by Gin Phillips
But they would not let you stay at school forever. So she would turn on the TV and watch her shows until her mother got home, and then her mother would take over the television—she had her own shows to watch. Joan would wait until late at night, after her mother had gone to bed, and then she would come back to the television, sitting close, neck craning up, because they had lost the remote control—no, not only that, but she liked to be close enough that she was more in the television than in her den. And she would be content. But sometimes she would be sitting there after dark, cross-legged and barefoot, slick, slick floor, and a roach would crawl right over her ankle or thigh or fingertip, and she would run to the sofa, choking back a scream, but she would go back to the television always, even if she did not know which direction the roach had gone and she was forced to keep checking under the chairs. The worst terror was always that first moment when she saw, from the corner of her eye, a dark shape creeping. She could never get close enough to them to kill them. The best she could do was to throw shoes at them and hope she got lucky, and sometimes she would spray them with hairspray until they were drowning. She liked to watch them die like that—but even when the roaches were threatening, she would go back to the television. She could not stay away.
The Sprite light on the machine is pulsing like Morse code. Lincoln is still chewing. The speakers are singing out. “It was a graveyard smash. / It caught on in a flash—”
She would watch a Scarecrow and Mrs. King episode and then rewind it—she always taped it—and watch the good parts over again. Rewind, pause, play. Rewind, pause, play. She remembers an episode where Lee and Amanda walk into a hotel and he’s holding her hand as they step into an elevator and then he lets go of her to push a button and Amanda reaches for his hand, groping in the air, and the look on his face is wonderful when he realizes Amanda is reaching for him. Joan watched that scene a hundred times. This was back when they were in love but hadn’t admitted it, so every single look was so important, and Joan wondered if anyone would ever look at her like that.
That patch of floor in front of the television stand is the only piece of her childhood house that she can see so clearly. The wall of bookshelves, painted beige, lace overhanging every shelf, the coffee table to her right, shining, with silk flowers in a brass bowl and magazines scattered. The television and VCR, the silver knobs and black buttons, the satisfying hum of a tape rewinding.
She did not like the other rooms. The kitchen drew the roaches the most. Once she reached into a bag of potato chips and felt a hard, slick shell move under her fingers. The hallway was long and carpeted, and she would run down it at full speed—so much empty space to cover, soles of her feet hot against the nubs of pale green carpet—and her bedroom was at the end, and she would vault from the hallway onto her blue bedspread, hoping nothing would be moving in her sheets.
She never went a single night without seeing five or six or ten roaches. Sometimes she lay awake, listening for the sound of their little legs scuttling. Sometimes she could not sleep at all.
Her mother never saw them. Joan could make a monument to the things her mother never noticed—a grandson, for instance, whom she has visited twice since he was born—but there is still a shudder of fury in her that her mother never saw the roaches.
Joan asked, again and again, for poison. You’re overreacting, her mother would say. You know Daisy could get ahold of it. And there aren’t that many of them.
She remembers when she liked to use the den carpet as a stage for her little plays, and she would ask her mother to watch her perform. Do it for me while I rest my eyes, her mother would say, lying on the couch, and she would have her eyes closed already.
She remembers her mother insisting on taking her for a manicure: It’ll be fun, her mother said. No, Joan answered, older by then, with a temper closer to the surface. It won’t. I hate getting my nails done. I hate the smell, and it hurts when they use the tools. I always hate it. You’re the one who likes it.
Her mother slammed her hairbrush onto the counter, her makeup mirror rattling, but the next day they went to Lovely Nails, and surely her mother believes to this day that Joan loves manicures.
Her mother never saw.
Her mother never even bothered to look.
You are supposed to be more forgiving of your parents, aren’t you, after you have children yourself? After you understand what parenting really means? But it has worked the opposite way with her. In her twenties Joan reached some vague peace with her parents, but once Lincoln came, the fury came back. The best she can manage is to keep her head turned away from it so that it stays a dark shape, creeping.
Lee Stetson said things like This Bordeaux is to die for, and he drove a silver sports car, and he kissed Amanda’s hand, and that is what Joan thought adulthood would be like. Everyone beautiful and witty, cocktails and exotic locales and montages. She had a mother who slept with a Lhasa apso, who didn’t mind smears of dog poop on her sheets but who sneered at touching treasure-bright rocks, and she had a father who could spend entire days hunting tiny animals but could never find his way back to a full-sized daughter.
The Sprite light is speeding up its rhythm, frantic.
She realizes that Lincoln is motionless, maybe asleep. White chocolate covers his fingers, which are relaxed and pointed skyward. His head has fallen onto her bicep. She looks at the soft curves of his cheeks and his eyelashes sweeping down and his nose that has a ball on the end of it, a perfectly round ending point. He used the word “arsenal” in a sentence yesterday. He has entire worlds inside his head.
She sees him.
With her unbloodied hand, she closes her fingers around his wrist, softly, a bracelet. She feels the bones under his skin.
She sees him.
Only him.
The trick is to keep her focus.
