The Boarding House

by Sharon Sala

  After a few minutes, she stopped fiddling with the rocks and closed her eyes, trying to find peace. This place was usually their sanctuary, but there wasn’t any peace to be had today. All she could feel was the knot in her belly.

  She leaned back, opening her eyes and gazing up through the canopy. The leaves were beginning to turn, which meant winter wouldn’t be far behind. She hated winter—short days with too many hours of darkness. The night was hard enough to get through as it was. Having it last longer only made her life more difficult.

  She stood up and began tossing pebbles from her lap into the creek. They landed with tiny plops, startling a squirrel in one of the trees above. The scolding he gave her made her mood worse. Even the squirrels were mad at her today.

  Too full of despair to really cry, she crawled over to the grassy bank, lay down on her belly and hid her face in her arms.

  Unaware of passing time, she was startled when she heard Wyatt’s voice near her ear. “I’m sorry.”

  Ellie didn’t answer.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I thought you were sad or something.”

  “I am sad, Wyatt, awful sad. But it’s the kind of misery when you’re too sad to cry.”

  Guilt stabbed at his core. “Aw, Ellie, you know I didn’t mean what I said. I was just jealous.”

  Ellie rolled over, then sat up, surprised by the admission. “Jealous of what?”

  He shrugged. “Of the time you’ve been spending with her, I guess.”

  Ellie sighed. “I’m sorry, too. It’s hard being this age, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t need to worry about me fighting with Sophie anymore. We made a deal.”

  “What kind of a deal?”

  “We’re both going to take care of you, okay?”

  Ellie smiled. “Yes, that’s very okay.”

  Wyatt threw a rock into the water.

  “You’re going to get in trouble for that,” Ellie said.

  Wyatt frowned. “Why would Sophie care about that?”

  Ellie laughed, as she pointed overhead to the squirrel that was having a little fit.

  “Not Sophie . . . the squirrel.”

  Laughter rang out along the creek bank, and for a short period of time, Ellie’s world was back on its axis.

  It snowed the first day of Christmas break. Ellie was wild with excitement and flew out of bed, yelling at Wyatt to tell him the news, then she dressed in the warmest clothes she could find.

  Garrett was sitting at the breakfast table when Ellie came running through. “Hey, hey, wait a minute,” he called, as Ellie passed him on her way to the door.

  “We don’t want breakfast,” she said. “Wyatt and I are going to play in the snow.”

  Garrett could remember his own youth and how exciting the first snow of the year could be.

  “Yeah, okay, but you have to promise me something. You stay in the backyard. No going to the creek.”

  “Okay, Daddy, we promise!”

  The door slammed shut. Garrett laid down the paper and walked to the window to look out.

  Ellie was running in circles and throwing snowballs right and left at Wyatt, then squealing in wild abandon as they flew through the air.

  He smiled to himself. He was going to have her to himself for the next two weeks—except of course for Wyatt and Sophie, but he already had a plan to take care of that.

  Garrett waited until after dinner. Doris had already gone home. Sophie bid them good night when the meal was over, announcing that she was retiring to her room. Wyatt had followed that announcement up with one of his own, saying he was going to watch TV.

  Ellie was finishing up the last of her cherry pie and seemed oblivious that she and Daddy were in the kitchen alone. She looked up. The expression on his face made her heartbeat stutter.

  Oh no.

  She glanced around for Wyatt and Sophie. They were gone. She hadn’t noticed them leaving. Why had Wyatt left her alone with Daddy? He knew what Daddy was like. She jumped up, carried her plate to the sink and stuck it in the dishwasher. Doris had already put soap in the compartment. All Ellie had to do was turn it on.

  “I’m going to watch TV with Wyatt,” she said, and darted for the door.

  Daddy grabbed her by the wrist before she could get past. “No. No, you’re not.”

  Shock swept through her so fast she felt that familiar urge to pee. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  He frowned. “You’re too big to do that now.”

