You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  Her father looks at his watch. “We have to get going,” he says. “It’s almost time for Peter to get off the bus.”

  “Peter?”

  “His mother has to go to the doctor’s. I told her he could come to our house.”

  Rachel’s father goes out to meet Peter when he gets off the bus and they walk in together, talking about the Red Sox. They walk right past Rachel. “Dad?” she says, but he doesn’t answer. She follows them into the kitchen. Her father is spreading cream cheese on a bagel for Peter. Later, when she is playing in her bedroom with him, Rachel says, “I wish your mom had an abortion,” which makes Peter cry. When her father comes into the room, he makes her tell him what she did and she tells him she didn’t do anything, but Peter tells on her and her father says she is grounded.

  Miss Engstrom tells them that they are very lucky to live in Stone, so near to Danvers and Salem and the history of witches. Rachel says that she knows there are a lot of witches in Stone and Miss Engstrom laughs and then all the children laugh too. Later, on the playground, Stella Miner and Leanne Green hold hands and stick out their tongues at Rachel, and Minnity Dover throws pebbles at her. Miss Engstrom catches Minnity and makes her sit on the bench for the rest of recess. Rachel swings so high that she can imagine she is flying. When the bell rings, she comes back to Earth, where Bret and Steve Keeter, the twins, and Peter Williamson wait for her. “We wish your mom had an abortion,” Peter says. The twins nod their golden heads.

  “You don’t even know what that means,” says Rachel and runs past them, toward Miss Engstrom, who stands beside the open door, frowning.

  “Rachel,” she says, “you’re late.” But she doesn’t say anything to the boys, who come in behind Rachel, whispering.

  “Shut up!” Rachel shouts.

  Miss Engstrom sends Rachel to the office. The principal says he is going to call her father. Rachel sits in the office until it’s almost time to go home, and then she goes back to the classroom for her books and lunchbox.

  “Wanna know what we did while you were gone?” Clara Vanmeer whispers when they line up for the bus.

  Rachel ignores her. She knows what they did. They are witches, all of them, and they put some kind of spell on her. I wish you were all dead, Rachel thinks, and she really means it. It worked with Melinda, didn’t it? But not her mom. She never wished her mom would die. Never never never. Who did? Who wished that for her mother who used to call her Rae-Rae and made chocolate chip pancakes and was beautiful? Rachel hugs her backpack and stares out the window at the witches of Stone, picking their kids up from school. The bus drives past rotten pumpkins and fallen graveyards. Rachel’s head hurts. She hopes Mrs. Williamson will let her take a nap but when they get there, the house is locked. Peter rings the doorbell five hundred times, and pulls on the door, but Rachel just sits on the step. Nobody is home, why can’t he just get that through his head? Finally, Peter starts to cry. “Shut up,” Rachel says. She has to say it twice before he does.

  “Where’s my mother?” Peter asks, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his jacket.

  “How should I know?” Rachel watches a small black cat with a tiny silver bell around its neck emerge from the bush at the neighbor’s house. Unfortunately, it is not carrying a dead bird or mouse.

  Peter starts crying again. Loudly. Rachel’s head hurts. “Shut up!” she says, but he just keeps crying. She stands up and readjusts her backpack.

  Rachel is already walking down the tiny sidewalk when Peter calls for her to wait. They walk to Rachel’s house, but of course that is locked as well. Peter starts crying again. Rachel takes off the backpack and sets it on the step. The afternoon sun is low, the sky gray and fuzzy like a sweater. Her head hurts and she’s hungry. Also, Peter is really annoying her, “I want my mother,” he says.

  “Well, I want my mother too,” Rachel says. “But that doesn’t help. She’s dead, okay? She’s dead.”

  “My mom’s dead?” Peter screams, so loud that Rachel has to cover her ears with her hands. That’s when Mrs. Williamson comes running up the sidewalk. Peter doesn’t even see her at first because he’s so hysterical. Mrs. Williamson runs to Peter. She sits down beside him, says his name, and touches him on the shoulder. He looks up and shouts, “Mom!” He wraps his arms around her, saying over and over again, “You’re not dead.” Rachel resists the temptation to look down the sidewalk to see if her own mother is coming. She knows she is not.

