by Lee Upton
The man turned on the bedside light.
“She isn’t here,” he said.
And they felt it. Relief. An enormous relief that she wasn’t in the room, that presence, that unfortunate who is not their child.
“We were selfish,” she said.
“No, we did what was right.”
“She’s from another world. We don’t even know her age.”
“She’s a child—whatever her age.”
“We’ve lost everything and now this. It doesn’t change that we’ve lost everything. I don’t know if I have the strength . . . We pretended. And we stole her.”
“No. Rescued.”
“Stole.”
“Lured her. At the worst.”
“She’s from so far away.”
“She’s who she is.”
“Our daughter—our real daughter—”
“—would have wanted us to save her. It was a miracle that she wound up in our room. She’s ours now.”
“Ours?”
The man turned off the bedside lamp. After a while he said, “She could have Allison’s room. It would be heaven for a girl like her. For any little girl.”
“You don’t understand how I feel—no. I won’t go that far—.”
“She’s here.” His whisper was a hiss.
In the half-darkness the woman saw the child crawling toward the edge of the bed.
“Picture for you, ma’am,” the girl said.
“What, honey? Oh, honey, what?”
“For the door, ma’am. For the room.”
The woman turned on the light. She looked at the picture—a stick figure of a girl with long hair.
“See. So you know.”
“Did they make you put up a sign?” the woman asked.
“Yes. Yes, ma’am.”
“The sign meant you were in the room and you were alone?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need a sign here . . . This is a pretty picture. This is a very pretty picture. You know, you don’t have to call me ma’am.”
“Sorry.”
“What would you like to call me?”
The child did not answer.
“Can you tell me?” the woman asked.
It was awful, everything was awful. Allison, their beloved daughter, had been lost to them. Then this other child appeared a month later when the woman was running the bathwater in the hotel and heard her husband call to her in a voice he had never used before. And there was the girl standing in the living room of their suite and it became obvious. The child had some English, enough to tell them what they needed to know, and the husband knew some of her language and so they learned more. There was no one from her family. No one left. What could the man and the woman do?
And now here she was with them—how had they done it? By what miracle could a living child be taken from one world to another, could pass through that membrane? Why had they been allowed to get away with it?
And the woman was thinking: What have we done? Will we be caught? Will it have been worth it?
It was breathtakingly easy to steal the child—and now there was no way to explain her.
The child would not sleep alone in the guest room. In the middle of the night she came into their room, night after night, to sleep on the floor near their bed. When they woke she was already looking at them. She looked as if she wasn’t sure what was expected of her but that she would wait for an answer.
What did the girl know? What had been done to her?
“We did the best we could, didn’t we?” the man whispered.
They could hear the child moving about in the room above their heads.
“What if they come after her?” the woman asked.
“No one will ever come after her. There are more and more and more where she came from. All those girls. They keep so many of them and use them up. She doesn’t have a family. She’s safe here. She’s already dead to the people who forced her to go to the hotel.”
“I dream about them coming for her. They take her away. And then she’s back.”
“You mean—our daughter’s back.” In his wife’s dream their daughter came back after they returned the foreign child. He knew because he had the same dream.
“It’s not fair,” the woman said.
The girl hardly ate and would not smile. She often looked as if she were waiting.
“She doesn’t trust us.”
“How could she?”
“You’re right. How could she.”
The woman still had Allison’s passport—that was what allowed everything to happen. She had kept her daughter’s passport with her, and so when the child was in their hotel suite they hardly needed to think. They knew the country was corrupt. Children could be bought. It was breathtakingly easy because their own child was not alive.
“Have you thought about giving her the room?”
“She’s so strange—to give her the room—it would be like saying Allison is gone.”
“Allison will never be gone. We’ll never let her go. She’s with us.”
“Would Allison want the girl to have the room?” the woman wondered.
“She would have,” the man said.
“Do you think so?”
“She was a loving girl—she would have loved to have a sister. She was a gentle girl. She shared things.”
“After she turned nine. Not before. After her birthday she started to be good about sharing with her friends. She shared some things anyway.”
“She didn’t share her stuffed animals. I’ll admit that.”
“The girl,” the woman said, “—she probably would like a stuffed animal to hug at night. Maybe that’s why she can’t sleep. Maybe the panda family.”
The woman could see them, the pandas, the mama and the papa and the baby, the two stuffed monkeys, the menagerie of tigers. The Barbies hadn’t been of interest to Allison, but just the same she wound up with a lineup of them on a shelf at the headboard of her bed. Most of the dolls came from other girls who gave them to Allison at birthday parties. But the stuffed penguin—Allison wouldn’t sleep without it. The stuffed penguin had been buried with Allison.
“It’s all right,” the man said. “I shouldn’t have asked. Come on. I’m sorry. It’s all right. It’s all right. The guest room is nice—it’s a nice room for a little girl.”
What did the girl know? What had been done to her? Who would have allowed this living breathing child to stand in the middle of a strange hotel room in an adult’s ruined pinkish brown evening gown torn to show her legs and with her chest nearly bare—the vulnerable breastbone standing out from her chest. The child wore a woman’s high heels, heels so high and large that her foot slid into the toe, and the sole at the heel was bare. The child’s eyes were rimmed with eyeliner. Trick or Treat was the woman’s first thought when she walked into the living room of their suite. And then the child began to undress and the man and the woman said No No No and the child looked around wildly.
