Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

  The curse was supposed to be said aloud, but Hanna knew she’d become a most special witch and that mouthing the words would suffice. She read the pages carefully to get a sense for what she was supposed to say. The article recommended destroying the photograph slowly, over many days, but Hanna wasn’t concerned about deviating from the internet’s instructions.

  She sat cross-legged and tore a tiny corner off the picture of sleeping Mommy. In her mind, she willed it to be a picture of dead Mommy and mouthed her spell.

  I inflict this curse on you.

  Piece by piece, she tore apart the picture, making a pile of paper bits in her notebook. She mouthed her spell over and over.

  It was so clear in her mind. In two days Daddy would build a fire and sing his odes to spring. Hanna would place her drawing of Marie-Anne on the flames, where it would curl and blacken and disappear. And then she’d toss the bits of Mommy like confetti into the fire. She could already feel Marie-Anne, redundant and unnecessary, leaving her; she would wisp away into the sky and be gone. It remained to be seen what would become of Mommy; she wasn’t sure how her spell would manifest.

  Determined not to fail, she tore the scraps into even smaller pieces and began to whisper.

  “I inflict this curse on you. I will thee to die. You will suffer and cease to be.”

  SUZETTE

  ALEX SLIPPED BACK into the room, easing the door shut behind him.

  “She’s asleep,” he said

  “Thank you.” It was 8:09, right on time. With a nimble determination, he’d managed to keep the household entertained—and free of drama—while maintaining Hanna’s regular routine.

  He ducked into the closet and emerged with a pair of clean socks, then sat on the bed to put them on. After a surprisingly pleasant afternoon and evening—the pain in her feet notwithstanding—with Alex close and attentive to her needs, Suzette felt a surge of dread. She shook her head, not wanting to believe what was happening.

  “You’re going out?” She pushed herself away from the headboard, her muscles taut and anxious. Was he running away to the gym? To work, for something Matt could do, or Alex could do on another day?

  “Two quick stops.” He grabbed his wallet from his bedside table.

  “Why? No. Alex, no.”

  He stood, tucking his wallet into the back pocket of his gym pants. With his fingers he combed his hair.

  “Just for a minute, to get a few things.”

  “What things? No.”

  He came around to her side of the bed, cozying next to her. Where before she’d seen compassion and concern in all his efforts, now she read selfishness. Condescension. Even in the way he took her hand.

  “We need a few things, for the weekend. It’ll be—”

  She withdrew her hand. “Fine? What if she wakes up? Finds me here alone? At least … Leave me with a weapon or something.” She regretted the words the minute she said them. “I’m…”

  Such pain on his face. She felt it, too. Everywhere. Her feet, her heart. Her body, stiffened by a day of cautious movement.

  “I was going to get you a pair of crutches.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you can get around better.”

  “Tired of carrying me to the bathroom?” She wanted it to sound light, but the reminder of her incapacitation only increased his torment. “Sorry. Maybe … We could put a bell on her door, so I can hear if she gets up.” She was thinking of his string of brass bells that dangled from his bookcase—a souvenir from his parents’ trip to Nepal.

  He nodded, but didn’t get up to retrieve them. “Maybe I could jury-rig a lock of some kind.”

  “Lock her in?”

  He shrugged, and his powerlessness sparked a new ache within her.

  “The bells will be fine,” she said, reluctant to admit she’d feel safer with a hockey stick, or a rolling pin, or an electric cattle prod. Maybe after he left, she’d hobble to the closet and dig out his old tennis racket.

  As much as she didn’t want him to leave, the thought of them all as prisoners, trapped within the walls of their energy-efficient dream home, was equally undesirable. He left the bedroom door open and she watched him tiptoe past Hanna’s door, aware of his own heaviness even as his socks muffled his footfalls.

  Weapons, locks, bells. Her failures pierced her in obsidian shards. What would come next? Straitjackets? Padded rooms? A lobotomy? Her thoughts waffled between wanting to help her daughter, and wanting to be free of her. Maybe a mental institution could accomplish both.

