“So you and your daughter go out into the woods?”
“Of course not.” There was a hint of fire in her tone now. As if she had finally wakened up to her own defense. As though her state of surrender were wearing off. “We’re not animals.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“We have a little porta-potty. It sits under the bed. Out of the way. It has a cover. It’s sanitary and all. And then in the morning . . . there’s a way to dump something right into the septic tank. There’s an overflow. A pipe that goes down into the tank. Macy showed me how.”
“I see. I’m sorry if it was a rude question. I just couldn’t help being curious.”
“You’re wondering why I can’t do better.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think I should go get a job. But what do I do with my daughter while I’m working? If I pay for her childcare then I’m working for practically nothing. I’m hardly better off than I was when I was staying home to raise her.”
Roseanna saw the first lights of town in the distance. It was a relief. It always scared her a little to motor through the middle of absolutely nothing. They drove without talking for a time. The only sound was the purr of the Maserati’s engine and the less civilized roar of little-girl snores.
“So what will you do now?” Roseanna asked as they pulled up at the motel.
“I have absolutely no idea,” the young woman said.
She stepped out of the car, slinging the little girl over her shoulder again.
So at least she understood that it was not Roseanna’s job to provide a solution. At least, beyond this one night.
Chapter Seven
People Who Hoard Metal . . . and Mouses
It was after eight the following evening, and pitch-dark. Roseanna had just arrived home from her second trip to the supermarket in Walkerville. In one day.
On the first trip she had bought coffee, food, and a few essentials of grooming that Nita had neglected to pack.
Then she’d spent the day noting how many items she had forgotten, but unable to make a list of them. Because a pad of paper—or any variety of paper that she hadn’t accidentally left on her bedside table at home—was one of them. And a pencil—that she hadn’t broken the point off of while carrying it in her purse—was another. Even a cheap sharpener would have helped a lot.
So she’d driven the sixty-mile round-trip a second time, holding a number of items in her head, spinning them around and around on repeat like a song you don’t enjoy but can’t stop mentally playing. It was a secret relief, that second trip to town. Because, quite honestly, Roseanna had no idea what she was supposed to do with all this time.
Only as she was driving home from the second trip did it occur to her that she could have made a list on her phone or her iPad. In which case she might have remembered that the flashlight, which she had remembered to buy, required batteries, which she had forgotten.
She was halfway from the dirt driveway to her front porch when she heard a small noise. It sounded human. A voice. More of a vocalization than a verbalization—in other words, not words. But a recognizable human sound.
The moon had not yet risen, or was locked behind the clouds. And Roseanna had not thought to leave a light on in the house, forgetting it would be dark by the time she got home.
She set her grocery bag in the dirt and began to move, slowly, quietly, toward the barn and the direction of the sound. Not so much with the goal of confronting it. It was more of a reflexive desire to get a bead on what and where it was. Her heart hammered, feeling more and more as though it were sitting in the base of her throat. Then she stopped. Questioned whether it would be smarter just to go inside and lock the door.
Before she could decide, something slammed into her. She screamed out loud, a huge, full-throated shout. The something screamed back, sounding a bit younger and more high pitched.
“Who is that?” Roseanna cried, her voice a terrified screech.
“It’s only me,” a young female voice said in return. Roseanna recognized it as the young woman she had put off her property the evening before. “I’m sorry,” the young woman said, a voice emanating from a dark shape in a black night.
“What are you doing back here? Did I not make myself clear about this?”
“You did. I’m sorry. I just . . . can we leave in the morning? Not tonight? I was trying to get all our stuff out, but it’s late and I don’t have a car that runs, and we don’t have anyplace to stay tonight, and . . .”
Then she seemed to reach the end of her steam.
Roseanna closed her eyes for a moment. It didn’t change the scenery much. She placed one hand over her heart, as if she could hold the shocked organ together manually.
“You scared the living . . . you scared me,” she said, letting it go at that.
“I’m sorry.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
“Inside. Asleep. We need time to figure out a way to move all our stuff someplace else. And right now I have no idea where that could be.”
Roseanna blinked her eyes closed again and left them that way for a moment. It felt like a comfort, but she wasn’t sure why.
It was quite obvious that the problem this young woman had just outlined could not, and would not, be solved overnight. But she wanted to be done with all of this. She wanted to leave her big scare behind and get back inside, and warm up the house, and feel safe again.
So all she said was “Fine. But just tonight.”
In the morning, while Roseanna was making coffee in the surprisingly distressing cold of the house, the young woman knocked.
Roseanna crossed the house in her robe and opened the door.
The little girl was hanging—fairly literally—from her mother’s hand. She was reaching up to hold hands, but at the same time leaning her weight on her poor young mother. As if it were all a game. As if she could use her mom as a makeshift rope swing.
Roseanna had never seen the little girl awake and with her eyes open before. She had rosy cheeks and wispy, thin, soft-looking brown hair. Huge eyes. She looked up at Roseanna and smiled broadly, showing teeth that looked tiny and perfect and orderly. Little enamel pearls lined up just so.
