The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 18

One of the men held the girl up, the other lifted her hair so that the Master could see her face.

"They found her in the bush, Master," Grace said, not looking up. She never wanted to see the girls when they were brought in. "They say if they put her back, maybe the jackals will get her."

The girl writhed and twisted to free herself from the grasp of the men. She bared her teeth, screeching pitifully. All the way up the hill, she had screeched and struggled like this, and all the way baboons had come barking after her.

De Jong stepped out into the yard and the men dropped their eyes courteously. Everyone knew he was not to be looked at when he was inspecting a girl, even an ugly one like this, even their own daughters. The girl stopped her squirming when he walked up, as if she too knew what was good for her. She stared at him as he questioned the men, breathing lightly through her mouth like a dog.

He put his monocle to his eye and, for several minutes, examined the girl in silence. And then, at last, he stood up and said, "Grace, clean the creature up. Here," he said to the men, digging around in his pocket for change. "Take this and divide it between you."

"Bring me the scissors!" Grace said to Beauty. "Bring me the Dettol!"

Beauty held the girl down while Grace took the scissors to her hair. "Ag!" she said, handing the tangle of hair and gra.s.s and blood to the garden boy. "Burn that," she said. "And bring me the blade for shaving. And the big tin bath."

By the time the bath was filled with hot water, the girl was almost bald, her scalp as pale as dough, and bleeding here and there from the blade. When they tried to lift her in, she struggled even more, twisting and thrashing and working one leg free so that she slashed at the flesh of Grace's arm with a toenail.

"Be still, you devil!" Grace cried, giving her a hard slap on the flesh of her b.u.t.tock. "You want to go back to the bush? You want the jackals to get you?"

But the creature would not be still. By the time she was clean, the kitchen floor was awash with dirty water and she was cowering against the side of the bath, shivering, the teeth chattering. Now that she was clean, they could see that the nose and arm had been badly broken, and that the skin was sallow where the sun had not caught it. It was covered in scratches-some old, some new-and her hands and feet were calloused as hooves.

"He'll send her back after all this trouble," Beauty said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway with an armful of clothes. They were the same clothes each time, flimsy things that the girls loved to wear. "They will only be spoiled," she said. "It's a big shame." She put them on the kitchen table.

Grace pulled a small chemise out of the pile. She didn't understand these clothes, she hadn't understood them when she'd had to wear them herself. "Hold up her arms," she said to Beauty.

But it was hopeless. One by one, the clothes were tried, torn, bitten, abandoned. The best Grace could do was to pin a dishcloth onto the girl as tightly as she could. And then once it was on, the creature only squatted on her haunches like a monkey and clawed at the cloth with her good hand, drawing blood in her madness to have it off.

"It's too cruel," said Grace. "Let's take it off."

And so the girl was carried onto the veranda, naked and bald, to be presented to the man who would decide what would become of her.

Over the years, there had been rumors in the local villages of children living with baboons in the forest-of children s.n.a.t.c.hed by baboons if you left them outside unguarded. Some children the baboons ate, the rumor went, some they kept for themselves. But only the old women ever believed this.

"Look again," Julian de Jong said to the local administrator. "See if anyone reported a baby missing-six or seven years ago, white, half-breed, anything you can find. I don't want any trouble later."

But no one had reported such a thing, not in the whole province. No one would challenge his claim.

"She could have been thrown away as a newborn and left for dead," said Doctor McKenzie, leaning over to examine the arm. "Some desperate teenager, who knows? I suppose it's not out of the question that baboons could have taken her up. But it hardly seems plausible, does it? Mind you, these fractures could very well be the result of a fall from a tree. She could have grown too big, I suppose. And she's malnourished, which would make her p.r.o.ne to fractures. Anyway," he said, straightening up, "there it is, and something needs to be done about the teeth. Don't mind telling you, old boy, I'm glad I'm not the dentist. Oh, and here-don't leave without the worm powder. Sure you're up for this one, Julian?"

The first night, de Jong had Grace lock the girl into the storeroom in the servants' quarters. But all through the night, the creature screeched and wailed, keeping the servants awake. The next morning they found that the sling on her arm had been bitten away, the bandage torn from her nose. Even her calloused hands and feet were bloodied and raw from trying to climb to the small, barred window above the door.

"It's cruel to lock her in there, Master," said Grace. "She's like an animal. We must train her like a dog."

De Jong looked at the girl. All night she had visited him in dreams-more like presences, really, than dreams-but, when he woke up, he could still not put a face to the creature. Usually he knew just what he had. At first they'd cry and beg to be sent home. Sometimes it would go on for weeks, and then he'd have to punish them. But in the end Grace always managed to have them ready for him, cleaned and oiled and docile.

