What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  The hinges squealed as he opened the trunk lid. The fusty odor of mothballs made his eyes water. There it was. The yellow wool dress sat on top of the clothes. Folded just so. Still as yellow as a dandelion. Just as he remembered.

  He closed the lid and left the room. Standing behind her, he looked down at what she had drawn. Ferocious, maddened red lines. Driven so hard into the paper the paper had torn.

  “No,” he said.

  He snatched the drawing from the table. Stick figures. Sprawled near the bottom and scribbled through with violent hacks of red and black crayon wax.

  He ripped up the drawing and threw it in the woodstove.

  “Why did you draw that?” he said.

  She pulled away.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “Why did you draw that?”

  Her fingers peeled dead chapped skin from her lips to reveal tender living flesh beneath. Pinpricks of blood seeped, blood as red as a rose in the rain.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  She took her fingers away and sucked on her lip.

  “Why did you draw that?” he said. “Please tell me.”

  She pulled at her lip. Blood seeped.

  “Stop. You’re hurting yourself.”

  The girl recoiled with a sob.

  “Sorry,” Jonah said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  He grabbed a wedge of honeycomb from a cabinet and handed it to her.

  “Chew. It’s honey inside. It will help your lip.”

  She bit the honeycomb and rubbed leaking honey on her lips.

  “Why did you draw that, sweetie?” he said. “Were you hurt?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Who hurt you?” Jonah asked.

  She shrugged.

  “What about your mother, was she hurt?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “Did she hurt you? Did I ever hurt you?” Jonah asked.

  She scrunched her face, shook her head.

  “Did your foster parents hurt you?” Jonah said.

  Her inky pupils shone. Meniscus trembling, yet no tears spilled. How could such a young child be so practiced at stanching emotion?

  He put a finger under her chin.

  “You’re safe with me. I won’t let anything bad happen. Now. Please. Tell me. Why did you draw that picture?”

  “Saw.”

  “Saw what? Where?”

  She pointed at her head.

  “In your head?” he said.

  She nodded.

  He pulled out the chair and sat down beside her.

  She chewed on the honeycomb. The honey flowed down her fingers.

  He studied her eyes. Her face. The mouth was wider. Her hair was darker. But the eyes. If the sun could warm him from . . .

  He should never have burned her drawing. It had looked so similar, it had scared him. But perhaps the drawing wasn’t as similar as he’d thought. Just a damaged child’s dark imaginings, or memories. She surely had her own share. He picked up the red crayon.

  “I shouldn’t have burned it. It was pretty. Can you draw another? Just like it?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ll get more honey,” Jonah said.

  She shook her head, jaw set. Obstinate. Like her mother, a voice said. He wanted nothing more than to hold her. He ached to do it. Then, he’d know. And she would too. But he couldn’t hold her. He couldn’t risk it.

  “Why can’t you draw me another picture?” he said.

  “Can’t see.”

  “Can’t see who?”

  Jonah hurried to the drawer and rooted around for a photo. He showed her the picture of Rebecca. “Her?” he said and set the photo down. “You mean her?”

  She snatched up the red crayon and scrawled on the photo, obliterating the face in violent strokes.

  Jonah snatched the photo back, slapped her hand.

  She shrunk away, a tiny star collapsing into itself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That picture is important to me. Give me the crayon.”

  He reached for the crayon in her hand. She pulled it to her chest and shook her head.

  “I’ll give you another color,” he said.

  A single drop of blood leaked from her palm.

  He was in over his head. He’d waded too far out into troubled water and been caught in a riptide, was being pulled into the deep with no way to get to shore.

  There was only one way to know if the drawings were the same, or merely similar. Compare them to the originals, which were in a pair of pants at the old house. No. He could not return there. Could never go back there.

  He reached for her hand.

  She shook her head defiantly.

  Blood dripped on her shirt.

  “Stop,” he said. “You’re hurt. Damn it, Sally. Stop.”

