You'll Thank Me for This

by Nina Siegal

  There was that time when Karin had noticed red marks on her mother’s wrist, a band of bruises that went all around her wrist, like a bracelet. Her mother had worn a long-sleeved shirt, one of those yoga shirts where you stick your thumbs through the holes, but Karin had seen it when her mother rolled up her sleeves to fill up Karin’s bath.

  Karin had asked her mom about it, and her mom had said she took the neighbor’s dogs out for a walk and the leash had pulled on her wrist; the dogs had run so fast! Karin got excited to hear that some neighbors had dogs she didn’t know about, but she was angry that her mom had not let her walk the neighbor’s dogs…She knew how much Karin loved dogs. But the dogs were never mentioned again, and certainly there were no more opportunities for taking them out, even though Karin asked a lot of times. Wow, she thought now, I’m really stupid.

  Now Martijn put his arm over her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but he held her close. Then he started walking, but not in the right direction. In the other direction.

  Karin stopped. “Where are we going?”

  “To the campsite, of course. To the other kids. To Rutger and Riekje. To your mom.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s in the other direction,” she said, looking behind her. “That way. That’s the way I was going.”

  “Oh no, Karin,” he said. “You’re just all turned around from your fall. It’s this way.”

  “Are you sure?” Karin said. “I really thought it was over there…”

  “Come on,” he said, sounding tired, and grabbing her by the arm. “It’s really late. And I’m getting impatient now.”

  She pulled her wrist out of his grip, taking her arm back. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll go the way you want to go. Just don’t touch me, okay?”

  He looked her over. “Wow,” he said. “Not very appreciative, are we? If I hadn’t come, you’d be lost in the woods by yourself, you know. But look, it’s normal to be a little turned around, especially when you’re scared. You can thank me for this later.”

  Thank you? Karin didn’t say it out loud. But that’s what she was thinking. I’m never going to thank you for anything, you vampire.

  As they walked, in silence, Karin ahead, with Martijn behind her, like some kind of prison guard, she started to think about all the ways that their life had started to suck once Martijn came into it. Her mom used to be really relaxed and happy when her dad was around, but since she met Martijn, she was nervous, like, all the time. Her whole personality had changed. She got super anxious, and she’d jump on Karin if she did even the smallest thing wrong. She had never been like that before. She used to be really nice, really fun and funny. Even her mom’s body kind of changed; she got weirdly thin, like rail thin, and not in a good way.

  It sucked that they’d had to move into his house, with Jasper and Frank, who totally didn’t want them there. They let her know all the time, calling her names and giving her nasty looks. They were pretty much always rude to her mother, but they were constantly torturing Karin, with all kinds of little tricks they thought were funny. Like they put a dead mouse in her closet one time, and another time a hamster in her underwear drawer. And they left things right outside her bedroom door so she’d trip when she walked out. One time they even dropped her toothbrush into the toilet and, when she told her mom, claimed she’d done it herself.

  None of that mattered so much. Karin could protect herself. She was just really worried about her mom. Why did she let Martijn treat her like that? What was so great about him that they had to stay with him?

  “Listen, Karin,” said Martijn from behind her. “I know it may not be the best time to talk, ’cause it’s late and we’re both tired, but since we’re here together…”

  Oh no, thought Karin. Here it comes.

  “I know it’s been kind of a hard transition that we’ve had as a family,” he started. “This last year. Your mom and I wanted to be all together, and I know that has been tough for you, because you miss your dad.”

  “It’s not ’cause I miss my dad,” Karin snapped.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I just meant, I can imagine that it might be really hard to start over with a new family after losing your dad. Maybe you didn’t really have enough time to mourn before we—”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Karin said. “I don’t need to talk about this.”

  “No,” said Martijn. “No, we don’t have to. Not if you don’t want to.” But then he continued anyway. “I’ve just been meaning to try to find some time alone with you. That’s part of the reason I volunteered to do the dropping with you. I know this park was really important to you and your dad. It was kind of your place, right? You spent a lot of time alone together here. Must have been very bonding.”

  Karin couldn’t believe this. Was he really going to be jealous of her relationship with her dad? That was so lame. “It’s, like, the middle of the night,” she said. “I’m not really in the mood to talk.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But when else do we have this kind of opportunity?”

  “O-M-G, are you serious? What do we have to talk about?”

  “Oh, lots of things. Lots of things,” he said. “For example, I want to tell you that I feel really sorry about what happened to your father. He was a good man trying to do something important in the world, and he got killed for the wrong reason. That shouldn’t have happened.”

  “You don’t have to say that,” Karin said. “You don’t have to apologize. People don’t have to apologize all the time. It wasn’t your fault, obv.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I know you guys spent a weekend together out here, camping together, before he left the last time for Syria. Was that nice? Do you have good memories of that?”

  There was something really irritating about the way he wanted to know so much about them, but she had a little voice of her mom in the back of her head saying, “Why can’t you open up to him just a little bit? He’s really trying, Karin. He may be clumsy about it, but he’s trying.”

