by Darcey Bell
“I’m looking for my grandparents, Edith and Frank Sloane.”
She’s obviously puzzled. But she smiles at Daisy, as if to reassure herself that we’re not home invaders about to tie her up, duct-tape her mouth, and pistol-whip her into giving us the keys to the safe.
What have we got in that bag? Candy! Again, it’s a good thing I’m nicely dressed. We’re not selling anything. Not even Girl Scout cookies, though a “homeowner” might find that charming. Nor are we Jehovah’s Witnesses, the most likely possibility when a strange woman appears on your doorstep with a child.
There’s a funny look on her face, though, as if my grandparents’ names are ringing a bell—and it’s not a bell she likes the sound of.
“I’m not sure . . . maybe they were the owners before the owner we bought it from. Before the owners before that—” She laughs, but Daisy and I don’t think it’s funny.
“They probably were!” I can play along if she wants to pretend that she lives here. Something about me must be alarming, though, because I can watch her decide that she’s not going to be helpful.
That’s going to be a problem for her, though she doesn’t know it yet. How could she?
“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong house.” She really believes what she’s saying.
But we don’t have the wrong house. This is the right house.
I’m stunned by a flash of understanding. Shocking, but probably true: She must have done something to my grandparents. She’s the home invader holding them prisoner. How could anyone do that to two sweet old people?
She doesn’t look like a criminal, but everyone knows that the worst offenders wear the most innocent disguises.
And then I know. That bad thing I always imagined happening in my grandparents’ basement . . . well, now it’s happened. And I wasn’t here to stop it. I wasn’t here to protect Granny Edith and Grandpa Frank. I was far from home, trying to enter a filthy disgusting world that doesn’t want me.
I was always terrified of my grandparents’ basement. Only now do I understand why.
I thought it was about spiders. But the truth is: I was seeing the future. I foresaw that they’d be locked up in the basement where—the thought makes my chest hurt—they might be suffering and dying right now, as I stand on the doorstep, unable to hear their dear little voices crying weakly for help.
I say, “I’m wondering . . . if we could just look at the house . . . it’s where my grandparents used to live. I have such fond memories of it . . . such a sentimental attachment . . . I so want to show my daughter . . .”
The woman isn’t stupid. Why am I asking to see the house where my grandparents used to live when a moment ago I was telling her that they still live there? Something doesn’t compute. Can she tell that Daisy is not my daughter? Does Daisy wonder: Why is Auntie Ruth lying?
The flicker of disquiet that crosses the woman’s pretty face lets me know that she’s all alone in the house. It’s a tell, like gamblers say. Okay, fine. Her face has told me something I need to know.
No, she’s sorry, she’s terribly busy. She’s not going to be here long. Her husband is going to meet her here soon.
That part about the husband isn’t true. He’s not coming out here.
Liars know when someone is lying.
She’s really scared of us. And she has reason to be. She’s in my house.
This is my house, not hers. My grandparents left it to me.
Then Daisy—my wing girl—says, “Could I please use the bathroom?”
Daisy must be desperate. Normally, I bet, she’d rather pee her pants than ask that of a stranger. I should have thought of her bathroom needs sooner, as any real mother would.
No decent human being could say no, and the woman resigns herself to whatever is going to happen. Probably nothing. We’re probably innocent. Honest. Just a little strange. Anyway, harmless. Who would bring such a dear little child along on a robbery-murder? I feel a mix of conflicting desires—to push past her, to hurt her, to warn her about what I might do.
Or just beg her to set my grandparents free and stop this cruel charade.
She says, “You’ll have to excuse us. We’re in the midst of a renovation. Your grandparents had a lovely house. But the investor who bought it let things run down. The house turned out to require an almost total gut job.”
What could be crueler than telling someone you’re “gutting” their childhood? Sheetrocking over your memories? This woman deserves whatever she gets, though I don’t yet know what that will be. But a part of me already knows. It’s as if I’ve lived through this before. As if I’ve been here and seen this. As if I’ve done what I’m about to do.
