by Zoje Stage
“Suzette—”
“—how remarkably talented she is at imitating vicious dogs. Can you do your little barking routine for Daddy?”
Hanna didn’t mind if they talked about her, but she didn’t want Mommy talking to her. She studied how Daddy ate his greens, stabbing them onto his fork, folding over any pieces that were sticking out, opening his mouth to receive them. She imitated him.
“I don’t like the tone you’re using to talk about our daughter,” he said.
“She’s not a baby. She needs to be held responsible for what she does. And you have no idea what she does. She’s a girl of many talents. Hanna knows how to sabotage getting into a school, or staying at a school. She knows how to print pictures off the Internet. She knows how to research stuff online—all on your computer.”
“She should know how to do those things.”
Mommy’s mouth dropped open at his response. Then Daddy squirmed a little.
“The computer stuff. That’s the age we live in.”
“She barked like a dog to terrorize the principal of Sunnybridge.”
Daddy put his fork down. He looked at Hanna for a long time, but she didn’t want to meet his gaze. She concentrated on her rice, one grain at a time. Onto the fork. Into her mouth. Eventually Daddy turned back to Mommy.
“That’s why we were talking about the … other thing…” He tried to communicate something silently to Mommy, and Hanna grew annoyed. Mommy didn’t look too happy, either.
“You know I’m waiting for the approval from our insurance—”
“You don’t have to. We can afford it.”
“Well Mrs. Wade, the principal, helped me get in touch with the Tisdale School and we have an appointment there tomorrow. And this school specializes in kids like Hanna.”
Hanna looked at her, startled. Kids who were learning to be witches?
“What does that mean?” Daddy asked, his voice a threatening rumble.
Mommy didn’t answer him for a long time. They made laser-beam eyes at each other, trying to suck out each other’s brains with just their thoughts.
“The pediatrician said…” She finally blinked and turned away. “There’s a difference between can’t speak and won’t speak. Hanna had some more things to say today.”
Hanna pressed the fork tines against her tongue. She imagined how it looked, skinny parallel rows of nubbly tongue poking through. She paid keen attention now, to Daddy especially. He looked like he’d been struck by a wayward lick of lightning.
“She really spoke? Not just … What did she say?”
He turned to her, and Hanna could see his hope that she’d say something to him, too. But Marie-Anne wasn’t interested in him. Daddy didn’t understand this was for the best.
Mommy sighed. “She said she was Marie-Anne Dufosset—remember, I asked you? A seventeenth-century witch—well, the last person in France burned as a witch.”
Now Daddy looked like he was trapped in a pinball machine. The little silver balls bounced off his face, his brain, making his eyes go wobbly. He looked from daughter to wife, back and forth.
“She said…? You said…?”
“I don’t know what it means, Alex. I’m not bullshitting you and I have no idea what … Hon skrämmer mig, ibland.”
It didn’t matter that Mommy tried to hide her words in Swedish. Once upon a time, Daddy always spoke Swedish around the house. “She scares me, sometimes.” That’s what her mother said. Hanna felt a tickle of relief. Her little canoes of rice traveled down their river into her victorious belly. She was still winning.
“Lilla gumman, is that what you told Mommy? I’d like to hear it too.”
She hummed a high-pitched version of the theme to Star Trek, her favorite show. Daddy didn’t really sound like he believed Mommy, but it didn’t matter. She’d never prove her mother right, and then Daddy would have to choose whose side he was on.
“We’ll talk later,” Daddy said to Mommy as Hanna moved her hand like the Enterprise, traveling around the stars.
Mommy nodded, her face still tight and unsettled.
* * *
Daddy wore what he called pajamas—old gym pants and a T-shirt—though she knew he slept all naked. He opened the book to the Post-it where they’d left off and sat beside her on the bed. She gripped her comforter, paddling her legs beneath it like she was swimming, so excited.
