by Robin Black
“It’s heavy,” I said.
She leaned away. “Do you want to smell what’s in the bottle? It’s a potion. But it’s not the real thing,” she said. “I have to wait for that till I’m grown. Like everything else. This is only flower petals and lemon peel.”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“I think it’s important to practice,” she said. “Even if it’s just with toys. That’s what professionals do. Professional killers. That’s what they did. They practiced stealing babies. They practiced on dolls. I know they did. I saw them, all these dolls stuffed in a tiny closet. Hundreds of dolls they would grab from each other. Then they would run away with them.”
“How do you remember so much? If you were only three?”
“Here.” She stuck the bottle under my nose. The smell reminded me of the library near my house.
“This was all my parents had left,” she said, picking up the lock of hair. “My mother never let it go. She slept clutching it every night.”
The rolled-up paper was a map of Italy. “Here,” she said, pointing to a star drawn in pencil. “That’s where they are. That’s the place where they took me.”
“How do you know?”
She rolled it up, without a word.
From her diary, Harriet read me the names of boats that sailed the Atlantic. Then she told me about poisons that inflicted excruciating pain before they killed. She told me that one bandit had a scar that ran the length of his long, bumpy nose, another had hair that grew in perfect stripes of black and white. One of the women had no thumb on one hand, but two on the other. One of the babies had been so fat he had to be propped up with half a dozen pillows or he might just roll away. She listed the foods she would prepare for her captors’ last meal. Caviar. Lobster. Strawberries. Chocolate éclairs. But, she told me, she would poison their first bite.
I still wanted to know more about the past. “You must have been afraid,” I said. “When you saw the dolls, you must have been.”
“I had to keep my wits about me,” she said. Then, for once, she looked directly at my eyes. “You should too.”
For lunch, Harriet’s father served us clear soup in china bowls. We sat in the dining room, at a long, wooden table glossy with polish. When he left, telling us to call him if we needed anything, Harriet reached for my wrist.
“It’s done like this, so no one knows,” she said. “See? Just a little twist of your hand.” She turned my arm a quarter turn. “And the poison comes out. You try.”
I touched the toy ring, pretending to open it, then moved my wrist the way she had, as though poisoning my own soup.
“That’s good,” she said. “But you have to be less obvious. You have to not get caught.”
“I wouldn’t get caught.” From the kitchen I heard a bell ring; a timer had run, and I realized the air was filled with something sweet. “Is your mom here?” I asked.
“Because if you do get caught murdering,” Harriet said, “you’ll rot in a jail for the rest of your life. Especially in Italy. They won’t even remember to feed you and if they do, when they come with your bread and moldy cheese, because that’s all you can have, not even water every day, they’ll find just your bones one time, your rotten bones. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“If it were France,” she said, filling her spoon with soup, “they would chop off your head.”
And I nodded again, slowly, as though letting these facts sink in, as though I too were plotting my revenge.
When Harriet’s father came back, he was carrying a plate of cookies. She smiled at him, seemed almost to laugh; and I realized I had never before seen her smile.
“There must be something that you want,” she said, back upstairs, after lunch, her door now locked. “Something important enough to make you brave.”
I thought of my parents. I only shrugged.
“It has to be something you want so much that it hurts. So you feel like your arms and legs will fall off if you don’t get it. And your head. Your head will roll away. And your backbone will crumble. So if you think about that, how bad that would be, you can’t be scared. Not of other things.”
I could feel my eyes begin to sting. I could picture my head rolling off and my backbone crumbling.
“There’s something, isn’t there?” she asked.
I shrugged again.
“Don’t tell me what it is,” she said. “I know a ritual you can do.”
She told me that first I had to write my wish down. In red ink, for blood. She gave me paper and a red marker. “Start by writing: This is the wish that is dearest to my heart.”
I did. And then I wrote the thing I wanted so much it kept me up through every night.