“I wish I had Sarge,” he murmurs, and she is surprised both because he is not asleep and because Sarge is usually a second choice next to his best-loved stuffed animal, a floppy giraffe. Sarge was her own stuffed dog, more than thirty years old now; his left ear has a hole big enough to slip your finger inside, and his nose has partially rubbed off. Her uncle would make Sarge creep onto the breakfast table and beg to have a taste of her eggs, and she suddenly misses Sarge, too, his stuffed German shepherd body, worn nubby. He has known everyone she has ever loved.
“Why do you want Sarge?” she asks.
“Because he’s a police dog.” Lincoln’s head lifts slightly. “He protects things.”
She is about to reassure him that she will protect him, but then there is a sound and a movement, out in the middle of the bright light.
In the second it takes her to realize that a door is opening—the door on the other side of the Coke machine—there is already a voice, and then there is a face lit pink by the red-and-white swirls of the vending machine.
A face. Long hair swinging. Dark eyes staring at them.
It takes her a second or two—time is gluey and slow, like a roach’s legs in hairspray—before Joan realizes that the voice belongs to a girl, and she barely manages to swallow down her scream.
The girl reaches out an arm, fingers curling and her whole body visible, just for a moment, then it slips back behind the machine. The body belongs to a young black woman, a teenager, with hair falling in braids, streaked with bright red like a crayon. Her face is small under all the hair.
“Come in,” says the girl. “Fast.”
7:23 p.m.
Joan stays perfectly still, studying the girl’s face to decide whether she might be a girlfriend of the shooters, someone sent to play games with the prey. But the girl looks very young and very nervous, and it is hard to suspect her of anything.
“If you want,” the girl says, only the back of her head showing as she turns and looks out into the darkness, sounding both uncertain and annoyed.
It is the annoyance that con
vinces Joan. She wraps one arm around Lincoln and lifts him up, waiting until his feet are under him, and then she pushes herself to her knees, swiping the banana leaves from her face. She pushes her son in front of her, past the Coke machine, shoving, scuttling, his hand twisting in her shirt, everything awkward, her thighs aching, and then they are stepping inside the restaurant and the glass door is closing behind them, too loudly.
Squatting on the balls of her feet, Joan keeps an arm around Lincoln’s waist. There is a long crack in the door, she notices, a silvery line that spreads across the glass in the shape of a chicken’s foot.
The girl is in front of her, motionless, also bent low to the ground. They are next to the lunch counter, with the cash register to their left. There is an entire wall of windows to their right. The ceiling lights are off, but the display cases of the restaurant are lit from within, so there is a fluorescent glow to the room, and the white plastic tables and chairs—she thinks they are white—are now the pale green of deep-sea creatures.
The girl has turned toward them, reaching over their heads, her armpit coming close. She smells pleasantly of powder and bread.
“The door,” the girl says, flipping the deadbolt.
Then the girl is bent down again, moving forward, past the food counter, and they follow her. A few tables have the chairs neatly turned over on top of them, legs in the air, but other chairs and even tables are scattered sideways across the floor. There is a red rope strung between two poles, the kind used to tell people where to stand in line, and the poles themselves are turned over so that their round bases are standing up.
“Back this way,” the girl is saying, waving them forward, as if they are not already so close that they might step on her feet.
“Who is that?” asks Lincoln, his voice warm and damp against Joan’s cheek.
His hand is still wrapped in the hem of her shirt, pulling.
“I don’t know,” she says, and she realizes she does not know many things, like why she has decided to close herself in this building with a stranger. The door opened and there was another human being, which seemed like a godsend—although if God were sending anyone, why a teenager?—and maybe this is a terrible mistake. Still, she cannot think of turning around. She feels compelled to move forward, and why is that?
Her brain is spinning off, pell-mell, but her feet are plodding along. Hunchbacked, they pass the empty metal-and-glass cases where food used to be—muffins, she thinks, and apple Danishes. They are keeping below the level of the windows that line the wall. Glancing through those windows, she can see the underside of the thatched roof and the darkness beyond the spotlights. The dark looks total in a way that it did not when she was outside—she sees nothing of the elephant’s domain, nothing of the faraway pine trees or the lighted streets. The straw roof stretches forever, and the world beyond might as well be actual Africa.
She wonders about the reverse view—from outside the restaurant looking in. Just how clearly are they outlined and highlighted? Is there someone outside thinking that her skin looks pale green like a sea animal’s?
She faces forward again. The girl’s hair is dyed a dark red in this light. Streaks of black and rust.
The music outside is a monotone hum.
There is a dead ladybug on the floor. Lincoln does not see it, and the shell crunches under his shoe.
The girl is picking up speed. Joan stays close, with Lincoln wrapped around her but moving by his own power. Her thighs are screaming from this squatted-over walking.
They round the counter and turn into the kitchen area, passing stainless-steel counters and a massive stove and many knobs of all sizes. The tile floor is slightly slick, and she takes care to place her feet carefully and to keep a tight grip on Lincoln’s hand.
“Nearly there,” whispers the girl.
