The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(32)
Dear Phoebe,
My dad found out about the play and he gave me the belt, and I’m grounded for the rest of the week. I am so sad! I’m going to miss your entire visit and I won’t be able to do the play, and I HATE HIM SO MUCH!
One of these days, I’ll get away from him, I swear.
I am so so so so so so sad about the play.
Love,
Suze
PS Write everything down for the whole week and leave it with Amma so I can read it when I’m free. Love you. Have fun with Joel. He’s such a nice guy. (I think you like him, and that’s okay.)
“What is it?” Amma asked.
I raised my head. “Suze landed the lead in a play, Anne Frank, and her dad found out and gave her the belt and grounded her.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “This is so unfair! She never gets to do anything. Her dad is so mean!”
She reached out and took my hand. “He is mean. He is a terrible man, Phoebe, and there are a lot like him in the world. There is nothing you can do for Suze right now except be there for her when you can.”
“Can you do something?”
She took a breath. “I do what I can, honey. I’ll keep doing that, I promise.”
CURRENT DAY
Chapter Ten
Suze
I remember a Sunday school class in some church or another. The details of the place are murky. All the churches blurred together after a while, sanctuaries and basements and pulpits and kitchens melding in a single memory file. Sunday school rooms boasted kid-size chairs and scarred tables and coloring pages of Jesus and the disciples. We sang songs and memorized Bible verses, and it was a happy place, cutting things out to glue on paper, using crayons to explore the lesson of the day. Bible verses still float through my mind at the oddest of times: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness.” “Love one another.” “The greatest of these is love.” And one that singsongs through with power, though I would almost swear my dad never uttered it because it was too positive: “Our God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think.”
Those were never the verses my father focused on in his sermons, which I assumed was a function of adults versus children. The grown-ups got the serious stuff, the harsh judgments and fiery admonitions, while the children learned about Jesus and love and kindness.
In this particular Sunday school class, my young, pretty teacher showed us a photo of Jesus as a brown man. He gazed kindly from a painting I now realize was a version of the Catholic Sacred Heart of Jesus. But for me, in that moment, it was the friendliest version I’d ever seen. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, and right then, Jesus became my friend.
All at once, I understood that this kindly God could keep me company and listen to my worries and prayers and even sleep next to me at night when I was afraid. My mother must have already died, because I missed her the most at night, when I felt the emptiness of her death pressing into my room, ready to smother me. I asked the teacher if Jesus could stay with you while you fell asleep, and she said, “Oh, of course, Suzanne! What a wonderful idea, to talk to Jesus while you fall asleep.”
That was it for me. Jesus of the big brown eyes and happy smile was my constant companion. I imagined that he strolled along beside me to school, double-checking when I crossed the street to make sure I didn’t get hit by a car (which had happened to a girl in our class—she had not returned to school, though she hadn’t died). He sat with me during lonely sandwich suppers while my dad worked on his latest sermon, and when I fell asleep, I imagined Jesus held me, stroking my hair the way my mother had, once upon a time. Sometimes, Jesus sang to me.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t protect me from my father, and in my fury, I turned my back on that comforting prophet. Even Beryl’s gentle religion couldn’t penetrate when I returned to Blue Cove.
As I sit in my kitchen looking out to a restless gray ocean, I can press my fingers into the ache the loss of my religion left behind. An REM song rolls through my memory, a song that wrecked me the first time I heard it.
Now I think about the man at the restaurant. The men who attacked me.
Was I too outspoken, too harsh, when I spoke out against the LNB? Maybe. I knew they’d killed Nadine Truelove, a freshman senator from California who had vowed to stand up to them.
But when I was a broken teenager, shamed and hidden away, I’d vowed to stand up for other girls. I promised myself that I’d never stand by in silence.
So I speak up. Against the Taliban, against Tea Party radicals, and yes, against the LNB, a radical white-supremacist sect out of the mountains of Colorado.
The day of the interview when I got myself in such hot water, we had pulled out of Afghanistan, and the country was falling to the Taliban in record time. Days. I kept thinking about all those girls, all those girls, six-year-olds and teenagers and earnest writers and budding scientists, girls who’d been happy about school and learning things and getting ready to take their places in the world—all sidelined, swept out of schools, suddenly forced to stay at home.
Every last one of them wore Jasmine’s face in my mind. Jasmine, who carried around a little notebook to write things down, who wrote geography reports just for herself, who loved to read.
Jasmine. What a fierce little being she is! I don’t remember where I was when Stephanie was born. Traveling somewhere with some movie. Those were the years when I worked pretty much all the time, going from filming to promotion to pre-production on one movie after another, twelve in fourteen years.