by Lisa Wingate
“Barbara, what are you talking about?” As far as I could tell, my father was mesmerized by Barbie. Why else would he have given her everything she wanted, including four kids, none of whom were his idea?
She laughed softly, ruefully. “You were perfect. His perfect little girl. I always wanted to be somebody’s perfect anything. I wanted someone to love me that way.”
“My father loved you.” Even now, it was hard to admit. I’d always convinced myself that his attraction to Barbie was merely physical—the hormonal insanity of a man facing midlife. I’d told myself that the pretty young wife and the batch of in vitro kids were merely a form of denial—his way of pretending he was in his twenties instead of his fifties. I wondered if he’d ever considered that he’d be over seventy before Jewel graduated from high school.
Now she might never know him at all. Would she end up like Shasta someday—desperately trying to fill the gap created by a father who’d left her behind?
“He took care of me,” Barbie said quietly, her expression hard and sad as she tracked something in the brush by the creek. “He liked the way I look. That’s all there ever is.”
“You let it be that way. You let it be just about the surface.” Who was I to talk? Hadn’t my life been mostly window dressing? In the weeks since the Rosburten crash, not one person, not even my so-called best friend, had called to check on me. I could be marked off like any other engagement that no longer fit into the social calendar. The worst of it was that I felt the same way. Other than the convenience, the ease of it, I didn’t miss my old life, or the people who had filled it. Amazingly, this life, my life here, felt real, and raw, and important, close to the center. I’d dug down because I’d been forced to, excavated myself, and begun to discover someone I never knew existed.
Barbie’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, thin lines of bone appearing through the T-shirt, and then disappearing again. “There’s nothing else anyone would want to see. The inside’s not always so pretty.”
“The inside is what’s real.”
Her lips trembled, full, perfect, perfectly sad. “I’m not like you, Tam. I’m not strong.”
“You must be.” I felt the connection to Barbie again. Part of me wanted to reach out and take her hand, but I didn’t. “You must be, or you wouldn’t still be here.”
Looking at her hands, she picked a rhinestone off the fingernail polish Fawn’s spa had probably done for her, pro bono. “I always found someone to take care of me. You can always find someone who likes the way you look, if you’re pretty. . . .” Her cell phone vibrated on the decking beside her, and she twisted to look at the screen. “It’s Fawn,” she muttered to no one in particular, then hit the button and silenced it. For a half second, I expected her to get up and take the phone into the house, but then she just slid it farther away, as if it were a temptation she didn’t need right now.
Somewhere nearby, a car alarm started going off as we watched Aunt Lute and the boys patrol the edges of the yard and gaze over the fence into the creek. Aunt Lute plucked something from a bush and placed it carefully in the boys’ hands. Running with newfound treasures cupped in their fingers, they hurried back to the porch to show us. Landon opened his hands, and a tiny canoe rocked back and forth, teetering on his fleshy index finger. “Is a boat!” Rolling the boat over, he displayed the bottom, where the letters B-o-A-t had been clumsily scratched into the wood.
“It sure is,” I said. “Did Aunt Lute give that to you?”
“Her get it from a tree!” Landon’s face was filled with the magical glow of toy-bearing trees—like wild blackberry vines, only better. Even the blaring of the car alarm couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. All three of the boys were so caught up in Aunt Lute’s story, they seemed oblivious to the noise.
“The Lady of the Water has left them for us,” Aunt Lute yelled over the racket as she crossed the yard, a paisley scarf fluttering on her shoulders like multicolored hair. “Aren’t they lovely? We’ll run a sink of water and sail them. Then tonight, we’ll lay them by our beds so that in our dreams, we might sail off down the river like Hiawatha.”
“The canoes were a great idea, Aunt Lute,” I said. No telling where she had found the little boats—probably someplace in the boxes of junk she kept piled on the porch.
