Under Threat (2 page)
My dad sighs and leans back in his chair. “Rich, assuming the anthrax turns out to
be baking soda, what’s our next step here? Obviously, we can change our phone number,
but knowing that someone has our address… I’m not sure what more we can do.”
They start discussing security systems and cameras, all of which we already have.
I excuse myself and clean up the dinner table, tossing the congealing pasta into
a container and sticking it in the fridge. Then I head up to my room to call Leah.
My bedroom is my favorite place in our house. I repainted it myself last year, two
walls white and two walls lime green. It’s got a wood floor, and the rug is a dark
cherry color. My parents bought me matching bedding—dark red with big geometric shapes
in the exact same green as the walls. Show-jumping ribbons hang from a picture rail,
and my dresser is covered with trophies. When I first invited Leah over, I was worried
she’d think it was bragging to have them all out, but she totally understood. “Well,
they’re not really yours, right?” she said, when I started apologizing. “They’re
yours and Buddy’s.”
I have photos of Buddy all over the wall—Buddy jumping, Buddy rolling in the mud,
Buddy looking out over his stall door, the white star on his forehead with a trail
like a comet. I’ve had Buddy since I was eleven, and for the last six years he’s
been my best friend.
No matter what else has been going on in my life, Buddy’s been
there for me.
I look at the screen saver on my computer: a photo of Leah and me, both sitting bareback
on Buddy as he grazes. The late-afternoon sun is shining with that golden, glowing
kind of light, and the late-fall trees are bare of leaves. Buddy’s coat is gleaming
red chestnut, and Leah’s face is turned toward the camera in an open-mouthed laugh.
Jake took the photo on my phone, because I asked him to. I wanted to capture the
moment, though he didn’t know why. It was three months ago, end of November. Just
a few minutes after Leah’s and my first kiss.
I sit cross-legged on my bed, call Leah and tell her about everything that’s just
happened.
“Holy crap,” she says.
If I wasn’t so stressed, I’d laugh. Leah never swears. Not that “crap” is
really
swearing, but Leah’s the kind of girl who actually says things like “shoot” and “darn
it.” It’s adorable. Dorky but adorable.
“I mean, you only just
left
here,” she says. “All I’ve done is eat dinner and start
my math homework, and you’ve been through all that? It must have been so scary.”
She knows all about the fake bomb and the brick through Jennifer’s window and everything.
She knows about my nightmares. “What did you have for dinner?” I say.
“What did I have for dinner? Are you serious?”
“Yes. Just…just tell me something normal, okay? Distract me.”
“Oh, Franny.” She is quiet for a few seconds. “Okay. I finished cleaning the tack,
and Jake finished his lesson with Brandy, and Mom came home from work with a carload
of groceries.
Jake and I helped her make dinner. Mashed potatoes, pork chops, broccoli…”
“Sounds good,” I say.
“Do you want to come over here?” she says.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I picture their cozy living room, Leah’s mom, Diane, marking
her students’ homework at the table, Jake in his room practicing his guitar or maybe
playing a computer game, the horse barn visible from the window. “But it might be
weird tonight, you know?”
“You mean not talking about it? With my mom there?”
“Yeah.” I chew on my bottom lip. “Acting like everything is normal. When all I can
think about…” My chest is tight, and my eyes sting with tears. I rub the back of
my hand across them. “I just…what if…I mean…” I start crying for real.
What if someone
kills
my parents? What if some nut with a gun walks into the hospital and starts
shooting?
I can’t bring myself to say the words, but the images in my head are vivid
and bloody and oh so real. My dad in his hospital greens, sprawled in the hallway
with bullet holes blossoming like poppies across his chest. My mom, trying to shield
a patient with her body as a stranger pulls a gun from his bag and points it at her
head, and there’s a loud bang and she’s falling…
“Franny. FRANNY!”
“I’m here,” I choke out.
“I’m coming over,” she says. “On my way.”
I hang up and feel a warm rush of relief at the thought of being with her. And then,
almost before I’ve even had time to form the thought, a wave of dread slams into
me with the force of a tsunami.
