The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  “Take it or leave it,” the girl said, and thank god the woman took it. The girl told her to hang on one minute, and then she went to the public bathroom and opened her duffel and dug to the bottom, where she’d hidden the briefcase, and she opened that and counted out the cash and brought it back to the woman all folded up in a brown paper towel. No idea if the money was real or not. She had already worked for three hours cutting the bills and still only ten thousand of the dollars were cut. She could have done it faster, but she had needed to be so careful, and out in the woods she had only had that small pair of scissors from the twins’ room, and besides, when the rain had started she had needed to tent herself beneath her jacket in order to continue cutting, and it had been an altogether terrible plan. At least five bills had been soaked through.

  After she handed the money over and bought her ticket, she asked the woman for a few dollars’ change in quarters, and then she bought two Snickers bars, a bag of potato chips, and a bag of peanuts from the vending machine. It hadn’t been an easy task. She’d dropped her quarters over and over again as she tried to get them into the machine. She was trembling so badly. Cold, yes, but also afraid. Afraid the bus would not run, afraid it would. She is astonished, really, when she looks back on it, that she went through with it at all.

  “I love you because you don’t care,” Kaus had said one time. She thought of that as she sat there on the dirty blue plastic seat, waiting for the bus. She did care, didn’t she?

  Eventually she went to the water fountain and took a long drink, and then when she lifted her head back up there the bus was. It was 4:30 a.m. Outside, the freezing rain that would last nearly a week had already begun to beat down so loudly that she couldn’t even hear the driver yelling to her. But she did see him calling out, waving his arms. His meaning was clear—he wanted her to stow her bag. She just shook her head and boarded. She would not let go of that bag for her life.

  It was slow going, but because of the rain her view out the window was as much a blur as it would have been had they been traveling one hundred miles per hour. Better this way, she’d thought, easier to say goodbye to a landscape hardly visible.

  She had almost been caught. In the woods she’d heard footsteps and had thought it was him, but then she’d heard her father’s voice and she’d scurried across to the dip in the land, that old dumping pit that she knew her sister liked to spy on her from. Why hadn’t her father looked there?

  The bus slid a few times, its tail kicking out toward the ditch, and when they approached a stop sign the driver had to pump the brakes long ahead of time. It was a miracle that the bus still ran in that weather, though she wouldn’t use that word. It was lucky; it was strange; no miracles here. She had been up all night, but still she kept her eyes open the entire trip. By the time they reached the coast the rain was softer anyway. Not so frozen. No one sat next to her; the bus was nearly empty. Just one woman spread out a few seats ahead, sleeping since she’d boarded the bus, and a long-haired man she didn’t want to make eye contact with all the way at the back. She was directly in the middle. She wanted to ask someone—the driver, because who else?—about the place they were headed to. She had been such a fool. Used all her focus to get to this point, and she had forgotten entirely to look beyond it. When the bus stopped at a rest area she got out and asked in the gas station for a newspaper for Bangor, and even though they were still some three hours away they actually had one. She got back on the bus and spread the paper out over her duffel on her lap and began to look at the ads. All she needed, for now, was a place to live. And food, clothes. That would be enough for more than a few months.

  At least she had counted carefully. So long as it wasn’t fake, or so long as no one caught her with fake money, she had one hundred thousand dollars. She would be all right.

  In the paper, there were so many ads—apartments, houses, roommates. Nothing like the occasional ad she’d seen in her own town’s paper. Seeing it all, she felt suddenly and totally desperate. She left the paper in her seat, carried her bag, and before even considering what she was doing she scooted up toward the driver to ask about Bangor. How big was it?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the man said. He was big, stocky and overweight, and for no reason at all Henrietta found this somewhat comforting. “I’ve never been good at that sort of thing.”

  “Is it a city?” she asked.

  “Course. Not so much as it once was, though.”

  “Is there somewhere else I could go?” she asked. What was she saying, giving herself up like this? They’d be looking for her, she had better shut up. “Somewhere I can…” she began again, but then she trailed off.

  “What are you up to?” the driver asked, and caught a glance of her in his mirror. “What’s your name?”

  She hadn’t thought of a name yet, and she didn’t particularly want to change her name anyway. So rather than answering, she said, “I’m going to visit my grandmother, she’s just moved up there, and I was just wondering if I might be able to escape the city with her to go see the ocean.” There, now. She was coming back to herself a bit.

  Eventually, once she got him talking, the driver told her about a farm where his niece had worked. It was in a place called South Harbor. Sheep, chickens, acres and acres of flowers and vegetables. And right on the water. They plowed the fields with horses; they gave quaint little cabins to their workers.