  The ceiling creaked as he walked across the floor above her head, followed by the tinkling of bells. A minute later he was back in the hallway. Cocooning them in his hands, he hung the bells from Hanna’s doorknob, snuffing out their chimes as they cascaded to the floor.

  He held his long limbs stiffly as he came back in, shutting the door behind him and exhaling with relief.

  “I feel like a thief,” he whispered, sitting on the bed’s corner, elbows on his knees, massaging a great burden from his scalp. “I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “The best we can.” She wanted to comfort him but couldn’t reach him where he was sitting, not without moving.

  “This is so fucking…” He pushed the thought aside. “So anyway.” He angled toward her. “Crutches from Rite Aid, maybe replenish the medical supplies, and a quick stop for some firewood, then I’ll be right back.”

  “Firewood?”

  “It’s Valborg, day after tomorrow.”

  His eyes looked sunken in, skeletal, and she saw not his exhaustion but how he would look as an old man. Frail. Tottering. Oblivious.

  “We’re not celebrating Walpurgis.” It was so final, the bite of her words. Yet he protested.

  “Why not?”

  “A fire? In our backyard? With how she’s been? You didn’t want to believe it but she likely did set that garbage can on fire when she was in—”

  “It’s not just for her, it’s a tradition, welcoming in the spring—”

  “Walpurgis? Witches’ Night? You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s a bit of home,” he said, his face so innocent and needy. Though the way they celebrated it was nothing like home, where communities gathered in the parks, singing, eating, drinking, tossing the debris from their gardens into a massive bonfire.

  Imagining their reduced ritual suddenly saddened her. The three of them gathered in the backyard around their copper fire pit, Alex singing alone in Swedish. It felt wrong to deny him such a paltry celebration.

  “Once upon a time … Wasn’t it about warding off witches and evil spirits?” she asked, seeing a relevant application for the old pagan holiday.

  Alex gave her a devilish half grin. “I already thought of that. I sort of made a deal. With Hanna.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “To get rid of Marie-Anne.”

  “Like an exorcism? Are you fucking insane?” Not that it was an inherently bad idea, but what did either of them know about exorcising a witch from a seven-year-old?

  “No! Like when you wanted to get rid of negative thoughts, leave things behind, and you wrote it all down—I don’t know what you wrote. And tossed it into the flames. Like that. Maybe Marie-Anne’s like … her bad side. So I told her to draw a picture, and on Sunday we’ll burn it. It might help, you don’t know.”

  If it wasn’t for her child’s ability to cause harm, it almost seemed like a reasonable plan. But something about her daughter near fire troubled her.

  “Maybe she’s become dependent on her,” she said, thinking about how Beatrix had described Marie-Anne as an aspect of Hanna’s personality.

  “Exactly. And we can encourage her, in a really harmless way, to get rid of her. I want Hanna back. Sweet Hanna. Maybe not perfect; there’ll still be things to work on. But maybe we can purge this violent side of her.”

  “You really think it’s that easy?” She fought to keep the disbelief from her voice. “She carried out
a sophisticated, well-planned attack—”

  “I know! I’m not forgetting what she did—but what are we supposed to do? Tiptoe around her and pretend like nothing happened?”

  “Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?”

  “And that’s why I’m trying to do something! She’s our child. She needs us to help her.”

  For a moment they were both silent, lost in the magnitude of their child’s disrepair.

  “Do you really think…” Her anger dissipated. She wanted a dram of Alex’s optimism. “You think that could possibly … make a difference?”

  Alex’s eyes wandered, lost, and he shook his head. But he tried to talk himself into it. “Maybe this, everything—maybe she really is trying to communicate with us, and it’s all going wrong. For what it’s worth, when I talked to her—she seemed remorseful. Sad. I don’t want her to think we’ve abandoned her. If she’s … sick…”

  No, Suzette couldn’t do such a thing, either. Their daughter’s sickness—her impending diagnosis—sat between them like an expanding tumor, threatening to smother them all. Hanna probably didn’t even understand what her father had asked her to do. But a purge was harmless, if ineffective.

