Motherless Child Read online

Sophie gave both oars a gentle pull and poked at the black, bulging root that had momentarily hooked them. “I don’t know from knots. Do you?”

  Thunder rolled again, no closer but long and loud. Glancing over the sides of the boat proved unsettling. The water looked smooth as a mirror, inky black, except where logs and roots rose out of it or ripples materialized for no visible reason and glided toward them. Looking up, Natalie could see no stars, not even sky, just trees and mist. Is it even raining? What difference would it make in air this fetid? To their right, something whooped and flapped.

  “Crane,” Sophie said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I used to come here, remember, every—”

  “About me. That I was going to jump out of the car.”

  Sophie leaned way back on the oars, elbows jutting over the water, almost touching the surface. Natalie could see condensation forming in the down of her arms and the hollow of her throat. Her skin green hued, thin as birch bark in the low glimmer of glowing green mist that passed for moonlight. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just another thing that happens, I guess, when you’ve Fed.” Then she lowered her gaze to Natalie. “You get telepathy.”

  She waited until Natalie pursed her lips and looked away, then burst out laughing.

  “Either that or I’ve known you my whole life. How do you think I knew?”

  Sophie’s laugh was still her laugh, bubbling all over everything. And for a moment, Natalie let herself love that.

  “You knocked me out, Sophie. Out. You bashed my head in.”

  “You were going to leave me,” Sophie said. Her laughter gone. Hair embedded into her cheeks like little cracks. “You were really going to leave me.”

  The boat bumped again, on the right side, then up in the stern, next to Sophie’s dangling elbow. Sophie sat up straight, pushed hard. Natalie’s eyes never left her face. It floated there in the heavy air, glowing like the luminous moss on the black gum trees all around. Sophie caught her eyes again.

  “You were going to leave me, Natalie.”

  Natalie nodded. She couldn’t think what else to do.

  “Well, you can’t.”

  They’d drifted into a wide spot in the river, or whatever this was, and the trees cleared, and actual moonlight blazed down, white and hard. It leached the color out of the moss, the leaves, probed the grooves in the roots and driftwood floating everywhere.

  “Why are we here, Sophie?”

  Sophie wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was watching the water. Her answer seemed to come from far away. From the surrounding trees. “It just seemed like somewhere to go. So you couldn’t run and we could figure this out. Where were you even going?”

  Natalie shook her head, which hurt. “Hadn’t thought that far.” She rubbed at the moisture on her wrists and forearms, which wasn’t cold and seemed closer in consistency to oil than water. Around them, the night swamp stirred and rustled. At least being knocked out had relieved the Hunger for a second. But it was back, now. A cramp with teeth, chewing up her esophagus toward the air. As though it, too, wanted to get free and run.

  “Sophie,” she said, curling forward, pulling her arms in tight against her sides. “What if I have to? What if we can’t be together anymore?”

  “We can,” said Sophie, and the boat bumped. Without straightening, Natalie glanced sidelong, saw detritus everywhere. Leaves that spun in their own whirlpools, sank away to nowhere, rose again. Roots and long, gnarled logs. That weren’t logs, of course. Not all of them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Natalie whispered, settling tighter into her crouch. “Sophie…”

  “You’re staying, Natalie,” Sophie said, eyes on the water. The things in the water.

  “What if I don’t want to anymore?” And then Natalie remembered. The revelation she’d had right before Sophie had jammed her face into the dashboard. The reason she had to run. Fly. Now. “Sophie, you don’t understand; he’s going to—“

  At the splash, Natalie half-stood, almost tipped the boat, sat down fast, and grabbed the sides and skidded over to the edge, shouting, “Sophie, no!” She bored her eyes into the exact spot where Sophie had vanished, the center of the ripples that were already somehow stilling themselves, surrendering to the weight of the air, the will of the water. She shot out a hand, saw the alligators to either side of it, and suddenly they were right up against the boat. Two of them, just floating there.

  When Sophie surfaced, she did so right between them.