She laid a splay-fingered hand on her chest. “Oh, not mine—the Lady of the Water. The boats were hers. Perhaps her little fairies grew tired of rowing and left them there in the bushes.” Sometimes it almost seemed as if Aunt Lute really believed her own stories. Other times, I knew she was crazy like a fox, and making up invisible ponies and the Lady of the Water was just her way of dealing with the kids and escaping the weirdness of our lives.
“It’s really nice.” Barbie fingered Mark’s canoe, then set it back in his hands and smiled. I knew she was trying. Normally, Barbie didn’t think anything Aunt Lute came up with was nice.
Aunt Lute drew back, her headscarf catching the breeze. “Why, thank you very much,” she said, her surprise evident. “Perhaps one day the Lady of the Water will leave something for you, as well.”
Barbie didn’t sneer as she usually would have, but just nodded. “I don’t have much imagination. Growing up, I didn’t see much use for it.”
Aunt Lute bent close to her, slowly extending a hand toward Barbie until her fingers cupped Barbie’s chin and they were eye-to-eye. The noise of the car alarm suddenly seemed far away. “It’s never too late,” she whispered. “Don’t let them tell you who you are. You know who you are.” For a moment, they were frozen in that pose, an odd diorama—Aunt Lute in her sun hat with her scarf drifting on the breeze, and Barbie in her lopsided ponytail, still wearing the sloppy sweats she’d had on all day. They seemed as if they were transferring information without speaking, as if they understood each other for the first time. Aunt Lute took one of the Lady of the Water’s wooden animals, which hung from a string around her neck, and slipped it over Barbie’s hair, crowning her with it. “There you are,” she whispered, as if Barbie had been lost and was suddenly found. “Welcome, Princess Andalusia.”
Mark stepped back and pointed toward the side yard, where a long shadow was advancing. “Somebody’s here!”
“Perhaps it’s the Lady of the Water,” Aunt Lute suggested.
Mark bolted toward the side yard and the other boys followed.
“Boys, wait!” I called after them, but they were already rounding the house. Barbie and I slid off the steps and followed, catching them at the gate as they were trying to let in Shasta and her kids.
“Hey, I meant to call you this . . .” I caught the look on Shasta’s face, and my heart jumped. She was sweaty and wide-eyed, out of breath, her hair clinging to her cheeks in moist, dark strands.
“Something’s wrong.” She panted out the words, pointing toward the source of the alarm, somewhere on the other side of our house. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! I didn’t know what to do. I’m trying to get in, and the boys are following me around, and I’m trying to figure out how to get in, and I keep hollering and hollering, and no one’s answering, but then I heard moaning. I know I heard someone.”
“Where? What’s going on?” I struggled to unhook the chain on the gate, but it was rusted shut.
Clasping a hand over her forehead, Shasta caught her breath. “At Elsie’s. Something’s wrong at Elsie’s. Something’s been weird all day. The place has been dark and the blinds have been down since morning. I noticed earlier that her car was in the driveway, but I didn’t think anything about it. And then I heard a car alarm, and I walked outside to look, and the car door was open. Then I realized the car was there when Cody got off work last night. Elsie never leaves her car out all night. She always comes home from class, lets herself in through the front door, then goes around and opens the garage and puts her car in. She said her garage door remote quit working. I told her it wasn’t safe for her to be leaving the car there and coming back out in the dark. What if somebody followed her in? What if some
one did something to her? I tried to get into her house just now, but all the doors are locked.”
“Okay, just a minute.” Yanking the chain free, I opened the gate. “Leave the boys here, and I’ll come with you to see what’s going on.”
Chapter 26
Sesay
The woman, Elsie, has trouble today, I think, and perhaps overnight as well. When I came this morning to leave tiny boats for Root and Berry and the other children, something was not right. I know the way the houses look. I know the rooms where they sleep, which spaces they enter in the mornings, which lights they use, when the curtains open. Elsie’s house was dark this morning. I went away and came back again, and it remained so. I heard someone inside, faint, just a low moaning and moving, and the sound told me something was not as it should be.
