The Age of the Child
Page 27
“That’s not true.”
“Hugh!” She pouted her bottom lip. It felt dry, so she licked it.
He slapped his hands to his eyes. “God, Millie. You’re—”
She stepped closer. “Yes?”
“I didn’t make editor at twenty-two by being an idiot. Do you really think I didn’t notice that the only time you wanted sex—after the first three months, anyway—was when you wanted something else?”
“I liked the way you would get on your knees to unfasten my pants,” she said. “The way you kissed me when you helped me out of them.”
Hugh’s boxer shorts started to misshape, and Millie tried not to smile. He stepped toward her, reaching down to adjust himself as he walked. He was fully ready, now. She wished pregnancy didn’t take so long to show, that she could leave after they finished and immediately flaunt her condition on the street.
Hugh came close enough to tap against her hip bone. He breathed into her ear, “I’m not capable.”
“Of course you are,” she purred in the voice she knew he liked. “They’re a simple clip and zipper. Have you hurt yourself?”
“Millie.” He stepped back and raised his eyebrows at her abdomen, then mimed a bulge by curling his arms to create an arc over his belly. “I’m not capable.”
She let go of her bra clasp before she could unhook it. “Since when?”
“Since inguinal hernia surgery at fourteen.”
Millie put on her shirt. “But you participated in the evaluation.”
“I figured it was a phase.” He picked up a pair of folded pants from somewhere behind the couch. “I thought you’d grow out of it.”
“And if I didn’t? If I had passed my evaluation and we’d continued living together, would you have told me then?”
“So you could find someone else to do it?” He laughed and jammed a foot into a pant leg. “Hell, no. But I did think I might have to stay, if you’d passed. At least until you didn’t want a kid, anymore. I’d have kept it going—we’d ‘try’ and ‘try’—until you either changed your mind or I couldn’t take it, anymore.” He pulled up the other pant leg. “Millie, you—and I mean this, seriously—you have qualities. You’re smart, you can be funny as hell, you’re ambitious, and you’re determined. That’s all damn sexy, and I’m sure some part of me’ll always crave some part of you. But you’re also selfish. Inconsiderate. You’re so insecure you’re borderline narcissistic. And that’d be fine, you know, for anyone who wants to be with you, because it’d be a choice, a consensual…you know, agreement.” He sucked in his stomach and buttoned his buttons. “But you can’t subject some poor, innocent kid to all that. To you.”
Millie went to the door. “Thank you for not waiting until after intercourse to tell me.”
“Don’t think I didn’t think about it. It’s what you would have done, isn’t it?”
She stepped out and closed the door behind her. It was noon on a Saturday. Floyd would be having lunch at the Broad Street deli until twelve-thirty, and if she left now, she’d arrive before he left.
THIRTY TWO
Lenny had only come over because she’d seen his truck and had thought there must be another problem with the house.
It should have been easy to know what to think. Or say. There must have been something to say. A word. But she thought and said nothing, felt nothing as she watched the backs of Floyd’s pale thighs flex as well as they could with each thrust into Millie.
Lenny had heard other women moan during sex (movies, television), but never Millie. A soft, girlish, and restrained “Eh!” pushed out of her every time Floyd’s body slapped against hers, even as she cracked her knuckles one-handed, that arm lying otherwise limply at her side until Floyd finished the way he always did, with a euphoric “Oh, yeah!” and a collapse. Millie used both hands to clutch his butt cheeks and held him close, her hips raised.
“Was it an impulse, at least?” Lenny said.
Floyd sprang out of Millie and stood beside the bed with his shining penis standing high. “Oh, God, Len.” He reached for a pair of striped underwear draped over the bed post. “Oh, God, yeah, what else? What do you think?”
Millie curled into a ball on her back, covering her chest with her knees but flashing the rest at Lenny before pulling the sheet over herself.