“There’s more,” she said. She told me that I had to lick my words. “Make sure the paper’s wet. All of it. It has to be.”
When I had finished, my tongue pasty, thick in my mouth, I found those blue eyes narrow and appraising. “Is it wet?” she asked, and I nodded. She told me to take my overalls off. She told me I had to be naked for it to work. That the wish had to be able to touch all of me. “That’s part of it,” she said. “That’s the part where your bravery starts to be in your veins. You need bravery to make a wish come true.”
I stood and undid the buckles at my shoulders. I let the denim fall—trying to feel like it was normal. Just as though I was home, about to take my bath or go to sleep. I kicked the overalls from my feet, then pulled off my shirt, my underpants, my mismatched socks, certain as I did that she’d thought I’d chicken out, determined to pass every test she gave, and only when wholly naked, feeling the full bore of her gaze on my still skinny body, still flat chest, on the area between my legs my sister said was bald and vowed would always be.
Harriet’s face was expressionless as she told me to rub the paper on myself. “Your wish has to cover you,” she said. “All over. Every part of you. Even the parts you think you shouldn’t touch. Especially those.”
The red ink trailed across my skin, leaving markings like the openings of tiny wounds. I could picture the words I had written seeping in. I was certain I could feel them in my veins. I smoothed the paper over my front and through that arch between my legs, made sure to press it there, then down, away, to knees and feet. She watched until I stopped.
“It’s almost finished,” she said. “You’re almost done.” She told me to tear it into bits and swallow them as quickly as I could. “Think about how no one can ever hurt you. How no one can ever make you feel bad again.”
The paper gummed in my mouth, but I forced it down, little bit after little bit. When it was gone, Harriet Elliot sprinkled my naked shoulders with her potion; then she brushed the lock of her baby hair across my face. And finally she declared me brave. Brave enough to make my wish come true.
And by then I believed every word.
NOT LONG AFTER THAT, my father moved out. On the Sunday morning he left, my mother stayed upstairs in her room while my sister and I sat on the front step, watching him shift the last of his boxes from the house to his car. Snow from another day lay on the ground, still white in the center of our lawn, nearly black at the curb. The brick walk wasn’t shoveled and the snow there had been pressed by our boots and our weight into ice. The sun was bright enough that I kept my eyes shielded with my hand while my sister puffed out cloud after cloud with her breath.
Every time he passed empty-handed, heading inside for another load, he would rub my hair, or he would rub hers.
The whole thing didn’t take very long. After he slammed his trunk, he walked back to where we sat. And he told us he’d be by to visit any day. That we would see him all the time. Neither of us said anything, until we stood up on the front stoop side by side and waved toward his car, calling Bye Daddy, bye Daddy while he disappeared from view.
Back in the kitchen, we took off our coats and boots without a word. I sat on the coiled radiator for warmth, and when my sister walked toward me, I thought she wanted my spot. I thought she
might shove me over with her usual insult. But then she smacked me so hard across my face my left eye swelled shut—as though she had closed another door. I tried not to move, hoping that the hit I’d taken was the end of something and not the start. But when she raised her hand again, the word you curling from her lips like something filthy, I grabbed those curtains of blond hair and pulled so hard that she just froze.
I was screaming as my knee slammed into her body. Screaming as my foot wrapped around her ankle, toppling her. My fingers gripped that hair as she fell, my hold on her pulling me down. “I hate you,” I spat as we thrashed on the floor, our knees and feet all trying to deliver blows, her hands squeezing my wrists. “I hate you.” I pulled as hard as I could, not letting go, not for a second, not until I had beaten down her years and years of practice torturing me, and I felt her give up.
“I really, really hate you,” I said more softly as she began to cry. By then, her arms were dropped to her sides. Her neck had relaxed. I told her she was a crybaby. I told her she was the moron. I told her it was all her fault. Because she was so mean. I told her that our father hated her. That her evil was the reason he moved out. And then I heard my mother’s footsteps overhead.
