"I'm Doctor McClelland. What seems to be the problem?" said the doctor. He took a cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, took a drag and then set it in the ashtray next to the clipboard.
Rosalind was silent. He looked at Susan.
"She's not a talker. But she seems to think she's pregnant. And Sheriff Hanes in Whispering Pines would like it very much if we can keep this between us."
The doctor nodded and turn his attention back to Rosalind. "Young lady, why do you think you're pregnant? What are your symptoms?"
Rosalind lifted her head and looked at Doctor McClelland. He was a middle-aged man with creases forming around his eyes. His face was clean-shaven except for the thick, dark caterpillars above each eye. Rosalind thought it was funny, and decided that someone with bushy eyebrows like that was probably okay to talk to. Although she didn't know what he meant by symptoms, she just repeated what she had told Susan the night before.
"I don't get my period no more. And I get sick in the mornin'. And—"
The doctor nodded, saying, "Go on."
"I'm real tired like the first time it happened."
"First time? How old are you?" he said.
Rosalind started to speak but Susan interrupted, "She's sixteen. This is a sensitive issue, doctor. She thinks she was r-a-p-e-d."
"I see," he said. "There was a new test developed last year to test the Gonadotropin levels in human pituitary glands, but that's an expensive procedure and one we'd have to send away for. Are you experiencing any tenderness in your breasts?"
Rosalind understood two words in that sentence, but she knew what breasts were and, come to think of it, they were a little tender. She nodded. "Okay, fine. I'm going to check your uterus, but don't worry, you won't have to disrobe. Just lay back on the table."
Rosalind lay back as he asked and shivered at how cold the metal slab was against her bare arms. He pressed his fingers from each hand on her midsection, lifting them and pressing down every inch or so. "Nothing out of the ordinary there." He continued his appraisal and then moved to her breasts. "Now, I'm going check your breasts for sensitivity, let me know when you experience any discomfort." Rosalind winced at the first sign of pressure. "I see," he said.
He stopped what he was doing and walked over to the chart to write something down. Rosalind was relieved when he did. After a few scribbles, he turned to Susan.
"I don't see anything out of the ordinary, but a woman always has better insight to her own body. What I'd like to do is take some blood. You have a rabbit lying around somewhere?"
"We live on a farm, but we don't raise rabbits," Susan said.
He laughed. "That's just a myth, anyway. Just a little medical humor. There's really nothing we can do aside from a very expensive test other than wait it out. If she misses her next cycle, then I guess we'll have our answer."
"Thank you, Doctor McClelland. You'll be the first to know."
"Actually," he said, "She will. Like I said, a woman knows her body. Her uterus would be bigger if she were further along, but I think any physical indications of pregnancy are at least a month away."
He marked a few more things on the chart and said, "Is there anything else?" Rosalind shook her head. Susan pointed to the door. She got up and walked out of the room with the doctor in tow.
The doctor closed the door.
"Thank you for your discretion on this matter. I'll let Sheriff Hanes know."
"And I would also like to be kept informed. If this child is in any kind of danger, we have to report it," he said.
Susan looked horrified. The last thing she needed was any kind of attention drawn to her household with this scandal. "There was an incident a month ago. A break-in when Rosalind was staying at Nancy Fletcher's house." The doctor raised his eyebrows and nodded.
"Nancy Fletcher? Car accident?" he said.
Susan nodded. "It was horrible, but I assure you the sheriff is investigating the break-in and you will be informed. And more importantly, he'll catch the man responsible if indeed this ever took place at all."
"You don't sound convinced that it did," he said.
"I was a girl once. I did my fair share of lying and my butt was beaten every time I did, but with this girl I just don't know. She's had a horrible life and what her father did to her—"
"That was my next question. It should have been my first. Where are her parents?" he asked.
"They were killed in a fire up north a few months ago. He…did things to her."