  “Have to keep a close eye on her,” she said, relenting for the cause of Alex’s well-being, his need to not be helpless.

  “Obviously.”

  “Really close. Don’t want her burning anything else.”

  “I’ll be right there the whole time.”

  “What about the champagne and strawberries?” she asked, swallowing her misgivings, and trying to lessen the sense of doom. In previous years he’d insisted on the traditional Valborg breakfast.

  “I’ll have to make another stop for that,” he said, sidling up to her, pressing his cheek to hers as he kissed her ear. “You’ll be okay here?”

  She smiled and nodded, and grabbed up her cellphone, holding it in both hands like it would save her in an emergency. She almost laughed, imagining herself calling 9-1-1 to say that her demonic daughter had arisen and was threatening … oh, never mind, she was just heading to the bathroom for a pee.

  “Hurry back,” she said.

  He gave her another quick kiss and sprang from the bed.

  “Leave it open?” she asked as he started to close the bedroom door.

  “Back soon,” he whispered, leaving the door fully open. He jogged down the stairs. Keys jangled, and the dead bolt clicked into place.

  A minute later his car started. The house loomed heavy as a grave, and her arm hairs prickled with the thought of her daughter emerging from her room, white-eyed and alien, her teeth transformed into daggers. She experienced for a moment the dream sensation of floating, knowing this is how her daughter’s body would move. Toward her. Smiling.

  She wanted to close her door, have a barrier between her and the monster that might yet awaken. She’d asked Alex to keep it open so she could keep an eye on the hallway, but now she couldn’t stop staring at the bells. Anticipating the slightest movement. Her vision grew blurry with the effort and she considered calling him, telling him she’d changed her mind. Come home.

  But she didn’t.

  Marie-Anne had died once before in a fire, an injustice of her time. They had to try. And justice was on their side this time. Once there’d been a baby named Hanna who smiled at the sun. A baby who flapped her arms when she saw birds. A giggler. Hanna wasn’t happy. And no speech-language pathologist or pediatrician had ever diagnosed a reason for her mutism. Suzette couldn’t gauge how prepared Alex was for their child to be declared mentally ill, though Dr. Yamamoto had all but said it. They’d finally have something to work with—and the common goal of helping Hanna.

  She tried to quell her nerves with the mantra sick not demonic.

  A shriek wafted in from the street, followed by a chorus of laughter. A carefree group heading to one of the local bars, she supposed. Ready to get drunk. Ready to get laid. In spite of her worries she didn’t envy them. There were no answers out there—in the communal obliteration, or the heartless sex, or the determined separation of self from reality. She had people she loved, people worth fighting for.

  Maybe she should offer Hanna help in drawing Marie-Anne. Maybe it could be their first real mother-daughter art project. She could say through her actions: “I am helping you excise your inner demons, because I love you. And I’m sorry for your terrible, unreachable pain.”

  That’s what she would say if the bells jingled, if the door opened, “I love you, no matter what you do.”

  HANNA

  SHE WATCHED FROM the kitchen table, slurping up the last of her banana slices and milk, as Daddy helped Mommy hobble down the stairs. Everything since her revenge with the thumbtacks had been weird and wobbly, like the whole house was on a seesaw that wouldn’t level out. No one yelled at her or threatened her with punishment. But she’d spent most of the previous day alone as Daddy made only cursory checks on her. She liked her aloneness best when it was of her own choosing. Daddy had barely helped with her bath, and didn’t bother to comb her hair so it didn’t hurt. And then he’d refused to read from her favorite book. He picked one instead, and it was boring and babyish, and she just stared at him while he hurried through it.

  When she emerged from her room the door exploded with noise, and she stood there frozen for a moment, afraid that her face or hands would fall off. Then she saw they were just the bells from Daddy’s study, bells she liked to tap with the tip of her finger while they hung in their rightful place upstairs. She could make them sing a tiny song, like the music fairies or insects might make. Daddy came into the hall, rubbing his eyes, and she pointed at the bells. Were they a gift? Who had moved them? Why?