The sane part of me holding Daisy’s hand doesn’t want to listen to the crazed part of me that can see into the near future.
It’s not pretty, I want to say, except that she (meaning the sane part of myself) knows that already.
The woman is still talking. About something. Nothing. “Once the systems needed updating, one thing led to another. The plumbing, the electricity, the—”
I don’t know how anything leads to anything, at least not in my grandparents’ house.
“The minute the contractors came on board, we had to dumpster what was left.”
Since when is dumpster a verb?
The woman is talking nervously, filling the silence with random words. “It’s like that TV show, where the couple’s house is being fixed up, and the designer says, ‘I have a not-very-nice surprise for you.’ Well, renovating a house is one very not-very-nice surprise after another.”
All this time I’m thinking that she may be about to have the most not-very-nice surprise of her life. I squeeze Daisy’s hand to make my thoughts stop racing like a hamster on a wheel.
“Help,” says Daisy. “The bathroom.” She’s dancing from foot to foot.
“Oh! Excuse me! This way.”
I look past the woman onto a desert of plaster dust, paint-speckled tarps, ladders rising like oil rigs from the wasteland they’ve made of the only place where I was ever happy.
What has she done with my grandparents? Where are they? What must I do to find them?
Suddenly I’m conscious of holding a huge bag of candy. The candy I used to lure Daisy here.
“I’m Vanessa,” says the woman.
“I’m Ruth,” I say. “And this is my daughter, Daisy.”
No reason to not give our real names. In a few moments none of that will matter.
Is Daisy looking to see why I lied? I can’t look her in the eye. I can’t let her solve the mystery that she might see in my face.
“The downstairs bathroom is useless,” the woman—Vanessa—says. “The plumbers shut off the water. But the one upstairs still functions. Be careful not to trip on the steps. The tarp’s—”
“Can you come with me?” Daisy, my heroine, asks me. “Can you keep me company? This house is sort of scary.”
I look at the woman for permission. Permission to move through my own home.
“Go ahead,” she says. “I promise, dear, that it won’t be the least bit scary by the time we fix it up. It will feel comfy and safe and nice. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs. I’ll walk you up.”
Daisy has no idea what this woman is saying. She literally can’t hear. The only voice she’s hearing is saying: I need to pee!
Do I really need this stranger, this intruder, to tell me that Daisy and I can go upstairs? On the second floor, unless she’s destroyed it, is my old room stuffed with memories of my childhood successes. With memories from when I was Daisy’s age and the sun hadn’t turned its back on me in order to shine on the lucky. That room is probably empty, if it exists at all. The walls have probably been knocked down.
The stairs are covered with white canvas, and chemical fumes sting the back of my throat.
Wherever she’s got my grandparents, they are inhaling this.
Daisy sneezes.
“Bless you,” Vanessa says.
&n
bsp; We let Daisy precede us toward the bathroom at the head of the stairs. Daisy rushes in and closes the door.
Then I turn around and push the woman—Vanessa—as hard as I can.
I push her down the steps.
It doesn’t feel like violence. It doesn’t feel like anything. It’s just something that I have to do.
Once I was crossing 23rd Street and a bicycle messenger turned the corner and came that close to running me over. I had to push him as hard as I could. I wasn’t hurt; he wasn’t hurt. We were breathless and upset.
This feels a little like that. Except that the woman at the bottom of the stairs isn’t cursing me out and shooting me a dirty look and getting back on her bike and riding off.
She isn’t moving.
Daisy must have heard the scream and the shockingly loud thunks as the woman’s head hit each step, and the final heavy thud when she landed at the bottom.
I stay at the top of the stairs waiting for Daisy. I try to arrange my features to look as if nothing unusual happened while she was in the bathroom.
Finally I hear the toilet flush.
