by Averil Dean
He sits up, takes off his glasses and begins to clean them with his shirt.
“I’m not a complete pussy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I did go see the guy while I was out on bond.” He glances over at me, his lips twisted in a wry smile.
“And?”
“I went to his house—this miserable piece-of-shit little place—and when he came to the door I more or less barged in. Rosemary was there. Strung out, clearly. Looked like she hadn’t seen the inside of a shower in days. And her hair...I don’t know what happened to her hair but it used to be glorious, really long and shiny and thick. That day it looked like she’d cut it herself with a pair of poultry shears, right to the scalp.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw.
“I lost it. I would have beaten that cocksucker to death with his own fucking fire poker. Actually had it in my hand, as a matter of fact.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Because a fire poker’s not much of a weapon when the other guy’s got a gun.” He pauses, holding his glasses up to the light.
“And now?”
“Now, I stay away from him. Only a goddamned idiot would get caught up in that shit again. And besides...”
He looks at me. His eyes trace the line of my hair, over my neck and shoulders.
“Rosemary wasn’t really worth killing for.”
I watch his fabric-covered thumb swirl across the lenses. Around and around, a methodical circular motion from earpiece to nose. A shadow plays along the curve at the base of his thumb, and I sense the power in his hands and remember the scrape of his callused palm up the contours of my waist, across the sensitive tips of my breasts.
There was a moment when we were together this morning, with my hair twisted around his hand as I rode his lap at the edge of the bed. He looked down my naked body, between my legs as I took him, back again to my face. And there was something in his eyes. A fierce need, barely contained. Beyond a normal man’s desire. His fingers tightened in my hair until I put both hands up to stop him, and with the climax building in his eyes, he drew back his hand and smacked me, hard across the ass.
I don’t know what he saw in me, the way the pain brought me to him, the contraction of my whole body around him as I whimpered into his open mouth. But he slapped me again as he pulled at me, again as he came. Harder each time. And there it was, his singular kink—in the wild light in his eyes and the sheen on his brow and the way he swallowed up my cries as he dragged me down on top of him.
He wants to hurt me.
I wonder what Jack would look like if he ever got really angry. He’s got to be at least six-three, with the lean, hard build of a soccer player and a soldier’s no-nonsense economy of movement that makes each motion seem choreographed. I can’t imagine him being clumsy. I can’t imagine him ever losing a fight. No matter the opponent, Jack would find a way to win, and he’d have no scruples about keeping it fair.
Rosemary wasn’t worth killing for.
But I’m not Rosemary.
I collect our trash, stow it in the backpack and get to my feet.
He rises, as well, and stands eye level to my perch on the rock. With one graceful shrug, he settles the backpack over his shoulders, then wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me closer until we are nose to nose. His eyelashes are thick and dark, almost as long as mine, curving toward his brow.
“Did I lose you?” he says.
I lay my hand over his heart and he covers it with one of his.
* * *
We stop for dinner on our way home. I’ve never eaten so much in my life as I have since meeting Jack. My body has never felt so hollow.
Afterward, in the passenger’s seat, I watch the scenery flash by and think about Jack’s story, and the level way he held my gaze as he told it.
I look at his profile with the light sliding over it, his arm stretched out to the wheel.
“Lean the seat back,” he says.
I lift the lever and push with my shoulders, until the headrest is practically in the backseat. Jack looks over as we stop at the last red light before we leave town. A neon sign is reflected in his glasses, the letters inverted like a child’s handwriting. His eyes are obscured for a second, then he turns back to the road and the truck starts to move. He curves his hand around the inside of my bare thigh and pulls my legs apart.
“Unbutton your shirt,” he tells me, and I do that, too, letting the thin cotton plaid fall aside in the breeze from the open window. I slide a hand into my bra and lift my breast free of the cup. He reaches past the hem of my shorts and strokes me through my underwear. I prop my right foot on the dash and lean my knee against the door.
He adjusts himself in his seat, then unsnaps my shorts. His fingers are cool, slippery. He glances at me, then the road, back and forth. I watch his wrist moving as the streetlights glide over my bare skin and the silver hoop in my nipple. I move under his touch, thinking, He wants me, he wants me.
He explores me that way, unhurried, and because I know what he wants I don’t try to come. I just let him look at me, dip inside, taste my liquor on his fingertips. I know when we park in his driveway that he will follow me up the walk and pull me through the door, and he’ll take off my pants and bare my breasts to his mouth. He’ll kick my feet apart and bend me over the sofa or the dining room table, or he’ll push me to the floor and bury his face between my thighs. He may even pull me on top of him right here in the truck, or fuck me standing up against the door that he held closed when I tried to walk away. I will wait and see. He can do whatever he wants.
I watch him and let the pressure build under his fingers. The question echoes in my mind:
Would you kill for me?
CHAPTER EIGHT
A strange thing is happening. The world around me is breaking into fragments, as though I’m looking through a sheet of broken glass. Each shard reveals a clear but separate piece of the view, but when I try to put them together it seems the picture is distorted and obscured by the cracks.
