Somebody Else's Daughter (31 page)

“It's not boring.”

“I have a good costume.”

“You'll make a splendid witch.”

“What about you?”

“I'm too old.”

“No! You should be a pirate,” she told him.

“Aargh!”

“You'd make a good pirate. How long did it take to grow your beard?”

“A long time. What do you think, should I shave it?”

She shrugged and asked, because she was intensely curious to know if he had one, “What does your girlfriend think?”

“Don't have one.”

“Why not?”

“I had one once. Then there were a few insignificant relationships.”

“What do you mean, insignificant?”

“Well,” he hesitated. “Let's just say I wasn't in love.”

“Well, you should find a girlfriend and ask her about your beard.” She tilted her head from side to side, trying to figure out how he would look without it. He had high cheekbones and gray eyes with little yellow flecks in them and he had a wide mouth that reminded her of a hammock.
A smile you could sleep in,
she thought.

“You know, that's a very good idea. I think I'll do that.”

“I think you would miss it, though,” she said.

“No doubt.” He stroked his beard contemplatively. “It's kind of like having a pet.”

“On second thought, maybe you should shave it. Unless, of course, you have a chin issue.”

“No, not that I know of, no chin issue. In fact, I have a rather respectable chin.” He held it up for her to see, dignified-like, in profile. “But I think you're right. Beards are totally out.”

“Off with your beard!” she proclaimed, and he laughed, but they both seemed to doubt that he would ever shave it.

He turned the van into the street. They passed small houses with tidy green lawns. People had put out pumpkins and skeletons and some had made gravestones out of Styrofoam that said R.I.P. on them. “How's this thing going for you? The internship. Is it hard?”

Her throat went tight and she admitted that it was.

“You're very bold to do it.”

They'd reached the end of the block, but for some reason she hesitated about getting out. She wished she could just go home, where everything was beautiful and orderly, unlike Sunrise House, where everything was not. They sat there another minute, looking at the small brown house. He didn't rush her. Slowly, she gathered her things and got out. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Gallagher.”

“You got it.”

There were two new children at Sunrise House, five-year-old twins. They were very shy, a boy and a girl, and said nothing to anyone. Their mother had snuck out of their apartment in the middle of the night and they had walked six miles into town—the mother had been beaten up by her husband. She was barefoot, the children only in socks and pajamas. Willa took the twins and Gracie and Tyrell out onto the back porch. Regina had bought small pumpkins for them to decorate. The grass was very green in the yard and beyond the high fence you could see the distant mountains. Willa liked how the mountains surrounded the town—all of the Berkshires were surrounded. They were like the walls around a castle, she thought, or like Regina's big, open arms around the children. Regina was a big mountain of a woman, she thought. Willa spread out newspaper on the porch floor, which had been painted a gritty, tree-trunk brown. She put the pumpkins out in a row. “Everybody pick a pumpkin,” she said.

The children considered the pumpkins carefully. Tyrell chose the largest and Gracie chose a lumpy, deformed one. The twins decided to share the smallest one. Willa set up the paint and the children got busy. Most of them made faces. The most prominent feature on each pumpkin, Willa observed, was the smile, and it came to her that children always drew a smile on a face, no matter what. She thought about it a moment, eager to derive some deep conclusion.
People just want to be happy,
she thought.

She could remember making jack-o'-lanterns with her dad. It was her favorite thing about Halloween, the two of them at the kitchen table, cutting shapes out of the pumpkin, crazy faces with jagged teeth and wicked eyebrows and triangle noses. When she was little, her dad always took her into town to trick or treat, while her mother stayed home just in case someone showed up—which was rare on their rural road. Her dad would put on his old pea coat from high school and a sailor cap and put a pipe in his mouth and he'd hobble around, calling himself a drunken sailor and she'd laugh and laugh. They'd light their pumpkins on the doorstep and watch the jack-o'-lanterns come alive. Later, when they returned home, she'd dump out her loot on the kitchen floor, strategically taking inventory. It made her smile, thinking of it now.

