Forbidden

FORBIDDEN

Part One: Chance

Middleton, Oklahoma – Saturday, June 17, 1995

6:30 a.m.

W
ade was late picking her
up, so Bryce was already in a shitty mood when Michelle got home. Through the open kitchen window she heard the familiar clunk of her mother's car being put into park. Bryce tilted her can past 45 degrees to catch the last drops of beer, the only available breakfast in the trailer, before stuffing the evidence deep in the overflowing trash can.

Not that Michelle cared so much; Bryce was nearly 21 years old and as Michelle often reminded her, she'd had a three-year-old daughter by that age. A statement that by now no longer set Bryce's lips in a grim line and made her renew a decade-old vow to get the hell out of Middleton, where she'd resided in Michelle's ash-gray doublewide since before her first steps. So far she had yet to manage making it out of Wagon Box Trailer Court, let alone her hometown. The Oklahoma state line may as well be on the moon; she had as likely a chance to reach either at the moment.

That's not my fault! Maybe you shouldn't have been having sex that young!

Michelle had slapped her across the face for screaming those words, around the Thanksgiving of seventh grade, the year she'd grown courageous enough to confront her mother directly, the year she'd met Wade, not too long before Michelle attempted suicide for the first time in their tiny bathtub. Scrubbing the blood from the grout lines of the faded blue tiles had been Bryce's job, and had been next to impossible.

The sun, moments ago hidden beneath the horizon, had hemorrhaged up and into the clouds lying low on the eastern plain and cast a dull red glow over the glasses piled in the sink. Michelle slammed the car door and Bryce heard her steps begin, then pause, and seconds later the scent of her cigarette preceded her into the kitchen.

“Hi,” Michelle muttered around the filter in her lips. She worked the graveyard shift at Leo's Diner, Bryce the mid-morning. Her beige uniform, a limp twin to her daughter's, was decorated with the remnants of her night: a smeary array of colorful condiments, her maroon apron dangling from one hand like a limp dishrag.

“Hey,” Bryce returned, rising gracefully and fishing the keys from the purse on her lap. “Can I borrow the car? Wade's late.”

Michelle delicately flicked the ashes from her smoke into an empty can on the counter, then used her pinky nail to fish a bit of mascara from her right eye, her dark eyeliner too stark against the skim milk of her face. She considered a moment longer without directly meeting her daughter's eyes. Just when Bryce figured she wasn't going to reply, Michelle exhaled in a cloud of smoke and muttered, “As long as you're home before 2:00.”

“Trish and I are first cut on lunch, so that's fine.”

Michelle nodded absently as she opened the fridge, seeming to have forgotten that nothing besides a six-pack of light beer adorned its wire shelves. Bryce clacked out the screen door into the early morning sun just as Wade's truck came rolling onto the cracked strip of concrete that separated their trailer from their neighbor Gayle's.

“Never mind about your car,” Bryce called over her shoulder and wrenched open the passenger door of Wade's truck, climbing into the cab under Wade's semi-apologetic gaze.

“What the hell?” she grumbled, tightening the band around her long ponytail. He lowered the volume on the radio before angling the truck back out onto the gravel road that wound like a lazy snake through the court. “Where've you been?”

“Jerry needed a ride,” was his answer, and reached to squeeze her left knee, bare beneath her tight beige uniform.

“Well hurry, please,” she said, scooting her leg away, in no mood to be touched. “Connie'll kill me if I'm late again.”

They rode the five miles in silence after that, the diesel engine growling along I-35 as the quality of the sunlight shifted gradually from burgundy to auburn and illuminated the prairie that stretched in quiet solitude to every horizon, an expanse of apparent emptiness. Bryce knew better.

As they reached the exit for Leo's, Wade asked, “You need a ride home?”

She glanced his way, met the familiar hazel eyes beneath the brim of his ballcap. Her friends didn't hate Wade, she knew, but wondered exactly what she saw in him; he was five years older, employed but residing in his mother's basement, and had been on her case about becoming his wife since early last winter. Bryce had grown weary of trying to explain how she was used to Wade by now, that he treated her pretty well and lived in a house with an actual foundation. And sometimes she liked the feel of his hair in her hands, the way he held very still on top of her for a few minutes after he came.

