Cursed Be the Child (10 page)

Warren felt his eyes sting with a wash of tears. He loved Vicki, loved the unique totality of her that made her Vicki and nobody else. He wanted to be with her, together with her now, wanted to make love, to be inside her.

He went upstairs to make love to his wife.

— | — | —

Ten

Lying on her side, Vicki was asleep, but not so deeply that she wasn’t aware of Warren getting into bed. He nuzzled the back of her neck, pressed his lips to the hinge of her jaw and kissed her. He put his hand on her hip. “Vicki?” He kissed her again, a light tickling touch on the ear.

A moment of panicky despair yanked her to full wakefulness as she smelled the liquor on his breath. He was drunk!

A heartbeat afterward, she realized she was, thankfully, wrong. There was neither slur nor sarcasm in his words as he said, “Vicki, I love you.”

She rolled to embrace him. Holding her, he kissed her deeply, passionately, and her openmouthed response was immediate. A rush of tingling, electric shocks raced through her.

Oh, my, she thought, surprised at her explosion of ardor, this was something! She felt like the heroine of a romance novel; she was positively melting.

Of course, a romance novel heroine wouldn’t giggle at the silly instant of having to lift up her bottom to slip off the bikini panties of her shorty pajamas. And the top of those pajamas wouldn’t get tangled around her head when she sat up to take it off.

But she was sure no romance novel heroine ever felt more loved than she did at this moment. Warren was touching her everywhere with his hands, his lips, his tongue. It had been a long time (years?) since he had been so wonderfully ardent. She understood, knew he had so many pressures, so much to drain him—his academic career, which had turned out so different from what they had expected or hoped for; the writing, consuming the hours of his life and filling his mind from one waking minute to the next. As for the drinking, well, in those dreadful drinking days, Warren had been married to the bottle, and he had been a faithful husband.

“I love you, Vicki.”

“I love hearing you say that,” she whispered. Then, knowing she had never before said anything more truthful in her life, she said, “I love you.”

She marched up the front stairs. One-two-three…Four-five-six! She stepped onto the porch and went to the front door of the house.

Missy was dreaming, and she knew it. She was inside and outside the dream. She had had dreams like this before. Sometimes they were scary and sometimes they were fun, and sometimes even after she woke up, she kind of thought what had happened in the dream was real.

Like when she dreamed she could fly. The secret was, if you got running a special way, and you breathed a special way, and you didn’t take your eyes off what was straight ahead, not even a flicker to either side, and then you held out your arms just right… Wow, you could fly!

That’s how it was in the flying dream, anyway. When she woke up, it was so real she had to try it. What happened was she ran and ran, squinting to keep her eyes straight ahead, and she kept on running until her eyes burned and the wind stung the tears on her cheeks and her side hurt so bad she thought she was going to burst. Then she fell down and ripped her jeans.

She didn’t know if she was crying because her knees hurt so much or because she would never ever fly.

But that was when she was little. She was only in kindergarten then. Now she was in second grade. She knew what was real and what was not.

And this house in her dream was real. It was the real house she lived in. “My name is Melissa Barringer, and I live at 1302 Main Street, Grove Corner, Illinois. Zip Code: 60412.” That was something you had to know.

All by itself, the front door slowly opened.

She walked into the living room. This was her house—but it wasn’t. That was how it worked in dreams sometimes. The living room was big, much bigger than it really was. It was gigantic. There was no furniture.

Instead, there was a tall mirror. It was the trick kind with wavy glass.

But there was something weird about the trick mirror. When you stood in front of it, you were supposed to see yourself. Sure, you’d look different, maybe all squashed down or stretched out like toothpaste squeezed out of the tube. You were supposed to see a goofy you—and not someone else.

But I don’t see myself in the mirror, she thought.

Yes, you do.

“What are you doing here?” she asked Lisette in-the-mirror. “I live here. This is my house. This is where I belong.”

This is where I belong.

Was Lisette being a snot? You know, repeating what she said. Oh, it didn’t matter. This was just a dream.

But now she knew it wasn’t going to be a fun dream.

Then Lisette held out her hands.

Missy took them. She didn’t want to, but she knew in dreams you sometimes have to do what you don’t want to do. She wasn’t sure if she pulled Lisette out of the mirror or if Lisette pulled her into it.

Lisette was gone.

No!

Oh, this was very scary. It was she herself who was gone. Now she just…wasn’t.

I am.

No!

Mom! Dad!

She called and called and no one came.

She was not in the living room, not anymore.

She was downstairs in the basement.

But it wasn’t the basement with the sofa and the television and the paneling on the wall. This wasn’t the real basement.

But, oh, this basement did feel real, awful and real, and it was cold, and it had a hard concrete floor and it smelled like wet coal.