  The drop of blood had congealed on the card table.

  He put his finger to it.

  Not blood. Red wax. She’d squeezed the crayon so hard she’d melted its wax.

  Her face went calm, beatific.

  Eyes clear.

  He tried to cup her chin in his hands. She yanked it away. It would take time. But she was safe now. Is that what she’d meant when she’d said “home” as they’d crossed the bridge? That this was her home, where she wanted to be. Or . . . they’d been passing the old house when she’d said it. She’d been looking out the truck window past him.

  At the old house.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “You know.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You know.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “You,” she said.

  “Me?”

  She nodded. Smiled.

  “You found me,” she said.

  The Yellow Dress

  She opened her hand to reveal a pool of greasy clown’s red, a poor man’s stigmata.

  “Messy child,” Jonah said. “I got something pretty for you. Let’s forget the crayon and the third degree. You want to look pretty for our trip? Prettier? You’ve always been the prettiest girl on the planet.”

  She smiled. Wiped her palm on her pants.

  “Let’s clean up that hand. Then we’ll get you pretty.” He led her to the back room where he lifted the trunk’s lid.

  She sucked in a breath and her eyes sparkled when she saw her yellow dress.

  Jonah smoothed his palms over the dress, its wool soft beneath the hand. How long he’d looked for a warm dress that would not itch, Sally’s soft child skin so sensitive, so easily rashed. Of three big-girl dresses in the shop in town Sally had preferred this one, and its matching boucle coat. Her little-girl taste so odd. So old-fashioned. That of an elderly woman from a time long before her own. As if she—

  He pressed his palms onto the dress. The odor of mothballs potent, odor of the forgotten.

  He lifted the dress up to display to her.

  Her face lit up.

  “Mine,” she said.

  “Yours,” he said.

  She reached a hand for it.

  “Feel it,” he said.

  Her chapped fingers worked the wool as she pulled the dress to her cheek.

  She eyed the matching coat from the trunk. The coat hem frayed. Mice had been at it. How had that happened with the trunk shut tight, damn it? He closed his eyes to calm himself. He would not sabotage this precious moment.

  “See,” he said. “They match.”

  “Mine,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, yours.”

  He searched the trunk, found tights. A tiny tank top. A hat and scarf. The perfect outfit for starting fresh.

  “Put them on. I’ll leave you be. You’ll wear them on our new adventure. I’ve waited a long time for this.”

  She nodded.

  “We’ll have to get real food too,” he said. “Canned sardines and smoked pike won’t suffice. We’ll stock up on your favorite: mac ’n’ cheese. You like that, right?”

  She nodded.
/>
  “I’ll be outside the door. Get dressed, sweetie.”

  He stood outside the door, looked around the cabin, looked for the first time in the years he’d been up here. A shack. A sixteen-by-sixteen-foot inhabitance of cobwebbed timbers and sagged plank flooring, of tattered shades drawn across windows opaque from woodstove smoke. A countertop soiled with mouse droppings. The pong of earth and wet wood. The culmination of his days. A trunk of clothes. A drawer of photos. A heart hardened to quartz by the pressures of grief and unknowing. Dark, dank, cold, lifeless. Every day, every moment he’d carried his wife and daughter with him and wondered.

  The world had pressed on. Not lost a breath for him. He’d been washed ashore on a barren, desolate island.

  But now. He had her. He felt like some amphibious creature who’d lain under the earth’s dark cool mud to survive an Ice Age now, finally, in retreat. He was slow and dumb to the ways of a new world. The bright light of the day pained his eyes, but his face warmed as he pushed up through the muck.

  A wail from behind the door startled him.

  Jonah tossed open the door to see her cowered in a corner, pointing at the trunk.

  “What?” he said, kneeling in front of her. “What is it, sweetie?”

  She trembled. “Spi-der.”

  “I don’t see it. It’s gone now,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You scared it. You’re okay now, sweetie. I won’t let a spider hurt you.”

