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Jen never liked her sister's husband, never trusted his charismatic smile that gave way all too easily to an aggressive snarl when he'd had too much to drink. Jen didn't put up with that kind of crap from her men, but Rebecca had always been too forgiving, and once they'd had that kid together she knew there'd be no convincing her to leave.
The last time she goes to visit them Brian won't let her stay in the house. She's prepared to fight him over it, because motels are expensive and it's her sister, for God's sakes, but Rebecca begs her not to make an issue out of it.
“We want to see you Jen, both of us do,” she says when Jen comes over for lunch, “But it’s just been such a stressful time for him at work, and the house is so small…”
“Give me a break, Becca,” Jen snaps, “he doesn’t want me in the house because he knows I won’t stand for him to treat you like dirt. He used to never have a problem with my staying, what the hell goes on that he doesn't want me to see..."
She trails off as Rebecca takes off her sweater and sees a line of dark, finger-shaped bruises on her arm. She sucks in her breath and Rebecca freezes. She tries to shrug back into her sweater, but Jen's too quick, striding over and seizing her arm.
"...Becs, did he do this to you?"
Her sister snatches her arm back and glares.
"I'll kill him," Jen says, her voice hard, "I'll fucking kill him, Becca, why are you still here with him? And god, with Brooke..." she lowers her voice as she glances over at her niece in the next room, playing happily with the stuffed giraffe Jen had brought for her as a present.
Rebecca shushes her as she gives her daughter a worried look.
"What do you expect me to do?" she asks in a strained whisper, "If I leave him he'll fight for custody. And can you imagine her being left alone with him when he's in one of his rages? I'm the only thing that's kept him from laying into her, she's just a kid, and I can't..."
"Becca, no judge in their right mind would award custody to him. I don’t care what he’s tried to tell you, you both would be safe if you just got out…”
"It’s been two weeks since anything’s happened," Becca looks at her, her eyes bright, her voice pleading. "He’s getting better. He's been trying to lay off the bottle, and he's doing so much with this work at the lab..."
Jen suppresses a frustrated noise as she runs her hands through her hair. They’ve had this conversation for what seems like a dozen times, and she just doesn’t know what else is left for her to do.
"Just promise me that if he does this to you again you’ll leave,” she says, “you’ll take Brooke and you’ll run. You’ll come straight to me, we’ll figure something else out. Will you do that?”
"I will," Rebecca says, "I promise," and Jen knows it's a lie.
***
Two years pass and the phone calls come fewer and farther between. Becca can’t seem to talk of anything but the weather, and Jen knows in the back of her head that she should go back to Dayton, but between her own divorce and working double shifts she just doesn’t have the means. She knows things are bad, but she's still not prepared for the phone call that leaves her curled sobbing on her bathroom floor—that Brian Banner had killed her sister, and that their daughter had witnessed the whole thing.
In the days and weeks that follow, she’s on the phone more often than not—with the cops, to make sure he won’t ever see the light of day again (mental health institution are you fucking kidding me), with her mother in the nursing home to tell her what had happened (carefully omitting the details), and with social services, negotiating what would happen to Brooke.
“I don’t know how I can make this clearer to you,” she says to the social worker, “I can’t take her. I don’t know the slightest thing about kids, or parenting, I’m working full time and back in school…”
“Ms. Robertson, if I may be frank, you’re hardly our first choice either,” the woman says, in the exhausted voice of someone with far too much on her plate, “but at this point it’s either bringing Brooke to you or placing her into foster care. We try and place children with family members whenever possible. And given these particular circumstances, it will be far better for her to be with family than with complete strangers…”
“She hasn’t seen me in two years,” Jen says, “I’m as good a stranger to her as anyone else would be. Am I really higher on the list than foster parents?”
There’s silence on the other end, and Jen sighs, knowing this would be where it ended all along.
They bring her two weeks later, hiding behind the social worker and trailing the same giraffe Jen had given her the last time, now looking rather worse for wear. Brooke herself still has a fading black eye behind taped-together glasses, and Jen’s stomach clenches tight.
“I remember this guy,” she says with a little smile, reaching down to pat the giraffe on the head. “You ever come up with a name for him?”
