​​​Chapter Nine

Eye through glass, Rochelle sees the tree her granddaughter sat against two years ago. It was during her son’s funeral, after she trailed her daughter-in-law and that terrible woman, Val, into the library. They left, shoulder-to-shoulder, co-conspirators in the biggest hurt Rochelle had felt in a very long time. But at that point, it just looked like Natalie was taking comfort in a wayward co-worker and her granddaughter was resting against a tree.

But things aren’t always what they seem. At least that’s what her therapist, Dr. Neese, says.

It’s the one thing we agree on.

Dennis. Dennis always saunters in, even more so than Mack. But really, the two are forever intertwined in Rochelle’s head and heart. Two different sides of the same problem. She was too busy to help them. Too busy to fix them.

You can’t fix a person, I whisper in her ear, and she nods at the tree through the glass.

“I know. I know that’s your job. But you can imagine why I’m slightly disappointed.” She smiles, and the tear slides over her upper lip. I know, I say. And she touches her chest where she hears me say it.

“The worst part is Wren. I can’t help her. I mean, I can’t watch you help her.” Rochelle fits inside her new self like a pair of too tight pants. She feels constricted. She acknowledges the concept of freedom. The letting go and letting me. But her heart clings onto her old understanding of the world. One foot in, one foot out. She doesn’t even have the courage to tell Glenn she got baptized.

“I didn’t do so well.” It’s the same song she plays on rotation that she refuses to erase. “Mack needed me. I gave him so little.” Another tear traces the other side of her face. She pretends she’s watching her granddaughter dance beneath the tree. “He needed me, and I traded him for a castle and a dream.” The library’s A/C starts up overhead, and Rochelle feels her bony arms through her sweater.

“Who are you talking to?” Glenn comes in. He’s tugging a white hand towel around his neck. Glenn is flourishing. He’s fifty-five and looks in his prime although every year for Glenn has been inarguably prime-worthy. At least that’s the way it’s spun when Rochelle feels her weakest. She’s lost weight. Her face has thinned. There are lines where youth once lived. Glenn doesn’t make her pay for it, though. He still kisses her hairline like he does now, and she’s just about to tip into the depth of love she has in her heart for him when she stops herself. The air blows cold at the top of her head, and she looks up.

“Nobody,” she says, the truth too strange to say out loud.

#

AS CHILDREN, THEY LOOKED more alike. Twins. Rochelle didn’t tell anyone how strange it made her feel. Here was someone who was half her and half himself. Someone who by all intents and purposes should have thought her thoughts and felt her feelings. But from the very beginning, Rochelle knew Dennis wasn’t anything like her.

His thoughts were very different.

It started with the cats. Dead ones everywhere. Half buried in the bushes, hiding beneath the coiled garden hose. Each demise was orchestrated differently as if someone was adeptly practicing the art of killing. Their father assumed it was Pete Grisholm, the competing insurance adjuster in Wake Village. But their mother knew better.

She brought the priest out twice, both times when their father wasn’t home. Their father, Bradford, already didn’t like Dennis. He favored Rochelle although it was a lukewarm attempt at fatherly love. He was more the hunting and fishing type. Any verb, really, that got him out of the house.

Their mother, Eileen, loved them both but spent the majority of her time worrying about her son. It’s the reason why in pictures, her eyes always looked pinched together, like the nerve between her eyebrows didn’t know when to take the day off.

Bradford and Eileen were always surface deep with each other. To their friends, they were the perfect couple because they never fought. But that was only because it required an energy neither thought to waste on the other.

“I’m not sure how to help, Eileen. He won’t tell me anything. He never says anything alarming in confession. He seems like a good boy.” The priest was at the seat of honor on their pepto-pink couch. Their mother sat in the wingback chair next to it. The nerve looked like a worm dancing above the bridge of her nose.

“What about an exorcism?” This was the second visit and the second time she proposed it. Father Ward gave the same dumbfounded expression he did the first. “Fine,” Eileen said. “Fine,” she whispered but the worm didn’t stop.

Rochelle heard every word because she was sitting under the dining room table. She eavesdropped a lot but never worried about getting in trouble, a byproduct of nobody ever worrying about her.

“We could do it ourselves,” Rochelle said later after dinner. She dried the dishes as her mother dipped and wiped each one with a rag.

“Do what?” Eileen asked. She was like Rochelle, not particularly pretty but not ugly either. They each found themselves to be blendable, the type of person that could easily disappear in a crowd.

“The exorcism.” Rochelle was eleven and barely knew what the word meant. But she had an unfailing confidence that she could do it. At eleven, she believed she could do anything.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Eileen said, but for an instant the worm stopped dancing.

“What happens during an exorcism?” Rochelle asked. She rubbed the plate in her hands and tried to see her face in it.

“Depends I guess. But the priest uses holy water and says some things in Latin. Sometimes they have to tie them up.”

“Tie who up?”

Eileen stopped dipping and wiping to weave a finger into her beehive. She rolled the two words around in her mouth like marbles before offering them to her daughter. “The afflicted.”

