You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  “The thing is,” I say, “I mean, come on. Don’t give up on me so fast, okay? It was just a movie. It’s research, all right? Fuck. I mean really, fuck. Look, I didn’t give up on you even with all the drugs and the stealing and shit, right? Right?” It seems like I should say something else, something perfect, but I can’t think what that would be so I hang up and call Terry.

  “The thing is,” I say, “I haven’t been completely honest.”

  There’s a moments’ pause. A long moment before he says, “Shoot.”

  “The thing is,” I say, “what I want to write about isn’t an innocent man.” I wait, but he doesn’t say anything. “The children . . .” She is standing there, in the middle of the living room, staring at the Christmas tree with the strangest expression on her face. She is dressed just like a regular little girl, in little girl pajamas and a bathrobe. I wave at her and point to the phone, signaling that I’ll be winding the call up soon, but her expression doesn’t change; she looks at me with confusion and sorrow.

  “What about the kids? What’s your point? Can you just give it to me in a sentence?”

  “The children were telling the truth, my father was not an innocent man.”

  Terry whistles, long and low. “Fuck,” he says.

  “You’re the first person I ever told.”

  “Well, this puts us in the crapper without any shit, that’s for sure.”

  “What?” She is reaching for the tree, touching it lightly with her fingertips, as though afraid it will disappear.

  “Listen, if that’s the case, what we got is just another story about a fucking pedophile. Those are a dime a dozen. The market is saturated with them. It’s not a special story any more, it’s just . . . now wait a second, that kid, you’re not saying he had anything to do with that kid’s murder are you, ’cause if you were saying that, well, then we’d have a story.”

  “No.” She is petting the tree, and this part really gets to me: she leans in to smell it; even though it is fake, she presses her face real close to the branches and then she realizes I am watching and she looks at me again, but in a new way, like she has something she wants to say, like she needs me. “I gotta go,” I say.

  “I mean even if you think he could have possibly had something to do with it, that we might be able to sell. It gets tricky, ’cause you know all of a sudden everyone’s fact checking the hell out of memoirs, but we might be able to work that angle, you know, not that you really believe he killed her, ’cause everyone knows her parents did it, right, but like you could tie her into your story and the idea that your father was someone like her father, you might have something there, ok? We might be able to sell that.”

  She has big eyes, and they are sad, and she wants to tell me something important, maybe she’s going to tell me who did kill her. “Listen, I gotta go,” I say. Terry keeps talking; he’s getting excited now, just the way, all those years ago, everyone got excited about her murder. I click the phone off.

  “What is it?” I say, “You can tell me.”

  “I wet myself,” she says, in the softest little girl voice.

  Sure enough, there’s a wet stain down the front of her pajamas, and a puddle on the rug beneath the Christmas tree. “That’s okay,” I say, even as the dank odor reaches me. “Sometimes that happens. Why don’t you go in the bathroom and take off your clothes. Do you have a way, I mean, I don’t know how this works, do you have some clean clothes with you?”

  She shakes her head.

  I nod, like, okay, no problem. The phone rings and she looks relieved when I don’t make any move to answer it. Instead I search through the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor until I find a dingy white T-shirt and a brand new pair of boxer shorts, which of course will be huge on her, so I also give her a tie. She looks up at me with confusion when I hand her the stuff. “It’ll be like a costume, for the party. Kind of different from the kind you usually wear, I know. Go in the bathroom, okay, and wash yourself off and take off your wet pajamas and put on the t-shirt, and these shorts, and tie these with this, see, like a belt.”

  “Will you wipe me?” she says.

  I shouldn’t be surprised by this; I’ve read all about how she still asked people to wipe her, even though she was dressed up like a movie star. “No. You have to do it yourself, okay?”

  She shakes her head and starts to cry.

  One thing I can’t stand is a crying kid. “Okay,” I say, “Okay, just don’t cry, all right?”

  We walk into the bathroom and I help her out of her pajamas. Her skin is white, pure as fresh soap, and she is completely unembarrassed of her nakedness. She smiles when I wipe her, first with toilet paper, and then with a towel dampened with warm water and I just try not to think about anything, about how tiny she is, or how perfect. I help her put the clean t-shirt on and the boxer shorts, which I cinch around her little waist with the tie, and by then she is laughing and I am too and we stand before the mirror to look at ourselves but all I see is me, in the ridiculous clown costume. Where does she keep disappearing to? I call her name, searching through all the rooms, thinking she’s playing some kind of game, but I can’t find her anywhere. The doorbell rings and I run to answer it, laughing because it’s very funny the way she’s hidden outside, but when I open the door, my brother is standing there.

  “Oh, fuck,” he says.

  “It’s not the way it looks.”

  He looks behind me, at the streamers, the table set with Barbie and dinosaur plates, the cupcakes, the Christmas tree. “Fuck,” he says.