  “Let me go, Daddy. Please.”

  “Not yet. We need to get something straight between us.”

  There was a smear of red cherry juice on the floor near her shoe. Ellie focused on it to keep from looking at his face.

  “I’ve given you all kinds of time to get over your Momma’s passing. I’ve let you bring people into our lives that don’t belong and paid Doris more money to keep her from quitting. I know you don’t want Doris to quit.”

  The thought of Doris being absent from their lives was too shocking to consider. “I’ll tell Sophie we don’t need to practice setting the table anymore,” Ellie whispered.

  “That’s good, but that’s not all. You know I love you more than anyone, don’t you?”

  The cherry pie was coming up. It was in the back of her throat, burning like the tears she continued to swallow.

  “I miss you, Ellie.”

  “No, Daddy. We can’t play games anymore. I got my period. Remember?”

  “There are ways of making sure nothing happens to you. You have to trust me. I would never do anything to hurt you, right?”

  Ellie tried to pull away, but his hold was too tight. “Let me go. Sophie will hear. You don’t want her to hear, remember? She will tell and then you’ll be in big trouble.”

  This was the opening Garrett had been waiting for. “She’s not going to hear, and neither is Wyatt, because you’re not going to say or do anything to alert them.”

  “Yes I will, I promise I will. I’ll scream. I’ll scream so loud even the neighbors will hear.”

  “No, you won’t, and I’m going to show you why. There’s something in my room that you need to see.” He began dragging her through the house toward his bedroom.

  “If you play the game, I’ll scream.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, and locked the door behind them as he entered his room. He pointed to the cedar chest at the foot of his bed. “Sit there.”

  Then he grabbed the remote and aimed it at the VCR on the TV. “If you tell, and if Sophie calls the police, this is what they’ll find when they come to take me away. The police will see. All the people at my trial will see. All the newspapers will put pictures in the paper and all the world will see. You watch this, and then what happens between us afterward is up to you.”

  Ellie couldn’t breathe. She felt like she was going to faint. Daddy sat down on the end of the cedar chest beside her, but he didn’t touch her. She could smell his aftershave, and the coffee he’d been drinking. When she heard the hitch in his breathing, she followed his gaze to the pictures dancing across the screen, and then froze. She never knew Daddy had been filming the game.

  Ellie shuddered. “I am so little.”

  He was smiling. “You were three . . . such a beauty, even then. Look at that precious curve of your tiny cheek.”

  Ellie couldn’t see her cheek for what Daddy was doing, guiding her little hand, putting candy in her mouth, urging her to keep playing.

  She watched for almost an hour as she and Wyatt progressed in age and skill. The game got longer and more erotic. Sometimes it was her with Daddy. Sometimes it was Wyatt. Some of it she remembered. Most of it she did not. Then suddenly it was over and the room was dark. She heard a click.

  Daddy had turned off the TV.

  She could hear the rough, jerky sound of his breathing as he turned on a light. “So, what’s it going to be?”

  Her mind was in chaos.

  Everyone would se
e. What do I do? Everyone would see. I have to protect Wyatt, like he’s been protecting me.

  She stared at her father’s face, trying to figure out how it was possible to live with someone you hate so much and knowing God wasn’t going to save her after all.

  At that moment another piece of Ellie died. “I won’t tell.”

  Garrett beamed. “That’s my girl, now come to Daddy.”

  Chapter Ten

  Memphis—April, 2005

  Ellie reached for a towel as she got out of the shower and began to dry off. She had less than forty-five minutes to get to work at Franklin’s Ice Cream Parlor—a place she’d been working after school and on weekends for almost two years now.

