Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  “And what did you say?” Landis asked.

  “I didn’t say anything.” Bernice was beaming. “I put out my finger and she gave it a squeeze.” She held up the finger to show him.

  “Don’t you think she might say something about this to the people?”

  “No, no, she won’t. She knows it’s a secret.”

  “Kids aren’t great with secrets.”

  She’d wrapped herself around him and hugged him hard, and he realized with some surprise that by not ever consciously making a decision, he had in fact made one.

  “It was an OK plan,” he said now.

  She went into the bathroom and began running water into the tub. “Go get some ice,” she said. “Get a whole big bag.”

  He was gone less than five minutes. When he returned, Bernice had put Emily in the tub. He reached a hand in and quickly pulled it out. “That’s cold.”

  “What do you think the ice is for? We need to get her fever down.”

  “That can’t be right. Look at her.” He put the bag down in the sink. Emily’s naked body was magnified and flattened by the bluish lens of the bathwater, and she was clearly shivering. Her eyes were shut tight. Landis reached in and scooped her up in his arms. Water splashed all over the floor and all over him. She was so light. He grabbed a towel off the rack, wrapped it around her, brought her back into the room, and sat her on her bed. Behind him, he heard the bathroom door click shut. He dried her off and put her T-shirt back on.

  “Did I do that OK?” he asked.

  “You forgot to dry my toes,” Emily said.

  He dried her toes.

  “And I want underpants.”

  “Right.” He found them on the floor, handed them to Emily, and looked away as she pulled them on. Then he tucked her in, leaving the towel under the back of her head where her hair was still wet.

  Landis knocked, entered the bathroom, and found Bernice staring into the mirror over the sink. “I’ve ruined everything,” she said. “I’m an unfit mother.”

  “Shhh. Nothing’s done that can’t be undone.”

  “It isn’t? Do you know what you are saying? Are you even in the same movie as me? Because mine is a bad gangster one, and it ends in a hail of bullets.”

  “Just stop it. Everything is under control. We’ve got a little money. We’ve got Emily. What we need is to get some sleep.”

  They went quietly back into the bedroom. Emily’s face was still flushed, her closed eyelids fluttering like tiny moths. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep. She was a strange one, he thought, just like her mother. Any other kid would have been screaming in that ice water. Landis took the towel out from under her head and hung it on a chair. “She’s still hot,” he whispered.

  Bernice took off her clothes and got into the other bed, facing away from him. As Landis undressed, he inventoried his body: his chest, hairy and beginning to gray; his appendicitis scar; another scar on his left thigh where a disturbed woman had stabbed him on a Greyhound ten years ago; the flat feet he’d inherited from his father. There’d been a time in his life when he was impressed by his body, the fact that he had muscles, the full head of long hair that made him look like a rock star. Now, he was just glad nothing embarrassed him too much.

  He eased into bed and slipped his arms around Bernice. “Who was he?”

  “Who was who?”

  “The guy. Her daddy.”

  “I’ve told you before, I don’t want to say. It doesn’t matter.”

  “If it doesn’t matter, why not tell me?”

  “Just some kid I liked for a while. He was a baker.”

  “A baker? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What did he bake?”

  “Muffins. Bread. Cakes. Pies.”

  “So what happened?”

  She rolled over onto her back. “I was a part-time cashier at the bakery. I saw the ad in Creative Loafing and I called.”

  “Where is this baker now?”

  “Married his high school sweetheart. That was his plan all along. Let’s not talk anymore, OK?”

  “You never told him?”

  “No. It didn’t involve him.”

  “It didn’t? How can you say that?”

  “I’d flunked out of school. I just did this thing. It was my business.”

  “If it was me,” he said, after a while, “I think I’d want to know.”