Daisy reappears.
“What was that noise?” she says.
“The nice woman,” I say. “Vanessa. She had an accident.”
Daisy looks beyond me and sees the woman at the base of the stairs.
“Don’t look,” I say, and she buries her head in my side. Did she notice that the woman’s head is at a terrifying angle? Clearly her neck’s been broken, but Daisy can’t know that.
Daisy says, “The lady who lives here is bleeding. From her head.” Daisy has seen more than I did.
I say, “She doesn’t live here.”
The woman has opened a gash in her forehead, and dark liquid—like maple syrup—is seeping onto the tarp. Now I remember what happened and what the liquid is.
“Is that real blood?” Daisy says.
She wants to hear that it isn’t. But for once—at this moment, of all moments—I can’t bring myself to lie.
“Don’t be scared,” I say. “She fell. She had an accident. She’ll be fine. We need to call a doctor. I promise. She’ll be fine.”
I hit reset and I fake a 9-1-1 call on a nonexistent phone. I don’t like lying to Daisy, but you can’t expect kids to handle the truth.
I wish I weren’t thinking of Charlotte. I wish I weren’t wondering how to persuade Daisy not to tell her parents what we did today, starting with the candy and ending with the dead woman at the base of the stairs.
I steer Daisy around the woman. I can’t stop myself from bending down and moving the dead woman’s head so that it doesn’t look so skewed and awful.
And so no one can see her from the window.
Does she have a husband? I feel sorry for whoever finds her. I hope it’s the carpenters or the painters, and not a loved one or a child.
Daisy says, “You’ve got blood on you.”
I wipe it on my skirt.
I’m not worried about fingerprints. No one’s going to wonder what happened. Our homeowner tripped on the sloppy tarp. The contractors will be lucky if they don’t get slapped with a lawsuit. There’s no forced entry. No sign of a struggle. No one’s going to check for DNA, besides which Daisy and I obviously aren’t in the system, as they say on TV.
I can’t ask Daisy to stay here while I search the house to see what this woman did with Granny Edith and Grandpa Frank. I’ll have to rescue them later.
I’ll bring Daisy home and come back. I hope I can get back before the police get here. If my grandparents have survived this long, they can hold out a few more hours . . .
I call down toward the basement.
“Grandpa! Granny! Are you down there?”
All I get is a blast of mildew.
Maybe I don’t want to know what happened to them. Maybe their remains got thrown into the dumpster with the drywall and all the beautiful wallpaper. I can’t let myself think about what the house used to be. If I start to remember, I’ll crawl into a corner and stay there until someone finds me and Daisy and . . . the dead woman. Vanessa.
I can’t do that to Daisy.
I hate the sight of blood. Why am I thinking of Eli? Lady Macbeth. I told a little lie about playing Lady Macbeth in high school. Out, out damned spot, all the perfumes in Arabia . . . Who cares if that bloodstained queen wasn’t me? I played one of the witches. I was typecast. Underestimated. Like always.
I say, “We’ll get cleaned up later.”
What does later mean? What will we do after this? I can’t think that far ahead.
I’d imagined the nice meal Daisy would have. Granny Edith’s delicious cooking. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw. Then I would bring Daisy home. That was as far as I got.
Vanessa spoiled all that.
Recalibrate. Reconsider. I need a new plan.
Maybe Granny Edith and Grandpa Frank are still watching out for me, wherever they are. Because there, in the hall, not far from Vanessa’s head, is a little table—exactly where the table was when my grandparents lived here. And on the table are car keys and the garage keys, just like they always were back then.
It’s a message from my grandparents. They’re taking care of me, still.
Thank you, Grandpa Frank!
I know where the garage is. I take the keys, grab Daisy’s hand, and go around back of the house.
One key unlocks the garage door. I almost expect to see Grandpa’s Caddy. But these new people have gotten rid of that along with the evidence of their crime.
