“Give me Eddie.”
“Tell me you’re running.”
“Give him to me.”
“Tell me you’ll let them all die. Say it. Say, ‘Sophie, I understand, I will let everyone I have ever loved die to save this kid I barely know who isn’t mine.’ Say those words, and he’s yours.”
Growling in exasperation, Rebecca grabbed her phone again and speed-dialed Jack, but got his idiot voice mail: “Up the beanstalk. Take care of my cow.”
“Jack, where are you? I need you,” she snapped, clicked End, watched Eddie wriggle and Sophie quiet (or mesmerize) him with a wave of her fingers across his tiny eyelids. Rebecca dialed Kaylene.
This time, she got nothing, not even a ring. “The number you have reached is not available…” And that was just plain ridiculous. Impossible. Kaylene not available was like saying … was like Kaylene not breathing … was …
“Looks like you’ve got a choice to make,” Sophie said, stroking Eddie’s hair. The action looked surprisingly comfortable, casual, automatic. Motherly. And all the more disturbing for that.
“How about a compromise? Let’s give him to Benny,” Rebecca said.
Sophie burst out laughing. “’Cause he was so good at keeping him away from me five minutes ago, for starters? Wasn’t he, little man? Little Nat-man.” She did it again, dropped her head like a chicken pecking feed and nipped Eddie’s cheeks. She might have been kissing them.
The effort of not flinging herself at Sophie—bowling her over, grabbing the baby, and bolting downstairs, out of this horrible house and through the woods to reach her friends—was causing Rebecca physical pain. She felt as though her skin might split, unleashing her skeleton from its straitjacket of brain and membrane so it could just get out there and do something.
“What did you do to Benny?” she whispered.
Again, Sophie laughed. “Nothing he didn’t enjoy. Much as he hates himself for it.”
Rebecca gaped. A little more of whatever she had inside her—of the woman she had been, an hour ago—escaped through her mouth.
“Oh, don’t be such a prude.” Sophie tickled Eddie, smiled at him. “It wouldn’t have been the first time. And he can’t really help it when I come for him, after all. It’s our secret, and it can stay that way as far as I’m concerned. It’s been good for both of us: relief, for him; practice, for me.”
The image solidified in front of Rebecca’s eyes, as clearly as if she had been in the bedroom closet, watching stump-Sophie—like the incubus in that Nightmare painting—climbing astride Benny. Crawling up his broken legs.
“Also,” Sophie continued, “it’s my little private revenge on Jess, for being such a black-and-white, hell-on-wheels bitch half the time.”
“For not killing you, you mean. For saving your life.”
“I said half the time.” Sophie caught Rebecca’s eye. Or—no—Rebecca caught hers, this time. Sophie blinked, looked away. “When she’s not being the mom I didn’t have, and really thought I was going to be.”
For a single moment, Rebecca wavered. The scene in front of her kept shifting, then shifting again, as if she were looking through a pinhole at a kaleidoscope. She shook her head, closed and opened her eyes, her fists. None of that helped. And there was no time.
“Nope. I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m taking him.”
“Only if—”
“You said you’d give him to me if I run. I’ll run.”
In Sophie’s arms, in his blanket, in the sleep she’d somehow caressed him into, Eddie shivered. And Sophie looked up, dead-eyed or maybe just tired. She certainly wasn’t grinning. “Really? You think you can make yourself do that?”
“Look at me,” Rebecca said, and Sophie did. “You said you liked me. You told me why you liked me. What do you think?”
“I think I’m impressed,” Sophie murmured. “I couldn’t have done it. And neither—despite what she would have claimed—could Natalie. But then, I guess, you’re not really a … Not like we were…” She lowered her own head to Eddie’s one more time. She was holding him out toward Rebecca when Rebecca’s phone blared.
Rebecca’s reaction was immediate, instinctive, multipurpose. So much in her life—her parents’ death, her years at Halfmoon House, the Crisis Center—had trained her for this moment, to somehow do everything that needed doing at the same time in one unbroken movement. She swept the phone to her ear with one hand and flung up a warning finger to Sophie with the other, along with a glance that said, Don’t move, and also, hold on. And, I’m still running.
