by Amy Gentry
One morning, John David didn’t come downstairs for her.
Esther waited anxiously in bed. She was not allowed to leave the bed until he bade her to every morning. She was afraid that if she got out of bed now, he would come back and beat her. Or, worse, that he would never come back at all. It might be a test.
Perhaps there was some reason he wouldn’t let her out of bed. Perhaps the floor would kill her.
She thought about the lids under the bed. They would not let the floor kill her.
She listened. She waited.
Later, when she had woken and slept innumerable times, her stomach began growling too loudly for her to ignore. It was like a vacuum inside her. She got up, put her feet down without thinking, realized that the floor had not electrocuted her, thanked the lids, and went upstairs. There was only one can of creamed corn on the counter. She opened it and ate it. The sweet starchiness went straight into her bloodstream; for an instant, her brain felt oxygenated and fizzy.
“Where are you?” she dared to ask out loud, partly because she knew he wasn’t there and wouldn’t answer. She reached for the feeling of his omnipotence, but it shrank back, and she felt that he was not only gone, but also no longer looking at her. The thought made her cold, and she shivered.
On the third day, Esther went to the food pantry alone. It was the bravest thing she’d ever done, but she knew the way. She kept her head down as much as possible and wore a scarf tied around her wig—A babushka, she thought, the word surfacing from another plane of existence, as words sometimes did these days. She stood in line.
The women standing in line stared at her. One elderly woman with a babushka like hers leaned forward over a grocery cart she had pushed across the bumpy parking lot. A very tall woman with a short, tight skirt and a long blond wig snuck glances. A junkie, a twitchy woman of indeterminate age with long, greasy brown hair, stared openly for a moment, then looked abruptly away.
A woman with a weave turned away from the counter and walked down the line, humming and swinging a plastic grocery bag clanking with cans. A box of animal crackers rattled on the top of the pile. Esther could feel her approach, could feel everyone else feeling her approach. She needed food.
“Sugar, where your friend at today?” the woman asked.
Esther kept her head down.
“I said, where your friend at?” the woman repeated. “He is your friend, isn’t he?”
The others pretended to mind their own business, but the twitchy woman in front of her, angry red marks glaring through the open cuffs of her oversize shirt, was the only one who seemed truly unconcerned with the conversation. Esther could feel the tension mounting. Another woman came shuffling away from the counter, cradling her cans in a windbreaker with its sleeves tied together. There was only one woman ahead of her in line now. She held her breath.
“Sugar, I’m talking to you. Who’s that man used to come here with you?”
She had to say something. “He’s my dad,” she whispered, keeping her head down.
“Mm-hmm. Where’d he run off to?” the woman asked immediately, as if this question were on the tip of her tongue.
Another word floated up through Esther’s brain and came out of her mouth in a whisper: “Laundromat.” She pointed to her right, as if indicating something around the corner, just a few blocks away at most.
“Huh.” The woman looked her up and down, taking in her dirty white sheet and sneakers, which were separating from their soles at the toes, and lingering on the wig. “Your mama know where you at?” the woman demanded.
Esther didn’t hesitate. “She’s dead,” she said, eyes on the ground.
“Uhh-huh.” The woman appraised her skeptically.
“Leave her alone, Janiece,” said the tall blond with the teetering heels in a low, guttural voice. “It’s some custody shit.”
The woman named Janiece snapped back. “Mothers gotta be with their daughters. Especially when the father is unfit.” She drew out the last word with a big pause between the syllables and looked pointedly at the blond woman’s heels and ropy, exposed legs.
“Fuck you, J,” said the blond, then sighed. “Besides, for all you know, her mama could be worse. I know mine was.”
The argument continued, but by this time the junkie was shuffling away from the front of the line, her baggy jeans and the pocket of her flannel shirt weighed down with cans, and Esther stepped up hurriedly. All the cans of franks were gone, but there was a can of chickpeas and another of refried beans, so she pointed to them wordlessly. The pantry worker was an older woman who was there often. With an expressionless face, she pushed an extra can of peaches across the counter. “Here,” she said, “I’ve been saving these for you. If you ever need anything, let me know.”
Esther couldn’t bring herself to nod in case he was watching from somewhere close by, testing her. But she made eye contact with the woman for just a moment and tried to thank her for the peaches with a half smile. The woman named Janiece was gone when she turned back, and the tall blond woman had folded her arms and was muttering to herself. The junkie was weaving back and forth down the sidewalk. Suddenly she put her hands up toward heaven and crowed toward the sky.
Esther hurried home, tennis shoes tripping over the tangled sheet. She wondered if John David would know she’d gone out of the house, and if so, what her punishment would be. If this had been a test, she had failed. Esther thought about Abraham in the Bible tying up his son, Isaac, the raised knife flashing in the early-morning sun, like John David told her. God, too, had sacrificed His Son, Jesus. Always sons, never daughters. Were daughters too important? Or was it the opposite?
She walked into the kitchen, ate, went down the stairs at the back of the pantry, and lay down in her bed to await further instructions.