If there was a principle that drove Julian de Jong, it was never to obscure his motives. And so, from the outset, there'd never been a question of theft. He was doing the girls a favor, everyone knew that, even their families. How else could it be that old McIntyre the missionary had never got any of them to talk? They'd just shake their heads when he came calling, press their lips together. They knew that when he was finished with them, the girls would fetch a decent bride price regardless. There was the money, of course, but there were other things too, things they'd learned from Grace-how to lay the table and mend the sheets, and sometimes even how to make a pudding or a soup. And so, when he finally sent them home, they seemed not to know where they'd rather be. And who was the worse for it then?

He stretched out his hand to touch the rough skin of the creature's cheek. He wanted to stroke it as he would stroke one of the others when she was new, for the pleasure of the life under his hand-grateful, warm, blameless. But just as his fingers came near her, she whipped her head around and tore at the flesh of his thumb with her teeth.

"Good G.o.d!" he cried, watching the blood well into the wound. He grasped the wrist tightly with his other hand as if to restrain it from grabbing her by the throat. And all the while, she was staring at him, panting, waiting, ready.

Grace lowered her eyes. She had seen him take the riding crop to a girl for staring. She had seen him take the crop to a girl for doing nothing at all.

"I'll call Beauty to fetch the Gentian, Master," she said quickly.

He turned then, as if he had forgotten she was there. A breeze was up, playing with his frizzy gray hair. But there was nothing playful in his face, she knew. It was flushed with fury, ready for the Lord knew what.

"Grace," he said, "I want you to tell the rest of them that no hand is to be laid upon this girl, not even if she bites. You will treat her like any of the others. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Master."

"De Jong," McKenzie said, smoothing down the last of the plaster of paris, "she will need to be restrained to a board if this is to do any good. And I'll have to fashion a bucket collar so that she can't get at the nose. No one come forward to claim her?"

"No one."

"Well, the word is out, you know. The papers are bound to dig it up sooner or later."

"Let them dig. I have Dunlop's word he'll fix things. Anyway, who'd want her? She's an animal-just look what she did to my hand this morning."

McKenzie took the hand and turned it over. "It'll need a st.i.tch," he said, "and we should test her for rabies. Here, keep still."

Grace took the girl to the chair in the corner. She held her there by the wrists, securing the girl's hips between her own copious thighs. But still the girl strained forward, as if she wanted another go at de Jong's hand.

"How long till the bones knit?" de Jong said.

"Bring her back in four weeks, and we'll take a look."

For four weeks, the girl was kept strapped to a board on the sleeping porch of the upstairs veranda. There Grace fed and cleaned her, and there, every night, de Jong himself slept in the bed next to hers, talking softly to her, telling her things he wouldn't have told the others. The hot season was beginning to die down, but when he tried covering her with his knee rug, she gasped and gagged, straining against the straps that held her head in place. So he took it off again.

After a while, he began to sit at the edge of her bed, and then place a hand on her forehead, almost covering her eyes. He'd hold it there until she stopped struggling, and, when she did, he'd run his fingers around the coil of an ear and under her jaw, down into the curve of her neck and shoulders. And then, if she was quiet, he'd feed her a piece of raw liver, which she loved best of all.

And so, soon he had her suffering his touch without struggling. She would lie still, staring at him around the plaster on her nose. Once, as his hand slipped itself over her rump, she even closed her eyes and fell asleep; he could hear her breathing settle. But when he stood up to leave, she was instantly awake again, following him with her eyes through the fading light to his own bed.

As the fourth week approached, de Jong had a cage built and placed at the back of the sleeping porch. Inside, Grace placed a tin mug and bowl, his knee rug and a driving glove that had lost its mate. The girl was to be lifted so that she could see every stage of the preparations, and Grace was to hold the bowl for her to sniff before she put it inside, and then the rug, and then the glove.

"Master," Grace said, "maybe she's not so wild now. Maybe we can let her walk for herself when the arm is better."

But the minute the plaster was off and the girl was given the freedom of the cage, she began to rage and screech again as if she had just been caught. With both arms growing stronger, she began to climb and swing and leap as well. She bit and tore at the blanket until it lay in shreds on the floor of the cage. The glove she examined carefully, turning it this way and that way, and then testing it with her teeth. The teeth themselves had been drilled and cleaned before the plaster came off. But they were still brown, and a few had been pulled out, giving her an even wilder look.