“Where the hell have you—” she started, and the giggling cut her off.
“Guess where we are?” Trudi said.
Rebecca heard more giggling, accompanied, in the background, by outright cackling, which was louder and nastier.
“I saw what you did!” the nastier voice taunted. Danni’s voice. “Ooh, Amanda’s mad at you.”
In an instant, Rebecca understood, knew what had happened so precisely, it was as though some of her really had slipped out of her skin, but hours ago, and stayed behind at Halfmoon House to see the whole ridiculous, utterly predictable episode unfold. She could perfectly imagine the reaction to her phone call of just a few minutes prior: it had triggered Jess, who had launched Amanda into action mode, set both of them sprinting through the house, slamming doors, locking windows, shouting for Joel, for the children upstairs.
Shouting. The thing that almost never happened at Halfmoon House, and that pretty much every girl who had ever lived there hated most. And Danni—who could be so mean—hated shouting even more than most, because she’d heard so much of it wherever she’d been before she came to Amanda’s.
She’d have been lurking on the landing, probably; that’s where she generally lurked. She’d have seen everything that happened. And when the shouting had started, and Jess and Amanda started whirling around and Joel yelled from outside to see what was wrong, Danni would have stood up and crept down the hall to Trudi’s room, not to torment—not this time—but to enlist.
To cling to. Like a sister.
Because that was the only relationship—the one person—Danni was absolutely sure she understood, Trudi the only living creature Danni was absolutely certain would respond to her, would neither judge nor fail her. Like I’ve failed her, Rebecca thought. And of course, Trudi would indeed come when Danni beckoned, for most of the same reasons.
So Trudi had come, and she and Danni had fled together out the patio door none of the kids was supposed to have a key to, down the back steps of Halfmoon House, across the lawn into the woods to escape the shouting. Once there, they’d chuck pinecones at wood rats and rip bark off birches, or else head to the lake to shriek with the loons, just to prove, once and for all, to anyone who would notice, that they were free.
“Trudi.” Rebecca cleared her throat, punching her finger toward Sophie again to nail her in place. “Trudi, listen. This is no jok—”
“Amanda’s mad at you,” Danni sang in the background. “Amanda’s mad at you.”
“Guess where we’re going?” Trudi said.
Not to the lake, Rebecca realized, as her stomach rolled all the way over. The lake wasn’t forbidden enough. Oh, Trudi, no. She sucked in air, thought she might throw it up, commanded herself not to. “You can’t go there,” she said. “Trudi, don’t go there. Not the clearing. Not those trailers. Trudi, please. You have to listen. Go back to the house. No, wait. Put Danni on. Or, come here, to town. I need you. I need you both. We can—”
The phone shrieked in her ears, three short bursts, like laser-fire in one of Kaylene’s idiot arcade games. Rebecca knew what she’d see even before she looked at the screen. She’d lost the call. She started to hit Redial but froze with her thumb over the button, watching as Sophie slowly drew Eddie back to her chest.
“Looks like you’ve got a choice to make,” Sophie said.
And no time. Tears came. Rebecca let them, ignored them, stared at the creature in front of her, and made her decis
ion. In the instant—and the only thing she forgot, she would realize later, was how long Sophie had said it had been since the night Jess’s daughter had died, and what that would have to mean about Sophie’s hunger—she was as confident as she could possibly be that it was the right one.
And even if it wasn’t, the Crisis Center had trained her to keep acting, doing something, instead of wasting time regretting.
“You’ll protect him?” she whispered.
Sophie shrugged. “Better than you can. You do understand that if he’s there—the Whistler—and you go to him, you’re not going to be able to do anything except die, right? I’ve made that clear?”
Rebecca was already moving. Sophie somehow scooted out of the way on her stumps.
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure,” Sophie said, cradling Eddie. “I don’t know that.”