  Okay, she had thought. A farm in South Harbor. I can get work there. And then she’d thought, Oh god, you can’t work on a farm with a baby. And then: Well, it’s not as if the baby will be born soon.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe, if she had a girl, she could name it Henrietta. And then it wouldn’t be like she had lost her own name. But then that would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

  * * *

  —

  She had waited for him like they’d planned. She had wondered, as she sat there freezing by their sugar maple, if he had misunderstood the location. But he wouldn’t have done that. Neither of them would have forgotten this particular spot in a hundred years, a thousand. As it got to be closer and closer to the time she knew the buses would start up again, she had been forced to decide. She had almost stayed. She had pressed the button to light up her watch in order to see the seconds pass. At 3:45 a.m., she’d felt more than anything else that she wasn’t willing to lose another baby. Not that she wanted to have one, not at all, not really. But she wasn’t going to not have one again. She ran down the road, past her field. She didn’t look at her house. Better not to. Her parents’ light would be on just then, her mother just sitting up in her embroidered flannel nightgown to say “Where is she?” She ran over the bridge, all the way to the far side of town. Slipping the whole way, wishing she had had the sense to head down earlier. She fell twice, and she was freezing. By the time she got to the station she found out the bus was running late anyway—of course it would be—so once she’d dealt with her ticket and the woman behind the counter, she’d had a little time to get cleaned up in the bathroom. She had packed light—only the money, the one book, and three changes of clothes in total. But what to do with the soaking clothes? She didn’t want to soak everything else in her bag. And she couldn’t leave them, people would find them, and then they would find her. Finally she did the grossest thing she had ever done in her life. She took the trash bag out of one of the bathroom cans, dumped all its contents into another one, and then sealed her wet clothes in that dirty bag and put it in her duffel.

  * * *

  —

  In Bangor, the buildings were big, as big as those in Boston, it seemed. The streets were wide, almost welcoming, and she thought that she might just like to stay on in the city. She could go to shops in the morning, drink coffee, that sort of thing. She could join some kind of club.

  But then this was only based on that quick ride through town on the bus. She didn’t really know a thing; she
hadn’t gone walking around, and now she was in a motel at the outskirts with a view of only parking lots. It was raining so hard here. In between looking out the window she watched TV. She had thought she would see herself on the screen, at least on the news channel, but she didn’t, not ever.

  By the time she fell asleep, TV still on, she had been up for more than forty hours. She had a knife that Kaus had given her a long time ago, a small thing that folded into its blue case, and the case had a little butterfly on it. She kept it under her pillow while she slept. Her sleep was fitful, and she still felt so cold, even though she’d taken a hot shower. In her dream, she had stolen a baby from a grocery store and put it in a paper bag, but when she’d arrived home with it she’d been afraid to take it out and put it on the counter. She opened her eyes and stood and walked straight to the shower, took another long one, and then she packed up all the motel toiletries, including the soap she had just used, because it was what her mother would have done.

  She had meant to venture out after that shower, but instead she took out the one book she had brought along. She hadn’t read a book in who knows how long, but she had been so used to seeing her sister read that when she’d left the Hennesseys’ and run into her house, claiming to be searching for the Ouija board but really packing, she’d just stuffed the book in her bag, a little reminder. Flowers in the Attic. She had found it in her own bedroom just that summer. It had been in her closet, on top of her little plastic set of drawers, and it had been so obvious that Jane had left it there in the midst of snooping. As punishment, Henrietta had hidden it and never given it back. She had thought Jane would have assumed her parents had taken it from her, and that she would throw a fit about it and maybe even tear the house apart, desperate to get to the end of the story. But then Jane never did say a word about it, and Henrietta more or less forgot. Now she lay down on the bed and opened it up. But instead of reading the words, she just rested her face right up against the pages and thought of Jane and fell asleep again. When she woke this time she got the phone book out and ordered a pizza with jalapeños on it. Twenty minutes later, the knock at the door made her heart stop for a moment. She peeked out from behind the curtain and of course it was just the delivery boy. She paid him much more than was due because she didn’t want him to linger making change, didn’t want him to see her face and recognize her from a picture. Not that there was a picture out there. But still. There must be one somewhere, mustn’t there? She ate the whole pizza, and then she slept once more, and then, finally, she put her duffel on her shoulder and left her room. She held a newspaper over her head as she ran across the parking lot in the rain. It was 1:00 in the afternoon on her third day gone.

  “Which way to the ocean?” Henrietta asked the woman in the motel office. There was a beaded door behind the office desk, and behind that Henrietta could hear a television. Incense burned somewhere nearby. The woman pointed to her left.

  “Are there any beaches I can walk to?” Henrietta asked.

  The woman laughed and asked Henrietta if she even knew where she was, and then she finally took out one of those little free tourist maps with all the shops and restaurants on it and showed her that they were some twenty miles from the ocean.

  Henrietta just stood there looking at the paper. Pretending to inspect it, but really unable to see anything in front of her. What to do, what to do.

  “Do you know of a farm?”

  “Sorry?”

  “One with sheep and chickens and vegetables. I heard about it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Henrietta hadn’t even cried when he never showed up. She hadn’t cried when she walked by her house for the final time, hadn’t cried when she’d fallen on the ice and gotten soaked to the core, hadn’t cried in she couldn’t remember how long. Had she even cried since she was a little girl? Now she felt on the verge of it. Maybe the woman could tell. She said softly, “You mean a particular farm?”

