Brighter Than the Sun

by Darynda Jones

  Her fingernails dig into Dutch’s tender skin and my lungs stop working. I shake. I snarl. I want to kill her. I want to bash her face in.

  “I’m not putting up with it, Charlotte. There’s nobody there, and you damned well know it.”

  But Dutch won’t quit looking at me, so the lady pushes her down the hall toward the front door.

  My anger consumes me. Rises and swells until the walls ripple around me with the force of it. I knock a vase off a side table, and the lady turns. Stares straight at me. Pulls her eyebrows together until they make an ugly line down her forehead. Then she clenches her jaw, turns once more, and hurries out the door.

  5

  By the time I get back, Earl is finished. I crawl to my closet and hide for a few days. Kim hides with me. She has long red hair and pale skin with a light dusting of freckles across her nose. She brings water and washes what she can. Then she makes me soup and we talk about what we are going to do when we grow up.

  Kim is the most timid, soft-spoken person I’ve ever known. So when she tells me she wants to be a fighter pilot, I laugh till my stomach hurts. It hurt already, so it doesn’t take long. I wish she were my real sister. But that would make Earl my real father. Fuck that.

  We left our TV behind at our last place because we had to sneak out a window in the middle of the night. The colors were off and the picture wasn’t quite in the center, but that didn’t matter. It was something.

  But the landlord wanted the rent and he wanted it now. Nobody tells Earl Walker what to do. Nobody gets in his face and orders him about. He leaves for a couple of hours and then we sneak out. I feel like something bad has happened, but I don’t ask Earl about it. I never talk to him if I don’t have to. I get enough unwanted attention.

  But Kim is asleep, and without a TV, I have to think. I think about Dutch. Why she saves me and doesn’t let me die. I think about her light. How bright it is. How nourishing. I think about Earl. I’m pretty sure he wants to kill me. He threatens to “put me in the ground” all the time, and I wonder why I’m even here. On earth. Why I even exist.

  Sometimes Earl takes pictures. The kind that roll out of the camera and slowly come into focus. It is the bane of said existence. He hangs them on a line in whatever room constitutes our family room. I think that’s why Kim walks with her head down all the time. Her shoulders concave. He leaves the pictures up unless he’s seeing someone. Then he stuffs them in a sock in his drawer.

  I used to wonder why he took them. I don’t care anymore. No one can ever see them. Earl knows how I feel about them and he laughs. He keeps them until we move again. And then he knocks a hole in a wall, dumps them in there, and patches the hole. He just leaves it like that. A big white spot on the wall. A reminder of what he has on me. He’s too stupid to know the photos are way more damning to him than me.

  It takes me awhile, but I figure out why he hangs them up. I think he does it so I won’t bring any friends over. Like I have any. I do get to know some of the neighborhood kids, because he lets us go out sometimes, but only if I have no visible bruises. So I concentrate on healing. He says I heal fast. I say I don’t heal fast enough. Any time spent indoors with him is too much.

  Sometimes he gets a job and we’re home alone. That is what heaven is. We get to do whatever we want and eat whatever we want. Well, whatever we have. He is working today, so Kim gets the last can of ravioli and I eat a package of crackers and mustard. We find a bunch of books in a box the last tenants left behind. I learned to read from abandoned books and magazines and from closed-captioning when we had a TV. And I taught Kim to read years ago. But today, I read to her until she falls asleep, the afternoon sun stretching across the floor and lighting her hair on fire. I eat more crackers. Lick the mustard off my fingers. And celebrate the good life.

  He’s gone and we can breathe.

  I close my eyes and find Dutch. She’s at a park near her house, riding bikes with another girl whose hair is almost as red as Kim’s. The sweater Dutch is wearing swallows her whole and is barely a shade lighter than her long coffee-colored hair. Her cheeks are flushed and she laughs when her tire almost slides down the side of an arroyo. The same arroyo she almost died in.

  She doesn’t come here often anymore, but it was her stepmother, Denise’s, favorite place to take her before she started kindergarten.