No one could work out how old she really was. Certainly, she was the size of most of the girls they brought to him. But the dentist seemed to think she was a bit older, which made the whole thing a little more urgent. All night and much of the day, de Jong stayed up there, talking softly to her. The servants watched and listened. It was the voice that he used for the dogs, and for the girls when they were first brought in. Never for anyone else. After a while even the girl herself seemed to listen. She would stare at him through the bars of the cage, frowning her baboon frown. And then he would pour some water into her mug, showing her how to drink it without lapping.

Over the weeks, she became quiet for longer and longer stretches of time. Even when de Jong went away and Grace came up to sit with her, she would wait quietly for her water, for her food. It was Grace herself who found a way to stop the girl tearing up the newspaper that was placed there day after day for her mess. And then one day, when the girl messed on it by chance, Grace began to sing. "You are my sunshine," warbling in her high-pitched vibrato, and the girl c.o.c.ked her head like a bird. She ran to the bars and hung on, waiting for more. But Grace just waited too. And the next time the girl messed on the newspaper, she sang the song again, adding a line or two. And so, with singing, Grace managed to coax the creature into a pair of pants and a vest, and by the time de Jong returned, she'd learned how to pull them off and put them on herself.

"Master," Grace said, "maybe we can unlock the dogs now."

And so the dogs were led one by one to the cage, ears back, straining at the leash. When the girl heard them coming, she ran wildly for the far corner of the cage, upsetting the bowl, climbing the bars and hanging there, screeching with all her teeth. The dog itself would jump up, wagging, barking wildly, only to be scolded, corrected, made to sit and stay.

Day after day the ritual was repeated until dog and girl could stare at each other without fright. After a while, de Jong could trust the dogs to approach the cage unleashed. And then, at last, when the girl was ready to be taken out, the dogs ran beside her without incident.

"Master," Grace said, "I can't make her stand straight like you said. She still wants to bend over like a baboon. I think she was living with the baboons over there. I think she can still be like them."

De Jong smiled down at the girl. Thick black curls were beginning to cover her head. And her face was beginning to reveal itself, the nose long and straight, a high forehead, small ears, olive skin and the wide black eyes of a gypsy. Considering only the head, she could be any child, any dark, silent girl, no b.r.e.a.s.t.s yet, no body hair either. If she still stooped, what difference would it make? She was ready, baboons or no baboons, he could see it in the way she looked at him. It was Grace who was trying to hold her back for some reason.

"You'll bring her to me tomorrow evening," he said, "the usual hour."

Grace bowed her head. Usually, she was only too glad to hand a girl over because then she'd have her two weeks off. When she did return, as often as not the girl would be over the first fright of it. So what had come over her this time? "Maybe a few more days?" she said.

He smiled at Grace. It was almost as if she'd known from the start how it would be with this girl. And now that he was taking pride-well, not so much pride in the girl herself as in the things she could do, the way he could make her obey him-now that he was waking each morning to the thought of what he might make the girl do for him next, now came Grace with her suggestions.

"She does not even have a name yet," Grace said.

They were walking down to the river, which the girl always liked to do. Once he'd thought he heard her laugh-laugh or bark, it was hard to tell which. The sun was shining brilliantly on the muddy water, and she'd looked up into his face, her mouth and eyes wide. And then, freeing her hand from his, she'd bounded down the hill with the dogs, down to the water's edge.

"Tomorrow evening. In the atrium. The usual time."

Grace had dressed the girl in a simple silk shift. There was a pool in the middle of the atrium, with a fountain at its center. Most of the girls couldn't swim, but the pool was shallow, and he'd be sitting in it, naked, waiting for them with his gla.s.s of whiskey. The girls themselves always stopped at the sight of him there, the pink shoulders and small gray eyes. And then he'd rise out of the water like a sea monster and they'd make a run for it, every one of them, never mind how much Grace had told them there was no way out.

Men in the village liked to say they'd come to the house one night and cut off his manhood like a pawpaw. But Grace knew it was all talk. Without his money, where would they all be? Where would she be herself? The Master himself knew that, standing there, shameless, before her. But when he had finished with this one, where would she go? Usually, they'd run home with the money, and then, sooner or later, they'd be back at the kitchen door, wanting work. But what about this one? Where could she go except back to the baboons?

Quickly, Grace turned and walked out of the atrium.

He held his hand out to the girl, but she didn't take it. She was leaning over the low wall, splashing one hand into the water. He caught it in his own then, and took her under the arms and lifted her in. She didn't struggle, she was used to his lifting her here or there. But this time he was lifting her dress off her too, throwing it aside. She wasn't wearing any panties, he never wanted them wearing panties when they came to him. So now there was nothing but her smooth olive skin. He ran his hands down her sides and cupped one around each b.u.t.tock-small and round and girlish, the rest of the body muscled like a boy's.