“Her,” she whispers, looking down at her shoelaces, “She’s Marie Curry.” Jen forces herself not to laugh at the mispronunciation, and instead reaches out and tucks Brooke’s hair out of her eyes.
“We’re going to have fun, you and me, yeah?” she asks gently. Brooke keeps her eyes on her shoes, but gives a little nod. Jen sighs, supposing that’s the best she can hope for at this stage. “We’ll have rules sooner, but pizza and ice cream for dinner tonight, how’s that sound?”
On the third night she wakes up to the sound of Brooke screaming. She runs into the bedroom to find her sitting upright in bed, woken up from a nightmare. She’s so hysterical Jen can hardly understand what she’s saying, and when she asks what’s wrong Brooke won’t answer, only cries and cries. Jen holds her and smoothes out the tangles in her hair, doing what she can to calm her, missing her sister, hating Banner more than she’s hated anyone else before.
I don't know how to help you, she thinks to herself, I'm all you have left and I haven't got a damn clue how to help you.
***
Jen never wanted kids, doesn't know the first thing about raising them, but in that first year she learns to be observant. She notices how Brooke shrinks away every time she brings a man home with her, so she stops. She notices the longing way that she looks at the Wonder Woman and Captain America comics on display next to the grocery store, so she buys them for her when she can. She notices, too, that she's quiet—too quiet, so quiet that it's easy sometimes for Jen to forget about her. She wishes she were better about that, but she’s still got her own life to live, and besides, it will be good for Brooke as well as her if she can finally finish up her degree.
Brooke’s too young still to be left alone in the house, so Jen brings her along when she works late nights at the diner. Her boss tries to give her trouble about it, but she chews him out in front of all the regulars, ending in a theatrical flourish and scattered applause. They both know he would lose half his customers if she left, he can deal with an eight-year-old doing the crossword puzzle in a back booth.
"Who's the kid, Jenny?" Danny asks as she pours his coffee, "whatcha been hiding from us this whole time?"
“Nothing, creep,” she resists smacking him on the arm, “Believe me, if I’d had a kid before you’d have known about it, and you’d be crying that I hadn’t had it with you.”
“Don’t go thinkin’ too much of yourself, now,” he smirks, “Takes a lot more than the thought of a pretty girl to make me cry.”
She makes a face but smiles as she does, and he raises his coffee cup over towards Brooke. “So, who is she then?”
"She’s my sister’s kid. She’s staying with me now.”
Something in her expression must have shifted at the mention of Becca, because Danny reaches out to pat her arm awkwardly.
“We were all really sorry to hear about that, Jen,” he says, his eyes sympathetic, “Jesus, what a load for a kid to deal with—how old is she, six, seven?”
“Eight,” Jen answers, “Only just started the third grade.”
"That sure don't look like no third-grader homework," Danny gestures again to Brooke, "you know she ain't just looking at the pictures in that." Jen glances over to see Brooke immersed in a five-year-old copy of National Geographic and rolls her eyes. Becca had always said the kid was smart, but it's on nights like this Jen thinks she might have been understating it all along—she’s caught her twice trying to finish the math problems in an old algebra textbook in the public library. She reflects that even if you took the dead mother and crazy father out of the mix, she'd have absolutely no idea how to deal with her niece.
It doesn’t help, though, that anytime Jen tries to talk to Brooke about her parents, tries to ask her how she’s feeling, how she likes her new school, something deeper than grief clouds her eyes and she shuts down, purses her lips and won’t look up from her hands until Jen changes the subject. Jen knows she’s probably going about it in all the wrong ways, but she’s got to press it in the beginning, because closure’s supposed to be a thing to work towards, right? But it becomes more and more tempting to simply leave her as a closed shell, and Jen’s terrified that there will come a day where she will give up on it.
She takes Brooke on a trip to Chicago at the end of the school year, in the vain hope that a weekend together with just the two of them will get her to open up just a little bit—or at the very least, it will allow her to have some fun. Ever since Jen told Brooke about the Field Museum she’s been begging to go, and Jen wouldn’t mind seeing the Art Institute again either—she gave up her art dreams a long time ago, but she’s still got a soft spot for the Impressionists.
