Home Again

Her mother had hated the haircut, of course. Like Billy Idol, Lina. Do you really want to look like Billy Idol?

The truth was, her mother couldn’t have paid her a higher compliment and, besides, today was the perfect day to look like Billy Idol.

It was Lina’s sixteenth birthday, and she was ready to make some trouble. Heck, she was itching for it.

Because there was only one present she wanted to receive—and when she asked for it, a truckload of turds was gonna hit the fan.

She reached inside her leather biker jacket and pulled out a crushed pack of Marlboro Lights. She lit one, then took a long drag. Her lungs burned and she coughed, but it was worth it.

Mom hated it when she smoked.

Smiling, she sauntered up the brick pathway, through the Martha Stewart-perfect front yard, toward the white farmhouse with the huge wraparound porch. It stood alone at the end of the street, this house that had once been in the middle of a hundred acres of farmland. Now it was the only old-fashioned home on a street of cookie-cutter tract houses. As always, every bush and tree was precisely trimmed, and the grass was a carpet of shaved green. Pots of autumn color lined the steps up to the porch.

The only thing that looked out of place in this picture postcard of suburban domesticity was Father Francis’s scruffy yellow Volkswagen bug sitting in the driveway. She noticed a new dent in the rusted front fender and wondered briefly who he’d nailed this time.

On the porch she paused, running a hand through her hair again. She knew she looked especially bad today—cheap and sleazy and in trouble—exactly the way she wanted to look. Three earrings in her right ear, four in her left. Blood-black lipstick and blue mascara. Skintight black Levi’s with a dozen fraying holes and a stained white men’s T-shirt.

She knew it was immature to dress this way just to irritate her perfect mother, but she didn’t care. It was a good enough reason. Everything she did was designed to get her mother’s attention. Doctor Hillyard, the Virgin Mary of medicine, who looked gorgeous after a ten-hour shift at the hospital and never seemed to do anything wrong. Every time Lina looked at her mother, she felt small and stupid and inept. It used to bother her, used to make her cry herself to sleep, wondering why she wasn’t more like her flawless mother.

But it had gotten so boring, all that crying and wanting and needing. This year she’d realized that she’d never be like her mom, and the realization had freed her. Lina stopped trying to get good grades and make good friends and do everything well. She had flourished in her rebellion, reveled in it.

After a while, though, even that wasn’t enough. And finally she had begun to understand what was wrong.

Daddy.

It was ridiculous that she thought of him in such childish terminology, but she couldn’t help herself. She remembered to the very day when she’d first started missing her father. Not in a vague I-wish-he-were-here way, but with a serious gnawing-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach sense of loss.

It had been in the sixth grade, a year before she started her period. She’d finally found the nerve to ask her mother about him, and Madelaine had looked startled at first, then she’d gotten a sad, faraway look in her eyes and said that he had left them long ago. That he wasn’t ready to be a father. But it had nothing to do with Lina, Madelaine said fiercely. Nothing at all.

Lina could still remember how that had felt, the loneliness of it.

Now, every time she looked in the mirror, she saw a stranger’s eyes, a stranger’s smile. With every day, she felt lonelier and lonelier, more lost.

It was then, that cold December of her sixth-grade year, when Lina realized she was alone in wanting her daddy, alone in thinking that something was wrong with her family. That was when things started to change with her mother. Lina had taken her questions to her bedroom, huddled with them, embraced them as she’d once snuggled with her teddy bear. A cold wariness settled between her and her mother, a watchful distance that seemed designed to deflect more questions.

Lina had cried herself to sleep so many nights. It felt as if she’d wept for him forever, this mysterious father who had never come for her, never asked about her, never called on her birthday.

She’d grieved until there was no grief left inside her, and then slowly, insidiously, she’d begun to think. Maybe he didn’t know about her.

Once the thought was planted, it took root. Lina fed it daily with the water of possibility, until one day she believed it. Wholly, completely. Her father didn’t know about her If he did, he’d be here, beside her, loving her, taking her places, buying her all the things Mom wouldn’t allow.

He wouldn’t demand so much of her, wouldn’t shake his head and cluck his tongue in disapproval when she asked for a tattoo. He’d answer her questions and comfort her. He’d let her stay at her boyfriend’s house all night.

Maybe he’d even hold her after a bad dream and let her just cry….

Clamping the cigarette between her teeth, she yanked the front door open and went inside. She tossed her coat on the rack and wandered down the airy hallway, turning in to the kitchen.

It was empty.

She took another burning drag off the cigarette and looked around, uncertain suddenly of what she should do. The kitchen table was draped in color and piled with packages wrapped in bright foil paper. In their midst was a white cake in the shape of a Harley-Davidson Low Rider. Balloons filled the small kitchen, winked at her from a dozen different locations—the backs of chairs, the chrome handle on the front of the stove, the refrigerator door. Big Mylar balloons that all read Happy Birthday.

There were sixteen candles on the cake—those silly pink twisty candles that came thirty to a box at Safeway.

Tears stung her eyes, blurring the cake and tablecloth into a white-and-red-checked smear. Angry with herself, she wiped at the moisture with the back of her hand and spun away from the table.

What was wrong with her? Who looked at a stupid old cake and wanted to cry?

But she knew what it was. Her mother had tried to put up the right balloons, buy the right cake. Lina had no doubt that her mom had agonized over every present.