She let him coax her down into the water, lapping at it happily. And when he moved one hand between her legs, she just glanced down there through the water with the frown she always wore when Grace tried to show her how to wipe herself after she'd used the toilet. But he was stroking her, prodding into her with a finger so that she jumped away and stared hard at him. And still he came after her, taking her by the arms before she could scramble up onto the fountain. He was pushing her backward to the side of the pool and his smile was gone, he was holding her arms wide so that he could force his knee between her legs.

Caught like that, she slammed her head wildly then from side to side against the edge of the tiles, shrieking piteously. A trickle of blood ran down her neck, and when at last he had her legs apart and was thrusting himself into her, she was bleeding there too. He knew from her narrowness that she'd be bleeding properly when he'd finished with her, that her blood would cloud out beautifully into the pool, turning from red to pink. It was the moment he longed for with every new offering, first the front, then the back, and always the mouths open in astonishment like this, the eyes wild and pleading, and for what? For more? More?

By the time he was finished with her and resting his head against the side of the pool, she was moaning. They all moaned like this, and what did they expect? What did this one expect after all these months she'd kept him waiting with her grunts and squawks? He stretched out an arm to grab her neck. Usually that's all it took to shut them up. If it didn't, he'd duck them under the water until they were ready to listen. "Quiet," he'd croon in his deep, soft voice. And if that didn't work, he did it again, and for longer. "Do you hear me now?" he'd whisper. "I said quiet!"

But with this one words were useless. And just as he was about to push her under, she slipped free, twirling herself into the air, twisting, leaping, springing out of reach until, at last, he had caught her by an arm. But then she only doubled back, sinking her teeth into his wrist, and, when he'd let her go, into an ear, and, at last, as his hands flew to his head, she took his throat between her jaws. And there she hung on like a wild dog, only tightening her bite as he bucked and flailed for air. But the more he struggled the deeper she bit, never loosening her jaws until he was past the pain, past the panic. Only then, only after the last damp gurgling of breath had left him limp, did she rip away the flesh and gristle she'd got hold of, and, gulping it down as she ran, leap out through an open window.

When they came in with the tea things, the whole pool was pink, pinker than they'd ever seen it, even the fountain. At first they just stood there, staring at what was left of his throat. But then they remembered the girl, and they ran, one for a kitchen knife, another to lock the doors and windows of the house.

But she never returned. And the generations that followed were inclined to laugh at the whole idea of a baboon girl-of any girl killing that demon like a leopard or a lion. They were inclined to doubt the demon himself as well. Surely someone would have reported him to the authorities? they said. Surely one of his girls would have told her story to the papers?

Elizabeth Tallent.

Never Come Back.

This was his life now, his real life, the thing he thought about most: his boy was in and out of trouble and he didn't know what to do.

Friday night when he got home late from the mill Daisy made him shower before supper, and he twisted the dial to its hottest setting and turned his back to the expensive showerhead whose spray never pulsed hard enough to perform the virtual ma.s.sage its advertising promised-or maybe at forty-three he'd used his body too hard, its aches and pains as much a part of him now as his heart or any other organ, and he had wasted good money on an illusion. Ah well. He rubbed at mirror fog and told the dark-browed frowner (his own father!) to get ready: she'd had her Victor look. Whatever this development was, it fell somewhere between failing grade in calculus and car wreck, either of which, he knows from experience, would have been announced as soon as he walked through the door. This news, while it wasn't life or death, was bad enough that she felt she needed to lay the groundwork and had already set their places at the table and poured his beer, a habit he disliked but had never objected to and never would. As a special treat Daisy's father had let her tilt the bottle over his gla.s.s while the bubbles churned and the foam puffed like a mushroom cap sidling up from dank earth, and if she enjoyed some echo of the bliss of being in her daddy's good graces while pouring his beer, Sean wasn't about to deprive her of that.

Daisy told him: Neither girl seemed very brave, yet neither seemed willing to back down. Not their own wounds but a st.u.r.dy sense of each other's being wronged had driven them to this. They had a kind of punk bravado, there on the threshold, armored in motorcycle jackets whose sleeves fell past their chipped black fingernails. A flight of barrettes had attacked their heads and seized random tufts of dirty hair. Dressed for audacity, but their pointy-chinned faces-really the same face twice-wore the stiff little mime smiles of the easily intimidated, confronting her, the tigress mother, bracing their forlorn selves as best they could, which wasn't very well at all. There was nothing to do but ask them in. As she told it to Sean, Daisy wasn't about to let them guess that (a) she pitied them, and (b) she understood right away there was going to be some truth in what they said. Victor's favorite sweater, needing some mending, lay across the arm of the sofa, and when one of the twins took it into her lap, talisman, claim, Daisy hardly needed to be told that girl was pregnant. As the twins took turns explaining not just one of them was in trouble, both were, an evil radiance pulsed in the corner of Daisy's right eye, the onset of a migraine.