“No, Trish is bringing me home. We've got Amy's birthday party after work.” For a half-second a smile lifted one corner of her lips. “You wanna come?”

“Hell, no.” Wade, certain all had been forgiven, cranked the volume again, and she exited his truck to the pounding bass of his Van Halen tape.

“See you later, babe!” he called through his open window as he drove out of the parking lot. Bryce waved wordlessly, jogging to catch up with her best friend Trish, who was tying her apron as she walked.

“Morning, baby,” Trish teased her as they entered the diner under the familiar tingle of the bell tied above the door.

“Don't,” Bryce groaned in response. “Shit, there's no time for a smoke, is there?”

Trish glanced down the counter where their manager Connie sat, her hard-packed bulk perched uncomfortably on a stool, steaming coffee, two jelly donuts and about 30 pages of newspaper spread before her. She had coal-black hair chopped evenly with her jaw and narrowed eyes, which she turned pointedly to the clock. It was 6:56, and her look meant they better light a fire or watch out below.

“Morning, Con!” Trish called gaily. Stacy appeared through the swinging doors between the dining room and kitchen, her blond hair in two bouncy pigtails, all smiles as she refilled Connie's mug. Connie grunted her thanks over a bite of donut, and Trish and Bryce darted in back while her mouth was full.

Amy was on the phone outside the broom closet, leaning against a stack of cardboard boxes jammed full of coffee filters. She caught sight of them and hung up with a snap. “Hey, bitches, it's about time! I was just calling your house, Bry.”

“Happy birthday!” Bryce said, catching her friend around the waist for a quick hug.

Amy grinned, said, “I know, I can hardly wait for tonight.”

“Your present will be available after 3:00 today,” Trish added, tucking her long bangs behind one ear. “Bry and I are collecting it.”

“Sweet! You two rock.”

A minute later they hustled out and proceeded to serve coffee, bacon and eggs over-easy to the breakfast crowd, smiling while splashing mugs full of regular, listening in sympathy to the woes of the many truckers who passed through their neck of the woods always bound for somewhere better, parrying the advances of those who suggested wanting more on the side than hash browns, joking with others, hurrying with arms full and suffering the eternally bad-tempered cooks, Toby and Lem.

But by 1:00 in the afternoon nothing but the dust motes dotting the rays of late-spring sunshine stirred in the diner and the four of them crowded into a corner booth to count their tips, roll silverware for the evening shift, smoke and plan for the night.

“Bryce, bring my bikini top you've had forever, will you?” Trish reminded her, speaking around the filter between her lips.

“I will, sorry.” Bryce used the tail end of her first smoke to light another.

“I want to look like a total whore,” Stacy said, and they all laughed while she blew a crisp smoke ring towards the water-stained ceiling. “Seriously, you guys.”

“That shouldn't take much effort,” Amy teased her affectionately.

“Not everyone can just be naturally beautiful, like Bryce,” Stacy continued, glaring at Amy.

“Shut up, Stace,” Bryce grumbled, then tried for her own smoke ring. It shredded a second after leaving her lips.

Trish reached and caught Bryce's silky ponytail in one hand, swirled it gently around. “Your hair is so gorgeous. Your dad was totally Cherokee.” Bryce had heard it before. Trish added, “You know Michelle and Gayle go to that strip of bars by the reservation.”

“Gayle,” Bryce snorted, exhaling smoke. “She was coming over today to give Michelle a perm, speaking of hair.”

“The last thing that poor woman needs is more damage to her scalp,” Stacy said, as Connie came busting through the kitchen doors and they all grabbed another set of silverware in an attempt to appear busy. Toby was right behind her with their order of onion rings.

“Not fooling anyone,” Connie called in her throaty voice as she disappeared into her office.

Toby, who was slightly kinder when away from Lem, placed their food on the table the way some men would bestow a dozen roses.

“Thanks,” Amy told him. “You guys still coming tonight?”

Toby nodded and headed back into the kitchen while Amy justified to their skeptical faces, “Who else would bring us free weed?”

“Good point,” Trish said. “Let's hurry, Bry, I have like a million errands to run before 3:00.”

Trish dropped Bryce at home 10 minutes later, promising to be back in an hour. Not yet ready to go inside, Bryce walked around the far side of the trailer and dragged their solitary lawn chair into the slim band of shade offered there, then curled up out of the hammer of the afternoon sun.