  She reached up and hugged him tight, pressed herself to him, whimpering. He clung to her, embraced her, finally, her warmth warming him. “You’re okay.” He let her go and looked at her.

  She’d put on the dress. It was lovely, and even lovelier on her.

  “You like it?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Your shoes are somewhere too. When we get away, find another town, I’ll buy you more new clothes. For our trip. But I can’t take you to town with me to get supplies,” he said. “I can’t risk you being seen. You’ll be good here, stay put, if I leave for a bit?”

  She shook her head so hard her face blurred, and he worried she’d break her neck.

  He took her by the shoulders. “Stop that. If you’re seen, they’ll take you. Do you want that?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll be back before dark. I’ll be as quick as I can, and I’ll get the woodstove going before I leave. You’ll be warm. You can color. I’ll bring back coloring books. I’ll bring back a couple stuffies. Ed the elephant. Yes? Maybe a favorite book.” And the old drawings, he thought.

  She shook her head.

  “You want to be together?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Then I have to get our supplies, food and clothes, and fuel up the truck, alone, without risking you being seen and taken away.”

  He stood, put his coat on.

  “No!” she shrieked.

  It was no use. He couldn’t leave her. He’d get two steps out on the porch and she’d lunge after him or, worse, she’d go after him too late and lose herself again in the woods. Yet, he couldn’t risk her being seen in town.

  There was one possibility. He did not like it.

  “We’ll wait until dark,” he said. “But when we get to town, you have to stay in the truck, under the blanket. You can’t come into the stores. You can’t look out the truck window when I am inside the stores, can’t make a peep. Because—”

  “I won’ peep.”

  “Promise.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. We’ll wait for dark.”

  Venom

  The cabin lay tattooed with shadows; the fire sputtered. Jonah fed firewood into the stove, again, as he had for years. His life an endless loop of the same tired beginnings. A path too worn. A life of aborted trajectory.

  No more. That life was over.

  “Let’s get that coat on you,” he said.

  He held out his hand.

  She hesitated, took it.

  Her hand was warm and soft, and so small. Her grip strong.

  He took her to the back room and got the coat. From the trunk, he dug out a pair of rubber boots, dried and cracked, and shut the lid and had her sit on it.

  He handed her the coat and she slung it onto herself then clawed at her scalp. He made a note to pick up RID at the store.

  “Warm,” he said. “Let’s get boots on you.”

  He picked up a boot and tipped it upside down. A sprinkling of mouse leavings spilled from it. He reached his hand in to straighten the lining and a startling, heinous pain bit into the web of flesh at his thumb. He howled and tossed the boot. A spider latched to his flesh, its brown sac abdomen pulsing. “Fucking Christ,” Jonah hissed and smashed the spider to brown juice and grabbed his wounded hand. The girl shrank from him, eyes alert with terror.

  “It’s okay. It’s dead,” Jonah said.

  A fierce pain lit his hand and fire streaked up his arm; the muscles twitched. What creatures this world unleashed. A spider waiting in the dark of a boot. A memory of a spider flared in his mind and died out.

  “All gone,” he said, sweat washing from him. He tried to flex his hand, the joint and muscles stubborn and rigid, as if set upon by rigor mortis.

  He ground his teeth against the pain as it spread and pulsed in his jaw. His heart felt as if it might burst from pressure.

  Sweat dripped from his forehead, spattered on her.

  “Let’s see if they still fit,” he said, his voice sounded odd, his jaw fizzed with a remote numbness.

  She dipped her toes in the boot and he slipped it on.

  “Perrfect,” he said.

  Cinderella’s glass slipper.

  He took hold of the laces best he could, fingers unable to grasp fully, and pulled. The laces turned to dust in his hand. He blinked back sweat, a hot sting in his eyes.

  “Let’s trry the otherr.” His cotton tongue disobeyed; his voice, a muddied river.

  He slipped her foot into a boot. Perrfect.

