I look and see a boy watching me. His eyes are like Ray’s, hungry, but it’s a simple hunger, easy to read. He is looking at me like how boys look at the girls who live below us when they talk to them on the stairs, hands under their shirts as the girls giggle and then pretend they want to stop when they see me.
“I just came to get her and bring her home,” he says, sitting down next to me, thigh pushing against mine. He is skinny, with long bony fingers. “You go to school around here?”
“No,” I say, and since I haven’t moved my leg away, he leans in toward me. His breath smells like pizza. Ray used to let me eat pizza. I remember the taste of cheese, of pepperoni, grease on my lips.
“Want to hang out?” he says, and I notice that behind the hunger his eyes are dazed, like he doesn’t or can’t or won’t see the world. “My car is right behind us, and I’ve got some pills …”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
He blinks at me. “Lucy. I’m Jake. Guess I should have said that before.”
I shrug. He grins, nervous. See his gums, they are pink-red, shiny. “So, you wanna … ?”
I nod.
He takes my hand, walks me to his car. Long walk, car in the back of the parking lot, shadowed by trees. All alone. Hiding place. There is a piece of sidewalk, broken, right beside it.
There has been one other boy. It was when I was fourteen, right after Ray put me on the pill. He whistled at me when I walked to the bathroom at the back of the supermarket, Ray telling me to hurry up while he waited in line at the pharmacy counter for his cholesterol pills.
The whistling boy came up to me by the bathroom and asked if I wanted company. He had bright red pimples, angry oozing sores, all over his face, and when I said yes he blinked and turned like he was going to run away until I dropped to my knees in front of him.
I did it because he was so surprised-looking and because his skin was so angry-looking and because I saw he saw my eyes and thought about running. I did it because he was nothing. I did it because I wished Ray had used the knife instead of tying me to a chair.
Ray saw my mouth when I came back and knew. I couldn’t sit down for a week afterward, and my back, from my shoulders to about my knees, was purple black, then yellow green, for ages. Both my little fingers have crooked knuckles now, and ache before it rains.
Jake’s car is expensive, smell of money underneath the ripe scent of boy. I do not take the pills Jake offers, I know nothing can take away the world. I just push him down into his seat and open his zipper.
“The backseat’s wider,” he says, but I shake my head and when he tries to threaten, his hands grabbing my hair, I dig my fingers into them, right into his skin, until he moves them away.
When I’m done, I sit up and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. He is looking at me, glassy-eyed still, but something in my face changes that, makes his expression shift, go alarmed. Almost frightened.
“You …” he says, trailing off, and I realize what he sees. That this was nothing to me, that his want was not mine. Is not mine.
I lean in, staring at his eyes more closely. His face turns red.
“I have to go,” he says. “Get—get out of the car.” Mouth works, and he spits out, “bitch,” but it’s a whimper. I smile to let him know I know his word is nothing, and he shivers, glassy eyes blinking fast.
I watch him go, then circle around and stand by a cluster of trees almost out of sight of the swings. Lucy is still staring at the clouds. Still dreaming.
Jake comes back for her later, face smoothed out, the pills I saw him take swimming through him. He tells Lucy something, and she stops swinging but doesn’t come with him. She is still watching the sky. I wait for him to grab her arm, but he doesn’t. He just waits, hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and eventually she looks away from the clouds and walks, turning in wide circles and telling stories, out of the park.
I walk to the bus stop and wait. On the way back, I try to picture having things I want, like mountains of food or sleeping without Ray beside me, but I can’t. I can only see Ray’s face when I tell him there is a girl and that I know how we can get her. I can only see his reaction when I tell him my plan.
I can’t dream of clouds, but I can see the knife on the kitchen counter. I can dream of it inside me, opening me up and closing me down.
31
RAY IS WAITING WHEN I GET HOME, and one look at my face sends his fist smash crashing into me, CRACK into my chest, right near my heart.
“I can see all the way inside you,” he spits, red-faced, voice deadly low. “I see that you don’t understand anything. Alice, I expected better from you.”