When they had finished their pumpkins, Willa brought them inside to have a snack. They sat at the little children's table in the dining room. Someone had put a bird feeder outside the window and they liked to watch the birds. Bobolinks, Regina had called them. Usually, somebody spilled and she would have to go into the kitchen for paper towels and come back and clean it up and tell the child not to worry, but so far that afternoon nobody had. A car pulled up out front. A girl was getting out of a taxi. She ran toward the house as if the sky were raining bullets. Immediately, Willa went to the stairs and called up for Regina, then went to the door to let the girl in. The girl was tall and scrawny with brown hair streaked with gold. She had on a raincoat, a Burberry, Willa noted, but she didn't seem like the kind of girl who could afford one. The girl glanced over at the children, her face raw, her eyes wild. Regina came down and Willa went back over to the children, who were watching the stranger with fascination, no doubt comparing her with their mothers. The girl turned her back on them, furiously unbuttoning her coat while Regina stood there, waiting, her eyes narrowed with anticipation. When the girl opened her coat, showing Regina what somebody had done to her, Willa caught the flash of her skirt—it looked like a Pioneer uniform— a green tartan kilt—and a chill throttled her insides.

Regina said, “You ought to go to the hospital, Petra.”

The girl shook her head. “I don't have any money.” She spoke with an accent. “I have no insurance.”

“You know you don't need any. They'll take care of you. You need to put this on record. You need to talk to the police.”

Willa noticed the blood dripping on the floor.

“I can't,” the girl cried. “You know I can't.”

“You need a doctor, honey.”

“Doctors ask questions,” she muttered. “The cut is not deep. Please.”

“I thought we'd made some progress last time, but now I don't know.” Regina held her hand out to the girl. “Let's go upstairs and clean you up.”

Regina led the girl upstairs, murmuring tenderly to her, and Willa felt humble down to her bones.

“She's bleeding,” Gracie said, pointing to the small puddle of blood.

Willa hurried into the kitchen and wet a paper towel and went and wiped the blood up. When she got back to the table Tyrell said, “She got cut up.”

The twins just stared.

“Do you like the cookies?” Willa said to them, gesturing, and they nodded their heads grimly.

“Mama got cut too,” Tyrell said. “He had a knife,” he held up his hands, “this big.”

Willa felt something go tight in her throat. “It's good for your mama to be here,” she told the boy, “where she won't get hurt anymore.”

“She cry every night.” The boy looked at her doubtfully. “She say it her fault.” He started to cry.

“It's not,” Willa said. “It's not her fault.”

He cried and cried, rubbing his eyes with his fists. She took his small body into her arms and held him tight. “It's okay,” she said, over and over, but it was such a lie she had trouble getting the little words out of her mouth.

Later, Regina asked her to bring the new girl up some tea. She handed her a tray. “See if she'll explain the uniform.”

The girl was in what they called the lounge. It was just a small room with an old green couch and a TV. She had her feet up on a coffee table and she was staring without expression at one of the soaps. The girl watched Willa's every move, entering the room, placing the tray on the desk, as if she were protecting something Willa might steal.

“We're wearing the same skirt,” Willa said.

The girl said nothing. Willa stood there.

“Where did you get it?”

The girl hesitated, looking as if she were translating in her head, but they both knew she spoke perfect English. She smiled a little. “It was a gift.”

“It's my school uniform.”

“A friend of mine. He likes it.”

“That's gross.”

“Why?”

“It just is.”

The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. “It is not unusual. He is very respectable gentleman.” She spit out a laugh.

“You're not allowed to smoke.”

The girl got up and went to the window and opened it and blew the smoke out through the crack. “Do you have any money, rich girl?”

Willa shook her head. She watched the girl as she smoked. “What happened to you?”

“Do you want to see?” The girl lifted her shirt. Someone had scratched the word LOVER into her abdomen with a knife.