  They walk back to the Williamsons’ house together. Rachel, trying not to drag her backpack, follows. “I’m sorry,” she hears Mrs. Williamson say. “I had a doctor’s appointment and I got caught in traffic. I tried to call the school, but I was too late, and then I tried to find someone to come to the house, but no one was home.”

  Peter says something to Mrs. Williamson. She can’t hear him and she leans over so he can whisper in her ear. Rachel stands behind them, watching. Mrs. Williamson turns and stares at Rachel. “Did you tell him I was dead?” she asks.

  Rachel shakes her head no, but she can tell Mrs. Williamson doesn’t believe her.

  “When the Pilgrims came to America they wanted to live in a place where they could practice their religion. They were trying to be good people. So when they saw someone doing something they thought was bad, they wanted to stop it. Bad meant the devil to them. They didn’t want to be around the devil. They wanted to be around God.” Miss Engstrom stands at the front of the room dressed as a Puritan. She puts the Puritan dress on every day for social studies. Her cheeks are pink and her hair is sticking to her face. She is trying to help them understand what happened, she says, but Cindi Becker has said, more than once, that her mom doesn’t want Miss Engstrom teaching them religion. “It’s not religion,” Miss Engstrom says, “it’s history.”

  Every day Miss Engstrom puts on the Pilgrim dress and pretends she’s a Puritan. The children are supposed to pretend they are witches. “Act natural,” she tells them. “Just be yourselves.” But when they do, they get in trouble; they have to stand in the stockade or go to the jail in the back of the room. The stockade is made out of cardboard, and the jail is just chairs in a circle. Rachel hates to be put in either place. By the fourth lesson, she has figured out how to sit at her desk with her hands neatly folded. When Miss Engstrom asks Rachel what she is doing, she says, “Praying,” and Miss Engstrom tells her what a good Puritan she is. By the sixth lesson the class is filled with good Puritans, sitting with neatly folded hands. Only Charlie Dexter is stuck in the stockade and Cindi Becker is in the jail in the back of the room. Miss Engstrom says that they are probably witches. Rachel decides that social studies is her favorite subject. She looks forward to the next lesson. What will happen to the witches when they go on trial? But the next day they have a substitute and the day after that, another. They have so many substitutes Rachel can’t remember their names. One day, one of the substitutes tells the class that she is their new teacher.

  “What happened to Miss Engstrom?” Rachel asks.

  “My mother had her fired,” says Cindi Becker.

  “She’s not coming back,” the teacher says. “Now, let’s talk about Thanksgiving.”

  Rachel is so excited about Thanksgiving she can’t stand it. A whole turkey! Think of the bones! Each night Rachel rearranges her bone collection. It is a difficult time of year for it. Cats still wander the crooked streets of Stone but they are either eating everything they kill, or killing less, because there are few bones to be found. Rachel arranges and rearranges, trying to form the shape that will dance for her. Damn that Melinda, Rachel thinks. What would happen if Rachel had bones like that in her collection? Human bones?

  Rachel has a fit when her father tells her they are going to the Williamsons’ house for Thanksgiving. “This will be better,” he says. “You can play with Peter and his cousins. Don’t you think it would be lonely with just you and me at our house?”

  “The bones!” Rachel cries. “I want the bones!”

  “What are you talking abo
ut?” her father asks.

  Rachel sniffs. “I want the turkey bones.”

  Rachel’s father stares at her. He is cutting an apple and he stands, holding the knife, staring at her.

  “You know, for my project.”

  “Are you still doing that, now that Miss Engstrom is gone?”

  Rachel nods. Her father says, “Well, we can make a turkey. But not on Thursday. On Thursday we’re going to the Williamsons’.”

  The night before Thanksgiving, though, her father gets a phone call. He says, “Oh, I am so sorry.” And, “No, no please don’t even worry about us.” He nods his head a lot. “Please know you are in our prayers. Let us know if we can do anything.” After he hangs up the phone, he sits in his chair and stares at the TV screen. Finally, he says, “It looks like you got your wish.”