A joke, Sean said. Because, twins? Somebody told these girls to go to V's house and freak out his parents.

Drinking around a bonfire and they wander deeper into the woods and they came across this mattress and it's like a sign to them. Sign is what they said. Does that sound like a joke to you? They have a word for it. Threeway. They have a word for it. Ask yourself what these girls know, what they've ever taken care of in their lives. Who's ever taken them seriously? We will. We will, now. Across the table Sean shook his head, his heavy disgust with his son failing, for once, to galvanize Daisy's defense of the boy. In the appalled harmony of their anger they traded predictions. Victor would be made to marry a twin, maybe the one whose dark eyes acquired a sheen of tears when she petted his old sweater, because she seemed the more lost. Victor would be dragged under.

"When's he get home?" Sean said.

"Away game. Not till two a.m." It was Daisy who would be waiting in her SUV when the bus pulled up at the high school to disgorge the sleepy jostling long-legged boys.

"We hold off on doing anything till we hear his side of the story."

We hold off? If she hadn't loved him she would have laughed when he said that. It wasn't going to be up to them to hold off or not hold off, but if Sean was slower to accept that reality than she was, it was because he hated decisions being out of his hands.

However disgusted he'd been the night before, in the morning Sean was somber, concerned, protective, everything Daisy could have wished when he sat Victor down at the kitchen table for what he called getting the facts straight. The reeling daylong party was true, and the bonfire, and the rain-sodden mattress in the woods where a drunken Victor had s.e.x with both girls, though not at the same time, which was what threeway meant. They must have claimed that for dramatic impact, as if this thing needed more drama, or because they were so smashed events blurred together in their minds. The next several evenings were taken up with marathon phone calls-Sean asked most of the questions and wouldn't hand the receiver to Daisy even when she could tell he'd been told something especially troubling and mouthed Give it to me! By the following weekend they knew for sure only one twin was pregnant, though it seemed both had believed they were telling the truth when they sat on Daisy's striped couch and said the babies, plural, were due July fifth. The sweater-petting girl told Sean she had liked Victor for a long time-years-and had wanted to be with him, though not in the way it had finally happened, and when he heard this Sean coughed and his eyes got wet, but who were those tears for? Daisy wanted to know. Not for his own kid, for those girls? Questioned, Victor remembered only that they were twins. He knew it sounded bad but he wasn't sure what they looked like. n.o.body was quote in love with him: that was crazy. And no, they hadn't tried to talk to him first, before coming to the house, and was that fair, that they'd a.s.sumed there was zero chance of his doing the right thing? And why was marriage the right thing if he didn't want it and whoever the girl was she didn't want it and it was only going to end in divorce? The twin who was pregnant had the ridiculous name of Esme, and what she asked for on the phone with Sean-patient, tolerant Sean-was not marriage but child support. If she had that she could get by, she insisted. She'd had a sonogram and she loved the alien-headed letter C curled up inside her. At their graduation dance she shed her high heels and flirted by b.u.mping into the tuxes of various dance partners. Victor followed her into the parking lot. Below she was flat-footed and pumpkin-bellied, above she wore strapless satin, her collarbones stark as deer antlers when he backed her up against an anonymous SUV hard enough their first sober kiss began with shrieks and whistles.

