No Good Asking

by Fran Kimmel

  His dad stood stock-still, one arm sticking out, clutching his coat.

  “You mean to live with us?” Daniel stood up, unable to keep still.

  They glanced over at him, and Mrs. Holt said, “Not live with you, Daniel. Just a few days.”

  A girl in his house? He couldn’t imagine it. “Sammy’s not going to want her there. He’s gonna explode.”

  “That’s enough, Daniel.” His dad turned to Mrs. Holt, red-faced. “You can’t be serious. We don’t even know her.”

  Mrs. Holt took hold of his dad’s sleeve. “She seems to think you do. You are her only neighbour and she says she trusts you. There’s no natural family support. None.”

  “What about Wilson?”

  “Mr. Wilson has no parental rights. He’s not her legal guardian. This is your decision, Eric. I’m talking about a few days. I can probably have a foster lined up for Boxing Day. You’re off the force so I don’t see any conflict here.”

  “But it’s Christmas, Betty,” his dad was saying now.

  “Exactly my point. I’ll check in every day and—”

  “Ellie’s not herself. It’s Christmas.”

  “Give Ellie some credit. Call her and ask.”

  His dad shook his head. “You can’t just send a child anywhere. You of all people know that.”

  “Hannah has a say in this. Her statement goes a long way. I’ve known you, your family, for years.”

  “You knew me before it got so complicated. Things have changed.”

  “Not the important bits. But this is your decision. Yours and Ellie’s.”

  Mrs. Holt stared at his dad, who rubbed his temple. They waited for the longest time.

  “Dad?”

  He put on his coat and announced wearily, “I’ll go call Ellie.”

  Mrs. Holt nodded. “You can use the desk phone, Eric.”

  “I need some air,” his dad said, walking away. “Dan, wait here. This won’t take long.”

  Mrs. Holt beamed. “So that’s it then, I’ll call my supervisor.” She sure seemed confident his mom would say yes. Daniel was doubtful, but what did he know?

  —

  So many scenarios had come to mind as Ellie twisted in the mohair of Myrtle’s beloved chair. But it was nothing she could prepare for. Eric called at half past twelve. She raced to the phone, batting away her feeble inventions about what had kept him so long, ready to forgive whatever had caused the delay. She caught it before the second ring, planning to tell Eric that it was all right, whatever it was. She just wanted him home, to bring her boy home. She didn’t want more.

  “El,” his voice weary and faraway when he said her name. She’d done this to him. She’d made such a childish fuss about his hacking down a tree. He’d failed, obviously. She didn’t care; it was not important. She would have told him this, but he didn’t give her space.

  “There’s been a situation,” he started slowly, then steamrolled through. “A young girl in trouble. She’s eleven. She’s been living across the road, at Wilson’s place—but she can’t stay there. Dan and I checked on her this evening and things were not good. I’d like her to stay with us for a few days until a foster can be worked out. Can we do that?”

  What was he saying? She couldn’t make sense of it, something about a girl and bringing her home. Here. She couldn’t untangle the particulars or think where to begin, like how he’d come to be in her house, or why her son was involved, or why such decisions had to come down to her. When she could think of nothing to say, Eric started over, repeating the rundown, adding more.

  “Hannah has been living across the road, at Wilson’s place.”

  That couldn’t be true. “There’s no girl across the road! The school bus stops right there. We’ve never seen a girl.”

  “She’s been in that house and she can’t stay with him. He’s a drunk. Dan and I checked on her this evening. We’re at the hospital. She’s pretty beat up. He’d locked her in the cellar for God sakes. Killed her cat. She has no other place.”

  “Danny?” Ellie clapped her hand over her mouth. A cellar. Dead cat. “You took Danny with you? Into that house?”

  “Danny’s fine. He’s fine,” he said too quickly to provide any reassurance.

  “How could you involve him in something like this, Eric?” She paced the length of the living room, the phone to her ear. When he didn’t say anything, she asked again, “How could you?” An edge of hysteria in her voice that she tried to swallow.

