Exposing those beams would have made this space so much nicer.
67.
When she was ten, Rose’s daddy had taken her to the beach. It was strange. Even Rose knew at ten how strange it was. He shook her awake while it was still dark, held his finger up to his mouth to quiet her down, and then smiled a smile that usually meant he was drunk, but this morning she couldn’t smell any of the drink on him, which made his smile even more worrisome.
He wrapped his arms underneath her and started lifting her out of bed, but she was too big for him to lift out of bed that way and her legs tangled up in the covers. He struggled for a second and then he dropped her halfway out of the bed, and she landed half-assed on the side of the bed, the rest of her ass sliding off her mattress and landing hard on the hard floor, along with her wrist and ankle and everything else. She twisted her ankle but didn’t sprain it. Her wrist stung. Tears welled up in her eyes, but her daddy didn’t notice, had started into a fit of giggling that he was working to tamp down, clamping his mouth shut with his left hand and waving at her with his right, as if she were about to burst out into giggles, too. Then he wiped his laughing tears and then he wiped her pained tears without asking her if she was all right, and then he stood her up on her feet and grabbed her hand and pulled her out front and loaded her into the car, all without saying a word, and not until they’d passed the 7-Eleven, and then the Coca-Cola bottling plant, did he say, as if she already knew where he was taking her, as if they’d had this little trip planned for weeks: “You excited for the beach, sweet pea?”
When they got to the beach and he pulled out the bag he’d packed for the day, she half-expected him to have brought her old bathing suit, the one that didn’t fit her anymore, or to have forgotten to bring a bathing suit for her at all. The other half of her, though, didn’t so much as expect but hope that maybe he’d bought her a brand-new bathing suit, like the bikini she’d seen in Target a few weekends ago, the aqua-blue one with the white piping and the ruffly top.
She should have known which half was going to be the right half.
“You’re just a kid,” he said. “No one cares if you’re out in the water in just your clothes.”
What he had brought with him were a couple of inner tubes, a big, thick black one for him, and a smaller light-blue one for her. His plan was for them to sit in their respective inner tubes and let the surf and the waves do all the work. Tubing down the coast, he called it. More exciting than tubing down the river.
“Let those other chumps fight against the waves by swimming, or sit on the sand and bake in the sun,” he said.
“Let those other chumps bore themselves to death inching down a swampy river,” he said.
Except there weren’t any other chumps. Not on the beach or in the surf. She doubted there were any chumps floating down the river, either, wherever the river was. It was October in Texas, and the beach was empty and the water cold and choppy. If she squinted, Rose thought she could see a squall forming out over the gulf in the distance.
We’re the chumps, she wanted to say.
You’re the chump, she really wanted to say.
Then, as she took the inner tube he held out for her, she sighed. I’m the chump.
They were supposed to anchor the tubes to the shore with a thick length of rope tied to a tree or shrub or the front bumper of the car, which her daddy would park right up at the edge of the shoreline, otherwise the current would draw them farther and farther down the coast. When she asked him about the rope, she saw in his eyes a flicker, the briefest look of Ah, shit, I forgot the rope, but he recovered quick enough and said, “You’re old enough. I thought you’d like to try it the big-girl way.”
He handed her a pair of goggles, to keep the salt spray out of her eyes, and a snorkel, just in case. In case of what, she didn’t want to consider. He threw a diver’s mask over his own face, and then a Houston Astros pith helmet on his head, the kind with the cup holders and straws meant for cans of beer, but instead of beer, her father had sloshy, melting frozen margaritas he’d poured into old Bud Light cans, the idea being that salt water, which would ruin a beer, only made a frozen margarita taste better.
At first, she was surprised to find herself having fun. The waves pulled her out and threw her back to the shore like they were rough-and-tumble friends. Sometimes she was swooped to shore under a bubbling, ruffling breaker, and sometimes she was lifted high on the crest of a wave, felt her tummy flop in on itself. The water was cold but even in October the air was hot and humid and the contrast felt warm and shivery, and against her better judgment, she found herself screaming and laughing and giggling with her father, who had finished the first set of margaritas-in-a-can and was working on finishing his second set. Where he kept them, she didn’t know and never found out.
It was unexpected fun, which made it somehow even more fun, the kind of fun you had when you got away with something, but then the storm she’d seen in the distance fell onto them in a rush, and the waves, already heavy and forceful and on the verge of mean, crashed over them with real purpose. Rose became anxious. Gallons of salt water sloshed into her nose and mouth. They had moved farther and farther down the shoreline so that she couldn’t see where they’d parked the car anymore. She tried to catch her daddy’s attention, but he didn’t care about the heavy rain, the rough waters. He thought it was all hilarious good fun, and he was drunk. Then a wave picked her up and then threw her down on the beach, where she landed face-first, cutting her skin just under her right eye against the blunt plastic of her goggles. Her cheek felt bruised and her whole body hurt and she stood up shakily and watched her daddy waving at her, yelling, “You’re all right, pumpkin. I’ll meet you back at the car.” Except the car was locked and the rain was coming down hard and fast and she sat behind the car, leaned against the back bumper, where the wind and rain didn’t hit her as hard, though they still hit her, and still pretty hard. Her father didn’t come back for another hour, deep into his drunk and missing his own inner tube and pith helmet. He didn’t see her, maybe, or had forgotten all about her, had jostled the driver’s-side door open and jumped into the seat and started the car all before she could even stand herself up—cold and tired and sore. It took minutes of her pounding on the passenger window before he realized she was still there, the doors were still locked. She refused to speak to him the whole way home, but he was too drunk to notice or care. Typically him: sober enough to drive home, too drunk to notice his daughter. By the time he dropped her off at her mother’s, the storm had passed and he blew her a kiss and gave her a smile and a wave as if they’d just finished a picture-perfect daddy-daughter day, and then he was gone.
