Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  It warmed his belly and immediately began to relax him, and as he drank, he seemed to feel the house—my house—all around him. Ten minutes later, the glass held only two melting ice pellets. He thought about another drink. One more wouldn’t hurt.

  Warren smiled. Uh-uh. He had will power. He was in control. He rinsed the glass and left it in the stainless steel sink.

  On the main floor, he checked to see the doors were locked. The bannister guided him up the long flight of stairs to the second floor.

  Passing the door of Missy’s room, he thought he heard her call.

  Drink of water? Nighttime tummy ache? A dream?

  He opened the door.

  The covers were on the floor. Close to the edge, Missy lay on her stomach, an arm hanging off the bed. Her head was turned, no longer on the pillow where her Winnie-the-Pooh bear lay alone. In the dim glow of the nightlight, her slender legs seemed made of ivory.

  She was sound asleep. He didn’t want to wake her, but he couldn’t let her stay as she was; she could so easily fall out of bed.

  He moved her gently onto her back in the center of the bed and covered her.

  He straightened. Missy sat up.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. She looked at him. Her eyes were big.

  She was asleep with her eyes open, Warren thought. His realization that she was beautiful came with that familiar feeling of delighted amazement that he’d so often had, and he wondered if every father felt like this about his kid. Missy was Tinker Bell and Alice-In-Wonderland and Alpine Heidi. There were times it was hard to believe this lovely little girl was his, his and Vicki’s, the miraculous result of biology, blind chance and genetic patterns.

  Missy’s lips moved soundlessly.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  She mumbled. He made out only two words. “Love…you…”

  “Love you, too. Go back to sleep now, Missy,” he said. He touched her shoulder, lightly pushing her back onto the pillow. “That’s the girl.”

  She smiled.

  “She loves you,” Missy said.

  She closed her eyes.

  — | — | —

  Four

  Melissa?

  Melissa… Melissa!

  Hey, go away and leave me alone ’cause I’m asleep and anyway, nobody calls me Melissa. I told you that. Melissa is nerdy. It’s Missy.

  I like Melissa better. It sounds like my name, Lisette.

  Well, it is not your name, Lisette. That’s ’cause I’m me and you’re you. And besides, you’re not even real.

  I am real, Melissa.

  No, you’re just imaginary, like an imaginary friend. I knew this girl in kindergarten and she had an imaginary friend just like you that wasn’t real. Everyone thought she was real loony tunes.

  You can see me, Melissa. That means I’m not imaginary.

  I can see you but you look real weird, kind of like you’re not even really here. And your clothes are so funny. They’re like old-timey, like in a movie or something.

  You’re being mean, Melissa. Don’t be mean to me. I’m lonely. I’m always so lonely.

  Phooey!

  I need you, Melissa. And I’m nice to you. Didn’t I teach you a funny song? And didn’t I give you a present?

  Yeah.

  Isn’t the paperweight pretty? Don’t you like the rose?

  I guess it’s pretty neat.

  I have other gifts for you. You can have them if you’ll be my friend.

  I don’t know. Dorothy at school said she’d be my friend. I asked her. Amy Lynn, too, and she’s got her own playhouse in her backyard. They’re nice, and they’re real. They’re not imaginary like you.

  Melissa, you’re making me sad. I’m so lonely.

  Hey, stop crying, okay? I don’t want to make you cry.

  Mama?

  Where is your mother anyway? You’re always crying for her like a big, dumb baby.

  Mama’s not here. It’s just me here, and I’m so lonely.

  Will you stop crying, huh?

  Mama?

  Just stop it. You can be my friend. You be my friend, and I’ll be yours.

  Do you mean it?

  Sure, I do.

  Really and truly mean it?

  Yeah. Cross my heart and hope to die.

  I’m happy now, Melissa.

  If you want, you can give me more presents. And I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you presents, too, ’cause you’re my friend.

  Yes.

  Should I give you a Strawberry Shortcake sticker? I have lots of ’em. They’re fun.

