Bill’s grin made her sick. He said, “Laurie and I, we’ve got an agreement. Share and share alike.”
“You’re lying,” Jaqe said. She realized she was shouting. “How can you say something like that about your own daughter?”
“It’s true, that’s how. We’ve always done it this way. When they start missing the real thing too much, Laurie sends them to me. Then I give them back to her all calm and happy.” Suddenly he let go of one arm to pull open the snaps of her smock. He bent down to kiss her breast, his mouth open, his teeth shining in the filtered light. With her free hand Jaqe tried to shove him away. He didn’t seem to notice, only pushed his hand inside the back of her shorts. She could feel his pudgy fingers push between her cheeks.
“You lying bastard!” Jaqe screamed, and jerked her knee up between his legs.
It wasn’t a direct hit, or at least he didn’t curl up in agony like she was hoping. But it did loosen his grip enough so that she could wriggle free. When she kicked at him again, this time with her foot, she missed even wider, getting him in the knee. But it was enough, for he stumbled and fell against the chair Jaqe had sat in for the haircut.
Seeing him on the floor, Jaqe wanted to kick him again and again, hit him with the chair, the mirror, anything she could grab until he took it all back, admitted it was all lies. But he had the scissors again, he was getting up. Get out, she told herself. Run. As she scrambled out the door something struck her leg, and she yelped in pain. But she kept going, while behind her Bill yelled, “It’s true! Just ask her. You’re the first one to complain. The first one. Ask her!”
Jaqe kept running when she got out of the house, hardly even slowed by the limp that had taken over her left leg. She didn’t know if Bill would chase her in the car, but just in case, she took the first turn she came to and then the next. When she’d looked back a few times with no sign of him, she stopped to inspect her leg. A narrow stream of blood ran down the thigh from a cut a few inches above the knee. Though it didn’t look deep, it throbbed every time she took a step. She thought of the black spots on the scissors and knew she should get the wound disinfected. But all she could think of was the danger that Bill might be following the drops of blood. She found some old tissues in her pocket and did her best to press them against the wound as she walked.
Sweat was pouring off her. It had to be in the eighties and the polyester smock didn’t help any. What an idiot she was to let him talk her into taking off her T-shirt. She stopped a moment to catch her breath. A teenage boy with a black dog came toward her. Nervously, Jaqe checked the smock to make sure all the snaps were closed. She must look ridiculous, she thought, like an escapee from something. Goddamn him, she thought.
The boy looked her over as he bent down for a stick. For a moment he hefted it in his hand, reminding Jaqe of the way Bill had hefted the scissors. But then he threw the stick. The dog ran after it, the boy followed, and then they were gone; Jaqe was alone again. It can’t be true, she thought. Of course it wasn’t true. Laurie would never think of making a deal like that. Any kind of deal. It was impossible. That sonofabitch. How could he say something like that? About his own daughter. She passed a lawn with a ring of stones around a plastic statue of a boy and girl holding hands. Jaqe wished she could grab up all the rocks and run back to throw them at Bill.
It was then that she realized that she didn’t know where she was. Laurie’s housing development was much larger than her own, with many more streets. Jaqe caught her breath. There was no need to worry, she told herself. She couldn’t go back anyway, not until she was sure Laurie had returned (damn her leg, she thought, and decided to ignore the pain). She could always knock on someone’s door and ask to use the phone. Or just ask for directions. She looked around. All the houses looked the same, blank and closed. Where were all the people? Even the boy with the dog had vanished. It’s all right, she told herself. She just had to wait. She kept walking. When she took away the tissues the bleeding had stopped; the cut looked dark around the edges.
What would Bill tell Laurie? Would he make up some story? She wished she could see Laurie first, tell her exactly what happened. She remembered Laurie saying “They won’t mind” last night when Jaqe worried about the noise they made making love. Did Bill hear them? Why wouldn’t he mind? Because he knew he was getting his turn the next day? “No!” she said loudly. “It’s not true.”
The street she was on curved to the left, and suddenly Jaqe found herself facing the wooded entrance to a park. She looked back. If she was lost she probably should stay inside the development. But the park looked cool. And suppose Bill decided to chase her after all. All he’d have to do was cruise up and down the streets until he spotted her. She limped toward the woods.