Wasn’t that look there still? But even the child’s fear was somehow almost calculating. How would they ever lure her into their world?
Their own lovely daughter—the country had stolen her, the awful country that the woman had taken Allison to because the girl missed her father. They were leaving in less than two hours when the girl appeared. There was no time to waste, no time at all, and with some of the woman’s clothing cut and pinned and with the child’s hair washed and cut—oh, the woman was working so quickly—the child would leave her own country. And because the child looked the age of their child in the passport it was fated perhaps. It was also fated, wasn’t it?, because the woman would never have returned to the country except that she couldn’t let her husband go back alone—and only two of them could have carried it off in that country—with its wobbling flat bed trucks and tankers and jitneys and scooters and insane taxis and buses that spewed black smoke and its skinny boys dodging between carts and horses and more carts from which the boys sold boiled eggs
inside of which a tiny bird already with pinpricks of feathers was boiled alive as a delicacy—a delicacy!—to be bitten into when the egg was cracked.
What else should they have done? If they allowed the little girl to leave the room, whoever brought her by mistake would take her away to be used again. The authorities were in league with those who brought children to foreigners’ rooms. The man and the woman were efficient people and their hearts were broken and they were numb and they had nothing to lose. How else could they have pulled it off?
But then there were the electric sensations that still fuzzed in the woman’s fingertips. They had stolen the child who had been sold and otherwise would be sold and sold until she was dead of disease and even the man and the woman were afraid to take her to the doctor now—where to go?—what was to be done? Except that the man had a friend who worked in a clinic and they could possibly approach him, and the woman was thinking that there is a place inside any mother who knows how to help a child, yes, a child is a child is a child, yes.
The woman turned on the light.
The child was standing in the bedroom again. Her nightgown was on backwards. The neckline dipped low on her chest where her breastbone jutted. The woman got out of bed. Getting up like this night after night—oh, suddenly it reminded her of when Allison was a baby waking up all through the night, night after night.
“Come on,” the woman said to the girl. “You’ll need to turn this around. That’s the back. You have to keep warm or you’ll get a cold. It’s cold here. But that’s okay because we make the house warm. Everything is okay here.”
The child looked at her with that look—of waiting and calculation.
The woman was so tired.
“Would you like to see—?” she began. “There’s a room that maybe you would be happy to sleep in—for tonight maybe. It was a special room and there are stuffed animals in it.”
She led the child out of the bedroom without waking her husband.
As she walked upstairs with the child she asked herself: what is my own life worth? A child was saved from disease and death—and enslavement. Who knew what had been done to her?
The woman fumbled for the light switch.
Allison’s room in the bright light was full of the lovely accoutrements of a lucky child. The bed with its pink canopy floated at the heart of the room. Stuffed animals were heaped in a jumble on the comforter. The woman felt breathless with pain.
The child ran toward the canopy bed.
When she turned back her face was alive. But she did not point at the pandas or the monkeys or the tigers. She pointed at the shelf of dolls at the head of the bed, as if at last out of her terrible loneliness she recognized what she missed.
“They are beautiful, ma’am,” said the child. “They are beautiful girls.”
The Swan Princess
When she tried the dress on at the store it looked nice, tight at the waist, not too fussy—and a harbinger of early spring. Now she couldn’t help but think of mold. Moldy cheese. Chapels of mold. Sarcophagi. Leaky molding things.
And her heels. She had never worn such outrageously high heels in her life. Was she a crazy woman? A stilt-walker? You had to be an acrobat to stay upright. The elevation—she might as well be a Sherpa. Clouds should be floating right outside her head. She was genetically engineered to be a short woman. Why was she trying to fool nature, balancing all her weight on these idiotic heels?
It didn’t help that the parish hall, overflowing with people, moved slowly from side to side like a giant bag of water. Ahead of her, bridesmaids in pastel blue gowns floated by like vapor.
There. There. Right there. Anise. In the center of the hall with that skinny old man in the rumpled suit. Happy, lucky man to be there with the bride. Anise. Anise for whom Julia was here because without Anise’s pleading she would never have returned. Oh, Anise, I’ve lost you inside your mammoth vat of a wedding dress.
Someone tapped her shoulder. The best man. “You certainly can’t encounter something like this in New York,” he said. He held out a cup of punch to Julia.
She laughed, “You’re not going to drink it yourself?”
“Oh no. But as I said, you can’t find this in New York.” When she didn’t take the cup he walked away, his face hardening. She hadn’t meant to insult him. She just didn’t know what to say. That was one of her problems: that delay she experienced when people talked to her.
The man in the groom’s party in a too-big tuxedo—he had a dent in his head as if part of his skull had been removed. He sneezed after he nodded at her. That bunch of men under the exit sign—the tall one kept twitching and shrugging his shoulders as if he was wearing a suit made of monkey fur. Julia’s brother might have become like any of them—a big guy who made his presence known.