If my house is a target, could being with me put Leah in danger?
Leah must have made an exception to her never-exceed-the-speed-limit rule, because
she is at my house in less than twenty minutes. I hear her pull into the driveway,
and I fly down to let her in, rushing her past my parents and the cops and up to
my room.
She pulls me in for a hug and we just stand there, my head on her shoulder,
breathing
in the clean, sweet scent of her shampoo mingled with the smell of horses clinging
to her jacket. “Poor Franny,” she says.
I lift my head and look at her. “Sorry,” I say, looking around for a tissue. My nose
is running, and my eyes are probably all puffy and gross-looking. “Sorry I’m such
a mess.”
“It’s okay. Don’t
apologize
. I mean, no kidding you’re upset. Who wouldn’t be?”
“You feel okay about being here?” I ask. “I mean, not scared or unsafe or…”
She laughs. “Given that the police are right in your living room, I’m not too worried.”
“What did you tell your mom?”
Leah pulls away, studying my face. “About why I was coming over? Nothing. I just
said you’d had a hard day and wanted company.”
“Right.” I flop onto my bed, and she lies down beside me, both of us staring up at
the ceiling. There’s a long silence, and I wonder what she’s thinking. It’s weird
that you can be so close to someone and not know what they’re thinking. I have to
bite my tongue to not ask her that all the time.
“You think I should tell her, don’t you?” she says at last.
I roll onto my side and prop myself up on one elbow so I can look at her. “I didn’t
say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” She sighs. “I hate keeping secrets from her. Hannah and Esther
always did that, and it really upset her. She says she wants to be the kind of mom
whose kids can tell her anything.”
Hannah and Esther are Leah’s twin sisters. They’re twenty—three years younger than
Jake and three years older
than Leah—and they’re away at college. In the Gibson family,
Jake and Leah are “the good kids.” They tell the truth and go to church and help
out with the horses and don’t keep secrets from their mom. Hannah and Esther are
the rebels. The bad girls. Although I think all they really did was get drunk at
a few parties and talk back to their mom. They’re in their third year of degrees
in commerce and tourism or something, so it’s not like they’re crack addicts.
“You thought your mom would have a hard time when you came out, right?” I say, treading
carefully. “And that went okay.”
“Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t easy. She cried when I told her. She asked if I was sure,
and if it was her fault or because of what happened to Dad.” She makes a face. “Which
was a weird thing to say, really. Have you ever heard of someone deciding she was
a lesbian because
her father died? It doesn’t even make sense.”
Leah’s dad died of a brain tumor when she was thirteen. Her mom, Diane, was left
to raise four teenagers and run the farm while somehow holding on to a full-time
teaching job. Which had to be tough. What got her through it all, she says, was her
faith. There are framed Bible quotes all over the Gibson house.
“Still,” I say. “You only came out a year ago. So she accepted it pretty fast.” Leah’s
mom joined PFLAG—Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She’s even spoken at her
church about how their community can be more inclusive of everyone.
Leah nods. “Yeah. She got her head around it. She says there is no way that God’s
plan doesn’t include every single one of his children. She says if this is what I
am, then it’s because God intended it to be that way.”
I’ve heard this story before, but it gives me goose bumps every time. Because although
I’m not religious at all, I can see that what Diane did was seriously huge. To take
something you’ve always believed was wrong—and then, because you love your kid,
turn that belief upside down? “It’s impressive,” I say. “You know? To support you
like that, given where she started.”
Leah shrugs. “Well, your parents supported you too. And you were way younger when
you came out. If I’d come out at twelve, I don’t think my mom would’ve even believed
me.” She blushes. “At twelve, I didn’t have a clue. I was really young, you know?
Still playing with dolls.”
“I’ve always known,” I say. “Always. But it wasn’t a big deal for my parents. They
have lots of queer friends. And it wasn’t like it came as a big
shock or anything.”
I shrugged. “I’ve wanted to marry my best girl friends since preschool. And I wasn’t
ever a very
girly
kind of girl.” I run my fingers through my short hair and grin
at her.
“I was,” Leah says. “Pink clothes, princess obsession and all.”