“Does it hurt?”

The girl nodded. “I have a lot of marks.” She shrugged. “They are my stories.”

Willa took one of her cigarettes and lit it and the girl cracked a smile, as if Willa was her new accomplice. The two of them smoked out the window.

“What do you do?” Willa asked.

“You don't know?”

“Are you a student?”

Again the girl spit a laugh. “No. I work.” She grabbed her crotch. “Step into my office.”

“Why do you do that?”

“Why?” She seemed surprised by the question and shrugged as if Willa were stupid. “I'd prefer to clean toilets, but I can't make so much money.”

Willa noticed a tattoo on the back of her ankle, a heart wrapped in chains. “It's pretty,” she said, wanting to keep the conversation going.

“For my mother,” the girl said, her eyes lit with pride. “She's dead already.”

28

When Jack Heath had asked Nate to take over the responsibility of driving the community service van, he'd gladly accepted, knowing it would give him more time alone with Willa. Heath had found him just before lunch and said he needed to talk, it was a matter of some urgency, would he come outside, and Nate wondered if he'd been found out. Maybe the Goldings had recognized him. But, as it turned out, that wasn't the case. They walked down to the lake, where Heath confided in him about his wife. “She's having some personal issues,” is how he put it. His wife was prone to depression, he explained, and suffered from spells of paranoia. He had serious concerns about her well-being; he wanted to spend more time at home. Heath looked out at the lake, squinting in the bright sunlight. “It's a shame, really,” he said. “The toll it's taken on her.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“The academic life,” Heath went on. “It can be hard on the family. I'm assuming you can relate to that?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, I believe I can.”

“It's something we all share.” He looked at Nate meaningfully.

As much as he was one of them, he felt distinctly apart, as though there were a thin piece of glass between them. “I hope she feels better soon,” Nate offered.

He too had observed certain peculiarities in Maggie Heath. Her lunch menu, in particular, had become nothing short of bizarre. From a small, plastic container, she'd extract her lunch with the precision of a doctor about to perform a procedure: eight cashews, ten carrot sticks, two radishes, a cheese stick, and a can of prune juice, all consumed methodically like forms of medication. Nate guessed that she'd lost at least fifteen pounds since his arrival at Pioneer. But these things he kept to himself. His other concern, which he informed Heath about, was her treatment of Teddy Squire, which verged on the extreme. To give an example, Nate described how she'd marked up the boy's story with a blatant disregard for his feelings. “I tried to talk to her about it,” Nate said. “I didn't get very far.” Quite frankly, he told Heath, it was unprofessional. He went on to explain how she'd pushed the paper into his mailbox with such force that it crumpled like a piece of trash. Nate had been unwilling to hand it back to the boy in that condition and had made up a story about accidentally spilling coffee on it. To his relief, Teddy had shrugged and said it wasn't a big deal. He had another copy on his hard drive.

Heath listened patiently, nodding his head. There were several variables to consider, he told him, speaking slowly, but he did not elaborate, and they walked back up to campus in silence and went their separate ways.

“I'll be driving the community service van from now on,” he announced to the students, who shrugged noncommittally as they climbed into their seats—except, he thought, for Willa, whose eyes seemed to soften with relief. Nate was especially grateful for the seven minutes they had after dropping off the sophomores at Solomon's Table. Seven minutes of time to just be together in the same place, breathing the same air. It was all he wanted. The more he came to know her, the more he saw little pieces of himself in her mannerisms. Her hair, her bushy eyebrows, her long fingers, the way she shook her hair over one shoulder in the exact same way Catherine had, the way she moved, curling herself up into a square on the seat, the way she always took off her shoes just like he did, preferring to be barefoot—it seemed unfair that she didn't know who he was, that he couldn't possibly tell her, yet it probably didn't matter, after all. She had a life here. She had her parents, grandparents; they were her family tree, not he and Catherine. She'd done just fine without them.