  She didn’t need the money. Momma’s trust fund had turned out to be a good one. Truth was, Ellie wouldn’t ever have to work a day of her life if she didn’t want to, but that wasn’t how Ellie wanted life to go. Work was her only opportunity to live like other kids her age, and she’d do almost anything not to lose her toehold in that world. She had access to computers at school, but they were blocked to any kind of social activity, and Daddy refused to allow one in the house. Everyone she knew was on Facebook, but all the social networks were off limits for her. She knew why. He wouldn’t be able to control it or her. But it was maddening to be so isolated. The job was her lifeline to normalcy.

  The full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door was an aggravation. She knew what she looked like. She was seventeen, almost eighteen, with a pretty face that was going to get her nowhere. She’d grown taller than anyone would have predicted, topping out at five feet, seven inches tall. She was slim to the point of being skinny, except for her size 34D breasts. She wasn’t proud of who she was, so why waste the time looking?

  She kept her eyes averted as she continued to dry, then turned to the mirror, brushed her shoulder-length hair and put it up in a ponytail, applied minimal mascara and a little lipstick and called it done. Walking nude out into her bedroom, she began putting on the clothes she’d laid out earlier on the bed.

  She would graduate high school soon and had stated she was going away to college, but Daddy wouldn’t have it. There was a junior college within driving distance, and that’s all he would allow. But she kept telling herself once she turned eighteen and was legally an adult, she was gone. She had it all planned out. One day when he left for work, she and Wyatt were going to get in the car and start driving and never look back. Daddy would never know where they went. She’d been making plans for a year, looking for a place where they could start over—a place where they could disappear.

  She hated her father now with a passion more fierce than her need to breathe, but they were caught in a repetitive loop that went nowhere but to Daddy’s bed. He had tutored her well. She knew how to make him happy, but the downside of that was that he knew how to make her body betray her, as well. She hated him for that most of all.

  She put on her uniform, then stepped into a pair of slip-on tennis shoes and headed for the door. Once she would have called out to Wyatt that it was time to go, but there was a distance between them now that she couldn’t bridge.

  Wyatt had been gone since daylight. She had no idea where he went these days. He was absent from her life more than ever, and it was all her fault. When she’d let Daddy get to her again, Wyatt had been angry because she’d given in without a fight.

  She had never told him about the movies Daddy had shown her that night and she couldn’t tell him now. She knew Wyatt. He was already an angry young man. Learning that Daddy was harboring such an ugly secret and holding it over Ellie’s head would have sent Wyatt over the brink. He would have killed their father without a second thought and spent the rest of his life either in prison or on the run. Ellie couldn’t do that to him—wouldn’t do that to him. It was ironic that in trying to protect Wyatt, she’d also driven him away.

  Sophie was still in her life, but more family member than nanny now. She’d become very hard of hearing and was completely unaware of the undercurrents in the house. Even Daddy had come to accept the old woman as a fixture. Doris still cooked and cleaned for them, and she still had weekends off.

  Ellie continued to attend church, but she didn’t pray anymore. There were times when she doubted there even was a God. Either way, she knew for a fact He wasn’t one bit interested in the hell into which she’d been born. Not much had changed in Ellie’s world since her Momma’s death, and wouldn’t until she graduated.

  Another glance at the clock and she began to hurry. She grabbed her purse and car keys and was out the door.

  Since it was Saturday, Ellie was working the day shift with Randy Parsons, the manager, and a girl named Tessa. Randy was an okay guy. He was short and pudgy, as Sophie would say, with a big bald spot at the crown of his head. He had a wife and three little boys who came in at least two or three times a week for treats. Ellie liked the kids. She thought the wife was mean. She was always belittling Randy in front of people. Ellie had experienced the same thing and felt sorry for him.

  Tessa was nearly six feet tall and into Goth. She had black hair, black fingernail polish, and kohl-rimmed eyes with fake black lashes. Ellie was all for people doing their thing, but she privately thought the black lipstick was overkill and didn’t like to work the same shift as Tessa because she was lazy.

