Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Read online

  Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Stay

  Have You Seen Luis Velez?

  Just After Midnight

  Heaven Adjacent

  The Wake Up

  Allie and Bea

  Say Goodbye for Now

  Leaving Blythe River

  Ask Him Why

  Worthy

  The Language of Hoofbeats

  Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition

  Take Me with You

  Paw It Forward

  365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World

  Where We Belong

  Subway Dancer and Other Stories

  Walk Me Home

  Always Chloe and Other Stories

  The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward

  How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide

  When You Were Older

  Don’t Let Me Go

  Jumpstart the World

  Second Hand Heart

  When I Found You

  Diary of a Witness

  The Day I Killed James

  Chasing Windmills

  The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance

  Love in the Present Tense

  Becoming Chloe

  Walter’s Purple Heart

  Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love

  Pay It Forward

  Earthquake Weather and Other Stories

  Funerals for Horses

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Trustee, or Successor Trustee, of the Catherine Ryan Hyde Revocable trust created under that certain declaration dated September 27, 1999.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542010054 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542010055 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 9781542017831 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542017831 (hardcover)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter One

  Brooke: Shattered

  It started that day with just the normal levels of my mother driving me crazy. Which, don’t get me wrong, is plenty bad enough. And some leftover feelings from the odd conversation I’d had with the young woman at my daughter’s new day care might have factored in.

  I’d picked Etta up at day care after my work, at about five thirty, and it was the first time I’d seen the place. It was only my baby’s third day there.

  My mother had been taking her in and picking her up, at least for the first two and a half days. But then she’d started complaining that it was too much for her “old bones.”

  I guess it sounds strange that I hadn’t checked the place out first with my own eyes. But I was dealing with a stress fracture to my psyche, thanks to my mother, that sprang up midweek. And three entirely unrelated people had recommended this as the best place in the city. And my phone and internet experience with them was stellar. Also, my mother would have been the first to point it out if the place wasn’t up to snuff. It’s not like me to fall back on her judgment. But if there’s one thing I can trust her to do, it’s judge.

  The yard of the place was on the side of a hill, shaded by trees. Terraced, so the kids had nice flat areas to play, with steps in between. On different levels I saw giant sandbox complexes, swing sets, riding toys. A building pad where two boys were constructing a small city of giant blocks.

  It was late in the season, so nearly dark outside, a heavy dusk, but the yard was well lit.

  My eyes flew directly to my daughter. She was sitting on one of the riding toys, a bright red plastic horse with a black “flowing” plastic mane. It wasn’t a rocking horse, exactly. It was attached by springs to a solid metal frame. It had handhold pegs below each ear, and nice wide platforms for little feet where the stirrups would be. She could bounce up and down on it, or rock it back and forth just a few inches, imitating the gait of a galloping horse.

  Etta was doing the latter.

  I had dressed her that morning in red tights—almost exactly the color of her horse—and a striped tunic. A light wind was blowing the curly brown hair off her face. And she was lost in utter concentration. She hadn’t even noticed me yet. I wondered how real the ride felt in her head. If her horse was galloping along a sandy beach or down a grassy hillside.

  She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. But I did anyway. In fact, I couldn’t stop.

  The young staff member came up behind me. I didn’t notice her until she spoke, so it startled me a little.

  “I like the way you look at her,” she said.

  I smiled a little. At least, I think I smiled. I meant to. I said, “Don’t all mothers look at their kids that way?”

  “Ha!” she said. “I wish.”

  Then we watched the girl in perfect silence for a time.

  “Etta is very attached to the bouncy horse,” she said. “Almost to the point where it’s become a problem for her. It’s very hard for her to let the other kids take their turn. The good news is, she will. She’s not the least bit bullying or unfair about it. But it hurts her. You can tell. She mopes. She seems brokenhearted.”

  “Oh good heavens,” I said, “I’ll end up having to buy her a pony. Number three hundred and thirty-four on the list of things I want for her but can’t afford.”

  She laughed. But it hadn’t really been a joke. It had been a genuine worry about the future.

  “She did very well with her big-girl pull-up pants and the potty today. No accidents.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “We were glad to see you come in instead of your mother.” That just sat in the air for a moment. Awkwardly, like a thing looking for a place to hide. I could feel that it had been a mistake on her part. A slip that she was now inwardly scrambling to cover. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

  “Not really,” I said. “It sounded about right to me.”

  Despite my dismissal of her words, it was an odd thing for a woman at a day care center to say. Then again, you never know what a person might say. People step over lines of propriety every day.