But Brooke’s uncharacteristically whiny for most of the trip, and by the time they make it to the Art Institute Jen’s starting to regret that she’d saved the Field Museum for last. Her temper is on thin ice by the time they make it to the special Van Gogh exhibit, and Brooke is in full-blown pout mode.
“This is boring,” she complains as she leafs through the brochure, “and it says here that everyone likes this painting, when the stars don’t even look like real stars, and it doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s why it’s called Impressionism, Brooke,” Jen struggles to keep her exasperation at bay, “it’s about how the painter feels about something instead of what he sees…”
Brooke rolls her eyes.
“Dinosaurs didn’t have art,” she grumbles, her lower lip sticking out in that stubborn way Jen’s begun to recognize all too well, “I’ll bet they never had to go to boring art museums.”
“You want to see them or not?” Jen snaps, “Little baby dinosaurs didn’t get what they wanted unless they were very well behaved, and you’re pushing the envelope, sister.”
Brooke glares and doesn’t say a word for the rest of the day, until they finally get to the Field Museum. Brooke’s eyes are practically popping out of her head when they step into the lobby and see the giant brontosaurus in the center of the hall. She hops from one foot to the next as they wait in line, and once they’re finally admitted into the museum she all but drags Jen towards the fossilized skeleton.
“Aunt Jen, come on!” she says, “I wanna see him up close!”
She skids to a stop at the base, her mouth open in awe. She stares at the dinosaur for at least a good five minutes, and Jen wishes, not for the first time, she knew what was going on in her head.
“These were a part of real dinosaurs,” she whispers aloud, “they were inside real dinosaurs,” and before Jen can stop her she reaches out to touch the base of the dinosaur’s leg bone.
“Brooke!” she scolds, grabbing her hand away, “We’re in a museum, you know better than that!”
Brooke glances fearfully from her aunt to the security guard, who Jen sees has come up behind them. Great, just perfect…
But the security guard puts a friendly hand on Brooke’s shoulder and smiles at her.
“Don’t worry about it, ma’am,” he says to Jen, before giving Brooke a wink, “Had to make sure yourself, didn’t you?”
Brooke blushes and nods, smiling as wide as Jen’s ever seen her. She all but skips towards the stairs as Jen follows her. She turns back and mouths thank you to the security guard, and he gives her a wink as well.
The long car ride home is mostly silent, but Jen reflects that it could have gone worse.
“Which dinosaur was your favorite, Brooke?” she asks finally.
“The brontosaurus,” she answers without hesitation.
“Oh really?” Jen’s favorite had always been the triceratops. “How come?”
"He's huge," she says, "He isn't a meat eater so it means he’s good, but he's twice the size of a T-Rex. No one would ever mess with him—I'll bet he could smash anything if he wanted to."
And Jen doesn't have anything to say to that.
***
Brooke grows into a near-perfect mixture of her parents, and it kills Jen a little bit each day to realize it. She's got Rebecca's quiet nature and sweet smile, but she's got Brian's unruly brown hair and inexplicable obsession with numbers and equations. The traces of Becca are welcoming in their own bittersweet way, but whenever Brian shows through Jen can’t help but recoil. Even years later she can’t stand to be reminded of him, of just how thoroughly he shattered their family and their lives. But she can’t ever say that to Brooke, so Brooke will never understand exactly why Jen’s response to her latest science project is clipped and irritated. She doesn’t seem to have inherited her father’s anger, though it’s something Jen keeps a wary eye out for. God knows the girl has enough in this world to be angry about; it’s only a matter of time before it crashes through the surface.
She finally breaks her “no-men-in-the-house” rule for Danny, because hasn’t that been a long time coming, and Brooke’s silence can no longer necessarily be equated with fear (at least, that’s what Jen tells herself). Besides, he’s good, and she trusts him, never mind that he’s one of those ambitionless nothings she swore she’d never waste herself on again. He loves her, and bit by bit she learns to love him, because he’s there, because he’s safe, because he’ll listen when she needs to cry about her sister or her mother or her job. It lasts two years and three months before it implodes, before he, ironically enough, is the one to leave her. He leaves, he says, because he wants someone who can commit, who can make him a priority, because the fights aren’t worth it when her heart’s only halfway in it. She yells out the door that he’d better watch who he’s calling half-hearted, but knows deep down that she can only place so much of the blame on him—the rest goes on her and the train wreck that’s become her life.
