by Mort Castle
There was the murmur of rain on the roof and William Ackerman’s “It Takes a Year” album on the stereo. Ackerman’s solo acoustic guitar sounded like a wispy dream. She’d never really been into the high decibel anger and defiance of Punk music, even though that had been all she played when she had first come—been brought back—home.
William Ackerman’s music was all so mellow, that’s what it was.
And that’s what she was. I am mellow and happy and I’m glad to be me.
Then the telephone on her nightstand rang and she picked it up, wondering if somebody from school had to ask her about the homework.
“Hello?” she said.
There was a moment’s silence. Wrong number, she thought.
And then she knew it was no wrong number.
It wasn’t a voice she recognized, but she subliminally identified the tone of it—and she somehow knew it was coming.
“Hi, baby. Been waiting for me to call? Been waiting for me to give you a nice hot fuck?”
There was a flashback to who she really was!
A feeling of damp and musky rottenness filled her, bubbling up from within her. It seeped out her pores, a slimy, sick sweat on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat.
And there was that disgusting, buzzing, warmth between her thighs.
She could smell herself, that stink aura that never vanished, the stench of the rot inside her.
She was dirty.
And he knew. Whoever he was and what did it matter, he knew she was dirty or he would not have called her.
“…my cock. Want to suck my big, hard thing? That what you want?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t keep from answering. “Yes.” It was a hiss. That was the way you talked to men, the way you lured them on, made them come on to you. That was the way you talked when you were never clean but always dirty.
“Cunt. You’re one drippy hot cunt, huh! You’re a real whore. Sucking and fucking. Whore cunt pussy! You want my hard cock in your…”
Whore! That’s what she was…a dirty whore.
Dirty whore! The two words defined her. They were her. Kristin Heidmann, her name, was meaningless. She was wicked, born wicked.
She was the wicked whore cunt evil thing who’d forced her own grandfather, to fuck her, fuck her, dirty whore cunt, whore…
“Hey, you listenin’? Hey, cunt…”
She let the phone drop to the bed and sat up. She put her hand over her mouth. She wanted to throw up, to let everything rotten and vile and dirty come spilling out of her. But she couldn’t vomit and she couldn’t cry, so she simply hung up the receiver and then stood up.
“I am tired of being dirty,” she said aloud. That was it. She no longer felt happy, of course, but nor did she feel bad. There was only a great tiredness a deep weariness, and a powerful and overpowering desire to be clean at last.
And she would be.
There was no one to stop her. Her mother and father were away. She was alone.
She turned off her stereo. She had a moment of near-laughing anger, wanting to snap William Ackerman’s tranquil guitar record. It was just such a goddamned lie!
Then Kristin Heidmann went into the bathroom. She adjusted the water carefully—warm but not hot. She undressed and got ready while the bath ran.
When she sank into the warm water it felt good. It promised cleanliness.
She held her left arm up out of the water. The blood gracefully spiraled down.
She let her arm slide into the water. It stung a bit, but only a bit. She had split the vein lengthwise with a razor blade she’d pried from her mother’s disposable Bic with a nail file. Red curlicues swirled against her hip. The dirt is spilling out of me, she thought.
After awhile, she opened the drain, letting bloody water out, and adjusted the tap to a steady tepid flow. It seemed to be in balance, the water level remaining just about the same. This way, when they found her, there wouldn’t be that much of a mess. It would have been wrong to have Mom find her in a blood bath.
Blood bath. Was that a joke? Would it be Mom who found her? What if Dad were the one and he came in and there she was, not only dead but naked? That would be embarrassing.
Would they understand? Would they know she had to do it?
She wished there were a way to tell them, to explain, at least to say, “I am sorry.”
Oh, she was sorry about everything. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, certainly not Mom and Dad. All she wanted was an end to being dirty.
And she was sorry, Selena. You tried, Selena. We both tried, but this is the only way because I am what I am.
Kristin Heidmann grew dizzy, as though there were a gyroscope whirling faster and faster inside her skull. She leaned her head back against the ledge of the tub. There was a butterfly fluttering within her, and she thought she was asleep and dreaming, although she had no idea what she dreamed.
Then she felt it sweet and warm and final.
I am clean.
And Kristin Heidmann died.
— | — | —
Twenty-Nine
With a silent prayer, Vicki Barringer snatched up the telephone a heartbeat into the first ring. She’d been waiting only about 45 minutes, but she could not have been more tense had she been a Death Row prisoner hoping for the governor’s last moment stay of execution.
Thank God, everything was much less bad than it could have been.
“Cuts and bad bruises, but no broken bones. The one knuckle, well, once they were able to stop the bleeding, it was okay,” Laura Morgan reported from Lawn Crest Hospital, six miles away. “Of course, they can’t be certain there won’t be nerve damage…”
With the wet weather that morning, Laura had driven to church instead of walking as she usually did, so her Toyota had been at the Barringers’ house for the unexpected trip to the hospital.
The hospital. Lord!
It all came back to Vicki, just as it had been coming back over and over ever since Laura and her sobbing child had sped off.