Great, Roseanna thought. The kid’s going to be looking at me like that the whole time I’m trying to evict them.
“Good morning,” the young woman said.
“Hi!” the little girl added, and her voice was so screechy and enthusiastic that it hurt Roseanna’s ears.
“Good morning. Have you figured out where you’ll go?”
“Well . . . that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. May we come in for just a minute?”
Roseanna looked down at the kid, who beamed up expectantly. Cheerfully. Optimistically. And just like that, Roseanna knew she was sunk. She could have said, “No, you can’t come in, because once I let you in, it’ll be like feeding a stray cat. I’ll never get rid of you.” If it had been only the mother on her porch, she could have. But she could say no such thing into the face of this happy child.
Roseanna sighed deeply.
“Fine,” she said. “For just a minute.” She stepped out of the doorway to allow them by. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please,” the young woman said.
“Yes, please!” the little girl shrieked. She probably hadn’t meant to shriek it. It seemed to be the way she said everything. She did not seem to have a second, more dignified, tone.
“You don’t drink coffee,” the mother said, tugging on her daughter’s hand. “Silly.”
“I don’t?”
“No, of course not. You’re five.”
“How old do you have to be?”
Her mother seemed to struggle with that question in her head for a moment. Then she said, “Eighteen.”
“Oh,” the little one squealed. “Never mind!”
Roseanna pressed one finger into her assaulted ear, as if that would repair it.
She handed the young
woman coffee in one of the late Macy’s chipped cobalt-blue mugs. Then she sat on the couch and watched the five-year-old put on a show, with some dismay. Dismay on Roseanna’s part, not the little girl’s. The kid had clearly never heard a discouraging word.
Every time the young woman opened her mouth to speak to Roseanna, the little girl tugged desperately at her sleeve, bounced up and down on the toes of her pink sneakers, or cried “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” Or, in most cases, all three diversionary tactics at the same time.
“What, honey?” the frazzled young mother said at last, peeling her attention away from Roseanna.
“I saw a mouse!”
“At our house?”
“No, here!”
“When?”
“Just now. In the kitchen!”
“There are mice in the kitchen?” Roseanna interjected.
“Oh, yeah,” the young mother said. Roseanna still had not asked her name. Quite purposely. It was not her intention that this be the beginning of . . . well, anything. “There are mice everywhere. That’s just how it is when you live in the country. Macy used to catch them alive in those ‘kind traps’ and drive them up into the hills. But I think they find their way back. Either that or more mice just move into the empty mouse holes. You know. It’s a place to live.”
“Speaking of which—” Roseanna began.
But the little girl interrupted them again with her bouncing and tugging.
“Mommy! Mommy! It was a gray mouse! I thought mouses were brown. But it was gray!”
“Well, honey, some mice—”
“Only maybe it was just dusty. Maybe it had dust. Do mouses have dust?”
“You know,” Roseanna said before the little girl’s mother could answer, “there comes a time in the life of every child when they need to learn they’re not the center of the universe.”
The young mother sat up rigidly straight on the couch. She looked directly into Roseanna’s face, her own face appearing positively scorched.
“In control, you mean.” She didn’t sound angry. Just measured. Careful.
“Exactly.”
“Well, I don’t agree. I think the whole problem with this world is that we control our kids too much. What they naturally are just seems too darned inconvenient for us, so we get impatient with it, and we tell them not to be who they are. No good comes of it. Not in my opinion.”
“We can’t always just do what comes naturally.”
“Why can’t we?”
As they discussed this, Roseanna noticed that the kid had fallen uncharacteristically silent. She seemed to have noticed the tension in the room. Maybe she even knew that she was the center of that disagreement. She shifted her eyes back and forth from one adult face to the other as if sitting in the stands at a volleyball tournament.
“Well . . . we have responsibilities. We have to learn that life . . .” But then she never finished. Because she realized she was reminding herself of Alice. “So, look. I don’t mean to be curt, but maybe we can cut to the chase here. You came to my door this morning to say something.”
“Right. I did. I need to ask something of you.”
But then she stalled and asked nothing.
Still the little girl stared from face to face in silence.
“My name is Patty,” the young woman said when she’d restarted herself. “And this is Willa.”
“The chase,” Roseanna said. “No offense.”
“We don’t have anywhere to go. We need time to figure out a place. We’ll probably have to move into Walkerville, but I don’t know of anyplace that’s for rent. I can probably borrow some money from my parents. I hate like”—she glanced at her daughter’s watchful face—“like heck to ask them, but I guess I don’t have any choice. Willa will be in kindergarten in the fall, and then I can work a part-time job and pay them back. And afford rent. I’ll call my folks today, but it’ll still take a little time to find a place. I swear we’ll be so quiet you won’t even know we’re here.”
Roseanna glanced at the little girl, who looked back in a perfectly unguarded stare. No agenda whatsoever.