I left my sister crying on the floor. I walked as quietly as I could through the hall, along the peculiar wall that shaped our home, and into my father’s ransacked study. There was little sign of him there. No books, no rugs, no cigarette packs, no round and naked women, thick-nippled, shameful, thrilling. Only sunlight pouring through the windows onto emptied surfaces, a few balls of rolled-up paper on the floor like tumbleweed.
My eye began to ache and throb.
From the kitchen, I heard my mother. What is going on? What do you girls think you’re doing? How am I supposed to handle one more thing?
I slid to the floor and I waited to be found.
AFTER THAT, I stopped believing the things that Harriet said. I knew she had been wrong about my wish. Just like I knew that when my father told us he would be visiting all the time it was a kind of lie, even though he meant it. Just like I knew that the God I had been looking for would never show himself to me. Just like I knew that Harriet Elliot would never ride a ship to Italy and kill those men.
I stayed away from her bench at recess. Most of the time, I sat alone. Occasionally I joined the others. But not very often. Sometimes, like Harriet, I would bring paper and a box of crayons outside. Or maybe a book. Sometimes I would play with Teacher Margie’s little dog. None of my classmates ever said a word to me about my father, though I knew, even then, that their parents must have told them he had left.
My grandparents, the ones who had brought me the kimono from Japan, visited that Thanksgiving. The nights they were there, I heard voices floating up the stairwell to my room again. But no more arguments. No more chances for making up. After they left, my mother told us, very calmly, that we would be moving in with them, in Washington D.C. We would leave right before Christmas. “It’s only until I find a teaching job,” she said. But to me that sounded like just another wish that wasn’t coming true. I mumbled something about it being okay with me, then glared at my sister until she did too.
“You’re good girls,” our mother said, and looked away.
On my last day at the co-op, I filled a brown paper bag with all the projects I had made, now peeled from the windows and the walls. I spent that recess watching my classmates try to build a snowman from the few fresh powdery inches on the ground.
Just before pickup time, Teacher Margie clapped her hands, calling us all to the circle. “We’re having a Farewell Ceremony today,” she said as we sat down. “We’re creating a new ritual for ourselves. We’ve never had to say goodbye to one of us before.”
She called their names, and one by one each of my classmates faced me where I sat, singled out, beside her feet; and each of them told me I was cool. Just as we had said about the slide of saliva that Jenny brought in and shared with the class. It had been great to be my friend, they said. It had been fun. And in the singsong of their voices I could hear the ease with which my absence would exist. A few handed me scraps of paper, their addresses written in an obviously adult hand. Mary Hudson unfurled a picture she had drawn of me in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, my hair a labyrinth of brown lines, my name written large, hers tiny in the corner.
When Harriet’s turn rolled around, she stood as the others had all stood. But when she spoke, she stared out over our heads, as if alone. Her hands clasped in front of her, she said nothing at all about me. Not that I was cool. And not that we had been friends. She only said that the most important thing to remember was that wishes made correctly do come true. Always.
“Even when you think it’s impossible,” she said. “Even when you think that it’s too late.”
Then she looked at me. With those eyes that seemed so powerful they could will away anything in her path. She just stood there, motionless, staring into my eyes, conjuring with her gaze her own determination, those tales of her capture, the smell of crushed flowers and lemon juice, the feel of my words seeping through my skin, spreading out into my veins. The fantasy of putting things to rights. She looked at me until I could feel something like belief again take root. And then Harriet Elliot blinked; and I was gone.
Gaining
Ground
MY DAD DIED on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh. But it isn’t truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.