The doctor looked at Susan thoughtfully. "In her chart it indicates that she was here previously for excessive bleeding, which turn out to be a miscarriage. Is that what you're talking about?"
Susan only nodded.
"I see," he said. "And it happened again? I should have seen it when I looked at her. There was something missing," he said.
"What's missing?" she asked.
"Her youth. That girl in there may be sixteen, but she isn't a child. I don't think she'll ever be one, either." Susan saw it the first time she met Rosalind. She was even more upset with herself for her impatience with Rosalind. Although she'd never outwardly showed it, she'd felt it inside, and that was what counted. "I expect to be kept informed. Please tell the Sheriff that I will be calling him by the end of the week."
"Thank you. And I'll tell him," she said.
The doctor disappeared behind the nurse's station. Susan went back into the room, collected Rosalind, and the two left the hospital and drove back to Whispering Pines. Neither of them spoke the entire way.
Chapter 27
John Byrd sat in his office looking at the clock. What had been an insatiable appetite for Rosalind had simmered to a moderate hunger since she had come to live with them. And with the sheriff coming around (or the possibility that he would at any moment), sticking his nose into his personal affairs, it was nearly impossible to do anything about it. Something had to be done about him. It was true; he hadn't yet graduated to murder, and he'd never even entertained the idea but a few times (one being his father when he told John that all he'd ever be was a farmer and that he'd better get used to it, and the other was William Ford, a high school chum who'd crossed the line when he declared his intentions to ask one Susan Armstrong out to a movie). He had to do something about the sheriff, but at this point, murder wasn't on the table. He could discredit him. Frame him in a scandal, even. But the uppity bastard was as clean as a bar of Dove soap. No, none of that would work anyway. Townsfolk were just as loyal to their choice of mayor as they were to their sheriff. Sheriff Hanes was a fixture for the time being.
He put the thought out of his mind and resumed his paperwork. The drivers were starting to come in and put their keys on his desk. The inner fire that burned soon died down. Not from his self-control, but because it was almost quitting time. And that meant it was time to see his girl.
Chapter 28
It hadn't snowed yet this winter, but when John got home, the sky let loose a heavy, quiet downfall that covered the entire county and showed no signs of ending. Rosalind looked out the window at the landscape and she smiled. She had always loved the snow and the way it always came to a rest on the tree branches around her home. Even her dilapidated trailer, when she could walk a hundred feet from it, looked like a hibernating dragon, tucked away against the hillside for winter. She wondered what this house would look like, so she put on her shoes and her jacket and went downstairs. John was hanging his coat on the coat rack and Susan was in the kitchen.
"Where are you going in such a hurry?" he asked. Rosalind froze and looked down. "You're running like there was a fire under your feet."
Fire, she thought. She ran from a fire once. She ran all the way to Whispering Pines from that fire, and it didn't do any good.
"I wanted to see the snow, Mr. Byrd, " she said.
"Call me John. We're all friends here, right?" She kept her head down and nodded. She didn't like talking to him at all. He had been nice enough to let her stay here and he'd never done wrong by her (at
least to her knowledge), but there was just something about him that was intimidating and dark. Maybe it was that smell sneaking out from below the sliding doors of his den. Maybe it was the pipe. She hoped that she would get used to it, because for the first time in her life, she was starting to feel like she belonged. She raised her head and smiled at John. John leaned down and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn't recoil and he noticed that.
His plan had worked. He had given her a wide berth. That was the key, he thought. He kept to his den mostly, but when he would come out for a cup of coffee, she'd be sitting there on the couch, flaunting her sex at him. But he had resisted! He sat back and waited. It was a testament to his character. The early bird may get the worm, but a patient Byrd will always get his piece of ass.
He patted her on the shoulder and retreated to his den.
Rosalind stepped onto the porch and felt the winter air on her face. The snow was still falling at an alarming rate, but there was nothing alarming about what spread out before her. The sun, which had poked its head out briefly between a small crack in the clouds had just fallen behind the trees on the other side of the road, and the snow turned from white to a purplish-blue.