Six
Candles in the Sun
The path into the park was narrow and overgrown with thorns so that Jaqe had to pull aside one branch after another to make any progress. Despite her care, the thorns kept scratching at her wound, making her gasp in pain. The path was so tangled she couldn’t think how anyone could use it at all. Maybe there was another entrance. Maybe they kept this one closed as a kind of museum exhibit of what it looked like before the houses came. They called the town Thorny Woods, after all. Maybe this park was really the remains of woods going back thousands of years. When she stopped to catch her breath, she discovered the smock had torn at the right shoulder. That bastard. That lying bastard.
She felt like such a jerk—falling for all that “special client” crap. She remembered all the things she’d said to Laurie about how great Bill and Janet were. She wanted to cry. What an idiot she was. Second parents, she’d called them. She remembered how Laurie had tried to get her to go to the mall. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything you don’t want,” Laurie had said. Jaqe felt dizzy, out of breath. Don’t think about it, she told herself. Stay calm.
She looked at the mass of thorns. It looked impossible to get through. But when she looked over her shoulder the ones behind her appeared just as thick as those in front. She had no idea how she’d gotten this far. When she took a breath, her leg beat with pain. She stared ahead. They were just bushes after all. It was so quiet. She could hear a bird somewhere and—very faintly—a child crying, but aside from that she might as well have been in a woods hundreds of years ago. Okay, she told herself, this can’t go on forever. The thing to do was go forward. At that moment she noticed a stick standing upright in the web of branches. Someone had made a walking stick from it, for the bark was peeled away and a string of colored beads was tied to a notch cut near the top. Carefully, Jaqe pulled the stick loose from its cage. It felt warm, almost polished, as if someone had used it for years before leaving it. Jaqe half leaned on it, half used it to push the branches away. It comforted her to have something to do, something to hold and use. It made her feel less…less like an orphan.
When Jaqe heard the crying, she almost thought it was herself. But the voice was a child’s, somewhere ahead of her. Using the stick, she pushed through the thorns. Soon she came out into a meadow, a wide soft hill ringed all around with old trees, many of them gnarled and bent, with thornbushes in the small spaces between the trunks. What a strange park, Jaqe thought, for there were no picnic benches, no baseball fields, nothing but grass, wildflowers, and trees. The trees stood like a fence against the outside. Toward the far end of the meadow, however, just past the rise of the hill, Jaqe saw a small circle of trees, younger than the others, straighter, more graceful. In the center rose a bushy tree with a rough bark and thick scaly leaves. Without thinking, Jaqe walked toward it. There was something blue; when she came closer she realized they were berries, small bright things like jewels.
Again she heard the child crying. Even with the stick it hurt Jaqe to walk, but she moved faster, and when she reached the top of the hill she could see a girl sitting on the ground with her back against the young bushy tree. The girl wore yellow overalls, but her blond hair shone brighter than the cloth. In front of her, on a red scarf, lay a small pile o
f bones. They looked old, all smooth and polished, like Jaqe’s stick. The girl just sat there, looking at the bones and crying.
Jaqe stood the stick against the tree and sat down in front of the child. “Are you lost?” she said. The girl shook her head. “Do you want me to take you home?” The crying got louder.
Nervously, Jaqe reached out to touch the child’s shoulder. It was wet with tears. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” she said. As if Jaqe had touched a spring, the little girl leaned forward with her arms out for Jaqe to scoop her up. “It’s all right,” Jaqe said as she held the child tight against her torn smock. “It’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you anymore.” She wasn’t sure what she meant, but it seemed the right thing to say. Jaqe too began to cry. At first, she worried that the girl might get scared, but when the girl held Jaqe even more tightly, Jaqe let her whole body weep. The two of them rocked back and forth in the sun.
Slowly they came to a stop. When Jaqe gently separated herself, the girl asked her, “Would you help me?”
“Of course,” Jaqe said. She started to get up, thinking the child wanted to go home. But instead the girl asked, “Can you help me bury them?”
“What?” Jaqe said, and then realized the girl meant the bones. She was already trying to dig a hole in the grass beside the bushy tree. Jaqe asked her, “Where did you get them?”