It was about a month ago, and you’d think I’d have figured out by now which way to put it. Harris says the whole worry is stupid, the whole question of how to put it, because it makes it sound like I’m debating some point of causality, as if the two events were in some way related. Linked. Which they obviously were not. The water ran electric because the house was not properly grounded. Because my electrician is an asshole. And always has been. And ought to be shot. Or at the very least not be an electrician anymore. My father died because he walked in front of a train. On purpose. Like in a movie. Like Anna Karenina. Because he was a whack job. Mentally ill. And always had been. No connection. Unless you think having a lousy electrician you don’t fire and a lousy father who offs himself is some kind of connection, which even I do not think. So in the end it’s just timing. And timing is nothing, meaningless, a slim quality to build any conclusion around.
That’s Harris’s point, anyway. That timing isn’t everything, like people say it is. It’s bull. And that’s Harris pretty much all around. Harris is a piece of work. Forty-seven years old, pretty fat now, he’s got these lingering tufts of leftover hair sprouting all over him, any which way. He’s got skin like badly mashed potatoes. He’s got eyes like he knows perfectly well he’s wrong. About everything. All the time. And couldn’t care less. He works in quality control at the local paper plant. Which is a joke, since neither quality nor control, nor any imaginable combination of the two that does not involve adding the words “lack of” or “out of,” can be applied to him. And he is just who you would expect to take you on about something like this. Just exactly who you would expect to pull the plug on trying to find meaning in anything. While he leans into my fridge, scrounging, foraging, investigating, making himself at home, taking it upon himself to debunk phenomena like coincidence. Like timing.
I used to be married to Harris and I know Harris well. Last year, just about halfway through realizing he had turned into a walking, talking laundry list of human decline, I threw him out. Harris. His cigarettes. His underpants. His poking through my food. His need to talk me out of things. Out he went. Still, he comes back around to see our daughter, Allison, who’s four now. Or at least that’s why he says he comes back. That is why Harris claims he is still always around. The fact is, though, that there is only so left he’ll e
ver agree to be. Only so thrown out. Only so gone he ever gets.
“Don’t you believe in anything?” I asked him, right while he walked suitcase number one out my front door.
“Nope,” he answered me, standing there under a streetlight, his luggage kind of tilting him with its weight. “Nope.” He shook his head. “Not a goddamned thing.” And Harris, he just walked away, as they say, into the night.
He was the one I called. When it happened. My father. The water. All of that. About which fact I have nothing to say. Except that old habits die hard. And that if I could remember which part I told him first, I might have some idea about this whole how-to-put-it question. Either I told him my father was dead, and then that I had been bathing Allison when the bathwater shocked us both. Or I put it the other way around. I know that Allison was screaming bloody murder, dancing this awful naked wet jitterbug of fear around my bedroom. Wouldn’t even let me towel her off, because she didn’t want to be touched. By anything. Ever again. Ever. And I had this phone in my hand. This phone that had rung just as I was reaching for it, so I just answered it and said hello. And then a man asked me, some man on the phone asked me if I was my father’s daughter, because if I was, there had been an accident. It was 911 calling me. If you can believe it. Them calling me.
“But I was just going to call you,” I said. Then I heard what was being told to me, and I asked, “What kind of accident?” And then I took that in. The train, the dead, the my-father-is-over part. And then I called Harris. And told him something. I’m still just not sure exactly what. But I know I told him to come. I know I did that. So this one’s on me, I guess.
Having a parent die who is crazy is different from having a parent die who isn’t crazy. I know because I have had both kinds, and they have both died. My mother was just so normal you couldn’t even be in the room with her and Dad both without losing all belief in God. In anything. In anything that made sense of anything. It just all seemed too impossible. Which, if you ask me, is why I married the king of nothingness in the first place. Why Harris’s essentially unpleasant view of the world as a random and pointless sphere held some appeal. I mean, she was nice, my mom. She was pleasant. She was a mom. Picture a mom. Go ahead. You get the idea. Picture her cooking meals, coming to assemblies, chatting on the phone with her other mom friends. Walking the dog. Making your teacher smile at pickup at the end of the day. Making your teacher like you more. Nice. Normal. Smart enough. Pretty enough. But not too pretty. A real mom.