  Today Randy was taking orders and money while Ellie was in back, filling them from a computer screen. As she was filling up the strawberry syrup, a new order popped up. Two chocolate malts and a hot fudge sundae.

  Ellie began scooping ice cream, adding malt and milk to the cans, then putting them under the mixers before moving on to the sundae.

  Tessa was supposed to be cleaning tables and keeping all of the condiment bins full, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. Ellie had already asked for a container of maraschino cherries and she had yet to get it.

  “Tessa, I still need those cherries,” Ellie whispered.

  Tessa did a blink that might have stood for “oh yeah” and headed for the storage in back.

  Ellie had been working here so long that she could make the orders without thinking. Her hands knew what was supposed to be happening, leaving her free to think. Sometimes thinking was good. Sometimes not so much. Today she was worrying about Wyatt, and just like that he walked in.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Ellie turned. “Hey yourself,” she whispered. “Where have you been?”

  Wyatt shrugged. “Around.” He could see they were busy, but he missed her. He eyed her curiously. He thought she was pretty and wished she had a real life like most of the kids their age, but doubted it was going to happen. He didn’t know this Ellie as well as he’d known her younger self and hated that they’d grown apart as they’d grown older.

  Tessa handed Ellie the container of cherries and gave her a strange look before going to bus tables out front.

  Ellie set the two chocolate malts on the pickup counter and finished up the hot fudge sundae while Wyatt watched.

  “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?”

  “I guess. Are you going to be home tonight?”

  “Maybe, why?”

  “I thought we might go to the movies or something.”

  Wyatt frowned. “You know Dad isn’t going to let you.”

  “I’ll do it anyway,” she said.

  “No you won’t and we both know it,” Wyatt said and started walking away.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?” he said, and then he was gone.

  Ellie wanted to call him back, but orders kept popping up and she kept scooping and dipping and pretending her heart wasn’t breaking. The pain in her chest was so real that she wondered if she was having a heart attack. A part of her almost wished it were true. She might not mind dying so much. It would solve her problems. Even if she didn’t go to heaven, she already knew her way around hell.

  When Randy went on break, Ellie moved to taking orders and Tessa stepped in to fill
them. She recognized a couple of the girls from her class and a few of the boys standing in line. One of the girls caught her eye and started to smile, then caught herself and looked away.

  Ellie frowned. She wondered what they thought about her that made them behave that way. She knew they’d freaked out when Momma had committed suicide. The whole class had acted as if Ellie had been the cause. She knew why she was different, but she hadn’t always believed that it showed. Obviously she’d been wrong.

  Later, a group of boys from the football team came into the shop. As she began taking their orders, she caught one of them staring. When he saw he’d been caught, he blew her a kiss.

  This time it was Ellie who looked away.

  They laughed, but she just ignored it and told herself it didn’t matter.

  When quitting time finally came, she was more than ready to get away. She hung up her apron, grabbed her purse and her keys, and headed home.

  She hadn’t gone far when she felt the car pulling to the right. She stopped at an empty parking lot and got out, then kicked the tire in frustration. It was almost flat.

  “Great. Just great,” she muttered, as she got her cell phone out of her purse. Daddy to the rescue, which was just the way he liked it.

  Garrett was watching the clock and pacing the floor while waiting for Ellie to come home. She’d insisted on taking a job, which he’d reluctantly agreed to, but only if she kept up her grades. With a 4.0 GPA, she’d given him no room to gripe.

  Now she was talking about colleges and leaving home and he was in a state of constant panic. He couldn’t think of one single way to keep her under this roof that wouldn’t get him arrested.

  When the phone rang, he ran to answer.

  “Daddy, it’s me. I have a flat. I’m at the parking lot in front of the old strip mall they’re going to demolish—the one on Randall Avenue.”

  Garrett frowned. That wasn’t the best neighborhood and it was getting close to dark.

  “Get in the car and lock all the doors. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Okay,” she said, and climbed back inside and hit the locks.