“Right, so … ‘I let my eyes acclimate to the darkness. My constellation stickers glowed on the ceiling. I concentrated on what I could hear: the television from downstairs; my older sister brushing her teeth in the bathroom. Then I heard it! De-ding, de-ding. It sounded like my Under-SlumberBumbleBeast was riding a squeaky bicycle and, with his lollipop hand, ringing a tiny bell. I grinned. But then there was a honking noise. And a crash. Wait a minute, this was all wrong!
“‘I hung over the side of the bed with my flashlight, hoping my UnderSlumberBumbleBeast was okay. But it wasn’t just him—there were others! They must have been sleeping when I first met Lollipop Hand. Now I could see several … One, two, three, four, five. And each one was different! I was immediately relieved, as it would be lonely to be a singular beast living in the forest of my under-the-bed forgotten things.’”
At that point Mommy slipped into the room. She bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
“Goodnight. Sweet dreams.” Hanna wiped off Mommy’s kiss with the back of her hand. “I’m really sorry, about before. I didn’t mean to lose my temper. I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.” She spoke the words to Hanna, but then she turned toward Daddy and her fingertips grazed his shoulder.
“We’re just going to read a little more,” he said.
Yay, Daddy was staying! Mommy threw her a kiss. “Love you.” Then she blew away like a ghost.
Hanna slapped her hand against the book so Daddy would keep reading.
“Okay, I know you love this part … ‘Lollipop Hand picked himself up and wiped the dust from his sky-blue knitted shorts. It looked like a second UnderSlumberBumbleBeast had lost control while trying to steer a lopsided airplane with only one wing. I worried for my lollipop-handed friend (who hadn’t been wearing a helmet), but he chased after the beast in the airplane (who had a Monopoly die for a mouth) and the two of them bickered and flapped and spun their parts. I was relieved they were okay, and I was about to suggest they drive around in different quadrants, so they’d each have enough space, when I saw something lurking in the far corner that almost made me scream. I lay flat against my pillow and stuffed sheets into my mouth.’”
Hanna stuffed her own sheet into her mouth, though she giggled with anticipation.
“Don’t chew on that,” Daddy said, and she opened her mouth so he could pull out the saliva-tinged edge of her bedding.
“‘I took a deep breath and told myself to be brave. I wanted to see that many-legged thing—was it friend or foe? Was it going to attack the other little beasts? Or crawl up the side of the bed and pounce on my foot? I dared to lie on my stomach and peer under the bed again. Lollipop Hand and Bad Airplane Driver must have kissed and made up. The UnderSlumberBumbleBeasts were all in a circle, dancing the Hokey Pokey! I even saw the one that had frightened me—the one with so many legs. They were just pencils—new pencils and stubs of pencils—framing its head like the petals of a flower.’”
Hanna squealed and kicked back the covers. She grabbed her flashlight and flopped over the edge of the bed to peer beneath it, just like the girl in the story. She gestured to Daddy: come look.
In the beam of her light she revealed her treasures: scraps of paper, the sock, the hair band, the barrette, a faded coin purse shaped like an owl, a twist tie she’d stolen from a drawer in the kitchen, a tiny plastic fluorescent-green stegosaurus, two colored pencils in undesirable booger-y shades. It was a miracle they’d survived so long without Mommy reaching under to decontaminate the world she was building.
“Are you trying to make your own UnderSlumberBumbleBeast?” Daddy asked, sittin
g back up with a pink grin on his face.
Hanna’s heart puffed so it was about to burst. She nodded.
“Very clever. Hmm. We’ll have to protect it from Mommy.”
She nodded so hard she bounced up and down on her knees.
“Last time I told her you were working on a little project, it didn’t go so well. I wouldn’t have printed that picture of Mommy if I’d known about the other ones. Putting Mommy next to all those dead people wasn’t nice. And having my password doesn’t mean you can abuse your computer privileges.”
Hanna sat cross-legged with her pillow on her lap, punching it halfheartedly.
“Maybe … I could ask her not to clean so much in here? We can tell her you can do it yourself. You think that’ll work?”
She chewed on her lip. A padlock would be better. But she agreed. Daddy tucked her back into bed. He planted kisses all over her face.