  No.

  Well, what do you want? What kind of present?

  You’re pretty, Melissa. I like your hair and your eyes and your ears and your nose and your mouth. I like your arms and your legs.

  You’re being silly. Come on, what kind of present should I give you?

  Your pretty hair. Maybe one, just one hair?

  Phooey! That’s stupid! What a dumb present. You’re just being silly!

  No.

  Hey, I can be silly too, you know. I know something real silly. And it’s dirty, too. Want to hear?

  Yes.

  I’m horny. Are you horny? Isn’t that funny?

  Is it?

  Sure, I think so. Anyhow, I guess we’re friends, okay?

  Yes, and now I want you to let me have one of your hairs.

  Well, take it.

  I will.

  Hey! That hurt.

  We’re friends now, Melissa. You and I.

  Always?

  Always, Melissa, always.

  — | — | —

  Five

  “How has it been going for you?”

  At ten o’clock Tuesday morning, in an office on the eighth floor of the Hamlin Building on Michigan Avenue, Kristin Heidmann sat in a Danish modern arm chair, chewing gum and saying nothing. Her hair, bleached blonde, dyed red and black, was a spiky punk nightmare that might have been the comb of a prehistoric rooster. Her lower lip was painted blue, the upper carmine. Though she had on a light blue dress that her parents had ordered her to wear, the smirk on her face and even her posture were a defiance not of any authority in particular but of the existing order, no matter what that order might be.

  “Nothing you feel like talking about today, Kris?”

  Kris popped her gum.

  Kristin Heidmann was 14. When she was 12, she’d run away from the Malling Academy, an exclusive boarding school where she had been on the high honor roll, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where she became a prostitute.

  “Look,” Selena Lazone said, “if we’re going to get anywhere working together, you’re going to have to do your part.” Seated in a matching chair, angled so that her clients could look at her or not as they chose, Selena tapped her ballpoint pen on the pad of paper on the clipboard on her lap.

  A tall woman, with the slender toned grace of a dancer, Selena Lazone was 28 and had two masters degrees, one in social work, the other in psychology; she planned next summer to begin working on her PhD at the University of Chicago. Until she was 15 she had been completely illiterate.

  Kristin glared at her.

  “Let’s try it another way,” Selena said. “This is our fifth visit and nothing is happening. Next week your parents are going to want a progress report, and I’ll have to say ‘No progress.’ Then they’ll do what they planned in the first place-lock you away in a private sanitarium where you’ll be under 24 hour observation. You’ll have to ask every time you need to go to the bathroom. How does that sound to you, Kris?”

  Kristin shrugged. In a breathy monotone, she said, “So I can always run away again.”

  “Uh-uh.” Selena shook her head. “You won’t even see the outside, let alone have a chance to get there. You work with me or that’s what will happen, and you know it.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, so you want to talk, so okay, I’ll talk.”

  “Fine,”
Selena said. “Talk.”

  “About what?”

  “You, Kris. The subject is Kristin Heidmann. What makes you happy? What makes you sad?”

  “You know what makes me happy? Fucking. That’s why I started turning tricks, you know. I like to fuck. Is that what you want me to talk about?”

  Selena frowned. With her high cheekbones, burnished gold complexion, and features that were more rightly called noble than beautiful, she seemed to be registering almost regal displeasure. Several years before, a drunken advertising account executive at a party had tried to make a move on her with, “You remind me of a wild Gypsy princess.” She had told him, “I’m no princess.”

  She was a Gypsy.

  “Is that what you want to talk about?” Selena said.

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “What does matter to you?”

  “Nothing,” Kris said.

  “Then let’s talk about this. You’re unhappy,” Selena said. “You’re miserable. You’re hurting and you think you’re the lowest, most worthless creature that ever got up in the morning or went to bed at night.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No,” Selena said, “the truth, and we both know it.” Tshatsimo, she thought; the Romany word meant “truth” and a great deal more than that. Though much was lost in translation, tshatsimo meant “that which truly is, the Great Truth to be found even under black lies, white lies, seeming truths and little truths.”