Well. She was safe, she told herself. Even if she had once been filled with soft down and was sucked empty, nothing unexpected could ever happen in this hall. If she felt awkward, even that was expected. When she and Anise were eighth-graders they served in this hall as volunteer waitresses at a wedding, and Julia had accidentally ladled gravy down the back of a man’s suit jacket and never confessed. Her shyness had kept her from speaking up even then.
After all these years there was the same beige paint on the walls as when she was a girl. The same tiles that made the dance floor look like a frozen lake crazed with cracks.
Anise’s mother—it would be comforting to find her in the crowd. She had held Julia on her lap and rocked her a million years ago after Julia’s brother had strapped binder twine across a plywood board and rigged the board to two inner tubes which were, in their turn, hooked with fence wire. It had been an early almost-spring day, and ice like grits still rimmed the roots where the water ate away tree bark. Julia’s brother sat cross-legged on his rigged-up raft and let himself drift on the creek. This was according to a witness who used to work at the grain mill and often wandered the creek bank and passed the boy without concern. Many years ago this man also rafted on the creek and knew its pleasures: how you find yourself veering, hitting against a rock and tipping like a tub toy. Or you’re snagged in an overhang and have to pole yourself away with whatever loose branch you can reach.
People lined the creek for miles to look for the body. The next spring they lined the creek again, but they didn’t come in memory of her brother. Julia had been stunned by the swans—like pillowcases coming alive and floating off a clothesline to settle on the creek. She remembered white wings rising and unfolding where the creek was fed by the stream behind the parish hall. The swans that arrived that spring were shockingly white, but ugly and ungainly when they tottered across the bank. A decade later she would ask about the swans. Her mother said she didn’t remember them. Memory’s like that, her mother said, it confuses us. Your father has no memory to speak of anymore, she said. Both of Julia’s parents were beyond confusion now.
The woman smelled like tic tac mints.
“You haven’t changed at all. You don’t remember me. It’s Katie Gibbs. Mag’s youngest sister?”
“Of course,” Julia said before it came back: Katie Gibbs, a spy rifling through her purse when she sat behind Julia at basketball games.
The quartet was tuning up, and Julia couldn’t hear what Katie was saying. A hand pressed her shoulder. She turned and saw an older woman in a peach-colored dress with wide shoulder pads. Who was she? Oh—it was Anise’s mother. Julia gasped in recognition and thought, What has she done to herself? The vividness Julia remembered had drained from her face.
“I’ve heard from nearly everyone we used to know,” Anise’s mother said. The warmth in her voice! “We were so relieved that you could make it.”
Julia said something about how glad she was to be there.
Anise’s mother cocked her head and said, “I hope you’re hungry. All Anise has talked about for weeks is chicken. How we have to have enough chicken and how tough it’s going to be to get good chicken. She makes everything difficult. You’d think s
he’d carried all the hens on her back across a mountain pass. Ask her to tell you about her stones.”
“Her stones?”
“She thinks she’s a sculptor now. She’s got it into her head that she can take something ordinary and just keep it ordinary and people will want it. She makes stones. Ask her.”
After her second glass of wine, Julia’s knees weakened. She knew that if she stood much longer her legs would go out from under her. Or else she might start laughing at nothing, even at that poor guy walking the outer rim of the hall as if she didn’t know he was following her with his eyes.
And then—another sip of wine clearing her head instead of turning it peculiar—she told herself to buck up. Stop it. No one cares. You’re nervous and acting paranoid.
It seemed to work—that blast of clear-headedness.
She was glad when she found an empty table. She made herself sit and was soon joined by a young couple. The wife worked at the Bridal Gallery. It turned out that the couple had moved into a new development. Their curlicue of a street was largely empty. Another family chose to design a home with bizarre specificity, down to the cat door, and was suing the developer for failure to comply with their plans. After the couple began to ignore her, Julia found herself staring at a man at one of the round tables. He was seated beside an older woman leaning in toward him. With a start, it came to Julia that she knew him. They had dated once or twice as teenagers. Seated with him was his own mother, who stared at the side of his face with such feeling that Julia endured vertigo. He had to know it was coming, that ball of scorching love. His mother had waited until he was looking away to send it.
“There’s something about a candlelight reception,” the woman at Julia’s table said, out of what struck Julia as an attempt to be polite to her. “It’s romantic.” The woman turned to her husband. “Where’s your sense of romance?”
“You’re right,” he answered. “Everyone’s starting to look surprisingly good.” He winked at Julia, and she felt herself blush.
Across the hall Katie Gibbs, her black dress barely covering her thighs, was talking to three men, one of whom was looking over Katie’s head at Julia. What could Katie be reporting? Didn’t anyone think she’d ever return? She had every right to return. Anise was her friend. Even though Anise was nowhere to be seen. After all, at her own wedding Anise had better things to do than to hover over a friend. Not that Julia needed to be hovered over. And Anise wasn’t a hoverer anyway. Anise accepted things. She made everything normal, because she was normal. A relief the way she was so normal. As if you could become normal just by standing next to her. But it was odd, what she was doing with stones.