I tried to think of the good thing to do. The best thing. If I told someone, and the police came, they would know I have been around her house. They would say I am a thief. When you’re living on the street, you feel like you can’t trust anybody. Terence said this last night, and I know it is true. I understand, don’t worry. But sooner or later, you have to come in out of the rain, Sesay. Sooner or later, you have to let yourself become human again. He told me how to find the hidden key to his building, then. He showed me how to open the lock. He showed me the room where I could stay and the sink where I could wash. He said, I’m leaving for an art festival in the morning. Look after the place a couple days for me, all right? You can stain those frames and sweep up the sawdust if you want. Be sure to lock up the place whenever you’re gone. We sat and talked a long time, and then he went to his home. He left me in his building with his things all around me, as if I were someone who could be trusted. As if I were someone.
I finished my boats early in the morning and went away. Everything was just as it had been before. I did not bother anything. I am not a thief. I am not a thief just because I watch the people. Just because I watch their houses. No one other than me has seen that it was wrong at Elsie’s house this morning. But I left it. I left it as it was, because I must be careful. Elsie is not a kind woman. She would tell the police to send me back to him. She would tell them to put me on a boat.
But I could not stay away forever. A person, a person who is someone , wouldn’t leave an old woman when there is trouble, and so I opened the car and caused it to wail, and then I hurried away.
I watch and wait as the young women run across the street and try to enter the house. I can see them from under the bridge, my hiding place. Sirens howl in the distance, coming closer. Someone has called the police. The good thing would be to travel down the creek to a safer place, but I feel as if I am bound here, my feet trapped in the sand. I want to know. I must know. The feeling is strange, after such a long time of being only myself.
Sooner or later, you have to come in out of the rain. . . . Terence is
speaking in my chest, and I creep from under the bridge, move to the edge of the bushes, watch the police car and the fire truck race along the street. They work to open the garage door. They are quickly in. The young women run into the garage, and the firemen follow, and I can no longer hear their voices. I move out of the creek, slip along the front of the yellow house, hide behind the porch, but still the voices are too faint. There is only the noise of fast talking and clinking metal. I look around, creep across the front of the porch, slip behind the oleander bush. The police car is close. A breath pushes hard in my chest, trapped, and my heart pounds as if I am the muck rabbit in the cane patch. In my throat, a hummingbird flaps its wings.
I try to be still, to listen.
“Elsie? Elsie? Can you hear me? What happened?” a voice calls out, and Elsie answers in words that run together like drops of syrup on a plate.
Voices continue. I hear pieces.
“. . . alert bracelet.”
“Blood sugar or the heat. Give me a body temp. . . .”
“Elsie? Elsie? How long have you been here?”
“Okay, now calm down. It’s all right. We’re just going to check you out and . . .” An air conditioner wakes and roars between the houses, and I can no longer hear. I should go away, move farther from the police car, but I wait. I must know. Firemen walk to and from the garage with their medical boxes. A new police car comes, then drives away. I think of the line picture for this word police. I cannot sound it out letter by letter. I cannot decode it, but I know this word. I have seen it on their cars many times.
Finally, there are only the firemen. The air conditioner goes to sleep, and I hear them taking Elsie into her house. The firemen leave with concerned faces. The young women walk out and speak with them in the driveway. I crouch behind the oleander bush.
“I’ll watch her,” Shasta, my teacher, says. “I’ll check through the night and make sure she’s all right.”
The fireman shakes his head. “We can’t force her to go to the hospital, but she needs to understand that she had a close call. I know it’s hard for an older person living alone to face that fact sometimes, but another hour or two locked in that garage, and this could’ve been much worse. Between the heat in there and her health problems, she could’ve easily slipped into a diabetic coma and been gone. I know she’s upset and embarrassed now, but her family needs to address this issue with her. A fall like this, when an older person can’t get up and get to the phone and, in her case, the medications needed to regulate her blood sugar, could easily turn deadly. She’s extremely lucky someone was checking on her.”