  There was a rustling from the next bed, and Emily got up and padded into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. When she came out, she did not return to her bed, but went to theirs and got in next to Bernice, who backed up to make room for her. Landis pressed up against Bernice’s back and put his arm over her, his fingers just brushing against Emily’s hot shoulder. As he lay there trying to gauge from their breathing whether either of them was asleep, the girl took his hand and squeezed it, lightly at first, then harder. She was making sounds. He thought about what he had prayed for as a child—a dog, a ham radio, his parents to stop the yelling that went on night after night. That was the thing about kids—they believed if they just asked the right way, they could get the things they wanted, all of them.

  In the morning, Emily’s shirt was soaked and clammy with sweat, but her fever was down. “It was the bath,” said Bernice, proudly.

  Landis left them to clean up, walked back to the repair place, and struck a deal with the owner: the much newer Hyundai, plus a hundred cash, for the Nova. It was fifteen years old and on its second engine, and there was rust lacing the metal around the wheel wells, but it ran, the tires were decent, and the radio worked.

  “Never thought I’d have a Korean car,” the owner mused. He was a fat, red-faced man of about fifty, with thick eyebrows. From the adjacent service bay came hammering sounds as the boy who’d towed them yesterday attempted to remove a tire from a rim. “But I used to say that about the Japs, and look at them now. That Nova’s a Jap car. I had a real Nova, a ’69, with a 350 V-8. That sumbitch could fly. Traded it for an El Camino. Shouldn’t have. Did you know the bombs Japan dropped on us at Pearl Harbor were made out of steel we sold them?”

  “I guess what goes around comes around,” said Landis, fingering a collection box for cerebral palsy on the counter. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with my wife to sign over the title.”

  “I’ll bet that car is made of steel from bombs we dropped on Korea. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Swords into plowshares,” said Landis. “Or sedans.” He thought about Emily. How long would it be before she asked to go home? It surprised him that she hadn’t already, but there was something between her and Bernice, an understanding, that he would probably always be excluded from. He supposed he didn’t mind that much.

  “My point exactly. If you ask me, what with these terrorists, the world’s finally come into focus. Good guys and bad guys—that’s all there really is. It’s nice to have an intelligent conversation like this from time to time.” The owner wiped sweat off his face with the back of his hand. It occurred to Landis that the last thing he ought to be doing was making an impression on people. He found a penny in his pocket and stuck it in the box.

  “Well, I’ll go get the plates off that one,” the man said.

  Landis followed him out into the sun. A mangy yellow dog watched him from the shade beside a Dumpster. As he headed back up the street to the motel, he reminded himself not to forget to transfer the booster seat they’d bought last week, the two of them shopping the baby section of Walmart like any other responsible set of parents.

  TWO

  “I know what it is,” Emily told Bernice on their second day at Gillian Cooper’s apartment. “I swallowed a demon.”

  “You did no such thing,” said Bernice. They were out by the pool, Bernice sunning in a green plastic chaise, Emily sitting up beside her with a white Diamondbacks sun visor shading her face. “There’s no such thing as demons.”

  “One slipped into my mouth while I was sleeping. Now it’s cooking me from the inside.” She seemed d
ownright pleased.

  Bernice picked up her Diet Pepsi and handed it to the girl. “Here, drink some of this. You do not have a demon in you, and you’re going to be fine.” In fact, Bernice was worried, as the child clearly still had a fever. Landis had left yesterday—she and Emily had dropped him at the bus station downtown—and she still hadn’t heard from him. She tried to tell herself that she would, that for some reason he just couldn’t get to a phone—he’d stopped service on the one at the trailer last week—but deep in her heart she knew she’d blown it. He was gone, run off, back to the life he’d had before meeting her. She thought it was a cheap and cowardly trick to leave the way he had, acting like he really wasn’t, like it was all still OK between them.

  “We need to go to church,” said Emily.

  “We do not.” She held out a tissue. “For one thing, it’s Friday. Blow real good, OK?”

  Emily did this, solemnly handing it back when she was done. The whites of her eyes were the color of robins’ eggs. “It’s OK. I can pray in my head.”