#

AT THIS POINT, ROCHELLE and Dennis still shared a room. Dennis slept in the twin bed near the window and Rochelle slept in the one against the bare wall. His wrists were so small. A puny kid who didn’t eat enough meat and poked at his vegetables. When his breathing turned rhythmic, Rochelle removed the laces from her Chuck Taylors. Dennis helped her out by sleeping with his arms raised upward like a swinging chimpanzee. She lightly laced each wrist to his bed posts, careful not to wake him. She figured his legs would be fine, and if things get out of hand, she’d jump on top of him.

She took the glass of water off her nightstand and dunked her fingers in it. She started waving them at Dennis and a spray of droplets hit his face. “Inyay ethay amenay ofyay esusjay ebay ongay atansay,” Rochelle said in Pig Latin. It would be a vicious scene to anyone who came in and didn’t know Rochelle’s heart. It would look cruel, unnecessary. But Rochelle had a deep affinity for Dennis, and even though he was different, she realized he didn’t have to be. If only she could fix him.

“What are you doing?” Dennis’s eyes widened when he realized he couldn’t move his arms. “Ro, why are you doing this? Let me go!” He tugged and his panic was loud in her ears. She untied his wrists, and he scooted up, bringing his knees to his chest.

“You’re mean,” he said, and when he said it, she knew what all those dead cats felt like. 

It would become a thing she’d laugh about years later, before the rape when Rochelle still laughed. How silly to tie someone up and force the demons out. How silly to try and make someone different by sheer intent. And she’d look into Dennis’s face when she said it only to see him not laughing.

#

WHEN ROCHELLE WAS TWELVE and got her period, they moved Dennis to the basement. There was an undercurrent of meaning with that move, but everyone pretended it was okay to stuff a boy where you couldn’t see him. Even Rochelle, Dennis’s other half, began to forget about him. She was too wrapped up in telephoning her friends or reading about Bob Dylan in Tiger Beat to remember she had a brother.

She painted her room pink and mopped the floors, erasing any trace of the skinny boy in the bed next to her. Sometimes she’d pass the basement door and hear music trickling up the stairs and remember somebody was down there.

They stopped finding cats.

Eileen gave up worrying as a pastime; she, too, forgot what she couldn’t see anymore. And once the cats were gone, her head went on a permanent vacation, pretending she was married to Dean Martin and living where she could hear the ocean.

Nobody thought to ask themselves what had replaced the cats.

#

AT SEVENTEEN, ROCHELLE was far less blendable. She stood out, her long legs shown off in short shorts. She was the lucky one because her father never told her to cover up like the other girls’ dads. Her mother’s worm came back around this time but she never said anything either. She was tired of talking and nobody listening.

Rochelle wasn’t popular but she was good looking enough that she had dates on the weekend. Sometimes double dates to the movies where she was pawed at in the backseat. Sometimes at the overlook where she was pawed at in the front. Rochelle never had any real qualms about this because it was the rite of passage everyone had to go through. So even though her good heart still beat in her chest, sometimes it would close its eyes at the worst moments.

Eventually, Rochelle got a reputation.

“They think you’re a slut,” Dennis said one day at the breakfast table. Her mother was flipping pancakes and her shoulder blades kissed when Dennis said it. Rochelle waited, silently begged her mother to say something, anything, but she continued to flap the jacks even with her shoulders pinched together.

“No they don’t,” Rochelle said. Her words were as weak as the coffee she doctored with cream and sugar. She had been having a hard time sleeping, sometimes the things she did with boys creeping into her dreams. She reasoned her aversion away, attempting to believe the sickness inside of her was like a meddling housewife who had no right to nose into her business.

“Yeah, they do. I’m just glad no one knows we’re related.”

“Me, too. For obvious reasons,” Rochelle said, looking Dennis dead in the eye. He showed off his middle finger behind their mother’s back and grabbed his books to leave. Rochelle had gone out of her way at school to keep Dennis’s existence a private matter. And Dennis never cared to thwart her efforts.

Rochelle looked at her mother’s back, burning holes into the Peter Pan collar at her neck. But Eileen kept looking out the window above the sink, wondering why everything bad had to happen to her.

#

SOMETIMES, DENNIS GOT beat up. It wasn’t unusual to see his lip puffed up or his nose out of joint. Their mother tried to drag him to their pediatrician, Dr. Willard, with the lollipops and phony smile. But Dennis shrugged off her good intentions and instead, let the pain consume him until it became his only good friend.

It was just by happenstance that the same guy who had punched Dennis in the face after school on October 14, 1965 was the same one who raped Rochelle later that night. Ricky Dean. Ricky’s fight was always inside of himself. He had no one to blame. His parents had good hearts and more than enough love to go around, but Ricky refused to believe them. He wanted to test the waters, dip a toe over the edge. He became violent, finding Dennis—the weird kid from Spanish class—an easy target. And then he became even more violent when he noticed someone like Rochelle.

Easy prey. 

Ricky would eventually see prison, see beatings far worse than ones he’d ever delivered. He’d sit shoulder to shoulder with a cinderblock wall and hyperventilate while holding a tiny Bible one of the Gideons had left the warden. He’d give himself over to me and look at his sins from time to time like a mirror. And then he’d break the glass.

