She had no idea what would happen to the house now. She thought they should sell it. It was the closest thing to an inheritance that Kurt had. And even if they had to tear the place down, the property had to be worth something. It was on two or three acres that backed up to the river. She dreamed about what they could do with the money. Though she knew that as long as Pop was alive, he’d never let it go.
Inside, she went to check on Gracy. On the weekends, she let Gracy sleep late in the mornings. Kurt was working at the 76 on weekends now, so she had given Twig her weekend spots at Babbette’s so she could be home with the kids.
Gracy would sleep until ten o’clock if you let her. Trevor, on the other hand, was up at the crack of dawn, even on the weekends, taking off into the woods to do God knows what. Before Jude moved into the backyard, she clung to the quiet time after Kurt’s truck took off down the road and before Gracy woke up. She’d drink her coffee sitting out on the back steps, watching the sun come up, and the birds that came to the feeder Kurt put up. But now, her view was of Jude’s god-awful trailer. She was never alone now. And the only birds that came by now were the filthy scavengers coming after all this garbage.
When she poked her head into Gracy and Trevor’s room, Trevor was gone and Gracy was still fast asleep on top of her sheets. Kurt was in the shower; she could hear the water running. Steam seeped out from under the bathroom door.
Normally, she would have snuck into the bathroom, locked the door behind her. She would have quietly stripped off her clothes and pulled back the shower curtain. She would have soaped her hands up and washed every inch of Kurt’s body. But not today. Not anymore. Jude could wander in any minute. Any bit of privacy they had was gone now. And so instead of slipping into that steamy place, Elsbeth knocked, hard, on the bathroom door.
“Kurt,” she said. And she could feel all that anger she’d felt toward Jude coming back, getting mixed up inside her. “Kurt!”
He opened the door, and for one quick second it was Jude she saw instead of her husband. He was staring at his face in the foggy mirror; she spoke to his reflection. “Your father is throwing his trash in the yard. Metal lids. Sharp goddamned lids. And I swear if Gracy gets hurt ...”
Kurt’s reflection peered back at her, but it was like he was looking at her without really looking at her. His gaze fixed somewhere beyond her, his body there but his mind elsewhere. It made her feel both pissed off and completely alone.
“Kurt?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I can’t take this much longer.”
“I know,” he said.
“I mean it. This is our house.
Our
home.”
Kurt stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel, still looking at her, past her, in the mirror.
“I hate this,” she said. “I want my life back.”
As the steam escaped through the open door, the mirror cleared, and she could make out his face. And, for a moment, their eyes made contact.
“Soon,” he said. “I promise.”
Promise
. Every now and then Elsbeth could remember what it felt like for there to be the promise of something better ahead. She could remember the excitement of all the things that might come, the hope that resided somewhere inside her ribs.
Promise,
that little bird inside the cage of her own bones that fluttered in anticipation, its wings quivering with longing. She had always been an optimist, somebody who truly believed,
trusted,
that the world had more to offer her and that one day she would find happiness. But now, at thirty years old, the realization suddenly struck her that maybe this was it. Perhaps this was as good as it was going to get.
At night, when Kurt disappeared into the darkness, going wherever it was that he went when his legs would not let him sleep, or when he worked at the station all night and she languished alone in their bed, she allowed herself the girlish, the childish, fantasies that seemed harder and harder to conjure lately: adventure, travel, fun. Her dreams were small, really. She didn’t need a fairy-tale life. What she really wanted was to just be happy. But
this
wasn’t happiness: her father-in-law living in the backyard, her son always in trouble, her husband so far away she felt like she barely knew him anymore. Nothing but work, work, work, and they still didn’t have two nickels to rub together. If something didn’t give, she was going to lose it. Alone, in bed, she fantasized about just getting in the car and taking off, starting fresh. She would just take Gracy and disappear. She dreamed them on the road to a new life. She imagined a second chance. But then Kurt would come home and climb into the bed, enclosing her with his arms, trapping her with his biceps. The familiar smell of him would envelop her, the heady smell of hard work and something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and suddenly all those stupid fantasies became just that. Stupid dreams, and she realized the cage was locked. That bird inside her chest was getting old, listless, as it waited for her to release it. She imagined what the key to the cage might look like. A tiny golden thing no bigger than her pinkie finger.
She thought about Trevor out there in the woods doing whatever it was he was doing, thought about all of the trouble that was likely to come once school started again. She thought about Kurt stuck at the yard, stuck inside the 76 station while the rest of the world was sleeping. And she even thought of Pop in his own prison in their backyard. And she wondered if the lock on this cage, like all the others, might be too rusty to open anymore. She had been silly; it was too late. The bird in the cage was too old. If she were going to set it free, she should have done so when its wings were stronger. When it still had the ability to fly. Before it shat all over the cage and forgot how to sing.
C
rystal was working forty hours a week now, happy to take the extra shifts, happy even to deal with Howard and his clumsy advances, which just kept coming. She had to admire his tenacity at least; he was not giving up. Working, even dealing with Howard, kept her occupied, kept her mind off everything else.
Crystal would work at the Walgreens for the rest of the summer and then she’d go off to college in the fall. And none of this would matter anymore. She would forget everything. She would start over again. She would forget Ty. The baby.