  On one particular occasion, she’s playing hopscotch with her friends, a group of older girls. Dutch is only three. Way too young to play by herself. But Denise is too busy chatting with the other girls’ mothers to be too concerned.

  Some boys are watching the girls play. I remember being jealous of them. They throw sticks and run. The girls chase them until Denise yells at Dutch to stay where she can see her. Then she turns and continues her story, completely ignoring her stepdaughter.

  A girl about thirteen years old calls Dutch over to where she is standing on the edge of a cement arroyo. They have had a lot of rain and it is half full of raging water. The current is strong enough to drown anything caught in its path.

  The girl summons Dutch closer. She is dead. The girl. Dutch ignores her stepmother and wanders toward her. The girl is lost. I can see it in her eyes. She is scared and desperate and confused, but that doesn’t give her the right to kill anyone. I can see a bad thing about to happen from a mile away. I think it’s the hellfire in me. The brimstone in my blood.

  I step between them. Shake out my cloak. Glare at Dutch until she backs away, her lids round, her face bright pink from the cold weather. After a moment, she runs back to her stepmother and gets yelled at for going too far. For once, I’m right there with the crazy bitch. Better yelled at than dead.

  I turn to the girl. She’s old enough to know better. Old enough to know what she just tried to do was wrong on several levels.

  She stares at me. Hypnotized. Enchanted. I lower my hood and she wants to touch me. With her fingers. With her mouth. I touch her instead. I grab hold of her throat. Pull her closer.

  “This is my world,” I say from between clenched teeth. “Go anywhere near the reaper again, and I’ll send you to a place where your skin will bubble and your face will melt and you will scream in agony for all eternity.”

  The girl’s mouth drops open. She nods. I let go and she disappears, and I’m more than a little surprised that worked.

  6

  I try to run away several times growing up. Before Kim comes along, I figure I’m old enough to be on my own at around six or seven. But Earl bars the windows and nails them shut, and I can’t get them open no matter how hard I try. He also locks the doors from the outside when he leaves, and no matter how hard I push, they won’t budge. Someday, I think, when I’m stronger, I’m going to smash the windows out and pull the bars apart with my bare hands. Someday.

  It’s around this time I begin to ponder why I created my other world. Why I created Dutch. I can be strong there. Powerful. Cunning. Like an angel from the Bible I stole from a hotel room we broke into. Or the superheroes in comic books I found in the trash. Or the Road Runner in my favorite cartoon.

  In real life, I’m more like the Coyote. Bumbling. Conniving. An absolute failure at everything I do. I feel like the Coyote when he falls off a cliff and splats on the ground below in a puff of dust.

  But not when I’m in Dutch’s world. Her world is so vivid. So tangible. Things happen that I can’t control. If I could, I would make Dutch’s new mother love her. And I would make Dutch love me, so it’s probably good I can’t control it.

  Instead, I go see her every chance I get. To feel her light on my face. To see the shimmer in her eyes. I lie back and fall into her world for hours at a time. Earl gets mad. Tells me to snap out of it.

  But he’s never been to her world.

  I used to ask Earl every day if I could go to school. He always said no. Said we move too much. And, boy, do we. Sometimes, I get to know a few of the neighborhood kids when we move in. Some I like. Some I don’t.

  I have to prove myself again and a
gain. The girls want to kiss me. Several of the boys want to kiss me, too. The older girls have something else in mind. Their eyes roam to my mouth. To my shoulders. To my stomach. But that only makes the older boys mad even though their eyes roam, too. It’s a pretty even split between desire and absolute hatred.

  I got in my first fight when I was five. Three boys from middle school tried to bash in my face with a rock. The leader was crazy as hell. Which figures. He’s going to hell for shooting a man in the car next to him at a stoplight, but not for several years.

  The actual fight didn’t last long. They tried to hold me down while the leader balanced the rock over his head. I pushed one’s face with my hand. Elbowed the other. And simply kicked one of the leader’s arms. The rock crashed down onto the top of his head, and that was that.