Curled up on the floor, white spots in my vision as I wiggle for air, wheezing in nothing as my body stops working for a moment, stunned, and I don’t understand why it starts working again. I don’t understand why my shell keeps living. Breathing. Why won’t it listen to me, to the little part I have that isn’t Ray, to that tiny once upon a time girl who just wants to close her eyes and never wake up again?
623 Daisy Lane. Helen and Glenn.
That’s why. Once upon a time, I belonged to them and they shouldn’t suffer for that.
Ray sits down next to me on the floor. “I’m tired of this,” he says. “I love you, I trust you, I tell you what I want, and what do you do? Hurt me.” He bends over and pushes my hair off my forehead, crooked bangs he trimmed for me because Alice has bangs.
Alice has bangs and loves him, loves him.
He puts one hand on my throat, higher up than normal, and the pressure is a sharp hot flare of pain, bright like light, and I am talking, babbling, grinding out words through a cracked throat I have a plan never hurt you never leave you love you please love you please.
I am the living dead girl because I am too weak to die. I hate those crying dough women on TV because they are just like me, weak and broken and clinging to the hands that hold us under.
“Plan?” Ray says, still red-faced, spit flecking his mouth, this was what the last Alice saw maybe, the Alice who wasn’t as afraid as I am. Who was so much stronger.
I dream of a knife in my chest but will never plunge it in. Will beg and plead to keep it away when Ray pushes it into me.
I strangle out my plan in broken words as Ray puts ice on my throat and rubs my ribs and carries me to the sofa, careful tender as he opens my clothes and marks me all over.
“This boy comes and picks up his sister,” he says, rubbing my feet while he stares at the dark TV. Turned off and silent, he still stares at it, playing out stories in his head.
“But not until she’s been there awhile,” I say, my toes curling up under his fingers, my throat hot with pain. I touch one hand to the fist-shaped bruise blooming near my heart. At least my feet don’t hurt. Ray knows how to rub feet. He used to do it a lot for his mother, back when he was young.
“What does his car look like?”
“Red,” I say, and when Ray pauses, hands hovering over my feet, I spit out what I can remember.
He starts rubbing my feet again, nodding. “So I get her, and when the boy comes, you keep him busy—I know you can do that (eyes going angry, and bitter pressure on my feet)—and then I’ll come find you, take care of him, and we’ll—” He pauses, eyes gleaming, and his fingers skate feather light over my feet. “We’ll put Annabel’s things in his car, a little dirt and blood on them. Maybe a little on him. And then we vanish and he’s left with a story of a girl who can’t be found.” He chuckles. “Two, even.”
Annabel. He is not calling her Alice. My bruised heart flutters, a trapped bird. “Annabel?”
“We’ll go to the desert,” he says. “I decided that today. The desert for sure. You, me, and baby girl makes three. At night you’ll sit and hold her hands while I show her how lucky she is to be loved.”
He is breathing faster now and pulls me toward him, a yank on my ankles drawing my rag-doll body in, lower half pushed against him.
“You’ll hol
d her,” he says, and everything I own is easily pushed down, away, clothes falling off me like water. “You’ll hold her and I’ll love her.”
He grins at me. “You’ll like that, won’t you?”
I nod because he wants me to. I nod because I will. She will get his love and I will hold her down to take it all because then there will be none for me.
I cannot save myself, and I do not want to save her.
32
THE ALICE BEFORE ME, HER PARENTS were named Bob and Megan. They cried so much at her funeral, at her coming home, that Ray says it’s a wonder they lived long enough to ever see her come home at all.
These are the kind of stories Ray tells.
His stories are always true, which doesn’t make them stories at all.
33
IN THE MORNING, RAY MAKES ME GET up when he does, puts me in the shower and hums as he lathers soap and rubs his hands across me.