She tries not to be resentful, to not let the bitterness of early middle age grab hold of her, but it’s hard when she’s stretched by so many different responsibilities, when she knows the directions her life could have gone in, and she knows that if she didn’t have Brooke underfoot she could have maybe found some time to make things right with him.
“Is Danny coming back?” Brooke finally asks, on one of the few evenings that they manage to have a meal together.
“No,” Jen says, “No, he isn’t coming back.”
“Oh.” Brooke picks at the broccoli on her plate.
“Did he leave because of me?” she asks.
Jen sighs heavily.
“No, Brooke, he didn’t,” she says, “he left because of his own reasons and his own problems. Now can we just leave it?”
“But…”
“Brooke, leave it,” she snaps, and Brooke’s eyes flash briefly before returning to fixate on her broccoli. They finish the meal in a stony silence, and Brooke doesn’t try to strike up a conversation with Jen for days. Which, to be perfectly honest, suits her just fine.
Jen supposes she should be grateful that Brooke doesn’t become the petulant, boy-and-makeup obsessed teenager she was at that age, but a large part of her wishes she was—that way Jen would at least have a way to relate to her. She remembers the dilemma of how much eyeliner to wear, which boy you were going to try and take to the dance. She doesn’t remember ever staying inside to do homework while the rest of the high school’s at a football game, and she certainly doesn’t remember asking for a goddamn Scientific American subscription for Christmas.
She also begins to resent that Brooke makes no effort to help out around the house other than the bare minimum, that she can’t seem to do anything with her life other than shut herself up in her room and work on whatever new experiment she’s cooked up for herself. It’s not like she expects Brooke to earn her keep or any nonsense like that, particularly given the minimum wage in this damn state. But Jen’s held some job or another since she was fifteen years old, it was the expectation in her house that you helped pull the weight once you were old enough, and Brooke can’t seem to get the concept through her head.
“I just don’t see what the issue is,” she says on a Tuesday morning as they’re both getting ready to head out the door, “You’re not on a sports team, you don’t have a boyfriend, there’s plenty of time in your life for you to find a job and keep on top of your schoolwork at the same time."
“I’ve told you,” Brooke says, her voice soft, “They want to bump me up to AP Chemistry at the end of the semester, I’ve got to do more than just keep up.”
“Yeah, smart cookie, aren’t you?” she snaps, as she gets up to put the cereal away, “if you’re so smart I’m sure you can apply it to finding a job instead of sitting on your ass solving useless equations. It wouldn’t hurt you to get some perspective, be more grateful for all that…”
There’s a loud clang as Brooke slams the milk jug down and springs to her feet.
“Useless equations?” she shouts, “you mean all those equations that helped get us to the moon? Or are working to cure diseases, or helped us figure out what DNA is? Those equations help me understand how the world works, just how USELESS do you think that is?”
“And I’m sorry,” she goes on, her voice rising in pitch, “That all I do is sit on my ass all day, isn’t that fine for you anyway? It doesn’t matter if I’m in my room or working at McDonald’s, either one gets me out of your hair, which is all you want, isn’t it? I’m sorry that I have to be around all the time, but at least I’m doing something productive with my life, at least I want to graduate college by the time I’m 22…”
She continues on, screaming at Jen until her voice cracks. In some ways Jen’s been waiting for this for years, and she doesn’t fail to rise to the occasion.
“I don’t ask for much in this household,” she says, her voice rising to match Brooke’s in volume, “All I ask. Is that you pull your weight. And that you learn to control yourself if someone tells you something you don’t like.”
Angry tears spring to her niece’s eyes but don’t fall.