Lenny left the bedroom while Floyd was still struggling to slide his foot through the correct pant leg. She was almost across the field when he screamed her name from Millie’s front porch. By the time she’d run inside, locked the door, and made her way to the upstairs window to watch for him, he’d only closed half the distance between the two houses. She could tell from the droop of his torso and the swing of his head that he was having a hard time. To run after sex would be overkill for Floyd’s system. Lenny watched from the bedroom until Floyd crumpled, heaving, a few yards shy of the back door.
It hurt her to see him lying there, so she went downstairs to the kitchen and kept her back to the window as she made two sandwiches. She ate lunch with Gabriella in the basement suite, the only part of the house without windows. When she went back upstairs to look for Floyd, he was gone.
“It wasn’t anything,” he said in a phone call two days later.
Lenny said she understood, because although she was sad, she did. “Be happy, Floyd. You’re a beautiful person, no matter what.”
“Goddamn, Lenny.” He took a breath like he had more to say, but he only sighed it out and kept her on the line, waiting. He sniffed, and in a guttural cry said, “Friends one day?”
“Oh, Floyd, of course. One day.”
Millie’s call came the day after Floyd’s. “I apologize for…for what you must have thought when you discovered us in that position.”
“Oh,” Lenny said.
“All right?”
“I have to go, Millie.”
“May I come ov—”
Lenny hung up. She’d been ready to understand Millie, too, but she could only extend herself so far.
After two weeks, Millie called again. Lenny heard the phone ringing as she opened the front door, her arms filled with groceries for Gabriella. She ran to the kitchen for her earpiece.
“I can appreciate your anger,” Millie said as soon as their lines connected.
Lenny waited for her to say something closer to an apology. When she didn’t, Lenny hung up.
For a week after that, whenever she came home from the store, the shelter, or a walk with Jenny and Andy, the phone rang the second she stepped inside. She activated the identification announcement and stopped answering until she heard who was calling.
“You can’t go upstairs during the day, anymore,” Lenny warned Gabriella in the basement after the tenth perfectly timed call. “I don’t know how closely she’s watching the house.”
“I almost wish I could meet her,” Gabriella said. “She sounds fascin—Do you hear something?”
Lenny ran to the bottom of the stairs and looked up to see that she’d accidentally left the secret door open again. She crawled halfway to the main floor and stopped, listened, but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. She went the rest of the way to make sure the front door was locked, looked through the peephole, and caught the wispy ends of Millie’s blond hair disappearing around the corner.
Lenny bolted into the kitchen and got there just in time to see Millie’s eyes and forehead zip past the window. Lenny ran to the living room and watched from the shadows as Millie tore across the field to her little house. She swatted at an overgrown arm of blue morning glories as she hopped onto her porch.
Millie had probably never once pruned the vine that (now) climbed the downspout and reached inside the rain gutter. Lenny thought, as Millie slipped inside and closed the door, that she and Floyd should have known better than to give Millie something she would have to take care of.
The calls kept coming. Lenny stored her earpiece in a drawer in the kitchen, silenced the ring tone, and, to make the house look empty so Millie wouldn’t come b
ack around, started spending evenings and her off days in the basement suite.
Two months into Gabriella’s stay, Lenny was fingering through the Margaret Mabary books on the den shelf while mentally lecturing herself (again) about how irresponsible she was being.
She’d made it a rule to keep her boarders at a distance. They could be caught any time after leaving her basement (it hadn’t happened, yet, but there was always that chance), and the less she knew about them, the less tempted she would feel to risk her own safety trying to help or save them. She had one job: to keep the current boarder hidden until the delivery so she could make sure the baby (or babies—Thomas had had surprise twins) got a safe and untraceable drop in a trusted shelter’s jurisdiction. Once the transfer was made, Lenny and the boarder parted ways, and Lenny went on with her life until another unwilling carrier found her.
