The Gulf

DedicationFor Scott Contents CoverTitle PageDedicationPart I123456789101112Part II13141516171819202122Part III23242526272829AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorCopyrightAbout the Publisher Part I 1My mother must have thought I was either blind or stupid, the things she did in front of me. Deaf, too, maybe, considering what she’d say. Or maybe she just didn’t think about me at all. The older I get, the more I think this is the most true.Usually, if she had to address us kids, she’d talk to my older brother, Robby, instead of me: “Don’t come in the room unless I say so—and keep quiet, would you?” When she acknowledged me, though, it came as a remark aimed at someone else, an adult who had her full attention, some guy whose dim motel room would be our home for the weekend, some woman who’d come over late at night and leave first thing in the morning, tottering still high out to the bus stop. “Don’t worry about Lulu, she’s harmless,” my mother would say, or “Who’s Lulu gonna tell, her dolls?” as if I had any. In my memories of her—and there are plenty of them, stacked up like dishes overflowing a sink—I remember her talking directly to me only once, the night she left us. Dead of night. Aunt Cece’s front stoop, porch light extinguished. Nothing but my mother’s headlights to see by.“Just a few days, all right?” she’d said, aiming this at Robby, who nodded bravely, and something in that nod told me that he didn’t believe her. That I shouldn’t believe her, either. I must have started sniffling, because she crouched down in front of me, fixed those red-veined eyes on mine. “None of that, little girl. No one likes a woman who cries for attention.” Then, to Robby again, “Now, you just wait until you can’t see my car anymore, then you ring that doorbell. Your auntie will see you’re out here and bring you right in.” “What if she doesn’t?” Robby asked.“’Course she will,” she said, already turned away. “Who’d leave a couple of sweet-faced kids like you on a stoop in the middle of the night?” I guess I was six or so then, when we came to live in Parson, Texas. Would have been around 1945, right near the end of the war, a world of sugar rations and women being let go from their factory jobs, making way for the boys coming home haggard and rattled from the Eastern Front. After that night, I lived with Aunt Cece for over a decade, then got my own place in Parson after high school; Robby also stayed in the area, settled down young with a wife and a baby, until the draft board came knocking and he shipped out for Vietnam. Parson was home to me, much more than those seedy motel rooms with my mother. When I think of home and family, I think of the frying hog fat smells of Aunt Cece’s kitchen, the strains of Spanish music from her ancient radio, the soothing clank of her beaded necklaces when she drew me close in her arms. But somehow, though nearly a native of Parson, I grew up feeling like an outsider. Maybe it was those first years at Aunt Cece’s house, always keeping one eye on the window, half hoping and half dreading that I’d see my mother’s car pull up the driveway. Maybe it was all the lying to my classmates—how, to stay at Granbury High, the white school, I had to tell everyone that Aunt Cece was just our housekeeper, that my (real, white) mother was out of town; how this lie kept me from inviting friends over. Maybe it was just those first six years on the road, everywhere in Texas but here: Parson is that kind of town, brutal and inward, the kind to hold a girl’s first six years against her. All of this to explain why I was so drawn to Joanna Kerrigan when she came to school in fifth grade: she was so clearly more the outsider than I was. An aura of oddness, offness, radiated from her. Was it her ghost-pale skin? Her miniature hands? Her eyes as round as coins? She looked more like a porcelain doll sprung to life than a real girl. Even just standing there in the doorway that cloudy morning in 1951, her eyes averted from us, a thumb hooked under her satchel strap, she gave off the impression that she belonged to some other world, as if any second she might turn and disappear through a magical doorway. She made me think of the hidden entrance in The Secret Garden, or the wardrobe portal to Narnia in the new book Aunt Cece had bought me. In later days, after everything, I would think of Joanna in terms of the other, darker stories I grew up on, the ones about demon children, foundlings and changelings and babies who are born bad. The ones whose eyes don’t catch the sunlight, whose ravenous appetites start to shrink their mothers while they’re still inside, then suckle them to dust once they’re born. The night she came back into my life, I hadn’t seen Joanna for fifteen years, not since she moved from Parson in our freshman year of high school. I would have assumed her aura of strangeness had dulled over that time, but when I set eyes on her, now a woman in her late twenties, I snapped back to that initial sighting in fifth grade, the unshakable feeling that she didn’t belong here. The impression was so strong that, at first, I didn’t even feel my anger toward her, all the carefully tended rage of the intervening years. I felt only that original sense of wonder and captivation, of gravity’s pull. I had just stepped out for a smoke in the parking lot at Buck’s, the dockside bar I managed and helped tend. Not long ago, Buck’s had been the rowdiest place in town, but ever since the storm last summer it had