  “I know” was what he said.

  “Where is the girl’s mother?” What kind of a woman would let this happen to her child?

  “She’s dead, Ellie.”

  As if that was an excuse. She’d left her child in this man’s safekeeping. It always came back to the mother, from either side of the grave.

  “You can’t bring her here.” A hundred obstacles flashed in front of her; she could barely hang on to what she already had. “I can’t do this, Eric. It’s Christmas. Sammy needs stability, not a stranger in his house.”

  “Sammy will be fine,” he said. He’d used these same flat words with her so many times.

  “He’s the worst he’s ever been.” She took a deep breath, exhaling into the phone. “I’m sorry for the girl, I really am, but this is not what she needs. And it’s certainly not what Sammy needs. I can’t do this.”

  Eric stayed silent for so long she wondered if he’d hung up. But she could hear the howling wind through the phone line, a car revving in the distance.

  When Eric finally cut in, he spoke methodically, like he was addressing one of his less capable constables. “You’re overreacting, Ellie. You’re perfectly able to do this. We all are. We have a good home. We can provide a safe place for the short term.”

  She stepped to the window and stared into the blackness.

  “Betty and I think it’s the best alternative.”

  Ellie flushed. Betty Holt? Eric’s old confidante. His childhood girlfriend. The one Myrtle admired. Of course, she was involved. Betty, the wonder worker, deconstructing families, passing around children like Christmas candy. “So you and Betty worked it out then.”

  Eric sighed. “It’s not like that.”

  “You make it sound like it’s been decided.”

  “I’m calling you, aren’t I?” He’d tipped, no longer able to hide his frustration. “I need you to be with me on this, El. Just a few days. Just until Christmas is over and we can get her into a foster home.”

  “You and Betty?”

  She did not need Betty as the yardstick to which she couldn’t measure up. When Eric didn’t respond, she hung up the phone.

  —

  Eric stood outside the hospital, staring at the phone gripped in his frozen fist. The wind whipped tufts of loose snow across the parking lot and between the cars lined up like little glaciers.

  You took Danny with you? You want to bring her here? You and Betty? That was all he remembered of her side of that impossible conversation. She’d never before hung up on him. This anger felt different, as though he was standing at a precipice and one wrong step could start a fall that he couldn’t climb back from.

  Daniel chose right then to come tumbling out of the emergency door exit.

  “I thought I told you to wait inside,” Eric said.

  “I needed some air,” Daniel said, fighting with his jacket zipper. “What did she say?”

  “We got cut off. It’s bad reception out here.”

  Daniel stomped his feet. “So call back!”

  “I’m giving it a minute. Go inside. It’s too cold.”

  Daniel stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Mom said no, didn’t she? It’s ’cause of Sammy, right? She thinks he’ll go nuts.”

  Eric chose not to answer.

  Daniel lifted one foot then the other, like he was warming up for a race. “I t
hought so too, but maybe he won’t. And she babies him too much. Sammy’s not a baby anymore.”

  “We know he’s not a baby.” Ellie’s feelings for Sammy were too layered to explain. God knows, tonight was not the night. “Go back inside. Let me work this out, Dan.”

  “Sammy might like Hannah. She seems okay. She seems nice.” Daniel stopped his fidgeting and looked right at Eric. “And she has nowhere else to go, Dad.”

  She’d felt so small when he carried her out of that goddamned cellar. “So you’d be okay if she came home with us?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess,” he said tentatively, as if surprised to be asked. Then he added with conviction, “It’s the right thing.”

  Eric stared at his son, whose view of life still boiled down to comic-book heroes and villains. He wished it would always be this simple for Dan: right versus wrong.

  Ellie’s ringtone went off in his hand, the sound so jarring that Eric nearly dropped the phone. It took three rings and Daniel’s yelling answer it, answer it before he could get the phone to his ear.

  “Ellie?”