  “You don’t know anything about me!” Kristin raged. “What the hell do you think you know, anyway?”

  “I know girls who feel good about themselves don’t run away and become prostitutes,” Selena Lazone said.

  “I told you I like fucking!”

  “And I know girls who feel good about themselves,” Selena continued evenly, “don’t try this.” She reached out, tightly encircled Kristin’s left wrist and turned the girl’s hand over. Kristin’s fingers shot up like the legs of a dying spider. Running along the blue veins on the underside of her wrist were two reddish, puckered scars—a serious suicide attempt.

  The child’s face turned white, and a sheen of tears glazed her eyes.

  And Selena Lazone froze.

  She understood.

  But no, not this way, she thought. She was a psychologist, a scientist, not a cohalyi. Not an ababina. Not a gule romni! A psychologist—not a witch or a sorceress.

  “You’re…hurting me,” Kristin said in a pinched voice, as she struggled to pull free of Selena’s grip.

  Hurting her, Selena thought as she turned loose the girl’s wrist. Nearly all of Kristin Heidmann’s life had been a hurting, and if Kristin were ever to escape that all-encompassing, enveloping pain, then paradoxically there would have to be still more hurting—and it would have to begin now.

  But now she could do something for Kristin; she could help her. She had the tool to crack the girl’s emotional and psychic armor, and it didn’t matter how that tool had been placed in her hand.

  That’s what Selena tried to tell her herself, but she was still afraid.

  Quietly, Selena said, “Tell me about Poppy.”

  Kristin’s jaw dropped. Beneath her teary left eye, there was a fluttery tic. “You don’t know. You can’t!” she whispered.

  But Selena Lazone did know, of course. Dukkeripin, the Gypsies called it—ESP, the sixth sense, psychometry, the terms employed by investigators of psychic phenomena. She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face, and so dukkeripin, this way of knowing that did not rely on the rational senses, was her birthright, one that she’d rejected, part of a life she had fled. But her powers of dukkeripin had been dormant for years and years; a talent not used, not even wanted, is a talent that atrophies and dies. That is what she had believed, what she had so fervently hoped.

  “You cannot run faster than your shadow” was what old Pola Janichka had taught her. Tshatsimo, Romany truth.

  “Poppy,” Selena insisted. “Your grandfather. You loved him.”

  Kristin nodded. “He was always making jokes. He kept saying stuff like about how I had to eat mashed potatoes because that would put hair on my chest. He used to take me fishing…”

  Kristin fell silent.

  “The first time,” Selena said, “you were six years old, staying with Poppy and your grandmother.”

  Kris nodded, then she exploded. “No, I promised. I said I would never tell. I promised Poppy.”

  “It’s time to break that promise, Kristin. You have to. Your grandfather was wrong, wrong to make you promise that and wrong to do what he did. You were a little girl, Kris, a baby, and you loved him and trusted him and he took advantage of that.”

  “Poppy wasn’t a bad man.”

  “Maybe not, Kris, but he did bad things to you.”

  “But it was my fault. I made him! He told me it was my fault!”

  “Wrong, Kris. You were a victim. You were the good little girl who did what her Poppy told her, what he made you do. And until we talk about it, get it out in the open so that you can start seeing it all for what it really was, you’re going to keep on being a victim.”

  Head down, Kristin sobbed dryly.

  “Kristin,” Selena said gently, “trust me.”

  It all came out then, with explosive bursts of tears and gurgled sobs. Kristin’s story of being sexually abused could have been an archetypical case study from a psychology textbook, Selena thought. “Kristin H’s grandfather introduced her to ‘our secret game,’ sexually fondling her, having her fondle him. When she was nine, Kristin H’s grandfather had intercourse with her. She recalls the experience as being painful.” No, Selena thought, nothing unusual about what had happened to Kristin Heidmann, nor about the emotional toll it had taken—not unusual, only terrible.