  “No, wait,” I holler, and when he doesn’t stop I follow him, flopping down the stairs, “Wait,” I say, running after him, though it is difficult in the too-big red shoes, the red wig bouncing down my forehead, “it’s not how it looks.”

  He turns, and I smile at him, knowing he’ll understand—after all, we share the same childhood—but instead he looks at me with a horrified expression, as if I am a terrifying ghost, and then he turns his back on me and runs. I don’t try to follow him; instead I walk back to my house. Someone in a passing car shouts something and throws a paper cup of soda at me, but misses. I am surprised by this, it seems to me clowns deserve a little respect; after all, they only exist to make people laugh.

  When I get back inside, I shut the door and sit on the couch in front of the TV and watch the cartoon people, who are shaped like balloons. There are no dead children and there are no secrets in a world where everyone is brightly colored and devoid of the vulnerabilities of flesh. In balloon world all the problems explode or float away. Even though it’s been cold and cloudy for weeks, the sun comes out and fills the room with an explosion of light until I can no longer see the picture on the TV screen. One of the streamers comes loose and dangles over my head, twirling, and I can’t help but think that in spite of what Terry said, there is plenty of shit for the crapper, but it doesn’t matter, because in the distance, I hear the soft hum of a little girl singing. And just like that my mood improves, because I am waiting for the children, and just thinking about them makes me smile.

  The Chambered Fruit

  Stones. Roots. Chips like bones. The moldering scent of dry leaves and dirt, the odd aroma of mint. What grew here before it fell to neglect and misuse? I remember this past spring’s tulips and daffodils, sprouted among the weeds, picked and discarded without discrimination. I was so distracted by my dead daughter that I rarely noticed the living. I take a deep breath. Mint thyme. It should have survived the neglect, perhaps did, but now has fallen victim to my passionate weeding, as so much of more significance has fallen victim before it. I pick up a small, brown bulb and set it, point up, in the hole, cover it with dirt. Geese fly overhead. I shade my eyes to watch them pass, and then cannot avoid surveying the property.

  Near the old barn are piles of wood and brick meant to further its renovation. Leaves and broken branches litter the stacks. The wood looks slightly warped, weathered by the seasons it’s gone untended. The yard is bristly with dried we
eds and leaves. The house has suffered the worst. Surely, instead of planting bulbs I should be calling a contractor. It can’t be good, the way it looks like it’s begun to sink into the earth or how the roof litters shingles that spear into the ground around it. But who should I call? How far do I have to search to find someone who doesn’t know our story?

  I think of it like the nursery rhyme. Inside the old farmhouse with the sagging porch, through the large, sunny kitchen, past the living room with the wood-burning stove, up the creaking stairs and down the hall lined with braided rugs, past the bathroom with the round window and claw-footed tub, past the yellow-and-white bedroom we called the guest room, past her room (where the door is shut) to our bedroom—my bedroom now—there is, on the bedside table, a picture of the three of us. It’s from her last birthday. Twelve candles on the cake. She is bent to blow them out, her face in pretty profile. Her dark hair brushes against the smooth skin of her puffed cheek; her eye, bright with happiness, dark-lashed beneath its perfectly arched brow. Jack and I stand behind her. Both of us are blurry, the result of Jack having set up the camera for automatic timer, his running to be in the shot, me moving to make room for him. He looks like her, only handsome, and I look like, well, someone passing by who got in the picture by mistake, a blur of long, untidy hair, an oversize shirt, baggy slacks. The camera captures and holds their smiles forever, locked in innocence and joy, and my smile, strained, my focus somewhere past the borders of the picture, as if I see, in the shadows, what is coming.

  When I think of everything that happened, from the beginning, I look for clues. In a way, there are so many it baffles strangers that we couldn’t see them. But to understand this, and really, I’m beyond expecting anyone else to understand this, but for my own understanding, I have to remember that to be human is a dangerous state. That said, Jack’s nature is not profoundly careless, and I am not, really, in spite of everything you might have read or concluded, criminally naïve. Though of course I accept, even as I rebel against its horrible truth, that a great deal of the fault was ours. Sometimes I think more ours than his. When I look for clues to the dangerous parents we’d become I have to accept the combustible combination that occurred, just once, when Jack was careless and I was naïve and that’s all it took. We lost her.

  You may be familiar with my old work. Folk scenes, sort of like Grandma Moses except, frankly, hers are better. Maybe the difference is that hers were created from real memories and mine were made from longing. No one I know has ever ridden in a horse-drawn sleigh, with or without bells. We did not hang Christmas wreaths on all the doors and from the street lamps lit with candles. We did not send the children to skate at the neighborhood pond (which didn’t exist, the closest thing being the town dump) or burn leaves and grow pumpkins (well, the Hadleys grew pumpkins, but their farmhouse was an old trailer, so it didn’t really fit the picture). We did garden, but our gardens did not all blossom into perfect flower at the same moment on the same day, the women standing in aprons, talking over the fence. The sun shone but it didn’t shine the way I painted it, a great ball of light with spears of brightness around it.

