after Bethie realized that she wouldn’t be able to purchase a ticket to her next destination unless she scrambled up some cash, but she didn’t want to tell her mother that.
“You’re not too far away from turning thirty! And this is your life?”
“Maybe it so happens that I like my life this way.”
Sarah groaned. She shoved her hands into her hair and started tugging, a gesture Bethie recognized from the night her father had died. “I wanted everything for you,” she said through her tears. “Everything.” She looked up, eyes streaming, mascara running in muddy tracks down her cheeks. “What did I do? Where did I go wrong?”
Bethie bit her lip.
“Your father died. That was hard, I know. It was hard for all of us. But I got through it, and Jo got through it, and you . . .” Sarah shook her head, as if her despair had reached a level beyond words.
Bethie kept her eyes straight ahead, looking at the front door. Sarah would stop talking eventually. Bethie would go inside. She’d take a long, hot shower. She’d sleep. Things would look better in the morning.
“And that boy, in college, and the rock show, and . . .” Sarah waved her hand in a shooing gesture that Bethie supposed was meant to represent her abortion. “I told myself, She’s been hurt. Give her time. But it’s been years.” Sarah’s voice cracked. “Is this what you want? Is this all you’ll ever be?”
“I don’t know, Ma.” Bethie hadn’t meant to say anything, but it felt as if some invisible force was wrenching the words out of her. Her throat was tight, and her eyes were full of tears, and all she wanted to do was to go backward, to unspool time, to erase her abortion, her rape, Uncle Mel’s hands, her father’s death. She wanted to go back to Adath Israel and be that pretty, smiling little girl onstage. She wanted to stand with her sister and her mother beside her, to feel her father’s hands, warm and steady on her shoulders; to hear his voice saying, My little girl was fantastic. “I really don’t know.”
* * *
Sarah left her at the bus station. Instead of kissing her, she’d simply nodded when Bethie said “Goodbye.” The I-love-you was the three folded twenty-dollar bills she’d pressed into Bethie’s hand before Bethie climbed out of the car.
Bethie bought a ticket to New York City. When she got to Port Authority thirty-six hours later, she made her way out of the bus station and began walking downtown. An hour later, she’d found a club she’d remembered, a place where she’d once heard Phil Ochs. That night, a band called Television was making something that did not even sound like music. Bethie withstood an angry blast of cacophonous guitar as the lead singer—if you could even call him that—shrieked into the microphone. How had things changed so much? she wondered. How had so much time gone by, without her even noticing? How had she gotten so old? In the grotty ladies’ room, she’d watched a woman with a mop of bleached-blond hair and tattered fishnet stockings loop a length of rubber tubing around her bicep while she held a loaded syringe clamped between her teeth, the way a pirate might have held a dagger. Pirates made her think of Dev, and thinking of Dev made her angry, and suddenly the woman was glaring at her.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” the woman had snarled, and Bethie had turned away, catching sight of her own face in the mirror. Her skin was pale, her lips were chapped, and her eyes looked haunted. She had forty-eight dollars in her pocket, and no idea where to go next.
She’d walked out of the club, ears ringing from the noise, and found a spot on a bench in Washington Square Park. There she’d sat, holding Jo’s backpack against her chest, trying to decide what to do next, when she heard a woman’s voice, almost in her ear.
“Hey, little sister.”
Bethie’s heart jumped. She remembered the twin bed in the house on Alhambra Street, with Jo in it beside her. Princess Bethie was locked in the tippy-top of the tall stone tower, with thorns all the way down, and nothing but a stale loaf of bread and one tin cup of water. She remembered the way she had leaned toward her sister, fingers hooked into the side of her mattress, her heart beating fast in the darkness, saying Tell