In the hushed joyous days after the baby was born Sean made a serious mistake that he blamed partly on sleep deprivation; the narrow old two-story house had hardly any soundproofing, and because Victor and Esme's bedroom was below his and Daisy's, the baby's crying woke them all. He had stopped in the one jewelry store downtown and completely on impulse laid down his credit card for a delicate bracelet consisting of several strands of silver wound around and around each other. Though simple, the bracelet was a compelling object with a strong suggestion of narrative, as if the maker had been trying to fashion the twining, gleaming progress of several competing loves. He was the sort of husband who gets teased for not noticing new earrings even when his wife repeatedly tucks her hair behind her ears, and any kind of whimsical expenditure was unlike him, but he found he couldn't leave the store without it. He stopped for a beer at the Golden West, and when he got home the only light was from the kitchen, where Esme sat at the table licking the filling from Oreos and washing it down with chocolate milk. Her smile hoped he would empathize with the joke of her appet.i.te rather than scold the late-night sugar extravaganza as, he supposed, Daisy would have done, but it was the white-trash forlornness of her feast that got to Sean-the cheapness and furtiveness and excessive, teeth-aching sweetness of this stab at self-consolation. With her china-doll hair and whiter-than-white skin she was hardly the menace to their peace they had feared, only an ignorant girl who trusted neither her baby's father nor her sneaky conviction that it was she and not the grandmother who ought to be making the big decisions about the baby's care. Esme wet a forefinger and dabbed the crumbs from Daisy's tablecloth as he set the shiny box down next to her dirty plate. She said, "What is this?" and, that fast, there were tears in her eyes. She didn't believe it was for her, but she'd just understood what it would feel like if the little box had been hers, and this disbelief was his undoing: until those tears he had honestly had no notion of giving Esme the bracelet. He heard himself say, "Just something for the new mama." As soon as she picked the ribbon apart, even before she tipped the bracelet from its mattress of cotton, he regretted his impulsiveness, but it was too late: she slid it onto her wrist and made it flash in the dim light, glancing to invite his admiration or maybe try to figure out, from his expression, what was going on. In the following days he was sorry to see that she never took it off. Luckily the household was agitated enough that n.o.body else noticed the bracelet, and he began to hope his mistake would have no ill consequences except for the change in Esme, whose corner-tilted eyes held his whenever he came into the room. Then, quick, she'd turn her head as if realizing this was the sort of thing that could give them away. Of course there was no them and not a f.u.c.king thing to give away. Sean began to blame her for his uneasiness: she had misconstrued an act of minor, impulsive charity, blown it up into something more, which had to be kept secret. The ridiculousness of her believing he was interested was not only troubling in its own right, it pointed to her readiness to immerse herself in fantasy, and this could be proof of some deeper instability. He didn't like being looked at like that in his own house, or keeping secrets. He was not a natural secret keeper, but a big-boned straightforward husband. Since he'd been nineteen, a husband. Daisy came from a rough background too, her father a part-time carpenter and full-time drunk who had once burned his kids' clothes in the backyard, the boys running back into the house for more armfuls of T-shirts and shorts, disenchanted only when their dad made them strip off their cowboy pajamas and throw those in too. The first volunteer fireman on the scene dressed the boys in slickers that reached to their ankles and bundled their naked teeth-chattering sister into an old sweater that stank of crankcase oil, and to this day when Sean changes the oil in his truck he has to scrub his hands outside or Daisy will run to the bathroom to throw up.

As Esme alternated between flirtation and sullenness he tried for kindness. This wasn't all her fault: he was helplessly responsive to vulnerability, and-he could admit it-he did have a tendency to rush in and try to fix whatever was wrong. Therefore he imitated Daisy's forbearance when Esme couldn't get even simple things right, like using hypoallergenic detergent instead of the regular kind that caused the baby to break out in a rash. The tender verbal scat of any mother cradling her baby was a language Esme didn't speak. Her hold was so tentative the baby went round-eyed and chafed his head this way and that wondering who would come to his aid. More than once Esme neglected to pick up dangerous b.u.t.tons or coins from the floor. She had to be reminded to burp him after nursing and then, chastened, would sling him across her shoulder like a sack of rice. Could you even say she loved the baby? Breast-feeding might account for Esme's sleepy-eyed bedragglement and air of waiting for real life to begin, but, Daisy said, there was absolutely no justifying the girl's self-pity. Consider where she, Daisy, had come from: worse than anything this girl had gone through, but had Sean ever seen her spend whole days feeling sorry for herself, reading wedding magazines in dirty sheets, scarcely managing to crawl from bed when the baby cried? It wasn't as if she had no support. Victor was right there. Who would have believed it? He was attentive to Esme, touchingly proud of his son, and even after a long day at the mill would stay up walking the length of the downstairs hallway with the colicky child so Esme could sleep. For the first time Victor was as good as his word, and could be counted on to deal uncomplainingly with errands and show up when he'd said he would. Victor's changed ways should have mattered more to Esme, given the desolation of her childhood. Victor was good to her. Esme could not explain what was wrong or what she wanted, Daisy said after one conversation. She was always trying to talk to the girl, who was growing more and more restless. They could all see that, but not what was coming, because it was the kind of thing you didn't want to believe would happen in your family: Esme disappeared. Dylan was almost four and for whatever reason she had concluded that four was old enough to get by without a mother. That much they learned from her note but the rest they had to find out. She had hitchhiked to the used-car dealership on the south end of town and picked out a white Subaru station wagon; Wynn Handley, the salesman, said she negotiated pleasantly and as if she knew what she was doing and (somewhat to Wynn's surprise, you could tell) ended up with a good deal. Esme paid in cash-not that unusual in a county famed for its marijuana. She left alone-that is, there was no other man. Not as far as Wynn knew, and he was being completely forthcoming in light of the family's distress. The cash was impossible to explain, since after checking online Victor reported their joint account hadn't been touched, and they hadn't saved nearly that much anyway. Esme had no credit card, of course, making it hard to trace her. Discussion of whether they were in any way to blame and where Esme could have gone and whether she was likely to call and want to talk to her son and whether, if she called, there was any chance of convincing her to come back was carried on in hushed voices because no matter what she'd done the boy should not have to hear bad things about his mother.