“If anything happens to this baby—”
Sophie shot out a hand, grabbing Rebecca’s wrist as she tried to pass and swinging her viciously around, pinning her to the very air with her gaze. “I can’t promise, girlfriend. No one can. But if you really thought I was your problem—if you thought I was Eddie’s problem—you wouldn’t be going. Would you?”
That was true, of course. All of it. But what amazed Rebecca most was that Sophie apparently wanted her to say so. Needed to hear it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Is she right, little man?” Sophie said, releasing Rebecca, returning her full attention to the bundle in her arms. “Do you think she’s read the situation correctly, little Nat-man?”
“Keep him safe, Sophie. Please.”
Down the hall, Benny started shouting, pleading, “Rebecca, don’t go. Don’t leave Eddie with that.”
But Rebecca was already flying down the stairs, out the front door onto the crumbling porch, into the surprising darkness, where she stopped in amazement, staring across the street at the battered blue truck parked there. She recognized it instantly, of course, even though she’d only ridden in it once, a few months ago, when she’d come off her late shift feverish and flu-ridden, started across campus, and met Oscar, as usual—sad, sweating, coated in leaves—under the black gum trees. With hardly a word, he’d parked his rake against a tree, left his bags in the grass, and driven her the five blocks home.
If she considered what she was seeing at all, now, she thought maybe he’d taken handyman work in the neighborhood: cleaning gutters, painting fences. No matter what he was doing, Rebecca knew, he would take one look at her face and then take her wherever she needed to go, without asking.
“Oscar!” she shouted, and sprinted straight for the truck.
24
In the backseat of the LeSabre, the children Caribou had selected—only three, it was enough, Miss Ju and the dark-haired, gray-eyed brother and sister in matching Spider-Man pajamas—bounced up and down in their seats, played cat’s cradle, squirmed around and leaned over one another to point at telephone poles, black horses in long grass, glimpses of moon: the world they’d barely even heard tell of popping up around them as though from the pages of a children’s book, as though the world were the fairy-tale place, not their crumbling, hidden, parentless house way back in the woods, or Aunt Sally’s camp, tucked away in the last expanse of lost Delta.
In the front, meanwhile, leaning half out of her seat belt toward him, one alabaster hand splayed on the vinyl like a sliver of moon marbled with beautiful blue, sat the children’s caretaker. Again, he’d brought only one, left the others; it was enough. And by the time the women he’d allowed to stay behind stirred from the dreams he’d draped over them, realized it was morning, and understood that their companions weren’t coming back, the Party would be over, the partygoers dispersed. The camp itself, which had been his and Aunt Sally’s home for more than thirty years, would be dismantled, drowned in the river, buried in the fertile Mississippi mud, where it would sprout stories, someday.
The caretaker had white hair streaked with blond, or lighter white. Whatever those colors were, they were natural, their pattern as unmistakable and un-creatable as sediment lines in a riverbank. Beautiful. She’d told him her name more than once, but Caribou had been distracted. He kept thinking about Aunt Sally’s voice—the hint of trembling in it, Aunt Sally trembling!—at the moment she’d tasked him, sent him forth to bring back children. Also, every time he glanced in the mirror, he found Miss Ju’s eyes staring back, bright green, unblinking, as though painted on the glass or hovering in the air. She was playing with the other two. He could hear them all giggling, slapping hands, calling out, “Pizza!” when they passed a pathetic little strip mall in some disintegrating town. And yet, she was always looking at him. At first, he’d thought it was her stillness that captivated him so. But she wasn’t ever really still. So it was something else.
“Hon?” the caretaker cooed, like a mourning dove, like a lover. “You all right? You want me to drive?”
Ann, Caribou decided. He’d call her Ann. Or think of her as Ann.
In the back, the Spider-Man-sister, too, kept darting glances at him, snatching at his glances. Her gaze held no mystery whatsoever. Almost, Caribou had left her behind, precisely because she’d started grabbing at his gaze from the moment he’d appeared out of the night and the woods, as if he were some white knight in his dark chariot, come to spirit her away. Her eyes winked with little-girl mischief, but also with longings and loneliness and hungers she barely even realized she felt, let alone had names for, yet. And that, he knew—though even he couldn’t have said how, and Aunt Sally certainly hadn’t specified—made her not quite the sort of guest he’d been commanded to fetch.