“They’re my brother’s,” she said.
Jaqe smiled. “Does he know you’ve got his collection?”
The girl shook her head. “Please help me,” she said. “We’ve got to make them safe.”
“Safe from what?” Jaqe asked, but the child wasn’t paying attention. The dirt seemed too hard for her, and the more frustrated she got, the more frantically she poked at the earth. “Let me do it,” Jaqe said. The pain made it unbearable for her to kneel, but she stretched out her leg and began pulling with her fingertips. A moment later she began using the stick like a pike to loosen the dirt. The girl’s worry must have been catching, for Jaqe worked very fast, jabbing with the stick, shoveling with her hands. She had no idea how much time had passed, but suddenly they were done, and she was sitting back, breathing hard, with the stick in her lap. Before her was a neat mound of dirt, packed down with bits of grass and torn flowers. The little girl sat quietly now, her hands in her lap. Her yellow overalls were covered with brown stains.
“It needs a stone,” the child said.
“A stone?”
“Sure. They’ve always got to have a stone.”
Jaqe looked around, but all she could see was dirt. She grinned. “You know,” she said, “I think I’ve got a stone right here.” She reached into her shorts pocket and with a flourish took out the flat rock with the tree and the boat. “Here,” she said. “How’s this?”
The girl held it in both hands. “Wow,” she said. “It’s beautiful.” Jaqe felt like singing as the little girl set the rock in the center of the mound of dirt. Very carefully, the child pressed the stone into the ground and packed some dirt on top of it. “We better hide it,” the girl said, “so no one’ll find it.”
Jaqe nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”
Looking around, Jaqe spotted a small mound of fresh leaves. They were dry and brightly colored, as if an early autumn had come for just this group of leaves. Together Jaqe and the girl grabbed armfuls and carefully placed them on the fresh dirt. “How’s that?” Jaqe said.
“It’s beautiful,” the little girl told her. “Thank you. You’re the kindest lady I ever met.”
Jaqe smiled and bent down to give the child a hug. When she straightened up she glanced toward the top of the tree. The light hit the leaves in an odd way, so that it looked like she could see a face, a child’s face, in the branches. The face was smiling, and Jaqe’s heart opened; for a moment even her leg stopped hurting.
But then she looked at the ancient trees at the end of the meadow, and her eye fell on a dark area embedded among the thorns and branches. She shuddered, and now when she glanced down at her leg, the ugly green and black of her wound made her recoil in disgust. How had it gotten so bad so quickly? It was as if days or weeks had passed in the short time Jaqe had been in the woods.
The little girl leaned her head against Jaqe’s head. Suddenly Jaqe became very tired. All that digging. When she looked down, she saw that the little girl had fallen asleep, curled on the ground with her head against Jaqe’s thigh. Gently, Jaqe moved the child and lay down beside her. For just a moment she thought she saw a face, not a child’s, not peaceful, in the dark trees. But then she had to close her eyes; she could no longer force them open. With the stick in her hand, she put her arm over the child and fell asleep.
She was standing in a chill room, almost bare, with just a plain wooden table and four chairs, and at the other end a stove with a large black pot. She strode to the table to arrange a life-size doll in one of the chairs. Carefully, she propped up the doll’s body, with the legs under the table and the hands neatly folded in front of it. It looked so funny she could hardly keep herself from falling over laughing. A doll in a golden coat! Cheerfully, she walked over to the stove, where the doll’s head lay beside the pot. It was one of those plastic heads, with a smiling mouth, rosy cheeks, and eyes that closed when the doll bent backward. Only, the smile had chipped and the eyes had rolled backward permanently so that all you saw was white with little flecks of red. She giggled. It really did look so funny. She picked up the head and did a little dance step as she moved back across the room to set the head carefully on the shoulders. She adjusted it and stepped backward. It was very important, she knew, to get it right.
She was sitting in the dirt, playing with a pair of sticks in the corner. She spoke bits of dialogue for them and allowed one to chase the other and then knock her down. But she had to do it all silently, very silently, or the mother might hear and punish her. She sneaked a glance at the mother stirring a pot of stew on the stove. The mother wore a dress with bright colors and little bits of metal on the shoulders. She herself wore a torn smock and no shoes. The mother turned, and she ducked her head, afraid the mother might have seen her staring.
