Born Under The Lone Star

“I was trying to protect you.” Marynell ignored Robbie’s question. “You were a very foolish teenage girl who had no idea what you were writing in those pages. You still have no idea.”

“Well, you certainly shouldn’t have had any idea what I was writing in those pages!” Markie was practically shouting now.

“Hey, now, Miss Marker.” Robbie’s use of Markie’s old childhood nickname did not mollify her. After years of heartache she was determined to have it out with the old biddy, right here. Right now.

“Nothing is sacred with you, is it, Mother?”

“Sis.” Robbie touched Markie’s sleeve. “Stop it. It’s just an old diary. Here.” She held out the volume.

Robbie, the peacemaker, Markie thought. Robbie, Marynell’s whipped little pet.

Marynell’s eyes flitted to the diary, then to the pained expression on her bereaved middle daughter’s face. Glaring back into Markie’s eyes, she said, “You can take the thing and publish it in the Dallas Morning News for all I care. Whatever happens now, it’s not on my head.” She turned on her heel and stomped from the room.

“What on earth was that all about?” Robbie said after they heard the stairway door slam.

“That diary.” Markie was unable to keep the creeping sorrow and resignation out of her voice, out of her heart. She sighed. “Or rather, what’s in it. Read. You’ll see.”

“I’m not sure I want to now. Here.” Robbie flapped the volume at Markie. “Take it.”

Markie pushed the diary back. “No. I’m sick of secrets. Go on. Read it. I want you to. Honest.” Even though she meant what she said, she couldn’t help crossing her arms protectively around her middle.

To hide her pain, she turned to look out the dormer window. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her sister hesitating, then unsteadily lowering herself to perch on the edge of the bed.

Just beyond the bare yard Markie could see the windmill, like a huge leaden sunflower, fanning above the leafy tops of twin live oaks. The holding tank to the side was the same dull silver color, the color of all things utilitarian on the farm. In the foreground a rickety post-and-barbed-wire fence demarcated her father’s garden, already bursting with spring foliage. An overalls-and-Stetson bedecked scarecrow, twice the size of a real man, stood over the rows with a toy gun lashed to one stuffed glove and a lurid smile painted on his pale muslin face. Markie smiled. One year her father had actually won first prize in the scarecrow festival over at Cedarville.

Beyond lay the acres and acres of gently rolling land that marked the southern reaches of the Texas Hill Country. Will I ever get away from this beautiful, godforsaken place? Markie was beginning to doubt whether she should stay on here to help her widowed sister. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass, as if her very countenance, her very identity, arose from this land, would always be imprinted here.

Markie’s love-hate relationship with the Hill Country had plagued her even after she’d made a disciplined effort to focus on a new life, a good life. Even her years as a mover and shaker among the power suits in the glass-walled urban canyons of Dallas had not eradicated the strange spell of the Texas Hill Country. Rocky gorges. Remote waterfalls. Wild rivers. Dusty rodeos. Savory barbecues. Old-time German Christmases. The memories, good and bad, always vivid, came back to her too easily as she looked out over the landscape where she had grown up. The Texas Hill Country was not the kind of place one could just leave.

Sometimes it felt as if she was two people. The hearty little girl who grew up running around this rustic landscape regulated by the seasonal rhythms of farming, and the sleek, sophisticated young woman who thrived in a bustling cosmopolitan culture, rushing headlong into the future. Two distinct parts, cleaved by the one event certain to change girl to woman—the birth of a child.

For some moments Robbie had been flipping pages, reading with the diary held close to her face as had been her girlhood habit. Markie noted the exact moment when she stopped. The clock ticked three times before Robbie lowered the open book to her lap, her finger touching one spot on the page, like a devotee lining a particular passage of the Bible in church.

Markie bit her lip as, with head bent, still as a penitent, her sister stared at the open page.

Robbie lifted sad eyes up to look at her sister and asked, “Am I reading this right?”

Markie didn’t answer. She turned back to the view. So peaceful. So beautiful. As if nothing had ever gone wrong in this place. But everything had.

“Markie?” Robbie’s troubled voice insisted from behind. “You…you had a baby?”

Markie stood stock still, closing her eyes, imagining again the scene of Danny’s death. What a horrible way to see one’s husband die. And what a horrible time to find out that your little sister is not even remotely who you thought she was. “Yes,” she said without looking back at Robbie. “When I was seventeen.”

“I… I don’t believe it.” Robbie flared a palm over her swollen bosom, where a perennial gold cross winked on a short chain. A gift from Danny, no doubt. Her sister, always the good girl to the core, would never understand what Markie had gone through, no matter how many diaries explained the pain.

Markie turned upon her sister with that uncompromising steady gaze that had vaulted her to her success in the political arena. “Well, you’ve got to believe it. Because it’s true.”

CHAPTER TWO

The maternity home is not such a bad place. It’s kind of pretty from the street, actually. Quaint. A brick three-story with a big porch and tall white columns. Somebody said it’s an old converted sorority house. Isn’t that weird? It’s a sisterhood of losers now. Girls like me who listened to some guy’s sweet talk until he broke her heart.

