Precious

by Sandra Novack

  His hand moves deeper, and there is this—a rush, a breath. She swells under his fingers.

  If someone comes, he thinks, if someone should see—

  She edges forward. Another button, a zipper. She pulls him, moves her hips slowly, draws from herself. And this is the way it continues until he, inside her now, feels her muscles tighten and release, a spasm. A rush of wetness. And then, a moment later, his own spasm, and his movements slow.

  Eva puts her fingers to her lips. Embarrassed, her eyes widen. She slips off the desk, repositions her skirt and adjusts her bra. “That’s never happened before.”

  Peter says nothing. There is a cynical thought creeping in already to ruin the moment, but then Eva laughs—a sudden burst that causes him to laugh, too. They fall into a comfortable silence.

  “I don’t want to leave,” she tells him, finally. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “I know,” he says, zipping up his jeans, “but we can’t stay in this room forever.”

  “If we wanted to, we could.”

  “Eva,” he says.

  “Miss me?”

  He hears in her voice something that reminds him of Amy and years ago, something soft, expectant. “I already miss you,” he says.

  “It was perfect,” she says. “Perfect timing.” And she supposes it is perfect timing and that the moment continues to advance perfection. There are moments when she is left to bare-boned stillness and moments like these—filled with unexpected laughter—when Eva permits herself to dream. There are moments she eases into joy.

  Natalia taught her girls that peril lurks just in the next room, just around every corner, in unexpected places. There was always something waiting to assail you. The girls were taught to register absence, to find the bad hiding in the good. The trick, Natalia taught, is to keep moving. The trick, according to Natalia, was to not slow down long enough to feel the hindrance of danger, or loss, or memory.

  The trick, Sissy thinks, is not to be afraid, to be a daredevil in your own skin.

  Twenty steps out the front door, down the sidewalk, Sissy stands for a moment. She looks right and left, to the curving row of houses and the trees that shade the street, the garbage tins already out for the next morning’s collection, the flies that buzz around the trash. She catches sight of Mrs. Morris down the street, hunched over at the mailbox, watering flowers. There are playful screams down the street from Michael Massit’s house, the boy who tortured Sissy at the Brandts’ picnic weeks before, calling her, to her chagrin, Mr. Ed. Across the street, the schnau-zer barks. All of this should offer the comfort of familiarity, and yet, in the wake of Vicki’s disappearance, in the wake of the heat, and in the absence of her mother, the entire world seems changed, irreparably harmed and damaged. Mrs. Stone’s white picket fence laced with wilting ivy, the hedgerow that borders the Kisches’ house, the corner riddled with trees, all might shelter a madman who is only waiting and ready to lurch out and grab Sissy when she least expects it.

  This is the way the story goes: Watch out, children. Peril lies around every corner. This is the way the story goes now, too: a slicing motion across the neck.

  Sissy doesn’t know anyone who has died. The idea of death seems plainly absurd, outlandishly impossible. Sissy should never have listened to Eva’s stories—hard, biting, dire to the end. Eva talking about the man who came and grabbed Vicki. She doesn’t understand what being abducted entails. Being swept away in the winds, perhaps, or living in another place entirely.

  She shakes her head, refuses to think about it, though thinking about it is exactly what she will do. She mounts her granny bike, which is an ugly blue bike with a worn seat. She throws her book on ghost detecting into the attached basket, remembering days when she and Vicki Anderson would ride down to the corner store for Swedish fish and ice cream. Once Sissy completed the ride while wearing Natalia’s heels, an incident that later earned her a quick smack, a day alone in her room.

  They were friends for more than a year, since the end of the third grade, when Vicki transferred from out of state and Mrs. Nash, Sissy’s social studies teacher, announced the new girl’s arrival. Vicki stood in front of everyone and gave her name and favorite hobbies, which were animals, sticker collecting, and traveling. She hoped, she said, to one day be an entertainer, moving from city to city, dazzling audiences with live performances and various acrobatic feats. Mrs. Nash placed her arm around Vicki’s shoulder and squeezed gently before directing Vicki to the desk adjoining Sissy’s. Pleased, clearly a soon-to-be teacher’s pet, Vicki flounced down into her seat, tossed her strawberry-smelling hair over her shoulder, and sat up perfectly straight. By lunch, she was telling stories of her father to a group of attentive classmates. Her father, she said, had won a Purple Heart in the war after his chopper had been shot down in Vietnam and he’d pulled the pilot through the jungle. When she spoke, she swelled with pride. Sissy later found out that Vicki’s father had taken his own life after the war had ended, a fact Vicki herself often left out of most conversations. Sissy was shocked the first time she heard this; she couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose a parent. She couldn’t imagine it at all.