But she’d wanted so to come, this girl, had twined her arms in Ju’s, wrapped herself around Ju like kudzu. And it had seemed easier, somehow, to bring her, and also merciful. For Ju, at least. At least she’d have companions.
And now that the Spider-Man-sister was here, Caribou knew it was also merciful, at occasional intervals, to look away from Ju or the road and actually give this girl a glimpse of what she thought she wanted. He did it only in flashes, only for a moment at a time, long enough to stir her, to let her know that he knew, and saw. But not long enough to set her climbing over the seat to get at him.
And there it was. The girl couldn’t help it, of course. If what was happening to her was anyone’s fault, it was his. She gave a little wriggle of her tiny shoulders, a near-wink. A smile twitched, too wide, across her heart-shaped face. All wrong. Aunt Sally would not want this one, not tonight. She was too close to conscious maturity, to the woman she would one day be.
Would have been.
To his own surprise, Caribou had a fleeting but powerful urge to turn the wheel. He actually had to fight, for a second, to keep the LeSabre pointing forward toward camp, to keep from spinning them around and speeding straight back past the shuttered pizza joints, the useless towns, through the woods to the orphanage, where he could eject them all from the car and vanish from their lives. Of course, if he did that, he’d have to vanish from Aunt Sally’s life, too—oh, yes, he’d have no choice—and from his own, the only one he could remember, and evaporate into the Delta night.
How delicious this feeling was. How startling. Almost new.
It was Ann’s hand, sliding over his on the steering wheel, pressing gently down, that brought him back to himself, settled him inside his glowing, ageless skin. She was singing, too, now, just like the children, though not along with them: some old, old song Caribou might have recognized, thought he did, though songs always blurred together for him. Ann’s voice proved surprisingly supple beneath the crackles, like a voice on a record; she was singing about tears in vain, regrets absurd. It was that sort of song. Turning his palm gently beneath hers, he shot a quick glance in the mirror and saw Ju, green-eyed Ju, just staring, not stirring. On impulse, Caribou winked. Then, squeezing Ann’s hand, he turned his attention fully on the older woman.
She rocked back without letting go. In fact, she clung harde
r, just as he’d known she would. And despite the fact that he knew it, he found himself marveling all over again. The monsters—the buffoons who stayed close to Aunt Sally’s camp, even Mother and her Fool, when they’d been around—always read that reaction as a purely sexual response: primal, ravenous, ungovernable. For them (or, more accurately, their respondents), maybe it was. But though Caribou remembered virtually nothing and no one from the life he’d had before this one, he had held on to this: the idea, for some reason, of anyone other than Aunt Sally responding to him sexually was either absurd or perverse. And Aunt Sally, after all, was like God, and therefore loved and was bored by all other living creatures in equal measure. Her arousals were her own.
And yet here were these girls and this woman, enthralled, mesmerized, anesthetized, just as he needed them to be, but maybe by something even more elemental than lust. It was in the way they stared at him, which was the same way he himself stared down the Delta some long, summer evenings at a thunderhead, a funnel cloud, an incoming storm: with awe, in other words. With terror, certainly.
But most of all, with wonder.
That was the way Ann watched him now. The irony, of course, lay in the effect that look had on him, the tingle it produced inside, all over, where so little else tingled. Surprising, impossible, delicious, tinged with an ache very like what he imagined melancholy to be, plus something else even more hurtful, even more luscious. Maybe that was regret.
But it was definitely the sensation of himself stirring, and not in awe, or wonder, either. He gazed openly at this woman, his Ann: the shades of white in her hair; the lines crisscrossing as they funneled sideways over her face, over skin she had actually lived in, ballooning into beautiful blue veins that plunged down her neck, over her breasts, which he imagined suspended in their support cabling under her red zip jumper, heavy and lopsided, each its own individual shape, a shape only this person’s particular life could have left as it moved over and through her, filled her, and devoured her.
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