“I doubt you’ll be so quiet I won’t know you’re here. You just said yourself that you never put any limits on your daughter.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You let her be a natural kid. Which is fine. Raise her any way you want. But now suddenly you need her to be quiet. How’s that going to work?”
“I can be quiet,” Willa interjected. Too loudly.
“Look. Patty. I feel for your situation. But the whole point of coming out here was to find peace and quiet for myself. It’s what I’ve been needing. If this place is not about solitude then what’s it about? Who lives in a place like this unless they want silence?”
“I swear it’ll just be for a week or two. And we can help you. I can help around the place.”
“What help do I need?”
“I could help you clean all that stuff out of the barn.”
“What stuff?”
A silence fell. Patty looked genuinely surprised.
“You didn’t look inside the barn?”
“No.”
“You bought this place without looking in the barn?”
“I’m not going to live in the barn, so who cares what’s in there?”
“Okay, fine,” Patty said.
She sat back on the couch and sipped at her coffee. Willa ran into the kitchen, probably to look for more mouses.
“I give up,” Roseanna said. “Now the curiosity’s got me. What’s in the barn?”
“Holy . . . ,” Roseanna began. But she never finished. Because the little girl was staring up at her and listening. “Why would anyone keep all this . . . ?”
“I think the word you’re looking for is junk,” Patty said.
Roseanna stepped into the barn. But it wasn’t easy. You couldn’t step in just anywhere. You had to choose an aisle.
In between the carefully constructed aisles lay . . . well, as Patty had said, junk. But it was junk with a theme. It was one hundred percent metal. Fenders and wheels and chains and engines and chain-link fencing and . . . in some cases, it was hard even to tell. If at one time these pieces of metal trash had been something else, something greater, it was impossible for Roseanna to guess at that prior state now.
Now it was simply a sea of stacked metal parts. Higher than her head in most places. Almost to the rafters in the corners.
Patty and Willa followed her down an aisle. She craned her neck in wonder.
“Why would anybody keep all this?” she asked no one in particular.
“I have no idea,” Patty said.
“But it was Macy who wanted it all?”
“Right.”
“For what?”
“No idea.”
“You never asked?”
Roseanna turned a corner at an intersection in the stacks and was struck with a sudden and disturbing thought. If there were to be an earthquake right now . . . hell, even a good sonic boom, maybe . . . we’d all three of us be squashed like bugs.
“I asked,” Patty said, holding her daughter’s hand and turning the corner behind Roseanna. “But she didn’t really like to talk about it. I think she knew it was unreasonable. It was kind of an obsession with Macy. You know. Like one of those people who love cats, but instead of having two or three they have two or three hundred.”
“Like a hoarder.”
“Yeah,” Patty said. “Like that.”
“What did all of this used to be?”
“Oh, different stuff. Farm equipment. Tractors and plows and trucks. Bikes. Even a motorcycle or two.”
Roseanna ran out of aisle and stopped near the inside wall at the back of the barn. Still staring almost straight up. It was beginning to make her neck hurt.
“But somebody had to take it all apart. And stack it up in here. And Macy was an old woman.”
“Not all her life, she wasn’t. But anyway, she had farmhands.”
“Right.
Farmhands. I guess you’d have to, on a place like this.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier, back at the house. I can be a helper around this place.”
Roseanna chose to ignore the comment entirely.
“What did she think she was ever going to do with all this? It has no use that I can imagine.”
“No idea,” Patty said. “Maybe just parts. Like an auto junkyard keeps old parts around. If the tractor breaks down or whatever, you can find a spare part.”
Roseanna wandered down another aisle and found a corner of the barn, near a side door, that was open and clean. A clearing.
“What’s this, then?” she asked Patty. “Was she not done collecting?”
“This is where she used to bring the horse in out of the weather.”
Roseanna squeezed by Patty and Willa, which was not easy in the narrow walkway, and made her way back to the open barn doors. She had begun to feel claustrophobic. It was making her a little bit ill.
“This is why that Loman Realty lady kept saying I needed to see the place before I put in an offer.” Roseanna stood in the open barn doorway, feeling better to be back out in the light. “Because it’ll cost thousands of dollars to have all this junk hauled away. And I should have deducted that from my offer.”
“Maybe,” Patty said. “But I could help you. I could start hauling stuff out. Maybe borrow a truck, or . . . well, I have no idea who would loan me a truck. Maybe rent one. And start making trips to the dump. I can’t move all of it. Some of it, the engines and stuff, are just too heavy for me. Unless I could use a winch or something. But even if I just moved everything that’s small enough to move, that would be most of it. Three-quarters of it, anyway. And that would give you plenty of useable space in here.”
Roseanna continued to ignore her offer. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t need a barn. I wouldn’t have cared if the place didn’t have one at all. I don’t keep livestock. Who needs it?”
“I figured you’d want a place to park your car inside.”
“Oh. My car. Well. Maybe. But I’m not sure I’d park it in here. Looks like the first good wind would bring it down.”
“Oh, no,” Patty said. “It’s very strong.”
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