  He was in the hospital for two days. The boys told the cops I attacked them. Thankfully, I was five and they were eleven and twelve. I told them my dad wasn’t home. I didn’t lie. Earl is not my dad. I’ve known that for a long time. He cowered in our apartment while I told the cops he ran to the store. While they were talking to the other parents, Earl threw our stuff into an old suitcase and a laundry basket and we hightailed it out of there. We’ve never been back to that apartment. We’ve never been back to that side of town.

  The apartment we’re in now, we got only because Earl flirted with the landlady. He even dated her a couple of times. I heard them having sex. They both faked it, and the relationship fizzled fast. But we have a shiny new apartment, complete with a washer and dryer that stack on top of each other. The dryer doesn’t work, but that’s okay. I’m just grateful for the washer. We’ve never had one actually inside the apartment.

  Earl is always happy when we have a new place. But happy is not always good. He cooks for Kim and me. Dotes on us. Sends her to bed. Calls me to him.

  I think he knows Kim and I are leaving soon. He starts locking us in again. Doesn’t let us walk to the store or go to the library. But we’ve learned to sneak out of most of the places we stay at. There’s always a weakness in the structure. Always.

  When I was a kid, we had a house once with an access panel in my room that led to the attic. In the attic was a vent. I could push the vent aside, crawl through, jump down onto a pile of logs, and make my way to the library. Not quite as good as school, but close. As long as I was home before Earl, I was good. The couple of times I wasn’t, I paid a hefty price. But it was still worth it.

  7

  As I’m growing up, I feel myself being drawn to Dutch more and more. Lured. Usually, I go to her. I watch her. But sometimes her emotions are so powerful, I’m actually pulled toward her by an invisible force. Like a magnet. I have to go. To see if she’s okay. Which is ridiculous, I know, since she’s not real.

  The first time that happens, the first time I’m drawn to her, I’m seven. Her emotions tug at me. The strongest is anger. An anger that only Dutch can feel. She is powerful, and her emotions, even at four, are a force to be reckoned with.

  She is sitting in a car with Denise. She calls her stepmom Denise, in fact, and it makes the woman so mad, her face turns red. But Dutch has figured out Denise doesn’t love her, and no matter what she says or what she does or how she acts, the woman probably never will. So she calls her by her first name instead of “Mommy” like Denise wants. Denise doesn’t even want it for herself but for Dutch’s dad. To make everything seem okay on the outside, no matter how messed up things are on the inside.

  But Dutch wants her dad to know how she feels. How distant Denise is. How unloving.

  I realize Denise’s face is red for a different reason this time. Her father has died, and Dutch is trying to tell her so. She’s trying to give her a message from him, but Denise is shaking, she is so astounded.

  She glares at Dutch. Her hand twitches, she wants to slap her so bad. She decides a good berating will do the trick. “Charlotte! How dare you say such a thing.”

  Dutch doesn’t like being called Charlotte. She likes “Charley” better. It’s what her dad calls her. And her uncle Bob. They are her two favorite people in the world. She likes her sister, Gemma, okay, but because Gemma is Denise’s pet, Dutch keeps her distance for the most part.

  Denise doesn’t believe her. Dutch repeats the message, trying to get her to understand. Something about blue towels. I don’t get it, but it seems pretty important to the dead guy talking to Dutch from the backseat. He looks over his shoulder at me. His eyes widen, but I’m more interested in the reaction of Dutch’s stepmom. Of his miserable daughter.

  “I can’t believe you would say such a horrible, horrible thing.” Denise grabs Dutch’s arm and jerks her closer. “You are a horrible child. I’m going to tell your father what you just said, and I hope he makes it hurt for you to sit down for a week.”

  A flash of anger takes my breath away. I hold back. I want to kill the woman for the hundredth time, but I don’t. Still, it’s my dream. Surely I can get rid of her somehow.

  They are behind a bar that Dutch’s dad frequents. It’s a local cop hangout. She unbuckles Dutch’s seat belt and pulls her across the seats and out the driver’s door with her. Her fingernails bite into Dutch’s skin. I feel the pain as they tear through several layers. But more than anything, I feel the humiliation when she drags Dutch inside and deposits her roughly on a bench just outside the kitchen.

  “You sit here. I’m going to get your father.” She leans down until her face is mere inches from Dutch’s. “And then we’ll see how much he thinks of his little angel.”