  “Yeah, it was nice,” said Karin, letting the memories of that final trip flood back into her mind again. “He loved this forest so much. He tried to do a lot of nature photography here. We came here a lot. Actually, we just left our spot. The place where we camped that last time. Also other times. That’s where we always saw the mouflons. That’s why I knew where we were just now. Where we ran into each other back there? That was my dad’s favorite camping spot.”

  Martijn did something really weird then. He grasped her wrist again, for no reason at all.

  “Where we just were?” he said. “The place we just left?”

  It was a tight grip. Too tight. She thought about her mom’s wrist and the bruise band, and the supposed dogs her mom had said she walked, which she didn’t walk.

  Karin glared at him while she tried to shake her arm loose. “Give me my arm back.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “Where?”

  Chapter 24

  Caller

  The caller’s house had a fence around it and a cobblestoned path that led to a quaint little cabin that looked like a gingerbread house from a fairy tale. It was painted dark brown, with a whimsical bright-yellow door, yellow trim, and the shape of a heart cut into the front door. Grace stepped onto a welcome mat that was shaped like a gingerbread house and let the surreal element of the moment touch her for a second.

  She rang the bell, which chimed with a cheerful sound of reindeer bells. Immediately, she heard loud barking. It was not just one dog but many—maybe dozens of dogs. Some of them seemed to be throwing their bodies up against the front door to try to open it themselves. She heard scratching and falling.

  It wasn’t long before the door swung open, and she saw a human figure pushing through the dogs amassed by the entrance. “Hush, now,” the human said. Grace couldn’t see her that well because of a screen door between them, but it seemed to be the woman. “Calm down, everyone. Quiet.” The dogs barked and yelped and jumped while the woman patted their
heads.

  Grace watched her maneuver. She could see that the woman was older than she’d anticipated, maybe in her late sixties or seventies. Her hair was big and round and silvery, reminding Grace of a halo in those medieval paintings, sort of hovering behind her head. The woman’s eyes were hidden behind large square-framed glasses and looked tired.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Grace said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you.”

  “Don’t apologize. I understand the urgency.”

  Having pacified the dogs to some degree, the woman turned her attention to Grace, peering through the screen. Grace could see that she was very tall, with broad shoulders like a man’s, and she listed just a little to the left. She thought: Julia Child. A Dutch Julia Child. Grace imagined her, for another second, holding a meat cleaver up over lots of headless raw chickens, and smiling a big, mischievous smile.

  The woman drew up her glasses to rest them on the top of her head. The expression on her face was serious as she finally opened the door. “I’m Maaike Bol,” the woman said. “You must be Grace.”

  “Yes, Grace. Grace Hoogendijk,” she added. “I came as quickly as I could, but maybe too quickly. I got pulled over for speeding.”

  “Oh, I should have warned you. They are always patrolling that exit. Did you get a ticket? Please come in.” Maaike pushed the screen door wide, and the dogs started barking again. “Don’t worry about them. They’re all sweet, friendly dogs. Susje here might jump up on you, but I just clipped her claws this morning. You can also just push her back down and she’ll obey.”

  Grace took a step forward tentatively while making a mental inventory of the hounds: a lean, shaggy dog; a brown spotted dog with long ears; a pair of small sausage dogs; a scruffy terrier; and a big black Labrador. Six in all.

  The little house was as quaint on the inside as it was on the outside, with mismatched antique furniture and lots of porcelain figurines everywhere.

  “I know that I alarmed you,” Maaike said, ushering Grace into the living room, past the sniffing canines. “I was debating as to whether it was a good idea to get involved, but that’s me. If I see something that looks strange or suspicious, I like to help. If I were the mother, I’d want to know.”

  Maaike had a matronly way about her, with her eggplant-and-squash-colored dress made of a thick organic cotton. On one foot she had a soft gray sneaker and on the other foot, her left foot, she had an enormous navy-blue boot, covering a plaster cast.

  “Oh, you’ve hurt your foot,” said Grace. “Is it broken?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s a ridiculous story,” Maaike began, ushering Grace into her house. “You know how one bad turn becomes another—in this case quite literally. My poor dear husband, Wim, who is now seventy-two years old, had to have his hip replaced. He’s needed it for a long time, but finally the pain got too bad and the orthopedist said it was a must. So I took him into the hospital on Tuesday, and we realized just after he was admitted that we had forgotten all his diabetes medications, and so I had to rush back home and get all that. And so I was leaving the hospital, and I guess I was just in too much of a rush because when I got outside there was a young boy there, and he had a skateboard, and I guess he was just rolling up and down the street for fun. Well, at some point he skated past me and then he fell into me—or maybe I ran into him, I can’t say—and he fell off the board, and then I tripped on the board, and there we were, the two of us lying on the pavement together. Luckily, we were right there at the hospital already. So they took us inside and then did some X-rays, and it turned out that I got the worse of it. He was okay with just some bruises and scratches—you know how kids’ bodies just bounce back from everything—and I had to get this cast for my ankle. But it’s not as bad as it looks. I can still walk on it.”

  Grace was selfishly wondering how this woman with a lame foot would hold her up. “It seems you must be doing pretty well with it if you went for a walk in the woods with the dogs already,” she said hopefully.