The sensation is vaguely familiar. In the days and weeks following my mother’s death, as I was moved from my home and into the foster system, it seemed as though the days were made up of a series of jagged and unrelated images. The visuals stand out in sharp relief, though the larger story—where I went, what decisions were made on my behalf—has never been clear in my mind.
Instead, I am left with individual pieces of the scene: a bubble in the paint next to my bed at the Seattle Children’s Center, a small run in the carpet where the cement showed through, a frayed bit of curtain. Above each bed was a cartoon figure made of tufts of faded plastic like a hooked rug. Mine was Cinderella, which struck me even then as a cruel sort of joke to play on a child.
There were faces. Big faces, pressed too close, and big hands. The damp odor of children, like crayons and wet chicken feathers, with a lid of disinfectant over the top. The clammy pipe-metal handrail on the stairs. A laminated sign in the bathroom with a cartoon picture of a frowning toilet, reminding us to flush.
I went to live at the Center even before my mother’s funeral, processed and ushered along by a succession of adult authority figures who eventually deposited me at the Cinderella bed, in a room I would be sharing with another girl my age.
She stood between the beds as my caseworker, Carla, made the introductions.
“Alice, this is your new roommate, Polly Jinks.”
“Molly,” said the girl in a thin exasperated voice. “Molly Jinks.”
She was fantastically ugly. An albino, with long white hair that trailed over her shoulders in two lumpy braids, and boiled blue eyes that flashed a rabbity pink when the light shone in from the side. Her body was like mine: unformed, narrow, exactly my height. She was wearing a sundress with a safety pin at the waist and a pair of grubby foam flip-flops to which her pal
e toes clung like roots.
“I stole you a feather pillow,” she said after Carla had gone. “You should probably keep it under the bedspread, just in case.”
In case of what, she didn’t say. She sat down on her bed, legs crossed, plucking at the hem of her dress. After a moment, since there was nothing else to do, I sat, too.
“Your mom died,” she said. It was a simple statement, repeating what she already knew. But the three words twisted like wringing hands inside me.
I am an orphan, I thought. Little orphan Alice.
Molly began to unravel one of her braids.
“Mine is still alive. Somewhere. I mean, I guess she is.”
She thought about this as she reached the top of her braid and started over. Her silvery hair twined around her fingers and the inside of her wrists.
Molly must have braided her hair fifty times a day, minimum, each side. She was a chain-smoker on training wheels, who unfastened her rubber bands with the weary anxiety of an adult flicking a cigarette lighter. This was her thing, everybody had one. Some kids would zone out on video games or TV; some would eat too much, or not enough, or they ate small bits of themselves like fingernails and scabs; the older kids fought with the adults, the young ones trailed around after them like puppies. We were twitchy or preternaturally still, as if we’d each short-circuited in some specific way as a result of the missing connections in our lives.
I became a cutter that summer. It was my thing.
“You won’t be here long,” Molly said comfortably. “They’ll want to put you with a foster before school starts. Your soc will start bringing people over for you to meet. If you like them, smile a little and start talking about how much you miss your mom. Or cry, but not too much or they’ll think you’re a head case. But you probably won’t like any of them. I never do. The last place I went, they didn’t even have a TV. Can you imagine? I was there a week, and only because it took that long for my soc to come pick me up.” She tied off the end of the braid and started on the other one. “I didn’t tell her it was because of the TV, of course, or she wouldn’t have come.”
She smiled. “You’ll learn.”
It was summer when I went to live at the Center. The staff had activities for us, I suppose, sports and books and all that, though I don’t remember much of it now.
I remember Molly, my self-appointed mentor. Ten years old, and the most accomplished thief I have ever met.
“Watch this,” she would say. And she’d sidle up to some unsuspecting adult, pointing to a splinter on her palm. When they leaned over to look, Molly’s other hand would dart nimbly sideways to a purse or pocket. She never came away empty.
“You need a distraction,” she told me, clicking her new pen. “But it can’t be the same thing every time or people will catch on.”
I was in awe. “Don’t you ever get caught?”
“No,” she said. “Nobody notices. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”
Not funny, exactly, but I saw what she meant.
Molly could steal anything. Mostly she lifted odd little things: a penny that had been pressed into an oval with the Disneyland castle on the front; a barrette made of pink plastic beads; papers from her own file that she never let me read. Sometimes she took expensive things like the magnifying glass she’d snagged from an elderly foster mom, but she never seemed to care about the object’s value. She said money wasn’t the point.
I didn’t have to ask what the point was. I knew it already. Molly’s stealing was a form of emotional scavenging, a way to creep a bit closer by carrying off a person’s belongings. It didn’t take me long to work that out; I was sneaky in my affections, too.
Growing up in foster care had made her something of a philosopher. She had an opinion on every topic and seemed to feel it was her duty to educate me.
“The problem is,” she said as we played cat’s cradle with a loop of frayed green yarn, “everybody tells you to be good, but they all mean something different. Mrs. Drummond means be quiet and remember to flush.”
We were sitting cross-legged on her bed, our nightgowns tucked up, bare knees bumping. I pushed my fingers into the loops and pulled them through hers.