That shriek! The entire house shook. A howl of shock and pain that scarcely seemed human, while at the same time it could have come only from a child.
“Dorothy!” Jumping up, Laura identified the screamer.
Later, Vicki would feel guilt among the myriad of emotions washing over her, but right then, she had to admit what she’d experienced was relief. It was not Missy! Missy was okay!
Getting upstairs seemed to take about two days longer than forever. Then they burst into Missy’s bedroom.
Dorothy staggered spastically around room. Tears and pain wetly twisted her face. No longer howling, she punctuated a constant moan with a gasping, “Uh-uh… “ Arms thrust woodenly before her, she looked like an oafish child doing an impression of the Frankenstein monster.
Dorothy’s right wrist was braceleted by swollen black and blue flesh that seemed to be growing and rippling in pain right before their eyes. The left hand was worse still, center knuckle of each finger a purple mound of ripped flesh and gleaming blood. The middle finger showed the too clean white of bone.
Everything became sheer pandemonium, Laura trying to comfort Dorothy and assess the damage and Dorothy whimpering and groaning like a grievously wounded animal.
Vicki was gaping at Missy, her kid, who looked as though she’d just beamed down to Earth from a faraway and completely alien world.
Missy’s face was utterly placid. She sat at her little table, tapping her fingers on its top. Even her posture seemed to declare none of this was her least concern.
Though she could not explain why, seeing Missy like that infuriated Vicki.
“She…She…” was Dorothy’s accusatory sob as her mother held her.
“What happened?” Vicki asked Missy.
Missy shrugged an indifferent “I don’t know.”
“She did it!” Dorothy cried. “She hurt me!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Missy said.
Dorothy was crying, “I hate her! She did, she did it
.”
More confused now, but knowing she should do something, Vicki said to Laura, “Maybe we ought to run cold water on it.”
“Really, it doesn’t seem too bad,” Laura said, “but I guess we need to have a doctor take a look.” Vicki could hear that Laura was deliberately trying to sound casual for Dorothy’s sake.
“No, not a doctor! I don’t want a shot!” Dorothy blubbered.
“Hey, it’ll be okay.” Laura exchanged a glance with Vicki. “It just looks worse than it is.”
Vicki wondered for whose benefit Laura said that. Dorothy’s fingers could be broken.
“Missy! You did it! You did it! I hate you!” Dorothy pulled free of her mother. Her head shot forward like a striking snake’s. The words spewed out, twisted and poisonous. “I hate your guts!”
Laura said she was taking her daughter to Lawn Crest Hospital. Vicki said they—she and Missy—would go along.
“No,” Laura said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Vicki, you still there?” Laura Morgan’s voice buzzed in the telephone.
Vicki jumped back to the present. “Yes, I’m here, and I want you to know, you and Dorothy, how sorry I am that…I wish I…”
“I know what you’re saying, Vicki. I know you’re sorry.”
“Missy is…”
“Vicki,” Laura interrupted, “Missy hurt Dorothy, okay? I know kids are kids. Sometimes they do things that work out a lot worse than anything they might have really intended. That’s what might have happened with Missy and Dorothy. That’s what I’d prefer to think, anyway.”
Vicki took a deep breath. “But what is it that you do think, Laura?”
“I think we’d better keep the kids apart for a while, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do know what you mean, Laura,” Vicki said. The hand holding the telephone had gone numb. She felt numb all over. She felt rotten and angry and sad.
“If it’s all right with you,” Vicki said, “I won’t come to work tomorrow. Maybe we all ought to have some time away from each other.”
“Maybe,” Laura said.
“Laura,” Vicki said.
“What is it?”
It came out of her in an honest rush. “I like you, Laura. I like being your friend. I don’t want to lose your friendship.”
There was a lengthy pause at the other end of the line before Laura said, “And I want your friendship, too, Vicki, but you can’t always get what you want.”
With a final apology for her daughter, Vicki hung up.
She took another deep breath. She thought of three dozen top-priority household chores she could assign herself right now. Anything, including toilet bowl cleaning, would be better than confronting Missy—and confronting her own angry feelings.
But she was Mom, and Mother had better find out exactly what had happened.
And why.
And Mother had better find out right now.
Missy ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip. She ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. She did it again. She wondered if you could wear out your lips by licking them. She wondered if she’d been sitting in the corner of her room for an hour or two hours or a week.
She was in trouble, bad trouble, for sure. As soon as Mrs. Morgan and Dorothy left, Mom was yelling, “Young lady, you are to sit right here”—Mom swung one of the chairs from her table and chair set into the corner and pointed—“and you are not to move even an eyelash until I tell you otherwise.”
But it was not fair! It was not right!
I didn’t hurt Dorothy, Missy Barringer thought. I wouldn’t do that.
Dorothy was her friend.
Lisette!
You did it. You’re the one, Lisette. You always get me in trouble. You smashed Dorothy’s hands! You did it!
I am you!
You’re mean, Lisette. You’re bad and you’re wicked!
No.
You’ve got to stop it! You’ve got to leave me alone. You have to let me be me!
No, I am you. I have your hair. I have your blood. You gave them to me.