They have a fancy but sensible family car, a Volvo SUV. A Volvo is way safer for Daisy than a vintage Caddy. I have their keys.
“Get in,” I tell Daisy. “Road trip.”
“Are we going home?” Her voice is shaky again. I wish she weren’t frightened, but given what she’s seen, I can’t really blame her.
“The long way home,” I tell her. “You’ll be home before bedtime. I promise.”
29
Rocco
Rocco’s head aches. Pain knuckles between his forehead and at the back of his neck, like two fists so strong they can hold him suspended in their grip.
He’s woken from a long dream to find himself in a room he knows and doesn’t know, as familiar and strange as a place in a dream. Ruth’s apartment looks different. Everything that used to seem charming or cool now seems sinister and mocking, like a nasty joke she’s playing on him even when she isn’t there. Especially when she isn’t there.
His niece is missing. Ruth took Daisy.
His sister’s eyes are scarlet and raw. And it’s all his fault.
What did he see in Ruth? Who would believe him, who would care, if he told them about the nights when he woke from troubling dreams—and Ruth, always a light sleeper, woke the same moment he did? Her dreams were just like his. He dreamed of a house; she dreamed of a house. He dreamed of a plane; so did she. Did she ever tell him her dreams first? How easy it must have been to lie about her dreams if she lied about everything else. He’d thought they were so connected that they communicated even in their sleep.
They shared the same dreams, had the same thoughts. Finished each other’s sentences. But he didn’t even know her name.
Naomi? Who is that? And who is Ruth? That person—Ruth—never existed.
He should have left her in Mexico. Maybe she wouldn’t have gotten back to New York in time to kidnap Daisy. But probably she’d be back by now, like the evil dead in zombie films.
There were so many signs. Not just whispers but shouts. The nonexistent start-up. The beggar children in Oaxaca. The missing passport. The pastry from downstairs! The job with the baroness! If someone told him about a guy who stayed with a woman after all that, he would think the guy was insane or very, very stupid. Of course Rocco always really knew the truth. And by the time they got back from Mexico, he most certainly knew.
Ruth assaulted Reyna. And now she has taken his niece.
When he realized that the pastry she’d brought Charlotte w
as from downstairs and not baked by her granny, that’s when he should have bailed. He was so embarrassed about that, he’d lied to Charlotte. Worse, he’d lied to himself. Is anyone not lying? Probably Daisy. Where is she? Now his niece is missing, because he is lazy and passive, and because he likes getting laid on a regular basis.
The first time he’d seen the pastry in the bakery window, he and Ruth were passing it together. Ruth gave his arm a squeeze. It was their fun little secret, their joke on Charlotte, whom Ruth had convinced that her granny baked it. In that conspiratorial moment, Rocco-and-Ruth-against-the-world went upstairs to Ruth’s bed and had amazing sex.
Granny Edith didn’t bake those sticky buns. Now it turns out that Ruth’s grandparents are dead. The truth is that they have been dead for years.
Where was she getting her money? Maybe he’ll never know, no more than he’ll know what happened to her passport.
Her stories were always so detailed. Who could invent lies like that? He’d wanted to believe her.
Now he’s paying the price. He’d always known that a reckoning would come.
HE’S NEVER BEEN happier to see his van, parked where he left it on Nassau, not towed away overnight. Patient old friend, his vehicle, waiting for him, no matter what.
He pulls away from the curb and rounds the block. Charlotte has come downstairs. So far, so good.
As his sister buckles herself in, she turns and looks at the nest of discarded jackets, cables, wooden farm crates in the back of his van. The part of her that expects to find Daisy—the part that coexists with the terrified part that thinks her daughter is gone forever—says that the back seat is not a safe place for a child to ride home when they find her.
Rocco says, “We’ll work it out.” The mess in the back is the least of their problems.
“Okay,” Charlotte says.
He sets Waze for the Hoboken address and puts his phone in the holder on the dashboard.