  He looks at his watch, and then, all in a hurry, they drive to the grocery store, where he buys a turkey, bags of stuffing, and pumpkin pie. He throws the food into the cart. Rachel can tell that he is angry but she doesn’t ask him what’s wrong. She’d rather not know. Besides, she has other stuff to worry about. Like is there a bad man in this store? Will he shoot them the way he shot her mother?

  When they get home, her father says, “Mrs. Williamson lost the baby.”

  “What baby?” Rachel asks.

  “She was pregnant. But she lost it.”

  Rachel remembers, once, when Mrs. Williamson got angry at Peter when he came home from school without his sweater. “You can’t be so careless all the time,” Rachel remembers her saying.

  “Well, she shouldn’t be so careless,” Rachel says.

  “Rachel, you have to start learning to think about other people’s feelings once in a while.”

  Rachel thinks about the lost baby, out in the dark somewhere. “Mrs. Williamson is stupid,” she says.

  Rachel’s father, holding a can of cranberry sauce with one hand, points toward her room with the other. “You go to your room,” he says. “And think about what you’re saying.”

  Rachel runs to her room. She slams the door shut. She throws herself on her bed and cries herself to sleep. When she wakes up there is no light shining under the door. She doesn’t know what time it is, but she thinks it is very late. She gets up and begins collecting bones from all the hiding places; bones in her socks, bones in her underwear drawer, bones in a box under the bed, bones in her jewelry box, and bones in her stuffed animals, cut open with the scissors she’s not supposed to use. She hums as she assembles and reassembles the bones until at last they quiver and shake. She thinks they are going to dance for her but instead, they stab her with their sharp little points.

  “Stop it,” Rachel says. She takes them apart again, stores them in separate places and goes to sleep, crying for her mother.

  The next morning, Rachel watches the parade on TV while her father makes stuffing and cleans the turkey. When the phone rings, he brings it to Rachel, and turns the TV sound off. The Grandma asks her how school is going and how she likes living in Stone, and finally, how is she? Rachel answers each question, “Fine,” while watching a silent band march across the TV. The Grandma asks to speak to her father again and Rachel goes to the kitchen. Her father reaches for the phone and says, “My God, Rachel, what happened to your arms?” Rachel looks down at her arms. There are small red spots and tiny bruises all over them.

  “She has bruises all over her arms,” her father says.

  Rachel grabs a stick of celery and walks toward the living room. Her father follows, still holding the phone. “Rachel, what happened to your arms?”

  Rachel turns and smiles at him. Ever since her mom died, her dad has been trying hard. Rachel knows this, and she knows that he doesn’t know she knows this. But there are certain things he isn’t very good at. Rachel is positive that if her mom were still alive, she wouldn’t even have to ask what had happened, she’d know. Rachel feels sorry for her dad but she doesn’t want to tell him about the bones. Look what happened when she barely even mentioned them to Melinda. So Rachel makes something up instead. “Miss Engstrom,” she says.

  “What are you talking about? Miss Engstrom? She isn’t even your teacher anymore.”

  Rachel only smiles sweetly at her father. He repeats what she told him into the phone. Rachel walks into the living room. She wraps herself in the red throw and sits in front of the TV, watching the balloon man fill up the screen as she munches on celery. How many bones does it take, anyway? Miss Engstrom never did answer her question.

  Later, when the doorbell rings, her father shouts, “I’ll get it,” which is sort of strange because she is never allowed to answer the door. She hears voices and then her father comes into the room with a policeman and a policewoman. Rachel thinks they’ve come to arrest her. She’s a liar, a thief, and a murderer, so it had to happen. Still, she feels like crying now that it has.

  Her father has been talking to her, she realizes, but she has no idea what he’s said. He turns the sound off the TV and he and the policeman walk out of the room together. The policewoman stays with Rachel. She sits right next to Rachel on the couch. For a while they watch the silent parade, until the policewoman says, “Can you tell me what happened to your arms, Rachel?”

  “I already told my dad,” Rachel says.