“You are fucking heinous, you know that?” she shouts, “You’re a heinous bitch,” and without warning slams her hand through the window on the kitchen door. The glass shatters and Jen shrieks at the sight of the blood on the floor. It takes every ounce of her self-restraint to only call an ambulance and not the cops, for her fury at Brooke is barely mitigated by her fear at the spectacular amount of red mixed in with the broken glass. By the time the ambulance arrives Brooke’s calmed herself into a dazed silence, and can’t take her eyes off of the blood dripping down her wrist.
Jen has to head off to work before Brooke’s discharged from the hospital, so they don’t see each other again until Brooke comes home that night. Jen’s staring resolutely at the television but she sees Brooke out of the corner of her eye, holding her bandaged hand and shifting guiltily to lean against the doorway.
“I can pay to get the window fixed,” she says awkwardly, “I’ll ask down the block, see if anyone needs babysitting or lawn work done or something.”
“That would be good,” Jen says stiffly. Brooke starts to head upstairs, but turns and ducks her head back into the living room.
“Aunt Jen, I’m really sorry,” Brooke says, her voice breaking just a little bit, “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” Jen cuts her off, her eyes locked onto the television screen. “Don’t worry about it, kid.”
There’s an uneasy truce for two weeks before a bigger and worse fight comes. Jen doesn’t even remember what started it but they go back and forth screaming at each other for over an hour, and though there’s no shattered glass this time something far deeper breaks.
“I’ve cut you a lot of slack over the years, Brooke,” she says, “a hell of a lot of slack, but you have got to grow up, stop trying to take advantage…”
“Taking advantage!” Brooke cries, “Is that what you think this is? So nice to know my existence is taking advantage of your hospitality…”
Jen’s tried so hard to hold back in the face of a fury she knows is driven by years of pent-up grief, but Robertson women have tempers of their own and they’re far sharper, more focused and cutting than a blind Banner rage could ever be.
“Do you think I wanted this?” she bites out in a low hiss, “I didn’t ask for you to be dropped into my life but I have done the best I could, and I don’t need a carbon copy of your father standing there telling me I could have done a better job. You take after him more and more every day, you’re as bad as he ever was—”
She regrets her words almost before they leave her mouth, but before she can take them back Brooke storms out of the house, slamming the door behind her. She doesn’t return for two days and Jen never asks where she went. For all she knows she wandered around the streets in that blinding rage and that’s fine with her, as long as it’s out of her house and out of her life.
***
Jen tells herself that she inquires into the possibility of early graduation for Brooke’s own good. She tells herself that her high school’s never seen a student the likes of her, that they can barely handle her now as a sophomore. She tells herself that Brooke will do far better for herself in college, that she’ll be happier if she can finally get out of this town and start afresh.
She tells herself that she’s not doing it for selfish reasons. She tells herself that it’s not because a tiny part of her fears what her niece has become, that it’s not because she blames herself for not doing right by her, that it’s not because she can’t face the family she’s broken.
She’s gotten quite good at lying to herself.
***
Brooke doesn't object, of course, and gets into some of the top schools in the country. She chooses Caltech for the scholarship, the weather, and (Jen suspects) for the distance. Her last months at home are quiet, but when Jen drops Brooke off at the airport is has far more of a sense of finality than Jen thinks dropping a kid off for college is generally supposed to. The house feels unexpectedly empty those first few months, and Jen works to fill in the spaces that ten years’ makeshift parenting have left. She slowly eases back into a pattern and doesn’t look back—re-orienting her life at age 43 is hardly the hardest thing she’s ever had to do, and in some ways it’s rather fun. Regret’s always been something she’s looked upon with disdain, and there’s enough left in this town to laugh at yet. She finally moves on from Danny and starts seeing new men, some of them good, some of them bad. She wonders if she’ll ever actually settle down, finds that she’s content not to know.
After the first Christmas Brooke doesn’t come home, choosing instead to spend her breaks in Pasadena and her summers in research facilities. They exchange cards on birthdays and holidays, check in on the phone every few months, but she doesn’t ask Jen for any favors and fades out of her life almost as swiftly as she came into it. From afar Jen admires her independence, remembering how different she’d been at Brooke’s age, how reliant she’d been on the boy she followed to Wisconsin. A part of her worries about what such self-sufficiency will do to Brooke, but knows it’s now truly out of her hands, if she’d ever had control of it in the first place.