After she’d come back to this town, after Morocco, after Spain, her father had found out and came back into town and made her sit down for lunch with him. Her mother had been dead for a few years by then, and her sister, Stacey, had become a sorry excuse, living in that old house of their mother’s, the place unchanged down to the goose-themed wallpaper in the kitchen. Their father had moved off some thirty miles north where he’d found a woman who liked him enough to not care just how little he did. He looked old and haggard and small, which at once pleased and depressed her. He didn’t ask where she’d been, what she had done to herself, why or how she’d left, or where she’d gone. He told her that someone—maybe someone she had known back in high school—once stopped him on his way out of the post office to tell him she’d seen Rose pole dancing at a strip club in Oklahoma, which made him laugh and say, “My Rose? With a job? I think you’re mistaken.” He laughed telling her this. And then when the bill came, he waited for her to pay for lunch, didn’t even pretend to reach for his wallet, and then they shook hands, and even before she’d grabbed her purse, he’d gone.
Maybe he’d wanted something from her but had gotten cold feet and decided not to ask, or maybe he had some lingering sense of obligation to her as her father, but either way, she never saw
him again after that.
68.
Her father hadn’t been the only one to fail to ask her what had happened to her so long ago. No one seemed to know that she had gone, had been whisked away so many years ago, or they had known she’d gone somewhere but had assumed she’d gone to some normal kind of place in the normal kind of way. College or junior college or to a slightly larger town, maybe, to find a slightly better kind of life. No one who saw her as she maneuvered again through her small hometown, which had changed so little, could even muster surprise that she had come back, but instead made automatic assumptions that she had gotten married and came back to raise her family, or that she’d come back looking to get married before it was too late, or that she’d gotten a job teaching at the elementary school, or was going to be working at the courthouse as a paralegal or an assistant. How they formed such specific ideas about why she was back and what she was doing, she didn’t know, but nobody seemed surprised, and when she told them she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, they gave her a sweet, poor-thing look and patted her gently on her arm and told her, “You’ll find something, I’m sure.” And then they’d ask her about church and make sure to invite her to theirs.
Even Stacey hadn’t been that surprised when Rose knocked on the door. Rose sat on the couch and waited for fifteen, twenty minutes, listened to Stacey complain about the house; about their mother’s death and all the hassle that accompanied it; about their father, who had shown up not even two days after the funeral trying to make some kind of sinister claim on this house; listened to her go on about all of this before Stacey finally, sighing heavily, asked, “So what’s been up with you?
“We just figured you went off to live with Dad,” she said when Rose asked if they hadn’t gone looking for her, hadn’t even noticed that she’d gone.
“But I didn’t,” Rose said. “Did you even ask Dad?”
Stacey shrugged.
“I went away. I was taken away,” Rose said. Kidnapped, she almost said. Changed.
Stacey shrugged her heavy shoulders again. “And now you’re back, so what? You look fine.”
“Honestly,” her old friend Patty said when she saw her, “at first we kind of assumed that you’d been raped and murdered by that guy, what was his name? And we were about to say something about it, but then your sister told us your mom kicked you out of the house and sent you to live with your daddy.”
She had met Patty for lunch near the end of her first week back home, when she was just beginning to think about staying. Patty hadn’t stopped growing until long after Rose had left, had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered woman who wore her shiny black hair in a shoulder-length bob with bangs.
“You should definitely go see Gina,” Patty had said. “It would kill her to see you, still so thin.” And then, after hardly any time at all, they ran out of things to say and ate their lunches quietly but for the soft grunting sounds Patty made while she ate, and then it was time for Patty to go, shopping to do, dinner to make, laundry to fold, and she gave Rose a hug and told her how nice it was to see her again, and then she was gone, and for the first time, standing outside on the square watching the tall, hulking frame of Patty lumber down the street, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, Rose knew what she wanted to do.
Or maybe want was too strong a word, or the wrong word altogether. She knew what she needed to do.
She needed to come back home. She’d left too soon, left before she’d been ready, and since leaving home, her life had gone off the rails. She’d cut a man in half, for Christ’s sake. And had done other things, sure, but there’s not much left after having done that. And she felt on the run, always unsettled and on the move. But coming home. Starting over. That would fix everything.
69.
The robot punched her, finally, but really punched her. And for the first time in her life, Rose thought, Oh, Jesus. I think I might lose.
