I find my mother on the back porch, which my father once screened in with loose netting and a staple gun. She has a cup of tea. Black tea, I already know. It’s one of the few things she kept from her culture. She doesn’t move when I come in, her gaze distant. I lean down and give her a kiss on the dry papery texture of her cheek.
“You stink,” she says without rancor.
She hates the smell of coffee, though of course she never mentions that to my father when she prepares his Folgers every morning.
“I know,” I say, not taking offense.
“Did you go to the circus?” she asks.
I hadn’t gotten home until late, but then that’s normal. “Everyone did.”
Everyone doesn’t include her.
She came to this country when she was only a child, and she resented her parents’ foreign accents and weird-smelling food. As a teenager, she shed every part of her heritage and embraced nightclub culture. Short skirts and heavy makeup.
Sometimes when I was little and my dad was at work she’d turn on Madonna and we’d both dance in the living room barefoot. Rebelling against her parents landed her in an Americana-themed prison, a place of shiplap Live Laugh Love signs and little tolerance for black tea.
And I knew without anyone having ever told me, that I was the turn of the key. A woman didn’t have many options, but a pregnant woman? Even less.
“I might go again tonight. Come with me.”
“Bessie says they all do drugs there.”
Bessie is one of her few friends, in the way that a spider befriends a fly as it wraps loop after loop of its string. “Good. Maybe they’ll share.”
She gives me a look of censure, and I see myself in the reflection of her dark eyes, my rebellious youth and my future cage wrapped up in one. I also see the hint of purple at her temple. I reach out, but she yanks her head back, and looks away again, staring into space. Not a random stare, then. Not this time. She’d been avoiding showing me her right side.
“Mom.”
No answer.
God, how many of the women in this town are hiding bruises? All of us? Fuck. “What if we leave? Right now. Pack bags. Get on a bus. Just you and me.”
She gives a dismissive snort. “I’m too old for buses.”
What she really means is that Dad would find us. He would destroy everything then, even these small moments with her tea. “Then at least let’s go to the circus. We could share a funnel cake. He doesn’t have to know.”
“He’d find out.”
The words are barely a sound, but they’re loud enough to make me flinch. Of course he would. Someone would tell him. Someone would tell him about the terrible debauchery of his wife at the circus, of fried dough and powdered sugar, of five dollars spent in pursuit of happiness. And he would hate it. He would punish her. And if I wasn’t very careful, he would punish me.
I stand with a sigh. There are only a few hours to sleep before he comes back from work. Then I’ll be out of the house again. Will I use that VIP ticket in my pocket? Maybe. Maybe not.
Either way, I won’t be home when he’s here and awake.
My mother grasps my wrists and holds me tighter than I’m expecting, hard enough to hurt. She doesn’t look at me when she grinds out the words. “If you ever get the chance to leave, Sienna Mae, leave. Don’t worry about me. And don’t look back.”
“Mom.” I think about all the times I’ve wanted to leave. When I would dream about running away from home. When I turned eighteen and pulled up every Craigslist rental in Austin. The way my father promised to find me and kill me if I ever left. And then he’d kill my mother.
Don’t worry about me. And don’t look back.
She looks at me, giving me that dark glass mirror, the whisper of my future. It makes me shiver.
“Promise me.”
My wrist throbs. “I promise.”
She lets me go and takes a serene sip of tea. I’m already forgotten.
CHAPTER FOUR
Every cell in my body warns me not to go into the tent.
A lighted sign proclaims Wonders from Around the World. You must see them with your own eyes to believe! Instead of the standard red and white, this tent is made from a plethora of jewel tones—an earthy brown, a deep sapphire, a dark ruby.
Fairy lights zig zag over the front, providing an illuminated entrance.
“You owe me,” Maisie says.
“I just don’t understand why they even have freak shows. In this day and age are we still going to be shocked by a bearded lady and a little person?”
“First of all, in Forrester?”
“You’re right. Of course we will.”
“More importantly, you don’t know that is what’s inside.”
“Right. I’m sure it will be ten thousand percent politically correct.” I’m reminded of Logan’s frustration with the protesters who wanted to protect a lion from having to turn a circle to get a sirloin steak. Meanwhile, people could be injured or paraded for public enjoyment.
“We’ll just go inside,” Maisie says. “We don’t have to stay long if it sucks.”
From the front, it looks like a smaller tent, but it goes back a ways. I’m imagining dark corridors with “freaks” held behind bars. Or maybe they jump out and scare you. “This isn’t going to be like the Hole, is it?”
The Haunted Hole runs every year in October by the community center. Inevitably the girls get felt up in the dark. The last time I went through I confronted a bloody clown. When I pulled off his rubber mask he turned out to be an oversized eighth-grader who started crying.
Shit like that is how I got a reputation for being a bitch, but he’s the one who squeezed my ass.
Maisie frowns. “It’s probably not like the Hole. But if it is, we’ll just punch people.”
“You mean I’ll punch people, and you’ll cower behind me until we get out.”
“Obviously, but you owe me for bailing on me yesterday. I had to listen to Mary Beth talk about her torrid love affair with Jesus for like an hour.”
I sigh. “It’s disturbing.”
“She talks about him in her bed. I’m honestly afraid to find out who’s really there. You also wouldn’t tell me what happened with Kyle and the assholes.”
“Because it’s not interesting. But fine. Let’s go.”
“Good.” She immediately flashes two Admit One passes. “I already got us tickets.”
We give our passes to the woman out front and immediately enter a dark hallway.
It opens into a wide room containing creepy wax figures of famous people, from Benjamin Franklin to Madonna. I snap a picture of Maisie giving bunny ears to Rihanna. The room is surprisingly cold. They must have mobile air conditioning units to keep the wax from melting. There are other pieces of interesting art, including a portrait of Madonna made from uncooked beans and a landscape made entirely from braided pieces of colorful gum wrappers.
Next up is a room of curiosities filled with cabinets with thin, glass-covered drawers. Inside there are fossils, pinned butterflies, and a few terrifying-looking taxidermies. Creepy but small.
And vaguely interesting, I’ll give it that much.