  “You better not.” Bernice watched another mother with her child on the opposite side of the pool. The woman was Mexican-looking, her daughter a round-stomached little windup toy, brown as a Brazil nut, wearing a yellow plastic water wing on each arm.

  “I can talk to him. I can talk to him for you!”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus.”

  “You know what, honey? Instead of Jesus, I wish you’d talk to Jerry.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Think of a nice, fat man with a beard and sunglasses kind of like Mr. Landis wears. Sort of Santa Claus, only with a guitar. He died, too. Instead of talking to Jesus, you talk to Jerry, OK?”

  Emily was quiet. It was hot out by the pool, but Bernice wasn’t ready for the air-conditioning again. At least out here the air was real. Gillian’s apartment was small and smelled of carpeting, and all the furniture was glass or acrylic. It was bad in there—deeply unnatural. Right now, Gillian was away at work.

  “I’m not afraid to die,” said Emily.

  “Stop it,” said Bernice. “No one’s dying.” She closed her eyes. This wasn’t so easy. She hadn’t planned on being abandoned. “Hey,” she said, brightly. “What about we go get some ice cream?”

  The Albertsons supermarket was only a few hundred yards away, but there was no practical way to walk to it—you had to cross eight lanes of traffic with no pedestrian light, and the line of cars never let up. It amazed Bernice that it had come to this—a world where you couldn’t walk, even if you wanted to. She got into the Nova, which despite being parked under one of the sun awnings that stood along the outside edge of the parking lot, still contained air as hot as a blast furnace. She cranked the feeble air conditioner and rolled down her window, then got back out and strapped Emily into her seat. For some reason, the word toenail had been stuck in her head all day, and she thought of it again. Tucson, toenail, tough, turban.She wondered if her brain was getting baked.

  Inside, the supermarket was so cold she immediately got shivers. Emily held her hand as they walked first to the liquor section, where Bernice picked out a green bottle of premixed margaritas for herself. Then they wandered past meats and the huge pharmacy area over to dairy and cakes and bread. The smell made her dizzy. Bernice did her best not to meet people’s eyes. She had no idea what the Hardings might have done in terms of putting out the word, but it wasn’t like they didn’t know her face. She tried to remember if they had any photographs around the house with her in them. She didn’t think so. But there were police artists who could draw you from descriptions. People got caught that way all the time.

  “What kind of ice cream is your favorite?” she asked.

  Emily stared at the big freezer doors. “Green,” she said.

  “Honey, there is no such thing as green ice cream. We could have chocolate or vanilla, or Chubby Hubby, or just about anything. Green would be lime, and that wouldn’t be a good flavor for ice cream. Sherbet, maybe. Is that what you’re thinking of?” Bernice opened the freezer and reached in. “Except I don’t like sherbet. Fudge ripple?”

  Emily pointed to the shelf below.

  Bernice picked up a plain-looking carton with old fashioned writing on it. “Pistachio,” she said. “You can read that? What else can you do? Wow.” She put the carton in the basket she wore over her arm. They made their way back to Health and Beauty, and she picked through the various hair products. “What do you like? Red? Auburn? You like my color? Blonde?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Emily. She had a bit of a runny nose starting up, and Bernice put down the basket, dug a tissue out of her pocket, and mopped it for her.

  “We’re going to turn you auburn. It’s a great color. I had nothing but fun when I was auburn.” She looked up and down the aisle, but they were alone.

  “I think I like my hair the way it is,” said Emily.

  “I know you do.” Bernice touched her hair, enjoying how thick it was. She imagined Tessa Harding doing this same thing. She couldn’t believe she’d allowed herself to miss so much of Emily’s life, but while she could not unmake the past, or ever really alleviate her guilt, she could still maintain some purchase on the future. She straightened the visor, which was falling down over the child’s eyes. “We need to make you look different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people are going to be trying to find you.”

  Emily coughed, a tiny, abrupt sound.