  He stood. The room listed. He reached out to steady himself.

  She was there, next to him. Keeping him upright. Her arms wrapped tight around his waist. He put his good hand toward hers. The bitten hand sang with pain at the center of his palm and his fingertips quivered. His heartbeat was too weak and too fast.

  She took his good hand. “Okay,” she said. “You okay.”

  He wanted to take a flashlight with them but he’d be unable to hold it in his injured hand and didn’t dare go into the woods among the mines without holding her hand with his good hand. They’d have to muster in the dark.

  “I knoww the waay,” he whispered. “I knoww the waay.”

  They ventured onto the porch, his hand in hers and her hand in his. He stood with his legs far apart to steady himself.

  Rags of snow seeped up out of the darkness at the knuckles of tree roots. He let his eyes soak up what light the night would give.

  “Holld my hand tiight. Don’t let go.”

  She gripped his hand.

  “Careful,” he said.

  And they stepped off into the dark together.

  One Misstep

  Jonah crept with her in the dark woods, led by the sound of spring water tumbling toward his truck. He needed to advance with care. The gaping entrances to the abandoned mines waited in the dark; one wrong step, a step to oblivion.

  He negotiated roots and rocks; he could not afford to break an ankle. His flesh around the spider bite felt flayed open, alive and crawling with a raw, fiery itch as pain rampaged from the wound. He was glad the darkness hid it.

  He stopped to rest, pickled in sweat. His hand felt as swollen and leaden as a water-soaked baseball mitt. He wanted to cut off the hand. Take an axe to it.

  The sound of the spring water sliding over the rocks was too distant. He’d strayed. He could not see her in the darkness but could hear her calm breathing beside him.

  She squeezed his good hand as he reached out with his wounded hand, felt a rock ledge
. Cold. Soft. Powdery. Soapstone. Talc. They were among the mines. Chasms of death.

  The phantom wingbeat of an owl swam overhead in the blackness, the whooph whooph like the rush of blood to his head.

  You old idiot, you’ve stolen a child, the voice said. And now you’ve killed her.

  This was wrong. All of it. Every second since he’d found her. Kept her. They’d die out here. Or be discovered. He’d go to jail and she’d be taken God knew where.

  “Trry,” he whispered.

  It was no later than 7:00 p.m., but it felt like the depth of night when those who are awake know that whatever befalls them is of their own making. Paralysis overtook him. He could not move. “Hellpp,” he whispered to the darkness.

  “What wrong,” she said. Her voice quiet, unafraid.

  The owl swam. Whoooph whoooph.

  “Nothiing,” he said. “Justt. Hold my hand tiight. Don’t let go unless. If I faall, let go. Don’t move till liight.”

  He waited for his pounding heart to subside. It didn’t.

  One tentative inch at a time, he picked along in the dark, moving toward the whisper of running water, crawling on his knees, feeling with his enraged hand for the lip where rock fell away to nothing. Hand in hand, they traversed the slippery vein of ultramafic rock embedded in the harder granite, the schist treacherously slick beneath his boots.

  He felt a soft bed of moss beneath his aching palm and stopped and sat her beside him to allow her some rest. He shivered, feverish, on fire. His mouth dry as powdered bone.

  They sat in the dark. Invisible to each other. He listened to her breathe.

  How’d he gotten so far off track?

  A creature clabbered over the rocks in the darkness. She drew closer to him.

  “Rraccooon,” he said with no way of knowing.

  She drew closer still.

  In the dark, he wept.

  “Okay,” she said. “You okay.”

  He stood. A boot heel skidded on a greasy wet rock. He was falling. “Lettt go!” he cried.

  She did not let go.

  He crashed on the rocks, his wounded hand crushed under his hip against an outcrop. The dark night cracked open with silver lightning in his head.

  He vomited, lay there panting.

  “We go,” she said.

  He moaned and rolled onto his side, off his ruined hand. He stood as she held his hand tight.