“Teachers mean be quiet and do your homework. And don’t cheat.” She lifted our hands and gave me a sly smile through the lines of yarn. “I bet you don’t cheat.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then you’re stupid. Smart people cheat all the time, everybody knows that.”
She shook out the yarn and we started over.
“Foster parents mean be quiet—everyone means be quiet, ha!—and smile. A smiling kid makes them look good.”
“Why?”
“Means the parents know what they’re doing,” she said. “Grown-ups are always watching each other. You don’t get to stop pretending just ’cause you’re old.”
We were silent for a moment, trying to make Jacob’s ladder, a complicated pattern consisting of several steps that always fell apart before we could finish.
“You’ll see. Fosters have weird sets of rules, and they think everyone else’s rules are stupid. I lived in one house where they kept a lock on the refrigerator and the cupboard doors. The dad did that, to keep the mom out of there ’cause she was fat. It didn’t work, though. She would get back from the grocery store and hide food all over the house. I mean, everywhere. Under the sink, in the garage, inside the bins full of Christmas decorations.” She giggled, and our ladder collapsed. “Anytime I needed a snack, I could go right to my laundry basket for a bag of chips.”
I looked at her uneasily. Molly talked about foster care like she was telling ghost stories. “Did the dad ever find out?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “But he didn’t hear it from me.”
Mrs. Drummond came to the door. “Lights out,” she said.
Molly gave her an angelic smile and leaped up to turn off the lamp. But a moment later she also opened the curtain, and we resumed our game by the light of the moon.
“Rule number one for how to be good,” she whispered. “Don’t tell the secrets.”
Her fingers slipped through mine inside the loops of yarn, her eyes flashing mercury-silver in the moonlight.
We understood each other from the beginning, and Molly was nice to me. She didn’t seem to mind that I was quiet, and I took comfort in her slippery conversation, in the strange pale presence of her. Her oddness was reassuring somehow, a constant visual acknowledgment that the world around me had shifted and everything ordinary had been left behind. A more commonplace friend would have unnerved me.
Because we were the same height, people started referring to us as Salt and Pepper, and later simply as the Shakers: me with my black hair, Molly white as salt. Opposite yet exactly alike.
Molly was a prostitute’s child. She had come into the world completely unattached and, with her goblin’s face and queer, knowing smile, she made adults uneasy. Every attempt to place her had come to nothing. She was a changeling; no one wanted her for very long.
What she thought of this, I didn’t know. Molly kept her secrets well. It was only now and then, when I’d glance up to see her watching me, when she’d offer to braid my hair or help me untangle a knot in my shoelaces, that a glimpse of her feelings would show through. We would stand side by side at the bathroom mirror, gazing at each other’s reflections.
“You’re going to be beautiful,” she said once.
I could think of nothing to say in response; I wasn’t sure I wanted to be beautiful, but answering that way to Molly would have been like refusing an expensive gift.
“You’re going to be Lex Luthor,” I said finally, and we both laughed, a dangerous moment averted.
* * *
Late one night, weeks after my mother died, I lay awake in my Cinderella bed and started to cry. T
he crying began from someplace deep inside my chest, as though my tightly held grief had begun to unravel, to release the tears from my body with a pain so intense I thought I was dying. My breath came in sharp, knifelike gasps. My limbs tightened and curled inward. I felt my mother standing at the other side of an uncrossable chasm, too far even for me to make out her features, too far ever to touch. She was gone, truly gone, and I was and would always be alone.
Molly crawled from her bed into mine, shivering down under the covers. She wiped the tears from my face with the sleeve of her polyester nightgown, and patted the top of my head until the spasms subsided. Then she kissed me, tight girlish kisses over my lips and face. She reached up my nightgown and stroked me through my underwear.
Molly said this was what grown-ups did. To make each other feel better, she said.
* * *
I think of her sometimes when I’m with Jack. When his jaw scrapes my skin, when he pounds and pushes too hard, I remember the smoothness of Molly’s young cheek, her tentative fingers and tongue, her secret wish arising from a grown man’s perversion.
Same as mine.
CHAPTER NINE
The first time Jack leaves his clothes at my place, I think it’s an oversight. I wash them and leave them folded on a chair in the bedroom. But the next day he brings more, in an old canvas gym bag, and leaves those behind, as well, crumpled next to the bed. Later, a shirt, an odd pair of boxers, one sock. A pair of muddy work boots drying on the front porch. Gradually the stack of clothes on the chair seems to be saying something, so I clear out a drawer and put them away. I brush off his boots and set them next to mine in the closet and think, There you are, Daddy, and wonder where that came from.
I don’t leave my clothes at his house, though he’s been trying, I think, to make me feel at home. He asks me to stay while he’s sleeping, so he can see me in the morning before he leaves for work.
“Bring your work with you,” he says. He buys me a chair for the ship room and clears off the table so I can use it as a desk. It’s surprisingly easy to work in this room, surrounded by the silent, vacant ships tossing on imagined seas—an idea in a bottle, a world inside the glass walls. Like me with my pages, trying to pin the whole thing down. I feel safe in this house, with Jack sleeping like a guard dog down the hall.