“Kiss me,” Ricky said. Rochelle was planted against the grass of somebody’s side yard. She had been walking home from the library one of those rare dateless nights when she got to be nobody but herself. She had felt him before she heard him. He was up behind her, and his hand covered her mouth. He forced her between the houses—a bold move. His hand tasted like dried sweat. He was kissing her face even after he had done the deed, and she felt like hell would have been a nice respite. Just as quickly as he was planted on top of her, he was ripped off like a dirty bandage. She looked up at the hand attached to the skinny wrist gripping Ricky’s collar.

Dennis.

I made Dennis do something different that night. He should have been holed up in his room, hitting the back of his head against his wall or drawing dark images until the paper tore. But I whispered a desire in his heart to take a walk. He figured it was to grow closer to the night or some nonsense like that. Really, it was to save his sister because Ricky wouldn’t have stopped at the rape.

“Dennis, Dennis.” Rochelle couldn’t figure out if it was a question or not. She was just aware that her brother was mauling Ricky in the moonlight, and she didn’t know how to make him stop. Or if she even wanted to.

A deck light popped on. An “Anyone out there?” traveled the length of the backyard to Rochelle’s left.

“Dennis, come on,” Rochelle said definitive, declarative. She grabbed his arm, and they ran all the way home.

Before they went in, he stopped her. He looked at her. Her hair was a mess and her top, untucked. She shifted her miniskirt down, and she was sure she was bleeding between her legs. But Dennis touched her lightly with the same hand that left Ricky unconscious in a yard two streets over.

“Ro, nobody can hurt you anymore,” he said, well meaning but very wrong.

#

DENNIS BECAME HER PROTECTOR. He’d been looking for a reason he was so alone and angry in this world, and then it was like he finally found his purpose. But it wasn’t an angel of light type scenario. Dennis saw himself as more of a vigilante.

He started to spend the night on the floor of her room. Rochelle was disturbed at first. She just wanted to be left alone so the quiet could eat her whole. But there was a comfort in hearing the same rhythmic breathing that used to send her off to sleep.

The kids at school were talking about Ricky. Ricky the junior who was always trying out for basketball but could never make the team.

“I get he was a loser but that’s no reason for someone to beat the snot out of him,” Belinda Devine said in the hall before third period. Rochelle thought she was going to be sick. Two weeks later she still had that feeling. And that’s when she knew. 

“Don’t tell them, Ro. Just come with me. We can make it on our own. We have my car. I’ve been looking through the want ads. I can find something. I can take care of us.” They were sitting in Dennis’s basement which is what they called it now. Rochelle was wearing a powder blue sweatsuit and sat ankles crossed on Dennis’s bed. They had burnt her miniskirts and hot pants in a barrel in the backyard. When their father asked what in the Sam Hill they were doing, Rochelle said, “Science class.” He had gone back inside.

“They say Ricky almost died, Dennis.” She didn’t know why that bothered her. For what she went through, she figured his death would be a fair enough trade. But she couldn’t stop rubbing her finger against that errant stitch.

“And? Some people deserve to hurt, Ro.” He was sitting criss-cross applesauce with his notebook in his lap. There was something dark on the page he kept working at with his pen. “I don’t make the rules.” He sounded matter of fact about it like he had received word from upper management.

Looking at her brother, hunched over on concrete in a dingy white t-shirt, Rochelle finally put her finger on why it bothered her so much. It was because it didn’t bother Dennis in the slightest.

#

THEIR PARENTS DIDN’T put up a fight. Their mother was too tired, and their father didn’t really care. Rochelle was kind of holding out on the certainty that her father would at least want her to get her diploma. But he just turned it into a positive. “Work will be good for you both.”

She never said anything about the baby.

Dennis found them a cheap enough duplex. He found work as a night janitor at City Hall. He worked at the gas station during the day. Rochelle found a temp agency willing to hire her, and she prayed nightly to no one that she’d find a position where she didn’t have to face the kids at school. Because when Ricky came back, he told everyone he hooked up with Rochelle and that her crazy brother jumped him. She couldn’t tell them the truth because the truth was worse than the lie. 

Their parents began to fade away. Without the kids in the house, they had to look each other in the eye and communicate. Instead of bringing them together, it had the opposite effect.

Bradford left one evening and never came back. Eileen stayed in the house. She found a job at the dry cleaner and called Rochelle sometimes to tell her how she liked having her freedom. But Bradford called from his new apartment in Missouri one evening. One of the checks he sometimes sent Eileen out of guilt or pity hadn’t been cashed. He kept calling her about it, but she never picked up. He had their neighbor, Mrs. Poke check on her. When the police finally came to break down the door, they found Eileen dead in the tub and Dean Martin crooning from the record player.

“Dennis, what have we done?” Rochelle said sitting on their kitchen floor, the receiver still cradled between her neck and shoulder.

“Nothing,” Dennis said, calmly scanning the water bill. “We don’t make the rules.”