My teacher hugs herself and shivers, even though her skin has a sheen of sweat. “I wasn’t checking on her. It was just . . . just a miracle that the car door fell open when it did, and the alarm went off. Thank God it did.” She squints toward Elsie’s car, her eyes narrow with thought, as if she is considering this miracle. Did Father God bring me here this morning? I wonder. And then I know that it is so. Father God has given a miracle to me in Terence, and now He has used me to make one. His was the voice speaking in my mind just now, telling me I must do the good thing. Telling me I can. I would not have found the courage to do such a thing on my own.
When their backs are turned, I slip from beneath the oleander bush and move to the bridge. They do not see me, but Father God sees. He smiles at me from heaven, and I feel it.
I sit in the cool sand underneath the bridge, where I have tucked my pack and my blanket. Leaning back against them, I close my eyes and let the hummingbird in my throat slowly beat its wings to a stop. All is well now. All is well. . . .
My mind drifts away on a sea of word pictures. Bird, store, milk, the, dog, cat, run, jump, fly, sky, try, sun. Such beautiful words. Boat, water, God . . .
I hear the creek passing by in a trickle.
I hear the ocean.
I feel the water.
I think of my grandfather. He is standing on the shore, beckoning me. I take his hand, and we walk long across the burned place, and I am a little girl again, hearing his stories. . . .
Children laugh somewhere nearby. “You ca-an’t catch me!” one calls out.
I open my eyes to the long afternoon shadows. “You ca-an’t catch me!” It is Root. I know his voice. “I wanna sail my boat!” He cheers. “Mommy, I wanna go down in the creek.” They are on the side of the house, close to me. The chain rattles on the gate as the boy tries to open it.
I take my pack and move to the other end of the bridge.
“Not now, Ty,” his mother says. “We need to stay here and get the hot dogs ready for everybody. We’re gonna have a picnic, remember?”
“Yay! A picnic!”
She laughs at his words. “Tell you what—before the fire gets going too much, let’s walk over and check on Elsie. If she’s feeling better, maybe she’ll come sit out with us while we grill the hot dogs.”
“’Kay,” the little boy says.
I can smell a fire starting. The smell carries my mind to the village when I am a child. I can see my grandfather bending over the small kettle that hangs above the
fire outside our house. My mouth waters, and I think that if I hurry, I might walk to the mission before the line is long.
I listen as Root and Berry move away with their mother; then I climb from the creek and slip around the railing. The branches slap closed behind me, striking the railing, ringing it like a drum.
“Mommy! Wook! There a lady! Is a red-dress lady!”
I do not stop, but walk faster. The hummingbird flutters in my throat.
“Hey!” the mother calls. She is my teacher, but she has never spoken to me before. She has never seen me. “Hey, wait!”
I continue on, but she is coming. I can hear her running behind me, the boys running with her. She will be angry that I am here. She will say, What are you doing near my house! Stay away!
Their footsteps are hollow on the bridge. “Stop!” she says, panting.
I hope she will grow tired of chasing me, but she does not. Soon she is just behind me, close enough to touch. “Wait!”
Chapter 27
Shasta Reid-Williams
She stood on the sidewalk with her back to me, her shoulders hunched like she was hiding something, protecting it. I skidded to a stop, pulling Benji and Ty back by their hands. What if this woman was dangerous? I had the boys with me. If she got confrontational, it wasn’t like I could run away.
Even Benji and Ty didn’t seem sure of what we were doing. During story time at the Summer Kitchen, when she was telling tales, they smiled at the voodoo lady and scooted closer to the front, but they weren’t smiling now. Benji had moved a step behind me, and Ty was tugging on his shorts like he had to go to the bathroom. Maybe they could tell I was afraid, or maybe they’d clued into the same thing I had—that even though she probably wasn’t five foot tall, and her stooped-over body was so thin her hair was the biggest part of her, there was something intimidating about her up close.
“I can walk here,” she said, keeping her back turned. Her voice bounced off the canopy of branches overhead and echoed under the bridge.