With Esme gone, Victor began to talk about quitting the mill. The ceaseless roar was giving him tinnitus; his back hurt; there were nights he fell asleep without showering and woke already exhausted, doomed to another day just like the last, and how was he supposed to have any energy left for a four-year-old? Had Esme thought of that before she left, he wondered-that he might not be able to keep it together? No doubt his steadiness had misled her into thinking it was safe to leave, and when he remembered how reliable and fond and funny and tolerant he had been, anger slanted murderously through his body; and it was like anger practiced on him, got better and better at leaving him with shaking hands and a dilated sense of hatred with no nearby object; and he began to be very, very careful not to be alone with his little boy.

Dylan understood this. After nightmares he did not try his dad's room, right next to his, but padded his way through the dark house up the narrow flight of stairs to the bedroom, where he slid in between Sean and Daisy. More than once his cold bare feet made accidental contact with Sean's genitals, and Sean had to capture the feet and guide them away. This left him irritably awake, needing to make the long trip to the bathroom downstairs, and when he returned the boy was still restless and Sean watched him wind a hand into Daisy's long hair and rub it against his cheek until he could sleep. Worse than jealousy was the affront to Sean's self-regard in feeling so contemptible an emotion. This was a scared little boy, this was his tight hold on safety, this was his grandfather standing by the side of the bed looking meanly down. Protectiveness toward his own flesh and blood had always been Sean's ruling principle, and if that went wrong he didn't know who he was anymore. He rose to dress for work one chilly 6:00 a.m. and noticed the amateur tattoos running cruelly down the boy's arm. Had an older kid got hold of him somehow, was this some kind of weird abuse, why hadn't he come running to his grandfather? Sean bent close to decipher the trail of descending letters. I LOVE YOU. Not another kid, then. Not abuse. But wasn't that bad for him, wouldn't the ink's toxins be absorbed through his skin, didn't she think that was going a little too far, inscribing her love on the boy while he did what-held his arm out bravely? Time, past time, for Sean to try to talk to Daisy, to suggest that day care would be a good idea, or a playgroup where the boy could meet other kids. When Daisy was tired or wanted time to herself she left the boy alone with the remote, and once Sean walked in on the boy sitting cross-legged while on the screen a serial killer wrapped body parts in plastic, and how could you talk to a child after that, what could you tell him that could explain that away? All right, they could do better. He supposed most people could do better by their kids. Maybe her judgment in taking a pen to the boy's arm wasn't perfect, but was it such a bad thing to have love inscribed on your skin, whoever you were? Half the world was dying for want of that. If Daisy adored this boy Sean could live with that. More than live with it: he admired it. He admired her for being willing to begin again when she knew how it could end.

Maybe Victor's mood would have benefited from confrontation-a kitchen-table sit-down where, with cups of reheated coffee to warm their hands, father and son could try to get at the root of the problem-but envisioning his own well-meaning heavy-heartedness and guessing that Victor would take offense, Sean was inclined to ignore his son's depression. In most cases, within a family, there was wisdom in holding one's tongue. Except for one thing: Victor could, if he concluded his chances were better elsewhere, take the boy with him when he left. This gave a precarious tilt to their household, an instability whose source was, really, Victor's fondness for appearing wronged. He came home with elaborate tales of affronts he had suffered, but Sean knew the foreman and doubted any unfairness had been shown Victor. When Victor needed to vent, Sean steered clear and Daisy, rather than voicing her true opinion-that it was time he got over Esme-calmly heard him out. Victor could ruin his mother's peace of mind by ranting at the unbelievable f.u.c.king hopelessness of this f.u.c.king dead-end town, voice so peeved and fanatical in its recounting of injustice that Sean, frowning across the dinner table, thought he must know how ridiculous he sounded, how almost crazy, but Victor kept on: he was only waiting for the day when the mill closed down for good and he could pack up his kid and his s.h.i.t and get out. What were they, blind? Couldn't they see he had no life? Did they think he could take this another f.u.c.king day? From his chair near his dad Dylan said, "Are we going away?"