  She stomps off as a waitress offers her a sympathetic glance. Dutch wants to crawl under the bench and disappear. Humiliation and anger surge through her.

  Denise finds Dutch’s dad, Leland, at a table with his brother, Robert, or Uncle Bob, as Dutch calls him. Denise is throwing a fit. He shifts in his seat, embarrassed by Denise’s behavior. Almost as humiliated as Dutch is until he hears the words, “She said my father just died.”

  He glances around. Stands up. Ushers her toward the door.

  “She said he died, Leland. How dare she say such a thing!”

  “Denise, honey, please calm down.”

  “Calm down?” she screeches. Really loudly.

  The other people in the bar, mostly cops, are either amused or annoyed. Some of them don’t like Denise. One of those is Leland’s brother. He glares as Mr. Davidson tries to lead Denise away.

  “Here you are, drinking with your buddies in the middle of the afternoon, and your daughter is telling me my father died.”

  “We were having lunch.”

  She leans forward until her face almost touches his. “She is evil.”

  Mr. Davidson clenches his jaw. He is angry and she is making a scene in front of his colleagues.

  I want to rant. To rave. To get their attention. Dutch is so hurt, she crosses her tiny arms over her chest and whispers, “Fine. I’ll just run away, then.”

  If only I could go with her.

  She pushes past the heavy back door and does exactly that. She runs. As fast as she can. As far as she can until she trips and slides into the street, scraping her knees and elbows.

  She looks around but doesn’t recognize anything. I feel confusion take hold. A slight sense of panic until a man comes over to help her up.

  “What happened here?” he asks. He lifts her up and shuttles her out of the street before a car runs her over.

  “I can’t find my dad.”

  He smiles. “I’ll help you, honey. I think he’s this way.”

  He holds out his hand, but Dutch hesitates. “You know my dad?”

  “Sure do. He’s looking for you.”

  “Oh.”

  He’s lying. He’s lying! And she knows it. She can feel it. She has to feel it. But she places her hand in his anyway. Lets him lead her away, and I know the emotion leaching out of him. I’ve felt it hundreds of times. The hunger. The desire.

  His name is Ethan and he committed the sin that branded him for hell yea
rs ago. He is old. Like forty or something, with hairy shoulders and rolls of fat hanging over the waistband of his pants.

  I appear in front of them. He can’t see me, but Dutch can. She looks up. Starts to slow. But he tugs her along behind him.

  “He’s right over here,” he says to encourage her.

  Fortunately, he is actually headed back to toward the bar, but she doesn’t know that.

  When she tries to wrench free, he says, “Everyone is looking for you, honey. You are in a lot of trouble. We have to hurry.”

  I go back to the bar. Denise is still berating her husband. Robert bounds out of his chair, almost toppling it over, and stalks out.

  He goes out the back door to see to Dutch, but she isn’t there. He looks around. Tears through the kitchen. The restrooms. Nothing.

  “There it is,” Dutch says, pointing to the back of the bar.

  The man hesitates. Scans the area. Probably knows it’s a cop hangout.

  When he sees no one, he says, “Yeah, but your dad is in that apartment building over there. Knocking on doors. Looking for you.”

  “Oh.”

  She looks toward the bar longingly as they walk right by it and into the apartment building behind it. She lets him lead her inside. Shudders when the doors close behind them. Chews her fingers when the building swallows her whole.

  Robert finally goes back to the table, grabs Mr. Davidson’s arm, and says, “Maybe you should help me find your daughter instead of bowing down to your sniveling wife.”

  Denise gasps but Mr. Davidson snaps to attention.

  “What do you mean, find her?” He looks around and rushes out the back.

  Uncle Bob follows him and they check everywhere.

  I try to think of a way to lead them to her. The man is taking her up the stairs, and the emotion radiating out of her is almost foreign to me. She isn’t scared of anything. Ever. Except me. When she sees me out of the corner of her eye, a small tingle of fear laces down her spine. But in all the years I’ve been dreaming of her, I’ve never felt fear off her for any other reason until now.