  The policewoman nods. “The thing is, I just want to make sure he didn’t leave anything out.”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “You’re not in trouble. We are here to help. Okay, honey? Can I see your arms?”

  Rachel shakes her head no.

  The policewoman nods. “Who hurt you, Rachel?”

  Rachel turns to look at her. She has blond hair and brown eyes with yellow flecks in them. She looks at Rachel very closely. As if she knows the truth about her.

  “You can tell me,” she says.

  “The bones,” Rachel whispers.

  “What about the bones?”

  “But you can’t tell anyone.”

  “I might have to tell someone,” the policewoman says.

  So Rachel refuses to speak further. She shows the lady her arms, but only because she figures it will make her go away, and it does. After she looks at Rachel’s arms the policewoman goes out in the kitchen with her dad and the policeman. Rachel turns up the volume. Jessica Simpson, dressed in white fur, like a kitten without the whiskers, is singing. Her voice fills up the room, but Rachel can still hear the murmuring sound of the grownups talking in the kitchen. Then the door opens and closes and she hears her father saying good-bye. Rachel’s father comes and stands in the room, watching her. He doesn’t say anything and Rachel doesn’t either but later, when they are eating turkey together, he says, “You might still be just a little girl but you can get grownups in a lot of trouble by telling lies.”

  Rachel nods. She knows this. Miss Engstrom taught them all about the history of witches. Rachel chews the turkey leg clean. It was huge and she is quite full, but now she has a turkey leg, almost as big as a human bone, to add to her collection. She sets it on her napkin next to her plate. As if he can read, her mind her father says, “Rachel, no more bones.”

  “What?”

  “Your bone collection. It’s done. Over. Find something else to collect. Seashells. Buttons. Barbie dolls. No more bones.”

  Rachel knows better than to argue. Instead, she asks to be excused. Her father doesn’t even look at her; he just nods. Rachel goes to her bedroom and searches through the mess of clothes in the wicker chair until she finds her Halloween costume. When her father comes to tell her it’s time for bed, he says, “You can wear that one last time but then we’re putting it away until next year.”

  “Can I sleep in it?” Rachel asks.

  Her father shrugs. “Sure, why not?” He smiles, but it is a pretend smile. Rachel smiles a pretend smile back. She crawls into bed, dressed like a pretend witch. Her father kisses her on the forehead and turns out the light. Rachel lies there until she counts to a hundred and then she sits up. She ga
thers the bones, whispering in the dark.

  A few days later, the witch costume has been packed away, the first dusting of snow has sprinkled the crooked streets and picket fences of Stone, and Rachel has forgotten all about how angry she was at her father. Since Mrs. Williamson lost the baby, she no longer watches Rachel. Rachel thinks this is a good idea because she doesn’t feel safe with Mrs. Williamson, but she hates being in school all day. All the other children have been picked up from the after-school program and it’s just Rachel and Miss Carrie, who keep looking out the school window, saying, “Boy, your dad sure is late.”

  Rachel sits at the play table, making a design with the purple, blue, green, and yellow plastic shapes. She is good at putting things together and Miss Carrie compliments her work. Rachel remembers putting the spell on her father and she regrets it. She pretends the shapes are bones; she puts them together and then she takes them apart, she whispers, trying to say the words backward, but it is hard to do and Miss Carrie, who isn’t a real grownup at all, but a high school girl like Melinda, says, “Uh, you’re starting to creep me out.”

  Miss Carrie calls her mother, using the purple cell phone she carries in the special cell phone pocket of her jeans. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “Rachel is still here. Her dad is really late. Hey, Rache, what’s your last name again?” Rachel tells Carrie and Carrie tells her mom. Just then, Mrs. Williamson arrives. She is wearing a raincoat, even though it isn’t raining, and her hair is a mess. She tells Carrie that she is taking Rachel home. Rachel doesn’t want to go with Mrs. Williamson, the baby loser, but Carrie says, “Oh, great,” to Mrs. Williamson and then says into the phone, “Never mind, someone finally came to pick her up.” She is still talking to her mother when Rachel leaves with Mrs. Williamson, who doesn’t say anything until they are in the car.