But hiding from Millie had forced her to get to know Gabriella, and Lenny liked her so much she went down to the basement even when there was no reason to hide. Gabriella had introduced Lenny to the spiritual enrichment, and fun, of having long talks over coffee. And she never treated Lenny like anything but an equal—one she was interested in knowing. She was also fancy without pretension, a quality Lenny’s mom had had, and she laughed at her own personal tragedies—“Any feeling we give to a moment after it’s past and gone is a lie. Don’t you agree? The mediocre becomes magical, the unpleasant we turn into torture,” she said. This, too, reminded Lenny of her mom.
Lenny decided she was willing to deal with any anxiety or sadness that might someday punish her for being Gabriella’s friend.
She found the first-edition book she was looking for and brought it down to the basement.
Gabriella took it from her with uncertain, but open, hands and wide eyes.
“I grew up on her!” Gabriella said after fanning and smelling the pages. She hugged the book to her chest. “My first Mabary book was at the farm, one of Esther’s collection. I read every one of them until there were no more left to read. How did you know my favorite, my very, very favorite,” she kissed the hardcover copy in her hands, “was Elmore and Lenore Steal the Light? Ah! I wouldn’t have had the courage to do half of what I had to do without it. If two mere children could defeat a scary, criminal government, then I could bear…Well, it’s as you said. Everyone has their own impos-sible situation,” she laughed.
They watched movies at night, the house kept locked and dark, the door at the top of the stairs (usually) secured. Gabriella liked many of the same movies Lenny did, stories of women traveling to exotic corners of the world. Why they traveled didn’t matter. The movies were vicarious journeys.
“What happiness money buys,” Gabriella said when the projection of Marla Helmsworth stepped onto a windy balcony overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. “There are people who would kill us for our advantage, even if they had no plans to make any more use of it than we do. But I sometimes think having the option must be enough.” She ate popcorn from her cupped palm. “I wonder if we might be insulting them by not enjoying our wealth. For them, we should go to Italy. Anzio!”
As much money as Lenny and Gabriella had, both also had their reasons for having never taken a single vacation to a single exotic location. Lenny played along, anyway. It was more fun to imagine traveling with Gabriella than it would be to travel. She couldn’t relax with the animals in someone else’s care, and she didn’t like being away from the shelter for more than three days at a time. And Gabriella couldn’t fly. Her adoptive mother hadn’t replaced her chip, and Gabriella had decided she was better off without it. “I don’t like the thought of it,” she’d once said with a dramatic shiver. “Those strange chemicals running through my blood.”
Over the next few weeks, Lenny developed a habit of checking the call log before going downstairs (seeing Millie’s name had become strangely comforting), but she forgot all about Millie in the basement, where she and Gabriella made and changed fantasy plans for overseas vacations in between movie viewings, book discussions, and lunches. As Gabriella’s growing pregnancy pulled her tops into new grooves, she would absently rub and stroke her middle while speculating on the beauty of springtime in Punta Arenas, the magic of Neckarsteinach in the fall. At night when Lenny took the narrow staircase to bed (never before the sun set on her west-facing bedroom window), she’d hear the jerks of sound and silence as Gabriella flipped channels for another movie to take her somewhere out of her reach.
Lenny’s avoidance of Millie had become such a mindless routine that she sometimes forgot she was crawling up the stairs while she was crawling. During the day, she regularly exercised the dogs inside instead of taking them out, giving them treats ten straight minutes of “upstairs” and “downstairs” commands. When Jenny and Andy did have to go out, Lenny took them only if she knew where Millie was (or wasn’t), sometimes posting Gabriella in a living room corner as a lookout. And every night, while creeping through the main floor on the way upstairs, Lenny squinted to see past each of the windows and into the dark. Sometimes Millie was there, her light hair a disembodied moonlit puff floating in the field. Usually she wasn’t. Lenny never heard her trying to open the front door again.
“What could happen if you talk to her?” Gabriella said one morning over coffee in her suite. Her bump was big enough to support her mug.