From her bed she heard the back door creak open, and two pairs of feet started moving through the kitchen upstairs. She almost didn’t recognize John David’s voice at first; it was pitched higher and reminded her of someone she had known a long time ago, a man with a guitar. He was talking with a second voice, and though she couldn’t hear the words, the tone was friendly.
The second voice belonged to a girl with heavy footsteps. A chair screeched across the floor, accompanied by a squeal of pain and a burst of laughter. Whoever she was, she was clumsy.
“Esther!” he yelled into the pantry. “Esther, come up here!”
She glanced at the wig, the sheet draped over the foot of the bed. As if he could see her, he yelled, “We’re not going outside, don’t worry about your shoes and stuff. Just come up and meet someone.”
Meet someone. She walked warily up the stairs in her nightshirt. A young girl, maybe a little younger than Esther, stood in the kitchen next to John David. She was short, with dyed-black hair pulled into scraggly pigtails. She wore a black T-shirt and a short black skirt that poofed out above her knees, exposing smudged white legs over faded rainbow socks.
“Esther, this is Charlotte,” John David said.
She saw with a shock that he had shaved his beard. A memory fizzed through her brain of a guitar with an embroidered strap, a room with posters on the walls. His skin that had been hidden under the beard looked pinkish and bumpy, like chicken skin; his mouth looked small and thin-lipped; there was a tiny cut above his Adam’s apple.
Charlotte rhymes with harlot. Esther kept her eyes on the floor, but she was aware that Charlotte was staring at her and became suddenly self-conscious about her appearance: ratty nightshirt over jeans he’d stolen from a dumpster, dirty, naked feet sticking out from the frayed cuffs. She wondered if the nightshirt smelled bad. It had never been washed.
“Charlotte, Esther’s my niece. She’s been crashing here for a little while.” There was that voice again, the new-old John David who reminded her of when she was someone else, a long time ago. He turned and addressed himself to Esther in that kind, friendly voice and it made her want to cover her ears and sing until she couldn’t hear it anymore. But she knew bet
ter. “Esther, can Charlotte use your computer to check her e-mail? She’s a long way from home, and I know she would really appreciate it.”
Esther didn’t have a computer. She knew what was required of her, though. She nodded without looking up.
“Great. I’ll just take her down and get her set up in your room. Do you mind hanging out up here for a few minutes?”
Esther nodded acquiescence and stepped away from the door. As they passed her, Charlotte said, “Thanks.” Esther looked up at her quickly, caught a glimpse of brown eyes with a shimmer of green or gold in their depths. She put a hand out to grab Charlotte’s arm.
But Charlotte had seen the narrow door in the back of the pantry by then. “Whoa, is this like a secret passage or something?” she said.
“Bomb shelter,” John David said, hovering behind her shoulder.
“No way!”
“This house belonged to my grandparents,” he said. “My grandfather was a fighter pilot in the Pacific. He was scouted for NASA in ’61. They could have moved out to a big house in Clear Lake. But my grandmother believed the Cold War would end in a nuclear holocaust. She believed Jesus would scourge the earth.” His voice sounded far away. “She convinced him to build an underground bunker here.”
“That is trippy,” Charlotte said appreciatively.
It was trippy. Esther had never heard any of it. Thinking about John David’s grandparents made him seem suddenly very ordinary.
“You can’t have a basement at sea level, but with about ten tons of concrete, you can have a fallout shelter.”
The words tumbled through her head, a history lesson, casually delivered, as if the man speaking weren’t outside of history, weren’t divine. As if he were just a man living in a house.
“Your niece is so lucky. This is the coolest bedroom ever.” Charlotte’s voice receded down the staircase with her footsteps. As the two of them vanished into blackness, Esther understood for the first time what was going to happen.
She understood for the first time that it had happened to her.
She curled up on the sofa and put her hands over her ears, but she still heard it. No words, just Charlotte’s voice getting higher and shriller, and then a thump and another thump, something dropped on the concrete basement floor with a clatter, muffled yells, the sound of shoes sliding against the floor as if scrambling for purchase. A short silence. Something heavy being dragged. And then a sort of stuttering bark she recognized, after a moment, as the sound of duct tape being ripped off a roll.
John David appeared at the top of the stairs, looking weary, and dropped a bundle of clothes on the pantry floor. He filled a plastic bucket with water at the kitchen sink and handed it to Esther. “Bathe her,” he said.
The concubines bathed and perfumed her and braided her hair.
The sponge was a new blue kitchen sponge, soft on one side and scratchy on the other. The bucket was unexpectedly heavy and swung a little as she took it, splashing a bit of water over the edge onto his shoes.
He walked to the sofa to lie down. The exercise had exhausted him, drained him of the emotional electricity that usually seemed to vibrate off him in waves. Lying with his eyes closed, he looked smaller. She took a step toward him, but he drew his elbow up over his eyes and turned toward the sofa back. In a moment he was snoring.