  For a long moment, and then another—too many, too long—everything floated and nothing moved. Natalie was leaning over the side, arm half-extended, paralyzed. All she could see of Sophie was her eyes, the top of her nose, her hair streaming behind her, her dress a shard of lily pad reshaping and settling as water lapped into and over it. So small, suddenly. Just Sophie, and nothing more. With a single snap, the alligators could tear her to pieces.

  But neither alligator so much as twitched. When Natalie dared a glance toward the one on the left, though, she caught a glimpse of its orange eye, just peeking out through its nictitating lid, like a trailer-park gossip from behind a curtain. A gossip with scales, and teeth. She glanced away just in time to see the alligator on the right bump up against Sophie. Without seeming to move. As if by accident.

  “Sophe,” Natalie whispered, the whisper catching in her mouth, because she knew, or thought she knew, why this had happened. The news the Whistler had delivered—the truth about the way they were now—had devastated Sophie at least as much as it had her. Doomed her, in fact. Not just to her fate. But just maybe to her fate without Natalie. Because unlike me, Natalie thought, self-loathing bitter in her mouth, she’d thought first about her friend, and not herself. “Oh, Sophe. I’m so sorry.…”

  Then she saw the bubbles around Sophie’s mouth. And heard her purring. Unless that was one of the alligators.

  “Sophie,” Natalie whimpered.

  But Sophie didn’t move. For the second time, the right-hand alligator nudged against her. The ridges of its scales bristly up close, like cactus skin. Its bulk seemed to swell as it spread along Sophie’s flank, and inside its barely parted jaws Natalie saw the same emberish orange that lit the eyes, as though everything were alight in there.

  Abruptly the one on the left wriggled, rocking the boat and almost tipping Natalie backward, and when she’d grabbed the sides and gotten herself straightened she saw both gators touching Sophie. Nuzzling around her, almost locked to her, tidy as puzzle pieces.

  Back and forth Natalie stared. Her whole body rigid, tingling. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gators. And she didn’t want to look at Sophie. Because every time she did, she realized all over again that Sophie was smiling.

  Finally, she edged forward on her bench as far as she dared. “Sophie. What the fuck are you doing?”

  For the first time since she’d gone over the side, Sophie’s mouth cleared the surface. She was smiling, all right. “Swimming,” she said.

  Natalie closed her eyes, fighting back the nausea, which was also terror, which was also loneliness more terrible than any she’d felt, even in these last few weeks. But mostly, this was terror.

  “You should come in, Natalie,” Sophie said. “The water’s fine.”

  The right-hand alligator lifted its head slightly, so that its teeth floated in the air, half an inch from Sophie’s face. Its eye grabbed hers.

  “Holy shit,” Sophie breathed. “Hello.”

  Around them, the wetness intensified, the rain not new, not even stronger, really, just refocused, like spray from the nozzle of a hose. The alligator lowered its head. The right-hand alligator had vanished. Could have been anywhere now, under the boat, under Sophie with its jaws wide open.

  The remaining alligator seemed to have stretched out flat, almost seeming to sleep. Or pretending to.

  “You really won’t come in, Nat?”

  “You’re lucky they’re not hungry.”

  “And they’re lucky I’m not,” Sophie half-san
g, in nursery-rhyme tones.

  For the third time, Natalie remembered what she’d realized she knew. She jerked hard on the bench, banged her knees into the boat-bottom.

  That means I know I’m going to have to make you. That’s what he’d said. That’s how he was going to make her.

  “Oh, God,” Natalie said, holding on. Then she grabbed for the oars.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Sophie laughed, edging away from her new companion, grabbing the side. “I swear, if you try to get away, I’ll pull you down here with me.”

  “Sophie,” Natalie hissed. “You stupid, blind, reckless bitch. He’s going for our children.”

  18

  Jess had Eddie on her hip—sidelong, so he could feel her laughing, which made him giggle—but Roo had climbed almost out of the sling again, latched half to her hair and half to her shoulder with his wet cheek at her chin. She’d been spinning for five minutes straight, holding the radio as far from her body as she could with her free hand so Roo couldn’t try to climb that, and when the doorbell rang she first assumed she’d bumped one of the kid toys and went on spinning, while tiny hands flung fingerpaint-blotches of color and heat all over her skin and not-so-tiny voices filled the emptiness with echoes. Smoky cinnamon smells poured from the kitchen, and through the curtains, which she’d let Benny open, the last red streaks of sunset settled over the pier, made it look red and wet, almost new once more.