Lenny said, “I don’t know,” and realized she really didn’t. Millie wasn’t a physical threat, or anything like that. There was no reason to be afraid of her. She imagined it: the bell, opening the door, Millie’s calculating, light blue eyes.
In her daydream, Lenny slammed the door before Millie could open her mouth. She was sneaking around to avoid a woman she’d known since they were born, she suddenly understood, because Millie would never take responsibility. It was so frustrating that just thinking about it deflated and exhausted her.
“Nothing would happen,” she answered Gabriella.
The next afternoon, in the upstairs bedroom, Lenny stopped short with the warm bundle of sheets she’d brought up from the laundry room when she saw on the call log that there’d been nothing from Millie since the night before. It was almost dinnertime. Millie’s routine ever since Lenny had started hiding in the basement had been one morning call and one in the early evening. At least.
Across the field, Millie’s vine-strangled house dropped a shadow on the empty driveway. That Millie’s car was gone was the only reason Lenny had felt safe near her windows that day, but now she had to try not to see the shattered windshield, the body in the street, Millie’s hair flat with blood.
She was relieved—and then annoyed—to see Millie’s distant figure in miniature leave her house without closing the front door and start across the field in a sprint. Her fuzzy hair, backlit by the sun, flickered around her head like white fire. The second Lenny noticed she was standing in the same beam of light, she forced herself not to move. A trick her mom had taught her, but one Lenny, always the seeker in games of hide and seek with Millie, had never been able to use.
Millie waved up at Lenny as she got closer to the house. Lenny pretended not to see her and didn’t breathe or blink—just in case—until Millie finally disappeared from view. Free to move again, Lenny picked up the fitted sheet from the floor and flapped it across the mattress. She pulled it around the corners, ignored the doorbell when it rang, and stuffed a pillow into a case while keeping an eye outside.
Millie reappeared in the field, stomping across dead grass with a trail of white smoke following her fingers. She faced the house and pressed her thumb to an imaginary control panel.
Lenny sighed, tossed the pillow at the headboard, and opened the window.
“I understand why you might avoid me,” Millie yelled up to the second floor. “I feel—I feel terrible about…about…” She looked around, took a drag from her cigarette, and blew the smoke over her head. “About what you witnessed.”
Lenny put her mouth to the screen. “That’s your apology?”
“No.”
Well, Lenny thought, she could ring the doorbell all day long, but—
She searched for the memory that would reassure her she’d locked the door the moment she came home.
She’d meant to. She always locked it, every day, every time. But today she’d had the groceries, and the sheets had been sitting wet in the washing machine for an hour, and then something else had distracted her…
“Hello?” Millie called from downstairs.
Lenny had thought, once, that it might be a good idea to install a door at the bottom of the basement stairs. Extra protection for the day someone entered without permission while the secret door was wide open.
“Up here, Millie,” Lenny yelled down to the foyer, hoping her voice was loud enough to reach Gabriella. “I’m coming down.”
She skipped every other step with her hand wrapped around the railing, but by the time she could see the foyer, she could also see that Millie wasn’t there.
THIRTY THREE
A deep sofa and an oversized chair fit comfortably in the underground living room the approximate square footage of Millie’s house. Lenny stood in front of a wardrobe Millie knew had been open when she’d first entered. It held an assortment of slippers, a wide selection of colorful shirts, silk nightgowns on hangers, and a dark red robe on a door hook.
“This used to be the gift wrapping room,” Millie said. She went into the kitchen and ran her fingers along the length of the short counter. She opened a lower cabinet to saucepans, deep pots, and three unique sizes and styles of colander. “I used to hide in the original cabinets with Uncle Ernie’s wrapping paper and his bins of bows and ribbons.” She closed the door. “Some of them were embroidered with your name, do you remember? Lenore Mabary, Lenny Mabary, Lenny. I’m sure you must still have them, somewhere. In a special frame?” She looked at the wardrobe.