She shot across the room and hit her back against the far wall, embedded herself there, the wind knocked out of her.
Even if she could have moved her head, she wouldn’t have looked down, wouldn’t have dared to look at the spot where the thing hit her, afraid there would be a hole there, a robot-fist-shaped hole passing right through her chest, where her heart should have been. That’s how it felt, anyway, as if the thing punched clean through her, everything else caving in around that spot, as if that spot had obtained the gravitational property of a tiny black hole.
“I expected you to be stronger,” the robot said.
“I expected you to be faster and smarter, too,” it said.
“I expected this to be much more difficult than it has been, honestly. Expected you to put up at least a little bit of a fight. To be clever. To find some way to try, at least.”
Rose couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Then it grabbed her, lifted her up, a foot off the ground, maybe more, she couldn’t tell. It turned her around, its hand wrapped tightly around her throat again. Its robot head was bent toward her ear.
It’s strange, she thought, that they gave a robot lips.
“I wanted this to be more interesting,” it said, and then it dropped her and she landed badly on her ankle and maybe that was broken now, too.
70.
If she was going to be honest with herself, and what better fucking time to be honest with yourself than at the very goddamn end, it was less the fact that she never saw Emma again after the Regional Office job. That hurt, sure. She loved Emma. They all loved Emma. But she wasn’t surprised, and so maybe it hurt just a little bit less.
But that bastard Henry had told her he loved her (okay, so maybe in a best-friend, brotherly kind of way, but still, she was only eighteen, she was impressionable, and he should have known better), told her that he would come find her after the job was finished, that they would have some kind of adventure when it was all said and done (and maybe when he said they he meant all of they and not just him and her).
And it wasn’t like he was dead.
She knew for a fact that he wasn’t dead.
Colleen had told her he wasn’t dead.
She had run into Colleen once in Spain. Ibiza. Rose was in between jobs, hadn’t yet experienced her Mariana Trench epiphany, but it wasn’t far off, either.
They ran into each other in an open-air market. It was awkward, at first, and then they fell onto each other, hugging and sobbing. They spent the next two days with each other, sleeping at each other’s hotel rooms, one waking early and buying coffee for the other, visiting tourist sites with each other, until finally Colleen insisted they simply stay in the same hotel, the same room, to save money, even though they both had money to burn. They didn’t talk about the camp, or Emma, or their assaults, or the attack, the things they had done, the people they had lost. Colleen had enrolled in cooking classes at the hotel. This was her third time through the class. She’d been there for months and had learned how to scuba dive, had parasailed, had learned spearfishing, had gone pearl diving, had exhausted and worn out the poor activity director, had seen the sights so many times that she had considered, jokingly, applying for a job as a tour guide. She paid for a long-term rental scooter. Rose didn’t have to ask her why she hadn’t simply bought a scooter or let out an apartment, for that matter. Colleen made paella and brought it back to the room one night. Another night she made diver scallops with a vanilla-champagne reduction, and Rose asked her what was Spanish about it and Colleen shrugged and said, “Saffron, I guess,” and the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of Colleen’s hotel room, which stunned Rose every time with its view of the Sant Antoni Bay, as they sat there silent but not comfortable in their silence, having run out of everything to talk about that wasn’t the operation, that wasn’t Emma or the Regional Office, Rose asked her if she’d heard from anyone else.
“Becka,” she said, “or anyone else, maybe? Henry, maybe?”
And ma
ybe Colleen knew how important it was and pretended it wasn’t important at all to spare Rose’s feelings, or maybe she didn’t know anything at all when she said, “Henry was, well, you just missed him, not more than two weeks ago.” Then she said, “I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you. You were always his favorite, you know. ‘The best we ever trained, blah, blah, blah.’ And, ‘What an amazing girl.’ You know how he was.”
She nodded. And then, because if she didn’t leave in the next few minutes, she would burn the hotel to the ground, Rose decided it was time to move on.
“I think it’s time I moved on,” she said.
Colleen sipped her coffee and nodded. “Okay,” she said.
And there was a moment, a soft, brief moment when it seemed one or both of them would start talking, would talk about what had happened at camp, what had happened after camp, what had happened to them since the assault on the Regional Office, what had made it so impossible for either of them to settle into any kind of new normal. But before one of them could crack, Colleen stood up, abruptly, too abruptly, knocking her knee into the table, sloshing Rose’s coffee out of its mug, and Colleen said, “Sorry,” and Rose shook her head and half-smiled and said, “It’s okay,” but not, I’m sorry, too, though she hoped it had been buried there, an I’m sorry, too, buried in the tone of her voice, maybe, or somewhere deep in the words she actually said. Then Colleen said she had to get ready for class and Rose said she’d probably be gone before she got back from class and Colleen nodded and said, “Okay, well, take care of yourself,” and not, I’ll see you soon, or, I’ll see you later, okay? but Rose thought she could hear that somewhere in her voice, too, and after Colleen went back inside the room, Rose finished her coffee, packed her bag, and then left while Colleen was still in the shower.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 25
