by J. A. Rock
Bessie Holmes’s Note: if you don’t mind my saying, there has been certain ways a lady can behave that brings such trouble on her.
Rollins’s Note: I do mind you saying.
“They know,” I told Alle. “They know Bitsy’s dead. They know we were all in town that night. Well, maybe they don’t know you were there.” “Three of them,” Denson had said.
Alle was staring at her lesson book, but she didn’t have a pencil or paper, and I knew she wasn’t doing homework. Anytime I was in the room with her, she had to be looking at a book, or folding clothes, or pretending to write a letter. I grabbed my own lesson book from under my bed. Took it to the desk and dropped it beside her. The spine cracked. She started.
“Look at me,” I demanded.
She whipped her head up, anger and fear in her expression. “What?”
“I want to tell.”
No response.
“I want to tell them what happened. Denson. We could tell Denson.”
She shook her head. “Kenna said we ought to keep—”
“And now I’m saying we need to tell. They already know.”
“You said maybe they don’t know about me.”
Rage flared in me. “So you want us to leave you out of it?”
“If you hadn’t made me come with you . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head more rapidly. “Why the hell’d you have to go into town, huh? Why couldn’t you just be normal?”
“I’d rather be anything but a coward!” And yet I slipped into cowardice so naturally. I used friends and I bullied strangers and I searched for enemies.
She stood. “Enough. Thera, enough. I mean it. We can’t. They can’t know I was involved.”
“Why not?”
“They just can’t. If you only trust me on one thing, let it be this.”
“Alle,” I whispered, suddenly exhausted. I started to lean my forehead against hers, and I placed my hand on her shoulder.
She pulled away. “We can’t do that anymore.”
I stepped back. “What?”
“We— I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you . . .?” What the hell was I going to ask her? If she loved me? My God, we were sick, the two of us, twisted in words and dreams. And if she didn’t need me anymore, then I sure as hell didn’t need her. But then who did I have? If Denson thought me a liar, and Alle didn’t want me anymore? Who, then? Kenna?
“Forget it.” I let my hand fall. “Forget every fucking thing.”
I left the room and went downstairs. Then outside into the night, where I pressed myself against the iron fence of Rock Point and waited to feel something grand and be a better girl. But the wind whipped through my hair and all else was silent.
So I steadied myself and looked up at the few stars that weren’t obscured by gray mist. God and all those liar’s tales, all the false things we go down on all fours like a dog for . . . I didn’t need or want anything except to find those two officers and make them pay. Terrible things happened in the world, but we could put them right if only we were fearless. If only we were not hampered by a weakness like love. I vowed I would never love anybody. That as a warrior I would concern myself only with justice and heroics—and never, ever with pretty girls who had scared souls and fools’ secrets.
Two more weeks passed, and nobody on staff approached me to talk about Bitsy’s death. DuMorg had a brief session with each girl at Rock Point after the news was announced. I mumbled through my session, assuring DuMorg that I was all right to continue with my lessons and my chores. The girls’ home had a moment of silence in the dining room each night for a week in Bitsy’s honor.
Kenna said we ought to have a memorial service for Bitsy, on our own. I didn’t care in the least, but thought perhaps I should keep my newfound coldness private for the time being. So I agreed.
We discovered, Kenna and I, as we attempted to write speeches, that we knew very little about Bitsy. Where she had come from, when she had arrived, what her middle name was.
“We ought to look at her file.” Kenna glanced up at me, that spinning, wobbling energy making me uncomfortable. I stared at her for a moment, not sure what she meant. “We could find out everything about her.”
“Don’t be stupid. We can use the things we already know.”
“And we could look at the report on her death.” Kenna’s tone grew more desperate. “See if they suspect we were there for it.”
“That’s what you want? To see if they suspect us?”
“It’s gonna matter, isn’t it?” She crumpled the paper on which she’d been trying to write a eulogy. “When we leave here? We’ll need letters of reference. Don’t you want to know what they’ve been saying about us all these years? Hell, didn’t Bitsy say she wanted to know if anyone ever thought of adopting her?”