  The hour came to an end with the girl saying, “That’s it, I guess, all of it.” She sniffled, having run out of tears.

  No, Selena thought, this was only the beginning, but it was a real beginning.

  “So,” Kristin said, “do you think…can you help me?”

  “Yes,” Selena said. Kristin Heidmann had to believe that she could be helped, and, for that matter, so did Selena if she were to aid the girl. “I’m sure I can help you,” Selena said, “and I will.”

  And she wished she could be so positive that she’d be able to help herself.

  A bath and two glasses of chablis had not relaxed her. In a green velour lounging robe, she stood gazing from the picture window at serene Lake Michigan, a view that boosted the Lake Shore Drive apartment’s rent a hundred dollars above those on the opposite side of the building.

  For the thousandth time, she wished David were here, but he wouldn’t be in until late. He was working hard, taking pictures for the new collection that would be published as The Blues In Black and White.

  Selena didn’t want to be alone with the past that threatened to enfold her, to become the present.

  Her stomach rumbled. She realized that she had not eaten since breakfast, and it was now nearly eight o’clock.

  She’d fix something light, an omelet, and then sip wine until she could fall asleep.

  In the kitchen, she cracked an egg into a mixing bowl, then another.

  The yolk of the second egg plopped into the bowl and staining its center was blood, a blob of deep red the size of the nail on the little finger, a clotty, mucusy mass that was a face, a face with a piglike snout and demonic, close-set, tiny eyes, and a twisted mouth.

  It was a miniature face from hell, and it was an omen.

  “Diakka!” Selena screamed.

  — | — | —

  Six

  Invisible steel arrows, the notes from King Pemberton’s Gibson electric guitar shot through the smoke and alcohol redolent fog, each arrow aimed straight at your soul, each a bulls-eye. On the small stage, King Pemberton leaned away from the microphone, as though he needed no electronic amplification. He was a gut-shouter, a huge black block of a man, and maybe he was 65
, or maybe 75, or maybe a few years younger than Methuselah (he’d recorded 87 albums and never offered the same year of birth for the liner notes on any two of them!), but he hadn’t lost a thing. Just the same as when he cut his first sides in the mid-thirties, King Pemberton could still wail and moan and holler and come at you full force.

  It was one in the morning, the final set at Big Red’s Stony Island Lounge and Nightclub.

  At the table directly in front of the bandstand, a man raised his Nikon and sighted through the view finder. He was the only white person in the club, likely the only one within ten square blocks. He had no sense of not belonging here because he had no sense of belonging anywhere.

  It was a strange thing. When he had his eye to the camera, he often thought of himself as invisible. He disappeared, ceased to be. There was only the camera, of itself impersonally recording reality without even the most subtle comment or imposition of viewpoint from the man behind the lens.

  When he was taking pictures, he often felt he did not exist. No less often, he felt that when he was not taking pictures.

  He zoomed in tight on King Pemberton’s face to catch the glittering beads of sweat rolling down that black skin. He triggered the shutter, the auto-advance, tick-tick, zipping the film along at two frames a second.

  Not yet, not yet, but we’re coming up to it, he thought, his photographer’s gift of seeing becoming more acute by the moment. There were preliminaries, of course; you had to shoot frame after frame, and all those pictures would go from developing tank to wastebasket, but they were an essential part of the ritual leading up to the picture.

  Tick-tick, tick-tick, two frames a second. The glint of light off King Pemberton’s gold tooth. The moment when an eyelid began its descent in a “let’s share the secret” wink. The brief self-satisfied nod at an explosive flurry of treble notes.

  And there it was, there it was. He had it! King Pemberton, the Blues Man, no sham, no pretense, nothing of the self-willed mask people create and wear to protect their most secret selves from the hurts of the world, tiny and great. This was a nakedly honest face, the face of a man who could boldly declare, “I know who I am.”