Rosalind stepped out from the porch and into the snow. The flakes were as big as a silver dollar she had once seen at Nancy's diner. She stuck her tongue out and closed her eyes, but didn't catch anything. She tried opening her eyes and instead of landing in her mouth, one landed in her right eye. It tickled so she wiped it away and laughed. She closed her eyes one more time and put her tongue out and it happened. When it hit her tongue, the cold was quick to disappear and she felt a small crackling as the flake dissolved into her taste buds. It had a sort of metallic, industrial flavor to it, but she savored it. She had done this many times at her home, but didn't ever remember the flakes being so big, and for some reason, although they tasted different, she thought that they were better. Everything was better.
Rosalind walked a few more feet into the yard, and then noticed the powder was halfway up to her knees. She still wore the shoes she had on when she ran from the blaze that consumed her previous life, but her feet and legs weren't cold. There was a new warmth in her to which no fire could ever compare. The warmth of happiness. The warmth of a comfortable bed. The warmth of a home where no one ever yelled. The warmth of looking forward to tomorrow.
She kicked through the snow and then made her way back to the house, but she stopped to see what it looked like against the dreamy landscape. This was no sleeping dragon nestled against a tree-covered hillside. The upstairs lights were both on and they looked like eyes. The living room window, the door, and the bay window in the dining room formed a row that looked like a mouth. It was smiling at her. The house that sat against the darkening sky and the luminescent landscape and smiled at Rosalind. And in her mind she heard it whisper welcome home.
Chapter 29
It was Christmas Eve and Susan was running around the house, frantically putting up decorations and cursing herself that she hadn’t done it sooner. The relentless downfall from a few days ago had stopped and left the countryside buried in powder. Susan took a break from putting up lights and tinsel and asked if Rosalind had ever decorated a tree. Rosalind nodded, and Susan, still trying to catch her breath, asked her to follow her out to the cellar where they kept some of the decorations. After seeing Rosalind out in the snow a few days back, Susan had asked the sheriff if he had any boots her size, and the sheriff said that "indeed, my daughter's grown out of hers." Rosalind put on the boots that the sheriff gave her and then waded out to the cellar with Susan. When they got there, Susan pulled out a ring of keys and then stuck a smaller, silver key in one of the locks, then the second one, and then the third one. She pulled the chains apart and set them in one of her tracks so she wouldn't lose sight of them.
When the door opened, Rosalind peeked in. But unlike the welcoming smile of the house a few nights ago, all she saw here was darkness. It even felt dark.
Susan stepped in the doorway and stomped her feet on the dirt floor. She walked confidently down the hall and disappeared into the black room, and Rosalind became scared.
"Miss Susan?" Rosalind whispered into the tunnel. Just as she did, a light came on and shadows started bouncing around the walls, stretching from normal squares to elongated, monstrous arms and then back again.
"It's alright, dear. Come on in," Susan said. Rosalind crept down the tunnel, her hand on one of the walls, almost as if she expected to fall through the floor. When she got to the rotunda, which was just a 16x16 room, Rosalind saw that various boxes were stacked against the left wall and on the right was a workbench with a conglomeration of tools, a small transistor radio, wooden blocks, rags, and an oil can. "I hate this place. Normally John just comes out here to do God knows what, but it's as good a place as any to store what won't fit in the house. If he ever fixed the ladder to the attic, I would prefer storing these decorations there. Some of them are glass and I can't tell you how many times I've come out here and found them in pieces." The light from overhead finally came to rest and the shadows of boxes and oil cans returned to normal. Rosalind was glad for that. Susan continued, "Did you know that we are directly under the house? Right smack-dab in the middle." She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the ceiling. "Sometimes I wish the house would just get sucked into this hole."