  “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Look. I know my mother. And now so do you. It’s actually a relief to me when other people see the problems, too.
Makes me feel a little tiny bit vindicated. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.”

  “She just seems to have a big cloud of negativity surrounding her. And that’s hard on a kid.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  She took a moment to appear deeply embarrassed before speaking.

  “Right. Sorry. You grew up with her. But it’s good that you seem to be more positive. That’s all I meant to say.”

  “Well, you know how it is. We either grow up to be our mother or we make a solemn vow to the universe to be her polar opposite. Doesn’t work every minute of every day, though.”

  Etta noticed me for the first time. Her face lit up. But she didn’t run to me. Just waved with vast enthusiasm and went back to riding her horse. More stridently, though, as if riding took on a whole new meaning with me watching.

  “I can’t tell you how hard it’s been,” I said, “going back to living in her house. After the divorce my finances had me over a barrel. But I’ve been watching how my mother behaves around Etta and how it affects her. And this week I just got to a breaking point with it and put her in day care. But I’m creating a vicious cycle, because my salary doesn’t cover much more than the day care. So I’m not entirely sure how to break this cycle I’ve gotten myself into.” I glanced at the woman’s face and wondered what she was thinking. I regretted going into such detail. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is more than you needed to know.”

  “No, it’s okay. I must admit, I wondered.”

  She walked up the steps to the second terraced level, where Ella rode her bright red steed.

  She tried to gently steer the girl off the horse, but Ella only fussed, just at the edge of a tantrum. She was clearly tired, which didn’t help.

  I walked up to them, thinking I could do better.

  “Honey,” I said. “We need to go home to Grandma’s.”

  Then I regretted bringing up Grandma. Who would want to go home to that? Even a two-year-old knows better than to want that. Hell, a two-year-old probably knows better than anybody.

  “Horsey,” she said, and started to cry.

  “Honey, we’ll see the horsey again tomorrow. I promise.”

  I shouldn’t have promised.

  Be careful what you promise your kids. We ask them to believe that the world is a deeply predictable place, and you can always know where you’ll be tomorrow. But how sure are we?

  We were closed into our room as a way of steering clear of my mother.

  She had the TV on far too loud. She doesn’t have trouble with her hearing. I have no idea what she thinks she’s doing with that—what need it fills in her. My personal theory? I think she’s trying to drive all the thoughts out of her head. Keep her own mind at bay. Then again, it’s just a theory.

  As though that din weren’t bad enough, she kept yelling in to where Etta and I were hiding in our room. And of course she had to shout at the top of her lungs to be heard over the blare of the TV.

  I don’t know what she was watching, but something with a laugh track. And that was getting under my skin. It was beginning to feel like the worst, most irritating moments of my life came with amused onlookers.

  It felt like the ultimate insult that any of this could be considered funny, even if the laughter was mostly in my head.

  “Brooke?” she bellowed into our room. She always started with my name, though there was really no one else she could have been talking to. These were not statements one would make to a two-year-old.

  I squeezed my eyes closed and sighed.

  She kept yelling.

  “You need to take Etta out more.”

  I sighed again. Walked to the bedroom door.

  Etta was sitting on the circular rag rug, playing with some blocks. Well, banging them against each other more than anything else, but I guess for her that’s a kind of play.

  I opened the door a crack to give my mother half a chance of hearing me over the TV.

  “I’m tired, Mom. I’m on my feet all day.”

  “But your daughter’s been without you all day. She needs to get out. She needs to spend time with you.”

  “Why do you think I’m spending all that money on day care? So she can be out all day.”

  My mother was in poor physical condition. Hugely overweight and out of shape, with bad knees, hips, and feet. She couldn’t be expected to get Etta outdoors, which was another brick in the wall of my expensive day care decision.

  “That’s not spending time with you,” she barked.

  “I am spending time with her,” I shouted. “Right now! We’re playing!”

  I don’t mean shouted as in yelled at her in anger. More like shouted as in attempted to be heard. I tried to be civil to my mother whenever possible. Two uncivil parties in that household would have been unlivable. It was so close to unlivable as it stood.

  Besides, it was her house. And I was fortunate to have it as a place to land, uncomfortable a landing as it may have been.

  “But she needs to go out. You torture that girl. She likes to go out.”

  I almost blew my stack at that. At the pronouncement that I “torture” my beautiful little daughter. Instead I closed my eyes. Breathed. Literally counted to ten in my head.