  “Gomorron,” Daddy said. He scratched his beard and ignored her silent questions.

  She got dressed and he fixed her breakfast, but he sliced her bananas thicker than Mommy did, and she liked them thinner so she could break them easily with her spoon.

  Mommy’s crutches were mesmerizing, like an extra pair of giant robot arms. She wore her exercise clothes—stretchy but formfitting—which she also wore to clean the house, but it didn’t seem likely that she could do either. Daddy glued his eyes to Mommy as she set the crutches on the step beneath her, placed one flat foot on it and then the other. Again and again, until she’d made her way down the stairs. Daddy walked down the steps backward in front of her, holding his hands out like he was afraid she would fall.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  “Not too bad. Won’t be going up and down too much, though. But the crutches really help for moving across the floor.”

  Daddy ran down the last couple of steps and darted over to the table to pull out a chair. They watched together as Mommy swung her legs between the crutches, making surprising speed.

  He tucked Mommy into the table across from her and dashed off to the kitchen.

  “Coffee? Cereal?”

  “Yes to both. You don’t have to run, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. For a while.”

  And then Mommy looked at her. It was the first time they’d seen each other since the thumbtack incident, and Hanna still expected Mommy to call her a fucking-this-or-that. But she just sat there with her chin in her hand, studying her.

  “Morning.”

  Hanna sucked a banana slice off her spoon.

  “So … We have to make things better. Between us. I’m sorry if I pushed you too fast. I wish you could understand. School, and how important it is. If we’re together so much and I’m teaching you at home … And what you really need is other people. We’re just at cross-purposes, and that’s why I was trying to get you into school.”

  Daddy brought over a mug of coffee and a bowl of cinnamon Puffins and set them in front of Mommy.

  “Thank you.”

  He stroked Mommy’s ugly hair and kissed her head. On another day those pets and kisses would have been for her. He pulled out the chair from the head of the table and sat with his legs wide apart, a stance that
made Hanna think of lions, comfortable in their territory. It bothered her, how united Mommy and Daddy were. They looked at her like they were the rulers of the kingdom and she was the ant who’d crawled under the door, lost. They both acted dopey-clueless about the other things Mommy needed to apologize for: the tug-of-war she insisted on engaging in with Daddy’s heart, when it was so obvious that she, the daughter, was worthier of his love; the warm bumpity-bump love Mommy owed her on principle, after all the years Mommy had spent either pushing her away, or hovering like a flying saucer, mangled and about to crash. Mommy was only a shell of a person with nothing to give. She was like a store full of bright and tempting candies held captive behind a thick, transparent wall. It wasn’t like Hanna hadn’t tried to tap on the glass and grasp what was inside.

  “Daddy told me about the arrangement the two of you made, for getting rid of Marie-Anne.”

  Probably Mommy had dragged it out of him, like a magician pulling endless handkerchiefs from her sleeve, while Daddy was under her spell. Hanna lifted her bowl, rolling the last few drops of milk around the bottom. She had to accept that Daddy couldn’t help giving up their secret, and maybe it was better if Mommy knew: then she wouldn’t be surprised when Hanna started tossing things into the fire.

  “We’re both really glad that you’re ready to let go of Marie-Anne. I’m glad she helped you find your voice, but I know you can do it again without her.” Mommy dunked her Puffins under the milk, drowning them before taking a big bite.

  “I can’t wait to hear you speak,” Daddy said, and his eagerness made her want to swallow every sound she’d ever uttered. She didn’t like that they were both focused on her; their misguided expectations formed a black hole in her gut. Black holes were dangerous; they absorbed everything around them, and maybe some parts of her that she needed would tumble into the abyss.

  She got up and stood beside her chair, her gaze on the floor.

  “You may be excused,” Mommy said. “But first…” She reached out for her as Hanna started to flee.