Chapter 24 Deborah
DEBORAH
ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON IN Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, Deborah Willis’s phone rings.
She is in the middle of canning the strawberries she’s grown in her garden, stewing jam on the stove.
The air in the kitchen is humid, thick with the sweetness of strawberries and sugar.
Deborah has pink stains across the front of her shirt.
A mound of stems sits on the counter, and it is their peppery, woody smell that she will come to associate with this day, this call.
The way it filled her lungs with something like dirt.
“Hello,” she says, licking strawberry pulp from her thumb.
“Hello?” She’s surprised. No one ever calls on the house line anymore.
She can smell the jam starting to burn and stretches the cord so she can reach over to the stove and turn the heat down, just a notch.
Maybe she was too late to answer. Maybe the caller had hung up already.
She is about to hang the phone back on the hook when a voice says, “Mom?”
She sets her spoon down on the stove, wonders if she conjured the voice: she associates the house phone with Georgia, the vintage blue rotary dial Georgia loved as a girl.
“Mom?” the voice asks again. She can’t say anything yet—she knows that she is about to cry and the words will come out wrong, crimped by emotion: anger, gratitude, joy, sorrow, all rolled together. “Mom, are you there?”
“I’m here,” she stammers. I’m always here, she thinks.
“Mom, I … I was wondering if I could come home.”
Deborah grips the curly cord of the phone, as though she could use it to hang on to her daughter, to pull her closer that way. “Of course you can. Are you in trouble? Do you need money? Where are you?”
“Atlantic City,” she says. “I can take a bus tomorrow. I have enough money for the ticket.”
“What time?” Deborah says. She thinks of the last time she saw Georgia, three years ago. The scabs on her cheeks. Her bleeding, bitten-down nails.
“I would get into Scranton at seven.”
“I’ll be there to pick you up. You need anything?
You sure you’re not in trouble?” She thinks of Georgia at fifteen, the DUI, the stolen truck.
Thinking it was a good idea to let her spend the night in jail.
The next morning, the look on her daughter’s face: the betrayal, the rage, the fear.
Deborah knew she had made a terrible mistake.
But she was a single mother trying to raise a daughter the only way she knew how.
Never as straightforward as planting seeds, coaxing fruit from the garden.
There was a whole alchemy of love and discipline that she must not have gotten right.
“I’m okay. I’ll be okay. I just need to get out of town.”
“Are you still with Josh? He hit you again?”
“No, not Josh. I’ve just got a bad feeling.” She wonders if her daughter isn’t alone. If she’s afraid to say what she is afraid of.
“Will you be safe, until you can get on a bus?”
A pause. “I’ll see you tomorrow, seven o’clock.” Deborah doesn’t know a lot of things about her daughter’s life. But she can tell when she’s scared. The small voice in the hallway. The sound of feet in footed pajamas padding down the stairs.
“I’ll pick you up. Tonight. Tell me where.”
“No, Ma, the bus is fine. That’s too long to drive.”
“At least tell me where to call you.”
“The Sunset Motel.”
“That’s where you’re staying tonight?”
“No, but you can leave a message for me there. Tell them it’s for Peaches.”
She doesn’t want to know what this means, that her daughter is going by another name. Georgia, Peaches. It would be a little funny, if it didn’t make her worry more. Despite herself, she can already hear the innuendo: Have a taste. Shake my tree. A shiver works its way up her spine.
DEBORAH DOESN’T sleep that night. Around 3 a.m., she heaves herself out of bed, goes to the kitchen for tea, tries to read.
Her jam is lined up on the counter, the mess of the afternoon long since tidied away.
When the first light comes into the kitchen, it makes the jars glow, a pinky red.
The sight used to be comforting, but today it is unsettling.
Maybe it’s her sleepless brain, but she can only look at the jam and see blood.
She thinks of her daughter coming home four, four and a half years ago after a night out with Josh, her lip split.
She keeps looking at herself in the rearview on the drive to Scranton. The lipstick perks up her face, but not enough to make up for the circles under her eyes. She’s early. She watches the clock on the dash. 6:03. 6:27. 6:44. 6:58. 7:05.
The Atlantic City bus pulls in, hisses, sighs out a trickle of passengers.
She waits to see her daughter among them, squints hard at a brunette girl—Georgia might have changed her hair—but no.
None of them is her daughter. She waits until the driver is done heaving suitcases from the guts of the bus, slides Gee’s picture from her wallet.
“Was this girl on your bus?”
The driver hardly glances at the photo, shakes her head no. All the passengers already gone, she says.
“No one in the bathroom?” She has a memory of walking in on Georgia taking a photo of herself in the bathroom mirror with her first cell phone.
She had drawn a lipstick heart on her cheek, on each of her breasts, around the nipple.
Who was it for? Deborah wanted to know. For a man online?
To text to a boy? Or just for herself? She hoped it was the latter, just a celebration of being beautiful, of being young, a private, exuberant joy.
At half past seven, she walks up to the ticket window, taps on the glass. “Any other buses coming in from Atlantic City tonight?”
The woman shakes her head, pulls a sliver of onion from her burger, coils it onto the paper wrapper, licks a spot of ketchup from her thumb. Deborah fumbles her phone out of her bag and dials the number for the motel Georgia told her about. It rings and rings and rings, but no one picks up.
Deborah sits in the parking lot until after midnight, thinking of the sound of her daughter’s voice on the phone, the light coming through the jars of jam.
At 12:03, she turns the engine on. It’s a three-hour drive to Atlantic City.
She hasn’t been there since a trip she took with a few other schoolteachers, back in ’99.
She was shocked at the dinginess of it back then.
It can only be worse now. She’s seen stories on the news: the opioid epidemic, the casinos shutting down, the gang violence, Hurricane Sandy battering the coast. It’s a wonder there’s anything left.
She stops for a coffee, even though she doesn’t need it. Her body is humming with purpose; her heart feels like it’s gotten loose, untethered, tumbling around in her chest. She’ll bring her girl back. This time, Georgia will come home.