Rosalind walked around while Susan took boxes from one side, opened them, and tossed them aside in her search for the ornaments. She came to the workbench and drug her hands across the coarse surface. In some spots it was smooth, but in others it was ragged from either files or handsaws. Rosalind didn't know anything about tools or workbenches. She had seen her father use tools to fix the lawn mower at times, and her mother used one to clean the stove pipes, but that was the extent of her experience with tools. She bent down and looked underneath the bench and saw something behind it against the wall. She reached forward but her arm wasn't long enough. When she looked back at Susan, she expected to see her staring back, but Susan was still going through boxes and muttering to herself. She turned back to the object that was lodged between the bench and the wall. It was still there, but she could get to it if she climbed in on the lower shelf. She did so, and her right hands grasped the object. It wouldn't come loose at first, but she pulled harder and then let go, sending her tumbling backward into the cold dirt of the cellar floor.
Susan looked up.
"What the heck are you doing, girl?" she said with a laugh.
Rosalind stood up and held out her hand. In it was a girl's shoe. Susan stopped what she was doing and looked at the shoe, and it appeared to be a size six at cursory glance. She walked over to Rosalind and took it from her, inspecting it all around. Susan looked down at her feet and then at the shoe. She looked at Rosalind's feet and then back at the shoe. Too small to be Susan's and too big to be Rosalind's. "Where did you get this?"
"Behind the table," she replied.
"Huh," Susan said. She handed the shoe back to Rosalind. "I found the box with the ornaments. I'll need you to carry the that one. You guessed it, they're all broken."
Susan handed Rosalind the box of broken ornaments and took the larger box into her arms. She ushered to Rosalind to the tunnel while she reached up and pulled the drawstring of the light. It got dark, and Rosalind found herself hurrying to the entrance.
Rosalind put the shoe in the box without thinking about it and headed back to the house while Susan clamped the locks: one, two, three. She looked at them for a minute and wondered why John needed so many of them. It wasn't like Whispering Pines was a big city with people all around you couldn't trust. Hell, they never even locked the door, come to think of it. And where did that shoe come from? John had been known to take off at night and do God knows what, and sometimes he'd end up in the cellar doing the same, but until now she never questioned it. He was the perfect husband and a community leader.
She shrugged it off and picked up the box and went back to the house.
>
Chapter 30
John pulled into the long driveway an hour later than he usually did. Rosalind was in her room looking out the window at the snowy drifts and saw his car pull in. She was happy to see that he was home, but even happier to see what was on top of his car: a freshly cut pine tree. She ran downstairs and sat on the bottom step, eagerly awaiting the green behemoth. Susan had prepared a space in the far corner of the room opposite John's den, but she was upset that they wouldn't be able to see it through any of the windows. Normally, she would have put it in the living room window, but John insisted on buying a television that year so he could watch the news. He still read the newspaper, but in the interest of keeping up appearances, one had to lead by example if one was to be a community leader.
The door flew open and the cold air hit Rosalind in the face. She closed her eyes and let it cool her until he pushed the tree in.
"Can I get some help with this?" he said.
Susan ran to the door, laughing. "My God, it's bigger than last year's." Susan closed the door as John pushed the trunk through. It fell to the ground and a few small needles lodged themselves into the carpet. Rosalind hopped up and raced to the couch, waiting for the opportunity to start hanging ornaments. Susan was popping corn in the kitchen and had found some tinsel in the ornament box. It was sitting on the coffee table with the box.
Rosalind took in the smells of pine tree, popcorn, cold air and tried to remember a time back home when she had been this happy, but she couldn't. She hadn't seen the stars in quite a while, but she made her wish, sitting on the couch in the Byrd house, that she would remember this night for the rest of her life.
John set the tree into the metal tripod in the corner and took a step back. He was out of breath and his back hurt, but the glow on his face when he saw Rosalind's reaction would never reveal that. Forget the sodas, he thought, this was the big score. She would never turn him away after what he had done tonight.
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