  She rides now, alone. She will not look back, or dwell on what might lie around the corner. She will not be afraid. She comforts herself, imagines words flashing in her mind:

  SISSY KISCH

  World-Famous Ghost Detective!

  Then she amends:

  SISSY KISCH

  World-Famous Ghost Detective

  with her sidekick, Scooby-Doo!

  She imagines Scooby-Doo sitting in the basket, coating it with drool every time he tries to communicate, because, as Natalia often said, he never learned to enunciate. Sissy has a vague belief that nothing is permitted to happen to a heroine, and that surely nothing bad has ever happened to Scooby-Doo. Still, she doubts, holding in mind a reservation that children often have when they are of two minds and worlds: that which is real, and that which is imaginary. How that line for a nine-year-old, in any day, blurs. Not everything is so pleasant, not every harm is kept away. Just a year ago, on their way home from the park, a squat-looking man approached her and Vicki, and then followed them in his car, and the girls hid behind bushes while he circled the block.

  When he first approached them, he exposed the hard flesh of his penis. “My God,” Vicki said later, and laughed nervously. “Did you see that?”

  Sissy hadn’t. She had kept her eyes closed. She lied and nodded. “That was wild.”

  If Vicki were here now, Sissy might pretend to be brave, and in pretending, she might find her bravery. If Vicki were here, Sissy would have no choice but to be brave.

  There is still the task, the truly awful task, of making her way past the hedges, past the fence, to the park. And yet she is compelled. She is compelled and she is bored and she is lonely, and the house, the empty house, is unbearable, worse than the torture of the outside world. She holds her breath and counts to ten, but it doesn’t rid her limbs of their shakiness, or her mind of its worry. If she pedals, if she rides hard, she will not die, and if she does not meet the face of a murderer, she will not be killed, and if she does not come across any bad thing lurking in dark places, she will not disappear. She breezes past the hedges, past the fence. She closes her eyes and reminds herself there are no such things as lunatic madmen or bogeymen, or Gypsies who steal children away.

  And yet, she believes in all these things.

  This is the way the story goes: peril, at every corner.

  She barrels down the hill to the park, follows familiar paths, and does not turn when Milly Morris calls out to ask her what’s she doing, and where Eva is, again. She pedals until her mouth is dry from the heat and flat air. At the park, she abandons her bike. She walks across the baseball field toward the woods, and at the place where the tree stands with its low branches spread wide like arms, she takes the secret path— wide enough for a single-file line, worn from trampling feet, each side riddled with bramble and packed with m
osquitoes that nip and suck on flesh. A sting, a bite. One, two, three. A swat at her ankles, her knees. A welt. She hears the wild hum of cicadas, already dying. Gnats dart back and forth. Sissy trails toward the creek until the woods open up. She walks to the water hole that, over the years, was dammed by those who told and told others, those who lugged sandbag after sandbag across the muddy banks. Ivy covers the grounds. Moss grows around the base of old trees. Here, the ground is moist and cool. Water bugs race across the stilled water.

  Sissy searches, hunting for clues—a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon; a piece of bubble gum; a message written hastily in the mud; a vine that tightens around the base of a tree trunk, possibly signaling a knot, a noose. She performs a ritual, snapping off a branch, sticking it in the mud, to bring back what is missing. She waits. Across the river, under the trees, ferns slope up and form a natural barrier. She looks around. There is no one. If Vicki came here, she might have swum across the creek. She might have passed over the lacy plants and climbed up the banks, intent simply on running away from everything that bothered her.

  Sissy breaks another branch, sticks it in the mud. The gloominess of the task, the possible peril and injury, consume her, and soon an hour has passed, and what Sissy wants to find, she does: a broken twig that might have been used to ward off threat, a place where rocks seem to form an arrow, moss that may hold an imprint of a hand, a stone shaped like a heart. She notes all these things. She picks up another stone, curls her index finger around it for luck, and then skips it across the water while the sun sinks deeper in the sky. She imagines the stones are Vicki, skipping across the water. She imagines the other side of the bank is another, secret world.