“Lilla gumman? I know you want friends. And you can have real friends too—little girls and little boys. I have friends—every day I like to go to work and see my friends. Then I like to come home and see you and Mommy. That’s what it’s like to go to school too. You go there and see your friends, and then later you come home.”
She shook her head and chewed on the edge of the sheet. He gently removed it from her mouth and folded it back down.
“I know you’re worried about it, and it can be scary at first, going somewhere new. But that’s where you’re going to find your friends. Okay? Be brave for Daddy?”
She really didn’t want to disappoint him, but she couldn’t explain why she didn’t want to go to school. She tried to nod but her eyes just turned up to the ceiling. She wanted a friend who looked like a yam in a pair of sky-blue knitted shorts. A nocturnal friend. A kind of ugly, broken friend.
A friend who could be taken apart if she grew bored with him.
Daddy planted three more kisses on her cheek. “Jag älskar dig.”
She loved him, too. So so very much.
* * *
The little girl in the book had glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers on her ceiling, and Hanna wished she could have some, too. Maybe she’d put them on her Hanukkah list. It would be nice to look at them on those nights when she couldn’t fall right to sleep. All sorts of weird images came into her head when she thought about school. Mommy was really determined this time, and it sounded like the Pissdale School was almost a done deal. She thought of worms swarming over the rotting body of a bunny that had once been adorable. Now it was mud and dried blood and oozing eyeballs and matted fur and the worms ate it up, yummy yum yum. She thought of armies of ants carrying away their bounties of food. Leaves and slices of bread and sticky red Tootsie Pops and severed fingers. The images frightened her, and she didn’t know where they came from or why, or how to tell them to go away and leave her alone.
She wanted Daddy.
She knew they were downstairs, probably on the couch, with the lamps set to glow and the corners of the room in shadow. Sometimes an isolated word or two, spoken in anger, floated upstairs through the floor. Mommy saying “it’s not” or Daddy saying “you can’t.” She heard a loud “Tisdale” and a louder “retarded” and a high-pitched booming “they’re not and that’s terrible.”
Hanna tiptoed into the hall. She sat on the top step where she could hear everything perfectly.
“That’s what we’ve wanted all along—a place that understands her.” Mommy sounded very convincing. Daddy didn’t say anything in response. She heard the clink of a glass being set on a hard surface.
“They have to have academic standards too—” he said.
“Of course.”
“—it can’t just be life skills, or … Whatever they teach in remedial classes, she knows how to tie her shoes.”
“I keep telling you it’s not remedial. They have small classes but also work one-on-one with the kids so they can address specific needs. But it’s still a school, they want to teach them, and the website says a lot of the kids end up mainstreamed by middle school. Not everyone starts in the same place. Hanna has her own particular issues.”
“No, I know.”
It got quiet again.
“Maybe it’s stupid, but I was wondering,” Daddy said. “When she spoke … What was her voice like? Her pronunciation?”
“She sounded…” Mommy hesitated. “French. And like she hasn’t used her voice very much. But everything she said was clear, if accented. Her pronunciation … You’d be proud. Excellent. She picks up so much.”
“Very smart.”
“Maybe too smart. I wish you could’ve seen her. So you’d understand. And I truly, truly … I’d never hit her, I’d never—”
“I know.”
There were kissy-smoochy sounds.
“Sometimes I think…” She waited a long time to hear what Daddy thought. “Maybe, I’ve been the bigger problem all along. I didn’t want … I just thought she needed time.”
“Maybe she did, at first.”
“Did they tell you how much the school costs?”
“It’s not on the website; they said we could discuss it tomorrow.”
“So, expensive.”
“Probably.”
“Put it on the credit card, doesn’t matter how much. There isn’t a ton in the cash account, but I’ll move some things around.”
“Thank you.”
Grown-ups talked about boring things in boring ways and it was almost enough to put her to sleep. But then Mommy made a gasping noise and she hoped for a moment that Daddy was strangling her. Mommy giggled, very much alive, and then there was a flurry of papery noises but no talking.