  The second ring stopped her so suddenly that Roo banged his head against her jaw and started to shriek. So Eddie did, too.

  Jess ignored them. Held them tight. Stared at the door. “Benny,” she said, but of course he couldn’t hear her over the racket. She pulled both kids to her breast, held them close. Felt them calm. So quickly, as if she’d cast a spell. As if she still had magic in her or ever had.

  “Benny,” she said again. She started to tremble, made herself stop. That spell, at least, she knew she still had mastered.

  Again, the doorbell rang.

  “Honey, could you grab that?” said Benny, leaning half out of the kitchen doorway and doffing his spatula at her like a tap dancer’s cane.

  He registered the astonishment in her face, the glare she could feel forming—of course he did; Benny registered if she so much as squinted—and in response he grinned. That infuriated her even more. He’d been cooking for close to an hour, she realized. Had plastic platters out on the counter, which he’d brought home earlier this afternoon. And she’d missed it. Assumed, so blithely, that he’d keep doing what she’d asked him to, because she knew how he felt about her. As if that were enough. As if that were how relationships ever worked. As if she didn’t know better.

  “You know who this is, don’t you?” she said. Leaning over, she put both children in the bassinet. Neither protested.

  “Unless it’s the UPS truck with that backyard I ordered for the kids, yeah. It’s our guest.”

  “Benny.”

  “What? Jess, for Christ’s sake. We need to see people sometime. You need—”

  “I told you. I warned you. I told you.”

  “Answer the door. Please?”

  Instead of moving that way, Jess went into the bedroom and began gathering her things and the kids’ things. Just like that. It wouldn’t take long. She never left anything out at the end of any day. So that she’d always be ready, when this day came. Because she’d known it would. It always came.

  Except that last time, it had been Joe leaving, not her. And he hadn’t needed to pack anything.

  Joe. So long since she’d thought about him, except in the way she thought about him all the time, in her dreams, in the shower, during pitching changes in the middle of baseball broadcasts. He just kind of hovered in the back of her mind, alongside the peach trees from her parents’ tiny backyard in Kentucky, and the tenth-grade Chem teacher with the steel-wool curls who’d told her she really might want to stick with this, and cars she’d owned. Joe had been learning to tango, ostensibly to please her, though she was a jitterbugger, and he liked taking pictures and fancied himself an artist with potential he’d never quite exploited, and he liked his hot dogs with too much relish and his sex a little straight. And that was all she’d managed to keep of the man she’d married. Almost all she’d known. Maybe all there was, really. He hadn’t had time or experience or disappointment enough to become more.

  Although he’d had dying. And he’d been plenty disappointed about that.

  In the kitchen, she heard Benny drop his spatula. “Just a minute,” she heard him say to the front door, instead of opening it. That was something, anyway. More than Joe ever had, Benny paid attention to what she needed, or maybe she’d gotten better at expressing it. He was in the bedroom with her, now. She expected him to start an argument. Instead, he waited for her to turn around. Eventually—to her own surprise—she did.

  And there he was, in his paisley cooking apron and egg-stained wifebeater. Salt-and-pepper hairs sticking out all over, but soft, somehow. Like a well-used loofah. Just add water.

  “You’ve told me nothing, Jess. You told me we needed to lay low. We’ve lain. You said it’d just be you and me.” Right on cue, Roo squawked. And Benny … Benny smiled. “And it is,” he said.

  And Jess realized she loved him. Or could love him. Really could, one day. Soon. “I said—”

  “What you didn’t say was, ‘Benny, we need to drop off the face of the earth.’ Or, ‘Benny, if you decide to give even one homeless kid one of your legendary homeless-kid pancake suppers, even once, I’m leaving you.’ Or, ‘Benny, stop being you. I just need some chest hair to sleep on.’” And again, he smiled. Sadly.