  She does not know when, exactly, she first hears laughter. Possibly seconds after skipping the first stone, maybe minutes. She freezes, stone in hand. On the other side of the creek, at the place where large limestone juts from the ground and a thick tree branch extends over the water, she sees Vicki just as she imagined her, her bedraggled hair crowned with flowers. “I didn’t really believe you’re dead,” Sissy calls out. “I knew I could find you.” Watching her, Sissy can hardly contain her heart, its joyful leaping. Before she can think that she will be famous for her detective skills, and that she will win if not the love of her mother then the love and adoration of Vicki’s mother, all while Vicki is chastised for running away and sent to her room for a month without dinner, before she can think any of this, she blurts out, “People are worried about you, you know. You can’t just leave like that.”

  Vicki says nothing. She bends down and inspects the water, then wades in, disappearing below the surface, a flower floating first in a circle before winding down with the current.

  It is a game of play, a game of magic. Sissy calls out again and waits. She pulls off her sneakers and socks, the cool water pooling around her. Her feet sink into the mud. Instinctively, she kneads her toes. She moves gradually, until her shorts and shirt take in water, until it seems that water is all around her, and that it has always been that way, so much so that water drinks her up and gathers her in.

  She sees her face in the water—her long cheeks, her hair that is pulled back in a ponytail. She sticks her tongue out at herself, scrunches her face. Ugly, perhaps a bit of a horse-face. She squints, trying to see below to where Vicki is hiding. Above her the clouds have grown wispy the sky a shade darker. Her feet lose the ground and she swims. She goes under once, quickly, and reemerges. She spits out water. She pulls in a deep breath of air, holds it, and submerges herself into the murky depths, the pool of diffuse light around her. She imagines the water is not four feet deep but bottomless and ancient. Her task is simple: to find an old friend. So much can happen in an hour, a moment. She adjusts, refocuses, moves deeper.

  There, at the bottom of the swimming hole, she sees a canopy the color of swirled peppermint, and animals: horses with black marble eyes, dark as night, their manes a cool gray, some spotted with flecks of white, and others with cream-colored bodies, all attached to opalescent poles. They rise and fall. She remembers a story her mother told her once, of a magical carousel that protected children. And there is Vicki, having taken up residence in a chariot pulled by lions. Vicki laughs, breathes in water, and in the moment, all of this is real, and all of this comforts Sissy.

  If she strains, Sissy can almost hear a dreamy pulse, a melodic rhythm of pipes, a surge of music and the whirl of a hollow pulse. Everything is in motion. One of the lions turns his head toward Sissy and roars. She expels a short breath, holds back air again. She feels her chest tighten and swims upward, toward the light, toward the waiting air, to cut through the surface of water and into the world again.

  No one would believe such a story, not even Natalia with her tales of ghost children and caravans and Gypsy camps. At the age of nine, what Sissy Kisch already senses—what she already knows—is that most people are lonely and that when they are lonely, they are prone to make up a story. What might Sissy say—really—if asked? That Vicki lives, protected, at the bottom of a watery hole, that she is fine and well there, in that place of waiting? That nothing can harm her? That she is protected by animals and loved?

  People would laugh at her. They would send her to the loony bin. Still, she might insist, no one disappears without any trace. There are always clues. There is always a story.

  No one leaves forever.

  Later, Sissy lies in bed, distressed by the almost-quiet, the fingers of women tapping on her window. She is not unaware of the larger world around her. Tap, tap, tap. In the smallest recesses of her mind, in the tiniest crack in her heart, Sissy believes the events of the day to be true—Vicki, the lions, the horses. She bites her nails, though it doesn’t do her any good because they are already a knobby mess of flesh and tortured cuticles. She is so engrossed in thinking about Vicki, in thinking about an underwater world, that she fails to notice the moon that brightens the room.

  Just after ten—an hour to spare before their father comes home— Sissy hears Eva climb the stairs and quietly shut the door. Sissy lets go a series of frantic knocks through the wall, and she is more than grateful when Eva knocks back and says that yes, it’s okay to come over.