  “The dogs need to be walked a few times a day, and with my husband in the hospital, who else can do it? Plus, they say it’s good for my recovery.”

  “And your husband? How did the surgery go?” Grace was doing her best to be at least minimally polite, in spite of her drive to get moving.

  “He’s all right. He got sick from the anesthesia, but they say the operation was a success.”

  Grace followed Maaike into a living room with a white tile floor and baroque-looking furniture spaced around a coffee table covered with ceramic figurines. A figurine of a woman in a nineteenth-century dress holding a parasol. A figurine of a woman in eighteenth-century costume reaching down to pat a tiny dog. A ceramic cat climbing up onto a ceramic birdbath, where a tiny ceramic bird was about to take flight.

  They moved at Maaike’s pace into the kitchen, followed by all the dogs, where Grace could see a red bucket on the counter. “I put it up here so the dogs couldn’t get to it again,” said Maaike, reaching to show the bucket to Grace.

  She could immediately recognize Karin’s T-shirt inside, with white and pink stripes and with a pink sequined star right in the middle. It was one of those “interactive” T-shirts they sold at H&M. Grace had an image in her mind of Karin swiping her hand over it, up and down, to make it change colors. Silver up, pink down. Anyone could have bought it; lots of kids walked around in identical H&M wear at school.

  Grace reached into the bucket and took out the shirt, bending back the collar to find the tag, which read “Karin 0641420787,” Grace’s own phone number. That was inarguable. She raised the shirt to examine it. Right in the center of it was a huge dark stain of brownish red, and lots of holes punctured around the star.

  She felt suddenly faint and grabbed on to the counter to wait for her head to stop spinning. Maaike’s hand came to rest on her back, steadying her. “The gashes are from Jezebel’s teeth,” said Maaike. “I think.”

  Grace let her head clear and took a deep breath. That stain could be blood, but it could also be something else—red paint or ketchup or tomato sauce.

  She brought the shirt to her nose to smell it, and got a whiff of something truly awful. It didn’t smell like blood per se; it didn’t have that slightly coppery scent. It smelled like something rotting, chemical, like the kind of toxic solution you’d use to clean out a really mildewed bathroom. It reminded her a bit of rotten eggs, sulfur. It may not have been blood, but it certainly wasn’t only something child friendly, like ketchup or tomato sauce.

  “I need you to show me where you found this,” said Grace.

  “Of course,” Maaike said. “But do you think we should call someone? The police?”

  Grace thought of the conversation she’d just had with the highway patrolman and anticipated how contacting the cops would only slow her down. Karin wasn’t technically missing yet, because she was scheduled to be on the dropping until tomorrow afternoon. And Grace knew this was not the shirt Karin had been wearing when she went out this afternoon. So at least that was something—something slightly less worrying. It was an extra shirt that she and Karin had packed in her zebra backpack this morning while sitting on the living room floor—Grace was sure of that. It also seemed that whatever this fluid was on the shirt might not be blood, so maybe the cops would not help anyway.

  “No, not now,” she said. “I’ve got my cell phone; if we find something we’ll call them.” But as she said it, she swiped her phone to check the battery. She was already down to 23 percent.

  Grace would have asked to charge the phone then, but there was no time.

  “We can take my car,” Maaike said. “The dogs are used to it, and I know the way to the place where we had our walk earlier. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes, of course. Can you drive with…” Grace looked down at Maaike’s booted foot.

  “Oh, it’s no problem. Thank God it was my left foot, not my right.”

  The foot didn’t turn out to be the limiting factor. It soon became clear that Maa
ike didn’t go anywhere without all of her dogs. She was less their owner than their pack leader, thought Grace, watching her try to get them all clipped into their leashes while balancing on one foot and the heel of her huge blue boot. Grace was becoming increasingly anxious. She asked Maaike if she had flashlights and a first-aid kit, and if she did, if it would be okay if Grace got them. Maaike instructed her where to find everything while she wrestled the Labrador into a reflective vest.

  “They love to be out there once they’re out there,” Maaike told her apologetically. “It’s just a matter of getting all their noses pointed in the same direction.” The two sausage dogs had run around her, so her ankles were now tied up in leashes, threatening to topple her.

  Grace didn’t have much of a plan at this point, except to get out there with flashlights, somewhere near where the dog had found the shirt, and to start calling Karin’s name. She figured that if Karin was hurt and lying somewhere out there by herself, at least she could hear her mother’s voice. But what if she was unconscious? Grace could only hope to come across her body with the flashlight in the darkness. Just the thought of that made her shiver. “Which one is the hunting dog?” she asked Maaike. “The brown one?”

  “Jezebel,” said Maaike, putting her hand out to pat the snout of a large brown dog, with dangling brown-and-white spotted ears. “This one. She’s a naughty girl. But she’s very good at finding things.”

  “If we give her the piece of clothing to smell and then send her out looking for my daughter, will she do it?” she asked, now thinking, she felt, with a bit of a clear head.

  “We can certainly give it a try.”

  She asked Maaike, “Do you have some kind of bullhorn or something that could amplify my voice?”