I sit naked and cold on the bed while he opens the safe he keeps in his room, all his paychecks cashed and stored in a fireproof, destruction-proof box with a combination only he knows. He pays for everything in cash, no checks or credit cards like his mother always used, spending money she didn’t have and then blaming him when everything got taken away.
He counts the money once, twice, numbers falling from his lips like a song, and he’s humming again when he’s done.
“We’ll be able to go somewhere nice,” he says. “Maybe someplace with a pool. I’ll watch Annabel swim. A little blue suit with yellow trim for her, and you’ll dry her off with a towel, then wrap her up and bring her to me.”
I will do that, will unroll her from the towel and make it so she’s wearing only her shriveled, clammy skin, and leave her to Ray. I will steal her food to keep her tiny, to keep him happy. I will put her on his knee at night and let her hear his bedtime stories.
“We’ll need sunscreen,” I say. “So she doesn’t burn.” He nods, pleased, and then picks out what I must wear. Not my black pants that sag around my waist and hips, that droop over my feet, that I wear every day. Not my gray T-shirt, his until he got tomato sauce on the hem, tiny holes on the sleeves from my fingers picking at the fabric while the day passes.
I have to wear jeans, dark and stiff and too small, cutting into my waist and leaving my ankles bare. My shirt is pink, pale like the first blush of hurt skin, just a little blow to let you know you are here, that you are not leaving. That you must open your eyes and see.
Pink like Ray makes me. I know that and he does too because he smiles big and fond and rubs the bruise on my chest, saying, “Remember? Remember how you used to be?”
I remember.
After I am dressed, he tells me what I will do. I will get to the park earlier than before, will miss my soap opera to be there on time. I will watch Lucy. I will wait for Jake, talk to him—and Ray narrows his eyes then, mouth biting off the word “talk” as his hands shake me back and forth.
“You do know what that means, right?” he says, and I nod.
I know.
“You get the boy to come tomorrow too,” he says. “Then everything can happen. Tomorrow morning we’ll pack up, spend the day together, and then I’ll pick up Annabel and come get you. Leave a present for the boy.”
He means it, really means it. I think. “What will we take with us?”
He looks at me, and then a slow grin breaks across his face. His gums are red like meat.
“Everything,” he says, and walks into his room, comes back with folded, printed pages.
Newspaper clipping in my hand, tiny girl with a bow in her hair grinning toothlessly. Vanessa Judith, miracle baby, born six months ago to Helen and Glenn. One daughter, gone long ago, and now a new one. Every day I think of what I lost, Helen says. And every day I’m glad God decided to give me a second chance.
We can’t go back, we can’t forget, Glenn says. But we want to live each day as it comes. In memory of what we lost, and in honor of what we have.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Ray says, and I stare at the baby, so tiny, so new.
“Hey,” he says, grabbing my chin, forcing my eyes to meet his. “Mess this up and we’ll drive to 623 Daisy Lane and I’ll burn everything. Little girl that replaced you. Mommy. Daddy. All gone.”
He cups my jaw in his hands. “Mommy and Daddy and I’ll hear them screaming and let you hear it too. Then I’ll leave you there, roll you in their ashes and put matches in your hands, and when the police come they’ll know you were bad and ran away and came back to punish them for forgetting you. After all, you sent those angry letters home. They gave them to the police and hope you never come back.”
Letters? I never … Ray grins at me. God-monster, ruler of my world.
When I don’t say anything, he kisses my forehead. “Be good today. Be very, very good.”
He is whistling when he leaves for work.
I stare at the picture of the baby for a long, long time, and then put it back in Ray’s room, face up on his dresser, next to his hairbrush and picture of his mother. Her hair was dark too.
34
ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A little girl. Now there is a new one.
There is always a new one.
35
MORNING, MY MORNING. I LIE ON the sofa and watch TV. After a while I get up and get the piece of paper I brought home for Ray out of the trash, turning it over to the clean side. I find a pen in the kitchen, next to where he keeps the shopping list, same things on it every week, and sit down at the table.