Hanna eased down the stairs on her butt. A little farther, a little farther, until finally she could see everything that was going on. Their clothes lay in random piles on the floor. Mommy and Daddy stood entwined in front of the couch, their hands running around like lost animals and their mouths like yucky suction cups, all over each other’s faces. Marie-Anne wanted to find something to light on fire, a paper airplane that she could sail into the room where it would ignite the couch. Mommy might swallow Daddy but he didn’t seem aware of the danger. Poor Daddy could die of his own cluelessness.
They made weird noises that Hanna began to recognize. The throaty whines and breathy gasps.
In a rush, they tore off their last bits of clothing and then they were naked, and Hanna saw Daddy’s sculpted bum and Mommy’s breasts looked sharp and ready to shoot. He picked her up and she wrapped her legs around him and then in a swift gesture they were on the couch, Daddy on top. He put his thing inside her and Mommy groaned, and he hovered above her and his bum went up and down, flexing with the effort. They were speaking it then, the language of adults, and now she understood what went with it. The savagery, out of control.
Hanna hoped for a minute that Daddy might kill her this way, as it looked so gruesome, but Mommy came more and more to life as he pumped himself against her. Like he was blowing up a bicycle tire, restoring it to usable condition. She hated Daddy for a minute then. He could have left her flat and lifeless and eventually Mommy would turn to rust like her old tricycle, dead from lack of use.
Mommy gripped his strong arms and threw her head back, and Daddy rode her back to life. He pumped her full of everything he had and they made all their mutant noises that were part of something she’d only faintly grasped before: sex. The strange physicality of it somehow left them wordless.
Hanna slid over into the protective shadows against the wall, got to her feet, and retreated back to bed.
She would get her chance. It remained disappointing that Daddy hadn’t let Mommy wither and die when he’d had the chance. But maybe she could undo Daddy’s life-giving efforts. Marie-Anne could help, and the devil would come along soon—he always visited his witch children, she’d read—and then they’d be even more powerful. As she grew stronger she could take advantage of Mommy’s weaknesses. Could Mommy die of cleaning too much—could she be scrubbed to death? And
Mommy needed a lot of medication. If something bad happened to her medicine, would something bad happen to Mommy?
Or maybe … Mommy was always fussing about how she looked, and she glowed whenever Daddy said she was beautiful.
Maybe if Mommy was uglier.
Maybe Daddy wouldn’t love her as much.
And she wouldn’t want to leave the house and Hanna would never have to go to Pissdale.
SUZETTE
FRESHLY FUCKED AND the sun was shining; oh, what a beautiful day—and soon they’d be heading off to Tisdale. Things were back to normalish with Alex, though it remained an easy source of disappointment that every conversation they had was about Hanna. In their early years, they could spend an entire day side by side with sketchbooks, silently taking in the beauty of the plants and the array of people at Phipps Conservatory. They could lose hours and hours hand in hand, walking around a museum or strolling through Frick Park or the cemetery. At night, they would lie together and the words would come. The things they’d observed about the people at Phipps, the draw of certain places for selfie and group photo opportunities: in front of the green and gold sea monster of a desert plant; beside or beneath one of the tangled and sexual Chihuly sculptures. Or they’d compare what they’d seen at the museum, enthralled by how differently their brains interpreted a piece of art. The cemetery would inspire them to talk about their beliefs in the universe, and how they hoped their decomposing bodies would become part of a forest one day.
They could stay up all night, saying “Remember…” or “Did you see…” Sometimes they’d doze and maybe they’d awaken to nibble at each other. They lived and breathed in extended silences followed by bursts of amazed nose-to-nose chatter that they were together, alive, in sync, in love.
After one final stretch, Suzette sat up. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw something dark on her pillow. Her mind scrambled for answers, not understanding, even as she touched what appeared to be human hair.
Her hair?
It didn’t make sense. She’d experienced a bit of hair loss years earlier when she’d been on 6-mercaptopurine—a medication she’d refused to stay on precisely because of the horror of seeing strands of her hair floating into the bathroom sink as she shook her head. But what was on the pillow was too much, too evenly … cut.