  “I mean, maybe. Don’t worry about it. OK, let’s get out of this ice-house.” Bernice took her hand and they made their way to the front, where only two registers out of ten were open. They stood behind a woman who was buying three cases of store-brand cola and four bags of cat litter.

  “Well, hello,” said the woman, looking down at Emily and ignoring Bernice entirely. “Aren’t you a lovely child? Would you like a soda?” She was pear-shaped, in a violet tracksuit, and had a nose that seemed too small for the rest of her face. Her sandals were gold, and her nails were painted a vivid shade of red. Tough Tucson toenails. Bernice imagined those toenails plowing their way through thick pile carpet in a hideous house with a private pool and a TV in every room.

  “No,” said Emily. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You tell her,” said Bernice.

  “I guess politeness is no longer something that gets taught to children,” said the woman, looking at Bernice like her head was smoking.

  “I guess some people don’t know when to mind their own business,” said Bernice. “What makes you think she’d want a cheap, warm soda? We have drinks at home.”

  “I’m sure you do,” the woman said, eyeing the bottle in Bernice’s basket. She turned away and began lugging her colas up onto the belt.

  “I don’t want my hair dyed,” said Emily. “I like it how it is.”

  Oh, Christ, Bernice thought, here it comes. Sure enough, the woman turned around again. “You’re not dyeing that child’s hair, are you?”

  “Not this minute.”

  “But you are later?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then what? Will you get her a tattoo?”

  “If she wants one, she can have one. She can have two.”

  “That’s criminal,” said the woman. “Putting chemicals on a little girl’s head.”

  “Hey, how’d you like one of those cans shoved up your ass?” asked Bernice, stepping forward. She knew the switch had been thrown—she could feel herself losing control. She wished Landis were there.

  The two security guards were beside her before she even understood that the woman had complained, or perhaps she hadn’t and the checker had summoned them with some secret button. They were polite, but insistent. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave,” said the larger of the two. He had acne-pitted cheeks, a moustache, and looked like a character from a Western movie.

  “Not without my ice cream,” she said.

  “She threatened me,” said the woman with the sandals. “Keep her away from me.”
>
  And then they had her, each with a firm grasp on one of her arms. Emily dutifully tagged alongside. The ice cream and hair dye and the margaritas had been taken from her. She felt the hot air of the parking lot, saw in the distance a horizon of low mountains and craggy rocks pointing up like broken teeth. “Hey,” she said. “This isn’t right. You can’t do this. I’m a mother.”

  “We’re sorry,” said the one with the moustache. The other was shorter, darker, possibly Native American. He hadn’t said anything, and he didn’t seem very interested in any of this. “I’m going to have to ask you not to come back.”

  Bernice shook herself loose from him. “You get your kicks doing that?” she asked. “Pushing women around? What if I told them inside that you touched my breast just now?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t. Anyway, you’re not going back inside. That’s the whole point.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Bernice. “My daughter wants pistachio ice cream. That rhinoceros in there insulted me.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am.” He looked down at Emily, who was standing in the sun with her hands folded in front of her. He smiled. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Don’t start,” said Bernice, taking Emily’s hand and hauling her off toward the car. “Let’s go find a store that isn’t run by fascists.”

  They drove over to Oracle, the next big intersection, where there was another shopping center, but they didn’t have pistachio ice cream in the smaller, crummier market there, so Bernice chose chocolate, which was what she’d rather have had anyway. They sold premixed margaritas, too, for a dollar more, but she bought a bottle anyway, figuring it was worth it, considering the way her day had gone so far. She decided maybe the lady had been right about the hair dyeing, and she didn’t even look for another box. Perhaps they should have thought up something clever to put the Hardings off track, like smashing the TV or writing odes to Satan on the bathroom mirror. Instead, they had taken clothes and even Emily’s toothbrush. And they hadn’t left a ransom note. Kidnappers always wanted a ransom. Changing Emily’s hair color wasn’t likely to solve much.