a child when I was certain I had not been a child in a long time.

      “How badly was he drinking? Was it bad?”

      “No.”

      “And he was driving. Was he—drunk?”

      I turned away. I hated this. I would not inform on my father any more than, to my father, I would have informed on my mother.

      We’d blundered out of the warm-lit kitchen of shiny maple wood cupboard doors on brass hinges and a countertop of pumpkin-colored Formica, into a shadowy, always musty-smelling alcove by the stairs to the second floor. As in an aggressive dance my mother seemed to be pushing close to me. Breathing into my face with a smell of something sour, frantic.

      Lucille didn’t drink: but Lucille had her prescription medication with the unpronounceable name: “Diaphra”—something.

      “Where are you going so quickly, Krista? Why are you in such a hurry to get away from me?”

      “Mom, I’m not. I have to use the bathroom. My clothes are wet, I want to change my clothes.”

      “He made you run through the rain? He didn’t even bring you up to the house?”

      “There’s an ‘injunction’ against him, Mom. He’d be arrested, coming onto this property.”

      “He should be arrested, violating the custody agreement. Picking you up at school—I assume that’s what he did—without my permission or knowledge. He should be arrested for drunk driving.”

      I was trying to smile, to placate her. Trying to ease past her without touching her for I feared that her touch would be scalding.

      It was so frequently a surprise to me, a sick-thrilling sort of shock, that my mother was not so tall as she’d once been. For by magic I had grown taller, and more reckless. My hard little breasts were the size of a baby’s fists but the nipples were growing fuller, a deep berry-color, and sensitive; I now wore these breasts tenderly cupped in a white cotton “bra” size 32A. I wore white cotton panties with double-thick crotches. Every four weeks or so I “menstruated”—a phenomenon that filled me with a commingled rage and pride, and anxiety