“I don’t care what she wanted,” I said. “I don’t care if I am a suspect. I don’t give a shit about who wanted to adopt Bitsy.”
Kenna’s desperation vanished, replaced by what looked like pity. “Awf. You sad old thing. You remind me of a drunken barman I once knew who’d whistle through a hole a bullet had left in his leg. His name was . . .”
In the end, I went along with it because I didn’t know what else to do.
Kenna claimed only Rollins and Dr. DuMorg had the keys to the file cabinet, but I had learned to pick Auntie Bletch’s medicine cupboard, and I felt sure I could manage this.
We slipped away during dinner, and I followed Kenna into Rollins’s office. It was tidy—a wooden desk, a chair, a file cabinet, and little else. Kenna walked past the desk to the cabinet and immediately began inspecting the lock. I was almost there when I saw a folder on its surface, pages sticking out. I don’t know what made me open the folder and look.
Adoption papers. Signed by Rollins, some legal so-and-so . . . and Denson. Under Denson’s signature was a blank line for me to sign on, my name printed under it.
Riley Denson intended to become my legal guardian.
I stared and tried to breathe. Kenna was rattling the cabinet. “C’mere, Thera. I need your help.”
I couldn’t move.
I would have hit anyone and anything, gladly. I would have broken a nose; I would have bruised an eye, split a lip, hurt someone until they cried.
That traitor bitch.
She hadn’t asked me.
She hadn’t fucking asked.
She’d had these papers drawn up, and—what? She’d just assumed I would sign them? That I’d throw my arms around her and cry, I have a mommy at last! Where did she expect me to live? In this place? The cottage, I realized. The cottage in Rock Hill. She’d bought it, perhaps knowing she was going to ask me to live there with her.
I gazed at that blank line. At the way the tail of Riley Denson’s Y came down to touch it. I didn’t deserve a mother. Denson had no idea what I was. And did she want to be my mother, really? Or was it just that she couldn’t quit thinking her devil’s thoughts about me?
“Come on, shit-weed,” Kenna whispered. “We’ve got to find those records.”
I closed the folder, blinking against the sting in my eyes.
Almost two years. Is that how long it took you to decide I might be worth it? Or to feel sorry enough for me that you’d have those papers drawn up?
I went over to the filing cabinet. Picked the lock numbly with a hairpin, ignoring Kenna’s hurry ups. At last the cabinet sprang open, and we rooted through the files. Kenna pulled Bitsy’s out and opened it. “Jane. Elizabeth Jane Lacombe.” She looked up. “Doesn’t she sound like the heir to something? A minor throne, or perhaps a stellar racehorse?” Kenna returned to reading. “She came here three years ago. Father died in a factory accident. Mother was institutionalized. Awf, look here. Someone tried to adopt her a few months after she got here, but decided not to go through with it because Bitsy was sick. They thought she was dying.”
I listened without feeling much of anything.
“Thera, c’mon. You read our files while I
look at this. See if they think we’re criminals.”
I searched the folders until I found my name. Pulled the folder free and opened it up. The words all jumbled together, but I was fairly sure there was nothing surprising here. Notes on my violent behavior. My dead parents. My bullying. My medications. No mention of anyone trying to adopt me. Nothing about me sneaking into town, or hiding facts about Bitsy’s death.
“There’s nothing,” I murmured. “They don’t think we’re hiding anything.”
“Well, that’s good, huh? Oh.” Kenna let out a breath. “Oh, this is sad.”
I turned toward her, my vision swimming. “Hmm?”
“Just, it says here Bitsy really likes horses. She told DuMorg in all her early sessions that when she grew up, she was going to ride professionally.” She flipped the folder shut. “I don’t know. It’s sad, isn’t it? That she never got to ride that fine bangtail she was to inherit?”
I nodded.
“Ballard? You aren’t listening to me at all.”
I was staring into the file cabinet again. I’d spotted a folder labeled “Beadurinc.”