She wondered what he was doing up here all those times while she trembled in her room downstairs. Napping on the sofa? Fixing himself a sandwich? These thoughts filled her with dread. She turned away and walked to the pantry door. She stepped over the pile of clothes, pulled this way and that like a cast-aside doll. The black T-shirt lay on top, inside out and twisted double, so that the picture on the front was only a blocky outline puckering the fabric, the letters on the back backward and illegible. She started down the stairs.
Before she could see Charlotte, she smelled her; she’d peed herself. Then her eyes adjusted, and gradually a glimmer of whiteness grew and spread into the shape of a torso. Charlotte lay naked on the floor. Her hands were duct-taped behind her back, her shins duct-taped solidly together in a silver column, so that in the dim light it looked as if her legs had been cut off below the knees, her white feet lying nearby like a pair of sneakers. A piece of duct tape was pressed over the bottom half of her small round face, a little bump showing where the lip ring was. Her eyes were closed.
The concubines bathed and perfumed her and braided her hair.
Esther knelt down, her knees making cold contact with the concrete. She put the bucket and the sponge on the floor beside her and waited.
This was too much. She would go back upstairs, tell John David she couldn’t do it.
Esther inched toward the body on her knees, trying not to look, feeling hot tears coming to her eyes. She put out a hand, moving closer and closer to where angry pink circles blotched the soft white belly in clusters of four, like fingertips, over her ribs, then pulling back. She took up the sponge and dipped it in the water, which had started out lukewarm but was nearly cool by now. Careful to keep the rough side of the sponge facing away from Charlotte, she very gently applied one wet, soft corner to the bruises that stained the white expanse of stomach, as if the water could wash them away.
The girl’s eyes flew open.
Esther started backward with a shriek.
Charlotte, unable to scream, moaned into the tape and raised her head only to shake it wildly back and forth, strands of her too-black hair coming out of her pigtails and floating in front of eyes that were all white. She rolled onto one shoulder and jackknifed her bound legs back and forth until she managed to kick Esther hard on the side of her knee.
Esther gasped and put a hand to her leg. But the impact of the kick overbalanced Charlotte and she fell back and hit her head on the concrete. Then she lay still.
Esther picked up the sponge, which had landed close to her feet in the scuffle. “I’m just going to give you a bath,” she reassured Charlotte. “It won’t hurt.”
The concubines bathed and perfumed her and braided her hair.
“I have to bathe you,” she said. “You have to be made clean.”
The girl began moving her legs again, but slowly this time, as if tired out by her initial fury, bracing her feet against the floor to push herself around, leaving her head limp. Still flat on the ground, she rotated clockwise by inches, like a fat white goldfish in a koi pond. Every minute or two, she would stop and lie still for a moment. Then she would start again. When she was facing away from Esther, she stopped and lay completely still.
Esther got up and walked around to Charlotte’s other side so she could see her face, wondering if Charlotte would begin inching around to escape her again. But Charlotte appeared to be looking at something.
Esther got down on her knees and put her head close to where Charlotte’s head was and looked. And she saw them. The lids, curled up on the floor like they were hiding under the bed.
No, like trash.
They smelled like trash. The whole room did. It reeked with a faint sickly-sweetness that Esther had never noticed before. She’d been sleeping on a bed of garbage. Her stomach turned. She looked around at the tiny, windowless room. Not a basement. You can’t have basements at sea level. A prison. A torture chamber. The bed covered with its tattered blanket. Her whole world, so small.
When she looked back at Charlotte again, she knew that Charlotte didn’t belong here. She’d never submit to this atmosphere. She would disrupt everything, had disrupted everything already. She had twisted the room inside out, changed it somehow, like the inside-out T-shirt. Esther could almost read a message coming through the thin fabric of her reality, but the letters were backward and didn’t make sense. She had to straighten everything out.
She had to get rid of Charlotte, and she knew how. It would be a sin, but then, John David had told her often enough she was a sinner.
Esther crept up the stairs. John David lay on the sofa, unmoving, and she was struck by how peaceful he looked. With his newly
shaven face and without his towering height above her, he looked more like a boy than a man. There, as she’d remembered, was the tiny red bump on his Adam’s apple where he’d cut himself shaving.
He’d cut himself.
There was a razor in the house.
The most logical place to look was the bathroom attached to John David’s bedroom, but she had never gone in there. All of the bedrooms were off-limits, so that even stepping into the dark, doglegged hallway gave her a shiver of discomfort. She had seen only the kitchen and the bunker, though she was allowed to use the half-bathroom up here instead of the tiny metal toilet in the bunker, which required buckets of water to operate. When she peered into the bedrooms at the end of the hall, she understood for the first time that it was an ordinary house, even comfortable. The beds were covered with bedspreads and sheets. There were lamps, teal carpets, and wallpaper—one room covered in flowers, one pebbled with gold. On the nightstand in the unused bedroom stood a bronze deer and a box of tissues with a knit cozy over it and a dust ruffle sewed to the bottom. The upper reaches of the single white tissue were coated with dust, and a few severed threads of cobweb floated in the still air.
John David’s bedroom looked much the same. She had pictured him on a pallet of some kind, but he slept on a king-size bed under a painting of a landscape, somewhere dry with mountains, as different from Houston as she could imagine.