Cigarette smoke emanated from the open window three feet above her head, a scent as familiar to Bryce as her own skin. Inside the depths of the trailer she heard her mother speaking quietly with Gayle. A second later the screen door sang on its hinges as it opened and Gayle called, “Bryce, that you?”

Gayle's magenta doublewide was the view upon which Bryce's bedroom window opened. The two trailers shared a strip of concrete and were closest to the edge of the court; their “backyards” consisted of a scraggly row of cottonwoods, and beyond that, wind-swept prairie the colorlessness of cinders. She couldn't recall a time before they'd known the woman.

“Who the hell else?” Bryce muttered just loud enough for Gayle to hear, and her mother's only friend stepped all the way out. She descended the wide cement steps and came around the end of the trailer faster than Bryce had ever seen her move, bare feet slapping over the ground. She tried to ignore Gayle, but the woman was nearly five-foot eleven, certainly over 200 pounds. Gayle stopped two feet away, planted both fists on her broad hips and glared down at the younger woman as though trying to start her hair on fire. Bryce lit a smoke with an air of indifference, but Gayle snatched it out of her fingers and flicked it to the ground.

“What the hell?” Bryce snapped, more from surprise than anything. Gayle had never actually touched her before.

“Don't you talk to me that way,” Gayle hissed, bringing her gin-tinted breath within a few inches of Bryce's nose. Bryce gripped the arms of the lawn chair when she realized her hands were shaking. “Your mother has had a very bad morning and she needs you right now. Get your ass up and get in there and be civil to her, so help me, Elizabeth.”

With that, Gayle stomped back to the trailer, leaned inside and asked, “You gonna be okay, honey?”

Bryce didn't hear her mother answer, but Gayle was apparently satisfied and headed across the pitted sidewalk to her own door without a backward glance at Bryce.

“Shit,” she muttered, lighting a new cigarette with slightly calmer hands. The slice of sky above the Wagon Box was a deep, brilliant, blue, dotted with chunky clouds, and Bryce concentrated on several for a moment, smoking slowly, letting the ash build up. She kicked off her work shoes and wished she had eaten a few more onion rings, wished she had gone with Trish, wished she hadn't been born to a woman who despised her. The memory of a thousand nights of her childhood played across her mind, and though time had somewhat dulled the waves of lonely desperation, she still cringed internally, her first instinct to shy away from remembrance. Alone, always so, and terrified when Michelle was late again, and yet another teenage babysitter had simply left after tucking her into bed. Hours of breathless waiting, accidentally slicing her finger on the edge of a can of soup she tried to open because she was hungry, finally hearing Michelle get home, realizing her mother didn't even recognize that her seven or eight or nine-year-old was without supervision. Drunk, high, and with some guy, that was Michelle's M.O. in those days.

And so Gayle's proclamation that something was wrong caused very little friction within Bryce's heart. Gayle, who had once pounded on their door in the middle of the night, raving about a killer tornado headed for the county, not realizing that she'd mistaken a late-night movie for the news. Gayle, whose own children wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire. Bryce almost smiled at that thought, something Wade had said once; he'd gone to school with her youngest son, Jimmy.

The screen door squeaked as Bryce eased it open a few minutes later, gingerly, half-expecting to find Michelle crumpled on the floor. But Michelle was sitting on the kitchen table, bathed in the dim yellow glow of the light above the stove, punching numbers into the phone with one thumb. Her back was to the door. She didn't stir as her child entered the room, and Bryce stood still for a moment, studying the familiar lines of her mother's back: the skinny, drooping shoulders, a black bra strap dangling limply from beneath a flowered tank top, frizzy golden hair in a scraggly bun, the tattooed bouquet of multi-colored roses blooming up her neck.

“Wilder?” her mother said into the phone, startling Bryce back into the here and now. Michelle cupped her other hand around the back of her neck and squeezed, while Bryce prayed that this woudn't end the way she thought. The last time Michelle had spoken to her brother, Bryce received a phone call at 2:00 a.m. from a bartender in Tulsa where she found Michelle on a bench outside the shithole establishment with a welt on her cheek where she'd fallen. The bartender was unsympathetic and Michelle had never spoken of the incident, the way she never spoke of her wrist-slitting and subsequent county hospital and carpet-cleaning bills.