  If there hadn’t been someone at the door, Jess would have shown him exactly what she’d discovered she thought of his chest hair. She didn’t think he would have minded. Neither would she.

  “Benny, goddamnit.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  And now her daughter’s face rose between them, right up out of the floorboards. Looking the way it had on that last night, hovering over Jess in the trailer. But this time, instead of flooding Jess with anger, the sight paralyzed her with guilt. Because I failed her, she realized. Utterly. Completely. In a way Joe would never have let me. She’d dropped everything after Joe’s death. Her night pharmacy courses, her softball, her friends. Boiled herself relentlessly down to just Momness. And maybe, just maybe, she’d boiled away so much of her essence in the process that she’d stopped being Mom, too. Became just a mom. Which would never be enough for a ravenous, radiant little fireball like Natalie.

  Who’d come back, now. Who was knocking at the door, had come to show Jess just how disappointed she was. “Benny, it’s her. She’s come for the kids. She’s going to…” But even as she started to say that, the words died in her mouth. She knew it wasn’t true. If it were Natalie—her Natalie—she wouldn’t have rung the bell. Certainly not more than once. Not with her child in here.

  Also, if it were Natalie, Jess would have known. And she would have let Natalie in. Wouldn’t have been able to help it.

  Homeless-kid supper?

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Can I let him in?”

  “Okay.”

  Benny’s smile brightened. “Really?”

  “Maybe. Move. I’ll let him in.”

  Half-shoving Benny back toward the kitchen, Jess made for the door. If Benny saw her pick up the scissors on her way past the coffee table, he didn’t say anything. She considered stopping at the front window, peering through the curtains. But what good would that have done? She snapped the dead bolt back and pulled open the door.

  The scissors came up before Jess realized she’d lifted them, flicking open in her hand like a switchblade, and she had to scream inside her own head to keep her arm from jabbing forward and sticking the blades right into the kid.

  Because that’s who it was. Some pitiful, swaying, teenaged boy, pimpled, bleach blond, his gauntness terrifying. That is, it
made Jess terrified for him. From somewhere, he’d scavenged someone’s cast-off straw hat, and he doffed it now. The straw had ripped around the perimeter, and when the kid lifted it Jess could see evening sky through it. The first stars against the blackening gray.

  “Hi,” said the kid, started to put the hat back on, then kept it down at his chest. Like a little boy asking if his friend could come out to play. “Sorry. Is, uh, Benny home?”

  “Come on in, hon,” Jess said. Only when the kid was past her, and past the bassinet, did she remember to lower the scissors.

  Meedy, the kid said his name was, or Meaty. He took the plates Benny gave him and started setting the table, just like that. Wrongly, but neatly, the spoons upside down along the tops of the plastic place mats but aligned just so, the paper-towel napkins unfolded but tucked under the edges of plates. He talked mostly to Benny, only occasionally glanced toward Jess, who’d settled on the couch. She’d fished out the kids, put them back on their play mat with their plastic letter-blocks, but she’d eyed the teenager’s every move and almost jumped up to run him through when he stepped abruptly in her direction, trying what she realized only just in time was some goofy lip-twist funny face for the benefit of the children.

  This time, the kid noticed the scissors. He saw the look on Jess’ face, too, and flinched, then blushed. From a pocket of his pathetic shirt, he fished out a harmonica. A toy harmonica. Red, with a train engine on top. It might as well have been a kazoo.

  “Sorry,” said Jess. “Old habit.”

  “Me, too,” said Meedy, and Jess wondered what he meant by that. He just stood there, now, looking uncertain. Then he glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, and Jess could actually see the spasms of hunger flit over his face.

  Pitiful kid. Beautiful black roots of his hair just visible through his hideous, flaking bleach job, like good wood under layers of dust. When he looked back her way, she gestured at the harmonica.

  “Well, go ahead. Let’s hear.”

  The kid let loose, and both babies started shrieking. Amazingly, the kid didn’t stop right away, seemed to think maybe the boys were singing along. Jess had to snap her fingers in his face to halt him.