  —

  “Well, bring the girl home then,” she said to him. “And bring my son home too.” After she hung up the phone for the second time, she took a great gulp of air. Where to put the girl?

  Myrtle’s craft room, the one beside Sammy’s and across from Walter’s. She’d kept that door shut since they’d moved here, unable to face its dizzying array of sparkles and spangles and other crap.

  She pushed open the door now and took it in. Here was the place where Myrtle whipped up a sense of wonder to dazzle her adoring family. How could she possibly make it decent?

  Working quickly, she stacked piles of boxes under Myrtle’s wooden tabletop, shoved the dress form into the closet, dragged the quilting frame over to the corner, and dusted every surface with a wet rag. There was a single bed with metal legs along the far wall. A much smaller Danny used to fall into it after long summer days running behind his grandma. The bed was barely visible now under mounds of needles and wool balls and swatches of fabric. Ellie swept the works into green garbage bags, stripped the bed to its rubber mattress cover, and layered it up again with fresh sheets and blankets. She tiptoed into Walter’s room, ignoring the gagging noises he made in his sleep, and seized the wooden folding table crammed behind his bureau. She set up the table beside the single bed and brought down the green glass lamp from the top shelf of the hall closet. Then she rooted through Eric’s mismatch of tools in the basement until she found an extension cord that would reach the wall socket. On her knees, stretching her arm to plug in the cord behind the bed, she found a discarded stuffie of Danny’s, Gracie the hippo with her ripped pink tongue. Ellie patted away the dust and placed Gracie on the girl’s pillow. But then she changed her mind, snatched up the hippo, and shoved it deep into the garbage bag, likely impaling it with a crochet hook.

  Five

  “Of course she said yes,” Betty said when he and Daniel got back to the waiting room.

  “Ellie’s a compassionate woman.” Betty pressed a clipboard onto his lap and a Santa pen into his fist. “Sign here and here and here.”

  That was all it took to bring the girl home. Eric drove slowly, cutting through drifts like a plough horse, both kids slumped in the back seat. He kept his eyes on the road, black ice the least of his worries.

  It was the middle of the night, and he was dead tired himself, more tired than he’d ever been. He could be charged for what he’d done to Wilson, who was passed out in one of the four cells at the station. He hoped he could shape the words to help Ellie understand. How he had to get the girl out of that house. How a person only got one or two chances in his whole life to get something like that right.

  Eric could hear Daniel squirming behind him. He felt proud of his boy, and this caught him off guard, bringing a tightness to his chest. Tonight, as Eric had pulled the car in front of the hospital’s sliding doors to take Hannah home, he’d watched Daniel extend his hand to Betty before she crushed him to her chest. He’d watched his son take Hannah’s arm too, shielding her from the wind, guiding her to the car. He’d failed to notice before tonight that his boy was becoming a man.

  —

  Daniel snuck glances at the girl without turning his head toward her. She was wearing the jeans and sweater he’d hauled out of her drawer and was wrapped in the butterfly blanket he’d pulled from her bed. Daniel thought she might be sleeping, but then her hand reached up from under the wool and rubbed at her eyes.

  “We’re going to chop down a tree tomorrow,” Daniel said, the best he could come up with. “Mr. Hodgins owns a whole forest. He lets us pick any tree we want. We were supposed to go out there tonight, but . . .”

  After a pause, Hannah finished for him. “But you got me instead.”

  “You’re safe now,” his dad said, looking at the girl in his rear-view mirror. “We passed the town limits quite a ways back. We’ll be home before you know it.”

  Hannah looked right at Daniel then. “Why would you do that?”

  Daniel stared at the back of his dad’s head, hesitating. “You mean come to get you?”

  She shook her head, furrowing her brow. “Chop down a tree.”

  He exhaled, not even realizing he’d been holding his breath. He almost laughed then, but stopped himself in time. “For Christmas. You know, like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.”