  “On the ocean,” Henrietta said.

  “I suppose there are a lot. I’m sorry, honey.”

  She had already booked the room for one more night, but now she just walked out of the office and back to the bus station. She didn’t even hold the paper over her head. Didn’t care if she melted right into rain, if she disappeared. At the counter she said she wanted to go to the ocean.

  “Okay,” the woman said.

  “Okay,” Henrietta said.

  “Well, where?”

  There was a map under the glass on the counter, no words, just route lines and blue dots to mark the destinations. She didn’t want to take too long, look any more suspicious than she already did. Quickly she pointed to the biggest dot.

  “Ellsworth?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  In Ellsworth, her motel was at least a little nicer. A cleaner tub, softer sheets. She also got the paper every day, and even though there were lots of ads for places to live, she didn’t call anyone. She just slept and watched TV. But then two nights in she woke up with a pain that made her double over. When she could walk she ran to the bathroom, sure that there would be blood, but there was none. She stayed up the rest of the night, checking. In the morning she found the phone book and called a taxi to take her to the hospital.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said at the front desk.

  “Well,” the receptionist said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Henrietta said. She thought of running out of the place, but she did as she’d been told—fill out the paperwork, wait. She used her real name but had to invent an address. Already she was amazed at how easy it could be to disappear. Eventually the receptionist came over to her and said, “Insurance?”

  “No.”

  The woman brought a flyer over to her. “Go to this place,” she said. “They’ll take care of you. They won’t charge you much. Probably nothing.”

  “But is it a hospital? I want to have my baby in a hospital.”

  “Well, you go to this place for your appointments and learn how you have it, and when the time comes you come in here and have your baby. Save you some money that way.”

  “But can you check now?”

  “Check what?”

  “On the baby,” Henrietta said. “I can pay.”

  Soon a nurse brought her into a room and lay her down and lifted her shirt and said, “Do you know how far along?”

  Henrietta shrugged and shook her head.

  “Do you know how many missed periods?”

  She shook her head again and told the nurse that her periods had never been regular, and then she said, “There was pain.”

  The nurse said they would have to perform an early ultrasound. She told Henrietta to change into a gown, and then she left the room. A few minutes later a doctor came in, another woman, thankfully. She pressed and felt around on Henrietta’s belly and she listened and said, “Still too early to hear a heartbeat.” She put Henrietta’s feet in the stirrups, and she felt around inside with the ultrasound probe while she kept her eyes on the computer screen. When she was finished she removed her gloves and washed her hands and patted Henrietta’s arm and told her to sit up and get dressed. After she had left the room and come back in again she sat down across from Henrietta and she said, “Do you want this baby?”

  Henrietta shrugged, unsure of how exactly to answer.

  The doctor told her the baby would be there by summer. “You’re in the first trimester,” she said. “You’re hungry. If you want this baby, you need to eat. Your baby is growing organs. It is building a heart and a liver and kidneys and lungs. Do you understand? Meat and vegetables and fruit and milk and cheese. If you want this baby you have got to eat and you have got to take vitamins.”

  Henrietta nodded and left the room with a slip of paper telling her which vitamins to take. In the lo
bby she called for another taxi. At the grocery store she asked him to wait in the lot. Inside, she walked up and down the aisles wondering how the hell she would ever be a mother if she didn’t even know how to cook chicken, fish, anything. And anyway, there was no way to cook in the motel. She bought her vitamins, plus four apples and a head of broccoli, and then she went back outside. Back at the room, she ate everything she had bought. Even ate the woody broccoli stalk. Then she looked out the window, across the street. She put her shoes back on and walked across to McDonald’s.

  There was one of those indoor playgrounds there, with a slew of children inside. Henrietta watched them for a while before taking her newspaper from her duffel. This time, when she looked at the ads, she stood right up and walked to the payphone and put her dime in and dialed.

  A caretaker. A house way up the coast. On the phone, the woman asked lots of questions and Henrietta was reminded of just how good she was at lying. “I’ve just finished college,” she said effortlessly. “Veterinary science,” and, “Hard work, I’m ready for a bit of a break.” They decided to meet the following day. As soon as she put the phone down she rushed to the counter and asked for a pen and paper, and she wrote down the time and the address of where they would meet, and the phone number from the paper, too, just in case. Then she walked up the road to the little strip mall and bought herself a new outfit for the meeting, plus a new winter jacket.

  * * *

  —

  They met in a coffee shop downtown. The weather was cold, unbelievably so, and so windy and gray, but Henrietta walked there because she didn’t want the woman to see her getting out of a taxi. It took her nearly an hour, just pushing against the wind. She had her duffel with her, of course. She had been a fool to not buy herself some sort of respectable bag while she’d been at the store. But then the woman didn’t even seem to notice. Henrietta just stepped into the coffee shop and the woman flagged her down, ushered her into a seat, and said, “I had a feeling that was you.”