“You still are,” I say. “I mean, maybe not the princess obsession, but yeah.
Total
girly-girl.”
She laughs. Then the smile slips from her face, and her forehead creases. “My mom
being so accepting about the lesbian thing…are you thinking that means she’ll accept
this too? What your parents do?”
“I think it shows she can be open-minded,” I say. “It shows she can rethink her beliefs.”
Leah shakes her head. “It’s totally different. Because—”
“Why? Both have to do with thinking a certain way and then—”
She puts her fingers on my lips, shushing me. “Let me finish, okay? It’s totally
different, because when I came out, she had to question what she’d learned.”
I nod. “Uh, yeah. I get that.” Religion was a subject we mostly avoided.
“But this abortion thing,” Leah said. “My mom is definitely against that. And there’s
no reason for her to change.”
“But there is,” I say, pulling away from her and up to sit cross-legged on the bed.
“She likes me, right? And she knows that you…well, that you like me.”
“But she hates what your parents do. Or she would if she knew.” Leah shakes her head.
“Seriously, Franny. It’s not worth it.”
“
I’m
not worth it, you mean.”
I’m feeling argumentative. Maybe I’m just full of fight-or-flight chemicals after
all the stress of the evening, I don’t know, but I feel like I need to know
that
Leah’s on my side. “What do you think?” I blurt out. I’ve never asked her this before,
and as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I wish I could snatch them back.
If she sees my parents as evil baby killers, I’m not sure I want to know.
Luckily, Leah misunderstands my question. “What do
I
think? I think the only reason
my mom changed her mind about gay people was because I came out. Otherwise she’d
still think it was wrong and a sin and all that.”
“But if she met my parents…If she understood what they do and why it matters…” I
trail off. “Women used to
die
because they couldn’t get safe abortions. That’s how
my dad got into this in the first place. When he was a medical student, in the early
seventies? He used to see women admitted to hospital with bleeding, infections, all
kinds of awful stuff. Some of them had abortions in dirty back-alley-type places.
Or they tried to give themselves abortions.”
Leah interrupts. “It doesn’t matter, Franny. Not to my mom. She says life begins
at conception and that’s that.” Her blue-green eyes meet mine, wide and honest and
steady. “To her, it’s murder. And so it doesn’t matter how you explain it. You can’t
justify murder.”
“To her, it’s murder,” I repeat. In my mind, I am hearing the voice on the phone:
baby killers.
Leah nods. “Yes. To
her
, Franny. Not to me.”
I relax ever so slightly. I needed to hear that. “You don’t see it that way?”
She drops her gaze. “I don’t know what I think exactly. I like your parents. I know
they’re good people. But the way I was brought up—we were taught it was wrong.”
“You were taught that being queer was wrong too,” I point out.
She sighs. “I know. But abortion? I mean, I wouldn’t judge anyone for doing what
they think is right for them. I guess…well, it’s complicated.”
“
Complicated
. How is it complicated? Women have a right to control their bodies.
Abortion is legal. We’re getting death threats because my parents are doctors providing
care to women who need it.” My heart is racing. “It seems pretty obvious who the
bad guys are.”
“Look, there’s a whole lot of things that aren’t clear to me anymore. This last year…I’ve
had to rethink a lot of what I’ve been taught. You know that.” Leah takes both of
my hands in hers.
“My mom really likes you. And she accepts us being together, which
means so much to me. Can we please not wreck everything by telling her about your
parents?”
I know she’s right. I just don’t want to accept it.
The stupid thing is, until the phone call tonight, I’d hardly even thought about
Leah’s views on abortion, let alone her mother’s.
But if the threats and everything are going to start up all over again, I’d really
like to know that my girlfriend is 100 percent on our side.
I squeeze her hands and let out a long, shaky sigh. “Okay. I mean, fine. Why rock
the boat, right?”
“Exactly.” She smiles, and the relief on her face is as clear and bright as sunshine.
“I love you, Franny Green.”
I close my eyes for a second, holding my breath, trying to hold on to this
moment
and keep it inside me. Then I open my eyes and she is still there, wide-eyed, waiting.