Jen sends her a card and her mother’s old ring for graduation, and when Brooke calls her up to thank her she asks, clearly hesitant, if she can come back for a visit.
“I’ll be driving out to Princeton to start my grad program in the fall,” she says, “And I think I’ve still got a couple of old boxes in the basement.”
They hug warmly but the silence is awkward, Brooke doesn’t seem to quite know what to say and Jen exhausts most of her new news in ten minutes. They go out to the diner that Jen used to work at, for something approaching old times’ sake. Half the regulars from thirteen years ago still spend their mornings there, and they all greet Brooke with the appropriate amounts of shock, awe, and “you’re all grown up! And you’re doing what now?”
“Anti-electron collisions,” she says to a kid around her age, the son of one of the town’s police officers. “We’ve got all this new equipment we’ll be working with, something we couldn’t have dreamed of doing even four years ago…”
By the time she finishes her monologue Jen feels that old edge, and as they sit down with their coffee she can’t help but start up her same tirade.
“All this time and you still haven’t left behind that copy of National Geographic.” She laughs as she says it, but she knows her irritation shows through. Brooke stiffens, but pours her sugar into the coffee delicately, as though determined to keep things as civil as possible.
“They asked me what I’m up to now,” she replies lightly, “Not really up to much more than schoolwork these days.”
“Same old Brooke,” Jen says, “You know, you’re never going to keep a man if all you do is talk all that science crap. You intimidate them—no one wants to be with someone who shows them up in every conversation.”
Brooke keeps stirring her coffee methodically, but she looks up to return her aunt’s irritated look.
“Better to intimidate them than have any of them want to be with me. The last thing we need is someone else hit by a Banner blast, right?”
Her voice is cool as she says it, but Jen’s thrown by the words. She stares at Brooke, really looking at her niece for the first time in four years. Her hair’s grown out again—she’d cut it short that last summer before she left, but it cascades below her shoulders now, framing her face rather than hiding it as it had all those years ago. She carries herself differently, with more confidence than Jen’s pretty sure she ever had while they were living under the same roof. But there’s a resignation to her stance, formed by years of something Jen knows she’s never quite understood.
“Is that it?” she asks at last. “You keep them away on purpose because you’re afraid you’ll turn into him?”
“Well, I’d probably repel them with my own geek charms anyway,” she snaps, “but if we want to talk shop…yeah, I’d rather not do to anyone what he did to Mom.”
It’s the first time they’ve ever discussed Brooke’s parents so openly and calmly, but Jen doesn’t miss the increasingly rapid motion with which Brooke stirs her coffee or the way that she bites her lip.
“Brooke,” she puts her hand on top of Brooke’s and the spoon clatters against the coffee mug. She looks at Jen, her expression pained and maybe a bit terrified. There’s so much Jen wants to say to her, all the regrets and apologies she’s practiced in her head a million times, the half-phrased words of comfort and care that she tried to get out over the years but mostly wound up storing in her head for a decade and a half. She owes Brooke all of it, and Brooke needs it if she really goes around thinking about herself in this twisted way.
But Jen still can’t find the right words, and their family’s never been the heart-to-heart type. And they’re in the diner, after all—it would only embarrass the both of them if they made a scene.
“You’re better than him, you know,” she says instead, her voice soft, “you don’t need to act like you’re his second coming.”
“Never said I thought I was,” she replies, her eyes flickering down to the coffee cup, “But contingency planning never hurts. Besides, you taught me better than anyone that you don’t need a man in your life to survive.”
“Surviving’s not the same thing as being happy, Brooke,” she counters, “and you know how to survive. I’d like to see you happy, too, believe it or not.”
Brooke ducks her head down the way she always used to, the curtain of hair falling in front of her eyes again before she pushes it back.
“I believe it,” she says, “And I’ve been happy, Jen—happier than I think I’ve ever been. And I will be, where I’m going, too. You don’t have to worry about me.”
Don’t I, though? Jen wonders.