"No, baby boy, you're not going anywhere," said Sean, at which Victor did the unthinkable, pulling out the gun tucked into the back of his jeans and setting it with a chime on his dinner plate and saying, "Then maybe this is what I should eat." Daisy said, "Sean," wanting him to do something, but before he could Victor pushed the plate across the table to him and said, "No, no, no, all right, I'm sorry, that was in front of the kid, that's taking it too far, I know I know I know, don't ask me if I meant it because you know I don't but I swear to G.o.d, Dad, some days it crosses my mind. But I won't. I never will." Gently he cupped his boy's head. "I'm sorry to have scared you, Dyl. Daddy got carried away."

"I want that gun out of the house," Daisy said. Sean had gone out into the starry night and folded the pa.s.senger seat of his truck forward and tucked the gun into the old parka he kept there. In bed that night Daisy turned to him, maybe needing to feel that something was still right in their life, and while he understood the impulse and even shared it, he found he was picturing Esme's pointed chin, her head thrown back, her urchin hair fanned out across a filthy mattress in the woods, an image so wrong and good he couldn't stop breathing life into it, the visitation no longer blissfully involuntary but nursed along, fed with details; the childish lift of her upper lip as she picked at the gift-box ribbon came to him, the imagined grace of her pale body against the filthy mattress, her arms stretched overhead, her profile clean against the ropy twists of dirty hair, no she wouldn't look, she wouldn't look and he came without warning, Daisy far enough gone that momentum rocked her farther, Sean relieved when she managed the trick that mostly eluded her while also, in some far-back, disownable part of his mind, judging her climax too naked, too needful, and at the same time impersonal, since she had no idea where he was in his head, and this, her greedy solitary capacity, bothered him. In the slowed-down aftermath when their habit was to roll apart and stretch frankly and begin to talk about whatever came to mind, a brief spell, an island whose sanct.i.ty they understood, where they were truly, idly, themselves, their true selves, the secret selves only they recognized in each other, she didn't move or speak and he continued to lie on her worrying that he was growing heavier and heavier, her panting exaggerated as if to communicate the extremity of her pleasure, and for a sorry couple of minutes he hated her. There was something offensive in her unawareness of his faithlessness. If he was faithless even in his mind he wanted it to matter and it couldn't matter unless she could intuit it and hold him accountable and by exerting herself against him, as she had a right to, make him want to come all the way back to her. That was up to her. If she couldn't do it then he might continue to be bewilderingly alone and even slightly, weirdly in love with the lost girl Esme, indefensible as that was, and astounding. Daisy squirmed companionably out from under, turned on her side, a hand below her cheek, the crook of her other arm bracing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the light of her eyes, the creases at the corners of her smile confiding, genuine, her goodness obvious, the goodness at the heart of his world, the expression on his face G.o.d knows what, but by her considering stillness she was working up to a revelation. With Daisy s.e.x sometimes turned the keys of the secretest locks and he could never guess what was coming, since years and decades of wrongs and sorrows awaited confession, and even now, having loved her for twenty years, he could be surprised by some small flatly told story of some terrible thing that had happened when she was a kid. Damage did that, went in so deep it took long years to surface. Tonight he had no inclination to be trusted, but could hardly stop her. "This thing's sort of been happening. Maybe four or five times? This thing of the phone ringing and no one being there. 'h.e.l.lo.' " The h.e.l.lo was hers. "And no answer. And 'h.e.l.lo.' And no answer. Somebody there, though. Somebody there."

Such a relief not to have to travel again through the charred landscape of her childhood that he almost yawned. "Kids. Messing around."

"No," she said. "Her." His frown must have been puzzled because she said, "Esme."

"Esme."

"Don't believe me then but I'm right, it was her and the last time she called I said, 'Listen to me. Are you listening?' and there was no answer and I said, 'Never come back.' I didn't know that was about to come out of my mouth, I was probably more surprised than she was. 'Never come back.' "

"And then what?"

"And then she hung up." She scratched one foot with the toes of the other. "And that's not like me. And I didn't have any right, did I?" Rueful smile. "If I'd said, 'Honey, where are you? Are you in trouble?' that would have been like me, right? And maybe she would have told me, maybe something is wrong and that girl has nowhere else to turn. She's the kind of girl there's not just one filthy mattress in the woods in her life, not just one fantastic f.u.c.kup, but last time she was lucky and found us, and we let her come live in our house, and we loved her, I think-did we love her?-and I think if things got bad enough for her she'd think of us and remember we were good to her, weren't we good to her?"

"Yes."

"Yes and now it's like I'm waiting for her to call again. Or turn up. I think that's next. She'll turn up. And I don't want her to. I never want to see that girl's face again."

He couldn't summon the energy for I'm sure it wasn't her, even if that was probably true. He could also have accepted Daisy's irrational conviction and addressed it with his usual calm. Of course you're angry. Irresponsible, not just to her little boy, but to us who took her in, who cared about her-she left without a word. It's natural to be angry.