Oh, but you gave me stuff, too! I understand now. It was kinda like magic, but it was a real trade! That is what it was, Lisette, wasn’t it?
Yes, Melissa, it was a trade. I gave you what I loved, and you gave me what I need.
The paperweight that I gave my Dad, and the doll…
Yes, my pretty doll.
No trades! I’ll give them back, Lisette! You’ve got to take them back, both of them and then you have to give me…Lisette, you have to give me back my life!
No, Melissa!
Yes! Yes!
Melissa stood up. Then, as though attached to the chair by rubber bands, she snapped back down. Mom had told her to stay in the corner, and the way Mom said it, she meant it.
The rose paperweight was downstairs in Dad’s study, but the doll was here. She would make Lisette take back the doll, and then she would make Lisette take back the glass paperweight. She would make Lisette go away, go back to wherever it was she had come from.
You cannot. You can’t.
Yes, I can!
Expecting her mother to surprise her any moment, Missy stood up. She felt sneaky and naughty and frightened. She tiptoed to the closet. Reaching for the doorknob, she stopped to listen carefully. Was that Mom on the stairs? Was it only the sound the roof sometimes made on a rainy day? There were so many sounds in an old house, you were better off not to listen to any of them.
Melissa…
She felt her heart jump so hard it hurt.
You shut up, Lisette! You shut up now!
She opened the closet door.
Then she stepped into the closet that was so big she sometimes thought of it as her special secret room, a place where you kept secret things, things made magical because you were absolutely the only one in the whole world who knew about them. On the rods, clothes hung like lonely invisible people. The lower half of one wall was all shelves for her folded sweaters and shoes, and on the top shelf, there it was! The shoe box. Her collection. Private. Personal. Secret.
I am the secret. You cannot tell. You will not tell.
On the shoe box’s top, in the very best crayoned letters she could do last year, it read: MELISSA BARRINGER.
That is who I am.
I am…
The shoe box contained her secret collection—a pretty stamp from a letter some professor in Belgium had sent her father, a rock from her old school’s playground so that she would never forget, a pair of huge earrings glittering with rhinestones.
There it was. The doll.
My doll. Your blood. My life, Melissa. Now it is my life. Mine!
The precisely crafted china image of the little girl with the bonnet, basket of eggs on her lap, It scratchy and cold. It feels dead, Missy thought, not knowing how she knew what dead felt like but not doubting that this was it. The doll’s face, she thought, might have been her face—or Lisette’s face. Or it might have been her face and Lisette’s face.
Missy stepped out of the walk-in closet. Eyes half-closed, she held out the doll. She swallowed a hot, excited sob down to her racing heart. “Take it, Lisette. Take it and go away and leave me alone,” she begged.
No.
“Then I’ll smash it! I’ll break it into a million pieces!”
Eyes wide now, she squeezed the doll as though to crush it in her hands. She wanted not to shatter it, not to destroy it—but to kill it.
But its lifeless eyes caught hers for a long moment, a moment in which she could not feel her heart and thought it had stopped beating.
And she knew she could not kill the doll. It wasn’t alive. It had never been alive, and so it would never die.
It was and it always would be.
Carefully, she set the china doll on the top of her play table.
She looked at it—and she felt lost.
Then she spun around as her mother came in.
— | — | —
; Thirty
“Didn’t I tell you to sit in that corner and stay there until I said otherwise, young lady?” When Vicki had thrown open the bedroom door, Missy froze.
Moments ago, as she’d started up the stairs, Vicki was convinced she had cooled down and could deal with the situation. Had she found Missy in the corner, penitent, guilty, perhaps a tear or two, then everything would have been okay, she was certain of that.
But Missy’s defiance was a blazing patch on each of her cheeks and a squint so tight it was painful.
Vicki curbed her fury and saw that her daughter was terrified! It was time for Mom to have a discussion with Missy to learn what had happened with Dorothy and to learn why Missy was acting so strange lately, so unusual.
“Are you mad, Mom?” Missy backed up, her retreat halted by her play table.
“No,” Vicki said. She was upset, but she was not angry. She was…concerned. Yes, that’s what she told Missy.
Mom needed to know what happened and why it happened. They had to talk about it so that nothing like this would ever happen again.
She had to know why Missy had hurt Dorothy like that.
“I didn’t,” Missy said softly and seriously.
Vicki did not raise her voice, nor did she acknowledge Missy’s words. She continued the interrogation. Was it something that had been meant as a joke, a trick played on a friend? Was it just an accident? Vicki persisted. Accidents do happen; she could understand that.
“It was not an accident,” Missy said, “but I didn’t do it.”
Vicki drew a resigned breath. “Missy, your friend, Dorothy, was really hurt. She was hurt badly, and she could have been hurt even worse. Do you understand? You cannot…”
“I didn’t do it.”
Missy’s not quite innocent but definitely not guilty look and her repeated denial of wrongdoing got to Vicki. She folded her arms. Goodbye, cool, she thought, as she severely demanded, “Then who did?”
Missy’s face screwed up. Her mouth worked wetly. Her lips soundlessly shaped words as though each one was too momentously weighty and awful to be said aloud.