And she had no clothes on.

Mom! Please, Mom, come get me. I don’t want to be here. I’m alone. I’m so alone. Mom!

Mama can’t come.

Dad! Dad!

She saw him on the wooden stairs. “I hear you, I hear you…”

Dad was here, and everything was okay.

But then she was scared all over again. She was scared worse. Dad’s face looked so strange. Sometimes on Sunday mornings, Dad slept late and Mom sent her to wake him for breakfast. When she saw him asleep, it was hard to believe he was Dad at all. His face was all changed. He looked like a stranger. And even after his eyes opened, it seemed to take a few seconds before his face would get right.

No, this was not Dad. She knew that.

“I know what you want,” he said, and it wasn’t Dad’s voice.

Love me.

“Whore! I’ll give you just what you want. Yes, I will, whore!”

He was right by her now.

Not Dad!

He was touching her.

It made her feel crawly. It made her feel sick.

Be nice. Must be nice. Let him…

It was wrong. Last year, at her old school, a policewoman came to talk to the first grade. Joey Douglas asked her if she knew Cagney and Lacey. She laughed. Then she told them about adults who wanted to touch you in ways they shouldn’t. They were bad to do that.

Kiss him and touch him and he will love…

And if someone touched you the wrong way—it didn’t matter who it was—you had to tell.

No, I won’t tell. I promise. I’ll never tell anyone! Don’t…

He raised his fist. “You filthy whore. You see what you make me do? And now you’ll tell the whole world.”

And he hit her and she screamed and he hit her and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

««—»»

They lay, tired and content, not saying anything. Then they heard the shriek.

“Jesus.”

“Missy, oh God, Missy!”

Jumping out of bed, Vicki wriggled into her pajama tops. Warren nearly toppled over, awkwardly yanking on his shorts.

The screaming went on and on, so loud it seemed to fill all the house and their minds. In the hall, Vicki shook her head. She was disoriented and felt almost disembodied.

Then she knew. “Downstairs!” she shouted as the screaming stopped.

They found Missy in the rec room. She was huddled in the corner, arms around her knees, eyes huge and unfocused. She was naked. Her mouth was shaped around a gigantic silent scream.

“Sleep walking, that’s all,” Warren said the next morning as he and Vicki sat drinking coffee in the kitchen. It was 8:30, and Missy was still asleep. “It happens. I don’t think we have any reason to be worried.”

“I hope so,” Vicki said. When they’d discovered Missy in the rec room, Vicki had an instant of paralysis. “It’s okay,” Warren whispered, as he gently shook Missy, calling her name. In a moment, Missy came around. She was bewildered and frightened. “This isn’t my room. This isn’t my bed.” She didn’t know how she got downstairs, didn’t remember taking off her clothes, didn’t recall anything except a “bad dream, a real scary one,” the kind of fright that needed to be assuaged by sleeping with Mom and Dad. Once she was dressed for sleep, Missy spent the remainder of a restless night sometimes moaning or sniffling and once kicking out so hard that Vicki was guaranteed what would be an ugly bruise on the thigh.

“She’s never walked in her sleep before,” Vicki said. “I just wonder if…”

“It doesn’t mean she’s neurotic, psychotic, or autistic,” Warren interrupted. “She doesn’t have epilepsy or a brain tumor or any other awful thing you’ve learned the symptoms of from Reader’s Digest. She walked in her sleep, that’s all, and there’s a first time for everything, right?” Warren grinned. “And how’s that for Reader’s Digest wisdom?”

“I guess, but…”

“Lot of excitement in her life, Vicki,” Warren went on. “New home, new school, new people, all kinds of things. So she’s off on a nocturnal stroll.” He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t turn nothing much into a big deal, okay?”

“I do that sometimes,” Vicki admitted. “You do, too.”

“I guess neither one of us is perfect. We’ll just have to live with it.”

Warren pushed back the chair and stood up, a tacit way of telling her that, as far as he was concerned, the discussion was finished. “Think I’ll do something middle-class and go get the car washed.” He glanced at his watch. “Back in an hour, and then we can sit down to a middle-class Saturday morning breakfast, lovingly prepared by a Super-Mom who manages to run the household while being active in her professional career.”

“Don’t tease.”

“Can if I want to. Says so in the marriage contract. Tell you what, I won’t work today. We’ll drive the clean car up to Brookfield Zoo this afternoon. Think Missy will go for that?”

“I know she will,” Vicki said. “Me, too.”

Grinning, he pointed at her. “You got it.”

When he left, Vicki poured herself another cup of coffee. That Warren had been the one to suggest a family outing greatly pleased her. When he was working on a book, he often got so wrapped up that he acted as though nothing but his battle with the blank pages was at all important.