by Alan Rodgers
The Lady held up a hand to silence her. “Hush, child,” she said, and then she gestured at the girls, the policemen, all the half-grown children writhing in the branches of the oak. “Look at them,” she said. “What do you see?”
Lisa didn’t want to answer, but she knew she had to. “I don’t see nothing,” Lisa said. “Just what they deserve.”
The Santa frowned.
“You need to learn, child,” she said. “You need to tame your rage.”
And then the Santa and the oak and the fire and the sword and the fire were gone, and the light was dark again, shadow-speckle dark as it ever gets in New York City, even up in Harlem. Lisa stood in a clearing surrounded by the dancers, the girls, the policemen — all of them still half-conscious writhing in their agonies.
The light girl and the dark girl lay at her feet; one of them groaned deliriously. When she saw them Lisa got an awful impulse to kick them both right in their faces.
She really did. She almost couldn’t stop herself. But she knew she had to, because that was the whole point of why the Lady came to her that night, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
So Lisa hobbled away from the clearing, out of the park and three blocks north till she got home, and all that way she didn’t hurt anybody, not anything, not even the bugs that skittered on the sidewalk as she approached them. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking. And she couldn’t stop herself from wishing, or wanting. And oh how Lisa wanted to hurt those girls!
She surely surely did.
Lisa didn’t have much trouble getting to sleep once she got back up the fire escape and into bed. But even if she slept readily, she couldn’t sleep well: all that night she dreamed of the girls and the Lady and her sword and tiny tiny children trying to murder her. In her dream Lisa gave them all as good as she got, and better — she killed everyone who tried to kill her.
But no matter how many she killed there were always more, and as the dream wore on Lisa lost her taste for killing. She wanted to turn and run away; she wanted to wake up and scream for help; she wanted to fall on her knees and pray for salvation and the blessings of the Lord.
But she didn’t dare.
Not for a moment.
Because they were that close, and there were that many of them: so many she could never win, no matter how she fought.
Lisa was still dreaming that awful dream when her mother woke her early in the morning, before the sun came up. At first Lisa didn’t realize who it was or where she was, and she tried to bat her mother’s arms away the way she fought off all the ones that tried to kill her.
“I won’t let you hurt me,” Lisa shouted. “I won’t I won’t I swear I won’t.”
Her mother gasped.
“Lisa!” she shouted. “Child, what’s got into you?”
Lisa saw her mother, but she confused her waking with her dream. “I won’t let you kill me, Mama,” Lisa said. “Not even you, I swear!”
“Lisa!”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Lisa, wake up!” Mama shouted. And then she stepped away. “What kind of a dream are you having, girl?”
As Lisa finally began to see the world around her. To smell the faint stink of her clean sheets; to feel the cool damp summer-morning breeze drifting through her open window.
She tried not to cry, but it wasn’t much use. She just couldn’t help herself, was all; she saw what she’d tried to do, and she saw the world, and she remembered her dream, and she knew an awful truth about herself — a truth so terrible she didn’t dare admit it even in her heart.
And so obvious she couldn’t deny it, no matter how she tried.
“I love you, Mama,” Lisa said, and she cried and cried. “I surely do.”
Things should have been so good after Lisa was born again. Emma and Lisa had everything, didn’t they? They had their lives, they had their living, they had their place in the world and the opportunity to make it good, and what else can a body ask from God?
We all get our moment in the sun. Emma knew that she and her girl could make the best of theirs.
But it didn’t work out. At all. What should have been a new life turned out to be a new kind of nightmare — and no matter how Emma wished she could wake from it, the nightmare went on and on, wearing her away.
It went bad right from the first night of Lisa’s new life. Emma woke that morning to find her daughter writhing against her dreams — still asleep but thrashing in bed, twisted in the bedclothes like a hanged man wrapped inside his noose. She said, “Lisa! Lisa, wake up, child, you’re having a nightmare!” but Lisa wouldn’t wake no matter what Emma said. And when Emma pressed against the girl’s shoulder Lisa struck her — hit Emma again and again with those tiny baby hands that were as powerful as the fists of a grown man but sharper and more piercing. Emma wanted to push the girl away and run for her life. But how could she do that? Lisa was her baby, for God’s sake! A mother can’t run away from her own child, not if she has a lick of decency.
So Emma leaned in close as the tiny baby battered her, and she said, “Lisa, Lisa, you’re having a bad dream!”
And Lisa said, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you kill you kill you,” and there was murder in the child’s tiny voice. And no regret at all.
“Lisa!”
“Kill you kill you kill you!”
Emma grabbed the girl by her wrists, and she tried to hold her still. It wasn’t much use; the baby was so strong her mother’s hands could not contain her.
“I won’t let you hurt me,” Lisa shouted. “I won’t I won’t I swear I won’t.”
“Lisa!” Emma shouted. “Child, what’s got into you?”
“I won’t let you kill me, Mama,” Lisa said. “Not even you, I swear!”
