the kind of thing Mia asked constantly: If you could be anybody in the world who would it be? If you could have any candy in the whole world, which kind would you get?—if she could do anything right then, she thought, she’d have loaded herself and Roddy and Mia and Squee into Roddy’s truck, all their bags piled under tarps in back and held down with bailer’s twine. They’d drive to New York, enroll Squee at Mia’s school, find Roddy work easily doing construction, contracting . . . Families had been built on a hell of a lot less than that.
Roddy pulled off his hat, ran a hand over his head, back and forth, rubbing the hair one way and the other so it stuck up like he’d slept on it wrong. She climbed the porch steps and he began to speak, updating her on the latest developments as though he were the one with something to tell. “We’ve got one of your housekeeping girls inside.” He flicked his head toward the door, replaced his hat and secured it down as if preparing to go out into a storm. “Peg?” he said. “Peg, right?” He rolled his eyes slightly. “She’s worried . . .” He said it half-mockingly, then seemed to retract the judgment as it came out of his mouth and just shook his head, saying, “Worried about Squee. About what Lance might do to him.”
It was all the validation and prompting Suzy needed. “He’s dangerous,” she said. “Mia’s been hysterical all day—he is dangerous.” She felt the power in that reiteration; it became truer each time she said it. She felt a blooming sense of freedom, the freedom to say anything, because she was out of there! She was already gone, she was on that ferry, and nothing mattered anymore. She wasn’t going to get up tomorrow and do her father’s bidding another day. She wasn’t going to put her kid through this any longer, no matter how that kid felt about it after a day at the beach and three scoops of pistachio ice cream.
“Lance is dangerous,” she said again. She fought the urge just to keep saying it, over and over and over again. “Of all people, I should know how dangerous Lance Squire really is.”
“What?” Roddy was confused. “What do you . . . ?” And then he commanded himself to stop—all thought, all action, everything— until he understood what she was saying. She could see him shutting down, the way you’d close the doors and batten down the windows in the threat of an oncoming twister. Only it ceased to look like steeliness. It was a slackening, if anything—like the way Squee looked when Lance came at him.
Suzy choked. Then she began suddenly, almost violently, to cry. She sucked in breath and held her hair in her hand, the arm blocking half her face to cover at least a fraction of her shame. Her words came in sputters. “You can ask your mother,” she choked out. “She knows it all.” And then she didn’t know how to go on, for she was saying something she had never said in her life, and though it had always been true, she had never felt its truth the way she felt it right then. “I lost my virginity down in that ravine”—she threw a hand out behind her—“when I was sixteen years old.”
“To Lance?” Roddy said. “I knew you . . . I didn’t know it was—”
“Everybody and their fucking grandmother knew I slept with him. He basically raped me—Lance, there, in that ravine—when I was sixteen years old. Ask your mother,” she sobbed, “just ask your mother. She probably remembers more than I do. Ask Eden . . . That’s how I know. That’s how I know what Lance is capable of.” She paused then, drew in her breath, and looked up at Roddy for the first time since she’d begun. “I have to leave,” she said. “I feel like I’m losing my mind. I can’t stay here. I can’t. I have to leave.”
She started to say “Come with me” but he stopped her.
“I can’t . . . ,” he said.
“You could . . . ,” she said. She didn’t know if it was true, or if she wanted it, but she said it anyway.
He said, “My mother . . . Squee . . .”
And she just sobbed harder until finally he had to take her in his arms. It was easier to hold her