She had to just keep reminding herself that next month she was going to UVM. Like any other student. She was moving into a dorm room with some girl named Fiona who was from upstate New York. They’d e-mailed each other a couple of times, friended each other on Facebook. Crystal scoured the pictures Fiona had posted, and it looked like she was pretty normal. Lots of pictures of her with her girlfriends, hiking and swimming and camping. She was pretty but not too pretty. Thin but not too thin. There were a few pictures of her with her arms around a big golden retriever, and lots of posts quoting famous authors. When Crystal was stocking shelves or pricing stuff or dealing with customers, she imagined what her life would be like at college. There were entire days when she could forget this year, amnesiacal days in which she could forget almost entirely that just a few months ago, she’d given birth to a baby girl. A girl who lived in the same city where she would be going to college.
Her body showed almost no evidence anymore that she’d been pregnant just a few months ago. Her very flesh seemed to exhibit the same amnesia, that same ability to deny or forget. She assumed this remarkable elasticity was because she was only seventeen, an athlete. Her stomach had returned to its normal size, her breasts had shrunken back down to their modest A cups. Even that dark line, the
linea negra,
her doctor had called it—that line that divided her in half, that divided her life in half (
before
and
now
)—had all but faded away. She had started running again, and by July, she was completely back in top form. Her body had put all of this behind her. And if her body could forget, couldn’t her mind as well?
Howard noticed, of course.
“You look
fine,
” he said. Crystal was pretty sure Howard had learned all of his social skills from TV.
“Thanks,” she said.
Today Howard was working the photo counter, and she was stocking the back-to-school items on the seasonal shelves near the front and manning the front counter as well. She’d just sliced open a box of ring-bound notebooks when the door jingled.
Crystal looked up and saw her: the shoplifter lady with her little girl trailing behind. The woman looked harried, her hair disheveled. She was wearing a hot pink sundress, the kind with a stretchy strapless tube top, and flip-flops. The little girl was filthy too, her mouth smeared with chocolate, which also spotted her T-shirt. Crystal felt her heart pang. She left the open box on the dolly and moved behind the counter where she had a better view of the store. She watched as the woman moved through the aisles. There was no pattern that Crystal could discern. No method as far as she could tell. She was like an ant, determined and forward moving, but without any sort of logic to her direction. As Crystal sprayed the counter down with 409 and wiped away the sticky spots, she watched the woman walk down the makeup aisle, the hair goods, and then make a sharp turn toward the grocery aisle.
Crystal’s hands were shaking, her heart racing as the woman’s fingers skipped across the dusty cans of beef stew, chili, soup. Really? Soup? Behind her, the little girl was tugging at her mother’s skirt, but the woman was so fixated on the canned goods, she seemed completely oblivious. It wasn’t until the little girl screamed, “Mommy!” that she snapped out of it. Her hands still clutching a small can of Dinty Moore, she turned to the little girl, her face angry, twisted.
There was a thin red line running down the little girl’s face. And then, as she started to cry, the blood rushed faster and faster, coming out like some horrific faucet inside her nostril had been turned on. Crystal grabbed a wad of paper towels from the roll and came out from behind the counter. She walked quickly past the chip display to them and knelt down next to the girl. “Here you go, sweetie.” She handed her the clump of paper towels and helped her press it to her nose.
The woman looked bewildered, a sleepwalker startled awake.
“Do you want me to take her to the bathroom?” Crystal asked the woman, and she nodded. “It’s right back there.” She pointed to the sign that said RESTROOM.
The woman was still clinging to the beef stew, her eyes vacant.
“And you can just take that up to the photo counter. Howard will ring you up.” Crystal gestured toward the can and studied the woman’s face for any sort of sign of guilt, any acknowledgment that she’d been caught red-handed almost stealing a can of Dinty freaking Moore. “You can meet us in the restroom.”
“Here, come with me,” she said to the little girl, taking her little hand and steering her down the aisle toward the back, pressing the paper towels to her gushing nose. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Howard and walked the little girl into the handicapped stall in the bathroom.
The little girl was crying now, and the blood was not stopping.
“I used to get bloody noses when I was little,” she said as she sat the girl down on the closed toilet lid. “You just need to pinch your nose and lean your head back. Here, like this.”
She did as she was told.
“Now you might taste something yucky in the back of your throat, but you need to keep holding your head back. Okay?”
The little girl nodded.
As they waited for the bleeding to stop, Crystal tried to take a quick inventory of the child’s body. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, but she had a feeling that something was really, really wrong in this family. The girl didn’t have any visible bruises, but she was covered with bug bites, which she had clearly scratched until they scabbed over. Her hair was in two braids that looked like they’d been slept on. She had a Band-Aid on one of her knees.
“What happened to your knee?”
“I fell down,” the girl said, her nose plugged. “In the backyard. Where Pop lives.”
“Your daddy lives in your backyard?” Crystal asked, horrified.
“No, silly. Pop. My
grandpop
.”
“He lives in your
backyard?
”
“He used to live in a house, but it got too dirty. There was a raccoon, I saw it. They were afraid the raccoon might bite the little kids.”
Crystal nodded and stroked the little girl’s hair, trying not to look shocked. Trying not to whisk her straight away. But to whom? The police? Child Protective Services? What do you do when some kid tells you their grandfather is living in the backyard? When you’ve been watching her mother shoplift for months and months?
Stay calm,
she thought.
Think this through.
“Here, let’s see if it’s fixed.” Crystal gently took the soggy wad of paper towels from the little girl’s nose and had her lean her head forward. For the moment, the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Crystal went to the sink and wet down another paper towel, which she used to wash the dried blood from her face. She also wiped away the chocolate ring around her mouth and dabbed at the tears in the corners of her eyes.
There was a knock at the door then, and as she tossed the bloodstained tissues into the trash can, the little girl’s mother came in.