Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  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.

  Moreover, how well did he know his own relations? He had met Cat’s mother only once, when he’d gone to tell her that Cat had died. He’d tracked her down in a trailer park in Sacramento. She lived alone, long divorced. She’d cooked him supper, and packed all of Cat’s childhood mementos in a suitcase for him. “You knew her better, ” is what she’d told him. He’d taken a train back east, a seven-day journey across the country. He recalled the ride as an excursion through purgatory, shooting dope in the train lavatory as the world flashed by through the tiny window, the smell of urine in his nostrils, the sound of the train cutting up the air.

  At six sharp, as instructed, he pulled the van up in front of Sunrise House to wait for Willa to come out. It was already dark and the air was cool. When the door to the house opened, he saw a brightly lit foyer, four small children at Willa’s hips hugging her good-bye. It choked him up a little and he coughed. She climbed into the back. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  She seemed upset. She told him a story about a prostitute who’d come in wearing a Pioneer skirt. He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. He watched her in the rearview mirror and saw that she’d begun to cry.

  “What’s up, what’s the matter?”

  “It’s not fair. How people treat each other. It’s very sad.”

  He didn’t know what to say to her. The things that came to mind were all clichés and would do her no good. The world was full of pitiful people—he himself had been one once—and she was getting her first taste of it. “People can change,” he said, but the words sounded false—platitudes from a clueless man.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not so sure.”

  “People get into stuff. For a while it defines them. Drugs and stuff. It gets the best of them. But it can end.”

  She said nothing. The car swelled with silence. At last she said, “I just want to go home.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. He thought of the letter he’d written to her on the afternoon he’d given her up. It was after her mother had died, after they’d taken the body away. For several hours, he’d sat in the car outside the Goldings’ home, unable to move—stuck—and he’d found the paper and a pen and started writing. When he’d finally finished it, he’d felt a little better. He’d gotten out of the car and walked to the door and it was like walking halfway around the world, his body weighed down, as if with sand, and he caught a glimpse of them through the window, the new parents celebrating their baby, holding her up, cooing at her, doing all the silly things parents do around babies—and he knew it was time to go.

  It was Candace who’d come to the door, wearing an expression of confusion, of feral determination, as though she would do whatever it took to keep the baby—and he shook his head that, no, he hadn’t changed his mind, nothing like that, he only had a request, and he’d held up the letter in his trembling hand.

  It’s the truth, he’d said. One day, their daughter would need to know it.

  Maybe that day had come.

  He turned onto North Street then circled around to Solomon’s Table where the group of sophomores was waiting out front. They climbed in and he drove them all back to school, the whole noisy lot of them, where their parents waited in the muddy horseshoe driveway in their respective cars. He watched Willa as she ran to her father’s car. Although he didn’t want to, although he knew it was inappropriate, he felt a tug of jealousy when she got in and kissed Joe Golding’s cheek and they drove off together, father and daughter, oblivious to their remarkable good fortune.

  Halloween was a big deal in Stockbridge. The Hopper Inn had a party every year. It was a grand old place, boasting the extravagant architecture of the twenties. It sat on ten pricey acres at the end of a long gravel driveway on Main Street. Larkin had told Nate that the inn’s owners, a married couple in their forties, were amateur trapeze artists and had set up a trapeze in their backyard. Every year on Halloween night they put on a trapeze show and everybody in town was invited. Nate had a few drinks at Hardy’s then walked over to see what was going on. A big crowd had gathered in the backyard to watch the act. Torches had been staked all around the property, giving off the smoke of kerosene, and there was a woman in circus clothes leading a baby bear around on a leash. Small tents had been set up with people doing tricks: there were card tricks, a snake charmer, a fortune teller, a man swallowing a sword. A band of drummers, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, were drumming a tribal beat, and Nate could feel the vibration in his feet, coming up through the grass. They were known in the area, bare-chested men with bongos and women too, in long skirts and halter tops, their bellies showing, their bodies gleaming in the cool night air.

  She was there. Claire. She was sitting in a lawn chair drinking something out of a paper cup. In the torchlight her face had an orange glow, and her eyes shone and glittered. He went over to her and sat on the ground. “Trick or treat,” he said.

  “Where’s your costume?”

  He thought she looked pleased to see him. “I’m wearing it.”

  She cocked her head. “Don’t tell me.” Squinting. “You’re a struggling writer.”

  “You’re good. What gave it away?”

  “The beard, of course. Can I touch it?”

  “Be careful, something might jump out and bite you.”

  She grinned. She reached out and tugged on it.

  “Ow.”

  “I thought it was part of your costume.”

  “Very funny. What are you drinking?”

  “Punch,” she showed him. “It’s black.”

  “That’s a sur
prise. What the hell is it?”

  “Here.” She handed him her cup. “It tastes like ouzo.”

  He took a sip. “It’s actually pretty good. Are my teeth black?” She grinned. “Are mine?”

  They both had black teeth.

  “Look,” she said, “they’re starting.”

  The beat of the drums got louder, faster, and all eyes were on the scaffold. The man and woman climbed up on opposite sides to their platforms. They were wearing skeleton costumes, black leotards with glow-in-the-dark bones stitched into the fabric. There was a net below, yet it vanished into darkness, compounding the sense of risk and danger. The woman began the act, perched on her little swing like an exotic bird. She did a few tricks, hanging upside down, doing somersaults the way kids do on the monkey bars in a playground. Then the man started swinging. He did some tricks too, then hinged at the knees and hung upside down. Simultaneously, the woman dropped through the air, swanlike, and he caught her around the ankles. The crowd ooed and ahhed in terror and Claire gripped his arm. Delighted, Nate looked over at her and she smiled, gratefully, he thought, and he held her gaze, and then suddenly everyone was cheering. The man and his wife were back on the platform. “I think I need a real drink,” Claire said.

  They went to Hardy’s. She ordered scotch, and he had a beer. “That was amazing,” she said. “Talk about trust.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “Imagine just flying through the air like that? Trusting someone to catch you?”

  “I know.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.”

  He watched her as she looked around the room, her eyes like magnets, pulling at life, drawing it near. There was a crowd at the bar. It was peak leaf-watching season and the place was packed with tourists, some of whom were in costume. They took their drinks to a small table in the corner. It was too noisy to talk; they had to shout at each other across the table. She finished her drink and glanced at her watch. “I need to get home. I gave Teddy a curfew. Can you give me a lift?”