The home—and I use that word in the worst sense, sort of like the warehouses where they stick old people—is tucked away at the end of a long, shady street a few blocks from the University of Texas campus. There’s nothing that indicates what’s really going on inside—just a little brass plaque beside the door that reads Edith Phillips Center. For Wayward Girls, I added in my head as I walked through the door.

Frankie insisted on lugging my bags upstairs, acting like she wasn’t in a hurry, but I could tell she was. I could tell she wanted to beat the rush-hour traffic around the capitol. And, of course, the almighty Dr. Kyle mustn’t miss his dinner.

A girl who actually looked more pregnant than me showed us to a tiny office where I met my caseworker, May, who is kind of cool. May looks as if she’s stuck back in the sixties, wearing a loud afghan and a shiny Afro. Really. She even made Frankie laugh. Then we met some of the other girls, who were in the kitchen cooking dinner together like one big happy family.

My room’s on the second floor. Frankie spread the twin comforter set she bought for me across the bed and set up some pictures in pretty frames on the dresser as if she was moving me into a real sorority house or something.

“Call me when it happens and I’ll come right away,” she told me as she gave me one last hug. “And remember, we love you.”

We who? Her and Kyle? I am well aware that Kyle thinks I’m a juvenile delinquent, a stupid little slut, and I’m sure he’s glad I opted to enter this free adoption program. I had to come here now so mom and dad would think I was off at the camp. Kyle doesn’t mind pretending that he and Frankie are helping me foot the bill for that.

It’s not bad here. Really. The backyard is pretty and secluded, with places for me to sit in the shade and write in my diary. Somebody put a little bowl of fruit on my dresser before I arrived. I’m supposed to keep up my studies here, but I don’t know if I’ll have the heart. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to be here at all.

But here I am. Waiting to give my baby to strangers.

ROBBIE, THE ONLY REDHEAD in the family and the most emotional of the McBride sisters by half, even when she was not pregnant, pressed a palm over the open pages of the diary as her face flushed and the tip of her nose gorged red from suppressing tears.

“Oh, Sissy, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She shook her head and gripped the diary. “I had no idea. I thought this was just going to be a bunch of kid’s stuff.”

“Of course you did.” Markie was determined to let her sister off the hook gently for this trespass. “That’s what a teenager’s diary should be, shouldn’t it? Innocent kid’s stuff. Like yours, I suppose.”

Robbie stared past Markie’s shoulder, at the sky beyond the window. “My diaries were mostly about Danny. From the eighth grade on I expect my whole life was about Danny. But you’re right.” Her eyes snapped back to Markie’s. “It was all innocent. School and proms and stuff. I just assumed yours would be the same.”

“How far did you read?” Markie took two strides and lifted the diary from Robbie’s hands. She angled her wrist so she could scan the page where her sister had been reading. The words Edith Phillips Center jumped off the page. “Oh, you got to the part where I moved to the Home.”

Robbie nodded. “So I assume you…you gave up the baby for adoption?”

“Yes.” Markie frowned at the loopy teenage handwriting that described the most painful months of her life. “I’m really sorry you had to find out this way.”

Robbie swallowed. “Don’t apologize. Do you know what…what happened to it? To him—her?”

“Him.” To keep from going into total meltdown, Markie frowned at her reflection in the window. “He was a little boy. He’s with a good family in Dallas.” Again, to keep herself composed, Markie stated the facts simply, though living through it had been far from simple. It would never, ever be simple. The fact that she hadn’t shared that experience with the sister she claimed to love so much seemed to only compound her loss.

“How in the world could I have missed this?” Robbie had the same look on her face that Markie recognized on her own. Self-condemnation.

The pattern of the McBride sisters from childhood on had been to shoulder the blame in any situation. A by-product of growing up under their mother’s unrelenting domination, Markie knew. All of them had chosen different ways of coping with Marynell. Frankie fled. Markie rebelled. But poor Robbie had stayed on in Five Points, trying to appease a woman who could never be pleased. She had ended up feeling responsible for everybody else’s happiness. And now even the buffer of happy-go-lucky Danny was lost to her. The last thing Robbie needed was more guilt.

“It’s not your fault. I intentionally kept it from you.” Markie took two more steps and sat down on the twin bed next to her sister, grasping her hands.

“And it wasn’t the end of the world. I survived. I know I did the right thing. I know he’s happy and well.” And brilliant and handsome and brimming with charisma and a natural-born leader like his father. But Markie couldn’t add those things. Be cause how would she explain how she had come to know all of that? There was too much risk…for Brandon.

“Don’t try to make me feel better. You were only seventeen. I could have helped you and your baby.” Robbie withdrew one hand, draping it protectively over her abdomen as if shielding the child growing there from the sad knowledge that he or she had an unknown cousin somewhere, far away from them all, far away from Five Points.

“You had just married Danny that Christmas. And then you guys got the opportunity to buy the farm and you and Mother and Daddy ended up working so hard to get it in shape by the following spring.”

“So, you were pregnant when I got married in December and then you had the baby that spring?”