“Lisa!”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Lisa, wake up!” Emma shouted. “What kind of a dream are you having, girl?”
And finally the girl began to wake, and as she woke she saw what she was doing — and the sight of it seemed to break her heart. She started crying, crying big long deep sobs so sad it made Emma ache to hear them, and Lord how she wished she were someplace else, anyplace else; how she wished she could go back to being an ordinary housekeeper who worked an ordinary job in an ordinary hospital; how she wished she could be an ordinary mother with an ordinary little girl who lived an ordinary life like all girls live, she really did, Emma just wished it’d never come to any of the things it came to, and for half a moment she wished she was dead and buried and her life was over so she didn’t have to face the awful life ahead of her —
“Time to wake up, baby,” Emma said. “We got to take you down to school.”
Lisa looked like she wanted to argue with that. For a moment Emma thought it was going to start all over again, the argument over whether or not Lisa was going to go to school — but it didn’t. Lisa held her tongue, and she did as Emma asked her to.
The day-care center was a Spanish place over on Lexington at 99th called Escuela Santa Angelica. Lisa knew enough Spanish to understand exactly what that meant, but she tried not to react to it anyway. What could she do, scream and carry on and stomp her feet? She didn’t want to do anything like that. Every time she thought about getting upset she thought about her dream, and her mama, and how she could’ve killed her mother if the dream was real. There was a moment as she rose out of her dream when Lisa’d thought she’d murdered her mama. Every time she thought about that she ached so bad she like to die.
Lisa loved her mother, even if the girl was something alive and dead and alive again who might as well have been a demon.
“This is your new school, Lisa,” Mama said. “I know you’ll like it here. It’s a special place! They teach special children, just like you, and they teach them very well.”
“Yes, Mama.�
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Inside the day-care center everything was shabby and run down. There were dust-piles in the corners of the waiting room, behind the chairs. The floor looked like it hadn’t ever been mopped.
But Mama didn’t even seem to notice those things. “You’re going to learn so much,” she said. She sounded thrilled — excited out of all proportion to their circumstances. “I talked to these people yesterday. They’re wonderful.”
Lisa didn’t want to think what those people had to say to Mama to make her think this place was wonderful. Such a strange idea! Like Mama was suddenly blind or something.
When they got to the waiting-room counter there was no one behind it. Mama tapped on the half-open window, and touched the counter bell, but no one seemed to hear it. After a while she leaned across the counter and called out for help.
For a moment Lisa thought that would go unanswered, too, and Mama would have to take her back home and call in sick to work and stay home with her —
And then the girls came through the door on the far side of the counter.
The dark girl and the light one. The girls from the dance around the fire; the girls who tried to beat Lisa senseless and would have killed her if they could’ve.
But Mama didn’t see that. She greeted the girls warmly, as though she’d known them for years. “I’m Emma Henderson,” she said. “This is my daughter Lisa. I spoke to —”
The dark girl smiled. “We’ve been expecting you,” she said.
Lisa tugged three times on her mother’s skirt. “I don’t want to go here, Mama,” she said. “Mama take me home please take me home.”
But Mama didn’t listen, no more than she listened before.
“You’ll be so happy, Lisa,” Mama said. “I promise you you will.”
“Mama, I’m afraid.”
Mama lifted Lisa in her arms and gave her baby such a hug!
“Hush, little darling,” Mama said. “There’s nothing here to scare you.”
And then she set Lisa back down on the ground. And just as quick as that she hurried out the door — so fast that she was gone before Lisa had the time to scream in terror for fear of being left alone in the hands of girls who meant to kill her.
“Mama. . . !” Lisa screamed, but it was too damn late because Mama was already gone and the door slammed shut behind her. “MAMA!”
She bolted for the door, but before she could reach it the dark girl had grabbed her by the arm and stopped her in her tracks.
“Don’t try it,” the dark girl said. She swung Lisa around and pushed her toward the counter. Lisa tried to catch herself, but she couldn’t find her balance, and fell headfirst —
— headfirst into the —
The light girl caught her before she hit her head.
She lifted Lisa in her arms and looked her coldly in the eye.
“We know who you are,” the light girl said. “We’re watching you. We aren’t afraid.”
And then she set Lisa down.
Lisa ran, terrified, in the only direction there was to run.
Which was behind the counter, and through the door on the far side of it.
On the far side of the door there was a corridor lined with offices and classrooms; at the far end of it there was a door that opened to the outside. Lisa ran for that door as though her life depended on it, and maybe it did.
But if it did she was lost anyway — because a high smooth wall surrounded the yard on the far side of the door.
Lisa paused as the door closed behind her, looking around her, trying to find an escape. But there was no escape from that place; nothing at all but the yard and the wall and a woman standing on the far side of the grounds, surrounded by children.
“Oh!” she said. “You’re Lisa Henderson, aren’t you? — Your mother told us all about you yesterday.”
“I’m Lisa,” Lisa said, still trying to catch her breath, still looking around and around the walled yard, trying to find a way to escape.