The kitchen comes to an end—no more appliances—and the tile floor curves into a short hallway that ends with a stainless-steel door. The girl pushes open the door, and they step into a room with steel counters on both sides and cardboard boxes stacked under the counters. The lights are off, of course, but one square window high on the wall lets in some combination of moonlight and the glare of the outdoor spotlights.
There is a woman sitting on the floor. An older woman, white-haired and pale-skinned, leaning back against a stack of boxes. She is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she nods once, her face shadowed.
“Come on in,” says the woman.
“This way, Lincoln,” Joan says, steering her son into the room as she nods back at the woman.
The cardboard boxes fill every inch of floor space other than a narrow path down the center of the room. Joan can make out plastic forks and spoons in one box and coffee filters in another, but most of them are taped shut. Above the counters at least a dozen ladles hang along a magnetic strip. There is a block of knives. Farther down, a pool of shining red makes her flinch, but then she sees the ketchup bottles, seven—eight—glass bottles of ketchup in a neat line. The lids have been removed, and in one spot the ketchup has overflowed onto the counter and pooled onto the floor.
“I was marrying them,” the girl says, sliding the lock on the steel door.
Joan looks back, and the door is so polished that even in the dim light there is a reflection of the girl, a wraith, mimicking the lift and fall of the girl’s arms. The girl in the door collapses smoothly to the floor just as the real girl does, limbs folding until she is sitting, cross-legged.
The real girl is wearing a maroon beret, the same color as her braids, and her jeans are loose around her hips. She is bird-boned.
“I mean the ketchup,” the girl says. She props an elbow on a cardboard box labeled NON-DAIRY CREAMER. “I was marrying the bottles when I heard them come in, and I spilled some, and it seemed dumb to clean it up after, you know?”
“Ketchup?” repeats Lincoln, crowding close, his feet tangling up in Joan’s feet as she shoves at a box, trying to make a space.
As Joan sits, she studies the room. Only one door. And the one window is too high, surely, for anyone to see inside. She finds it easier to focus on the space around them—the strengths and weaknesses of it—than to make sense of whatever the girl is saying about condiments.
Other than the girl’s voice, it is quiet in the room. Joan can no longer hear the Halloween music. She is not sure that she likes the silence.
Her feet, she realizes, are almost touching the older woman, who is silent and watching. Joan draws her legs closer to her body, and she situates Lincoln on her thigh. His legs land in the space between her knees.
“So you were here when the shooters came into the restaurant?” she whispers to the woman.
“Not me,” the woman answers, voice low. “I was by the elephants. I had headphones on, so I didn’t even hear the shots at first. But she found me. Like she found you.”
“They didn’t know,” the girl says, not whispering. Like she is sitting on a couch somewhere, gossiping over pizza and Dancing with the Stars. “The men. They didn’t know that I was here. They didn’t even look hard. That’s the weird thing. Wouldn’t you think they would have checked harder? Like, that they would have been really serious about it? Aren’t you supposed to have a plan for things like this?”
The girl’s answers use up so many words.
“Should we talk more quietly?” Joan whispers.
“Why?” The girl gives a slight roll of her shoulders. “You can’t hear anything in here from outside the door. Trust me. I’ve tried, because when the manager wants to tear someone a new one she’ll come back here and close the door and there was this one girl who was always eating coffee cake, like a crazy addiction to coffee cake, and all of us wondered, I mean—anyway—I was saying how I was back here when the men came inside. No customers were here, which is a good thing, I mean, because—but after the men walked out again, I opened the door and watched them leav
e, and from the window I could see a man and a woman going down the path and I heard shots, and then they fell. But maybe they got up later.”
Joan is having to focus very closely on every word the girl is saying. It is like arriving in a country where she thinks she speaks the language, but then some taxi driver or concierge starts speaking at full speed, and she realizes all her practice and CD-listening have not prepared her for it: even though she has the vocabulary, she’s only getting one out of every three or four words.
“Maybe,” she says to the girl, and she catches the white-haired woman’s eye.
They study each other for a moment, and she notices that even though the woman is wearing a sweatshirt, she is also wearing silver earrings and a necklace, and her hair is carefully styled—it looks like it would bounce back into place if you touched it. Her nails are manicured. Nothing flashy—some sort of pastel color. Tasteful. Cautious.
Joan suspects this is a woman who never leaves the house without fixing her face.
She regrets following the girl. She does not want to be here.
The girl tilts her hair-heavy head backward, staring up. She is swaying slightly, making her hair swing over her shoulders.
“Have you ever heard about how if anyone pulls a gun on you and tries to force you into a car,” the girl says, “you’re better off running away from them, because the chance of killing you with a shot from even, like, six feet away is only something like 60 percent? And if you get ten feet away, it’s like 30 percent? So they might shoot you, but they probably won’t kill you. And if they were thirty or forty or fifty feet away, it’s not likely at all.”
Joan looks down at Lincoln, who has shifted on her thigh. He seems to be absorbed with what looks like a potato masher—she does not know how it wound up in his hand—but he is often listening more closely than she realizes. She does not want to discuss the ins and outs of gunshot wounds.