  “She’s been out all day!” I said, and left it at that.

  “But not with you!”

  “It’s dark, Mom. Where am I supposed to take her in the dark?”

  It was only six something in the afternoon, but it was nearing winter. And it was dark.

  “They have lights in the playground, you know.”

  I closed the bedroom door.

  My mother continued to yell in to me, but I did my best to ignore what she was saying. I could vaguely hear that it was the long story about my cousin’s little boy, and how a doctor finally intervened and said the kid wasn’t getting enough sunshine. I had heard the story before.

  It wasn’t worth asking where she thought I would find sunshine at that hour. Or why she thought the day care center didn’t have any. It would only cause her complaints to veer off down a different, barely related path. You couldn’t stop her once she got on a tear like this. Only send her in new directions. Ones I had learned I wouldn’t like any better.

  I picked up my phone. Opened the web browser and looked at the website for the movie theater down on the boulevard. I had seen on their marquee that they were playing a kids’ movie. The one about the talking cartoon lizards.

  I did not do this because I thought my mother was right. Etta loved to sit quietly on the rug with me and play. I did it because being in the same house with the woman was driving me crazy.

  I could still hear the drone of her voice—if a full-throated shout could be called droning.

  There was a 7:00 showing.

  “Etta,” I said. “Do you want to go to a movie?”

  She turned her huge brown eyes up to me, full of questions. Her brown curls spilled onto her forehead.

  She was gorgeous, if I do say so myself. She was also too young to know what I was proposing.

  I did a quick internet search and brought up the movie trailer. And played it for her. The phone was turned away from me and toward her, so I don’t know exactly what she was seeing, but she shrieked with laughter, waving her arms up and down.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Mom!” I had to raise my voice to be heard, even though I was standing right behind her chair.

  “What? I’m watching this.”

  For a woman who interrupted my every thought, she had precious little tolerance for any kind of interruption.

  I walked around to the footstool of her chair and grabbed the remote, muting the TV. The silence was stunning. I’d had no idea how utterly punishing the noise had been until it stopped. It felt as though someone had been driving a spike into my ear with a mallet. I felt the absence of that pain as a wash of relief.

  “Hey! I just said I was watching that!”

  “Etta and I
are going to a movie.”

  “A movie?” From the tone of her voice you’d have thought I’d said I was going to run my daughter through a car wash or toss her off a cliff. “Who takes a child her age to a movie?”

  “It’s a kids’ movie. She’ll like it. It’s funny.”

  “So you want to take her from a dark, cramped house to a dark, cramped movie theater.”

  I counted to ten again before speaking.

  “Mom,” I said. Calmly, but it was an artificial calm. “This house is over six thousand square feet. She’s not cramped.”

  “I just think you don’t know what kids need. You haven’t been a mother long enough.”

  “I think I’m doing a good job raising her, Mom. Please don’t suggest otherwise. It really bothers me when you take that away from me.”

  She sighed, and I knew she at least would stop attacking me on that particular front. A sigh was a good sign from her. It was a complaint over the fact that she couldn’t keep jabbing.

  “Take my car,” she said. “It’s safer.”

  “My car is fine.”

  “Your car is a total disaster. What if it breaks down in a bad neighborhood?”

  “We don’t live in a bad neighborhood, Mom. We live in a nice part of West LA. And the theater is in the same nice part of West LA. I’m not going to purposely detour through a bad neighborhood. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

  “All of LA is a bad neighborhood. The whole world is dangerous. Not like when I was a girl.”

  “Funny. And yet you just said you wanted us to go to the playground in the dark.”

  “Don’t speak disrespectfully to me.”

  “Then don’t treat me as if I were a child. I’m not a child. I’m thirty-nine years old.”

  She drew back an arrow and hit me right between the eyes.

  “Well, you wouldn’t know it to look at you,” she said. “Back living at home with your mother like a little girl.”

  I knew counting to ten would not do it. Not that time. So I just picked up my daughter and left.

  “Wear your seat belt!” she shouted to me as we walked out the door.

  I normally wear my seat belt, and I always, always buckle Etta into her car seat, in the back, rear facing. Just the way you’re supposed to do it. But one time—one damn time—my mother saw me leave the driveway without buckling myself into my own seat belt, and she just wouldn’t let it die. “Wear your seat belt, wear your seat belt, wear your seat belt.” It became a mantra. An ad slogan that goes through your head so many times you begin to push back against it. My mother can take even a good thing and make it into something I need to flat out refuse to do.