But no, the mother only said, “Your silly brother has fallen asleep again. Go give him a push and wake him up.” She got up from the floor and walked to the table, where her brother sat upright with his hands folded in front of him. She touched his shoulder. No answer. The mother said, “You have to do it harder than that. You know how deeply he sleeps.” The mother sounded so cheerful. She took a deep breath and pushed her brother with both hands. His head leaped off his shoulders and rolled across the table.
Jaqe woke up with a shout. God, she thought, what a nightmare. She felt the small body under her arm. She thought, What am I going to do with her; and then, What am I going to do with me? She sat up, gasping with pain, but careful not to disturb the child. As soon as Jaqe moved her arm, however, the girl began to twitch and her face twisted, as if some terrible dream had seized her. “It’s all right,” Jaqe said softly, and touched her shoulder. The child made a noise. Her arms shot out and grabbed at the air. “It’s okay,” Jaqe said, and hugged her. “It’s okay.” The girl woke up to stare at Jaqe without seeing her. “It’s just a dream,” Jaqe said.
At that moment, she looked beyond the girl to the fence of trees. Once again, she thought she saw that angry face. It was just a suggestion, really, nothing more than a gleam of eyes, a flicker of movement. And yet Jaqe had never felt such a stab of terror. She wanted to run, hide in the dirt, but she knew that would leave the girl all alone. Breathing hard, she stared at the trees. It all looked normal now. It was so hard to tell, the woods were so dense. There—she saw it again. Jaqe stood up. Leaning against the tree, she waved the stick in the air. The beads rattled against each other. “Keep away from us!” she shouted. “Get out of here.”
She heard a rustling sound in the bushes. It lasted only a second, and then the silence came down again. Jaqe leaned on the stick. She felt foolish, shouting like th
at. If she had seen anything at all, it was probably just some harmless animal. She hoped she hadn’t scared the child.
But when she looked down the girl was gone. She’s run away, Jaqe thought. I scared her and she ran into the woods. She could get really lost. Or injured. There were all those thorns. “Come back,” she called. “It’s all right. No one’ll hurt you.” Why hadn’t she asked the girl’s name? “It’s all right,” she shouted again. “Come back and I’ll take you home.” Nothing.
She tried to run, not knowing where to go, but in only two steps, she cried out in pain and fell to the ground. As she fell, her body turned toward the meadow. And there she saw something so strange that for a moment she forgot the girl, forgot the pain in her leg, even forgot Laurie and Bill. The entire meadow was filled with burning candles. Hundreds, thousands of candles, all sizes and shapes, some thick and bright, others thin, delicate. The air above the flames shimmered and shook. And in front of them all, in the midst of grass white with melted wax, stood a single low candle, sputtering, as if about to go out.
Jaqe turned; she didn’t know why, but that sputtering candle terrified her more than everything that had happened. Frantically, she scanned the trees, looking for a way through. She saw an opening, a space between the trees. She started out, leaning heavily against her stick, then stopped. What if the girl came back looking for her? She needed to leave a sign so the child would know Jaqe had gone for help. She laid the stick on the ground, pointing at the path where she now limped away from the meadow.
The trees looked different here, not so old and bent. She limped quickly, sometimes bracing herself with the branches. And then she came to the end, and stood for a moment, dizzy and sick in the bright sun of the housing development. Holding her hand above her eyes, she looked around, hoping she could recognize something or at least see someone she could ask for directions.
There was nobody, and nothing looked familiar. The houses didn’t even remind her of Laurie’s. Jaqe wondered if she had come out into some other development on the other side of the park. But then she looked closer at the houses and saw they really were the same—split-level, shingle siding, contrasting roofs. Only—only, they looked so old, so dilapidated, the paint peeling, gutters all rusty, shingles coming loose, bare spots on the roofs. Jaqe fought hard against panic. She tried focusing on the ground, but everywhere she looked she saw decay. The paving in the road had broken up; weeds and wildflowers overran the lawns, they looked like no one had cut them in weeks, even months.
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