Kenna put Bitsy’s file back and took out her own. Spent a few minutes reading it and snorting, then replaced it without telling me any of what it said. “That sounds about right,” she muttered when she’d finished. “Come on, Thera. Put your folder back and let’s go.”
I put the folder back. And when Kenna wasn’t looking, I grabbed Alle’s and stuffed it under my sweater.
I sneaked down to the reading room that night, opened Alle’s folder, and read a story.
I read about a girl of twelve who’d hidden in a woodshed with her parents when two men had come to the farm to collect on her father’s gambling debts. I read how her parents had seen the men approaching their hiding place and had ordered her to go out the back—she was small enough that she could crawl through the shed’s window and into the tall grass. Her father would distract the men by going out to meet them face-to-face.
The girl hadn’t wanted to leave, but her mother shoved her away, told her to go quickly and not to look back. But the girl had, of course, looked back, and had seen one of the two men cut her father’s throat. Heard her mother scream and saw her run from the shed with a shovel and attack the man. She’d knocked him unconscious, but the second man had stabbed her and left the blade in her chest while she died on the ground.
And so the little girl had doubled back. She’d pulled the blade from her mother’s chest. She’d sneaked up on the second man while he crouched alongside his unconscious friend, and she’d plunged the knife into his neck.
A strange case, the police report said. Not precisely self-defense, but an understandable desire for revenge and self-preservation. Alle had not been prosecuted, but she’d been passed from one foster home to another. She’d been counseled by a church and then finally sent to Rock Point. The man she’d stabbed had died, but the other man, Aaron McInroe, had awoken. He’d been charged with murder in the first degree. Sentenced to twenty years in prison. There was a picture of him in a newspaper clipping attached to the report. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a long time.
The story sounded so clinical, written as it was—just the facts and none of the feelings. But I could imagine that little girl peering through cracks in the shed, could imagine her clinging to her mother and being forced away. I felt her terror, and I wondered what to do now. Could I tell Alle I knew?
I looked through the rest of her file. Saw DuMorg’s notes from an early session.
Nothing I have seen leads me to believe A Beadurinc is a danger to the other girls here. However, a therapist she talked to soon after the incident claims A spoke of finding Aaron McInroe and killing him.
Aaron McInroe. He must be the reason Alle spoke to Rocky Bottom. To find out if McInroe was still in prison. And if he was, what did she intend to do?
I sat shivering in the parlor, half hoping a monitor would walk by, that I would have the distraction of being in trouble. I could not be any of the things I wished. I couldn’t be Denson’s daughter, and I couldn’t be Alle’s protector. I was no warrior; I was a girl who played with sticks. All this time, I had been sleeping beside someone who truly knew what violence was, who had chosen action over bitter dreaming.
Some girls at Rock Point begged to know what happened next if Miss Ridges left off at the end of a suspenseful chapter. I would happily leave characters dangling from a cliff’s ledge or trapped in a basement with a lunatic. I left them to suffer alone in the dark. I saved their fears for later. I wished it were possible to do this with myself—wished I didn’t have to know what happened next. Perhaps it would be a mercy if nothing happened—if I could eat and sleep and grow old and forget myself, forget my own story, and die untroubled in my sleep.
I swiped the thought away angrily. No self-pity. No regret.
Just make it right. Make it right.
I look back now, and I do pity the girl I was that night. It’s not that revenge has no place in the world. But we so often clamp our jaws around the things we think we want, while the real prizes escape between our teeth, slide down our necks in rivers and are lost in our skin.
I was in the parlor plucking my chin hairs. It was just after dawn, and I was using the gray light and my hand mirror, which I’d had to wedge between the table and the wall to keep it upright. I needed both hands for plucking, one to hold the tweezers and one to pull my skin taut.
Denson entered the parlor. She didn’t reprimand me for being out of bed. She just said, “You’re up early.” Her voice was hoarse, and she tried unsuccessfully to stifle a bout of coughing.
All at once, I was breathtakingly grateful to her for her kindness toward me when I’d first come here. It hit me like big news, that Riley Denson had probably saved my life. And just as quickly, I was furious.