“Why don’t you join us here, Lisa, and I’ll introduce you to the other children?”
Lisa scowled. “I don’t want to,” she said. She sulked away from the door, wandered toward the yard’s far wall.
“Suit yourself, then, Lisa,” the woman said. “We’re here when you decide you want company.”
Lisa ignored her. Of course she did! She wasn’t going to change her mind, not for a minute. Lisa didn’t want to be in that awful place, and if there was a way out she was going to find it, and in the meantime she didn’t want a part of it if she could help it.
So she found the corner of the yard, and she sat down in it, and she put her head on her knees and covered it with her arms.
After a while she fell asleep. She didn’t mean to, but she did.
And for once she slept and there were no dreams — just the blackness of her own heart, suffusing her; and the quiet that comes when the waking world is a million miles away; and somewhere out beyond the endlessness of that distance there were the sounds of children playing in the yard, and the woman calling after them, and now and then a siren sound like you always hear in Harlem in the daytime — maybe it was a police car, or an ambulance, or a fire truck, who could tell when it wasn’t right there in the middle of the emergency?
As Lisa slept.
After a while she heard the noise get closer, and then she felt a warm moist hand resting on her shoulder. Someone was trying to wake her, she realized, and for half a moment she thought that meant the day was done and her mama had come back to get her —
Only it wasn’t like that at all.
Because it wasn’t her mama’s face Lisa saw staring at her when she opened her eyes.
Far from it.
It was a boy — he looked like he was what, four, five years old? A little boy who was bigger than Lisa, four or five times bigger than she was. And he had a stupid expression on his face, all slack and rolly-eyed, like a brain-damage retard or something.
“You got to wake up,” the boy said. “It’s not nighttime! Sun’s out! You got to wake up!”
The woman should have kept this boy away from her, Lisa thought. And maybe she would have, too, but there were children shouting at each other on the far side of the yard, and she was too busy watching that to even notice how the boy harassed Lisa.
“Go away,” Lisa told him. “Leave me alone.”
The boy looked stricken. He started bawling. “‘Leave me alone,’” he whined. “I don’t like you! Got to get up! Can’t sleep all day!”
Lisa didn’t have the patience for it. At all. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Right now.”
She didn’t bother to see how he’d take that, because she knew how he’d take it. She buried her head in her arms and tried to pretend she was a million miles away again —
— and the boy grabbed her by the arm, and pulled Lisa to her feet.
“No sleep!” he shouted. “Wake!”
And Lisa just couldn’t take it anymore.
Just couldn’t take it.
“Get your hands off me,” she said, but the boy didn’t hear. “Let me go.”
The retard didn’t let go. He shook Lisa like she was a rag doll. “Wake! Wake!”
Lisa managed to get a grip on his t-shirt with her free hand, and pulled herself close to the big stupid child.
Pulled on his shirt with all her strength — pulled so hard she forced the boy to stoop.
That surprised him so bad he lost his grip on her other arm —
And Lisa couldn’t help herself.
She just couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t feel; she couldn’t hardly see what she was doing. She just started hitting the boy with the fist of her free hand, pounding him over and over again. In her mind’s eye his face was a nail and her fist was a
hammer, and she had to pound the nail flush with the rest of the world, and she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t think, and if she’d stopped to think she would have heard the boy screaming in abject terror, shrieking in shock and rage and agony indignation, pleading for his life as she pounded and pounded him with her tiny fist as hard and mighty as a sledge, pounding and pound —
After a while the woman and the dark girl and the light girl got to her, and pried her off that awful boy. But there was blood everywhere by then, and the boy was all twisty-looking and mewling like a cat half-run over by a truck, and the girls screamed and the woman swore and someone called an ambulance.
Maybe someone called the police. There were a lot of sirens.
Everything got confused after that. Someone forgot to keep an eye on Lisa, and she wandered away from the day-care center. But not for long. She couldn’t go long, or far, she realized; she had to be here when Mama got back from work to pick her up.
She went three blocks through the battered parts of Spanish Harlem, and then she went back to Escuela Santa Angelica. When she got there there were three ambulances parked in front of the place, and there were people hurrying in every direction, and no one even noticed Lisa.
Lisa didn’t care. She didn’t want them to notice.
After a while half a dozen medics carried a bloody stretcher out the front door of the school. Lisa didn’t watch them. She didn’t want to see. She didn’t care! That awful boy deserved just what he got, he damn well did, she knew.
But she didn’t feel good when she thought that. And maybe it was wrong.
She turned away from the school, and there before her was one of the ambulances, its wide back doors open into shadows so much darker than anyplace should ever be in the daytime. Why was it so dark in there? Lisa stepped up to the edge of the ambulance, peered into the shadows — and saw the Lady cloaked in darkness, waiting for her.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him, Lady,” Lisa said. “He was just a little boy!”
The Lady didn’t say a word. She lifted Lisa in her arms, enfolding the girl in her cloak.
And carried her away.