  These are the paintings I made. Little folk scenes that were actually quite popular, not in town, of course, but in other places where people imagined the world I painted existed. I made a decent living at it. Even now, when all I paint are dark and frightening scenes of abduction and despair that I show no one (who would come anyway; even old friends keep their distance now), I live off the royalties. My paintings are on calendars, Christmas cards, coasters, t-shirts. In the first days of horror, when the news coverage was so heavy, I thought someone would certainly point out that I (the neglectful mother of the dead girl) was also the painter C. R. Rite, but as far as I know the connection was never made and my income has not suffered for my neglect.

  Jack still represents my work, which also makes it strange that no one ever made the connection. Maybe people assumed we were actually farmers, though the locals certainly knew that wasn’t true. Maybe the media was just too busy telling the grisly details of our story to focus any attention on the boring issue of our finances. Certainly that matter isn’t very titillating. What people seemed to want to hear was how our daughter died, an endless nightmare from which I can’t ever wake, that strangers actually watch and read as some form of entertainment.

  I accept my fault in this, and I know it’s huge. I live every day with the Greek proportions of our story. In the classic nature I had a fault, a small area, like Achilles’s heel, that left me vulnerable.

  But not evil. As Jack likes to point out, we didn’t do that to her and we would have stopped it from happening if we knew how.

  The unforgivable thing, everyone agrees, is that we didn’t see it. How evil do you have to be? We did not keep our daughter safe and she’s dead because of that. Isn’t that evil enough?

  When we moved here, Steff was eight. She didn’t know that we were really country people, having lived her whole life in the city. At first she spent all her time in her room with her books and her dolls but eventually, during that giddy first hot summer when I walked about in my slip (when the construction crew wasn’t working on the barn) eating raspberries off the bushes and planting sunflower seeds and hollyhocks (though it was too late and they wouldn’t bloom), she joined me, staying close, afraid of all the space, the strangeness of sky. Eventually, she came to love it too and brought blankets into the yard for picnics, both real and imagined, and paper to color, which, in true Buddha-child fashion she left to blow about the yard when she was finished. When one of these pictures blew across my path, a scene of a girl picking flowers, a shimmering angel behind her, I memorized it and then let it blow away, thinking it would be a gift for somebody unlucky enough not to have a child who drew pictures of that other world which children are so close to.

  In the city, Steffie had attended a small private school with a philosophy that sheltered children from the things in our world that make them grow up so fast. The influence of media was discouraged and, contrary to national trend, computer use was considered neither necessary nor particularly beneficial to children. At eight, Steffie still played with dolls, and believed in, if not magic, at least a magicalness to the world; a condition that caused strangers to look at her askance and try to measure her IQ but for which I took great pride. In her school they learned the mythic stories, needlework, and dance. Friends of mine with children in public or other private schools talked of the homework stress and the busyness of their lives, transporting kids from practice to practice. When I visited these friends, their children did not play the piano or happily kick soccer balls in the yard. In spite of all those lessons, or, I suspected, because of them, these children sat listless and bleary-eyed in front of the television or wandered about the house, restless and bored, often resorting to eating, while Steffie played with dolls or spoons, whatever was available. I feel that our society has forgotten the importance of play, the simple beginnings of a creative mind. The value of that. Not that anyone is interested in parental guidance from me now.

  At any rate, Steffie got off the bus, that first day, in tears. Several of the children would not sit with her because, they said, we were a bunch of hippies who ran around the yard in our underthings. When Steffie told me this, I cried right along with her. I’d made a life out of forgetting the world. I found its reminders sharp and disturbing.

  Eventually, she adjusted and I did too. I wore clothes in the yard, though I was baffled how anyone knew I’d ever done differently. Steff put away her dolls and proudly carried her heavy backpack filled with books and maps and serious questions about the real world, completely neglecting anything about the spiritual. Incredibly (to me) she liked it. A lot. She loved the candy they were rewarded with, the movies they watched. “I like it because it’s normal,” she said, and I realized that she knew we were not.

  The years passed. I had the barn converted to an art studio and planned to further the renovation so that I could turn it in
to a sort of community art center for teenagers. I imagined Saturday mornings teaching painting, others teaching things like weaving, or, when Steffie began to take an interest in it, even dance. I think part of the motivation for this plan was the idea of filling the place with teenagers and helping Steffie’s social life, which still seemed, though she never complained, strangely quiet for a child her age.

  So, when Jack bought the computer, I thought it was a good idea. He said he needed it for the business and Steffie had been complaining for some time that she “needed” one too. He brought home the computer and I didn’t argue. After all, he and Steff were the ones dealing with the notorious “real” world and I was the one who got to spend all morning painting happy pictures and the rest of the day gardening, or baking cookies, or reading a good book. Who in the world lived a life like mine?