Dear Vanessa Judith,
You look pretty in the paper, shiny new
not broken. Be better than I was, am.
I didn’t write the letters that came. I never
wrote any letters but this one. Don’t ever
listen to anyone who asks if you want
to know where I am.
I stop and put the paper in my pocket. It’s a stupid letter and I can’t find the words to say what I want, feeling happy she’s here and safe, angry she is so pretty and new and not smeared like me, and babies can’t read anyway. Stupid.
In the park, I crumple it inside my fist, squeezing tight, and drop it into a trash can.
“You were here yesterday, weren’t you?” someone asks, not Jake, not a boy, but a woman, and I turn to see the tired-looking cop staring at my hand still crushed into a fist, red from where I squeezed the paper like I could force the words out and let them float up into the sky.
Ray does not like cops. Once one came to the door to ask if we’d seen a guy who’d stolen two cars, and then asked me if I was sick because he said I looked pale and Ray said I had the flu and did the officer have a card, he would call if he heard anything and then sat watching the door for two hours after the cop left, knife in his hand with my throat right under it. Waiting.
I don’t like cops either.
“I thought you were homeless yesterday,” the cop says. “The clothes and everything. But then how do I know how kids dress now? Where do you go to school?” She squints at me. “What happened to your throat?”
Across from me, a little boy kicks another little boy in the leg.
“Fight,” I say. “My brother.”
“He do that a lot?”
I shake my head no. She is still looking at me.
“You hungry?”
I shake my head no again but she pulls out a candy bar, and my hands are reaching for it even as she says, “I bought this earlier but it melted some and I hate melted … oh. You are hungry.”
I do not look at her as I swallow, breaking the candy apart with my teeth, breaking it as fast as I can to get it inside me.
“When’s the last time you ate?” she asks.
“Lunch.” That is the right answer and I did eat yogurt for the first five minutes of my soap, Storm waiting to see if her baby was all right or if it was going to be born with a rare disease that only the doctor she used to love could cure. Then I had to run for the bus, heart thump-thumpthumping in my chest.
“I’m Barbara,” the cop says, holding out her hand, and I think I pause too long before I take it. Her skin is very warm.
“Cold hands you’ve got there,” she says, and pulls something out of her pocket. A card, which she hands to me.
SAFE HARBOR, it says.
“It’s a special place,” she says. “For teenagers who don’t—who might need a safe place.”
There are no safe places, but I nod and say thank you like Ray did when he got the card from the police officer and put it in my pocket like I will keep it.
“I have to go now,” Barbara says, and touches my arm. I try not to flinch but no one other than Ray and the waxer who rips off flesh and sees my parted legs as money touches me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like hands on me. I have Ray’s and they are so heavy I feel them all the time.
Barbara nods like I have told her a secret and walks off. I wait until she is all the way over in the trees, near the swings where I am supposed to be, and then I turn around and leave.
On the bus, I try to think of how to tell Ray what has happened. How I can say it so he will not think I have taken Annabel away from him and then think about what he said this morning and decide to do it.
There is no way I can say “cop” without him getting angry. I take the card out of my pocket and tear it into tiny pieces that I sprinkle into the bag of the old woman sitting with me, jealously clutching her shopping bags like I want to steal her oranges and grapes.
I do, but I won’t.
When I get home Ray is there, sitting on the sofa, waiting, and as soon as I see him I open my mouth and say, “She’s sick, so we can’t get her tomorrow, but soon.”
“Sick?”
I have lied to Ray. I have never lied to Ray, not since the gas station and what happened after, and I know he will know I am lying, but what he does is frown and say, “Did the boy say with what?”
I shake my head.
“Stupid,” Ray says, and I start to sink to the floor, ready to crawl and beg, anything, but then he says, “Annabel will thank us for getting her away from people who don’t take good care of her, won’t she?” His eyes are gleaming and he stands up and he has been thinking about her while I’ve been gone and then whispers what he will do to her, what I will help him do, while I lie silent under him.
Living Dead Girl Page 4