  Blue light drenches Eva’s bed. Eva lifts the sheets and lets Sissy settle in next to her. “Hey, bugaboo,” she says lazily. She still feels the wave of a dreamy high, the sweet musicality of the day. After Peter, she spent the evening with Greg, getting high in his bedroom, laughing about the Mafia girls but saying nothing—nothing at all—about Peter and saying nothing about all that has bothered her in the past months.

  “Nightmare?”

  Sissy shrugs, and Eva draws her closer, letting Sissy form her body to the shape of a spoon against her long frame. She covers them up. “We could live under here,” she says, musing.

  “After a while we’d suffocate,” Sissy tells her.

  “Maybe.” She puts her chin on Sissy’s head, notices that her hair is damp and smells vaguely of leaves and mud.

  Eva will not ask. She will not encroach on Sissy’s time alone any more than she wishes anyone to encroach on her time, on her meeting with Peter, even more perfect now that it has slipped into memory. Let Sissy have her secrets, Eva decides. She is sleepy, she is tired, and she can and will ease into dreams.

  “Eva.”

  “What?”

  Sissy tries to form the words for the day, for all she hopes for and all she questions. She wonders if Eva believes in heaven, or God, or if there is another place people go to, another world just out of reach where they watch, wanting to be remembered. She threads Eva’s arms around her instead. Finally, she says, “Never mind.”

  “Go to sleep, Sissy,” Eva says, yawning.

  “Tell me a story first.”

  “I don’t know any,” Eva says. Try.

  Eva thinks for a while. “When you were little, I used to carry you around and pretend you were mine. I’d sing to you.”

  “That’s not a story,” Sissy whispers. “That’s just
something you remember.”

  “Once when you were a baby, I dropped you.”

  “Really?” Sissy turns.

  “You landed on the carpet but you didn’t cry.”

  Sissy pulls the covers closer and thinks about this. “Knowing myself,” she says, “I have a hard time believing that.”

  “Well, you didn’t cry,” Eva says, nearly drifting off to sleep. “You didn’t cry at all—you laughed, actually. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

  As so often happens, each of the girls, as well as Natalia, would remember the incidents around Natalia’s leaving differently, and they would conjure their memories in the days and months afterward but would never compare, never use the other’s recollections to temper the emotions. Eva would think about events despite not wanting to, always with a feeling of dread that first left her numb and then turned to anger. For her, the entire exchange was brief, fleeting, and reminded her, as did the incident after Christmas, of how quickly things could change. That day snow fell earlier than expected, a snow that would, over the days before Christmas, shut down businesses and blanket the town and gradually recede into ice. If the record shop where Eva worked part-time hadn’t closed early, if elderly Mr. Matthews, her supervisor, hadn’t been worried about Eva driving home, she might have missed Natalia’s departure entirely. Once home she was quick to assess the situation: the open bags, her mother’s plane tickets to New York City on the table. She’d known of the doctor as the elderly man who’d hired her mother the year before, a man with a dry sense of humor and a love of sailing. Her mother had spoken of him not with fondness but with simple gratitude. Everything seemed to fall into focus: the late days at work, the low-cut dresses. It was last minute, Natalia told her, not bothering to look at her daughter directly as Eva stood on the other side of the bed, dumbstruck. When Eva’s demands for an explanation turned into frantic pleading, when her mother denied Eva the possibility of going, too, Eva felt as if her world were suddenly fracturing. This grew more pronounced with each blouse Natalia pulled from the closet and with each pair of high-heeled shoes she placed on the bed. Even the worn, brocaded suitcase lying open on its hinges seemed to indicate that things were resolutely over, the dissolution of marriage inevitable, the loss of a mother absolute. Eva might have forgiven her mother for leaving her father. Her father, everyone knew, wasn’t an easy man. He was prone to stoic silences, outbursts of anger. He was complicated by the sheer fact that you might never know what he was thinking, and yet he always had expectations for the girls, for Natalia. Leaving her father, Eva might have understood. But that Natalia wasn’t taking the girls—that she could be that sort of woman—was something Eva couldn’t fathom. There had been fights, of course, made worse by her mother’s return to work and her father’s complaints that the children, particularly Eva, needed more guidance, less leeway and freedom.