Not just about the adoption papers—though that still made me feel sick and uncertain—but because she knew. She knew we’d been out that night with Bitsy, and yet she’d said nothing.
“I’m doing my chin.” I could see her in the mirror, watching me. I forced a smile. “If you’re worried about your hair going thin, I could lend you some of my fucking beard.” Denson let me say fuck. It was a privilege I tried not to abuse, but that I did like to make use of.
She smiled, and sadly.
I always thought loneliness must be a quiet thing. Up all night with frog sounds, wandering an empty room by day, resenting the sun squares on the floor. Guilt too seemed like it ought to be a silent kind of suffering. But what was going on inside me was a filthy and violent underground. Jeers and wagers and the sound of creature versus creature.
“You don’t need to worry about your chin,” she said softly. “You’re beautiful, Thera.”
Something in me broke apart then. I set my tweezers down. “I don’t think you know me at all.”
“I do know you. And there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
I turned. “The adoption?”
She opened her mouth but didn’t speak right away. “Yes. I . . . Did Rollins tell you?”
“No. I found out, though.” I stepped toward her. “And I have to tell you, it’s not a good idea.” I kept my voice very calm.
Her brow furrowed. “Thera? Are you ill? You don’t look well.”
I nodded solemnly. I was close enough to touch her now, to feel her breath on my face. I reminded myself that love was a weakness. That this woman kept secrets—mine and her own. That she’d had two years to rescue me from this place, to take me to a cottage in Rock Hill, and she’d waited until it was too late. I let all the anger from the past two weeks, all my pathetic hope from the past two years, collide in me.
I grabbed her. Spun her so she faced away from me, and wrapped an arm around her neck. She didn’t resist; her body was as easy to move as a pillow—light and yielding. She gave a small gasp, but other than that, she was silent.
“You don’t know how dangerous I am,” I murmured in her
ear. “I’ll make you hurt. Oh God, I’ll make you hurt.” I said it like the idea was appealing to me. I closed my eyes and twisted any goodness that remained in me into the bliss of imagined pain. Her pain, and mine. She writhed gently, not like she was trying to get away, but like she was trying to get more comfortable. She finally let out a frustrated breath and went still.
“Please,” she whispered.
I opened my eyes. “What do you want from me? Should I tell them what you want from me? Rollins? Grenwat? Should I tell?”
She twisted her neck in an apparent effort to see me. Said, in a shaky voice, “I don’t want anything from you, Thera, but happiness.”
I tightened my grip. “You think I don’t know how your appetites run? At this late stage, what would an adoption be but your attempt to wed me the only way you can?”
“Thera, stop!” She sounded genuinely shocked.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, pushing my arm against her throat. “I’m unnatural too. Perhaps I was made so by spending so much time with you.”
“Please,” she said again between gasps. She coughed, and I felt the vibrations through my skin. “Please.”
I let her go. She stepped away, breathing hard like she’d been chased and looking at me like I was something she hoped never to see again. “Stay away,” I warned. “And don’t tell.”
I left her there and went to my room.
I remember being driven to Rock Point Girls’ Home in my Auntie Bletch’s wheezy, rusting car. Auntie was talking to me about the squirrels that kept getting in her bird feeder. She seemed guilty, each squirrel-grumble a peace offering. She could barely drive—her hands shook on the wheel and the car shook and twice she pressed the gas when she meant the brakes.
I thought it cruel I was being sent away. But I slouched in the seat, too blanched of feeling to dwell much. I had slipped a bottle of phenacetin into my coat pocket, out of revenge and necessity.
“Goodness, Thera,” Auntie said, glancing over. “Sit up straight. Don’t you want to make a fine impression?”
I laughed then, hysterically. I don’t know what all I was on, but my head seemed to be floating away from my body. I imagined it was a balloon on a string, and the string was tied to a skeleton hidden in an ill-fitting dress. I watched the gray sky as though a future might resolve from it like a vision in the mists of a crystal ball.