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  “Friday. No. Saturday. December 21.” Daniel held his breath again. He’d done nothing but whine since his accident. He’d gone on and on about the unfairness of his life, about how his grandpa was crackers, how his mom wanted a damn tree, how this damn cold made everything unbearable. And here was this girl who had nothing. She didn’t even know what day it was.

  They were pulling into the driveway with its layers of new snow. His mom had turned on the porch light, its beam scattering crystals across the road. The house was lit up too, every light, like there was a party going on. His dad cut the engine, and for a moment, the three sat motionless in the car, all eyes focused on the silhouette in the light waiting for them behind the windows.

  “We’re here,” his dad said at last. Then it was unbuckling and doors opening and the tensing of bodies against the cold. Without being asked, Daniel picked up Hannah’s bag of belongings from the back seat of the car, and the three trudged single file, Hannah in the middle, toward the light.

  —

  Ellie stood in bare feet at the screen door as the car pulled into the driveway. Thorn sat beside her, tail thumping the linoleum. When she saw her husband and son and the girl step out of the car, she instinctively backed up. She tried to push Thorn away too, but he wouldn’t budge. She would make room out of kindness, so they could enter unfettered and strip out of their coats without falling over each other. But it was the voice from the shiny pamphlet that said that, the one she wished was hers. Beneath, something more true and hateful rose from within her. I don’t want her here. I want her gone. When the car doors slammed, she had backed all the way to the open kitchen. She stood at the sink in the island, which gave her a clear view of the front door. Picking up a soggy dishrag, she chased it along the countertop. It all still felt dirty, so she threw the rag down and leaned against the sink, fingers pressed against the cold porcelain edges, as if she were waiting to be sick.

  She called Thorn over to her, softly, so as not to wake Sammy, but it was no good. The dog stayed at his post at the door. The three entered, the girl wrapped in a tattered butterfly quilt, Daniel and Eric stamping boots, throwing off hats, and ripping open rows of snaps down their bulky jackets. Ellie paid close attention to her son, hunting for signs of damage cropping up like pimples round his boyish heart. But he looked much the same as he had during dinner, if not more peppy and keen.

  Thorn circled their feet and drew his big dopey face up one side of the girl’s blanket a
nd down the other, sniffing. The girl stood still as a stick for the assault, then poked a small hand out from beneath her blanket, which Thorn licked vigorously.

  Ellie should have said something, or at least called off the dog. She should have marched over to the girl and extended her hand. But she was rooted to the kitchen sink, unable to move.

  —

  Eric, now in sock feet, glanced at his wife and found a look he understood immediately. How could you bring her here? If it were simply raw anger staring back at him, he could come up with a plan. He would tell his wife he was sorry—sorry for it all—ride it out beside her, and move forward. But her anger was her outer shell, as fragile and as sturdy as a stubborn egg waiting to be whomped against hard glass. Beneath Ellie’s sulky and sharp-tongued surges, there were layers upon layers he could no longer reach. He used to uncover his own feelings by reflecting back hers. Now he wished he could crawl under her skin to find her again. And he wished she could do the same, even just on this one night, so she could see the tragedy unfolding from inside his head.

  I didn’t have a choice, he wanted to tell her. Instead, he stated the obvious. “Ellie, this is Hannah.” A part of him was relieved to hand her over.

  —

  Ellie studied the girl, who was too small for the magnitude of the story that Eric had twice doled out on the phone. She had enormous eyes, unblinking, staring right back at her. It was clear she expected Ellie to do something. They all did, standing frozen in the front entrance, waiting.

  “Hello, Hannah,” she said, her voice harsh in the silent room. “Come in, please. It’s cold by the door.”

  “Where should I put my runners, Mrs. Nyland?”

  Ellie wanted to scream. There would be a thousand questions she would be expected to answer. Eric turned and fumbled with the bifold closet door behind him, the heap of jackets and boots jamming it from opening.

  “You can just leave your runners right there on the floor,” Ellie said, noticing one had no shoelace. “We’ll take care of this mess later.”